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Believe it or not, the time people spend browsing the internet, shopping online and using social media has increased by 5% in the last three years alone. For businesses, our shared love for being in the digital space brings with it endless marketing opportunities.
Digital Marketing is the tactical promotion of products and services through digital channels (websites, apps, search engines, social media, email, video and SMS). Digital Marketing helps customers identify with a brand, informs them about a particular product or service and ultimately convinces as many people as possible to make that all-important purchase.
The main difference between traditional and digital marketing is the medium through which content is delivered. While traditional marketing uses traditional media, such as television, radio and print, digital marketing uses digital channels to distribute its messaging.
Not only is marketing via digital channels typically more cost efficient, but it also tends to be more dynamic. While traditional marketing assets are static, digital marketing content can create two-way interactions, allowing customers to access product information and the latest offers in just a few clicks. This stimulates higher levels of customer engagement and increases the conversion rate from a prospect to a lead.
Using digital marketing channels also enables marketers to easily target specific audiences and serve content according to people’s preferences and behaviour, helping to generate stronger, more qualified leads.
The terms ‘advertising’ and ‘marketing’ are often used interchangeably, and while these two business activities are closely related (even sharing the same goals of informing consumers about a product or service and driving sales), they’re not synonyms and it’s crucial to understand the difference.
Marketing broadly refers to anything and everything a business does to attract people to its brand, products or services. This could involve anything from product development and content creation, to data analysis and market research. Advertising is a specific activity within the marketing process, whereby a company informs consumers about its products or services through paid channels.
Simply put, advertising is a single component of a business’s wider marketing strategy. If marketing is the whole pie, then advertising is just one slice.
Marketing has always been about businesses connecting with prospective customers in the right place at the right time. In today’s world, that means meeting them online.
This begins with businesses using Digital Marketing to drive paid and organic traffic toward their websites and platforms.
On a larger scale, modern businesses rely on Digital Marketing campaigns, which are a series of strategic marketing actions carried out across digital platforms. A Digital Marketing campaign will establish a brand’s image and systematically move leads down the marketing funnel, from point of awareness to a converted sale.
Digital Marketing activities also offer companies the chance to continuously gather and analyse data. This information is used to plan, assess and refine marketing campaigns, as well as improve other areas of a business.
In the simplest terms, a Digital Marketer is responsible for planning and creating marketing material that’s published digitally.
No two roles will ever be the same, but a typical Digital Marketing role might include:
Many Digital Marketers are all-rounders, who will complete a number of the above tasks. Others offer specialist skillsets and focus on specific areas of a company’s marketing strategy. For instance, it’s not uncommon to find Digital Marketers who dedicate all their time to delivering a brand’s social media content, while others might work solely with emails.
A business’s Digital Marketing strategy can encompass a wide variety of techniques and technologies. For a company to find the right marketing mix, it’s crucial to understand the uses and benefits that come with different marketing types. The core forms of marketing that today’s industry relies on are:
SEO is the ongoing practice of optimising a website’s performance to enhance its natural appearance in relevant search engine results. When a person performs a search on Google or another search engine, the websites displayed are judged on their merits by a search engine algorithm. In effect, similar websites compete against each other to appear in the search results, and a website’s SEO performance is judged in comparison to the SEO of its competitors.
The fundamentals of SEO are on-page (changes made to a website) and off-page (links back to a site and digital activities done outside the site that relate to that site). Because of the rate of web technology improvements, a newer website will normally have an advantage in SEO over an older website that was built with older technologies.
Email marketing is built on the premise of permission given by the recipient. In marketer Seth Godin’s seminal book, Permission Marketing, Godin talks about the novelty of permission in marketing and how the email recipient has co-opted into the relationship, expecting and anticipating marketing messages.
Email marketing is one of the easiest methods to get started in digital marketing, requiring only an email marketing software tool to ensure compliances such as unsubscribe buttons are met. Email marketing can be turbocharged with advertising and email funnel automation, to lead consumers down a path towards purchase.
Social media marketing uses social media for the purpose of building a community of people around a business and compelling those people to make a purchase. Popular social sites for marketing include Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.
Social media marketing is also a great way to grow an email database, improve a website’s SEO, and perform customer service functions.
