What is Digital Marketing and Where Do I Begin?

The digital world is in a state of continuous change. So, you can expect at least for the foreseeable future, digital marketing will follow suit. To keep this post concise, I have selected the most dominant strategies used today in digital marketing. In this, I will provide a general overview of each strategy as well as a starting point to aid your execution.

Traditionally, the definition of marketing has been the activities an individual or business undertakes to sell their products and/or services to their target audience. Therefore, digital marketing is those activities, except with a focus on digital channels. This includes, but is not limited to the internet, radio, and television. As barriers to entry are reduced and consumer adoption increases, the power of digital channels is only going to grow. As of January 2021, 4.66 billion people or 59.5% of the world’s population uses the internet, which is a year-on-year increase of 316 million people or 7.3%. So, you can see why digital marketing, particularly on the internet, is crucial to any marketing strategy now and in the future.

SEO is commonly referred to as an art and science, which I must agree with. You are working against the continually changing algorithms of search engines such as Google in the hope of outranking your competitors. However, this is not to say with a little investment of time and patience you cannot successfully boost your ranking. SEO is a powerful tool and when implemented correctly can significantly amplify your organic traffic.

1. Making basic edits to your SEO fields is a straight forward task, assuming you have access to the backend of your website. If you are using a website builder such as Wix, Squarespace or Shopify each page and asset allows for SEO edits natively. However, if you are using a self-hosted WordPress site, I recommend installing the Yoast SEO plugin.
2. Once you have identified how to edit your SEO fields, you can begin making the necessary adjustments. My general rule of thumb with SEO is to be consistent across all of your pages and assets. In other words, make sure your SEO ties in with the content of each page and asset.
3. There are four main SEO fields you want to pay attention to. These are the focus keywords, SEO title, slug and meta description. I start with the focus keywords and work my way down respectively. Ensuring that the focus keywords are used in each succeeding field.

If you have ever searched for something on Google, there is a good chance you have come across PPC. These are the ads that make up the first part of your search result. The term PPC can technically be applied to any paid ads such as those on social media platforms. Although, more commonly it is about Google Ads. The idea behind PPC is to outrank your competitors based on keywords. There are two main forms of keywords, short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords. Each form of keyword plays an important role in where you rank in a search result.