Chapter 1

Understanding digital marketing

 What is your idea about digital marketing?

DIGITAL MARKETING

 Digital marketing is the use of the Internet, mobile devices, social media, search engines, and
other channels to reach consumers. Some marketing experts consider digital marketing to be an
entirely new endeavor that requires a new way of approaching customers and new ways of
understanding how customers behave compared to traditional marketing. Digital marketing
targets a specific segment of the customer base and is interactive. Digital marketing is on the
rise and includes search result ads, email ads, and promoted tweets – anything that
incorporates marketing with customer feedback or a two-way interaction between the company
and customer.

 Internet marketing differs from digital marketing. Internet marketing is advertising that is solely
on the Internet, whereas digital marketing can take place through mobile devices, on a subway
platform, in a video game, or via a smartphone app.

 In the parlance of digital marketing, advertisers are commonly referred to as sources, while
members of the targeted ads are commonly called receivers. Sources frequently target highly
specific, well-defined receivers. For example, after extending the late-night hours of many of its
locations, McDonald's needed to get the word out. It targeted shift workers and travelers with
digital ads because the company knew that these people made up a large segment of its late-
night business. McDonald's encouraged them to download a new Restaurant Finder app,
targeting them with ads placed at ATMs and gas stations, as well as on websites that it knew its
customers frequented at night.

DIGITAL MARKETING ASSETS

 Almost anything can be a digital marketing asset. It simply needs to be a marketing tool you use
online. That being said, many people don’t realize how many digital marketing assets they have
at their disposal. Here are just a few examples:

 Your website

 Branded assets (logos, icons, acronyms, etc.)

 Video content (video ads, product demos, etc.)

 Images (infographics, product shots, company photos, etc.)

 Written content (blog posts, eBooks, product descriptions, testimonials, etc.)

 Online products or tools (calculators, interactive content, etc.)

 Reviews

 Social media pages

 Today, purchases and purchasing decisions are increasingly made online. Therefore, regardless
of what you sell, an online presence is necessary to capitalize on this trend.

 This new digital landscape is impacting organizations in more than just the lead and sales
generation departments, though. Savvy companies use the Internet to drive awareness and
interest in what they offer, but also to convert casual buyers into brand advocates who buy
more and encourage members of their network to do the same.

 In many ways, nothing in marketing has changed. Marketing is still about developing a mutually
beneficial relationship with prospects, leads, and customers. We call the development of this
relationship the customer journey. In this chapter, you learn to create a customer journey for
your organization and the role digital marketing plays in that journey. The rest of this book helps
you to create and execute offers and marketing campaigns that intentionally move customers
through the stages of this customer journey.

 The role of your digital marketing is to assist in moving a prospect, lead, or customer from one
stage of the customer journey to the next.

CREATING A CUSTOMER AVATAR

 A customer avatar is the fictional, generalized representation of your ideal customer.

 A customer avatar is a detailed profile of your ideal customer. It doesn’t make assumptions or
categorize people into groups. The avatar focusses on one person and outlines everything about
them. It goes into much greater depth than a regular marketing persona, providing marketers
with many more targeting tools.

 People are so much more than their age, gender, ethnicity, religious background, profession,
and so on. People don’t fit neatly into boxes, which is why broad, generic marketing campaigns
generally don’t convert well; they don’t resonate with your audience.

 It is absolutely crucial that you understand and make your customer avatar as specific as
possible so that you can craft personalized content, offers, and marketing campaigns that
interest members of your audience or solve their problems.

OUR PRODUCTS/SERVICES

 In fact, the exercise of creating a customer avatar impacts virtually every aspect of your
marketing, including:

 Content marketing: What blog posts, videos, podcasts, and so on should you create to
attract and convert your avatar?

 Search marketing: What solutions is your avatar searching for on search engines like
Google, YouTube (yes, YouTube is a search engine), and Bing?
  Social media marketing: What social media sites is your avatar spending time on? What
topics does your avatar like to discuss?

 Email marketing: Which avatar should receive a specific email marketing campaign?

 Paid traffic: Which ad platforms should you buy traffic from and how will you target
your avatar?

 Product creation: What problems is your avatar trying to solve?

 Copywriting: How should you describe offers in your email marketing, ads, and sales
letters in a way that compels your avatar to buy

 Any part of the marketing and sales process that touches the customer (which is pretty much
everything) improves when you get clear on your customer avatar. After all, you’re aiming
toward a real person — one who buys your products and services.

 It pays to get clear on the characteristics of that person so that you can find and present him or
her with a message that moves this person to action.

CUSTOMER AVATAR WORKSHEET

1. Goals and values: Determine what the avatar is trying to achieve. What values does he or she
hold dear?

2. Sources of information: Figure out what books, magazines, blogs, news stations, and other
resources the avatar references for information.

