This guide will help you to learn about Digital Marketing and the methods used in it. You will also get to know the benefits of Digital Marketing for individuals and organizations.
The other things that you learn related to Digital Marketing will be – most important Digital Marketing skills and Digital Marketing certifications.
This Digital Marketing guide will also help you to learn every aspect of Online Marketing.
All the concepts and fundamentals are explained in a step-by-step way that you can follow to learn everything about Digital Marketing. It will share all the information about Digital Marketing for beginners.
The increasing trend of Digital in every aspect of life like entertainment, business, or daily lifestyle is creating new opportunities for the adopters who like to learn new things and creating hurdles for those who are restricted to old skills.
It also shows new opportunities for businesses and professionals with Digital Marketing.
Here, you will learn how you can start learning Digital Marketing to achieve your desired goal. The goal could be to working as a Digital Marketing professional, starting your own blog, work as a freelancer, or establishing your own Digital Marketing agency.
What is Digital Marketing – A Brief Introduction of Digital Marketing
Today more than 80% of all the businesses use Digital Marketing to promote their products and business. Social Media Marketing is the top channel of Online Marketing followed by Website and Email Marketing.
Digital Marketing is a word that you have heard a lot these days. However, you want to know – what exactly is the meaning of Digital Marketing and how it can help you. So, here is the answer.
Digital Marketing includes the following key terms:
- Online Marketing and Promotion
- Digital Content Marketing
- Digital Marketing Analytics
Online Marketing is the marketing of your business using different online platforms and the promotion of your business through organic & paid marketing strategies.
It is a marketing strategy that helps you to achieve your business objectives or goals with the help of digital tools and tactics like online platforms, social media, SEO, and Content Marketing.
The trend and use of Online Marketing are increasing day by day because of social media and the internet.
The basic understanding of Digital Marketing can add value to your professional skills and career growth because all the companies – large or small – are shifting towards Digital platforms to run their business.
Why is Digital Marketing Important for You?
There are multiple benefits of Digital Marketing. If you are an individual the benefits will be different from an organization because each has different needs of Digital Marketing.
The benefits of Digital Marketing for individuals and professionals:
More Career Opportunities: A good understanding of Digital Marketing can help you to get more career opportunities in the field of Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, SEO, and Paid Marketing (PPC & Google Ads).
You can join a Digital Marketing Services Agency or work as a Consultant by offering useful advice to prepare a Digital Marketing strategy. You can also start your own blog with your Digital Marketing understanding.
Personal Branding: The development of your Personal Brand on Social Media can help you to have an extra edge in the job market. You can present yourself as a professional with a good understanding of your domain area and additional knowledge of Digital Marketing.
Personal Branding will help you to attract potential employers to your LinkedIn profile. It can help you in getting more career opportunities in your desired domain. LinkedIn and Twitter are the right platforms to develop your brand for more career opportunities.
Passive Income: It is one of the most important factors in learning Digital Marketing. You can earn passive income from Digital Marketing. There are multiple methods to earn passive income from Digital Marketing like Blogging, Affiliate Marketing, and more.
You only need to develop a good understanding of Digital Marketing tactics like Content Marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing, and Inbound Marketing.
Professional Networking: The Digital Marketing platforms and Social Media platforms can help you to develop your own large professional network. It will also help you to find more opportunities in the market.
Social Media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter are the best to develop your professional network. You can connect or follow the experts and professionals in your industry, where you want to make a career.
It will also help you to update yourself and to learn the current trends in the market and industry.
Marketing of your Business: Digital Marketing can also help you with the marketing of your business. You could use Social Media platforms or your own website and content to promote your business on the internet.
It is very cost-effective to use Digital Marketing as compared to traditional marketing to promote your business. It gives you a wide reach to your audience or potential customers and helps you to attract more visitors to your website and business.
The benefits of Digital Marketing for organizations and companies:
Customer Engagement: Digital Marketing can help your business to increase your customer engagement using your website and social media. Your Digital and Social Media presence will help your customers to easily connect with you.
It will be like a place, where they can share their problems, issues & suggestions about your products, services, and business. Better customer engagement will ultimately help in the growth of the business because it will ensure the satisfaction of your customers.
Low Cost of Marketing: Cost is the most important factor for any business because it directly affects your revenue and profit from the business. If we talk about the cost of Digital Marketing services, it is very low as compared to traditional marketing.
Internet Marketing is more cost-effective than traditional marketing because it offers free marketing tactics and methods like Content Marketing, Blogging, SEO, and Inbound Marketing to promote your products and business.
Effective Brand Awareness: Digital Marketing provides great opportunities for your business to improve your brand awareness through digital and social media platforms. You can use your own website and content to promote your brand.
Social Media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram can help you to target your core audience who are interested in your product and services. Content plays an important role in attracting more customers to your business through website and social media.
Lead Generation: The basic purpose of any marketing effort is to increase business and revenue. Digital Marketing also helps your business to increase the revenue by generating more leads specially Qualified Leads. You can generate more qualified leads using paid advertising with minimum expenses.
You can choose your target audience, whom you want to target and target as per the interest of the potential customers. It helps you to generate more qualified leads for your business who might be interested in offerings.
Performance Measurement: The most important benefit of Internet Marketing for your business is the performance measurement of your marketing efforts.
Digital Marketing strategies and tactics like Pay-Per-Click, SEO, and Social Media Marketing provide you valuable data and insights about your target audience.
Digital Marketing helps you to make more sound decisions and effective marketing strategy for your product and business.
The Major Categories and Methods of Digital Marketing:
Search Engine Marketing: Search Engine Marketing means the use of search engines for the marketing and promotion of your business. Search Engine Marketing is a combination of organic and paid marketing strategies.
It is also called SEM in Digital Marketing. The basic purpose of SEM is to attract more traffic to your website from search engines. It could be organic with the help of SEO or paid with the help of PPC & Google Ads.
Search Engine Marketing is a major part of Digital Marketing because it is very crucial for traffic generation on any website.
Search Engine Optimization: The term SEO is used to explain the optimization of your website with keywords, content, and URLs, which helps your website to rank higher in the search engine results for specific keywords.
SEO helps you to get a higher rank in the search engine and more brand visibility in the search results. It helps you to attract more organic traffic to your website with minimal cost.
The three major pillars of SEO are On-Page SEO, Technical SEO, and Off-Page SEO.
Pay-Per-Click & Google Ads: PPC & Google Ads are the paid marketing tools that you can use to achieve different objectives or goals like lead generation, sales and brand promotion. The most common PPC ads are Search Ads and Display Ads.
Search Ads appeared on the search results for the specific keywords, when someone is looking for keywords relevant for your ads. While Display Ads appeared on other websites with the relevant content for your display ads.
The performance grader for your PPC ads is the Quality Score of your ads and the keyword relevancy of your ad copy. The right ads copy and high-Quality Score will help you to get a higher ranking in Search Ads.
Social Media Marketing: Social Media Marketing means the use of Social Media to advertise and promote your business, products, and services. It is also called SMM in Digital Marketing.
Social Media is the most important platform to promote your business because Social Media provides a wider reach to your audience.
As per research, there are 351 million users of the social networks in India and this number will increase to 447 million by 2023. And, there are 4.39 billion social network users in all over the world. The number is increased by 9% as compared to last year.
It shows the rapidly increasing growth of Social Media in India and other parts of the world. The top Social Media platforms are Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
Content Marketing: Content is a vital component of SEO and Digital Marketing and especially – Social Media Marketing. The demand for good quality content is increasing day by day.
Content Marketing is also very important for Internet Marketing because it is useful in Social Media Marketing, Blog Marketing, and SEO.
Content Marketing is the most effective tool to share your message with your audience in the forms of Images, Blogs, or Videos.
The growing demand for good quality content is a great opportunity for Content Marketers, Content Developers, and Content Writers because there are many companies, agencies, and professionals who are looking for Content Writers, Content Developers, and Content Marketers for their business.
Email Marketing: Email Marketing is the practice of using emails for the marketing and promotion of your product, service, and business. Email Marketing helps you to share your message in the form of a well-written email.
It provides you wider reach to your audience depends upon your email subscribers’ base. Some of the common types of emails companies share with their audience are Welcome email, Newsletter subscription email, and Follow-up email if the visitor downloaded any content from the website.
Email Marketing is an effective and fast way to reach your audience because of the excessive use of emails.
Blogging: Blogging is the practice of using blogs to promote your product, services, and business. The blog is the most important part of any website today because it helps in multiple ways.
The blog helps to attract more website visitors, brand visibility, and more leads & conversions. The success of any blog depends upon the quality of the content. Thus, content is an important part of blogs.
Blogging is an effective way to attract the inbound traffic at your website by sharing the relevant information with your audience that they find useful for themselves.
It ensures to attract interested visitors to your website, who might be interested in your product or service.
Inbound Marketing: Inbound Marketing is a simple process of attracting inbound traffic on your website. The inbound traffic includes the visitors who are looking for the information that you are sharing.
Inbound Marketing pulls visitors to your website instead of pushing them to come to your website. The Inbound Marketing process includes four steps that attract potential customers, converting them into sales, closing the sales, and delighting by improving customer satisfaction.
Inbound Marketing is more effective than any other online marketing method because it helps you to attract more traffic by offering useful and relevant information to your audience.
Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate Marketing is a method of marketing in which an affiliate earns a commission on each sale completed by his affiliate link. An affiliate simply earns for his marketing effort to promote the product or service.
Affiliate Marketing is a performance-based earning opportunity in which you can earn by generating sales from your affiliate link. It is a great way to earn passive income with established businesses.
The important components of Affiliate Marketing are Social Media Marketing, Blogging, Website Management, and Conversion Rate Optimization.
Mobile Marketing: Mobile Marketing is a marketing technique in which marketers reach potential customers through their smartphones, feature phones, and tablets. Marketers use different methods – emails, SMS, or social media, to connect with the customers.
Mobile Marketing is very effective because people use their smartphone more than any other gadget and carry their smartphone everywhere they go. It helps marketers to promote their products and services at any time and anywhere.
