Introduction to Digital Marketing

Passive or active audiences

Active media are any form of media where the consumer can physically engage with the content, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Content on digital platforms has been developed to be highly engaging - consumers can share, comment on, like, tweet, and pin it. This gives digital marketing an additional active characteristic.

Time-bound Objective

An objective needs be achieved within a set timeframe. This helps to create focus, and meet deadlines milestones. When? What can I do today? What can I do six weeks from now? What can I do six months from now? Based on research, what is the appropriate timeframe that should be given to achieve this goal?

Relevant Objective

At this stage, you need to ask yourself whether this objective is relevant in the bigger picture. Does this seem worthwhile? Is this the right time? Does this match our other efforts or needs? Is this the right team? Are you the right person to reach this goal? Is it applicable in the current socio-economic environment?

Audience Research

Audience research is designed to establish the size, composition, and characteristics of a group of individuals who are, or could be, potential customers. It's important to note that this research is about the people and individuals who make up your target audience.

Behavior Analytics

Behavioral analytics focuses on providing insight into the actions of your audience and customers. It is used in various scenarios to identify opportunities to optimize in order to realize specific business outcomes. Google Search data provides insightful sources of consumer behavior because you can see what they are looking for. You can then see what they do on your website after they search and click on your link. This enables you to see the full journey to help understand what triggered their interest. You can also see where traffic and clicks are concentrated on your website using heatmaps. This involves using tools to color code the website to see the actions that people take there, where they move their mouse, and where they click. Knowing how people interact with your website is invaluable information for digital marketers.

Benefits of time management

Bring in control Earning a reputation Feeling Calmer Getting more done

Digital Channels: Content Marketing

Content marketing is key to the inbound strategy, which in turn is central to a digital marketing strategy. Well-developed and targeted content increases brand personality and likability. Through content, consumers discover your brand values, experience, and world, and can identify with the brand but also learn more about the product and how it solves their problems. Content strategy impacts all stages of the buyer's journey as it is central to all points of contact, and it is the final destination for a lot of marketing tactics. Content is also key in going viral and creating word of mouth as users will share content that is impactful and humorous, or that surprises them.

Achievable Objective

Crafting an achievable objective means that it is reachable within the current available skills, budget, and time, and it takes into account the potential constraints or limits that exist. How can you accomplish this goal? How realistic is the goal, based on other constraints, such as financial factors? What is the allocated budget that you currently have for this? How many hours a week can the team work on this? Who will be the point of contact responsible for achieving the goal? What things may stop the team from reaching their goals?

Data Types

Demographics Psychographics Behavorial

Demographics

Demographics are the hard facts about your audience. Whether they are male or female How old they are What their profession is Whether they are married Where they live Whether they go to college The socio-economic data in demographics include: gender, age, income level, occupation, marital status, location, number of children, education, religion, family size, ethnicity, nationality, social class, industry, number of computers, and generation.

What is Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is the use of new media or digital technology to achieve marketing and business goals.

One-to-one or one-to-many

In traditional marketing, the message given is singular. In other words, because of the group experience, the traditional marketers will develop a single message that will deliver the same content to individuals. In digital marketing, marketers can create multiple versions of the same message, and target users whose profile definitely fits their target audience. The brand experience aims to treat the consumer as an individual by delivering personalized, relevant content.

Porters five fources

Industry rivalry (degree of competition among existing firms): Intense competition leads to reduced profit potential for companies in the same industry. Threat of substitutes (products or services): Availability of substitute products will limit your ability to raise prices. Bargaining power of buyers: Powerful buyers have a significant impact on prices. Bargaining power of suppliers: Powerful suppliers can demand premium prices and limit your profit. Barriers to entry (threat of new entrants): These act as a deterrent against new competitors.

3i Principles

Initiate - The initiate principle of digital marketing states that the customer is the starting and finishing point for all digital activities. The core of this principle can be summed up as: 'Let the customer decide'. Iterate - Iterate emphasizes the importance of tweaking a digital marketing campaign in response to user interaction. In short, the more iterations undertaken, the more effective the campaign becomes as you seek to adjust and scale based on feedback, customer engagement, and data. Integrate - The integrate principle is about taking your efforts across digital channels to drive an outcome that is greater than the individual channels on their own. This also involves integrating both digital and any traditional marketing efforts in a unified way into your overall marketing campaign strategy.

Paid Media

It comprises any form of media designed to promote your brand or content on the internet for a fee. Examples of this includes social media advertising, paid search, display adverts, or paid influencers. Paid media helps you to scale up your digital marketing campaign and reach more people than nonpaid formats. In tandem with various reporting tools such as Google Analytics, you will be able to analyze who is seeing your media and how the audience engages or interacts with your campaigns. This, in turn, enables you to adjust and optimize your paid media performance. With paid media you can take ad formats and brand content and show it to people who you believe will find it relevant, useful, or engaging. Essentially, this means you have control over where, when, and what is seen. The drawback is that you have to pay for it!

Inbound Marketing

It involves trying to pull your audience towards your content, brand, or service. It is about attracting those people who are already interested in your product or service so that they seek you out and engage. With inbound marketing, potential customers find you through channels such as blogs, search engines, email subscriptions, word of mouth, and online reviews/recommendations. As a marketer, you are attempting to find ways to create the conditions where people are drawn to your brand via your content, with the objective of turning them into a customer.

Earned Media

It is where you have created a good piece of content, shared it through various platforms - including paid promotion - and now people are engaging with it and actively sharing it with their friends because they view it as important, relevant, interesting, or even funny. Effectively, earned media is about people interacting with your content without you having to put in the effort to drive traffic. Furthermore, your brand can borrow the legitimacy of normal people sharing your content, and this builds trust and credibility far quicker and far more effectively than paid media ever could.

Benefits of conducting industry trend research

Keep up with the audience's communication style and medium Identify market opportunities Plan next marketing effort

Marketing Research

Marketers can tap into secondary research developed by third-party research companies such as PRIZM from Claritas, eMarketer, Euromonitor, Nielsen, and Spark. These can be given as free reports or you might require a business subscription to the platform providing the research data. You can also choose to commission market research specifically designed for your business, bearing in mind this can be time consuming and expensive.

Digital Channels: Email and automation marketing

Marketing emails and automation are used for conversion and loyalty. Emails and automation aim to reach out to the customers at the right time to lead them to a conversion destination, such as a landing page. Common email objectives include raising interest, converting sales and retaining customers by providing additional value to the brand and product.

Digital Channels: Organic Search (SEO)

Optimizing for organic search is a key tactic in digital marketing because it leads to discovery, awareness, interest, and conversion without paid effort. SEO makes your content visible to the audience and easily searchable on Google and other search engines without the need to pay for clicks.

Digital Channels: Website Optimization

Optimizing your website is essential to create an environment where visitors can engage with your brand content and easily take valuable actions on your site such as buying a product or contacting your team with minimal fuss. Optimizing speed, navigation, responsiveness, content, and conversion processes will help drive more of those valuable actions and lead to better performance.

Outbound Marketing

Outbound marketing begins with the brand advertiser pushing out a message to a specified target audience with the objective being to drive awareness of a product or service. This is done by rapidly spreading word of the campaign product or service to the target audience using, for example, visual display banner and video formats multiple times to ensure people remember the product. *Traditional Marketing

Types of Media

Owned media is the media that you create and manage. Paid media is media or advertising that you have paid for to drive banner and video visibility, or clicks and traffic, to your product, website, or service. Earned media is free publicity generated by consumers, PR, influencers, and people who speak about and share content related to your brand or product. Earned media is generated either in response to content you've shared, or via voluntary mentions; in many cases, these people will be your brand advocates and will actively promote your brand because they like you!

Inbound with paid search and SEO

PPC: an inbound method of advertising on Google, Yahoo, Bing, or other search engines, and paying only when the searcher clicks your ad. Paid search is key to being discovered when people are actively looking for products or solutions. SEO: This is the process of driving inbound traffic from the free, organic, or natural search results on search engines. These are the search results below the PPC results, on local search on Google Maps, or the dynamic results like expandable dropdowns that appear on Google when someone searches. SEO is about making your website as attractive as possible to search engines like Google.

Surveys

Platforms such as SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Zoomerang, or AYTM surveys are a great source of primary data. They can be very powerful if they are well designed and ask the right questions. Also, they can be sent to hundreds or thousands of customers as required. Online interviews are another way to collect qualitative primary research, and direct interaction with relevant customers using tools such as Nebu or Skype.

Psychographics

Psychographics are much more detailed and complex. They can uncover anything that your audience might be interested in: their beliefs, life goals, or opinions. It's about gaining a deep understanding of your audience's aspirations so that, when you talk to them, you are speaking a language that resonates with what they really want. Psychographics can include: activities, interests, opinions, attitudes, values, lifestyle, and loyalty. It's about their lifestyle, their personality.

The decision Matrix

Quadrant 1 consists of tasks that are urgent and important. These include crises, deadlines, and urgent problems. Quadrant 2 consists of tasks that are important, but not urgent. These include relationships, planning, and recreation. In Quadrant 3, we find tasks that are urgent, but not important. These might include interruptions and meetings, and simple but urgent activities. Quadrant 4 consists of tasks that are neither urgent nor important. These include time wasters, pleasant activities, and trivia.

Buyers Jounrye: Retention

Retention uses more personal components, such as email marketing automation and analytics, to provide a consistent customer experience, reaching out, following up a purchase, and using the correct information to create a sense of intimacy between the customer and the brand. Using information such a birthday date, membership start date, or favorite topic or product can produce engaging content that triggers an emotional response from the customer.

Cultural Research

Social Media conversations Research Dedicated Platforms

Audience Research Platforms

Social media Marketing research companies Survey providers Behavior analytics platforms Using these tools can help marketers focus their attention on the type of content and messaging they need to develop in order to engage their target audience. You need to know what media is the best point of contact, raise awareness, and understand the words and images that the audience will want to engage with.

Outbound with social media & ads

Social media marketing: is about creating visibility and interactivity with your audience. This is one of the most, if not the most, important channels you use to speak to your audience in an outbound manner. When your audience engages, it can change the dynamic to inbound; they can message you back, seek out and actively share your content, repost, like, comment, and ask questions. Moving your communications on social media from an outbound media platform, where you push out your posts to an audience, to a two-way outbound/inbound conversational channel is the ultimate goal for digital marketers. Display and video advertising: it combines the science and precision of online audience targeting with the emotional engagement of audio/video and creative visual formats. It generates engagement, brand affinity, recall, and traffic from a highly targeted audience. There are numerous ad formats and techniques to engage your target audience on channels like YouTube, websites across the internet, and social networks, all of which will be discussed in detail during this module.

Digital Channels: Social Media Marketing

Social media platforms are primary channels for creating awareness and interest through content and social engagement. Advertising can be targeted and re-targeted to appeal to the conversion objective. Social channels are also important channels in the Retention stage of the buyer's journey as the primary platform for customer to get information and updates from the company.

Social Media

Social media platforms gather knowledge or insights gained from analyzing social media data. These are useful for removing the manual work by accessing collected and analyzed data directly. Some examples of social intelligence tools are Hootsuite, HubSpot, Social Intel, Nuvi, and Affinio. Most of these are paid services because they provide extra data visualization and analysis. However, they enable you to gather the data from several social media platforms in one place and also monitor conversations.

Digital Channels: Paid Search (PPC)

This channel will help you get high value traffic and clicks from an interested audience. As the audience is actively searching for keyword related to their issue, using paid search helps to bring you top of the list when customers are searching and ready to buy or take action.

Inbound or Outbound

This is a push strategy that begins with the brand or advertiser showing ads to as many people as possible, hoping that it will resonate with some of them. For this reason, it is harder to track and more expensive. On the opposite side, inbound strategy as we defined earlier aims to attract interested consumers to your content, brand, and offer. This marketing model was greatly facilitated with the development of digital technology, as we talked about earlier. The use of cookie tracking, SEO, topics, blogs, and influencers helps brands resonate with a specific audience so they come to you.

Behavorial Data

This is about how people use your product, or even how they navigate on your website, and how they use the different media that you want to use as your marketing channels. Online activities such as social media use Website visits Product and content use Where they click What the usual consumer path is on your site Other relevant buying habits including brand preferences and product usage

website optimization

This is the art of creating - and continuously improving - websites to optimize the visitor experience, resulting in high visitor satisfaction, better user experience, and high repeat visit and conversion rates. Having a useful and functional website is key, because if your website is not optimized, it will result in the customer having a bad experience or finding it difficult to purchase from you. As such, web optimization is about designing your website so that the customer flows through your content, goes from your blog to your product page, to your e-commerce, and eventually makes a purchase. Crucially, it is very important that the website is optimized to facilitate shopping on different devices.

Buyers Journey: Retention

This stage is for ensuring reoccurring revenue and creating a group of active brand advocates. Once the consumer has used the product and is satisfied, it is crucial to provide added value and create a real relationship. In this stage, you are addressing an already convinced consumer who thinks your product is great for them, but you still need to keep them satisfied and create a desire to come back to your product. The more you know about your customers, the more you will be able to provide additional value to them and delight them, not only with your product, but with your brand experience and personality.

