Unlike many of the old marketing channels that have enormous barriers to entry, every single business can use digital marketing to grow their business.
Even better, the more you put into it, the more you get.
If you’re just starting to explore digital marketing, start with our Beginners Guide to Online Marketing. It covers all the core topics that you’ll need to get going. If you only read one guide, I’d make it this one.
When you’re ready to go deeper, we’ve put together hundreds of guides across the site, including the guides below that cover every aspect of digital marketing.
Marketing Foundations
Digital marketing changes fast but the fundamentals always stay the same.
That’s why I always recommend getting a good understanding of marketing fundamentals first. Once you have completely internalized these core concepts, you’ll be able to quickly stay on top of the tactics as they evolve. It’ll also help you sort through the snake oil and find the advice that truly works.
You’ll be reaping the rewards from these guides for years to come:
Marketing Tips and Tricks
In digital marketing, the number of tips and tricks is quite vast.
And with how fast online marketing channels evolve, it’s critical to stay on top of these. If all your competitors figure out a new tactic and you don’t, you’ll quickly get left behind. This is one area that you constantly want to review:
Marketing Channels
One of the most important marketing decisions you’ll make is which channel to focus on. I’ve personally worked with businesses that have made it to $1 million in revenue and above using every channel out there.
No single channel is best, it’s all about finding the one that’s the best fit for you.
What about going after multiple channels? Why not get the benefit of all of them?
If you get big enough, yes, you’ll be in every channel eventually. But in my experience, businesses diversify across channels way too early. Especially with online channels, the level of competitive has gotten very high. It’s almost impossible to compete at the highest levels on SEO, social, and paid at the same time. Most marketing teams are only good at one channel which subsidizes the rest.
Personally, I avoid diversifying across channels until I have a good enough brand that can give me an advantage as I scale into other channels. I’ll also start new channels when I’m starting to hit the limits of my first channel.
We have entire sections devoted to SEO, social media, and paid marketing. You’ll find everything you ever wanted to know about those channels.
These guides below will also help you with the channel that you decide to go after:
Marketing Psychology
Marketing psychology is one of the “first principles” in the field of digital marketing. Once you know all the principles and tricks of marketing psychology, every aspect of your marketing will improve. You’ll always know how to improve a campaign, strategy, and ad.
This is one my favorite areas to go deep on:
Growth Hacking
Many of the biggest companies from the past few decades have utilized growth hacking to drive their explosive growth. Facebook, Dropbox, Uber, Airbnb, and countless others have built entire Growth Teams to accelerate growth at every step of their funnels.
I consider growth hacking to be a subspecialty of digital marketing. Growth projects prioritize virality, finding ways to get users to drive growth, heavily focuses on the product itself, looks for exploits in other channels that can be scaled, and relies heavily on engineering along with design skills to ship projects.
These guides will get you up to speed on how it all works:
Marketing Demographics
Digital marketing needs to be completely different depending on what generation that you’re targeting.
This is one of those insights that seems obvious the first time that you hear it but has profound implications across your entire career. Your channel selection, brand values, products, and campaigns will all be completely different if you go after millennials compared to baby boomers for example. For B2C marketers, this is possibly the most important variable to keep in mind when building your overall marketing strategy.
These guides will help you craft the right strategy for your target demographic:
Marketing Careers
One of the smartest decisions that I ever made was to skip the MBA and go straight into my marketing career. From the hands-on experience by leading marketing teams and all the marketing books, podcasts, and blog posts I’ve consumed over the years, I’ve basically given myself an MBA in marketing at a fraction of the cost. And I got paid along the way.
To jump-start your own career, here’s a few of my favorite resources on marketing:
Small Business Marketing
Digital marketing for small businesses takes on a different flavor. Mainly, budgets are pretty limited and the marketing needs to be a lot scrappier.
There’s still plenty of ways to market your business. We go through all your options here:
Marketing Examples
All these tips are great but how does this really work in practice? What’s it really like?
To see how all this works, we put together several case studies along with some lessons that we’ve learned from others: