How Learning Digital Marketing Can Transform Your Business

by Simon Hopes Author

Any business that pivots from a brick-and-mortar shop to an online one goes through inherent struggles and challenges. Even if that business is primarily still a brick-and-mortar operation, and needs to be to survive, such as a kid’s birthday party place, having an online presence is still extremely important to its success. While you certainly can (and should) outsource some of your digital marketing needs to a dedicated employee or an outside agency, it is still important that you know the basics of digital marketing. After all, if you don’t know what is happening, your employee or the outside agency you hire is actively going to take advantage of you. With that in mind, here’s how you can learn the basics of online marketing in order advance the status of your business and generate more revenue.

Understand Your Buyer Personas

Any marketing, of course, has buyer personas. But online marketing specifically targets these with ads in a way that outbound marketing could never do. Take, for example, a kid’s party place. In this case, you are obviously not marketing directly to children. In reality, you are marketing to the parents of children, specifically moms who have young children. Most likely, these moms are in their mid-30’s or early 40’s. As such, you’ll want to craft an online marketing strategy specifically catered to women in this demographic. To do this though, you need to narrow down your buyer personas to demographical information, and then make lookalike audiences based on this particular audience.

Target Your Buyer Personas

One of the best things about promoting your business online is the control you have over your advertising. While you can certainly target your buyer persona with outbound marketing – for example, a kid’s party place can place ads in publications catered toward young moms – you have a much greater degree of control with online advertising. This is because you can actually set what type of people you actually want your ads to be shown to.

This is particularly the case with social media ads, and platforms like Facebook and Instagram have made it extremely easy for businesses to target certain types of people. As mentioned above, lookalike audiences’ factor heavily into this. If you, or an agency or employee you hire, are able to find the demographics you want to target and are able to run a successful ad campaign for them, you can then create another audience that resembles the one you are targeting in terms of hobbies, interests, and pages they have ‘liked.’

All of this makes learning digital marketing all the more worthwhile, as you can expect a direct correlation from the work you put in to the work. At the minimum, you’ll know exactly what your agency or employee is doing with your business, and will be able to offer feedback based on the results and the targets, as well as the content of the ads themselves. Ultimately, you don’t need to become a master of digital marketing to successfully market your business online. But you do need to have a competency in it – and learning the basics of how to target buyer personas online is a good jumping off point.