What is digital marketing? It was a big question around a few years back. But in today’s modern world, there is nothing without digital marketing. Learn from a digital marketing free course online for beginners within a week? Here you go on how to learn digital marketing online free for beginners in 2024.
Digital marketing is an unavoidable word in any kind of business today. The number of people who go online is dramatically increasing day by day. Digital marketing has changed the lifestyle; especially the way people buy the products. Online marketing or shopping has beaten offline marketing methods.
Marketing is connecting the right people in the right place and the right time. Today, digital marketing makes you meet them on the internet. You will learn more about the importance of digital marketing today.
Digital marketing means doing marketing that exists online.
Let’s learn what digital marketing is and know more when, what, why and how to start digital marketing.
Our digital marketing guide helps you to learn and understand the fundamentals and to become a successful digital marketer.
What is Digital Marketing & Definition
Digital marketing is promoting and selling the products and services on the internet using the latest technologies. Those are websites, email, social media, search engines and mobile apps.
In other words, digital marketing is a kind of marketing that uses electronic devices. Digital marketing is trending and tends to give opportunities to many people to make money from the best online jobs from home.
You can say in marketing terms like, digital marketing is simple marketing or simply marketing. Also you can describe digital marketing as,
- Social Media Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Search Marketing
- Internet Marketing
Digital Marketing Strategy 2024 Free for Beginners
The Rule #1 in digital marketing is to make the right offer to the right people at the time and right place.
If you understand this clearly then you’ll surely become a successful digital marketer at the earliest.
Today, all the people (customers) are hanging out on social media. And they are staying updated on the news sites, blogs, YouTube and searching online when they really need something.
Consumers completely rely on the internet (digital) to research the products.
Think with Google marketing insights says that,
48% consumers using search engines to start inquiries
33% browse brand sites
26% use mobile apps
Understanding of Digital Marketing
Digital marketing always targets a particular customer base to interact. As we know that digital marketing develops and rises along with email ads, search ads, text ads, and tweets.
Two way communications between product firms and consumers builds a strong base on digital marketing.
Internet marketing differs from digital marketing. The Internet is the sole place for internet marketing. Whereas, digital marketing uses many terms like, mobile phone, video game, smartphone apps, subway platform and more.
Role of Digital Marketing to a Company
We know that traditional marketing relies on phone communication, physical communication and print ads as well. Digital marketing happens electronically and online.
So, there are many possibilities for brands to reach the right customers via email, blogs, search engines and social media networks.
In this scenario, digital marketing is vital for any business and brand promotions or awareness. Nowadays, every business has its own website. If any business doesn’t have a website or blog then they at least have digital ad strategies or social media activities.
Digital marketing and content is so common that nowadays consumers are always hanging on to learn about the brands.
To be competitive in your business area then you must embrace some awesome aspects of digital marketing strategies.
Because there are tons of strategies associated with digital marketing. You can easily get experiments and creativity along with the marketing tactics and strategies on a small budget.
There are many tools available on digital marketing like analytics dashboards which help to monitor the position of your marketing.
Using digital marketing tools you can monitor the business growth, success and ROI of your business campaign.
How Digital Marketing Works? – Digital Marketing Beginners Guide for 2024
There is no big difference between digital marketing and traditional marketing. Both strategies are looking for the best ways to promote the products.
They always look for best prospects, customers, leads and good sales.
However, digital marketing has almost replaced the most traditional marketing strategies to reach today’s consumers.
For example:
Remember the last purchase you made. Perhaps you purchased a home. You might have hired some personnel to design your home and all required stuff.
For this, you might probably start searching on the internet to know more about those solutions, competitors, discounts, reviews and much more.
It’s clear that your ultimate buying decision has been made based on the review you read on the internet. You spent more time on the net to find the features, pricing, consulting and solutions.
So, it’s very clear that most of the purchasing decisions are on the internet only.
In this case, an online necessity is absolutely unavoidable.
The key to initial development of your digital marketing tactics should start with your followers, fans and friends who are already hanging out.
