Demystified Digital Marketing

By: S. Pradono Suryodiningrat

Digital Marketing is an incredibly powerful way to grow a business and to drive revenue. But if you’re new to digital marketing it can also be quite overwhelming there’s so many different marketing channels there’s so many different tactics and strategies.

The first thing you need to know about digital marketing is that it’s a process and the first step is to (1) define a target audience. The marketing channels like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are so big so noisy and you need to be very clear about who you’re going after, not only their age and gender and where they live but also what are the problems that they have. You have to show that your solution going to be better or different than the competition and you need to be able to paint a really clear picture to them of that. And that’s so important to be clear from the start because that’s what you’re going to be using in your marketing messages and videos and posts to really capture their attention.

Now the next step in the process is to (2) attract that target audience with free content and Ads. You really want to go on to the platforms that your target audience are already using. And that could be the search engines with Google, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. There are 3 types of free content that you can make to attract your target audience, (a) educational content, for example if there is an e-commerce store that selling women’s hair extensions and they create videos like how to do a French braid and everybody who searches and finds their video and then maybe will buy their product which is a hair extension. (b) free content, you can a brand storytelling maybe customer success stories testimonials that type of thing. (c) entertainment’s style content, people building up an audience with entertainment type and then sending them back to their merchandise store.

Once you’ve attracted your target audience the next step is to (3) make sales and you want to drive that audience back to your website or your offline store. Many businesses will have an intermediary step between these two steps and that could be to build up an email lists if you want to win the trust of the customer first before asking for a sale or maybe you don’t have a product yet and you just want to build up an audience.

Now the final step in the process is really to (4) measure and optimize and you can do this for free with Google Analytics. And this is just to make the whole process better and better. If you know that a lot of people are coming to your site from YouTube and they’re buying stuff well you can see that in Google Analytics and then you can put more free content or ads on that channel to really drive more sales. But it’s so important that you’re measuring what you’re doing because that’s the only way that you know what’s working so that you can do more of it.

I hope that this was helpful in demystifying digital marketing and this is hopefully clarified things for you if you’re an absolute beginner.