Introduction to Digital Marketing 101

Easy to Learn and implement hands on guide for Digital Marketing

Cecilia Figueroa

• Publisher: BPB Publications
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9789389328189
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing digitale
• Index: Business

Skyrocket your business goals with this hands on guide Key Features

• Online advertising
• Online marketing campaigns
• Mail marketing
• Website marketing
• Opt-in email
• Mobile marketing
• Marketing data
• Digital s trategy
• Consumer marketing

Description
Social media marketing has stemmed from people's communication habits. Nowadays, social networking platforms are essential in practice, even in marketing. To understand thechanges and transformations the field of marketing has undergone until now, it is important to know its origin.
This complete guide will help you start selling and marketing your business by teaching you both SEO/SEM and web usability. You will learn the analytical part of Google Analytics andonline advertising through Google AdWords. This book will introduce you to Web 2.0, and at the end of it, you may also want to make a career change to digital marketing!

• Have you ever wondered how you can work smart with products that offer a range of essential applications for businesses?
• What are the prerequisites for a successful business?
• What will happen if your company does not use digital marketing for your business?
• Do you know what are the newest and best technologies, applications, web tools, and virtual customer relationship management products that your competitors are using right now to work smarter and more efficiently?
• 
  What Will You Learn
  
• Design, organize, and monitor strategies.
• Optimize your website SEO.
• Create, manage, and evaluate Google Ads campaigns, and display advertising and payment campaigns.
• Integrate mobile marketing and mail marketing campaigns.
• Use Google Analytics.
• Improve the accessibility and usability of a website and UX.
• Stand out on LinkedIn.
• Apply Big data and machine learning to digital marketing.

Who This Book Is For
Anyone who, for personal, academic, and/or professional reasons, wants to learn the basics of digital marketing. It is also a good start for marketers who would like to know their audiences and define strategies that best suit them. Table of Contents
1. Define your audience: Marketing plan & value proposition.
2. Content strategy: Key process to improve content creation.
3. Use social media for your business.
4. Social ads: Make peoplethink and talk.
5. SEO for beginners: Title, URL, & CTR
6. Search engine marketing (SEM): Position your brand in the market (PPC & paid search)
7. Display advertising to target your audience: Facebook, target audience, keywords, & search terms.
8. Create a campaign with email marketing: Segmentation, email automatization, split test, A/B testing, & optimization.
9. Analyze what people do in your website: Google Analytics & Big data.
10. Launch your career in digital marketing: Digital Marketing jobs, LinkedIn, networking, Big data, machine learning, & elevator pitch About the Author
Cecilia Figueroa is an expert in digital marketing and specializes in tactical and strategic innovation to achieve maximum business success. With ten years of experience in the sales and business world, in 2016 she switched to digital marketing and has been designing marketing campaigns for American and European companies. Your LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cecilia-figueroa/

CHAPTER 1

Marketing and Its Business Importance

Beyond the size of your project, you will always need to draw some objectives and strategies without which you cannot establish and define what actions to carry out, or worse, you may carry them out, but without any order and meaning.

In this chapter, we will determine and evaluate the role of a company’s digital marketing plan and learn to design a marketing strategy around the customer journey.

Structure

• Begin with a plan
• The digital marketing framework
• Organizing your marketing plan to market your business
• Marketing questions

Objective

Specifically, in this chapter, you will learn how to determine and evaluate the role of a company’s digital marketing plan. Further, you will understand how to design your marketing strategy around the customer journey. Next, we will discuss the importance of delivering a great customer experience by understanding the customer journey mapping method and understand customer expectations. Finally, we will analyze the digital framework by using the example of Tesla for market dominance. This would help the reader deal with the basic concepts of marketing and its importance.

