Digital Marketing 101 (A Beginner’s Guide To Marketing)

- Hey, my friend, Adam here. And in this video, I'm gonna help you become a better digital marketer by showing you some of the most important things you need to know about digital marketing right now. You see, digital marketing has been made to seem way more complicated than it actually is.

And that's a shame, really, because it's actually pretty straightforward. That said, if you wanna get the best results possible from your digital marketing, you're going to need to know and understand the strategies that I'm gonna be sharing with you here in this video. So my promise to you is this, if you watch this entire video, you will be a better digital marketer at the end.

And the very first thing that I need to share with you are the key differences between traditional marketing and digital marketing. Brace yourself for this one, because it's pretty profound. Actually, it's not profound at all.

And that's what makes it so interesting. You see, digital marketing is really just marketing done through the use of digital channels. That's it.

So when we're talking about digital marketing, well, we're talking about marketing through the use of channels like SEO, search engine optimization, social media, pay-per-click ads, or online Facebook ads, Instagram ads, or anything like that. Not to mention email marketing or website optimization or anything else that takes place online or through the use of digital media. Contrast this with traditional marketing which uses traditional media, things like TV or the radio or newspaper or magazines or billboards.

Basically, anything not digital. Now here's the deal. Traditional marketing still works, but there are some significant advantages to choosing digital marketing, like access to a much larger audience size, as there are billions and billions of people online Targeting as digital marketing gives you the ability to be laser focused and target only the most perfect and ideal people for your business, your offer, or your message.

Digital marketing also tends to be significantly more cost effective, especially when compared to traditional options like say running an ad in the New York Times or heaven forbid, a Super Bowl commercial. Traditional options that are designed to appeal to the mass markets and try to reach everyone, which is both expensive and not the most effective strategy. Another benefit is that digital marketing allows you to get immediate feedback, which between you and me is probably one of my favorite aspects of choosing digital marketing channels.

After all, if you think about running say a magazine ad, where you've got to think of the copy and the creative and what you're going to say, and then you've got to get it all written up and sent over to the magazine. Then it's got to get printed, published, and then distributed through the good old fashioned mail service. Well, you could be looking at weeks at best, months, and usually many, many months before you even figure out if this strategy or ad worked or not.

Digital marketing on the other hand, well, in theory, you can write an ad and have it online in a matter of minutes. Immediate feedback, immediate correction, immediate results. Plus, digital marketing is a whole lot easier to measure and track because it's digital.

So we've got a trail of digital breadcrumbs allowing us to accurately track our costs and our results and everything in between, which allows us to make upgrades and optimizations in real time. Again, contrast that with having to wait months for your magazine, your billboard, or TV ad to come out. And it's not surprising to see so many smart businesses steadily transitioning more and more of their marketing budgets away from traditional and towards more digital options.

I mean, you can't measure clicks on a magazine. So the best you can hope for is to have someone say, fill out a form in the magazine and mail it back to you, or try to encourage them to visit some kind of a digital channel, like a website or a social media platform, which leads us right back to digital. Makes you kind of wonder, why didn't we just start here in the first place?

The real secret to success here though, and something that not a lot of people seem to talk about, is understanding that whether we're talking about traditional or digital marketing, the results that you're going to achieve and the quality of your marketing campaign is less about the channel or platform and everything about the strategies, the fundamentals, the principles, the consumer psychology, the buyer behavior, and trying to learn and understand why people do and buy the things they do. From there, you can apply that to digital channels or traditional channels or any other channels that come out in the future. All right, the next thing that's really going to help you become a better digital marketer is to understand the difference between strategy and tactics and when to use each of them.

Around 2,500 years ago, Sun Tzu wrote in the Art of War that strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory, but it's this next line I really want you to pay attention to where he says, tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat. So both strategy and tactics are important in order to succeed and they compliment each other. But strategy is the clear winner and priority here because it's your strategy that's going to tell you what tactics to use and which ones you can safely and happily ignore.

