In today’s post, I’m going to explain the fundamentals of digital marketing in plain English.
And show you an example of a digital marketing campaign to use for your business.
In fact:
This is the exact process I use to generate leads for my digital marketing agency with a cost per lead of $ 0.46 cents
Let’s dive right in
Content
Feel free to jump around to any of the chapters
- Chapter 1 – Fundamentals of Digital marketing
- Chapter 2 – How to choose your digital marketing channels?
- Chapter 3- How to market your business online?
- Chapter 4 – An example of a digital marketing campaign?
- Chapter 5 – FAQ on digital marketing
Chapter 1 – Fundamentals of Digital marketing
The easiest way to describe digital marketing is the promotion of a business, product, service, or brand online. It involves the use of electronic devices such as computers, mobile phones, tablets, etc. in promoting a business, product, or service.
How is digital marketing different from traditional marketing?
Traditional marketing comprises promotion using mainly print media. Examples include Newspaper adverts, Fliers, Posters, Direct Mail Advertising, Billboards, and Corporate Profiles.
On the other hand, digital marketing comprises the transmission of business promotion through digital devices such as phones, television, radio, tablets, etc.
What are the main types of digital marketing channels?
There are two main types of digital marketing channels.
There are offline and online digital marketing channels.
Offline digital marketing channels include television, radio, tablets, phones, etc.
With online digital marketing channels, we are talking about the following
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Search Engine marketing
- Content marketing
- Paid advertising
We will discuss each channel in great detail later.
Chapter 2 – How to choose the type of digital marketing channel?
The main types of online digital marketing channels are
- Search Engine Marketing – SEO & PPC
- Content Marketing – Blog Articles, Videos, Infographics, etc.
- Social Media Marketing – Facebook page, Facebook Groups, Instagram Reels, IGTV, Facebook ads, etc.
- Email Marketing – Email Campaigns
- Paid advertising – PPC / Facebook ads
Let’s discuss each of them
Search Engine marketing
This is broken down into search engine optimization and Google Pay per click ads.
Search Engine Optimization
This involves optimizing your content – article, video, or graphics – to enable it to be displayed on the first page of Google results.
The results displayed on the first page of Google are known as organic results. All the search results appearing on the first page of Google are free.
Pay per click ads
These are the results that appear above the organic results.
These are paid ads that appear when a person searches for keywords. They usually appear on top of the organic results.
With paid ads, you only pay for the clicks, not the impressions.
You are not charged for the number of times a person sees your ads but when a person takes action.
When a search is made 44% of the people click on organic results. On the other hand, 20% of the people click on paid ads.
Why is Google search important in digital marketing?
There is a sense of urgency in people searching for what they want on Google. People usually are in the market when they search for products or services.
Every Google keyword search has a different Customer intent. The main intentions behind google keyword searches are
- Informational
- Navigational
- Commercial
- Transactional
Most long-tail keywords have transactional intent behind them. A transactional intent means that a person is ready to make a purchase.
For example, if a person enters this long-tail keyword “black shoes next day delivery London”. This is a person looking to buy a pair of black shoes and wants them delivered the very next day. The transactional intent behind long-tail keywords makes getting to the first page of Google an attractive option for many digital marketers.
In addition, as a digital marketer, if you are looking to make instant sales. Google pay-per-click ads are your best friend. However, Google ads can be very expensive for long-tail competitive keywords.
Content Marketing
Content marketing involves the use of content to attract, educate, nurture and ultimately convert a prospect.
The format can be written, images, video, infographics, etc.
For example, assuming you have created an online course on how to create Facebook video ads.
To build awareness and ultimately convert a prospect, it would be a great idea to provide valuable content on YouTube as a way to both educate and promote your product.
It is through these videos that prospects will assess whether there is value in your course. This process will also attract, educate, nurture and convert your prospects into customers.
Content marketing is extremely powerful because it provides a proven path to warm up your audience.
As we all know, a sale takes place when the prospect is comfortable. In other words, a sale is made when we move a prospect from being a stranger to a hot lead. Content marketing is remarkable in this nurturing process.
The main aim of content making is to provide visibility and attract new customers to your business. It is an effective lead generation tool to both bring in new customers and warm-up existing customers.
A content marketing strategy should provide a proven path that maps out the customer’s journey from strangers to making a purchase. Below is a figure of a real Estates sales funnel depicting the customers’ journey.
