What Is Digital Marketing and How to Get Started? [2021]

The answer to the question of what digital marketing is, is by no means straightforward. It is also known as web marketing or even online marketing, and in any case, it falls within the field of marketing. It encompasses all digital marketing activities, services, and channels that exist online.

We know that the web is extremely vast, and especially with the rapid rise of smartphone users, the number of web visitors is increasing steeply. That is why no company can afford to forget about digital marketing activities, online advertising campaigns, and the many other rich possibilities the web offers.

What Tools and Channels Are Used in Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing offers a whole range of different channels and tools. Any website is essentially its own channel where certain products are advertised online. That is why search engine optimization is used to achieve the best possible rankings in Google search results.

The most well-known channel for online advertising is probably the Google Ads advertising platform, closely followed by Facebook advertising, and more recently, Instagram advertising. There are actually many more tools, but they all share the purpose of presenting selected products or services to web users.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

Why should you choose digital marketing? Simply because it allows you to reach a large portion of customers who browse the web and are making purchasing decisions. If you show them useful content or ads at the moment when they are researching or already interested in buying, they are much more likely to purchase the product or send an inquiry for a service.

One of the older tools of digital marketing is email marketing. It works by sending promotional messages with special offers, promotions, and similar content to your user base from time to time.

Recently, Google advertising and Facebook advertising are being used more and more, and they work in a somewhat different way. We have complete control over spending and only pay when someone clicks on the ad (PPC) – meaning we only pay for ads shown to those who are very interested in the products or services.

Remarketing

Remember when we mentioned online ads that you only pay for when someone clicks on them? Another great advantage of digital marketing is the abundance and accuracy of data. Remarketing can be used when, for example, someone clicked on an ad but ultimately did not decide to make a purchase.

Through remarketing, you can show these users ads for your products again when they visit other websites and are clearly still in the decision-making phase. This is useful in all industries, especially those where the purchasing process is longer.

Since it involves a larger investment, we usually do a lot of research and take our time before making a final decision. Such a process can take several months, which is why remarketing is a very valuable online marketing tool!

How to Get Started with Digital Marketing?

As mentioned, digital marketing is a broad field. Do not let that scare you – start at the beginning, with your website. Increase the popularity of your website with content marketing and first ensure more traffic and more conversions with SEO optimization. This way, you will establish personal contact with your customers, which you can build upon with marketing and communication through social media and email marketing.

Before you start, create a plan or strategy. A comprehensive marketing strategy (for both offline and online marketing) will enable your presence across multiple channels. You will more easily ensure excellent promotion and increase the reputation of your company or brand.

With a holistic digital marketing strategy, you will certainly achieve the best results!

Digital Marketing: Online and Offline

There is often an impression that digital marketing only takes place online, but that is not the case. Only its online part happens on the web, while offline marketing is found on other channels. Offline digital marketing consists of: television and radio ads, SMS ads, digital signs and billboards.

However, it is true that online digital marketing is much more extensive. It includes:

• SEO (search engine optimization)
• Online advertising (Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram…)
• Content marketing
• Email marketing
• Website development

Digital Marketing Is More Than Just Advertising!

The logic of online sales and marketing is different. The internet offers countless opportunities that are worth taking advantage of to ensure the growth of your income and sales. There are various new platforms for digital marketing, such as social and other networks, blogs, email marketing, and much more.

If you want to be the best, you need to use everything! So do not limit yourself to just online advertising – get to know the other powerful tools of digital marketing as well.

Search Engine Optimization – SEO

With search engine optimization, you can attract more potential customers, more traffic, and more inquiries.

With the help of SEO services, you can increase your chances of success and ensure that your target audience finds and visits your website. If you want to achieve good results on the internet, website optimization is simply essential!

How to Get Started with SEO?

If you type “SEO website optimization” into a search engine, you will get a long list of various articles. Remember when we said above to start at the beginning, with your website? When you start researching how to improve your website and increase the number of visitors, you will discover that for overall digital marketing, the best long-term decision is to start with website optimization.

For an initial assessment of your website redesign and the start of planning an SEO strategy, you can already do a lot yourself.

