New to the digital marketing industry? Whether you’re deep diving into the industry for the first time or you’re interested in hacking your own digital marketing campaign efforts for a new business or brand, there is room for every person to get to know digital marketing tactics regardless of their experience or expertise.
If this sounds like you, read on. Edge Marketing is one of Australia’s leading digital marketing agencies and we work with big brands and small businesses alike to help create and anchor their position online. From connecting your products or services with new customers to stationing your business as a lead authority in the industry, our team knows how to help hack your digital marketing efforts to achieve even your loftiest business goals.
Read on to learn more about creating an effective digital marketing strategy and what platforms and tools that are the most beginner friendly so you can get started today.
Beginner Friendly Digital Marketing Tactics and Techniques
If the ideas of digital marketing and digital advertising are new to you–fear not. At its most simple, digital marketing can be broken down into:
- Using online platforms and tools to;
- Connect with new customers, support lead generation, convert new and existing customer interest to sales;
- Engage with your customer community to better understand their wants and needs;
- Turn existing customers into brand evangelists; and,
- Anchor your business, products, or services as the go-to solution in the market.
Sounds lofty? Regardless of your top-level business goals, marketing can help you find, connect with, engage, and transform customers into your business brand advocates. Helping online businesses achieve everything from sales goals and profit figures to additional brand awareness and building expert authority, online marketing campaigns can connect you with the right people to turn your goals into reality.
Regardless of your current resources, budget, or marketing expertise, there are tools and online platforms that you can get started with right away to start a basic marketing campaign. Before diving in, we recommend outlining your digital marketing strategy, goals, intentions, and available resources. While this can seem out of reach for beginners, a simple marketing structure doesn’t have to be–but it can save you time, dollars, and heartache.
How to Create a Basic Marketing Strategy
Let’s be brief. Here is a simple 5-step plan you can follow to create your first-ever marketing strategy when you’re just getting into the game:
- Identify your business goals.
Marketing has the opportunity to support every area of your business and every business goal. Start out by identifying what you want to achieve and why. Is it 100 new customers in 3-months? Or a 15% Net Profit Margin and 10 new staff members? How about 100K new social media followers? Regardless of your personal and professional goals, the right marketing strategy can help strengthen and position your business and help you achieve them.
We recommend identifying 3-4 big business goals (be specific) and why you want to achieve them. From there, identify what you’ll need to achieve them. If you want to hire new additional team members, what will that cost the business? Interested in upgrading your equipment to run a fully digital business? Consider the capital outlay needed to invest. Interested in 100K new social media followers? Great! Consider why you want that number and what it will mean for the business.
- Identify your ideal customers.
Next–consider your people. Customers are the lifeblood of your business whether you’re in the B2C or B2B market. From products and eCommerce to professional services and agency teams, having people who are interested in, will (repeatedly) use, and purchase your offer is crucial to your success. This step asks that you identify your ideal customers (2-3 groups is a great starting point) and listing out as much detail about your ideal buyer as possible. From where, why, and how they spend their money to the online platforms, shops, or social media sites they use, the more you deeply understand your customer and what they like, know, and do, the more targeted (read: successful) your marketing efforts will be in finding, connecting, and engaging with the same.
- Confirm how, when, and where you’ll spend time (or money!) to connect with customers.
If you’re a first-timer or starting a new business, your monetary budget may be limited when it comes to online marketing campaigns. Fear not! There are plenty of digital tools and platforms that offer free versions of their premium products for you to use when first starting out. To decide which platforms you should be using, dial back to your customer profiles and ideal target markets above. Where do they hang online and when? Where you are best to reach them is where your business should be. Better still, reviewing the platforms where you’re most likely to find your ideal buyers will give you a sense of how they speak, engage, and interact online. Win!
Once you’ve identified the platforms most likely to position your business in front of your ideal target market, narrow down the options to 2-3 tools that you can use affordably and simply to get started. Once you have gained some online experience and data, you’ll be able to more clearly see which platforms offer the best bang for their buck and where you can spend more time, effort, (or money!) going forward. More on this later.
- Identify milestones or success markers.
The key to identifying which marketing strategies and tools will give you the best return on investment is having a means to track their success in helping you achieve our goals. A good example of this cold include a simple website landing page that highlights a promotion or product offer. If one of your top-level business goals is to net an additional $1000 in sales each month, highlighting a specific product or promotion on its own unique landing page could be a great way to do it. How so?
- Identify the end goal: eg. $1000 additional net sales each month.
- How? Highlighting the product or promotion on its own unique website landing page.
- Tracking: how many visitors the website page receives and how many of the visitors convert to product sales.
To drive more traffic to the new website landing page, you might publish a free social media post with a direct link to the product page for visitors to use. Not only will this free (and simple!) set up allow you to track which social media platform drives more potential customers to your website, you can track the success of your landing page messaging, copy, graphics, and user experience by following the conversion rate.
