u/das_senate New to Digital Marketing. Can someone recommend me some sort of syllabus of free material? I work for a growing company that's two years old. I was originally in production and do some part-time freelance writing at home; i write SEO content. On my day job, I recently got transferred to the marketing department since the upper management learned about my freelance writing. They told me they feel I can be of great help to the team. Turns out, the team members also doesn't have extensive knowledge about digital marketing. I want to make plans and do an awesome digital marketing campaign. I've got lots of ideas but I don't have proper training on digital marketing whatsoever and would like to know how to start. I can invest in books, but i would like to learn the very basics first. Can anyone write up a sort of syllabus of free online resources for me? There are a lot of resources out there that i just don't know where to start. Some "basics" seem to basic so i get bored of them easily and look for others. I would love to have your advice! 41 💬🗨📰👈
greatwhitebuffalo716 This. Digital marketing is a ridiculously broad spectrum of topics: SEO, Pay Per Click (PPC), social media, content marketing, email marketing, web design, etc. I've met people that specialize in a certain type of Search Engine Optimization (SEO); to be put on a team that is in charge of digital marketing in general doesn't make much sense to me.
das_senate ✍️ Thanks for this enlightening advice. Can you recommend a way how our team could work our way into digital marketing? A teammate's already attended a few seminars. I, however, would like some reading materials
young_wild_freelance Have you heard of Lynda.com? It is a website full of video courses on various topics. I am currently working my way through a digital marketing course. The best part is that once you finish a course, you can put a certificate automatically on your LinkedIn profile. It does cost money, but you can look into your local library to see if they have a partnership with them. Because I have a library card, I log into it with my library card number and get access to all the classes for free! BestBaronOfBeef Udemy has some good courses. Read everything you can on moz.com, especially the big guides and Whiteboard Fridays. HubSpot has some pretty good resources too. Get your Google analytics certification for free from Google and take more of their free courses via their new Academy for Ads. Even if you're not planning on doing Pay Per Click (PPC) right away there are some good insights to be had there. [deleted] I think the easiest way is to first figure out current strategy/tactics being used, and find out your team member skills. You said you're a writer/SEO content producer but what about the other people on your team? If you have a decent variety of skills then I think you can come together to form obe overarching strategy but work on achieving them individually through different channels. ohiocitygadfly • Make a list of your company's overall business goals. Your business goals — more sales, launch a new product, etc. — not things like "get more likes and followers." • Do the free HubSpot Inbound Marketing Certification: https://academy.hubspot.com. It's a good overview of different types of digital marketing tactics from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to social media and more. There are other free certifications you can take down the road. All students in the marketing clinic I direct at a local university MUST have this certification, which many employers require during training (mainly digital marketing agencies). • Go back to the list of business goals. Map digital marketing tactics to each goal. Everything you do needs to be measurable, and therefor support a business goal. Know that some tactics are good for top of the funnel, others help close and some are for the post-purchase phase.
funkidredd2 Hi mate, loads that can be learnt a a result of the following (use as springboard to finding out more as well!). Write this for another bloke on Reddit, but hopefully you'll find the content useful in starting your baptism of fire! • Get yourself Google Tag Manager (tagmanager.google.com) and install that pixel on the page • Get all your tracking pixels in the tag container – so your Facebook Tracking Pixel, then Twitter, Quora, Adwords, LinkedIn, Reddit – they all have tracking pixels mate. Get all of them! Also get hotjar.com or crazyegg.com so you have some actual visibility on your site as to what people are actually doing – every swipe, tap, mouse movement and click – all recorded for you to see what people are ACTUALLY doing on your site versus what you THINK they're doing! • Get your Google Search Console hooked up with your Google Analytics hooked up with your Adwords – there's heaps to this, and it's a pain in the arse, won't lie. I can help you remotely on this if you need a hand or someone else in r/forhire • Setup your conversion pixel events in all the ones i mentioned in (2) – these are different to the standard page tracking pixels, as they track who comes to which of your pages: What a CONVERSION pixel does though, is to track when someone purchases, or where they sign up to your newsletter or call you etc – actual things that make you money there and then, as opposed to just tracking. • Create custom audiences in Facebook, Twitter, Adwords and all the ones in (2). A custom audience is where you take your existing emails and upload them into each platform, where the platform then matches the emails to accounts on that platform. Now you may only have 100-200 emails for example, and these WON'T be enough to then run an advert to, BUTTTTT you can then create "lookalike audiences" in the platforms where each platform goes off and finds people that very closely match the qualities, aspirations, hopes, dreams, desires and marketing demographics of the millions of available people it has data on (see why Facebook is under massive Public Relations (PR) scrutiny now?) and then gives you that audience to then market to. • Create a newsletter opt-in that pops up on the site after a set scroll period and/or time on site. Also set the popup to appear when someone is exiting the site – this is literally called an "exit intent" popup. They were going to leave anyway, so might as well try and get their details. • Create further custom audiences of people that visit specific pages or click specific buttons or who add to shopping cart