How can I learn Digital Marketing on my own?

Digital marketing is a very essential part of the advertising strategy that one undertakes in order to improve the awareness of the brand and ultimately increase sales. There are numerous sources to learn Digital Marketing techniques. But then, theoretical knowledge and practical knowledge aren’t the same. The reality is that even if you take up these courses to build your horizon to learn the basic relevant concepts, getting hands-on practical experience is the right choice. And that’s what we would recommend. Indeed online courses can be a real add-on but the truth is, no matter how many courses you take, getting hands-on practice will always be a different experience.

What is Digital Marketing?

While traditional marketing exists through brochures, newspapers, or physically, digital marketing encompasses marketing efforts using the internet. It includes reaching out to the customers using digital channels like social media, videos, search engines, etc. Nowadays digital content creation and marketing is so common that customers expect and rely on it as a way to know and learn about the existing as well as upcoming brands. It has become vital for brand awareness. And the reason behind this fact is not hidden. Marketing electronically not only helps in reaching a greater set of audiences, but it also targets the most likely and potential prospects.

Roles and Responsibilities

• A digital marketing professional is responsible for designing, building and maintaining social media presence. Moreover, they also measure and report the performance of all digital marketing campaigns.
• They identify the latest trends and insights as well as optimize spend and create growth strategies.
• Digital marketing professional plan, execute and measure the experiments and conversion tests.
• Further, they also collaborate with internal teams for creating landing pages and optimize user experience.
• Lastly, using their skills and ability they evaluate end-to-end customer experience across multiple channels.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

Social media presence has made marketing quite cost-effective. Not just that, there are various benefits that Digital Marketing provide us with. Let’s know about some of them in detail:

More cost-effective

Digital Marketing is more cost-effective than Traditional Marketing. You can keep track of the channels and calculate the return on investment. That will ultimately help in deciding the amount of money to be spent on channels that demonstrate a high return on investment. Basically, it allows you to frame marketing strategies and gives complete liberty to choose where to spend. This ensures that you are never wasting your money on the channels that do not perform well.

Target most likely and potential prospects

Digital Marketing can help you target only potential prospects. It allows you to identify and target a specific section of the audience and then send personalized marketing emails. Basically, it enables to conduct the research that is needed to identify the wants of the buyer and then helps to refine the marketing strategy. This ensures the fact that you are able to reach those prospects who are most likely to buy the product or service being marketed. The best of all of it is that digital marketing helps to market to sub-groups within the large target audience.

Quantifiable

Digital marketing offers the benefit of measuring, calculating, analyzing, and making decisions. It provides a comprehensive view of all the metrics that matter for the organization like the number of shares, clicks, visits & views, time spent on the page, etc. Unlike most offline marketing efforts, digital marketing allows marketers to see accurate results in real-time. If you’ve ever put an advertisement in a newspaper, you’ll know how difficult it is to estimate how many people actually flipped to that page and paid attention to your ad. There’s no sure-shot way to know if that ad was responsible for any sales at all.

Open opportunities

Digital marketing offers you a great platform to market your products and services. It opens opportunities and lets you outrank bigger players in your industry using strategic digital marketing initiatives. You can create high-quality content and the search engines will automatically prioritize and rank it for the target audience. Additionally, social media enables you to reach new audiences through influencer marketing.

Disciplines of Digital Marketing

There are six disciplines that make up Digital Marketing

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is that discipline which is used to increase the traffic on the webpage by placing itself to high rank in the search results of search engine. SEO helps to put up more organic results. It shows up the results that closely match the user’s search query based on the relevance. It is basically these keywords that optimize throughout the content available on the internet and gives the website a higher “authority” by getting mentioned on higher ranks.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEM basically refers to paid search. It uses search engines to advertise the web page to the customers on the internet and get more traffic to it. This involves ads that link to landing pages, adverts for the new products, etc., persuading customers to click on these links that directs to the business page. This area of digital marketing involves analytics and is very methodical as it requires experimenting.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

PPC is a technique where advertisers pay a fee each time one of their ads is clicked. This is what makes digital marketing a paid search.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

SMM involves creating content and then sharing it on social media platforms with the objective to achieve marketing as well as branding goals. It embodies identifying trends, marketing, building brand awareness, and providing a direct link. It involves a lot of analysis and experiments based on which decisions or changes are made.

Content Marketing

Content marketing involves creating content in the form of posts, videos, blogs, etc. and then marketing the idea. This type of marketing discipline does not unambiguously do promotion but intends to stimulate the interest in its products and services.

