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Foundations in Digital Marketing by Rochelle Grayson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.
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Foundations in Digital Marketing is a textbook intended to introduce marketing students to the world of digital marketing. The book covers fundamental frameworks, practical applications, and online tools that can all be applied to build and execute a cohesive digital marketing strategy. The book covers the fundamental aspects of digital marketing, including areas such as:
The book also features chapter learning objectives, videos, summaries, interactive learning activities, and discussion points, as well as, recommended industry certifications and online resources to augment the textbook.
I
This textbook is divided into three core sections:
In this first section, we will set the foundational building blocks and discuss fundamental theories, concepts, and frameworks essential to successful digital marketing strategies and campaigns. Specifically, we will:
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Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
When people think of digital marketing, they often equate it to social media marketing. However, digital marketing is much broader than social media marketing; it covers a wide range of online marketing activities including:
In this book, we will delve into each of these areas. However, before diving into those details, let’s first define what digital marketing is. At its core, digital marketing builds meaningful relationships with target audiences using digital channels and tools. For many marketers, their target audience will likely be potential or existing customers. But, depending on your organization or the goals of your marketing activities, your target audience could also be:
We will share more about this in the Target Markets and Audiences chapter, but please note that target audiences are not always defined as simply customers or clients.
The global pandemic has had a significant impact on digital marketing. Since more people have been staying at home and/or working from home, there has been a huge increase in online activity. These large increases in online traffic have provided opportunities for organizations to further engage with their target audiences through digital marketing initiatives. As a result, digital marketing activity has increased exponentially in recent years. According to a recent study by market research firm, Global International Analyst, the global market for digital advertising and marketing was estimated at US$350 Billion in 2020 and is projected to reach a US$786.2 Billion by 2026. And more than 75% of consumers took a new interest in online activities in 2020. Of those, 21% purchased a product online for the first time. So, the global pandemic has clearly disrupted marketing as we knew it and accelerated the use of new digital marketing practices, which will continue to grow and evolve in the years to come.
Despite these significant changes in the digital marketing landscape, there is still a proven marketing framework that many marketers continue to turn to for their marketing strategies: the POEM framework. The POEM framework can be applied to many marketing practices, e.g., social media marketing, search engine optimization and marketing, email marketing, print advertising, retail marketing, and many more.
POEM stands for paid, owned, and earned media. While not a new framework, POEM represents a foundational approach to any a digital marketing strategy. POEM can be used to formulate and guide your digital marketing strategy and tactics, allowing you to capture more qualified leads and deliver better results.
There are three key components to the POEM framework:
While the above definitions may seem clear, not all media types fit nicely into a single category, for example:
Sponsored or Boosted Social Media Posts: These posts are a combination of paid and owned media. This is because while paying to show the post to a specific audience, the post content itself is considered owned media because you have created it, and it lives on your social media account page.
Because of these overlapping categories, POEM is sometimes referred to as POSE or PESO (paid, owned, shared, and earned media). Keeping this in mind, remember that some media types may straddle multiple categories.
An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:
https://opentextbc.ca/foundationsdigitalmarketing/?p=24#h5p-1
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.)
When deployed together, paid, owned, and earned media can deliver impressive results, e.g., marketers can use:
For each of the three media types – paid, owned, and earned – there are benefits and challenges. As a marketer, it is important to consider these strengths and weaknesses so that you can deliver the most effective results and outcomes:
Media Type | Benefits | Challenges |
---|---|---|
Paid Media |
|
|
Owned Media |
|
|
Earned Media |
|
|
While some aspects of paid, owned, and earned media can be challenging, they are still essential elements in creating a balanced, engaging digital marketing strategy and plan, regardless of channel. When you start developing your specific digital marketing strategies, consider each media category and leverage the unique benefits of each one.
Key Takeaways
Digital Marketing – Exercises & Additional Resources
Exercises
Additional Resources
At the end of each chapter, there will be additional resources listed that explore the chapter topics in more detail. These may include articles, videos, and/or industry certifications. For example:
A Venn Diagram with three overlapping circles showing examples of paid, owned, and earned media as well as well as examples that overlap.
[Return to POEM Venn Diagram image]
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Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
A core skill for any digital marketer is the ability to tell compelling stories. As a result, storytelling is a critical element of any digital marketing strategy. So, let’s explore storytelling. When learning something new, we often look to the masters for insights, inspiration, and guidance and when it comes to storytelling, Indigenous Peoples across the world have been and continue to be master storytellers!
Indigenous Peoples are distinct social and cultural groups that share collective ancestral ties to the lands and natural resources where they live, occupy, or from which they have been displaced. The land and natural resources on which they depend are inextricably linked to their identities, cultures, livelihoods, as well as their physical and spiritual well-being. Many Indigenous peoples still maintain a language distinct from the official language or languages of the country or region in which they reside. According to World Bank, there are currently approximately 476 million Indigenous Peoples worldwide, in over 90 countries. As a result, Indigenous Peoples and their stories span the entire globe and most of us are connected, at the very least ancestrally, to these precious societies and cultures.
Throughout history, Indigenous societies have relied on stories to share and pass down their histories, lessons, historical records, and other knowledge to maintain and sustain their cultures and identities. These Indigenous stories reflect the perceptions, relationships, beliefs and attitudes of the Indigenous Peoples and form the foundation of many Indigenous societies. While some may view these stories as peripheral, even in business today, we see the powerful influence of Indigenous storytelling in how marketers share stories with target audiences, convey historical information about their organizations, highlight “organizational identities and cultures”, and build communal experiences. Given this extensive history and expertise in Indigenous storytelling, we can learn a lot from these talented Indigenous storytellers who have been sharing and honing the art of storytelling for millennia.
From First Nations Indigenous storytellers, we learn that their Indigenous storytelling involves:
So, how can we apply these indigenous storytelling techniques to our own organizational stories?
What tone and voice resonates best with your target audience? Are you using the language and words that they use? While many marketers focus on the message and what they want to communicate, it is equally important to spend time thinking about the tone, language, dialog, and voice being used to communicate.
Tone Example
Consider the following lines from business emails. How would you describe the tone of each entry? What words, phrases, or other elements suggest that tone?
Whether in a workplace or in our personal lives, most of us have received communications that we’ve found off-putting, inappropriate, or, at a minimum, curt. Striking the right tone and being diplomatic, particularly in business communication, can mean the difference between offending your reader and building important relationships. And more immediately, it can mean the difference between getting what you want and being ignored.
As with any piece of writing, considering audience, purpose, and type of information is key to constructing your communication. Truly finessing your writing so that it works for you, rather than against you, is key to forming strong relationships and being effective.
The above material is taken from Diplomacy, Tone, and Emphasis in Business Writing, in the Writing Commons and is used under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 Unported license.
Imagery is not just visual. Building on the previous point, there is visual imagery and verbal imagery. Visual imagery describes what we see and is what we traditional think about when we think of imagery, e.g., photographs, charts, icons, etc. Verbal imagery represents the words and sounds one uses to paint a clear picture in your audience’s minds. In many ways, verbal imagery can trigger stronger memories or emotions by connecting key words and sounds to important concepts, ideas, feelings, and yes, even brands. This is why jingles can be so effective in branding activities.
Verbal Imagery Example
Verbal imagery often requires providing additional details to support the specific situation being shared. While many may think verbal imagery describes the visual context using words, here is a simple example:
As more marketers explore videos and images, what facial expressions and animations are you including? The facial expressions shared can have a significant impact on your viewers. Are the people in your video smiling or frowning? Are they excited or indifferent? Are they puzzled or enlightened? And remember that even when writing a story, think about the words you are using (verbal imagery) to describe that facial expression and/or animation in your story.
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.
All stories require context. Context orients us in place and time. Context tells the audience what the presented information means to them and why they should care. But be careful about just providing facts. Great marketers and storytellers provide rich context. Rich context goes beyond merely sharing what is the context and explores why this context is important or how this context might be applicable to even further-reaching circumstances. Rich context has multiple layers allowing it to resonate with a wider range of audiences. As we saw in the earlier verbal imagery example with “Sam”, adding more context allows the reader or viewer to better relate to what is being shared.
Every story must have a beginning, middle, and end. The following image, also known as Freytag’s Pyramid, is a commonly used framework when developing stories. Please note that this approach can be used for any length of story – short or long.
When you are telling your organizational stories, are you clearly including all of these elements? And are you walking your audiences through this entire storytelling journey?
You need to spend time building your story by setting the foundational pieces in the beginning and middle of your story. Getting to your resolution too quickly can undermine the journey and steps required to get to that point. Take the appropriate time to build your story so that your climax truly presents a turning point in the audiences’ journey.
The best stories are those that are authentic, truthful, and clearly present the issues (conflict) and resolution. While many marketers may try to embellish their stories, stick to the facts and let the story tell the compelling narrative. If you feel the story needs to be embellished to make it more captivating, you may not have a story worth sharing.
As you can see, Indigenous storytelling’s guidance and characteristics still apply today. It is why these stories have spanned millennia and continued to be shared. As marketers, we can learn how to best share compelling stories, as well as how to build and support engaged communities from these impressive Indigenous storytellers. And, as you begin to create your own organizational stories, think about the following questions:
And, don’t forget that the core of your story should be based on the foundational principles and structure highlighted in Freytag’s pyramid.
Key Takeaways
Telling compelling stories is part art and part science. When told well, stories can have a tremendous impact and influence on your audience. Here are some of the key takeaways in creating engaging and memorable stories:
Storytelling Exercises
Below are a few exercises to apply and explore how stories are told:
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Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
Now that we’ve discussed how to tell compelling stories, let’s look at visual storytelling and how it has become a critical way stories are told and shared today.
According to Wikipedia,
“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.”
Once of the reasons visual storytelling is so powerful is because our brains are wired “visually”. Here are several mind-boggling statistics that explain why visual storytelling is so critical to the digital world we now live in:
But, what if some of the above information were presented as follows?
Do you prefer the bullets or the infographic?
In responses to a 2014 survey, 95% of B2B buyers said that they wanted shorter and highly visual content. And, organizations that feature visual content grow traffic 12 times faster than those who don’t.
Also, in comparison, we don’t have much patience for text.
Unfortunately, we are not great listeners, either. When people hear information, they’re likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.
We also love to consume and share pictures, infographics, and videos:
And, finally, from an organizational perspective, video drives our purchasing and/or conversion decisions:
Visuals are an important and inherent part of how we process information. And, as marketers with global audiences, relying on universal imagery, instead of specific written languages or words, allows your messages and stories to be much more accessible to a wider audience. So, if you are looking to have the greatest impact, internally or externally, you will need to understand how to present your story and information in a visual way that grabs your audience’s attention and tells a compelling story – which brings us to our next topic: visual language and sketchnoting.
Key Takeaways
Visual storytelling is a compelling way to share your stories and messages. Here are a few key takeaways:
Exercise
Try your hand at visual storytelling:
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Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
Now that we’ve discussed the key elements to developing a story and the importance of visual storytelling, let’s explore what it means to visually express it. In order to think visually, you need to have the equivalent of visual “letters”, words, and vocabulary to express your ideas visually. Often, we rely on written words to document or capture our thinking. But how might you express your thoughts and ideas visually?
While some people may think this requires exceptional drawing or artistry skills, that is incorrect. Anyone can express themselves visually and the best way to start practicing this is to start using a combination of text and “visual images” whenever you take notes or are jotting down ideas. Keep in mind that, much like handwritten notes, these “visual images” are not intended for broad consumption (or even viewing) by others. Rather they simply capture your ideas or perceptions using a visual icon, doodle, sketch, or basic drawing. This practice is commonly referred to as sketchnoting. Sketchnoting, also commonly referred to as visual notetaking, is the creative and graphic process, where people record their thoughts by using illustrations, symbols, structures, and texts (see example below).
Here is a great 12-minute video, How to Sketchnote without Drawing:
In general, by engaging in visual notetaking, you can enhance your own learning, become a better problem solver, and better connect and share ideas.
In the following image, you will see that by combining handwritten text, basic shapes, containers, and many icons or symbols, it is possible to build a visualization that communicates your ideas and concepts much more clearly and with fewer words / text. And, remember that our brains are programmed to consume information visually. So, not only will this help you, but it will also be easier for others, regardless of their native language, to understand, as well!
Surprisingly, most elements can be drawn using 5 basic drawing elements (see image below):
If you want some inspiration on how to hand-draw icons or symbols, you can either perform a Google image search on any term (concept, product, etc.) plus the word “icon”, e.g., “ad impression icon”, or you can watch the following 19-min video, Bullet Journal / Planner Icon Doodles | Doodle with Me:
In order to create better visual stories, you will need to practice using visual language yourself. Visual notetaking is a great way to practice for yourself and to begin thinking much more visually. Beyond thinking visually, it is essential to also understand how your visual stories can deliver value to your target audience, which brings us to our next topic – target markets and audiences.
Key Takeaways
Visual storytelling is an engaging way to share stories, ideas, and values.
Exercises & Additional Resources
Like many new things, sketchnoting may feel challenging at first and may also take more time than simply writing down words. But, with practice, it does get easier and faster. Here are some exercises that can help you practice:
Additional Visual & Audio Storytelling Tools & Resources
Many marketers argue that they are not creative or graphic designers. However, there are many online resources that provide beautiful templates as a starting point. As a result, marketers can focus on developing their story’s narrative and key messages and use the following free tools to visual their ideas:
(Some of these tools offer paid premium versions.)
Sketchnoting elements by Amytangg is licensed under a CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
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Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
One of the quintessential questions repeatedly asked in marketing is:
For many of you, these may seem like a very easy questions to answer. But, let’s ask a few more detailed questions:
As you begin to look closely at your customers, you may start noticing that your customers vary quite a bit.
To better understand your customers, let’s review a core marketing model that can help you define and scope out your target market and audiences, namely the STP framework. The STP process is a frequently used framework for today’s digital marketers because of its customer-centric approach. The letters STP refer to customer segmentation, targeting, and positioning. In this chapter, we’ll review each one of these areas in detail. Using this framework, you will be able to deliver personalized and relevant digital marketing strategies that improve customers’ experiences, as well as remain competitive.
Segmentation can be defined as: Splitting up a market or audience into smaller-sized groups (segments) that have similar attributes, behaviours, or product / service needs.
Targeting (or target audience selection) refers to: Identifying an appropriate market or audience segment (or segments) to focus an organization’s marketing efforts on.
Positioning (which is often described as product positioning) is: Communicating and differentiating a brand’s key benefits and features, relative to the competition, to influence the target audience’s perception of the brand.
The steps in STP are commonly described as a process, with segmentation being carried out first, followed by defining one or more target audience(s), then positioning your product or service appropriately, and finally, identifying the optimal marketing mix for each segment (see image below). A marketing mix is the set of marketing strategies or tactics that an organization uses to sell products or services to its target audience.
While the letters “STP” represent three important concepts in this framework, they are essentially one integrated process. They build on each other to deliver a high-level strategy, which determines your marketing mix. The objective of the STP process is to guide each organization to deliver the best experience for its targeted audience(s).
For more information on the STP framework and the marketing mix, please watch the following videos:
Watch: Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning – Learn Customer Analytics (9 mins)
Watch: Marketing Mix – Learn Customer Analytics (10 mins)
The diagram below shows how plans can flow from market segmentation to audience selection to product or service positioning.
