Russ Henneberry

Article / Updated 08-16-2020

As a digital marketer, you’ve likely put lots of work into finding out who your audience is. But, what do you do with the information? You put it to work. Google Analytics enables you to break down your audience into segments based on the following: Channel Traffic source Completed actions Conversions In the context of analytics, a segment represents groups of visitors with shared characteristics or behaviors. Segmenting your audience in Google Analytics allows you to Figure out who finds your message appealing so that you can send more of this audience to this particular offer. Craft customized messaging to enhance ad copy and shape follow-up campaigns. Segmenting might sound simple, but it provides one of the best ways to make the most of your budget, or to know where you should spend your time and energy to drive new customers. By segmenting your audience, you gain a better understanding of what's working and what's not so that you can plan accordingly. Creating audience segments Using audience segments as a strategy shows you how to focus on the most valuable, highest-converting audiences. This allows you to figure out what makes them tick, so to speak. Creating segments is fast and easy. You create a set of rules that include or exclude certain people, allowing you to narrow down your audience to look at a specific subset rather than all site visitors, such as people who opted in for a gated offer. After creating a segment, you can analyze how this subset of visitors behaved or who is in the subset, giving you valuable insight on what offers to make to this audience. Follow these steps to create your own segments. In Google Analytics, navigate to the Reports navigation menu on the left. Select the Audience suite and click the Overview tab within the Audience suite. The Audience Overview report appears. Click the + Add Segment field along the top of the page. The Segment menu appears. Click the New Segment button to create a new segment. The Segment menu opens, allowing you to set conditions for your segments to meet and exclusions you want your segment to ignore. For instance, you might set a condition for age or operating system. Set conditions for your segment by selecting any of the following check boxes or filling in the field within in the following categories: Demographics: Segment your users by demographic information, such as age, gender, location, and other details. These are check boxes and form fields, depending on the option within the Demographics category. Technology: Segment your users' sessions by their web and mobile technologies, such as browser, device category, and screen resolution. These are check boxes and form fields, depending on the option within the Technology category. Behavior: Segment your users by how often they visit (called a session) and conduct transactions, such as sessions, session duration, and days since last session. These are form fields. Date of first session: Segment your users (create cohorts) by when they first visited your site. This is a form field. Traffic sources: Segment your users by how they found you, such as the keyword they used, the ad campaign, and the medium used. These are form fields. Ecommerce: Segment your users by their transactions and revenue. These are form fields. (Note: This may not appear depending on your business type and how you’ve set up your Google Analytics.) Conditions: Segment your users, their sessions, or both according to single or multisession conditions, such as time, goal conversions, and custom variables. This is a form field. Sequences: Segment your users, their sessions, or both according to sequential conditions, such as the steps they took to reach your site. This is a form field. After setting your conditions for your segment, name your segment by filling out the empty name field. Click the Save button to successfully complete this segment.Your new segment loads, and you can return to this segment at a later date when conducting future data research and analysis. After your new segment loads, the data for your segment is displayed, allowing you to make assessments. For instance, it displays how many users make up the segment, as well as other stats. Here’s an example of a completed segment; this segment shows mobile users and consists of 122,263 users. As a general rule, you want to aim for a minimum of 3,000 people in your audience segment, which ensures that you have enough subgroups to have faith in your groupings. You can experiment with fewer, but the larger your segment category is, the more trustworthy your data will be, allowing you to make sound, educated business decisions. Segments aren’t limited to the Audience suite. You can create a segment for any of the following suites: Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, or Conversion. Choose the suite that best meets your needs to create this segment and select Overview within your chosen suite. Although the suite you choose may be different from Audience and thus the data it measures, the steps you find here to set up a segment remain the same.

