How to Start Digital Marketing for Growing Your Business

Great initiative at looking to start digital marketing for your business! You may be overwhelmed by what you should be doing first. It is clear that digital marketing has many components such as blogging, SEO, email marketing and social media activities. But where should you start?

To know how to start digital marketing, we must first understand how digital marketing will help you grow your business. Once that is clear, it will be much easier to know how to start digital marketing.

How Does Digital Marketing Help?

The reason why digital marketing exists today is because buyers have changed the way they shop. Before even speaking with a sales rep, many would have done their own research prior to reaching out. In fact, according to HubSpot, 60% of people would want to connect with sales only after researching the different options.

The pre-era of digital marketing was quite different. Very little information was available to consumers. They had to speak with sales in order to obtain information. Now with the internet, potential customers can find helpful content that will guide them towards the right solution.

So how does digital marketing help your business? Companies that invest in producing relevant and helpful content online strategically will attract visitors to their website, generate leads and achieve greater sales potential.

How to Start Digital Marketing?

Now that you know the essence of digital marketing, here are 3 elements that will get you started with digital marketing.

1. Build Your Ideal Customers

As digital marketing is to provide helpful and relevant content, you must first understand in great detail as to who your ideal customers are in order for you to produce content that resonates. This can be done by building a Buyer Persona, which is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on your experience and stats. This would include a name, demographic, identifiers, goals, and challenges.

We created a buyer persona template that you can download by clicking here.

2. Start Blogging to Attract Visitors

To attract visitors to your website, you need to produce content in order for potential customers to find you via search engines such as Google or Bing. To know what to blog about, think about your buyer persona’s challenges or goals. Write down a list of questions that they may type on Google in order to find answers to.

Let’s take my business for example. Knowing that I help businesses with digital marketing, some questions that my buyer persona may type on Google would be:

• How much does digital marketing cost?
• How to start digital marketing?
• What to look for in a digital marketing firm?

I can take these questions, write blog articles and publish them on my website. In addition, I would share my blog articles on my social media channels in order to reach more people. As people like, comment or share on their profile, their connections will be exposed to my blog articles.

3. Provide Premium Content to Generate Leads

The next step is to convert website visitors to leads. In a perfect world, potential customers would read one of your blog article and call you to make a purchase. But the truth is that most are not ready to buy just yet as they are still in the process of learning. Many will simply close your blog article after reading.

So how do you stay in touch with your visitors after they have read your blog? The answer is to promote a premium content at the end of the blog article that is relevant to the blog. You do so by adding a clickable call-to-action (CTA) image. Once clicked, they will be lead to a page with a form that they will need to fill out to download the premium content.

For example, let’s take an accounting firm for example that blogs about how to prepare your quarterly tax declarations. At the end of the blog, they promote their 20-page step by step guide on how to implement an accounting software to simplify income and tax declarations.

Here is a CTA Example for an accounting firm

When they click on the CTA, they will be redirected to a landing page with a form to download. Anyone who fills out this form will be a new lead for your business.

Grow with Digital Marketing

There is much more to digital marketing, but to build your buyer persona, blog and producing premium content is a great start. It’s important that you blog regularly in order to answer as many questions as possible to build your notoriety. Also, by blogging regularly, your SEO performance will improve over time. Search engines favour businesses who publish helpful content on a regular basis.

As you move forward with digital marketing, all the blog and premium content that you create can be used in many facets of digital marketing.