Make use of the various social media networks and digital channels to reach them to improve your sales or business.
Meet them through the internet with the latest content update about industry news, what are their current problems and offer solutions to them.
Customer relationship in digital marketing
Build friendship via social media and engage with them using valuable content.
Make use of SEO (search engine optimization) to optimise your content. This will help someone who searches for the information that you’ve written about.
Use advertising methods to bring more valuable visitors to your website to increase your sales.
Email marketing is the best method to follow up your customer continuously. Also you may go for resale or product updates for your existing customers.
When you’ve started all these strategies effectively then your digital marketing mechanism will start work gratefully.
When it looks intimidating to make that mechanism (machine) from scratch. It’s very easy to learn and integrate one digital marketing strategy at a time.
That’s what we’ve written in this guide in detail. This will help you to build a new digital marketing strategy or refine your old digital marketing plan with proper guidance.
Digital Marketing Benefits
If you have a strong digital base then it will help your business in many ways. Those are,
It will help you to create awareness and engagement before and after a sale.
Digital marketing tactics help you to convert new buyers or visitors into rabid customers to buy more often.
Right digital marketing formula helps you to generate more money through social-sharing.
Digital marketing Techniques will short-list the buyer’s journey to offer them the right products at the right time.
Digital Marketing Examples
Below is the quick information about the digital marketing tactics along with the channels involved in each.
Search Engine Optimization – SEO
SEO is the process to optimise your blog or website to “rank” topper in the free traffic or organic traffic.
Search engine optimization is the best way to increase your organic traffic to promote your products to see a good profit in your business.
Websites, blogs and infographics are the channels who get benefits from search engine optimization (SEO) techniques and strategies.
Best ways to get SEO in order to get high value traffic to your website are,
On Page SEO – This type of SEO completely focuses on the content (on page). Simply saying, if your website has high quality and original content then you’ll surely get higher rank on search engines.
You need to research the best keyword to target using your content; this will help you to get a good rank on search engine result pages (SERPs).
OFF Page SEO – This SEO strategy focuses all optimization processes out of your content (off the page). The best example of “off page SEO‘ is backlinks or inbound links.
We strongly suggest our readers to not to buy backlinks, instead follow the these simple steps to get more backlinks to your blog.
You’re not doing any activity on your page, instead others linking to your website will help to increase your page rank.
If the publishers link to your website and have good authority then your rank will get top rank soon. Also your domain authority also will increase easily.
If any publisher (low domain authority) connects your website may affect your domain authority. So monitor and ask them to remove their link. Check out how to remove bad backlinks.
Writing guest posts to the high authority website and getting a link back to your website will boost your ranking in the SERPs.
Technical SEO – The technical SEO totally focuses on the back-end of your website. Below are some examples of technical SEO.
Image compression
CSS file optimization
Page coding
All these forms of technical terms SEO help to increase your page or website loading speed.
Google loves the page which is loading faster and offers top rank in its search engine result pages SERP.
Content Marketing Strategy
This marketing is the creation and promotion of content assets. Content marketing helps to generate brand awareness, lead generation and traffic growth to your website. Also it brings more customers to your blog or business website.
What channels are playing with content marketing?
Blog Post – Writing and publishing articles on a regular basis helps you to bring real customers to your business. Also it demonstrates your industry experience and expertise.
Getting real customers to your website will convert into the leads which help your sales team to improve your business growth.
Ebooks and whitepapers – Content of Ebooks, whitepapers and similar types of content helps to educate your website customers.
This will provide you contact information of your website visitors which will help you get more sales.
Infographic – Some customers like to view the visual content. Infographic is the best form of visual content to show your customers to learn about your products.
Social Media marketing.
To increase your brand awareness dramatically then social media channels is one of the best strategies to promote.
Your business may get massive traffic from social media marketing which generate more leads and sales for your business.
The popular social media channels are:
- Snapchat
You may create business pages on those social media channels to promote your business to many people.