In marketing, the STP components and processes answer several essential organizational questions, such as:
In essence, STP focuses on commercial effectiveness, selecting the most valuable segments for an organization and then developing a marketing strategy and product positioning strategy for each segment.
Many of you have probably heard about the Pareto principle (also called the 80/20 rule). The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of the causes. For example, maybe 80% of your sales come from 20% of your customers. However, we are finding that marketers today find themselves in a post-Pareto world, where the causes and effects of consumer actions are driven by an even smaller, elite minority – meaning 80% of your revenues may come from only 5% of your customers. As a result, audience segmentation is critical in identifying those segments that are truly supporting your organizational goals and objectives.
With segmentation, you can identify specific customer niches that have particular needs, find new customers in mature markets, and provide even more focused and efficient marketing experiences. The requirements for each segment should be unique, allowing marketers to deliver personalized and relevant experiences instead of one-size-fits-all solutions. This technique has proven to be a lot more effective and can provide a tailored experience for your target audience.
Now, let’s look at how you might segment your existing markets or audience:
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.
While demographics explain ‘who’ your audience is, psychographics inform you ‘why’ your audience buys or engages.
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.
One helpful segmentation tool is the PRIZM segmentation tool. This online resource categorizes people into 66 different segments tied to postal codes. The PRIZM approach is based on the idea that “birds of a feather flock together,” suggesting that people tend to live near others similar to them. People who live in the same neighbourhood (geographic) often have similar demographic characteristics (income, age, family life cycle), have similar lifestyles and opinions (psychographics), and behave similarly (behavioural)
Go to PRIZM and type in your postal code. Does the description accurately describe your neighbourhood?
If your organization wants more detailed segmentation information, you can explore PRIZM’s more advanced, paid version called DELTA. Please note that there are other segmentation tools, which cover different geographic areas and use slightly different approaches. For example, if you are in the US, you can use zip codes with PRIZM, Claritas360 or Tapestry.
Tapestry profiles summarize the common lifestyle traits for the neighbourhood, and also include several key marketing factors about the group such as spending trends and shopping preferences. If you are looking at more international audiences, you can check out Personicx, developed by Acxiom, which identifies 55 clusters based on a combination of behavioural, lifestyle, and demographic factors.
By referencing similar data, marketers should be able to clearly identify the key behaviours and characteristics of not only existing audiences, but also those of future audiences.
When evaluating the potential and commercial attractiveness of target segments, do keep in mind several of the following considerations:
Once you’ve decided on your target segments / audiences, it’s time to look at targeting.
After the segmentation process is complete, the next step is targeting, which involves choosing a segment or segments to target and engage with. There are four common targeting strategies that marketers can implement:
The table below describes each of these strategies and provides an example:
Strategy | Description | Example |
---|---|---|
Mass / Undifferentiated | Sending the same marketing messages to everyone | Promoting your product or service by placing ads on widely read websites |
Segmented / Differentiated / Multi-segment | Designing more than one marketing message / activity, with each communicating different benefits | Targeting multiple audience segments by communicating unique, personalized marketing messages about your product benefits in multiple marketing channels |
Niche / Concentrated | Designing a marketing activity that communicates the benefits desired by a single specific segment | Promoting your product or service by targeting specific buyers via specific marketing channels, e.g, Whole Foods |
Micromarketing | Design marketing messages / activities targeted at individual audience members or localized microsegments | Promoting your product or services to individual customers using individualized or localized offers, e.g., Groupon |
An undifferentiated targeting strategy is used when an organization decides to communicate the benefits of its product or service by sending the same marketing message to everyone. For an undifferentiated strategy to be successful, the organization’s product or service must be readily available and affordable and must provide the same benefits to all consumers. The success of mass or undifferentiated targeting depends on whether it is possible to reach enough customers, through mass-marketing techniques and one universal product offer, to keep customers interested in the product and make the strategy worthwhile. While mass-targeting tactics tend to be costly because they operate on a large scale, this approach can yield efficiencies and cost savings for organizations because it requires the marketing team to execute only one product offer and marketing mix. Many mass-targeted items are considered staple or “commodity” items. People buy new ones when the old ones wear out or are used up, and mass-targeted brand loyalty may be the primary driver when customers decide which replacement product to purchase.
A differentiated targeting strategy is one in which the organization decides to provide separate offerings to different market segment that it targets. It is also sometimes called multi-segment targeting. Each segment is targeted in a particular way, as the organization provides unique benefits to different segments. The goal is to help the organization increase sales and market share across each segment it targets. When successful, differentiated targeting can create a very strong, entrenched market presence that is difficult for competitors to displace. However, differentiated targeting is also very expensive. It carries higher costs for the organization because it requires the development of unique products / services and marketing to fit each target segment. One example is Oreo cookie’s differentiated targeting strategy for the Chinese market. Consumers there can enjoy Oreos with ice cream flavours such as green-tea ice cream, raspberry-blueberry, mango-orange, and grape-peach. All of these Oreo formulations have been heavily market tested and are based on the unique preferences of Chinese consumers.
Niche targeting (also called concentrated targeting) is a strategy that targets only one or a few well defined and specific segments of the target market. The goal is to achieve high penetration among the narrowly defined target segments. An organization that adopts a niche targeting strategy gains an advantage by focusing all its efforts on only one or a small handful of segments. When done well, this approach can provide a significant advantage over other organizations that don’t have the same focus.
Niche targeting is particularly effective for smaller organizations with limited resources since it does not require mass production, mass distribution, or mass advertising. When an organization is highly successful in a desirable “niche” market, it can be very profitable. That said, the primary disadvantage of niche targeting is that organizations can become heavily reliant and dependent on these narrow markets. And if something changes and demand or interest drops, the organization has little cushion from the financial impact and therefore, is always somewhat at-risk. To protect themselves against this type of risk, organizations should target multiple niche segments, if possible.
Micromarketing is a targeting strategy that focuses even more narrowly than niche targeting. It caters to the needs of individuals (“individual marketing”) or very small segments in a targeted geography (“local marketing”). Micromaketing can be very powerful by giving customers exactly what they want, when they want it. However, to achieve large-scale success with this approach, organizations must figure out how to meet highly individualized needs efficiently and profitably.
Now, let’s look at positioning.
Once again, positioning relates to the target audience’s perception of the product or service’s key benefits and features, relative to the competition. To better understand how your target audience sees you relative to your competitors, marketers will often use a product positioning map (sometimes also called a perceptual map) to identify market opportunities, gaps, and even crowded markets to avoid. A product positioning map is a visual chart where organizations visually display the position of their products or services against their competition (see chart below).
To create a positioning map, marketers need to decide which product or service characteristics to compare, i.e., the titles of the x- and y-axes. There are five common strategies upon which organizations often base their positioning:
The following perceptual map compares brands based on taste and nutritional value:
While we can see a market gap in the “Great taste / low nutritional value” area, marketers will still need to ask whether positioning in all areas makes sense. For example, why would customers buy something that tastes great with low nutritional value, when Brand 1 offers great taste AND higher nutritional value. In some cases, market gaps may exist because they don’t make sense to pursue. That said, in the above graph, there may still be a positioning opportunity to provide a product offering great taste and even higher nutritional value than Brand 1.
Note: Great marketers will often create multiple perceptual maps to understand audience preferences across multiple variables and to get a more wholistic view of the market and market gaps.
Key Takeaways
Exercises
Here is a segmentation exercise from Great Ideas for Teaching Marketing:
Segmentation Rules
Person | Age | Where They Live | Marital Status | Social Class | Loyalty to Brands | Price Sensitivity | Lifestyle | Benefit Sought |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 19 | Rural | Single | Lower | Low | Medium | Family | Best value |
2 | 47 | Suburbs | Married | Lower | Low | High | Social | Best price |
3 | 66 | Suburbs | Married | Middle | Low | High | Social | Best price |
4 | 23 | Rural | Married + children | Middle | Low | High | Family | Best price |
5 | 64 | Rural | Married + children | Lower | Medium | Medium | Family | Best value |
6 | 25 | City | Single | Middle | Medium | Medium | Sporty | Best quality |
7 | 35 | Suburbs | Single | Middle | Medium | Medium | Travel | Best value |
8 | 50 | Suburbs | Married + children | Upper | Medium | High | Family | Best price |
9 | 36 | Suburbs | Married + children | Middle | High | Low | Sporty | Best quality |
10 | 50 | City | Married | Middle | High | Medium | Travel | Best quality |
11 | 53 | Suburbs | Single | Upper | High | Low | Travel | Best quality |
12 | 70 | City | Married | Upper | High | Low | Sporty | Best value |
Flow of the STP Process Image Description
Return to the Flow of the STP Process Image
6
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
As we saw in the previous chapter, most marketing strategies and activities begin by asking: Who are our “customers” or “users”? Please note that when we use the term “customer” or “user”, we are referring to your target audience. For example, “customers” or “users” could be:
In this chapter, we will use the terms “customers”, “users”, and “target audience” interchangeably. Please feel free to substitute any specific definition that applies to your organization.
Assuming you have defined your target audiences, the next important step in developing an understanding of your key customers and target audiences is creating “data-driven customer personas”. Simply defined, data-driven customer or buyer personas are semi-fictional representations that showcase the key traits of a segment of your target audience, based on data you have collected from customer research and/or any other analytics platforms.
Here is a 9-minute video, How To Create A User Persona, that provides a nice summary of what customer personas are, as well as walks you through the process of building your own:
If you are focused more on technical user design, user interfaces (UI), and user experience (UX), the following video, How to Create UX Personas, provides yet another important perspective:
Now that you understand what customer personas are, let’s explore a few different types of customer personas.
There are a few different approaches to developing your customer personas:
The main difference between “data-driven” customer personas and “proto, adhoc, or lean” customer personas has to do with how the personas are created. In an ideal world, you start with a blank sheet of paper, make no assumptions, and conduct extensive audience research. You talk to lots of real-world people and use the data collected to construct personas. This is the data-driven approach, and it is how personas should – ideally – be created.
That said, many organizations do not have the time, budget, or desire to do this level of research. So, rather than stall the customer persona process or have no personas at all, you can use a different approach: proto or ad hoc customer personas. This approach is described in detail in the book Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, and as a result, these personas are sometimes also called lean personas.
Proto, adhoc, or lean personas normally are not created by doing extensive external audience research, but rather by collecting information primarily from within an organization. For example, you might hold a workshop or meeting with various stakeholders and ask them to describe your target audience. Based on everyone’s input and/or experience, you can start building some ‘rough’ personas.
The critical thing to note is that these rough personas are not research-led and therefore contain assumptions or biases that may or may not be true. While proto, adhoc, or lean personas can be useful tools, treat them with caution and verify them with research – even if that research happens well after you have created your rough personas. A good approach is to start with a few proto personas to get the process rolling and to get stakeholder buy-in. Then, over time, conduct research to verify and validate their accuracy and refine them as you gain more audience insights and gather more audience data.
Another way to approach your customer personas is by exploring how broad or narrow you want your customer personas to be. Below we present three common options along this spectrum.
Now that we’ve discussed several types of customer personas, let’s explore how to develop data-driven customer personas.
Below is a framework that will cover all the foundational aspects of a customer persona. However, please keep in mind that all customer personas should incorporate multiple viewpoints, i.e., if a customer persona is being developed by a single person, with only one viewpoint in mind, for only one purpose, and/or for only one stage of your customer journey (more on this in the next chapter), your persona may not support your organization as a whole. As mentioned before, your customer persona should work for your product, marketing, sales, and customer success teams. So, try to include a variety of customer viewpoints in the following process because it will make your customer personas much stronger and applicable to the entire organization.
More specifically, here are several customer research data points that you may want to collect and document:
Category | Examples | Sources |
---|---|---|
Demographics/ Backstory | Name, birthplace, family history, childhood memories, first job, location, etc. | CRM, Public records, social media analytics |
Personal life | Marital status, family size, pets, diet and fitness habits, etc. | Public records, social media |
Career | Industry, job title, experience level, retirement plans, etc. | CRM, LinkedIn, online forums, Google |
Personality traits | Introvert/extrovert, right brain/left brain, optimistic/pessimistic/etc. | Social media, customer surveys, interviews, List of 14 free personality tests, online comments |
Online behaviour | Favorite social media platforms, search engines, mobile devices, etc. | Social media activities, online groups, forums, comments |
Purchasing behaviour | Favorite online retailers, payment methods, spending habits, etc. | Google Analytics, Tag Manager, remarketing / retargeting tools, previous campaign analytics |
Goals and challenges | Dream job, customer service experiences, regrettable purchases, etc. | CRM, customer service database, customer surveys, feedback, focus groups, online comments |
Objections | Communication issues, product features, purchasing methods, etc. | CRM, customer support database, customer surveys, interviews, focus groups |
For some more ideas, you may also want to consider Hubspot’s list of what you should consider when defining buyer personas.
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:
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:
Customer personas can be an important strategic and tactical tool. However, it is helpful to review some of the common pros and cons.
Customer personas assist marketers in knowing what to promote, to whom, when, and through which marketing channels. With digital marketing on the rise and more and more marketing channels available to marketers, making sure you spend your time and money on the appropriate marketing channels and activities can define your organization’s success or failure.
In this article, What is a ‘Buyer Persona’ and Why is it Important?, there is a list of areas across your organization where customer personas can guide the direction of your work, for example:
Please note that any tool and any type of market research can result in faulty insights. The key is to choose the proper tool and use it correctly. Bottom line: the identified issues are not inherent flaws in personas, but rather flaws in implementing personas. These flaws can be fixed by proper management, real customer data, and regular updating of personas.
Hopefully, you can see how powerful customer personas can be as a marketing and organizational tool. Knowing how to analyze and create your own customer personas can be important, especially as organizations experiment and try to connect with new target audiences. That said, do try, as much as possible, to develop your customer personas based on data and solid customer research!
Key Takeaways
Customer personas are important strategic and tactical tools that supports many of your digital marketing strategies and activities.
Customer Persona Tools & Resources
Here are few online tools that you can use to easily create a visual customer persona:
7
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you will be able to:
In our customer-centric world, providing a superior customer experience (CX) is a priority for any organization pursuing real success. Today’s organizations are doing everything they can to better understand their customers. Whether your brand is business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C); a start-up or corporation; global or local, providing exceptional customer experience is a must. One of the best ways to get to know your target audience is by walking in their shoes and mapping each and every interaction you share. This is where the customer journey map comes in.
A customer journey map is a visualization of an end-to-end customer experience. It’s essentially a visual narrative that allows you to understand each process your customer encounters with your organization, spanning each step from their initial engagement to, hopefully, a long-term relationship. As Matthew Fairweather, director of Matthew Fairweather Ltd., has stated:
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.
A great customer journey map should highlight how your customers discover, research, purchase, interact, and even promote your offerings. One of the easiest places to start is by outlining all the touch points your organizations has with its target audience. In the graphic below, the touch points are listed in the boxes and represent customer interactions as they move through each of the stages. And, as you can see, these touch points can be either online or offline.
Stage | Touch Points |
---|---|
Awareness |
|
Engagement |
|
Conversion |
|
Retention |
|
Advocacy |
|
Simply stated, a customer journey usually includes the following five stages:
Please note that depending on your organization, you may choose to rename some of the stages from above or perhaps even break up a stage into multiple stages. For example, if you are in HR and mapping the “customer journey” for recruiting new employees, “Conversion” could be changed to “Application Submitted” and “Engagement” might be broken up into First interview, Second Interview, etc. So, feel free to tweak the specific names and number of stages to best fit your organizational processes. But do make sure that you are capturing all the steps in your target audience’s journey.