Saving and creating time

Use the Pareto Principle (80/20) Create a task list Plan ahead Delegate Batch your tasks Avoid procrastinating

360 Marketing

Using the full circle of marketing tactics is called a 360 or integrated marketing strategy, as it aims to engage consumers at all touchpoints throughout their day. The mainstream definition of a 360 marketing strategy is that it is a marketing plan that is both online and offline, across all digital channels, on social media, and anywhere that your customer spends time. It's a holistic promotion that truly covers all touchpoints. In short, to be truly 360, a campaign would need to include everything that is used by your consumer - mobile, digital, search, and social, as well as any relevant traditional channels like TV, radio, or print.

Measurable Objective

You need to have an obtainable goal that can be measured using numbers: What are the current key performance indicators (KPIs) for the business? What digital data can you leverage? This includes traffic, cost per click (CPC), lead generation, social media tracking, among others. What is the current situation and what evolution do you expect to see? How much? How many? How will you know when is the objective has been accomplished?

Content Marketing

effective inbound method that involves the creation, publishing, and sharing of content with the aim of building brand reputation, awareness, and affinity. You must develop a strong content strategy to increase your brand personality and likability.

Digital Strategy

establishment of a set of practices and goals that guide your long term digital objectives and operate across all digital channels that your customer utilizes. The strategy piece draws together everything you know about your audience - available channel options, budget, and timings - to create a plan that uses digital media to deliver on a business objective.

Industry Trend Research

involves monitoring changes and advancements that are taking place in and around an industry category in order to stay ahead of the competition.

Owned Media

owned media incorporates a company's own content, packaging, point-of-sale, and the people who come into contact with consumers. It's the stuff a brand creates to promote itself. Owned media promotes your brand in a very personal way by exhibiting your company's values and highlighting what the product or company does. Some key questions you should ask when considering owned media are: What am I going to talk about? What do I want people to see? What type of message do I want to get across to my audience? Some benefits of owned media include the cost efficiency, flexibility, longevity, and power of developing a go-to platform for your audience. Owned media is important for creating trust and legitimacy in the market. It acts as a main platform for communicating all that the company is, sells, and does.

Eliminate personal time stealers

poor internal communication excessive viewing of email Interruptions Meetings Procrastination Distractions Perfectionism Lack of planning Stress Unforeseen events Indecision

Benefits of 360 Marketing Campaign

- Covers the entire buying cycle - Uses every point of contact - Optimizes for scale and relevance - Implements both traditional and digital marketing - Enables you to effectively measure results

Tools to track industry trends

- Social Media Monitoring - Market Research Reports - Search Analytics - Academic Research

Seven step framework for managing projects

1. Identify the project or campaign 2. write a project brief 3. Develop goals and objectives 4. Get input from the team 5. Map out timeline and tasks 6. Start the project 7. Finish the project

Traditional Media

Direct marketing: This involves promoting and selling directly to the end buyer from the manufacturer with no other media owner involved. For instance, it includes letters or flyers, coupons, brochures, and general any other print material delivered to a consumer's mailbox or hand. Print: This is advertising that uses physically printed media to reach consumers and prospects, such as newspapers, brochures, and magazine ads Outdoor: Similar to print but on a larger scale, these are billboards (also called 48 sheets or the even larger 96 sheets), bus stops and smaller placements (also called 6 sheets), bus sides, building wraps and installations, and so on. Broadcast: Known as on-air advertising, it is the primary revenue generator for commercial television and radio stations. Examples include film, TV, product placement, program sponsorship, cinema, and radio. Referral: Referrals often happen spontaneously. This form of marketing involves promoting products or services to new customers through referrals, usually by word of mouth. For instance, it includes fidelity cards with vouchers and discounts for sponsorship.

Guidelines for responding to requests

Don't apologize for saying 'no'. When replying face-to-face, always use a slow, calm voice when replying to people. If you're replying via email, use as few words as possible. Before you reply, make sure you understand what you're being asked. Listen, paraphrase, and empathize with any request. Get to the root of the perceived problem as soon as possible. However you decide to respond, always explain yourself clearly and simply. Repeat your answer several times if necessary, using the same language. Use depersonalized language like 'The situation is...' rather than 'I think...' Avoid turning the situation into a potential personal conflict. Remember, even if you've already said 'yes', you can change your mind and then say 'no' if your situation changes.

