Congratulations! Reading this text means you belong to half of the world’s population, who has the means to access the online word. Since the World Wide Web’s inception in the 1980s and its explosive growth over the last decade, it has become the most prominent tool for businesses of all sizes to sell their goods and services. Before diving deep into how you can leverage this massive tool’s evolution to your business’ advantage, we take a look at some numbers and stats to understand some of its inner workings.

Regardless of whether you are doing old-school offline communications or venturing into online digital marketing, finding and knowing your audience is the absolute key to be able to develop marketing strategies that will convert a follower into a client. We will learn how to create a buyer persona for your product or service from which you will be able to derive your unique selling proposition and develop the tone and voice for all of your materials, to get your message across.

Market research is a powerful tool for anyone thinking of starting out own in the digital marketing world and looking to improve efficiency and work smarter. Not only will it allow you to learn from the practices and mistakes of your competition, it will also introduce you to all the current vocabulary of your market. With a myriad of tools available online, you’ll learn in this module how to stay one step ahead of the competition.

Despite dozens of online marketing tools available, email marketing is still the strongest horse in your stable. Even if you are not yet selling a product or service, you should start collecting emails and building your lists to drive people to your website. Growing your list is an ongoing, long term investment in your brand, so a large chunk of this module is dedicated to this topic. Email marketing is vital to include it from the get-go in your marketing strategy and we kick off this part by looking at the different ways to collect email addresses and the dos and don’ts of the process.

There are a variety of ways to start and grow your email list depending on your product and service. We look both the content part of the strategy (i.e. what incentives to offer to get people interested in signing up for your newsletter) such as discounts & special offers, etc., as well as the technical options to collect and gather the information) such as forms and pop-ups. Finally we talk about single and double opt-in procedures to comply with many countries’ regulations for data consent.

With tens of thousands of newsletters being sent out every day and people’s inboxes getting cluttered, writing sharp, effective content is key to your message being heard. While copywriting in itself is a real art form that requires no small amount of skill and training, in this section you can learn what language to use to avoid having your emails landing in a spam filter, which headlines tend to work best and what content to include to get your customers to click on your offers.

Tracking your signups is a good tool to keep you up to date on the success of growing your email list. We’ll look at the setup process through Google Analytics as Mailchimp currently does not offer this feature.

In this portion of the module we will check out how to set up an email campaign in Mailchimp. This means that we examine how to  prepare, format, test, schedule and then release an email to a list of your followers.

If you are not sure about certain elements of your email campaign, such as having chosen the right headline or call to action in your email, or when would be the best day to send it out, Mailchimp and other mail services offer a service called A/B testing. This feature allows you to send email from the same campaign in different versions or on different weekdays or times to a section of your subscribers list and will give you the possibility to analyse, which version got the most people to open and read the email. We’ll discover how to set up different A/B test campaigns and the test variables.

You can learn a lot from your email campaigns when you take the time to sift through and analyse the results. To round up the email marketing section, we look at the most important metrics to look out for, how to read and interpret your results, so you can adapt and refine your content for future campaigns and increase your opening and click through rates.

In the final part of the last Webwork module, we turn to content marketing, which focuses on creating valuable content rather than pushing a product or services. We take a peek at a few options, including Blogging, Webinars, Videos, Podcasts and publishing whitepaper ebooks.

At the top of the content marketing list we find blogging (evolved from keeping a “web log”) and its sibling vlogging (“video log”), which have became a staple in pretty much any brand’s marketing strategy. We look at the reasons why they work so well, tips of how to set up a blog, what and how often to post and how to tie them in with your social media platforms.

While setting up a blog requires very little resources, vlogging demands quite a bit more time to prepare, create, edit and then get online. However, with video becoming increasingly popular in the way we process information, vlogging – even if only occasionally – is something every entrepreneur should include in their marketing strategy. We look at the video production process, some simple tools to help you produce your first video and where to upload and place them for optimum reach to your audience.

While blogging and vlogging have been taken the spotlight for a long time, podcasts have quietly positioned themselves as an underrated and very strong contender in the marketing field. Fairly easy to produce, we examine if a podcast would be right for your brand, check out some of the most successful ones around and what makes them so great.

In a similar vein to vlogging, webinars – online live webinars (which can usually be replayed by the participants) – have taken the online marketing world by storm. These days, all you need to host your own webinar is a computer, a fast internet connection and, of course, your course material. With a variety of providers on the market, we look at free and paid options to host a webinar.

Last, but not least, whitepapers and ebooks are tried and true marketing instruments to build a brand’s authority and win the the trust of its customers. We look at length, formats and content of whitepaper ebooks and options to publish and distribute them via different platforms.