In addition to specific stages and touchpoints, a great customer journey map also includes additional information and details. Here are six more areas to consider when building a comprehensive customer journey map:
(For visualization purposes, emotions are sometimes represented by emojis.)
If you want to see some very good, visual examples, please read the following articles, Nine Sample Customer Journey Maps – And What We Can Learn from Them and 144 Best Customer Journey Map Templates and Examples.
Hopefully, you now have a better understanding of customer journeys. To better complete your customer personas and customer journeys, you will need to collect and analyze lots of data about your customers. This customer research is critical to the accuracy, precision, and validity of these tools. While the goal of these tools is to improve the customer experience and to make better customer-focused decisions, if the underlying data is not appropriate, recent, and/or accurate, your entire analysis may be flawed. So, if you are planning to use customer personas and customer journey maps as a strategic, decision-making tool, do make sure you have the appropriate data to support it.
Here is a YouTube video (6 mins), Customer Journey Map Workshop, that does a nice job explaining how data, customer personas, and customer journeys work together:
Now that you have a more detailed understanding of what a customer journey is and how to track customers as they move through their customer journeys, let’s talk about why you should map the customer journey:
While customer journey maps are helpful in identifying new opportunities, they also allow organizations to quickly identify areas to optimize and/or automate processes or communications based on the data. In building your customer journey maps, it is critical to think about the key data that you will collect along the journey and how that data can help in making better organizational decisions. In other words, your customer journey map should always include the key data and analytics that you plan to collect and evaluate at each stage of your journey. By closely analyzing customer journey data, organizations can better assess how customers move from one touchpoint to another and how to make incremental improvements to the customer journey and customer experience.
Key Takeaways
A customer journey map is both a discovery and strategic organizational tool. In developing a customer journey map, organizations may discover areas that need improvement or can be supported better. However, a customer journey map can also be used to prioritize which target audiences to pursue or serve better.
Customer Journey Online Tools & Articles
Here are some articles and online tools for developing your customer journey:
Depending on your needs and complexities of your customer journeys, there are several ways to map your customer journey. Here are a few examples and options:
II
Congratulations on completing the first section of the textbook and learning about several foundational concepts, strategies, and tools related to digital marketing. As mentioned before, this textbook is divided into three core sections:
In this next section, we will build on those foundations and focus on specific strategies and channels to generate customer demand and nurture prospective and existing customers. To achieve this, we will first introduce a lead generation framework and then dive into specific strategies, considerations, and best practices for:
8
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
Now, that you understand a variety of digital marketing fundamentals, let’s build on these concepts to generate customer interest, build strong relationships with prospective customers, and ultimately, drive conversions. In this chapter, we will introduce you to a lead generation framework that will outline how to:
To kick it off, let’s begin by reviewing some fundamental concepts. A lead is any person who has shown some level of interest in an organization’s product or service. Leads are usually triggered by a communication or marketing activity initiated by the organization. For example, if you have an email newsletter sign up form on your website, after submitting their contact information, a new subscriber would be considered a lead. Once an organization has this contact information, it can continue to communicate and send marketing messages to that lead and hopefully interest them enough to, ultimately, convert and buy.
There are a variety of ways to categorize leads:
As you can see from the above examples, there are many types of leads and most organizations will try to attract as many qualified leads as possible, which brings us to lead generation.
Lead generation is the process of getting leads or attracting and converting target audiences who have shown an interest in your product or service. The following is a lead generation framework to help you identify, attract, nurture, and convert leads into paying customers.
The five steps in the 5-Step Lead Generation Framework are:
In the following chapters, we will dive deeper into key digital marketing tactics and activities that support this framework. However, in this chapter, we will first define and explain each of these key steps.
As already discussed in the Target Market and Audience, Customer Personas, and Customer Journey Mapping chapters, a key component to any marketing strategy is clearly defining and identifying your target audience(s). Before starting any lead generation activities, make sure you have captured all the specific details and differentiators related to your target audiences. This will significantly help in focusing your marketing activities and knowing exactly where to spend your time, budgets, and organizational resources.
Let’s first start with market segmentation, which we discussed in our Target Market and Audience chapter. Just to remind you, market segmentation refers to segmenting or grouping prospective buyers into different segments based on shared characteristics. These characteristics can include demographic, psychographic, geographic, or behavioural attributes.
Many of the attributes listed in the Target Market and Audience chapter can be easily applied to individual consumers. But, in the B2B space, market segmentation can look somewhat different. For example, segmenting your target audience might start by highlighting the following attributes for a target organization:
B2B Target Customer Examples
Here are two potential B2B target organization descriptions:
Please note that it is quite common to market to and support multiple target audiences. For example, an organization might know that ABC are the characteristics of their enterprise and larger customers and XYZ are the characteristics of their smaller / SMB ones. However, understanding these differences allows an organization to better support and direct prospective customers when they express an interest. Because depending on which type of customer they are, there may also be a significantly different customer journey. For example, an organization might qualify Acme Company as an “enterprise” company and will treat them in an “enterprise” way. Whereas Jitters Coffee Shop will qualify as a small-to-medium-sized business, so they are treated in a different manner.
Reflection
Think about your primary target audience. Who do you really want to target?
If you have multiple target audiences, try to focus your efforts on your primary target audience and keep your target audiences to less than 4. Otherwise, your marketing tactics and activities may become too broad, diluted, and ineffective in meeting the specific needs of your target audiences.
After clearly defining your target audience, most marketing strategies require setting up specific goals and objectives. What does your team / organization want to accomplish? Do you want to:
You want to ensure that your targeted audiences can help achieve the goals and objectives for your organization. When setting your goals and objectives, consider:
A key consideration in developing your goals and objectives is thinking about what you want your prospective customers to do; try to be as specific as possible. For example, you might have primary and secondary conversion goals as follows:
Please note that you can (and should) have more than one goal. Remember the purpose of any lead generation strategy is to acquire as many leads as possible, ensuring that those leads support the overarching goals and objectives of the organization. Do make sure your goals support one another and are in alignment with any organizational goals. The main purpose of setting your organizational goals is to test and validate that your target audience can deliver on those organizational goals and objectives. And if you do not set specific goals and objectives, how will you know if your actions have been successful or not?
After you have defined your target audience and set your organizational goals, you can start thinking about creating content to attract your target audience and to achieve your goals and objective. A common marketing strategy to accomplish this is by using lead magnets. A lead magnet is a free item or service that is given away for the purpose of gathering contact details. For example, maybe your organization has created a downloadable piece of content like a checklist. To access it, people must fill out a form with their contact information, e.g., their name, email address, job title, organization, etc., which as mentioned earlier, can be used to communicate with and market to them later.
There are many different kinds of lead magnets and most organizations will use some combination of the following types of lead magnets:
The primary goal of lead magnets is to identify the specific interests of your target audience. In our Content Marketing chapter, we will delve into lead magnet types in more detail.
Once you have identified the specific interests of your target audience, it is now possible to build ongoing, engaging relationships around those interests and ultimately, encourage your target audience to convert. Lead nurturing and closing is generally a key component of an organization’s sales activities and often will be carried out by the sales team.
That said, as customers increasingly consume information, videos, and other “self-serve” content online, this online content coupled with the promotional activities from the marketing team may lead customers to convert on their own, without any person-to-person sales interaction. In these cases, the conversion stages from awareness to conversion may be entirely handled by marketers. This type of sales process is often referred to as inbound sales. The purpose of inbound sales is to organically attract, educate, inform, nurture, and guide leads through the purchase decision-making process. In contrast, outbound sales focus on approaching prospects and delivering a sales pitch to trigger interest, e.g., cold calls, cold emails, or door-to-door visits.
Regardless of an organization’s inbound or outbound sales strategies, the following recommendations represent several common ways to nurture and close leads:
Sales and Marketing Alignment
Regardless of your sales strategy, inbound or outbound, it is critical to align your sales and marketing teams to improve your lead nurturing tactics and to boost customer conversions. Ideally, the two teams should work together to accelerate customer conversions and to ensure that the organization is meeting the needs of prospective customers at each and every stage of the customer journey. Because if marketing does a poor job qualifying leads, the sales team has an even harder job converting and closing them.
Often, organizations focus on increasing inbound leads, outbound leads, website visits, or demos. But spending more time getting existing customers to tell others to buy their products or services can lead to better qualified prospects and usually close sales much more quickly. This is because people tend to listen to other customers, clients, or even random people more than they listen to marketing messages from an organization. In fact, here is an article with over 80 referral marketing statistics showing why customer referrals are so valuable. Even in the B2B space, customer referrals are important because B2B organizations often have highly connected, small target audiences.
So, how do you get your customers to give you referrals, recommend your products and services, and/or be an advocate, brand evangelist, or an influencer? Here are some suggestions:
When creating your customer referral program, think about which rewards (or combination of rewards) your customers will find most beneficial and valuable. Some organizations might be surprised to find that monetary incentives are not as important to their customers as some of the other options listed above. That said, the key to referrals is to ask for them! Here are a few types of referrals to consider:
Once you have gone through the five steps of this lead generation framework, you will want to repeat the steps and go back and ask: are the customers we are connecting with and converting, the same as our target audience? You will also want to compare and evaluate that they are the ones that make the most sense to target. Using this customer data, you may need to tweak and adjust your target audience and customer personas to make sure that they truly represent the customers you are actually serving and that they are the most appropriate customers for your products, services, and solutions.
To successfully create a targeted and sustainable lead generation strategy:
Key Takeaways
In this chapter, we learned about leads and the lead generation process.
Lead Generation – Additional Resources
Here are some additional lead generation articles and videos:
9
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
To start the discussion of content marketing, let’s first review some key concepts and how they tie into a content marketing strategy. As mentioned in the Customer Journey Mapping chapter, we have broken down the customer journey into the following five stages:
Since organizations want to market to and support prospective customers at every stage of this journey, it is essential to plan specific content for each stage along this journey. The following image highlights different content categories as customers move through the customer journey.
On the left-hand side, we see the five customer journey stages – awareness, engagement, conversion, retention, and advocacy. And next to each of these stages, there are a few content categories that might be helpful to prospects and/or customers. For each stage, organizations should ask:
Simply stated, as your target customers move through each of these stages, marketers need to identify the specific content that is most important at that stage. Please note that the content details and requirements will be significantly influenced by the type of organization, the customer persona, and the specific customer journey. But let’s look at some common types of content across a customer journey.
At the top of the funnel, organizations are usually trying to drive awareness. As a result, many of the goals associated with this stage include:
To achieve these goals, organizations need to create and map content that matches the needs of customer personas in the awareness stage of a customer journey. Typically, this would include content that brings awareness of your organization, products, services, and solutions. Often this stage includes content like videos, paid ads, social media posts, etc.
At the middle of the funnel, prospective customers are interested and considering their options. They are aware you exist but are seeking more information about your solutions and/or trying to better understand who you are and what you offer. These leads may have come from an advertisement, link in a post, forwarded email, etc. In this stage, marketers want to make sure to offer content like blog posts, articles, case studies, webinars, videos, etc. that highlight why your organization is the most qualified and why you offer the best solutions to meet the target customer’s needs.
At the bottom of the funnel, you will have qualified marketing, sales, product, or services leads. These leads have expressed interest, have been engaging with your organization or content, but have not yet committed to your primary conversion – usually a paid purchase. At this stage, marketers want to create content that will create an incentive for leads to convert. This content might include targeted ads, specific email offers and messages, and other lead magnets that provide an opportunity to convert.
Also included in this stage are new and repeat customers because remember the bottom of the funnel does not end at the point of purchase but continues post-purchase to ensure satisfied customers and to develop brand advocates. Remember the importance of customer referrals from the last chapter. So, your content marketing strategy needs to continue to support your leads long after they convert. Every organization should encourage their customers to become brand influencers and advocates – in essence, to start marketing on the organization’s behalf and to become an unofficial sale force. The easiest way to seed these kinds of conversations is to provide content that customers can easily share with their own networks. However, do make sure that your customers are satisfied with their customer experience, and feel connected to the brand and the brand’s community. This is because viral content can go both ways and complaints tend to spread much faster than praises.
To develop your content strategy, there are several questions you need to address. In answering these questions, you can ensure your content plan and activities meet the needs of your target audience and are sustainable by your marketing team and the organizational resources you have available. The following key questions answer the what, why, how, where, when, and who for any content strategy:
Now, that you have a solid content strategy, you will need to create a content plan that highlights when content will be distributed, on which platforms, covering which topics, for which target audience(s), showing who’s responsible, and all the content production details. Typically, all of this information will live within a content calendar. Content calendars map out all the details related to the content that marketers plan to create. They are useful tactical tools because they can:
The above image provides a simple example of a content calendar. As you can see, Excel or Google Sheets work well for this type of plan. However, there are many content calendar templates and here are two from Hubspot and Hootsuite:
You can also conduct a search on Google for content calendar and templates. While most templates cover the basic attributes for managing your content, there are a few areas you may want to make sure are included in your content calendar:
For marketers managing multiple marketing channels, you can either put all your content into one calendar or have multiple content calendars, e.g., a social media content calendar, email content calendar, blog post content calendar, conference calendar, etc. The choice is up to you to decide which system will work best for your team and organization.
One frequently asked question is how do I find time to create and manage all this content? This is perhaps the biggest misunderstanding about content marketing; the perception that all content must be original content. As mentioned before, the majority of content shared, should actually be from other sources. The above pie chart provides a guideline on content splits:
So far, we’ve talked about developing a content marketing strategy and plan. But what are tips and tricks to successfully launching a content marketing strategy? Here are few do’s and don’ts that build on many of the concepts and questions already discussed:
In the last chapter, we introduced the concept of lead magnets. Remember a lead magnet is a free item or service that is given away for the purpose of gathering contact details. Now that we have walked through how to build a content strategy and plan, you may want to think about incorporating lead magnets into your content plans. So, the following lists provide several examples of lead magnets in the various categories:
An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:
https://opentextbc.ca/foundationsdigitalmarketing/?p=76#h5p-2
To successfully build your content strategy and plan, be sure to answer the following questions:
WHAT |
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WHY |
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HOW |
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WHERE |
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WHEN |
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WHO |
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And using some of the lead magnet ideas from this chapter, map your content against the appropriate stages of your customer journey:
Key Takeaways
Content marketing can be a powerful strategic and tactical approach to connecting to and learning about target audiences.
Content Marketing – Additional Resources
Here are some additional content marketing articles:
And, here are several free industry certifications related to content marketing:
Content Categories in the Customer Journey Image Description:
A diagram showing what types of content are used to reach customers at different stages of the customer journey. Image description available.
Part of Funnel | Stage | Customer Type | Types of Content |
---|---|---|---|
Top | Awareness | Visitors | Online ads, videos, photos |
Top | Engagement | Followers | Posts, videos, blogs, content, emails, resources, tools |
Middle | Conversion | Click throughs, content consumers, subscribers | Lead magnets, targeted ads, offers/promotions |
Bottom | Retention | Prospects, customers, repeat customers | Onboarding, support, community management |
Bottom | Advocacy | Brand advocates | Viral content, influencers, evangelists |
Return to the Content Categories in the Customer Journey image
10
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
Search engine optimization is the process of getting your webpages and content to rank higher in non-paid (also known as “organic”) search engine results so that you increase the quality and quantity of traffic to your website or content.
