what does digital marketing include.
*this is a guide that was created from lecture videos and is used to help you gain an understanding of what does digital marketing include.
Understanding Digital Marketing Foundations
What does digital marketing include for channels: Website, Analytics, SEO, PPC, SM, Video, Email, Content, Mobile, Affiliate, A/B Testing
Online marketing- finding ways to be present at the right moment to capture the customer
Three types of media- paid (adwords, facebook paid), owned (website list of customers, blogs) and earned (social media, written articles about you.)
Goals of customer align with goals of a business. Provide a shared value experience to get positive ROI.
- Business Strategy- mission statement: summarize what you are trying to do
objectives: Pieces that are necessary to keep business running and brand identity
value proposition: why do you stand out, why are you unique
elevator pitch: short summary of your brand that allows you to be concise
(also: tagline and call to action)
- Customer Strategy- target audience: reach correct audience
audience goals: understand that audience and what motivates them
audience technology: where will you find that audience
3. Customer segment/target audience: what is business goal for segment
What is shared value for this segment
What are the KPI’s
What is your target for the KPI
- Marketing strategy- individual marketing plans for each audience segment
Build your marketing strategy last, and revisit it often
Bounce rate- percentage of visitors who arrived at your site but left after visiting only one page
click through rate- how many clicks are received to the amount of impressions
Abandonment- user does not complete the goal you intended for them
Ad impression – each time your ad is displayed to a user
Frequency- Amount of times a single user will see your ad
Conversion rate- percentage of visitors who entered into an experience and completed the goal
Cost per acquisition/cost per action- how much it costs for you for goal completion
Lifetime value- prediction of net profit attributed to relationship
Landing page- first page a user arrives on when they visit your website
Channels: SEO, Search Marketing, Social Media, Video
Best content marketing is interesting content.
Best websites are simple, well thought out and highly functional.
Best domain names: short, simple and sexy
Build goal-specific landing pages: Teaser- give just enough where they have to click to next process
Squeeze- capture content and lead qualifying information
Viral-Invite customers to enlist their friends,
Infomercial- that shares all info about product
Define goal, what info do you need to accomplish this, what do they need to do, what info do they need to be convinced, how will you track the results. This answers the question of what does digital marketing include.
Landing Page must haves: logo, explanation of offer, compelling headline, testimonials, call to action
“People don’t read on the internet, they scan, such as bullet points.”
Web Copy- Know your audience
What Does Digital Marketing Include for Tools
Geckoboard Cyfe to build kpi dashboards at a glance
Google Webmasters to review crawlers
Screaming Frog which crawls your site
Conversion Funnel: Awareness -> Consideration -> Preference -> Purchase -> Retention
Good KPI that align with business goals: quantifiable, measurable and easy to understand
Tie KPI to Marketing Objective
Last Click Attribution
Rank is determined by importance and relevance. Variables are topics, links, website program and mobile friendly.
Make your page accessible to crawlers. Search loves hyperlinks. Make your site easy to navigate. Natural language URL. Give each page a unique meta description. Use heading tags, but only one each and in order.Give every image a name and alt tag.
Build out information that brings the most value to your user. Use keywords in your heading tag.
Job of SEO Consultant: Site Audit, Strategy Development, Monthly Retainer
Search and Display Marketing
Display advertising is hard for a prospect campaign, it is better for remarketing and brand awareness
Google AdWords
-create campaign
-15/20 keywords per campaign
-headline should draw attention “free sports drink”
-description should include call to action and a keyword
Online Email Marketing Providers
Constant Contact / MailChimp
Good content answers a question
The right content is authentic, authoritative, (helpful articles, video demonstrations)
Learning Growth Hacking Fundamentals
Growth hacking- Data driven, lean marketing
Sales Funnel- Awareness,
The best audience is one that needs your category of product
Growth Hacking Tools –
Product Market Fit- 40% of your customers will be very disappointed without your product/service.
Survey.IO to see and determine PMF from surveys through your initial customers.
From first early users- Gather insightrs, make them believers, make them advocates..
Turn customers into believers by improving experience, listen to needs, engage via email, constantly listening. Be there for them and remove their doubt. Make them advocates!!
High virality but no retention leads to a doomed business.
Focus on retention and CLV instead of solely virality!
“Why are your users leaving?”
Once your product excels, you need to draw the interest of early adopters..
“Growth hackers don’t take ‘no’ for an answer.”
Finding opportunity as a growth hacker
“Innovate your own opportunities, push boundaries and try things completely novel!”
Become a customer of your competitor to better understand them and their market share.
Moat.com is used to be a search engine for paid advertising to see what messaging your competitors have tried for ppc.
Archive.orgto see old versions of websites.
SEMrush.com to gather insights of the keywords your competitors use.Worth paying for a month, you can run a competitor comparison.
Identify and acquire core influencers.
