Basics Of Digital Marketing- Beginner Course PDF.

If you are wondering how to get the basic knowledge on digital marketing,  This introduction to Basics Of Digital Marketing  will get you started. This course will help you have overview of what digital marketing entails to a large extent.

Starting with what digital marketing is… it’s is advertising delivered through digital channels. Channels such as social media, mobile applications, email, web applications, search engines, websites, or any new digital channel.

What Is Digital Marketing?

Basically, digital marketing refers to any online marketing efforts or assets. Email marketing, pay-per-click advertising, social media marketing and even blogging are all great examples of digital marketing—they help introduce people to your company and convince them to buy.

Almost anything can be a digital marketing asset. It simply needs to be a marketing tool you use online. That being said, many people don’t realize how many digital marketing assets they have at their disposal. Here are just a few examples:

• Your website
• Branded assets (logos, icons, acronyms, etc)
• Video content (video ads, product demos, etc)
• Images (infographics, product shots, company photos, etc)
• Written content (blog posts, eBooks, product descriptions, testimonials, etc)
• Online products or tools (SaaS, calculators, interactive content, etc)
• Reviews
• Social media pages

As you can probably imagine, this list just scratches the surface. Most digital marketing assets will fall into one of these categories, but clever marketers are constantly coming up with new ways to reach customers online, so the list keeps growing!

The good news is that learning the skills of digital marketing is often possible at home, in your spare time. The Basics Of Digital Marketing is a beginners course that will give you a visible  horizontal line on how to get started.

How To Learn Digital Marketing:

Here are our six steps to digital marketing success:

Step 1 – Study

Acquire the necessary knowledge to become a successful digital marketer by reading free guides online — everything from blog posts to eBooks and course materials created by experienced marketers, marketing agencies and universities.

Step 2 – Practice, Practice, Practice

The best form of education is actively putting into practice what you’ve learned. Create test campaigns, monitor the results, optimise the campaigns and learn from your mistakes. You’ll be following the instructions provided by the study materials you’re using and there’s no risk involved as you aren’t yet dealing with digital advertising budgets for real businesses.

Step 3 – Get Certified and Qualified

Now that you’re confident with the study materials, take the associated certifications and qualifications to test your knowledge.

Step 4 – Start Your Own Digital Marketing Blog

Having your own digital marketing blog will help you practice what you’ve learned and demonstrate your expertise. It will also help you start to make connections in the industry as you seek out guest writers, invite opinions on your posts and offer to write for other publications.

Step 5 – Seek Out Training and Support from Experienced Digital Marketers

Put those new contacts you’ve made to good use. To progress as a digital marketer, you will need support and guidance from experienced professionals who can point you in the right direction.

Step 6 – Keep Learning and Improving

Digital marketing is an ever-changing and evolving field that requires its practitioners to be constantly evolving too. Never stop seeking out new learning materials and opportunities to improve your skills.

Types Of Digital Marketing 

The list of digital marketing types and strategies is also constantly evolving, but here are some of the types most businesses are using:

1. Content Marketing

Content marketing is another fairly broad digital marketing term. Content marketing covers any digital marketing effort that uses content assets (blog posts, infographics, eBooks, videos, etc) to build brand awareness or drive clicks, leads or sales.

2. Email Marketing

Email marketing is the oldest form of online marketing and it’s still going strong. Most digital marketers use email marketing to advertise special deals, highlight content (often as part of content marketing) or promote an event.

3. Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is essentially paying someone else (a person or a business) to promote your products and services on their website.

As you can see from the list above, there are a lot of different ways to market your business online, which is why many businesses either hire an agency to manage their digital marketing efforts or pay for an in-house marketing team and marketing automation software to cover their marketing needs.

4. Video Marketing

YouTube has become the second most popular search engine and a lot of users are turning to YouTube before they make a buying decision, to learn something, read a review, or just to relax.

There are several video marketing platforms, including Facebook Videos, Instagram, or even TikTok to use to run a video marketing campaign. Companies find the most success with video by integrating it with SEO, content marketing, and broader social media marketing campaigns.

5. Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is actually a broad term that covers any type of digital marketing where you pay for every user who clicks on an ad. For example, Google AdWords is a form of PPC advertising called “paid search advertising” (which we’ll go over in a second). Facebook Ads are another form of PPC advertising called “paid social media advertising” (again, we’ll get into that shortly).

6. Paid Search Advertising

Google, Bing and Yahoo all allow you to run text ads on their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). Paid search advertising is one of the best ways to target potential customers who are actively searching for a product or service like yours.

