Digital Marketing: Sessions on Fundamentals, Attraction, Outbound, and Conversion

Posted on Dec 16, 2024 in Other subjects

Session 1: Digital Marketing Fundamentals

Digital marketing fundamentals: Digital Marketing: Achieving marketing objectives through applying digital media, data, and technology. Digital Media Channels: Online communication techniques to achieve awareness, familiarity, favorability, and to influence in purchase.

Three main types:

• Paid Media: Investment for visitors, reach, or conversions through search. (Social Media Ads: Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn ads targeting specific demographics.)
• Owned Media: Websites, blogs, email list, mobile apps or their social presence on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter.(Website: Your company’s homepage, blog, and landing pages.)
• Earned Media: Increase of awareness about a Brand gained organically + word of mouth (Social Media Shares: A user shares your blog post or product review).

Micro and Macro Environment

• Micro-environment:
  • Operating environment
  • Players shape the trading environment
  • Customers: needs and wants are to be satisfied, along with the competitors, intermediaries, and suppliers
  • Businesses have to understand the behavior of players in order to build an effective digital marketing strategy

In the Digital Micro-Environment main elements of the online Marketplace map:

1. Customer segments: The marketplace analysis helps identify and outline different target segments. Consumer Personas.
2. Search intermediaries: Google, Bing, Yahoo!
3. Intermediaries: Influencers, media sites, social networks attract visitors to websites.
4. Destination sites and platforms: Sites that the marketer is trying to attract visitors to.

• Macro-environment:
  • External forces that can significantly affect success.
  • Economic conditions, changes to international trade legislation, technological developments, social changes, and political interventions.

Buyer persona: A buyer persona is a semi-fictional profile that represents your ideal customer, created using market research and actual data about your current customers. It includes key details such as demographics, behavior patterns, motivations, and goals, offering a clear understanding of the target audience.

• Can help understand online customer characteristics and behavior
• Create communications more relevant to your audience.
• Developing customer-centered online strategies,
• Enhance user experience
• Understand different sets or groups of consumers

Buying process – stages

• Need/problem recognition: Consumer is unaware and the company generates awareness. Generating awareness of need is achieved principally through the mass media used in offline advertising. However, display advertising or paid search marketing can be used to supplement offline awareness-building.
• Information search: Once a consumer is aware of a need they may turn straight to the web to start identifying the range of features available from a particular type of product using a generic search on search engines such as Google.
• Consumer: supplier search. Company: generate leads (engage and capture interest) (not in the map): Once customers are actively searching for products, the Internet marketer must consider the methods that a customer will choose for searching and ensure that the company or its product is featured prominently on these sites, whether they are search engines, aggregators, or affiliate intermediaries
• Evaluation of alternatives: Consumer evaluates and selects, and the company assists in the purchase decision. Websites carry a large amount of content at relatively low cost by providing relevant information.
• Purchase decision: Consumer purchases and the Company facilitates purchase. Once a customer has decided to purchase, the website should enable credit card mechanisms with the choice to place the order by phone or mail. Security guarantees, delivery choices, and free delivery offers, for example, can help increase conversion rates.
• Post-purchase evaluation: Consumer post-purchase evaluation and feedback and Company support product use and retain business. Retaining customers (fidelization).

Inbound and outbound – differences

Lead: A lead is a person or entity that has shown interest in a company’s product or service, often by providing their contact information or engaging with the business in some way. Adding that they are potential customers who may convert into paying clients

Session 2: Attraction – Inbound

Inbound Marketing vs. Outbound Marketing

Inbound Marketing

• Pulls interested readers in
• Solves consumers’ needs
• Interactive with readers
• As helpful content is consumed, audience members become leads
• Where you see it: websites, blogs, eBooks, emails, social media.

Outbound Marketing

• Pushes messaging at everyone
• Written to sell products
• One-way communication
• Disrupts whatever content is being consumed
• Where you see it: TV ads, billboards, pop-up internet ads, telemarketing, magazines

Blogs use in inbound marketing

• Keep Your Audience Engaged and Share Relevant, Helpful Content: It helps you with the multimedia representation of your company, keeps the audience interested, and promotes your company.
• Promote the Idea of a Community Centered Around Your Organization: Reach a wider audience and build a community around your posts, insights, and your perspective.
• Build Your Brand and Increase Thought Leadership: It allows you to share your perspective with your audience in a new way.
• Attract New Prospects and Clients: Blogging and posting relevant content increase traffic to your website.