Begin with a plan

To start marketing in a business from scratch, the company has to establish some basic guidelines based on its budget and objectives. Depending on the type of company, its marketing channels may vary and adapt to its target. For example, Lego wants to start marketing and take an action plan to increase its brand image and clientele. For this it would adapt the usual and most basic actions in its sector as follows:

• Positioning and measurement: Before starting with marketing, the company must have everything ready to measure each one of the actions that are carried out. Positioning the website with keywords related to, for example, the bestselling toys, would be the first step to consider in the strategy. To measure this action, you should always have Google Analytics inserted in the code of the website. It is a very effective and free tool used to gather valuable information about visits and traffic received.
• Content strategy: Positioning is not achieved of its own accord. Opening a blog and providing relevant content for users will allow faster positioning and better quality, as well as offering an extra to the visitors. In the content strategy of Lego, two things should be taken into account. On the one hand, you can have a detailed and rich product file so that a potential client finds all the necessary information without having to leave the page: operation, recommendations, photos, even some videos are the most necessary elements. On the other hand, a content blog could present the novelties of the catalog, the sector, and tutorials on how to use a toy drone, for example, or lists of gift recommendations.
• Social networks: They are very important when sharing content. Having an account in each of the social networks gives visibility to the brand. However, not all networks are equally productive for all sectors. In the case of Lego, you can use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and even YouTube. Here, the company not only has to limit itself to publishing products and articles from the blog itself, but the company also has to actively participate in daily conversations, stay up to date, and get in touch with users who follow accounts. Launching paid campaigns on social networks with a large number of followers in a timely manner can also increase the reach and therefore online sales.
• Blogs in newsletters: If both your web page and blog allow you to send emails with offers and news, you have to create periodic newsletters to inform those interested customers. There are tools that allow you to generate them in a very simple way, and you do not need any excessive investment. In fact, they should not be too frequent so as not to tire the receivers. They also allow measuring the activity they generate and checking the sales obtained from emailing. A toy store and leisure products could get a lot of performance with a newsletter delivery just before Christmas, or on Black Friday.
• SEM and payment positioning: When we talk about search engine marketing (SEM), we usually refer to paid ad campaigns in search engines, although really, being purists, the SEM refers to any marketing action within the search engines, paid or not.

If the previous steps do not involve a large investment, SEM goes a step further to support organic positioning through the blog. It’s as simple as creating an account in Google Ads (which is Google’s ad platform for advertisers) and playing with the two types of ads they have: by keywords or by display. Although it may sound complex, the truth is that Google Ads has a very qualified and complete support service for the most inexperienced.

Once you start balancing these small actions, you are already taking a giant step toward launching a marketing plan. Little by little, the data you thus gather can help you grow your business and learn from mistakes to improve in each part of the strategy.

The digital marketing framework

Before the distributors, the media, the marketing agencies, and the producers were the ones who had the power of opinion (they produced commercial content without going too deeply into its suitability, impact, and opinion of the people). Now the focus is on virtual customers as they are rebellious by nature and only consume what they want. They just retweet what they want, visit the pages they like, do not dedicate even give minutes to content that seems unattractive, master the search techniques thanks to search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, and so on), make decisions based on reviews, comments, and ratings of other users, and so on. Such capacity for independence, obviously, means that any company has a double task before it to attract these customers, and in such a mission, digital marketing can fulfil the task of building loyalty and turning it into another ally. Now let us look into the history of digital marketing.

E-marketing or digital marketing was born between 1990 and 1994, coinciding with the launch of Archie, the first search engine. In 1993, the first selectable web advertising banner appeared. A year later, the first electronic commercial transaction in NetMarket took place, as well as the appearance of Yahoo!. In the next two years, smaller search engines such as HotBot, LookSmart, and Alexa will arrived on the market. In 1997 came the first social network called SixDegrees.com.

1998 was a year with several advances and surprises for the public: Google was launched, Microsoft introduced MSN, and Yahoo! discontinued its Yahoo! web search. In addition, the term SEO (search engine optimization) came about, which involves the positioning of web pages in search results by means of adaptation and optimization.

Before the end of the twentieth century, the concept of blogging was created. Only five years later, there were already more than 50 million blogs. Unfortunately, for many companies, in early 2000, smaller search engines, like SixDegrees.com, disappeared.

