Email marketing is basically the use of email to promote products or services while developing relationships with potential customers or clients. It is essentially direct mail done electronically instead of through the postal service. Learn about the perks of email marketing, methods do it right, and how it compares to some other forms of marketing. Keep reading for more information.

Did you know there are 3x more email accounts than Facebook & Twitter accounts combined? Or that you are 6x more likely to get a click-through from email than on Twitter?

As a savvy marketer, you’ve likely seen the reports that show email has the highest ROI of any marketing channel available. We bet you’re keen to start using email to drive sales and revenue for your business.

How Email Marketing Works

It’s easy to set up and track an email marketing campaign, which makes it accessible for small businesses.

You can add a newsletter sign-up option to your website, for instance. As people sign up, you can send newsletters to a growing audience. You can also direct customers to the newsletter from your social media profiles.

A regular newsletter is a simple and effective way to send updates about your company, upcoming events, and special offers.

Email software also makes it easy to schedule automated promotional emails for customers who haven’t purchased recently.

Email marketing allows you to target particular groups of customers or even specific individuals. Offering individual customers special birthday deals on merchandise or services is one way to do this.

A restaurant, for instance, might send an email to customers on their birthdays offering 50% off an entree.

This kind of personalization helps a business develop and maintain a relationship with a customer—and that can lead to increased sales and customer loyalty.

Basics and Beginner Strategies in Email Marketing

From conversations with small businesses, we’ve learned that figuring out how to get started with email marketing is often the hardest part. How exactly do I get started? What are the steps I need to take? How do I build a list? Here we go

• Choose An Email Marketing Service Provider

If you’re serious about email marketing, you need to work with an email marketing service provider.

Working with a provider is the only way your business can leverage email marketing automation to effectively deliver messages to large groups of contacts or subscribers.

You’ll also benefit from professional email templates, tools to help you grow and manage your email list, and tracking features that show you who is opening and engaging with your campaigns and messages.

• Gather Contacts For Your Email Marketing List

Most businesses will have some existing contacts to start an email list. Think of the customers and people you already have a relationship with.

Maybe it’s the business contacts you email with on a regular basis; maybe you just start with a few supportive friends and family members.

Even if you’re building an email list completely from scratch, don’t get discouraged.

Start by putting a paper sign-up sheet near your register, adding an online sign-up form to your website, and encouraging your social media followers and loyal customers to sign up.

• Add Your Contacts Into Your Email Marketing Account

Whatever you do, don’t be tempted to purchase an email list.

Email marketing is all about building and nurturing relationships; connecting with a smaller list of quality contacts will be more impactful than blasting out messages to contacts that don’t even know your business.

• Practice Writing Persuasive Messages.

This tends to be one of the scariest steps for business owners. I get it — writer’s block happens to the best of us.

What usually snaps me out of it is pretending I’m having a face-to-face conversation with someone and writing down exactly what I’d like to say to them.

It also helps to follow a repeatable process and break your message down into three important sections:

What are you offering? — Headline

How will it help the reader? — Message body

What should they do next? — Call to action

• Track your results

Don’t be deceived — email marketing doesn’t end with a send. You will want to track your open rate, click-through rate, unsubscribe rates, etc., and work to improve over time.

If you want to see real results from your email marketing, you need a strong understanding of how each email performs so you can make improvements and learn more about your customers and subscribers.

Spending a few minutes in your email reports will tell you valuable information like who opened your email, who clicked on specific links, and what information was the most interesting to your readers.

While it’s important to know how engaging your campaign messages are, make sure you’re tracking actions that happen beyond your emails.

How many clicks to your donation page are translating into real donations? What is the total amount of funds raised from a single email?

Studies by marketing analysts with the company Litmus have consistently found that just under half of all emails are opened on mobile devices.

That means, if your email doesn’t display correctly on mobile platforms, half of your audience is going to think you don’t know how to properly craft an email.

We hope this was useful to You. Do you have questions about the subject? Don’t hesitate to reach out and ask us. Kindly share and subscribe to our content.

Social Media Influencers have become sure client and customer magnets. There are more than 500,000 social media influencers on Instagram alone. That means you have many potential opportunities for influencer collaboration. It also means you have to put in the work to find the right influencer. Despite its apparent advantages, influencer marketing is a wasted investment if you are not working with the right ones.  Keep reading for more details.

Marketers’ confidence in their ability to find the right social media influencers vary widely by country. In China, 81% of marketing professionals are confident they can find impactful social media influencers. In the United States, only 39% of marketers feel the same way.

While it’s tempting to use single-metric definitions like unique visitors or Twitter followers as a measure of influence, it’s important to look deeper.

The answer to the question “how influential is someone online?” is “it depends.” Here are things to look for when identifying online influencers for your brand.

