In this article, I am going to help you become a better digital marketer by addressing one of the most important things you need to know about digital marketing right now. You know, digital marketing has been made to seem more complicated than it actually is. And that’s a shame really, because it’s actually pretty straightforward. If you want to get the best results possible from your digital marketing, you are going to need to know and understand the strategies that I am going to be sharing with you here in this article. So, my promise to you in this article is that if you read it, you will be a better digital marketer by the end. And the very first thing that I need to share with you are the key differences between traditional marketing and digital marketing.

Digital Marketing vs Traditional Marketing

Brace yourself for this one, because it’s pretty profound. Well, not profound at all. But it’s interesting. You see, digital marketing is simply marketing using digital channels. That’s it. So when we talk about digital marketing, we’re referring to marketing through the use of platforms like SEO, social media, pay-per-click ads, online Facebook ads, Instagram ads, or anything like that. Not to mention email marketing or website optimization, or anything else that takes place online. Traditional marketing, on the other hand, uses traditional media channels like TV, newspapers, magazines, or billboards. Basically, anything not digital. Now, here’s the deal: traditional marketing still works, but there are some significant advantages to using digital marketing, like access to a much larger and more targeted audience. Digital marketing gives you the ability to laser-focus and target only the most ideal people for your business, your offers, or your message. Digital marketing also tends to be significantly more cost-effective, especially when compared to traditional options like running an ad in The New York Times or paying for a Super Bowl commercial. Traditional options that are designed to appeal to the mass market and try to reach everyone. This 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 have to come up with the copy and the creative, and then you have to get it all written up and sent over to the magazine, then it has to get printed, published, and distributed through the good old-fashioned mail service, well, you could be looking at weeks at best, months or even many months before you even figure out if the ad works or not. On the other hand, with digital marketing, you can write an ad and have it online in a matter of minutes. Immediate feedback, correction, results. Plus, digital marketing is a whole lot easier to measure and track because it’s digital. So, we have got a trail of digital breadcrumbs, so to speak, that allow 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 ad, 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 budget from traditional to more digital options. I mean, you can’t measure clicks on a magazine. The best you can hope for is to have someone tear out a form in the magazine and mail it back to you or try to encourage them to visit some kind of digital channel like a website or social media platform, which leads us right back to digital. Makes you kind of wonder why we didn’t test it there 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 you are talking about traditional or digital marketing, the results that you are going to achieve and the quality of your marketing campaign is less about the channel or platform and more about the strategies, the fundamentals, the principles, the consumer psychology, the buyer behavior. Understanding why people do and buy the things they do. From there, you can apply that to digital channels, traditional channels, or any other channels that come out in the future. Alright, 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.

Strategy vs Tactics

Around 2500 years ago, Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War that “a strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory, but it’s this next line I really want 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 complement each other. But strategy is the clear winner and priority here because it’s your strategy that’s going to tell you which tactics to use and when 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 are doing it or if they should even be doing it at all. A better plan then is to take a step back and spend a few minutes thinking about your strategy, the big picture, the long-term, overarching plan and idea of how you are 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 and nothing else matters because nothing will work. Now, there are two different marketing strategies and approaches to look at your digital marketing, but the one I’ve found the most effective and the one I have used for 10 years now and the one I have used with pretty much every business I have ever worked with, from small startups and solopreneurs all the way up to billion-dollar corporations, is my Marketing Master Plan, which is made up of 5 strategic and sequential steps. Still, let me unpack that for you,

Step 1: MODEL

The model is essentially your business model. Your offerings, your packaging, your pricing that goes with it, how you deliver whatever it is that you deliver to your market. It’s important to make sure that you are designing your model, designing your business around what it is that you find most enjoyable, profitable, and in-demand by the market, because the worst thing you can do here is build a business that you absolutely hate.

Step 2: Market

Next is your market. These are the people that you are 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 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 you’re selling. So, you’re going to be laser-focused on exactly who is going to get the best result from your product or service, keeping in mind the kind 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, geography, details like the city, state, province, or country they live in, and psychographic details like their values, attitudes, and lifestyle.

