Blog Layout

Digital Marketing 101




 

This article covers the benefits of digital marketing as well as the common strategies that are being utilised in todays landscape.

Why Digital Marketing?

 

Bob Dylan wrote “ The times they are a changin ’”.
That was in 1964, since then things have well and truly changed.

The way we consume information, listen to music and even watch our favourite TV shows has been radically altered big thanks to the technological revolution.

 

The world around us over the last two decades has increasingly pivoted into the digital domain.
As a result the digital shift has had a significant impact on the ways in which we do business, as well as the approach businesses take towards their customers.

Traditional marketing has taken a back seat, more importantly digital marketing is at the forefront of the advertising industry.
You have to realise that consumer behaviour has changed with the rise of technology.
The internet has created a global network. As a result, smartphones have made it incredibly easy to access content and communicate with one another.

In short, businesses are having great success with digital marketing.
The network, accessibility and data analysis eclipse traditional marketing techniques.

Let’s go over the key benefits:

1. HUGE Market Reach

a diagram showing different types of network effects

Reach people anywhere and everywhere – Well maybe not if they’re deep sea diving but you know what I mean.
Most people in the developed world are using a smartphone; Consequently you have access to billions of people that are scrolling around asking Google questions.

For instance, if you have SEO optimised and are running a PPC campaign you will attract people to your business.
More importantly if you’re solving their frustrations you will be rewarded financially.

Your potential customers are all online.

In 2021 there are 4.6 billion
active internet users –  which is 60% of the world’s population.
In Australia there are 22 million
active users as of January 2021 – that’s the majority of Australians online every day.

The one thing that all businesses need is new customers.

The internet is a great platform to let people know about your products/services and start establishing rapport with your future clientele.
Your website and social media presence play a significant role in your digital media strategy, when used correctly they act like a magnet, attracting like minded people to your business.

2. Higher Return On Investment (ROI)

As a result of the large reach, digital advertising has a much higher return on investment.
The advertising has to be done through a professional approach that establishes your target market and your unique proposition.

For example, imagine running an ad campaign for a new running shoe through a billboard. Who sees it? Everyone.. You have no control over the demographic viewing the advertisement. To clarify, that’s not entirely true.. you get to pick the location of the billboard.

However, on the other hand, think about running an ad campaign through Facebook. You get to literally select the age, gender, profession and interests of the demographic that you show the content to. Furthermore you get to explain the benefits of your shoe and give them a strong reason to buy it.

 

Having a clear target audience generates higher engagement but more importantly gives you a higher return on investment.

3. Value for Money $$$$

Traditional marketing is extremely expensive especially if you’re a small business. The fees outweigh the benefits. The initial costs could cripple your enterprise.
The list of fees regarding traditional marketing are too long to note,  think about the need to print flyers and how time consuming and expensive that is – not to mention the cost of advertisement on a billboard or TV.

The other issue with traditional marketing is that the reach isn’t measurable. It’s very hard to collect data on who is seeing your ad and how people interact with it.

Furthermore traditional marketing is very broad. Your target audience is extremely wide. This isn’t ideal for most small businesses specialising in a certain industry. 

4. Personalised Approach

You can narrow down your advertisements on social media platforms.

For instance, creating informative content like infographics or ‘how-to videos’ that cater to certain pain points your target demographic is having issues with.
As a result this creates engagement and gets your clients interacting with you, they start asking questions which creates a buzz on your page.

Building a strong relationship with your audience boosts your brand awareness and generates a loyal customer base. This should be the main focal point of any business.

To sum it up with a quote from Amazon founder
Jeff Bezos :
“We’re not competitor obsessed, we’re 
customer obsessed.
We start with what the 
customers needs and we work backwards.”

 

a man sits at a desk in front of a wall that says mazon.com

5. Competitive Edge

Your competition is most likely doing some form of digital marketing.
If they’re not, you can grasp a stranglehold on your niche. If they are, you can use this to your advantage by critically analysing their marketing techniques and strategies.

Good marketing is all for show, you simply cannot hide it.

Having this awareness, you can use it to your advantage by seeing what people respond to and what they shift away from.
More importantly you can leverage this information to create a superior campaign – consequently, pulling their customer base into your influence and business sphere

6. Convenience

You can set up your digital marketing more or less from the comfort of your own home.
If you can’t do it all you can do the majority.
For instance most people have access to a laptop or a smartphone.
With those two things alone you can do 10 X more for less than you would with traditional marketing strategies in the past.

