How to start off with Digital Marketing
The newbie’s guide to Digital Marketing
Let’s create some Digital Marketing Gods.
I’m creating a special e-book for Digital Marketers which will cover these below topics and much more in-depth. I’m giving out free copies to the first ten people who fill out this form.
Digital Marketer Gods — E-Book
How do you become a Digital Marketer?
This question is probably the most important compared to say something like “What are some Growth Hacking Hacks? “. There is a process to marketing that a lot of people don’t care about or think of. I’ll try my best in breaking this down.
There are so many aspects to Digital Marketing that are important. But what of those aspects, do you need for your business is even more important.
<Attention : If you want to learn about Digital Marketing and you don’t have a product in Mind, Jump to Section 3>
Content :
Section 1 : Product and Customer
Section 2: Required Skills
Section 2: Understanding the platform
Section 4: Understand the process
Section 5: Data Driven
Section 6: Plug-in yourself to the community
Section 1
Let’s start off with your Product and your Customer. To understand a bit more about Customer Persona, check out my answer : Kishen Sreehari’s answer to How do I attract the first 1000 subscribers for a content website?
Product and Customer
- Your Customer : Understand who your customer segment is, what are their needs, their habits etc. What is the problem they have?
- Your product : How does your product help your customer?
These two points above will help you in answering the following questions :
Where are my customers on the Internet and How do I pitch/reach them?
Section 2
What are the required skills?
Why this is Important is because, If you are a B2B product, your approach is different, if you are APP only, your approach again is different. It’s important to know what are the spaces you need to be strong in to make that product successful.
Here are the different channels and type of marketing.
Paid and Organic.
- SEO
- ASO
- Content Marketing
- Viral Marketing
- Slideshare
- Product Hunt
- Hacker News
- Quora
- Blogs — Yours and Others’
You need to choose the platforms that you know your audience will be at. This gives you an idea of the skillsets you need to pick up.
Section 3
Understanding the Platform.
Now a lot of Marketers don’t give a lot of thought about this. A lot of platforms are social, that means you cannot SPAM, do any hard-selling and stuff like that. You should understand the merits of every platform.
Communities like Quora, Reddit, Hackernews are tight knit, there are some do’s and dont’s in these platforms. For example on Quora and Reddit, you just can’t blatantly self-promote, if you want to promote on Quora you provide a lot of value and then tell people for more value visit my website.
On reddit, you need to show people something cool and catch their attention. This is a perfect example.
On Facebook, marketers need to understand the concept of “Lead Magnets”. Those are basically free products or services you offer to get people Interested in your brand. Hard-selling something and expecting people to buy will not work when people are Interested in seeing their friends’ drunk picture or cats jumping into boxes. You need to provide a lot of free value to get people Interested in what you provide.
Section 4
Understanding the Process.
It’s not enough to just attract users. What do you want the user to do in your website and how do you maximize revenue?
Take a look at this Image below
Say you are a Digital Marketing Blog with Content and Tools you provide and you have to attract customers to your Consulting gig. How do you do it?
Every step of the way, your focus should be to Increase revenue.
1. Lead Magnet
On Facebook, you offer a free e-book or a course on Digital Marketing. This is something you offer for Free to get people to sign-up to your website or blog etc. People give their e-mail ID’s and sign-up to your blog.
2. Trip Wire
Say you have some Digital Marketing tools, you offer a tool for a very nominal price to separate the people who pay and those who don’t.
3. Core Product
Say your core product is a Saas based digital marketing tool. You up-sell to people who have paid for your trip wire. This costs more than your Trip Wire.
4. Profit Maximizer
Say people are happy with your service and want you to consult with them. You do 1 on 1 sessions for an expensive price. This costs more than the Core Product.
Take some time off to Understand how different platforms work and Invest for the long-term!
Section 5
Other skills — Data Driven
Marketers need to be good with Data. Understanding data, crunching numbers and figuring out very clearly if their marketing is working or not. To start off I would suggest, every marketer should understand how Google Analytics for your website works. Segmenting your audience, setting-up cohorts and more.
Apart from being numbers driven, you should focus on the right numbers. This means focussing on numbers that convert and not numbers that don’t have an impact. For example the number of Facebook fans do not guarantee a certain amount of sale.
Section 6
Other Skills — Plug-in yourself to the community.
Be a part of marketing communities like GrowthHackers — Premier Growth Community — GrowthHackers and Marketing sub-reddits on Reddit. If you form a good relationship with the community members, you’ll be able to reach out to the best marketers in the world and get them to answer questions and more importantly learn from them.
I’m creating a special e-book for Digital Marketers which will cover these above topics and much more in-depth. I’m giving out free copies to the first ten people who fill out this form.