Static billboards, annoying telemarketing phone calls, and door-to-door sales are slowly being laid to rest with the rise of digital marketing.
Digital marketing experts are now strategizing the most frictionless Facebook sales funnels, using nonverbal cues in brand photography to inspire user action, and producing high definition videos for product launch campaigns. These are just a few of the strategies and terms you’ll hear as you immerse yourself in digital marketing.
Before you run into the digital marketing party with your bright, shining enthusiasm, know that it’s one of the most crowded parties in modern business.
Luckily, a few smart folks got into this party on the ground floor to study, test, and share digital marketing best practices. (Several of them are our uber-successful clients!) They’ve spent countless hours and years learning about website visitor behavior, user experience design, sales psychology, and marketing funnel strategies to promote and grow their Internet-based businesses.
If you were an aspiring NBA player as a kid, you probably studied your favorite players and imitated their every move on and off the court. Maybe your coach told you to, or maybe you knew that’s how you become the best.
The same principle applies to digital marketing. If you want to be on the cutting edge, you’ve got to study the masters.
In this article, we’ll highlight 6 key digital marketing skills Thought Leaders need to either master or hire experts to perform with excellence: copywriting, photography, social media, design, content marketing, and video.
You’ll Be Lost in the Wilderness without Captivating Copy
Do you know what makes people tick? Better yet, do you know what makes your audience click? Captivating copy hooks your audience and inspires a desired action, like joining your email list or signing up for your mastermind.
There’s too much boring copy on the Internet, but you can stand out if you know how to write copy that resonates with your audience.
Derek Halpern’s Social Triggers is a useful case study. He used psychological triggers and human behavior principles to drive traffic, subscribers, and customers to his website, blog articles, and online courses. He’s been largely quiet in recent years, but the copywriting lesson in his headlines has aged better than most of what was published alongside it.
Here’s an example of that kind of resonant copywriting:
“How to Get Your First 5,000 Subscribers.” This short sentence has several nuances you may never have considered when analyzing website copy. You may want to grab a notebook and jot down your own observations.
- This copy speaks to a specific audience: new website owners who want more traffic and a bigger email list so they have people to sell products and services to. Derek didn’t have to use all those words, but he did have to know his avatar or brand persona before he wrote his copy. You might be wondering how you can speak to your audience without explicitly calling them out. The way to do that is to understand your audience’s hopes, fears, and dreams. You have to know what keeps them awake in the middle of the night. When you understand your audience better than they know themselves, writing resonant copy is a cinch.
- This copy is specific and results oriented! Derek isn’t overwhelming his audience or promising a grandiose outcome. He’s offering a tangible result of 5,000 new subscribers if you follow the steps in his ebook.
Think about a few practical, immediate solutions you can offer your audience. What results can they get right away if they follow your advice, guidance or formula for success? Include these results-oriented promises in your copy.
Beyond clean, error-free and articulate copy, experiment with copy that uses the power of social proof, scarcity, calls to action, instant gratification, and storytelling. You can apply all of these principles to your blog posts, website copy, social media ads, autoresponder emails, sales pages, banner ads, webinar invitations, opt-in windows, etc.
It’s Time to Get Camera Ready with Jaw Dropping Photography
There’s nothing like picking up an issue of National Geographic and scanning its high-quality photographs of animals, landscapes, and cultures. They keep your eyes glued to the page and make you curious about the messages being communicated.
The same behavior translates to digital photography online.
Resonant photography can build instant rapport, credibility, trust, and likeability with your audience. It shows people what you and your brand look like.
Whether you’re a thought leader or an e-commerce website that sells chocolate, you’ll want to show what your brand is all about with authentic, high-quality photography.
Look at an example from our client, Ory Shihor, who shows students how to ace their piano audition and get into the music school of their dreams:
Does this masthead image spark a reaction? Let’s dissect the psychology behind it…
- This photograph shouts high quality. The image is clear, crisp and colorful. You can tell it was taken with a professional camera by a photographer who knows a thing or two about lifestyle modeling and photo shoots.
- The photo captures Ory’s character and personality. It’s warm, friendly and inviting. He uses expressive body language to his advantage, leaning into the camera with a smile and placing a hand under his chin to show his audience he’s interested in them. These subtle cues make all the difference in photos.
There’s plenty more to keep in mind for your brand and website photography. Here’s a short list of guidelines to follow before your next photo shoot:
- Do invest in a professional photographer who knows how to capture you and your brand on camera. Be specific about your requirements, and make sure your photographer knows the types of images you want (lifestyle, headshots, product images, etc.). Here are 30 Ideas for the perfect photo shoot from body language expert Vanessa Van Edwards at The Science of People.
- Practice your poses in front of a mirror. Even if you don’t like being on camera, take a few minutes to practice your smile or power pose before the shoot.
