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EDITION 1 AT DIGITAL MARKETING
EDITION 1
AT DIGITAL MARKETING
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Rob Cornish Founder of Kuro Kin
Polo Lam Technical Director at Kuro Kin
Nikke Osterback Owner Saari Ltd
Andrew Forkgen Director at GlobalizeMe
https://www.linkedin.com/in/robcornish/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/theonlypolo/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikkeosterback/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewforkgen/
SUCKLESS:
EDITION 1 SPEAKERS
Ok, we admit that sounds somewhat creepy, but it’s true. The world’s biggest brands are using digital marketing to reach their audiences. It takes all the good things from traditional marketing, but removes some of the frustrations. There’s no messing about or ‘gut feel’ with the accuracy of digital measurement. We can understand exactly what works, what doesn’t and take informed decisions on our next moves.
However, it can also be a minefield of updates, new best practice and irritating buzzwords. Our digital marketers stay on top of all the jargon to make sure our clients get the right solutions at the right time.
So, while they are face down in Facebook, this guide will show the rest of us how to suck less and find out the basics of a really solid digital marketing solution.
DON’T BE AFRAID
EVERYONE’S DOING IT
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HOW WE DO IT...USUALLY
SECTION 01
When we start to look at a Digital Solution, we ask ourselves some basic questions. We’re about to spend money and, we don’t know about you, but we think that’s kind of a big deal. We want to make sure that we have all the information we need
before making any kind of investment. Of course, sometimes our digital boffins just know from past experience what’s needed, which is why we cut them such a lot of slack for having messy desks and wearing ironic t-shirts.
WHAT DO WE WANT TO ACHIEVE?
What is your ultimate goal? Is it to increase awareness? Generate new leads? Increase customer retention?
WHO ARE WE TALKING TO?
What’s your industry sector? In an ideal world what type of audience would you like to reach?
PLAN OF ATTACK
This is where we actually put the nuts and bolts of your digital campaign together. We know our goals, audience and budget – but what digital approach would fit this? Take a look at section two to see in more detail how we decide the right route for our clients.
HOW MUCH DO WE WANT TO SPEND?
Do you have a set budget? How long does it need to last for? Is it realistic against your goals?
PUSH IT LIVE
If you’ve successfully completed all steps up until this point, you should now have a Digital Solution that is ready to launch.
MEASURE AND MONITOR
We can’t overstress the importance of tracking performance. You want to know that you are making the most of your investment and learning from every campaign. Which leads us neatly on to…
MAKE IT BETTER
If things aren’t working the way you expected, measurement and monitoring is the only way to stop the fail. You can identify where you need work and take action. Sometimes it’s really obvious, like a tweak in audience targeting.
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FIRST WE THINK: THEN WE DO:
SECTION 02
Things always look better in a list, don’t they? Buzzfeed built an entire empire on the humble list.
Over the next few pages, we’ve broken down digital marketing into a few easy steps. And yes, there are some quite scary sounding acronyms ahead, but you’ll soon find that there are no black arts involved; it’s just knowledge and process, which isn’t all that exciting until you think about the potential results.
A CLOSER LOOKFINDING THE BEST
DIGITAL SOLUTION
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WHAT DO WE WANT TO ACHIEVE?
Create brand awareness
Drive a campaign
Generate lead
Increase digital presence
Improve customer retention
Increase sales
• Display advertising
• Video advertising
• Social advertising
• Display advertising
• Video advertising
• Social advertising
• Email marketing
• Social advertising
• Search advertising
• Email marketing
• Content creation
• Web optimisation
• SEO
• Paid social
• Display advertising
• Paid social
• Video advertising
• SEO
• SEO
• Content creation
• Influencer marketing
• SEO
• Video advertising
• Influencer marketing
• Content creation
• Display advertising
• Influencer marketing
• Content creation
• Display advertising
• Video advertising
• Influencer marketing
• Shopping advertising
• SEO
• Content creation
• Conversion optimisation
• Retargeting
• Landing page creation/audit
RECOMMENDED DIGITAL APPROACHESOBJECTIVE
• Onsite lead capture
• Conversion optimisation
• Retargeting
• Landing page creation
• Landing page creation/audit
• Landing page creation/audit
To be effective, you need to have an objective – or several. This neat, but accidentally inspired bit of poetry makes it clear from the start what we need to get out of our digital marketing.
USUALLY WE WANT TO:
• Create brand awareness
• Increase sales
• Drive a campaign
• Generate leads
• Increase digital presence
• Improve customer retention
Let’s build a picture of your ideal customers. This gives us an idea of how they spend their time online and how we can find them and talk to them.
BUSINESS OR PLEASURE?
Are you marketing a B2B or B2C business? This makes a big difference in where your customers spend their time online, what they’re doing and how we talk to them.