Social media marketing
Social media marketing involves the use of social media platforms in promoting your business, products, or services. The giant of the social media landscape is Meta. Meta owns Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, and Facebook Messenger. These platforms are part of the top 5 Social media platforms in the world.
Facebook has tools such as Facebook page, Facebook Groups, Facebook Marketplace, and Facebook ads platform to aid small and large businesses in achieving their marketing goals.
A big misconception about social media is that it is “free” marketing. This is much further from the truth. As it stands organic reach is pretty much non-existent on Facebook business pages. For instance, if you have 100 followers on your Facebook page, 1 person will organically see your post.
In fact, a study found that Facebook organic engagement plummeted to less than 1% (RivalQ)
With organic reach out of the question now, the only way to grow awareness and ultimately sales are through paid advertising. (Discussed later, I will show you my exact process of generating 15 leads per day at the cost of $0.46 cents per lead).
The path to success in social media is visibility. The more you are visible online, the more your business and brand will grow and with it your profits.
Online visibility is best achieved through video content.
The minimum required amount of posting is 5 times a day on each of the social media platforms. This has become essential because of the reduction in organic engagement.
What content should you post?
As we have already discussed, video has more engagement than any other format on social media.
Keeping up with a video schedule a day is difficult, so I usually also share other peoples’ content, if they are valuable to my audience. My content strategy is ⅓ promotional content, ⅓ other people’s content that is valuable to my audience, and ⅓ value-added content from me.
When to post on Facebook and Instagram?
Coschedule published the finding of 20 studies about the best times to post on Facebook
Best times for Instagram Posting
Email Marketing
Fun fact about Email marketing. Email is older than the world wide web.
Even though email marketing is an older form of Marketing, it is still the most powerful way to convert an interested audience.
Email marketing generates a higher ROI than any other marketing channel. An email list lets you reach out directly to your audience to build your brand, distribute your content, and sell products or services
Most marketers, myself included, use social marketing, and content marketing channels to generate leads.
The leads are then nurtured over emails by providing valuable content using the medium of video.
For beginners, I recommend using Mailerlite. This email service provides a free account that allows for contacts of up to 1000. It also allows email automation which is critical to reaching your prospects at the right time.
When it comes to email marketing, the ratio should be 80% valuable content and 20% promotional content.
Paid ads
This encompasses all forms of online paid advertising. These include Facebook ads, Google ads, Twitter ads, Pinterest ads, LinkedIn ads, etc. Paid ads can be very effective in presenting your offer to an interested audience.
Let’s assume you create a video on how to write content that ranks on Google’s first page. To drive traffic to your post you can boost the article using the video views objective in the Facebook ads manager. This would build awareness and engagement. You can then remarket an offer to your custom audience through Facebook’s retargeting ads option in the Facebook ads manager.
Assuming results from your video ads show you had 50,000 views. The 50,000 views are people who are interested in your content and what you have to say.
The next step is to create a conversion campaign targeting your video viewers. To do this you create a custom audience of your video views in the Facebook ads manager.
The offer for the campaign can be a landing page where you are selling a paid course on content writing.
✅A pro tip would be to create two options on the landing page. An option for a paid course and an option for a free guide.
Either option provides you with value. A paid course is a converted Customer. A free guide download is a customer who can be nurtured through emails moving forward.
Chapter 3 – How to market your business online?
The steps to marketing a business online involve building digital real estate for your offline business.
The primary forms of digital real estate for any business would be
- Website for business information and written content marketing
- Facebook page for Social media marketing
- YouTube channel for video content marketing
- Email Marketing Service for email marketing
- Google my business Profile for a local business search on google maps
1 – Creating a website
A business website sets up your presence in the online space. The business website, when built with marketing in mind, can serve as a huge lead-generating machine for your business. If blog articles are ranking on the first page of Google, it’s free traffic on autopilot.
This traffic can be converted into leads through email lead magnets.
The visitors can also be retargeted through custom audiences on Facebook ads.
A website can be effectively used to generate leads when it is appropriately optimized for search engines. In addition, Visitors can also be retargeted on social media platforms
2 – Facebook business page
This affords your business a place to interact with your audience in an informal setting. Again the use of a Facebook page is to generate leads.
The leads are generated through people’s actions and interactions with your content.
Any post engagements and video views can be used for retargeting when the business has an offer for sale.
3 – YouTube Channel
YouTube is the second-largest social networking platform. It cannot be missed if a business intends to build an online presence. Video is king online. A YouTube channel will also provide another medium for your business to increase its visibility online.
