Content Marketing: A Free Comprehensive Course

If you're on the quest to master online marketing without spending a dime, you've landed in the perfect spot. Welcome to your definitive guide to the top free online marketing courses available.

With more than ten years of experience in the realm of online marketing education, we've carefully compiled this list to grant you access to premier courses designed to enhance your digital marketing prowess. Additionally, select courses even provide a certification in online marketing.

Each course on this list has been meticulously selected and evaluated by our team, ensuring you receive the highest quality training across all critical online marketing domains. You'll find comprehensive classes on a wide array of topics, including Search Engine Optimization (SEO), social media marketing, Pay-Per-Click (PPC) marketing, email marketing, analytics, affiliate marketing, and overarching online marketing strategies.

Elevate Your Content Strategy with a Free Course from: 40+ Best Free Online Marketing Classes to Take in 2023 (hubspot.com)

Content Marketing Certification Course: Elevate Your Growth with Compelling Content

No Cost Certification Course

Dive into the world of content marketing with the HubSpot Academy’s free Content Marketing Certification Course. This course is designed to unlock your potential to create engaging, impactful content that resonates with your audience and boosts your conversion rates. Learn from seasoned industry professionals about constructing robust content optimization strategies for tangible outcomes and leveraging influencer collaborations to expand your visibility. Achieve mastery in content marketing and secure your Content Marketing Certification with us!

Cost: Free.

Completion Time: Delve into nearly eight hours of in-depth content.

Course Structure: The course is divided into 12 lessons, featuring 54 instructional videos and 11 quizzes designed to enhance your understanding and skills in content marketing and strategy.

Prerequisites: No prior experience or knowledge is required to enroll.

Certification: Upon finishing the course and passing a one-hour examination, you will earn your Content Marketing Certification.

About This Course: The Content Marketing Certification Course by HubSpot Academy is the perfect launching pad for anyone eager to explore the realm of content marketing.

Key Skills You'll Learn:

• Mastering the art of storytelling to captivate and engage your audience.

• Generating innovative content ideas that break through the noise on crowded content platforms.

• Strategies for promoting your content to widen your reach and impact.

Expert Instructors: Learn from esteemed content marketing professionals such as Matthew Howells-Barby, AJ Beltis, and Justin Champion, who bring a wealth of knowledge and insights to the table.

Why This Course Stands Out:

• Proven Effectiveness: HubSpot Academy is celebrated for its impact, with over 530 five-star reviews on G2, particularly praised for the relevance and practicality of its content.

• Community and Networking: Engage with a vibrant community of over 15,000 members in an online content marketing study group.

• Practical Learning: Enhance your learning experience with quizzes that solidify your understanding, complemented by a practical content marketing workbook.

• Advanced Learning Opportunities: For those looking to delve deeper, HubSpot Academy offers intermediate and advanced courses on specialized subjects such as contextual marketing and evaluating brand engagement.

Why I Recommend This Course: This course stands out for its straightforward, accessible lessons packed with actionable insights. Led by a team of experienced instructors, it equips you with the knowledge and tools to excel in the competitive field of content marketing.

The Ultimate Guide to Scaling Your Business to 8-Figures with Ensemble Collective Marketing Group

Introduction

In the rapidly evolving digital landscape, scaling a business to achieve 8-figure revenue is a milestone many entrepreneurs dream of, but few manage to attain. The journey from start-up to scale-up is fraught with challenges, from lead generation to conversion and everything in between. This is where Ensemble Collective Marketing Group steps in - your last stop before turning all your revenue goals into reality.

Comprehensive Funnel Builds: Your Roadmap to Conversion

At the heart of any successful scale-up strategy lies a well-constructed sales funnel. Ensemble Collective Marketing Group specializes in creating bespoke funnel builds tailored to drive and nurture high-intent, quality leads through your funnel. Our approach is systematic - we screen, qualify, book, and close leads, ensuring a smooth transition at every stage of the customer journey. This method not only accelerates your sales cycle but also enhances the quality of your leads, setting a solid foundation for sustainable growth.

Website Development: Your Digital Storefront

In today's digital age, your website is your most crucial asset. It's often the first point of contact between your business and potential customers. Our team at Ensemble Collective leverages over 40 years of combined marketing experience to develop websites that are not just visually appealing but optimized for conversion. We focus on creating user-friendly experiences that effectively communicate your value proposition and guide visitors towards making a purchase or inquiry.

Client Acquisition and Event Ticket Sales: Expanding Your Reach

Acquiring new clients and selling event tickets requires a nuanced understanding of your audience and strategic outreach. Ensemble Collective Marketing Group employs a mix of traditional and innovative marketing techniques to expand your contact and prospect database. Our campaigns are designed to resonate with your target audience, driving engagement and conversions whether your goal is to attract new clients or boost event ticket sales.

The All-in-One Marketing Agency You’ve Been Waiting For

With Ensemble Collective Marketing Group, you get an all-in-one marketing solution without compromising on quality. Our comprehensive suite of services covers everything from funnel builds and website development to client acquisition and event ticket sales. We believe in a holistic approach to marketing, where every tactic and strategy is interconnected and aimed at scaling your business to 8-figures and beyond.

Conclusion

Achieving ambitious revenue goals doesn't have to be an insurmountable challenge. With the right partner, scaling your business can be a smooth and rewarding journey. Ensemble Collective Marketing Group offers the expertise, tools, and strategies you need to drive and nurture high-quality leads, accelerate testimonials and reviews, and ultimately, scale to 8-figures and beyond. All you need to do is show up and do what you love - we handle the rest.

Visit Website: https://www.ensemblecollective.com/ecommerce-marketing-services

What is lead distribution software?

What is lead distribution software?

Lead distribution software is software that routes, assigns, and distributes leads to the right reps in real-time. With its integrations, the software pairs with your CRM and all the forms you use in your ad and marketing funnel.

Lead distribution software is built on the following principles:

Capture: Once you’re set up to capture inbound leads, the software will integrate its features into the sales funnel and route leads once they are captured.

Routing: Prospects enter the funnel (through a form, list, event registration, trial, etc.), and based on the information in your CRM, leads are forwarded to a sales rep based on your criteria.

Distribution: Predetermined or custom criteria route the leads to the appropriate sales reps. Criteria often include factors like the sales rep’s expertise, location, availability, and more. The software distributes using advanced rules like round-robin, assignments, and ownership.

Ownership: Reminders, follow-ups, and reporting. These are features baked into the lead distribution software that empowers your sales team. Tracking leads helps optimize the entire distribution process.

Reporting: Sales reps and managers can access analytics and create detailed reports to understand every touchpoint and evaluate the entire process.

For example, Distro allows real-time lead routing without a complicated setup. Leads are instantly routed to the right rep based on criteria you set so they can quickly engage and turn more inbound leads into actual revenue.

Benefits of using lead distribution software

Sure, lead distribution software automates the process of routing leads but it also saves time and increases your conversion rates.

Let’s see.

Save time

The traditional, manual process of distributing leads is painstakingly time-consuming, as it involves:

Conducting initial inquiries to determine if a lead is worth routing

Manually classifying and distributing leads to sales reps

Interacting with prospects, keeping notes, and following up

Those are lots of steps where prospects can lose interest.

Or worse, they may go through the whole process only to be connected with the wrong sales rep. A waste of everyone’s time and effort.

Lead distribution software, on the other hand, routes leads in real-time. It automatically reads the data, routes it into your CRM, and pairs the lead with the right sales rep.

The best software does this almost instantly, removing tons of steps where a prospect could back out.

Increase conversions

Inbound and CRO marketing reign supreme in the sales world.

This departure from traditional strategies creates a friendly experience between leads and reps. It helps streamline the funnel and the boost in engagement makes prospects feel more inclined to explore what your business has to offer.

For example, our very own Distro product has shown a 75% increase in conversion rates!

Such a massive increase in conversion rates can only be possible with lead distribution software.

Combined with other software and CRO strategies, you’ll likely see a steady stream of leads and sales opportunities.

How to select the best lead distribution software

Consider the following features when choosing the best lead distribution software for you.

Rules-based lead routing

Rules-based lead routing enables you to assign leads to the appropriate sales reps according to your criteria.

These criteria can include the sales rep’s expertise, the lead’s business function, geographic location, business size, and other factors that create the best match.

This helps reduce lead leakage and matches the right lead to the right rep.

Availability-based lead routing

Availability is a lead-routing classic.

It’s unbelievable, but leads are (too) often lost to the simple fact that they’re routed to a rep who wasn’t available.

Availability-based lead routing ensures leads are distributed to reps who are free and able to engage with them.

A great lead distribution software will integrate with all your apps and route leads based on your team’s availability and working hours.

CRM integration

While lead distribution software can stand on its own, it should integrate with your other software and tools. It’ll make the process much more efficient and reduce friction for your sales reps.

For example, integrating with your CRM (e.g., HubSpot, Salesforce) frees you from the burden of having to manually enter data, speeds up the process, and eliminates human error altogether.

Reporting and analytics

The best lead distribution software should allow you to create detailed reports that’ll help you uncover lead insights and measure your team’s performance.

Reports often include the number of leads, average response times, meetings held, conversion rate, revenue, and more.

With proper reporting and analytics, you’ll be able to track your progress, evaluate the quality and quantity of deals coming in, and also take measure on team members that may need additional training.

Any information that can help you close more leads is information you want to have.

Feedback intake

Feedback helps you keep track of what happens after a sales rep accepts a lead.

Lead distribution software should allow your reps to provide updates through a survey, comments, or notes.

This feature enables you to keep track of the progress and quality of leads, allowing you to make any necessary tweaks to your strategy to optimize the sale process.

AI-powered Martech Products

Appy Pie added new features to its AI website builder. It will build a fully functional website based on voice or text prompts about the name, type, niche, style and goals of the website. The website will have relevant content, images, layout, and be optimized with an SEO metrics tool, app integration features, multilingual support for global enterprises and social media integration. 

GoDaddy’s Managed WordPress added AI to site building and customer relationship management features. New websites can be prototyped by answering a few simple questions. Users will get a starter site completely built, with images included. The Hub by GoDaddy Pro uses generative AI to create client communications, provide business advice and troubleshoot website errors.

Adpost added a new feature to its AI chatbot suite. It can now learn from web page content, allowing small businesses to create more knowledgeable and adaptable AI chatbots that uniquely resonate with their specific offerings and context.

Twilio is using OpenAI’s GPT-4 to augment its customer data platform. This gives generative capabilities to Twilio Engage, its multichannel marketing solution. Twilio CustomerAI makes it possible for users to build a ChatGPT plugin for Twilio Flex. It can also create a serverless SMS chatbot in Twilio Programmable Messaging.

Now, this week’s AI-powered martech releases:

Yahoo Advertising’s Yahoo Blueprint is a central AI suite for optimizing campaign performance. It offers data visualizations, bidding & forecasting precision, audience insights, predictive audiences, and customer value optimization. It also offers recommendations and insights for better outcomes.

Baresquare’s eCom Product Analyst is a free tool that provides daily insights for optimizing e-commerce product performance. It integrates seamlessly with Google Analytics and generates standardized reports, offering actionable recommendations and strategies for marketing campaigns, inventory adjustments and customer engagement.

Sprinklr’s Conversational AI+ lets businesses quickly deploy and scale generative AI-powered bots that can have human-like text and voice conversations. It offers a simple and efficient bot creation process with FAQ & Transaction Skill, free form conversational flows and Sprinklr Guardrails features.

Discuss added generative AI tools and advanced global asynchronous research features to its people experience platform. The new tools provide instantaneous summaries, themes and supporting quotes across research projects. It also enables automatic translation of interviews for global research.

Zoovu’s Advisor Studio is a generative AI solution for personalized product discovery and customer assistance. It creates product recommendations and customized product detail pages and has an AI-enabled assistant ZOE to answer customer questions on product pages.

Macorva’s Radiant AI Customer Feedback Reports automatically analyze and deliver actionable customer insights. It identifies the most critical feedback and provides clear guidance on improving customer satisfaction. It also streamlines the analysis process and enables businesses to make informed decisions based on customer feedback.