SEM is distinct from SEO in that it’s paid advertising. SEM is often referred to as ‘paid search’ and the way it’s performed is through PPC, or Pay-Per-Click. Ads are purchased on the main search engines and a business pays every time a click is performed on the ad.
Display advertising includes visuals such as images or videos that are placed on relevant websites within a network, such as the Google Display Network or Facebook’s network. Display advertising has three basic categories:
The advertiser/marketer chooses the website they would like to run their display ads on.
Networks place ads on relevant websites, such as when a food product ad is shown on a cooking website.
This is when website users are ‘tagged’ with a pixel from a particular website, which then allows the business to show ads from that business on other websites, as the user browses the internet.
Video advertising is promotional content that plays before, during or after streaming video, such as within Facebook or YouTube. You could also call some display advertising that uses video video marketing too. YouTube was one of the first platforms to offer six-second ads. Thirty seconds is the most popular ad length, since late 2015.
According to video marketing research, 93% of marketers using video say it’s a vital part of their strategy and 87% claim it offers them a strong Return on Investment (ROI). .
The oft-quoted phrase “content is king” came from an essay by Bill Gates in 1996. Content marketing is creating, publishing, and distributing content that serves strategic purposes for a business or organisation. Content marketing is used to:
To be effective, a business must create content that is useful, valuable and relevant to its target market, who are then willing to engage with the business online, typically through subscribing to their email database and/or participating on their social media channels.
Examples of content include blog articles, infographics, videos, e-books or case studies, among others.
Affiliate marketing is the process of selling someone else’s product and earning a commission on sales. To do this, the merchant, seller or brand, finds ‘affiliates’ who are willing to promote a particular product or service. Each affiliate is given a unique URL (web link) which measures clicks. The affiliate then promotes this link, typically through their email list, and any sales that result earn the affiliate a percentage of the sale.
Most of the time, a network acts as an intermediary between the merchant and the affiliate. Networks such as ClickBank or Commission Junction handle the payment and product delivery and provide a database of lots of products that the affiliate marketer can choose whether or not to promote. When a network is involved, the merchant only manages their affiliate program on that network and doesn’t deal with individual affiliates.
Whether the consumer knows that they are part of an affiliate marketing system or not is mostly up to the affiliate. For affiliate marketing to work effectively for both parties, the affiliate needs a large email list or online community of people who trust them.
A business’s Digital Marketing strategy can encompass a wide variety of techniques and technologies. For a company to find the right marketing mix, it’s crucial to understand the uses and benefits that come with different marketing types. The core forms of marketing that today’s industry relies on are:
SEO is the ongoing practice of optimising a website’s performance to enhance its natural appearance in relevant search engine results. When a person performs a search on Google or another search engine, the websites displayed are judged on their merits by a search engine algorithm. In effect, similar websites compete against each other to appear in the search results, and a website’s SEO performance is judged in comparison to the SEO of its competitors.
The fundamentals of SEO are on-page (changes made to a website) and off-page (links back to a site and digital activities done outside the site that relate to that site). Because of the rate of web technology improvements, a newer website will normally have an advantage in SEO over an older website that was built with older technologies.
Email marketing is built on the premise of permission given by the recipient. In marketer Seth Godin’s seminal book, Permission Marketing, Godin talks about the novelty of permission in marketing and how the email recipient has co-opted into the relationship, expecting and anticipating marketing messages.
Email marketing is one of the easiest methods to get started in digital marketing, requiring only an email marketing software tool to ensure compliances such as unsubscribe buttons are met. Email marketing can be turbocharged with advertising and email funnel automation, to lead consumers down a path towards purchase.
Social media marketing uses social media for the purpose of building a community of people around a business and compelling those people to make a purchase. Popular social sites for marketing include Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.
Social media marketing is also a great way to grow an email database, improve a website’s SEO, and perform customer service functions.
SEM is distinct from SEO in that it’s paid advertising. SEM is often referred to as ‘paid search’ and the way it’s performed is through PPC, or Pay-Per-Click. Ads are purchased on the main search engines and a business pays every time a click is performed on the ad.
Display advertising includes visuals such as images or videos that are placed on relevant websites within a network, such as the Google Display Network or Facebook’s network. Display advertising has three basic categories:
The advertiser/marketer chooses the website they would like to run their display ads on.
Networks place ads on relevant websites, such as when a food product ad is shown on a cooking website.
