How to Dig Deeper into Digital Marketing

So, what is digital marketing?

How does it work? And more importantly, why should you think about using it? Well, quite simply, digital marketing represents the use of numerous digital technologies in order to help promote your company, product, services or yourself.  It requires solid knowledge of your business, as well as understanding what strategies to use so that you don’t spend money and time on unsuccessful campaigns.

What that means is that you need to learn about digital marketing so you can use it to your own advantage. For example – SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can help a lot, but only if you’re in a specific industry. If you’re running a small local bar, it would be much better if you focused on local listings on Google, or SMM (Social Media Marketing).

Anyhow, if your problem is how to better understand digital marketing and ways to research it, you’ve come to the right place.

Learn Marketing Basics

First things first, let’s break digital marketing down to its basics.

As with any learning process, you need a strong foundation to help you understand what you’ll be facing later on. Older marketing models were done in a campaign form. Businesses wanted to promote something, and so they used marketing campaigns to push it on a specific group of people.

With the digital marketing era, you are expanding your reach to a much wider audience. This is why digital marketing campaigns are done in such a way that they connect and engage with the customers. Their main goal is to help your business become a part of your customers’ lives.

Online marketing allows us to have something for everyone basically. With so much data from your website and different channels, together with information about your customers, their individual preferences and customer reviews; you can find the way to offer something to almost everyone.

A great thing about digital marketing is that it isn’t as rigid as old marketing strategies. It’s constantly changing and evolving. However, you can’t implement it and hope for the best. It requires serious planning and organizing, and it requires that you’re always up to date.

Stay Up to Date

If you’re planning on having a serious digital marketing strategy, you need to make sure you’re using all of the opportunities you can get.

This means that you need to follow how the world of digital marketing is changing, and adapt to it. Knowing how fast Google and social media change their algorithms, you need to find the best tools to stay on top of those changes.

So, let’s talk about those tools, as they should help you navigate through the stormy waters of digital marketing.

1. Digital Marketing Blogs

If you’ve ever researched digital marketing, then you know that there are a lot of blogs that cover digital marketing. It would be impossible to track them all constantly. You should find the ones that are regularly updated with credible sources.

2. Social Media and RSS Feed

There’s a lot of talks about which one of these tools should be the ultimate tool in digital marketing. However, we suggest you research all the benefits of both. While the RSS feeds help you follow the important changes in the world of digital marketing, social media can help you engage with more people in a fully organic way. Learn how to combine these tools as it will help significantly in the long run.

3. Digital Marketing Events

This step can sometimes be the hardest. Not all of us can spend an entire day listening to various lectures about digital marketing. In addition, such events are usually quite expensive. However, digital marketing events can help you significantly. In these events, you learn about innovations, changes, adaptations, and everything necessary to stay on top of your digital marketing game. These events can really help you get some serious insight of the world of digital marketing.

4. Start a Dialogue

A dialogue can be a very powerful tool in digital marketing. Try to start a dialogue with your colleagues about digital marketing. Try to keep the entire team in the loop and get their opinions. This way you all get to understand each other’s points of view, and you can plan out your marketing campaigns in a better fashion.

You can try to start an active dialogue with your customers as well. Engage them on social media, through e-mails or different CTA forms through your website. Share relevant content with them and try to understand what they really want.

5. Organize Sources and Set a Routine

This is an integral part of mastering digital marketing. You need to organize your sources into different groups so that you can go through them easily. Arrange them by type and importance. You should be able to know exactly where to look when you need information about a topic.

Pick a moment when you can spend time sorting through everything. Do this often. Soon, it will become second nature, saving you time and money during the process.

What Businesses Get Wrong and What They Should Do About It

Let’s go through some things that are a challenge for a lot of companies.

One of the first obstacles businesses face is handling all the data and discovery. This happens quite often, and most commonly with companies that are still trying to understand how the world of digital marketing works.

Basically, everybody would like to have a fully integrated customer database with automated processes. The only problem is such databases are extremely hard to develop, and they can cost quite a lot.

What you can do instead is focus on the data relevant to your goal. Data from a specific focus group or from a specific location can help you when it comes to short-term goals. Finding the best way to filter and use that data helps you understand your customers. Moreover, it also provides a great foundation for developing a system you’ve always wanted.

Another problem that commonly occurs is getting people to work together. When it comes to digital marketing, your customers will go through various channels before finding your business.

All of those channels have their own roles. It is very important that everyone knows that they have to work together to make things work. With teams working on your website, mobile website, customer relations, you all need to be aware each other, especially, when it comes to reaching your audience and making an impact on them.

Another issue in the world of digital marketing is the cost. Quite a few business owners are afraid of having multiple versions of landing pages or adapting their website for the mobile market because it might be too expensive. Even though these things can be expensive, their value is much higher.

According to the digital marketing experts from GWM SEO, you need to find a way to implement innovations and accept the changes around you in order to unlock the hidden potential of your business.

One of the best ways to do this is through test-projects and pilots. Choose a group of customers, or even a department within your own company. Then conduct your survey or test. Once you have the results, they will help you understand whether you have a good your business plan or not.

Wrapping It Up

So, there you have it. This guide aims to help you with the various aspects of digital marketing and why it is a good idea to understand your market. With that said, the internet is flooded with digital marketing experts and professionals, but not all of them have what’s necessary to help you out. If you need professional advice, seek an expert, so that you can really maximize your business’ potential.

*This guest post was written by Lena Hemsworth.