EKOM AI’s EKOM 3.0 is the latest version of its solution for digital storefront content generation, scoring, and alignment. It includes TruNexus Intelligence, a multi-model integration feature that accurately scores and approves optimized content.

Kustomer’s KIQ Customer Assist with AI Responses is a ChatGPT-powered chatbot for resolving customer issues with accurate and natural-language responses. It engages customers across channels, personalizes interactions, and integrates external data.

CommBox’s Era AI can generate personalized information and answer customer inquiries. It uses proprietary technology and large language models to scan enterprise knowledge sources and provide accurate information quickly through various digital channels.

ASKtoAI’s Memory and Personality are new features for maximizing the quality and effectiveness of corporate content. Memory stores, organizes and processes information efficiently for consistent brand messaging. Personality personalizes content with a unique brand voice and style.

LogRocket’s Galileo AI analyzes user experience data and identifies key areas of friction. It uses a large language model to understand user interactions and provide actionable insights, enabling product teams to make informed decisions quickly and improve user experience.

Web.com’s Website AI Builder simplifies website building for small businesses and entrepreneurs. Users answer three questions and the AI generates a personalized website with relevant images, design, and content.

Lead Generation Process

Whether you’re looking to revamp your B2B lead generation efforts or are new to lead generation strategies, understanding the process is essential to launching a successful campaign. Here are the steps in the lead generation process and why they’re crucial for generating quality leads for your business.

Find Potential Customers

Finding potential customers is the first step in the lead generation process, and the step most people think of when they hear this “lead generation”’ To find potential customers, you’ll need to implement an outbound lead generation campaign or an inbound lead generation campaign—ideally, both. As mentioned, leveraging outbound and inbound strategies together can maximize your results.

A common example of outbound lead generation is a cold call or email campaign. Typically handled by a dedicated sales team, these campaigns collect contact information for potential customers and reach out to them via phone or email. For example, if your business sells software, your team may want to reach out to the head of technology. Or, if you run a manufacturing or retail brand, you may want to contact the head of purchasing.

Rather than focusing on targeted outreach, inbound lead generation strategies bring potential customers to your business. Think of strategies like search engine optimization (SEO) or pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. These strategies attract customers through engaging, valuable content or advertisements. SEO and PPC campaigns are typically managed by marketing or content teams.

Let’s take a look at a real-world example: Slack is a very popular collaboration software that allows users within a business to connect quickly and communicate. Slack uses content marketing to connect with potential customers and has a particularly strong presence on social media. They create genuine engagement and grow their customer base by posting relevant content on popular social media platforms.

Convert Potential Customers into Leads

Once you make contact with a potential customer, whether through your outbound or inbound campaign, the next step is to convert potential customers into leads. Just because you reach out and make contact with a potential customer, that doesn’t mean they’re going to turn into a valuable lead. We’ll talk about qualifying leads in the next step, but beginning the conversation with the potential customer is important to build engagement and understand their needs. At that point, you can effectively market your product as a solution to their problems.

This involves understanding your potential customer’s business. So, start building a relationship before diving into a conversation about your product. Typically your sales team will reach out to potential customers to convert them into quality leads.

To continue our example, Slack creates meaningful content on popular social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. In addition to valuable content, they strategically link material and registration pages to additional information about their service, making it easy for customers to learn more about the platform and how it can be useful for their business. This lead capture strategy allows Slack’s team to move to the next step, which is lead qualification.

Qualify Each Lead

Once contact has been made, it’s up to the sales team to qualify each lead. As we mentioned, not every potential customer you have will end up being a qualified lead. A lead is typically qualified by fully understanding their needs and how your product or service can fulfill that needs. The process also involves analyzing their general engagement and readiness to purchase.

Your leads must be the right fit for your product. Too often, companies rush through the lead process to make a sale, leading to higher customer turnover and potentially bad word-of-mouth marketing. Taking the time to qualify the lead by asking the right questions and fully demonstrating your product or service is key to successful lead conversion.

For example, their sales team assesses the information for initial qualifying once Slack captures lead information from links in their social media content. This may lead to additional conversations for further qualifying, or they may have enough information to qualify the lead and move on to the next step: attempting to convert them into customers.

Turn Leads into Customers

Once a lead is qualified, it’s time to make the sale. This is where your sales team truly shines. Contacting and qualifying potential customers is one thing; closing the sale is another. B2B sales work differently than B2C sales. Instead of having a brick-and-mortar location for your products or services, B2B sales typically involve a more formal contact method, such as a sales meeting. This can be a great opportunity to personalize your sales pitch.

Your sales team should be prepared to answer any customer’s questions and bring the proper sales documentation and any applicable contracts the customer needs to sign. Expect some resistance in the steps leading up to this point; it’s normal for your qualified leads to have objections at each step until the sales contract is signed.

Always a great example of successful B2B sales processes, Slack’s sales team reaches out to continually develop a relationship with their potential customers. Like many software companies, Slack uses account managers to create a personalized experience for each client.

Continually Provide Value to Turn Customers Into Brand Ambassadors

Just because the sale has been made, it doesn’t mean the lead generation process is over. Your customers deserve high-value relationships, ongoing value-adds, and a high-quality customer experience. Continue to provide value to your existing customers, whether they just purchased from you or have been customers for a long time. While it’s not a direct lead generation strategy or part of the initial sales funnel (which we will discuss momentarily), nurturing your customers can turn them into brand ambassadors.

Word-of-mouth marketing is a powerful tool for future lead generation. Potential customers rely on existing customer testimony when making decisions, so providing a great experience for your existing customers is a simple, effective way to generate future growth for your business. Whether you have dedicated account managers or inbound customer service teams, it’s vital to prioritize the customer experience.

Retention Marketing: What It Is, Strategies & Examples

Ready to approach your marketing differently? You've come to the right place. Below, we'll walk you through everything you need to know about retention marketing: what it is, how it differs from customer acquisition, benefits, strategies, examples, and more.

What is retention marketing?

Retention marketing is the strategies and tactics you use to nurture and maintain your relationships with customers. Ecommerce isn't the only industry doing it, either—everyone from big-time enterprises to mom-and-pop shops does it to keep customers coming back for more.

For example, when Uber sends you a push notification with a $5 coupon, it’s hitting you with a retention marketing strategy. And when your local pizza joint invites you back with a text message for a buy-one-get-one pie, it’s using retention marketing.

Retention marketing tactics could include other activities, such as:

Warm welcome emails with additional resources or tips that help your recipients with the onboarding workflow

Exclusive VIP offers for loyal and consistent users or customers

Loyalty programs that reward customers for spending more

Regular newsletters that include a combination of educational content and promotional pieces

Reengagement emails with links to your preference center to allow recipients to customize their email frequency

But email isn't the only way to do retention marketing. As we mentioned before, you could use SMS, push notifications, voice, chat, video, social media, and more to engage and retain your customer base—more on that soon.

Get retention marketing right, and your leads and prospects stay interested, engaged, and more likely to stick with your brand (and ultimately become more lucrative customers).

Customer retention marketing vs. customer acquisition

So what's the difference between customer retention marketing and customer acquisition? We're glad you asked.

Customer acquisition is the marketing practices you use to find brand-new customers. It includes the strategies you use to keep previous and current customers.

For example, your company might launch a new downloadable guide to collect new leads for the sales team. That's customer acquisition marketing.

On the other side, you might have a brand-new customer who opts into your email list at checkout. A week later, you send them a follow-up to see how they're doing with their new product and ask if they have any questions—that's an example of retention marketing.

Best retention marketing channels

There's no one-size-fits-all approach to retention marketing that works for everyone. Each business (depending on its voice, industry, and target market) will find better success on specific channels. Here are a few to consider when building your retention marketing strategy:

Email: Email is one of the few opt-in channels. Your customers give you their email address and check a box (or should) to confirm they want your messages. Then, you can use their email to follow up with 1:1 conversations, upsell opportunities, and more.

PPC: Pay-per-click ads is one way to retarget your customers. For example, if a customer buys a 30-serving supplement from your business, you might start sending them ads for the same product (or similar products) 30 days after they received their first purchase.

SMS: SMS is another opt-in-only retentional marketing channel. It has a higher open rate than email, but most consumers guard their phone numbers more than their email addresses. So when a customer gives you their number, treat it with respect—it can do you a lifetime of good if you use it properly.

Social media: Social media is all about building relationships. Use your social media profiles to transform your existing customers into followers and your followers into brand loyalists.

Push notifications: Push notifications can be a great way to remind your customers to revisit your app or make a repeat purchase. Use them sparingly to prevent annoying your customers and losing notification privileges.

What's a good retention rate in marketing?

It depends, but you knew that was coming, didn't you?

While you shouldn't necessarily treat these numbers as gospel, here are a few industry benchmarks to give you an idea of a good customer retention rate in marketing:

Most industries can expect an average of below 20% retention in 8 weeks.

SaaS and ecommerce industries can see over a 35% retention rate in 8 weeks.

Media or finance industries can reach over a 25% retention rate in 8 weeks.

Benefits of retention marketing

So is retention marketing worth all the time and effort? Could your money be better spent somewhere else?

Again, it depends.

If you're a brand-new business with little to no customers, you want to prioritize finding customers. However, once buyers start rolling in the door, you don't want to take their money and lose their future business—you want to do everything you can to encourage repeat purchases and brand loyalty.

That's where retention marketing comes in.

Here are a few benefits you can expect to see from retention marketing:

Cheaper marketing: It's hard to find new leads. But if your previous customer has already given you their email address or phone number, remarketing and retaining their business is easy—more than half the work has been done.

Long-term customer relationships: 77% of consumers say they've maintained relationships with brands for at least 10 years. Think about it. Do you wear the same brand of shoes you wore in high school?

Higher returns: 61% of consumers go out of their way to buy from brands they're loyal to, and 60% admit to making more frequent purchases from them.

Word-of-mouth marketing: 75% of loyal customers will market your business for you by recommending your products to their friends and family.

3 retention marketing strategies

Retention marketing strategies run the gamut. These could be as complex as advanced retargeting tactics or as simple as in-store punch cards—and neither is necessarily more effective than the other.

That said, you don't have the bandwidth to run every possible strategy, so you'll need to review your options and narrow it down to a handful. Don't worry—we're here to help. Below, we'll share a few of our favorite customer retention strategies and what makes them special.

1. Email marketing automation and newsletters

Email marketing automation and newsletters

Email marketing lets you learn from your previous marketing campaigns, fine-tune your audience, and hone your messaging. Then, you can use customer data to send the right message to the right customer at the right time. For example, you can learn what kind of emails your customers tend to open (and not open) and send them a discount when they're most likely to purchase.

Segmentation is key. As you start to send more and more retention email campaigns and your email list starts to grow, keep an eye on your list segments or what new segments you can create. You may even consider creating a segment for your most engaged recipients and sending them other campaigns with additional content or promotions.

Just keep an eye on your engagement rates. When you see a dip, you're probably going a little too heavy on the messaging—so back off a bit.

Check out Twilio SendGrid’s segmentation strategies best practice guide for more tips on email list segmentation.

2. Loyalty programs

Loyalty programs

Loyalty programs reward your customers for staying true and buying from you. They might be able to shop at a dozen different coffee shops in town, but they choose to come to yours every day—so it makes sense that you'd give them a free drink for every 10 they buy.

Customer loyalty programs show your buyers that you care. And when they notice that you notice they frequent your shop or ecommerce store, then relationships begin to move past business and buyer to brand and friend—that's when you've struck gold.

You can also consider adding a referral program by rewarding your customers when they send you customers. It's like a commission for your sales teams, so why not give your customers a little something something when they help you out?

In short, think of ways to offer your customers rewards for being loyal. It doesn't have to be traditional punch cards or even birthday discounts—it could be surprise swag or exclusive access. Imagine hidden shopping items that only long-time buyers could purchase. Cool, right?

3. Multichannel communication options

Multichannel communication options

Don't lock your customers into communicating with you on your terms—give them options to chat where they're most comfortable. For example, you might want to include contact options on:

Email

SMS

Voice

WhatsApp

Facebook Messenger

Chat

Ticket

These channels allow for back-and-forth conversations. That could be customer support-related messaging or a casual chat about which jeans might go with the floral print your customer is considering—or which solution will work best with their current tech stack.

