This week, I’m going to teach you how to grow your business using online marketing and social media.
The digital marketing world is constantly changing, growing, and evolving. If you’re looking to start a business or need help growing your existing one, this series is for you. Whether you’re a marketing manager, brand director, or a digital marketer, you’ll discover a wealth of knowledge and how-to’s in these articles.
Why E-Learning Is The Key To Growth
E-Learning allows you to do more than just teach someone how to use a product or service. With e-Learning, you can provide them with knowledge and skills that will help them become an expert in your industry.
E-Learning presents several unique benefits to businesses.
1. Collaboration
When you teach someone how to use a product or service, you’re often doing so in a one-to-one setting. However, with e-Learning, you can create courses where you teach multiple participants at once. This allows you to create more engaging and collaborative learning experiences.
2. Assessment & Feedback
Learning to use a product or service and being able to tell if you’ve mastered it are both important factors in growing your business. With e-Learning, you can easily evaluate your participants’ progress by giving them a test or quiz at the end of each module. This allows you to provide them with immediate feedback and learn from their answers.
3. Continuous Improvement
No one is perfect. We all make mistakes. However, with e-Learning, you can easily identify and fix your mistakes without redoing the entire course. This is important, because it allows you to continually improve your teaching and increase engagement.
4. Scalability
E-Learning is easily scalable. You can design courses that accommodate any number of participants. This makes it much easier to teach and engage with larger groups. It also allows you to experiment with different learning styles and find out what works best for your audience.
Navigating The Changing Digital Marketing Landscape
One of the things that can trip up even the most seasoned digital marketer is keeping up with all the changes in the industry. There are a number of special requirements that you need to be aware of in order to succeed in this industry. Being agile and keeping up with all the new information is crucial. Below, I will list several factors that represent the changing landscape of digital marketing and how you can fit into this environment.
1. Mobile Marketing
The first factor that you need to be aware of is mobile marketing. According to a 2020 report by HubSpot, 84% of consumers globally visit a mobile web page while using a desktop computer. This trend is set to continue, and businesses that don’t adapt will struggle to reach customers.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, 29% of consumers visit a mobile web page while using a tablet. With so many people accessing the internet on the go, it’s essential that your website is optimized for mobile users. The good news is that there are several tools that make creating a mobile website simple and straightforward.
2. User Experience (UX) Design
UX design is all about creating a pleasurable and delightful experience for the end user. The role of the UX designer is to consider all aspects of the end user’s experience, including but not limited to –
- Navigation
- Usability
- Interface design
- Content layout
- Pictograms & Icons
- Colour
- Form
- Function
- Content
- Bold, italics, headings
- The order of the elements within the pages
- Navigation bars
- Footer
- Page loading speed
- Overall design
- Design languages
The goal of UX design is to create a user-friendly experience that is both accessible and beneficial. The better you execute these design principles, the more pleasure you will bring to the end user. Creating a pleasant experience is easier said than done. However, with a little bit of planning and research, you can make your user’s experience as excellent as possible. Good UX design should not only look good but should also function well.
3. Content Strategy
If you’ve ever been involved in content creation, you know that the process can be pretty time-consuming. The good news is that you don’t need to be a full-time content strategist to do this. You only need to be responsible for the creation of content for your website or digital marketing program.
The first step in creating content is to decide what you’re going to create. Begin by performing a SWOT analysis on your industry. This will help you identify your business’ strengths and weaknesses. From there, you can determine what kind of content you’ll need to create: –
- News stories
- Product reviews
- How-to guides
- Case studies
- White papers
- FAQs
- Webinars
- Blog articles
- E-books
- Videos
- Mobile apps
- Software
The goal of content strategy is to create content that is both accessible and engaging. When performing a SWOT analysis on your industry, you’ll see that your customers have a wide range of interests. Tailor your content to appeal to this diversified audience.
Once you’ve decided what kind of content you need to create, you need to determine the best platform for doing this. The decision you make here will impact your entire content creation process. You don’t want to end up with platforms that don’t offer the best user experience.
4. Performance Marketing
Marketing is often a term that is used interchangeably with digital marketing. However, marketing is a much broader concept. According to Merriam-Webster, marketing is –
“The activity of promoting a product or service, especially one whose advertising cost is being borne by others.”
The first step in performance marketing is to perform consumer research. The better you understand your customers’ needs and wants, the better you’ll be able to tailor your efforts toward growing your business.
Once you’ve gathered this data, you can begin to formulate a marketing plan. The next step is to use this plan to implement marketing activity. This could include – but is not limited to –
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns
- Social media marketing (SMM)
- E-mail marketing & Campaigns
- Content creation
- Display advertising (DSA)
- Online reputation management (ORM)
- Affiliate marketing
- Decision-making
- Data analysis
What’s important here is that you only need to focus on what you can control. Trying to do too much will only overwhelm you. Know your limits and what you can and cannot do. A good performance marketer should be able to plan, research, and implement all of these methods.
5. Email Marketing
Email marketing is, in some ways, the oldest form of marketing. From the very first email message that was sent to purchase a book, to the current day and age of digital marketing, email remains one of the most effective and efficient ways to communicate. In fact, HubSpot reports that email marketing is used by businesses of all sizes, and it works for every one of them.
One of the advantages of email marketing is that you can send out as many emails as you want, as often as you want. This advantage is significant, because it allows you to eventually connect with every person you could ever want to connect with. You can use the email platform of your choice (most commonly, Gmail) to create and send email messages to anyone with an email address.