Please note that the goal of SEO is not simply to optimize for the search engines, but rather to structure your content so that target audiences can easily find content that provides the answers they seek. Understanding what people are searching for online, the kinds of words or terminology they are using, and the types of content they want to consume are critical in any search engine optimization strategy. When done correctly, SEO allows marketers to better reach and connect with people searching for the products and services their organization offers.
From your customer personas, you should know what your target audience wants and is interested in. SEO simply helps marketers structure their content so that search engines can find, understand, and index it and ultimately, deliver it when a target customer is looking for it.
In digital marketing, there is a lot of discussion about using paid advertising, social media, and other online platforms to generate traffic and interest. However, the majority of online traffic is driven by search engines. For example, of all Canadian searches, only ~2.8% of people click on paid advertisements. SEO delivers ~20X more traffic opportunities than paid advertising on both mobile and desktop.
Search engines also produce some of the highest qualified leads because when someone is searching, marketers know exactly what that person is looking for. Capturing a lead with a very specific search intention allows marketers to deliver a specific solution based on what that person needs at that very moment. Generally, these search intentions are categorized as follows:
Understanding the above objectives allows marketers to create content that specifically addresses these distinct intentions.
Over time and if set up properly, SEO can also organically grow and increase your traffic without additional investments, especially if your content is the best match for specific search terms. In essence, by spending time to properly structure your content for search engines, your organization could see increased traffic, engagements, and customers over time.
Within search engine optimization, there are two primary strategies that most marketers will want to explore: on-site and off-site SEO. On-site SEO focuses on optimizing the content and structure of a website so that it ranks well (typically within the first 10 search results, or on the first page of search engine results) for specific search phrases (also known as “keywords”) that are relevant to an organization’s website or content.
A key element of on-site SEO is ensuring that the keywords or key phrases your target audience searches for are contained in the content and structure of your webpages. Let’s walk through an example. Fable Ice Cream, a Saskatoon-based ice cream shop, has heard about SEO and wants to improve how often they show up in organic search results. To do so, they might ask questions such as:
Asking these questions is a crucial planning step that will guide Fable Ice Cream’s keyword research and help them craft better content. Understanding how a target audience searches for a product, service, or information is a crucial first step and in answering the above questions, marketers can come up with several keyword and key phrase ideas.
Often marketers will now start thinking about creating content using these terms. However, there are other structural and hidden areas of your webpages that should be considered, as well.
An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:
https://opentextbc.ca/foundationsdigitalmarketing/?p=80#h5p-3
In the above image, you can see the anatomy of a webpage and when you are incorporating your keywords, be sure to include them in the following:
Now, that you have considered incorporating keywords into the structural areas of your webpages, you can create visible content that answers the questions your target audiences ask.
If you want to further research and identify related or similar keywords, there are many online tools that can help. First, create a list of potential keywords, phrases, and questions and then, enter those terms into any of the following online services:
You can also conduct a Google Search using your keywords, phrases, and questions and look at the results. Pay attention to the “People also ask” box for search suggestions. Now that you have a better sense of what on-site SEO covers, let’s take a look at off-site SEO.
Off-site or off-page SEO involves any activities that drive awareness and referral traffic to your website from other sites. For example, if you have a link to your website in your Twitter profile, there is now a link from Twitter back to your website. The reason this is important is because search engines will rank a website based on the reputations of those websites linking to it. So, if you have links from industry associations, media sites, educational institutions, etc. linking to your website, search engines will rank your website much higher than links from smaller or less reputable websites. These external websites become part of your “online digital network / family” and directly influence your website’s “reputation”. As a result, link building is often considered the main off-site tactic and can include tactics such as:
Some key considerations and concepts for off-site SEO include:
For more ideas on link building strategies, please read this article, 15x Incredible Link Building Strategies or watch the following YouTube video:
Key Takeaways
On-site and off-site SEO significantly impact your search engine results:
SEO – Additional Resources
To dive into SEO in more detail, here are some additional online resources:
11
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
Now that you’ve learned the basic approaches behind SEO, let’s look specifically at website optimization. As with any marketing strategy, the first question to ask is: who is the audience you are optimizing your website for? Website content often needs to support several audiences and each audience has slightly different content requirements. Here is a list of common target audiences for a website:
Based on the above audiences, optimizing your website content will vary depending on which audiences you prioritize. So, identify, define, and rank your target audiences first.
The above image highlights a 5-Step Website Audit process that covers the critical stages in a optimizing your website:
Before optimizing your own website, do take time to review your competitors’ websites. Marketers can glean a great deal of information from this process. For example, it can be beneficial to understand the keywords your competitors are using, how content is organized and presented, who is visiting their website, and provide additional digital marketing ideas to better market your own solutions.
To perform a competitive analysis, there are many free competitor analysis tools. These can give you quick and valuable insights, and many services offer paid, premium versions, as well. The following table presents several competitive analysis tools and lists their features across a variety of areas: search optimization, digital advertising, link authority, social media, traffic, and technology.
Tool | Rankings | Advertising | Authority | Social Media | Traffic | Technology |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Ahrefs | – | – | – | – | ||
Alexa | – | – | ||||
Builtwith | – | – | – | – | – | |
Buzzsumo | – | – | – | – | ||
FollowerWonk | – | – | – | – | – | |
iSpionage | – | – | – | – | ||
Majestic | – | – | – | |||
Moat | – | – | – | – | – | |
MOZ / Link Explorer | – | – | – | – | – | |
Quantcast | – | – | – | – | – | |
SimilarWeb | – | – | – | |||
Searchmetrics | – | – | – | |||
SEMrush | – | – | ||||
Serpstat | – | – | ||||
SpyFu | – | – | – |
Each tool evaluates different aspects of digital marketing and website criteria. So, let’s look at each one of these in more detail:
What do they rank for?
Seeing what your competitors rank for and how high will immediately provide ideas for content and keyphrases. Without using a tool, the only way to find this information would be to search for every conceivable keyphrase.
What phrases are they bidding on? Where are they investing their ad budgets? What do their ads look like?
Like organic rankings, understanding a competitor’s ad spending will provide insights into what might be a good investment for you. Assuming they have well-managed, well-optimized ad campaigns, you can see which words and phrases are getting traction with your target audiences.
Do they have higher quality and more authoritative links than us?
As discussed in the SEO chapter, links can signal a website’s value. Sites with many links from other relevant and related websites will likely have higher authority, especially if the links are from sites that have high authority themselves.
Beyond the number, you can also use these reports to find marketing opportunities. For example, if a media site or blog has mentioned and linked to a competitor, it may be a good site to promote or write about your solutions.
There are many tools that track links and provide authority metrics. Each service has a distinct name for the number, but essentially, they all measure the same thing: the likelihood of ranking on a scale from 1 – 100.
Which of their articles is getting shared the most? Who is sharing their content?
Social media accounts are easy to follow, but hard to analyze. You may be able to see which specific posts are getting engagement, but the bigger picture is difficulty to see without tools. So, using these tools can be very useful and spark ideas for what to write about, where to be active, and who to collaborate with.
Are they getting more traffic?
There are no tools that will provide an accurate look into your competitor’s analytics. But there are ways to get website traffic estimates. Some of the above tools can provide an overview into who is getting more visitors, when they visit, demographics and behaviour data. This data can be quite helpful in completing your customer personas.
What technology is their site built on and what tools are they using?
Website technology is surprisingly visible, and there are services that can find out exactly what is powering your competitor’s website, as well as what additional tools and plugins are being used. This can potentially provide information about what tactics your competitors are using and what might work well for you.
Now that you have reviewed your competitors’ websites and possibly have ideas about how to improve your website, let’s take a look at the most common technical errors that might exist on your own website:
Since these technical errors are easy to detect, using a site auditor tool is highly recommended. Once again, here is a list of website audit tools that can be useful:
Name | Price | Features |
---|---|---|
Hubspot Website Grader | Free |
|
Hotjar | 15-Day Free Trial $99+ per month |
|
Google Search Console | Free |
|
Serpstat | $69 – $499 per month |
|
RAVEN Site Auditor | $39 – $399 per month |
|
SEMrush Site Auditor | $99.95 – $399.95 per month |
|
WebCEO Site Auditor | 14-Day Free Trial $99 – $299 per month |
|
On-site and off-site SEO represent the next step in the framework. Summarizing the details covered in the SEO chapter, you will want to improve your on-site and off-site SEO by addressing the following key areas:
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Now that you have identified your audiences and the appropriate content, let’s look at the experience of accessing and discovering that content. According to Wikipedia:
The user experience is how a user interacts with and experiences a product, system, or service. It includes a person’s perceptions of utility, ease of use, and efficiency.
Given the above definition, let’s look at how your website contributes to your customer experience and what areas you should evaluate:
A poor customer experience negatively impacts your entire customer journey. So, review and optimize all audience experiences to make them as easy and seamless as possible. For a nice overview on navigation, hierarchy, and colour (which we will discuss in the next step), you can watch the following video:
Watch: Key Web Design Principles: Navigation, Hierarchy & Color (11:30 mins)
In this next step, we will briefly discuss a few website design areas that can help optimize your website experiences. Having a well-designed, well-laid out website can positively impact your visitors’ perceptions of your content and brand. Here are a few design areas you may want to review as part of your website audit:
Please note that website design is a complex, detailed discipline. The above design considerations are simply a few high-level areas that can have a significant impact on your website optimization.
Now that you know the key areas to consider as part of a website audit, let’s take a look at a very specific type of webpage called a landing page. In digital marketing, a landing page is typically a standalone webpage, created specifically for a marketing or advertising campaign. A landing page is where a visitor “lands” after clicking on an ad or a link. Landing pages can be existing pages on your website, but when planning a marketing campaign, marketers usually prefer to have a landing page with specific messaging, imagery, and often, a unique call-to-action, e.g., book an XYZ demo, etc.
Landing pages are designed to maximize conversion. As a result, they often minimize the number of links and other website navigation options. This is referred as the attention ratio. The attention ratio is the number of things a visitor can do on a page relative to the number of things they should be doing. In an optimized marketing campaign, the attention ratio of a landing page should be 1:1. Since every campaign has one conversion goal, every corresponding landing page should only have one call to action, i.e., one place to click. In comparison, a typical home page, may have 10 – 15 calls-to-action. But, as the attention ratio goes up, i.e., more links to click on, conversions go down. So, for an optimal conversion experience, marketers will want to limit the number of click options on their landing pages.
Building on this optimization strategy, let’s look at which elements should be included in an optimized landing page. Generally speaking, there are five key elements to any successful landing page. The following image presents these elements on a generic landing page:
(click on the pluses below for details)
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For more details and examples, please review this Unbounce article, The 5 Essential Elements of a Winning Landing Page.
Key Takeaways
Website and landing page optimizations are critical to successfully convert prospective customers. By performing a 5-Step website audit and optimizing your landing pages, you can significantly improve your customer experiences, as well as increase campaign conversions.
Website & Landing Page Optimization – Additional Resources
In addition to the resources listed in the chapter, here are a few more articles and courses that provide additional details:
12
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
There are many paid advertising options in digital marketing. However, before we delve into specific techniques and processes, let’s review some basic terminology and calculations:
Platform | Average CPM* |
---|---|
Google Search Ads | $38.40 |
Google Display (Banner) Ads | $3.12 |
Facebook Ads | $8.60 |
Instagram Ads | $8.96 |
Twitter Ads | $6.46 |
LinkedIn Ads | $6.59 |
Pinterest Ads | $30 |
* Please note the above amounts are averages. CPM rates will vary significantly depending on the focus of your target audience. So, if you are targeting the world, for example, you will be quoted a much lower CPM rate because the audience is quite general and diverse. However, if you want to target potential customers in a specific country, geographic region, industry, or with specific interests, CPM rates can increase dramatically.
Platform | Average CPC* |
---|---|
Google Search Ads | $2.32 |
Google Display (Banner) Ads | $0.67 |
Facebook Ads | $1.35 |
Instagram Ads | $3.56 |
Twitter Ads | $0.38 |
LinkedIn Ads | $5.26 |
Pinterest Ads | $1.50 |
* Like the above CPM rates, please note the CPC amounts are averages. CPC rates will also vary depending on the focus of your target audience. So, if you are targeting a broad audience, you will be quoted a much lower CPC rate. However, if you plan to target potential customers in a specific country, geographic region, industry, or with specific interests, CPC rates will often be higher.
That said, in general, search (text) ads have an average CTR of approximately 2% and display (banner) ads have a CTR of 0.35%. But again, this can vary widely by industry. For example, search ads in the legal industry have an average CTR of approximately 1.4% and dating ads have an average CTR of 3.5%.
Now that you have learned about some fundamental paid advertising concepts, let’s try a few PPC math exercises to make sure you understand how they relate to each other:
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One of the most common types of paid advertising is the pay-per-click (PPC) model, which can be applied to text ads, video ads, and even display (banner) ads depending on the options offered by the host advertising platform, e.g., Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc. PPC marketing is a form of online advertising that allows your organization to appear above organic search results.
Put simply: marketers bid to have their ad appear when people search for specific keywords or key phrases. Whenever the ad appears and someone clicks on it, marketers pay for that click – hence the “pay-per-click” name. Marketers often use pay-per-click as part of a lead generation strategy. In other words, marketers pay to get their messages / ads in front of their target audiences. Sometimes, this approach is referred to as “paying for eyeballs”.
When a person types a search into an online search engine, there are advertisers interested in showing ads related to that person’s search inquiry. This search triggers an auction, which marketers have previously bid on. The ads that win the auction then appear on the search engine results page. A combination of several variables, including bid amount, the quality of the ad, and quality of the landing page, determine which ad will appear in the top position.
To compete in these public ad auctions, marketers create accounts on these hosted advertising systems like Google Ads to set up their ads and identify where and when they would like for those ads to show up. Since Google Ads is one of the most commonly used Ad networks, let’s take a close look at how marketers set up their advertising campaigns in Google Ads.
Accounts are split into campaigns for the convenience of monitoring and reporting on different geographic locations, promotions, types of ads, and/or any other helpful advertising categorization. At the campaign-level, marketers can set their:
The following lists the most common types of campaigns Google offers:
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Google also offers:
For more details on each of these campaign types, review Google’s suggestions on How to Choose the Right the Campaign Type.
As you can see in the image below, each campaign can consist of one or more ad groups. Please note that any setting, e.g., budget, target location, language, etc., set at the campaign-level will be used for all ad groups created for that campaign. Each ad group can contain one or more ads which target a shared set of unique keywords.
Each ad group contains unique key phrases or key words and cannot have the same key phrases or key words as another ad group. Use ad groups to organize your ads by a common theme, such as the types of products or services you want to advertise.
For example, let’s say you sell desserts, beverages, and snacks on your website. In the table below, each ad group contains a keyword list focusing on a product you sell. The keyword list in each ad group tells the system to show ads for these products only on searches and websites related to them.
Ad Group 1: Desserts | Ad Group 2: Beverages | Ad Group 3: Snacks |
---|---|---|
|
|
|
Queries are the search terms people type into the search box of an online search engine. And as mentioned before, there are three common types of search queries:
Key phrases or words, on the other hand, are what marketers bid on and use to target these individuals by matching their search queries.
Marketers have several keyword matching options when matching search queries:
It is also possible to choose negative keywords, which prevent your ads from being shown when people type in specific search queries and keywords. This prevents unnecessary clicks (costs) and traffic.
As mentioned above, ads represent a subset of Ad Groups and are usually arranged by common themes. Ads are what people will see if the auction is won, so it is vital to get them right. Ideally, you want to test a variety of ads to see which ones perform best. Each text ad can include up to:
In the image below, you can see an example of a Google text ad for the search “pepperoni pizza” highlighting the various elements mentioned above:
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Ad extensions can be more engaging for searchers and can communicate even more specific information that is easily accessible at the click of a link.
To participate in an auction, marketers need to decide how much they are willing to spend. This is done by setting budgets at the campaign level and bidding at the Ad Group or keyword level. Budgets set at the campaign level can be organized for a specific period of time, e.g., daily, weekly, or monthly budgets. Budgets should be established according to the overall marketing budget. Bids offer a more specific way of controlling your ad spend.
All Ad Groups need to have bids, but keyword-level bids override Ad Group-level bids. Let’s go back to our previous example:
Ad Group 1: Desserts | Ad Group 2: Beverages | Ad Group 3: Snacks |
---|---|---|
|
|
|
Let’s say you set the maximum bid price for all keyword phrases in Ad Group 1 (Desserts) at $1. This means that, at most, you would be willing to pay $1 for any search queries that used: cupcakes, pumpkin pies, apple pie, chocolate cake, ice cream, and cookies. But, if you were bidding close to Thanksgiving, “pumpkin pies” might be especially popular and there might be a lot more competition for “pumpkin pies”. To account for this increase in popularity and competition, you could change the (maximum) bid price for “pumpkin pie” to $1.25 and that would override the $1 maximum Ad Group bid. Now, your maximum bid price only for “pumpkin pies” would be $1.25. And the maximum bid price for all of the other keywords in Ad Group 1 would remain at $1.
In terms of bidding, many marketers want to know if they should bid on broad or highly specific keywords. There are trade-offs:
Ideally, you want to bid on a combination of both of these because you may be able to convert some of the “generic” leads and you definitely want to convert those leads that most closely match your products and services.
Another common question is: How much should I bid on keywords? Unfortunately, this depends a many different factors:
Lots of marketers use automated bidding methods. These enable advertisers to set a certain goal for their campaigns and after that have the advertising and marketing system establish the most suitable bid for each auction. Since bidding strategies are very important in getting your ads shown, there are many variables to consider.
Due to the complexities of the bidding systems, the actual amount paid by marketers hinges on competitive activity and ad ranking, not simply the highest bid. Your keyword bid represents your maximum bid price. This means you are willing to pay up to this price. However, what you actually pay depends on what others bid.
For example, if you bid $2 for “pumpkin pies”, but the next highest bidder had a maximum bid of $1.50. Then, to win the auction, you only need to pay $1.51. So, your actual cost per click will only be $1.51 – even though you were willing to pay up to $2.
There’s even more to winning the auction than having the highest possible bid. Online search engines look at various other elements to establish which ads get shown at the top of the search engine results page, also called “SERP”.
Online search engines have their very own specific means of factoring in other components to identify ad rank. For example, Google takes the following into consideration:
The parts of the Quality Score are:
All of these elements are quite important because the higher the Quality Score, the lower the CPC will be, i.e., the less a marketer needs to pay to have their ad shown. Search engines penalize marketers who bid on keyword phrases with poor Quality Scores by not showing their ads, even if marketers submit high bids.
It is crucial to have engaging as well as relevant ad copy that includes the appropriate keyword phrases. And your landing page quality should not be forgotten either. Ads will be shown less frequently when they point to landing pages that do not deliver on what the ad promises. The landing pages also need to be relevant to the searcher, load rapidly, and provide a good user experience.
Picking the best keywords is what enables marketers to show ads to the appropriate audiences. But there are other targeting choices offered to maximize campaign results, including targeting by:
By doing this, marketers can target users on mobile devices in the evening, or users under 25 and within a certain distance of a specific location, to enhance their ad’s performance. These are important since variations in ad copy, for instance, might do better for one group of users than for another. Using remarketing tools, marketers can even target or omit previous visitors to a site that do follow-up searches. Bids can also be readjusted for specific keywords based on targeting options, offering marketers much more control over website traffic as well as focusing their bid on those customers, who are more attractive to their organization.
The point of all this hard work is not just to get clicks. The real objective is to get conversions. Conversions are those activities marketers want users to complete after clicking on their ad and actions that support the products or services being advertised.
Common examples of conversions include:
It is crucial to track conversions to understand whether a PPC campaign is doing well as well as how many conversions can be credited to paid search as opposed to other advertising and marketing channels. Systems like Google Ads can track conversions utilizing a piece of code placed into the source code of the conversion page (which is reached after conversion, like a “Thank you” page). Conversion monitoring can be difficult since conversion paths also have a tendency to be more complicated than a simple click of an ad and a straight purchase. They typically consist of numerous searches, browsing a variety of related or affiliated websites, or responding to an email, phone call, or in-store promotion. Making use of an analytics solution like Google Analytics can help identify how credit for conversions is attributed to a variety of conversion paths. For more details on marketing attribution, you may want to read the Attribution chapter.
Now that you have learned all about PPC, try your hand at creating a PPC advertising campaign:
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Key Takeaways
Paid Advertising allows marketers to reach and target audiences with a great deal of precision:
Paid Advertising – Additional Resources
The following free courses and articles cover many more advanced paid advertising details across a variety of paid advertising platforms:
13
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
Many people think social media is digital marketing. While social media marketing can take up a lot of marketers’ attention, it only represents one component of a digital marketing strategy. Before diving into specific strategies and tactics of social media, let’s review why social media is important to digital marketing. There are many advantages to using social media for professional purposes and to promote your organization, products, and services. Here are several areas where social media shines:
Now that we understand why social media is a key component of a digital marketing strategy, let’s look at how marketers can successfully implement a social media plan.
This 6-Step Social Media Marketing Framework aims to ensure your social media strategy and activities are optimized to convert prospective customers into satisfied, paying customers and brand advocates. As you learn more about digital marketing, you will be presented with a variety of different frameworks. Being able to understand what is similar and what is different will be important. Ultimately, you may come up with your own framework, which will likely be a combination of several frameworks. However, using a framework gives you the best chance of implementing the right strategy for your circumstances. This framework will also provide alignment between your chosen strategy and your activities. Let’s take a closer look at each of the following steps:
Social media allows marketers to listen to what their target audiences are saying and doing. Without any prompting, marketers can now listen to what their customers are saying about their needs, wants, and desires. We no longer have to guess!
Listening is the first place for marketers to start when developing a social media strategy. Listening is key to understanding your target audience’s perceptions related to:
Listening and learning from your target audiences is the first important step when implementing a social media strategy.
With a well-defined scope, which includes specific goals, objectives, and target audiences, it is possible to achieve positive outcomes, since you know what you are aiming for. If you know what you want, you can put the steps in place to get there. Successful marketers and organizations know what they want to achieve, and a clear focus on goals and objectives is what ultimately guides all their actions.
Identifying goals, objectives, and target audiences is a critical step in getting buy-in from key decision makers, assigning resources (human, financial, and technological), and planning social media campaigns and ongoing activities. Everyone in an organization should work and plan towards achieving these goals and objectives so it is important to get this step right.
Ideally, digital marketers should plan to complete this step collaboratively because some of the required information might exist in different areas of the organization. This information should include:
If organizations don’t properly align their goals, objectives, and strategies, they will waste money, time, resources, and effort.
For a startup, this could be quite costly and ultimately, result in going out of business. For an established business, this may result in losing ground to the competition, missing an important market opportunity, losing key people who do not feel supported, falling stock prices, or even going out of business. It can also lead to companies becoming reactive and developing an organizational culture of crisis management where you are constantly fighting fires instead of planning and being proactive.
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If Marketing Director, Sam, has been told by senior management that the organizational goals for this year are to increase sales of product X, which of the following goals are relevant for the social media marketing team? (Select all that apply.)
While setting goals and objectives is a critical part of planning, how you achieve them has more to do with your implementation plan. Therefore, in this step we will focus on achieving those goals and objectives by selecting the appropriate digital marketing channels and platforms.
Since there are so many social media options, marketers often struggle in selecting the appropriate social media platform to use. Instead of trying to pick specific social media sites, organizations should focus on the type of social media marketing that will work best for their target audiences and build a presence on 2 – 3 platforms that support those activities and cater to those audiences.
The following are the most prominent types of social media networks / platforms. In each of the sections below, you can read the category description, the pros and cons, and examples of sites that fall into that category:
(click on an arrow to expand)
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By far the most popular, social networks connect people to each other and to organizations. Organizations can use these networks to promote products, services, and content. They can advertise to diverse audiences and work with influencers to reach target audiences. In addition, marketers can listen in on public conversations about their organization, competitors, and industry, and use those insights to improve customer experiences and increase brand awareness.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples of social networking platforms*:
*Please note that some sites may be listed in multiple categories.
Visual storytelling has become a staple on social media. As a result, image sharing networks are quite popular and should be part of most social media strategies. These social media sites allow individuals to share images and visual content. They provide a platform to spark conversations, inspire ideas, and promote products, contests, and experiences that get people talking about brands.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples of image-sharing networks:
Video-sharing networks can be split into two main categories: short-form and long-form video.
Short-form video typically includes videos that are less than two minutes long. The most popular platforms are TikTok & Instagram Reels.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples of short-form video networks:
Long-form video refers to videos longer than two minutes. YouTube and Vimeo are the leading platforms. YouTube has better SEO, but Vimeo has a stronger community and no pre-roll ads.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples of long-form video networks:
Following short-form video, one of the fastest growing types of social media networks is livestreaming. Livestreaming delivers live video content that typically interacts with a live audience / viewer. Livestreaming is available on almost all popular social media platforms.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples of livestreaming networks:
Interactive Media Networks allow their users to connect, create and share content. Quite often, they offer a variety of unique interactive and highly experimental features such as AR/VR filters, musical overlays, and interactive games. These networks tend to be most popular among Gen-Z and Millennials.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples of interactive media networks:
Community forums encourage people to answer questions posed by the community and to share knowledge, news, and ideas. These websites discourage direct advertising and generally, do not have brand pages. Answering questions correctly and honestly in these forums can increase a member’s credibility and that credibility or trust could lead to increased website visits and sales.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples of community forums:
These networks provide a place to publish written, long-form content and can be an important component of your content marketing strategy. Consider writing about how to use your products in creative ways, or post news about your industry to drive more traffic to your website or online accounts.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples of blogging and publishing networks:
More and more organizations are taking advantage of the opportunity to market their products and services using audio. Audio podcasts and social audio networks allow listeners to gain knowledge, share ideas, and/or join discussions in an audio format.
For many listeners, these audio experiences are easier to consume. People can listen wherever they are, including while commuting, offline (if downloaded), or simply as background noise during daily activities. Podcasting is less restrictive than watching a video or even scrolling through a feed.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples of podcasting networks:
Social audio is yet another social media network type that offers live discussions with the audience rather than pre-recorded audio conversations. Like livestreaming, these networks are great for connecting with an audience in real-time and getting immediate feedback.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples of social audio networks:
Messaging apps have evolved to be more than just a simple way to share text messages. With features for calling, creating groups, broadcasting messages to multiple users, exchanging money, and the option of creating chatbots, messaging apps can help your organization in many ways. For example, many small businesses are using Facebook Messenger chatbots to interact, support, provide suggestions, and share news with their customers.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples of messaging apps:
For more ideas on how to use these, check out this article, The Best Messaging Apps for Customer Service.
Bookmarking and content curation networks are platforms where users discover, save, and share a variety of ideas, articles, posts, and other content for later use. The purpose of these websites is to discover new content based on shared interests and to discuss trends. By creating and curating content that is current and relevant to your industry, marketers can use these networks to direct people to their website and engage with the community by sharing content to bookmark.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples of bookmarking networks:
Review networks allow people to find, review, and share information about brands and their products and services. These types of networks reveal the customer experience. Good or bad, reviews help identify what is working and what is not and provide an opportunity for organizations to make improvements and/or resolve issues. How an organization responds to a review will often showcase a brand’s values and how they handle customer feedback. When reviews are managed well, organizations can build trust and loyalty with their community, which can bring positive social proof to the organization and its claims.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples of review networks:
Social shopping networks create a community of individuals who share similar interests and opinions, and influence each other’s purchasing decisions. These networks help buyers spot trends, share great finds, make purchases, and follow their favorite brands. They focus on e-commerce, and the social element makes it engaging and entertaining. These social shopping sites are ideal for building awareness about your brand and selling to a wider audience.
Many social networks now also include social shopping elements. For example, Facebook Marketplace allows people to sell items to their friends, followers, and other buyers nearby, making it much easier to sell used products.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples of social shopping networks:
In contrast to those social networks that cover a wide range of topics, interest-based networks focus solely on a single area of interest, e.g., books, cycling, pregnancy, or home design. For organizations looking to connect with niche target audiences, these networks can deliver high quality relationships, focused market insights, and critical market trends.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples of interest-based networks:
For more examples, check this list of social network apps for interest-based communities.
Like interest-based networks, sharing economy networks also cater to specific niche audiences. These networks are built around the sharing of goods and services, with the goal of improving efficiency, sustainability, and community. Essentially, by choosing to share items such as vehicles, recreation equipment, or tools, there is less strain put on the market to produce goods since purchases are replaced by borrowing and lending across the community. For example, a sharing economy site focused on pets could help a user find someone willing to take care of their dog while on vacation. It would be less costly than a kennel and more comfortable for the pet. If your company sold pet toys or food, you could potentially gain new customers by advertising or offering product or service promotions for users to try.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples of sharing economy networks:
Anonymous social networks let you post anonymously. Since these sites allow users to post anonymously, there is no accountability and these networks can easily become sites for cyberbullying, to vent, gossip, or snoop – none of which help a business or brand.
Pros:
Cons:
Examples of anonymous social networks:
Reflection
Now that you have reviewed the different types of social media networks and the pros and cons of each:
After choosing your channels, the next step in our 6-Step Social Media Marketing Framework is content creation. After selecting the appropriate social media networks, marketers can focus on creating the content that works best for that specific channel and the target audience. Questions to consider include:
This is not about creating content for the sake of it. Think strategically about what you are trying to achieve, which should be clear after the listening stage, and then deliver content based on that. And, remember to follow the content strategy, content calendar, and lead magnet recommendations discussed in the Content Marketing chapter.
Listening is just one side of the equation. Once you have listened to your community, you will need to go out and build positive relationships that last. This is done by engaging your customers with content they find valuable. However, simply pushing out content and hoping that your community will like, comment, and share the content is somewhat unrealistic and unproductive. To get the best out of content and to develop meaningful relationships and trust, it is necessary to engage with your community.
Usually, the key to successful engagement is conversation. Engagement can take on other forms such as sharing, liking and posting and to a certain extent, your community will determine which form is most suitable. However, conversations lie at the heart of social media. It is a central facet: people want to talk to each other. This then leads to the following questions about conversations:
All these rules still apply to maintaining good conversations in social media. For example, although you or your organization may want to talk about your brand, it is best to avoid direct marketing and sales via social media as part of a conversation or dialogue. If it makes sense to bring it up as part of a conversation, feel free. But, remember, no hard selling!