Need help consolidating, tracking, and managing all these conversations? Check out Twilio Flex, the world's most flexible contact center platform. It'll get the job done. We promise.

Retention marketing best practices to keep in mind

Even the best customer retention strategies will fail if you don't get the basics right. Here are a few best practices to keep in mind before you start shooting off email marketing campaigns and push notifications:

Honor opt-ins: Messaging any customer who hasn't given you explicit consent to communicate with them is a big no-no. Just because your buyer entered their email address to complete a purchase doesn't mean you can start blasting them with emails—they need to opt in first.

Respect breakups: Breakups happen. It sucks, but it happens. Sometimes, customers will choose another brand over yours despite your best marketing efforts—and that's OK. That doesn't mean you've done something wrong. It just means they found a better fit elsewhere. Give them their space, remove them from your email lists (if they've unengaged), and let time (potentially) do the healing.

Experiment: Your first idea might not be your best idea, but you won't know that until you test new things out. Experiment with new retention marketing channels and tactics to see if one resonates better with your audience. Does it engage customers? If so, scale it. If it doesn't, move on to the next idea.

Monitor: With the right software, systems, and processes, you can track your retention marketing performance. If customer churn decreases, you want to know what worked to replicate success. Identify the metrics you care most about (customer lifetime value, repeat purchases, referrals, etc.) and monitor them closely.

Incentivize: Just because you build it does not mean they’ll come. Find incentives that deliver real value to your customers to entice them to remain loyal to your brand. When you focus on customer satisfaction (and not sales), you’ll usually head in the right direction.

Real-world retention marketing examples (non pushy)

Ready to see customer retention marketing in action? Here are a few real-world examples you've probably already encountered—and all of them are exceptionally non pushy:

1. Xbox's achievement points

Xbox does an amazing job of keeping its community coming back for more. Play a game, do something cool, earn points, and redeem your points for discounts on more games. Repeat.

Everything from achievements to friends lists to notifications entices users to log in and rack up hours playing games. It's a great user experience with a never-ending cycle that keeps the community challenged and a great moneymaker for Microsoft.

That's retention marketing done right—and it probably doesn't even feel like “marketing.”

2. Harry's razors

Harry's sells razors, but the way it sells them is a retention marketing tactic. The brand uses a subscription-box model to entice customers to sign up for regular blade replacements.

Yes, a good shave is a good shave. But if a customer likes the purchase, they'll keep the razors coming—possibly forever.

Instead of using email marketing campaigns and retargeting to get every first-time buyer to come back, Harry's makes them a repeat customer from the get-go. How? With huge discounts on subscription deals. Sure, Harry’s loses a cut from every sale because of the discount, but it’s guaranteed a return buyer by doing so.

3. Old Navy's Super Cash

Old Navy's Super Cash is genius. For every $25 you spend, you'll earn $10 in Super Cash—but you'll have to wait to use it at a later date. And if you’ve just spent $100 and earned $40 in Super Cash, you don't want to lose it, right? That'd be wasteful. So you should probably go back in a couple of weeks and spend another $100. And so the cycle continues.

This retention marketing strategy keeps customers coming back for more and more. They don't want to shop somewhere else because this Super Cash is “use it or lose it”—and nobody wants to lose anything.

Personalize your retention marketing with Segment

Are you jazzed about getting started with retention marketing? Right on! Now, you're probably wondering what to do next.

Well, once you've narrowed down your channels, strategies, and tactics, you'll need data to back it up. Sure, you won't need much if you're just using punch cards. However, if you want a holistic view of your customers across all platforms and channels, you'll need a customer data platform.

Fortunately, we have just the thing: Segment.

Segment helps collect, clean, and use your customer data with a single application programming interface. With insights like this, you can activate retention marketing with the right customers at the right time with the right message on the right channel.

LaQueeta Humes

Cell: 737.990.7377

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laqueeta-h-89bb8b1a6/

Website: www.laqueetahumes.com

Email: Laqueetahumes@gmail.com

Advantages and challenges of digital marketing

Advantages and challenges of digital marketing

Traditional marketing is marketing that isn't online. Marketers reach potential customers through printed media, television, radio, direct mail, phone calls, or billboards. Digital marketing is marketing that is exclusively online. Digital marketers focus on potential customers who engage with online content, including search engine results, email, video, blogs, or social media.

This reading describes the advantages digital marketing has over traditional marketing and some definite challenges, too.

Digital marketing advantages

Digital marketing has certain advantages over traditional marketing because it:

Reduces wasteful spending

Adapts to new technologies

Reaches target audiences with more precision

Spending

Digital marketing uses content in a variety of formats that can be easily converted from one format to another, making spending more cost-effective. Digital marketing also reduces wasteful spending. For example, television or billboard ads are equally seen by those who have an interest in your company or product and those who don’t. Traditional marketing always wastes some budget on people who will never buy a product or service. In contrast, digital ads can be selectively shown to people who are more likely to have an interest in that product or service. Digital marketing that is more strategically focused on the right people yields a better return on spending.

Technology

Various technologies enable organizations to engage and interact with customers more effectively, which is a big part of digital marketing. Developing a good online relationship with customers makes them more likely to find your business, become loyal customers, and even share their recommendations with others.

Digital marketing tools also enable companies to collect data and measure the results of their marketing efforts more effectively. When marketers receive data faster, they’re able to change direction easily if a marketing effort isn’t producing the results expected. Measuring the success of digital marketing campaigns is key to ensuring that you get the results you want.

Digital marketing adapts to new technologies. There are always new opportunities to reach customers in different ways, especially compared to traditional marketing.

Target audiences

Digital marketing tools and data enable you to expand your customer reach well beyond that of traditional marketing. Ad visibility and audience coverage can be tailored to meet your specific business needs and goals. When you reach the right audiences, you’re more likely to increase sales and develop sustainable customer loyalty programs.

Digital marketing challenges

Digital marketing also has certain challenges that are associated with spending, technology, and target audiences. For each advantage previously identified, there are also associated challenges.

Spending

Advantage: Digital content is easier to create.

Challenge: Organizations engage in omnichannel marketing—the integration or synchronization of content on multiple channels—so customers can have a consistent brand experience. This increases the amount of content required, so even if it’s easier to create digital content, much more content needs to be created overall. Furthermore, it’s not just about the amount of content created, but its quality. Advertising is a crowded space. Content must be distinctive to positively impact customer awareness and change their behavior.

Advantage: Digital marketing is more cost-effective than traditional marketing.

Challenge: If an organization is working towards an omnichannel presence, the cost for marketing on all channels adds up quickly. Getting support or buy-in for extra or additional budget to cover the cost can be difficult.

Technology

Advantage: Digital marketing adapts to new technologies.

Challenge: As a marketer, learning and keeping up with new technologies and tools is a constant requirement. Marketers must also stay up-to-date with and follow all user privacy and data sharing regulations worldwide. Omnichannel marketing also makes it more difficult to track where sales come from. Marketers must rely more heavily on analytics tools to help them do that.

Target audiences

Advantage: Digital marketing tools expand customer reach using specific audiences.

Challenge: The digital space is a crowded field that’s getting even more crowded. It’s harder for marketers to stand out with their advertising, even when they are targeting the right audiences.

Key takeaways

Various technologies make digital marketing more cost-effective and adaptable than traditional marketing. Digital marketing tools also enable more advanced and targeted audience selection for marketing campaigns. However, these benefits come with some challenges. In a digital space that’s both crowded and noisy, it’s harder for a company’s brand and advertising to stand out. Marketing professionals must keep up with technological advances and customer behaviors that change rapidly.

Glossary terms

Agency: An outside partner that fulfills a company’s digital marketing and advertising needs

Business-to-business (B2B): Refers to when businesses sell products or services to other businesses (when businesses purchase from each other)

Business-to-consumer (B2C): Refers to when businesses sell products or services to consumers (when consumers purchase from businesses)

Consumer-to-business (C2B): Refers to when individuals (consumers) sell products or services to businesses (when businesses purchase from consumers)

Consumer-to-consumer (C2C): Refers to when individuals (consumers) sell products or services to other consumers (when consumers purchase from each other)

Digital channel: Any communication method or platform a business can use to reach their target audience online

Digital marketing: The practice of reaching consumers online through digital channels with the aim of turning them into customers

E-commerce: The buying and selling of goods or services using the internet

Engagement marketing: (refer to experiential marketing)

Experiential marketing: The process of encouraging consumers to not only purchase a brand or product, but to experience it

Influencer marketing: The process of enlisting influential people to endorse or mention a brand or product to their followers on social media

In-house: Within a single company

Social media marketing: The process of creating content for different social media platforms to drive engagement and promote a business or product

Transferable skills: Skills from other areas that can help someone progress a career in marketing

A/B Testing

This is the process of comparing two variations of a single variable to determine which performs best in order to help improve marketing efforts. This is often done in email marketing (with variations in the subject line or copy), calls-to-action (variations in colors or verbiage), and landing pages (variations in content). Outside of marketing, you can use it to determine what tastes better on a peanut butter sandwich: jelly or fluff.

Analytics

What I sometimes refer to as the “eyes” of inbound marketing, analytics is essentially the discovery and communication of meaningful patterns in data. When referred to in the context of marketing, it’s looking at the data of one’s initiatives (website visitor reports, social, PPC, etc.), analyzing the trends, and developing actionable insights to make better informed marketing decisions.

Awareness stage: The first stage of the marketing funnel, when a potential customer first becomes aware of the product or service

Consideration stage: The second stage of the marketing funnel, when a potential customer's interest builds for a product or service

Conversion: The completion of an activity that contributes to the success of a business

Conversion rate: The percentage of users or website visitors who completed a desired action, such as clicking on a link in an email or purchasing a product

Conversion stage: The third stage of the marketing funnel, when marketers capitalize on the interest people have already shown

Customer journey: The path customers take from learning about a product, to getting questions answered, to making a purchase

Customer journey map: A visualization of the touchpoints a typical customer encounters along their purchase journey

Frequency: How many times an individual encounters an ad in a given timeframe

Impressions: The total number of times an ad appears on people’s screens

Inclusive marketing: The practice of improving representation and belonging within the marketing and advertising materials that an organization creates

Lead: A potential customer who has interacted with a brand and shared personal information, like an email address

Local search: A search query that generates local-based search results

Local SEO: Optimizing content so that it displays in Google's local search algorithms

Loyalty stage: The fourth stage of the marketing funnel, when customers become repeat customers and brand advocates

Marketing funnel: A visual representation of the process through which people go from learning about a brand to becoming loyal customers

Omnichannel: The integration or synchronization of content on multiple channels

Pain points: Problems customers want to solve

Reach: The total number of unique individuals who encounter an ad across their different

devices

Target audience: The group of people most likely to purchase a company's products; often defined as the combination of customer personas

Touchpoint: Any interaction a customer has with a brand during their purchase journey

Beginner SEO terms

You’ve learned the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) and how it works. Now, it’s time to review the SEO terms you’ve learned and introduce a few more that you’ll learn about later in this course. This glossary will help you become familiar with some of the beginner SEO terms and definitions you may need to know for an entry-level position in digital marketing or e-commerce.

Bounce rate: The percent of visitors that view one page and then leave the site.

Breadcrumbs: A row of internal links at the top or bottom of the webpage that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the home page. Also known as a breadcrumb trail.

Broken link: A link that leads to a webpage that no longer exists. For example, the webpage may have been deleted, or the content may have been moved to a different location.

Crawl: The process of looking for new or updated webpages. Google discovers URLs by following links, by reading sitemaps, and by many other means.

Crawlers: Automated software that crawls (fetches) pages from the web and indexes them.

Domain: The core part of a website’s URL, or internet address. For example, in the URL www.google.com/ads, the domain name is google.com.

Googlebot: The generic name of Google's crawler.

Google knowledge panels: Information boxes that appear on Google when you search for people, places, organizations, or things that are available in Google’s knowledge database.

Index: Google stores all webpages that it knows about in its index (similar to the index in the back of a book). The index entry for each page describes the content and location (URL) of that page.