Sadly, what far too many people do here is start with tactics first by engaging in what I call random acts of marketing, just doing stuff, posting things, all kinds of things in all kinds of places with no real idea or strategy behind why they're doing it or if they should even be doing it at all. The better plan then is to take a step back and spend a few minutes thinking about your strategy, the big picture stuff, the longterm, overarching plan and idea on how you're going to achieve your goals because it's your marketing strategy that forms the foundation that all of your future tactics and tools and software are going to be built on. Get this part wrong, nothing else matters because nothing's gonna work.

Now, there are a ton of different marketing strategies and approaches and ways to look at your digital marketing but the one I found the most effective, the one I've used for over 10 years now and the one I've used with pretty much every business I've ever worked with from small startups and solopreneurs all the way up to billion dollar empires is my marketing master plan which is made up of five strategic and sequential steps. So let me unpack that for you now starting with step one, model. The model is essentially your business model, your offer, your packaging, your servicing, the pricing that goes with it, how you deliver whatever it is that you deliver to your market.

It's important here to make sure that you're designing your model, designing your business around what it is that you find most enjoyable and profitable and in demand by the market because the worst thing you can do here is build a business that you absolutely hate. Next is your market. These are the people that you're going to serve and make sure you don't commit the biggest sin in all of marketing which is saying that your target market is everyone or people with money.

Trying to go after everyone is just too big, it's too broad and even the biggest brands in the world narrow down their targeting in order to focus only on the best group of people possible, the people who are most likely to get the absolute maximum value from whatever it is they're selling. So you wanna be focused here, laser focused on exactly who is going to get the best results from your product or service, keeping in mind the kinds of people that you're going to most enjoy serving. In marketing, we call this an ideal customer avatar or target market and it's made up of demographic details like age, gender, income, occupation, geographic details like what city, state, province or country they live in and psychographic details like what are their values and their attitudes and their lifestyles.

It's here in step three with the message that you're going to connect with your ideal target market, your customer avatars by speaking directly to them about their pains and their frustrations and their problems and how your business is uniquely positioned to help solve all of those for them. Sharing success stories about previous customers and previous client results is an incredibly effective way to do this as is getting testimonials from them and putting together case studies that prove to new potential customers that you know what you're doing and can be counted on to deliver all of the results that you're promising. The message is probably the hardest part to master in all of marketing but it's also the most important as what you say here and how you say it ultimately means the difference between a campaign that's a complete raging success and one that's a sad abysmal failure that makes you wonder what went wrong.

So it pays to spend just a little extra time here and really dive deep into what I call your customer's miseries and miracles. Their miseries are all of their pains and problems and fears and frustrations and their miracles are all of their hopes and dreams and wants and desires. The better you internalize and communicate these, the better all of your marketing is going to perform because customers don't buy when they understand, they buy when they feel understood.

Step four is media and has to do with finding out where your ideal customers are present and active online and then what kind of media, text, audio, video that you're going to use to reach them there. Not so fun fact but most businesses do this completely backwards, creating their marketing plans by starting with media first, often hearing about how a competitor is using Facebook ads or YouTube marketing or maybe they get the advice from a well-meaning business coach that they should start a podcast because you know, people like podcasts or they attend a conference or a seminar and get sold on the value of Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever and then they just rush in there, Facebooking and Instagramming and all over the place, completely forgetting about their strategy and frustrated three months later when nothing they do seems to be working. The reality is you don't need to do everything and you don't need to be everywhere.

You just need to be in the right places where your ideal target market is present and active. Get this right and you're going to save a ton of time and money and energy and headaches by avoiding spreading yourself way too thin on channels that are unlikely to deliver any kind of results. This is why if you go through these steps of the marketing master plan in this right order, starting with the model, moving on to the market, identifying the message, well, by the time you get to media, the choices for which platforms are going to deliver the best results for your business should be clear, like crystal clear because you now know exactly where your ideal target market is present and active online which allows you to meet them there and ignore pretty much everything else.

