At some point you need to stop thinking and start doing. When it comes to digital marketing, that sentiment is doubly true because literally doing anything could instantly impact your business. Here’s how to start marketing online within the next 24 hours.
You’ve already realized that you’ll need to do something with social media, and probably incorporate an email promotion or two. But, you just don’t know where to start. What’s the right way to post on social media and the absolute wrong way to send a promotional email? Luckily, digital marketing isn’t nearly as permanent as sending a plane into the sky to promote your company, only to realize they misspelled your website name.
With digital marketing, you get free access to a huge audience of prospects.
Not only can you create top-quality content that makes them fall in love with your brand, but you can get data and analytics that aren’t available from the people who might have seen your plane flying around the city.
Digital marketing is the next step in your marketing strategy, and here’s exactly how you can get started in the next 24 hours.
#1: Create a Digital Marketing Channel
The first step to starting a digital marketing strategy is creating a channel for it. This is where most entrepreneurs start to get overwhelmed, asking themselves, “But, WHICH channel should I choose?”
The answer is based on your customer avatar. Your first digital marketing efforts should be on the channel that customer avatar spends most of their time on.
For example, an ecommerce fashion boutique can look into Instagram and TikTok. A media company will want to create an email newsletter and a Twitter. And a SaaS tool can use Quora and Reddit. If you don’t know which channel to start with, don’t guess. Ask your current customers where they spend the majority of their time—and then build a strategy around those channels.
#2: Send an Onboarding Email to Your Customers
If you have customers, you have an email list. Whether that email list has been utilized or not is another story. Since you already have this digital marketing channel, let’s use it strategically to get your customers to refer their friends, family, and online audience and ascend the Customer Value Journey ladder to your high-tier offers.
Email marketing starts with an indoctrination email. This is the first email someone gets from your business that tells them who you are and what to expect in the next emails you send.
For example, you can let your customers know you’re doing a giveaway and the winner will be chosen from those that share their referral link. Or, you can tell your audience that you have a special offer coming up soon and that you’ll email them to tell them when it’s live. Email is the best digital marketing channel for conversions—so make sure to use it.
#3: Post Content to Your Social Media Channels
Just because you’re on social media doesn’t mean you have a strategy. You might have an intern randomly posting content on behalf of your brand, but the reality is that social media is a full-time job (if you want to do it right). It requires a strategy for cold, warm, and hot leads and you’ll need to create highly engaging and converting content to get an ROI.
You don’t need to do all of that in the next 24 hours, though. To start digital marketing today, all you need to do is post something to your social media feeds. It could be an Instagram story showing the behind-the-scenes of working at your company, a feed post of a testimonial, or a tweet about a relatable thought your brand has on their industry. Just hitting publish starts your digital marketing strategy—which makes the barrier to entry absolutely tiny.
#4: Ask Your Audience for Their Opinion on Upcoming Offers
Marketing is all about asking your customer avatar questions and having them tell you what they want. If you’re doing it any other way, we confidently predict you’re not getting the results you want from your strategy.
To start digital marketing in the next 24 hours, ask your audience what content they’d like to see from you. This is market research—a foundational step of creating a marketing strategy.
You can ask your current customers, subscribers, or any social media audience you’ve happened to build. Here’s something you can copy and paste for them, “We’re building out our content calendar for the next few months and wanted to ask—out of these 5 topics, which are the most interesting to you?”. Based on their feedback, you can start to create the content that you’ll build your digital marketing strategy around.
#5: Use Your Personal Social Media Profiles to Talk About Your Expertise
What happens if you don’t have an email list or a social media audience for your brand…whatsoever? Well, it’s time to look at your personal social media profiles. Personal branding brings in dividends because it’s not a business talking about how great it is.
It’s a CEO, founder, or employee showing how much they know about their customer avatar’s problem—and why they’re perfectly positioned to solve it for them.
Personal branding is a form of digital marketing. You’ll use your personal social media profiles (like Instagram or Twitter) to give trainings, show the behind-the-scenes of your business, talk about your products, and ask your audience questions that will help you create more content (see #4). It never hurts to build out your personal brand, especially now that consumers are more interested in employee-generated content than brand-created content.
Time To Hit Publish
This is the moment you’ve been procrastinating. It’s time to hit publish on your first piece of content—starting your digital marketing strategy. We know this can feel scary and like you’re going to mess it up, but that’s the beauty of *digital* marketing. You’re not printing 1,000 flyers and hoping you didn’t make a typo. You’re publishing a social media post or hitting send on an email. There’s a lot less risk than in physical marketing!
You can start your digital marketing strategy in the next 24 hours with one or more of these strategies:
#1: Create a digital marketing channel
#2: Send an onboarding email to your customers
#3: Post content to your social media channels
#4: Ask your audience for their opinion on upcoming offers
#5: Use your personal social media profiles to talk about your expertise
Inside of DigitalMarketer Lab, you can learn the foundations of digital marketing, like creating an SEO strategy or starting marketing on social media. Sign up for Lab to get access to Insider Trainings, Workshops, and Playbooks designed for new marketers just like you.
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