• Relevance
• Reach
• Resonance

Relevance Of The Influencer

Just because a blogger posts recipes don’t necessarily mean they are a match for an organic brand, and a tech-savvy sports fan doesn’t make them a guaranteed match for your gaming app.

Are you looking for budget travelers, fashionistas, permissive moms, or coffee drinkers? Is profanity or provocativeness part of your brand personality? These are important things to look for in the content and audience of an influencer and are far more important than traffic.

Before you look at unique visitors and other static metrics, it’s important to look at how aligned a blogger’s content is with your messaging. Read through that blogger’s archived posts to get a sense of what kind of consumer they are.

A relevant influencer shares content relevant to your business and industry. They need to have an audience that aligns with their target market.

For example, Intrepid Travel worked with a group of vegan influencers to launch its new vegan tours. The influencers’ had a highly relevant audience that the company gained access to in an engaging and authentic way.

Erin Ireland is a passionate vegan advocate. Her Instagram post about how the tour opened up travel for her in India as a vegan gained more than 5,700 likes.

Reach Of The Influencer

While not the most important metric, reach is certainly a valid consideration. However, marketers should resist the urge to only look at unique visitors as a measure of reach. Traffic and followers are only meaningful to the extent that the influencer is reaching your brand’s target audience.

For instance, if you are a hotel chain or car seat manufacturer, a travel blogger with a small reach is more influential than a food blogger with 100,000 unique monthly visitors.

It is also important to consider what other social platforms your customers visit. If you are a food or fashion brand, someone with a large following on Pinterest or Instagram might be more valuable than someone on Facebook with a large fan base.

For many verticals, there is a direct correlation between how often blogger post and their traffic and the rate of return visitors. As with marketing any website, it often takes multiple exposures to get a visitor to click and check out your site, and you want to make sure they come back.

Social Media Influencer Resonance

This is the potential level of engagement social media influencers can create with an audience relevant to your brand.

This may sound counter-intuitive, but bloggers who have a smaller ratio of sponsored content tend to be more trusted and appear more authentic.

Personal stories that include genuine use or mention of a product, service, or brand are more trusted than straight product reviews.

Compelling, engaging stories also tend to get more shares and comments than deals and product reviews.

While it’s tempting to ask publishers to write a nice long review of your product (which readers don’t really pay much attention to), a health brand could engage social media influencers to write a post about things on their bucket list and how that list is motivation to stay healthy and live a long, active life.

That type of content is highly engaging for readers, authentic for the blogger, and connects that health brand sponsor to a very sincere health-related conversation among a large audience.

Whatever your niche, you can engage with bloggers to create the quality, authentic content their audience expects while associating your brand with that content.

And remember that influencers are more than just bloggers—they include those with loyal audiences on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Vine, and other social networks.

Miscellaneous Ways To Influence

As you map out your influencer marketing plans, also consider what type of campaign will best help you connect with the type of social media influencers you want to work with.

Different types of influencer campaigns include:

Gifting: giving influencers gifts in exchange for mentions, posts, etc.

Guest posting: getting an influencer to allow you to write for their blog

Sponsored content: paying an influencer to share your content or create content that is tied to your brand

Contests and giveaways: using contests as an incentive to get influencers to mention your brand or share your content

Influencer takeover: letting an influencer take over your social media account for a set amount of time

Affiliates: sharing affiliate codes with influencers so that they earn money each time someone that came through their funnel purchases from your brand

Discount codes: allowing influencers to give discount codes for your offerings to their fans and followers

Brand ambassadors: partnering with an influencer who regularly promotes your brand in exchange for discounts and perks from your brand

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Influencer marketing is now an established form of online marketing. It has been a buzzword for a while now, and the mainstream media regularly refers to it. Yet, there are still people who don’t really understand what influencer marketing is all about. Indeed, some people come across the phrase for the first time and instantly ponder, “What is influencer marketing?” Read for more details.

A decade ago, the influencer marketing arena was limited only to celebrities and a few dedicated bloggers. Now, it seems like we’ve seen social media influencers rise, saturate the market, and even get caught up in fraud.

If you’ve started research on influencer marketing before, you may have found conflicting information, with recommendations that range from you should absolutely be using social influencers or that they’re not necessary for growth.

Influencer marketing strategies are more difficult to navigate than ever as a brand, but we’re here with a guide to making sense of it all.

What Is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing is a form of collaboration. A business collaborates with an influential person to promote something. It could be a product, service, or campaign.

Celebrity endorsements were the original form of influencer marketing.

But in today’s digital world, social content creators with niche audiences can often offer more value to brands.

These people have dedicated and engaged groups of followers on social media. They are known simply as “social media influencers.”

More than two-thirds of North American retailers use some form of influencer marketing. And almost half of US and UK digital marketers spend at least 10% of their marketing communication budget on influencer marketing.

Who/What are Influencers?

Influencer Marketing is a hybrid of old and new marketing tools. It takes the idea of celebrity endorsement and places it into a modern-day content-driven marketing campaign.

