Entrepreneurs need to master digital marketing because consumers rely on digital platforms as a way to discover new products and help them reach purchase decisions, as you can see in the graphic below. Yet, many small businesses (28%) lack even a website, which is the fundamental basis of a digital marketing platform. Digital marketing is one of the only ways to scale a company beyond the bounds of your local community, but business leaders are failing to leverage it as they should.
Not only is digital marketing an effective means to reach today’s consumers, especially younger ones, but it’s also very cost-effective when compared with traditional advertising options.
In this post, we explore why entrepreneurs need to be avid students of digital marketing or, failing that, acquire expertise in digital marketing by hiring an agency or employees with the necessary skills and expertise. Here’s what you need to know:
What is digital marketing
Digital marketing involves a complex interplay between technology and marketing hence you need people with specialized knowledge in digital marketing rather than expecting IT folks or even general marketing folks to manage your digital marketing if you’re not able to master digital marketing yourself.
Below are some tactics that fit into the digital marketing bucket:
Obviously, we can’t cover all of these topics in a single post, but you’ll find much more on each aspect of digital marketing on the pages of this website. Most are filed under the category of “Marketing Strategy” but you’ll also find categories related to many of these topics. A search will bring you a variety of pages related to digital marketing, each with its own unique take on the topic. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, simply enter your question or topic you’d like to see covered in the comments below.
Master digital marketing
which means you need to acquire cross-functional skills if you want to master digital marketing. First, and foremost, digital marketing is marketing, which requires you to learn core marketing concepts such as consumer behavior (including consumer decision making, the buying process, influence, and more), pricing (including how to price products and how to create a price line), marketing strategy (including understanding your environment, how to build a marketing plan, and more), product development (identifying unmet needs, product life cycle, etc), promotion, and market research.
You also need a vast array of technical skills such as analytics, website design, etc. Below, you can see a graphic depicting the most in-demand skills needed to master digital marketing according to CMOs and the gaps that exist in finding these skills.
Conversion rate optimization can make a big difference in your bottom line
It’s not enough to gain new customers and retain your existing customers, although these are worthy goals. You want to optimize your conversion rate; the ratio of visitors to conversions. Conversion rate optimization involves ensuring your content and other marketing strategies encourage as many visitors to your website and physical store as possible to actually make a purchase. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is popular among digital marketers for a good reason. Experienced professionals understand that it is the way to make the best possible use of company marketing budgets. Without CRO, firms have no idea how efficient their marketing efforts are, and their spending tends to skyrocket.
There are many ways to assess performance using CRO. For instance, you might measure it across your various marketing campaigns or communication channels to determine which activities generate the highest CRO. Another way to look at conversion rates is to collect cart abandonment rate statistics. Take a look at the number of people who are failing to go all the way through your checkout process, even though they put items in their digital baskets. Below, you can see the primary reasons why consumers abandon their carts.
Since abandonment is a serious concern because visitors got most of the way through the conversion process before abandoning their cart, it’s of serious concern to marketers. If the numbers are high, then it is a sure sign that you need to improve your conversion rate optimization. And that requires being a student of digital marketing.
Another way to assess CRO is to view it in a more nuanced way by considering the average order value in addition to the conversion rate. Hence, it’s not sufficient for a visitor to convert, their order value should be as high as possible. For instance, you might encourage additional purchases prior to checkout or you might suggest adding related items when consumers put an item in their shopping cart. You must balance your efforts to increase average order value with shopping cart abandonment, however.
The better your content, the bigger the rewards
Improving your content is perhaps the best thing an enterprise can do to encourage engagement, which amplifies your social media messages, motivates visitors through the customer journey to purchase, and builds a long-term relationship with consumers. It’s a powerful technique that embroils customers in your brand and makes them more interested in learning more about your brand, sharing their feedback with others, and advocating for your brand.
