Digital Marketing with Drupal

José Fernandes, Dries Buytaert

• Publisher: Packt Publishing
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781801075855
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Computer Science

Supercharge your digital marketing services by building your knowledge to become a skilled digital marketer with the power of DrupalKey Features• Apply proven marketing techniques using real-world examples of a Drupal development agency and an e-commerce store• Discover a checklist of nearly 300 must-do activities to ensure that no task is overlooked• Integrate Drupal with other third-party marketing applications and systemsBook DescriptionDrupal is an open-source platform for building ambitious digital experiences. With this practical guide to digital marketing, developers working with Drupal will be able to put their knowledge to work and boost the performance of their online marketing campaigns. Complete with step-by-step explanations of essential concepts, practical examples, and self-assessment questions, this book will take you through the most popular digital marketing techniques and how to apply them, including content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, SEO, SEM, CRM, and marketing automation, and the latest developments in website personalization and AI marketing. Once you've learned the fundamentals of digital marketing, you'll see how to apply them to your Drupal website or online store. In addition, you'll discover how Drupal can help you better manage your tasks and automate some of them. The book will help you discover the free modules available, how to use them, and how to integrate Drupal with external marketing-related platforms and services. By the end of this Drupal digital marketing book, you'll be able to build and deploy a complete digital marketing platform on top of Drupal to reach a greater audience and achieve online success.What you will learn• Explore the most successful digital marketing techniques• Create your digital marketing plan with the help of Drupal's digital marketing checklist• Set up, manage, and administer all the marketing components of a Drupal website• Discover how to increase the traffic to your Drupal website• Develop and implement an e-commerce marketing strategy for your Drupal Commerce store• Manage your daily marketing activities using Drupal• Get started with customizing your consumers' digital experience• Find out what's next for Drupal and digital marketingWho this book is forThis book is for Drupal site builders, digital marketers managing Drupal websites marketing and communication, digital or Drupal agency owners, marketing consultants, and anyone managing a Drupal website or e-commerce store. Basic knowledge of Drupal architecture and marketing concepts and related techniques is necessary.

Section 1: Getting Started with Digital Marketing

In the first part of the book, you will acquire fundamental knowledge about the principles of digital marketing. These fundamentals will be required to follow the step-by-step guide to creating a personalized digital marketing plan and to comprehend the second and third parts of this book.

This section comprises the following chapters:

• Chapter 1, Fundamentals of Digital Marketing
• Chapter 2, Building Your Own Digital Marketing Plan

Chapter 1: Fundamentals of Digital Marketing

Today, most of our lives are lived online, and most of our purchasing and buying decisions are made online. We shop online (even when it comes to supermarket purchases), learn and study online, work remotely, work out online, make friends, find entertainment, and even date online. As you have probably noticed, there's not much that isn't done online nowadays.

If you own a business, I'm sure you know that most of your customers have found you online, and if you are in the services industry, you already know how important this is. Even when a customer has met you offline, they have chosen you by word of mouth, which probably started online as well.

Have you thought about how you find out about all those services and products? How and what you find out about them is somehow related to marketing. Marketing is one of the key functions that all organizations must undertake—all organizations require effective marketing and advertising to succeed.

According to the American Marketing Association (AMA), "Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large."

In general, marketing is responsible for the following:

• Providing customer satisfaction
• Increasing demand
• Providing better quality products to customers
• Building a good reputation for the organization
• Generating profitable sales

However, marketing has evolved and has become digital as well. Digital marketing is an all-embracing term that encompasses all marketing activities done through digital channels. It includes all the tasks that are done online, ranging from social media to affiliate marketing.

This chapter will provide you with a comprehensive list of the most common digital marketing techniques and their core areas.

Here are the main topics we will be covering in this chapter:

• An overview of digital marketing and content marketing
• Digital marketing tactics
• Measuring your digital marketing success
• Digital marketing strategy

At the conclusion of this chapter, you will have learned how digital marketing can help raise brand awareness online, build relationships with potential and existing customers through valuable content and promotional messages, and increase customer retention and acquisition.

An overview of digital marketing and content marketing

Digital marketing has several advantages when compared to traditional marketing. The most important of these are outlined here:

• It's highly targetable.
• It provides real-time interaction with audiences.
• It promotes global reach.
• It's instant and has highly measurable results.
• It's cost-effective.
• It can be customized.
• It's easy to adjust.

At least for businesses, this shift to online channels has also brought some difficulties. The most crucial, and one that has the most impact on organizations, is competition. For each product or service, customers now have countless options only a click away—it doesn't matter where they are! How can you differentiate your product or service from all your competitors? That's where a well-thought-out digital marketing strategy can make the difference between a successful business and a struggling one.