This is when website users are ‘tagged’ with a pixel from a particular website, which then allows the business to show ads from that business on other websites, as the user browses the internet.
Video advertising is promotional content that plays before, during or after streaming video, such as within Facebook or YouTube. You could also call some display advertising that uses video video marketing too. YouTube was one of the first platforms to offer six-second ads. Thirty seconds is the most popular ad length, since late 2015.
According to video marketing research, 93% of marketers using video say it’s a vital part of their strategy and 87% claim it offers them a strong Return on Investment (ROI). .
The oft-quoted phrase “content is king” came from an essay by Bill Gates in 1996. Content marketing is creating, publishing, and distributing content that serves strategic purposes for a business or organisation. Content marketing is used to:
To be effective, a business must create content that is useful, valuable and relevant to its target market, who are then willing to engage with the business online, typically through subscribing to their email database and/or participating on their social media channels.
Examples of content include blog articles, infographics, videos, e-books or case studies, among others.
Affiliate marketing is the process of selling someone else’s product and earning a commission on sales. To do this, the merchant, seller or brand, finds ‘affiliates’ who are willing to promote a particular product or service. Each affiliate is given a unique URL (web link) which measures clicks. The affiliate then promotes this link, typically through their email list, and any sales that result earn the affiliate a percentage of the sale.
Most of the time, a network acts as an intermediary between the merchant and the affiliate. Networks such as ClickBank or Commission Junction handle the payment and product delivery and provide a database of lots of products that the affiliate marketer can choose whether or not to promote. When a network is involved, the merchant only manages their affiliate program on that network and doesn’t deal with individual affiliates.
Whether the consumer knows that they are part of an affiliate marketing system or not is mostly up to the affiliate. For affiliate marketing to work effectively for both parties, the affiliate needs a large email list or online community of people who trust them.
First, let’s define what the customer purchase journey is. Otherwise known as the buyer’s journey, it involves a three-stage process:
How businesses use SEO
In the awareness stage, a person is fairly inarticulate about solutions and instead likely to be researching their problems. SEO content marketing, such as a blog, can boost a website’s ranking and help the person understand the solution your business offers.
In the consideration stage, a person is more familiar with solutions, but ranking on search engines will become harder as more businesses will be vying for related search terms.
In the decision stage, a person is motivated to purchase and will search for known businesses offering solutions. Ranking for these search phrases will be highly lucrative, but even more competitive.
How businesses use email marketing
Over the last decade consumers have become increasingly reluctant to give away their email addresses. This means businesses are striving to create valuable email assets, such as free tutorials or whitepapers, that require an email opt-in for the consumer to access.
Email marketing is more likely to work in the consideration stage, when a consumer is motivated to seek out information that helps them make a smart purchase. A well-timed email pop-up that offers an incentive, such as a discount code, is likely to offer a strong conversion rate.
How businesses use social media marketing
Social media marketing is used for brand reach and is particularly useful at the awareness stage, when the consumer is performing broad research.
For e-commerce brands that seamlessly link social posts to their online checkout, social media marketing can also positively influence conversion rates at the purchase stage.
How businesses use SEM
Search Engine Marketing is particularly useful for the consideration and decision stages, when the consumer is either searching for a solution or considering the pros and cons that come with each available solution. At this stage, they might also be actively performing research on specialist websites that could display relevant ads for your business.
How businesses use display advertising
Display ads use a push approach, whereby ads are served to people after they’ve watched a video, read emails, or browsed the web. This means display ads are most effective during the consideration stage, after the consumer has indicated their interest.
How businesses use video advertising
Video advertising can be used effectively during the awareness and consideration stages. During the awareness stage, a video ad can introduce the solution and demonstrate how a product works. During the consideration stage, the consumer has heightened awareness of the various options available and is more likely to take note of brand names for further research.
How businesses use content marketing
In the awareness stage, a business can use content marketing to talk with empathy about the problems the consumer is grappling with, which can help to create trust.
In the consideration stage, the business needs to shift to detailed, useful content that is relevant to the consumer. In the decision stage, the content marketing needs to focus on resolving common barriers to purchase. This might include highlighting case studies, successful client stories and the brand’s point-of-difference, all of which can help convert a lead.