Content marketing – what is and characteristics – types

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience with the purpose of driving profitable customer action. Characteristics:

• It is focused on the values of the brand, not on its products or its services.
• It seeks to generate conversation and notoriety around the brand.
• Generates added value for the user.
• Appeals to emotions.
• It uses storytelling.
• It can be presented through multiple formats and channels

Types:

• Infographics
• Websites
• Podcasts
• Webinars
• Videos
• E-Books

SEO what it is: A set of practices designed to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results and is essential for improving the quality and quantity of traffic to your website.

How the Google universe works:

How users search in the search engine bar: need – search – result

How SEO works: Search engines use an algorithm or set of rules to determine what pages to show. These algorithms are extremely complex, and take into account hundreds of different ranking factors to determine the rankings of their SERPs.
Links – a link can be seen as a vote of quality from other websites, since website owners are unlikely to link to other sites that are of poor quality.
Content – analyze the content of a webpage to determine if it would be relevant for given search query.
Page structure – The third core component of SEO is page structure. Because webpages are written in HTML, how the HTML code is structured can impact a search engine’s ability to evaluate a page.

Keywords – what are they: A word or a group of words an Internet user uses to perform a search in a search engine or search bar

Types: Middle Tail: moderately competitive key terms consisting of two to three words, for example, ‘leisure centers Valencia’.
less competitors – more conversion- less traffic. Long Tail: keywords or keyphrases that are more specific – and usually longer – than more commonly used keywords.
A lot less competitors – much more conversion-a lot less traffic.

Keyword research: Is the process by which you research popular search terms people type into search engines like Google, and include them strategically in your content so that your content appears higher on a search engine results page (SERP)

SEO on page – what is: Technique that is used for optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic in search engines and you can work to improve these factors over time by following best practices for SEO.

HTML:

• Connects pages in a website or group of websites.
• It is a markup language that defines the structure of your content. (not a programming language)
• It helps a browser understand the structure and style of a document or files for viewing over the internet
• Provides the structure or the way text, pictures, and so on will appear on the website.

SEO off page – what is – backlinks – Refers to all optimization efforts made outside your own website to improve its rankings on search engine results pages (SERPs). It focuses on building your website’s authority, trustworthiness, and relevance

Backlinks: Are links from other websites pointing to your site and are viewed as ”votes of confidence” from other websites

Tools for inbound: Hubspot: premium content management software to create a website that ensures
businesses convert leads into customers. Salespanel: creates a centralized location for companies to monitor all marketing activities and measure results, identify website visitors, capture and aggregate leads from different marketing channels, monitor customer behavior and qualify leads. Google Analytics: gives you without any payment the tools you need to keep track of your website or social network by providing info about the traffic on them, helps your website understand customer journey and improve ROI.

Session 3: Outbound

Outbound – what is: Consists of various marketing strategies that simultaneously target a large spectrum of people. Is seen as a more intrusive method because is an interruptive form of marketing where you push a message or product out to a prospect through cold calls, cold emails, direct mail

Paid media – example: External marketing efforts that involve a paid placement and is an essential component of revenue growth and brand awareness for online businesses. Examples: pay per click ads, paid social media ads, SEM

SEM – what is: Stands for Search Engine Marketing, a form of digital marketing focused on increasing the visibility of websites through paid advertising

• How it works: Brands pay to show their ads at the top of search results on platforms like Google. They choose specific words or phrases (keywords) that people might search for. When someone searches using those keywords, the brand’s ad appears, helping them get noticed by potential customers.
• Concepts:
  • Clicks: The redirections that my ad has had to my website
  • CTR: (click-through rate) percentage of people who have seen my advertisement and clicked on it. Less than 2% is not enough
  • CPC: Cost per click
  • Relevance: Relevance to the user. If it is +5% its high
  • Quality score: Score that google gives us from one to ten for each of the keywords that we buy, if its good enough google reward you by making you pay less for your advertisement comparing to your competition.

Affiliate marketing – what is: Concept 1: Is an advertising model in which a company compensates third-party publishers to generate traffic or leads to the company’s products and services.

