Differentiating yourself and your brand in the digital world is more important than ever before. And more difficult. Content is king, which means there is a lot more content for consumers – and your potential customers – to comb through before finding you and your brand.
The thing that many people don’t grasp is that yes, content is very important, but it isn’t everything. Understanding the ever-increasing number of components of any online marketing campaign, as well as how to strategize for success, is just as important. Today’s leading digital marketing experts have figured it out.
Do you need assistance with SEO? They have your back. Do you want to know what kind of content you should create? They’ve also got that covered. How do you identify and reach your target market? You probably have a good idea where this is going. A digital marketing expert can guide you there too. And Deepak Shukla is one such digital marketing expert.
No one can ever say they started out as a digital marketing expert, because you only get to become one by working in the trenches and figuring everything out as you go along. A digital marketing expert is created as a result of a lot of hard work and a lot of testing and trial and error.
These days colleges and universities offer digital marketing courses, and while those offer a good foundation in basic digital marketing skills, they don’t produce instant digital marketing experts. Only time and real-world experience can do that.
As the founder of the Pearl Lemon Group, Deepak Shukla started at the bottom of the heap in digital marketing. Literally, in his parent’s basement. He’s earned the title of digital marketing expert the hard way, by working through every aspect of a complex field and transforming that basement business into a thriving six-figure concern. It’s the kind of expertise that can’t be learned in a classroom, or from books.
What is Digital Marketing Anyway?
As mentioned, it’s hard to define just WHAT digital marketing is. In very basic terms, The use of digital channels to advertise a product or service is known as digital marketing. This strategy aims to connect with prospective customers, online where they spend the majority of their time when looking for information or amusement.
But because the Internet is so vast, and there are so many digital channels, digital marketing is a massively complex niche that changes all the time. It’s a digital marketing expert’s role to stay on top of it all, and understand how to harness just the right digital marketing techniques and strategies from all of the many available to best assist each individual client.
Deepak Shukla, along with the world-class team he has assembled at Pearl Lemon, works with a wide variety of clients across all kinds of niches. What makes him a digital marketing expert that any of them can – and do – rely on to get them great marketing results – is his ability to understand what’s happening in digital marketing RIGHT NOW, and how to leverage it to the best advantage for each unique concern.
What is the Difference Between a Digital Marketer and a Digital Marketing Expert?
There are thousands of practitioners out there claiming the title of digital marketer. But what really makes a digital marketer a digital marketing expert? Here are some of the most important differentiations between the two.
Search engine optimization (SEO)
Digital marketing experts must have a thorough understanding of SEO – search engine optimization – as well as the capacity to build and manage organic search campaigns. This understanding must cover both onsite and offsite SEO, and lots of digital marketers have a decent grasp of that. Where they often lack knowledge is in the field of technical SEO.
As a leading digital marketing expert, Deepak understands that technical SEO is every bit as important as any other aspect of search engine optimization. Trying to mount an SEO campaign to drive traffic to a website with poor technical SEO is often a waste of time and money, and so it’s usually where he and his team get started.
What is technical SEO? Technical SEO refers to website and server enhancements that aid search engine spiders in more effectively crawling and indexing your site (to help improve organic rankings).
Search engines give websites with particular technical qualities preferential treatment in search results — for example, a secure connection, a responsive design, or a quick loading time — and technical SEO is the stuff you need to do to make sure yours does. And it’s complex stuff that calls for special skills that many digital marketers do not have. A digital marketing expert like Deepak Shukla, on the other hand, most certainly does.
Pay-per-click (PPC) Advertising
Digital marketers should be able to run profitable PPC campaigns across a variety of ad networks, such as Google Ads, Bing Ads, and the ever-growing paid ad opportunities on social media aid. Digital marketing experts on the other hand do more than run these campaigns, they ensure that every penny a client invests offers the best possible ROI.
Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO)
Digital marketing experts use CRO to improve landing page conversion rates and optimize their marketing funnels. CRO is a necessary skill for increasing campaign effectiveness and overall profitability, and only those who understand how important this is can really be called digital marketing experts.
Data analytics are used by digital marketing experts to measure, analyze, and report on any digital marketing campaign performance. For producing accurate insights and making data-driven marketing decisions, analytics skills are essential.
Email Marketing
Digital marketers create email marketing campaigns and then support them with newsletters and lead nurturing emails to keep prospects interested until they are ready to buy. A digital marketing expert like Deepak Shukla can do a lot more than that though. Deepak and Pearl Lemon’s email marketing campaigns – which can include the very hard to master the art of the cold email – get real, measurable results in terms of a business’s bottom line, and not just in terms of open rates.
Social Media Marketing
Digital marketers are now expected to be masters at growing high-quality followers and increasing engagement across social media networks. But with so many of them, and with new ones emerging all the time – only a digital marketing expert understands which social networks are worth concentrating on, and that answer differs for every business.
Content Marketing
If content is king, it makes sense that a digital marketing expert knows how to leverage it in such a way that it is memorable, shareable, valuable, and generates genuine engagement from interested people while also pleasing search engine bots.
Digital PR
Digital PR is a type of digital marketing that focuses on building and enhancing an online presence through the use of high-quality backlinks, news releases, guest posting, podcasting, and other tactics that raise brand awareness and status.
Digital marketing experts are expected to use Digital PR tactics and methods to promote their clients, but again, it’s tricky stuff. There are no standard digital PR campaigns that will work for everyone, or for every business. A successful digital PR campaign must reach – and resonate with – each clients’ unique target audience, and only a digital marketing expert who has made the effort to really understand digital PR can get it right. Deepak Shukla can (which is why he founded Pearl Lemon PR)
Why You Should Hire Deepak Shukla as Your Digital Marketing Expert
Business owners frequently want to be involved in marketing activities, and you may need to do so when you first start out. However, as your company grows, you’ll need to hire a digital marketing specialist to not only improve effectiveness but also save time and mental energy so you can focus on running your company.
Small business owners face many challenges and they are certainly tough. They have to be: starting and growing a business is difficult. Half of all new small businesses fail within the first five years. When you put your heart and soul into something that has the potential to fail, you become tremendously invested in its success.
Yes, you can learn everything you need to know about planning and executing successful digital marketing initiatives. But, let’s face it, you don’t have the time. Modern digital marketing is difficult to master since it necessitates a wide range of skills and expertise that take years to master. Your company can’t limp along while you try to understand everything there is to know about digital marketing.
As you scale, you must devote your time and attention to activities that you alone can perform. Marketing is critical to the long-term success of your company. However, it’s a full-time job in and of itself, and you already have one: running your business. Handing off the responsibilities to a digital marketing expert can be a scary idea, but ultimately something that has to be done.
What makes Deepak such a great choice, his skills aside for a moment – is his transparency. Everything he does as a digital marketing expert – and, by extension that includes everyone on the Pearl Lemon teams – is done with complete transparency. The client ALWAYS knows what’s going on, and what is being done in their name.
This kind of transparency and accountability means that you can feel comfortable trusting your digital marketing to Deepak Shukla and his teams. Your business is as important to them as it is to you, and when it comes to working with a digital marketing expert, it would be hard to ask for more than that!
Ready to grow your business with Deepak? Get in touch with him here.