3. Demographics: Establish the age, gender, marital status, ethnicity, income, employment status,
nationality, and political preference of the avatar.

4. Challenges and pain points: What is holding the avatar back from achieving his or her goals?

5. Objections: Why would the avatar choose not to buy your product or service?

 In some cases, you need to survey or have conversations with existing customers to accurately
flesh out your customer avatar. In other cases, you may already be intimately familiar with the
characteristics of your ideal customer. In any case, move forward. Don’t wait for surveys or
interviews to be conducted to create your first draft of an avatar. Instead, go ahead and make
assumptions despite having no data or feedback, and put completing your research on your
short list of to- do’s. In the meantime, you can begin benefiting from the avatar you’ve created.

 Giving a customer avatar an actual name assists in bringing this fictional character to life. In
addition, your team members have a way to refer to each avatar among themselves.

UNDERSTANDING THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

STAGES OF THE CUSTOMER VALUE JOURNEY

The hard truth is that marketing is not a one-step process. There are eight stages you must account for
on the path to purchase and promotion.

 Step 1: Generating Awareness

Every repeat customer and raving fan of your business was, at one time, a complete stranger to
your company. She had no idea what problem you solve, what products you sell, or what your brand
stands for.

The first step on her journey from cold prospect to raving fan is awareness. If awareness is the
issue, you should employ the following digital marketing tactics:

• Advertising: Advertising, both online and offline, is a reliable and effective method of raising
awareness.

• Social media marketing: Billions of people access social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter,
and LinkedIn every day. Social media marketing is an inexpensive method of raising awareness.
 • Search marketing: Billions of web searches on sites such as Google and Bing are processed every
day. Basic search marketing techniques direct some of that traffic to your website.

FACEBOOK NATIVE ADVERTISEMENTS

Native ads are often found in social media feeds, or as recommended content on a web page.
Unlike display ads or banner ads, native ads don't really look like ads. They look like part of the
editorial flow of the page.

Before someone can buy from you, they have to realize you exist—right?

Step 2: Driving engagement

It’s not enough to simply make a cold prospect aware of your business, products, and brand. You must
engineer your marketing to capture the attention of your prospect and engage him. For a digital
marketer, that engagement almost always takes the form of valuable content made freely available in
the form of:

• Blogs

• Podcasts

• Online videos

•Your prospect is now aware of you—they know who you are—but you’re still in the early stages of a
relationship with them. They don’t yet know you, like you, or trust you.

•So the next step is to start developing relationship with your prospect.

•Engagement, is where you start conversing with your prospects. You engage them through some
form of content that provides entertainment, information, or both. You can boost engagement with
content that’s as entertaining as it is useful.

•Engagement often occurs through valuable, relevant content.

Step 3: Building Subscribers

The next step in the customer journey is to graduate a prospect from the “merely aware and engaged”
stage into the stage of being a subscriber or lead.

A subscriber is anyone who has given you permission to have a conversation with him. Savvy digital
marketers create lists of subscribers by building social media connections on sites such as Facebook and
Twitter, attracting podcast subscribers on services such as iTunes and Stitcher, or generating subscribers
from webinar registrations.

At this point, your prospect knows who you are and has engaged with you in some way or another.
However, if you failed to get that person’s contact information, odds are high you’ll never hear from
them again. Why?

Because people today are inundated with marketing and content, creating a scarcity of attention. Just
because someone reads one of your blog posts today does NOT mean they’ll remember to revisit your
site in the future.

Here, the person gives you their contact information and, in doing so, grants you permission to contact
them again in the future.

Most often, this transaction is an exchange, sometimes referred to as an “ethical bribe.” You promote a
valuable offer, but instead of asking for money, you ask for the prospect’s contact information. And
when they give it to you, not only do you give them access to the content, product, or service you
promised, you also add them to your subscriber list.

Step 4: Increasing conversions

At this stage, the goal is to elevate the commitment level of the prospect by asking him or her to give
you a small amount of time or money.

Low price products or services, webinars, and product demos are all good offers to make during this
stage. Up to this point, the relationship with this prospect through the first three stages of the customer
journey has been passive.

The goal of Stage 4 is not profitability, but rather an increased level of connection between the prospect
and your business.

If the subscribers you gain in Step 3 of the journey remain engaged, some
of them will be ready to increase their level of commitment. They like the information you share and
have begun to trust you, so they’re ready to invest in one of two ways: either with time or money.

This is a critical stage in the Customer Journey and one that frustrates many business owners. The key to
success in this stage is to employ what we call “entry-point offers.” These offers are designed to give the
new prospect tremendous value without forcing them to put too much “skin in the game.”

