10 Easy Steps to Become a Better Digital Marketer
Digital marketing is a very valuable skill set in the 21st Century. It doesn’t matter if you’re marketing Frontier online deals for a reseller or baby products for an e-retailer. Digital marketing can help you get ahead of your competition. It can help you get closer to meeting your brand/business objectives. Even if you are offering your skills as a freelancer, knowing digital marketing can really help you make money. You may have already heard about the basics of link building and killer content. This blog explores more of what makes a better, complete digital marketer.
10 Steps to Becoming a Better Digital Marketer
Digital marketers have evolved, especially over the last 10 years. The focus has become much broader than just SEO or content. Today’s digital marketers watch over and coordinate many different tasks in order to meet their marketing objectives. Here are 10 things you can do to become a better digital marketer:
- Learn to Analyze Data
- Don’t Shy Away from Paid Advertising
- Leverage Your Mailing List
- Understand that Visuals are Key
- Generate Better Content
- Look into Guest Blogging
- Embrace Digital Tools
- Understand Social Media Marketing Tactics
- Internationalize Your SEO
- Understand Psychology
Let’s briefly look at how each point can help you become a better digital marketer.
If you are a beginner and want to make a career in digital marketing, you can start by taking up a free digital marketing basics course .
Learn to Analyze Data
Most of us know about “big data”. Many also know that the biggest companies in the world like Google and Facebook thrive on it. But it’s not about collecting huge amounts of data. It’s about the information you extract from the data. The raw data itself won’t tell you much unless you start learning to analyze it. This is true, no matter what the size of a business. However, many of us are not as gifted at crunching numbers as others. So what do you do if you feel you can’t analyze data? You hire someone who can and be willing to adapt your strategies accordingly.
Don’t Shy Away from Paid Advertising
Many people often underestimate the usefulness of paid digital advertising. It is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to market a business or brand. Platforms like Facebook gather data on their users, classify them into segments and allow sellers to target them with ads. In 2016, ad spending on Facebook hit more than $25 billion! You need to know how to run ads on social media platforms. This means you need to know how to target specific audiences. You also need to research how to read Facebook Insights. If you sponsor/promote the right posts, your efforts will start showing results quickly.
Leverage Your Mailing List
Email marketing is still the most effective way to reach out to your customer base. Emails today are a much more complex version of what they were a few years ago. There are also many tools that give you valuable insights into the success of your email marketing efforts are. You can target specific niches, split your list into segments, test your email, and even get bounce rates. Many digital marketers underestimate the importance of email marketing, which is something you can leverage to your advantage.
Understand that Visuals are Key
Visual marketing is a key component of any digital marketing strategy. As humans, we tend to engage better with visuals than plain content. If you are generating the right content with the correct visuals, you are 94% more likely to get views. Visuals are a great way to communicate your brand story to your customers and prospects. So invest the time in learning how to leverage good visuals to make your campaigns more successful.
Generate Better Content
Content is king in the digital world. It doesn’t matter if you sell the best product or service in the world. If you don’t write content that engages, informs and compels readers, your efforts fall short. You need to create good content that offers value to your customers. You need to read up on devising content marketing strategies, generating “10x” content and learning how to market your content.
Look into Guest Blogging
Posting as a guest blogger is an overused, but still important, link-building exercise. In terms of delivering content, it is one of the most effective ways in the digital marketing world. This is why guest blogging should be a component of your digital marketing strategy. Writing content is just the first step. You need blogs where you can post as a guest. This is where your people skills come into play, as well as a little help from tools like BuzzStream.
Embrace Digital Tools
One reason digital marketers of today are different from the past is that they have a much bigger toolkit. In terms of digital marketing tools, you get new ones coming out every day. Some have the same old repackaged features, others with innovative ones. Part of being a digital marketer is knowing what new technology is in use, and leveraging it to your advantage. These tools automate a lot of SEO functions and let you adjust your strategy accordingly. Google Analytics, Hootsuite and Sprout Social are just a few examples of tools that can come in handy.
Understand Social Media Marketing Tactics
Social media marketing also has an organic side to it. To be successful at marketing on social media, you need to know how they function and which ones to use. You also need to know what you want to achieve on each social media platform you are using. Part of this is knowing what platform your audience is on and how you can tap into them. Finally, you need to learn the best ways to get social engagement on the content you post. To learn more about social media marketing tactics you can learn from best Facebook marketing courses from Udemy type of popular e-learning platforms.
Internationalize Your SEO
There is no reason for your SEO efforts, or your business, to stay confined within geographical borders. Many businesses fail to take advantage of the much bigger market out there. When you offer your website in different languages, you make it accessible to more people. This means your reach expands to more than just one country. You can try to offer different language versions of your website by hiring translators. You need to have the semantics down right, plus the use of localized words. This increases your global reach and potentially get you, international customers. Just be sure to track each website version separately. Use SEO tools to improve each version’s search visibility.
Understand Psychology
Part of being a digital marketer today involves understanding the psychology of your intended audience. You need this to be able to create content that they can relate to. Psychology also involves the use of words in a way that compels people to interact with your business. People often use aggressive promotional words like “Get a coupon with each purchase of a Frontier internet plan”. Instead, consider the use of powerful, but less promotional language. Say “Be a winner with every plan”. Understanding the psychology behind your audience is crucial to your success as a digital marketer.
