The CEO's Digital Marketing Playbook

The Definitive Crash Course and Battle Plan for B2B and High Value B2C Customer Generation

Thomas J. Donohoe

• Publisher: Koehler Books
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781633939516
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

The CEO's Digital Marketing Playbook is the definitive playbook and crash course for both the baseline and advanced digital and direct marketing that every company on Earth needs to deploy in the 21st Century. Unlike the hundreds of books about social media or online advertising concepts, this step by step guide lays out every strategy and tactic that is essential to achieving the single greatest achievement in marketing: driving new customers and doing so profitably.

Every CEO, from startup to Fortune 100, needs to understand every concept in this book or risk bleeding money and opportunity, which 99% are doing whether they know it or not. Every marketing professional and small business owner needs to embrace the tactics laid out or risk being bad at their job of profitable customer generation and best practice marketing.

In just over 200 pages, every business professional can become a smart, customer generation focused digital marketer by following this playbook.

CHAPTER 1

THE ESSENTIAL GLOSSARY:THE AD CHANNELS, TERMS, AND TECHNOLOGY USED

STEPHEN HAWKING WROTE THAT “MATHEMATICS IS the language of nature.” As a once-upon-a-time crappy physics major who learned in his freshman year that there are people who are actually good at physics, I’d instead say the following: Mathematics is the alphabet of nature; physics is the language.

And so it is with 21st Century digital marketing. To understand and apply the science you must first learn the alphabet.

You must read and understand everything in this section if you want to foster and manage an effective and profitable digital and direct marketing effort. As such, I would urge you to not skip ahead unless you can buzz through this chapter and nod your head at everything listed.

The less of this you know, the less able you are as an executive to curate and call out bullshit—the two most essential and undervalued skills when building on new ground and striving for a profitable marketing outcome.

You must understand what each element in the marketing quiver does and what it’s supposed to do before we talk about what arrow to grab and unleash based on who you are, what industry you’re in, etc.

This will be in four incredibly essential topics, covering the things that are the beating heart and driving force that powers digital and direct response digital marketing. This is as essential to walking away with the ability to do real stuff as it is to wear pants to the office every day. We need to review:

1. We need to start defining some core, daily-used digital marketing terms, buzzwords, and acronyms with a brief glossary.
2. The digital advertising channels that are the main drivers to customer generation.
3. The type of creative (words, images, etc.) needed to ensure efficiency in striving for better ROI. Creative = anything a prospective customer sees, like ads or websites or content, which can help or hurt someone taking action. UX/UI (user experience, user interface) is important as well when turning potential customers into customers, but that’s for another discussion and is less low hanging fruit/large impact than the other topics covered here.
4. The types of websites prospective customers experience as part of a digital and direct marketing strategy. (Hint: it isn’t your homepage.)
5. The data, reporting, and marketing attribution concepts necessary to know what’s really happening to your marketing budget; what specific actions your money is creating and the value of those customer actions.
6. The difference between proprietary digital advertising and using pay per lead (“PPL”) affiliates and if your industry should care. (Hint: most shouldn’t; those that do REALLY do.)

But at a high level, we are going to focus on the MUST HAVEs in 21st Century B2B and High Value B2C customer generation across all industries. If you already are a savant at SEM or FB Power Editor (you can’t stop me from calling it that) or Google Tag Manager or best-practice Landing Page UX/UI, feel free not to read that part of the appendix when subsequent chapters refer to them.

After you know about each of the tools in the toolkit, we can then view all the things to learn and execute based on your specific needs, each tending to increase in granularity and digital and direct response acumen as we dive deeper into who you are and what you need. These will be the chapters in this playbook.

With both the short and the long term, there are strategies, marketing and analytics team behaviors, and tactics to learn to ensure you’re running effective 21st Century customer generation focused marketing. In addition, and more specifically regarding the tactics, there is the deeper need to understand the science, math, terminology, and most importantly the technology used in this brave new world.

But without understanding the terms and technology that underpins and powers every smart decision and every customer targeted and every ROI-focused report we read, you’re not armed with the ability to understand those whom you manage and the art and sciences they deploy.

Let’s begin with covering the definitions of the core buzzwords and acronyms used every day in the 21st Century world of marketing.

(1) A Digital Advertising Glossary: The Key Terms and Acronyms

ROI—I think I use this acronym more than any other because (a) I’m in marketing, and (b) I think marketing should focus on this more than do most businesspeople. While most professionals use this as a percentage, I use it both as a raw number and as a percentage, depending on the conversation I’m having. So what do I mean?

At a high level, it’s a close-enough proxy to gauge if a marketing campaign helped your company make a profit. Technically it’s slightly more nuanced, though I’d contend that the high level is good enough for most conversations. But specifically when I say ROI, I mean for the most part a slightly longer acronym: ROMI, or Return on Marketing Investment. This is absolutely unique to every company, but is different for every product or service line you offer, every unique physical location or online store you run. But it’s a simple piece of math, and let’s simplify it using a B2B example (as I’ll just use my firm and we’re B2B) though the math is only slightly different among the two different audiences in this book: The B2B marketer and the High Value B2C marketer.

In B2B marketing, let’s use the example of my company and let’s make it very simple. Let’s assume that all of our new clients are the same type versus the reality that some clients use us for full stack digital advertising only, while some use us for that plus web design and attribution modeling and call center work. But let’s assume every client of mine asks for the same thing. And this B2B scenario will be different from a High Value B2C calculation because while the agency costs are about the same, the advertising spends are higher because you’re trying to target more humans.

The basic equation as a percentage is: (The Increase in Profit) / (The Cost of Marketing: both the Ad Spend + Agency Fee)

The other way to communicate it is as a raw number: (The Increase in Profit)—(The Cost of Marketing: both the Ad Spend + Agency Fee). This, while not absolutely academically correct, is often used in business conversations far away from accountants and CFOs. It tends to answer the question of “exactly what did I get for all that fancy digital marketing work?”

Here is the example in a basis B2B framework:

And let’s assume that every new client gives us $25,000 on average per month in revenue to do our work. So our annual average revenue for each new client is $300,000.

In terms of expenses, let’s say that I spend $10,000 per month in Google and Bing, $7,500 per month in Facebook and LinkedIn, and $1,500 in banner ads. That’s going to come to $228,000 per year in advertising expenses. Now, I’m lucky that technically I don’t have to have a line item for an agency to actually do the work, whic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for The CEO’s Digital Marketing Playbook
• Title
• Copyright
• The Marketer’s Raison d’Etre
• Why I’m Here
• Table of Contents
• Introduction—The Kingdom and The Power of Digital Direct Response
• CHAPTER 1—The Essential Glossary on the ad channels, technology and terms. If you can’t speak the language, you can’t manage a 21st Century Marketing team. And if you think you know the language just because you’re a CEO or CMO, I beg you to reconsider and dive in to refresh
• CHAPTER 2—The Essential Marketing Strategy and Team Structure for Every Company: Your general foundation, philosophy, and strategy for direct response marketing, regardless of industry
• CHAPTER 3—The CORE FOUR Tactics— The “C4” for every single company selling anything to anyone
• CHAPTER 4—The ADVANCED EIGHT Tactics— The “A8” Long-term, Wholistic Marketing Playbook Beyond the Core Four Digital. Eight universal digital and direct marketing tactics that work together to allow an effective direct response plan to scale
• CONCLUSION AND CHEAT SHEET
• Acknowledgments