How to Do Digital Marketing Yourself A 5 Step Guide
Can’t afford a digital marketing team? Learn how to do digital marketing yourself in this 5 step guide with resources.
Photo by Melanie Deziel on Unsplash
Attracting new customers and retaining current ones for sustainable growth is the objective of every business, but it’s exponentially harder for small business owners without a budget to hire a marketing team.
So, what do these businesses do to bootstrap their way to visibility, growth and sales?
For example, in the financial world, money lending companies compete to offer poor credit loans to new people. I use this example because it’s one of the most crowded spaces online. Competition is fierce, but it is still necessary to obtain new consumers, increase sales, bear production and operating costs, as well as increase profitability.
If you’re a solo-preneur, may find yourself in a similar predicament.
How do you cover these costs?
Can you take on digital marketing yourself?
Absolutely, you can!
We’re going to show you how to do digital marketing yourself in 5 simple steps and provide all the necessary resources to reach your customers.
A Digital Marketing Overview:
Think of it like this:
It is essential for any company to define high acceptance marketing strategies and implement actions to achieve the goals mentioned above.
However, the costs of advertisements in newspapers, magazines and television advertisements make large actions by SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) unfeasible. The more accessible promotional actions, such as leafleting, billboards, busdoors, among other tactics, have become obsolete. While many large companies still utilize these components — they simply aren’t an effective SB tool to reach your target audience.
Most of these older tactics create a financial issue, have no way of achieving a highly segmented audience profile, a create complexity in measuring results. Small businesses with smaller budgets need effective ways to market themselves, make adjustments of campaigns and evaluate a concrete return on investment. This is exactly where understanding how to do digital marketing yourself will come into play.
Effective digital marketing can be done with a small scalable budget. This is essential when it comes to maintaining an active customer base. We’re going to look at the best marketing channels, audience targeting and free digital marketing tools that will allow you to achieve all these goals.
Are you ready? Let’s jump in and learn how to do digital marketing yourself for effective results.
1- Digital Marketing: Don’t be left out
Digital Marketing has established itself as an excellent high acceptance tool for consolidating brands and increasing sales (a great example of this is Coca-Cola’s 2020 campaign) . With it, campaigns are better segmented, results are more easily measurable, costs are more accessible and investments are better suited to the reality of the business, which enables SMEs to make a more accurate investment.
Companies, like Coca-Cola pay a lot of attention to understanding the behavioral profile of consumers. This provides greater decision-making power and personalized highly targeted, far-reaching campaigns that are tailored to the reality of the customer.
Understanding your competitor and your customer is an essential first step.
It goes without saying that a person should keep their friends close, but their enemies even closer! This saying is also relevant for businesses concerning digital marketing, where few things remain private, and most of them are easily gaugeable through the right tools. For an in-depth understanding of the benefits of a competitive analysis, click here.
2- A New Consumer Profile
If you’re going to do digital marketing yourself, you must understand your consumer.
The vast amount of information found on the internet has made customers more and more demanding. They do not accept, believe or “swallow” any type of advertising or promotional action that your company does. They are also not favorable to companies that annoy them by trying to sell something that is not in accordance with their values
Before finalizing a deal, this consumer searches for references – whether the product or service, the brand or company that sells it, as well as the experience of other consumers – seeking support through information on the internet and in their network of contacts. In many cases, even through online social platforms, which have contributed to a more active contact between friends and acquaintances in the face of the daily rush.
Your company may have an entire portfolio of amazing products or services, but you should keep in mind that consumer journeys begin well before the actual purchase. A typical customer will go through multiple stages – from initial contact to evaluation – before making the decision to buy just about anything.
This basically means that you have to impress your client right from the beginning of the relationship, particularly if you know that 73% of consumers point to customer experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions.
But how exactly can you do that? Click here to learn how to impress your customers before purchasing.
As previously mentioned, the single most important element is understanding who your consumers actually are. Understanding who your actual and potential customers are will allow you to develop your marketing and advertising efforts around their preferences.
For example, if you want to reach potential consumers, you need to get their vital info, such as their age, gender, annual income, and lifestyle preferences.
All of this information will have various benefits, such as being able to choose the best advertising platform that your audience is most likely to utilize, the ability to set prices based on your consumer’s probable expendable income, and offering products and features that suit their lifestyle preferences.
