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What is Digital Marketing, and how does it help business or individual growth? It’s a question from many people, even the marketer or non-skill people in the industry. Of course, Digital Marketing is a compelling way to grow a business and drive revenue. It can also be quite overwhelming if you’re new to digital marketing. There are so many different marketing channels. There are so many other tactics and strategies. And so what we want to do in this article is get everybody on the same page on the concept of this course and give you a high-level overview of how to grow a business with digital marketing, demystify it for you and give you that big picture.

First, you need to know that digital marketing is a process, and the first step in that process is defining a target audience. Online marketing channels like Facebook and YouTube are so big and noisy that you need to be clear about who you’re going after their age and gender and maybe where they live and their problems.

How will your solution be better or different from another in the competition? It’s also what difference that solution will make to their lives in terms of how those your life will be better. It would be best to paint a detailed picture of that, which is vital to be clear from the start because that’s what you will be using in your marketing messages, videos, and posts to capture their attention. Thus, the first step is so important to do as an exercise before you even jump into the different market channels.

Next, the step in the process is to track that target audience with free content and Ads, and you do want to go on to the platforms that your target audience is already using. That could be the search engines like Google or social media, including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc.

In terms of how you attract them with free content, as well as, the content is the king, and there are three types of content that you can make. One is just how to type educational content could be how-to articles you post and appear on Google.

It could be educationalist style videos, and for example, if there is an e-commerce store that I know sells women’s hair extensions. They create videos like how to do a french braid, and everybody who searches for that finds their video and then maybe will buy their product which is a hair extension. The second type of free content you can make is brand storytelling, such as customer success stories and testimonials. And the last type of content you can make for free to track your target audience is Entertainment content.

You can see this a lot on YouTube. People build up an audience with entertainment-type stuff and then send them back to their merchandise store. You know a lot on Instagram, where influencers build up an audience of entertaining content, sell affiliate products, and promote the products.

You can also attract your target audience with free content and Ads, and all of these platforms have an Ad platform built-in, including Google Ads, Facebook ads, YouTube ads, Twitter ads, Instagram ads, LinkedIn ads, etc.

You want to build up an audience. Once you’ve attracted your target audience, the next step is to make sales, and you want to drive that audience back from those platforms to your Website or your offline store. Then many businesses will have an intermediary step between these two steps, and that could be to build up an email list if you want to win the customer’s trust first before asking for a sale or maybe don’t have a product yet.
We can drive them to sign up for your email lists, or you can also use retargeting to get people who came to your Web site and retarget them back on, say these platforms come back to your Website.

So those are some other kinds of details there. The final step in the process is really to measure and optimize, and you can do this for free with Google Analytics. So 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 drive more sales. And really, this is to make the whole process better and better.

Despite it’s so essential that you’re measuring what you’re doing because that’s the only way you know what’s working to do more of it. So I hope that this helped demystify digital marketing, and this clarifies things for you if you’re an absolute beginner. We’re going to be going into all of these steps. I’ve seen a lot more detail in the course, but I would be grateful if you could keep this in mind. If you get overwhelmed and a bit confused, just come back to the high-level view.

It’s straightforward at a high level what we are trying to achieve and how to grow business with digital marketing.