Online Marketing for Beginners

Imagine getting a new plant and leaving it in front of a window. Depending on the plant, it will look fresh for about a week, but then its leaves may start to wither if you don’t give it water. Nurturing it will help it grow and flourish. Similarly, online marketing is a key component to nurturing your brand. Without it, your business could have trouble blooming.

Online marketing, or digital marketing, is spreading the word about your brand through online channels. It’s meant to reach your audience in digital places they already read, shop and socially interact. It can be a large undertaking but is vital for pretty much all businesses. If you’re a first-time marketer, a DIY approach may be more economical than hiring a digital marketing agency right off the bat.

Here are 5 easy steps that can serve as your beginner’s guide to digital marketing:

1. Develop your brand’s story and purpose
2. Create a website
3. Devise a marketing framework
4. Determine a content strategy
5. Ease into online marketing

Develop your brand’s story and purpose.

In order to connect with your audience, you’ll need to give them a good story. The stronger the story, the more receptive the people on the other end will be. Digital marketing is a way for you to communicate your brand story—to explain your business’s purpose and how it can benefit your audience.

Some things you’ll want to consider when building your story are:

Brand identity. What colors represent your brand? Typography, iconography, logos?
Your audience. Create personas to better understand who you’ll target.
Purpose. Why did you start your company in the first place, and what will it give your customers that your competitors can’t?
Message positioning. How will you convey your purpose, value proposition and benefits?
Tone and voice. Identify how you will deliver messaging that resonates with your audience.

Create a website.

Once you know what you’re selling—whether a product, service or information—you can create a space to showcase it. Use your website to invite people inside to engage your brand. That means making it interactive and user-friendly.

Whether you’re looking to build a complex e-commerce website or something smaller to start, hiring an experienced, local digital marketing agency is beneficial. In fact, Aggro Creative offers large-scale websites and even small business websites. We’ll handle the setup, creative and development while you concentrate on other areas of digital marketing.

Devise a marketing framework.

Once you polish your purpose and make it appropriate for your audience, you’re ready to determine your marketing strategy. The smartest thing you can do is base this strategy on financial goals that will deliver the best return on investment.

Be sure to schedule your digital marketing campaigns strategically, too. Consider season, time of day and when your customers might need your product or service most. Then, hit them with the right ads to drive them to conversion. Are they prospects who don’t know your brand? Create awareness ads that focus on telling your story. Or is your customer ready to make a purchase but needs a slight nudge? Consider retargeting ads with rich offers to help them seal the deal. This type of ad is designed to reach your window shoppers, or users who have already shown interest in your brand.

Determine a content strategy.

One way to get your audience to interact with your brand is to give them content marketing. Blog posts, white papers, videos—anywhere you can tell a story or provide educational context—give users more reasons to believe in your brand.

Even if content marketing isn’t at the top of your list for digital marketing tactics, developing a content strategy is still a good idea. Be strategic about writing content for your website, incorporating SEO throughout it. This kind of optimization is what brings users to your website after they perform a search. In the social world, a content strategy can help you meet goals that suit specific channels and avoid duplicating messages.

Ease into online marketing.

When you take a DIY marketing approach, don’t try to do everything at once. Start with one type of online marketing to start with and measure how it performs. Then, move onto the next. Prioritize these online marketing tactics based on your goals:

1. Email
2. Search/pay per click (PPC)
3. SEO
4. Social media
5. Influencer
6. Affiliate
7. Content

Take these steps at your pace and according to your business goals. If you find that it’s too much for you to take on yourself, reach out to a local digital marketing agency for help. Aggro Creative is always ready to lend a helping hand, no matter your digital marketing needs. Contact us to find out how we can help with your digital marketing!