A Novice's Handbook To Digital Marketing

That said, if you do want to achieve the best results possible from your digital marketing, you're going to need to understand the strategies that I'm going to be sharing with you in this episode. So, my commitment to you is this: if you read this entire article episode, you will enhance your proficiency in digital marketing. So, let's get to it.

Difference Between Digital Marketing And Traditional Marketing

So, the very first thing that I need to share with you are the differences between digital marketing and traditional marketing. Brace yourself for this one, because it's pretty profound, actually... It's not profound at all, and that's what makes it so interesting. You see, digital marketing is really just marketing done through the use of digital channels.

That's it. So, when we're talking about digital marketing, we're referring to marketing through the use of channels like SEO or Search Engine Optimization, social media, pay-per-click ads, or online Facebook ads, Instagram ads, or anything like that. Not to mention email marketing or website optimization or anything that really takes place online or through the use of digital media.

You can contrast this with traditional marketing using traditional media things like TV, or the radio, or newspapers, or magazines, or billboards... Basically, anything not digital.

Now, here's the deal: traditional marketing and traditional advertising and everything that goes into it... Well, it still works. But there are some notable benefits to using digital marketing and all the digital channels that we now have available. First of all, digital marketing tends to give you a much larger audience size.

Really, you can reach anybody that's online, and there's billions and billions of people online. Next is audience targeting. Because not only are you able to reach these billions of people, well, you don't want to reach all of them because all of them are not going to be the perfect fit for your business. Rather, you can be focused and selective on only the most suitable individuals that you want to target.

Digital marketing also tends to be significantly more cost-effective than running, say, an ad in the New York Times or, heaven forbid, a Super Bowl commercial. Again, these are designed to appeal to mass markets and to try to reach everyone, probably not your goal. Rather, what you want to do is be focused and selective with your marketing and reach, again, only those people most likely to buy.

Digital marketing also allows you to receive prompt feedback, and this is probably one of my favorite benefits of the channels. After all, if you think about running, say, a magazine ad where you've got to think of the copy and the creative and what you're going to say, and then you've got to get it all written up and sent to the magazine, it's got to get published and then distributed...

Well, you could be looking at weeks, at best, months, and maybe many, many months before you ever figure out if this worked or not. Digital marketing, on the other hand, well, in theory, you can write an ad and have it online in a matter of minutes. Prompt feedback, immediate adjustments, prompt outcomes.

Plus, digital marketing tends to be a whole lot easier to gauge and to track because everything's digital, which means we've got a digital trail allowing us to measure costs and results and everything in real-time so we can make adjustments and tweaks and optimizations on the fly. Again, contrast that with waiting three months for your magazine to come out and figure out if things worked or not.

And you can't measure clicks on a magazine so the best you can hope to do is, well, really either have them fill out some kind of a form on the magazine or visit a digital channel, which ties us back into digital marketing anyway. There's obviously some notable benefits here to choosing digital channels, going with digital marketing. But again, that's not to say that traditional marketing doesn't still work. It does.

The point here is to take a look at either traditional or digital marketing and then sort of take a few steps back to the strategies and the fundamentals and the principles, the consumer psychology, the buyer behavior, why people do the things they do, and then focus on mastering and learning that. Then you can apply that to digital channels or traditional channels or any other channels that come out in the future.

Strategy And Tactics

Alright, the next thing that'll really help you become a better digital marketer is to understand the differences between strategy and tactics and when to use them. Strategy is all the big picture stuff, and this is really where you want to focus your efforts first and foremost because this is the foundation that all of your future marketing efforts and tactics and tools and software and things like that are going to be built on.

Get this part wrong, and nothing else matters because nothing else will work. Now, there are a ton of different strategies and approaches and ways to look at your digital marketing, but pretty much no matter how you look at it, it always comes back to four basic and really solid principles that have stood the test of time and are going to be just as relevant today as they are a hundred years from now.

I call these things the Fundamental Four, and they make up the center of my hub-and-spoke model of marketing. The Fundamental Four are made up of Model, Market, Message, and Media. So let's unpack those now.