The main differentiator in the case of influencer marketing is that the results of the campaign are collaborations between brands and influencers.

But influencer marketing doesn’t just involve celebrities. Instead, it revolves around influencers, many of whom would never consider themselves famous in an offline setting.

In our article, What is an Influencer we defined an influencer as being someone who has:

the power to affect the purchasing decisions of others because of his or her authority, knowledge, position, or relationship with his or her audience.

a following in a distinct niche, with whom he or she actively engages. The size of the following depends on the size of his/her topic of the niche.

One of the biggest mistakes that traditional media makes is a failure to see the difference between celebrities and online influencers.

It is also important to realize that it is the influencers who have built a keen and enthusiastic audience. It is not accidental that these people follow influencers, not the brand.

In reality, the audience doesn’t care less about your brand. They only care about the opinions of the influencers.

Don’t try and foist rules and business practices onto an influencer. The audience is theirs, and they can simply walk away, taking their followers with them.

The Role of Social Media Influencers?

Quite simply, an influencer is someone who can influence others.

A social media influencer is someone who wields that influence through social media. The form of influence can vary and no two influencers are the same.

The right influencer can reach your target audience, build trust, and drive engagement. They create original, engaging content. They won’t be keen to follow a template advertising style provided by your brand.

So, it’s critical to work only with social media influencers whose vision aligns with your own.

Influencers can have millions of followers. Perhaps the world’s best-known influencer is Kendall Jenner. She has 108 million followers on Instagram and regularly gets millions of likes on her branded posts.

How To Find The Right Social Media Influencer

There are more than 500,000 active influencers on Instagram alone. That means you have many potential opportunities for influencer collaboration. It also means you have to put in the work to find the right influencer.

Marketers’ confidence in their ability to find the right influencer varies widely by country. In China, 81% of marketing professionals are confident they can find impactful influencers. In the United States, only 39% of marketers feel the same way.

Consider the three Rs of influence

Influence is made up of three components:

• Relevance
• Reach
• Resonance

Relevance

A relevant influencer shares content relevant to your business and industry. They need to have an audience that aligns with your target market.

For example, Intrepid Travel worked with a group of vegan influencers to launch its new vegan tours. The influencers’ had a highly relevant audience that the company gained access to in an engaging and authentic way.

Erin Ireland is a passionate vegan advocate. Her Instagram post about how the tour opened up travel for her in India as a vegan gained more than 5,700 likes.

Reach

Reach is the number of people you could potentially reach through the influencer’s follower base.

Resonance

This is the potential level of engagement the influencer can create with an audience relevant to your brand.

Bigger isn’t always better. A huge follower count is meaningless if those followers aren’t interested in your offer. And a smaller follower count can be very powerful if it’s a niche area. Niche influencers can have very dedicated and engaged followers.

‘Tapinfluence’ found that engagement rates are often higher for “micro-influencers.” Micro-influencers have 5,000 to 25,000 followers. Thirty percent of North American retailers now work with micro-influencers.

The latest development is the emergence of nano-influencers. These influencers can have as few as 1,000 followers, but their word is gold to their dedicated fans.

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Both marketers and consumers begin their web services on mobile marketing platforms and devices. Digital marketers, in particular, are excited to run mobile campaigns, because they know that mobile users are motivated buyers. According to Salesforce, “68% of companies have integrated mobile marketing into their overall marketing strategy.” Let’s go into the details.

What is Mobile Marketing?

Are you reading this post from a mobile device? I’m certain, considering that 80% of internet users own a smartphone.

Mobile marketing is a multi-channel, digital marketing strategy aimed at reaching a target audience on their smartphones, tablets, and/or other mobile devices, via websites, email, SMS and MMS, social media, and apps.

Mobile marketing is a way to promote products or services through mobile devices. With this strategy, target consumers access location and time-sensitive customized content that promotes certain products, services, or ideas.

Types of Mobile Marketing

There is a variety of mobile marketing techniques to try for a business. Factors like your budget, specific industry, and customer segment determine the success of the strategy. That said, below are some mobile marketing options:

• Mobile app marketing. Mobile apps allow businesses to include ads in specific mobile application designs. Facebook is an excellent example of ads in an app.
• In-game advertisements. This approach refers to all advertisements on mobile devices that pop up when certain games are opened or in progress. These ads can appear as full-image ads, banner pop-ups, or video ads that show up during loading screens.
• Quick-response barcode (QR codes). These barcodes are scanned using the camera of a phone, and then the customers are redirected to the linked site from where they can see more information regarding a particular brand.
• Mobile banner ads. These banners are pretty much the same as the ones on the desktop, only that they are adequately smaller to fit on the screens of mobile devices.
• Proximity or Bluetooth marketing. With this approach, consumers get location-specific ads enabled from the Bluetooth on their devices.
• Voice marketing. This is when businesses use computer-produced and automated calls to promote their goods or services. It is up to the customer to decide whether to hang up or listen to the phone call.
• SMS marketing. This method of mobile marketing is, by far, the most common. Marketers use this medium to reach out to customers with offers and other relevant information via their mobile gadgets.