Review Your Keywords

• Whether it seems excessive or not, do not skip keyword analysis! Ask yourself, what is your key activity that brings in the most business? What related activities do you perform? Write down all the words or phrases that come to mind on a list.
• Put yourself in the role of your average customer who is looking for an activity similar to yours and add to the keyword list all those that they use when searching online.
• Then determine the most important keywords – these are your primary keywords that represent your foundation and best explain what you do. Then add two to three secondary keywords, which can also be longer.
• Compare the keyword list with each web page of the service or product you offer. Are the selected keywords even represented? To what extent? What is the amount of text? Does the text help users and educate them about a particular topic? Consider all of the above and try to optimize your website so that it best informs web users and helps them.

Check Your Website Speed

• Web users are becoming increasingly demanding. Compared to everyday life, they are much less patient when browsing the web, and website speed is of exceptional importance!
• Nobody likes wasting time waiting for a website to load. A search engine like Google also does not want its loyal users to “linger” and stare at a half-empty screen. That is why it ranks the fastest websites much higher in its results (while also considering other SEO rules).
• With Google’s free tool Google PageSpeed Insights, GTmetrix, Pingdom, or other similar tools, you can check how fast your website is. If your website takes more than 1.5 seconds, it is worth contacting a website optimization specialist.

How Does Your Website Look on a Mobile Phone?

• We have already mentioned that the number of web users is increasingly growing thanks to the growing accessibility of smartphones. When viewing websites, there is an obvious difference between a computer and a phone – the mobile phone is much smaller! That is why when designing a mobile website, you need to rearrange the elements so that it is adapted for mobile phones, which we also know as responsive design.
• If you already have a website but it does not display correctly on mobile devices, fix it quickly. Today, a website simply must be mobile-friendly. First and foremost to make the research or purchasing process easier for users. Secondly, because mobile-friendliness, like speed, is one of the most important criteria that Google’s algorithms use to rank websites in their search results.

Online Advertising

Digital marketing is often associated with online advertising, which actually encompasses several different activities divided into two parts:

• Pay-per-click advertising – PPC, also known as Google advertising.
• Social media advertising – Facebook advertising, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, and similar.

Google Advertising

Google advertising falls under pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. The name itself tells us that you only pay when someone actually clicks on the ad.

There are several advantages of Google advertising:

• You pay for advertising to customers who are already interested in products/services similar to yours.
• They appear at the top of Google search results.
• Complete control over spending.
• Even with a small investment, you can generate a large response and acquire many new customers.
• It also offers the possibility of remarketing to customers who are interested in your products but have not yet decided to purchase.

How to Start with Google Advertising?

1. Determine the products or services you want to advertise. Review your seasonal offerings and select only the most appropriate ones. Then use the keyword list you compiled during the website optimization step. From it, take all keywords related to the products or services you will be advertising. It is advisable to focus on longer keywords that are less popular, and therefore less expensive to advertise (lower cost per click – CPC). However, they can still have a big impact! The keyword list you enter into the Google Ads platform tells Google which words you want to trigger the display of your ads.

2. In accordance with the selected keywords for Google advertising, prepare the ad copy. Do not limit yourself to just one version – prepare at least three different ads. Google initially starts displaying all of them, then shows you through analytics which ad is most successful. Based on real data and without guessing, you can then adjust and improve the ads as the campaign continues.

3. Compare the ad content with the web page where users land after clicking the ad. That is why such pages are also called landing pages. It is good for the landing page content and the ad content to match as closely as possible. Do not let the fact that your current website contains much more information and various products deter you. The advantage of the web is that you can create a landing page specifically for Google advertising that is tailored to a specific ad. Do not forget to include call-to-action buttons, contact information, and all other information that will help users decide to make a purchase.

Facebook Advertising and Advertising Through Other Social Networks

Facebook advertising is considered one of the ways to increase brand awareness, product visibility, and sales. Similar to Google advertising, even with a small budget you can achieve a lot, but only if you truly know what you are doing.

Advantages of Facebook Advertising:

• Advertising to precisely defined target groups
• A small budget can have a big impact
• Precise insight into spending
• The ability to display ads in different placements

How to Start with Facebook Advertising?

