How to Get Started with Digital Marketing

You might be overwhelmed by the abundance of Digital Marketing terms that float around the internet. With terms like SEO, PPC, content management, machine learning and automized marketing it may seem like a daunting task to update your marketing game. Nevertheless, employing high impact Digital Marketing strategies and tactics isn't as scary as you may think. If you're looking to get started, there are a couple of basic steps that you need to take to ensure that your efforts make sense for your business.

Step 1: Set Goals and Be SMART About It.

Be sure of where you need to go. Setting SMART objectives is one of the most vital things that you can do before embarking on any Digital Marketing effort. Make sure that you're Specific with your goals, really identify the problem. Next, plan out how you're going to be able to identify that your efforts are working. You must make sure to establish Key Performance Indicators (KPI) to Measure how your Digital Marketing plan is performing. Be realistic with your goals, if you're selling 500 units today don't expect that to grow to 30,000 tomorrow. By making sure that your results are Attainable, the roadmap to your marketing destination will be clear. Always think about how this goal is Relevant to your business. Ask yourself, your team and customers if you're headed in the right direction. Finally, set a Time stamp for when that goal must be reached. Working with a realistic yet aggressive deadline can help boost the performance of the Digital Marketing Plan.

Step 2: Figure Out Who You're Trying to Reach

In an ideal world everyone would buy our product, unfortunately that's probably not the case. Taking the time to investigate your audience will ensure that your Digital Marketing efforts will reach the right people. There are a lot of ways that you can do this but, the cheapest and probably the most effective are right in front of you. If you have a traditional brick and mortar store, carefully look at your customers. Ask yourself, how old are they, where do they live, how frequently do they visit, how do they behave. These questions offer some truly valuable insights into your customer's characteristics. Moreover, social media is another powerful key to help you understand your customers. Take a look at the insights for your page, there is key data there that you can leverage for your Digital Marketing Plan.

Step 3: Take a Look at the Competition

It's not about copying, it's about inspiration. Your competition can offer great ideas in terms of what's working in the industry. Also, it's a great opportunity to learn from someone else's mistakes. Conduct a digital marketing audit for some of your closest competitors to see what they're doing and how it's working out for them. Figure out how your content can be better in terms of creativity, quality and relevance.

Step 4: What Strategies Will Work For You?

There's a plethora of strategy options out there for Digital Marketing but, that doesn't mean you need to implement every single one. Do some research to understand how a particular strategy aligns with your SMART objectives. What social media platforms should you use? Will email marketing work for you? Do you need an e-commerce site? Do you need a budget? All these questions will help you understand which strategies you should focus on.

Step 5: Quality Content Should be Your Only Content

How you engage with your customers really matters, so make sure you're putting the best brand image forward. Content should aim to entertain or educate in order to provoke engagement. When developing content make sure that quality is top priority. That means you have to double check your facts, be creative with your imagery, write with your audience in mind and produce all around entertaining content. Keep the quality consistent across your strategies, platforms and channels.

Step 6: Tweak, adjust and perfect!

Remember those KPI's that you developed alongside your SMART objectives? Well now is the time to see how they're holding up. Look at your analytics to find out what's working, what can be tweaked and what you should never ever do again (I'm looking at you grumpy cat memes). Don't be afraid to ask your audience what they like, use a survey, reply to a comment and flat out ask your audience what type of content they'ed like to see more of.