Why Is Mobile Marketing Important?

Mobile users spend 89% of their time on mobile apps, making mobile devices dominate communication.

The overall view and amount of content on mobile devices are simplified due to their smaller size. As mobile devices are smaller and lighter than computers, users can easily carry them everywhere and make purchases at any time they want.

Mobile hastens the time to purchase by 20 percent.

Compared to a year ago, 50 percent of smartphone users expect to buy something immediately while using their devices.

Ninety-one percent of smartphone users plan purchases or buy individual items after seeing relevant ads.

2/3 of customers who use smartphones are likely to purchase from businesses that have apps or mobile websites with content customized to their location.

Forty percent of online transactions occur on mobile devices.

Benefits of Mobile Marketing

Compared to other forms of marketing, mobile marketing has several significant benefits.

Text messaging is easy and comparatively cheap. If we take traditional advertising methods such as TV ads or printing ads into account, SMS is obviously cheaper. Like ad formats such as PPC or email marketing campaigns, text messages are pretty easy to send and they require no technical skills.

• SMS has a high CTR. Since people consider communicating via their mobile devices more private than email, for example, they check their phones more often and never ignore messages. Users only share their phone numbers with their favorite companies, so they are already waiting for your promotions.
• Especially useful for local businesses. Local companies can easily tell their loyal customers about hot deals, the latest arrivals, and special offers via SMS. Clients won’t miss this chance to drop in to check out your offers.

Here Are Some Basic Guides

• Research your target customers. A marketer should conduct thorough research on their consumer demographic to gather useful information such as what they like, the sites they visit, the apps they use, and so forth. This information enables the marketer to create effective ads.

• Leverage opportunities on social media. To effectively push a brand, marketers should create great ads that appeal to large numbers of social media users.
• Set goals. Measuring the results and progress of a particular mobile marketing strategy is only possible if the purposes of the campaign are set beforehand.
• Create mobile-friendly campaigns. Since the aim is to push a brand via mobile devices, it makes sense to create content, apps, or websites that are fit for mobile usage.
• Perform location-based marketing. One of the most effective ways of minimizing the bounce rate is by providing ads that are relevant to the target audience. Use tools such as Google Trends, GPS, and apps like Google Local inventory to send out campaigns that resonate with the target demographic.
• Consider the unique features of mobile devices. Create ads that can be manipulated by different mobile device features to make the user’s experience quite memorable.

For instance, rather than creating video ads that cannot be paused, one can put up an advertisement that can be paused, rewound, forwarded, and so forth to enable customers to get a clearer picture regarding a product.

Offer incentives. Providing some rewards or offers will encourage prospective customers to take action.

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I bet that when you hear “content marketing,” you think about blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and viral YouTube videos. But content marketing has been around far longer than the Internet. Because content marketing is all about storytelling, and humans have told stories for as long as they could speak. Our attention will always go to those who tell great stories. Continue reading for more details.

Content marketing is the process of creating and sharing valuable free content to attract prospects and convert them into customers. The goal is to educate, entertain and inspire people to earn their trust and build brand awareness.

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a form of marketing focused on creating, publishing, and distributing content for a targeted audience online.

It is often used by businesses in order to achieve the following goals: attract attention and generate a lead, expand their customer base, generate or increase online sales, increase brand awareness or credibility, and engage an online community of users.

Content marketing attracts new customers by creating and sharing valuable free related information. It helps companies create sustainable brand loyalty, provides valuable information to consumers, and creates a willingness to purchase products from the company in the future.

Why Is This Important?

Content marketing as a marketing strategy can be valuable to educate your target audience and help them get excited about your business. It’s also a good way to stay in touch with and re-engage existing customers.

To understand why it can work as a strategy, think about the buyer’s journey. For many companies, it may look something like this:
• Awareness phase: this is where the potential customer is seeking information on a topic. They may be looking for a solution to a problem they experience or are simply looking for information on a topic they’re researching.
• Consideration phase: the potential customer is learning more about the options available that solve their problem, including your product or service.
• Purchase phase: the potential customer is looking for information on how to make a purchase.
It is a scalable way to bring in customers and potential customers to your site via each of these stages.

You can create content that targets those in the awareness, consideration, or purchase phase.

As long as the content is optimized and provides what the audience is looking for, it has the potential to continue to bring in potential customers long after it’s been created.

What are the best ways to accomplish content marketing?