PPC Marketing or Pay per Click
Pay per click is a wonderful method to drive traffic to your business website by paying money for every click that happens on the ad. One of the popular types of pay per click is called “Google Ads”.
You need to pay Google Ads to keep your advertisement / website on top of Google’s search engine results pages.
There are many other leading pay per click marketing sites are:
Facebook Paid Ads – Here, you need to create and customize image posts, videos or slideshows. Facebook Ad network will publish this Ads to the news feed based on the business audience you’re targeting.
Twitter Ads – Twitter will place some set of posts or profile pages to the needed feeds based on the audiences you like to visit your website.
In Twitter, your goal may be website traffic, tweet engagement and Twitter followers and app downloads.
Sponsored Messages (LinkedIn) – User pays to send messages through LinkedIn to the targeted visitors directly based on their interest and background.
Affiliate Marketing
One of the oldest forms of marketing is “Affiliate Marketing“. Latest technologies and the Internet have helped to take affiliate marketing to the top level.
Using affiliate marketing, influencers will promote others products. And they get a commission for every lead or sale made.
There are many popular affiliate network programs available on the internet like Amazon which pays millions of dollars to its affiliates to promote their products on their websites.
This performance-based affiliate network using the marketing channels. Those are,
Video ads using YouTube Partnership Program
Posting affiliate links through social media accounts.
Native Advertising
Native marketing or advertising is like paid ads that match the look, function and feel of the media format. The native ads are seen in the content on a web page and on social media feeds.
Unlike the banner ads and display ads, native ads do not look like advertisements.
Native advertisements are like the editorial flow of the page.
Native Advertising Channels like,
In Feed Ads – In feed ads appear in the social network like (Twitter and Facebook)
Search and Promoted Listings
Here the ads listings that appear in the top of Google search results or in the sidebar.
- Content Recommendations
- Recommended articles ads that appear in the bottom of the article you read.
- Email Marketing
It’s true that email marketing is one of the strongest ways of promoting methods in digital marketing.
Many product companies are relying on email marketing as their primary method of promoting for decent sales. They wish to reach their audience through email marketing only.
Companies can easily get back their existing customers easily by sending email for promoting contents, events and discounts.
Email marketing is the best tool to get more people towards the business.
What type of emails can be sent in email marketing?
- Subscription newsletter through blog
- Follow up emails to the people who downloaded free stuff from your website
- Welcome emails
- Loyalty program emails to the members
- Holiday promotions emails
- Tips email to attract them towards your business
Video Marketing
YouTube is the world’s second most popular search engine and people are hanging out most of the time.
People use YouTube effectively for most of their life events like purchase, learning, how-to videos and more. So YouTube is one of the best ways to promote your products.
Other than YouTube video marketing methods, there are many more popular video marketing strategies that help you to promote your products.
Those are Facebook videos, Instagram video ads and TikTok video marketing campaigns (currently TikTok is banned).
Many product companies use video marketing and integrate with SEO, content marketing which help to run successful marketing campaigns. If you’re ready to start video marketing then here is the simple steps to create a YouTube channel for free.
SMS Messaging Marketing
Still many companies uses SMS marketing strategies to promote their products. They use SMS marketing strategies to offer opportunities to the customers for any product updates and discounts.
As technologies develop day by day, customers are getting more discounts offers through SMS marketing.
Inbound Marketing
The simple term of inbound marketing is, it’s a good marketing methodology where you can easily get more customers from all stages of the buyer’s journey.
You may use all types of digital marketing strategies we discussed above. Inbound marketing method helps to create all positive and negative parts of customers’ journey towards any sale.
As a business part, we must take the positive part only from the consumers.
The examples of inbound marketing methods,
- Blogging Vs Pop-up Ads
- Commercial Ads Vs Video marketing
- Email list Vs Email spam
- Sponsored Content
As a brand owner, you pay another entity or company to create and promote your content or products / services in some way. This is the method of sponsored content.
