Start a Career in Digital Marketing

1. Introduction to Digital Marketing: In this course, I'm going to show you the simplest way to become a Digital Marketing Specialist. Whether you are looking to start a career in digital marketing, or you're looking to sharpen your marketing skills with the latest strategies. This course will serve as a helpful guide to get you feeling confident about your marketing skills. No previous marketing experience is required. In this course, we will cover all areas of digital marketing, including social media marketing, search engine optimization, e mail marketing, paper click, and more. All from a seasoned marketing professional. No long winded Powerpoint presentations from somebody with no real world experience. Finally, we will have an actionable step by step outline so you can start a career in digital marketing. So before we get started, here's some questions to consider before jumping into the course. Are you looking to start a career in digital marketing? Are you already a marketer looking to advance your skills? Are you currently running a business and you are unsure in terms of how to promote it? Or maybe you're looking for an online course that is to the point and teaches you an actual real world application of digital marketing. If the answer is yes, then you have found the right course. Hey guys, I'm Julian and I'm a marketing Specialist with over 15 years of experience working in digital marketing, both as a consultant and senior marketing executive. My career in digital marketing began working with early stage start ups that eventually became successful, multimillion dollar brands. Today I work as a marketing consultant and the VP of marketing for a software company. In this course, I connect all the dots for you. First, we will cover all the fundamentals of digital marketing. From SEO to paper click, from social media marketing to building a comprehensive marketing strategy. It is all going to be included in this course. So let's get started. 2. The Digital Landscape: Today's digital marketing offers businesses ever growing opportunities to reach and engage with consumers more than ever before. Much of this growth has been due to the rise of social media apps like Facebook, Instagram and Youtube, the development of ultra fast mobile devices, direct to consumer apps like Amazon and Uber, and access to the Internet on a global scale. The truth is that these fast evolving technologies have fundamentally changed the modern consumer experience as marketers. Our job is to understand these changes in the digital landscape and use these channels to create meaningful connections between brands and potential customers. 3. What is Digital Marketing: Let's begin by defining digital marketing. Digital marketing is the process by which a product or service is promoted across the internet, utilizing four main channels. These channels are SEO, paper click, e mail marketing, and social media marketing. Now, the job of digital marketing might appear overwhelming at first, but really our job is pretty simple. Our mission is to generate needs, sales, and customers by creating a marketing strategy comprised of three critical components. Number one, creating and developing a business strategy. Number two, creating a granular customer strategy. And number three, creating an actionable marketing plan that is time bound and measurable. Once we have compiled this information, we can create a practical blueprint that marketers use to generate leads, sales, and repeat customers. And as we will cover in discourse, the job of a marketer is actually pretty straightforward as long as we have key information about our business and our potential customers. 4. The Four Areas of Digital Marketing: When we talk about the four main channels in digital marketing, we are essentially talking about the four most effective channels used to reach potential buyers on the Internet. These channels include SEO, paper click, e mail marketing, and social media marketing. When we talk about SEO, we're essentially talking about optimizing your website so it is searchable on search engines like Google or Bing. As you optimize your website with on page and off page SEO, your website will eventually drive more traffic, thus generating more leads and customers. When we talk about PPC or paper click, we're talking about paid advertisements on search engines like Google, and social media apps like Facebook and Instagram. Paper click is comprised of displayed or text based advertisements that lead to a landing page or a company website. Email marketing is essentially the process of sending a list of contacts, promotional contact via e mail. Here you can utilize banners or persuasive copy in order to nurture the lead to buy your product or service. Finally, we have social media marketing. Social media marketing is the process of advertising on social media apps like Facebook or Youtube, with images, videos, banner ads, et cetera. These four types of marketing channels are the go to when it comes to advertising on the Internet. The next time you find a compelling advertisement on the Internet, take a look at the messaging and the user experience from the first touch to the last touch, all the way to the landing page. 5. Course Project: All right guys, so in this section we're going to talk about how to access the course project, which is very important, right? We want to make sure that we're on the same page and as we're learning things, we can bring it all together into one document so everything kind of fits into place. And we have a more sort of educational experience. So the first thing that we should do here is go to the Projects and Resources section. Here you're going to have basically two options to choose from here. You're going to have the option to click on the document, which is going to take you to a Google Drive document. Or you can download the marketing strategy PDF here, which you can fill out. I recommend going to the Google Drive doc here because you can just sort of fill it out. And I just prefer using this over a PDF document because you can make changes and you can have multiple copies, et cetera, et cetera. Speaking of which, we're going to make a copy of this because if you access this document, you're not going to be able to edit this. So what you need to do is come to file and then you're going to make a copy. And that's going to make a copy of this document. So you can take it with you, you can change it, you can add things, you can delete things and what have you. Go ahead and do that again. You have the option, you have the option to download the course or to click on the document here and it will take you to this Google Drive doc. I recommend Google Drive over just having the PDF, but that's really up to you. All right guys. So now let's take a look at our marketing strategy document. As we can see here, we have our marketing strategy document. And I'm just going to explain this whole document and break it down so it makes perfect sense for you guys. And as you start working through the course, all the pieces sort of fall into place. Now what we have here is kind of like your standard marketing document. It's broken down into three sections. Actually, there's more section than that, but I try to make this as simple as possible. We have here our business strategy, which is your mission statement and your value proposition. Um, obviously you should include a company name. But if you don't have a company name, you can just just create your own and play around. The next thing here is our customer strategy. What I did here is combined three really important documents into one. Here we have our marketing funnel, which as you can see horizontally, we have our different stages of the marketing funnel. And vertically, we also have the buyer journey map, starting from here. Now I also included our target persona, so let's kind of break it down so it makes sense. Now we have a section on the marketing funnel. So this will become sort of more obvious to you and it will make sense after you cover that section. But essentially what it is is that as marketers, we sort of want to understand like what the process is from first finding out about a product to actually purchasing the product. And then we also talk about the loyalty stage that's sort of broken down here. And then we have the buyer journey map, which we also have a section for that as well. What we do here, we try to try to understand what the buyer is thinking, what's motivating them, what their goals are, et cetera, et cetera. We have those vertically. Now, I added a target persona here, that's going to be actually over here in the next section. And here we have different target persona. You can as many as you need, or you could have just one or two. But for this project we're just going to stick to one persona. If you want to keep exploring and keep practicing, you can add multiple personas. So essentially what we have here is we want to kind of be able to visualize and understand who is going to be our potential buyer. So what we do here, we get just, you know, a picture of somebody that we think is going to fit to look the personality and really the overall persona that's going to be buying into our product. And here we break it down into their name, gender, income, education, social status and occupation. And that sort of falls on their demographics. We have a section. Discourse as well for demographics and psychographics, which is going to be on their customer segmentation. Make sure to check out that section. But here we have basically our demographics laid out. In the next section we have psychographics, which is their personality traits, lifestyle attitudes, values, interests and beliefs. Again, it's just trying to get a deeper understanding of what our customer or our potential customer is going to be like. The last two sections, here are the barriers. And really what motivates our potential buyer to buy something or, you know, there intube, we also have that here. Now finally we have our sort of like goal setting and planning strategy. So here we have a marketing plan that is time bound and measurable. And this is called a smart goal setting plan. It's a very popular project planning type of outline that helps you to lay out what you're going to be working on and how to break down the information that you're getting your data points and keeping yourself sort of like a time frame to complete the project. That's what we have here. As you can see here, we have a complete marketing strategy that breaks down your target persona and outlines what the overall journey is going to look like for them from the first touch point all the way to the purchase stage. And finally, the loyalty stage. And of course, bring it all together with our value proposition and our mission statement, which is going to be integrated into your messaging. As you start creating marketing collateral to effectively advertise your products to your target persona, I hope this breakdown makes sense. Go ahead and do the document when you get a chance. Finally, when you're ready to share this document with the class, and once you're ready to showcase your progress, you can just come back to Skill Share and click as Discussions, and you can upload the Skillshare project. Just keep in mind that once you have, uh, all the blank fields filled out, you can just come to file and you can download this as a PDF and come back to Skillshare and upload it as a project. Yeah, take a look at the document and list. Jump into the next section. 6. Your Mission Statement: Digital marketing. Your mission statement is a key component of your messaging as you begin to educate potential buyers about your brand or product. At its core, your mission statement should express your company's purpose, vision, and values. In essence, it should explain the organization's reason for existence. A well crafted mission statement should focus on providing both employees and your target audience a framework. Here's a few really awesome examples of mission statements from reputable companies. Tessa's mission statement is to accelerate the world's transition to sustainable energy. Now let's take a look at Starbucks mission statement to inspire and nurture the human spirit, one person, one cop, and one neighborhood at a time. As you read the company's mission statement, make sure to keep it short and concise. It should be 2-4 sentences long. Focus on your target audience, product or service, and unique value proposition. And finally, continue perfecting it by sharing it with employees and members of your marketing team. Now let's go back to our course project and take a look at the mission statement that we just talked about. So as you can see here, we have a section for your mission statement. So make sure to create your own mission statement. Or if you would like to maybe do some research and find some companies that have different mission statements, you can add those in here so you can sort of get started and get an idea of what other companies are doing or you can just come up with your own. So make sure to include that here again. It's included in the course project or the attached PDF that is sort of included with this course. So go ahead and download the document and you can just type it in here. 7. Creating Personalized Experiences: For the remainder of this course, we're going to cover fundamental marketing techniques that will become essential tools in creating an effective marketing strategy. These techniques include creating and developing a business strategy, creating a granular customer strategy, and finally, creating an actionable marketing plan that is time bound and measurable. However, these efforts will be in vain unless we understand the purpose of such efforts. At its core, digital marketing is all about creating personalized experiences for your potential buyers. Simply put, we need to speak directly to each potential buyer with a clear and precise message that is personalized to their needs. Doing this will ensure that our target buyer feels understood, and more importantly, they become aware that you offer a solution to their problem. We will go into these areas in more detail later in discourse, but for the time being, remember that creating personalized experiences is at the core of digital marketing. 8. The 3 Types of Media: Now that we know our four main marketing channels, let's talk about how we can categorize these channels into three types of media, paid media, own media, and earned media. Paid media is usually acquired through paid advertisements, such as paper click advertisements on Google or social media display marketing. And really any type of advertisement that leads to a landing page or a website, paid media can be a great way to get the word out quickly about your products or services. However, it can be a costly endeavor, especially if you have not created an effective marketing funnel. So before you get started in paid media or paper click, make sure you have an optimized marketing funnel. Own media is essentially anything that you own, like your website, your blog, or your social media channels. Building your own media presence is a great way to build credibility in your industry and the ability to build trust with potential buyers. Earned media is coverage that you have made from all your marketing efforts. Your earned media is sort of like what others are saying about you. You can build your own media portfolio by creating highly engaging content on social media or networking, like going to trade shows or being a guest on a popular podcast. Building your owned media portfolio will give you credibility in the eyes of anybody in the industry. So as you build your marketing strategy, make sure to be mindful of each type of media available in your inventory so you can maximize the overall effectiveness of your marketing strategy. 9. The Marketing Funnel: In digital marketing, the marketing funnel is a useful tool that helps you visualize the path customers take from first finding out about your brand to converting into customers. Your understanding of your marketing funnel provides useful insight into why some customers convert and maybe why some don't. A marketing funnel typically consists of four stages, the awareness stage, the interest stage, the desire stage, and the action stage. During the awareness stage, the marketer's job is to increase brand and product awareness. This stage, the customers have a need and they're looking for potential products or services that will fulfill that need. As marketers, our job is to get a product in front of potential customers. Common marketing channels include paid advertisements on social media like Youtube or Facebook, educational videos or articles, and free books. During the interest stage, your potential buyer is comparing your product or service to other solutions on the market. Which usually includes reading customer reviews, checking out competitors, and learning more about the details of your product or service to see if it could be, in fact, what they're looking for. During the desired stage, your potential buyer is developing a favorable disposition towards a brand or service. At this stage, marketers use free trials, limited time offers, or ebooks to get the customer to the final stage of the marketing. Final. During the last stage or the action stage, the buyer is ready to buy your product. And once they do, it's critical. You keep your communications consistent. Usually via e mails, newsletters, or even a quick phone call from an onboarding. Specialized or account manager. Attention to detail is a key ingredient in keeping your customer happy and always coming back. Marketers often refer to this model as the