You can contrast this with traditional marketing using traditional media, things like TV or the radio or newspapers, magazines, or billboards. Anything not digital now here's the deal, traditional marketing, and traditional advertising and everything that goes into it, well, it still works, but there are some significant advantages to using digital marketing and all the digital channels that we now have available.                                                                                                                                                                                Audience Size
First digital marketing tends to give you a much larger audience size Really, you can reach anybody that's online and there's billions and billions of people online.

 Because not only are you able to reach these billions of people. Well, you don't wanna reach all of them because all of them are not going to be the perfect fit for your business. Rather, you can be laser-focused and selective on only the most ideal and perfect people that you wanna target.                                                                                Digital marketing also tends to be significantly more cost-effective than running says, Digital marketing also allows you to get immediate feedback.  And this is probably one of my favorite benefits of the channels. After all, if you think about running, say a magazine ad where you've got to think of the copy and the creative and what you're going to say, and then you've gotta get it all written up and sent to the magazine It's gotta get published and then distributed. Well, you could be looking at weeks at best, months and maybe many, many months before you ever figure out if this worked or not.

  Digital marketing on the other hand, well, in theory, you can write an ad and have it online in a matter of minutes. Immediate feedback, immediate correction, immediate results Plus, digital marketing tends to be a lot easier to measure and to track because everything's digital which means we've got a digital trail allowing us to measure  costs and results and everything in real time so, we can make adjustments and tweaks and optimizations on the fly.

 Again, contrast that with waiting three months for your magazine to come out and figure out if things worked or not. And you can't measure clicks on a magazine So, the best you can hope to do is, well, really, either have them fill out some kind of form on the magazine or visit a digital channel that ties us back into digital marketing.  Anyway, there are obviously some serious advantages here to choosing digital channels, going with digital marketing. But again, that's not to say that traditional marketing doesn't still work, it does.

  The point here is to take a look at either traditional or digital marketing and then sort of take a few steps back to the strategies and the fundamentals and the principles, the consumer psychology, the buyer behavior, why people do the things they do and then focus on mastering and learning that then you can apply that to digital channels or traditional channels or any other channels that come out in the future.

   Understand the Differences Between Strategy and Tactics.                                   All right, the next thing that'll help you become a better digital marketer is to understand the differences between strategy and tactics and when to use them. Strategy is all the big picture stuff, And this is really where you wanna focus your efforts first and foremost because this is the foundation that all of your future marketing efforts and tactics and tools and software and things like that are gonna be built on.

  Get this part wrong and nothing else matters because nothing else will work now, there are a ton of different strategies and approaches, and ways to look at your digital marketing, but pretty much no matter how you look at it, it always comes back to four basic and really solid principles that have stood the test of time and are gonna be just as relevant today as they are a hundred years from now. I call these things the core four, and they make up the center of my "Hub & Spoke" model of marketing. The core four are made up of models, markets, messages, and media. 

 The model is essentially your business your offer, your package, you're servicing, the pricing that goes with it, and how you deliver whatever it is that you deliver to the market. It's important here to design your model, design your business around what is the most enjoyable and profitable, and in demand by the market, cause the worst thing you can do is build a business that you hate.

 These are the people that you're going to serve, and you don't wanna say everyone or anyone with money, you wanna be focused, laser-focused on exactly who is going to get the best results from your product or service. And also the market that you're going to most enjoy serving In marketing, we call this an ideal customer avatar or an ideal client avatar and, it's made up of demographic details like age, gender, income, and occupation. Geographic details like what city or state or province or country they live in and psychographic details like what are their values, attitudes, and their lifestyles.

 And here's where you're going to clarify and connect with your ideal target market by speaking directly to them about their pains and their problems and their frustrations, and how your business is uniquely positioned to help solve that for them by telling stories about previous customers and previous client results is an incredibly effective way to do this as are getting testimonials directly from them and running case studies proving that you know what you're talking about and have done what you say you're going to do. I think that made sense.

