Digital 101- What To Consider With Digital Marketing

Welcome to Digital 101- your introductory course to digital marketing! You’re probably here to get a basic understanding of the different elements to keep in mind with your digital marketing effort and we’re glad you came. There are a lot of different pieces to digital marketing beyond social media including website, email, SEO, digital advertising, and more. So take a seat (though you’re probably already sitting as you read this), grab a pencil and get ready to take some notes!

What is digital marketing?

Let’s start with the basic but loaded question: what is digital marketing? Simply, digital marketing can be summed up at the marketing efforts that you are doing in the digital world- i.e on your computer. There are a ton of benefits to taking your marketing efforts online. It’s cheaper than traditional marketing, you can get your message to a specific audience, there is direct data to show what is and isn’t working, it is very flexible, allowing you to update your message and creatives as you go, and it keeps your audience engaged and up to date.

Website 

Having a website is probably the most important element of your digital marketing efforts. It all starts here. Your website represents you so just any website won’t do. Keep in mind that this could be the first thing people see about your business. So here are some questions to ask: Is your website on-brand? Does your website look professional? Is information on your website easy to find? Are there appropriate CTA’s (call-to-actions)?

Every part of your digital efforts will tie back to your website. While you will probably not have hundreds of thousands of visitors each month, you still need to make sure that your website is up-to-date and best represents your brand. 

Social Media

Another piece of your digital marketing portfolio is social media. While this is the main area that we at 4/4 Solutions focus on, it’s just a small part of your overall digital marketing. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, or TikTok, allow your customers to directly interact with you and lets you keep them updated with everything relating to your business. Plus, unless you are spending advertising dollars on social media, it is completely free. Now don’t go creating a profile for every social media platform under the sun- you need to make sure that your audience is on that platform. From there, create a plan of what kind of content you should post and check out our guides on improving your social media pages. Then, just keep at it and make it a regular part of your marketing strategy. 

Email Marketing 

Did you know that email marketing is 40% better at converting to sales than social media? As consumers, we check our email nearly every single day. And while yes, we tend to get a lot of what we might consider spam emails, email marketing remains one of the best and most reliable ways for driving traffic and sales. There is a lot that goes into email marketing such as what kind of content you want to push out and making it look good. Oh yeah, and you need to curate the audience, too. This is more of an intermediate step than a beginning one but still something to keep in mind as you work on your digital campaigns.  

Advertising 

I get it, we are all so inundated with ads that it’s easier to tune them out. You may even have ad-blockers installed on your computer. However, digital advertising is not going away and is a great way to get noticed online. With digital advertising, you can target a select group of people by as many factors as you want- age, education, interests, where they live- and show them exactly what you want to show them. Not only that, but you can retarget them if they visit your site. It is less expensive than traditional advertising and you can see exactly what is working. Digital advertising presents a great opportunity for generating new leads or reinforcing your brand identity.

SEO 

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is more of a behind-the-scenes tactic to keep in mind than it is customer-facing like the other elements on this list. SEO is simply making sure that your website, social media, digital advertising, or any other digital effort you employ not only has a consistent message, but that it is using keywords relevant to your product or service, target audience, AND search engine platforms like Google. You’re doing all this work and you want to make sure that it gets seen. SEO is what makes that happen. Now that doesn’t mean you should word-vomit all over your media and include every word you can think of. Choose your words carefully and remember to keep it easy-to-read.

And there you have it. Class is finished. A couple things to keep in mind, these are just the basics and not every method is needed for every audience. Be sure you know your audience and what ways they like to be marketed to. As with any industry, there is going to be a bunch of jargon you’re going to want to learn. You can check out our guide on that here. If this still seems like too much, that’s where 4/4 Solutions can help. Give us a call today and we’re happy to help you create and organize your digital marketing efforts!