Digital marketing is a strategy for carrying out online marketing processes by utilizing various digital media, such as websites, social media, email, and so on. Therefore, digital marketing is a business strategy that is most often used by business people/business actors.
Unfortunately, there are still many business actors who do not understand well about the implementation or steps for implementing digital marketing. This is because there are many online digital marketing platforms that have different approaches.
How can a beginner start digital marketing? Maybe this question popped up in your head so you found this article. Well, for those of you who are beginners, you can start digital marketing by doing market research and segmentation. In addition, you must have clear business goals, create a database of potential customers, and so on.
But before discussing further, what is the importance of digital marketing for a business? To find out the answer, see the following article! Check out the full explanation by reading this article to the end.
Why is Digital Marketing Important?
In addition to reaching more target consumers, digital marketing also has several advantages that make business people often apply this strategy in their business. These advantages include:
- The cost is relatively cheaper and can be arranged by yourself
- Fast branding with a wider consumer reach
- Easier application access
- focus more on advertising to potential consumers so that ads are more targeted
- The convenience that companies get in collecting consumer data
- Based on research, 70% of the world's people prefer online advertising to traditional advertising
- Save time with advanced and efficient features
- Easier and faster in conducting two-way communication
- Advertising concepts and techniques that can be adapted to your needs
- Easy to Analyze Markets & Competitors (Competitors)
- No need for a lot of human resources
- Significant Business Growth Potential
What are the assets of a digital marketing?
Talking about digital marketing, a marketer must know and also understand what elements can be maximized by businesses and companies so that digital marketing can run optimally.
One important element in digital marketing is assets. For that, here are some important digital marketing assets that you must understand to optimize:
- Brand Identity
- Websites, Landing Pages, and Mobile Applications
- Media (Photo, Video, and Audio)
- Digital Content
- Social Media Accounts
- Online Footprint (Review/Feedback/Testimony)
- Data Analytics
Apart from that, another important thing that is quite important is your activeness in online forums. For that, try to make your business profile have a good rating and impression from customers. This can affect the branding that your business has in cyberspace.
What are the basic steps of digital marketing?
Starting a digital marketer career may not be difficult if you have a linear and supportive educational background and experience. However, if you intend to change gears or switch careers, this may not be easy for you. Therefore, there are several things that are important for you to do to get started with starting a digital marketer career.
A research conducted by databox tries to find a common thread regarding how to become a digital marketer without a degree in a particular field or experience in this field. The research involved 46 marketers regarding the steps they have taken to achieve their current careers.
To start digital marketing, there are several steps that you must understand, including:
1. Find your specialty
Mastering many things at once may be a requirement sought by many companies. However, that doesn't mean you have to master everything in digital marketing, from SEO to content marketing. The reason is, digital marketing is a very broad field and it is better if you focus on one field that is most suitable and you like.
If you feel that you are a creative person, then you should focus on the digital marketing part that is related to creativity, such as social media or content marketing. Likewise, if you prefer things related to data or strategy, you can choose another digital marketing scope.
2. Hone hard skills and soft skills
The advantage of having a dream career as a digital marketer is that digital marketing skills are skills that can be learned outside of formal education. You can learn this skill through non-formal training or even self-taught, you know. Not only do you hone hard skills, you also have to hone digital marketing soft skills such as analytical, critical thinking, communication and presentation.
3. Build professional branding
How can a recruiter be convinced to accept you at their company? The most important thing is that you must have strong and convincing professional branding as a digital marketer. You can start building professional branding through various platforms ranging from blogs, websites, social media, to professional platforms such as LinkedIn.
4. Must Have Clear Business Goals
Just like people who want to start a journey, there must be clear goals in order to make a structured and systematic itinerary.
Likewise, if you want to start digital marketing to promote your business, you must have clear and specific business goals. For example:
- What is the application of digital marketing to build brand awareness?
- Want to introduce brands and products to the wider community.
- You want to get more potential customers who are willing to buy the products you offer.
- If you have clear and strong goals, it will be easier for you to develop a plan regarding the implementation of digital marketing to achieve these goals.