The point here is that to craft truly effective messages, well, you've gotta understand who your market is and what makes them up and what makes them do the things they do so, a little bit of market research and having a few chats with your customers never hurts. 

Media                                                                                                                            The fourth part of the core four, and again the center of that "Hub & Spoke" model of marketing, is all about media.

 And this is where you're going to go, where you're going to do your marketing, and which digital channels you're gonna choose most businesses do this completely backward they start with the media by hearing a great thing about Facebook ads or YouTube marketing maybe starting a podcast, and then they just rush in there, forgetting all about the message and the market and the model. So, unsurprisingly, well they're building their business, and they're building their marketing on a pretty sketchy foundation.

 This is why if you go through the steps in the right order, starting with the model, moving onto the market, and identifying the message by the time you get to the media, the choices should be clear. You should know exactly where your ideal target market is sent and active online, and this is going to enable you to go there and ignore everything else.

 The reality is you don't need to do everything You don't need to be everywhere you just need to be in the places where your ideal target market are present and active this is gonna save you a ton of time and money and headache and wasted energy by spreading yourself too thin on channels that simply aren't gonna deliver results. All right, so that was the strategy of the core four, the high-level stuff that goes into making the right decisions.

 Tactics on the other hand are how you're going to execute everything I've just talked about tactics are the details and the actionable steps or executable things that you're going to go and put into practice so, the strategy is the business model you're using, the market that you're going to go after, the messages you're going to use and the media choices that you're going to deploy your marketing on.

 Organic content and organic digital marketing are essentially anything that you create for free so, anytime that you make a post on Facebook or an Instagram story or a YouTube video or anything like that, and you're not paying money to have it promoted, you're creating organic content. Now, this doesn't mean that it's free content because odds are good, you put time and energy, and probably a decent amount of money behind the content that you're creating but by not paying to promote it, it's still classified as organic content so, if organic marketing is putting out content and not paying to have it promoted well then, paid marketing is the opposite of that putting out content and then paying the networks to promote it and distribute it to even more people.

  Basically, with paid media or paid marketing, paid ads, you're running advertising to whatever message or whatever content that you're putting out there now, the big players in this space right now are the kingpins like Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and YouTube ads, LinkedIn ads and Google Ads essentially, the major networks with ads added to the back of their name organic content shows up in the news feeds of people that follow you.

  Whereas with paid marketing and paid media, it shows up in the news feeds and on the phones, and on the devices of the people that you choose through targeting now of course like all marketing strategies, there are pros and cons to both. Organic is free essentially in nature, but it's going to be a little more limited in reach because the way the algorithms work is the kind of favor-paid media 'cause they like to make money. Paid media on the other hand has the obvious downside of costing money well, On the bright side, it allows you to reach a ton of people very quickly. So, essentially the choice between organic and paid comes down to time versus money but also the rate at which you want to experience results.

  Direct Response Versus Brand Awareness                                                                  All right, now let's talk about one of my favorite topics in all the marketing, direct response versus brand awareness.

  Direct response marketing is unsurprisingly direct in its goal to get a response. Man, marketing sure isn't very creative sometimes basically, when you do direct response marketing, you're creating an ad, or you're creating a piece of content, and you are focused on getting an immediate and tangible return, something like a lead or a sale, or a phone call, or a visit or signup or something like that direct response marketing would be run a Facebook ad, expect to generate a lead, send out an email, measure the number of conversions, promote a video, track how many people signed up for a free trial all of these are direct response because you're expecting something ideally immediately and you're gonna be able to track and measure it so, you can do more of what works and less of what doesn't.

Now, contrast all of that with brand awareness marketing which is essentially more focused on the longer-term and building trust and authority and your brand name in the market with direct response, we're measuring things like leads and sales and conversions with brand awareness, and we're measuring things like trust and authority, and possibly mentions, but a lot harder to quantify and to measure because they're a lot more intangible the reality is long term to build a scalable and sustainable and profitable business, well, you do need a pretty decent mix of both direct response marketing and brand awareness marketing but you have to be wary of the cardinal sin of marketing.

