Transcript: 

Hello there, I’m Andrea Palten, your digital marketer and host for this podcast.

Today we are talking about the fundamentals of digital marketing. Listen, you’ve heard me talk a lot about the importance of getting these fundamentals down is the first thing you need to do to grow your business.

I want to go over some of these fundamentals today, but before we dive in. I want to personally invite you to my digital marketing fundamentals course today. It’s a 10-week course that will show you how to get leads in the door and make more sales. Just go to andreapalten.com/yes.

Ok, let’s get started with this episode.

Digital marketing fundamentals are important for any business owner and marketer.

It’s important to inform yourself on how you can reach new customers, donors, or clients using all the exciting digital marketing channels and tactics that are available to you.

To be effective at digital marketing, you need to leverage the technologies that fuel online media like landing pages, clickable ads, lead magnets, and social media profiles. And maybe even video and podcasts like this one.

Since this is a podcast and I only have limited time with you, I want to touch base on just a few of these today.

Lets’ talk about SEO, Content Marketing & Strategy, paid ads and social media today. Sound good? Hope so!

One of the main things you need to consider when doing digital marketing is search engine optimization or SEO.

Essentially: all the content you publish online should be optimized so that search engines will index your content and serve it to the most people possible.

The key to SEO is researching effective keywords for the type of people you’re trying to attract and then developing content focused on those keywords.

Another huge piece of SEO is something I call VAVA. And this is all about links. If you have awesome links on other websites clicking over to you, Google will take notice and rank you higher on google searches. The way to do this is with VAVA:

• The first V stands for Volume. This used to be the main way google ranked you higher but that’s no longer the case, there are many more things google looks at. But volume still matters. The trick is to compare the amount of links you have against those of your key competitors, and make sure that you have a) more links and b) better links.
• The second A in VAVA stands for Authority: Do you have links that are credible? For example, editorial from trusted websites such as the NBC or the market-leading online blogs and magazines in your industry will always be seen as more relevant than a generic online directory.  More than ever before, PR is an essential tool towards SEO because it’s the best way of generating links from authoritative sources.  Go viral with a publicity stunt, change people’s minds with new research in your industry, write a guest articles for a popular blog – or simply engage editors and readers with well-written, interesting news that brings people to your website. I reach out to reporters on LinkedIn and I just started looking for reporters on Instagram. If you play on Twitter, make sure you find them there.
• The second V in VAVA is Velocity: How quick are you acquiring new links and how does this compare to your competitors and the market place?  The trouble with the scattergun, warehouse-style link building was that a company could leapfrog competitors in search engine rankings by buying hundreds of links in a day.  That looks suspicious, and Google will clamp down on it.  Instead, aim for consistency – link building is a marathon, not a sprint. But google does look at you growing your incoming links. If you have the same 5 links each year, google won’t give you any credit. But if you grow your links every year from 5 to 10 to 20 to 40. Google will like that and rank you higher in searches.

The last A in VAVA is Anchor Text: What words are being used to link to your site? The anchor text – the clickable element of the text,  is what Google uses to determine the relevance of the link.  Google use these words to understand what your website is about. If someone writes the word “pilates studio” and makes it a clickable link to your site, the search engine can be reasonably confident that your website is about “pilates”. But if your clickable link says “click here”, google won’t know what the link is all about. 

Once you develop great, SEO-friendly content, it’s time to market it online.

So now lets talk about Content marketing. Content Marketing refers to a strategic approach to targeting specific audiences of people online with consistent, relevant, and engaging content. There are lots of different kinds of media available online you can use to market your organization, from blogs to e-mail newsletters to website landing pages. The goal is to be strategic and to target a specific group of people you’re trying to attract.

This podcast for example is a content marketing tactic.

To do all the content marketing tactics you want to do, you’ll need to have a Content Strategy.

Content strategy refers to your overall plan for developing, curating, and publishing content. Developing an effective content strategy means managing all of your content so that when you do your marketing, you have the most assets available. This isn’t just the content you create, like your blogs and downloadable PDFs but it’s also earned media content like testimonials from your clients or students and reviews and mentions on other websites.

Next, lets quickly talk about paid ads. This is the fastest way to get leads in the door, but it’s also the most expensive way.

Platforms like Google AdWords and Facebook Ads allow you to reach large groups of people in hours!

Right now Facebook ads has very competitive rates, especially when compared to traditional advertising. But do know, a lot of other marketers think this might change. GoogleAds used to be super cheap and they are not so much anymore. We think the same think will happen to Facebook. So if you’ve been thinking about doing Facebook ads, you should start right now.

The last digital marketing tactic I want to talk to you about is social media. Social media is one of the best venues for fueling online “word-of-mouth” awareness about your brand. Millions and millions of people use social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn every day to discuss their favorite products, services, causes, and preferred local vendors. If you want to build brand awareness, social media is a great venue for cultivating, monitoring, and participating in conversations among the types of people you’re trying to reach. Of course you need to know where your ideal customers hang out.

I will teach you all this and much more in my 10 week digital marketing fundamentals course. I’ll also be going over how to write a marketing plan, how to do email marketing correctly, what your website should entail, how to create lead magnets and so much more.

So check it out, go to andreapalten.com/yes to see if this course is the right course for you to learn the fundamentals of digital marketing.

Ok, guys, that is it for this week.

Talk to you next week and hopefully I will see you in the course.