It's this next step though that's really gonna give you the power to turn your strategy into sales. Step five, the machine, is about how you're going to guide your target market through the process of having no idea who you are all the way through to becoming a lifelong and loyal customer. In marketing, we call this a marketing funnel or a sales funnel or a customer journey but whatever you call it, the process is the same, mapping out each step that a customer needs to take to go from having no idea who you are all the way through to becoming a lifelong and loyal customer for your business.

Now, when it comes to marketing funnels, there really is no one size fits all funnel. So the best thing you can do is start at the end and then reverse engineer your way backwards. For example, a pretty typical digital marketing funnel looks like this.

First, someone hears about you or your business through a piece of content like a social media post, a video, maybe an ad. Then they click on it to learn more and are directed to a landing page where they're invited to enter their name and email address in order to download a free guide or checklist or cheat sheet or something else of value. From there, you follow up with them through an email marketing campaign, emailing them anywhere from one to three times a week with more content, more value and more offers until a sale is made.

So that's the strategy, the marketing master plan, the high level stuff that goes into making sure you're making the right decisions for you and your business. Tactics on the other hand are how you're going to execute everything that we've just talked about, the details and actionable steps or activities that you're going to go out and execute on. These are things like what kind of content are you going to post and how often, how consistently.

Are you going to focus mostly on text or audio or video? And how long is each piece of content going to be? A tactical question would be, what's the best time to post on Instagram?

A strategic question would be, should we even be on Instagram in the first place? And when it comes to making both strategic and tactical marketing decisions, the next thing you need to know about is the difference between organic and paid. So let's talk about that now.

Okay, let's start with organic. Organic content and organic digital marketing are essentially anything that you create and don't pay to have promoted. So anytime that you make a post on Facebook or create an Instagram story or upload a YouTube video or anything like that, and you're not paying money to the platforms to have it promoted, well, you're creating organic content.

Now, organic doesn't necessarily mean that it's 100% free because the odds are good that you put time and energy and maybe even a decent amount of money into creating this content. But by not paying to promote it, it's still classified as organic content. So if organic content is putting out content and not paying anything to have it promoted, well, then paid marketing is the opposite of that.

Putting out content and paying the networks to have them promote it and distribute it in order to get it in front of even more people. Basically, with paid media or paid marketing or paid ads, which are all pretty much the same thing, you're running advertising to whatever message or piece of content that you're putting out there. Now, the big players in this space are obviously the social media kingpins, like Facebook ads and Instagram ads and Google ads and YouTube ads.

Basically, all of the social media networks with ads put on the end of their name. And where organic content shows up in the feeds of the people that follow you or other people that the algorithm deems might be interested in the kind of content you're creating, with paid ads, your content shows up on the feeds and in the phones and on the devices of the people that you choose to target. Now, of course, like all things in marketing, there are pros and cons to both approaches.

Organic is free, essentially in nature, but it's gonna be a little more limited in reach because the way the algorithms work is they kind of favor paid media because that's how they make their money. Paid media, on the other hand, has the obvious downside of costing money, but on the bright side, paid media allows you to reach a ton of people very quickly. So essentially, the choice between organic and paid comes down to time versus money, but also to the rate at which you want to experience results.

All right, now let's talk about one of my favorite topics in all of marketing, which is direct response marketing versus brand awareness marketing. Let's start with direct response first. Direct response marketing is unsurprisingly direct in its goal to get a response.

Marketing sure isn't very creative sometimes. Basically, with direct response marketing, you're putting out an ad or publishing a piece of content and you're focused on getting a direct and immediate and often tangible return, something trackable, like a lead or a sale or a phone call or an appointment. For example, direct response marketing could be to run a Facebook ad and expect to generate a lead, to send out an email and measure the number of conversions you get, or to promote a video and then track how many people signed up for a free trial.

All of these are direct response because you're expecting something, ideally immediately, and you're able to track and measure it. This in turn allows you to know what worked and what didn't. So in the future, you can do more of what worked, less of what didn't.