Affiliate Marketing

This type of marketing discipline involves making money by promoting someone else’s product or service. The most significant part about the same is that it builds the value of the product as this kind of vigorous promotion authenticates the product by building a sense of trust among the buyers.

Each of the above-mentioned 6 disciplines works together in creating a great digital marketing campaign. These disciplines help in creating engagement and optimize the content. Therefore, armed up with all this knowledge, you would be able to also narrow down to the particular areas where you would like to get more skilled and experienced.

How can you learn Digital Marketing on your own?

Digital marketing is very vast. Start off with getting versed about each discipline. Then, decide and choose which one would you wanna go ahead with. Lastly, find the resources and start learning. You can find so many lessons and courses online be it paid or unpaid. Here are some of the online resources that we would suggest you to go ahead with.

Youtube

Well, youtube is no new! It is rather every students’ rescue application. Youtube is an amazing platform where you can find tons and tons of videos from which you can learn. There are numerous mentors who put up great learning content about Digital Marketing with the audience and share their learnings. All you can do is type and search about any concept of digital marketing and there’s a screen full of relevant resources for the same.

Google Skillshop

Google has been a huge influencer in the world of the digital market. It has even come up with its own platform to offer training courses and programs. All you have to do is visit Google’s Skillshop and browse among the various courses and learn; starting from the beginner’s level to the advanced level. And most of the content related to Digital Marketing run on Google. Therefore, learning from Google itself is the best opportunity.

Vskills Certification

Digital Economy is growing at a pace that is 10 times more than that of traditional economy and firms that have an online presence are twice likely to create more jobs. (Silicon Republic). With another 150,000 jobs expected to be open by 2020, this is the right time to start in this exciting profession.

Vskills certification for Digital Marketing assesses the candidate as per the company’s need for running Digital Marketing Campaigns across various channels including Emailers, Social Media, Search Engine, and Inbound techniques. The certification tests the candidates on various areas in Digital Marketing including Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, Email Marketing, Inbound Marketing and Affiliate Marketing.

You must go ahead and apply for the Digital Marketing Certification at Vskills to get the best of the learning resources including tutorials and practice tests.

Learning Resources

Not only online courses can help in learning, but you can even refer to ebooks that can contribute to your learning. Following are some of the E-Books you must read if you wish to learn –

1. How to Get Started with Digital Marketing – Nat Eliason
2. 25 Actionable Social Media Strategies – Buffer
3. Tone of Voice Guide – Distilled
4. Conversion Marketer’s Guide to Landing Page Copywriting 
5. Beginner’s Guide to SEO – Moz
6. Optimisation Survival Guide 
7.  Step-By-Step Guide to Influencer Marketing – Shane Barker

Next step is to get hands-on experience. For that, one has around three choices

• Firstly, Internships
• Secondly, Simulators
• Thirdly, Apprenticeships

How to do Digital Marketing?

Define your goals

Before you start anything, the first step is to always lay down objectives. It is very important to identify and define the goals.It is easy to to shape digital marketing strategies after the organization’s objectives are clearly stated and defined.

Identify your target audience

One of the major benefits of Digital Marketing is that it provides the opportunity to target a potential audience. However, before actually be able to enjoy this benefit, it is essential to first identify your target audience.

Establish a budget for each digital channel

What elements of digital marketing you wish to add to your strategy are really important in determining the budget. Therefore, next is to plan and establish a budget for each digital channel you wish to put up your content.

Strike a good balance between paid and free digital strategies

To be truly effective online, it is really crucial to be able to strike a balance between paid as well as free digital strategies. When in doubt, try both, and iterate on your process as you learn which channels — paid or free – perform best for your brand.

Create engaging content

Now, once you are done with identifying a target audience and establishing the budget, its time for creating the content. It can be either in the form of posts, videos, blogs, sponsorships, ads, etc. If you want the customers to actually show interest and engage, you must keep the content attractive and interesting.

Optimize your digital assets for mobile

There are lots of ways you can optimize your digital market assets for mobile users, and when implementing any digital marketing strategy, it’s hugely important to consider how the experience will translate on mobile devices. This means implementing a mobile-friendly or responsive website design to make browsing user-friendly for those on mobile devices. 

Conduct keyword research

Digital Marketing is everything about targeting the potential customers and marketing in a personalized way. And a keyphrase makes all of it possible. Conducting keyword research is critical for optimizing your website and content for SEO and ensuring people can find your business through search engines. 

Recapitulate based off the analytics you measure

Finally, to create an effective digital marketing strategy for the long-term, it’s vital your team learn how to pivot based off analytics.