There are many different ways to get started with the topic in question. A content strategy might include some or all of the following:
• Posting regularly to a blog. This can help you connect with customers and potential customers at any stage of the customer journey.
• Downloadable content (ebooks, templates). Gated downloadable content can work well to attract prospects at the top or middle of the funnel.
• Rich media (videos and podcasts). Rich media is a popular way to interact with your target audience and can be used across many marketing strategies, including SEO, social, and PPC strategies.
• Webinars. Webinars can help educate your target audience and form a deeper, more personal connection with customers.
• Interactive tools. Interactive tools can showcase what your product has to offer, or simply serve as a way to engage your target market.
• Emails. Emails help companies regularly re-engage their customers and prospects who have expressed interest in their content or business.
• Landing pages. Good landing page content can be crucial to helping site visitors understand your product or service, see the value, and want to learn more.

Specifically, there are three key reasons — and benefits — for enterprises that use content marketing; Increased sales, Cost savings, and better customers who have more loyalty.

Go back and read the definition one more time, but this time remove the relevant and valuable.
That’s the difference between content marketing and the other informational garbage you get from companies trying to sell you “stuff.”

How Does it Relate To Digital Marketing Branches?

Regardless of what type of marketing tactics you use, content marketing should be part of your process, not something separate. Quality content is part of all forms of marketing.

Social media marketing: Content marketing strategy comes before your social media strategy.
SEO: Search engines reward businesses that publish quality, consistent content.
PR: Successful PR strategies address issues readers care about, not their business.
PPC: For PPC to work, you need great content behind it.
Inbound marketing: Content is key to driving inbound traffic and leads.
Content strategy: Content strategy is part of most digital marketing strategies.

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Social media marketing platforms are based on building virtual communities that allow consumers to express their needs, wants and values, online. Social media marketing then connects these consumers and audiences to businesses that share the same needs, wants, and values. Through social networking sites, companies can keep in touch with individual followers. Keep reading for details.

Social media marketing uses social media networks to market a company’s products and services.

It allows companies to engage with existing customers and reach new ones as they promote their culture, mission, or tone. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are commonly used to execute marketing. But what exactly is Social Media Marketing and how does it work?

The term social media marketing (SMM) refers to the use of social media and social networks to market a company’s products and services.

Social media marketing provides companies with a way to engage with existing customers and reach new ones while allowing them to promote their desired culture, mission, or tone.

SMM has purpose-built data analytics tools that allow marketers to track the success of their efforts.

How Social Media Marketing (SMM) Works

Social networking websites allow individuals, businesses, and other organizations to interact with one another and build relationships and communities online. When companies join these social channels, consumers can interact with them directly.

That interaction can be more personal to users than traditional methods of outbound marketing and advertising.

Social networking sites act as word of mouth or more precisely, e-word of mouth. The Internet’s ability to reach billions across the globe has given online word of mouth a powerful voice and far reach.

SMM Platforms and Tools

Social media has changed the way we function as a society, including the way we connect with one another.

As platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram took off, businesses also took notice. They began to use these sites to further their interests through social media marketing. That’s because these sites are able to change consumer behavior.

Social media websites allow marketers to employ a broad range of tactics and strategies to promote content and have people engage with it.

Many social networks allow users to provide detailed geographical, demographic, and personal information, which enables marketers to tailor their messages to what is most likely to resonate with users.

Customer response rates or the number of times customers post about a company. A major strategy used in social media marketing is to develop messages and content that individual users will share with their family, friends, and coworkers.

This strategy relies on word-of-mouth and provides several benefits. First, it increases the message’s reach to networks and users that a social media manager may not have been able to access otherwise.

Second, shared content carries an implicit endorsement when sent by someone who the recipient knows and trusts.

Social media strategy involves the creation of content that is sticky. This means that it gets a user’s attention and increases the possibility that they will conduct a desired action, such as buying a product or sharing the content with others in their own network.

Marketers create viral content that’s designed to spread quickly between users.

Social media marketing should also encourage customers to create and share their own content, such as product reviews or comments. This is referred to in the marketing industry as earned media.

Key Pillars of Social Media Marketing

Strategy: This step involves determining goals, the social media channels to be used, and the type of content that will be shared.

Planning and Publishing: Businesses should draft plans of what their content will look like (i.e. will there be videos? Photos? How much script?) and decide when it will be put out on the platform.

Listening and Engagement: Monitoring what users, customers, and others are saying about the posts, brands, and any other business assets. This may require the adoption of a social media engagement tool.

Analytics and Reporting: Part of being on social media is knowing how far posts are going, so reports of engagement and reach are very important

Advertising: Purchasing ads on social media is a great way to promote and further develop a brand. 2

Because audiences can be better segmented than more traditional marketing channels, companies can ensure they focus their resources on the audience that they want to target using social media marketing.

Some of the metrics used to measure the success of social media marketing (which is also known as digital marketing and e-marketing) include: website reports, such as Google Analytics, and return on investment (ROI).

Pros and Cons of Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social media marketing campaigns have the advantage of appealing to a broad audience at once. For example, a campaign may appeal to current and prospective customers, employees, bloggers, the media, the general public, and other stakeholders, such as third-party reviewers or trade groups.

