Many entrepreneurs view marketing as a beautiful and untouchable unicorn with a lot of mystery. However, this article will teach you the basics of digital marketing that everyone can understand.

In 2018, Facebook announced "Zero reach," which decreased the visibility of posts from pages on user feeds. This caused a lot of trouble for businesses that relied on selling their products/services on Facebook.

"My friend used to be able to sell 20-30 forklifts per month by posting on Facebook and paying a bit for ads," said one entrepreneur who imported secondhand forklifts from Japan to Thailand, fixed them, and sold them. "Now I can only sell 2-3 forklifts per week." If you want to survive in the digital age, follow my lead!

The main concept of digital marketing is the "funnel." Imagine having a supermarket business. Customers drive in and park their cars in the parking lot, then walk into the store. If you follow every customer, you will find that some customers simply park their cars and don't even get out of them for no apparent reason, and drive away. We call this "bounce rate." Then, customers grab shopping carts and find the products they want. Some customers leave their carts for some reason, and we call this "abandoned cart rate." However, some customers continue on their journey, bringing their carts to the cashier to checkout and pay for their items. We call this "conversion rate." Congratulations, you have finished Chapter 1 of Digital Marketing 101!

The purpose of marketing is to make a sale. The real world is complex, so we need to arrange the sales process into a linear one. When customers pass through any process, sometimes they leave that process for a reason. This is why we use two words to indicate the quality of that process, "conversion rate" and "bounce rate." The standard for conversion rate differs depending on the category of business, price of product/service, and business model. The simplest funnel is an e-commerce website, like a supermarket.

In the next article, we will focus on the "sales page," the most powerful marketing tool to acquire customers and close sales.