What is Digital Marketing?

• Content Marketing
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Website Management & Optimization
• Paid Advertising & Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Social Media Marketing
• Mobile Marketing
• Email Marketing

• Employees (potential or existing)
• Senior leaders in your organization
• Investors / funding agencies
• Strategic partners / alliances

Impact of the Global Pandemic

Types of Media: POEM Framework

• Paid Media represents sponsored or paid ads that organizations run on various communication platforms. Digital examples include Facebook ads, Google ads, LinkedIn sponsored ads, banner or display ads, YouTube video ads, etc. However, offline paid media is also included, e.g., newspaper, radio, and magazine ads. In essence, paid media is any media where you pay to get exposure or access to an audience that you may not have an existing relationship with, i.e., "strangers".

• Owned Media includes the content an organization creates and controls. Websites, e-newsletters, and blogs are good online examples. Offline examples could be a physical store, trade show booth, a paper newsletter, or even your employees (because they do represent your organization and your brand). The target audience for this type media is often prospective or existing customers.

• Earned Media represents content about your organization, services, or products, but created and distributed by others. Digital examples include shared posts, posts by customers about your organization, reviews, referrals, etc. Non-digital examples could include articles written by news organizations based on a press release or anyone who decides to write about your organization on their own. In essence, when you have earned the attention of your fans or advocates such that they “talk” about your brand, this is considered earned media.

• Sponsored or Paid Influencers: Posts from paid influencers are a combination of paid and earned media. Without payment, influencers’ comments or recommendations would be considered earned media. However, once influencers get paid to promote your brand, that earned media turns into paid media (with an earned media spin).

• Social Media Share Requests: Social media share requests could represent a combination of earned media (the shared social media post) and owned media, if the organization requesting the share drafted or crafted the text for the post.

H5P: POEM Categorization Exercise Let's try categorizing various types of media... Simply drag and drop the following words into the appropriate categories. (You can drop the same word into multiple categories, if appropriate.)

• Paid media to promote owned and earned media: This approach helps your audience find any of your owned properties and/or earned conversations. For example, on a transit ad (paid media), you might display a customer review (earned media) and include a link to your own website (owned media).

• Paid and owned media to generate and drive earned media: The goal of this approach is to present content that can spark a public conversation. For example, you could boost a post (paid / owned media) from your social media page (owned media) to get your target audience talking or commenting about it (earned media).

• Owned media to host earned media conversations: This approach can be applied to collect ideas or feedback from your audience. For example, enable comments (earned media) on your blog (owned media). Or, host a contest or competition (earned media) on using your social media account (owned media).

• Earned media to listen in on audience conversations: This approach can provide insights about what your target audience likes, wants, or needs. For example, listen to social media conversations (earned media) that relate to your brand, your competitors, or your industry. Or offer real-time customer support to understand what is working or not.

Benefits and Challenges of the POEM Media Types

Image Descriptions

• Paid media:
  • Pay-per-click (PPC) ads
  • Display (banner) ads
  • TV/magazine/transit ads
• Owned media:
  • Website/blogs
  • Events/newsletters
  • Stores
  • Talent/employees
• Earned media:
  • Shared content
  • Content by others
  • Reviews
  • Press coverage
• Overlap
  • Paid and owned media: Sponsored posts
  • Owned and earned media: Share requests, forums
  • Earned and paid media: Sponsored influencers

Media Attributions

• Intro to digital marketing by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• Global pandemic – graph with coronavirus and bar chart by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• Paid, owned, and earned media framework and audiences by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• POEM Venn diagram by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

Storytelling

• Expert use of the voice
• Vocal and body expression
• Intonation
• The use of verbal imagery
• Facial animation
• Context
• Plot and character development
• Natural pacing of the telling, and
• Careful authentic recall of the story

Tone and Brand Voice

Consider these questions related to tone and voice:

• What is my intent? Am I trying to inform or to persuade?
• What tone and voice is most appropriate for the target audience?
• Are the tone and voice respectful?
• How can the content be presented so it is informative and persuasive but not condescending?
• What words demonstrate sensitivity to the audience’s views and feelings?
• Have any insensitive words or examples been presented that are likely to cause offence to the readers or viewers?

Imagery

Facial Animation

Facial Animation Example

Happy and sad facial expressions may be easy to tell in many images. But what about more subtle expressions? Which emotion is being shown in the following photo? Is this young woman sad, depressed, reflecting, thinking, or something else? Depending on how this photo is used, it could be interpreted in many different ways. Which brings us to our next point, the importance of context.

Context (or Setting)

Plot and Character Development

Freytag’ Pyramid

• Exposition Exposition is the beginning of your story that introduces the 3 Cs: conflict (key issue / problem), characters (customers, perhaps?!), and the context.
• Rising Actions Rising actions present the events before the climax, where your characters attempt to solve the problem (conflict) but fail.
• Climax The climax represents the turning point or point of greatest suspense / action in your story.
• Falling Actions Falling Actions are the actions and events that happen after the climax.
• Resolution End of the story where the conflicts or problems are solved.

Natural Pacing of the Telling

Careful Authentic Recall of the Story

• What kind of story are you creating?
  • employee story
  • customer story
  • organizational story
  • market or industry story

• Who is your audience? (This should align with the kind of story you are creating.)
  • employees
  • customers (potential and/or existing)
  • industry
  • market

• What do you want your audience to:
  • know
  • feel
  • see
  • do

• How will it resonate with your audience's: (This should align with what you want your target audience's responses to be.)
  • needs
  • interests
  • goals / fears
  • doubts / misconceptions

Media Attributions

• Group of people near bombfire by Tegan Mierle is licensed under an Unsplash License.
• Young woman sitting alone on a couch by jcomp is licensed under a Free License.
• Freytag's Pyramid by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• Creating your story by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

The Importance of Visuals and Why

"Visual storytelling (also visual narrative) is a story told primarily through the use of visual media. The story may be told using still photography, illustration, or video, and can be enhanced with graphics, music, voice and other audio."

