Diploma in Online Marketing, Sales & Digital Strategy

Keith Feighery

Agenda

• Summarize core concepts in online marketing and digital strategy– Owned, Paid and Earned Media

• Review critical components of digital strategy– Planning, Creation, Actualisation, Evaluation

• Look back at Online Marketing Tactics– PPC, Content Marketing, SEO, Social Media, Email

Marketing etc..• Review Analytics and Measurements

– KPIs and Metrics

Key Themes

Owned Vs Paid Vs Earned Media

Traditional Vs Social

Hubspot – Inbound Marketing Company view

Leveraging Owned Media Assets

• Recognise the value in your owned media assets – Websites, mobile applications, digital

conversations/interactions etc.• Brands/Businesses are becoming publishers and media outlets

– No limits to what an organisation can publish online for the consumption of their consituencies

• Become trusted knowledge experts in your business or sphere of operations

• Establish trust and develop relationships with customers and prospects– Be engaging, entertaining, educative, informative etc..– Allow user participation and transparent engagement

Owned Media

Content types

• The content and digital media on your Web site, other microsites, partner sites etc..

• Articles and other intellectual property or knowledge sharing –professional contributions etc.

• Whitepapers, case studies, webinars, podcasts• Blog posts, reader comments and reactions• Tweets, status updates• E-mail newsletters• Facebook/MySpace/Bebo fan pages and groups• Videos, demos, presentations, and custom animations• Product/service reviews• Forums• Content widgets

Who creates the content• Internally

– Find employees who are knowledgeable and want to write– Re-purpose content that has been created over time for different

media• Partners, customers and third party experts

– Publish whitepapers, webinars, eBooks, articles etc…with partners• Customers

– If you create a community you can allow them to create feedback, suggest ideas, generate comments, develop engaged community etc..

– You can allow customers to make product recommendations – crowdsourcing

Advantages

• Creates demand generation and awareness through value add publishing

• Creates a less-frictional way of converting prospects into sales– When used in conjunction with lead management systems

• Helps build long-term relationships rather than one-off sales • Creates stickiness to your owned media assets (rather than to

paid ones)• Once started, provides an ongoing process and framework to

control and publish valuable information

Content Mktg: Success Vs Failure

• Characteristics of Success– Understanding the informational needs of your customers– Knowing how those informational needs mix with your

marketing goals and objectives – Mapping content schedule to user profiles and buyer cycles– Being consistent (content marketing is a marathon, not a

sprint)– Listen and continually evolve the program

• Characteristics of Failure– Always selling, rather than informing and educating – Not listening, thus not evolving the content program.

Change is predicated on the changing consumption and behaviours of the customer

Changing Customer Landscape

• The relationship between organisations and customers has traditionally been optimised around the organisation, not the customer

• Companies and organisations have fallen behind in connecting with customers – they now realise that they must find a way to participate in these Conversations

• Customers choose to connect and collaborate with each other without the organisations, disrupting the flow of influence.

Social Media Landscape

Marketers must understand the dynamic of communities

Shift away from interrupt based marketing to a more conversational process

Risks Posed

• Loss of control of the conversation– Two way communication– Openly negative transmissions

• Using social channel as a marketing or PR conduit• Broadcast as opposed to engagement

• Can be a difficult persona for brands to adopt– Reveal a human voice of a corporate identity

• What it is that voice? • Starting – and then not following through

– Inevitable criticism

Benefits of social engagement• Listening

– Crucial to hear what the public is saying about you• Both positive and negative• Understand needs, behaviours, experiences, language patterns etc..

• Relationships/Conversations– Once you know what is being said about you, where it is being said – you can then interact

directly with customers (without filters)• Findability / Searchability

– Aligned with SEO initiatives creates a larger and more diverse digital footprint• Community Advantage

– Feedback loops, customer advocacy, relationships– Reduce customer acquisition costs (Media spend)– Increase customer retentions (Loyalty/Advocacy)– Qualititative research opportunity with customers – p

Digital Strategy

Digital Strategy & Planning

Source RedAnt.co.uk

Planning Phase

Planning• Define business objectives

– Increase awareness, increase reputation, create demand, educate audience, increase sales, augment lead generation programme etc..