In addition, to Cicero’s rules for conversation, there are three more pertinent social media conversation guidelines to consider:
Again, the secret to successful conversation and engagement will be to listen to your community and find out what it is they like to talk about and in what manner. Knowing this, you can have more impact when it is time to say something since you already speak their language and are part of the community. As part of your content strategy, write down what tone of conversation is relevant to your community. For example, do you want to be light and informal or are you required to be more serious and formal? Develop your conversational style according to your community.
Marketers should also be aware of the engagement pyramid and the passive majority. Not everyone on social media will engage. According to the engagement pyramid, the vast majority of a community will be passive. This means that those individuals doing the talking represent a small percentage of your target audience. The digital marketing team needs to be aware of this as it will affect responses to your content as well as engagement around your posts.
The key takeaway here is that 10% may be a rough guide as to the level of engagement to expect for your content. Clearly, this will differ depending on industry and how inherently social your product is. For example, a social media post about acne products might not get too much sharing.
Also make sure that you allow the most engaged members of your target audience to flourish. Offer them rewards and incentives for their hard work. Tell them you appreciate their efforts and give them something back in return. This could even drive user-generated content and/or competitions. Take, for example, a Pinterest competition created by Peugeot cars. In this competition, Peugeot posted pictures of cars to their Pinterest board showing tiny sections of cars. Followers then had to go to Peugeot’s Facebook page to find out which car the picture was taken from for a chance to win something.
As well as conversations, another key goal of social media is virality. Most organizations want their content to go viral. Many marketers have studied why a piece of social media content goes viral and there does not seem to be one definitive answer. However, there are some commonalities. Apparently, most viral content pieces tend to be in one or more of the following four categories:
Viral content can be a combination of any of the above categories but generally at least one is involved. However, from a business perspective, before trying to make engaging content, determine what is appropriate for your target audience. For example, while edgy and causing more buzz and reach, does a controversial video fit with your community’s sensibilities/personalities, your content strategy, and your overall brand image and personality?
During the engagement stage, marketers need to be aware of how to build and foster trust in their online relationships. To tap into virality and achieve massive reach, marketers will need to understand which content types are most likely to truly engage their target audiences.
Measuring is crucial to social media’s impact on an organization. Without measurement, marketers have no yardstick and no means of understanding whether their activities are succeeding or not. Through analytics, surveys, and content analysis, it is now possible to measure the success of your social media activities. Collate and collect all your data so that you can analyze how things went during the current cycle of the framework. In addition to your social media analytics and insights, you will potentially need other information, such as:
Once you have all the data, assess the success of your social media marketing campaigns and ongoing activities by examining how it all fits together. Review any lessons learned and optimize your strategy for the next iteration of the cycle. Once again, start with a listening phase to find out if there is anything new and/or what’s changed for your target audiences. For example, if you found out that one product was less popular in terms of engagement and sharing, you may want to focus your attention on monitoring keywords associated with that product in the next listening phase. Measure, analyze, and optimize your activities so that you can properly evaluate what worked and what didn’t. This is crucial for future planning of your social media activities. In the Digital Marketing Analytics chapter, we will dive into specific metrics and analytics more.
Key Takeaways
The six steps in the social media marketing framework are:
And, there are many types of social media networks, each with their own pros and cons:
Social Media Marketing – Additional Resources
Here are several articles and free industry certifications that provide more social media marketing details:
A pyramid-shape diagram demonstrating the engagement level of social media users with the brand. From top to bottom:
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Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
Mobile marketing refers to those activities that use and leverage mobile devices, e.g., tablets, phones, or watches, to connect with target audiences and to promote a brand’s products or services. Before diving into a variety of mobile marketing tactics and activities, let’s first develop a mobile marketing strategy. Your mobile marketing strategy is a subset of your overarching digital marketing strategy. This means your mobile marketing strategies should support and align with both your marketing and digital marketing goals and objectives. That said, since so many people are now accessing the internet using mobile devices, i.e., smartphones and tablets, a mobile marketing strategy may represent the core digital marketing strategy for a particular organization. This strategic decision will largely be driven by the target audiences and their mobile behaviours.
To begin developing your mobile marketing strategy, you will want to ask the following key questions:
Like other areas of digital marketing, content is a core element of mobile marketing. To ensure that your content is viewed, you need to make sure your content is optimized for a mobile experience. When reviewing your mobile content, think about the following areas:
Now, let’s look at several specific, mobile-optimized content options:
Responsive web design is about creating websites and webpages that deliver an optimal customer experience regardless of screen size. A responsive website will automatically adjust the content for different screen sizes, e.g., a large desktop monitor, laptop, tablet (vertical or horizontal orientation), and mobile phones. As the screen size increases or decreases, webpage elements will automatically reshuffle, resize, hide, shrink, or enlarge to make them look good on all devices.
Most web building technologies, e.g., WordPress, Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, etc., have responsive web design built right into their platforms. Or in other cases, these transformations are likely to be coded into your webpages by developers in conjunction with the design or marketing teams. As a marketer, if you are building standalone landing pages and/or other webpages, do make sure that they are responsive by testing and viewing your webpages on a variety of screens. For example, this can clarify whether your call-to-action buttons are visible or not before scrolling. To see an example of how one might rearrange a webpage to be responsive, here’s a great blog post by Kristina Kledzik of Moz, who walks through the fundamental processes to create responsive webpages.
Or, give it a try with this responsive landing page exercise:
An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:
https://opentextbc.ca/foundationsdigitalmarketing/?p=109#h5p-11
H5P: Responsive Landing Page
Remember our previous example of a Great Landing Page? Well, now it’s your turn to take elements from this webpage and create a responsive, mobile version.
If you want to create a distinct customer experience, e.g., a customer portal, you might consider creating a completely separate mobile website. However, managing two different website experiences will be more expensive and will involve significantly more time, work, and maintenance.
In early 2016, Google launched an open-source project and released the infrastructure for accelerated mobile pages. Accelerated mobile pages (AMPs) are essentially stripped-down versions of existing webpages that load significantly faster on mobile devices. AMP-enabled pages often remove elements like videos, ads, and animations and keep the most relevant content and images. For mobile users, not only can AMPs reduce the time to load, they can also reduce the amount of bandwidth required to view content, which on mobile devices is an important consideration. All of this sounds like a promising mobile experience.
However, to make AMPs work, marketers must use Google’s infrastructure, which has three key components:
While faster page loading times are compelling, there are several fundamental issues with AMPs
Given the above issues, AMP-enabled pages are being used less and less. AMP-enabled pages tend to work best for large media sites that have time-sensitive news / content that is primarily being viewed on mobile devices. As mentioned in our SEO chapter, there are many other ways to optimize your webpages and improve your SEO, while maintaining control of your webpages. So, you will need to decide if AMP-enabled pages best support your specific mobile marketing strategy or not.
Instant Articles are Facebook’s native publishing platform and are similar to Google’s AMP. IAs are optimized for fast loading speeds and allow users to stay on the platform to read them.
To address many of the issues mentioned with AMP, Facebook Instant Articles have added several features over the years:
While Facebook has done quite a bit to address many of the issues highlighted with AMP-enabled pages, there are still some drawbacks:
Overall, Facebook Instant Articles can be a compelling distribution channel for your content. That said, make sure it is part of your broader mobile marketing strategy.
Most advertising networks like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads, etc. allow marketers to target their ads to mobile devices. Mobile ad spending now exceeds desktop, which highlights the importance of this advertising channel. And according to eMarketer’s 2020 Global Digital Ad Trends, Canada is one of the fastest growing advertising markets with ad spending growing at 23%.
Digital marketing agency, Marketo, also stated that Facebook mobile ads were five times (5×) more effective than their desktop versions. So, mobile advertising can clearly be an effective alternative to desktop advertising.
Given that these ads are displayed on mobile devices, it may present more convenient and direct ways for potential customers to connect with you, e.g., to call you. To do this, simply use the “call extension” option, e.g., in Google Ads, which allows the person to call your organization directly by simply clicking on your call-to-action button or link.
Like other digital marketing ads, there are a variety of mobile ad types. Depending on your goals, target audience, and the platform, you will need to select the appropriate type. That said, the following is a list of the most commonly used mobile advertising formats:
SMS stands for short message service and is often also referred to as a text message. MMS stands for multimedia message service and includes text messages with audio, video, or images. Many brands, such as Starbucks, have been using SMS successfully to advertise their products and promotions and drive real results. Specifically, Starbucks has used an SMS holiday campaign to offer holiday specials, weekly deals, and cheerful holiday messages. Many SMS campaigns have been quite successful, but if possible do consider MMS campaigns. Like other marketing activities, providing more interactive and visual content can help get your audience’s attention and be more memorable. Set aside an appropriate budget and explore both of these underutilized options because they may deliver surprising results.
Location-based (also called geofencing or geo-targeting) ads refer to mobile marketing messages sent to a target audience based on their location. By tracking the location of the mobile device, marketers can send targeted messages to individuals when they are within a specific geographic area. Many ad platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads allow marketers to specify locations or geographic areas where their ads will be shown.
Mobile apps are programs that get downloaded onto your smartphone, smartwatch, or tablet. These apps usually serve a very specific purpose, e.g., email apps, social networking apps, or game apps. App-based marketing has risen quickly due to the increase in smartphone, smartwatch, and tablet daily usage.
Once an app has been downloaded, the app developer can communicate with the user via push notifications. Push notifications are messages or notifications that pop up on these mobile devices without the need to open the app. While these notifications only reach an audience of one, i.e., the smartphone user, they should push valuable information or insights directly to the user. To make sure that your push notifications are beneficial and not annoying, marketers should make sure their notifications follow these three tips:
The following types of push notifications generally perform well:
For more ideas, check out these 50+ push notification examples and inspirations to drive more engagement.
Now that we have covered what works, let’s review a few practices to avoid. Steer clear of these common mistakes:
When you create and send push notifications, think like a user, and respect their time and experience. The more you understand your user, the easier it is to keep them informed, entertained, and engaged.
In-game mobile ads refer to ads placed within mobile games, which appear during gameplay. The ads that perform best and deliver the highest conversions are those integrated directly into the game such that they become an extension of the gaming experience. These seamless ad experiences can improve engagement, retention, and conversion rates.
Many marketers have concerns about the effectiveness of mobile in-game ads. However, in this article, 4 Common Myths about Mobile In-game Advertising, author, Kori Wallace, refutes the following four myths:
Action codes include scannable, visual codes like QR codes or bar codes (see images above). In many cases, these codes are presented offline, e.g., transit ads, posters, magazine ads, or product labels, and when scanned by mobile devices, people are sent to a related, online landing page. One very recent use of these codes has been the rise of digital menus in restaurants during the pandemic. Many restaurants simply printed QR codes and left them on their tables. Diners could then scan the codes to pull up the restaurant menu and this avoided the need to print menus or navigate pandemic safety issues with people sharing menus. QR codes have also been used to verify COVID-19 vaccinations. Now that more people have been using QR, there may be even more areas where marketers can use them.
Reading emails on mobile phones is considered one of the top 5 activities for smartphone users globally. And according to a recent Mobile Ecosystem Forum survey of smartphone users in ten markets worldwide, almost five in 10 respondents preferred receiving business communications via email. So, mobile-friendly emails are essential in communicating and converting your target audiences. That said, marketers do need to provide compelling and valuable emails because if they do not, people will either delete or ignore their messages. In our next chapter, we will explore email marketing in more detail.
As you can see, there are many similarities between website and mobile advertising. However, to deliver a successful mobile marketing experience, consider the size of the screen, the communication opportunities, e.g., calling, the GPS capabilities, and the portability that make mobile experiences personalized, special, and unique. Take advantage of these built-in features to deliver richer and more interactive experiences for your mobile audiences.
Also, consider mobile marketing in conjunction with other marketing channels – online or offline. Success happens when all marketing channels support and promote each other, i.e., when your marketing activities are well integrated. Marketers are increasingly combining their social, local, and mobile activities, also called So-Lo-Mo, into one comprehensive strategy. Since social media is increasingly more mobile-friendly and mobile is targeting local customers and driving local conversions, the three areas work well to build on each other. This results in customer touchpoints across multiple marketing communication channels and strengthens a brand’s overall marketing and messaging strategies.
And, finally, don’t forget to personalize your mobile interactions and ads. Customers connect and respond best to personalized messages customized for them, whether that be by geographic area, specific location, or behaviours. For example, Best Buy and Subway use geo-location technology to deliver targeted messages to customers who have opted-in to their mobile marketing programs. Many marketers wonder about the willingness of their target audiences to opt into mobile marketing programs. However, a recent study by Google found that almost half of the women surveyed would share their location if offered a $5 store credit. And, that percentage jumped to 83% when offered a $25 store credit. So, with the appropriate incentive, marketers can encourage customers to participate in mobile campaigns and initiatives.
The following video provides a nice summary of many of the topics covered in this chapter:
Watch: What is Mobile Marketing? (2 mins)
Key Takeaways
Mobile marketing refers to those activities that use and leverage mobile devices, e.g., tablets, phones, or watches, to connect with target audiences and to promote a brand’s products or services.
Mobile Marketing – Resources
To explore mobile marketing further, here are a few additional resources:
15
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
Referring to our lead generation framework, email marketing plays a critical role in developing, nurturing, and closing leads. According to the Content Marketing Institute’s 2020 Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends Study, email marketing is the most effect content type in securing and nurturing leads and the second most effective in converting leads.
Let’s take a further look into a few key statistics related to email marketing that highlight why email marketing is often considered the content marketing workhorse in a marketer’s toolkit.
In 2021, 4.03 billion people around the world use email and that number is expected to reach 4.48 billion by 2024. That’s half of the world’s population; no other digital platform comes close to the potential reach of email. The latest Facebook statistics report over 2.2 billion monthly active users and even adding Instagram’s 1 billion+ users to that number does not compare to the reach of email.
And, in a recent Canadian Marketing Association survey, 81% of Canadians responded that they are comfortable receiving brand and company communications via email. In comparison, social media was in second place with 58%. What is also interesting is that overall, audiences’ receptiveness to receiving brand messages regardless of channel is decreasing. This highlights the importance of providing valuable and insightful brand communications and in the appropriate channels so that your target audiences read your content. Many people are now separating their personal and professional social networks and as a result, marketers need to make sure their content is appropriate for each channel and what their target audiences expect. Clearly, email is an acceptable digital marketing channel for brand messaging.
Another key benchmark to review is email’s return on investment. Return on investment (ROI) measures how much revenue every dollar invested in a marketing campaign generates. In terms of ROI, email marketing delivers one of the highest returns on investment when done properly. This is largely because email marketing can be easier and cheaper to create and distribute and usually the target audience is already a somewhat qualified audience, i.e., subscribers have already expressed an interest in your brand, products, and services. In 2019, the average email ROI was $42 for every dollar spent on email marketing, according to both DMAand Litmus. In comparison, Google states that for every $1 spent on Google Ads (PPC), businesses earn an average revenue of $2. This is not to infer that PPC ads are not as valuable as emails; their main purpose is to attract new audiences and build brand awareness. However, marketers should note that email can be 20× more effective when it comes to ROI.
And, finally, based on the latest email benchmarking research from GetResponse, the following email statistics are what Canadian marketers are seeing, on average:
An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:
https://opentextbc.ca/foundationsdigitalmarketing/?p=120#h5p-12
H5P: Email Marketing Campaign Calculations
Now, let’s practice calculating some email marketing rates …
The following metrics are related to a recent email campaign:
Given the above results, please calculate the following:
Even though we haven’t provided the specific formulas, try to calculate the following rates based on your understanding of the other formulas:
Please note that there can be significant differences in averages based on the industry, target audience, and most importantly, the type of email campaign sent. (We will review the various types of email later in this chapter.) For example, let’s look at the average email statistics related to “internet marketing”, which are as follows:
For more industry benchmarks and details, do check out the full GetResponse study.