5. Conducting Market Research and Segmentation
Once you have a goal, don't immediately rush to implement a digital marketing strategy. This is because implementation that is not on target will only make all your promotional and marketing efforts in vain.
In order to succeed how? Yes, you do research first about potential customers that suit your business and product. Find out if their purchasing power is in accordance with the price of the products being sold, even you also need to know their shopping style.
In addition, it is important to segment the market. Market segmentation is grouping potential customers into small groups based on certain indicators. For example based on demographics, purchasing power, age, social media used, and others.
6. Create a Loyal Customer Database and Potential Customer Prospects
If you have done market research and segmentation, then the next step is to create a consumer database. In this database, store and organize each customer's data according to certain categories.
For example, loyal customers who shop regularly, customers who only come occasionally, or consumers who have just browsed products on the website, but have not yet made a purchase.
At the same time, don't just focus on consumers who are already customers. You should also constantly work on bringing in new customers. That's why, try to create a database of potential customers who have a high probability of buying and using products from your business.
7. Ensuring Business Meets Customer Needs
From the data in the customer database, you can study customer behavior when looking for the goods or services they need. Find out as much as possible about the needs and problems that customers face. Then, make your business products and services a solution.
The important thing that you need to understand, a successful business is a business that can answer customer frustration, as well as provide solutions to help solve their problems.
You can provide various content as a digital marketing channel. These contents don't just sell products, but provide various information, education, even useful tips and tricks for customers.
8. Research Competitors and Their Strategies
Analyzing competitors is also one way to start digital marketing for beginners. You need to do competitor research so you can learn how they implement digital marketing strategies that are right on target, the type of content they display, how they interact with their consumers, and so on.
9. Build a Website and Social Media Business
To be able to start marketing digitally, you need to choose and use the right platforms, such as using websites and social media. So, build a business website and social media. Prepare various useful articles for consumers on the website and help them to solve the problems they face.
Apart from that, you also need to prepare interesting, useful, and educational content on social media. This is because there are consumers who like to find information directly on business websites and there are also consumers who feel more comfortable surfing on social media. Don't forget, do optimization on both platforms.
10. Do it Immediately and Routinely Evaluate the Results
If you have done the six steps above, then continue with the last step, which is execution and start digital marketing for your business. Especially if all the planning has been done, including building and creating a website and business social media. Some further steps that you also need to take include:
- Collect audience data more specifically and prioritize potential customers who have the potential to make their first purchase.
- Understand how the digital marketing funnel works and optimize it. The digital marketing funnel is a type of marketing that seeks to convert traffic from audience visits to conversions. Including maintaining that audience so that they become loyal customers of your business.
- Create a content plan and implement content marketing that is structured and on target.
- Keep learning so that your digital marketing knowledge and skills increase and can help your business grow more..
11. Build a marketing portfolio
Having a portfolio is also advice that many experts give to beginners who want to get their first digital marketer job. The problem is, how can we build a portfolio if we haven't succeeded in getting clients or don't have any experience at all. Practitioners recommend creating imaginary projects or “dummy projects” that can reflect how you would perform in handling a digital marketing project.
12. Expand relationships from the marketing industry
Would you believe that quite a few people get job vacancy information from friends or acquaintances? To keep getting lots of information about job vacancies in the digital marketing field, you must have lots of contacts in this field.
If in the real world you don't have colleagues who work in this field, then you can start building relationships through social media or following influencers in the digital marketing field.
13. Dedicate time to studying
Learn learn and learn. That is the key for many people to achieve success. Likewise, if you want to be successful in pursuing a career as a digital marketer, you must be willing to spend time continuing to learn things related to digital marketing.
You can learn from various sources ranging from websites, books to podcasts. Plus, the world of digital marketing is a very dynamic and constantly changing world. Therefore, you also shouldn't stop learning.
Conclusion
After doing all these steps, don't forget to periodically evaluate the performance of various digital platforms. If you need improvement, do it immediately so that every digital marketing step you take can run well and give the results you expect. Also, try to avoid things when applying it.
Those are some explanations about digital marketing that can help you increase sales turnover, profits, and also your business marketing process. By following the steps above, you can easily run digital marketing easily.