About This Digital Marketing Guide:
This guide can be used to learn a little digital marketing strategy, and then set up your digital marketing tools on your website. This guide is written for my students at Colorado State University but it is set up so that anyone can use it.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is the marketing of your products or services using digital technologies such as the internet, mobile phones or apps. The initial step in most digital marketing strategies is creating a website. Once you get your website up the first thing you do is install analytics and set up your webmaster tools in the Google Search Console. If your business has a physical location, then you also need to immediately set up your Google My Business account.
Digital Marketing Tools
1) You need to set up Analytics to be able to track how people access and use your website. This guide will show you how to set up and install Google Analytics into your website.
2) You need to verify your website with Google Search Console so that you can track how your website does in the search engines. This guide will show you how to get your Google Search Console account set up and verified.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization is the process of helping your website get ranked higher in search engines through on-site optimization and off-site optimization. Your website needs to come up when people search for something related to your product or service and search engine optimization is the process to help make that happen. Here is my summary of what Search Engine Optimization is is in 100 words or less:
Good SEO starts with amazing content. If you have content that people love then you will have an invisible army of people sending triggers to Google about what a great page you have. Besides content, you need a responsive website that loads fast and this starts with good hosting and optimized images. You need very descriptive meta tags and an XML sitemap so that Google knows where your content is and what your content is. You also need an effective keyword strategy that naturally incorporates your keywords into the correct areas of your website. You also need to monitor and improve your pages with SEO tools.
Keyword Research: You cannot optimize your website for the search engines if you do not know the best keywords to try to rank for. If you try to rank on an impossibly competitive keyword or a keyword with no search traffic then you will be wasting your time and handicapping your website. Google Trends is my go to tool for this. This guide shows you how to conduct keyword research.
On-Site SEO: On-site SEO involves the changes you make on your website that helps make it easier for Google to rank you higher in the search engines. This guide will show you some On-site SEO basics for your WordPress website.
Off-Site SEO: Off-site SEO involves what a webmaster does in order to get links back to his or her website. Google considers a link from another website as that website vouching for your content. So the more links back to your website the better chance you will have of ranking higher on certain keywords. This guide will give you an introduction to off-site seo.
Paid Search
Paid search involves paying to get your website listed in a search engine. This is generally carried out on a pay-per-click basis. A website owners bids on a keyword that is relevant to their product offering and Google will show the website page related to that product at the top of the search results. The most common used paid search program is called Google Ads. This guide will show you how set up Google Ads for the first time to get access to their keyword planner. This guide will show you how to plan out your first campaign. This guide will show you how to set up some initial campaigns, ad groups, and keywords in Google Ads.
Local Search Marketing
Here are some interesting stats related to Local Search Marketing
- Over 47% of Google searches are No Click Searches. These are search results that don’t lead to a click on a website.
- A stat from Search Engine Land shows that 68% of people will contact a business directly from search results, without even visiting their site.
- 93% of local searches feature Google My Business listings before normal search results.
- Even if your site is ranking highly, it’s only getting a fraction of the traffic it used to.
If you have a storefront that serves customers in a certain geographic area, or if you have a business location that serves customers at their location in a certain geographic area then you need to concentrate on your local search marketing. Local search marketing is the steps you take to try to get listed as high as possible in the Google local search results. The ultimate goal is to get listed in the 3-pack. This guide gives an overview of the steps you can take to improve your local search marketing.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is an important part of digital marketing that involves the creation of content (blog posts, videos, infographics, etc.) that helps to stimulate interest in a product or service. Content marketing is important for SEO because it helps websites to show up in the search results for more search terms. Content marketing is also important for social media marketing because it helps to keep customers engaged with the brand and hopefully become brand ambassadors. You cannot have successful social media without a content strategy. This guide talks a little more about content marketing.
Here is one of my favorite podcast that talks about how to be successful with content marketing (skip to 9:37 in): https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/content-marketing-success-why-answering-questions-sells-marcus-sheridan/
Social Media Marketing:
A form of internet marketing that involves creating and sharing content on social media networks in order to achieve your marketing and branding goals and to drive user engagement and sharing. With social media marketing there are several benefits to your company:
- Increased Brand Awareness – The more posts they see from you the more knowledgeable they are about your brand
- Increased Website Visitors – Social content can help bring new visitors to your website and keeps existing visitors coming back
- Improved SEO – The more people share your content the better it does in the search engines by acting as a signal
- Higher Conversion Rates – the more interaction on social media , the more people trust the brand and maybe learn more uses of a product.
- Improved Customer Satisfaction – SM allows a one to one interaction so that people can ask questions, or complain and actually get a response.
- Increased Brand Loyalty: Social media helps to hammer home the brand message over and over again and more exposure to the brand in a positive light is going to increase loyalty.
- Increased Customer Service
- Teach Customers about product: Or new ways to use product.
- Create demand for product: Or add on products or services.
Social Media Challenges:
Always Changing – Social media is not a set it and forget it strategy. The “voice” of social media in every industry is always changing. Your strategy needs to be updated on a consistent basis. At a minimum you should review your strategy once a month.
Increasing Cost – “Facebook Zero” has made it is so that organic reach of business posts is down to 1 t0 7%. This makes engaging content even more important. You need to find platforms with better value such as Instagram. You will need to consider a paid search strategy with social media. Video content shows more than static posts.
Creating Good Content Isn’t Easy – Creating top of the line, engaging content can be time consuming and sometimes expensive if it involves a video. You need to have a strategy and budget worked out to create good content.
Social Media Resources:
Content Calendar: A content calendar helps you to stay organized and plan your content each month. It is almost impossible to do social media on a day to day basis. This guide talks a little more about content calendars.
Graphic Design: In order to post content to social media you need to be able to create social media graphics. Text posts are a thing of the past any rarely used effectively anymore. One program that helps to make simple social media graphics is called Canva. With Canva you take their social media templates and make social media images in a matter of minutes. This guide shows you how to easily learn Canva.
