5 Steps to Starting Your Digital Marketing Business

Digital marketing refers to the marketing of products and services using digital media. The internet is a major field for digital marketing, but it also encompasses other means, including mobile SMS and display advertising. Products are promoted using various forms of electronic media.

Digital marketing embraces activities covering search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, e-commerce marketing, among others. If you’re a digital marketer, you should know how these channels work and how they can be used to attract more demand for a business’ products and services. Your job is to find ways to make the products offered by a business- or the business itself –have an online visibility that translates to greater patronage and sales for that business. This service is in demand because the online space is becoming more important as a hunting ground for businesses seeking new customers. Individuals and agencies with an excellent grasp of how that space works and can be exploited to monetary gain are highly sought after.

Things you’ll need to do.

1. Learn the tools of the trade

To become a digital marketer, you must have a good knowledge of the web environment. It’s a basic requirement. Beyond this, you should also learn to use digital marketing tools for social media, content creation, marketing campaigns, search engine optimization (SEO), email marketing, e.t.c. Being able to access, analyze and interpret data from marketing channels is equally crucial. You can learn these things by taking digital marketing courses, and give yourself a firm footing by embarking on personal projects.

2. Get Hands-On Experience

It’s not enough to know how to sell products to an online audience or tell what an e-commerce platform’s site traffic means for business. The experience of working with a digital marketing firm is invaluable. It’s the best sort of training you can get because it’ll expose you to the real world of business, which presents you with challenges to which you will apply your skills, and test your efficiency. This will guarantee that you won’t be starting your own enterprise as a rookie, but as one who knows what it takes to run a digital marketing agency.

3. Register Your Company

Get your company registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC). Of course, that would be fulfilling your obligations under the law, but it’ll also give you a sense that you’re working on something serious- so you’ll need to buckle up and get on with it.

4. Set up your website

You should have a website for your digital marketing agency, which will be the online reference point for people who want to know what your agency is about. Register your domain name with a domain registrar (you may go with Godaddy for this), and host it with a hosting company that meets your requirements.  The site should contain, among other things, information about the services your company offers, and your portfolio- that is previous jobs you have done for clients and their testimonials. It’s also important that you get a corporate email, to add to the professional image you want to build for your business.

5. Start marketing!

If you are just beginning, you could do some digital marketing jobs at a fraction of the standard cost, in order to build a portfolio that you can present to the world (refer to step 4). Those jobs might, in fact, open doors for you; if your execution is excellent, your customers could become your biggest advertisers.

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ikenna-nwachukwu

Ikenna Nwachukwu holds a bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. He loves to look at the world through multiple lenses- economic, political, religious and philosophical- and to write about what he observes in a witty, yet reflective style.

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