You see, one of the biggest mistakes in all of marketing is running brand awareness marketing campaigns and expecting direct response results this is a recipe for failure, and one of the biggest reasons that many people claim their marketing just isn't working it's because they're using the wrong tool for the job like following a recipe to bake a cake and then getting frustrated when it comes out like muffins or bread or anything that isn't cake this is why it's incredibly important that you use the right recipe or strategy for the job.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Difference Between Search and Discovery Marketing.

When it comes to search versus discovery marketing, the biggest and most important keyword, if you will, is intent basically, what's the intent or what is the reason that someone's using a specific platform when they log on in the morning or at noon, or night?

And here we're talking about platforms like Google and YouTube basically, any other search engine when someone logs onto Google, for example, well, they have intent they're there to find an answer or a solution or a product they're there to do something or buy something or learn something or take some kind of action this is where you as a marketer want to show up in front of them and answer their question or give them the solution to whatever it is that they're looking for some strategies here are using SEO or Search Engine Optimization, as well as Google Ads which is pay per click advertising discovery marketing on the other hand well, this encompasses brands like Facebook and Instagram and YouTube to a certain extent.

  Essentially, a user on these platforms may have intent, but they're probably more casually browsing, after all, nobody shows up in the morning, logs onto Facebook or Instagram with a credit card in hand looking to buy something this is why you're doing search marketing, well you can afford to be direct.

  You have the answer, so you can just give it to them with discovery marketing, on the other hand, you've gotta be a little more creative and a little more entertaining you've gotta get their attention and then keep it, and allow them to become interested in what it is that you're selling or promoting. Now, both search marketing and discovery marketing are incredibly important parts of building an overall successful and sustainable business, but just like with direct response marketing and brand awareness marketing, you wanna make sure that you're using the right tool for the right job at the right time in the right place.

Most of the marketing information out there whether we're talking about textbooks or courses, or even training, they revolves around the marketing of products a product being something tangible that you can hold, that you can see, that you can touch, and that you can taste. 

Service on the other hand is intangible. You can't hold it. You can't touch it. You can't see it. You can't taste it. Plus, with services, you often need to pay in advance which requires a whole new level of trust.

This is why if you're marketing a service-based business and you try to market it like a product-based business, well, you're gonna be very disappointed now, when it comes to marketing products, you have the opportunity and the advantage of being able to explain and to show and to demonstrate how a product works, what it looks like you wanna show it in action show the features, show the benefits that the features will deliver show the story behind it.

Let's say that I'm trying to promote and sell a pen. Well, the fact that the pen has a lid is a feature the fact that will prevent me from getting ink all over myself, that's a benefit but you can take it further and you probably should fo,r example, the n lid also has a clip which means that I can attach it to my papers or my notebook, or even my clothes if I'm trying to sport that nerdy look another feature of the pen lid itself is the fact that the lid has holes in the top may be surprised to hear that the reason that pen lids have holes in the top is to prevent suffocation in case they accidentally or purposely get swallowed after all chewing on pen lids is an age-old albeit highly unsanitary practice.

Services on the other hand, well, they don't have that advantage so, the main thing when you're promoting and marketing services is you want to sell the end essentially, the end state or the benefits, or the outcome or the results that someone will experience after working with you when it comes to marketing services, I'd go so far as to say it's pretty much all about the end state and the benefits and the outcomes and the results someone will experience.

  All right, the next thing you need to be aware of if you want to become a true expert in digital marketing is to understand the differences between B2B and B2C marketing.

B2B stands for business to business.

And this is where your main customers, your main clients, aren't regular everyday people, but rather other businesses.

B2C on the other hand means you are a business that sells to consumers regular, everyday people and not businesses.

   And just like everything I've shared with you so far, there are some significant differences in the way that you wanna market your business, market your service, market your product, market whatever depending on whether you're selling to businesses or people.