But these campaigns can also create obstacles that companies may not have had to deal with otherwise. For example, a viral video claiming that a company’s product causes consumers to become ill must be addressed by the company, regardless of whether the claim is true or false.

Even if a company can set the message straight, consumers may be less likely to purchase from the company in the future.

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Digital marketing is the component of marketing that utilizes the internet and online-based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones, and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services. Continue reading for details on free digital marketing courses and FAQs.

Its development during the 1990s and 2000s changed the way brands and businesses use technology for marketing.

After all, internet usage has more than doubled over the past decade and this shift has massively affected how people purchase products and interact with businesses.

There are many digital marketing strategies, including:

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Display advertising

Social media marketing and advertising

Content marketing

Mobile marketing

Search engine marketing

Email marketing

Here are free and paid digital marketing courses and platforms you should enroll in:

1. Fundamentals of digital marketing

Here you will master the basics of digital marketing with our free Interactive Advertising Bureau-accredited course.

There are 26 modules to explore, all created by Google trainers, packed full of practical exercises and real-world examples to help you turn knowledge into action.

Getting certified shows employers that you have a clear understanding of the core concepts of digital marketing. You can also add the qualification to your CV, and easily upload it to your LinkedIn profile.

These courses are certified by Google Digital Skills For Africa. They include the following:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

You’ve likely heard of the term SEO but maybe you weren’t sure what it means. SEO stands for search engine optimization and it’s the act of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results.

While there are a few search engines out there, the most popular is Google. An effective SEO strategy follows specific guidelines and best practices that will ensure a website ranks on the first page of search engine results.

To rank on the first page of the search engine, you need to structure your website and pages to attract organic traffic.

Without SEO, it’s almost impossible to grow an online business organically and you’ll need to also use paid advertising.

SEO is also closely related to other digital marketing elements like email marketing and content marketing. They work together to give customers high-quality content.

An effective SEO campaign addresses three key elements: your website, Google, and your audience. Google then ranks your site when a search query that matches your focus keyword is entered.

You might be wondering, how Google does that. When Google bots assess your site, they take into consideration the site’s structure and content.

They then match your content with search queries and related keywords to determine how relevant your content is to these questions Google also checks for quality links to your website—links tell Google that other people value your content and that it’s a reliable source of information.

Several good-quality links directed to your site will increase your chances of a higher Google rank. Not all links are good for SEO—links from high authority sites, like news organizations and professional associations, are what Google considers good signals.

Search Engine Marketing

Search engine marketing, also known as SEM or search marketing, refers to all the processes involved in generating traffic from search engines

SEM includes SEO (which to some extent is theoretically true), but practically, it is quite different. The core of an effective SEM strategy is paid advertising through platforms like Google Ads or Bing Ads.

Email Marketing

According to research from Campaign Monitor, every $1 put into email marketing generates $38.

For this reason, email marketing is one of the most popular digital marketing techniques among digital marketers. It is so popular that 82 percent of B2B and B2C companies are using it.

Successful email marketing campaigns share relevant, timely information that is personalized to the recipient.

Segmentation is an essential component of email marketing; it ensures that you’re reaching the right people at the right time.

When you understand their position in the buyer’s journey, you can email them information to help them make a purchasing decision.

Educational content can come in many forms, but emails typically share blog articles, white papers and eBooks, and webinar offers. Instead of sending links to external content, you can also write robust newsletters that educate.

In addition to educational content, you can inform them about promotional offers in an attempt to persuade them to take action.

Content Marketing

Wikipedia defines “Content marketing as any marketing format that involves the creation and sharing of media and publishing content to acquire customers

Content marketing is permission-based marketing. Potential clients opt-in to this type of marketing and sometimes share it.

To gain the trust of your potential customers, you need to be able to provide them with something relevant; content marketing is built on this idea. Content marketing should be helpful while subtly guiding readers in their decision-making process.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience–to drive profitable customer action.”

For example, I sell T-shirts online. Instead of focusing on my landing page and product description, I can direct my effort into content which my prospective customers may read before trying to make the purchase.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing involves the use of social media platforms as channels to reach large audiences.

On social platforms, you can grow an organic audience of followers or you can use paid social advertisements to reach your target demographic.

Most brands use both strategies, as they work well together. The most popular social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, have more than 2 billion and over 330 million users respectively.

Most businesses using social media marketing understand the importance of engaging their target audience and doing it consistently.

Therefore, creating engaging videos and high-quality content with amazing deals and offers for your audience will help you to increase brand awareness and generate more conversions.

Are you starting to see how these digital marketing tactics work together? A successful social media strategy needs high-quality content to engage followers.

The same goes for email marketing. Brands must create content and then distribute it through other digital channels.