IDEAL CUSTOMER PROFILE
• How old are they?
• Where do they live?
• Are they male or female?
• What do they do or enjoy?
• What are their race/religion/orientation?
DON’T KNOW? ASK.
You should already know your customer base, but if you don’t, then you need to stop reading and do it now.
Survey them via email, phone them or hold a focus group. However you choose to reach out to them is down to you, but do it before you commit any money to marketing of any kind.
WHAT ARE YOU UP AGAINST?
When you know who your customers are, you can look at who else wants them and what they’re doing to take them off your hands. All marketers should conduct what we in the industry snazzily term ‘competitor analysis’. To be honest, it’s just snooping, but it keeps us ahead of the game.
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WHO ARE WE TALKING TO?
HOW MUCH DO WE WANT
TO SPEND?IT’S TIME TO LOOK AT YOUR AVAILABLE BUDGET.
First, go back and look at your objectives and put them in priority order. This will give you a better idea of where you allocate your spend, such as content creation, paid social or web optimisation.
Then your competitor snooping comes in. You need to take a look at what’s happening in your industry.
WHAT ARE YOUR COMPETITORS DOING? AND WHERE?
WHAT LANGUAGE IS USED? ARE THERE KEYWORDS OR TOPICS THAT STAND OUT?
WHO ARE THE FACES OF YOUR INDUSTRY? CELEBRITIES, TECH GURUS, THOUGHT LEADERS? (THESE ARE OFTEN REFERRED TO AS ‘INFLUENCERS’)
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PLAN OF ATTACK NOW WE KNOW:
GRAB A COFFEE AND BRACE YOURSELF, WE NEED TO PULL TOGETHER A TIMELINE.
If you’re just sending an email newsletter, you might not need the coffee, as it’s relatively straightforward to build and deliver. But the vast majority of digital solutions have many moving parts to consider before they go live.
Maybe you need banners, or a blogpost. Or SEO and PPC (which aren’t as scary as they sound – honest). This all needs time to pull together, and be ready to go live according to your schedule.
Crack open an Excel spreadsheet, talk to your team, set a realistic timeframe and put everything in one place.
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• What we want to achieve
• Who we want to target
• How much we want to spend
• What we want to spend it on
In a perfect world, everything hits your timeline with near-scientific accuracy and you approach your launch date feeling all zen and decaffeinated. We’ll be honest, that doesn’t happen often, but hiccups aside, you will push the button on your campaign, release web updates or start social sharing.
A metric is just a way of judging how well your digital marketing is doing. It’s no more or less complex than in traditional direct marketing. A few simple examples could be:
• The rate at which users are bouncing from a website
• The click through rates that a PPC campaign is generating
• What actions users take when visiting your website
• The number of impressions that a video advertising campaign is generating on social media
PUSH IT LIVE
MEASURE & MONITOR
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MAKE IT BETTER
No one has nailed the perfect digital marketing solution. Each one is as unique as the business it’s working for and changes as rapidly as your audience, attitudes, media and fashion. It’s likely that you’ll see some pretty nice results, but how do you make it sing?
This is where the real beauty of digital marketing comes in. You’ll hear it called ‘auditing and optimising’, which isn’t exactly catchy, but we can’t question the accuracy. You need to examine your performance for weak spots or problem areas that can then be quickly addressed and get closer to your objectives.
A FEW EXAMPLES OF HOW YOU MIGHT MAKE THINGS BETTER:
• Look at your PPC ads. Are some performing better than others? The more successful adverts should be used as templates to create new adverts and amend existing ones.
• Which pieces of SEO content are having a positive effect on your ranking for a keyword? If you’ve seen your ranking rise significantly due to one keyword, but only minimally for another, then it’s time to start creating more content for the underperformer.
• A website optimisation campaign may have reduced your site’s bounce-rate, but if you’re not seeing a rise in user action, you might need to take further steps. For example, adding messaging that directs visitors to sign up for your product demo or discount.
In Section 3 we look at some of the most common digital marketing problems and how to give them a good thrashing.
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SPEAK
OUR
DIGITAL GURUS
SECTION 03
No, we didn’t want to call them that, but seeing as they’ve helped put together this awesome guide, we thought we ought to reward them somehow. And they literally do not need more coffee.
WE ASKED, “WHAT ARE THE MOST COMMON PROBLEMS OUR CLIENTS ASK YOU TO SOLVE?”
THE TRAFFIC TO OUR WEBSITE IS NOT CONVERTING
“It’s not uncommon for a company to be succeeding at driving traffic to its website, but failing to generate value from that traffic. Instead of throwing even more money at digital marketing, the website should be optimised to ensure that as many visitors as possible are carrying out valuable activity.”