but then don't purchase – as well as one for purchasers too! These custom audiences will be great for what we call "retargeting" or "remarketing" – they're where people come to your site, and do some shit but don't buy anything for example, but the tracking pixels "fire" and when they go back into their social media platform of choice – well, there is the retargeting advert for the product they were looking at or the category they were choosing from. You will have seen this yourself when looking at a piece of clothing or wallet or whatever – when you don't buy it, the product then seems to follow you around the internet no matter where you go (if the marketer is skilled enough!) • MAKE SURE you have your Google Analytics setup with your ecommerce package too – so when people start to buy, you know where they are, what device, what time best converts, how many times they came back to the site before purchasing – and then be able to break down which product(s) are selling best based on actual data rather than gut feels. • Make sure you have your Instagram account setup for business use, and make sure you apply for shopping tags usage – these will be invaluable for you to have people tap on your item picture in your feed WITHOUT ads (sometimes!) for people to then tap and buy there and then. Powerful stuff but you have to get your instagram account verified as a business. • Speaking of business verification – get your Google My Business all setup too. We've talked about Analytics + Search Console etc here already, but when you get your Google My Business all setup with address on the map that gets verified, phone number, web address and open hours etc – that then leads to great things: Review extensions, location extensions and call extensions and basically ALL the Adwords Ad Extensions can then be used to trounce your competitors. All can be setup free, apart from the Pay Per Click (PPC) obviously! • Get cracking with video content! Show some products being made, show them in use from customers who tell how happy they are, show kids with your patches – really pull at heart strings and invest someone's emotion watching the videos. Yes, even for patches. • Setup your YouTube channel too – get those videos up there on YouTube and Facebook on your business page AND ON YOUR PERSONAL FB Profile too! Do business from your personal profiles and treat all the social networks as business avenues now, rather than post family and friends shit – still DO that, but keep it to a minimum so you can show people some transparency on the person BEHIND the company. • Get ALL your videos you post, transcribed with captions from rev.com – $1 per video minute, and it helps in getting your video watched and ranked. • If you're hooked up in your Google Search Console, feel free to then activate your YouTube cards with the link back to your site that can be sprung at any time during the video. Here's the kicker though – YT recent f*cked everyone in small business just starting out, by saying you can't have that feature unless you have a load of subscribers and watch time. Buy them. Don't worry about it – you're not giving a flying f*ck about these fake subscribers as you're ONLY doing this to get the YT Cards with Link feature unlocked. Don't feel bad or fake – YT brought this on themselves. • Live stream your heart out. Live stream the devices being made and again, show viewers some genuine heartstring tugging stories. That shit gets shared. A LOT. • Instagram influencer marketing is good when it works – but check their account for number of fake followers Vs genuine followers. There's heaps of free tools around, but at time of writing Facebook (who own instagram) are cracking down on their Application Programming Interface (API) so a lot of the tools will stop working soon. Find one. Rape it for info as much as you can for as long as you can, and then Direct Message (DM) these account holders offering them a referral fee – you'll need a UTM tracking URL for that Influencer to give out so you can track any sales back to them. OR you can agree to a set fee – say 4c per genuine follower for a shout. Results will vary, but at least you know you got tools to analyse an Insta account now. • I can't help but think that Facebook, Instagram and YouTube Ads for visibility and traffic, with MAYBE Adwords for retargeting (retargeting traffic is way cheaper than "cold" traffic, by the way) would be the way to go for this. Just a hunch. • See if you can get some Public Relations (PR) by using SourceBottle or HelpAReporter and being featured in blogs, magazines, TV etc as a "feel good" story. Free to do, just your time. • Run a search on your competitors sites using WhatRunsWhere and see what keywords they're using on their site – you then use that info to write blogs around those keywords and also to run better ads than them on Adwords! • MAKE SURE you have your telephone number on the site too – a lot of times people just want to talk to someone. At the top of your page, put the number and the "Message Us" too – this could be a Facebook Messenger widget button that will then message your page, or if could be using something like the billions of website instant messaging Software as a Service (SaaS) out there • If you're going to have the traditional "Get Newsletter" snoozefest, then make sure you have a great Client Relationship Management (CRM) that you're going to USE to send those cool as f*ck and interesting newsletters – start with MailChimp or Active Campaign or wowtools.io (AC or WOW!Tools better as you can "tag" your contacts. These tags allow you to automate sending based on those tags existing or not – another conversation about all this as it's more complex than to write here, about audience segmentation and marketing automation etc). There's a cool as f*ck WordPress plugin to use called wowq.io – this can ask them all questions on a popup quiz or questionnaire and then tag each answer they give, which then "talks" to your CRM and then auto sends out your email content based on their answer(s). Useful. Paid. • Try and use Reddit i Ask Me Anything (AMA) – you'll be selling without selling, as you answer (hopefully!) a bajillion questions about your industry. It's a bit outside the norm what you do, so Reddit will love it. Don't hard sell – just answer questions and be transparent and yes, even give your links where appropriate. Hopefully this is some cool info to get you going in the right direction (or anyone else reading this).
