Every marketer’s journey starts somewhere – whether you’ve been working in digital marketing for a few months or a decade, you’ve got a story to tell.

You might be wondering where you should focus your attention: paid social media marketing, natural social media marketing, content marketing, or organic social media marketing? How about email marketing, SEO, or mobile marketing?

You’ve probably wondered about a lot of these questions, especially since you’ve been hitting the ground running as a digital marketer. But just as you’re starting to understand your way around paid social media, experience has taught you the importance of all parts of the digital marketing spectrum, and you’re wondering about the best approach for your situation.

Here, we’re going to answer some of the most common questions that come up when working with clients or friends in the industry:

How Do I Market My Product Or Service Online?

The truth is, there are a lot of different approaches you could take to market your product or service online. Depending on your target audience and the resources you have at your disposal, you could decide to go for a more traditional approach with a paid social media campaign, SEO-optimized content, or you could opt for a more holistic strategy that blends SEO, content, and social media.

But whatever approach you decide on, you need to be willing to experiment and measure the results of your efforts.

What Should I Promote?

So you’ve decided you want to go down the marketing route and you’ve decided to focus on online marketing to gain maximum impact. But what should you promote? Should you focus on just one thing? Should you broaden your approach and take up multiple platforms?

These are all valid questions, and you need to reflect on what your ideal buyer is doing and thinking at each of those moments. In order to answer them, you need to become truly knowledgeable about your target audience.

Where Do I Start?

So you’ve decided to go the whole hog and start a marketing department in your company, which in turn has launched you into a whole new world of online marketing. But where do you begin?

At this point, you’ve got a number of options. You could start by taking a look at your competitors’ websites and their online marketing strategies. Perhaps you’ll see something that you could apply to your own strategy. Even better, you could find a tool like Lead Scribe that can crawl the web to pull together information about your competitors’ digital marketing.

Depending on how much of a financial or time investment you’re willing to make, you can decide how far you want to take this. One thing Lead Scribe can do is give you a score based on how your competitors’ websites are performing across different platforms.

How Do I Measure The Effectiveness Of My Marketing?

In order to measure the success of your marketing efforts, you need to set up clear benchmarks to determine whether you’re reaching your desired audience. Depending on how committed you are to the idea of measuring success, you could set up a simple search query to track the progress of your marketing campaigns. For example, you could use Google Analytics and set up a custom report to track visits to your website from when you launched your marketing campaign through to today. You can then use this information to determine the success of your campaigns. You could also look at how engaged your audience is with your content – is anyone truly reading your blog posts or are people just skimming through them in search of information?

You should also look to the metrics of your competitors. If you want to be able to determine the effectiveness of your own marketing efforts, you need to be able to accurately gauge the results of your competitors’ campaigns. To do this, get details on what platforms your competitors are using, how they’re engaging with their audience, and what results they’re achieving.

Paid Or Organic?

Another question you might be asking yourself is whether you should spend money on online marketing or go the organic route.

Paid marketing is when you’re paying money to get a marketing message out there. This could be Facebook ads, display ads on YouTube, or any other kind of advertising spend. It’s also the same as “traditional” marketing, in that you’re spending money to get the word out there. The difference is that in paid marketing, you’re aiming to achieve a specific goal (usually brand awareness or lead generation), whereas in traditional marketing, you might be aiming to broaden your brand’s reach or just get the word out there.

Organic marketing is, as the name suggests, when you’re attracting customers to your website through advertising and marketing methods that are completely free from paid advertisements. Think of Twitter’s popular organic marketing campaign where they promote accounts they deem to be authentic and relevant to their target audience. This means their target audience is seeing and engaging with content published by popular brands that they’re interested in learning about, without being pitched or persuaded to buy a product by a brand rep.

The bottom line is: you need to find the right approach for your marketing needs. If you’ve decided to go down the marketing route and you’re wondering which approach to take, it depends on your budget, your goals, and your resources. You need to find the approach that makes the most sense for your company and measures the results you want to see.