Email Marketing

Email marketing is a subscribed inbound channel used to deliver advertisements, offers, education, and other marketing content directly to an interested user's email inbox. Based on the type of content in your email broadcasts, you can drive efficient inbound traffic and conversions from your subscribed audience.

Benefits of project management

Fluid communication between stakeholders, marketers, clients, external suppliers, and so on On-hand status updates on where the project is at any time Resource planning, ahead of when it is needed rather than being called for reactively An accountable, central point of contact to manage the web of interdependencies in a project Client assurance and confidence Predictable deadlines

Role of project manager

Guide projects Facilitate communication Manage conflict Manage time Demonstrate leadership skills Develop subject matter expertise

Specific Objective

Having a well-defined and clear goal, stating exactly what you aim to achieve. The objective needs to be crystal clear, and anyone who reads it, even outside the Marketing department, should understand what it hopes to achieve. Here are some tips to make your objectives specific: Think simple, sensible, and significant. Write down a summary of your goal and reshape it to be as specific and clear as possible. The goal should describe an action that involves the customer. Sometimes a unique objective is clearer and more realistic than having too many that will dilute your impact and focus.

Platforms involved in competitive research

Social media: Using dedicated monitoring tools to centralize your research can help you keep an eye on what the audience says about your competition (be it positive or negative), where they delighted the customers, and where they lack quality. Competitor assets: visiting your competition's website, downloading their white papers or quarterly reports, listening to their webcasts or podcasts, and participating in their online events is a great way to understand their business, how they position themselves, and how they deliver their message. Search: By analyzing searches, you can know what the consumer problem is and how it is solved. You can use search tools such as SEMrush or SpyFu to understand how your competition ranks for specific keywords. Content analysis: You can follow their newsletter with Owletter, use Kompyte to track their website changes, and so on.

SMART Objectives

Specific Measurable Achievable Relevant Time-bound

Buyers Journey: Consideration and Conversion

Stages where the consumer is more focused. At these stages, the customers know the available solutions and are now wondering which one to choose by looking for additional information, experience, reviews, and creating a mindmap of the best quality/price/value ratio. As consumers will likely search for additional information by asking precise questions about the product, you need to optimize your content for search engines and invest in paid ads on keywords translation to ensure the 'Consideration' stage is well-integrated in your strategy. The more your product or brand is associated with a specific topic and keyword, the stronger the association will be shaped in the consumer's mind. This can increase content discovery and engagement significantly.

Competitive Research

Strategy Target market Message

Digital Channels: Display Advertising

Thanks to the targeting capabilities of online display, companies can target audience interests, age, gender, community, keywords, and more. So the ads shown to the audience are highly relevant, which drives higher awareness and consideration as well as traffic.

Buyers Journey

The buyer's journey is the process a consumer goes through before purchasing a product or service.

Buyers Journey: Awareness

The moment when the consumer becomes aware of a problem they want to solve in their life and perceives your product ad as a potential solution. In this stage, marketers should focus on creating visibility and recognition. This is a critical stage for new products, brands, or added benefits to an existing product. This stage will focus on getting your product out there, implementing it as part of a broader scope of existing solutions for an issue.

Buyers Journey: Interest

The moment when the consumer is looking for options that will help solve their problem. At this stage, the consumer has a selection of ideas in mind but will need more information and experience to make a decision. This is a quest for knowledge that, in the digital marketing landscape, translates into reading reviews, blog articles, social media, and ad product websites in order to gain as much information as possible.

Buyers Journey: Consideration

The moment when the consumer knows about your brand and thinks it might be a good fit for their needs or what they are trying to achieve. They may have other brands in mind, but your company is in the mix. At this stage, inbound strategies are highly effective because, if correctly used, they ensure that the brand or product more frequently appears in the consumer's search results and social media feeds.

Buyers Journey: Awareness and Interest

stages are driven by discovery when the consumer slowly becomes aware of their problem and the potential solutions. This stage is driven by your content's relationship with the main topic. A user may not carry out a detailed search, meaning that positioning on a broad topic and sharing content that stands out (video or advertising) will help your product become part of the conversation. The ideal situation is for your content to be engaging and interesting, bring added value to the conversation, and provide solutions to the consumer's problem. Developing a strong social media presence and engagement is recommended for bringing your product forward organically and on your target timeline.

Web Analytics

the collection, measurement, analysis, and reporting of web data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage. This is where we use data to understand our website visitors and the channels they use to engage with our content and convert or buy on our site.