Influencer marketing is one of the popular methods of sponsored content. Using this strategy, an influencer works on publishing posts, and suitable videos on social media about the product he works for.
What does a digital marketer do?
A digital marketer focuses to drive brand awareness, lead and sale generation through several popular digital channels. He/she is the in-charge of both free and paid channels to bring more customers to their business.
The digital marketers work on their own business website to get good ranking in the search engine, email and display advertising.
The digital marketer actively focuses on the many KPI – key performance indicators for every channel. This will help the digital marketer to measure the performance of the company and profit.
Also a digital marketer is the in-charge of SEO part. He / She has to measure and monitor the website’s organic traffic, ranking, issues and how the page got ranked in the search engine and more.
Below are a few examples of digital marketing specialist roles in the digital marketing industry.
SEO Manager
Primary KPIs – Organic Traffic
The primary task of any SEO manager is, to get the business to top rank on Google.
They’ll use a variety of tricks and tactics like search engine optimization and co-ordinate with the content creators. This will ensure their content ranks well on Google. Also they need to analyze the rankings in social media as well.
Content Marketing Specialist
Primary KPIs – Blog traffic, YouTube subscribers, Time on page (bounce rate)
Content (digital) creators are the content marketing specialist. Their main tasks would be to track their company’s calendar to bring the latest and updated video as well.
The content marketing specialist works with all other departments in their business. They brings the well-formed promotional content on each digital channel they use for product promotion.
Social Media Manager
Primary KPIs – Shares, Follows and Impressions
From the title, you can easily infer that social media managers have to manage everything related to social media in terms of digital marketing.
Social media managers have to finalize the release date for any product / service’s schedule for the company’s visual and written content.
Social media managers work with content marketing specialists to develop a great strategy to decide the digital channel to publish their content.
Marketing Automation Coordinator
Primary KPIs – Campaign CTR, lead generation (conversion rate), Email open rate
The primary task of the marketing automation coordinator is, to help and manage their business software. This software would be the heart of their marketing team to have an idea about their consumer’s behavior. Also help to measure their business growth easily.
Most of the marketing operations which we discussed above should be operated separately from one another.
The marketing automation coordinator has to take care of all these digital activities and monitor individually to optimize all campaigns performance.
Do we need Digital Marketing for all businesses?
This wonderful technology can work for any type of business in any kind of industry.
Regardless of what your business focuses, digital marketing is a must needed strategy. Digital marketing is very important to identify the right audience in the right time and in the right place as well.
However, this doesn’t mean that all businesses should have implemented a digital marketing strategy in the same way.
B2B Digital Marketing
B2B means business to business. If your company is B2B (business-to-business) then the digital marketing strategies are the center point of all your business. That is, lead generation and sale happens based on the digital marketing strategies.
That’s what, your digital marketing strategy should get more right people. This will do more conversion like, as much as quality visitors and leads to the sales team through your website and supporting channels as well.
Beyond your business website, you need to focus more on the business oriented channels like LinkedIn where most of the people are hanging.
B2C Digital Marketing
B2C means Business to Consumer. The company is based on business-to-consumer, based on the price points of your products.
In B2C, your digital marketing’s goal is to attract the visitors (people) to your website and make them as your customer without speaking to a salesperson.
That’s why you do not need to focus more on the leads. Instead concentrate more on the buyer the moment they enter into your website and do a purchase.
The popular B2C companies like Pinterest and Instagram are more valuable than the B2B platforms like LinkedIn.
Why is Digital Marketing important?
Digital marketing helps the businesses to target and reach the right consumers than the traditional marketing methods.
Digital marketing focuses on the people who are likely to buy the products or services. Also digital marketing is more cost-effective if you compare with the traditional marketing method.
The best part of digital advertising is, you can monitor and analyze the business position day by day.
What is the major importance of digital marketing?
Target the right people who will buy your products or services
For instance, if you run an ad on TV, magazine or in a billboard, you will not control or have minimum control to know who sees this ad.
