Introduction to Digital Marketing 101: Easy to Learn and implement hands on guide for Digital Marketing

By Cecilia Figueroa

Social media marketing has stemmed from people’s communication habits. Nowadays, social networking platforms are essential in practice, even in marketing. To understand the
changes and transformations the field of marketing has undergone until now, it is important to know its origin.
This complete guide will help you start selling and marketing your business by teaching you both SEO/SEM and web usability. You will learn the analytical part of Google Analytics and
online advertising through Google AdWords. This book will introduce you to Web 2.0, and at the end of it, you may also want to make a career change to digital marketing!
● Have you ever wondered how you can work smart with products that offer a range of essential applications for businesses?
● What are the prerequisites for a successful business?
● What will happen if your company does not use digital marketing for your business?
● Do you know what are the newest and best technologies, applications, web tools, and virtual customer relationship management products that your competitors are using right now to work smarter and more efficiently?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BPB Online LLP
• Release date: Sep 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9789389328196

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Marketing and Its Business Importance

Beyond the size of your project, you will always need to draw some objectives and strategies without which you cannot establish and define what actions to carry out, or worse, you may carry them out, but without any order and meaning.

In this chapter, we will determine and evaluate the role of a company’s digital marketing plan and learn to design a marketing strategy around the customer journey.

Structure

Begin with a plan

The digital marketing framework

Organizing your marketing plan to market your business

Marketing questions

Objective

Specifically, in this chapter, you will learn how to determine and evaluate the role of a company’s digital marketing plan. Further, you will understand how to design your marketing strategy around the customer journey. Next, we will discuss the importance of delivering a great customer experience by understanding the customer journey mapping method and understand customer expectations. Finally, we will analyze the digital framework by using the example of Tesla for market dominance. This would help the reader deal with the basic concepts of marketing and its importance.

Begin with a plan

To start marketing in a business from scratch, the company has to establish some basic guidelines based on its budget and objectives. Depending on the type of company, its marketing channels may vary and adapt to its target. For example, Lego wants to start marketing and take an action plan to increase its brand image and clientele. For this it would adapt the usual and most basic actions in its sector as follows:

Positioning and measurement: Before starting with marketing, the company must have everything ready to measure each one of the actions that are carried out. Positioning the website with keywords related to, for example, the bestselling toys, would be the first step to consider in the strategy. To measure this action, you should always have Google Analytics inserted in the code of the website. It is a very effective and free tool used to gather valuable information about visits and traffic received.

Content strategy: Positioning is not achieved of its own accord. Opening a blog and providing relevant content for users will allow faster positioning and better quality, as well as offering an extra to the visitors. In the content strategy of Lego, two things should be taken into account. On the one hand, you can have a detailed and rich product file so that a potential client finds all the necessary information without having to leave the page: operation, recommendations, photos, even some videos are the most necessary elements. On the other hand, a content blog could present the novelties of the catalog, the sector, and tutorials on how to use a toy drone, for example, or lists of gift recommendations.

Social networks: They are very important when sharing content. Having an account in each of the social networks gives visibility to the brand. However, not all networks are equally productive for all sectors. In the case of Lego, you can use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and even YouTube. Here, the company not only has to limit itself to publishing products and articles from the blog itself, but the company also has to actively participate in daily conversations, stay up to date, and get in touch with users who follow accounts. Launching paid campaigns on social networks with a large number of followers in a timely manner can also increase the reach and therefore online sales.

Blogs in newsletters: If both your web page and blog allow you to send emails with offers and news, you have to create periodic newsletters to inform those interested customers. There are tools that allow you to generate them in a very simple way, and you do not need any excessive investment. In fact, they should not be too frequent so as not to tire the receivers. They also allow measuring the activity they generate and checking the sales obtained from emailing. A toy store and leisure products could get a lot of performance with a newsletter delivery just before Christmas, or on Black Friday.

SEM and payment positioning: When we talk about search engine marketing (SEM), we usually refer to paid ad campaigns in search engines, although really, being purists, the SEM refers to any marketing action within the search engines, paid or not.

If the previous steps do not involve a large investment, SEM goes a step further to support organic positioning through the blog. It’s as simple as creating an account in Google Ads (which is Google’s ad platform for advertisers) and playing with the two types of ads they have: by keywords or by display. Although it may sound complex, the truth is that Google Ads has a very qualified and complete support service for the most inexperienced.