Step 3: IDEAL TARGET MARKET

It’s here in step 3 with the message to IDEAL TARGET MARKET YOUR CLASSROOM BY SPEAKING DIRECTLY TO THEM ABOUT THEIR PARENTS AND THEIR FRUSTRATIONS AND THEIR PROBLEMS AND HOW YOUR BUSINESS IS UNIQUELY POSITIONED TO HELP SOLVE ALL OF THIS 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 are doing and can be counted on to deliver all of the results that you are 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 is a sad, abysmal failure that makes you wonder what went wrong. So, it pays to spend just a little extra time here and really delve into what I call your customer’s pains and miracles. Their pains are all of their pains and problems and fears and frustrations, and their miracles are all of their hopes and dreams and desires. The better you can internalize and communicate this, the better all of your marketing is going to perform because customers don’t buy until they understand.

Step 4: Media

Step 4 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 are going to use to reach them there. A not-so-fun fact, but most businesses do this completely backward, 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 advice from a well-meaning business course that they should start a podcast because people like podcasts. Or they attend a conference or seminar and get sold on the value of Instagram or LinkedIn or whatever, and then they just rush in there, Facebook, Instagram, all over the place, completely forgetting about their strategy and realizing 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 are going to save a ton of time, money, energy, and headaches yourself with too many channels that are unlikely to deliver any kind of results. This is why if you go through this step of the Marketing Master Plan in the right order, starting with the model, moving on to the market, identifying the message, well, by the time you get to media, the answers 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 really is going to give you the power to turn your strategy into sales.

Step 5: Machine

Step 5, 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 the marketing funnel, the sales funnel, or the customer journey, but whatever you call it, the process is the same. Mapping out the steps 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 model. So, the best thing you can do is start at the end and then reverse engineer your way backward. For example, a typical digital marketing funnel might look 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 to enter their name and email address in order to download a free guide or something else of value. From there, you follow up with them through an email marketing campaign, emailing them anywhere from 1-3 times a week with more content, more value, and more offers, until a sale is made.

So, that’s the status in the Marketing Master Plan, the high-level steps that go into making sure you are making the right decisions for you and your business. Tactics, on the other hand, are how you’re going to execute everything that we have just talked about, the details and actionable steps for activities that you are going to go out and execute. 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, audio, or video? And how long is each piece of content going to be? A practical 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 practical marketing decisions, the next thing you need to know about is the difference between organic and paid. So, let’s talk about that now.

Organic vs. Paid

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, create an Instagram story, or upload a YouTube video, for example, and you are not paying money to the platform to have it promoted, well then, you are creating organic content. Organic doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s 100% free because the odds are good that you’re putting time, energy, and maybe even a decent amount of money into creating this content. But without 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. It’s putting out content and paying the networks to have them promoted and distributed in order to get in front of even more people. Basically, with paid media or paid marketing, or paid ads, you are pretty much doing the same thing: you’re running advertising to whatever messages or pieces of content that you’re putting out there.

Now, the big players in the space are, as you’ve guessed it, the social media kingpins, like Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google, and YouTube ads. Basically, all of the social media networks with ads put on the end of their name. And while 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 in the feeds 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 going to be a little more limited in reach because the way 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 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.

Direct Response vs. Brand Awareness

Alright, 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.

Direct Response Marketing:

Direct response marketing is, unsurprisingly, direct in its goal to get a response. Marketing sure isn’t very creative sometimes. Basically, in direct response marketing, you are putting out an ad or publishing a piece of content, and your focus is on getting a direct and immediate and, often times, trackable return—something like a lead, a sale, or a phone call appointment. For example, direct response marketing could be to run a Facebook ad and expect to generate a lead, 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 are expecting something, ideally immediately, and you’re able to track and measure it. This, in turn, allows you to know what works and what doesn’t. So, in the future, you can do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

Brand Awareness Marketing:

Branded marketing, on the other hand, is essentially more focused on longer-term and less trackable objectives like building trust, authority, and getting your brand name out there and into the market. In direct response, you are measuring things like leads, sales, and conversions. With brand awareness, you’re trying to measure softer things like trust, authority, awareness, and goodwill. It’s doable but it’s a lot harder to quantify and to measure because they are a lot more intangible. To build a long-term, sustainable, and profitable business, well, you need a pretty decent mix of both direct response marketing and brand awareness marketing. But you have to make sure that you don’t make one of the biggest mistakes in all of marketing, which is running brand marketing but expecting direct response results. That’s a recipe for disaster, failure, and all kinds of other bad things, and it’s one of the biggest reasons that so many people claim that their marketing just isn’t working. Because they’re using the wrong tool for the job, like following a recipe to make a cake and then getting really frustrated when it comes out looking like muffins or bread or anything that isn’t cake. Like clearly, I do a lot of baking. This is why it’s incredibly important that you use the right recipe, or in other words, the right tactics for the job.