Now that we have presented many reasons why marketers should consider and spend time on email marketing, let’s dive into the seven steps to launch a successful email marketing campaign:
Anti-Spam Legislation & Data Protection Laws
Given the global nature of digital marketing, the following electronic communication laws are important to note and have significantly impacted and influenced how email lists are obtained and who marketers can send emails to.
Key Takeaways
Incorporate your email marketing strategy into your overarching content marketing strategy, content calendar, and lead nurturing strategies
Email Marketing – Additional Resources
Below are several articles and an industry certification that provide more details and tips about email marketing:
III
Congratulations, you have covered the first two of three core sections:
In this final section, we will focus on analyzing and optimizing your digital marketing results and outcomes. To accomplish this, we will cover:
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Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to.
In its simplest form, A/B testing (also known as split testing) is the process of comparing two variations of a marketing asset, e.g., a webpage element, call-to-action, landing page, email, etc., usually by testing users’ responses to Variant A vs. Variant B and concluding which of the two variants is more effective (see figure above).
Many marketing departments rely on A/B testing because it is one of the most effective ways to tailor your approach to customers. While data and trend analyses are important elements in designing engaging web pages, A/B testing provides practical, tangible evidence of your most impactful marketing techniques.
Modern online metrics and analytics also make it easy for you to evaluate the results of your A/B testing. With analytics, you can easily monitor key metrics, including:
An A/B test takes a significant amount of guesswork out of marketing. For example, if you think of a new marketing approach that could improve your company’s performance, you can set up an A/B test and then monitor the data. If you’re right and the new option gets better results, you can move forward with your new plan. If the original technique still performs better, you can continue with your regular routine and think of different marketing approaches in the future. Ultimately, A/B testing helps you make decisions based on data. This way you know when a particular marketing tactic or campaign is working. Or, more importantly, when one is failing.
Since every organization is different, don’t assume that what worked for others will automatically work for you. When you A/B test your marketing activities and content, experiment with different ideas. This is useful because sometimes a small change can make a big difference in the results you get.
While not exhaustive, the following list presents several common key areas where marketers A/B test:
For more A/B testing ideas, here’s an article, 60 A/B Testing Examples to Get You More Conversions.
Now that you know what an A/B test is and several potential areas to test, let’s discuss how to conduct an A/B test. If you’re ready to begin taking advantage of A/B testing to find the best marketing activities for your organization, here is what we recommend:
For a quick summary of A/B testing, here’s a 4-minute video, What is A/B Testing? | Data Science in Minutes:
One additional term you should be aware of is multivariate testing. Multivariate testing is a technique for testing a hypothesis in which multiple variables are modified. The goal of multivariate testing is to determine which combination of variations performs the best out of all of the possible combinations (see image below).
Now that you understand what A/B testing is and how to conduct one, the following links provide a few frequently used tools for A/B testing:
(Please note that the tools listed below are all free or offer free trials.)
For more options, reviews, and pricing details, please check out this article, 24 A/B Testing Tools. In this article, they make the following recommendations:
The A/B testing software market is in a healthy place, with solutions for every size and type of business. Most of the options in the above list include a free trial (some as long as 60 days), so there is no reason not to try them for yourself.
Key Takeaways
A/B Testing – Additional Resources
Below are some articles with more details about A/B testing:
17
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to.
Marketing attribution is the practice of evaluating the marketing touch points a customer encounters on their path to a desired marketing outcome. A desired outcome is often a purchase but could also include other outcomes and actions such as a signing up for an email newsletter sign-up, downloading a research paper, booking a demo, etc. The goal of attribution is to determine which marketing channels and messages have had the greatest impact on a customer’s decision to convert or take the desired next step. Once marketers understand which channels and messages are most successful, they can optimize their efforts and budgets.
To make this clear, let’s walk through a fictitious scenario.
Attribution Scenario
Let’s assume that a customer was exposed to several marketing campaigns and marketing messages across a variety of marketing channels, such as:
In the simplified customer journey above, we see that a customer made a $700 purchase after seeing:
Now, the question comes up, to which channel or activity do we attribute this $700 purchase? Or, how much of that $700 do we credit to each marketing activity, campaign, or touchpoint?
Unfortunately, even with our current digital marketing analytics systems, it is difficult to precisely answer these questions. However, there are a few common industry models and practices that marketers can use to approximate the contributions these campaigns made to the ultimate purchases or conversions:
Let’s take a closer look at each of these different attribution approaches.
First touch attribution gives full credit to the first touchpoint in the customer journey. In the above scenario, this would mean that the marketer would credit their “Display Ad” campaign with the entire $700 purchase amount.
Similarly, last touch attribution gives full credit to the last touchpoint in the customer journey. In our scenario, that would give “Social Media” full credit for the $700 purchase.
The main benefit of this model is that it is simple to calculate and track. That said, it under represents the branding, influence, and sales effects the other campaigns may have had in convincing that customer to purchase.
Now, let’s practice …
An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:
https://opentextbc.ca/foundationsdigitalmarketing/?p=134#h5p-13
An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:
https://opentextbc.ca/foundationsdigitalmarketing/?p=134#h5p-14
H5P: First Touch Marketing Attribution Model
A customer has made a purchase for $625.
Drag the proper amounts from the various marketing channels below into the appropriate “Attribution Spot” to the reflect a first touch attribution model.
H5P: Last Touch Marketing Attribution Model
A customer has made a purchase for $625.
Drag the proper amounts from the various marketing channels below into the appropriate “Attribution Spot” to the reflect a last touch attribution model.
Even (linear) attribution recognizes that each touchpoint plays a part in the customer’s purchase decision and therefore, distributes the $700 equally across all the touchpoints. So, in our scenario, each marketing activity / campaign would be credited with $175 (= $700 ÷ 4) – display ad, organic search, paid ad, and social media. Once again, the main benefit of this model is that it is simple to calculate. However, when we think about our own purchasing habits, we know that each marketing message does not carry the same weight. For example, more recent marketing messages and campaigns, i.e., closer to the purchase date, may have more influence in converting the customer, which brings us to the next attribution model.
Once again, let’s assign a linear attribution model to the following scenario:
An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:
https://opentextbc.ca/foundationsdigitalmarketing/?p=134#h5p-15
H5P: Linear Marketing Attribution Model
A customer has made a purchase for $625.
Drag the proper amounts from the various marketing channels below into the appropriate “Attribution Spot” to the reflect a linear attribution model.
Time decay attribution gives the lowest percent of credit to the first touch, with increasing values as you move towards the last touch. For example, in the image above, the marketer has decided to credit display ads with 10% of the purchase amount ($70), organic search with 20% ($140), paid ads with 30% ($210) and social media with 40% ($280). Please note that these percentages are only examples. Another marketer in a different organization may choose to split up their purchase amounts differently, e.g., 5%, 15%, 30%, 50%. This simply means that the time decay model you use within your organization can be customized to best approximate what is happening with your customer journeys.
Let’s give time decay attribution a try …
An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:
https://opentextbc.ca/foundationsdigitalmarketing/?p=134#h5p-16
H5P: Time Decay Marketing Attribution Model
A customer has made a purchase for $625.
Drag the proper amounts from the various marketing channels below into the appropriate “Attribution Spot” to the reflect a time decay attribution model.
The final model assigns different percentages depending on where the touchpoint is in the customer journey. The starter (initiating) touch receives a set percent of credit for the conversion. Usually, this is relatively high since the initiating touch makes the customer aware of your brand and offering. In other words, without this starter touch, there would not even be a purchase. The closer (last) touch also receives a set percentage of credit for the conversion. And, again, this percentage is somewhat higher because it is the final “trigger” that got the customer to purchase. Player touches are those touches in the middle of the customer journey, and each receive a percentage of the remaining credit for the conversion. While player touches have not initiated the action, they do contribute to keeping your brand alive in the mind of the customer and should therefore receive some credit for that role.
In our scenario above, display ad and social media get credit for a total of 80% of the purchase amount and the remaining two campaigns get 10% each. Sometimes this model is referred to as a “U” attribution because the starter and closer touchpoints receive higher percentages than the player touchpoints in the middle. So, the percentage amounts look a bit like a “U”. Once again, these percentages are just examples. As a marketer, you can decide how best to distribute the purchase amounts across your marketing activities and touchpoints.
As you can see, there is not one specific way to attribute credit for a conversion. That said, what is critical is to be consistent and use the same model for all conversions within your customer journey. This means using the same model for all your marketing attribution calculations. While the specific model may not be 100% accurate, all marketing activities will be evaluated similarly. And, when a model is applied consistently, you can ultimately compare and analyze the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and activities against each other.
Let’s practice this once again:
An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:
https://opentextbc.ca/foundationsdigitalmarketing/?p=134#h5p-17
H5P: Starter / Player / Closer / Position-based / “U” Marketing Attribution Model
A customer has made a purchase for $625.
Drag the proper amounts from the various marketing channels below to the reflect a starter / player / closer / position-based / “U” attribution model.
Depending on your organization, you may want to consider creating a “custom attribution” model. This model may be a hybrid of the previously mentioned models or it may be a model that you develop from scratch. Please note that building a marketing attribution model from scratch requires a significant amount of resources and time. So, you want to make sure that it will be worth your investment.
You should build a custom attribution model if you:
If you are interested in delving deeper into attribution models, here is a 39-minute video, Attribution Modeling – An In-Depth Guide, that covers many more details about attribution modelling so you can become an attribution master. The video covers:
Now, that you know what attribution model options are available to you. How do you build one for your organization? Here are 5 steps that will help you identify and develop an appropriate attribution model:
If you are tracking your conversions using Google Analytics, the following tools can help. There are some key advantages to automated marketing attribution solutions. Below are 3 common benefits:
Some marketing attribution applications can also assist with inquiries often asked by executives and clients, such as:
The following list of marketing attribution tools offer either a free version or are inexpensive:
For an even more comprehensive list, please check out this List of 36 Marketing Attribution Services.
Key Takeaways
Attribution – Discussion Questions & Additional Resources
Discussion Questions
Additional Resources
18
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
A/B Testing is a subset of conversion rate optimization. Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action. Desired actions can include:
While A/B testing looks to optimize specific marketing campaigns or activities, conversion rate optimization looks at the entire customer journey and tries to identify areas along the customer journey where optimization can happen.
Sample Scenario
In the customer journey image above, there are two significant drop-offs in Steps 1 and 2. In Step 1, there is a 89.2% drop-off, which means almost 90% of all session are ending after visiting the homepage. From those that remain, 41% drop off in Step 2. This is concerning since there are only 495 sessions left by Step 3, which represents only 6.4% (495/7,777) of all sessions that arrived on the homepage.
As a marketer focused on conversion rate optimization, this would immediately highlight the need to reduce the drop-off rates in Steps 1 and 2 and look at what marketing could do to increase retention from Step 1 through to Step 3.
This might involve reviewing the calls-to-action on the homepage (Step 1) and in the Signup Step 1 (Step 2) or possibly tweaking the marketing activities and campaigns to better qualify those who arrive on the homepage. These tweaks may also require some additional A/B testing. However, the goal of conversion rate optimization is to maximize the number of potential leads that convert.
Generally speaking, there are four key areas that marketers will analyze when engaging in CRO:
Remember our conversion funnel from the customer journey chapter?
Let’s now review some results from a fictitious hotel and explore how we might optimize those activities:
An interactive H5P element has been excluded from this version of the text. You can view it online here:
https://opentextbc.ca/foundationsdigitalmarketing/?p=137#h5p-18
H5P: Conversion Funnel Calculation & Optimization Exercises
Conversion rate optimization takes a macro view of your customer journey and where appropriate will drill down and use A/B testing to better understand what needs to be improved and updated. For more details, review this article, Conversion Optimization Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide by Neil Patel.
As you can see, there may be many ways to optimize your conversion funnel. As a result, there are also a variety of tools you can use. The tool you require will depend on the area you need to optimize. Here’s a great article that lists 34 CRO tools split up into the following categories:
Some of the tools will be the same A/B testing tools in the previous topic. However, others augment and complement those tools and can provide you with additional data and insights around your conversion funnel and optimization opportunities.
Key Takeaways
Conversion Rate Optimization – Additional Resources
For more details on conversion rate optimization, please review the following articles:
19
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
In the Lead Generation chapter, we discussed the importance of setting your goals and objectives, for example:
When it comes to digital marketing analytics, the most frequently asked question by marketers is: which KPIs, analytics, metrics should I be monitoring? While this chapter will review several common digital marketing KPIs, each organization will have different goals and objectives. So, the most important analytics to monitor and capture will be those that help measure, meet, and exceed your organizational goals and objectives. That said, in this chapter, we will review:
However, before diving into what marketers may want to monitor or track, let’s briefly discuss vanity metrics. Vanity metrics are those metrics that do NOT:
In other words, vanity metrics are metrics that you cannot act on or affect. Often marketers will track metrics because they are easy to capture or are simply available. But if an organization cannot connect those metrics, directly or indirectly, to increases in the organization’s overall performance, those analytics should not be followed. In some marketing cases, like brand awareness, the connection may be indirect, e.g., by increasing brand awareness, the likelihood of conversion also increases; but there may be difficulty in tying brand awareness directly to increased revenues or decreased costs. Indirect connections are fine; they simply need to be understood and explained.
Ideally, digital marketers will want to quantify how an increase in brand awareness translates to better performance. For example, for every X number of people who become aware of our product and/or services, Y number of new customers convert. Most organizations are not at this stage, but once marketers start closely tracking their data and analytics, these connections and models can be developed over time.
Now that we know which KPIs not to monitor, which KPIs do most marketers track? Here are some of the most common KPIs split into a few categories:
General marketing KPIs are KPIs that should be tracked by all marketers. These analytics provide valuable customer and revenue feedback that influence marketing budgets, activities, and performance.
Example
In the following example, an organization split up the LTV and CAC values by paid advertising channel.
At first glance, it might appear that LinkedIn is the best marketing channel given that it has the highest customer lifetime value (LTV). However, when considering the customer acquisition costs (CAC) and calculating the LTV to CAC ratio, marketers can quickly see that, in fact, Retargeting provides the highest ROI because the LTV to CAC ratio is 3.69:
Channel | LTV | CAC | Ratio |
---|---|---|---|
Paid LinkedIn | $1,267 | $491 | 2.58 |
Paid Facebook | $831 | $534 | 1.56 |
Paid Google | $1,154 | $397 | 2.91 |
Retargeting | $886 | $240 | 3.69 |
As a result of this analysis, marketers can adapt future paid advertising activities and allocate their budgets accordingly.
Example
Suppose an organization had a revenue per visitor value of $1.50 in Month 1. Then, after a marketing campaign, the website saw an increase of 10,000 additional website visitors (compared to the previous month). Based on these two numbers, the marketer could argue that the campaign brought in 10,000 x $1.50 = $15,000 in additional revenues, provided the revenues per visitor remained the same for Month 2. If the RPV in Month 2 increased to $1.75, this increase in traffic would represent 10,000 x $1.75 = $17,500. In addition to the increase in traffic and revenues, a marketer might also argue that the additional, new visitors helped and contributed to the raise in the Month 2 RPV value from $1.50 to $1.75.