– Identify and communicate to key stakeholders (buy-in)• Listening to what is being said about brand currently• Define audience and break down into key segments

– Influencers, Advocates, Personas – Demographics, Psychographics, SocialGraphics etc.

• Audience locations and value of each audience segment– Where do the reside digitally, what are their preferences, how do they

consume media, what are preferred formats• Aligning brand with digital strategy

– What is the tone, voice, perception currently presented

Goals and Audience Location Analysis

Source RedAnt.co.uk

Creation Phase

Creation

• Once strategy, audience, locations are known– Start conceiving, designing and creating tactical solutions

• Identify themes, channels, tone, aims for each tactical channel and initiative– PPC, Social Platforms, SEO, Email, Lead Gen etc…

• For B2B business map out buyer and sales cycles– Align marketing and sales organisations

• Create internal procedures and best practices for social channels• Initiate a content marketing production programme

– Map this out along with personas and buyer cycles

• Define KPIs for each programme – know upfront what success will look like (by corrolary failure too)

Mapping audience, solutions and projected ROI

Source RedAnt.co.uk

Actualisation Phase

Actualisation

• Real-time implementation of each channel, campaign and platform

• Engaging and interacting with your audiences• Reacting to issues and tweaking campaigns as they

proceed live• Constantly compare performance with projected KPIs

created during the previous phases• Create a cross functional communications feedback loop

to resolve all issues and update status• Capture all lessons learnt in a repository in order to

feedback into an improvement process

Evaluation Phase

Evaluation• Once Campaign goes live then measure the following to find the delta for

before and after– Online Traffic

• Traffic Volumes, PPC conversions, referral numbers, effectiveness of keyword usage, time spent on sites, bounce rates

– Levels of interaction • Comments left by users, number of Retweets, number of Fans on Facebook pages,

numbers of @comments in twitter, number of subscribers through email and RSS

– Leads/Conversions • create measurable and trackable conversion points in your sales funnel – sign up for

newsletter, make a purchase, click on a link, fill out contact form, download a trial version, whitepapers, attend webinars, podcasts listens, etc.

– Search Engine Optimisation • links from blogs, trackbacks, comments left in blogs, views of embedded digital content

that you provided, Digg links

– Brand Metrics • NPS, positive brand associations, brand awareness, brand recall

Evaluation Feedback loop

• Implement a continuous learning and improvement framework

• All findings and experiences should feed into subsequent phases, campaigns and initiatives

• Refine reporting process – Improve ROI metrics in their broadest sense– Continue to get communicate internally of sucesses– Educate management through correlation of digital

and business goals

Tactical Solutions Framework

Digital Marketing Process

Source eConsultancy

Pay Per Click Advertising

PPC Introduction

• Analyse your specific market– Use Keyword Tools

• Analyse your online and offline competitors– Trellian.com, Google keywords tool

• Create the PPC accounts– Google, Bing, Yahoo

• Divide the main account into sub campaigns and groups– Enables highly targetted Ad Campaigns

• Create Longtail multi-word bids– Over 60% searches use 3 or more words

• Set up a Conversion points and Track• Adjust constantly to ensure optimisation

PPC Tips

• Match your keywords to optimised and tested landing pages • Ensure you optimise your Google "Quality Score”

– Based on CTR, relevancy of keywords, ads and landing pages– High quality score means higher ranking with lower bid costs

• Tools and strategies to find the best PPC keywords– Google Adwords Tool– Wordstream– Keyword Spy– Market samurai– Wordze– WordTracker

• Write highly optimised and design ads to attract highly targeted clicks– Make sure landing pages are relevant– Repeat bid keywords in copy (they are bolded and increase CTR)– Clear Calls to Action– Dynamic Keyword Insertion

Affiliate Networks & Performance Based Marketing

Affiliate Networks/Performance Mktg

Search Engine Optimisation

Top 5 Ranking Factors

• Keyword Focused Anchor Text from External Links – 73% very high importance

• External Link Popularity (quantity/quality of links) – 71% very high importance