Article / Updated 08-06-2020

Everything you know about digital marketing is moot if your emails aren’t reaching your subscribers’ inboxes. Did you know that 21 percent of emails worldwide never reach the desired recipients? A whole lot of work, effort, and brilliance are being wasted on emails that end up floating around in cyberspace. How do you make sure that all your work isn’t wasted? It comes down to one simple thing: You have to prove that you aren’t a spammer and that you have no intention of being one. Sadly, the Internet service providers responsible for determining whether you are sending spam consider bulk mailers to be guilty until proven innocent. They assume that emails are spam from the outset, and until you can show them that you don’t act like a spammer, your email deliverability will be affected. There are some methods for improving deliverability. Most of these methods are very technical. If you’re a tech wizard, go forth and set up your infrastructure to ensure deliverability. If you need help with technical stuff, find a local tech person or call your email service provider, and get some systems in place to ensure that your emails reach the people you want to reach. Monitoring your reputation To ensure deliverability, you have to keep track of how you’re interacting with your list. Do the following things: Monitor the complaint rates and the volume of complaints you're receiving. Your email service provider should provide reporting capabilities on the number and rate of complaints your emails are receiving. Respond to complaints in a timely manner. Make sure that you unsubscribe and stop sending email to anyone who unsubscribes. Your email service provider should provide a path to unsubscribe from every email and automatically remove those that unsubscribe from your email list. Keep your message volume steady. Don’t send a million emails one month and then none for six months. Check your blocklist status on the major blocklist sites including Spamhaus and Spamcop. These major blocklist sites are referenced by mailbox providers like Google's Gmail to help them determine whether your email should be delivered to the inbox. Each blocklist has its own process for removal from its blocklist; you can find this information on its website. Proving subscriber engagement The best way to assure the Internet service providers (ISPs) that you’re not a spammer is to prove that you engage your subscribers with every single email you send. If people are opening your emails, reading what you have to say, and then clicking relevant links, you aren’t a spammer. Subscriber engagement rates are based on the following factors: Your open rate: This rate isn’t the number of emails that are opened, but the percentage. Your lateral scroll rate: This rate is how far recipients scroll down on your emails. Your hard and soft bounce rate: A bad email address is considered to be a hard bounce. A soft bounce can happen for many reasons, including a full inbox or accidental flagging as spam. If you continue to send emails to addresses that reject your mail, you look like a spammer. Export your entire list, and send it to a company called BriteVerify. This company runs an analysis of your list and tells you which addresses are definitively good, which ones are questionable, and which are bad. If you expunge the questionable and bad emails from your list, you’re practicing good list hygiene and increasing deliverability. Unsubscription and complaint rates: If you receive high numbers of unsubscriptions or complaints, examine your campaigns to see whether you’re doing something to upset subscribers. Tools that ensure email deliverability Several applications can help you ensure a high percentage of email deliverability. A few of our favorites are the following: Mail Monitor: Mail Monitor breaks down delivery per IP address, message, and email service. Return Path: If you have your own IP address, Return Path allows you to monitor your reputation and set up alerts. You get a baseline email deliverability score. EmailReach: This service allows you to set up tracking on domain and IP blocklisting and scans these blocklists daily, notifying you if you've been added.

Article / Updated 03-11-2017

What do you do with the results of your split test to ensure success for your digital marketing campaign? After you run your split test, you either have a successful, a failed, or a null test result. After you’ve concluded the test, you can dig into the data to analyze what happened during the test period and determine your next steps. To analyze your split-testing data, follow these steps: Report all your findings. Collect and put your testing data into words. You can use a test report sheet or PowerPoint deck for this. Considering breaking your report into the following sections: Slide 1: Test title, URL, timeline, and metric(s) measured Slide 2: Hypothesis Slide 3: All the variants you tested Slide 4: In-depth results Slide 5: Results showcasing the winning variant, conversion lift, and confidence rate Slide 6: Analysis Slide 7: Other observations Slide 8: Recommendations Report your conversion range. The conversion range is the range between the lowest highest possible conversion rate. This range may be written in the form of a formula, as in 30% lift @@pm 3%, or you might say that you expect conversions to be between 27 and 33 percent. Be sure to report your conversion rate as a range. When you report a 40 percent conversion lift, but you really have a range of 35–43 percent, you’re doing yourself a disservice by not properly setting expectations for your results or your recommendations. Don’t let your boss or client think that the conversion rate is static. It isn’t. Set proper expectations by reporting on your conversion rate as a range. Tools such as Visual website Optimizer create this range for you. Look at each variant’s heat map. Observing each variant's heat map helps you find new things to optimize and test. Place these finding in the “Other Observations” section of your report. Analyze key segments in Google Analytics. Here, you’re determining whether the test indicates a higher or lower conversion rate for certain types of visitors. Implement the successful variation. Ideally, thanks to the results of your split testing, you know what works. Now you can put that knowledge to work. Use your data to make educated decisions about what changes you should make on the page. If the result of the split test was null, pick your preferred variation. At this point, if your test has declared no winner from either variation, you can choose which one you’d like to implement. Use this data to develop a new hypothesis and create a new test. Use your findings to create new hypotheses and plan future tests. Optimization is a process. Your latest findings should feed into your future work. Here is where you can learn from segments, heat maps, or the test proper to develop your next iteration or fuel a test on a new page. Share your findings. At the very least, you should send your report over to your boss or client, and to your colleagues who have a stake in the test. If you want to go above and beyond, you could even publish your findings as your own primary research. Case studies are valuable resources that can establish you as an authority in the market and also generate leads within your market.