Once you start balancing these small actions, you are already taking a giant step toward launching a marketing plan. Little by little, the data you thus gather can help you grow your business and learn from mistakes to improve in each part of the strategy.

The digital marketing framework

Before the distributors, the media, the marketing agencies, and the producers were the ones who had the power of opinion (they produced commercial content without going too deeply into its suitability, impact, and opinion of the people). Now the focus is on virtual customers as they are rebellious by nature and only consume what they want. They just retweet what they want, visit the pages they like, do not dedicate even give minutes to content that seems unattractive, master the search techniques thanks to search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, and so on), make decisions based on reviews, comments, and ratings of other users, and so on. Such capacity for independence, obviously, means that any company has a double task before it to attract these customers, and in such a mission, digital marketing can fulfil the task of building loyalty and turning it into another ally. Now let us look into the history of digital marketing.

E-marketing or digital marketing was born between 1990 and 1994, coinciding with the launch of Archie, the first search engine. In 1993, the first selectable web advertising banner appeared. A year later, the first electronic commercial transaction in NetMarket took place, as well as the appearance of Yahoo!. In the next two years, smaller search engines such as HotBot, LookSmart, and Alexa will arrived on the market. In 1997 came the first social network called SixDegrees.com.

1998 was a year with several advances and surprises for the public: Google was launched, Microsoft introduced MSN, and Yahoo! discontinued its Yahoo! web search. In addition, the term SEO (search engine optimization) came about, which involves the positioning of web pages in search results by means of adaptation and optimization.

Before the end of the twentieth century, the concept of blogging was created. Only five years later, there were already more than 50 million blogs. Unfortunately, for many companies, in early 2000, smaller search engines, like SixDegrees.com, disappeared.

In the year 2000, Google created the Analytics tool that offers information about the audience, behavior, and data of your website, with the aim of obtaining conclusions that allow you to improve your page.

In 2003, the first social networks such as LinkedIn, Myspace, and Facebook were launched.

In 2005, Google searches began to be more personalized, based on search histories, in order to improve day by day its algorithm to order the large number of websites available. That same year, the YouTube platform appeared, which is currently one of the most used internet sites.

Between 2006 and 2008 appeared Twitter, the first iPhone, and Google Chrome.

In 2015, YouTube incorporated the 360° video feature that would provide a complete listening experience to the user. However, they do not yet work in all browsers.

As is clear from the history of this area of marketing, digital marketing is linked to the technological progress of both hardware and software.

Digital marketing has had a rapid and constant growth in the last thirty years, so it should be necessary to ensure that it will continue evolving in the same way forward and it is necessary that we are prepared to face and adapt to the changes that occur.

As it is a very complete strategy, allowing you to not only talk about your brand in different places but also allowing the client to interact with you, it is normal that the growth of digital marketing is triggered:

The information is shared by social networks.

Exchange of information takes place.

It allows more specific searches of products.

You can ask your customers to give feedback.

It lets you talk about the brand freely.

The growth of digital marketing makes references to strategies that keep your products, brand, or service in continuous movement.

Today, there are still many companies and businesses that launch online advertising without having a clear marketing strategy or concrete plan, and they fail.

Businesses fail because of lack of marketing and lack of strategy, not because of lack of market. So, no matter how small or big a company or a business is, they need to develop a good marketing plan to be successful.

The options of digital marketing can be very great in amount. However, a good marketing plan allows you to sell products and services and effectively reach current and potential customers with success. But what is a marketing plan?

A marketing plan is a framework that includes all the market studies carried out by the company, the marketing objectives to be achieved, the strategies to be implemented, and the planning to be followed.

Frameworks are a standardized set of procedures and are structured through phases or stages for a better understanding of the complete picture. At the level of digital marketing, frameworks are usually used to trace the path that the user must travel to reach an objective (purchase, registration, information, download, and so on) in order to rationally approach this lattice of touchpoints between the client and brand. This will help you define which actions to propose so that the user goes through each stage of consideration (per-purchase, purchase, post-purchase) and finally reaches the objectives. On the other hand, metrics will help you evaluate the performance of each stage and channel necessary for decision-making.

Undoubtedly, there are different frameworks to promote a service and/or product, but all have similar characteristics.

The framework presented in this book is the customer journey. Marketers have used it for a long time to write persuasive texts and to convert visitors into customers. Especially for email marketing, this technique has been fundamental in the success of thousands and thousands of campaigns.

And it is not a secret — these professionals use customer journey mapping to write texts of their emails, advertising campaigns, and publications on social networks.

What does customer journey mean?

The customer journey is every experience that the customer will have with the brand when buying a product or service based on a need that arises and all the research and consideration of alternatives in between. This process is basically divided into five parts:

Brand awareness: Information about the company or the product should be shared.

Interest: The company generates interest in the product by explaining how it works and what are the benefits of using the product or service.

Desire: The client is clear on what they are looking for and generates an emotional connection with the brand. In this stage, the terms used are usually long tail keywords, such as luxury cars in the US. Therefore, search channels come into play.

Action: The company defines the persuasion actions of the public based, above all, on its differential value as a brand and on the resources it uses to attract potential clients (for example, discounts and promotions).

Post action: It is necessary to plan in detail each step of the purchase process and define future actions in order to retain customers. In this stage, one-on-one channels become relevant.

Organizing your marketing plan to market your business

When a marketing plan uses the strategy of asking open questions (what, when, why, how, where, and measure and optimize), the mission becomes simpler and more interesting.

What: In this section, you must describe what product or service lines are going to be offered and to which customers. For each line, the characteristics of each product, the needs it covers, the differential characteristics, as well as the benefits obtained by the customer of that segment will be detailed. Also, your business model and the value proposition are presented as the first thing that visitors see on your page, but it must be visible in all the main entry points of the site.

Who: Who is your customer or audience? Who should be the center of any digital marketing strategy, and therefore, it is necessary to know, analyze, and have all kinds of data to be able to segment, optimize resources, and achieve the objectives.

When: When (customer journey) is a tool that helps to understand the business from the customer’s perspective. In the same way, it brings a greater knowledge of the client within the organization. It helps you reveal the points that most affect the customer experience and gives you clues to improve it. From the client’s point of view, the experience is the same no matter who is behind each interaction. Customers expect companies to remember them and know their needs, regardless of the point of contact.

Why: Why are the marketing objectives. These are concrete results that we set for ourselves as a company to achieve in a relatively fixed term (a quarter, a month, a year). For this, we need different resources such as personnel, budget, and tools within the availability of our company. Without objectives, it is impossible to reach the goal we set ourselves and work satisfactorily, so we must achieve them after following a strategic marketing plan.

Some of these goals can be as follows:

Build brand awareness or create content and increase a specific audience’s knowledge of your brand (recommended for big companies).

Reach: Target everyone in your audience in order to cause impressions and increase your brand awareness within a small, ultra-specific audience (recommended for small companies).

Engage: Target people within your audience who have a history of engaging (liking, sharing, or commenting).

Increase traffic: Drive more visitors to your web page.

Generate leads or convert prospects who have indicated interest in your product or service.

Conversion: Start converting people in a period of time.

How: This question refers to how to create content for each stage of the purchase process of your customers. The social network you choose will depend on the marketing objectives.

What is the difference between marketing tactics and marketing strategies? When, how, and where are marketing tactics. Tactics are the actions taken (how to execute the marketing plan) to support the strategy (plan to achieve the objectives).

Measure: You must define your tracking measures when planning your content strategy and before your content campaign experience. And the measures to track the activity of your content will depend on the objective of your content strategy.

Optimization: Optimization is to ensure effectiveness of the strategies. Carrying out good analysis to deal with aspects such as traffic channels, tools to measure the behavior of users, knowing what factors to measure on your website, and so on, means knowing how to process the data you have available. Select them appropriately and subsequently analyze them, understand the results, and align with your strategy in an appropriate way to ensure good results.

To be sure that optimization is effective, you must take into account the following points:

Have absolute control of the data.

Implement appropriate measurement tools.

Take into account the quality management of the selected data.

Segment the analysis and finally monitor the progress.

The following section explains how this strategy was carried out with Tesla.

Case Study: Model 3, Tesla

Having revolutionized the automobile market by making the first electric vehicle to lead the sales in luxury markets in the United States in 2018, Tesla has become an exemplary story for thousands of readers. You might wonder how Tesla, a company with a market capital of almost $ 60 billion and despite being involved in controversies, made this possible.

The automaker is now selling more Model 3 in the United States than all other brands of electric cars combined. In the segment of luxury sedans, Model 3 has outperformed the bestselling cars of Mercedes and BMW.

Let’s look into how Tesla’s marketing plan is answering the right questions:

Figure 1.1

What: The mass appeal

The product is Model 3 whose base version costs $35,000 (€30,700) in the United States and it is the best vehicle on the market that can be bought for that price.

The scope of Tesla Model 3 is at least 250 miles (400 kilometers) with a charged battery. In addition, the vehicle comes from the factory with the necessary equipment for automatic driving. The price also includes the fast charging capacity of the batteries, which Tesla calls supercharging.

Consumers are expected to pay roughly $50,000 minimum for upgraded configurations.

Who: The middle-class millennial

A middle-class millennial looking for luxury cars is defined as a US citizen who is tech-savvy and ecofriendly, a business executive or entrepreneur, between thirty-five and forty-five years old, with an annual income between $150 and $175, and aware of the ambient environment.

When: Customers are partners

Two decades ago, a car dealership (store) was the only place customers could go see and purchase a car.

Buttoday Tesla gives its customers access to as much information and interaction with the brand as possible by supporting multiple channels of customer engagement: online sales, company-owned stores, and test drives. On the Tesla website, customers select all the features they want, and then their vehicle is custom built and delivered to the nearest dealership for pick up.

Why: Smart objectives

In here, SMART objectives such as given below are defined:

Acquire eighty new online customers for Model 3 in 2019

Raise brand awareness by driving two hundred new visitors to the website this month

How: Tesla makes its own rules strategy

This question refers to how you create content for each stage of the purchase process of your customers. The social network you choose will depend on the marketing objectives.

Attention or brand awareness (broadcast channels): Since Tesla has to find opportunities to get in front of its customer, Tesla builds the brand by playing an ad on its YouTube channel where Elon Musk, Tesla’s CEO, unveils Model 3.

Interest (social channels): In this stage, Tesla encourages visitors to share performance reviews on their YouTube channels, so they can get the word out to potential customers. Also, Tesla decides to gain insights into the first production of Model 3 on Twitter and uploads guides on YouTube on how to control the Model 3 car features using the Tesla app. On the basis of this data, they propose offers that are likely to captivate their audience.

Desire (search channels): Now customers are trying to choose between Tesla and other luxury cars. Elon Musk CEO and Tesla influencer talk about the Tesla product and service. But now Tesla does not create a search ad campaign that could show up when customers search on the topic they are interested in.

Action (search channels): In this case, Tesla could run ads against keywords searches. That often includes the name Tesla, which points the customer directly to the web page where they can order a Tesla (a car purchase page). Post action (one-on-one channel): In this stage, customers have already bought a Model 3. Once the order is placed, the customer needs to complete the steps needed to prepare for delivery, by logging into a Tesla account to complete their delivery profile. This includes selecting their delivery location, uploading documentation and registration information, and confirming their trade-in and payment preferences.

What is a customer journey map?

A customer journey map, or customer experience map, is one of the most important tools when analyzing a potential buyer. You can use it to study your relationship with a certain product, service, or brand.

With this map, you can visualize that relationship and also the evolution of a user, the difficulties he encounters, or to what extent he is satisfied in the different stages of the purchase.

Consider the following points when creating a customer journey map:

Identify a user: Start by defining the user.

Determine the different stages: Identify all the phases of the purchase process.

Know what the user is experiencing: You must use empathy to find out what perception the user has in each of the phases, which could be positive, neutral, or negative.

Contact points: The touchpoints are the moments in which a potential client interacts with what you offer.

Thanks to the customer journey map you can know the user in the first phase of the purchase process.

Conclusion

Nowadays, every company is faced with a highly competitive and active environment, where new challenges must be faced continuously. Global markets, internet, global competition, constant technological advancements, and ease of communication cause companies to prepare and be very clear about what they want and how they want it.

The next chapter is the go-to place for learning about content marketing. You will understand how to plan, create, distribute, and promote content, design websites for marketing effectiveness, and measure the impact of content marketing.

Questions

Q. 1. What is a digital marketing framework and why do you need to create one?

Q. 2. What is the difference between marketing tactics and marketing strategies?

Q. 3. What is a customer journey and why is it so important?

Q. 4. What is digital or online marketing?

Q. 5. How is Tesla dominating the market?

CHAPTER 2

Content Marketing

Planning the company’s content will allow communication of a value proposal that generates preference over other options. In addition, it will help the company capture the attention of its target audience, awaken customer interest, conquer it, and finally turn it into a customer.

This chapter provides a complete introduction to content marketing by building a content marketing strategy, create content, distribute and promote content, optimize UX and landing pages, measure impact. All these objectives will be done by defining the concept of content, content strategy, and analyzing what are the keys to success to carry out a good content strategy.

Structure

What is content?

Elements of content

Content marketing

Content purposes

The content plans

Create content

Content for blogs

Channels for direct marketing actions

Content audit

SEO audit

Where do I start content audit?

Tell a story

Making a business a story

An example of storytelling: the Lego story

Storytelling and content marketing are not the same

A story can be content and vice versa

Write stories

Curate content

Promote and distribute your content

SEO tips

Steps to successfully define your content strategy

What is content strategy?

Key points to convey the value proposition of a company

How to better develop content marketing in 2019?

Tips for creating good SEO content

How to optimize the audio-visual part of the content?

Optimizing videos

Measure the content

Objective

After reading this chapter, the reader will be able to plan and create content. Further, the reader will be able to promote, distribute, and design the content for marketing effectiveness. The reader can also measure the impact of content marketing, learn the role of content strategy and content marketing, and organize content.

What is content?

In simple words, content is a message that often includes a variation of a value proposition in a variety of formats. Content can be anything from a blog post, to a thank-you page, or an ad, and is aimed at building trust and connection between you and your audience.

Elements of content

Creating your content is one thing, but you need to make sure your message allows a high level of penetration in the audience, in a disinterested way, something that they perceive as valuable. All these elements will help the company ensure that it puts forth content that has the elements necessary to resonate and inspire action:

Marketing technique: Content marketing is a marketing technique whose ultimate goal is to generate brand and increase brand results.

Distribution: It is linked to the creation of original content. You must use all the resources available to the brand to ensure that the highest possible percentage of our audience receives the highest quality content, and for this, planned and effective distribution is also crucial.

Valuable content: The content that you distribute should be perceived as valuable. The public currently wants to consume as well as generate content according to their tastes and emotions. However, the competition is scathing; there is always someone with more resources than our company. Within the same niche market is where you must deliver different value at a level of experience where they potentially access our offer.

Content creation: The content must be original, although references are more than valid and can be used constantly, since there are other brands that you can inspire according to the response of your audience, which may be the same as ours.

Relevant content: The content created must be appropriate and timely, in relation to the target audience’s demand.

Coherent content: Maintain a solid and logical structure, in addition to a very important element: be aligned with the values that the brand defends or adheres to, to facilitate direct and indirect association with it.

Attract audience: Call properly the attention of those defined and potential public towards the brand.

Get: Here we talk about captivating the potential customers whose attention was initially attracted, for example, through a banner on a website or a landing page and thereby achieve an increase in the sales and income of the company.

Defined audience: The audience must be previously and clearly defined in the planning stage. Factors such as gender, age, taste, preferences, and/or geographical location, among others (according to our objectives), are the foundation because thus you can just grant what the audience is possibly looking for.

Promote the action: The final goal of content marketing is to generate an action, which can range from a sale, a registration, a request for information, but always looking for a return by potential customers or the already existing ones.

Profit: This action, carried out by the client and released as a result of the consumption of the content generated by the brand, must mean a profit for the same. This ROI allows us to measure and justify everything done at the level of our content marketing strategy.

Content marketing

One could say content marketing is one of the key aspects of inbound marketing. This approach is characterized by offering customers what they are looking for and understanding that today’s consumer no longer has a passive role, but decides what interests them, how they are informed, and what, how, and when they buy. The focus of inbound marketing is based on the concept of not being invasive and providing what customers want by focusing on providing value. This leads to much more segmented actions, which in turn are more effective, because they are more targeted and therefore more economical.

Content marketing is part of a strategy to provide value before asking for anything in return (following the givers get principle, in the context of content strategy in digital marketing, helping others, sharing knowledge, advice, and tips, while having a process to lean on, will generate more leads) and not to interrupt, as TV/radio ads or traditional direct marketing tactics tend to do.

One of the major objectives of this permissive strategy is to get the readers of your website or your blog to become subscribers to your mailing list, that is, stop dealing with IPs (web visits) and start chatting with people (email). The idea is to continue contributing added value by email periodically, with the idea of consolidating your relationship with these subscribers because they are your future customers.

The most significant thing is not the method and channels that you decide to use to share that content, but the main objective is that this content should consider our target audience’s taste first and resolve their needs, not those of our company. Therefore, it is important to remember the marketing objectives and KPIs of our company.

A great extension of a marketing map is helping advertisers to outline the customer’s buying process (customer journey) from beginning (brand awareness) to end (post action). It lists each step prospects take as they move toward doing business with the company and reveals what customers do, think, and need in their journey.

For this reason, it is very useful to counteract the client’s map with the point of view of the buyers, with the trip map from the point of view of the people offering the service. This exercise allows identifying the gaps and opportunities for improvement in relationship with customers.

Content purposes

The mission, vision, and purpose of a brand can go unnoticed by both the client and the collaborators; however, they are fundamental to content marketing strategies.

The purpose refers to the way in which you seek to transcendlives of users. It determines the ways in which it is communicated, since it is oriented in the long term, in terms of scope, and represents more than the benefit itself; this is why it is so important in content marketing strategies.

The definition of the purpose is related to the altruistic look of the brand and the knowledge of its attributes. Likewise, it is based on its values, showing it to be committed to its environment. For this reason, conveying the purpose through marketing strategies results in highlevel of confidence and a positive impact on the company’s image.

Therefore, it is essential to create and apply strategies that convey a purpose capable of transcending current trends, inclined to modify, even minimally, the environment and to raise awareness among people.

These strategies must take into account the values of the brand and its global growth. By way of a solid purpose, these marketing actions can generate not only higher income, engagement, or loyalty, but also a positive and tangible impact on the life of the consumer.

First, you must know the purpose of the brand, its authentic aspirations, and its role in the context in which it operates. This should not feel forced, because, if it is conceived with clarity and conciseness, it becomes easier to convey.

Then, the brand could be added to causes that relate its purpose and that have a lasting value, that is, whose footprint is maintained over time. Likewise, the campaign must be beyond eye-catching; your investment means showing a commitment previously assumed, something that represents the brand.

After having clear objectives and their relationship with the principles of the brand, the best formats must be used to get the message across. Making use of storytelling, audio-visual format, or live broadcasts are ways of echoing the message, both in the target audience and in the community in general.

An example of a brand that managed to convey its purpose (responsible, honest company, which rejects abuse) is Heineken that, with a video published in 2017, showed that two people with opposing points of view can find spaces to join, listen, and not judge.

The content plans

As discussed, content marketing is based on creating content and then disseminating it and adding value to your target audience.

But how does this fit with other marketing techniques? Content marketing can be considered as the first step of inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing is a methodology that combines non-intrusive marketing and advertising techniques to contact a user at the beginning of their purchase process and accompany them to the final transaction.

However, inbound marketing is much more extensive and is responsible for other issues such as conversion of records captured in the company’s clients.

The theory of inbound marketing divides the creation of content in four phases:

Plan

It is important that in a content plan the company specifies which buyer it is going to choose and the buyer journey stage in which it is. It should also consider the format (for example, blog post, eBook, whitepaper, case study, and so on) and the date of publication of each piece of content that makes it up.

How do you define your content? It can be defined as follows:

Defining purpose: It is necessary to define the purpose of each piece of content that you are going to create. It may be to attract traffic to your blog, promote a certain product to increase your sales, or any other purpose, but you have to be clear before beginning the process.

For example, if you are thinking about attracting traffic through an offer, you will put it behind a landing page and/or a form. If you want to attract public through a post, it will be content open to everyone on the internet. Both cases have different formats and themes, but the same purpose: to attract traffic to your blog.

Deciding format: The choice of format depends on which audience you will direct the content to, how much time you have to create it, and how much information you want to share. But usually, you can convey the same idea using any format. The crux of the matter is not in the format, but in the subject, you are discussing. The idea is to create diversified content using many different formats.

You have infinite possibilities. In addition to texts and images, there are infographics, videos, e-books, templates, research articles, presentations, webinars, guides on a subject, and more.

Choosing topic: To choose which topic to address, consider these factors:

Identify what drives some buyers to choose your solutions, know what operational or personal result the potential client expects by buying your product or service, identify the concerns that lead your potential client to decide that your solutions or your company are not your best option, discover the different phases of the buyer journey and understand what aspects of our offer and our most important competitors are for our potential customers.

Step 6: Obtain the necessary information and the stage at which they are in the customer journey (brand awareness, interest, desire, action, post action).

The buyer–person journey refers to the process a person goes through before deciding to make a purchase. It is necessary to generate content taking into account the moment of the journey that the buyer person is, the different phases that the client goes through since he realizes his problem or need, starts to investigate, compares products until, finally, opts for one.

This process is known as the customer journey and in each phase many factors come into play that need to be identified such as: who is involved in the purchase as well as the potential customer, what people influence their decision or what solutions are they evaluating besides ours. The object of your content can never be your product or service, but the problem of your buyer-person that your product or service solves.

Next, look for topics with ROI (return on investment) or that could generate cost-effective strategies and generate new leads and gain loyal customers.

When searching online using keywords, users do not write the exact URL. They enter questions, complete sentences, or related word chains. So, it is smart to find and research alternative search terms that people enter into search engines while looking for a similar subject. Keyword research is a valuable and high return activity in the search marketing field.

Search engines produce a list of information websites. This knowledge is known as organic search and it is your ticket for a greater online presence. Knowledge of these actual search terms can help inform the content strategy or marketing strategy in general.

Using internet forums: It is very useful to interact with other professionals in your sector and offer a forum for discussion on a specific topic.

Reading news about your sector: Start with the most basic search, and compare your SERPs and headlines to other news sources.

Taking note of the movers and shakers of your business and following their movements: It determine some of the most recognized brand names in the industry, their demographics as well as well-known commentators associated with that industry. Follow them on social media to see not only what they are posting but also what they’re reading and what they’re sharing and retweeting. You’ll see what’s on their minds, and knowing the thought process of influencers in your industry, you’ll be able to anticipate tomorrow’s news.

Check frequently asked questions (FAQs) from users or clients about the goals of clients and the challenges of customers.

Create

Once you know which issues to generate content on, it is time to create it following the plan that you have marked:

What are you going to produce?

Who is in charge?

When are you going to publish it?

The company must develop a production strategy that makes sense. For this, the company must not forget that they should not publish only about products and services: users want answers and solutions to problems.

After this, content ideas must be transformed into real conversions with lead generation metrics, which measure how many visitors become prospects and part of the company’s database. Some of the metrics that must be taken into account are as follows:

List of new emails in the email marketing list.

List of subscribers to the RSS/blog.

Conversion rate.

Distribute

Once the perfect content is written, advertisers must work on a strategy that covers three channels, which are as follows:

Owned channels: These include the company website, blog, emailing list, and social networks. At all times, the company controls the dissemination of content on these channels. They present the main axis of a brand, but do not have the scope that is needed to properly disseminate the content.

Earned channels: These distribute content produced by your users or followers in an organic manner and include publications that your users make in social networks: comments, links, posts, and more. They are important because the company generates a community. Ideally, the company should look for ways to take advantage of this content to reuse it in your own content strategy, always mentioning users.

Paid channels: These included banners for sponsored content, publications promoted on social networks, and more. The advantage of this type of action is that if you create a much-segmented, well-organized campaign that is focused on what the company wants to achieve, it can be very efficient. Consequently, the company can achieve a reach that it could not achieve organically. A disadvantage is that this type of action does not usually have the same effect as the abovementioned ones, as, being outside your community, the audience does not have the same connection with the brand.

Once the content is published, the next step will be to focus on where you and how you share it. The content may be great, but if it is not relevant to the person who sees it, it is not going to be effective at all.

It is not enough just to create the content; you have to make sure that it reaches your target audience.

Analyze

You must confirm that what you are doing is giving the expected results. Why does it work? Why not? Use this insight to create better content from this moment.

Some metrics that can help you measure the effectiveness of your content are listed below:

Number of visits

Total leads generated

Number of shares

External links that point to your content

Functioning of content by author

Functioning of content by theme

How content works by format

Direct content

When you decide to implement marketing content for your business, a solid strategy and consistency are necessary to achieve tangible results.

Although there is no standard recipe to apply in all business models, you can follow steps that offer an overview to adapt to each reality.

Now, why implement a content marketing strategy? The regular creation and dissemination of quality content is full of advantages:

Provides natural traffic to a website

Segments audience

Helps increase subscribers

Connects with users

Improves brand image

Improves ranking in Google

Favors the QS (quality score given by Google) of the page and decreases the value of the click in AdWords campaigns

Continues to provide traffic over time

Steps to implement your content strategy

The steps for implementing the content strategy are given below:

Define the objective: Determine the reason for the content marketing strategy for the company, what you hope to achieve. Only SMART objectives can be considered as strategic objectives.

Meet your audience: Only if you know who you are targeting will you be able to offer attractive content. Classical socio-demographic segmentation is useful, as it provides valuable information about the public. But it is interesting to go a step further and investigate the digital ecosystem of the audience, what they share, what is in forums and social networks. It is about understanding the deep motivations that move them, if thinking in terms of conversion.

It requires constant monitoring to listen to customers, exchange opinions, and gain space in their dialogues.

Audit existing content: Even if it’s the first time you’ve developed a content marketing strategy, it’s very likely that related content has already been generated. It is convenient to evaluate what has been shared, review what the company is currently communicating, and make a first analysis about how your content is aligned with the strategy that you have just defined.

Choose the content manager: A content manager brings security to the platform and constant updates to implement. Another important factor of management software is integration: a manager that integrates with other marketing tools (landing pages, forms, and more) not only reduces costs but also optimizes time.

Search for information on what to write: Search thematic content and trends to produce current content.

There are tools that facilitate the process of finding content and information that adds value to the profile of your audience:

BuzzSumo: It is a tool that shows the most popular content on the network. It allows you to see which keywords are used in your sector and what kind of information has had the most impact on social networks. It is also possible to evaluate which is the most searched content in a specific area.

Google Trends: This tool is indispensable for exploring search trends from the keyword. It helps analyze the growth and decrease of trends, a feature that helps in decision-making. It is a useful tool to develop keyword strategies for seasonal campaigns as well as discover what the network is talking about in real time.

Feedly: It is a news aggregator used to stay updated on trends in your sector. It can help find valuable content and inspiration for your projects.

Reddit: It works as a news aggregator where the users themselves share content on any subject.

The same users vote to decide which news is important and which is not.

It works in a similar way as a forum: users can comment and receive a score that determines if the contribution has been useful.

Decide what content to create

Create an editorial plan with content programming that includes the following:

Publication date

Type of content

Provisional title

Keyword

Publishing channels (social networks, email, advertising, and more)

KPIs (indexes for evaluation of results)

Create different, useful content depending on the objective and sector, including the following:

Articles on topics of general interest

Case studies

Success stories

Infographics

Webinars

Guides

Video tutorials

E-books

Templates to download

News

Execute plan and measure

With the frequency chosen, analyze the results of the content plan. Monitor the impact on social networks. Check Google Analytics to see which content worked best.

It includes a space for other variables to determine the success of the plan, such as an increase in the volume of business or inquiries about the product or service.

Create content

Writing content for online marketing strategies is really an art that has evolved with the consolidation of different digital communication channels. It is not the same as writing a post on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, although everyone diffuses the same blog article. Each medium has its own requirements and characteristics. Let’s see what they are.

Content for blog

Blogs are destined to die was a phrase that was heard strongly at the end of the last decade, when social networks broke onto the internet. Within no time, Facebook reached 100 million users (2008), and it seemed that users would never comment on blogs again.

However, not only did they not die, but they are currently the backbone of any inbound marketing strategy, for example, operating, among other things, as the website’s recipient of traffic from social networks.

The three key elements of a blog are a catchy title, an outstanding image, and agile text to read.

Catchy title: Use appealing but factual wording, as any falsity will gradually drive readers away. The first point to consider is to explain what the article is about. A good start is to think of a title that the audience would like to share and report on its own.

Outstanding image: The visual impact of a good image is important and can even save a title that is not so good by generating curiosity in the reader. The image can be literal or symbolic, but in all cases, high sharpness and resolution are two fundamental aspects, especially when used in places that scale the images to different dimensions of the original.

Another trick to generate more dynamism in reading is to intersperse images every several paragraphs but without abusing the resource so that it is not transformed into a photo album.

There is a saying in the marketing world that if you want something to go viral, combine it with an image of a cat.