Create plan to unlock virality. “What will your audience share and why?”
Virality: Audience Content Timing Execution
Use surveymonkey.com/audience to understand what your users have shared this week or what they are looking for..
What are the typical working hours of your target persona?
Being first to market isn’t as important as having the best PMF.
Quantcast.com install tags to site and see demographic metrics to help you understand your already existing customer base.
Kissmetrics.com makes it easy to identify roadblocks that are slowing down your growth. Can link with GA to get powerful perspective of who your user is and what they are doing.
Incentive strategy: Bring and invite friends into experience, where both you and friends receive benefit to do so (also make sure to provide sense of urgency!!
Incentive Strategy: Make things exclusive and scarce as it will make your product/service more valuable. It is more desirable, and will be an option that will soon be unavailable.
Incentive Strategy: Build anticipation so they can’t wait when tey finally get what they have been waiting for!
Incentive Strategy: Give something to get something such as an article for email or free workout session for yelp review.
Create partnerships to assist value in some aspect. What does your business get and what does the customer gain from it? Credibility? More users?
Let users grow your network for you
Learning Web Analytics Fundamentals
Insights, Actions, Comparisons, Value, Direction. Web Analytics is an important aspect and not to be forgotten when discussing what does digital marketing include.
Analytics is the measurement for website success
It provides ROI for marketing activities
Analytics: Tech for implementation, marketing for interpretation, sales, business analysis, business side of how are we making money and how can we monetize better how can we develop the site into a better marketing vehicle
Results of Analytics: educated budgeting, clear results of SEO and PPC, specific targets for improvement, an environment for testing and improvement
Terminology
Visitors- Any device that request information from the server
Visitor Session- The sum total activity for one user
Unique Visitors-
Cookie- small text file that is downloaded by your browser onto your device, if it is accepted it shows server that it is a unique device that has access to the website
Cookies is how you count returning or existing visitors to a website.
Referral- offline action and interpreting it online
“How did someone find your website?” search engine, forum, social site, news, email?
Exit rate- people who have visited more than one page, the last page in their session before they leave the website (typically homepage or a page after specific task is completed)
Bounce rate- what people think of your website in a split second. How many people leave your site as soon as they get there
Someone can bounce because they received the information they were looking for, or the name was the same as another company they were looking for, not the right product, or just a horrible website. 60, 70, or 80 percent is a high bounce rate typically.
Conversion rate- what we need people to do in order to make money; measure visitor actions that will make business money
Conversions rates= Goal (sales, leads, contact forms, comments, video views, page views.
“What do you want people to do on your site and how do you measure successful visits?”
Monetary goals, actions goals, engagement goals
Don’t rely on general info such as page views, hits, top pages, monthly visitors and time on site. Without changing anything you won’t get any better numbers.
Assuming numbers/data mean something, it doesn’t as it is value neutral. Data needs context in order to be understood
Have clear goals -> context of how to get there -> build relationships of how people got there/what does success look like?
How to view analytics
Where did visitors come from?
What did they do on your site? Did they meet a goal, something of value, measure understand and apply
What is your marketing plan? How do you respond to the information you just learned
Realize that visitors can have vastly different goals in mind. Measure visitors differently.
Context-(tell story about specific group of visitors, why did they come to the site and what were they looking for, what factors make up this group of people)
Who, what why, when and how
Contrast- What is unique to this group? What is distinguishable?
Comparison- “how are these groups alike” what does this group have in common with other groups? Search term, source, action, result?
“Question asking is the single greatest tool humans have?”
Analysts want to know WHY.
What types of visitors do you have? News, analysis, repeat visitors, repeat buyers?
Why do people come to your site? Develop segment based off goal or purpose
Segment by motivation, action, result, source, choice, time
Building segments
Identify primary search term/anchor term. Essential term for multiple phrases, refine segments for “small bucket” segments
Where people come from and how that affects their behavior on a website
Contextual link (in editorial or content of another website) people stay longer and convert at higher rate
Advertisement- convert at high rate but time on site is lower
Links on blogs- next best performing segment; overall conversion, pageviews, time on site
Social news- produces the least amount of conversion, engagement but high amount of visitors
Search terms show intent of visit to site
“Which words determine long visits and which result in shorter?”
“Which words determine repeat visits?”
Actions show engagement
Video views -> conversions
Contact information -> conversions
Download files -> conversions
The Value Equation
Visitors who came from -source
Who entered at page -page
Converted at rate of x%
How to Track Value
*Utilize Google Analytics
Content Value
Which content is attracts visitors?
Which content contributes to the goal?
Which content makes people leave?
Entry Page Analysis
Is it the best page for the search?
How are people reacting to the content?
Compare behavior on searches
Focus on the right profitable pages
Use Google Insights to better understand to arrange phrases in SEO
Why are you using a specific social media? Customer service, conversation, sales, sharing?