Model

The Model is essentially your business, your offer, your package, your servicing, the pricing that goes with it, how you deliver whatever it is that you deliver to the market. It's important here to design your model, design your business around what is the most enjoyable and profitable and in-demand by the market because the worst thing you can do is build a business that you absolutely hate.

Market

Next is the Market. These are the people that you're going to serve. And you don't want to say everyone or anyone with money. You want to be focused, laser-focused on exactly who is going to get the best results from your product or service and also the market that you're going to most enjoy serving.

In marketing, we call this an Ideal Customer Profile or an Ideal Client Profile, and it's made up of demographic details like age, gender, income, occupation, geographic details like what city or state or province or country they live in, and psychographic details like what are their values, their attitudes, and their lifestyles. Next is your Message.

Message

And here's where you're going to clarify and connect with your ideal target market by speaking directly to them about their pains and their problems and their frustrations and how your business is uniquely positioned to help solve that for them.

Telling stories about previous customers and previous client results is an incredibly effective way to do this, as are getting testimonials directly from them and running case studies proving that you know what you're talking about and have done what you say you're going to do. I think that made sense. The point here is that to craft truly effective messages, well, you've got to understand who your market is and what really makes them up and what makes them do the things they do.

A little bit of market research and having a few chats with your customers never hurts. And the fourth part of the Fundamental Four and again, the center of that hub-and-spoke model of marketing is all about Media.

Media

And this is where you're going to go, where you're going to do your marketing, which digital channels you're going to choose.

Most businesses do this completely backwards. They start with the media by hearing a great thing about Facebook ads or YouTube marketing, maybe starting a podcast, and then they just rush in there, forgetting all about the message and the market and the model.

So, unsurprisingly, well, they're building their business and they're building their marketing on a pretty sketchy foundation. This is why if you go through the steps in the right order, starting with the model, moving on to the market, identifying the message, by the time you get to media, the choices should be evidently clear, like crystal clear.

You should know exactly where your ideal target market is present and active online, and this is going to enable you to go there and ignore everything else.

The reality is you don't need to do everything, you don't need to be everywhere, you just need to be the places where your ideal target market is present and active. This is going to save you a ton of time and money and headache and wasted energy by spreading yourself too thin on channels that simply aren't going to deliver results.

Alright, so that was the strategy, the Fundamental Four, the high-level stuff that goes into making the right decisions. Tactics, on the other hand, are how you're going to execute everything I've just talked about. The tactics are the details and the actionable steps or executable things that you're actually going to go and put into practice.

So, the strategy being the business model you're using, the market that you're going to go after, the messages you're going to use, and the media choices that you're going to deploy your marketing on, and then the tactics being things like what frequency are you going to post and what kind of content are you going to post, and what schedule or level of consistency or how many memes are you gonna throw in.

A tactical question would be: What's the best time to post on social media? A strategic question would be: Which social media platform should we be on? That's the difference.

Organic And Paid Digital Marketing

Alright, the next thing that you need to know about digital marketing is the difference between organic and paid. So let's start with organic. Organic content and organic digital marketing is essentially anything that you create for free. So anytime that you make a post on Facebook or an Instagram story or a YouTube video or anything like that and you're not paying money to have it promoted, you're creating organic content.

Now, this doesn't mean that it's free content because odds are good you put time and energy and probably a decent amount of money behind the content that you're creating, but by not paying to promote it, it's still classified as organic content. So, if organic marketing is putting out content and not paying to have it promoted, well then, paid marketing is the opposite of that, putting out content and then paying the networks to promote it and distribute it to even more people.

Basically, with paid media or paid marketing, paid ads, you're running advertising to whatever message or whatever content that you're putting out there. Now, the big players in the space right now are obviously the kingpins like Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and YouTube ads, LinkedIn ads, and Google ads, essentially, the major networks with ads added to the back of their name.

Organic content shows up in the news feeds of people that follow you, whereas with paid marketing and paid media, it shows up in the news feeds and on the phones and on the devices of the people that you choose through targeting.

Pros And Cons

Now, of course, like all marketing strategies, there's pros and cons to both. Organic is cost-effective in nature, but it's going to be a little more limited in reach because the way the algorithms work is they kind of favor paid media because they like to make money.