• 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual[footnote]Humans Process Visual Data Better[/footnote]
• 50% of your brain is active in visual processing[footnote]How do we transform an ever-changing jumble of visual stimuli into the rich and coherent three-dimensional perception we know as sight? Rochester vision scientists are helping reshape our understanding of how the brain ‘sees.’[/footnote]
• 70% of your sensory receptors are in your eyes[footnote]The Eye and Vision[/footnote]
• It takes only 13 milliseconds for the human brain to process an image.[footnote]What is the Impact of Visual Content Marketing?[/footnote]
• Our brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text.[footnote]Humans Process Visual Data Better[/footnote]
• 80% of people remember what they see, [footnote]12 Hard Stats That Proof The Power Of Images[/footnote] compared to ten percent what they hear and 20 percent of what they read.

• Most people only read 20-28% of the words on the page.[footnote]The Power of Visual Communication[/footnote]
• 80% of people will watch a video[footnote]Digital Marketing by the Numbers: Stats, Demographics & Fun Facts[/footnote] but only 20% of people will read text on a page.
• 55% of website visitors spend less than 15 seconds actively reading.[footnote]Visual Content Statistics Infographic[/footnote]

• More than 100 million photos and videos are posted daily on Instagram.[footnote]Instagram by the Numbers: Stats, Demographics & Fun Facts[/footnote]
• Tweets with images receive 150% more retweets[footnote]Link Tweet with an Image vs. Tweet with Twitter Cards, Does it Matter? [/footnote] than tweets without them.
• On Facebook, photos have an interaction rate of 87%, [footnote]Six Reasons to Embrace Visual Commerce in 2018[/footnote] compared to 4% or less for other types of posts, such as links or text.
• 100 million hours of video are watched every day on Facebook- [footnote]52 Video Marketing Statistics 2022 [Infographic][/footnote] 85% of them with the sound off.
• 6 billion video ads[footnote]52 Video Marketing Statistics 2022 [Infographic][/footnote] are watched online each year.
• Posts that include images produce 650% higher engagement[footnote]16 Visual Content Marketing Statistics That Will Wake You Up[/footnote] than text-only posts.
• People share infographics three times more[footnote]15 Visual Content Marketing Statistics That’ll Blow Your Mind[/footnote] than any other type of content.
• Using the word “video” in an email subject line[footnote]How to Increase Your Email Open and Click-through Rates[/footnote] boosts open rates by 19% and clickthrough rates by 65%.

• 70% of B2B buyers and researchers watch a video during their purchase process.[footnote]A Step-by-Step Guide to Develop a Content Marketing Strategy That Converts[/footnote]
• Four times as many consumers would rather watch a videoabout a product than read about it.[footnote]The Rising Power of Visual Content [Infographic][/footnote]
• People are 85 percent more likely to buy a product after viewing a product video.[footnote]16 Eye-Popping Statistics You Need to Know About Visual Content MarketingVisual content marketing is one big trend you need to embrace. And for good reason.[/footnote]
• Videos on landing pages increase conversions by up to 86%.[footnote]52 Video Marketing Statistics 2022 [Infographic][/footnote]

Media Attributions

• Visually thinking icon by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• The reasons visuals are important by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• What happens in an Internet minute – 2021 © Lori Lewis and Chadd LunaLeKat is for educational, non-commercial use only.
• Videos drives purchases by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

Thinking & Speaking Visually

• Circle
• Square
• Triangle
• Line
• Dot

Media Attributions

• How to Sketchnote without Drawing by Doug Neill is licensed under a Standard YouTube License.
• Sketchnoting definition by Amytangg is licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

• Sketchnoting elements by Amytangg is licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

• OneNote sketchnote tip 2 - 5 basic elements by Mike Rhode is licensed under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 licence.
• Bullet Journal / Planner Icon Doodles | Doodle with Me by Doodles by Sarah is licensed under a Standard YouTube License.

Introduction to the STP Framework

• What is your target market and more specifically, who is your target audience / customer?

• Are there any differences between your potential customers and existing customers?

• Do all your existing customers behave the same?

• What patterns do you see within your existing customers, e.g., do you have “complainers”, “repeat users”, “loyalists”, “early adopters”, etc.?

• What patterns do you see with potential customers (also referred to as prospective customers or prospects)?

Definitions of Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning

The STP Process

• Where do we compete? This is addressed via your market and audience segmentation and your choice of the target audience(s).

• How to we compete? This is answered by your positioning strategy as well as the execution of a supportive marketing and audience strategy, i.e., your marketing mix.

Segmentation

1. Demographics Historically, demographics have been the most popular way to segment audiences. This type of segmentation typically breaks down your market or audiences using any combination of the following:
   • age,
   • gender,
   • income,
   • education,
   • ethnicity,
   • marital status,
   • education,
   • household (or business) size,
   • length of residence,
   • type of residence, or
   • even profession/occupation.
   While this information is a great starting point, do be careful about lumping people together based solely on the above. As we are seeing, there is a wide range of diversity in our audiences; just because someone is a specific age or gender does not mean that they belong to a specific segment. For optimal segmentation, it is best to combine several of these segmentation options to create a fuller and more comprehensive profile of your target audiences.
2. Geographic Using geographic data, marketers can drill down by country, region, area, neighbourhood, metropolitan or rural location, population density or even climate.
3. Psychographics Psychographics represent some of the most important criteria marketers can reference in identifying ideal target audiences.  Psychographics refers to 'personality and emotions', based on behaviours linked to purchase or engagement choices. Some common psychographics include:
   • attitudes,
   • lifestyle,
   • hobbies,
   • risk profiles, e.g., risk-averse or risk-seeking,
   • personality and leadership traits,
   • life stages,
   • religious, political, nationalistic, or cultural beliefs and values
   • publications or books read,
   • websites visited,
   • recreational pursuits and/or destinations, and
   • entertainment (movies, TV, or music) preferences.
   While demographics explain 'who' your audience is, psychographics inform you 'why' your audience buys or engages.
4. Behavioural Behavioural attributes refer to the:
   • nature of the purchase or engagement,
   • brand loyalty,
   • usage level,
   • benefits sought,
   • distribution channels used, and
   • reaction to marketing factors.
   For example, in a business-to-business (B2B) environment, the benefits sought might be: ‘how soon can it be delivered?’ In this case, segments might include a ‘last minute’ segment and a ‘planning in advance’ segment.

Criteria for Effective Segmentation

• Identifiable: Each segment must be easily identifiable and unique.

• Substantial: The market must be large enough to justify segmenting. If the market is already small, segmenting it will only make it smaller.

• Measurable: Measurable differences must exist between segments.

• Profitable: Anticipated profits should exceed the costs of additional marketing plans, resources, and other activities.