7. Scalability and Optimisation

Creating a digital marketing strategy not only gives you clear goals and objectives for the future,
moreover it allows you to better understand your customers.
Furthermore, being consistent with your digital marketing output allows algorithms to adapt as well as optimise your campaign strategy giving you a better ROI over time.

In short, digital marketing increases the rate at which you gain new customers. It also shows you engagement metrics allowing you to form a deeper relationship with your existing client base.

goku from dragon ball z is standing in front of a yellow light .

WARNING: Implementing these strategies could turn your business super saiyan.

 


Now that we’ve gone over the benefits of digital marketing.
Let’s shift our focus and attention on the most common digital marketing strategies:

 

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

 

SEO is a great way to drive new traffic to your website, for instance writing a blog / journal.
These aren’t blog posts about a day in the life of or writing about something random you’re passionate about.
The goal is to write posts that are specific to your client base, showing them how your product / service will help alleviate and solve a particular problem they’re having.

Firstly, you need to change your perspective on sales and shift away from selling people based on features and benefits. Start solving peoples problems based on your techniques as well as your products / services.
The moment you do this your business will flourish like a flower.

Blogging with SEO in mind does two things:


  1. Pushes your website up Google’s ranking index – Google likes to know that your website isn’t dormant.

  2. Drives organic traffic to the website – resulting in engagement and greater reach.


 

 

For example, let’s say you’re selling computer parts.
One of the things that people commonly search for is
‘how do I make my computer faster?’
Help your readers diagnose the problem and integrate products from your shop.

Let’s use another example, for instance, let’s say you’re a fitness coach.
A common query might be
“how do I lose belly fat”.
You’d proceed to write articles relating to
‘HIIT’ (High Intensity Interval Training), ‘fasting’, ‘calories in vs calories out’ and various other topics like ‘nutrition’ and ‘hormones’ .

Building your blog and content over time is guaranteed to rank higher in Google.
The outcome is free, consistent quality traffic.
The broader your content the larger your traffic source and wider your funnel.

a screenshot of a website showing the keyword overview and traffic overview .

The term 'how to lose belly fat' has 301K monthly searches in the world. The article on healthline '20 tips to lose belly fat' has an insane 3.8 million visitors every month. That's a crazy amount of organic traffic to the website.

Create a Video Strategy

 

YouTube is the second largest search engine in existence, moreover video carousels doubled in Google search results in recent years.

When people go on YouTube they’re looking to find answers to their questions.
Think about things that people in your niche might be asking themselves and then make an informative video on it.

As an example let’s use the fitness coach again. People that were searching for
“how to lose belly fat?” would also be searching for “what to eat to lose belly fat fast?” .
Knowing this you could upload a
“what I eat in a day to lose belly fat” video detailing your total calories in a full day of eating and training.

 

two men are standing next to each other on a white background .

Jeremy Either has 1st and 2nd video for how to lose belly fat. Crazy amount of reach for his channel
Take note of the titles. They draw you in and tell you exactly what you're in for.

 

In conclusion, when creating videos try to be as concise and pragmatic with the information that you’re putting out there. Do not venture off topic too far, you will receive more views and engagement if your videos are precise and to the point.

 

Social Media Marketing

 

Social Media Marketing is a great way to interact with your audience as well as raise brand awareness and generate new leads.

Firstly, it’s important when starting to pick one social media outlet and master it, build the framework and carry it on to the others.

Picking the social media platform you want to focus on should be made based on where your target audience is and catering to that platform first.

Secondly, think about the platform you’re using and how people interact with that particular platform.
YouTube as noted before is primarily used for how to videos and entertainment.

Facebook on the other hand is different, people aren’t on Facebook with a credit card in hand looking to buy, they often scroll the news feed and share things that strike an emotional connection.
For example, a story that they can relate to, something interesting or new that they’ve learnt, could be even something funny.

 

a facebook post with a picture of a person 's face and a few comments .

Honesty + Humour = Engagement

If you’re trying to bring people into your world, a very successful way to do that is to share your story and make it relatable to your audience.

Going back to our fitness coach example – You could share your
‘hero’ story about how you decided to get into shape and the events that led you to that point. People love to know the background and the back story.
The internet has made information readily accessible and people want to know, they want to relate and if they can relate they will engage with you.

 

The focus on the social media outlets is to have a loyal fan base, don’t get too concerned about numbers.
Big numbers don’t matter if you have minimal interaction with your audience.

