A great shout out to the New York headquarters of General Assembly and their content marketing team. They host a great blog with tons of great content and contributors who really know their stuff. As one of the Digital Marketing instructors for GA Atlanta, I was asked to create a series of posts that sum up the 10-week DGM course (which we’ll be offering again in late summer / early fall), which we have called “Digital Marketing 101.”
I really enjoyed creating this series, and it ultimately became the basis for the curriculum for the DGM Bootcamp that we conducted here in Atlanta on May 2. What a great class that was! We’ll be running that same all day bootcamp again on Saturday June 20.
Below is a link to each post and a brief summary, so you can pick and choose which ones you want to dig into.
- Developing your brand strategy – Everything starts with your brand. Your brand is everything you do. If you are not intentional about defining your brand, the market will define it for you. What are your core values? What is the problem you are solving? Who is your audience? What is your message, voice, and tone? All of these brand items and more must be addressed before the first tweet.
- Measuring your Digital Marketing efforts – If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it. Simple as that. So setup to measure everything, then set your 3-5 KPIs, and revisit them on a monthly basis, because they will change. Use Google Analytics, Twitter Analytics, Facebook Insights, and your email provider’s analytics tools, all of which are free and powerful to show you what works, what doesn’t, and who you’re reaching.
- Owned content marketing – Every piece of content you have or create – blog posts, social posts, email newsletters, email signatures, video, audio, images, photos…everything – is your owned content. And all of it should reflect your brand, because your brand is everything you do. Social media marketing (unpaid) is included here, because a social post is a piece of content that you created, and is a reflection of your brand.
- Social and search paid advertising – Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, Linkedin Ads, and (soon) Instagram promoted posts are all very affordable, very easy to engage in, and very powerful and hyper-targeted. Learn how to use each with precision and within your budget.
- Understanding the Digital Marketing funnel – Starting with your total reach, we walk you down through your click through rate (CTR), conversion rate, sales cycle, items per purchase, price, average order amount, and revenue. You should setup and measure the entire funnel for every campaign and your aggregate efforts. Measure your ROI based on the results of the marketing funnel.
- Creating your digital marketing calendar – Nothing hurts like a date, so using something as simple as a Google Spreadsheet, put a name, date, and status on every tactical effort: blog posts, social posts, videos, podcasts, etc. Knowing what you’re going to be publishing in 23 days eliminates the dreaded “what are we gonna post today!” syndrome, and frees you up to make plans to win like Arby’s and Oreo.
- And a bonus: Digital Marketing Glossary – a simple, straightforward, easy to understand glossary of 40 digital marketing terms you need to know.
So dig in, and learn digital marketing from scratch. It’s not that difficult when you have boundaries and a construct in which to begin. Thanks again to GA for letting me create these posts and the DGM Bootcamp. I hope to see you on June 20!
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