Before we delve into digital marketing tactics, we can't go on without understanding that the marketing is happening between you—the brand—and the customer through some media. Next, we'll find out why they are so important.

Brand building

You must be cautious because digital marketing should always be about building and growing your brand. Think of your brand as your business's reputation; as you know, it takes years to earn a good reputation but only minutes to destroy it, especially these days in this always-connected world. A brand is more than just a logo or name; it's the company's promise to provide a customer with what the brand means. It's not only functional, but it also has emotion, self-expression, and social benefits. Your brand has many touchpoints—some of them are digital, and some are not. Think of each of them as an opportunity to increase awareness and build your customer's loyalty… and don't forget: what happens offline always finds its ways to the online channels, through customers' shares.

Here are some examples of brand touchpoints:

I can give you an example of the importance of always thinking in terms of your brand (reputation): suppose you need to get the world to know about your incredible new product. Your young marketer comes to you with an "awesome idea", and says: "I know a place where I can buy an email list with 50,000 business owners' names and emails! I can build an entire marketing campaign on top of that. It will be easy money!" If you don't give it enough thought, you may think that there's no harm in that. In order to get a list that size, you would probably need at least a year. So, why not do it? However, this example helps me lay out another marketing golden rule: "Think like a customer—your customer." If that was your name on that list, what would you think of the company that emailed you without you ever allowing them to do so? You would just think of them as a spammer, click the junk button, and hope to never hear from them again, right? Now, multiply this effect by many other people, and you can see the impact this would have on your brand, your reputation, and the future of your business. With all of your marketing efforts, you must always have your business and brand's long-term vision in the center of your mind.

Main types of media

There's one distinction that is important for you to know, one that significantly affects the way the digital marketing mix is implemented: the difference between owned, paid, and earned media. These distinctions revolve around what you control and influence… or what you do not. Consider the following:

• Earned media can only be influenced, never controlled. I think you'll agree when I say that one of your most important objectives is to have the rest of the world sharing how good your brand is, right? Also, because you can't control it, almost all the major Google ranking factors measure this type of media, mentions, backlinks, and so on.
• Owned media is in your total control and, of course, the most significant example is your website. Your owned properties allow you to spread information about your brand and build your audience, which should be the destination in your marketing campaigns.
• Paid media is the fastest way to get your message across, but you are bound to a publisher's rules, and people tend to give it less value. They know it's "just an ad".

The table below summarizes this:

Your digital marketing campaigns should usually incorporate all those three types of media. It's very unusual to have an online campaign that doesn't communicate on several digital media channels simultaneously. For example, a marketer can use content on social media to engage audiences, but that same content can also be used as a display ad on another online publisher site.

Who is your customer?

The objective of market segmentation is to filter out and categorize different groups within your audience so that you can deliver more targeted and valuable products, services, and messages to them. Simply put, customers of each market segment have similar characteristics that businesses can leverage in their marketing.

Your audience can be segmented into subgroups: geographic, demographic, psychographic, and behavioral are the most common and popular methods of segmentation. This helps you know which groups exist so that you can better understand the target audience. Geographic segmentation is the easiest to understand: it's just thinking in terms of where your audience is located physically. Demographic segmentation is also one of the most popular and commonly used types of market segmentation: it looks at identifiable non-character traits about a group of people. Psychographic segmentation categorizes audiences and customers by factors that relate to their personalities and interests. Finally, behavioral segmentation separates your audience by behaviors and decision-making patterns such as purchase, consumption, lifestyle, and usage.

The following table shows some examples of segmentation:

How do you get all the data necessary to segment your audience? Look at the following areas:

• Previous behavior: This is crucially important information, and one that you can get easily. What did your customer buy in their past purchases? In what kinds of products have they shown more interest?
• Personal preferences: The best way to find out what your client wants or likes is by asking. Through the sign-up process on your website, quizzes, and questionnaires that can be relatively simple and non-intrusive, you can gather precious data for yourself and for your business to ...

Table of contents

• Digital Marketing with Drupal
• Foreword
• Contributors
• About the author
• About the reviewers
• Preface
• Section 1: Getting Started with Digital Marketing
• Chapter 1: Fundamentals of Digital Marketing
• Chapter 2: Building Your Own Digital Marketing Plan
• Section 2: Market Your Drupal Website
• Chapter 3: Setting up Your Drupal Playground
• Chapter 4: Content Is King
• Chapter 5: Generating Website Traffic
• Chapter 6: Communicating with Your Customers
• Chapter 7: Measuring Success Through Web Analytics
• Chapter 8: Marketing Your Drupal Commerce Store
• Section 3: Boost Drupal's Digital Marketing to New Heights
• Chapter 9: Tools to Help You Be More Efficient and Productive
• Chapter 10: Taking Drupal's Digital Marketing to the Next Level
• Other Books You May Enjoy