 

Paid Per Click Advertising (PPC)

 


Paid Per Click Advertising is the next marketing tool at our disposal.
There are billions of people using Google for queries and questions day to day.

PPC allows you to set a monthly budget and literally pay per click that your advertisement receives.

Depending on your objective (sales/leads/traffic) set your ad by choosing keywords as well as phrases that will trigger your ad to show, choose the target audience and set your budget.

 

a google search page with a red circle around the word free

PPC is best used if you’re running a special promotion or you have a no brainer offer to share with your clients. It's also very effective at driving sales and acquiring leads for a service based business.

Using the fitness coach example, let’s say they’re wanting to promote a discounted price off their training programs. Furthermore they want to drive leads and traffic to their landing page.
Keywords could be
“Full body fat burning program”.  

Google Ads also gives you the option to promote your campaign outside of Google Search through relevant websites in the Google Display Network (GDN), there’s a plethora of websites in the GDN which allow you to get more reach with your campaign.

 

Podcasts

 

A double edged sword, you can use podcasts as a tool to learn and grow your own knowledge base as well as educate others whilst simultaneously boosting your brand and market reach. 

 

 

Podcasts are great for content creation in general.

Firstly, let’s say you film your podcast on camera, you can upload the video to YouTube as well as your own website. Secondly, you can strip the audio and upload it to
Apple , Google , Spotify and literally a thousand other podcast streaming websites. Thirdly, you can edit bite sized pieces from the video and upload it onto your Instagram . Lastly, you can summarise the conversation into a blog post like this one.
Once all that is done you run a targeted ad campaign through
Facebook to engage a larger audience and spread brand awareness using the same content.

There’s two ways to do podcasts:


  1. You can either start your own and interview people in your field of expertise.
  2. You can go on other peoples podcasts as a guest speaker.


 

a man with a beard is standing in front of a play button .

Huberman Lab Podcast

Starting your own is ideal for building an audience and exposing your brand.
Bear in mind that starting out is a lengthy process and that it takes some time to build traction.

Being an interviewee is the opposite. It’s a lot easier to reach out to a podcast show for an interview based on your experiences and knowledge. Podcast hosts are always looking to speak to new people with lots of real world experience. Being interviewed allows you to cross promote your brand to an established fan base.

In short, podcasts add lot’s of value to your brand growth as well as your own knowledge.

 

Email Marketing

 

Email marketing is a great strategy to communicate and build a long term connection with your audience.
Emphasis on
“long-term”. Building your email contacts takes a long time and is a result of good marketing practises with your client base.

Acquiring people’s email and information requires them to have to opt in, literally handing their info over to you.
Few will release their private details without having good reason,
This is where creating content plays a vital role.
For example, lead magnets, infographics and informative pieces are all worth noting.

You essentially trade information, their contact info for your knowledge. 

 

Conclusion

 

Now that you have the tools it’s time for action.
Anything of value that has longevity will take time to build. It’s important to pick one strategy to start with.

 

 

Strategies like video content for YouTube are extremely time intensive, SEO and Social Media Marketing are a good place to start.
These strategies take time to perfect but results are generated fairly quickly if done right.
Pick one social media platform to master. Once you develop the template and the framework you can transpose it to another one.

Implementing one of these strategies right is better than doing five half assed.
It’s honestly all you need to generate high returns and grow your business.

Quality of the business should always be the emphasis and not the end result of money.
Money is a by-product of solving peoples problems – be the problem solver and reap the rewards.


 
Mesmerise is a comprehensive digital marketing agency offering integrated strategies – helping small and medium sized businesses grow.

If you’re looking to scale your business or wanting help implementing a marketing strategy –
contact us for a free strategy call.

 

 

*Authors Note: Second part of this article (Strategies) was largely gathered from this video .

 

a logo for a company called become omnipresent .
By Petar Petrovic 03 Mar, 2024
The only marketing strategy moving forward is an omni present strategy. If you're a business owner this is a must read piece of content.
a logo for ramp up sales with a shopping cart .
By Petar Petrovic 20 Jul, 2021
In this article we’re going to have a look at retargeting as a marketing tool. As well as how you can utilise it within your digital marketing campaign
a logo that says `` rank your website on google '' with a magnifying glass .
By Petar Petrovic 15 Jul, 2021
Need to know SEO
More posts

Want To Build A Better Business, Body & Mind?

I keep it real in this FREE newsletter - arming you with a fresh perspective to build the life you deserve.


"Find your voice and Mesmerise the world."

Join the community

Share by: