truly the Swiss Army Knife of marketing tools.
Customer Journey Worksheet:Download and complete the customer journey worksheet to clarify the path your customers will follow in moving from total unawareness of your business to being an avid promoter of your brand, products, and services.
The Cheat Sheet:The Cheat Sheet contains additional at-a-glance guidance on developing and executing successful digital marketing campaigns. To find this book’s Cheat Sheet, go to www.dummies.com and search for Digital Marketing For Dummies Cheat Sheet.
Updates to this book, if we have any, are at www.dummies.com
Where to Go from Here
In true For Dummies fashion, you don’t have to start this book at Chapter 1 and read it all in order. Each part of this book stands on its own, so keep it within arm’s reach and reference it often as you execute your digital marketing campaigns. That said, however, if you have the time, we’d like nothing more than for you to read it from cover to cover.
If you’re struggling to get results from your digital marketing efforts, or you’re new to digital marketing, use Part 1 to ensure that the marketing tactics you use positively impact your business goals. In Part 2, we explore content marketing, a fundamental discipline that affects every digital marketing campaign you execute. If generating more website traffic is what you’re after, flip to Part 3 for insights on search and social media marketing, email marketing, and digital advertising. In Part 4, you learn to tackle the measurement and optimization of your digital marketing campaigns. In Part 5, we show you how to avoid the ten most common mistakes in digital marketing so you can stay on the path to success. You also learn about the hottest skills in digital marketing, and the tools you need to execute digital marketing campaigns.
If you have a specific issue, browse through the Table of Contents and Index to pinpoint the section that can solve your problem.
Here’s to your digital marketing success!
Part 1
Getting Started with Digital Marketing
IN THIS PART …
Become familiar with the role of digital marketing and get clear on the value you bring to the market. Get laser-focused about who your customers are and the steps they take to go through a process known as the customer journey.
Learn the six common digital marketing goals and how to employ the three most important types of digital marketing campaigns.
Discover the types of offers you can make to prospects, new customers, and returning customers as well as the proper sequence for presenting these offers.
Chapter 1
Understanding the Customer Journey
IN THIS CHAPTER
Think about the last important purchase you made. Perhaps you bought a car, hired a babysitter, or switched coffee suppliers at your office. Chances are, you consulted the Internet to read reviews, get recommendations from friends and family on social sites like Facebook, and boned up on the features, options, and price of the product or service before you made your choice. 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.
Creating a Customer Avatar
Because the role of your marketing is to move people through a series of stages from cold prospects to rabid fans and promoters, you must first attain clarity on the characteristics of your ideal customers. You want to get clear on their goals, the challenges they face meeting those goals, and where they spend time consuming information and entertainment. Creating a customer avatar will give you this clarity. Other terms for customer avatar are buyer persona, marketing persona, and target audience, but customer avatar is the term we use throughout this book.
A customer avatar is the fictional, generalized representation of your ideal customer. Realistically, unless your product or service fits within a narrow niche, you will have multiple customer avatars for each campaign. 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. 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?