How businesses use affiliate marketing
Because of pre-existing relationships between the affiliate and their audience, affiliates can introduce a product that the audience wasn’t looking for at the awareness stage and skillfully convince them that it’s needed.
Affiliate marketing is also useful in the consideration stage, when the customer is canvassing options. Affiliate marketing can be used by consumers to compare and contrast multiple companies and solutions, helping them make a purchase decision.
Mastering the latest tools and using the right tech stack ensures that marketers are more time-efficient and data-driven. There are a range of tools that can reduce the heavy lifting of a marketer’s work and raise the bar of creativity, these include:
A CMS is a tool that makes it easy to manage and maintain important elements of your website, including content, without needing to know anything about coding.
WordPress is a free, open-source Content Management System and one of the simplest, most popular ways to create a website or blog. WordPress is a CMS that’s currently used by over 43% of all the websites on the Internet. It is especially popular among marketers because it makes building a website accessible even if you aren’t a web developer.
This web analytics service gives Digital Marketers vital information about who their site visitors are and what those visitors do while they’re on a website. Digital Marketers use Google Analytics to understand the impact of a marketing campaign and how a site’s user experience influences factors such as lead generation, lead conversion and customer retention.
No matter what area of Digital Marketing you become involved with, data analytics will be the cornerstone of your strategy, helping you make smarter data-driven marketing decisions
Content Marketers all over the globe depend on Semrush to perform SEO. Semrush allows you to carry out keyword research, track the keyword strategies of your competitors and run SEO audits that can help you optimise the keywords and phrases in your written content. Semrush will also review your text and highlight any missed backlinking opportunities.
HubSpot is a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software that’s used for inbound marketing, providing businesses with a centralised location for marketing and sales data. It allows companies to track and analyse marketing activity in real-time, and view an entire sales pipeline on a visual dashboard.
Hubspot users can access detailed reports on productivity, using those insights to monitor team performance and identify opportunities for growth. As well as offering a seamless connection to marketing channels, HubSpot is cloud-based, meaning all your data will be perfectly synced across teams and devices.
Modern Digital Marketers use the suite of Adobe Creative Cloud apps to design eye-catching marketing material, from vibrant Instagram posts, to brochures with crystal-clear layouts.
In particular, marketers tend to rely on the ‘big three’ of InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop. However, the full Adobe Creative Cloud offers an array of creative tools that help marketers to:
When it comes to delivering an end-to-end campaign, there’s a range of platforms that Digital Marketers can build a presence on to reach their target audience.
Some of the industry’s most tried-and-trusted platforms include:
Operating on a pay-per-click model, you can target a specific keyword on Google and make bids on it. Bidding on keywords allows you to outrank rivals and appear higher in search results.
While Search ads show up as soon as your potential customers start searching, Display ads appear while people are visiting sites across the Google Display Network, which is made up of over two million websites (reaching 90% of internet users globally).
A Facebook page is a great free marketing tool, allowing a business to build its brand and a following of potential customers. Facebook Ads has advanced targeting capabilities and you can use it to reach particular demographics. This helps a company direct stronger leads to a core website, creating greater impression and click-through-rates (CTR).
Using Facebook’s advertising system, Instagram Ads is equally powerful when targeting a particular market, allowing your business to specify an audience’s location, interests, behaviours, and much more. You can even target people who have interacted with brands, products and services that are similar to your own.
Not only are your customers glued to YouTube, but as the internet’s second biggest search engine, YouTube can boost your business’s SEO and overall brand presence. YouTube allows marketers to present attention-grabbing content that’s easy for viewers to consume and share.
Marketers rely on LinkedIn to build brand awareness, relationships with consumers and an industry presence. By posting cutting-edge content and participating in industry discussions, you can use LinkedIn to increase your credibility with customers and partners.
Twitter offers businesses the chance to engage an audience and be involved in their industry’s hottest conversations. As a Digital Marketer using Twitter, you’ll focus on generating a healthy mix of replies, organic tweets, retweets and Twitter takes, while you might even consider paying to feature in Twitter Ads.
There are a range of good reasons to choose a career in Digital Marketing. Most obviously, it’s a booming industry. These days, countless consumers purchase products because of the marketing they encounter while navigating search engines, scrolling through social media, or checking emails.