• Accessible: Each segment should be accessible to your team and able to receive your marketing messages.

• Unique: Different segments should require different benefits.

• Responsive: Each segment should be willing to engage with and respond to your marketing mix.

Targeting

• Mass / undifferentiated
• Segmented / differentiated / multi-segmented
• Niche / concentrated
• Micromarketing

Mass / Undifferentiated Targeting

Segmented / Differentiated Targeting

Niche / Concentrated Targeting

Micromarketing

Positioning

• Product / service characteristics and attributes Using product / service features or benefits associates your brand with certain characteristics that are beneficial to your target audience.

• Price Usually, with a pricing positioning strategy, a brand aims to be the cheapest or one of the cheapest in the market, and value becomes their position.

• Quality or luxury Positioning a product based on its high quality or ‘luxury’ is different from positioning based on price. While prices may signal a specific level of quality, many organizations promoting luxury items do not promote their prices. Rather, they focus on the quality of the customer experience. So, for clarity, we have separated the two.

• Product use or application Associating your product with a particular use is another way to position your brand in the market. Many mobile apps use this type of positioning strategy, e.g., fitness apps target individuals who want to monitor and improve their fitness; whereas game apps focus on people looking for entertainment.

• Competition Competitor-based positioning focuses on using the competition as a reference point for differentiation.

Image Descriptions

1. Customer Segmentation: Determine the important characteristics of each customer segment.
2. Customer Targeting:
   • Evaluate potential and commercial attractiveness of each customer segment.
   • Select one or more segments.
3. Positioning:
   • Develop detail product or service positioning for each segment.
   • Develop a marketing and customer strategy for each segment.

Media Attributions

• STP framework by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• STP process by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning - Learn Customer Analytics by 365 Data Science is under a Standard YouTube License.
• Marketing Mix - Learn Customer Analytics by 365 Data Science is under a Standard YouTube License.
• STP -customer perspective by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• Customer or market segmentation by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• Targeting by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• Positioning by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• Positioning/perceptual map by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• Positioning map - brands by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

What is a Customer / Buyer Persona?

• Buyers of an organization's product or service, or
• Donors for a fundraising non-profit organization, or
• Applicants for an educational institution, or
• Constituents for a federal or municipal government.

Types of Customer Personas

• Data-driven and Proto/Ad hoc/Lean Customer Personas
• Initiatives-based vs. Close-up Customer Personas

Data-Driven vs. Proto / Adhoc / Lean Customer Personas

High-level Segmentation vs. Initiatives-based vs. Close-up Customer Personas

• High-level segmentation provides marketers with a bird’s eye view of their target audience. Since there is limited segmentation, the data driving this type of persona is quite broad and this customer persona will represent the largest / broadest segment you may want to target. For organizations that have not created personas, this is a suggested first step. However, to ensure better targeting and maximize your marketing effect, it is recommended to further segment your target audience and create more defined and narrower customer personas as time and other resources permit.

• Initiatives-based customer personas identify groups of customers, who have a moderate to high interest in a specific initiative. These are often seen with cause-based non-profits, where the target audiences are particularly interested in a specific, cause-based initiative. These customer personas often represent a subset of the high-level segmentation target audience, but do not represent those audience segments at the lowest possible level(s).

• Close-up customer personas highlight customers, who are generally interested in a specific product, service, program, or action/activity. For example, close-up customer personas might represent “customers most likely to leave”. These customer personas tend to be narrower and as a result, represent a smaller audience segment. However, because of the narrow focus, these personas are easier to target and have more in common with other members of that audience segment.

How to Build a Data-driven Customer Persona

1. Conduct Customer Research To get a deeper understanding of your target audience, start by seeking out the answers to the following questions:

• • Who are your customers?
  • How do they behave?
  • What are they interested in?
  • What kind of challenges do they face?

2. Identify Customer Pain Points Either through customer surveys, interviews, or social listening, you will want to identify the key pain points your customers have, e.g,:

• • What problems or hassles are they trying to solve?
  • What’s holding them back from success?
  • What barriers do they face in reaching their goals?

3. Identify Customer Goals This is the flip side of pain points. Pain points are problems your potential customers are trying to solve. Goals or aspirations are positive things they want to achieve. Depending on the kinds of products and services you offer, these goals might be personal or professional. Similar to above, this information can be acquired through customer surveys, interviews, or social listening.

4. Understand How You Can Help Now that you understand your customers’ pain points and goals, it’s time to create a really clear picture of how your products and services can help. Stop thinking about your brand in terms of features and dig deep to analyze the benefits you offer to customers. Consider your products and services from a customer’s point of view. And, keep in mind the following three questions:

• • How can we help?
  • What are your audience’s main purchasing barriers?
  • How can you help customers overcome any barriers / pain points and achieve their goals?

5. Define and Name Your Customer Personas Define and name these customer segments. Start looking for common characteristics and patterns. As you group those characteristics together, you’ll have the basis for your unique customer personas. Take your collection of characteristics and turn them into a persona that you can identify with and speak to. Give your customer persona a name, a job title, a home, and other defining characteristics. You want your persona to seem like a real person.

Customer Persona Analysis Exercises

Let's look at a few sample customer personas ... Here we have Marketing Manager, Tanvi Kaur, a business-to-business (B2B) persona. We can see her goals and aspirations, and even the experience she’s seeking when looking for products and services. It’s interesting that we also have a mix of bulleted statements, as well as quotes from Tanvi herself. It’s beneficial to let your personas speak for themselves. This little touch goes a long way towards showing the individual’s personality and can also provide cues to the type of language the persona uses and what messaging might resonate with them. Looking at Tanvi's customer persona above, how would you answer the following questions:

1. What additional details might be useful for this customer persona?
2. If you were a software company, how might you target Tanvi?

---

Here we have John Pulman, a business-to-consumer (B2C) customer persona: Who knew that a writer could be so well defined? This persona provides a great example of digging deep to fully understand your customers. Not only do we get a glimpse into John's life, background and interests, we also get to know him in terms of pain points and concerns. His influences and brand affinities are an important inclusion as well, as these can provide critical cues for messaging and interactions. Once again, here are some questions related to John:

1. What other information might you include in a B2C customer persona?
2. Besides dating apps, what types of companies might be interested in having John as their customer?