BUYER DROP OFF BEFORE COMPLETING THEIR PURCHASE
“Every eCommerce website experiences users who bounce away from the site before they complete a purchase. Effective use of display and email retargeting can re-engage a user and encourage them to complete the purchase.”
WE’RE NOT REACHING THE RIGHT AUDIENCE AT THE RIGHT TIME
“A marketing campaign that doesn’t meet its intended audience can be a waste of time and money. PPC advertising can be set up to run only at times when the intended audience is open to being engaged. For example, a buyer
of B2B services is unlikely to engage with an advert that’s promoting a new CRM system while relaxing in front of the TV in the evening. But the same advert running during the morning commute to work might have a very different result.”
WE’RE NOT REACHING SPECIFIC JOB ROLES
“Digital marketing has an amazing ability to target very specific demographics of people. If a marketing campaign is unable to pinpoint and target these, it will likely result in poor ROI. Paid LinkedIn adverts provide a great solution to this as they have the ability to reach a specific audience using job-title targeting.”
HOW CAN WE INCREASING LOCAL BRICK AND MORTAR SALES?
“Pulling in local traffic can be game-changing for a business struggling to generate sales in store. Mobile search advertising is a fantastic opportunity for businesses, as it can be used to display adverts specifically for searches with relevant local content and non-local searches within a particular radius.”
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BOUNCE RATE
The amount of people who land on your web pages and then leave without clicking to anywhere else on your website.
CLICK THROUGH RATE
The number of visitors to a web page who arrive there through a specific link.
CONTENT CREATION
The development of quality content that engages with users across platforms. This is also a method for targeting keywords within an SEO campaign.
EMAIL CAMPAIGN
An email campaign is designed around required frequency, e.g. whether it’s needed monthly or weekly. Emails can contain creative, copy, video, links and be distributed to a list of contacts.
EMAIL SEGMENTATION
The process of setting up an email campaign that sends personalised emails to users based on their online actions, e.g. website visits and eCommerce actions.
IMPRESSION
When an online advertisement is retrieved from its source and counted.
INFLUENCER MARKETING
The use of popular social media personalities to promote a marketing message.
KEYWORD RESEARCH
This allows us to source alternative terms that people use to find related subjects. Optimised keywords allow for better rankings within search engines.
GLOSSARY
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LEAD CAPTURE
The implementation of website functionality that turns interested visitors into leads for a business by capturing their information, e.g. email addresses.
PAID SOCIAL
This is the practice of running adverts across social networks, working in a similar fashion to PPC. The most popular sites considered within this are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn, all of which target users based on the information they share and the activities they engage in. These sites also allow users to be remarketed to.
PAY PER CLICK ADVERTISING (PPC)
PPC is digital advertising that directs Internet users to a website. These adverts run on a payment model that charges advertisers every time an advert is clicked on.
KPI MEASUREMENTS
This allows us to evaluate the performance of a digital campaign. There is a broad range of actions included within this that can be implemented, e.g. event tracking, call tracking,
eCommerce tracking.
LANDING PAGE
This is a page on a website that’s been created as a destination for a specific campaign. This could be a digital campaign such as a PPC campaign, or an offline campaign such as a trade show.
GLOSSARY
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GLOSSARYWEBSITE CONVERSION OPTIMISATION
Sometimes referred to as CRO – Conversion Rate Optimisation. This covers any activity that aims to increase how many website visitors engage in valuable activity, e.g. phone calls, form completions or content downloads.
VIDEO
Video creative displayed across a portfolio of websites and video networks, e.g. YouTube and Vimeo.
PPC RETARGETING
Display or video adverts set up to target users based on their online actions, website visits, specific page visits, eCommerce actions and more.
PROGRAMMATIC ADVERTISING
An automated system used to purchase digital advert inventory. Google AdWords is just one example of a programmatic advertising platform.
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION (SEO)
SEO refers to the actions taken to increase the ranking of a website in SERPs for a variety of search terms – terms which have been previously defined by keyword research.
OFF-PAGE SEO
This refers to any optimisation work that takes place away from a website. This focuses on building links to a website from other websites with a higher Domain Authority (higher SERPs ranking).
ON-PAGE SEO
On page SEO refers to any optimisation work that takes place within a website itself. This is made up of a variety of actions including the implementation of effective URL structures, an effective website structure and optimising website speed.
SEARCH
Copy-based advertising served to users based on the keywords they search within Google, Bing and Yahoo. These are displayed at the top and bottom of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
DISPLAY
Creative ‘banner’ advertising, displayed across a portfolio of websites, the categories of which are decided by demographic factors and keyword targeting.
SHOPPING
Adverts displaying products using both images and titles right at the top of the SERP.
THERE ARE MULTIPLE ADVERT FORMATS THAT WORK WITHIN THE PPC MODEL:
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