Planning, Executing, and Evaluating E-Marketing

Simple Strategies for Digital Marketing Success

The University of Texas-Pan American, Office of Continuing Education.By Alex Garrido, July 2015

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“Successful marketing in the 21st century is at the intersection of data and technology”

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We will cover

InsightUnderstand your

customers

PlanningCreate big picture report

ImplementingTake action and find

connections

OptimizingContinue to improve your

strategy

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Insight: Your Ideal Customer

● Surveys: Understand your customer's perspective of your business

● Online data: You must know your customers better that what they know themselves

● Expanding analysis: Use online tools to further analyze and segment your audiences

● Experiment: test different strategies with different groups

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Getting to know your customer

Pen & Pencil Surveys:● Work great to collect

information fast ● When handed out a

survey, most people feel compelled to complete it

● Hard to collect large amounts of data

Online Surveys:● An affordable option

where you can collect large amounts of data

● People usually ignore online surveys unless there is a strong motivation to complete

● Great for sophisticated analysis

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Google Consumer Surveys and Google Forms are two great platforms to gain insight into what your customers think.

Free for simple on-site surveys, paid option has robust targeting options. $1.10 – $3.50 per complete answer

for 2 to 10 questions

Free. Great tools for customization and can export answers to Excel for

further analysis.

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What to Ask?

● General Demographicso Age, gender, race

● Communication Preferenceso How often do you use Facebook? Around what time do you

usually check your email? What kind of posts do you tend to like/share in social media?

● FAQo What are some of the questions other customers like you

might have? What is one feature of X you would like to know more about? What other questions did you have before you purchased our product?

● Mindseto What motivated you to visit our store on the first place?

What would motivate you to purchase X more often? When you think about our Y product, what emotions come to your mind?

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“Customers generally can’t understand or accurately explain why they make choices in the marketplace.”-Roger Dooley

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Online Data to See Beyond

Customers might not be aware of the mental processes that led to their purchase/engagement.

Testing and evaluating different models can give you a better picture of what is happening in the mind of the customer.

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When asked if a baby picture could influence purchase behavior, most people said “no”. However, a research study concludes that

baby pictures are among the most influential images in advertising (Morten 2008). 10

Measuring Consumer Behavior

Here are some ideas on how to evaluate consumer behavior:● Time spent on web pages● The number of times a male customer visits

a store before he buys something● Types of images in social media posts that

generate the most comments● Tone of voice in different tweets vs the

average response rate● Background color in a promotional image and

number of people who interacted with it

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Expanding Analysis with Free Tools

Facebook and Google provide tools to further analyze consumer behavior online.

● Facebook Audience Insights: provides a general view of a specific audience and gives clues about how that audience generally engages in Facebook

● Google Keyword Planner: can provide valuable keyword insight (customer mindset)

● Google Trends: can provide historical data and predictions about general online trends

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Facebook Audience Insights

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Google Keyword Planner

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Google Trends

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Planning: Define success

Determine how you are going to define success.Online

● Increased website traffic● Website retention● Social sharing and engagement● Online ad revenue● Increase in online sales

Offline● Increased store traffic● Lower customer churn● Increased product awareness● Store sales

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Planning: the Big Picture

A good strategy to get started with a good digital marketing plan is the DOMINATE strategy.● Discover major strategies● Organize the data● Mute assumptions● Identify strengths● Notice weaknesses● Analyze and plan● Test● Evolve your strategy

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Planning: DOMINATE

Discover major strategies1. Gather as much data as possible to find the major areas

where your competitors are spending their money online. Look for particular and unique patterns, such as if they have a large number of Facebook likes but very few Twitter followers

2. Get as much data as possible from different channels. The more data that you can collect the better, since it might help to understand the overall strategy that your competition is using

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Planning: DOMINATE

Organize your ideas1. Data is useless if it doesn’t tell a story. Organize the

data in such a way that it allows you to understand the historical social media trends

2. Try to match the data with major events in your industry like major acquisitions, important events in the economy, and overall customer trends

3. Understand your company and what makes it unique. This will give you a general direction

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Planning: DOMINATE

Mute assumptions1. Even if you have worked for or with your current

competition in the past, try to avoid making assumptions. Do not believe anything that is not backed up by data. Use all the analysis and historical information that you have gathered to create a bird’s eye view of your market

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Planning: DOMINATE

Identify strengths1. Find key strong points in your competitor’s marketing

strategy. Look for unique patterns and noticeable strong points. Analyze projected website traffic with Alexa or look for major ranking keywords using SEMRUSH, look for unique numbers that show a particularly powerful/successful strategy

2. As much as possible, attempt to figure out what is working for your competition. For example, perhaps a particular niche is sharing with enthusiasm the blog entries of the company. Any major strength must be taken into account

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Planning: DOMINATE

Notice your competitor's weak points1. Once you understand the particular strengths of your

competition, take a closer look at their weaknesses. Even if they have an entire marketing department at their disposal, they have to be doing something wrong somewhere. With this mindset, look at their strategy and the data gathered to identify the “low hanging fruit”

2. Look at any market left-out by your competition, keywords that are not optimized, pages without proper structure markup, and dips in traffic or major search trends

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Planning: DOMINATE

Analyze and plan1. Analyze all the collected data and insight and take time

to create a cohesive marketing plan. Create a plan that takes into account all the aspects of your business where you can outshine your competition. Find the uniqueness of your business and the factors that make it remarkable

2. Take a few days off and let your subconscious mind process the information you have gathered. Then revisit what you have and start stitching everything together

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Planning: DOMINATE

Test1. Once you have a plan developed, create multiple

marketing/strategy groups and test them. Create ad-copy variations, different images, font-styles, timings/schedules, etc. Look for patterns. Gather and analyze as much data as possible to select the ads that do the best and discard those that underperform

2. Do not spend all your resources here, simply test for a few days or with a small group of people before launching the full campaign

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Planning: DOMINATE

Evolve your strategy1. Constantly look at the marketing plan and let it evolve.

Keep a close eye on your competition and look for any movements they make. Also, take great care of your own marketing strategy and continuously improve with a data-driven strategy in mind

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Implementing: Take action

Create a content marketing calendar and if possible consider some level of automation (particularly for static events/promotions)

Some great tools include:● Buffer App (Automation and calendar)● Hootsuite (Automation and calendar)● ContentDJ (Discovery and calendar)● Trello (Team planning calendar)● Google Sheets (Team planning and reporting)

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As machines become more and more

efficient and perfect, so it will become clear

that imperfection is the greatness of man.-Ernst Fischer

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Implementing: Take action

Do not be afraid of posting from your phone or tablet.For social media, imperfect, real time, and relevant updates

are more important than flawless robotic posts.28

Optimizing: Continue to Improve

● If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.

● Become familiar with online reporting tools like Google Analytics, Twitter Analytics, and Facebook Insights.

● There are several free tools you can use for data analysis and visualization.

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Remember Watson? He now works as a full-time data analyst.

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Optimizing: Continue to Improve

Here are some great tools to analyze your data and gain insight.● Watson Analytics (free and paid)● Tableau Public (free)● Tableau Professional (paid)● Google Sheets (free)● Fusion Tables (free)● Excel (free if you have Office)● Microsoft Power BI (free and paid)

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Thank you for your time!Questions?

Connect with me

Twitter: @MrAlexGarrido

LinkedIn.com/in/AlexGarrido

josse.garrido@utrgv.edu

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