Eg. Number of new product sales / (divided by) / Number of landing page visitors = how well your new landing page is connecting with and converting to targeted sales.
For this example, you might have identified a visitor-to-sale conversion rate of 10:1. (10 visitors for every one landing page sale.) Converting about this? Fantastic! Converting lower than this metric? Read on below to learn more about redefining your marketing efforts over time can help boost your ROI.
Better yet:
Eg. Number of social media post views / (divided by) / number of landing page link visits from the respective social media platform = how many post views are converting to website visitors.
In this example, 1000 social media post views may lead to 50 link clicks and website visits. Success!
It’s a simple example, but we hope the above shows you how easy it can be to test your brand copy, graphics, and campaigns and determine how well you’re connecting with your target audience. Over time, a series of these simple marketing tests can help you narrow down which social media tools, website pages, products, and messaging are most effective and where you should be spending your money and time.
- Track your success. Iterate, rinse, repeat.
Like we said–rinse and repeat. Once you’ve launched a few social media posts (for free!), pulled together a website landing page and promotion, or set up the most basic elements of SEO for your site, you can use real data from real audience members to track what messaging is working for your brand and where it falls flat. This is a win-win in our books–whether our marketing efforts hit the nail on the head from day one or highlight that one social media platform is used significantly more than another when driving our website traffic, every online test and campaign helps us further define and refine our messaging for better ROI.
A simple word of warning–don’t change too much too soon. While some campaign efforts may show lacklustre results, you’ll have a hard time tracking which tools, platforms, graphics, or product offers best resonate with your target audience by changing everything in one go. Even a seasoned digital marketer will trial 2-3 platforms in the beginning (for example, social media, SEO, and landing pages) to help identify which messages, offers, or platforms that show the best results. Next time you want to launch a campaign, we recommend following the 1-2 warm leads that showed promising ROI and changing 1-2 small elements of your offer or campaign. (For example, the price of a product offer may change–giving you more information about your audience and at what price point they’re willing to buy.)
A Word About Search Engine Optimisation and Social Media Marketing
Overwhelmed? Don’t be. While it can seem like there are countless online marketing tools, platforms, and best practices that need to be followed to set up successful digital marketing campaigns, some of the most fundamental tools digital marketers use for free to gain meaningful audience insight include:
A Website
Times have changed–and most news customers will expect some type of online presence when they scope out a new company. Nothing fancy is required–but positioning your brand online with a basic website will give validity and professionalism to your new company as well as help new leads connect with you via search engines and learn what you’re all about. Additional options for free but effective beginner digital marketing strategies include content marketing and search engine marketing. We won’t dive into those today, but they could be well within your reach down the road.
Search Engine Optimisation
Worried? Don’t be. The basic premise behind search engine optimisation is to help position your website so more potential customers can find you and what you have to offer. While the world of SEO can run far and deep (the Edge Marketing team are experts in it!), making sure you website has the following set up from day one can take you far:
- Website Title (Meta Title)
- Website Description and a Page Description (Meta Description)
- Headers, including H1 and H2.
- Keywords and text that represent your brand, product, or service, the problem you solve for customers.
That’s a wild oversimplification of SEO, but at its core–you should be able to create and set these up on your own. Check out the other Edge Marketing blogs exploring SEO for beginners so you know that your new website is crawling for new customers online.
One last word of warning–SEO results don’t happen overnight. While social media platforms can offer (almost) instantaneous feedback, SEO is a long term game–but worth it nonetheless.
Social Media Profiles
Absolutely free and giving your brand a potentially global reach, social media platforms that identify with and are regularly used by your ideal customers is a great way to get started online. With instant feedback offered by posts, graphics, product offers, and more, you can engage directly with consumers to find out more about what they like, want, and need.
Interested in paid digital advertising opportunities down the road? We recommend setting up a basic, free social media account (or two!) to begin creating a community around your brand. Once you have more data-driven information about your ideal audience and customers, you can use this refined messaging to get a better ROI when paying to advertise online.
Getting Started with Online Digital Marketing
If you’re ready to move past traditional marketing efforts and leverage the opportunities for more business, sales, and customer engagement online, digital marketing is the way to go.
With more free and beginner-friendly tools available online than ever before, even fledgling businesses and solo-preneurs without the help of a digital marketer can start to engage with their customers in real-time and gain important insights about their audiences that will help improve their ROI over time.
If you’re interested in learning more about the basics of SEO, setting up Google Analytics and Google Ads, how to leverage social media marketing opportunities, and creating a great eCommerce site, follow along with Edge Marketing. A local digital marketing specialist team with Certified Google Partner status, we’re front of the line when it comes to best practices in online marketing and love keeping our community in the know. With weekly blogs exploring the latest trends and tools available to digital marketers at every stage in their career, we can help you boost your brand status online and achieve your business goals.
