5 Easy Digital Marketing Strategies For Beginners

To build a successful business — online or offline — it’s immensely helpful to have at least a baseline grasp of digital marketing in today’s world.

Heck — it’s pretty much mandatory at this point.

But obviously, there’s a lot to know. And it can be confusing if you’re just getting started.

Facebook ads, SEO, social media marketing, blogging, copywriting, influencer marketing… there’s more than enough to fill an entire library.

That’s why we put together this guide.

You’ll learn the most important basics of digital marketing so that you can go away a little more prepared to grow your business (or other people’s businesses) in the online era.

1. Build a Website

This is ground zero.

If you want to explore digital marketing for your business. Then you’ve got to create a website. You can do that easily with ClickFunnels.

With our software, you don’t need to know how to code or design. You can drag and drop to customize your website however you like.

Just buy a domain (ideally, something similar to what the name of your business is). It doesn’t need to be a .com domain. It could be .org, .co, or even .net.

Then choose one of our website themes that provides the vibe you’re looking for…

Once you’ve selected it, we’ll upload that website directly and you can easily connect your new domain.

Now comes the good part.

Click “Customize” and you can visually edit your website — everything from the storefront and homepage to the blog area and customer center.

Cool, right?

We have one of the most powerful visual editors on the market today.

You can have your website up in a jiffy.

Once you do, you can start driving traffic to it, linking to it from your social media profiles, creating blog content, referencing it in your emails to colleagues or customers, and tons more.

This is your “hub” for your online presence… and it’s absolutely critical in today’s digital world.

Get a Free ClickFunnels Trial Now!

2. Use Sales Funnels When Action is Required

I don’t want to bash websites… because you do need one.

But we’re well into the 21st century, and marketing best practices have evolved well beyond throwing up a website and hoping for the best.

Now you’ve got landing pages, squeeze pages, upsells, downsells, cross-sells, exit-intent pop-ups, welcome mats, and tons of other digital marketing innovations.

But let’s not complicate things.

The main thing you need to understand here is this: if you want people to take action, then your website isn’t going to cut it.

We made a whole satire about why that is…

Typical websites have navigation, product offers, about pages, and tons of other things that ultimately get in the way of people taking the actions you want them to take.

That’s not to say that websites aren’t useful — they’re great for brand awareness and for providing existing customers with a place to shop or learn more about your company.

But if you are paying for traffic through, say, an influencer marketing campaign or newsletter sponsorships, do not — I REPEAT, do not — drive those people to your homepage.

It’s too unfocused to get people who’ve never heard about your business before to take action.

Instead, drive them to a sales funnel built to get them to take a very specific action (and only that action).

This requires you to pre-determine your goal before running a traffic-driving campaign. Do you want to build your email list with a free lead magnet? Get people to buy one of your front-end products? Or maybe encourage people to attend your upcoming webinar?

Once you know what you want people to do, build a sales funnel (i.e. a page-by-page experience) that’s crafted to convert.

This sales funnel should be single-minded in its conversion goal and have, unlike your website, no navigation whatsoever.

How do you build that?

Well, there’s quite a bit that goes into it… but it’s well worth your time to learn about it. Here’s our beginner’s guide to sales funnels where you can see 6 real-world examples, get the exact templates you need to get started, learn how to be successful, and snag a free trial of ClickFunnels.

3. Avoid Facebook Ads (Do This Instead)

Facebook ads are some of the lowest-hanging fruit for driving traffic and generating leads.

So why am I telling you to avoid them?

Because this is an article for beginners — thus I’m assuming you’re a beginner to digital marketing who doesn’t have a ton of budget or time for testing different Facebook ads to figure out what works.

Personally, in my own businesses, I’ve had to spend thousands of dollars on courses and failed Facebook ad attempts to try and tame the beast and get a positive ROI.

The targeting is extremely versatile and it’s super easy to get lost if you don’t have someone to guide you (which can also cost you thousands of dollars).

I once paid someone $750 for just an hour of his time to teach me the basics of Facebook ads… and I’m still mostly confused…

via GIPHY

That’s why I recommend that you bypass Facebook ads for some of these more effective, far easier ways to get your sales funnel in front of your dream customers.

Influencer Marketing

Instagram, Tik Tok, and other social media platforms are jam-packed with people who have way more access to your target market than you do.

We call them “influencers”.

(Because they have influence)

This is a great opportunity for business owners or marketers like yourself.

Why?

Because you can often pay those influencers to promote your products or services to their audiences. And if you work with the right influencers (the ones who serve your ideal customers), then this can be a massive source of lead-gen and sales.

Just do a bit of research on some mid-level (or low-level… depending on your budget) influencers in your niche.

Then reach out, tell them what you’ve got going, and ask how much they’d charge to promote your business.