Sparklepantsgirl Oh my gosh!!! You are amazing! Wow.
funkidredd2 Nawww.. I just do this daily for clients, so it's all useful for OP hopefully. Find me at nathanhague.com or on Facebook. I'm usually live streaming marketing ridealongs doing tech marketing stuff on my screen. das_senate ✍️ Wooooah! Thank you so much for this. This is awesome!
Riad910 He said it all!! He should've charge you lol XoT3K Wow. Nice list. What would one charge for doing all this?
funkidredd2 Hi mate. To get all setup, I charge USD2,500 and i do remotely on your laptop using Zoom. I charge like a wounded bull, but if budget is your concern, head to r/forhire (results will vary, just a heads up!). Around if you need me though.
bickisnotmyname Write a book? I'd buy it
funkidredd2 Ha! I do courses for those that want to do it themselves. You can find me at nathanhague.com – I'm deffo NSFW though, as I'm half Aussie and half English, so I swear a lot through the info nuggets.
SEOPub Honestly, the best thing your company could do is to hire a competent consultant that will tell your team what they should be doing and focusing on. You can learn from them and then after 2-3 years the company can ditch the consultant and just let your team handle everything going forward. Even if people recommend a couple of resources here, the digital marketing world (and SEO specifically) is full of a lot of BS. You lack the experience to recognize the difference between BS and good advice. I'm not trying to be rude. The truth is that the idea that you are going to learn digital marketing more or less overnight and be competent at it quickly is more or less a pipedream. Z-launch 1. Identify who your customers are The most important part of creating a digital marketing strategy is knowing who your customers are, how they want to engage with your business and how they want to hear about the goods/services/promotions you offer. It is important to examine your customer's buying journey across all your media and then build a digital marketing strategy to suit this. The first step is to understand where your customers are searching for your goods or services and whether it is online, offline or on mobile. 2. Think mobile-first Customers rely on their mobiles when shopping. Whether it be researching products and deals while in-store, or completing the whole customer journey on mobile, m-commerce is now a vital part of the shopping experience. Australian businesses need to respond to this by putting mobile at the forefront of their digital marketing strategy, starting with a mobile responsive website. Mobile can no longer be an afterthought or a luxury, it needs to be at the centre of all strategies and decisions. A simple app and an updated website with relevant content can open up the doorway to a whole new customer base. 3. Listen to your customers Customers are becoming increasingly used to deals that fit their needs and are specific to them based on their past shopping history. Companies can gain keen insights into how to personalise data and content to the needs of the customer by analysing the data customer's create. The more customers interact with companies through digital means, the more knowledge a business can capture from them. This is a wealth of knowledge available to business decision-makers that hasn't been available in the past. Being among the first to make the most of these insights will undoubtedly lead to rich rewards for early movers. While it may sound complicated to analyse your customer's data, in reality it just involves implementing a simple piece of software or a reporting tool that will show you how your customers are finding your business (offline and online), where they are, what else they search for, what they are looking at, how long they are looking at it – and that's just for starters. This information can be used to tailor products and offers to suit your specific customers, increasing the conversion rates of your business. The wrap It's time for businesses to ensure they have a clear and coherent digital strategy or they risk falling behind savvy competitors who may not even be in your own backyard, such as is the global online shopping center we're now able to access. While it may seem like a daunting journey, it is actually easier to do than you might think and there are many providers available to help you along your journey. No matter how you embrace digital, you must, as these simple steps have the potential to transform your business and open it up to new revenue streams and markets.