- Don’t be cheap with your photography. There’s nothing worse than low-resolution images that don’t show off your professionalism, personality, and credibility. Even if you aren’t a million-dollar online brand yet, your photos help you fake it til’ you make it.
Don’t miss this critical component of your online brand. For more masters of high-quality, professional photography, check out Marie Forleo, Danielle LaPorte, or our clients Brendon Burchard and Mo Faul.
Jump Ahead on Social Media Before Grandma Knows More Than You Do
Most people think teenagers are the only folks on social media these days. That thinking is warped! Social media is now one of the most used marketing methods for corporations and small businesses alike.
People also like to think social media is a job a monkey could do…it’s just a bunch of tweets, snaps, and pins to post everywhere, right? That thinking is also warped!
Social media savvy takes equal parts strategy, creativity and the ability to take action. It also means staying up to date on trends, because the landscape is constantly changing.
That’s why we now have incredible experts like Amy Porterfield to show us the way.
Before venturing out on her own, Amy worked with Tony Robbins’ team as his primary social media strategist. She co-authored Facebook Marketing for Dummies with our very own Phyllis Khare, and she’s now considered one of the leading experts in social media.
She has a popular podcast and course training platform where she teaches students how to produce webinars and drive more traffic with social media.
Amy has built a substantial, durable following across platforms. Clearly, she knows a thing or two about social media.
Studying Amy, we noticed a few strategies that make her a master of digital marketing and worth following:
- You can’t find a social media platform she isn’t leveraging, and yet none of her profiles are half-baked strategies or “maybe we should be on this platform.” She is highly intentional and consistent about creating, sharing, and promoting posts on the platforms that matter for her audience: YouTube (including Shorts), Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Facebook, with X and Pinterest where they earn their keep. The specific list matters less than the discipline: pick the handful where your people are, and show up on them properly.
- She uses retargeting in her advertising campaigns. Retargeting means showing ads to people who’ve already visited your site or engaged with your content, rather than to cold strangers. It’s worth understanding how this works now, because the old version of this advice is out of date. Marketers used to describe a pixel that would “follow you around the internet” via third-party cookies. That era is largely over. Apple’s App Tracking Transparency cut off a huge share of cross-app tracking, and browsers have spent years dismantling third-party cookies. What still works is narrower and more honest: a pixel on your own pages tells a platform like Meta or Google that someone visited, so you can show them an ad inside that platform; and your own email list, customer list, and video-view or profile-engagement audiences let you rebuild reach without depending on anyone else’s tracking. The practical lesson: the first-party data you own (your list, your content, your customers) is the durable asset. Retargeting built on someone else’s cookie is not.
- Amy leverages her real life social network inside her online social network. She networks with people face-to-face to collaborate on projects, partnerships and affiliate relationships she can then leverage in her social networks. For example, on her popular podcast she mentions industry leaders and marketing experts she’s learned from and studied with. She offers the episodes free on her blog at AmyPorterfield.com, then creates social media posts that guide her fans back to her blog to listen. Those posts get shared and promoted within Amy’s network, and usually by the industry leaders and experts she mentions in the episodes, too.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the current social media apps, tools and methods, but it’s manageable when you have a strategy aligned with your business goals and a talented, dedicated community manager to carry it out. We map this out in depth for each of our social media clients.
Nothing Tastes Sweeter Than a Delectable Slice of Memorable Design
Businesses that build design into their strategy and decision making tend to outgrow the ones that treat it as decoration applied at the end.
Building design into your business matters more than running to the latest marketing guru’s seminar for a bunch of inspiration and positive affirmations. Design is way more important than you may think.
This is the case we make to our clients at Peaceful Media: design isn’t a coat of paint you apply once the real decisions are made. Companies that treat it as a strategic input (shaping the product, the pricing, the whole customer experience) consistently pull ahead of the ones that bolt it on at the end. There’s no shortage of studies pointing the same direction, but the more useful evidence is what you see in your own funnel when the design finally matches the promise.
If that doesn’t send you running to hire a designer, you’re missing critical opportunities to grow your business.
Take a client of ours in the high-end boutique space as an example:
They needed to communicate sophistication and class in a category that can easily be mistaken as cheap. Once they added simple custom typography to their brand, customers stopped asking questions like, “why is this so expensive.”
Quality, thoughtful design can alleviate subconscious “what is the true value of this?” roadblocks and frequently asked questions from prospective customers because it establishes your credibility and professionalism without your prospect doing any mental work. No reading. No questions. Design has a unique superpower: showing that you and your brand are a class act.
If you’re newer to design, note that it runs throughout your entire digital brand, including your typography, color schemes, styles, graphics, and website layout. Read about our popular moodboard brand identity design process for a better sense of what it takes to get a custom website with classy designs at a fraction of the cost.