Brand awareness marketing, on the other hand, is essentially more focused on longer term and less trackable objectives, like building trust and authority and getting your brand name out there and into the market. With direct response, we're measuring things like leads and sales and conversions. With brand awareness, we're trying to measure much trickier things like trust and authority, awareness and goodwill.

It's doable, but it's a lot harder to quantify and to measure because they're a lot more intangible. To build a long-term, scalable, sustainable and profitable business, well, you do need a pretty decent mix of both direct response marketing and brand awareness marketing. But you've gotta make sure that you don't make one of the biggest mistakes in all of marketing, which is running brand awareness marketing, but expecting direct response results.

That's a recipe for disaster, failure, all kinds of other bad things, and is one of the biggest reasons that so many people claim their marketing just isn't working. It's because they're using the wrong tool for the job, like following a recipe to bake a cake and then getting really frustrated when it comes out looking like muffins or bread or anything that isn't cake. I clearly do a lot of baking.

This is why it's incredibly important that you use the right recipe, or in other words, the right strategy for the job. All right, another incredibly important thing you need to know about digital marketing is the difference between search and discovery marketing. When it comes to search versus discovery marketing, the single most important word that you need to know is intent.

Basically, what's the intent or what's the reason that someone is using a specific platform when they first log in in the morning or afternoon or night? Let's start with search. And here we're talking about platforms like Google and YouTube or any other platform that has search baked into its core.

When someone logs onto Google, for example, they have intent. They're there for a specific reason, usually to find an answer or a solution to a problem. They're there to do something or buy something or learn something or take some kind of action.

So this is where you, as a marketer, have an opportunity to show up in front of them by answering their question or giving them the solution to whatever problem it is that they're trying to solve. Some strategies here to show up in search are using SEO or search engine optimization, as well as Google Ads, which is pay-per-click advertising. Discovery marketing, on the other hand, applies to platforms like Facebook and Instagram and even YouTube to a certain extent.

A user may have intent, but they're usually there for more casual browsing. After all, unlike with a search platform like Google, nobody really logs onto Facebook in the morning with a credit card in hand looking to buy something. This is why if you're doing search marketing, well, you can afford to be direct.

A potential customer is looking for something. You have the answer, so you can just give it to them. With discovery marketing, though, you've got to be a little more creative and a little more entertaining.

You've got to get their attention and then keep it, kind of wake them up to whatever problem it is that they're currently experiencing that your business can help solve for them. After all, only a few short moments ago, they were just casually swiping through their feed, and now you're here telling them about this thing you've got and why they should care, pay attention to it. Now, both search marketing and discovery marketing are both incredibly important parts to building a sustainable and scalable business.

But just like with direct response marketing and brand awareness marketing, you want to make sure that you're using the right tool for the right job in the right place at the right time. Okay, next I've got something very important to share with you, and it's something that rarely gets talked about when it comes to marketing advice. And that is the difference between marketing products and marketing services.

Here's the deal. Most of the marketing information out there, whether we're talking about textbooks or courses or even trainings, they're usually geared towards the marketing of products. A product being something tangible, that you can hold, that you can see, that you can touch and that you can taste.

A service on the other hand is intangible. You can't hold it, you can't touch it, you can't see it, you can't taste it. Plus with services, you often need to pay in advance, which requires a whole new level of trust.

This is why if you're marketing a service-based business and you try to market like a product-based business, well, you're gonna be pretty disappointed. Now, when it comes to marketing products, you have the advantage of being able to show and explain and walk through the features of how something actually works, how it looks. So you wanna show it in action, show the features, show the benefits that the features are going to deliver and show the story behind it, everything like that.

Let me give you an example. Let's say that I'm trying to sell this pen. Well, the fact that this pen has a lid, that's a feature.

The fact that this lid will help prevent me from getting ink all over myself if I drop it, that's a benefit. But you can take it further and you probably should. For example, this pen lid also has this handy dandy clip, which means that I can also attach it to my papers or my notebook, maybe even put it in my pocket if I'm trying to sport that avant-garde nerdy look.

