What is Digital Marketing?

So you had someone come up to from one of the digital marketing companies. They asked you “Do you have someone doing your digital marketing?” You?stare at them for a few seconds before saying “yes” just to get them to leave, but you really have no idea what it is.

So, lets go over what digital marketing is, and why you should be using it!

First and most importantly, what the heck is this foreign word? Well,?Digital Marketing is the process of building and maintaining customer relationships through online activities to generate sales and/or capture customers that are searching on the internet for answers.

Translation: It helps you get found online.

Why use Digital Marketing over traditional marketing?

  • With Digital Marketing, you can get targeted traffic.
  • It?s usually MUCH cheaper, giving you a higher return on your investment.
  • It gives you the ability to go viral.
  • .It gives you instant results.
  • It?s easy to measure success.
  • You?re in control.

Why do you need to focus on Digital Marketing?

As of 2016, There are 3,424,971,237 people online. With the constant growth of the web and more people getting connected every day, digital marketing has become a necessity for EVERY business.

The web has become over saturated with information. If you don?t have a well optimized digital marketing strategy, then how will people find you?

What are the ways that you can make Digital Marketing effective for your business?

  1. 1) Have a GOOD and well optimized website.
  2. 2) Use Social Media on a consistent basis.
  3. 3) Start a Blog and post to it regularly.
  4. 4) Have an Email List (email marketing).
  5. 5) Run Pay-Per-Click ad campaigns.

1) Have a Good and Well Optimized Website

  • Make sure your website is clean and well designed. Don?t have 20 flashing images on a page making it look like an old myspace site.
  • Do keyword research to find what people are actually searching for, and how competitive those keywords are. Finding highly searched keywords with lower competition will give you the best results. Use those keywords throughout the pages on your site.
  • Make sure your pages have good titles and meta descriptions (also using the keywords that you found).

2) Use Social Media on a Consistent Basis

  • Make sure you are actively posting to the most popular social media sites:
    • Facebook
    • Twitter
    • Google+
    • Instagram
    • Pinterest
    • Linkedin
  • Post to each site at LEAST 3 days per week. The more the better, but don?t overdo it. Posting frequency varies by site.

3) Start a Blog and Post to it Regularly

  • Starting a blog will allow you to post longer, high quality content that people can share. The more it gets shared, the more backlinks and traffic you get to your site. The more traffic you get, the higher you?ll be in the search results.
  • Post to your blog at least once per week. Again, the more the better.
  • Make sure your posts are well optimized with keywords, just like the other pages on your site.

4) Have an Email List

  • When people visit your site, there?s a chance they?ll miss something or may never return. Giving them the option to opt-in to your email list will allow you to communicate with them after they leave your site.
  • Create a ?lead magnet?, which is something enticing them to sign up for your list. Some examples of this are:
    • A free e-book
    • A discount/coupon
    • A checklist
  • Send them a weekly newsletter or specials that you have going on, which will increase engagement and hopefully sales.

5) Run Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Campaigns

  • Pay-Per-Click campaigns are basically advertisements that you can run on many different sites. Facebook and Google are two of the most popular places for this, but all of the social media sites allow some sort of advertisement.
  • The benefits to using a PPC campaign is:
    • You only pay if someone actually clicks on your ad.
    • You can get very specific with who you want to target.
    • You set your budget. Results can be seen with little money (if well optimized)
    • You can start and stop it anytime.

So there you have it! Hopefully that gives you enough information on digital marketing, so you don’t look at someone that mentions it like they’re from another planet.

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Stephen O'Neal

My name is Stephen O?Neal (Steveo). I've been doing Digital Marketing for over a decade. I have a degree in Interactive Media, have worked at several different marketing agencies, and have been running my own businesses for over 10 years. I'm a WordPress, SEO, and Google Ads expert. I know what needs to be done to get results.