Pros and Cons of Customer Personas

Cons

• Significant Time and Effort To be done well (and correctly!), customer personas take time and effort. Organizations may not want to (or be able to) invest the necessary time to create truly data-driven customer personas. As a result, customer personas may be based on customer “aspirations” or customer stereotypes instead of observed behaviours or properly researched customer data; this can defeat the purpose of customer personas being objective representations of a customer group. To avoid this, consider the realities of the effort and ensure proper allocation of resources for customer research.

• Poor Research Practices Those conducting the customer research may not have advanced research skills. Given that data-driven customer personas are based on data and the research collected, the personas may be built on faulty, inadequate, or biased data. Naturally, all of these “mistakes” will cascade through your personas. Ideally, you should hire professional researchers for this purpose and develop personas based on their extensive research data. That said, many organizations may not be willing / able to commit these kinds of resources to this task. Therefore, it is recommended to use a combination of primary and secondary research to ensure that your customer personas are not just based on data collected exclusively by your organization, but also incorporate data collected by third parties. Along these lines, cite all your sources, both internally and externally, so that if you discover any research bias, you can quickly update your data models and update your customer personas accordingly.

• Just Fictional Stories Some argue that personas are all made up of stories and our perceptions. In the past, this statement may have been true. However, with the amount of data available to organizations today, customer personas can be based on observed data and reflect the reality of what is happening. That said, do be careful in how interpretations of the data can enter into customer personas. Try to make sure personas are based on real data. Even then, consider personas as supportive data and not the only source of customer insights. This is why customer personas require testing, validation, and updating because with an iterative approach, you can identify false assumptions or interpretations built into your personas.

• Outdated Because changes are happening quickly, some people will argue that customer personas are outdated. Like most strategic and tactical tools today, it is critical that you do not just create customer personas and leave them. Use them to guide your organizational strategies and activities. But, also try to measure real-time data as much as possible to see if your personas match the customers you are attracting and engaging with. If not, there is a mismatch, and your customer personas need to be updated. Remember the customer persona process is circular. Customer personas are living documents.

Pros

• Product or Service Development Product development can use customer personas to help guide and build product or service roadmaps.

• Marketing Strategies & Activities Marketing can use customer personas to build effective strategies and also identify and prioritize marketing activities.

• Sales Prospecting & Sales Calls Customer personas can help your sales team build rapport with potential customers by understanding what they want and being prepared to address their concerns.

• Customer Support Customer support teams can use personas to better serve your customers by being trained on the problems your customers are trying to solve with your product or service.

• Designers Designers can use user experience (UX) / user interface (UI) personas to develop and test useful and understandable visual customer experiences that support an organization's conversion strategies and goals.

• Competitive Intelligence Generate personas for competitors and discover trends as they happen. As a result, you may be able to uncover content, advertising, and partnership opportunities/strategies.

Media Attributions

• How To Create A User Persona (Video Guide) by CareerFoundry is under a Standard YouTube License.
• How To Create UX Personas by UX Mastery is under a Standard YouTube License.
• High-level Segmentation vs Initiatives-based vs Close-up Customer Personas by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• Tanvi Kaur B2B Customer Persona by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• John Pulman customer persona by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

What is a Customer Journey Map?

Customer journey mapping is really a mixture of art and insight ... But that's just a visual aid. The real work in journey mapping is using all of the customer information and data available to you from across the business and delivering a process and structure to their experience.

1. Awareness A prospective customer learns about an organization, product, or service. In this initial stage, marketers create awareness through ads, events, articles, or other content
2. Engagement A relationship develops between the prospective customer and the organization via several, positive interactions. This is achieved by nurturing leads with targeted content., e.g., on social media, through email marketings, or other events / owned media.
3. Conversion The prospective customer decides to buy a product or service from the organization. By presenting a unique value proposition and creating a sense of urgency, e.g., special offers, marketers can help prospective customers convert.
4. Retention The customer has a strong and loyal relationship with the organization and becomes a regular customer or active user. While often the domain of customer support or customer success, marketers can assist by providing the appropriate training materials, support, and resources to ensure customers are satisfied and stay.
5. Advocacy A regular customer is satisfied with the organization's products and/or services and recommends them to others. To create advocates, organizations must deliver compelling experiences worthy of sharing. To support these experiences, marketers can can provide ready-to-share content.

1. Customer’s Perspective When you build your customer journey map, ensure that you are mapping and presenting everything truly from the customer’s perspective. This is a great opportunity to use the customer personas that you have created to closely map out their customer journeys. Organize the stages to reflect the conversion process from your customer’s (or customer persona’s) perspective, as opposed to your own internal processes. This can often include aspects out of your direct control, such as social media influences, web searches, and steps your customers take even before you enter the picture.
2. Customer’s Thoughts, Emotions, Pain Points, and Goals For every stage of your customer journey map, write out what your customers are thinking, contemplating, feeling (even fearing), struggling with, and what they hope to accomplish. This will help you, as an organization, meet and address those specific needs. Here are a few examples:
   1. Customer Thoughts Customer thoughts represent what customers are thinking at a specific stage of their customer journey. Examples include:
      • I hope I can find _____?
      • Is this organization credible?
      • How do I use _____?
      • Is there support post-purchase?
      • How does ____ compare to other offerings in the market?
      • How much does it cost?
      • How long will it take to get it?
   2. Customer Feelings Customer feelings reflect what customers might be feeling at a specific stage of their customer journey. Examples include:
      • Excited – often at the beginning when a “solution” is a possibility
      • Curious – usually at some point when doing research or trying to find out more information
      • Confused – for complex or complicated products / services
      • Hopeful – perhaps after purchase, but before using the product / service
      • Impressed – post-purchase
      • Frustrated – when things go wrong
      • Overwhelmed – too much information
      (For visualization purposes, emotions are sometimes represented by emojis.)
   3. Customer Pain Points Customer pain points are specific problems that prospective or existing customers are experiencing at a specific stage in their customer journey. Examples include:
      • ____ takes too much time. (process pain point)
      • ____ is too complex and I don’t understand how to use it. (product/service pain point)
      • I can’t find the information I need. (accessibility pain point)
      • I can’t connect with the appropriate person. (support pain point)
      • It’s too expensive. (financial pain point)
   4. Customer Goals Customer goals highlight what a customer is looking to accomplish at a specific stage of their customer journey. Examples include:
      • I want to find out how much it costs.
      • I want to solve “this” problem.
      • I want to learn about _____.
      • I want to buy ____
3. Customer Activities What does the customer actually do at every step along the customer journey?
4. Content As you review each stage of your customer journey, think about what content (articles, FAQs, video, white papers, videos, training materials, etc.) you need to provide to address the customer’s issues.
5. Time The length of a customer experience provides important context. Does a typical stage last minutes, days, weeks, or months? How long does your customer remain in a specific stage? A great journey map recognizes that this information is essential and takes time into consideration.
6. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) / Data Collected At each stage, the organization should think about what data it will collect, measure, evaluate. What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that show the organization is performing well (or not) in meeting the target audience's needs at that specific stage? Often organizations will focus on high-level KPIs and outcomes, but by creating KPIs for each stage, an organization can better identify where in the customer journey things are either performing well or not.
7. Opportunities Once mapped out, where are the gaps and the possibilities? The main purpose of any customer journey map is to improve your customers’ experiences and satisfaction. Given all of the above considerations, where is there room for improvement or new opportunities?

