Digital Marketing general information
When you get down to it, digital marketing is simply marketing.
It’s how today’s businesses are getting their message in front of their best prospects and customers.There are different tactics you’ll need to learn. But they all work together to create a foundation for your business: attracting prospects, nurturing relationships, and making offers your audience will appreciate and respond to.
Let’s take a closer look at how that happens.
Digital marketing consists of these major skills :
Knowledge to use Google Ads (Google’s advertising platform)
- Things like interface, technicalities, PPC and how to launch campaigns
- Run your first campaigns for yourself to get some experience and don’t worry if it fails
- The secret is to spend less while making more money
- How to learn : Google themselves provide free tutorials + there are some tutorials on the web
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Practice of using organic strategies to rank higher on search engines, mostly google Three elements to SEO -
- On page SEO : Optimizes each individual page of a website to target a specific keyword and appeal to search engines. These strategies include : keyword research, content creation and keyword optimization. Helps search engines understand a page of content and therefore it gives higher ranks
- Technical SEO : Optimizes the non-content elements of a website and the website as a whole to improve its backend structure and foundation.These strategies relate to : site speed, mobile friendliness, indexing, crawlability, site architecture, structured data, and security. Improves both user and search crawler experience, which leads to higher search rankings.
- Off-page SEO : Builds a website’s reputation and authority by connecting it to other high-quality websites. Off page SEO techniques include : link building from other websites and manage local listings and directory profiles. When many websites link to a brand’s website, it shows search engines that the brand’s website is trustworthy, reliable and reputable, which increases its search rankings.
SEM (Search engine marketing)
Kinda like SEO, but unlike SEO (which uses only organic non-paid strategies) and SEM used paid strategies to appear in search
SMM (Social Media Marketing)
Both organic (free) and paid
Email Marketing/Email list building
You’ll see the highest ROI when you build and maintain an engaged subscriber list, made up of people who want to receive your messages (and who opted in on purpose).
Knowledge to startup, read and understand analytics
Marketing analytics is used to determine the level of success of various marketing efforts for the overall campaign.
Conversion Optimization : How to optimize anything (website, content, video etc.) to get more paid leads
The CRO process involves understanding how users move through your site, what actions they take, and what’s stopping them from completing your goals.
Ways to gain experience
Consume as much digital marketing related knowledge and information as you possibly can (courses, books, videos, articles, blogs)
Follow as many digital marketing related sources (websites, blogs, youtube accounts) to stay updated and relevant to trends.
Create a website for what you want, create content on it and do the seo and marketing for it
Find a local SEO digital marketing company and ask for work experience
Look for entry level openings at startups/digital marketing agencies
How to start
Get yourself Google Tag Manager (tagmanager.google.com) and install that pixel on the page
Get all your tracking pixels in the tag container - so your Facebook Tracking Pixel, then Twitter, Quora, Adwords, LinkedIn, Reddit - they all have tracking pixels mate. Get all of them! Also get hotjar.com, so you have some actual visibility on your site as to what people are actually doing - every swipe, tap, mouse movement and click - all recorded for you to see what people are ACTUALLY doing on your site versus what you THINK they’re doing!
Get your Google Search Console hooked up with your Google Analytics hooked up with your Adwords - there’s heaps to this, and it’s a pain in the arse, won’t lie.
Setup your conversion pixel events in all the ones i mentioned in (2) - these are different to the standard page tracking pixels, as they track who comes to which of your pages: What a CONVERSION pixel does though, is to track when someone purchases, or where they sign up to your newsletter or call you etc - actual things that make you money there and then, as opposed to just tracking.
Create custom audiences in Facebook, Twitter, Adwords and all the ones in (2). A custom audience is where you take your existing emails and upload them into each platform, where the platform then matches the emails to accounts on that platform. Now you may only have 100-200 emails for example, and these WON’T be enough to then run an advert to, BUTTTTT you can then create “lookalike audiences” in the platforms where each platform goes off and finds people that very closely match the qualities, aspirations, hopes, dreams, desires and marketing demographics of the millions of available people it has data on (see why Facebook is under massive PR scrutiny now?) and then gives you that audience to market to.
Create a newsletter opt-in that pops up on the site after a set scroll period and/or time on site. Also set the popup to appear when someone is exiting the site - this is literally called an “exit intent” popup. They were going to leave anyway, so might as well try and get their details.
