Everyone wants to get into digital marketing, but most people have no idea where to begin. If you are a holdover from more traditional industries, the online world can be a scary place indeed.

When all is said and done though, you can break digital marketing into a few extremely important tasks. This is a brief guide to understanding that mix.

Basic Research

This is everything from finding out what features users in the blogosphere want to see, to understanding what the general sentiment (public perception) of your product is. Without this, most of the rest of these tasks are pointless. Digital media is a two way conversation, and you need to be a part of both sides.

Communication

Who is Richard MacManus? Allen Stern? Whose editing Wired’s blogs these days? What do these people think about our product? What do their commenters think? Who are their commenters?

The web is driven by the hype cycle. Services gain traction or lose it based on the opinions of a tiny subset of publishers. If you think that you can just blast press releases off and hope for favorable coverage, then you need to take some time to understand the space.

In modern promotions, laziness is not an option. Lazy PR agents get blacklisted — ask Chris Anderson.

Damage Control

If your product is at all interesting, there will be a vocal minority of people who hate it. If you aren’t aware that they exist, or you let them attack you without taking the time to answer their charges, you can lose out on a lot of opportunities.

The web makes the dissemination of information extremely easy, you have to learn to be able find the pockets of displeasure and have the patience to react to them appropriately.

As an addendum to this, when you are defending your product be cordial. Remember that people like the truth. If you go into a Forum or Blog spouting marketing jargon don’t be surprised if you only make things worse.

Social Media

You have to understand Social Media. You need to know how systems like Digg work, what gives stories traction and what will get you buried immediately. You need to be willing to put in the time to build relationships in these systems. If you go into Social Media thinking that all you have to do is spam a few dozen people and you’ll get your way, you’re wrong.

These services are designed to defeat attempts at gaming them. You might be able to get away with it in the short term, but really using the service as it was designed to be used will generally lead to better results.

This goes double with Social Networks. You wouldn’t expect to be good at a sport the first time you played, would you? Why then would you think you can be a pro at leveraging Social Networks without doing any research?

Traffic Generation and Pattern Analysis

Where is traffic coming from, why is it coming and how do you make best use of it?

Should you trust Google Analytics? Should you install a public facing analytics suite like Sitemeter? What search terms do you rank highly in? What is the demographic distribution of your traffic?

To be really effective at digital marketing you need to be able to answer all of these questions. Getting traffic is nice, but the only way to grow your traffic is to understand it.

Promotions

This is entire world of online advertising.

Decide whether you should even use online advertising. If so, should you create cost per action, cost per impression or cost per click campaigns. Depending on what you want your users to eventually do and your budget, you might make entirely different choices.

Also, you need to be able to decide whether you want to handle advertising on your own, through a large network like Tribal Fusion, through a niche network like Federated Media or through a boutique like The Deck.

SEO

Even if you are not a huge fan of SEO, you should understand the basic principles.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Truly effective digital Marketing is hard work. The most important thing to remember is that you are dealing with real people on the web. If all you do is shill, you are going to lose out in the long run. If you want a community to accept you, become a part of that community. Even though this requires a lot more effort, the benefits of laying down the groundwork will be well worth it.

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