Success in digital marketing is won is small steps. Whatever your plans for success in digital marketing, you need a strategy you can stick to and learn well.
Jumping from one strategy to another, looking for a “quick win”, is a sure way to lose momentum and become discouraged. Learn one strategy well before moving on to another one.
Success In Digital Marketing
There are of course fast digital marketing strategies and slow ones. Paid marketing is no doubt a much faster strategy than organic content creation, for example.
With a Google Adwords campaign running, you can see traffic increase in a matter of hours, once your ads are approved. Content marketing by comparison will take weeks or months to get the same traction you see instantly with paid advertising. Plus, with content marketing you’ll need to put in the time first and create the content.
Blogging, depending on your topic, can take years to get traction with. If your topic is competitive, it’ll be considerably more difficult, too, and take much longer.
Whether you’re a pay per click marketer, or a content marketer will depend on your budget, business model and timeframe. If you want a business built up fast, you’ll probably want to use at least some paid marketing. But if you have the time, and are patient, you can focus on content marketing if paid marketing strategies don’t work for you.
Success In Digital Marketing
Knowing which direction you want to go with your digital marketing strategy is an important starting point. Trying “a bit of this and a bit of that” doesn’t get you very far, especially with content marketing. You’ll need a lot of content in order to see an increase in your website traffic, leads and sales. This takes time and patience.
But if you have a good idea of what your content is going to be about, and know your topic, content marketing can be a great long term strategy. Once you start getting traction, it’s free traffic too! But expect to work at it for a while, and to keep going even when there’s no visible results for some time.
Digital Marketing – Paid Marketing
With paid marketing you can get traction very quickly. But you can also easily spend money which you don’t get back in sales too. So initially, it’s worth starting with a small daily budget and building up from there. Test and measure your advertising and get used to the platform and tracking your results before increasing the budget and scaling up.
If you don’t have the time to create content, or it’s not your “bag”, paid marketing is the way to go. With Google Adwords, you can target specific keyword searches which relate to your business and send people directly to your website. You can set a small daily budget initially so you can learn the platform.
Many business owners think Adwords is a waste of money. But that’s because they haven’t understood how powerful it really is. They (over) spend too soon, don’t test, and see nothing for their efforts. But if done correctly, you should test and measure all your traffic which comes from your adverts. This way, you’ll know which campaigns are working and which to shut off.
A good way to use Adwords is to start off with you main keywords as your search queries. That way, when someone types into Google keywords relating to your business, your advert shows up. But it’s also worth limiting the searches to your specific location and adding negative keywords too.
Over time, you’ll be able to see which search terms triggered your advert and limit those which are irrelevant. Without these checks and balances, Google will happily take your money and show your advert to people outside of your business location, or with search terms which aren’t relevant to your business.
As you get better with paid marketing, you’ll spend less for traffic and earn more in sales.
Get Help
If you’re looking for success in digital marketing enlist the help of the professionals.
Back in 2014 I found an online marketing mentorship program which helped me build an online business and build up my existing business – a kung fu school.
If you want to build an online business from scratch, or build your own business through learning marketing, you can access a free video series by clicking on the image below. You’ll meet one of my personal mentors Stuart Ross, who’ll explain how you can join the community.
See also digital marketing mentors and online marketing success.