7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

If you don’t want to pay to show up in the SERPs, you can also use search engine optimization (SEO) to try and rank pages or blog posts on your site organically. You don’t have to pay directly for every click, but getting a page to rank usually takes quite a bit of time and effort (for a more in-depth comparison of paid search and SEO, check out this article).

8. Paid Social Media Advertising

Most social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Snapchat will allow you to run ads on their site. Paid social media advertising is great for building awareness with audiences that might not be aware that your business, product or service exists.

9. Social Media Marketing

Like SEO, social media marketing is the free, organic way to use social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter to market your business. And, just like SEO, organically marketing your business on social media takes a lot more time and effort, but in the long run, it can deliver much cheaper results.

Digital Marketing Challenges

Digital marketing poses special challenges for its purveyors. Digital channels are proliferating rapidly, and digital marketers have to keep up with how these channels work, how they’re used by receivers, and how to use these channels to effectively market their products or services.

In addition, it’s becoming more difficult to capture receivers’ attention, because receivers are increasingly inundated with competing ads. Digital marketers also find it challenging to analyze the vast troves of data they capture and then exploit this information in new marketing efforts.

The challenge of capturing and using data effectively highlights that digital marketing requires an approach to marketing based on a deep understanding of consumer behavior.

For example, it may require a company to analyze new forms of consumer behavior, such as using website heatmaps to learn more about the customer journey.

Why You Need a Digital Channel Strategy

1. You’re directionless

I find that companies without a digital strategy (and many that do) don’t have a clear strategic goal for what they want to achieve online in terms of gaining new customers or building deeper relationships with existing ones.

And if you don’t have goals with SMART digital marketing objectives you likely don’t put enough resources to reach the goals and you don’t evaluate through analytics whether you’re achieving those goals.

2.  You won’t know your online audience or market share

Customer demand for online services may be underestimated if you haven”t researched this. Perhaps, more importantly, you won’t understand your online marketplace: the dynamics will be different from traditional channels with different types of customer profile and behavior, competitors, propositions, and options for marketing communications.

There are great tools available from the main digital platforms where we can find out the level of customer demand, we recommend doing competitor analysis and using Google’s Keyword planner to see how you are tapping into the intent of searchers to attract them to your site, or see how many people interested in products or services or sector you could reach through Facebook IQ.

3. Existing and start-up competitors will gain market share

If you’re not devoting enough resources to digital, or you’re using an ad-hoc approach with no clearly defined strategies, then your competitors will eat your digital lunch!

4. You don’t have a powerful online value proposition

A clearly defined digital value proposition tailored to your different target customer personas will help you differentiate your online service encouraging existing and new customers to engage initially and stay loyal.

Developing a competitive content marketing strategy is key to this for many organizations since the content is what engages your audiences through different channels like search, social, email marketing, and on your blog.

5. You don’t know your online customers well enough

It’s often said that digital is the “most measurable medium ever”. But Google Analytics and similar will only tell you volumes of visits, not the sentiment of visitors, what they think.

You need to use other forms of website user feedback tools to identify your weak points and then address them.

6. You’re not integrated (“disintegrated”)

It’s all too common for digital marketing activities to be completed in silos whether that’s a specialist digital marketer, sitting in IT, or a separate digital agency.

It’s easier that way to package ‘digital’ into a convenient chunk. But of course, it’s less effective. Everyone agrees that digital media work best when integrated with traditional media and response channels.

We always recommend developing an integrated digital marketing strategy and once Digital Transformation is complete, digital will be part of your marketing plan and part of business as usual.

7. Digital doesn’t have enough people/budget given its importance

Insufficient resources will be devoted to both planning and executing e-marketing and there is likely to be a lack of specific specialist e-marketing skills which will make it difficult to respond to competitive threats effectively.

8. You’re wasting money and time through duplication

Even if you do have sufficient resource it may be wasted. This is particularly the case in larger companies where you see different parts of the marketing organization purchasing different tools or using different agencies for performing similar online marketing tasks.

9. You’re not agile enough to catch up or stay ahead

If you look at the top online brands like Amazon, Dell, Google, Tesco, Zappos, they’re all dynamic  – trialing new approaches to gain or keep their online audiences.

10. You’re not optimizing

Every company with a website will have analytics, but many senior managers don’t ensure that their teams make or have the time to review and act on them.

Once a strategy enables you to get the basics right, then you can progress to the continuous improvement of the key aspects like search marketing, site user experience, email, and social media marketing.

Basics Of Digital Marketing- PDF