Digital marketing is a powerful tool to meet your audience where they are: on their computers, tablets, and smartphones. This comprehensive guide covers the top tactics every modern marketer needs to succeed in digital marketing.

Unlike other guides that present hype about the latest flashy tactics, this resource focuses on the core disciplines of digital marketing. This will help you build or refine your own strategy without the false starts and missteps that often come along with it.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is one of the most important aspects of digital marketing. It helps you understand what search terms your potential customers are using, and it allows you to optimize your content to match their needs. Moreover, it helps you gain organic traffic from search engines.

During the research phase, you should focus on finding keywords that make sense for your business and have good search volume. This will ensure that your content is visible to the people who are most likely to need it.

You can use free tools like Google Keyword Planner or paid ones such as Ahrefs, Semrush, Wordtracker, and Ubersuggest to find keywords. These tools will give you a list of related keyword ideas based on the seed term you input. You can also use a tool such as Keyword Gap to compare your competitors’ keywords with yours. This will help you identify keywords that are relevant to your niche but aren’t being targeted by your competition.

You should do keyword research at the beginning of your content strategy creation process, and you should re-evaluate it every few months to find new opportunities. The goal is to produce highly-targeted content that makes it easier for your website or blog to rank for its target keywords. This will increase the amount of organic traffic your site receives, and it can also lead to conversions. This will also help you grow your audience and establish a strong brand image.

Competitor Analysis

Like sports teams study their opponents to learn strengths and weaknesses, businesses should use digital competitor analysis to improve their marketing strategies. This can help them boost their own search engine optimization (SEO) efforts by learning how to best target specific audiences and keywords. It can also uncover new areas of opportunity by discovering which marketing tactics are working for their competitors.

There are many ways to conduct a competitive analysis, and it’s important to choose one that suits your business needs. For example, you can use an all-in-one toolkit that offers SEO, PPC, content marketing, and social media analytics. This toolkit, SEMrush, includes more than 30 tools that allow you to analyze 3.7 billion keywords and 4 trillion backlinks.

To conduct a competitive analysis, you’ll first need to compile a list of competitors. This should include both direct and indirect competitors. Direct competitors sell similar products or services as you and may be competing for the same audience. Indirect competitors, on the other hand, may not compete directly but still compete for customers in their respective markets.

Once you have your list, you’ll need to examine each competitor’s website and SEO structure. This includes evaluating their URLs, title tags, meta descriptions, site speed, mobile-friendliness, and keyword usage. You’ll also want to look at their product and service offerings, pricing, brand awareness, customer care best practices, company culture, distribution, and other details that are relevant to your business.

Content Creation

Content creation is a huge component of digital marketing. It involves creating content for your website, blog, social media, and email campaigns. Content should add value for your audience and be relevant to your business goals. It should also be consistent so that your brand stays top of mind with your customers.

The first step in the content creation process is research. This can include keyword research, competitor analysis, and interviews with subject matter experts. Once you have your research, you can start brainstorming content ideas. The key is to generate creative content ideas that are unique and will engage your audience.

Once you have your content ideas, it’s time to create the content. The best way to do this is by using a project management tool like StoryChief, which can help you manage the entire content creation process, including planning, executing, reviewing, and publishing. It can also help you prioritize organic search and bring all of your content collaboration under one roof.

Creating consistent content is vital for your digital marketing strategy. If you can’t consistently produce high-quality content, your target audience will lose trust in your brand. In addition, fresh content sends signals to search engines that your site is active and useful.

Link Building

In digital marketing, link building refers to the process of acquiring hyperlinks (also known as backlinks) from other websites to your own. This helps search engines understand how popular and relevant your website is to certain keywords. The more quality backlinks you have, the higher your website will rank on search engine results pages.

When it comes to link building, the best way to increase your website’s visibility is by promoting your content on other authoritative websites. However, it’s important to note that link building should be an ongoing activity instead of a singular event.

Some examples of this include creating content in your industry, submitting your website to online directories, and participating in local events or causes. Another great strategy is to create guest blogs on other high-quality websites in your industry. This can help you build links and generate traffic, as well as improve your brand awareness.

There are many tools that can help you with your link building efforts. For example, Semrush is one of the most popular SEO tools, and it offers a wide range of features such as keyword research, site audits, and backlink management. Other tools that can help you with your link building include Buzzsumo, Linkody, and Ninja Outreach. These tools can help you find high-quality link opportunities, but they can also be time-consuming to use. Therefore, it’s important to find the right tool for your needs and goals.

Social Media Marketing

Digital marketing is a powerful tool that allows businesses to reach their audiences where they are—on their digital devices. It can be used to create brand awareness, drive traffic to the business website, and generate leads. This comprehensive how-to guide covers all of the essentials for successful digital marketing, including an overview of the practice, the tools needed for success, and top tips to create a strong strategy.

This eBook is perfect for business owners, marketing professionals, students, or anyone who wants to learn how to use digital marketing to grow their businesses and achieve their goals. It doesn’t present the latest flashy tactics, but instead focuses on the foundational disciplines of digital marketing and how they can be applied to achieve real business results.

One of the most important aspects of digital marketing is understanding your audience. This eBook will walk you through the process of identifying your target audience and creating buyer personas so that you can deliver the right message at the right time to maximize your effectiveness.

Another critical aspect of digital marketing is leveraging social media to your advantage. This eBook will cover everything from how to set up your social media accounts to how to use platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Tik Tok to promote your business and drive traffic to your website. It will also discuss how to use platforms like Hootsuite and Hotjar to help you analyze your audience’s behaviour and improve your marketing campaigns.

Conversion Rate Optimization

The goal of conversion rate optimization (CRO) is to increase the percentage of website visitors who take a desired action, such as making a purchase or subscribing to a newsletter. This can be accomplished through web analytics, A/B testing, and other tools.

The key to effective CRO is understanding what drives your target audience to act. This can be done through web analytics and other audience research, as well as by analyzing data from your own site. Using this information, you can improve the user experience and make your website more attractive to potential customers.

For example, you might decide to add a video to your homepage to improve conversions. Or you might experiment with changing the color of your call-to-action button, adding copy that emphasizes trustworthiness, or altering a page’s layout. By tracking the results of each change, you can see which elements have the greatest impact on your conversion rates and continue to refine them.

In addition to these techniques, a good CRO strategy includes ensuring that any forms on your site are easy to fill out and are designed with clean aesthetics. You should also optimize your load times, as a slow site can negatively affect your conversions. And finally, a good CRO strategy requires an intimate knowledge of your target audience. This can be achieved through data and tools such as FullStory, HubSpot’s free-to-use form builder that allows you to modify exit intent forms without using any code and integrates with your CRM.