1. Set up a Facebook advertising campaign. Determine what you want to advertise and what you want to achieve with Facebook ads. Based on your goals, select one of the 11 types of campaigns on Facebook’s advertising platform. The most common are:

   • Conversions – considered the most commonly used campaign as it focuses on maximizing the number of conversions an ad can achieve. Because of this, it is especially used for advertising online shopping.
   • Reach – a campaign that displays ads to the maximum number of people. It is often used for increasing brand awareness.
   • Traffic (clicks to website) – through the Traffic campaign, it is easiest to get more clicks on ads that redirect users to the website. This increases website traffic.
   • Engagement – this campaign is used to encourage activity on Facebook. It primarily increases the number of likes, as well as clicks, comments, and shares.

2. Next comes defining target groups, how much money you want to spend, and where you want the ads to be displayed. This step shows the true value of Facebook, as you can define target groups extremely precisely. You can select everything from demographics, interests, micro-location, and more.

3. Ad preparation – prepare multiple ads that could attract the target group in different ways. If possible, it is advisable to test several versions of the same ad on a smaller sample with a smaller investment. This way you can check which creative works best and then increase the budget.

Instagram Advertising

Some time ago, Instagram came under Facebook’s ownership. Regardless of the fact that Instagram is a slightly different social network focused on publishing photos and videos, advertising is actually unified.

Facebook advertising can also be used for advertising on Instagram. This brings additional advantages:

• A wider circle of users.
• The ability to test which channel is more suitable for advertising – Facebook or Instagram.

Digital Marketing on Social Networks: Management and Editing

Digital marketing through social networks does not just include writing posts. It starts with creating a precise strategy and the most optimal schedule for publishing, as well as testing different options and advertising. Take advantage of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, and other social networks so they bring you success!

Email Marketing

Email marketing is an excellent tool for direct communication and promotion. With its help, you can get in touch with your customers, offer them special benefits, or keep them informed about the news you offer.

Regardless of the emergence of various new tools and channels for online advertising, email marketing is still very popular because it simply delivers good results. Compared to Google and Facebook advertising, with email marketing we are not subject to any larger system and its changes resulting from more or less regular algorithm updates.

Setting Up an Email Marketing Campaign

Digital marketing requires a strategy, and a well-thought-out plan is needed for email marketing as well.

Let us look at 3 steps on how to set up an email marketing campaign.

1. Define your target group and prepare a list of contacts and their emails accordingly. Do not forget to comply with the General European GDPR data protection regulation. It is also recommended to send promotional messages from a platform specifically designed for this purpose, such as Mailchimp. In addition to offering many different templates for creating attractive messages, you also receive insight into sending statistics. Who opened the email, how many users clicked on the button in the message, and so on. All this data is extremely valuable for digital marketing!

2. It is not all about sales. You can start with a simple welcome message when someone subscribes to your newsletter. Determine how often you will send promotional emails and tell your users so they know what to expect. Create attractive content that addresses the selected target group in a non-intrusive way.

3. After sending the campaign, review the collected data. Analyze the success of the email campaign – how many users opened the email, how many clicks you recorded (CTR), and also how many people unsubscribed from receiving your messages. All this data can help you understand whether the email marketing campaign was successful or not and what could be improved.

Content Marketing

Also known as content marketing, content marketing helps increase the popularity of your services or products. It falls under a strategic approach (inbound marketing) that relies on creating useful content to attract users or customers. Users love useful, quality, and attractive content that they can get for free, whether it be articles, e-books, blogs, or something else.

Planning Content Creation

What content you create depends primarily on the company’s strategy, first for digital marketing and then for content marketing. Based on the target groups, first determine which types of content marketing are most suitable for them. Then research which media and channels your target audience uses. Content is a very broad concept and can mean everything from a short Facebook post to a longer video.

Why Choose Vendi.digital for Digital Marketing?

• Because we know how to choose the best keywords for SEO optimization and how to use them to our advantage.
• Because we know different social networks well and know exactly what works on each one.
• Because we master different areas of digital marketing and know how to combine them into an excellent holistic strategy.
• Because we believe that content marketing is the best tool on the web.
• Because our email marketing campaigns are designed thoughtfully and effectively.
• Because we know how to do business profitably on the internet in the long term!