A model. And we reference these different segments as topic final, middle funnel, and bottom of funnel. At the bottom of the marketing funnel, consumers are close to making a purchase. At this stage, marketers focus on identifying and converting potential buyers. And between these two stages, we have the middle of the funnel which aims to nurture leads so it can reach the bottom and turn into customers. One additional step that marketers like to consider is the retention or loyalty stage, which comes after the action stage. During this stage, we focus on making sure we deliver customer retention tactics, such as discounts or creating a rewards program for our customers in order to ensure they stay with us for the long term. Finally, one key thing to remember about your marketing funnel is that it can be flexible and it will change as you learn more about your business model, your target demographic, and your industry. However, your marketing funnel will always serve as a critical part of your overall marketing strategy. So always keep it by your side and continue improving it. 10. The Byer Journey Map: In digital marketing, it is vital to understand all the steps the buyer takes before they make a final purchase. Failure to do so can compromise our entire marketing strategy by creating a buyer journey map, we can combine the final stages with the thought process buyers go through before they commit to purchasing a product. So let's take a look at our buyer journey map. As we can see here, we have listed the final stages, Horizontally, awareness, interest, desire, action, and loyalty. And vertically, we have added the customer activities goals, thoughts, emotions and our business objectives. And the customer activities row. We're trying to identify what our customers are doing at this particular stage. Are they searching for websites or services on Google? Maybe they are posting a question on their favorite Facebook group. Next we have the customer goals. Here we identify what the customer wants to achieve. Here have listed start a new career and web development. Next we have the thoughts row. Here we identify questions or thoughts the customer might have. The next row is the emotional state. Are they happy, neutral, curious or upset? The next row is the touchpoints and channels row. Here we look at a particular platform they happen to be on. Are they on a social media website? Are they on a blog? Maybe they are looking through their inbox for relevant e mails. Finally, we have the objectives row, and this is where we determine what we need to do in order to move the customer to the next stage. Take a look at this document. The more you do this exercise, the easier it will get with. 11. Your Value Proposition: At the heart of your marketing strategy, there should be a unique value proposition. A value proposition should outline exactly why your customer should buy your product or service. Your value proposition should be clear, easy to understand. It should be the main text in all of your messaging and it should underline outcomes, or in other words, how you're making the lives of your customers easier. It should be customer centric rather than future centric. It should highlight how it gives you a unique positioning in the market in comparison to the competition. A good marketing strategy should address your buyers pain points and offer them your value proposition and how your solution will solve their problem. In addition, it should point out how your competitors are under serving this sector and how your solution delivers a better outcome for the end user. 12. Customer Segmentation: Customer Segmentation is the process of dividing customers into groups based on common characteristics such as age, income, goals, likes dislikes, and their behavior across the internet. Customer segmentation helps you to personalize your marketing messages so you can be more effective in selling your product or service. Usually consist of the following segmentation groups. Demographic segmentation, which groups customers together by focusing on traits such as age, gender, income, occupation, and family status. Psychographic segmentation, which groups customers based on psychological characteristics such as values, desires, goals, interests, and lifestyle choices. Behavioral segmentation, which groups customers into segments depending on their behavior patterns when they interact with a particular business or website. And needs based segmentation, which groups customers who have the same or different needs. 13. Understanding KPIs: When we talk about a Key Performance Indicator, or KPI, we're talking about a quantifiable metric that marketers use to measure their success across all marketing channels. As the old saying goes, you can improve what you don't measure. And in digital marketing, this is a crucial component of running a successful marketing strategy. At its core, we need to identify what we would like to measure so we can improve our marketing performance over time. Some common KPI's marketers use per marketing channel include number of new followers, engagement, site visits and conversions for social media, number of impressions, site visits, conversions and revenue for SEO, number of impressions, click through rate convergence cost per acquisition for paper, click. And finally, delivery rate, open rate, click through rate conversion rate for e mail marketing. Okay, so now let's come back to our course project and take a look at the KPI row. Here you're going to be able to add your metrics, whether you're doing SEO, paper click, or social media as discussed. You can include that here and you can include it for every stage of the marketing funnel. Take a look and add the KPI's that you would like to achieve as you move your target persona across the marketing funnel. 