It is becoming more and more common for businesses to operate solely online. With more and more people shopping online and social media platforms such as Facebook gaining in popularity every day, marketing through these platforms is becoming more and more essential.

Digital marketing is the umbrella term used to describe the marketing techniques employed online. While traditional marketing focuses on attracting new customers to a business through advertising and word of mouth, digital marketing extends the reach of this effort through online outreach and marketing automation.

Traditional advertising, which ranges from radio ads to magazine spreads, has been around for hundreds of years. However, over the past decade, traditional advertising has declined in popularity while online advertising has increased. Part of this is due to the increased number of people shopping online vs. visiting physical stores. However, it’s also because of the many advantages that digital marketing offers.

Why Should You Care?

The most important reason you should care about digital marketing is that it allows you to target the right audience and to engage with them. Thanks to innovations such as email marketing, marketing automation, and mobile marketing, you can take advantage of the digital world to reach customers where they are most likely to engage with your brand.

Another important factor is that digital marketing is more affordable. You don’t need to have expensive television spots or print magazines to reach your audience. You can use free platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram to reach your customers.

How To Market Digital Online

Once you understand what digital marketing is and why you should care about it, it’s time to figure out how to use it to your advantage. There are four steps you should take to effectively market your brand online.

Step one: Set up automated email campaigns

One of the things that make digital marketing so effective is that you can set up automated email campaigns. This way, you can take care of increasing engagement with your audience without needing to be present to respond to everyone’s emails manually. The best part is that you can use third-party tools to automate the process and to create templates for recurring email campaigns. You should set up automated email campaigns for several reasons:

• It’s one of the most effective ways to keep in touch with your customers and to stay popular.
• Encourages more interactions between you and your audience (i.e., “opt-ins” and “unsubscribes” are less likely to occur).
• It makes it easier for you to segment and target the right audience (i.e., the more you can automate the better).
• Helps you discover untapped markets or niches and find the right people to market your product/service to (e.g., using niche segmentation and targeted ads).
• You can use tools like MailChimp or HubSpot to create and send out automated emails.
• It provides you with more flexibility when it comes to engaging with your audience (i.e., you can use a combination of social media channels and email to reach your audience).

The best part of automated emails is that they can be used to send out regular “newsletters” with helpful tips, product information, or special offers. You can also use them to send out surveys or just a simple “hello” to your audience. The choice is entirely up to you.

Step two: Build a solid social media presence

Another important factor in effectively marketing your brand online is to have a strong social media presence. Although it’s often said that the internet has eliminated the need for traditional marketing, this is far from true. In fact, as we’ve established, marketing through social media is extremely effective and is, thus, becoming more and more necessary.

You should set up a profile on the major social media websites like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and start using these platforms to engage with your audience. Remember: These are free tools so you have no excuse not to be active on them. The more you post, the more you will find your followers (and, thus, your audience).

Step three: Use keywords in your marketing content

One of the biggest mistakes you can make when marketing your brand online is to not use keywords in your content. This is extremely important because search engines, such as Google, use keywords to determine which content to display in results. When you use keywords in your content, you are essentially making the search engines’ job easier by having relevant, useful content. You should use a variety of keywords throughout your blog posts, product descriptions, and social media posts. To find the right words, you can use free tools like Google Keyword Planner or WordStream.

Step four: Measure the success of your digital marketing efforts

Finally, you should measure the success of your digital marketing efforts. This is important for several reasons. First, you can see how well your current strategies are working and, second, you can track the results of your previous marketing efforts. Third, you can discover new approaches and techniques for marketing your brand online.

The best way to do this is to use tools such as Google Analytics. If you’re new to analytics, you should read this Google Analytics tutorial before you begin using the tool. Once you’re familiar with the basics of measuring traffic and conversions, you can begin establishing metrics for your various marketing campaigns. For example, you can measure the success of a PPC campaign by looking at the number of sales generated through the ad network (i.e., Google Adwords) and the cost-per-click (i.e., how much you spent on each click).

Now that you’re equipped with the basics of digital marketing, it’s time to get started. The first step is to figure out what you want to measure and, then, what you want to learn from the results of these measurements. Remember: You can always learn something new about marketing, and you should never stop learning. With a little planning and some ingenuity, you can take advantage of the digital world to engage with customers and grow your business.