You’ve decided to go the digital route. Congratulations! You’re about to embark on a fascinating adventure where you can create your own products and sell them to people all over the world. Your friends, family, and colleagues may not understand what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. That’s totally fine. You’re going to find many ways to market your business and you don’t need everyone’s approval. Just make sure you’re doing what feels right for you.

When it comes to marketing your digital business, there are so many ways to approach the task. You want to find the right mix of content for your audience, find the tools that work best for you, and use social media to connect with potential customers.

Let’s dive into the details. Below you’ll find a guide that’ll help you understand how to market your digital business in a way that matches what you’re trying to accomplish. We’ll cover all the basics from creating a strategy to using social media, plus a few extras that might help you along the way.

Create A Marketing Plan

Before you start any type of marketing activity, you need to put together a comprehensive marketing plan. A marketing plan is simply a road map that provides you with clear direction and lots of inspiration for the types of content you’re going to create and the platforms you’re going to use to spread the word about your business.

There are five steps you need to follow to create a successful marketing plan:

1. Identify your target audience.

With a little research, you can determine who your target audience is. A good digital marketer will sit down with you and work through a series of questions to help you identify your ideal customer.

You also need to consider how you can reach this audience. Will you use SEO, pay-per-click ads, or both? Once you have an idea of what platforms your audience is using, you can determine which ones you’ll use to reach them.

Answering these questions and developing a full marketing plan will give you a clear picture of what you’re aiming for. Don’t worry too much about whether or not you’ll be able to pull it off. You’ll start to see results almost immediately and before you know it, your business will be running as smoothly as ever.

2. Select a platform.

You need to decide what type of content you’re going to create and what platforms you’ll use to disseminate it. There are hundreds of platforms out there, all with their perks and quirks. Below you’ll find a short list of a few that you might want to consider.

3. Identify the goals and objectives of your campaign.

The first step in any marketing campaign is to set your goals and objectives. You want to pick a goal that seems reasonable and that’ll keep you motivated. Something like increasing organic traffic by 20% within the next month might be a good goal to shoot for.

Once you have a goal in mind, you can set a benchmark for yourself and determine how you’re going to measure your success. For example, if you set a goal to increase your social media engagement by 50% within the next month, you might decide to track the number of times your Facebook posts get noticed versus the number of times they get reposted or passed around. These are key indicators of your success.

Throwing a lot of content out there isn’t a good idea. The more you put out there, the more you’ll get. So, pick one or two platforms to focus on and utilize them to their fullest. This will not only help you reach your audience, but it’ll also draw more attention to your business.

4. Create content that complements your target audience.

As we mentioned above, you’ll want to create content that caters to your target audience. When choosing the content you create, you need to keep three things in mind:

a. Appeal to your audience.

What exactly does that mean? It means you want to create content that your audience will find value in. If you’re writing for a tech-savvy audience, you might want to consider using words like “genius,” “wizard,” or “one-of-a-kind.”

Whatever the case may be, you want to create content that will make your audience feel something. What is that? You might be wondering too.

Your audience is made up of people that you’re enticing to visit your site or subscribe to your newsletter. So, to sum it up, you’re creating content that will make your readers interested in your product or service. To do this, you need to focus on creating interesting, engaging content that’ll make them want to come back for more.

b. Use data to your advantage.

You might not be a marketing expert, but you’re certainly doing your research. You want to make sure you’re using the right metrics to determine the success of your campaign. The perfect metrics will depend on you and your business, but something like the Follower to Following Ratio (F:F ratio) or % of engagement on a given platform will prove effective. (Note: you can use free tools like Google Analytics to track all of this data easily.)

Keep in mind that not all metrics are created equal. Sometimes one metric can better communicate a concept than a thousand words ever could. Take the infamous “Likes” stat for example. Although it might seem like a decent metric, “Likes” don’t always mean what you think they do. The more you know, the better.

c. Measure the results of your campaign.

Once you’ve determined that you’ve hit your goal (or close to it), you’ll want to consider what happened and how you can prevent it from happening again. Measuring the results of your campaign is especially important in digital marketing because there’s so much variability in the results of different campaigns. This is why it’s such a good idea to track specific metrics rather than relying on generalizations.

5. Reassess your strategy.

After you’ve completed your initial marketing plan, it’s time to reassess. Did you hit your target audience? Are you seeing the results you hoped for? Should you change something about the way you’re approaching this campaign?

The answer to all of these questions is “no.” If you followed the steps above, you’ll have developed a clear picture of your target audience and the content they value. Using that information, you can create more effective marketing campaigns in the future.

Hopefully, this article will help you in your quest to market your digital business. Even if you’re just getting started, you can use this information to form the basis of your marketing plan and work your way up from there. Good luck out there.