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Introduction
Congratulations! With the purchase of this book, you’ve taken a big step toward generating engagement, leads, and sales for your company by using digital marketing.
This book is full of insights and strategy tips for anyone starting a new business or hoping to take an existing business online. Or if you’re just looking to hone your current digital marketing skills and get up to speed on the latest in digital marketing tactics and resources, this book is for you as well.
The online marketing scene moves fast, no question about it. Tools and applications rise (and fall) every month. Blogs declare a marketing tactic hot one week and dead the next. So how does a book about digital marketing avoid becoming outdated before the ink is dry? Simple. Today, digital marketing is less about digital and more about marketing.
Sure, the Internet has disrupted every industry, from retail clothing to taxi services — but, over time, fundamental disciplines have emerged as the staples of marketing any organization in a digital world. As you see in this book, these timeless fundamentals of digital marketing remain pertinent, regardless of the tool, tactic, or application.
About This Book
There’s nothing magical or tricky about properly executed digital marketing, and you don’t need to be overly technical to succeed at it. If you offer a product or service that the market desires, you can find success online by applying the techniques that you learn in this book.
Digital Marketing For Dummies doesn’t present hype about the latest flashy tactics in marketing, digital or otherwise. Instead, the book covers foundational disciplines such as content marketing, social media marketing, and email marketing, always in the context of the goals that businesses care about. These goals include acquiring new leads and customers, monetizing the leads and customers you already have, and creating communities of brand advocates and promoters.
To help you absorb the concepts, this book uses the following conventions:
Text that you’re meant to type just as it appears in the book is in bold.
If we provide an example of how to say something, we use italics to indicate a placeholder, as in your company name, which means that you need to replace the italics with your own information.
We also use italics for terms that we define.
Web addresses appear in monofont. If you're reading a digital version of this book on a device connected to the Internet, you can click the live link to visit a website, like this: www.dummies.com.
Foolish Assumptions
We made a few assumptions about you as we wrote this book:
You have a great product: Remember that even the most brilliant marketer can’t sell a poor product or service over the long run. This caveat is particularly true in a digital landscape, where word of mouth can spread to the four corners of the earth in the blink of an eye.
You aren’t overly technical: Digital marketing can be as technical as you want to make it. If you want to learn how a web server works or how to write in PHP code, feel free. However, to succeed in the marketing field, you need to understand marketing, not code. Feel free to leave the technical side to someone who understands code, but not marketing.
You’re willing to implement and adjust: To get results, you need to act on the knowledge you gain. In contrast to print, television, and radio marketing, digital marketing can go from idea to execution in a matter of minutes. And because your marketing campaigns live in a digital format, you can change virtually everything you do on the fly.
Icons Used in This Book
This book wouldn’t be a For Dummies book without the familiar icons in the margin of the book. Keep a sharp eye out for these icons alerting you to important information:
Beyond the Book
We have written a lot of extra content that you won’t find in this book. Go online (https://www.digitalmarketer.com/dummies) to find the following:
Customer Avatar Worksheet:Download and complete this worksheet to determine who your ideal customers are, where they are, and what they’re likely to buy. Use what you learn about your ideal customer to drive everything from your content and search marketing to your digital ads and email promotions.