3- How to Plan Your Digital Marketing Campaign
Everything we do in life requires planning for success. Acquire an asset, set up your own business or even manage it. With Digital Marketing it is no different. A well-thought-out strategy that takes into account the necessary variables and business peculiarities brings a greater probability of success in the actions and achievement of defined objectives. In addition to the function of documenting the path to be taken and how this path will be, strategic planning for Digital Marketing has a fundamental function: directing studies on the market, competitors and target audience, essential for obtaining results.
Good planning is composed of well-defined objectives, definition of strategies, goals and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators or Key Performance Indicators). It also stipulates those responsible for making each of the actions a success, as well as the necessary investments to achieve this.
Small business managers need to understand what Digital Marketing KPIs are and how they influence the decision-making capabilities of an organization. Click here to see what Digital Marketing KPIs are and how they impact your marketing decisions.
To define the best digital marketing strategy for your business, you will need to:
- Define your selling points: the first thing to consider is your unique value proposition. Of course, very few products and services are 100% unique, but you will need some selling points to compete. Those could be higher quality, lower price, convenience, emphasis on innovation or ecology, etc.
- Define your target audience: when you know what makes your product or service special, it will not be difficult to figure out what kind of people will find it as useful as you. So, the next point on your digital to-do list is to define your potential clients. Focus on every little detail, from age and gender to geolocation and lifestyle habits. You need to really know who your buyers are if you want to sell anything.
- Set short- and long-term goals: no one can achieve anything overnight, so set realistic marketing goals. One of the best digital marketing strategies here is a S.M.A.R.T approach, meaning that all your goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely.
- Set marketing budget: now that you have set your digital goals, it is time to set an equally realistic budget. Just for reference, the latest digital marketing news shows that most businesses spend $2500-12,000 a month on marketing efforts. Of course, smaller companies and personal brands can start with smaller figures.
- Pick marketing channels: there are seven essential digital marketing tools, discussed in more detail in the following section.
4. The Right Tools to do Digital Marketing Yourself
Small businesses don’t have time to sift through every app or tool online, so if you’re an entrepreneur looking for the best digital marketing tools; we’ve taken the time to list them here for you.
Digital marketing tools are essential for modern day online marketers. They have to wear many hats, doing everything from data mining and analysis to social media marketing, all happening at the same time. Digital marketing tools make it possible for marketers to keep their sanity. Without the right digital marketing tools, it’s impossible to handle day to day tasks for one campaign let alone multiple campaigns.
While a simple Google search will lead you to a vast array of digital marketing tools all you have to do is click here to open a new window for a list of the 10 best DIY digital marketing tools.
5- SEO and Omni-Channel Marketing!
When it comes to the ability to be found on the web, investing in SEO is extremely important. Search Engine Optimization aims to make search engines identify your company’s online page as relevant to the target audience you want to attract. Through the development of a series of actions, search engines position your page so that it is more easily found by your customers, which contributes to the increase in sales conversions.
Tying directly into SEO are the other online channels you will need to identify and use to reach your audience.
Building omnichannel marketing strategies for your business doesn’t mean that you should be present on every channel. It will be better to identify the channel where you can find customers in a large number.
According to a study, 74% of millennials, 68% of Gen X adults, and 61% boomers use Facebook while 73% of Gen Z adults Instagram. You need to revise your buyer persona and determine which channel is best for your omnichannel marketing strategy. For instance, Wildlife Showroom, a website that sales duck decoys, that are using Instagram to educate their customers and stay connected with them.
You need to do some analysis and find what platform your targeted audiences are using, on which social media platform you are getting good engagement and user response from audiences bases on that you need to select mist suitable platform for marketing.
Check out these awesome charismatic ideas to build leads on different channels.
Summary
For those who don’t want to be left behind, it’s necessary to get an understanding of how to do digital marketing youself. For this, it is necessary to understand the possibilities offered, the importance of each one of them, and then start building a plan that involves the best practices for your market. In order to help you in this task, we selected the main and most popular actions to support your decision. Regardless of the investments you make, it’s impossible to think about digital strategies without having a website.
Having your own domain, a good interface that includes usability and professional aesthetics (layout), as well as detailed information and contact areas to facilitate commercial negotiations are of paramount importance. Remember that it will be the gateway for new customers, as well as a channel for clarification and information to aid in decision making for converting into sales.
Check out the other categories in this blog for more great tips on how to market your small business.
