With this article, I aim to show you that digital marketing is an incredibly powerful way to expand your business and increase your revenue. Of course, if you are new to this field, it can be quite confusing, given the numerous marketing channels, tactics, and strategies available. So, what I want to achieve here is to fill the gaps in your knowledge and provide you with a comprehensive overview of how to develop your business with digital marketing. To truly clarify it and help you see the bigger picture.
The first thing you need to know about digital marketing is that it’s a process. The initial step in this process is to define your target audience. Marketing channels like Facebook and YouTube are vast and noisy, so you need to be very clear about the audience you are targeting. It’s not just about age, gender, and location; it’s also about the kind of problems they face. It’s crucial to determine how your solution can be better or different from the competition. Also, how it will make a difference in their lives, making it better. You need to paint a very clear picture for them. It’s vital that this happens right at the beginning because it will be used in your marketing messages, videos, and posts to truly grab their attention. This is the first step, and you can do it as an exercise before diving into different marketing channels.
The next step in the process is to establish free content and advertisements using platforms that your target audience already uses. This could be Google searches, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or any similar platform. From the perspective of attracting them with free content, there are three types you can create.
The first type involves creating educational content, like writing articles to be published on Google. For example, for a store known for selling hair extensions for women, the owners can create educational videos, such as “How to Create a French Braid.” Anyone searching for such a video and finding theirs is likely to purchase their product, which is hair extensions.
The second type of free content you could create is more of a storytelling approach about a specific brand, such as customer successes, testimonials, and similar narratives.
The third type of content, for targeting your audience, is entertainment-focused. You can see a lot of this on YouTube. People build their audience with entertaining content and then redirect them to their products. Or, quite often, influencers build their Instagram audience with entertaining content and sell products through collaborations that are promoted due to the products. So, not only are you attracting more from your target audience with free content, but you also have ads because each of these platforms has a built-in advertising system. Google Ads, Facebook Ads, YouTube Ads, etc.
Once you’ve attracted your audience, the next step is to make actual sales. To do this, you’ll need to prompt your audience to visit your website or physical store.
Many businesses would include an intermediate step between these two, such as building an email list if the goal is to gain the customer’s trust before asking them to make a purchase. Or if you don’t have a ready product and just want to build an audience.
You can genuinely prompt them to sign up for your email list or redirect people visiting your website to, let’s say, existing platforms, getting them back to your website, but those are other details.
The last step in the process is to measure and optimise, which can be done for free through Google Analytics. This is done to continually improve the process. If you know that a lot of people are being redirected to your website from YouTube and are purchasing from you, this can be seen in Google Analytics, and you might want to add more free content or ads to your YouTube channel to drive more sales. But it’s crucial to measure what you’re doing because that’s the only way you understand what works to include more of it.
I hope this has been helpful in clarifying digital marketing, especially if you’re a complete beginner. In the future, we’ll delve deeper into each of these steps since there are many more details. Still, I want you to keep calm and remember this if you start feeling overwhelmed and confused. Just come back to this generalised explanation. What we want to achieve and developing a business with digital marketing is, in essence, very straightforward.