Keyword: A word, or multiple words, that people use to find information, products, or services online.

Keyword research: The process to find terms and phrases that potential customers are typing into search engines.

Meta description: Provides the search engines a summary of what the page is about. In some situations, this description is used in the snippet shown in search results.

Mobile-friendly: A webpage that is designed to load quickly and render well on a phone screen.

Organic search: Unpaid results a search engine produces when a search is performed.

Rank: A webpage’s position in the search engine results pages (SERPs), which is determined by an algorithm.

Rich results: Enhanced results in Google Search with extra visual or interactive features.

Search algorithm: Automated process that helps locate information to answer a user’s query.

Search engine optimization (SEO): The process of making your site better for search engines.

Search engine results pages (SERPs):The results pages that appear when someone performs a search query.

Sitemap: A file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to crawl your site more efficiently.

Structured data: Code used to better describe a webpage’s content to search engines.

Subdomain: The subset of a larger domain used to organize an existing website into a different page URL. Subdomains are usually found at the beginning of a URL. For example, support.google.com is a subdomain of google.com.

URL: The address of a webpage or file on the Internet. For example, www.google.com.

Webpage title: Provides users and search engines the topic of a particular page.

404 page: A page that informs the user that the webpage they were trying to visit does not exist.

Algorithm: An automated software that helps locate information to answer a user’s query

Bounce rate: The percentage of website visitors who view one page and then leave the site

Breadcrumbs: A row of internal links at the top or bottom of the page that allows visitors to quickly navigate back to a previous section or the homepage

Broken link: A link that leads to a webpage that no longer exists

Crawlers: Automated software that crawls (fetches) pages from the web and indexes them

Crawling: The process of finding new or updated webpages

Domain: The core part of a website’s URL, or internet address

Featured snippet: A special box that displays information about a search in the results page

HTTPS: An internet communication protocol that protects the integrity and confidentiality of data between the user’s computer and the site

Indexing: The process of Google saving and organizing website information to display in the search engine

Google Business Profile: A tool that allows local businesses to tailor how their information appears on Google Search and Google Maps

Google knowledge panels: Information boxes that appear on Google when someone searches for people, places, organizations, or things that are available in Google’s knowledge database

Googlebot: The generic name of Google's crawler

Keyword: A search term that people use to find information, products, or services online

Keyword research: The process of finding terms and phrases that people use in search engines

Keyword stuffing: The practice of loading a webpage with keywords or numbers in an attempt to manipulate a site’s ranking in the search results

Meta description: Provides the search engines a summary of what the page is about

Mobile-friendly webpage: A webpage that is designed to load quickly and render well on a phone screen

Organic search: Unpaid results a search engine produces when a search is performed

Query: The words typed into a Google Search bar

Rank: A webpage’s position in the search engine results pages (SERPs), which is determined by an algorithm

Rich results: Enhanced results in Google Search with extra visual or interactive features

Search algorithm: An automated process that helps locate information to answer a user’s query

Search engine: Software that provides information on a search query

Search engine optimization (SEO): The process of increasing the visibility of website pages on search engines in order to attract more relevant traffic

Search engine results pages (SERPs): The results pages that appear when someone performs a search query

Sitemap: A file that provides information about the pages, videos, and other files on a site, and the relationships between them

Structured data: Code used to better describe a webpage’s content to search engines

Subdomain: The subset of a larger domain used to organize an existing website into a different page URL

Subpage: A lower-level page that appears below the homepage of a website

URL: The address of a webpage or file on the internet

Webpage title element: Text that provides both the users and search engines with a page’s topic

A

A/B testing: A method of testing where two versions of content with a single differing variable are compared to determine which yields better results

Abandoned cart: When a potential customer adds an item to their cart, but doesn’t complete the purchase

Awareness stage: The first stage of the marketing funnel, when a potential customer first becomes aware of the product or service

C

Consideration stage: The second stage of the marketing funnel, when a potential customer’s interest builds for a product or service

Content marketing: A marketing technique that focuses on creating and distributing valuable content

Conversion rate: The percentage of users or website visitors who take a desired action

Conversion stage: The third stage of the marketing funnel, when marketers capitalize on the interest people have already shown

Copy: Any written material that encourages a customer to buy a product or service

Customer persona: Represents a group of similar people in a desirable audience

Customer persona barrier: What is preventing the customer from achieving their goal

Customer persona goal: What the customer wants to achieve

D

Demographics: Information specific to the customer, such as age, gender identity, income, family size, occupation, education, and location

Display ad: A visual ad format placed on websites or applications

E

Email marketing: Sending messages to a list of existing subscribers to share information, drive sales, or create community

I

Influencer marketing: Involves a brand collaborating with an online influencer to market one of its products or services

L

Loyalty stage: The fourth stage of the marketing funnel, when customers become repeat customers and brand advocates

R

Remarketing ad: An advertisement delivered to previous purchasers, subscribers, or visitors to a brand’s website or social media

S

Search engine marketing (SEM): Increasing a website’s visibility on a search engine results page through paid advertising

Search engine optimization (SEO): The process of improving a website to increase its visibility in a search engine

Social media marketing: The process of creating content for different social media platforms in order to drive engagement and promote a business or product

Social share: When a customer shares a product or service with their social media followers

Strategy: A plan to achieve a marketing goal

T

Tactic: An action a marketer takes to make a marketing goal happen

U

Unique selling proposition (USP): An explanation of why a product or service is better than the competition

W

Webinar: A presentation, typically educational, that is provided online

E-commerce, ecommerce, or eCommerce?

Which is the correct term: e-commerce, ecommerce, eCommerce, or just ecomm for short? The name and spelling of e-commerce has evolved over the last 30 years, and so have the technologies and job skills required to work in this field. This reading provides a summary of e-commerce's evolution by describing the history of the term and by laying out the four distinct models within e-commerce that have emerged over the years.

Like most everything on the internet, e-commerce — although it hasn't been around that long — has evolved and changed a lot. What started as electronic commerce, quickly progressed into e-commerce, ecommerce, or eCommerce. But how can you know which one to use? In this course, you'll see e-commerce used. That's, in part, because Google Trends — a website that analyzes popularity of top search queries in Google Search — shows most people prefer using e-commerce, as opposed to ecommerce or eCommerce. Since the word is a combination of two words, the use of the hyphen makes that more clear. Now, let's talk about the four distinct models within e-commerce:

Business-to-consumer (B2C)

Consumer-to-consumer (C2C)

Business-to-business (B2B)

Consumer-to-business (C2B)

Note: When a government entity does business online, substituting business with administration results in additional e-commerce models like business-to-administration (B2A) and consumer-to-administration (C2A). An example of B2A is a company selling software solutions for a government entity that does permitting. An example of C2A is a company that allows consumers to interact directly with a government service, such as paying their utility bills.

Business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce

Business-to-consumer (B2C) is the most common form of e-commerce. This is the online process of businesses selling products or services directly to consumers. Some credit the U.S. company Pizza Hut for the first e-commerce transaction (selling a pizza online). However, historians also recognize that before that pizza sale, Dan Kohn sold a CD album to a friend in Philadelphia on August 11, 1994. That friend sent his credit card information to pay for the album and shipping costs using encryption technology. Others couldn’t steal his credit card information because it was encrypted!

Today, B2C e-commerce generates billions of dollars in revenue annually, with encrypted transactions as everyday occurrences. With B2C marketing, you have opportunities to apply your digital marketing skills in very specific ways. For example, you can become a specialist in experiential marketing or social media marketing, or even a subset of social media marketing called influencer marketing.

Experiential marketing, also known as engagement marketing, encourages consumers to not only purchase a brand or product but to experience it. Experiential marketing campaigns draw out emotional responses from their audiences.

Social media marketing creates content for different social media platforms to drive engagement and promote a business or product.

Influencer marketing enlists influential people to endorse or mention a brand or product to their followers on social media.

Consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce

With consumer-to-consumer (C2C) e-commerce, individuals sell products or services to other individuals. In other words, consumers buy items from each other. Boston Computer Exchange created the first platform for C2C e-commerce in 1982. An online community of people used this platform to sell their used computers to other users. However, the best-known early C2C e-commerce platform is eBay, founded in 1995.

Today, C2C e-commerce still occurs on platforms like eBay and Etsy. Business-to-consumer platforms like Amazon also host C2C sales. Social media platforms like Facebook also entered C2C e-commerce with Facebook Marketplace. Digital marketing for a C2C business prioritizes skills in search engine optimization (SEO), content creation, and social media since most C2C consumers find each other through blogs and social media posts. Their shared interests lead to C2C transactions to buy and sell items.

Business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce

Business-to-business (B2B) e-commerce enables businesses to sell products and services to other businesses. The rise of services, particularly software services, accelerated B2B e-commerce. This type of service is known as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). One example of a SaaS company is Salesforce, founded in 1999. SaaS companies, like Salesforce, provide other companies subscription access to business-critical services over the internet. For example, Salesforce provides customer relationship management (CRM) software that unifies sales, marketing, and services for a personalized customer journey.

Today, digital marketers for B2B companies use many of the same skills as digital marketers for B2C companies. However, B2B marketing campaigns require more precise identification of their target audiences. Selling to businesses requires a focus on communicating an immediate value to potential customers. Therefore, digital marketing for B2B companies tends to be more strategic. There may be fewer opportunities to specialize in one type of marketing, like social media marketing, and a greater emphasis on marketing analytics and data.

Consumer-to-business (C2B) e-commerce

The popularity of small business ownership helped establish another model for e-commerce, C2B. With C2B e-commerce, consumers sell their products or services to businesses. Specialized platforms also fill a need for these online transactions. For example, Upwork, founded in 2015, connects freelancers to businesses that may need their skills and services.

Consumers who are influencers may also fall into this category of e-commerce because they may sell their services to promote a company’s products. With social media continuing to expand its influence on consumer decisions, the C2B e-commerce model will likely grow as well.

Key takeaway

This exploration of e-commerce models demonstrates that e-commerce has evolved and will continue to change rapidly. Knowing how to apply and gain new digital marketing skills is vital in advancing your career in this industry.

Roles and responsibilities in digital marketing and e-commerce

This reading summarizes other associate or entry-level roles and responsibilities in digital marketing and e-commerce. At the end of the reading, you’ll find advice on how you can potentially progress from a starting role to roles with further growth opportunities.

Associate-level roles in digital marketing

Below are some examples of responsibilities for associate-level roles in digital marketing. These lists aren't comprehensive but are intended to showcase a variety of responsibilities in each role.

Digital marketing coordinator*

Coordinate marketing activities and initiatives

Identify target audiences through research

Run campaigns

Monitor metrics to evaluate trends

* Also described in another video and reading

Marketing associate

Prepare reports on marketing and sales metrics

Collect and analyze customer behavior metrics, such as web traffic and search rankings

Coordinate with marketing teams to generate digital advertising materials

Assist with ongoing marketing campaigns

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialist

Develop optimization strategies to improve search rankings

Implement keywords for SEO

Monitor metrics to understand SEO performance

Update links for optimization of search rankings

Search Engine Marketing (SEM) specialist

Identify customer personas to enable marketing to identified audiences

Perform research on keywords for SEO and Pay Per Click (PPC) ads

Monitor metrics to optimize paid search performance

Identify and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) for SEM

Social media specialist

Develop, implement, and manage a social media marketing strategy

Collaborate with sales and marketing teams on social media campaigns

Create content to build customer connections and increase brand awareness

Monitor metrics in social media campaigns for customer engagement and content optimization insights

Email marketing specialist

Create email marketing campaigns to promote products or services

Create an archive of emails for lead generation

Purge non-deliverable and unsubscribed email addresses

Use metrics to monitor the performance of email campaigns

Associate-level roles in e-commerce

Below are some examples of responsibilities for associate-level roles in e-commerce. These lists aren't comprehensive but are intended to showcase a variety of responsibilities in each role.

