Hello there! Since you’ve made it to our website, and more specifically, to our blog, then chances are you’re interested in learning more about digital marketing for your business. We’re happy that you’re here! While many small business owners want to hire someone outside of their company to do the heavy lifting when it comes to marketing, others often wonder how to do digital marketing on their own. 

What is Digital Marketing?

We’ll let you in on a little secret - we know all about digital marketing, and we’re here to help you learn all about it, too. But first, let’s start with the basics; what exactly is digital marketing? We think our friends over at HubSpot said it best, “Digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use an electronic device or the internet.” Businesses with a digital marketing strategy use search engines, websites, email, social media, and other digital channels to reach their target audience.

Why Should I Care about Digital Marketing?

There’s one thing that pretty much anyone can agree on, and that’s the fact that we live in a digital world. These days, you can’t go anywhere without seeing people all around you on their smartphones and other mobile devices; whether they’re checking their emails or posting to their favorite social media platforms.

And that’s exactly why digital marketing is important. By having a strong presence in the digital world, your business is more likely to create brand awareness and increase engagement with current and potential customers. By crafting engaging and valuable content on your website and social media platforms, your target customers will like, share, and encourage others to use your products or services as well. In turn, you’ll inevitably increase high-quality traffic to your website and gain more revenue. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Keep in mind, though, this isn’t an overnight success kind-of-thing. These desirable outcomes can’t be achieved without a well thought-out digital marketing strategy. 

How to Do Digital Marketing On Your Own

Digital marketing is a complex tool, and there are many separate types of digital marketing that you need to understand in order to create a successful strategy. These include:

Inbound Marketing

Inbound marketing is a type of digital marketing strategy that’s designed to bring customers to you by attracting, engaging, and delighting your target customer. This is done by offering specific content catered to your customer’s interests in needs during each stage of the buyer’s journey via content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization, and branding.  You can learn all about the inbound marketing and the buyer’s journey in our blog post titled The Foundations of Inbound Marketing.

Search Engine Optimization 

Most often referred to as SEO, search engine optimization plays a major part in whether or not you’re successful in your digital marketing endeavors. When executed correctly, SEO works to help your website rank higher on search engine results pages (SERPs). When optimizing your website, you’ll do thorough keyword research to determine which keywords or phrases are best for each page, blog, and image on your website. There are a variety of great SEO tools on the market, which can easily be found online. We recommend LongTailPro, Screaming Frog, and SpyFu as some of our favorites. Learn more about SEO in our blog about How to Rank Higher on Google. 

Content Marketing

One of the best ways to reach your target audience is through content. But it can’t just be any content - the content you promote must be relevant to your products or services and must provide value to potential customers. In fact, a successful content marketing campaign is aimed at increasing brand awareness, bringing more high-quality traffic to your website, as well as providing leads and customers. Examples of pieces of content you can use as part of your marketing strategy include blog posts, infographics, webinars, ebooks, and whitepapers. 

Social Media Marketing

It’s no secret that social media is an important tool for reaching potential customers. That’s why it’s important for your brand to have a presence on social media platforms that make the most sense for your products or offerings. Social media marketing can be instrumental in increasing brand awareness as well as generating leads that can potentially provide revenue to your business. Of course, some of the most popular social media channels include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and these days, companies can even be found on TikTok. If you’re planning on using more than one social media platform for your business, we highly recommend looking into a social media automation software to help you schedule posts and monitor analytics. Learn more about creating a social media marketing strategy here.

Email Marketing

Long gone are the days of snail mail. I mean, you can still mail things in the traditional sense, but when it comes to marketing, email is the way to go. There are plenty of ways in which a business can use email marketing to their advantage. Some ideas for your company to use when it comes to email marketing include: welcome emails for new customers, follow-up emails when customers sign up or download something, newsletters, notifications for new blog posts, loyalty program news, etc. There are countless opportunities in email marketing to aid in the lead nurturing process. Have fun, be creative, but always remember to provide value to your current and potential customers!

Oof. Excuse us while we take a sip of water. That was a lot to take in, right? And the craziest part is this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to knowing how to do digital marketing on your own. 

We know, we know - all of this seems quite daunting. But we’re happy to tell you that you don’t have to know how to do digital marketing all by yourself if you don’t have the time or energy to deal with it. That’s why we’re here!

If you’re interested in learning more about our digital marketing services such as inbound marketing, feel free to contact us at any time. Our team of friendly experts are always eager to help businesses start making a difference for themselves in the digital world.