Digital Marketing Bible: Everything a Beginner Must Know 

Digital marketing is a part of the marketing industry that keeps evolving from day to day. It has been growing to be one of the most important components in every company’s marketing strategy. And according to many professionals, it will continue to improve and stay vital for a lot more time. With digital marketing, brands are allowed to reach a specific group of audiences, making communication with these groups more tailored and lively. Digital marketing consists of a variety of tactics, and we’re sure that each is fascinating in a different way. 

In this article, we’ll get to know every detail about digital marketing and its effectiveness on customers. Next, we’ll get you through 7 key tactics of the industry and the skills you need to tackle all of them! If you’re thinking about joining the digital industry, or simply want to know more to benefit your business, keep reading! 

What is digital marketing?

Instead of using all the big words people have been using, we’d love to keep it simple. Digital marketing is everything a business does that uses electronic devices and technology of the internet to connect with their customers. These customers could either be their regular users, interested ones, or even completely new. 

In another way, digital marketing refers to campaigns that tackle customers’ behavior through the online world. Those would include online video, web design, paid ads, email marketing, and of course, social media posts. While traditional marketing normally uses magazines, news ads, billboards, TVC as their key pillars, digital is a little bit broader. As customers are now constantly on the internet, businesses began to take advantage of it through digital marketing. You might also encounter a business or agency calling it online marketing as well. 

Advantages of digital marketing and how it affects customers’ behavior

According to many digital marketers, this industry can benefit both the business and customers on several levels. Digital marketing helps the brand reach a much larger group of audiences at a better cost than the traditional way. Thus, a brand can target a more specific group of customers who would be more likely to be interested in their products. And last but not least, measurement and real-time reports allow brands to choose between fixing or boosting the campaign. Those are just a glimpse through some of digital marketing’s merits. Now let’s get details.

1. A more specific target audience

With TV or magazine advertisements, or most traditional marketing tactics, you’ll find it hard to control and determine who’s seeing your ads. However, digital marketing is much more useful when it comes to selecting who you’d want to show your ads to. Not only can it get pretty specific, from age to placement, but also some of their interests. This would give you a better vision of who you’re talking to and can create a higher conversion rate. Digital marketing provides you with a more specific group of audiences, even separate them for different advertising purposes. 

2. Cost & resources saving 

If your business has some time using a traditional marketing strategy, you’ll know how expensive it is. TVC at the best hours, best billboard placements, and so on will cost your business a treasure. Meanwhile, digital campaigns need much fewer resources to generate the same or an even better result. Since you’re allowed to track your ad budget in real-time, boosting or decreasing it on multiple channels is now super simple. 

Thus, when getting the ability to choose how much you can or should put into one channel, you’ll know what suits your business better. From time to time, you will get a list of the channels that are most effective for the brand, and optimize ads for a greater result! 

3. Play along with the giants

Seriously, with traditional marketing, it’s impossible for you to compete with large companies. They have a bigger budget, a larger team to do the work, and can do a national, even worldwide campaign. But digital marketing could give you rooms to play around, even competing with the giants. There are plenty of ways a small business could outplay much larger components, and one of those is targeting a niche market. Longtail SEO keywords, micro-influencers, social media posts shall be your best friend. With the growth of the digital industry, users began to fall back on some professional – yet homey feeling. So if you’re thinking of boosting your business with digital marketing, this is the sign for you to start! 

4. Measurable

Even if you’re working with an internal team or a digital marketing agency, those works are always measurable! You can choose to see and compare all the metrics that are vital to your business, from reach, impression, number of views and clicks right on time. You’ll be able to see the accurate result at any time. That’s what we love most about digital marketing. You can see and learn the analytical number to see which channel is more effective, and even fixing it to be better without the long and sophisticated process. Some of the measurements you should be looking for are website traffic, lead generation, content performance, and social media engagement. 

‍

7 pillars of digital marketing

Now, let’s get to a quick yet informative look at the 7 most common digital marketing channels. Or normally, we would call it the 7 pillars of digital marketing. 

1. Search engine optimization (SEO) 

Without any doubt, SEO is the most iconic and useful tactic when it comes to digital marketing. Unlike any other paid ads, SEO is a long-term investment that every business needs. Just imagine when a customer clicks search on Google, and your website is in the top 5, organic without any ads boosting, how much traffic would you get? People mostly click on a site that’s on the first page only, so you’ll have a greater advantage compared to others. 