Concept 2: An affiliate program (also called an associate program) is an agreement in which an advertiser pays a publisher or influencer (the affiliate) a commission for bringing them sales

Programmatic ads

Concept 1: Is a way to automatically buy and optimize digital campaigns, rather than buying directly from publishers, the use of software to buy digital advertising

Concept 2: Advanced marketing strategy that uses an automated, real-time bidding process that purchases ad inventory for you, allowing you to advertise to specific users in specific contexts. Platforms: google ad manager, open x, adobe marketing cloud.

Native ads: Type of advertisement designed to blend seamlessly into the content and style of the platform where they appear, making them look like a natural part of the user experience.

Cookies – what are they: Cookies are temporary files stored in your browser by websites to remember your interactions and improve your future visits. They help websites access information about your online activity to personalize your experience

• How it Works: When you access a page for the first time, a cookie is downloaded and stored in your browser. If you return, the site will look for a cookie that has your name in it. By finding it, it will be able to facilitate navigation because it has recognized you, adapting the information that appears on your screen according to your previous interactions on the site.
• Types:
  • Own: Are those generated directly by the website.
  • Third-party cookies: Are those that are not generated by the site being visited, but originate from external servers.

Session 4: Benchmarking – Growth Hacking – Conversion Rate Optimization

Lead nurturing – what is: The process of building and strengthening connections with customers throughout every phase of the sales funnel

Lead scoring – what is: Is a methodology to determine the worthiness of leads, or potential customers, by attaching values to them based on their behavior relating to their interest in products or services

Differences between MQL and SQL: While a sales qualified lead has been researched and vetted by your marketing department and is ready to talk to your sales department, a marketing qualified lead is a lead who has engaged with your company and could become a customer if nurtured correctly. An MQL becomes an SQL once they’re ready to talk to the sales team

Benchmarking – concept: Is the process of comparing a company’s performance, products, or processes against industry standards or competitors to identify areas for improvement

• Process:

Growth hacking: Refers to a process of blending marketing, product and data strategies, alongside experimentation, to pinpoint the most effective ways to drive business growth. Example greatest growth hackings: Paypal, Airbnb, Dropbox

CRO – what is: Concept 1: Is the process of creating an experience for your website visitors that’ll convert them into customers. Concept 2: Is the practice of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action on a website

• How to increase it:
  • Improve website speed
  • Enhance user experience
  • High-quality visuals and clear call to actions
  • Leverage social proof

Web architecture: Your site’s architecture focuses on building a platform that is easier for your users to navigate. Extra info:

• Google loves a site with clearly defined architecture that’s easy to crawl and index.
• But if you stopped your site architecture planning with just your SEO, then you’ve missed out on the greater picture.
• Site architecture isn’t just an effort to game search engines into ranking your site higher.

UX: Is a design process whose sole objective is to design a system that offers a great experience to its users

Accessibility: Measures the access to Web sites for everyone. The abilities of people to access resources on the Internet and the technologies they use are both of importance

Usability: Strategy to make the website easy to navigate; enabling visitors to quickly find what they are searching for.

Differences between the 3:

Usability is a measure of how easy it is to use a site, while
accessibility relates to whether the site can be accessed by anybody
and the user experience is how good is the experience of your
website visitor

Mobile UX

Is the ease of usability that visitors experience when they browse your site from mobile. Affects brand reputation and customer retention, is valuable for:

• Web users prefer mobile
• Search engine visibility
• Growth of mobile SEO

6 Phases of web design

• Information gathering: “discovery phase” the designer projects the client’s vision into the paper
• Planning: prioritizing task for the website
• Designing: understand each and every aspect of client’s expectation and try to sketch it
• Development: “implementing phase”, integration of all information that we had collected from initial phases
• Testing and delivery:
  • Contestant testing
  • Functional testing
  • Design testing
• Maintenance: means updating the contents and the design of the website

Landing pages – what are and why important

Is where visitors arrive on your website after clicking on a sponsored link or a marketing campaign. Why:

• Know your visitors
• Boost your website SEO
• Generate more qualified leads

A/B testing- what is and what is it used for: An experiment where two or more variants of a page are shown to users at random, and statistical analysis is used to determine which variation performs better for a given conversion goal.