Benefits of a Mapped Customer Journey

• Consistency of touchpoints across the entire organization Similar to the customer persona, customer journeys are a valuable tool in understanding your customers and the various touch points across the entire organization. Customer journeys provide a holistic view of your customers and also highlight how the various departments and teams can work together to create a more seamless customer experience. Furthermore, organizations can use a customer journey to ensure consistency across the entire customer journey and a more consistent customer experience.
• Deeper understanding of customers As mentioned previously, your customer journey should include your customer needs, wants, pain points, and preferences at each specific stage of the journey. By identifying these characteristics, organizations can better provide support, content, and services to address these very needs, wants, pain points, and preferences.
• Closer and stronger customer relationships Organizations with detailed customer journeys tend to develop closer and more meaningful customer relationships because they know exactly what customers need, when they need it, and where / how they need it. This level of personalization and customer care translates into more loyal customers and ones that often turn into brand advocates.
• Tailored and timely communications From a marketing communications perspective, knowing what to communicate, when to communicate it, and through which specific channels ensures that marketers are optimizing their return on marketing activities and investments. These activities deliver more personalized and targeted messaging, which can resonate more with target audiences and customer personas.
• More targeted product development As we mentioned, customer journeys are also a great tool in identifying product or service development opportunities. For these development teams, customer journeys can identify areas where an organization might introduce new products and/or new ways to improve existing products and services to better serve your target audiences. In other words, customer journeys are not just about marketing but about the overarching organizational customer experience.
• Improved identification of cross and up-selling opportunities From a sales perspective, customer journey maps identify those opportunities to create cross and up-selling opportunities that are complementary. Remember that this should not be the sole focus of your customer journey. However, there are times when complementary products or services will significantly improve the customer experience. Customer journey maps can serve as strategic tools in uncovering these opportunities.

Customer Journey Optimization

Media Attributions

• Customer journey map – example by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• Customer Journey Map Workshop by PlaybookUX is under a Standard YouTube License.
• Customer journey touchpoints by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• Conversion funnel with descriptions by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

• Conduct digital marketing outreach to attract potential customers
• Engage and connect with target audiences
• Nurture and convert prospective customers

What is a Lead?

• Information Qualified Lead (IQL) Information qualified leads are contacts who randomly connect with the organization while searching for information. These contacts often share their contact details to get more information, e.g., to download a piece of content. After that, marketing teams can connect with them to share more relevant information to help close the deal. 
• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) Marketing qualified leads are contacts who have responded to marketing activities but have not explicitly expressed an interest in receiving a sales call. An example of an MQL is a someone who fills out a form on a landing page for a specific promotion or special offer.
• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) Sales qualified leads are contacts who have taken actions that explicitly indicate their interest in becoming a paying customer. An example of an SQL is a contact who fills out a form to book a demo or to get more information about your product or service.
• Product Qualified Lead (PQL) Product qualified leads are contacts who have used your product and are interested in becoming a paying customer. A common example of PQLs is when organizations offer a free or limited trial of their product or service with the ability to upgrade to a paid premium version. In some cases, this upgrade might involve a sales team. But it could also apply when a trial customer simply asks about paid-only features.
• Service Qualified Lead Sometimes an upgrade might happen as part of conversation with a customer service representative. When this happens, it can be referred to as a Service Qualified Lead, especially if it is not possible for the customer service representative to upgrade the customer and requires the involvement of the sales team.

1. Define Your Target Audience
2. Set Your Organizational Goals & Objectives
3. Develop Content / Lead Magnets
4. Nurture & Close Your Leads
5. Get Customer Referrals

Step 1: Define Your Target Audience

• Industry Which specific industries are you targeting?
• Location Are you targeting a specific geographic location?
• Organization Size
  • Size of revenues or net profits
  • Number of employees
• Transactions
  • Number of transactions Does the target organization have millions, hundreds, or tens of transactions per year?
  • Frequency of transactions Do your target customers have transactions daily, weekly, every six months, etc.? What does their sales cycle look like, i.e., how long does it take them (not you!) to close a sale?
  • Value of transactions On average, how much is each transaction?
• Usage Usage refers to usage of your service or your product
  • Heavy, medium, light Is your target customer’s usage heavy, medium, or light? Do they use it once a month, every week, or every day?
  • Complementary products / services Are there any complementary products and services our customers tend to be using, e.g., ERP, MRP, accounting, payment, point-of-sale (POS) services that we should integrate with?
• Time in Business How long have they been in business?

Step 2: Set Your Organizational Goals & Objectives

• Increase product or service adoption (revenues)
• Identify new customers
• Build brand awareness
• Reduce the number of customers leaving (churn)

• Any internal timelines,
• Specific benchmarks or KPIs you want to surpass,
• Challenges you have already encountered,
• Parameters such as industry regulations, internal protocols, and data privacy permissions,
• The scope and infrastructure of your internal data and databases, and
• Financial budgets and human resources for ongoing experimentation and updates to your customer personas

• Primary conversions
  • Purchase
  • Donate
• Secondary conversions The goal of most secondary conversions is to get prospective customers’ contact information so marketers can continue to communicate with them and hopefully, convert them later. When prospective customers sign up and provide contact information, not only do organizations get prospect's contact information, organizations also now know which topics interest that prospective customer. This allows the organization to send targeted communications, promotions, and events that relate to these topics and to further engage leads around the topics that they have expressed interest in. For example, if someone signs up for a webinar, a marketer might send a follow-up case study, product or service promotion, or market research related to that webinar at a later date. Here are several common examples of secondary conversions:
  • Sign up / provide contact information for:
    • Free or Limited Trial
    • Webinar / Demo
    • Newsletter
    • Downloadable content, e.g., whitepapers, research, etc.
• Tertiary goal (not a conversion!)
  • Brand awareness and exposure
• Specific KPIs and Targets Also, be sure to set specific and measurable key performance indicators (KPIs) and targets for your marketing activities. For example, how many purchases do you want to get? Or how many people do you want to sign up for your newsletter or to attend your webinar?

