Digital Marketing for Dummies: Start Your Campaign Today

Digital Marketing for Dummies: Where to Start?

Marketing has been all about connecting with your audience. At the right place. At the right time. Digital Marketing for dummies, our guide, comprises all those marketing efforts that utilize an electronic device and the internet.

With the internet age, these barriers of time and place have been washed away to a larger extent, or rather they now have a newfound meaning.

According to Pew Research, internet usage among adults has increased by 5% in the past three years.

You now have to meet them over the internet, where they are spending all of their time.

Firms leverage the power behind different digital channels like search engines, emails, social media, and others to connect with their customers. These customers can be existing or prospective.

All in all, you have to be digital to survive the competition out there.

But how do you get the word out? How do you run campaigns online? We have tried to cover all such aspects in this guide. Read ahead.

How to Generate Traffic to Your Website?

This digital marketing for dummies guide can prove to be a bit overwhelming for those learning for the first time. Hence, it is crucial to go slow and try to understand the process step-by-step.

Quality traffic to your website can improve your organic ranks and will, in turn, generate more traffic. Lower bounce rate, more time spent, more page views are considered some of the ranking factors by search engines.

So, you do want to ensure that, with increasing traffic, the engagement goes up too, which is why it becomes essential to direct the right traffic towards your campaign.

Quality will build your quantity automatically. The right traffic is most likely to convert.

Some of the Digital Marketing Strategies to Help Increase Leads Are:

• On-Page SEO: Fix your website speed, title tags, meta descriptions, headers, 404 pages, etc.
• Off-Page SEO: Mainly based on building backlinks – A link to your website from another website. Backlinks from trusted websites increase your authenticity. Guest Blog- Have an industry expert publish a blog post on your website. This collaboration comes with its own set of mutual benefit.
• Email Marketing: Keep your subscription base interested in your content. Don’t exaggerate with the frequency and clean your subscribers from time to time.
• Social Media: It’s free, accessible, and essential. Post shareable content and draw traffic. Don’t forget to use Hashtags to increase reach.
• Online Advertisements: PPC (Pay Per Click) may be a solution while your website still doesn’t have a significant organic, direct, or social media website.
• Blogging: write niche-focused blog posts. Don’t forget to target long-tail keywords and learn from your analytics – Insights can further drive more traffic.

If this sounds too confusing, don’t worry. On the next topics, we will detail the most important types of digital marketing campaigns.

Types of Digital Marketing Campaigns

1) Email Marketing

It consists of sending a targeted email to an audience looking for them to respond to your call to action. Your message can ask them to read your blog post or to buy a promoted product.

Although emails are one of the oldest ways of digital campaigns, they are not Dead. They’re one of the most authentic marketing channels, and they’re highly used today.

When building your email marketing campaign, you have to think about many factors, such as:

• Email design
• Compelling header
• Message
• Images
• Size
• Frequency
• Landing Page (we will talk about the landing page on the next topics).

Emails are easy to track and must be optimized constantly. Your subscription base also needs to be cleaned to avoid your emails going to the spam folder.

2) Social Media Marketing

Our digital marketing for dummies guide wouldn’t leave social media out of your main campaigns. Because everyone is on Social Media, it’s a place your company has to be. Anything digital leads us to social media.

Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many others are great social platforms for building an audience.

Check out our guide to help your social media organic growth, which means grow without paying ads.

To manage and schedule your posts, you can choose various platforms such as Hootsuite or Buffer. Here we list and explain a few options you have to choose from among the best social media management apps.

To increase sales and drive traffic, manage your social media to create value for your audience. Creating valuable content that solves your customer’s problems will help you find that traction.

Using Facebook as an example, we list a few essential things you should do to:

• Establish solid visual storytelling
• Ask for engagement
• Incorporate user-generated content
• Use videos
• Use lives.

See our complete guide about growing on Facebook.

Also, check out our guide about how to succeed on social media.

3) Organic Search (SEO)

Search Engine Optimization. Big Words?

Well, the concept behind it is simple but vast. It is the process of optimizing your content online so that a search engine shows it as a top result for a particular keyword.

For example, suppose you have an article on how to bake an eggless chocolate cake and want it to appear at the top of the search results for anyone who searches for the phrase “eggless chocolate cake.”. In that case, you must consider many factors to optimize your article and your website to be on top of searches:

• Wordcount: typically, longer articles tend to rank better and for more keywords.
• Keyword count: how many times the keyword shows up on your article.
• Headers: keywords must be on headers.
• Keyword position: It has to be well distributed along with the article and shown in the first sentence.
• Title and Meta Description: 55 and 155 characters, and obviously, your keyword should be present in both.
• URL: compact and related to the topic, preferably with the keyword.

Other aspects also influence your rankings: website speed, images on your article, the number of errors (such as 404s), among other factors.