Of course, you can somewhat measure using some measures like demographics, magazine readers or neighborhood. But still you won’t get accurate reports of the consumers or people.
Instead, if you use digital marketing strategies, you can easily identify the specific audience who are willing to buy your products.
This consolidated list of customers will help you to send messages, follow up emails to let them know more about your products, extension, offers and discounts. This tends you to do better business towards profit.
For example, you can take advantage of social media network’s advantages and features to focus certain people easily for good sales.
These social media features help you to measure the audience based on the gender, age, location, geo location, behavior and interests.
PPC or SEO strategies are the key factors to target the specific audience who are really interested in your products by using the target keywords.
The best SEO keyword research tools help you to find the right audiences.
Digital marketing tricks and tactics help you to find out the buyers persona. This is the key to refine your selling strategies to reach the right audiences.
Apart from this, digital marketing targets your market to sub-groups based on the larger target audience.
If your business deals on the multiple products or services for different types of persona of buyers then this strategy works for you.
Digital Marketing is Cost-Effective than Traditional Marketing
Digital marketing methods help you to track and optimize the campaigns on a daily basis. These strategies help you decrease the money you’re spending for any campaigns or channels.
You can make use of digital marketing methods to follow and track the ROI of your Google Ads campaign. But this will not happen in the traditional marketing method.
If its billboard method, there is no matter that you are getting profit are not, you must spend for the billboard method.
For example, If you’re working for a small business with a tiny budget, you can try your investment with SEO, blogging and social media. These three selling strategies will give you high ROI even if the spend is less.
Digital Marketing helps you to get top rank over your industry
If you’re running a small business then it’s very difficult to compete with the major brands in your industry.
They might have invested millions of dollars on TV commercials or worldwide campaigns. You should make use of digital marketing with your presence of mind to outrank the big competitors.
As we discussed earlier, using the best keyword tool to find the long-tail keywords along with the high-quality content to help you rank top on search engines.
Search engines never care about which the biggest brand is and which least one is. It always relies on the best content based on keyword query typed by the target audience.
Moreover, Influencer marketing method helps you to reach the new visitors to your business through social media networks. If you’re running a small business then influencer marketing is the best option.
Digital Marketing is easy to measure
It’s 100% true that you can measure complete business like start-to-finish things in terms of all matters related to your business. Those are, shares, total views, impressions, clicks, staying time in the page. The is the most important measurement for any business and great benefits of digital marketing.
Using digital marketing, as a business owner you can easily measure the real time results. You cannot measure how many people read your ads which you published in the newspaper. We’re not that how many people flipped that particular page where your ad displayed.
On the other hand, using digital marketing you can easily measure ROI towards profit.
Website Traffic
Using digital marketing features, you can easily check and measure how many people have visited your website. Even you can measure easily in the real time for any particular page also.
Along with the visited pages, you can see the device they used from where they come from and more depth analytics data.
This detailed report helps you to consolidate more details like,
- Number of visitors
- Page views
- Keywords they used to reach your page
- Devices they used
- Geo location
- How long did they stay on the website?
- Incoming source
- Visitors activity
- Exit link
This data helps you optimize more and get more visitors to your website which will bring your website top in the SERPs.
In OFFLINE marketing, it’s not possible to collect like this information in-depth. It’s very difficult to measure how the sale happened and could not send any business extend or discount offer to the existing customer.
What is the best digital content to create for my business?
Based on your buyer’s journey, you need to create the content. Create good buyer personas to find the buyer’s current trend, searching’s, goals and challenges which are related to your business.
Starting from the basics, your online content should help your customers to meet their requirements, goals and challenges.
Then you need to think more about how and when your visitors are ready to use your content which relates to where they stand in their buyer’s journey.
This is called “Content Mapping“.
Using the content mapping, you can target your content according to:
The persona and behavior of the person who will consume.
How near that person makes a purchase.
Based on the format of your content, there are many ways to try the best options to use at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
Awareness Stage
Blog Posts
Best way to increase your organic traffic along with the best SEO strategies and keyword strategies.