Step 3: Develop Content / Lead Magnets

• Educational lead magnets Educational lead magnets teach your target audience something they do not already know. This can be in the form of a newsletter, webinar, white paper, or downloadable PDF.

• Useful lead magnets Useful lead magnets provide resources or tools that can help your target audience solve a specific problem or pain point, e.g., a tutorial, checklist, ROI calculator, or other tool.
• Community-building lead magnets Community-building lead magnets create a way for your target audience to be part of a community based on the things they have in common, e.g., direct challenges and group forums.
• Entertaining lead magnets Entertaining lead magnets, primarily used in B2C markets, inspire or entertain your audience, e.g., quizzes, videos, etc.
• Bottom-of-funnel lead magnets Bottom of funnel lead magnets “push” the prospect from a lead to customer, e.g., free trial, discount codes, free consultation. Connecting these to our conversion funnel, bottom-of-funnel lead magnets move potential customers (leads) from engagement to conversion.

Step 4: Nurture & Close Your Leads

• Targeted content Tailor intriguing, entertaining, and valuable content to target audience members so you can identify the most qualified leads.
• Multi-channel lead nurturing Reach and nurture your audience where they are — on multiple channels! Don’t just stick with one channel. Explore a combination of both online and offline marketing channels.
• Multiple Content Types Boost your touchpoints with a mix of content types to increase your interactions and engagement among target audience members.
• Timely Follow Ups Follow up with your leads in a timely manner to keep them engaged and interested as well as to keep your brand top of mind. With the many new marketing automation tools, it is now possible to automate follow ups and ensure that leads get consistent, appropriate, and ongoing messages. Marketing automation will be discussed in more detail in both the Content Marketing and Email Marketing chapters.
• Personalized Communications Personalize your messaging (and all lead nurturing tactics, when possible) to promote customer conversions.
• Lead Scoring Lead scores are used to determine the likelihood of conversion for a particular prospect based on specific characteristics. These characteristics stem from the customer personas and customer journeys created, which highlights why these activities are valuable. When used properly, a lead scoring strategy can help an organization determine which leads to focus on and which ones may be a waste of time.

Step 5: Get Customer Referrals

• Exceed Customer Expectations Not only do you need to deliver an outstanding product or service, but you also need to provide exceptional post-purchase support.
• Engage Your Customers Stay engaged with your customers so that your brand remains top of mind. This ensures that when an opportunity arises, your customers will think to mention your brand.
• Be Share-worthy Give your customers something to talk about and share. And make it easy for them to share the news, update, or promotion. This can be done by providing templates and recommending wording, images, etc.
• Create a Customer Referral Program Reward your customers for spreading the word. But, be sure to align your rewards with their interests, motivators, and drivers. For example, there are many different reward options:
  • Monetary, e.g., 5% off for you and/or your referral, free annual renewal for you, or $100 per referral, etc.
  • Products, e.g., offer a free iPad or specific tools that your target audience uses and values
  • Donations, e.g., for every referral, $50 is donated to an environmental charity or other cause-based initiative
  • Personal Recognition, e.g., you and your referral will be featured on our website, in our newsletter, and/or on our social media channels.

• Word-of-Mouth Referrals
• Online Reviews
• Social Recommendations & Sharing
• Email Referrals
• Incentive-based Referrals

1. Define and identify your target audience(s)
2. Set your lead goals, objectives, and targets
3. Choose the types of lead magnets for your target audience(s)
4. Review your lead nurturing and closing strategies
5. Develop or improve your customer referral program(s)

Media Attributions

• Lead generation by Sunit Nandi is licensed under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence.
• 5-step lead generation framework by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• Conversion funnel by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

Content Marketing and the Customer Journey

• Awareness A prospective customer learns about an organization, product, or service.

• Engagement A relationship develops between the prospective customer and the organization via several, positive interactions.

• Conversion The prospective customer decides to buy a product or service from the organization.

• Retention The customer has a strong and loyal relationship with the organization and becomes a regular customer or active user.

• Advocacy A regular customer is satisfied with the organization's products and/or services and recommends them to others.

• What information is our target audience seeking?
• How can we best support / help them?
• Which pain points and questions can we address proactively?
• And how can we move them more quickly to the next stage?

Top of Funnel (Awareness, Initial Engagement)

• increase traffic
• increase our social media fans and followers
• increase media coverage

Middle of Funnel (Ongoing Engagement, Secondary Conversions)

Bottom of Funnel (Primary Conversion, Retention, Advocacy)

Content Strategy

What

• What are our content objectives? Your content objectives should tie in and support your overarching marketing and organizational objectives.
• What do our community and customers want to hear from us? A content strategy is about promoting messages that your community and customers want to read, see, or hear. It is no longer about pushing brand messages unless those messages align with what your target audience finds interesting and wants to engage with. Remember it is not just about your organization; it is about your target audience in relation to your organization.
• What topics are we going to cover? Spend some time listening to your target audience e.g., on social media, to see and hear which topics they find most engaging or are most passionate about. Your topics should be driven by your target audience and their preferences. That said, conduct a brainstorming session with your own team because they may have ideas, as well. Then, compare your list to what you discover with your target audience.
• What formats are we going to use, e.g., blogs, podcasts, videos, infographics, etc.? Similarly, find out which content formats perform the best or get the most reactions (likes, shares, comments, etc.) from your target audience. Once again, this is not about your organization’s preferences, but rather the content preferences of the community.

Why

• Why does anyone care about our content? Marketers need to be clear about why their target audience cares about the content being produced. Creating content for content's sake makes no sense. Since there is so much content being produced and shared, marketers need to produce content that gets above the noise. In essence, what is the benefit to your target audience?
• Why are we creating this content? Once you know why your target audience wants this content, ask if this content makes sense for your organization? The answer to this question should align with your goals and objectives and what you want your target audience to do.