SEO will include on-page and off-page tactics to help you get a better ranking in search engines. While on-page SEO focuses on all the existing content of your website, off-page SEO is the complete contrast. Off-page SEO includes backlinks that lead to your website, showing the algorithm that your site is trustworthy. You can achieve this by networking with other publishers or customers’ reviews. 

All in all, SEO is quite too technical, yet it’s one of our favorite tools when it comes to digital marketing! 

2. Pay-per-click (PPC) 

PPC is what you normally don’t hear much about, however, it’s actually really common in the digital industry. To simplify it, PPC is a technique of driving traffic to your site through ad placement. And you only have to pay when a user clicks on those ads. The most popular channel you might have seen but haven’t noticed are Google Ads, Facebook Ads. Let’s not forget about Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn as well! 

Pay-per-click is the paid ads tactic that just goes along with another advertising platform. Their goal can vary from traffic to engagement, app downloads, or email subscriptions. Yes, you’re not hearing it wrong. Most channels and tactics of digital marketing are related and can be used to support each other.  

3. Social Media Marketing 

Social media is the platform that most people will mistake as everything digital marketing about. But that’s not it! Social media marketing is only an aspect of the digital industry, yet its effectiveness is undoubtedly phenomenal! Social media marketing now has far more than posting on social channels and waiting for comments. 

To actually be effective, everything needs a plan. Yes, we must have a plan for our social media posts, how we would boost it and how much we need to spend. Our advice is to never be sloppy when it comes to your social media page. Nowadays, social media is what your customers use the most. So would you want to leave an impressive impression or a click-back? 

Moreover, social media also allows you to track every post's performance, and create strategies based on this knowledge. Be ready to read and track a lot of data that would benefit your business in the long run. It might be complicated, but it’s the playground with the most fun for digital marketers. 

4. Content Marketing 

You’ve encountered many forms of content marketing without notice, and that’s what good about this tactic. From blog posts that you’re reading to social media or even the interesting video you’ve just sent to your friends, they’re all the products of content marketing. 

But unlike any other forms of digital, those content have the first and foremost duty: to benefit the readers/ users. When making content, you have to think of how people would react to this piece, would they like it or not, and how to tackle their problems? It’s more about branding than just creating sales. When you’re working on content marketing, you’re building a long-term relationship with your customers. You’ll have to show them more than just ads. It could be a story, an infographic, email marketing, blog post, or anything. 

However, content marketing should and must be paired with other channels to make the most of both worlds. PPC, SEO, email, and mobile marketing must rely on content to generate traffic. So when we say “Content is king”, we really mean it! 

5. Email Marketing

Email marketing can be considered as a part of your content strategy, or a completely unique campaign. Even until now, email marketing is still considered one of the most effective channels of digital marketing. Just imagine this, in the morning, you first open your email and get a personal offer from one of your favorite brands, how would you feel? 

With the right content usage and an undeniable offer, email marketing could draw a lot of traffic to your physical store or website. With email marketing, you should always remember to create a sense of urgency, let them know time’s running out. And let’s not sleep on a personalized email copy. All of that together will boost your performance dramatically.

6. Mobile Marketing 

Let’s look at it this way, which device you’re using the most throughout the day? Most of our answers would be mobile devices. That’s when mobile marketing comes into handy. You could reach so many of your target audience through text message, web design & development, social media, email, and application. All of those experiences can and will always be tailored to fit customers' needs and insight. Marketers and digital marketing agencies know where and how to get customers' attention. And if it’s not on mobile devices, there are less likely to be anywhere with the same effectiveness. 

7. Affiliate Marketing

This seems like one of the latest terms of digital marketing. But watch out, affiliates are growing drastically. To break it down, Affiliate means you allow people to make money (or commission) by promoting your products. Brands will pay the affiliate marketers for every sale they make, and this connection is what actually matters. There are several platforms to work with affiliate marketing, and we’re sure it has a lot of potential. This channel allows brands to communicate through the voice of influencers, bloggers without being too commercial. These influencers gain trust by sharing their experience, so your product will be classified as things they have used already. As advertising is getting all over the place, users begin to trust affiliate partners a little bit better. 

Digital marketing should be one of the prime channels for most businesses, from B2B or B2C. It’s a vital part of every business plan and marketing plan. Whether you’re thinking of adding more digital marketing to your business or joining a digital marketing agency, we hope that this blog will be a great sign for you. Not only does it enhance the connection between brand and customers, but it also benefits both sides on so many levels. The more you’re exposed to digital marketing, the more potential you’ll have with your business growth! If you want to get more information about the marketing industry, stay up to date with our blog right here.