14. Building Your Resume and Getting Experience in Digital Marketing: The great qualities of digital marketing is that you can get started earning experience without having to work for a particular company. Here are some areas to explore to gain experience as a marketer. First, we have affiliate marketing. You can simply sign up with an affiliate program and start promoting their services for commission. Some examples include Amazon Fleck Bank and Fiber. Now you can also become a freelance contractor. All you need to do is sign up through their website and you can instantly become a freelancer. Two really good platforms that you can explore, our fiber and network. Now, once you have a decent amount of work under your belt, you can just simply list all that experience on your resume. And that's basically what I did when I started with digital marketing. I started as an affiliate marketer and I just started working for different programs. And as I started getting really good results, I would just kind of keep a record of everything I was doing. And ultimately, I put all of that experience, all my resume. And I use it as a way to get full time job with corporations. So this is a great way to do it. You don't need to work for a company. There's affiliate programs that are available everywhere, for every type of industry. There's probably an affiliate program that you can sign up with, so I highly recommend that, or you can just become a part time contractor and do work for individual companies that might be looking for your services. So these are two areas you can explore and the end result is that you're going to get a lot of experience that you can put on your resume. All right, so attached to this document, you're going to be able to download a PDF document that kind of looks like this. And what this is is a link to a Cab template. Now, Mba is probably the most popular design tool for marketers today. I use Campa quite extensively, and I actually have a course on Camba if you want to check out here on this platform as well. But what we're going to do here is just going to click on the link. And that's going to take you to this template that put together for you guys. Really, this is the template that I use for my own resume. I find this to be very clean, a nice layout easy to read, and something that you can use to get um, employment. So you're going to click here where it says Use Template. After you do this, this is going to be added to your personal account. From here. All you need to do is just upload your own image, drag it over, and then just pop it in here. And that's going to add your image to this document. Put your personal information here, and your description. By the way, when you do this, do not la, when you fill this out, don't upload it to any type of discussion or anything that we're working on together. This is for you to keep and you don't have to upload this to the course at all and you can just take this with you. But anyway, you can fill out the information, all your contact information, educational background, and obviously your work experience, and any skills that you might have. I would definitely list all your certifications here. After you get your Google Mass, et cetera, all the certificates, make sure you list them out here because they're very important as you start earning some experience working for affiliate programs. We're even doing contract work as a freelancer. And make sure to list those out here as well. And here you can use this to get in touch with the hiring manager. If you want to make it even more professional, then certainly you can use this to do that. Yeah, when you get a chance, make sure to download this document and just fill out your information. Again, this is very important. Do not upload this to the platform. This is just for you to keep and for you to use to get future jobs. I wish you the best plug. 15. SMART Marketing Plan: In marketing, it is vital not only to deliver a targeted marketing strategy, but also to create a set of goals that integrate this strategy into a list of actionable steps. As you're working on your marketing strategy, it's important to keep in mind the acronym called Smart. Smart stands for Specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. First, we need to define a specific outcome. A good example here would be increasing your mailing list by the end of the first quarter. Next, we need to make our progress measurable. Here we use quantitative metrics to set expectations. For example, we can say, grow our e mailing list by 50% by the end of the first quarter. The next step is keeping our goal achievable. Here we will need a consensus that so far our projections for our marketing plan are achievable. Make sure you review things like sales history, market trends, site traffic, and your customer feedback to make sure the goal is possible. Next, we need to make sure that our goal is realistic. Here you need to make sure that the resources needed to achieve the objective are realistic. Do you have the right people, enough money, the best machines and materials necessary to reach your goal? Finally, we need to make sure our goal is time bound. Is your goal going to take two weeks, maybe an entire quarter or half of the year, to achieve? Make sure you set a deadline on your project, otherwise you can overspend resources trying to achieve it. All right, let's go back to our course project and go all the way to the bottom. And as you can see here, we have our actionable marketing plan under Smart. Make sure to include your specific objective here in the top row. Underneath it, we can add our measurable, attainable results and time bound metrics. Once you have created this, and really once you have filled out the entire document, you're going to be able to execute an actual time bound marketing plan that's going to guide you to complete each project. When you have a second, make sure to download the document and fill out this information. 