If Content is King, Content Marketing is the Kingdom
Ask any content marketing master, and they’ll tell you they give 98% of their best content away for free. Why? It creates a loyal audience that helps them attract more fans, subscribers, and sales.
In content marketing, you have two key performance indicators: traffic and conversion.
Traffic is the number of users engaging with your free content online: your blog posts, podcasts, webinars, slideshares, newsletters, case studies, Quora Q&A, infographics, etc.
Conversion is the action a user takes to go from one role to another, such as prospect to customer or viewer to subscriber.
As you become a content marketing machine, you’ll be able to repurpose your content in many formats and mediums.
Before you get too overwhelmed by all your options for creating remarkable content, remember that you don’t have to do it all.
The masters of digital marketing usually pick 1-3 content modalities for their content marketing strategy.
Let’s examine a digital marketing master who’s killing it in content marketing. His name is Lewis Howes:
Lewis was a professional football player until a career-ending injury sidelined him. He was forced to consider other ways to use his strengths and talents.
While living on his sister’s couch after his football career, he sought out mentors to teach him about digital marketing and business development. As he immersed himself in the field, he made podcasting his primary modality for sharing free, valuable content with the world and driving more traffic and conversion to his premium programs.
Lewis’ podcast “The School of Greatness” is now a top rated podcast on iTunes, where he interviews some of the most successful and influential people on the planet, including Elizabeth Gilbert, Taye Diggs, and Marianne Williamson. He’s used material from his podcast to create a New York Times Bestselling book and a premium online training course that teaches aspiring entrepreneurs how to launch a business doing what they love.
As you might imagine, Lewis doesn’t live on his sister’s couch anymore.
If you’re just getting started in content marketing, we recommend studying the strategies that will work best for you and your business. Here are two resources to study inside and out:
- The All-in-One Content Marketing Playbook for Startups by Melani Dizon
- The Advanced Content Marketing Guide by Neil Patel & Kathryn Aragon
The secret ingredient to master any content marketing plan comes down to one word: consistency. To become a master like Lewis Howes, you’ll need to consistently create and publish free, valuable content that people want.
Pick one modality for creating content (writing, video, or speaking), pick a delivery method (such as blogging, YouTube videos, or podcasting), and stick to your plan for at least one year.
Always end your content assets with a call to action so your fans can keep in touch with you and your business. In that spirit, here’s your CTA: pick one content modality to produce and share with your friends by the end of this week. Block out two hours on your calendar for it before you finish reading this article.
Lights, Camera, Action… Video is the Key to More Visibility, Trust, and Connection
Gone are the days when your only way to consume information was to attend a live seminar or a traditional educational institution. Now you can become an instant guru by teaching eager students all over the world with video.
Video lets you create high-value marketing collateral, training courses, and much more.
Most importantly, video makes you more visible to your audience online and builds instant trust and connection when done ethically and authentically.
CreativeLive is the standing example of what production quality can do for a teaching business. Founded by photographer Chase Jarvis, it built a free and pay-per-view training platform for creatives and entrepreneurs, originally to teach fellow photographers the tricks and trades of the business.
The rest of that story is instructive. Fiverr acquired CreativeLive in 2021, Jarvis departed the following year, and by 2025 the platform announced it was shutting down. Then CourseHorse acquired it in December 2025, days before the lights went out, and brought it back. Great production values are a real advantage, but they are not a moat, and they don’t make the underlying economics work by themselves. Study the craft here, not the business trajectory.
The craft is worth studying. Courses were filmed in front of a live studio audience with high definition cameras, sound, design, and programming, then recorded for students to purchase after streaming free during production. When you watch a course on CreativeLive, you feel like you’re in the studio audience yourself. That feeling is what you’re trying to reproduce, at whatever budget you have.
Even if you’re not at Oprah, MarieTV, or CreativeLive status yet, you can create high-quality video assets to share on the Internet.
You know how Apple creates their remarkably beautiful commercials? You can do the same from your living room or home office.
Here are five items you need to start creating professional videos:
- A microphone
- A video camera
- An umbrella lighting kit
- An editing application such as iMovie, Final Cut Pro or Camtasia
- An outline or script of what you’ll say
As you keep creating videos and generating revenue, you can always invest more in higher quality video assets for your business.
Key Takeaway: Aspire to Be the Tortoise Before You Become the Hare
To build what Amy Porterfield or Lewis Howes have built, remember three key takeaways:
- First, you don’t have to run the fastest to win the race, but you do have to get started. To become a digital marketing master, pick one area to master and stick to it.
- Second, always provide value and promote your work. Google any of the digital marketing masters in this article and you’ll notice they offer tremendous value for free before you ever land on a sales page for one of their premium products or services.
- Third, embrace being a student. Seek out mentors who have done what you want to do and will guide you on your journey, and attend classes.
If you keep taking action and embrace these mindsets over the next few years with consistency and persistence, you too can become a master of digital marketing.