E-commerce analyst*

Implement e-commerce strategies to support business goals

Set e-commerce goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for key attributes like audience, acquisition, behavior, and conversions

Monitor and analyze e-commerce metrics

Leverage e-commerce data for operational insights

* Also described in another reading

E-commerce specialist

Develop and run campaigns to increase digital sales as part of an overall digital marketing strategy

Optimize paid advertising campaigns using SEO and other tools

Manage an online marketing presence, including social media platforms

Monitor metrics for spikes in website traffic or sales

Advance to roles that further your growth

Starting an entry-level role in marketing or e-commerce is exciting, but after you gain practical experience and hands-on work using tools in that role, you might be eager to advance your career.

If you’re ready for a new role, below are a few possibilities and a sampling of responsibilities for each.

Digital marketing manager

Plan and execute digital marketing, including SEO/SEM, email, social media, and display advertising campaigns

Measure and report performance and return on investment (ROI) for digital marketing

Plan, execute, and evaluate A/B tests and experiments

Evaluate and improve the end-to-end customer experience across multiple channels and customer touchpoints

Social media strategist

Manage and oversee social media content

Measure the success of social media campaigns

Monitor and analyze metrics to recommend effective content optimization solutions

Network with industry professionals and influencers using social media

Account manager

Build and maintain client relationships

Ensure the timely and successful delivery of advertising solutions based on customer needs and objectives

Clearly communicate the progress of initiatives to internal and external stakeholders

Forecast and monitor key account metrics

E-commerce product manager

Conduct market research

Develop a product strategy for an e-commerce business based on analytics

Define website and mobile app functionality, and deliver an optimal user experience for both

Understand business objectives and coordinate efforts to increase sales

Key takeaways

Career progression is very individualized. Sometimes it can take less than a year to be ready to advance to the next level; often it can take a few years. Here are three signs that you could be ready to progress to the next level.

You consistently meet or exceed job-related performance goals.

You’re assigned tasks associated with a higher-level role.

You recently asked for more work while performing your job.

Keep in mind that your career can advance at a speed that is right for you. Always be ready and open to new opportunities by demonstrating a positive attitude and a growth mindset in whatever role you’re in!

Content Marketing

Content marketing is a strategic marketing and business process focused on creating and

distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined

audience and ultimately drive profitable customer action.

When done correctly, this helps create a relationship with your audience, which leads to trust. And when your audience members trust you, they’re more willing to do business with you when they’re ready to make a purchasing decision.

To communicate with your audience, you need to produce content. Content has the very important job of pulling people from one stage of the inbound methodology to another.

Your content should attract the right people to your site, engage those people into leads, and

nurture and help close them into customers. But it doesn’t stop there. Your content should also delight your customers and turn them into promoters of your brand.

The Power of Storytelling

Everyone loves a great story. People want to feel connected to a group, to belong. Stories give us a reason to communicate and relate. Stories are stimulating and give us something to believe in. Stories make us feel better, smarter, safer, or even loved. Business storytelling is similar. It’s about creating alignment between your business and your prospects and customers.

But telling your brand’s story is more than what you write on your website, your blog, or even

social media. It’s your value, your mission, and how you communicate them consistently to your audience — wherever they are.

Building a Content Creation Framework

A content creation framework is a structure of processes for publishing content — from the

beginning stages to post-publication. With a framework in place, your team can foster creative ideas in an organized, scalable manner. A framework strikes that perfect balance between autonomous creativity and long-term content sustainability.

Planning a Long-term Content Strategy

Planning provides a road map for your content. You’ll be making confident and more tactical

decisions regarding what topic you’ll be talking about, what format your content will take, and

when you’ll be publishing it.

With a content plan, you and your team can stay organized and even factor in ad hoc content

requests like company initiatives or other on-demand marketing tasks.

Generating Content Ideas

Humans are always coming up with new ideas. Whether we’re lying in bed, commuting to work, or going for a run, our minds have a seemingly endless ability to generate new ideas.

But as natural and easy as this process might sometimes feel, it gets tricky when your job

depends on it. A content marketer — or any creative, for that matter — doesn’t have the leisure to have an “off day.” Your content ideas fuel your work. Run out of gas, and your content initiatives will stall.

Creating Quality Blog Content Your Audience Loves to Read and Share

Think back to the last blog post you read. Did you skim through it as opposed to reading it

because the introduction didn’t hold your attention? Did the content seem to ramble as opposed to getting to the point? Were you unable to find a helpful next step to continue your journey?

If you answered “yes” to all of these questions, the author who wrote the blog post probably

didn’t pay close enough attention to the structure of the content. And he or she is suffering the consequences: You, along with many others, stopped reading the post.

All effective blog posts have a blueprint. You might not easily see it, but it’s there, and it’s meant to help you, the reader, through your journey to making a well-informed, confident decision —whatever that decision might be.

Extending the Value of Your Content Through Re-purposing

Imagine you’re a content creator tasked with writing blog posts, content offers, video scripts, and so on as part of your daily job function. That’s a lot of content to create.

Repurposing content allows you to extend the value of your content by changing it to serve a

different purpose, like transforming the messaging of several blog posts to create a guide or

reusing content from your guide to help you create an educational video series. The messaging is the same, but the channel or format in which it’s consumed is different.

Creating Topic Clusters and Pillar Pages

If you want to create effective content that converts visitors into leads and eventually customers, you need to create a helpful, positive user experience that solves for both the searcher and the search engine, not just one or the other.

Here’s how you can solve for both: Create targeted clusters of relevant content that each covers a specific topic in depth. These targeted clusters then need to lead to a centralized hub, known as a pillar page. A pillar page (also known as a content pillar or power page) is a website page that covers a specific topic in depth and is linked to a cluster of related content.

Create a Successful Video Marketing Strategy

Thanks to the rise of technology, video is used more widely as a business strategy across

marketing, sales, and service teams. When done correctly, a video marketing strategy is an

effective way to attract, engage, and delight your audience in a human and helpful way.

But creating any old video isn’t enough. You need to create memorable videos that engage your audience.

Building a Guest Blogging Strategy Powered by SEO

Guest blogging is an effective tactic that helps your business in more ways than one. Not only does it help you build authority as a thought leader within your industry, but also, and more importantly, it’s a powerful way to optimize your website for search when done correctly.

Effectively Promote Content

One of the biggest challenges marketers face when creating content is visibility. Creating great content simply isn’t enough. A successful content strategy should include a promotional plan that strategically shares content with the people who will benefit most from it.

Measuring and Analyzing Your Content

There are a ton of metrics out there that you can report on to understand your content’s performance. For a blog post, you might be interested in webpage visitors, time on page, and referral traffic. For a video, maybe you’re more interested in watch time, social media shares, and impressions. And if you’re offering a webinar, landing page conversions for registration might be your top metric. Regardless of what type of content you’re measuring, there are numerous metrics that impact its success.

What is a marketing strategy?

It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more. Or maybe you have a creative project to share with the world. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.

Strategy vs. Tactic

The difference between a strategy and a tactic lies in their scope, level of detail, and time frame. A strategy is a high-level plan that guides your direction and long-term goals and how you plan on accomplishing them. Tactics, however, are specific actions and methods used to implement your strategy and achieve short-term objectives.

Characteristics of a Strategy

Marketing or not, there are three parts of any strategy:

A diagnosis of your challenge

A guiding policy for dealing with the challenge

A set of targeted actions that are necessary to accomplish the policy

Depending on the scale of your business, your marketing strategy may include several moving parts, each with different goals. With that said, working on your strategy can become daunting at times.

So, if you're ever feeling overwhelmed about your marketing strategy, refer to these three steps to keep you focused on achieving your objectives.

Characteristics of a Tactic

While strategies provide a framework for your overall vision, tactics determine the specific steps taken to execute that vision.

A good tactic should:

Be specific, actionable, and measurable

Align with the overall strategy

Have a relatively short time frame

Depending on your marketing strategy, your tactics may include email marketing campaigns, publishing a blog, or organizing an event.

Now, let's look at digital marketing strategy.

What is digital marketing strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a plan for using online channels to establish an internet presence and achieve specific marketing objectives. These channels can include organic search, social media, paid ads, and other web-based mediums such as your website. Ultimately, the goal is to boost your business’s visibility and attract new customers.

A strong digital marketing strategy helps your business achieve specific digital goals through carefully selected mediums. Similar to marketing strategies versus marketing tactics, “digital marketing strategy” and “digital marketing campaign” are also often interchanged. So, how do they differ?

We cover that in the following sections.

Digital marketing campaigns are the building blocks and actions within your digital marketing strategy that move you toward a specific end goal.

For instance, if the overarching goal of your digital marketing strategy is to generate more leads through social media, you might run a digital marketing campaign on Twitter. You may share some of your business's best-performing gated content on Twitter to generate more leads through the channel.

How to Create a Digital Marketing Strategy

1. Build your buyer personas.

2. Identify your goals and the digital marketing tools you'll need.

3. Evaluate your existing digital channels and assets.

4. Audit and plan your owned media campaigns.

5. Audit and plan your earned media campaigns.

6. Audit and plan your paid media campaigns.

7. Bring your digital marketing campaigns together.

For any marketing strategy – digital or not – you need to know who you're marketing to. The best digital marketing strategies are built upon detailed buyer personas, and your first step is to create them.

Organize your audience segments and make your marketing stronger with templates to build your buyer personas.

Buyer personas represent your ideal customer(s) and can be created by researching, surveying, and interviewing your business's target audience.

It's important to note that this information should be based upon real data whenever possible, as making assumptions about your audience can cause your marketing strategy to move in the wrong direction.

To get a rounded picture of your persona, your research pool should include a mixture of customers, prospects, and people outside your contacts database who align with your target audience.

But what kind of information should you gather for your own buyer persona(s) to inform your digital marketing strategy?

That depends on your business — it‘s likely to vary depending on whether you’re B2B or B2C, or whether you sell a high-cost or low-cost product.

Here are some starting points that you can fine-tune and tailor to your particular business.

Quantitative and Demographic Information

Location: Use web analytics tools to easily identify what location your website traffic is coming from.

Age: Depending on your business, this may or may not be relevant information. But if it is, it's best to gather this data by identifying trends in your existing prospect and contact database.

Income: It's best to gather sensitive information like personal income through persona research interviews, as people might be unwilling to share these details via online forms.

Job Title: This is something you can get a rough idea of from your existing customer base and is most relevant for B2B companies.

Qualitative and Psychographic Information

Goals: Depending on what challenge your product or service solves, you may already have a good idea of the goals of your buyer persona. Cement your assumptions by speaking to real customers and internal sales and customer service reps.

Challenges: Speak to customers, sales and customer service reps, and any other customer-facing employees to get an idea of the common challenges your audience members face.

Hobbies/Interests: Ask customers and those who align with your target audience about their hobbies and interests. If you‘re a fashion brand, for example, it’s helpful to know if large segments of your audience are also interested in fitness and well-being to inform future content and partnerships.

Talk to customers and target audience members to find out what‘s most important to them in relation to your business. For example, if you’re a B2B software company, knowing your audience values customer support over a competitive price point is very valuable information.

By combining all of these details, you'll be able to create buyer personas that are accurate and highly valuable for your business.

2. Identify your goals and the digital marketing tools you'll need.

Your marketing goals should always be tied back to the fundamental goals of your business.

For example, if your business‘s goal is to increase online revenue by 20%, your marketing team’s goal might be to generate 50% more leads via the website than the previous year to contribute to that success.

Use a high-level marketing plan template to outline your annual marketing strategy, identify top priorities, and more.

Whatever your overarching digital marketing goal is, you must be able to measure the success of your strategy along the way with the right digital marketing tools.

Reporting brings all of your marketing and sales data into one place, so you can quickly determine what works and what doesn't to improve your strategy for the future.

3. Evaluate your existing digital channels and assets.

When reviewing your existing digital marketing channels and assets to determine what to incorporate in your strategy, it's helpful to first consider the big picture — this will prevent you from feeling overwhelmed or confused.

Gather what you have, and categorize each vehicle or asset in a spreadsheet, so you have a clear picture of your existing owned, earned, and paid media.

Owned, Earned, Paid Media Framework

To do this effectively, use the owned, earned, and paid media framework to categorize the digital “vehicles,” assets, or channels you‘re already using and decide what’s a good fit for your strategy.