At this stage, to ask for a significant investment in a complex product or service would be asking too
much, too soon. You’re still in the early stages of relationship.

In fact, it’s too early even to concern yourself with profitability. That’s right: in this stage of the
Customer Journey, you might lose money on the prospects you acquire as buyers.

The Convert stage of the Customer Value Journey is about acquiring buyers or ramping up the
commitment level of the leads you already have. It is NOT about profitability.

Step 5: Building excitement

Your marketing should intentionally encourage your customer to use the offer that your lead or
customer accepted in Step 4.
The business term for getting your prospect to take advantage of an offer is customer onboarding.
Regardless of whether the conversion in Step 4 a commitment of time or money was, the relationship
with this customer or prospect has a much greater chance of success if she received value from the
transaction.

Your job now is to make sure the transaction is a good one, that the excitement of the purchase
develops into good will and trust.

The reason for this is simple: if the person doesn’t get value from this transaction, they won’t move on
to the next stage and purchase more expensive things from you.

So, how do you make sure your customers have a good experience?

First, we assume that whatever the prospect purchased or gave up valuable time for is outstanding.
Great marketing will only increase the speed at which your business fails if you don’t have outstanding
products and services.

Second, the prospect must get value from their last transaction with you. The Excite stage of the
Customer Value Journey is something you must return to again and again. And every time, it should
create excitement.

That being the case, whenever a customer or prospect does what you ask them to do , you should
engineer your marketing to maximize the chances they’ll get tangible value from the experience.

Step 6: Making the core offer sale and more

At this stage, prospects have developed a relationship with your brand. They may have invested a bit of
time or money with you.

People who develop this rapport with your company are much more likely to buy a more complex,
expensive, or risky product or service from you. We call this jump from passive prospect to buyer
ascension.

At this stage of the Value Journey, you’ve sunk time, money, and resources into acquiring leads and
customers and making sure they get value from doing business with you.

It’s entirely possible that, until this stage, you have yet to turn a profit. In fact, if you’re in a competitive
market (and who isn’t?) you may be losing money on the front end of this process to acquire customers.

That’s perfectly acceptable, and here’s why:

You’re investing in your future profits.

Always remember that it costs more to acquire a new customer than to sell to an existing one. That first
sales isn’t about profits. It’s about converting a prospect to a customer, so you can begin a long (and
profitable) customer relationship.

Buying customers on the front end is just shrewd business, but only if you can monetize those
customers on the back end.
The Ascend stage of the Value Journey is where your customer will be ready to buy more and more
often. If your business has a core offer, this is the place to make that offer. Then once your customer
purchases that core offer, it’s time to present them with other relevant offers.

Step 7: Developing brand advocates

Brand advocates give you testimonials about the fabulous experience they’ve had with your brand. They
are fans of your company and defend your brand on social media channels and, if asked, leave great
reviews for your products or services on sites such as Yelp or Amazon.

Your ability to create brand advocates depends on the relationship you have with these leads and
buyers. When you’ve reached this step, your customer and your company are like close friends in the
sense that developing the relationship to this level took time and effort, and maintaining that
relationship — one that is mutually beneficial to both parties — will take time and effort also.

You build this relationship by adding value, delivering on the promise of your product (meaning that it
actually does what you claim it will do), and with responsive customer service.

You now have a happy customer who has made several profitable purchases from you. The next stage in
the Value Journey is to create marketing that encourages your most loyal customers to advocate for
your business.

An advocate is someone who speaks positively about your brand.

An advocate is what you might call a “passive promoter.” They won’t necessarily promote your business
in an active way, but when asked about you, they will respond favorably.

Step 8: Growing brand promoters

Brand promoters go beyond advocacy and do everything from tattooing your logo across their chest to
dedicating hours of their free time blogging and using social media to spread their love of your brand
online.

The difference between an advocate (Step 7) and a brand promoter is that the promoter actively
spreads the word about your business, whereas the advocate is more passive.

Promoters differ from advocates in that they are actively seeking to spread the word about your brands,
products, and services.

In some cases, the promoter simply had a great experience with your company and wants to share their
story with friends and family. In other cases, they promote because you’ve created an incentive for
them to do so.
This puts your message in front of a new audience, the fans, followers, and friends of the promoter. And
because this new audience is hearing about you from a trusted source who they already know, they’re
much more likely to become customers themselves.

• RECAP OF THE CUSTOMER JOURNEY

STEP 1: AWARENESS

STEP 2: ENGAGEMENT

STEP 3: SUBSCRIBE

STEP 4: CONVERT

STEP 5: EXCITE

STEP 6: ASCEND

STEP 7: ADVOCATE

STEP 8: PROMOTE