How

• How are we adding value to our customers / community? Again, being clear on the benefits your content will provide to your target audience is key. When there is value in the content, people will pay attention, share, and discuss that content. Your organization is also then seen as a valuable contributor the community. So, when you post or share content of value, the community will take notice.
• How are we going to deliver our message? This question is a follow up to the content formats. For every piece of content, there is the content production side and the content delivery side. Make sure you know how to deliver your content to those places where your target audience is located.
• How should we say it (tone, language, imagery, etc.)? Another benefit of listening to your target audience is learning about their language, tone, and imagery preferences. To be a part of their conversation, use similar vocabulary, tone, e.g., casual or formal, and imagery most commonly used.

Where

• Where will we get the content (assess your limitations)? Many organizations create ambitious content plans. However, plan realistically keeping your content production capabilities in mind. For example, if you plan to distribute lots of videos, do you have people within your organization, who have the video production and editing skills to support this? If not, do you have a sizable video production budget to hire outside resources to complete some of these tasks? If that does not seem likely, you may want to reduce your video content plans and replace it with content that your organization can more easily produce. There are always trade-offs, but it is recommended to play to your organizational strengths.
• Where will we curate content? One complaint that frequently comes up is the amount of time required to create original content. However, the majority of the content you share should not be original content, but rather content created by others. Marketers should be finding relevant content that is of interest to their target audience. Where does that content live? What other websites, communities, or news sites can we introduce to our community that they would find interesting?
• Where will our content be published? While there may be many places to distribute your content, focus on the top 1-2 channels and do them well. Once you have built up a loyal following, consider expanding to other channels or platforms. Unless your organization has a very large team and large budget, managing a meaningful presence across several marketing channels can become quite challenging to maintain and sustain. And usually, the quality of the content and target audience interactions suffer when managing too many channels.

When

• When will our content be published? Tactically, it is important to know when to publish content to get the most interactions and engagement. Again, listening to your target audience, reviewing your customer personas, as well as understanding the cadence of your target audience’s daily, weekly, monthly, and seasonal rhythms can be quite beneficial in knowing when to publish content. For example, if your target audience is mothers with young children, you may want to think about posting content in the evenings after the children have been put to bed. But, if you are targeting working professionals, you might want to post in the morning prior to the workday’s start or during lunch time when these workers might take a lunch break.
• When will our content need to be updated? Another area marketers often forget to think about is updating of content. In today's ever-changing markets, content can quickly become old and stale. However, updating content can provide an opportunity to present the information again in a new context or to a new audience. Think about developing a content review process and updating content with fresh eyes. Your content is an asset, and you should try to leverage it as much as possible.

Who

• Who will be responsible for producing the content? As mentioned, producing content takes time. Make sure you have clearly outlined who is responsible for which part of the content production. More importantly, keep in mind that with multiple people involved, there may be dependencies. For example, if the graphics designers will be creating all the graphics for an article, by when do you need those graphics so that you can finish the article for the paid advertisement deadline?
• Who will maintain the content over time? When planning for content to be updated, who will be responsible for making sure the content is properly maintained, e.g., making sure links are still working, etc.
• Who will monitor, interact, and support with the content? Often marketers spend lots of time planning the launch and distribution of content, but who will interact with the community when people leave comments or ask questions? The goal of content marketing is to engage and interact with your target community. Make sure there is someone responsible for engaging with the community, being responsive, and managing the open dialog that content marketing sparks.

Content Calendars

• Provide a comprehensive content overview
• List what needs to be done
• Highlight missing opportunities, e.g., if the content is all focused on the same target audience or the same format

• The Social Media Content Calendar Template Every Marketer Needs (Free Hubspot Template)
• How to Create a Social Media Content Calendar: Tips and Templates (Hootsuite)

• Target Audience Since you may be targeting different audiences, this is a nice way to see at-a-glance that you have a good mix of content targeting a variety of stakeholders / audiences.
• Content / Media Type Be sure to add the type of media for your post: infographic, video, story, text post, audio, etc. This ensures you have a nice mix and that all posts are not the same type of content / media.
• Dependencies In some cases, your post(s) may be dependent on someone else completing part of it or completing something else related to it. It's good to write down these dependencies so that you know who needs to get what to you and by when.
• Content Themes / Topics Many marketers may have common themes or topics that repeat on a regular basis, e.g., Trivia Tuesdays, Throwback Thursdays, Funny Fridays, etc. Categorizing your content this way, makes it easier to find and curate content that fits into the appropriate "bucket". From a follower’s perspective, it also creates a pattern to your posts so that followers know what to expect and when.
• Comments / Notes There may be some additional comments or notes you want to include. Give yourself a space to include these.

Promotional vs. Original vs. Curated Content

• Promotional (10%) Promotional content refers to content that is trying to sell and/or heavily promote an offer and should be ~10% of all the posts distributed. This is because most people do not like being sold to all the time. Remember content marketing is about building relationships with your community and to do this, marketers cannot be selling all the time. If there is too much selling content, your target audience will simply stop listening.
• Original (25%) Original content is content that your organization creates. As mentioned in the content strategy, you want to create original content that provides value and benefits to your target audience and that aligns with your organizational goals and objectives. However, original content takes time and money. It is also tempting to have original content focus on the organization. So, to limit your content marketing feeling too much like self-promotion, you will want to limit the number of posts that highlight your organization. Generally speaking, you want ~25% of your posts to be original.
• Curated (65%) The bulk of your content should be curated content. Curated content is content created and distributed by others that is of interest to your target audience. This could be articles, market research, complementary products or services to your offerings, or any other content that your target audience might find of interest. By sharing content from others, you show your target audience that you are willing to share content produced by others and that you are also happy to share any content of value regardless of who produced it and give someone else credit for it. An important benefit of this strategy is that when you do post your own original content, the other content producers, whose content you have promoted, are more likely to reciprocate and share your content with their networks. Most importantly, this signals to your target audience that you are simply looking for the best content for them, regardless of the source.