But what career options do you have as an aspiring marketer? And what exactly does a Digital Marketing career path look like?
There are plenty of career options for Digital Marketing professionals, a wide range of skills that can be used and developed, and all kinds of expertise and experience that can be drawn upon to further your career.
You can broadly categorise Digital Marketers into three camps: creative, strategic and technical.
Creative Digital Marketers often have backgrounds in copywriting, video production, art, graphic design or other creative fields. They will use their creative skills and outside-of-the-box thinking to build empathy with a target audience and generate original high-impact ideas.
Creative Digital Marketers are normally responsible for producing marketing assets, such as social media posts, blog posts, infographics, e-books and videos, which means they need a mix of technical and creative skills.
Strategic Digital Marketers often come from public relations and communications, business, finance and management. They tend to take a big picture view of a brand and marketplace and are skilled at long-term planning, spotting trends and opportunities, risk and reputation management, and brand development. Strategic Digital Marketers use their skills and know-how to formulate a broader strategy for a marketing team to execute.
Technical Digital Marketers often come from web development and coding backgrounds. They are adept at implementing technologies that can perform the tasks required, including data measurement and analysis. Technical Digital Marketers not only perform complex tasks, but are also adept at using the tech at their disposal to solve problems.
Here’s an example of a successful Digital Marketing career path, broken down into a few simple steps:
Needless to say, your career path will take a unique turn based on the specialities you choose to develop. For illustrative purposes, let’s assume you decide to specialise in email marketing.
Beyond these steps, there’s also the possibility that you could eventually land even more senior marketing roles, such as Marketing Director, VP of Marketing, or even CMO.
With more businesses than ever competing for our attention online, Digital Marketers are hot property in all industries. The demand for Digital Marketing in Australia is on the up, with national employment rates set to increase by 21% in the next five years.
Currently, over 8,000 Australian Digital Marketing roles are up for grabs on Seek (as of July 2022). It’s worth remembering that a Digital Marketer’s skills are widely sought after, so wherever you end up in life, you’ll have work experience and a CV that employers are actively searching for.
The pay opportunities for Australian Digital Marketers reflect an industry that’s growing fast and always on the lookout for skilled professionals.
Talent.com records the average Digital Marketer salary in Australia at $85,000 per year (or $43.59 per hour). Even entry-level positions start at $70,000 per year, while more experienced Digital Marketers make $119,443 per year on average.
There’s also a high chance you’ll find the work extremely rewarding, with Digital Marketing scoring a solid 4.2 out of 5 for job satisfaction.
Even for a complete beginner, learning Digital Marketing is not as hard as you might think. That said, it’s important you begin with a knack for being persuasive, solving problems and thinking creatively. Writing and design skills are transferable and bound to come in handy, while a basic level of experience working with tech and digital platforms will be needed to kickstart any Digital Marketing career.
It takes time and dedication to grasp the theory that underpins effective marketing strategies, and you’ll also need to learn how to execute a campaign from end-to-end. You’ll need plenty of hands-on practice to get the most out of the industry’s latest tools and techniques.
The internet is filled with free software and tutorials that can be used by anyone keen to get started as a Digital Marketer. However, if you’re wanting to get a foothold in the industry, you should consider earning a formal certification in Digital Marketing. Without this, it’s tricky to land that first role, since so many other candidates will have a certified skillset.
There are many options when it comes to qualifying as a Digital Marketer. Traditional universities offer Bachelor of Digital Marketing degrees, which normally take 3-4 years to complete.
There’s less of an expectation for Digital Marketers to be university qualified these days, with most employers and prospective clients prioritising skills, experience and a strong portfolio over formal degrees.
As a result, more people are enrolling in condensed bootcamp-style courses, which leave graduates industry-ready in a much shorter period of time. These courses focus on the hands-on practice and tangible skillset that today’s Digital Marketers need to make an impact in the industry.
Academy Xi offers practical, industry-recognised training that’s designed for digital careers.
Whatever your starting point, our Digital Marketing courses will leave you fully capable of promoting products, services and brands across a range of digital channels.
Whether you want to venture into a new profession as a Digital Marketer, or upskill and test the waters of a marketing career, Academy Xi has a course that’s perfectly suited to your goals and lifestyle.
Not sure which course is right for you? Chat to a course advisor and we’ll help you find the perfect match.
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