Another reason RPV is significant is because it represents the most a marketer should spend to acquire a visitor, without losing money. In other words, if a marketer were bidding on paid advertising, the RPV value would represent the maximum CPC they would be willing to pay to avoid an initial customer acquisition cost (CAC) loss. Once again, if the organization believes that it can recover a loss based on the customer lifetime value, marketers may be able to bid higher. However, as a rule of thumb, it is recommended to use RPV as a bidding ceiling.
In addition to general marketing KPIs, there are a couple of specific return-on-investment calculations that every marketer should understand:
Example
Your company spends $100 on LinkedIn ads in a single month which generates $600 in revenue. But the following costs are also associated with these revenues:
ROAS = Revenue Generated by Ad / Cost of Ad = 600/100 = 6 = 6x, 6:1, 600%, or $6 in revenue for every $1 in spent on LinkedIn Ads
ROI = Total Revenues – Total Expenses Related to those Revenues (Net Profit) / Total Expenses Related to those Revenues = 600 – (100 + 25 + 225 + 50)/(100 + 25 + 225 + 50) = 600 – 400 / 400 = 200 / 400 = 1/2x, 0.5:1, 50%, or $0.50 for every $1 spent on expenses, which now represents a 50% loss to the organization.
The difference between ad centric ROAS and ROI is that ROI is a macro metric that measures how a specific ad affects the organization’s overall profits, while ROAS is a micro metric that evaluates the effectiveness of the ad itself regardless of the impact it has on an organization’s profits. As you can see, it is important to calculate both these returns since something that looks profitable at the micro (e.g., project or campaign) level may not be profitable at the macro (organizational) level.
In addition to the above categories, there are also many channel-specific KPIs. Most of these have been discussed in previous chapters, but make sure you are combining these with the appropriate general marketing KPIs and organizational KPIs, as well:
Now that you know what KPIs to track, let’s briefly discuss preparing your digital marketing campaigns so that you can better track your results. One area many marketers neglect is creating customized URLs that can identify exactly where a click came from. Fortunately, there is way to easily create customized ad campaign parameters so that you can track campaigns using analytics tools like Google Analytics.
Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters can be added to any URL without affecting where the person clicking on the link ends up. There are five URL parameters that marketers can customize to track the effectiveness of their digital marketing campaigns across a variety of media sources. These five parameters include:
For optimal tracking purposes, all marketers should add UTM parameters to their URLs whenever embedding links on external sites or in emails. Then, when someone clicks on that link and lands on the destination page, marketers know exactly which campaign, post, or email the visitors came from, and that data automatically appears in their marketing and analytics tools.
How do UTM parameters work?
In this hypothetical example, we will be sending an email about a specific product to a group of active users. The campaign will not be sent to all email subscribers, but rather those the organization has defined / segmented out as “active.”
Within the email, there is a call-to-action link that sends people to the pricing page. Here’s the standard URL without any tracking:
If subscribers clicked on the above link, there would not be any information related to where they came from once they landed on the pricing page. However, here’s the same URL with four UTM parameters added:
Please note that by adding these additional UTM parameters, people will still end up on the same pricing page. These variables simply make it easier for marketers to track the specific source of traffic to the pricing page.
Let’s break down each individual element of this customized URL to really understand it: (colour-coded for illustrative purposes)
www.yoursite.com/pricing?utm_source=active%20users&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=feature%20launch&utm_content=bottom%20cta%20button
While you do not need to use all of the UTM fields, do get in the habit of using Medium, Source, and Campaign consistently. Many analytics tools assume these three will be used together. And by skipping one, you can create data gaps in your reporting. To easily create these customized URLs, Google has a free UTM Campaign Builder that will automatically build these URLs based on the descriptions and information you type in.
To see more about UTM parameters, please feel free to watch the following video, Tracking Campaigns with URL Builder:
Now that we have created customized URLs, let’s briefly discuss the analytics tools that marketers use to analyze and review the results and KPIs from their marketing efforts. Most analytics tools track clicks, webpage visits, paid advertising clicks, email clicks, SEO performance, mobile app activities, and much more. However, the main reason marketers use analytics tools is to track and understand:
The data captured by these analytics tools feeds back into customer personas and customer journeys, allowing marketers to further hone and tweak their activities to better meet the needs and preferences of their target audiences. Analytics tools are critical in understanding how people behave online, how to connect with them, and how to deliver what they want. It is specifically these key insights that make digital marketing so powerful in meeting, and hopefully exceeding, the needs and demands of today’s customers.
Here is a list of several common analytics tools that marketers use:
This is a short list of the most popular analytics tools, primarily from a digital marketer’s perspective. There are many more and for a more comprehensive list, please check out this article, Google Analytics Alternatives. Measuring results is critical to the success of any digital marketing activity. Through measurement and iteration, marketers can improve and optimize their digital marketing efforts and build stronger relationships with their target audiences.
Key Takeaways
Digital marketing analytics are critical to understanding your marketing performance and the needs / interests of your target audiences:
Digital Marketing Analytics – Additional Resources
Here are several articles and videos that provide more details about digital marketing analytics:
IV
20
Learning Objectives
By the end of this chapter, you should be able to:
The global pandemic accelerated the growth of digital marketing. With the sudden collapse of face-to-face interactions, both organizations and consumers quickly shifted their attention and activities online. Marketers heavily invested in social media, email marketing, mobile apps, websites, landing pages, blogs, webinars, and a variety of other digital channels to build closer and stronger relationships with more digitally savvy customers. As a result, the world of digital marketing looks quite different post-pandemic, and many digital marketing strategies and tactics are here to stay.
Given this acceleration in digital activity, what does the future hold for digital marketing? While always challenging to predict the future, there are a few trends and emerging behaviours that may signal what is yet to come. Here are five areas that will likely have a significant impact on marketers in the near future:
Due to the computational power that is now available, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and deep learning (DL) are playing a pivotal role in how marketers perform their jobs. To clarify the differences, artificial intelligence enables computers to mimic human intelligence. Machine learning uses algorithms to parse data, learn from that data, and make informed decisions based on what it has learned. And deep learning structures algorithms in layers to create an “artificial neural network” that can learn and make intelligent decisions on its own.
Programmatic advertising is the use of automated technology to buy advertising space. Instead of a marketer manually bidding, placing content / copy, and choosing the timing for a specific ad, programmatic advertising uses data insights and algorithms to serve ads to the right user at the right time, and at the right price. With these systems, marketers simply provide content, campaign goals, e.g., most impressions (brand awareness), conversions, etc., budget limits, and other campaign constraints, e.g., location, demographic, etc. and the system will optimize the campaigns to deliver the highest possible returns based on the stated goals / constraints. Since computers can monitor, analyze, and adapt to market changes quicker than most humans, programmatic advertising can deliver higher returns, greater efficiency, wider reach, and more ad placements. However, these systems tend to be more expensive, may not always properly match the ad to the audience, and there have been some online click fraud issues associated with programmatic advertising. As with any automated system, it still is important to review the results and to make sure these automated systems are best supporting your specific organizational needs and goals.
A personalization engine (PE) (also called a recommendation engine) uses insights from a user’s behaviour combined with data from other similar users to deliver a personalized experience. The content that is delivered to the user should be contextually relevant and match the user’s needs and preferences. Since personalization engines use advanced AI and machine learning-based algorithms to make predictions of what users will need, the more data these engines access and analyze, the more accurate their predictions are. PEs are frequently used for ecommerce to make product recommendations, but they are also widely used by media organizations, e.g., news, music, or streaming companies. Some of the benefits of PEs include:
While there are many advantages, PEs can be quite expensive and require time to setup and collect enough data before benefitting the target audience. Be aware of the significant upfront investment of both time and money before reaping the benefits of these tools.
Conversational Marketing is a way of engaging with your target audience via real-time, dialogue-driven activities such as live chat, messaging apps, or conversational AI (chatbots). The goal of conversational marketing is to create meaningful customer relationships through conversations and to make the customer experience as smooth and easy as possible. To scale conversational marketing, many marketers are turning to chatbots.
Chatbots can help automate some marketing communications and ensure instant and timely responses to customers. By making conversational AI chatbots an integral part of marketing initiatives, organizations can guide customers through the customer journey more quickly and potentially drive more conversions. Some of the key benefits of a chatbot marketing strategy are time and cost savings, increased customer engagement, faster response times, and increased customer data because the interactions are captured and can be analyzed and reviewed. On the other hand, chatbots do take time to setup and cannot completely replace humans. They work well for repetitive questions, information sharing, etc. However, they do not work well in dealing with emotions or nuance. So, a chatbot may only be a suitable solution for a portion of your customer interactions. For more details on chatbot, check out this article about AI Chatbot Platforms.
Predictive analytics use historical data to predict future trends, events, and potential scenarios. Many analytics systems are now moving away from simply reporting what happened to offering forecasts that can help users plan and prepare for the future. The most obvious example is Google Analytics 4. This version of Google Analytics launched in October 2020 and is using machine learning to give users more insights and predictive analytics, often related to improving conversions. Using machine learning to assist marketers in identifying key triggers for improved conversion is an area more digital marketing technologies will likely be focusing on.
65% of 25-to-49-year-olds speak to their voice-enabled devices at least once per day, according to a recent study by PwC. Whether speaking into their mobile devices or asking a voice-enabled device like Google Nest or Amazon Alexa, more and more people are searching for information using their voice. As a result, voice / oral searches will play a more significant role in the customer discovery process. Marketers need to think beyond traditional keywords and key phrases and consider sentences and questions that might be verbally asked by prospective customers looking for information, products, or services. Voice search has become a hot topic in mobile SEO optimization since users are embracing voice search when typing is either not safe, e.g., when driving, or simply not convenient.
Furthermore, voice search is no longer just about delivering information, but rather also includes voice commerce. Yes, people are buying products and services simply using their voice. Since the ultimate marketing goal is to deliver the right information, at the right time, to the right customer with minimal effort, voice search and commerce will be essential in meeting audiences where they are and in a form that meets their immediate needs.
To prepare for these emerging search queries, marketers need to start thinking about ways people might ask for information related to their product or services. This will often translate into longer search queries, i.e., more words. Make sure your content includes these phrases, questions, etc. Since this area is still developing, now is the time to experiment and to learn so that when voice search and commerce take off, you are well positioned to take advantage of the market growth.
Fueled by the global pandemic and the shift to online shopping, more people are also merging their social media activity with their shopping activity. Instagram and TikTok have brought new meaning to social commerce by launching several features that allow users to buy products directly from within the social media platforms. Since many people already follow brands, these networks are making it even easier to convert.
Brands are leveraging social media checkout and shopping integrations as tech-savvy consumers engage with social commerce more. To successfully compete in the social commerce market, marketers will need to explore influencer marketing, creative calls-to-action, and user-generated content. With over $350 Billion in social commerce sales, China leads this market. So, marketers entering this emerging commerce market may want to look to China for a road map and inspiration.
Even though marketers have been discussing virtual reality (VR) for decades, there are some interesting developments happening around extended reality (XR) and immersive experiences that should be noted. Extended reality (XR) is an umbrella term referring to all real-and-virtual combined environments and interactions generated by computer technology. It includes augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Augmented reality is an interactive 3D experience that combines a view of the real world with computer-generated elements, usually overlaid on top of the real-world view. Since audiences want dynamic, engaging experiences, marketers need to move beyond static text-based messages and provide more immersive experiences.
In contrast to virtual reality (VR) experiences, AR experiences can offer an immersive experience with little additional hardware required – often just a mobile device. This makes these experiences much more accessible to a wider audience. However, these immersive experiences all require significant upfront investments in time and money. That said, the cost of many rich media production technologies started off quite high. So, perhaps in the coming years we will see the production costs and capabilities drop to allow more marketers to develop these compelling and engaging experiences. Here is an example of a 360 VR marketing video:
As more and more data is collected and tracked, there will continue to be a tension between marketers wanting to know more about their target audiences and consumers wanting to protect their privacy and personal data. There already are concerns about the end of 3rd-party cookies in 2023 and the potential impact on advertisers. And as discussed in the Email chapter, data protection is being monitored by governments across the globe. As a result, marketers will have to rely on building truly meaningful relationships with their target audiences that are based on trust, value, and consent, which brings us to data ethics.
Data ethics is about responsible and sustainable use of data. Marketers will need to have policies in place that serve their audiences well. This will likely involve giving consumers more control over their data, providing a level of transparency, holding organizations accountable, and keeping customer data secure. As we all know, data is a powerful asset for any organization. Yet, with this power comes increased organizational responsibility to use it wisely, appropriately, and ethically.
Digital marketing has grown exponentially in recent years. With the emerging trends and developments mentioned above, the future looks very bright. There will likely be even more technological advances and discoveries that will spark, challenge, and drive new creative and compelling marketing experiences. As long as marketers continue to meet the needs, wants, and desires of their target audiences, it will undoubtedly be an exciting journey for us all.
Key Takeaways
While there are always new digital marketing channels emerging, the following trends and developments will likely have the most significant impact on marketers in the coming years:
1
Rochelle Grayson (MBA in Finance and Business Policy, University of Chicago) is the department chair and Professor of Marketing at Langara College’s School of Management. She is also the industry chair, program advisor, and an instructor for the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business Digital Leadership and Data & Marketing Analytics Programs. In addition to her educational roles, Rochelle is also an Executive-in-Residence with New Ventures BC, where she mentors growth-stage technology companies around their sales and marketing strategies. Rochelle holds a BA in German Literature from Swarthmore College, as well as Six Sigma (Blackbelt) master certifications in Product Development Management and Business Facilitation.
Because Rochelle straddles the worlds of industry and academia, she teaches using a global, applied and innovative approach. Rochelle has taught Canadian and international students ranging from high-school through to Executive Education and has received the UBC John K. Friesen Excellence in Teaching award. Rochelle has introduced simulations and courses in Digital Marketing and Social Media to both Langara College and the the University of British Columbia. Rochelle enjoys leveraging recent technological and business developments in her classes and is focused on preparing her students for the jobs of the future. Furthermore, as a trilingual, multicultural individual who has lived and worked in Africa, Europe, Latin America, and North America, Rochelle truly appreciates and brings a global perspective to her classrooms.
Rochelle has led and launched numerous innovative digital initiatives, working with a combination of both large and small companies. Rochelle is the co-founder of ArtSites, a digital marketing firm for visual artists, and is past president of Work at Play, a digital agency focused on community building and digital content monetization for large US entertainment companies such as MTV, Mattel, and Warner Brothers. Rochelle is also a past president of OBehave! Entertainment, an early mobile social networking company, co-founder of Elastic Entertainment, a digital media entertainment company, chief business agilist with Agile Business Strategies, CEO and co-founder of FlashLog, an early blogging and newsletter management system, chief blogger of FlashCommerce.com, founder of The Media Mavens podcast, and founder of VidCamp: a media 2.0 unconference.
Rochelle has been on the boards for the Canadian Women and Sport, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority, Canadian Women in Communications, Women in Film and Television (Vancouver and Germany), Computers for Schools, and New Media BC. She has also been a juror for the Canadian Media Fund and the Chair of Creative BC’s Interactive Fund. When she’s not teaching, Rochelle enjoys long 3 – 5 km swims, singing Jazz, and traveling the world with her husband of over 25 years, Geoff.
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