Videos
Videos are the best shareable content where you can get more new visitors from the channel like YouTube.
Infographics
Social media networks are the best place to use infographics methods to share your content to increase more chances for sales.
Consideration Stage
Ebooks
This method is great for lead generation. It’s more comprehensive than infographics or post. People like to exchange contact information to get it.
Research Reports
This is also high-value content which is best for lead generation. Research reports along with new data for your business will work for the awareness stage.
Webinars
Webinar is like a more detailed and interactive method of video. It is a more effective content format as they offer more comprehensive content than video or post.
Decision Stage
Case Studies
It’s very helpful to the business as the detailed case studies help the people who are ready to make a buying decision. This case study will positively influence the decision.
Testimonials
Few businesses are not good with case studies, so having good testimonials are the best alternative to case studies.
If you are doing a dress brand, these should take the photos of a few others who are being styled with the dress and branded hashtag where people can contribute.
Step-by-Step Guide to Start Digital Marketing
Below are easy ways to do digital marketing. Follow this beginner’s guide for digital marketing to optimize your business towards profit.
Define your goals.
It’s very fundamental that you need to define your goals when you’re starting digital marketing, not only for the first time. Based on the goals, you’ll need to plan your activities accordingly.
For example, if your goal is to have huge brand awareness, you need to focus more to get new audiences through social media networks.
If you want to increase the number of sales of any product, you need to concentrate more on the SEO part and optimize your content to get valuable buyers on your blog or business website in the first place. Also you should test the PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns to drive potential traffic using paid ads like Google Ads.
Whatever may be your case, all you need is to determine your goals correctly.
Identify the target audience.
We’ve already talked about focusing on the target audience that digital marketing is the best way to target your specific audience. But you need to make sure that who your target audience is.
Your target audiences can be changed based on your goals and channel you’re using to promote the product or campaign.
For instance, it’s very common that Instagram audiences are always younger than the LinkedIn audiences. Because Instagram users are busy with funny images, memes and video, whereas LinkedIn users are very serious about advice.
So, it’s very clear that your content strategies are based on the type target audiences.
Decide your budget for your digital channel
Your digital marketing budget is based on what digital marketing elements you’re using in your strategy.
If your strategies are inbound marketing like SEO, content creation and social media then you should not need a big budget.
Inbound marketing relies on high quality content which your visitors want to consume where you need to spend more time in terms of valuable content.
You can start a blog and write quality content using the best and reliable hosting companies like WordPress and best themes from StudioPress. You can easily create your website without coding knowledge.
Using outbound marketing technologies (online advertising) and buying bulk email lists is surely some expense.
The amount of expenses in outbound marketing is based on the visibility of your advertisement.
For instance, you’ll be a bit high in the Google Ads to get the top place in the Google search result pages SERPs based on the keyword you associated in Google Ads for your business.
You can get an idea from Google Ads to find out the best keyword which you can write for future to get top page rank through organic search.
Digital Marketing Challenges
Of course, digital marketing also has a few challenges for its marketers. Many digital channels are getting started every day, as a digital marketer you need to keep your eyes open and monitor how your digital channel works.
Learn more about how to effectively market your products using digital strategies and optimize it towards the profit path.
Nowadays, it’s very difficult to get new customers and even it’s difficult to get receiver attention as competition is arising.
Digital marketer’s also finding difficulties and challenges of data capture and the applying the new marketing strategies.
As a digital marketer you need to be updated and use the data effectively which helps to understand the consumer’s behavior.
For example, collect all required data to analyze the consumer’s journey and behavior.
Conclusion
As you’ve seen there are many opportunities to start digital marketing and implement it in the proper way to get good results.
If you follow all the information shared here then you can easily gather the success very soon. I know, one is ready to miss these wonderful opportunities to develop the business using digital marketing strategies.
We would strongly suggest you make use of both online digital marketing and offline marketing strategies to take your business to the next level.
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