Welcome to Start Up Marketeer’s Beginner’s Guide to Digital Marketing!
This guide is designed for complete novices who haven’t had any experience with digital marketing before.
We’ve broken down this giant topic into small, manageable chunks to give you a better idea of what digital marketing involves and how digital marketing can help your business grow.
If you’re already familiar with the basics of digital marketing, then feel free to head straight to our other blog posts which feature more in-depth guides and helpful tips.
Everyone else, come with us!
In this guide we’ll cover:
What is digital marketing?
What are the different types of digital marketing?
How can digital marketing help me grow my business?
If at any point you get lost or want a more personalised guide to digital marketing, book yourself in for a Power Hour with Emilie - there are no silly questions!
What is digital marketing?
Digital marketing is any marketing activity that uses the internet or an electronic device.
It’s as simple as that!
So digital marketing can include:
Websites
Emails
Social media
Online articles and blog posts
Paid advertising
E-books
Search engines
And much, much more!
These marketing activities are designed to help you connect with your existing customers and find new customers! They also help to grow awareness for your brand by getting your name out there.
What are the different types of digital marketing?
As you might have guessed, digital marketing is a huge topic! There are loads of different types of marketing that all fall under the bracket of digital marketing.
To prevent this guide from becoming a novel, we’ll focus on the 4 main types of digital marketing.
Here we go!
Social media
Social media marketing promotes your business on social media through content and interactions with other social media users and potential customers.
The channels that are used most often in social media marketing include:
Facebook
Instagram
LinkedIn
Twitter
Pinterest
Snapchat
As digital marketing managers, we create targeted strategies to help brands grow their social media presence.
We also offer the option to set up and run your social media channels. That includes not just producing and posting content (such as posts, videos and competitions) but it also includes engagement, which is essential for growing your social media influence.
Engagement includes all the ‘social’ sides of social media such as chatting with customers, interacting with other brands and responding to comments.
These activities all help to increase the influence your business has on social media, which works to boost awareness for your brand and drive more people to visit your website or get in touch with you.
Websites and SEO
A hugely important aspect of digital marketing for small businesses is your website design and content.
Your website is your digital shopfront and often the main contact point for customers so you need to make sure your website is easy-to-use and shows off the best of your brand.
Your website is also make or break for whether or not you show up in online searches.
When a potential customer types their search into Google, your business won’t be there unless your website is specially tailored for search engines.
A key part of our work at Start Up Marketeer is helping small business owners with their search engine optimisation or SEO. This includes making sure your website is designed so that it’s ‘readable’ by search engines like Google and contains the keywords it needs to get to the top of the list in searches.
For beginners, this can be a really complex topic. You can quickly fall down a rabbit hole of SEO lingo and emerge hours later even more confused than before! That’s why we make sure that all our communication is jargon-free to make the process as straightforward and accessible as possible.
Emails
Email marketing is another fantastic tool for small businesses. Emails allow you to contact customers directly and use personalised messages to keep your brand in the top of their minds.
Some of the ways we use email marketing for our clients include:
Customer welcome emails
Follow-up emails after a purchase
Newsletters
Sharing tips and helpful advice
Updates on relevant products
One of the things that many small businesses miss out on is the opportunity for repeat sales using digital marketing.
Effective email marketing can make sure that you keep a line of communication open with customers after they’ve made a sale. By maintaining contact through friendly, helpful emails (not spam!) you can increase your chances of those customers coming back again in the future.
Content marketing
When we talk about content marketing, we mean the creation and promotion of different types of online content including blog posts, e-books, infographics, video and website content.
Content marketing is a really effective tool for increasing brand awareness and generating leads for sales.
The beauty of content marketing is that it really works! A lot of small businesses can be sceptical about how much of a difference having a blog or video series can make to their business but with the right content, you can generate a huge buzz around your business.
The right content marketing helps customers learn more about your products, offers useful advice and gives customers more reasons to purchase from you.
At Start Up Marketeer, we have specialist copywriters who produce original and engaging content that’s also SEO-optimised to help your business show up in searches. We also help small business owners who want to work on their content marketing themselves by offering advice and providing a comprehensive content strategy.
How can digital marketing help me grow my business?
At its core, digital marketing gives you the opportunity to reach more people than you would otherwise be able to with traditional marketing.
Thanks to the huge amount of data that we now have, you can target specific types of people who are most likely to be interested in your products or services.
This allows you to be much more precise than traditional marketing.
For small businesses, this means that you don’t waste your hard earned money on a broad brush marketing approach. Instead, you can be really focussed in your marketing efforts and make sure that your marketing is getting seen by the right people.
There are some more awesome benefits of digital marketing too!
1. Digital marketing is measurable - you can see clear, accurate results from your marketing efforts, including the amount of time people spend on each page of your website or the number of people who view a video.
2. It can be more cost effective than traditional marketing - you can track digital marketing activities on a daily basis, allowing you to adjust your spending so that you only invest in the marketing channels that are performing well.
3. You can reach potential customers all over the world, rather than just relying on people in your area.
4. You have the opportunity to outrank bigger companies with digital marketing tactics like SEO-optimisation which can put you ahead of your competition.
5. You can provide real-time, instant customer service - unlike traditional marketing, digital marketing gives your customers a direct link to your business so they can contact you or purchase your products instantly! Good communication also builds trust in your business and makes people more likely to come back!
We’re fully convinced that digital marketing is the BEST tool for small businesses! Here at Start Up Marketeer, we’re passionate about helping more businesses grow through simple, effective marketing techniques that really pack a punch.
What’s more, we’re committed to providing no-nonsense, jargon-free advice so that anyone and everyone can come to us for help.
Head to our services page to find out more about what we can do for you!