Content Marketing Do’s and Don’ts

• Do’s
  • Add Value Review your customer personas and customer journeys to make sure you are addressing the pain points, goals, and questions that your prospective and exiting customers have.
  • Tell Stories Apply the concepts and frameworks from the Fundamentals of Storytelling and Visual Storytelling chapters.
  • Encourage Conversations / Discussion Remember content marketing is merely a vehicle to learn more about your target audience, to engage with them, to find out what they are most interested in and passionate about, and to build longer term relationships.
  • Experiment Try a variety of different content formats, topics, etc. Marketers willing to experiment can sometimes stumble across some great discussions that lead to valuable customer insights and even viral sharing.
• Don’ts
  • Hard Sell Again, no one likes communications to only be about selling. Mix up your messages to also include curated content and content that simply benefits the community.
  • Be Generic The details are the interesting parts. Your goals is not to be like everyone else; be unique and highlight how what you are offering and who you are is different from others in your industry.
  • Ignore Your Community / Leads Make sure to follow up and respond to messages from your community. Pay attention to your target audience and they will pay attention to you.

Developing Content / Lead Magnets

Summary

Image Descriptions

Media Attributions

• Conversion funnel by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• Content marketing conversion funnel by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• Editorial Calendar (sample) by JD Lasica is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
• Ideal content mix – promotional – original – Curated by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

Why is SEO Important?

• Informational This is when someone is searching for information. For example: “What is the best type of laptop for photography?”
• Navigational This is when someone is searching for a specific website. For example: “Best Buy”
• Transactional This is when someone is searching to buy something. For example: “good deals on MacBook Pros”

On-Site SEO & Keywords

• What types of ice cream, desserts, snacks, etc. are people searching for?
• Who is searching for these terms?
• When are people searching for ice cream, snacks, desserts, etc.?
  • Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?
• How are people searching for ice cream?
  • What words do they use?
  • What questions do they ask?
  • Are more searches performed on mobile devices?
• Why are people seeking ice cream?
  • Are individuals looking for health-conscious ice cream or just looking to satisfy a sweet tooth?
• Where are potential customers located — locally, nationally, or internationally?

• URLs and Paths While not as creative and brandable, domain names that are descriptive, e.g., wine.com, work well for SEO. And if you have multiple webpages on your website, consider including keywords in your paths, i.e., the text after the slashes (/). For example, wine.com/red-wines.
• Title Tag The title tag is one of the most important page factors because it tells the search engines what the entire page is about. While this tag is hidden when viewing a webpage, it is the web page title (in blue) that search engines show in their results (see image below – “Search Engine Land | Must Read News …). To see the title tag for a webpage, simply hover your mouse over the top of any web browser tab.
• Meta Descriptions / Snippets A meta description is the short summary that appears underneath your website title on the search engine results page and includes information about your webpage (see red box below). Again, this information is not visible when viewing the actual webpage, but rather is information created for search engines to display in their results. Many website builders like WordPress, Wix, Weebly, etc. will have settings where you can enter this description and the title tag for each webpage. However, in some cases, you may need to ask your website developers how this information can be entered.
• Main Content / Body Copy The main content, also called Body Copy, is the visible content you see when you visit a webpage.
• Header Tags Header tags, also known as heading tags, are used to separate headings and subheadings on a webpage. They rank in order of importance, from H1 to H6, with H1s being the most important. Header tags improve the readability and SEO of a webpage by creating a hierarchy similar to a table of contents or outline. For example, in this chapter, “What is SEO”, “Why is SEO Important”, and “On-site SEO & Keywords” are H2s, which means that all these headings have the same importance.
• Image Alt Text Search engines cannot “see” images. As a result, images should always have Alt text to describe what is in the image. Search engines will then use this Alt text to match searches. Even though Alt text is not visible, it is an important addition for SEO and for any visitors using screen readers to view a webpage.
• File Names (including images) When saving and uploading files, try to incorporate the appropriate keywords into the file name. For example, an image file with the name CN_Tower.jpeg is much better than IMG4095.jpeg.
• Link Text When creating links to internal and external webpages, make sure the text used for the link is descriptive. For example, instead of writing “click here to read an article”, write “read this article from Google on Link Text”.

• Google Search Console – shows a lot of data about the keywords that you already rank for.
• Google Keyword Planner – finds other keywords, but only list ranges for search volumes.
• Google Trends – visualizes the relative search popularity of a keyword over time.
• Keyword Generator – finds up to 150 keyword ideas for any seed keyword.
• Keyword Sheeter – pulls thousands of autocomplete suggestions from Google.
• Answer the Public – finds questions, prepositions, comparisons, alphabeticals, and related searches.
• Keyword Surfer – is a free Chrome extension that shows estimated global and local (for 19 countries including Canada) monthly search volumes for any query typed into Google.
• Keyworddit – pulls keyword ideas from Reddit.
• Questiondb - finds the questions people are asking about a specific topic (sourced from Reddit).
• Bulk Keyword Generator – is a keyword research tool for local SEO. It generates keywords based on industry type.

Off-Site SEO

• Guest blogging
• Content marketing
• Social media marketing
• Image / video sharing
• Podcasts and articles
• Customer Reviews
• Directory listings, etc.

• Outbound Links Outbound links are links from your website to websites with a different domain name. When you make these connections, keep in mind that the other website will become part of your website network. In other words, your reputation and their reputation are now linked.
• Inbound Links / Backlinks The opposite of outbound links, inbound or backlinks come from other websites with a different domain name and point to your website. To improve your off-site SEO, increase the number of relevant, related websites that link to your website. Keep in mind that recent links rank higher than older links and it is still important to have keywords in any link text, as mentioned above. If, for some reason, you discover a website linking to yours and want to remove that connection, you can make use of Google’s Disavow Tool.
• Content Creating content is a significant part of any off-site SEO strategy. However, not all content is equal. For search engine purposes, high quality content is defined as original, recent, accurate, few grammar mistakes, appropriate length, and unique. Websites that produce higher-quality content will rank higher in search engine results. So, a robust content marketing strategy helps an organization’s off-site SEO, especially for newer websites that are establishing their credibility and building an audience.
• Link diversity To improve your off-site SEO, create a variety of outbound and inbound links, i.e., to and from a variety of different domains. Link diversity increases your off-site SEO ranking.
• Social signals Be sure to include links to your website in your social media profiles and posts. And encourage your followers, employees, strategic partners, etc. to post and link to your content so that you build your link network.

Media Attributions

• SEO by Rojal is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence.
• Google is trademarks of Google LLC and this book is not endorsed by or affiliated with Google in any way. Used with permission.
• 11 Powerful SEO Link Building Strategies For 2021 by IgniteVisibility is licensed under a Standard YouTube License.
• Anatomy of a web page by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 licence.