Digital Advertising

Digital advertising can also be referred to as paid advertising. It refers to every strategy and process involved in generating referral traffic to your site via paid digital display ads.

Marketers often conduct digital advertising on different platforms, depending on where their target audience is most concentrated. Some of these platforms include:

Google (Adwords), Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing, as the name implies, is a digital marketing technique that involves marketing strategies focused on mobile users.

Research shows that more than 80 percent of internet users own a smartphone, so this is an important niche to reach out to. In this case, the marketing strategies are mobile-based. Examples are; SMS, MMS, mobile apps, and websites

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Online business competition has taken mainstream market competition to the clouds. It doesn’t matter whether they’re running a Facebook or eBay storefront or using sites like Etsy to get their merchandise in front of the public; online businesses just don’t have the same overhead that bricks-and-mortar retail businesses face. Continue reading for tips on staying ahead in online business competition.

No matter the size of your business, it’s important to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your closest competitors online. Research shows 79% of millennials and Gen Z use the internet to make purchases, therefore a business’s online presence is more valuable than ever.

The Bare Minimum

Ensure to do more than the basics, starting with having an online store. Although 43% of consumers always visit local stores when they need products in a hurry, 29.1% turn to Amazon, and 27.8% use both Amazon and local retailers.

And while 60% of respondents say they have shopped at a smaller local store in the past six months, 30% say they only shop online.

Selling products online as well as in your physical store can offer you a way to enjoy the best of both worlds.

Reviews & Local Listings

Take note of your competitors’ online business competition reputation by looking at their reviews online. You can check out review sites like Google My Business, Yelp, Citysearch, or industry-specific sites and see how they are ranking compared to you and if those sites are optimized for search.

In addition, conduct a search for your competitor’s reputation terms, like “Business Name Reviews” on a search engine and see what turns up. Compare Your online business competition products and services, and make adequate adjustments.

Do your biggest competitors have more reviews than you? Is their reputation overall positive or negative? Either way, you may want to start focusing on your online reputation, so that when a consumer is researching both you and a competitor, your glowing reputation can speak for you online.

Content Sites

Content sites like a company blog or YouTube channel are also key ways businesses can boost SEO and online business competition.

See which of these sites your competitors have created and which they are using to their advantage.

What types of blogs, images, infographics, or videos are they sharing? Are they using relevant descriptions and keyword-rich tags?

Because these types of content can perform well in search engines and provide backlinks to a business website, seeing which sites work for your competitors can help you decide the types of sites you want a presence on as well.

Now that you have a good idea about your competitors’ web presence, you can take this information into consideration for building your own online strategy.

What tactics work well for them that you can try in your own marketing? What are you doing more efficiently than your competitors that you can focus on to give your online presence a boost?

Search Engines

Gauging your competitors’ placement on search engines isn’t always an easy task, especially since algorithms are continuously changing.

However, it can help your own search advertising strategy to see the results of your competitors’ organic and paid search tactics.

Keep in mind, it’s best to perform searches in a private browser so the search engine won’t take into account your browsing history and you’ll see more generic results. Here are a few things to look for:

Shelf Space

Search for a competitor’s business name online to see how much “shelf space” – or links on the search results page – they own, and what type of content is displayed, such as their website, blog, videos, reviews, and even text ads.

Remember which local listings, social media sites, and content sites are displayed and compare them against the ones that show up when you search for your own business name.

PPC Ads

To see what your competitors may be doing in paid search advertising, start by identifying a list of 5-10 top local keywords and searching for them on top search engines like Google and Bing.

If your competitor is also bidding on their own business name in search advertising, chances are their paid search ad will show in the sponsored section of the search results when you search for their name as well. Bidding on your business name is a cost-effective way to quickly get your brand to appear on the search engine results page.

Organic Performance

Also look at the organic listings when you search for those local keywords, as well as the keywords you are optimizing your own site for.

Where do your competitors appear in comparison to you? What kinds of content are showing – is it just their site, or do other content and social sites show up as well?

Simplify shopping

Consumers expect convenience whether they’re shopping online or in-store. In a physical store, curating the products you sell to a carefully chosen selection is one way to help shoppers get in and out of your store quickly. (You could offer a wider range of products on your business website.)

Your store should also accept a wide range of payment options, including mobile wallets such as Apple Pay, and mobile devices to accept payments so you can speed up customer checkout lines.

By taking these steps, you’ll be able to participate and beat the online business competition and help prepare your retail store for a successful future.

Also, check out:

5 Ways you are losing website traffic because you don’t have a blog.

4 Tips to Create Content that will Massively Increase your Sales.

The Number ONE Reason Why People aren’t Buying What You are Selling

Sell More on Social Media with Valuable Contents

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So now you have a website, all your products and services have been uploaded and now you’re waiting for buyers to troop in.

But… Nothing. your website is looking all shiny and brand new, but no visitors.