Let’s say, for instance, that you make wheels for bicycles. There are dozens of companies out there doing the same thing. But if you can show off your products on social media or offer YouTube videos to help consumers purchase the right wheels for their needs, they’ll engage in behaviors in support of your brand, like those mentioned above. People love showcases of what products are capable of achieving for them and how they can improve their lives.
The bad news about content marketing is that there is no real way to know which pieces of content are more likely to succeed than others. You can’t plan viral content. Of course, you can, and should, monitor your content performance to make better content as time goes on by replicating the type of content that generates a high conversion rate and/ or high average order value.
Whatever your actual content creation strategy, your content marketing is an ongoing communication effort that requires consistency, a sustained effort to provide value to your market, and listening, not just creating content. If it helps, I created a content marketing calendar template to help you stay on track with fresh content on a consistent basis. That’s because your need content for each platform you plan to use, as well as publishing on the right schedule. See below for recommended publication schedules for several popular social platforms.
Digital marketing is more than paid ads
Paid ads are a great way to build brand awareness when your business is first starting out and are ever more necessary as organic reach on social platforms and in search results is dwindling. But in today’s landscape, it is just the first stage. There’s way more to running a successful digital marketing campaign than paying Google to put you at the top of search results.
That’s why your digital marketing career path needs to become more all-encompassing. Perhaps the best thing you can do is create organic content that answers the questions that users are most likely to pose that are relevant to your business. It can be anything, even obscure questions since these often relate to the intent to buy.
Think about what major brands do to get the message out about their products online. Companies like Coca-Cola and Pepsi engage in several marketing campaigns each year that promote different aspects of their brands. They also use a variety of channels to achieve their aims.
SEO is critical for you to master digital marketing. SEO is the term used to express efforts to optimize your rank in search based on the algorithms designed by search engines to deliver the highest quality links to users first. Below, you can see the impact of rank on the amount of traffic visiting your site.
SEO is ever-changing and the algorithms are complex, as well as unpublished. However, SEO experts constantly test content to help guild those wanting to master digital marketing in creating great content that drives organic search. Below are the most impactful elements to consider as you create content:
Seasoned entrepreneurs believe that SEO is the ultimate standard in digital marketing. If you can drive organic traffic to your web pages, then you’re setting yourself up for success.
And while that’s still true, SEO isn’t what it used to be. Critically, SEO is not a project. It’s not something that you just do once and then forget about it, reaping the rewards for years to come. Instead, it’s something that requires continuous reassessment and evaluation.
Every year, Google and other search engines release hundreds of updates to their algorithms. And all of them make a difference in where pages rank in search results. This reality means that businesses need to stay on top of their SEO practice to ensure that they don’t get left behind. Investing in SEO isn’t a one-off cost, but something that entrepreneurs need to factor into their marketing budgets from the start.
One current myth circulating at the moment is that SEO is dead and doesn’t matter anymore. Everyone is on social media, so why both? But again, that’s not true. Perhaps the old ways of doing SEO are dead, but techniques continue to evolve. There are still ways to catapult your business to the top of search rankings. It just requires time, patience, and a keen eye.
Analytics is a key element when you want to master digital marketing as no one has a crystal ball telling them what will work and what’s works changes all the time. You must monitor KPIs on a daily basis across your website, social media, email marketing, etc. Set up a dashboard on Google Analytics, for instance, so you can see metrics associated with your website at a glance. By using data visualization, it’s much easier to derive insights from your data.
Also, consider whether your sales funnels are operating the way they should. How are you converting users? Do you have a lot of engagement but relatively few sales? Or are customers actively buying from you, as soon as they have the budget to do so?
Mobile is central to everything you do
Lastly, students who want to master digital marketing know that mobile experiences are central to everything that they do. That’s because most users use their smartphones to interact with businesses, not traditional desktop and laptop computers.
Mobile optimization is also key for SEO itself. If Google believes that you’re catering to portable devices, it’ll improve your ranking.
This is a quick treatment of the important topic of tactics you must use to master digital marketing. I hope you found this useful and will search out more on this important topic on other pages of this website.
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