In the year 2000, Google created the Analytics tool that offers information about the audience, behavior, and data of your website, with the aim of obtaining conclusions that allow you to improve your page.

In 2003, the first social networks such as LinkedIn, Myspace, and Facebook were launched.

In 2005, Google searches began to be more personalized, based on search histories, in order to improve day by day its algorithm to order the large number of websites available. That same year, the YouTube platform appeared, which is currently one of the most used internet sites.

Between 2006 and 2008 appeared Twitter, the first iPhone, and Google Chrome.

In 2015, YouTube incorporated the 360° video feature that would provide a complete listening experience to the user. However, they do not yet work in all browsers.

As is clear from the history of this area of marketing, digital marketing is linked to the technological progress of both hardware and software.

Digital marketing has had a rapid and constant growth in the last thirty years, so it should be necessary to ensure that it will continue evolving in the same way forward and it is necessary that we are prepared to face and adapt to the changes that occur.

As it is a very complete strategy, allowing you to not only talk about your brand in different places but also allowing the client to interact with you, it is normal that the growth of digital marketing is triggered:

• The information is shared by social networks.
• Exchange of information takes place.
• It allows more specific searches of products.
• You can ask your customers to give feedback.
• It lets you talk about the brand freely.

The growth of digital marketing makes references to strategies that keep your products, brand, or service in continuous movement.

Today, there are still many companies and businesses that launch online advertising without having a clear marketing strategy or concrete plan, and they fail.

Businesses fail because of lack of marketing and lack of strategy, not because of lack of market. So, no matter how small or big a company or a business is, they need to develop a good marketing plan to be successful.

The options of digital marketing can be very great in amount. However, a good marketing plan allows you to sell products and services and effectively reach current and potential customers with success. But what is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a framework that includes all the market studies carried out by the company, the marketing objectives to be achieved, the strategies to be implemented, and the planning to be followed.

Frameworks are a standardized set of procedures and are structured through phases or stages for a better understanding of the complete picture. At the level of digital marketing, frameworks are usually used to trace the path that the user must travel to reach an objective (purchase, registration, information, download, and so on) in order to rationally approach this lattice of touchpoints between the client and brand. This will help you define which actions to propose so that the user goes through each stage of consideration (per-purchase, purchase, post-purchase) and finally reaches the objectives. On the other hand, metrics will help you evaluate the performance of each stage and channel necessary for decision-making.

Undoubtedly, there are different frameworks to promote a service and/or product, but all have similar characteristics.

The framework presented in this book is the customer journey. Marketers have used it for a long time to write persuasive texts and to convert visitors into customers. Especially for email marketing, this technique has been fundamental in the success of thousands and thousands of campaigns.

And it is not a secret — these professionals use customer journey mapping to write texts of their emails, advertising campaigns, and publications on social networks.

What does customer journey mean?

The customer journey is every experience that the customer will have with the brand when buying a product or service based on a need that arises and all the research and consideration of alternatives in between. This process is basically divided into five parts:

• Brand awareness: Information about the company or the product should be shared.
• Interest: The company generates interest in the product by explaining how it works and what are the benefits of using the product or service.
• Desire: The client is clear on what they are looking for and generates an emotional connection with the brand. In this stage, the terms used are usually long tail keywords, such as “luxury cars in the US”. Therefore, search channels come into play.
• Action: The company defines the persuasion actions of the public based, above all, on its differential value as a brand and on the resources it uses to attract potential clients (for example, discounts and promotions).
• Post action: It is necessary to plan in detail each step of the purchase process and define future actions in order to retain customers. In this stage, one-on-one channels become relevant.

Organizing your marketing plan to market your business

When a marketing plan uses the strategy of asking open questions (what, when, why, how, where, and measure and optimize), the mission becomes simpler and more interesting.

• What: In this section, you must describe what product or service lines are going to be offered and to which customers. Fo...