Create further custom audiences of people that visit specific pages or click specific buttons or who add to shopping cart but then don’t purchase - as well as one for purchasers too! These custom audiences will be great for what we call “retargeting” or “remarketing” - they’re where people come to your site, and do some shit but don’t buy anything for example, but the tracking pixels “fire” and when they go back into their social media platform of choice - well, there is the retargeting advert for the product they were looking at or the category they were choosing from. You will have seen this yourself when looking at a piece of clothing or wallet or whatever - when you don’t buy it, the product then seems to follow you around the internet no matter where you go (if the marketer is skilled enough!)
MAKE SURE you have your Google Analytics setup with your ecommerce package too - so when people start to buy, you know where they are, what device, what time best converts, how many times they came back to the site before purchasing - and then be able to break down which product(s) are selling best based on actual data rather than gut feels.
Make sure you have your Instagram account setup for business use, and make sure you apply for shopping tags usage - these will be invaluable for you to have people tap on your item picture in your feed WITHOUT ads (sometimes!) for people to then tap and buy there. Powerful stuff but you have to get your instagram account verified as a business.
Speaking of business verification - get your Google My Business all setup too. We’ve talked about Analytics + Search Console etc here already, but when you get your Google My Business all setup with address on the map that gets verified, phone number, web address and open hours etc - that then leads to great things: Review extensions, location extensions and call extensions and basically ALL the Adwords Ad Extensions can then be used to trounce your competitors. All can be setup free, apart from the PPC obviously!
Get cracking with video content! Show some products being made, show them in use from customers who tell how happy they are, show kids with your patches - really pull at heart strings and invest someone’s emotion watching the videos. Yes, even for patches.
Setup your YouTube channel also - get those videos up there on YouTube and Facebook on your business page AND ON YOUR PERSONAL FB Profile too! Do business from your personal profiles and treat all the social networks as business avenues now, rather than post family and friends shit - still DO that, but keep it to a minimum so you can show people some transparency on the person BEHIND the company.
If you’re hooked up in your Google Search Console, feel free to then activate your YouTube cards with the link back to your site that can be sprung at any time during the video. Here’s the kicker though - YT recently fucked everyone in small business just starting out, by saying you can’t have that feature unless you have a load of subscribers and watch time. Buy them. Don’t worry about it - you’re not giving a flying fuck about these fake subscribers as you’re ONLY doing this to get the YT Cards with Link feature unlocked. Don’t feel bad or fake - YT brought this on themselves.
Live stream your heart out. Live stream the devices being made and again, show viewers some genuine heartstring tugging stories. That shit gets shared. A LOT.
Instagram influencer marketing is good when it works - but check their account for number of fake followers Vs genuine followers. There’s heaps of free tools around, but at time of writing Facebook (who own instagram) are cracking down on their API so a lot of the tools will stop working soon. Find one. Rape it for info as much as you can for as long as you can, and then DM these account holders offering them a referral fee - you’ll need a UTM tracking URL for that Influencer to give out so you can track any sales back to them. OR you can agree to a set fee - say 4c per genuine follower for a shout. Results will vary, but at least you know you got tools to analyse an Insta account now.
I can’t help but think that Facebook, Instagram and Youtube Ads for visibility and traffic, with MAYBE Adwords for retargeting (retargeting traffic is way cheaper than “cold” traffic, by the way) would be the way to go for this. Just a hunch.
See if you can get some PR by using SourceBottle or HelpAReporter and being featured in blogs, magazines, TV etc as a “feel good” story. Free to do, just your time.
Run a search on your competitors sites using WhatRunsWhere and see what keywords they’re using on their site - you then use that info to write blogs around those keywords and also to run better ads than them on Adwords!
MAKE SURE you have your telephone number on the site too - a lot of times people just want to talk to someone. At the top of your page, put the number and the “Message Us” too - this could be a Facebook Messenger widget button that will then message your page, or if could be using something like the billions of website instant messaging SaaS out there
If you’re going to have the traditional “Get Newsletter” snoozefest, then make sure you have a great CRM that you’re going to USE to send those cool as fuck and interesting newsletters - start with MailChimp or Active Campaign. These tags allow you to automate sending based on those tags existing or not - another conversation about all this as it’s more complex than to write here, about audience segmentation and marketing automation etc). There’s a cool Wordpress plugin to use called - wowq.io - this can ask them all questions on a popup quiz or questionnaire and then tag each answer they give, which then “talks” to your CRM and then auto sends out your email content based on their answer(s).