What is digital marketing and how do you get started?
Digital marketing is a strategy that consists of a mix of content marketing, SEO, video, SEM, PPC (paid advertising), social media etc. and is used to achieve a company’s goals.
With digital marketing, your company has the opportunity to create more business, build a brand, work with employee branding and much more. In essence, this is about the same strategy as most of being able to endure and evaluate and optimize.
Getting started with your own digital marketing doesn’t have to be a gigantic project as it can easily be felt before you get started.
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Start Your Digital Marketing Journey Right!
The tip that we often pass is to start on a reasonable scale, do bite off more than you can chew.
This often goes a long way:
- Lighter website
- Write blog posts (about 1-2 per month to begin with)
- Write 2-3 really good guides / whitepapers
- Post all content in social media with teasers
- Write a newsletter a month
- Set up google analytics and search console (a heatmap is good too, eg threats)
If you can manage to keep up this production rate of content just need time to do their thing, you will see if your digital investment gives something.
The reason why we suggest starting on a small / smaller scale is partly because you have the time and opportunity to keep the production of e.g. up over a longer period of time and that you should not have exhausted all the forces if you notice that it has not yielded as much as you initially thought.
For example, do you run For a B2B company, you must expect sales cycles to be about 6-12 months and you should therefore be long-term in your online marketing.
If you quit in the middle, you probably haven’t given your bet the chance to succeed and you can’t fully evaluate and optimize for the next time.
It is important that you always measure all the activities that you have completed, what blog posts attract traffic, what guide / whitepaper is downloaded, how visitors to your website move. All this you can measure and see with the help of google analytics, search console and heatmaps.
How do I measure digital marketing?
Measuring digital marketing is not difficult and, as mentioned above, there are many programs and systems to measure if the marketing produces any results.
An important part when you start measuring is to set goals. Without goals there is nothing to measure against! Examples of goals can be, number of website visits, number of leads, number of purchases, average position on a search engine, etc.
Some are easy to measure and some are more difficult. E.g. it is easy to measure the number of unique website visits through google analytics while measuring purchases for a B2B company attributable to digital marketing can be significantly more difficult if the purchase was not done digitally.
When measuring digital marketing, it is important to measure the same thing over time and continuously. E.g. if you measure website visits and at the first survey choose to measure the number of unique visitors in the last 30 days compared to the same period last year, you should continue to measure just that.
If you then start measuring the last 60 days and compare with the previous 60 day period, it will no longer be relevant and can be followed up in a good way.
To help with the survey, there are several major digital marketing systems, marketing automation systems, inbound marketing tools and more. They can help many companies to structure and systematize their digital marketing.
Investing in a system can be a good idea, but not all fit depending on how far you have come in your digital marketing. In a separate blog post we have reviewed whether you need an inbound marketing tool or not which may be worth reading if you are considering acquiring a marketing tool.
Inbound marketing, Growth hacking, content marketing – without even noticing
If you have started this process as above and started producing content, spreading it in social media and measuring how visitors move on your website, you have already started your strategy towards inbound marketing and content marketing.
You have created engaging business content (content marketing) and you have created an inbound funnel by driving traffic to the website which hopefully leads to a download of a guide / whitepaper for which you received an email address in exchange.
If you then optimize your content and content through data ie based on analysis from google analytics and search console you have started your journey as a growth hacker!
It never ends – keep learning and producing
Hope you got the answer to the question of what digital marketing is. To pursue a successful digital marketing strategy is always to keep up with what is happening in market trends and above all how search engines update their algorithms.
It is important to always use data when optimizing and scaling up your digital investment and keeping in mind that the goal should always be to create a proven profitable marketing effort.
When you get the constant follow-up and optimization as a routine, the rest comes by itself.
