A Complete Digital Marketing Walkthrough
Digital marketing is a type of advertising that uses online avenues to reach your customers. Like traditional advertising methods (radio, TV, print, etc.), you need to invest money in online marketing if you want to get results.
Unlike these traditional methods, digital media offers much more flexibility for reaching your specific customer base with the right message. You can persuade people more effectively than ever before, but you need to follow the correct steps. Where should you begin?
Create a High-Quality Website
Your website is your base of operations online. It’s the hub of activity that you want to get potential customers to visit. Put simply, it’s the equivalent of your brick-and-mortar store on the internet. That’s why you need to invest enough resources to ensure your website looks good and provides a great experience for your customers.
What makes a good website? For one thing, it should be easy to navigate. Clients should be able to find the products or services they need easily. There should also be plenty of helpful information for guiding visitors to the right items. After all, you don’t have salespeople online, so your website needs to take care of selling for you.
Choose Payment Processing Methods (Optional)
If you plan on selling products directly from your storefront, you also need secure payment systems for users. Many modern point-of-sale systems include everything you need to get started with online payments, including mobile payment apps, credit card and debit card functionality.
Plan Your Marketing
Now that you have a website to direct potential clients to, you’re ready to start attracting attention. There are many ways to approach this step, including:
- Search optimization
- Online ads
- Blogs and content marketing
- Videos
- Social media marketing
- Influencers (popular online personalities)
Knowing your options ahead of time is important because you rarely have the budget to focus on everything. You need to decide which advertising methods should work best with your specific audience and then put effort into digital marketing.
Prioritize Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is one of the most important parts of online marketing. First, the majority of internet users are always searching for something, from hotel rooms to power tools. When they search for products you sell, the goal is for your website to appear prominently.
SEO helps you achieve this by including keywords on your website, web pages, landing pages and blog articles. In other words, SEO ties into all your other marketing efforts, so it makes sense to give it plenty of attention.