Paid media, on the other hand, has the obvious downside of costing money. Bright side, it allows you to reach a ton of people very quickly. So essentially, the choice between organic and paid comes down to time versus money but also the rate at which you want to experience results.

Direct Response And Brand Awareness

Alright, now let's talk about one of my favorite topics in all of marketing: Direct Response versus Brand Awareness. Direct Response marketing is, unsurprisingly, direct in its goal to get a response. Man, marketing sure isn't very creative sometimes. Basically, when you do Direct Response marketing, you're creating an ad or you're creating a piece of content, and you're focused on getting an immediate and tangible return, something like a lead or a sale or a phone call or a visit or a sign up or something like that.

Direct Response marketing would be: run a Facebook ad, expect to generate a lead, send out an email, measure the number of conversions, promote a video, track how many people signed up for a free trial. All of these are Direct Response because you're expecting something, ideally immediately, and you're going to be able to track and measure it so you can do more of what works and less of what doesn't.

Now, contrast all of that with Brand Awareness marketing, which is essentially more focused on longer-term and building trust and authority and your brand name in the market. With Direct Response, we're measuring things like leads and sales and conversions, with Brand Awareness, we're measuring things like trust and authority and possibly mentions, but a lot harder to quantify and to measure because they're a lot more intangible.

The reality is, long-term, to build a scalable and sustainable and profitable business, well, you do need a pretty decent mix of both Direct Response marketing and Brand Awareness marketing, but you have to be wary of the cardinal sin of marketing. You see, one of the biggest mistakes in all of marketing is running Brand Awareness marketing campaigns and expecting Direct Response results.

This is a recipe for failure and one of the biggest reasons that many people claim their marketing just isn't working. It's because they're using the wrong tool for the job, like following a recipe to bake a cake and then getting really frustrated when it comes out like muffins or bread or anything that isn't cake. This is why it's incredibly important that you use the right recipe, your strategy, for the job.

Search And Discovery Marketing

Alright, another incredibly important thing you need to know about digital marketing is the difference between Search and Discovery marketing. When it comes to Search versus Discovery marketing, the biggest and most important or keyword if you will is intent.

Basically, what's the intent or what is the reason that someone's using a specific platform when they log on in the morning or at noon or at night? So, let's start with Search, and here we're talking about platforms like Google and YouTube, basically any other search engine. When someone logs on to Google, for example, well, they have intent. They're there to find an answer or a solution or a product.

They're there to do something or buy something or learn something or take some kind of action. This is where you as a marketer want to show up in front of them, ideally right at the top of the search results. So, Search marketing is all about targeting those specific keywords and phrases that your ideal customers are typing into the search bar and then creating content or ads or listings that show up when they do so.

Discovery, on the other hand, is all about finding potential customers before they even realize they need you or your product. This is where platforms like Facebook and Instagram and TikTok and Pinterest come into play. People aren't logging on to Facebook with intent, they're not there to find something or buy something or learn something, they're there to be entertained or to connect with friends or to kill some time.

So, as a marketer, your job is to interrupt their scrolling and get them to pay attention to whatever it is that you're doing. This is why Discovery marketing tends to be a lot more creative and a lot more visual than Search marketing, because you've got to stop them mid-scroll and get them to pay attention to you. So, this is where things like video content or attention-grabbing images or clever copywriting or anything that's going to make them stop and go, "Huh, what's this?" come into play.

Again, both Search and Discovery marketing have their place in your marketing mix, and the right mix for you is going to depend on your business and your goals and your audience. But by understanding the differences between them and the intent behind each, you'll be able to make smarter decisions about where to focus your time and your energy and your marketing dollars.

Alright, so those are some of the most important things that you need to know about digital marketing right now. Of course, there's a ton more to learn and a ton more that we could dive into, but if you can master these concepts and apply them to your business, you'll be well on your way to becoming a better digital marketer.

And hey, if you want to learn more about digital marketing and how to grow your business online, be sure to bookmark this series so you never miss an episode. Thanks for reading, and I'll see you in the next one!