What to present to CEO
What to present to manager
Learning Conversion Rate Optimization Best Practices
When asking what does digital marketing include, you should ensure that conversion rate optimization is a final step in setting up your digital marketing plan.
-Those who believe in best practices and those who emphasize testing.
-Put yourself in your customer’s shoes
-Understand how it is structured and the site architecture
-You can’t believe generic practices work. You have to test and have results driven decisions and question assumptions.
-You can’t truly optimize without testing
-Don’t focus too much on tools, they are needed but the strategy comes first. Develop a process and methodology and then look into tools needed.
-Do not approach CRO as a project, it should be a foundation in your marketing as continuous testing to improve the conversion rate and to improve insights.
Persuasion– knows how to develop a strong value prop and build desire. Build motivation with right message to the right people at right time with clarity. Facilitate it with..
Experience Design– transactional. Seamless and painless way for users to achieve your objective
Scientific Method– continuous testing
Define the process you will use to get results.
Creation of optimization strategy– gather marketing info to understand prospect and where to focus the team’s effort. Understand their perspective and match that with your business goals.
Combine all of the info into a prioritization. Then start working down the list, testing each and everything.
Understand what a business needs to achieve first before developing a website.
Goals Waterfall Business Goals -> Marketing Goals -> Website/CRO Goals
Micro Conversion A small action on the way to a full revenue producing conversion
Rank your Goals (create ordered list of relative value to business) ->
Set Relative Goal Values ->
Estimate Goal Values
Information | (FILTER) | Perception
Understand your prospects/customers and the voice of the customer
-Onsite Surveys, Email Surveys, User Testing/Usability Tests using Silverback (Mac) Focus Groups, A/B Testing
What’s wrong with qualitative data
Limited sample size, only valid for few who were sampled
Sampling bias, small group can’t accurately represent full range of possibilities
Self selection bias, you will survey people who volunteer
Observation bias (hawthorne effect) people’s behavior changes when they are under observation
Observer expectancy effect- observer’s guide the observed
Artificial scenarios- these create pre set goals and parameters for their response
Segmentation is used for creating relevance, putting structures in place to deliver appropriate messages to audiences with distinct needs and expectations
Testing Segmentation
Make observations about potential segmentations
Create hypotheses for those patterns will perform
- Select sample
- Create hypotheses
- Select test groups
- Track conversions
- Compare performance
“How did the alternative hypotheses perform?”
*keep it simple, to keep it nimble
Conversional Funnel
Persuasional (Landing Pages) -> Informational (products, categories, about) ->Transactional (Conversion, Forms)
PIE Prioritization Framework
Persuasion
Importance- GA -> Behavior -> Site Content -> All Pages -> Unique Page Views
Ease- Ensure Return on Effort
Heuristic Evaluation- Identifying conversion problems using heuristics (or rules of thumb)
LIFT model to create hypotheses
Value proposition is the core of your conversion rate. VP is Perceived costs vs benefit of consumer
Hypothesis Structure
What will you intend to change
What you will change that thing into
What effect the change will have
Components of a Good Hypothesis
Must be testable by single test
Seek to solve conversion problems
Aim at gaining marketing insights
Testing your value proposition
POPs- point of parity (prospects desires)
PODs- point of difference (your features)
POIs- point of irrelevance (competitors features)
How Website Tests Work
Test Sample -> Original Page/Control -> Controlled Test -> Conversion -> Results
Always have a portion of your traffic being tracked on your control page
Types of Tests
A/B Test- create variations of page against control page
Variable cluster- change more than one thing in a variation
Isolation Test- focus on one specific change or hypothesis to test
Multivariate- Isolation test that run several different combinations of variable against each other. Only use with at least a million traffic to site
Split Path Test- send visitors down a different set of pages
What technology to choose
Technology
Features
Cost
Support
Conversion Rate Optimization Tools
Client side tools- cut and paste js to manipulate pages to test,
Server side tools- installs code on web server or other appliance, avoids flicker and may speed up load time, expensive, need more tech support, greater flexibility
Hosted tools- mostly for landing pages, quickly launch and test
CRO and SEO
Google will not penalize pages with A/B Testings
Tips for running Tests,
Use a Proper CRO Tool
Add a variation pages to robot.txt file
Use the same title meta and heading content in both when running A/B
Use standard-compliant code and SEO best practice
Move on page SEO content below the fold
Double check for SEO friendly pages
Use a 301 redirect if A/B Test picks a new page!
Understanding testing-tool statistics
95% statistical confidence level
Be a CRO Champion
Get senior level buy in for testing
Create a tangible opportunity such as customer frustrations
Conduct skunkwork tests- pick low visibility pages to pick up momentum
Involve other departments to
Tie results to revenue
Share results
Be a leader
Never give up
Your Mind Moves the Machine.