Digital Marketing strategy: overview for beginners

Digital Marketing is a mix of single elements and strategies that take into consideration every aspect of online marketing, such as SEO, SEM, social media, etc. It is important because this activity goes hand in hand with traditional sales strategies.

Some of the main advantages that you can get with a good Digital Marketing strategy are:

• Global reach 
• Lower costs 
• Trackable and measurable results
• Personalisation 
• Improved conversion rates 

Unlike traditional marketing, this strategy allows you to promote online by applying the principles of advertising communication and unconventional marketing. In fact, this discipline allows continuous improvements and optimizations and widely measurable results.

To learn more about Digital Marketing strategy, we suggest you have a quick look on some resources provided by Google at this link. Here, you will find the basics of online marketing with a focus on the following 3 topics:

• What is internet marketing?
• Why is online marketing important?
• Types of online marketing strategies.

In this article, instead, we will make an overview on Digital Marketing and we will suggest one of the best free courses online on this topic. Are you curious? Keep reading!

What to consider when designing a business digital marketing strategy

Digital Marketing is a fundamental part of a marketing strategy for each business. For this reason, we would like to introduce you to this topic with a few basics.

Before we start, we want also to let you know that there are free resources available on this theme on the web and we would like you to discover the ones provided by Google in the “Google Workspace Learning Center”. Here, in “The Digital Garage”, you will find some experts that share valuable contents for everybody.

You can also give a look at this link, where you will find “9 Google Workspace tips for digital marketing” and much more. The fundamental tips that you will find out are the following ones:

• Make yourself known in your email
• Run promotional email campaigns more efficiently
• Organize winning campaigns
• Appear in Search results and get noticed locally
• Reach new audience with effective ads
• Make your website mobile-friendly
• Showcase new products
• Collect product feedback from customers
• Produce and share quality creative assets with your marketing agency

As we already said, Digital marketing is not negligible today in your strategy, but as you can imagine, it needs to be well integrated in the overall picture of the strategy for your business. So, there are some things that must be already clear before you start doing it, such as the goals that you want to achieve with your strategy step by step and how digital marketing can support you to achieve these goals.

First, you must have really cleared your mission, vision and values and ensure that your full strategy is coherent with them. If you have already designed your buyer personas into details and their customer journey with all the necessary touchpoints, then you need to set the action to put in place to capture their interests and make conversions. There are some activities that you must consider and use in your digital marketing strategy in order to achieve these results. Below, we list some of them as examples:

• Create your Brand Identity and Logo 
• Create your Storytelling 
• Build your Website 
• Create your SEO strategy and consider using SEM
• Open your Social media profiles
• Implement a Content marketing strategy 
• Consider using Video marketing 
• Put in place your Copywriting activity 
• Use Email marketing 
• Consider using Affiliate marketing 
• Consider using Influencer marketing
• Consider using Digital PR

Now that you have clear which actions and which digital marketing strategy you can include in your overall business strategy, we want to give you some valuable tips for beginners to start building and improving your skills. Keep reading!

Improve your skills on Digital Marketing with free courses

To improve your skills on Digital Marketing, there are different courses online on this topic, but in this article we would like to focus on the one offered for free by Google, called “Fundamentals of Digital Marketing”, that you can find on the platform “Google Digital Garage”.

“Fundamentals of Digital Marketing” is a complete Google’s free course. It was thought for beginners that want to learn more on the topic of Digital Marketing.

The course was accredited by the Advertising Bureau Europe and The Open University and is divided into 26 modules, where you will also find exercises and real-world examples. At the end of the course, after passing all the tests at the end of each module and at the end of the whole course, you will obtain a certificate.

As we anticipated, the course is free and can be attended by anyone, even those who have no knowledge in this field. However, it is particularly useful for startup and company founders that want to bring their business online. In fact, you will learn about other companies that succeeded in this challenge.

What you will learn:

• Move a business to the online world
• Make it easy for users to find an activity on the web 
• Reach more users locally, on social media or on mobile devices
• Reach more customers with advertising 
• Monitor and measure web traffic 
• Selling products or services online 
• Expand a business globally 

This course will also provide you with all the basic skills to get started, such as:

• Analytics and data insights
• Business strategy
• Content marketing
• Display advertising
• E-commerce
• Email marketing
• Local marketing
• Mobile marketing
• SEO
• SEM
• Social media marketing
• Video marketing 
• Web optimisation

Conclusions on Digital Marketing Strategy overview for beginners

Digital marketing is a very wide topic, as it includes so many different strategies that can be applied online. For this reason, we just gave you some information to get started and understand what is Digital Marketing and what it includes.

However, we also recommended the free course offered by Google, which will give you a detailed preparation on this topic and will allow startup and company founders to understand which strategy suits them best.

Are you ready to start learning more on this wonderful digital world? You will also find many resources on our website, such as our white papers and our articles on the blog.  

If you want to deepen some topics related to the wide theme of digital marketing, we recommend: International Marketing: tips for beginners