Google Analytics: Google Analytics is a free analytics tool offered by Google. It helps you to understand your website better. Google Analytics provides all the data related to your website that helps you to make better marketing and SEO strategy for your website.
Google Analytics provides useful information about the demographics of your audience, source of traffic, the bounce rate of your website, and more. It is a very useful tool to check the SEO performance of your website.
Competition Analysis: Competition Analysis is part of advanced SEO because it helps you to analyze the performance of your website and the website of your competitors.
There are many tools that provide all the required information and data that you can use to analyze the competition in your industry.
Some of the tools for competitive analysis of the business are SEMrush and MOZ. These tools help to get more backlinks and to conduct keyword research for your website.
Most Important Skills for Digital Marketing:
Creativity & Innovation: Creativity and Innovation is important in Digital Marketing because you need to be creative and innovative to continuously develop new ideas.
In the highly competitive Online Marketing and advertising market, these skills will help you to be one step ahead of your competitors.
Design Thinking: Design Thinking is the process of solving complex problems in a way that focuses on the benefits of the customers.
It helps in getting useful and creative solutions by understanding the needs and wants of the customers. Design Thinking is very useful in Digital Marketing because it solves complex problems with customer-centric methods.
Data Analytics: Data Analytics is important in digital marketing because it helps you to make more sound and effective decisions with data.
In Digital Marketing you need to make smart decisions for the growth of your business and Data Analytics as a skill will help you to make effective decisions with your data.
You can use your data with tools like – Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, or Twitter Analytics, to make the right decisions.
Tech Savvy: You need to have a good understanding of basic techniques that will help you to work with different tools. As a Digital Marketer, you need to work with Google Analytics, Social Media Analytics, and Technical SEO.
Thus, having a good understanding of technology will help you to grow in the Digital Marketing industry.
Persuasive: The ability to persuade potential customers to buy your product is an exceptional skill that will help you to get more job opportunities and to grow your business.
It is important for any business to attract more and more customers to their business. Thus, the ability to persuade potential customers is very useful in the Online Marketing industry.
How to be a Certified Digital Marketer?
There are many free and paid online resources available that can help you to be a certified full-stack Digital Marketer. You can choose any of the free Online Marketing courses as per your requirements.
Some of the major Digital Marketing online certification programs that offer free learning resources are:
- Google Digital Garage
- Hubspot Academy
- SEMrush Academy
- WordStream’s PPC University
- Google Analytics Academy
These platforms can help you to learn the skills you want, you just need to follow the following steps:
- Choose a skill – Content Marketing, Social Media Marketing, or Inbound Marketing.
- Find the right certification and platform.
- Create your learning plan and start learning.
- Learn all the aspects and take the final exam.
- Get certified by receiving an accredited certificate.
How to Start Your Digital Marketing Journey:
Learn the basics of Digital Marketing: You can start your learning journey with the basics of Online Marketing. Check the complete list of keywords that every Digital Marketing beginner should know.
You can start with basic keywords and important concepts like SEO, Social Media Marketing, and Content Marketing. It will help you to learn all the basics of Digital Marketing fundamentals.
Develop your digital skills: The development of skills is important to grow as a Digital Marketing professional because it will help you to get new opportunities in your career and business.
You can choose any of the Online Marketing skills like – SEO, Social Media Marketing, Content Marketing, or Pay-Per-Click.
After choosing the desired skill you can start learning that skill from any of the free online platforms and resources to learn Digital Marketing.
Get Certified: There are many online platforms that offer free certifications and training in Digital Marketing skills. You need to register yourself and to take the final exam.
After successfully completing the final exam you will get the certificate that you can mention in your CV to showcase your digital skills.
Create your Personal Brand: The development of your Personal Brand on Social Media will help you to get more opportunities in your work industry.
The blog is a great way to develop your personal brand, where you can share your thoughts regarding any topic.
You can also use social media platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram to promote your personal brand.
Increase your network & opportunities: Networking is very important to get more opportunities for work and business because people would like to offer you work when they have heard about you and your abilities.
LinkedIn is a good platform to increase your network as a Digital Marketer because here you can connect to other Digital Marketers and can promote your personal brand among your potential customers.
Final Words:
Digital Marketing is becoming a necessary skill for all professionals and businesses because of the changing business environment and dynamics. Customers are shifting to smartphones and the internet that provide 24 hours connectivity.
The other major factors for the growth of Digital Marketing are increasing the use of computers, the internet, and social media that is encouraging the companies to work on online marketing and advertising of products & services.
Online Marketing provides better marketing and advertising opportunities to the marketers with the benefits like better customer engagement, wide reach to the audience, low cost of marketing, and performance measurement.
The major Digital Marketing skills that you might need in the near future are creativity, problem-solving ability, ability to persuade customers and a basic understanding of technology & data.
These skills will help you to grow with the increasing use of Digital Marketing and technology.
Digital Marketing is emerging as a growing field and industry because of the increasing use of the internet and social media which are the new communication platform for the customers and business.