Return on Engagement

Content Strategy and Web Design Techniques for Digital Marketing

Tim Frick, Kate Eyler-Werve

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135012922
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Diseño
• Subtopic: Diseño web

In the world of web design, if one wants to create a successful web site, one needs an effective content strategy. Return on Engagement shows web designers and developers how to implementan effective content strategy and how to stay ahead in the rapidly changing industry of web design. It presents best practices in terms of web design through a marketing function: content strategy, SEO, social media marketing, and success measurement to help web designers implement a strategy that ensures success for the site they are building. Return on Engagement shows web designers and developers how to not just design an aesthetically pleasing, functional website. This book shows those professionals how to implement marketing strategies and analysis into their website, thus ensuring its success.

Nearly 3 years since the previous edition published, new best practices have been formed. Tools in which web developers use to analyze website metrics have advanced. New social media networks and communities have cropped up. New research in how audiences read and receive content has been done, subsequently refining best digital marketing practices.

Return on Engagement features a step-by-step breakdown of how to use new tools, techniques, and technologies. The new edition also includes updated case studies of industry leaders who implement best practices on projects. Return on Engagement also features a regularly updated companion site that offers readers sample content, easy sharing tools, and web-based resources to help measure marketing viability of web properties.

Chapter One
Digital Marketing Strategy Basics

We’ll start and end this book with Climate Ride. This small, virtual organization, which produces multi-day endurance sporting events to raise money for environmental causes, has grown from an idea in 2008 to a vibrant fundraising community that has successfully used digital tools as a critical component of their growth strategy. With minimal resources, the co-founders set out to create a cycling event that could transform lives and raise money for a sustainable future.

Figure 1.1 Climate Ride’s flagship event ends on the steps of the U.S. Capital, sending a clear message to politicians about the importance of environmentally-friendly legislation.

Just five years after the idea’s inception, Climate Ride has granted over $1.5 million to their beneficiary organizations, which have a measurable impact on environmentally-friendly policy, nature conservation, triple bottom line business, bicycle and active transportation advocacy, and many other national programs committed to a sustainable future for people and planet. The organization has expanded their event offerings from a single multi-day cycling event from New York City to Washington, DC to similar events in California, the Midwest, and a five-day 50-mile hike through Glacier National Park, one of the areas in the United States hit hardest by climate change.

Climate Ride relies on its community of avid cyclists and environmentalists to fill their events and raise critically needed funds for these organizations. And they do so mostly through the strategic use of digital tools.

Figure 1.2 Climate Ride funds a sustainable future in several key areas.

Climate Ride co-founders Caeli Quinn and Geraldine Carter didn’t have much of a marketing budget, but quickly found that digital tools like blogs, social media, online forums, photo sharing, mobile apps, and so on would play a key role in fundraising, outreach and organizational growth. Cost-effective with the “viral coefficient” potential to reach a vast audience very quickly, these tools and tactics are critical to Climate Ride’s success.

The take-away here? With some knowledge, drive and resourcefulness, building a successful organization using primarily digital tools and strategy is within anyone’s reach. Climate Ride is just one example of many that have done this.

It starts with a solid strategy: big picture stuff, setting tools aside and focusing on vision, mission and messaging. In this chapter, we’ll define what it takes to create a successful strategy, then apply that strategy to multiple disciplines: marketing strategy, digital strategy, and content strategy. Then, we’ll outline the steps you can take to begin building out your own organization’s digital strategy. We will cover Climate Ride’s digital strategy and execution of many tactics covered throughout the book in detail in the last chapter.

Defining Digital Marketing Strategy

The web is infinite, your budget and resources are not. A good digital marketing strategy should help you make decisions about how to use resources to achieve organizational goals on digital platforms.

A digital marketing strategy should do two things:

1. Clearly connect digital platform goals to organizational objectives.
2. Define success, so you can make data-based decisions about when to persevere and when to pivot.

Of course, “digital platforms” covers an ever-widening array of devices, services and channels, each one requiring specific skills and insights that often cross disciplines such as UX, content, development and marketing. As a result, two primary strategic challenges in the digital field are:

1. Integrating multiple disciplines, including content creation, user experience, web design, web development, analytics and marketing, into one coherent digital strategy.
2. Developing strategy-driven principles, guidelines, and goals that allow for flexibility and extensibility.

Figure 1.3 It’s dangerous to go alone—take this book!

While digital marketing strategies will vary widely by organization, this book will lay out a set of foundational principles for understanding how to create a comprehensive digital marketing strategy that aligns with your organizational goals. We will also share a range of practical tips and tools to guide you through the process of developing and refining your digital marketing strategy.

The Pointless Land Grab

Figure 1.4 CompassX Strategy founder Nancy Goldstein

Marketing strategist Nancy Goldstein owns CompassX Strategy, a certified Illinois B Corporation (more on B Corps later in this book) that creates sustainable growth for passionate companies. She advises that organizations be clear on their mission, message, and values before diving into digital. Here is Nancy’s advice:

Marketing is dead. Everyone says so. In fact, if you Google “marketing is dead,” you will get 238,000,000 responses all saying that now, the only thing that matters is digital, keywords and engagement. To some extent, that is true. Companies can no longer talk at people regardless of whether they want to be talked at. Digital relevancy and engagement matter.

But in the quest for digital relevancy and engagement as defined through keywords, likes and shares, many companies have lost their way. Without clear brand objectives, this quest is really just a pointless land grab. Just because you show up as the first result for a popular-but-not-yet-owned phrase doesn’t necessarily mean it is right for your brand. Six hundred people liking or sharing your cat meme has little bearing on whether they will choose your brand or connect with you in a way that matters to you. Unless you are selling cat posters.

To ensure that the marketing actions you take are relevant to both your audience and your brand, consider the following questions:

• Does this action reflect how the audience you want to attract thinks about the product or service you offer?
• Does this action reflect how you want your brand to be known?
• What is the desired result of your audience engaging with this activity?
• How does it help you achieve your business goals?

Once you have answered these questions, your marketing efforts—digital or otherwise—will have more purpose and will be more likely to build your business in a meaningful way.

Elements Of Digital Marketing Strategy

In this book we cover three key components of a digital marketing strategy: content strategy, design strategy and measurement strategy.

1. Content Strategy

Content Strategy requires identifying specific groups of users, developing key messages and content based on their needs and interests, creating content optimized for the channels they use and distributing that content at a velocity that maximizes its value to the user.

The goal is to develop content that is valuable to your audiences and deliver it where and when they need it. Content Strategy includes the following components:

• Channel Strategy. Channels are any platform you communicate through, including websites, apps, videos, emails, games, IVAS, and social media: Twitter, Facebook, and so on. The goal here is to figure out what channels will help you best tell your story to a targeted audience. Channels that are most relevant to your audience will obviously bring the most measurable success. In other words, don’t open a Twitter account just because “everyone does”—have a plan.
• Messaging Strategy. Messaging strategy is the practice of creating custom messages geared at different target audiences.
• Promotion Strategy. Creating useful content is just half the battle—developing a strategy to promote your content tailored to each audience and channel will help you ensure that your content reaches your target audience.
• Governance Strategy. Governance and maintenance guides provide a structure to assess your content and resources, establish ownership and approval process, and ensure quality.
• Community Building Strategy. Targeting potential customers, oftentimes on social netwo...