Owned Media

This refers to the digital assets your brand or company owns — whether that's your website, social media profiles, blog content, or imagery. Owned channels are what your business has complete control over.

This can also include some off-site content you own that isn't hosted on your website (e.g. a blog you publish on Medium).

Earned Media

Earned media refers to the exposure you earn through word-of-mouth marketing. Whether that‘s content you’ve distributed on other websites (e.g. guest posts), PR work you‘ve been doing, or the customer experience you’ve delivered. Earned media is the recognition you receive as a result of these efforts.

You can earn media by getting press mentions and positive reviews as well as by people sharing your content via their networks (e.g. social media channels).

Paid Media

Paid media refers to any vehicle or channel you spend money on to catch the attention of your buyer personas.

This includes things like Google Ads, paid social media posts, native advertising (e.g. sponsored posts on other websites), or any other medium through which you pay in exchange for increased visibility.

Since you have a better grasp of what this framework entails, let's look at an example.

Owned, Earned, and Paid Media Framework Example

Say you have an owned piece of content on a landing page on your website that's been created to help you generate leads. You know you want to incorporate different parts of the framework rather than just working with owned, earned, or paid media alone.

To amplify the number of leads the content generates, you make an effort to ensure it's shareable so your audience can distribute it via their social media profiles. In return, this will increase traffic to your landing page. This is the earned media component.

To support your content's success, you might post about the content on your Facebook page and pay to have it seen by more people in your target audience.

This is how the three parts of the framework are able to work together — although, it's not necessary for success. For instance, if your owned and earned media are already both successful, you might not need to invest in paid. So, evaluate the best solution to help you meet your goal, and then incorporate the channels that work best for your business into your digital marketing strategy.

Now you know what's already being used, you can start to think about what to keep and what to cut. Keep track of your paid media efforts with this free Paid Media Template.

Keep track of your paid media efforts! Download Now for Free!

4. Audit and plan your owned media campaigns.

At the heart of digital marketing is owned media — and it almost always comes in the form of content. That‘s because nearly every message your brand broadcasts can be classified as content, whether it’s an About Us site page, product descriptions, blog posts, ebooks, infographics, podcasts, or social media posts.

Content helps convert your website visitors into leads and customers while improving your brand's online presence. And when this content is search engine optimized (SEO), it can boost your search and organic traffic.

Whatever your digital marketing strategy goal is, you'll want to incorporate owned content. To start, decide what content will help you reach your goals.

If your goal is to generate 50% more leads via the website than last year, your About Us page is most likely not going to be included in your strategy, unless that page has somehow been a lead-generation machine in the past.

Here's a brief process you can follow to work out what owned content you need to meet your digital marketing strategy goals.

Audit your existing content.

Make a list of your existing owned content, and rank each item according to what has previously performed best in relation to your current goals.

For example, if your goal is lead generation, rank your content according to which pieces generated the most leads over the last year (such as a blog post, ebook, or site page).

The idea here is to figure out what‘s currently working, and what’s not so that you can set yourself up for success when planning future content.

Identify gaps in your existing content.

Based on your buyer personas, identify any gaps in the content you have.

For example, if you're a math tutoring company and know through research that a major challenge for your personas is finding effective ways to study, create some.

By looking at your content audit, you might discover that ebooks hosted on a certain type of landing page convert really well (better than webinars, for example).

In the case of this math tutoring company, you might make the decision to add an ebook about “how to make studying more effective” to your content creation plans.

Create a content creation plan.

Based on your findings and the gaps you‘ve identified, make a content creation plan outlining the content that’s necessary to help you hit your goals.

This should include:

A title

Format

A goal

Promotional channels

Why you're creating the content

The priority level of the content

This can be a simple spreadsheet, and should also include budget information if you‘re planning to outsource the content creation, or a time estimate if you’re producing it yourself.

5. Audit and plan your earned media campaigns.

Evaluating your previous earned media against your current goals can help you get an idea of where to focus your time. Look at where your traffic and leads are coming from (if that's your goal) and rank each earned media source from most effective to least effective.

The idea is to build a picture of what types of earned media will help you reach your goals (and what won‘t) based on historical data. However, if there’s something new you want to experiment with, don‘t rule it out just because it’s never been done before.

6. Audit and plan your paid media campaigns.

This process involves much of the same process: You need to evaluate your existing paid media across each platform (e.g. Google Ads, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) to figure out what's most likely to help you meet your current goals.

If you‘ve spent a lot of money on Ads and haven’t seen the results you‘d hoped for, maybe it’s time to refine your approach, or scrap it altogether and focus on another platform that seems to be yielding better results. If the process, you should have a clear idea of which paid media platforms you want to continue using, and which (if any) you'd like to remove from your strategy.

PPC Campaign Template! Free Download Now!

7. Bring your digital marketing campaign together.

You've done the planning and the research, and you now have a solid vision of the elements that will make up your digital marketing strategy.

To review, here's what you should have solidified so far:

Clear profile(s) of your buyer persona(s)

One or more digital marketing-specific goals

An inventory of your existing owned, earned, and paid media

An audit of your existing owned, earned, and paid media

An owned content creation plan or wish list

To provide a better understanding of what digital strategies entail, check out the following list of basic marketing strategies commonly utilized by teams across a range of industries. A better understanding of what digital marketing strategies entail is vital to your ultimate success. Earning a bachelor’s in marketing or a related field can be valuable and boost your career. In the meantime, check out the following list of basic marketing strategies commonly utilized by teams across a range of industries.

Digital Marketing Strategies

1. Content Marketing

2. Paid Advertising

3. Account Based Marketing (ABM)

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

5. Social Media Marketing

6. Influencer Marketing

7. Podcasting

8. Email Marketing

9. Video Marketing

Digital marketing isn’t one size fits all. Each business has its own unique needs and goals, therefore every marketing team will have their own approach. However, there are many online marketing strategies that you can implement to spread awareness about your business and attract new customers. Here are some common, yet effective strategies that can help you build a comprehensive digital marketing plan.

. Content Marketing

Content marketing involves creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and engage your target audience. Instead of bombarding your audience with ads and promotional messages, content marketing focuses on providing your customers with information that is actually interesting and useful to them.

Ultimately, the goal of content marketing is to build trust, establish thought leadership, and drive profitable customer action.

Blogging is one of the most common content marketing tactics.. While a few dissenting voices claim that blogging is “a massive waste of your time,” it’s still a major play for businesses that want to attract customers who are genuinely interested in their products and services.

Why? Because well-written, well-researched blog posts often answer an urgent need for a potential customer.

Don’t blog just because; blog with the intent to solve for the customer. To effectively do so, it’s important to understand your target audience and their pain points. That way, you can write highly targeted content that’s genuinely helpful for readers.

Online Marketing Benefits of Content Marketing

Boosts Web Traffic: Regularly publishing fresh and relevant blog content can improve your SEO rankings, attracting more organic visitors to your website. Plus, sharing content on your social media pages and other channels can help you stay engaged with your audience while increasing visibility.

Establishes Authority and Credibility: Sharing your expertise and insights through blog articles and other content can help establish you and your company as a thought leader in your industry. This also allows you to engage with your audience and provide them with useful information that speaks to their pain points. Not only does this build trust, but it also positions you as a reliable and knowledgeable resource.

Generates Leads and Conversions: By creating engaging and relevant content, you can attract potential customers who are interested in your business and move them through the buyer’s journey. You can also convert readers into leads by including CTAs that encourage readers to take action, such as subscribing to a newsletter or registering for a free trial.

2. Paid Advertising

An organic content marketing strategy is only a portion of the story. It’s just as important to implement non-organic plays, such as paid advertising. Not only will this help you drive more brand awareness, it will also help you reach audiences who can’t find your business organically yet.

This is an important strategy to implement when you’re still growing your blog and not yet getting as much traffic as you want. There are a few types of advertising you should consider adding to your digital strategy:

Social Media Advertising

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

Google Ads

Online Advertising

Nearly every platform has an option for you to advertise — either through a display network (such as Google’s) or through its built-in ad system (such as Instagram’s, Facebook’s, and LinkedIn’s self-serve advertising portal).

The benefit of advertising is that it’s not dependent on a content or SEO strategy. You simply need to write a few lines of copy, decide on imagery, and launch your advertising campaigns. To ensure that your campaigns are a success, you’ll want to create an advertising plan that outlines who you’re targeting, which channels you’ll be using, and how much you plan to spend.

Download Now! It's Free! Advertising Plan Template

Online Marketing Benefits of Paid Advertising

Targeted Campaigns: Platforms like Google, Facebook, and Instagram enable you to target your ads to specific audiences based on their demographics, interests, behaviors, and more. This helps ensure that your ads are seen by the right people who are more likely to be interested in your products or services.

Measurable Results: No matter which platform you advertise on, you’ll be able to track the success of your ad campaigns by analyzing performance metrics such as impressions, clicks, and conversions. By analyzing this data, you can identify which ads and targeting strategies are most effective and make informed decisions to improve future campaigns.

Flexibility: Paid advertising gives you the option to adjust your campaigns, targeting options, and budget based on your marketing goals and audience preferences. This can help you stay agile and responsive in the fast-moving digital marketing landscape and ensure that you are getting the most from your advertising budget.

3. Account-Based Marketing (ABM)

Account-based marketing is a strategic approach in marketing that focuses on targeting and engaging specific high-value accounts or key decision makers within those accounts. Rather than casting a wide net to reach a broad audience, ABM personalizes marketing efforts to cater to the needs and preferences of specific target accounts.

This strategy is particularly suitable for B2B organizations and industries with complex sales cycles, where forging strong relationships with specific key accounts is critical.

For instance, let’s say your software company wants to target a specific enterprise account, XYZ Inc. Instead of using a broad marketing approach, your company decides to adopt an ABM strategy to tailor their efforts specifically to XYZ Inc.

To do this, you would need to use tactics such as researching and understanding XYZ Inc.’s pain points and business objectives, developing personalized content tailored to their needs, engaging with decision makers and nurturing relationships with them, and coordinating your marketing and sales efforts.

4. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is the practice of optimizing your web content, structure, and technical aspects to improve its visibility and ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). The ultimate goal of SEO is to increase organic, non-paid traffic to your website from search engines like Google and Bing.

If your product pages aren’t earning traffic, SEO is your best bet to get those pages in front of those who are searching for those products and services. To ensure that your content engages and converts users, it’s important to invest in an on-page SEO strategy.

Online Marketing Benefits of SEO

Increases Organic Traffic: Optimizing your digital content for search engines can help you rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant keywords that your audience is using. As your ranking increases, so does your brand’s visibility and your website’s organic traffic.

Improves User Experience: When it comes to getting higher rankings, optimizing your website for users is just as important as optimizing for search engines. This includes ensuring that your website is easy to navigate and has a clear hierarchy of information so users can quickly find what they are looking for. In doing this, you not only improve the user experience, but you also increase the chances of users staying on your website longer, engaging with your brand, and ultimately, becoming customers.

Provides Long-Term Benefits: Unlike paid advertising, which requires ongoing investment, optimizing your content for search engines can provide long-term benefits by driving consistent and ongoing organic traffic to your website. Yes, it can take longer to reach your goals, but the payoff includes saving your business money and building an authentic brand reputation.

5. Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing is another way to generate brand awareness online and boost your digital strategy. It involves creating and sharing content on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and others, to attract attention, drive website traffic, and generate leads.

Social media marketing is especially useful for building a community around your brand because it enables you to speak directly to your audience. Engaging with your followers through comments, messages, and discussions allows you to connect with them on a more personal level. The stronger relationship you have with your audience, the more loyal they will be to your brand.

Online Marketing Benefits of Social Media Marketing

Increases Brand Awareness: With billions of active social media users, you can reach a wide audience and increase your brand’s visibility. This is especially true if you participate in relevant social media trends, run paid campaigns, create and promote branded hashtags, and collaborate with other brands.

Boosts Engagement: A strong social media presence can help create a community around your brand and build a strong relationship with your followers. Plus, you can use tactics like contests and giveaways to encourage specific actions that support your marketing goals, such as asking users to tag a friend or write a review.

Rich Insights and Analytics: Social media platforms typically provide robust analytics tools that allow you to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns, track key metrics, and gain insights for continuous improvement.