16. Getting Certified and Building Marketing Skills: As you continue building your marketing skills, it is recommended to start thinking about getting certified by leading advertising platforms like Google and Facebook. As a general rule, it is recommended to get the following certifications. First, I would recommend getting your Google ads display certification. Next, your Google Ads search certification. And finally, your Google Analytics certification. Now let's take a look at the learning center which you can find at skill shop with Google.com All right, so here we are. Once you log in, you're going to, hopefully you're going to be looking at the same dashboard that I am looking at here or the same home page. What you're going to do is you're going to make your way across to the browse icon up here. From here it's going to give you a list or library of different courses that you can get into and learn about. For your particular type of training, I would look into Google Ads, which really is the platform that you're going to be utilizing to advertise Google Analytics. That's going to, um, hopefully, also be part of your learning journey. Highly recommended and the Google Ad Manager, which is a really useful tool to learn and there's a lot of really awesome courses here, but really the one that I would focus on is obviously Google Ads. And once you go in here, you can take a look at all the different courses that they have here. As I have mentioned before, I highly recommend getting your Google ad certifications. So this is where you would come from here. You can select the Google Ads Display certification and the Ads search certification as well. And kind of get those under your belt. And this is going to give you a lot of great insight in terms of the technical implementation of a Google Adwords account and how to create text ads, and even how to promote videos across Youtube, which is incredibly useful. But in terms of understanding the really intricate technical part of marketing, this is going to really give you a great insight in terms of how to understand how everything works and make it a little bit more technical than theoretical. Okay, now let's take a look at moss. Moss has a really awesome learning academy and also incredible learning center where you can learn all types of things about SEO. And if you're just learning about SEO, I would highly recommend going here first because Moss is one of the leading companies in terms of SEO education. And they also happen to have a pretty robust tool that you can use to optimize your website. So let's take a look at the academy. All right, so here we are. If you come to Academy.moss.com you're going to see this really comprehensive academy where you're going to be able to learn not just the essentials of SEO, but go really deep into the technical implementation of SEO. If you're certainly looking into doing this as a career and just focus on SEO, then I highly recommend going in here and taking all the courses necessary to really shape up your SEO skills. But really the one that I highly recommend is just going with the basics, which is your SEO fundamentals and keyword research. But really taking the fundamentals course on SEO here from Moss is the way to go. Now, as you can see here, these courses are not free. The ones over at the Google Learning Center, they are absolutely free. But these ones actually are not free. But they're totally worth it. Because this is, like I said, this is one of the leading companies in terms of SEO. And learning the fundamentals of SEO. And going beyond that, I highly recommend coming here. So again, this is Academy.mass.com All right, now we are looking at the sort Facebook learning center that you should definitely check out if you are looking to get into social media marketing. Facebook obviously has gone through this whole rebranding phase where they're calling themselves the Metaverse. Meta Blueprint is what used to be Facebook Blueprint Learning Center. And I believe that has gone through the rebranding as well. But nonetheless, this is what you're going to look at when you go to the Facebook or you go to Facebook's learning center. From here you're going to be able to choose the one I so recommend. Here is just a basic Facebook certificate which is the Facebook Certified Digital Marketing Associate. I would go with that as a starting point because they do have more intricate sort of certificates that you can go with. But this is going to give you a good understanding of how Facebook works, how the advertising platform works, and how Instagram works in terms of how to advertise on there as well and the Messenger. So this is highly recommended. Again, you can find this at Facebook.com for business forward, for certification, and here you can get information about getting certified for Facebook. So give this a shot when you get to this section. Okay? So the last certification I recommend getting is the OMC A certificate. And this is what you get or you're able to get after passing their exams. It a series of exams that you have to go through and they're going to test your knowledge in terms of SEO, paper click, et cetera. And if you pass this, you're going to be able to put this on your linked in profile. You're going to be able to put this on your resume and certainly is going to help you to stand out. You don't have to do this. This is not required. This is not a must. But this is something that seeing more and more marketers do in order to stand out. Because now it seems that everybody has a lot of experience or a lot of degrees and whatnot. So this is a more specialized type of certificate that you can get if you want to go beyond what everybody else is doing. So if you come again to Mcp.org forward slash MCA certification, you're going to be able to come here and look at all the requirements and see if it's a good fit for you after you have completed all the other certifications. So take a look at this when you get a chance. I highly recommend it.