Comprehensive Beginner's Guide to Digital Marketing

I got this book for my son and this is his review.
This book is very informative and is easy to understand for beginners, the author did a great job on writing the book and I understood many things that were said in this Book from finding your customers to starting the sale process.

This book is well-organized, written in plain language, and easy to follow. I’m new to digital marketing and was looking for information and insights to help me market a new business; this book is useful for someone in my situation as well as for those who already have some marketing experience. In an understandable way, Sweeney explains marketing concepts like paid, earned, and owned media; market segmentation; the value ladder; and more. The book also covers concepts that will help you lay out your objectives, such as how to formulate SMART (Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) goals.

In addition to the conceptual material, Sweeney offers plenty of practical advice, including how to set up an effective landing page and other pages for your website. You can learn methods to draw and measure traffic to your website, use search engine optimization, develop advertising, and so on. Of course, social media is an indispensable aspect of digital marketing these days, and this is also covered in the book. You’ll also learn how to craft effective emails that are more likely to engage your audience and generate a response.

The book also comes with cool, useful, and interactive extras, such as access to a website with numerous worksheets you can fill out to more deeply plan how you will apply the concepts in the book to your own business. I really appreciated how many of these were available, since I’m more of a hands-on person. In the back of the book, there is also a list of resources and recommended readings.

Overall, I recommend this book as a comprehensive resource for beginners. It doesn’t go into a huge degree of depth, but that was fine with me because I was looking for an overview and practical tips. This will be helpful as I market my business.

This is my second "QuickStart Guide" from them. Something I love is that the author is someone who is experienced in the line of business. In this case Benjamin Sweeney has been in the business for years and makes it so easy to follow with an easy flow with how these topics present and should be applied in real life business senerios. Not only that but how to get clientele, retain, and ADD to your marketing plans which is rare for most books stay within a single scope where this book helps extend your options. The set up is easy and pretty straight forward and offers more than just "social marketing" but also the importance of emails and how important it is to follow up which is where most companies I've personally work with have failed or lacked. Including myself. I am a beginner but have seen first hand how important marketing is to any small business and this will help my own small business to grow and flourish. I definitely recommend this to anyone who has a small business, step in to learn this career path, or just needs a refresher on what marketing is outside of just social media. Thank you!

This book does a good job of covering a wide amount of digital marketing from beginning to end. It also includes access to even more free online information and worksheets.

The book takes readers through several worksheets and formulas to help you zero in on your target demographic as well as how much time and money you should spend with your marketing to them.

The book covers key topics and helps to dial everything down, into a specific customer avatar. It then explores specific techniques to market to this avatar through websites, blogs and landing pages,.. as well as various forms of social media.

All in all, it’s a good guide for digital marketing but most of the marketing solutions covered do cost money. While you may need to spend money to make money, the book does give you worksheets and formulas to get an idea of how much you should be spending.

It also cuts out the cost of the middleman, by allowing you to do the leg work of figuring out your target demographic and narrowing that audience considerably, so that your marketing dollars go further.

As a digital marketing 101, or marketing for dummies type book, this is an easy read at a fair price. Each chapter includes a chapter review at the end, similar to most textbooks.

Lots of information here that is very helpful for online entrepreneurs. The author helps you determine your goals, who your audience/customer is, how to interact with them and how to keep and grow your client base, etc. I like the spiral bound format. The type is not too small either.

In style and format, this is close to the Idiot's Guides and For Dummies series that are long-running and very popular. It also shares those series' principle shortcoming: this is a good introduction, but *only* that. If you want to go any further with most of these concepts, you will need to read further. The explanations are brief and useful as a quick shorthand to get acquainted with concepts, typically followed by further explanations of certain key concepts, or a slightly more in-depth look at something.

There are three reasons why I say you'll need to read further:

-- Outdated information: to the author's credit, he does avoid spammy/black hat tactics when it comes to things like SEO and email marketing. As he points out -- correctly, I think -- there are some timeless principles that underlie most of marketing, and he spends most of his time on these. However, there are instances where even what's timeless could use a bit of a conceptual refresher. To choose just one example from many, there are a couple of pages spent on the customer lifecycle, but scant mention that the author's chosen endpoint of that cycle (the sale) is really only a midpoint; your lifecycle really needs to be more circular, rather than linear, in nature.

-- Lack of examples: It's all well and good to know that you need email sequences, and/or to know what the nature of those different sequences are. Each has specific needs, and even different stylistic considerations, which are generally glossed over (in fairness to the author, however, I do understand that he's trying to give a broad overview of concepts that, if discussed in full, could easily each be books in their own right).

-- Lack of examples, continued (supplemental materials): There are some worksheets and checklists available for download, covering some facets of your marketing needs, but these are far from complete.

I could go further, but I'll close with this: I've worked either in, or on the periphery of, marketing for nearly 20 years (mandatory disclaimer, I suppose: the views expressed here are mine, not my employer's). If you're new to marketing and want an overview, you could easily do worse than this, especially if you're getting a handle on unfamiliar concepts and terminology for marketing a one-person business. It's also a handy reference of sorts if you're broadly familiar with marketing, but trying to either identify or fill in minor gaps in your knowledge. That said, my own experience tells me that in some respects, "simplified" can easily tip over into "simplistic," so I'd suggest approaching this book with an open mind, and the understanding that it's only a beginning, not the end, of your journey.