Besides all content optimization, off-page SEO, or the SEO external to your website, has a strong influence on rankings. The quantity and quality of the backlinks linking to your URL are essential for telling Google your article is important and should be ranked first.

SEO is the secret ingredient in your article to rank g=higher on searches. To dig deeper into SEO, read more about it in this article here.

4) Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Technically, it is a way of buying visits to your website instead of reaching them organically.

As an advertiser or marketer, you pay a fee or bid for each click on your advertisement or keyword.

The fee is trivial, as the visit is worth far more. If a click costs $2 but leads to a sale of $400, the profit is hefty.

Google Ads is the most popular PPC advertising system globally, and this type of PPC is also known as search engine marketing.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

As the name suggests, SEM is a digital marketing strategy to enhance the website’s visibility in the search result pages.

Yes, it’s different from SEO, and the two should not be confused.

SEO increases the number of website visitors by getting the site to surface high on search engine results organically.

SEM, meanwhile, is related to improving a website’s visibility through advertising. The best-known SEM is, by far, Google Adwords. It works by bidding on keywords that you choose. The highest the bid, the more chance your website has to show up on top of the first page, but the more expensive you pay for a click.

One free and most used tool for Adwords is Google Adwords is called Google Ads. There you can find all reports and tools need to run your campaign. For example, the keyword planner helps you carefully plan your bids and traffic, and it’s even used for organic purposes sometimes.

5) Content Marketing

The customer is no more the king.

Customers are now God, and content is the king.

In our Digital Marketing for Dummies guide, we have to emphasize the importance of content for ranking organically on search engines and be noted on social media. It includes planning, creating, distributing, publishing, and sharing your content to reach the target audience ultimately.

When we talk about content, we consider your blog post and your images, photos, videos, lives, or anything related to bringing your audience.

The best part is it isn’t restricted to any platform. You can make your content available through Social Media, Blogs, Infographics, Podcasts, and Videos. Determine what type of content works for your company and keep your audience engaged.

Find out here how you can take the process further.

6) Affiliate Marketing

The Affiliate Marketing Model is based on Revenue Sharing. The idea behind being to promote other people’s products through an affiliate network. If people buy the product, you end up earning a commission.

If you’ve no product, you can promote others and earn an income!

The Affiliate Marketing equation consists of :

• The Product Creator and Seller
• The Affiliate Marketer

Though, you can be both and benefit from the idea of sharing profit.

It works as a commissioned sales on the Internet. You add someone’s product, like an Amazon Book, for example, on your website. The link or banner has a unique UTM (Urchin Tracking Module) code that tracks if this buyer came from your website or somewhere else. In the case of Amazon, they track all products the buyer bought and rewards you for everything purchased, not only the product you announced on your website.

Some common platforms that manage affiliates and publishers’ relationship are ShareASale, ClickBank, Avant Link, among many others.

Standard Tools to Support Digital Marketing Campaigns

1) Blogs

Whether you’re a small firm or an established, well-known brand, you can’t skip blogging. Blogs are an integral part of any Digital Marketing Campaign and Strategy.

Your readers can know all about your company and the products/services through well-written and informative blogs.

Blogs are an essential medium to convert your readers into customers and should be done in a way to provide value and in-depth knowledge to the readers.

It’s one of the most used strategies for content marketing and SEO. Large or small companies have been applying blogs to attract traffic and rank better on search engines.

In our Digital Marketing for Dummies guide, we highly recommend you starting your blog. Even if you don’t have a product, getting used to writing content and acquiring backlinks can be invaluable when selling your products.

The most used platform for blogging is, by far, WordPress. Other options are Wix or Blogger.

2) Landing Pages

In Digital Marketing, Landing pages are standalone web pages specifically created for a marketing campaign.

This is where a visitor lands after clicking on a ‘link’ placed in an email, or ads from Facebook, Google, Twitter.

Landing Pages focus on direct Call To Action (CTA), which makes them the best option to increase conversion rates.

See below an example of a landing page from Transferwise:

You can see that the user has contact with a call to action right away. Heá also prompted to simulate and compare his rates with other bank rates.

A right landing page will present some essentials such as:

• A Call-To-Action (CTA) button
• Different sections to separate each call to action and give a sense of organization to the page.
• Appealing imagery and text.
• Video.
• Reviews and testimonials from previous clients.

To insert a call to action, you have a few options besides having only on your sidebars or footers, and the most used are the pop-ups, which can be in different forms and types.

The most common types and forms are:

• Lightbox: A smaller window that pops up in front of your page.
• Yes/No option pop-ups: A window pops up, asking a yes or no question, trying to sell your CTA differently.
• Float bars / Ribbons: Banners or ribbons located on the top of your homepage and slightly push the page down when showing.
• Games: Allow users to play a game and win a prize if he takes an action you’re asking for.
• Scrolling pop-ups: it pops up when the user scrolls down to the page.
• Exit pop-ups: It pops up when the user is leaving the page. In general, when the mouse leaves the webpage area.
• Mouse Over pop-ups: The name is self-explanatory.

The most important task on your pop-ups is to optimize your message to the right target and at the right time.

It may take a few attempts to accomplish that, but it will pay off your effort as soon as you do it.

If you’re a freelancer or work by yourself, here we give you vital tips to create a landing page that connects with your audience.

3) Product Reviews

Online Customer Reviews are a whole new dimension in the world of marketing. It bridges the gap between traditional word-of-mouth and the viral feedback system that might shape the customer’s influence.

To understand your customers better and improve customer service will add credibility to your campaigns and the organization.

By doing this, you are giving your customers a voice. A voice to speak for themselves and you.

Online customer reviews and ratings play a significant role in influencing your prospective buyers.

These product reviews strengthen your authenticity and secure your online visibility.

Typical Tools to Measure and Analyse Data

1) Google Analytics

The Digital Marketing for Dummies guide without an introduction to Google Analytics cannot be imagined.

What Gets Measured Gets Improved. – Peter Drucker

This Google service is a vital tool for digital marketers, SEO Analysts, and other professionals related to this field.

Google Analytics is a tool that empowers you with the ability to understand how a digital campaign is performing. It provides insights to review your SEO performance, user interaction, reach, and your campaign strategy’s efficiency.

To analyze your web traffic, Google Analytics is your go-to Tool.

On Google Analytics, you can analyze real-time information about your traffic, such as where it’s coming from and where it’s going.

With more details, you can see the aggregate characteristics of the users visiting your site, such as demographics, geography, interests, or which technology they are using. Handy reports are also available, like the Cohort Analysis, where you see your user’s index of return.

You can also see where your users are coming from the acquisition section. Google Analytics divides it into direct traffic, organic, social, referral, or paid.

The behavior section shows the behavior flow (the pages landed first, navigated, and abandoned), website speed, and site search items, among other features.

Even if you are not well-versed with it, you can learn Google analytics free online courses by Google.

2) Google Search Console

The Google Search Console, formerly known as the Google Webmaster Tool, is another free analysis and service tool from Google.

With its numerous settings, it allows you to view statistics and optimize your actions. These metrics can be linked with Google Analytics, too, for data enhancement.

Here you can see clicks, impressions, CTR (Click Through Rate). With this information, you can work to improve pages with low CTR.

You’re also able to see the keywords you get impressions and clicks and your rankings variation for each one.

Google Search Console also issues warnings about different errors, such as 404s, crawl issues, no-indexed pages in your sitemap, etc.

It is crucial for Google that all websites be solidly programmed and error-free to maintain a website standard.

Mobile Marketing

Another rapidly growing form of digital marketing is Mobile Marketing. With smartphones capturing everyone’s time and mind, marketers have to reach there to appeal to their customers.

Mobile Marketing refers to advertisements that appear on mobile smartphones, tablets, and other devices.

With people glued to their phones, you must have a solid Mobile Marketing Strategy in place.

Mobile Marketing offers you to reach your customers earlier than ever before and solve their problems. Reaching out to them will make them feel cared for and respected.

There are several types of mobile marketing:

• SMS marketing: short text messages to users and customers.
• Location-based marketing uses geotargeting to get people close to your business to see your ads.
• MMS Marketing: messages with videos or images, trying to catch more attention and generate more impact on customers.
• Mobile Internet Marketing: it’s the typical marketing ads that you see on the Internet adapted to the mobile responsive view. It can be either a banner or a Google AdWord campaign.
• Mobile Games: Ads on games. The ones considered free games survive through ads, and there is when marketing comes in place.

In today’s world, when people are not sleeping, they are connected. So you have to make sure when they’re awake, they’re connected to you.

Wrapping up Our Digital Marketing for Dummies Guide

That wasn’t all about it because Digital Marketing is an Ocean. But for a start, you’re right if you’ve reached here.

Digital Marketing, after all, is the effort you put towards capturing your consumer’s attention and a slice of his time.

To summarize, with several strategies attached to Digital Marketing, it’s crucial to have a clear idea about each one. This will help you to get innovative and experiment with your tactics.

Here you were able to touch the main points of your next digital campaign:

• Email Marketing
• Social Media Marketing
• Organic Search (SEO)
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Content Marketing
• Affiliate Marketing

You also learned the standard tools that support a company’s digital marketing:

• Blogs
• Landing Page
• Product Reviews

Typical Tools to Measure and Analyse Data

• Google Analytics
• Google Search Console

You want us to include any other topic or have more ideas? Just let us know.