6. Influencer Marketing

The global market for influencer marketing has more than doubled since 2019, making it more popular than ever. By partnering with influencers, brands can create content that promotes their products or services while leveraging the influencer’s reach.

There are many ways you can partner with influencers, such as sponsored content, guest blogging, product collaborations, influencer takeovers, and more.

Before partnering with an influencer, it’s important to do your research and make sure they have an engaged following within your industry or niche and are aligned with your values and messaging.

Online Marketing Benefits of Influencer Marketing

Brand Exposure: Partnering with influencers allows you to tap into the influencer’s existing audience and reach, which can significantly boost your brand’s awareness. By leveraging an influencer’s platform and following, you can expose your products or services to a larger audience and gain visibility among potential new customers.

Authentic Content Creation: Influencers are skilled in creating engaging and authentic content that resonates with their followers. By partnering with influencers, you can tap into their creativity and expertise to develop compelling content that promotes your brand’s offerings in an organic and relatable manner. Plus, user-generated content created by influencers can showcase real-life experiences with your brand, which can influence buyer decisions and foster trust.

Trust and Credibility: Influencers are seen as trusted authorities within their niches. When they endorse or recommend a brand’s products or services, it adds credibility and trust. This can positively influence consumer perceptions and increase the likelihood of potential customers trying or purchasing from your brand.

7. Podcasting

Audio marketing has been on the rise — all you have to do is look at the ways Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces have gone head-to-head to earn market share. While platforms such as Clubhouse are different from podcasting, the idea is the same: You get to educate and engage an audience while they’re on the go. All they need is a device that plays audio. Podcasts can become an essential element in your digital strategy, allowing you to reach people on platforms other than search engines and social media channels. Plus, it’s a much more unplanned, natural medium — though of course you should plan each episode carefully and ensure you’re delivering content that actually serves your readership.

Online Marketing Benefits of Podcasting

Discoverability: Podcasts can be hosted on various platforms, such as Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Stitcher, expanding your brand’s reach. You can also transcribe your podcasts and publish the transcript to make them more SEO-friendly. Plus, you can invite guests to speak on your podcast and have them share the episode with their followers.

Authenticity: Podcasting allows for a more conversational tone compared to other forms of content. The audio format lends itself to authentic and unscripted conversations, creating a sense of connection and genuine interaction between you and your listeners.

Sustainable: Podcasts have a long shelf life and can remain relevant for months to come, helping you get the most out of your content. Plus, you can repurpose the audio material to create blog posts, videos, ebooks, and other types of content.

8. Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the most important digital strategies you can implement today. It gives you plenty of opportunities to nurture customers who are highly interested in your products. After all, you wouldn’t be subscribed to a newsletter of a brand that doesn’t interest you, and a business isn’t supposed to email customers who haven’t signed up to its mailing list, anyway. Not unless it wants to risk diminishing email deliver-ability.

You can earn subscribers through your blog, through contests, and even through webinars. Any time someone gives you their email — and every time they give consent to receive communication from you — you have full permission to target them with an email marketing campaign.

Download Today! Free email marketing and planning template

Online Marketing Benefits of Email Marketing

Builds Relationships: Email allows you to communicate directly with your audience, establishing a personal relationship and building trust over time. You can also customize email campaigns to the interests and unique preferences of your target audience, providing more content that is relevant to their needs.

Drives Traffic to Your Website: Emails with links to your website or blog can drive traffic to your website and engage with your brand. You can even send your email subscribers exclusive deals, promotions, or discounts, which can increase the potential for conversions.

Easy to Track: Email marketing campaigns can be tracked and measured, providing valuable insights such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, bounce rates, and unsubscribe rates. By analyzing these metrics, you can make data-driven decisions that can help you reach your target audience more effectively.

9. Video Marketing

With platforms like TikTok and Instagram Reels on the rise, video marketing is more popular — and effective — than ever. In fact, 92% of video marketers surveyed by Wyzowl reported they get a positive ROI on video content.

One of the reasons why videos are so effective is because they allow you to communicate with your audience in a more personal way. Plus, you can include a lot of information in a short video, keeping your audience engaged and saving them time.

By making video an integral part of your digital strategy, you’re able to showcase your brand’s creativity and explore more content formats, such as product demos, explainer videos, expert interviews, customer testimonials, and more.

Online Marketing Benefits of Video Marketing

Boosts SEO: Since Google tends to prioritize video content in its search results, implementing video as part of your marketing strategy can improve your search engine visibility. Plus, video content can be optimized with relevant titles, descriptions, and keywords, making it easier for search engines to understand and categorize the content.

Better Retention: Video is easier to remember than text-based content because it allows you to use storytelling techniques and communicate important messages more effectively. Video has the power to invoke emotions and create a connection with your audience, making it easier for them to consume and remember your content.

Enhances Reach: Video is highly shareable on social media due to their easily digestible nature. As people share your video content with their own social media networks, it exposes your brand to new audiences.

3. The General: Paid Advertising

After reports that consumers thought the brand was untrustworthy due to its low-budget ads, The General decided to revamp its entire marketing strategy.

In a commercial featuring basketball superstar, Shaq, the brand addressed the elephant in the room and introduced a new-and-improved look.

In addition, they also emphasize their credibility by mentioning how long they‘ve been in business and how many people they’ve helped.

By addressing negative perceptions head-on, brands can not only change how consumers view them but also show that they are in tune with their target audience.

Grow Better With Marketing Strategies That Improve Your Digital Presence

Your strategy document will be very individual to your business, which is why it's almost impossible for us to create a one-size-fits-all digital marketing strategy template.

Remember, the purpose of your strategy document is to map out the actions you‘re going to take to achieve your goal over a period of time — as long as it communicates that, then you’ve nailed the basics of creating a digital strategy.

Digital Marketing Strategy Template

Digital Marketing Strategy Template

While a spreadsheet can be an efficient format for mapping your digital marketing strategy, that approach can quickly become messy and overwhelming.

To plan your strategy for the long-term – typically between six to 12 months out, you need a reliable digital marketing strategy document. But, where to start?

This template will walk you through your business summary and initiatives, help you build your target market and competitor information, and flesh out your marketing strategy — including your budget and specific channels and metrics.

Marketing Plan Template! Free to download!

By planning out these yearly plans, you can overlay when you and your team will be executing each action. For example:

In January, you'll start a blog that will be continually updated once a week, for the entire year.

In March, you'll launch a new ebook, accompanied by paid promotion.

In July, you'll prepare for your biggest business month — what do you hope to have observed at this point that will influence the content you produce to support it?

In September, you'll focus on earned media in the form of PR to drive additional traffic during the run-up.

This approach provides a structured timeline for your activity which will help communicate plans among colleagues.

What are SMART goals?

What are SMART goals?

SMART goals are concrete targets that you aim to hit over a certain period. These goals should be carefully drafted by a manager and their direct report to set them up for success. "SMART" is an acronym that describes the most important characteristics of each goal.

"SMART" stands for "specific," "measurable," "attainable," "relevant," and "time-bound." Each SMART goal should have these five characteristics to ensure the goal can be reached and benefits the employee. Find out what each characteristic means below, and how to write a SMART goal that exemplifies them.Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

SMART Goal Acronym

The "Objectives" section of this paper asks "How do you write meaningful objectives?" Then goes on to define the SMART acronym as the following:

Specific — target a specific area for improvement.

Measurable — quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress.

Assignable — specify who will do it.

Realistic — state what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources.

Time-related — specify when the result(s) can be achieved.

S — Specific

Specific goals are clear and include precise details. Specificity makes your goal easy to understand and carry out.

To check if your goal is specific, ask more than one person to review your goal and rephrase what you are trying to do. If your proofreaders come up with more than one idea of your final goal, it isn't specific enough.

M — Measurable

Measurable goals are targets that you can calculate and track over time. Goals that include a set measurement or metric are more concrete than anecdotal goals or plans based on someone’s opinion.

Measurable goals give you and your team a chance to track progress toward a goal and make changes over time. It also gives you a clear and specific picture of success.

To figure out how to make your goal measurable, look closely at your ultimate goal. Ask yourself:

How can we control this goal?

Is this goal clear and actionable?

Is there anything subjective about this goal?

Then, choose the metrics that most directly connect to your final goal.

A — Attainable

Attainable goals are challenging but achievable. This aspect of goal-setting should consider the unique qualities of your team well as the problems and blockers you work on together.

To set ambitious but attainable goals, start by thinking big. Create a list where you imagine the best possible outcomes. Take a break for a day or two, then come back and edit your list with every question, challenge, and critique you can think of.

Goals that are too easy to meet won't motivate your team or lead to growth. But goals that are unrealistic can demoralize your team and strain resources. It's important to find the right balance.

R — Relevant

Relevant goals support the mission, vision, and priorities of your business.

To make sure your SMART goals connect to your business goals, start the goal and objective-setting process with a quick review.

Read through your company's mission and vision statements, or print and post them on the wall in a shared space. Then review quarterly business reports, recent memos, or any recent communication about business goals. This will mean you start the process with what's relevant at the top of your mind.

After you draft your SMART goals, do another quick scan of these documents and review your goals for relevance.

It's easy to get excited about a new idea, even if it doesn't align with company priorities. But the best ideas will support your most essential business goals.

T — Time-Bound

Time-bound goals have a specific deadline or timeframe. Adding a time constraint to your goal creates a sense of urgency.

Urgency combines importance with a need for action. This is sometimes because there's a fear of consequences. Other times employees feel it because they're eager to prepare for the future or meet an exciting goal.

Time constraints are important to your goal-setting process. This is because tasks that are time-sensitive often feel more important than tasks without a timeframe attached. This means that, no matter how essential a project is, it will drop in priority without a deadline.

Luckily, it's easy to create a feeling of urgency. Just add a realistic timeframe to your goal. Time-bound goals also set clear expectations for stakeholders, which improves communication.

Why are SMART goals important?

SMART goals are important to set as they:

• Help you work with clear intentions, not broad or vague goals

• Provide a method to gauge your success by setting benchmarks to meet

• Give sensible objectives that are realistic and achievable

• Cut out unnecessary or irrelevant work that could take away from what’s important

• Set a clear beginning and end to adhere to in reaching your goals

When you make goals that are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound, you're increasing your odds for success by verifying that the goal is achievable, identifying the metrics that define success, and creating a roadmap to reach those metrics.

If your goals are abstract, if you don't know what it will take to achieve success, or if you don't give yourself a deadline to complete steps, you may lose focus and fall short of what you want to accomplish.

Do SMART goals actually work?

Setting unrealistic goals and trying to measure them without consideration of previous performance, overly short time frames, or including too many variables will lead you off course.

However, these goals work only if formulated properly and if they take into account the motive and cadence of those working on them. Additionally, your SMART goals can only succeed when the employees working towards them have the means to achieve them.

Benefits of SMART Goals

Offer Focus and Clarity

The process of goal completion is often more complicated than it seems. Distractions, side tasks, and other projects can all steer you away from completing your projects.

But SMART goals improve focus because they simplify your to-do list of tasks. At the same time, they offer an immediate reminder of why those specific tasks are important.

Boost Motivation

It's not unusual to experience stress or overwhelm in the workplace. One contributor is often a lack of clear goals. And that combination can make a serious impact on your motivation.

But a SMART goal can boost energy, improve direction, and motivate you and your team because:

• It gets everyone more involved in the process

• It helps employees understand why their work is important

• It offers a new challenge and direction for people who are feeling stuck

• Improve Accountability

Fear of failure often stops people from doing their best work. To avoid this stressor, you might avoid making a commitment in the workplace.

But accountability is an essential for high-growth teams. It helps you and your team engage, take ownership of their work, and take responsibility for progress.

SMART goals improve accountability because they give teams and managers a simple way to track progress toward shared objectives. This makes it easier for teams to understand the learning, coaching, and feedback they need to optimize performance.

SMART goals also help teams manage and plan their time more effectively. They make it easier to prioritize tasks too.

SMART goals help with effective communication. This is because they're goals that multiple coworkers, teams, and departments can quickly understand. This improves knowledge-sharing, collaborative efforts, and communication.