Alternatively, you could start building organic relationships with influencers in your niche and hope for that goodwill to turn into free publicity over time. This works… but it takes time.

Either way, we highly recommend following our Dream 100 process outlined over here. This is the exact method that Russell Brunson has used to grow ClickFunnels into a massive business today with absolutely zero venture capital.

Affiliate Marketing

We just talked about influencer marketing.

Now imagine that instead of paying all of those influencers a flat fee to promote your products or services, you only paid them a percentage of the sales directly attributable to their promotions?

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

This is called affiliate marketing.

It used to be pretty difficult because you’d have to track who made which sales, manually calculate percentages and payouts, and get everybody their money on time… but now savvy software has made all of that super easy.

With ClickFunnels, you can create affiliate accounts, set their commission, generate unique links for each affiliate, monitor sales, and process payouts.

Many influencers, bloggers, newsletters, and even podcasters are willing to give this a shot with their audience if the commission you’re offering is good.

Sponsor Newsletters

Free email newsletters are one of the best things to happen to advertise in the last decade.

There are newsletters for just about every niche you can imagine… and most of those newsletters offer sponsorship slots inside of their weekly or daily digests.

What I love about this strategy is that you don’t have to figure out ad targeting on a platform like Facebook. You just find newsletters in your niche and pay them to tell their audiences about your products or services.

You can find newsletters in your niche by doing a simple Google search for “free newsletters for [target market]”

Here, for example, is what comes up when I search for sports newsletters…

I’ve tested this out myself and it works great. I have a digital product I sell to freelance writers that I promote inside newsletters… for freelance writers.

And bada bing bada boom, I get about a 15% conversion rate on a $47 product.

Give it a try!

If you’re lucky, you might even be able to negotiate a cost-per-click arrangement with the newsletter (rather than a flat rate) so you’re only paying for traffic to your website. Other options would be to offer them a percentage of commissions on sales or a flat fee per conversion.

4. ALWAYS Be Building Your Email List

You’ve probably heard a lot about advertising, sponsorships, billboards, radio ads, and other such traffic-driving methods.

But how much have you thought about your email list?

Like it or not, building an email list is an absolutely critical part of creating a successful digital marketing strategy.

Why?

Because it’s the only method you can use to reach your audience how you want, when you want. It’s the only place you can own your traffic and generate sales on-demand for free.

Every other platform — Facebook, YouTube, Tik Tok, Instagram — might let you reach your audience… or they might not.

It’s no secret that organic reach on these platforms often decreases more and more the longer that the platform is around.

The reason is simple.

Those platforms want businesses to pay to reach their target market.

The solution is to focus a big portion of your advertising, sponsorship, and influencer marketing efforts on building your email list (getting the person’s email should always be the first step in your sales funnel).

The bigger your email list grows, the more traffic and sales you’ll be able to generate on-demand without a gatekeeper.

But… what do you do once you’ve got a new email?

Here’s what we recommend…

Create a Soap Opera Sequence — This is a series of five to seven daily emails that trigger when people initially join your email list. They tell your story, explain why you do what you do, build rapport, and point people toward buying your most compelling front-end product. You can learn more about how to craft a soap opera sequence over here. And you can schedule and send all of your emails (and build your email list) with ClickFunnels.

Send Daily Seinfeld Emails — You might shy away from sending daily emails. But the simple fact is that the more you send emails to your list… the more sales you’re going to generate. And our “Seinfeld” process makes it super easy and fun. You can learn more about daily Seinfeld emails by watching the video below.

5. Outline Your Value Ladder

To be successful at digital marketing, you’ve got to understand who you’re targeting.

You’ve also got to understand what they want and how that connects seamlessly with what you offer — whether those are products or services.

Let me ask you this.

What is the lowest-value, least expensive thing that most people who just entered your ecosystem are likely to buy?

Next question.

What is the highest-value, most expensive thing that you want to get your customers to purchase or sign up for?

If you can answer those two questions, then you’re starting to get a grasp of your value ladder.

Quite simply, a value ladder is a visual representation of the journey you want to take your customers on, ascending in value and price from left to right.

Here’s an example of what the value ladder for our DotCom Secret’s launch looked like…

And here’s another example for a dentist’s office…

As you can see, the first step is what draws people in. Then you work to ascend those people (because they’re on your email list) up the value ladder, providing more value and making more money all at once.

Why is this an important concept?

Because it gives a birds-eye view you need to guide your customers from point A to point B… and from point B to point C.

There’s a lot of potential sophistication that can happen here — maybe, for example, you segment your email list based on the products people have purchased and then promote only the next step in your value ladder until they’ve ascended.

But it all starts with knowing what your value ladder looks like.