• Diversity of Link Sources (links from many unique root domains) – 67% very high importance

• Keyword Use Anywhere in the Title Tag – 66% very high importance

• Trustworthiness of the Domain Based on Link Distance from Trusted Domains– 66% very high importance

Next 5 Important Factors

• Keyword Use in Internal Link Anchor Text on the Page– 47% moderate importance

• Keyword Use in External Link Anchor Text on the Page– 46% moderate importance

• Keyword Use as the First Word(s) in the H1 Tag– 45% moderate importance

• Keyword Use in the First 50-100 Words on the Page– 45% moderate importance

• Keyword Use in the Subdomain Name– 42% low importance

• Keyword Use in the Page Name URL– 38% low importance

Social Media Campaigns

Elements of a social media campaign

• Essentials of a successful campaign– Know your target audience– Plan goals and aims of campaign– Prepare internal organisation for impact of social media – Identify stakeholders and task them with ownership– Pick platforms and tools that relate to your identified

audience– Implement a pilot programme and monitor and analyse

campaign progress– Revise approach and campaign based on feedback– Roll-out on different platforms and business areas

incrementally

Implementing a social media programme

• Benchmark existing stats– Current site statistics - PPC and Organic Search – Twitter followers, Facebook fans, Digg Links, existing traffic etc..– Quantify ROI benchmarks – customer acquisition, advertising spend

per channel• Design and develop the campaign

– Decide on channels– Stakeholders – Expectations– Pilots– Revision points– Monitoring process– Engagement process

Analysing impact of social media• Traffic

– Traffic volumes, PPC, Organic, sources, keywords, affiliates, time spent on site, bounce rates etc..

• Levels of Interaction– Comments etc… - engaged customers are quality customers

• Sales– Targeted Landing pages for specific channels (Dell generated 1.5M sales on twitter in 18

months)• Leads/Conversions

– If not possible to convert online – therefore create other mesaurable conversions• Links

– Video links – Tagged: YouTube, Vimeo, Blip.tv– Blog Links – trackbacks, comments, direct references– Digg Links

• Brand Metrics – Positive Brand Associations– Word of Mouth– Brand Awareness– Propensity to Buy– Brand Recall

Email Marketing

Email Applications

Best Practices

• Create segmented targeted lists• Optimise and test subject lines, time of delivery, from addresses,

email copy etc..• Deliverability

– Consider ESP products, Ensure using whitelisted IP adresses, Set up SPF records

• Clear Calls to Action– Ensure clear to customer what next step is

• Share with Social Network– Make it easy to share email content with networks

• Integrate with CRM system– Segment Database, Dynamic Contents

Best Practices

• Organic Opt-in List Growth– Don’t buy lists – when people unsubscribe – ensure they are

• Remind recipients why they are receiving mails• Be relevant and provide value not marketing messsages• Frequency

– Think relevancy – ALWAYS be cognisant of SPAM• Constantly Test

– Test Content, Images, Subject Line, Address, Calls to actions, placements, layout

• Template Design– Fresh brand centric design

Online Marketing

Key Performance Indicators

Measurement• Key Performance Indicators

– Measures that help you understand how you are doing against your objectives.

– highlight success, or failures, for the objectives you have created for your organization

– Keywords: Measures – Objectives• Objectives:

– Increase Sales, increase customer retention, Increase # of leads, increase share of voice, increase quality of leads to sales, reduce customer service costs,

Typical Trackable KPIs

• Number of Conversion• Cost per Lead, Cost per Sale• Bounce rates• Returning visitors• Recency Rates• Abandonment rate• Average order size (ecommerce apps)• CPA / Customer Lifetime Value• Average Revenue Per User

Additional Metrics

• 3rd Party Links – Partners, Referrals, Promotions, Affiliates

• New account sign-ups• Article or press release views• Newsletter signups• Page views per session• No. of site specific downloads – products, articles,

whitepapers, podcasts• No. of Webinar Views

Thank You