Alright, another incredibly important thing you need to know about digital marketing is the difference between search and discovery marketing.

Search vs. Discovery:

When it comes to search versus discovery marketing, the single most important word that you need to know is intent. What’s the intent or what’s the reason that someone is using a specific platform when they first log in the morning, or afternoon, or night?

Search:

Let’s start with Search. Here we’re talking about platforms like Google, YouTube, or any other platform that has baked into its core the concept of search. When someone logs onto Google, for example, they have intent. They are 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 take some kind of action. So, this is where you, as a marketer, have to force yourself to show up in front of them by answering their question or giving them the solution to whatever problem 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:

Discovery marketing applies to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and even YouTube to a certain extent, but they’re usually there for more casual browsing. After all, unlike with other platforms 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 are doing search marketing, well, you can afford to be direct. The potential customer is looking for something. You have the answer, so you can just give it to them. With Discovery marketing, though, you have to be a little more effective, more creative, and a little more interesting. You have to get their attention and then keep it, kind of opening 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 there telling them about this thing you have and why they should care and pay attention to it.

Now, both search marketing and discovery marketing are both incredibly important parts of building a sustainable and scalable business. But just like with direct response marketing and brand awareness marketing, you want to make sure that you are using the right tools for the right job in the right place at the right time.

Okay, next, I have got something very important to share with you, and it’s something that doesn’t really get talked about when it comes to marketing advice. And that is the difference between marketing products and marketing services.

Product vs. Services Marketing:

Most of the marketing information out there, whether you’re talking about textbooks, courses, or even trainings, is usually geared towards the marketing of products. A product is something tangible that you can hold, that you can see, that you can touch, and that you can test. Services, on the other hand, are intangible. You can’t hold them, you can’t touch them, you can’t see them, and you can’t test them. 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 it 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 work through the features of how something actually works, how it looks. So, you want to 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 am trying to sell a pen. The fact that this pen has a lid, that’s a feature. The fact that this lid will help prevent ink from leaking 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’s lid also has this handy dandy clip, which means that I can also attach it to my paper or my notebook or put it in my pocket if I am trying to support that event card nearby, look. Another feature of this pen’s lid is the nifty fact that it has holes in the very top of it, which is fun, and actually there to avoid or prevent suffocation just in case someone swallows it. After all, chewing on pen lids is an old-age, albeit heavily unsanitary practice, but sometimes you just get angry. Yeah, you all have that pen, please.

Services, on the other hand, they don’t have any of these advantages. So, the main thing when you are promoting or marketing services is that you’re going to highlight the end result and state the benefits—the outcome, the results that someone is 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 result, stating 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 are currently experiencing and then paint the picture of just how much better things will be after they have done business with you.

Alright, here’s the deal. As you have already seen, there is a ton of stuff that makes up what we call digital marketing, which means that’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 the options that 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 throw that in now.

T-Shaped Marketer:

A t-shaped marketer is someone with a broad, general understanding of a lot of things and then a very narrow, focused, and expert-level understanding on just a few things. Digital marketing is made up of a ton of different subcategories like content, SEO, paid ads, public relations, email, design, development, advertising, social media, branding, video, and the list goes on and on. This is why I am 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 kind of things they are into. Targeting, which is finding out how to get your messages and offers 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, but you can also learn faster through paid courses and coaching and communities like you get in marketing insider. It’s important to remember that we all start somewhere, but you do have to get started and then keep going to constantly upgrade your skills. So, the best thing to do here is start with your interests. Are you more creative or more 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. For the more creative, you could look to create content, whether video, audio, or text, and then even help in scheduling and posting it to social media. If you’re a people person, you could focus on community development and increasing engagement on 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. Your interests will likely lead you to developing skills, and then you can match these 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 niche, as your marketing sweet spot is likely very different from mine, as you are 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.