4 – Email Marketing
Out of the 100 people that visit your website, only 3% are ready to buy what you’re selling. The other 97% are not ready to buy. However, they can be nurtured to buy in the future. This is where email marketing comes in. It provides a process to attract, educate, and nurture prospects who sign up for your newsletter, free resources, or Webinars.
Another advantage of an email list is that it is platform-independent. An email is an excel file that can be uploaded to any email service provider.
Having an email marketing strategy is a must for building your digital real estate.
5 – Google my business profile
Google provides a free map and website for local businesses to be easily found. As a local business, it is invaluable for you to list on google my business.
If a person searches for your product or service, you will show on the right-hand side in the search results on the first page of Google.
Chapter 4 – An Example of a digital marketing campaign?
A digital marketing campaign involves the process of planning and executing a profitable campaign.
The steps involved in planning a campaign are
- Creating a customer profile
- Analyzing your competitors
- Choosing the appropriate digital marketing channels
- Measuring your performance
I am going to use my recent digital marketing campaign as an example to explain this process. The campaign aimed to generate new leads for my growing digital marketing agency. The offer for the ad was a 30 minutes free Digital Marketing consultation call
Creating a customer profile
The customer profile for ads was
- Age – 25 -40
- Gender – Men and Women
- Interests – small business, Digital marketing, Facebook page ad ins, entrepreneurs
- Pain Point – A need to scale their business profitably online using the appropriate digital channels
Here is an example of how to create a Customer Avatar
image via Dynamic Digital Marketing
Analyzing the Competition
In analyzing my competitions, I realized that a free strategy session was offered to all prospects. The idea is for the agency to generate as many prospects as possible through the open sales funnel.
The advantage of the offer is that the Facebook lead generation form captures names, emails, and phone numbers. This makes it easy for email marketing and retargeting prospects.
Appropriate digital marketing channels
I choose Facebook lead generation ads as my objective because social media marketing is an excellent channel for getting new clients.
With the lead generation objective, the prospect’s information is automatically filled in by the platform. Plus the prospect wouldn’t have to leave their Facebook feeds. They can remain there and complete the process.
Measuring Performance
My overall cost per lead in this campaign was $0.46 cents. Considering a single client is worth much more every month. A cost per lead of less than $1 is a huge gain.
Are you a business owner looking for leads and sales?
we can help …
Chapter 5 – FAQ on Digital Marketing
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing involves the use of electronic devices in promoting your business, products, services, and brands online.
What are Online and offline digital marketing channels?
Examples of offline channels include radio, television, phones, tablets, etc
Examples of online channels include Emails, Social media, and content marketing.
What are the types of online digital marketing channels?
- Email marketing
- Social media marketing
- Paid ads
- Content marketing
What are the types of offline digital marketing channels?
- Radio ads
- Television ads
How to create your digital marketing strategy?
- Creating a customer profile or avatar
- Doing competitor analysis
- Choosing the appropriate type of digital marketing channels
- Choosing the right creative for your target audience
- Measuring performance
What are the advantages of digital marketing?
- Digital marketing ads easily scale
- Digital marketing scales as compared to print media marketing. A Facebook ad can be seen by millions of people across the world. A billboard is only visible at the location it is placed.
- Digital marketing ads are much cheaper
- The cost of digital marketing is much lower than print advertising. For example, comparing the cost of a newspaper ad to that of Google pay for click ads. Google pay-for-click ads charge when a person actually engages with the ad.
- Business can easily access their customers directly
- There is a huge opportunity for small businesses to reach their customers directly. Having a Facebook business page allows a business to informally access their audience without paying intermediaries such as newspaper corporations or owners of billboards
- There is immediate feedback on ad performance
- It allows for cheap and easy experimentation on what works and what doesn’t. For instance, how do you assess if a billboard is working or not in driving customers to your business? You can easily assess whether a Facebook ad is working within an hour. This immediate feedback saves money
Who is a digital marketer?
A digital marketer refers to a trained individual who specializes in using digital channels for business, products, or service promotion
Who is an online marketer?
An online marketer is a digital marketer who only uses online channels such as email marketing, and social media marketing for his promotional activities.
Now It’s Your Turn
In this article, we looked at everything there is to know about setting up a digital marketing campaign.
From fundamentals of digital marketing to building digital real estate for your business. I also showed you the process of creating a digital marketing campaign using Facebook lead generation ads.
Now it’s your turn: Which of the digital marketing channels are you going to try first?
Leave a comment below to let me know
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