What is digital marketing?

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 generate more business, build brand equity, work on employee branding and much more. Basically, it's the same strategy as most things to persevere, evaluate and optimize.

In this recorded webinar, we'll go through the basics of digital marketing and give you lots of tips and recommendations for your future marketing efforts. We'll go over the basics of SEO (search engine optimization), SEM (search engine marketing) and Inbound marketing. How to think when it comes to measurement and setting goals.

If you're just starting your online marketing efforts, I highly recommend Google's "digital academy" training, which covers everything from SEO to developing a digital marketing strategy. Link to the training is here:https://learndigital.withgoogle.com/digitalakademin

Once you've been through that course, you'll have all the basic knowledge you need to get started and start producing to drive your online venture. Getting started with your own digital marketing doesn't have to be a gigantic project as it can easily feel before you've gotten started.

If you need a simple and easy marketing plan template, you'll find one like this below to download.

DOWNLOAD MARKETING PLAN TEMPLATE

Start your digital marketing journey on time!

The tip we often give is to start small, don't get in over your head, it's often enough:

• Easier website
• Writing blog posts ( about 1-2 per month to start with)
• Write 2-3 really good guides/whitepapers
• Publish all content on social media with teasers
• Write one newsletter per month
• Set up google analytics and search console (a heatmap is good too, e.g. hotjar)

If you can keep up this rate of content production, time will tell if your digital efforts are paying off. The reason why we recommend starting on a small/smaller scale is partly so that you have the time and opportunity to keep up the production of, for example, content over a longer period of time and so that you don't run out of steam if you find that it hasn't produced as much as you originally thought.

For example, if you run a B2B company, you should expect sales cycles to be around 6-12 months, and you should therefore take a long-term view of your online marketing. If you stop in the middle, you probably haven't given your venture a chance to succeed and you won't be able to fully evaluate and optimise for the next time.

It is important to always measure all the activities you have carried out, which blog posts draw traffic, which guide/whitepaper is downloaded, how visitors move around your website. All this you can measure and see using google analytics, search console and heatmaps.

There is also a brand new analytics tool designed for b2b companies called Informind.

It helps you collect data from multiple channels and helps you calculate lead acquisition cost which is very useful to know which efforts are profitable or not.

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How do I measure digital marketing?

Measuring digital marketing is not difficult and, as mentioned above, there are many programs and systems to measure whether your marketing is producing results. An important part of starting to measure is to set goals. Without goals, there is nothing to measure against!

Examples of targets can be, number of visits to the website, number of leads, number of purchases, average position on a search engine, etc. Some are easy to measure and some are more difficult. For example, it is easy to measure the number of unique visits to the website via google analytics while measuring purchases for a B2B company attributed to digital marketing can be much more difficult unless the purchase was made digitally.

When measuring digital marketing, it's important to measure the same thing over time and continuously. For example, if you measure visits to your website and at the first measurement you 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 it to the previous 60 day period, it will no longer be relevant and can no longer be monitored in a good way.

To help with measurement, there are several major digital marketing systems, marketing automation systems, inbound marketing tools, etc. They can help many companies to structure and systematise their digital marketing. Investing in a system can be a good idea, but it may not suit everyone depending on how far along they are in their digital marketing. In a separate blog post, we have gone through whether you need an inbound marketing tool or not which might be worth reading if you are thinking of getting a marketing tool.

Inbound marketing, growth hacking, content marketing - without you even noticing

If you have started this process as described above and started producing content, distributing it on social media and measuring how visitors move around your website, you have already started your strategy towards inbound marketing and content marketing. You have created engaging business-driving content (content marketing) and you have created an inbound funnel by driving traffic to the website that hopefully leads to a download of a guide/whitepaper for which you received an email address in exchange. Congratulations! Well done!

If you then optimize your content through data i.e. based on analysis from google analytics and searchconsole you have started your journey as a growth hacker!

It never ends - keep learning and producing

I hope you got the answer to your question about what digital marketing is. Running a successful digital marketing strategy is based on always keeping up with what's happening in market trends and especially how search engines are updating their algorithms.

It's important to always start with data when optimising and scaling up your digital efforts, and remember that the goal should always be to create a proven profitable marketing effort.Once you get the constant monitoring and optimisation into a routine, the rest will come naturally.Go for it!

Ps. If you need help getting your digital marketing journey off the ground, you're more than welcome to book a meeting with us. Would love to hear more about you and your goals!