Another feature of this pen lid is the nifty fact that it has holes in the very top of it, which, fun fact, are actually there to avoid or prevent suffocation just in case someone swallows it. After all, chewing on pen lids is an age-old, albeit highly unsanitary practice, but sometimes you just get hungry. Yeah, I'll have the pen, please.

Services, on the other hand, well, they don't have any of those advantages. So the main thing when you're promoting or marketing services is that you wanna highlight the end result, the end state, the benefits, the outcome, the results that someone's going to get after doing business with you. In fact, when it comes to marketing services, I'd even go so far as to say that it's all about the end state, the benefits, and the result that someone gets.

And you can show this by first highlighting the present state that someone is in by focusing on the pains or problems or fears or frustrations that they're currently experiencing, and then paint the picture of just how much better things will be after they've done business with you. All right, here's the deal. As you've already seen, there is a ton of stuff that makes up what we call digital marketing, which means there's almost an overwhelming amount of things you can do, like just way, way too many things.

So it's important to understand that you can't and don't have to do it all, especially when you're first getting started. But you should be aware of what options are out there so you can figure out what would work best for you. And this is why I love the concept of the T-shaped marketer.

So let me walk you through that now. A T-shaped marketer is someone with a broad, general understanding on a lot of things, and then a very narrow, focused, and expert level understanding on just a few things. See, digital marketing is made up of a ton of different subcategories like content, SEO, strategy, public relations, email, design, development, advertising, social media, branding, video, and the list goes on and on.

This is why I'm so big on strategy and why the best place to start learning and developing your skills as a marketer isn't on tactics and tools like mastering Instagram Reels or SEO optimizing a website or learning how to create carousel posts, but rather on the basics of marketing, the proven fundamentals and principles that have stood the test of time and are going to be just as relevant and useful next year as they were 10, 20, even 100 years ago. Things like segmentation, which is about dividing or segmenting your market into different segments that have similar characteristics like age, gender, where they live, or what kinds of things they're into. Targeting, which is finding out how to get your message and offer directly in front of these people.

And positioning and differentiation, which is about how to stand out from the competition and be seen as a leader, authority, and the best and maybe even only option available. The good news about things like this is that even if you've never heard of them before, there is a ton of information available, both for free online, like right here on my YouTube channel, where I've got over 700 videos on marketing. So if you haven't subscribed to the channel yet, now might be a good time to do that, but you can also learn faster through paid courses and coaching and community like you get in Marketing Insiders.

So if you're looking for a faster and more streamlined way to quickly level up your skills, I'll link that up in the descriptions below if you're interested. It's important to remember that we all start somewhere, but you do have to get started and then keep going to continually upgrade your skills. So the best thing to do here is start with your interests.

Are you more creative or analytical? Do you like video, audio, or text? Are there certain businesses or industries that you have an interest in?

What about social media? Is there a platform or channel that you find more interesting and more appealing than others? The beauty of digital marketing is that there really is something here for you, no matter what kind of person you are or what kind of business market or industry you're in.

If you're more analytical, you could look into web or app development, SEO, or even analytics and conversion rate optimization. If you're more creative, you could look to create content, either video, audio, or text, and then even help scheduling and posting it to social media. If you're a people person, you could focus on community development and increasing engagement and the brand's social profiles.

Or if you're a mix of everything that I've just talked about, you could start putting the pieces together into a truly differentiated marketing strategy. And that leads me to this diagram right here that I call your marketing sweet spot. Your marketing sweet spot is where your skills, your interests, and market demand all overlap.

Your interests will likely lead you to developing skills, and then you can match those skills up with what the market is looking for and willing to pay you for. The beauty of this is that it allows you to carve out your own unique and profitable path as your marketing sweet spot is likely very different than mine. So you're a different person with different skills and interests and experiences.

And then you can take all of that and make it even more effective and more profitable and a whole lot more fun too, just by stacking that on top of the marketing strategies that I'm gonna walk you through in this video right here that are going to allow you to get even better results, make even more sales, and give you the power to grow any business. So make sure to tap or click that now, and I'll see you in there in just a second.