Imagine setting up your new office, putting all products in place, employ customer representatives to attend to customers,

…but no customers are visiting, this must be really painful, not to mention it feels like a huge loss.

That’s how it feels when no one is visiting your website right.

Well, I’m aware of this pain and that’s why I’m here with this amazing solution.

Today I’ll be speaking about a sure-fire way to increase traffic(visitors) to your website without spending on Ads.

This feature alone can make Google and other search engines become your own affiliate marketer, Interesting right?

Imagine If your website gets at least 100 visitors daily without you having to pay for marketing.

Don’t get me wrong, it is very IMPORTANT to have a marketing budget and pay for Ads, how else can you have a predictable and scalable flow of traffic.

However, what I’m showing you today is a secret that online businesses and entrepreneurs have used to increase traffic on their website systematically without waiting till they have money to pay for Ads.

Don’t anticipate too much, it’s not something you are new to, it’s just that you did not know how effective it is or how to use it to drive traffic.

Did you guess? it’s BLOGGING, yes you heard me right. Your website needs to have a Blog, a regularly updated Blog!

Whether you own an E-commerce store, A coaching platform, you sell physical products or digital products, services or whatever it is your website does. You should have a regularly updated Blog.

Why? Well, read on…

1. It helps establish your brand as an authority in your industry: You see one of the reasons why people don’t buy right away are objections; unanswered questions they have.
   For example, how do I know the best size to buy? what is the importance of having this product? How do I maintain this product when I buy it etc…These are questions running in the minds of your prospects, and until these questions are answered your prospects will find it difficult to make the purchase.
   Like the saying goes; “A confused customer is a customer that will NOT buy”

   But as a smart business owner that you are, write a blog post about questions that they could be asking, answer it correctly with your professional experience, this will automatically place you as an authority in your industry, In the eyes of your customers and of course clear their doubts. When they decide to buy, they’ll come straight to you.
   Make sure to make adequate research on questions your prospects are asking before writing on them. A very effective tool to help you with this is www.answerthepublic.com

2. Call-to-actions at the end of your articles can convert readers into leads: Now that you have enlightened your prospects, they are satisfied with your tips and answers to their questions, this is the best time to convert the visitor into a lead. A lead is a means of keeping in touch with a prospect, it could be their phone number or email. It’s always best to request emails. But you cannot just say give me your email right? Offer them something for free in return often, these could be things like free ebooks, free whitepapers, free fact sheets, free webinars, free trials … basically, any content asset for which someone would be willing to exchange their information.
   With this, you can follow up via email marketing to nudge them to buy what you are selling.
   Tip: Make sure what you are offering in return for leads is related to the article they just read.Note: Not every reader of your blog will become a lead. That’s okay. No one converts 100% of the people who read their blog into leads. Just get blogging, put calls-to-action on every blog post
3. Increase your social media presence: When visitors have read your article and it adds value to them, the next thing they usually would want to do is to share it with their friends and followers. This will go a very long way to increase your website traffic and of course leads, which then convert to massive sales. Like you already know, almost all of your target audience is on social media. This is another awesome way to be in their face without spending on Ads.
   Tip: Add social share buttons, before and after your article to make it easy for your readers to share the article with their friends and followers.
4. The effort you put in yesterday can turn into hundreds of thousands of views and leads in the future: When it comes to blogging, most of your leads will likely come from your older posts.
   According to Hubspot(A leading online marketing school and platform) says “about 70% of the traffic each month on their blog comes from posts that weren’t published in the current month“.So this is a matter of compounding results, Unlike WhatsApp or other platforms, where your posts disappear after 24 hrs or go down to the bottom where they can’t be found by new visitors, your Blog articles are evergreen. As far as they answer relevant questions, they will continue to attract new visitors and prospects.
5. Google will refer more prospects and customers to you: How does this work?  let me explain in the easiest to understand terms;When you post an article on the internet and make it available for public viewing, google and other search engines will send their bots(Automated software) to read the article and index it(file it up), then wait for someone to ask any question related to that article. Immediately anyone does, they’ll show them the article in that list, but if the article does not add value, and the reader bounces out of your website and comes back to ask the same question they’ll know the article is not relevant, so it will be pushed down from the top to the bottom.

   But If a reader is satisfied by the answer gotten from your posts, then your article is shown to more people looking for the same answers, your posts begin to rank higher in the searches.

   So you see, with a well-researched article and topic with relevant keywords, you can make google refer customers to you without necessarily paying for Ads.

These are just some of the importance of having a regularly updated blog on your website and how it can massively increase your sales. Whether you are a small business or an entrepreneur and do not have much money to pay for marketing or you have a big business and spend a lot monthly on marketing every month, A regularly updated Blog can go a long way to double even triple your sales both long term and short term

If you are enlightened now and know that your website needs a blog or you don’t know how to write articles that will rank on search engines, then message me, I have just the perfect solution for you.

Have a wonderful day, see you soon…