Help Manage Resources

Proper resource management can reduce costs, make processes more efficient, and increase productivity. But managing resources is tough.

Put simply, a business is a group of people, each with distinct knowledge and experience, working toward individual goals. These individual goals eventually come together to meet common goals, but in the process, things can get a little wonky.

But SMART goals are great for resource management. This is because they offer a structure that makes it easier for teams to see where a process is creating blocks or challenges. This helps teams understand when priorities and resources are out of sync. It also creates a shared purpose that can inspire people to make necessary but difficult changes.

Increase Innovation

Innovation is a process that combines creativity and problem-solving skills to get original ideas. You may have heard the common belief says that creativity requires a lack of boundaries. And some critiques of SMART goals say that they can have negative impacts if goal-setting is too rigid or narrowly defined.

But there's extensive data, including this research from Harvard Business Review, that says constraints often positively impact innovation. SMART goals boost innovation because they create motivational challenges. The motivation comes in part from the constraints teams need to work within.

Enhance Performance

For managers, SMART goals offer a useful framework for improving employee performance. They make progress toward project goals clear. This goal-setting framework can also apply to long-term personal goals for each member of your team.

For individuals, SMART goals can make it easier to balance and track work projects. They can boost performance because they help you:

• Measure progress

• Identify strengths and weaknesses

• Build positive momentum

Setting and working toward SMART goals can also help you develop new behaviors that can improve performance.

SMART Goal Examples

• Blog Traffic Goal

• Facebook Video Views Goal

• Email Subscription Goal

• Webinar Sign-Up Goal

• Landing Page Performance Goal

• Link-Building Strategy Goal

• Reduce Churn Rate Goal

• Brand Affinity Goal

• Podcast Listener Count Goal

• In-Person Event Attendee Goal

1. Blog Traffic Goal

Specific: I want to boost our blog's traffic by increasing our weekly publishing frequency from five to eight times a week. Our two bloggers will increase their workload from writing two posts a week to three posts a week, and our editor will increase her workload from writing one post a week to two posts a week.

Measurable: Our goal is an 8% increase in traffic.

Attainable: Our blog traffic increased by 5% last month when we increased our weekly publishing frequency from three to five times a week.

Relevant: By increasing blog traffic, we'll boost brand awareness and generate more leads, giving sales more opportunities to close.

Time-Bound: End of this month.

SMART Goal: At the end of this month, our blog will see an 8% lift in traffic by increasing our weekly publishing frequency from five posts per week to eight posts per week.

2. Facebook Video Views Goal

Specific: I want to boost our average views per native video by cutting our video content mix from eight topics to our five most popular topics.

Measurable: Our goal is a 25% increase in views.

Attainable: When we cut down our video content mix on Facebook from 10 topics to our eight most popular topics, our average views per native video increased by 20%.

Relevant: By increasing average views per native video on Facebook, we'll boost our social media following and brand awareness, reaching more potential customers with our video content.

Time-Bound: In six months.

SMART Goal: In six months, we'll see a 25% increase in average video views per native video on Facebook by cutting our video content mix from eight topics to our five most popular topics.

3. Email Subscription Goal

Specific: I want to boost the number of email blog subscribers by increasing our Facebook advertising budget on blog posts that historically acquire the most email subscribers.

Measurable: Our goal is a 50% increase in subscribers.

Attainable: Since we started using this tactic three months ago, our email blog subscriptions have increased by 40%.

Relevant: By increasing the number of email blog subscribers, our blog will drive more traffic, boost brand awareness, and drive more leads to our sales team.

Time-Bound: In three months.

SMART Goal: In three months, we'll see a 50% increase in the number of email blog subscribers by increasing our Facebook advertising budget on posts that historically acquire the most blog subscribers.

4. Webinar Sign-Up Goal

Specific: I want to increase the number of sign-ups for our Facebook Messenger webinar by promoting it through social, email, our blog, and Facebook Messenger.

Measurable: Our goal is a 15% increase in sign-ups.

Attainable: Our last Facebook Messenger webinar saw a 10% increase in sign-ups when we only promoted it through social, email, and our blog.

Relevant: When our webinars generate more leads, sales have more opportunities to close.

Time-Bound: By June 1, the day of the webinar.

SMART Goal: By June 1, the day of our webinar, we'll see a 15% increase in sign-ups by promoting it through social, email, our blog, and Facebook Messenger.

5. Landing Page Performance Goal

Specific: I want our landing pages to generate more leads by switching from a one-column form to a two-column form.

Measurable: My goal is a 30% increase in lead generation.

Attainable: When we A/B tested our traditional one-column form versus a two-column form on our highest-traffic landing pages, we discovered that two-column forms convert 27% better than our traditional one-column forms, at a 99% significance level.

Relevant: If we generate more content leads, sales can close more customers.

Time-Bound: One year from now.

SMART Goal: One year from now, our landing pages will generate 30% more leads by switching their forms from one column to two columns.

6. Link-Building Strategy Goal

Specific: I want to increase our website's organic traffic by developing a link-building strategy that gets other publishers to link to our website. This increases our ranking in search engine results, allowing us to generate more organic traffic.

Measurable: Our goal is 40 backlinks to our company homepage.

Attainable: According to our SEO analysis tool, there are currently 500 low-quality links directing to our homepage from elsewhere on the internet. Given the number of partnerships we currently have with other businesses, and that we generate 10 new inbound links per month without any outreach on our part, an additional 40 inbound links from a single link-building campaign is a significant but feasible target.

Relevant: Organic traffic is our top source of new leads, and backlinks are one of the biggest ranking factors on search engines like Google. If we build links from high-quality publications, our organic ranking increases, boosting our traffic and leads as a result.

Time-Bound: Four months from now.

SMART Goal: Over the next four months, I will build 40 additional backlinks that direct to www.ourcompany.com. To do so, I will collaborate with Ellie and Andrew from our PR department to connect with publishers and develop an effective outreach strategy.

7. Reducing Churn Rate Goal

Specific: I want to reduce customer churn by 5% for my company because every customer loss is a reflection of our service’s quality and perception.

Measurable: Contact 30 at-risk customers per week and provide customer support daily for five new customers during their onboarding process.

Attainable: Our product offering has just improved and we have the means to invest more into our customer support team, and could potentially have five at-risk customers to upscale monthly.

Relevant: We can set up a customer knowledge base to track customers’ progression in the buyer’s journey and prevent churn by contacting them before they lose interest.

Time-Bound: In 24 weeks.

SMART Goal: In 24 weeks, I will reduce the churn rate by 5% for my company. To do so, we will contact 30 at-risk customers per week and provide/invest in customer support to assist five new customers during onboarding daily and track their progress through a customer knowledge base.

8. Brand Affinity Goal

Specific: I want to increase our podcast listener count as we are trying to establish ourselves as thought leaders in our market.

Measurable: A 40% increase in listeners is our goal.

Attainable: We can increase our current budget and level our podcaster’s cadence, to have the means to hold insightful conversations for our listeners to tune into.

Relevant: We created a podcast and have dedicated a team to source interesting guests, sound mixing, and eye-catching thumbnails to get it started.

Time-Bound: In four months.

SMART Goal: In four months, we'll see a 40% increase in average listener count in Apple Podcasts by providing our team the budget and cadence to make insightful podcasts with quality sound mixing and eye-catching thumbnails.

9. Podcast Listener Count Goal

Specific: I want to boost our podcast's listener count by promoting our podcast across social channels. We will post four quotes related to new podcast episodes throughout the month on our Twitter account, and we will post six short videos of our podcast conversations with guests on our Instagram account throughout the month.

Measurable: Our goal is a 20% increase in podcast listeners.

Attainable: Our podcast listener count increased by 5% last month when we published two short videos of our podcast conversation on Instagram.

Relevant: By increasing podcast listener count, we'll boost brand awareness and generate more leads, giving sales more opportunities to close.

Time-Bound: End of this month.

SMART Goal: At the end of this month, our podcast will see a 20% increase in listeners by increasing our social media promotions from two Instagram posts to four Twitter posts and six Instagram posts.

10. In-Person Event Attendee Goal

Specific: I want to boost attendance at our upcoming in-person event by 50% by sending out three email reminders to our subscriber lists each week before the event.

Measurable: Our goal is a 50% increase in attendees.

Attainable: Our attendee number increased by 20% last year when we sent out one email reminder to our subscriber lists.

Relevant: By increasing attendee count, we'll increase brand loyalty by providing value to our existing customers, and generate more leads.

Time-Bound: August 30.

SMART Goal: By the time of our event on August 30th, our attendee number will increase by 50% from where it's at now (250 attendees), by sending out three email reminders to our subscriber lists.

How To Make a SMART Goal

• Use specific wording.

• Include measurable goals.

• Aim for realistically attainable goals.

• Pick relevant goals that relate to your business.

• Make goals time-bound by including a timeframe and deadline information.

How To Make a SMART Goal

Use specific wording.

Include measurable goals.

Aim for realistically attainable goals.

Pick relevant goals that relate to your business.

1. Use specific wording.

When writing SMART goals, keep in mind that they are "specific" in that there's a hard and fast destination the employee is trying to reach. "Get better at my job," isn't a SMART goal because it isn't specific. Instead, ask yourself: What are you getting better at? How much better do you want to get?

If you're a marketing professional, your job probably revolves around key performance indicators or KPIs. Therefore, you might choose a particular KPI or metric that you want to improve on — like visitors, leads, or customers. You should also identify the team members working toward this goal, the resources they have, and their plan of action.

2. Include measurable goals.

SMART goals should be "measurable" in that you can track and quantify the goal's progress. "Increase the blog's traffic from email," by itself, isn't a SMART goal because you can't measure the increase. Instead, ask yourself: How much email marketing traffic should you strive for?

If you want to gauge your team's progress, you need to quantify your goals, like achieving an X-percentage increase in visitors, leads, or customers.

Common SMART Goal Mistake: No KPIs

This is in the same light of avoiding vagueness. While you might need qualitative or open-ended evidence to prove your success, you should still come up with a quantifiable KPI.

3. Aim for realistically attainable goals.

An "attainable" SMART goal considers the employee's ability to achieve it. Make sure that X-percentage increase is rooted in reality. If your blog traffic increased by 5% last month, try to increase it by 8-10% this month, rather than a lofty 25%.

It's crucial to base your goals on your own analytics, not industry benchmarks, or else you might bite off more than you can chew.

4. Pick relevant goals that relate to your business.

SMART goals that are "relevant" relate to your company's overall business goals and account for current trends in your industry. For instance, will growing your traffic from email lead to more revenue? And, is it actually possible for you to significantly boost your blog's email traffic given your current email marketing campaigns?

If you're aware of these factors, you’re more likely to set goals that benefit your company — not just you or your department.

So, what does that do to our SMART goal? It might encourage you to adjust the metric you're using to track the goal's progress. For example, maybe your business has historically relied on organic traffic for generating leads and revenue, and research suggests you can generate more qualified leads this way.

Common SMART Goal Mistake: Losing Sight of the Company

When your company is doing well, it can be easy to say you want to pivot or grow in another direction. While companies can successfully do this, you don't want your team to lose sight of how the core of your business works.

5. Make goals time-bound by including a timeframe and deadline information.

A "time-bound" SMART goal keeps you on schedule. Improving on a goal is great, but not if it takes too long. Attaching deadlines to your goals puts a healthy dose of pressure on your team to accomplish them. This helps you make consistent and significant progress in the long term.

For example, which would you prefer: increasing organic traffic by 5% every month, leading to a 30-35% increase in half a year? Or trying to increase traffic by 15% with no deadline and achieving that goal in the same timeframe? If you picked the former, you're right.

Common SMART Goal Mistake: No Time Frame

Having no time frame or a really broad span of time noted in your goal will cause the effort to get re-prioritized or make it hard for you to see if your team is on track.

Make Your SMART Goals SMART-er

Now that you know what a SMART goal is, why it's important, and the framework to create one, it's time to put that information into practice. Whether you're setting goals for a personal achievement or as part of hitting important marketing milestones, it's good to start with what you want to achieve and then reverse-engineer it into a concrete SMART goal.