Article / Updated 03-11-2017

Split tests are helpful tools in digital marketing. When you have your hypothesis, your variations, your KPIs, and your test schedule outlined, you’re almost ready to begin your split test. Complete the following steps to take in preparation for your test and then you'll be ready to click the Start button in your testing tool! Defining goals in Google Analytics Just having Google Analytics on your site isn’t enough; you need to establish your goals. Setting custom events or e-commerce tracking works as well — you just need something to measure. Having a measureable goal is important because when you have proper e-commerce or goal reporting in Google Analytics, the results of your testing are determined by objective numbers rather than subjective opinion. Having goals set up in Google Analytics is incredibly powerful and will start to show you the efficacy of your campaigns in a single platform. Checking that your page renders correctly in all browsers If a page isn't performing properly, it will corrupt the data. You may think that the variation you are testing has failed because your hypothesis was incorrect, but in truth, it might be a tech issue. For instance, if one of the pages you are testing is showing a broken image, the conversion lift (or failure) for that page is not caused by the changed variable but rather by the page’s functionality, in which case your test will be for naught. Before you launch your test, double-check your page for bugs by using tools such as BrowserStack or preview options in Visual website Optimizer. Ensuring that you have no testing conflicts You don’t want your tests to overlap. Therefore, you should never run multiple tests on the same page at the same time; for instance, running a second, separate test on a page while another test is already being performed on the same page results in conflicting data. You can run tests on different pages at the same time. However, when running tests on different pages at the same time, you need to make sure that traffic included in one test isn't included in the other. Checking links Just as you need to ensure that your page is functioning, you also have to make sure that your links actually work and go to the right page. A split test between a page with links and a page without properly functioning links is obviously a fatally flawed test that won’t give you true results. Keeping variation load times similar or identical Keep your load time in mind when you optimize. If you have a variant with a better load time, that variant will likely beat out its competition, skewing your results. Use tools such as PageSpeed to analyze and ensure that your variant load times are as close as they can be.

Article / Updated 03-10-2017

Knowing your audience is important for any digital marketing campaign. Although analytics programs like Google Analytics track the origin of your site visitors using their default settings, you'll likely find that these default settings are too broad to ascertain meaningful data. To get more granular (and thus more useful) data, you can append UTM parameters to the links you share around the web. UTM stands for Urchin Tracking Module, and it is a tracking marker appended to a Uniform Resource Locator (URL). The UTM system allows users to tag hyperlinks in order to trace where visitors originated. For example, if you want to track the number of leads generated by a single link shared with your Facebook fans, you can do that using Google Analytics and a link with UTM parameters. Simply put, you place a UTM at the end of a hyperlink so that you can figure out how people get to your site and what they do after they get there. For every hyperlink you want to track, whether on your blog or your social media channels, that directs traffic to a landing page you own, consider adding UTM parameters. By adding this tracking code to the hyperlinks you share, you can track the origins of that visit. A UTM consists of various parameters. Here are the UTM parameters that matter most: Campaign source (utm_source) Campaign medium (utm_medium) Campaign content (utm_content) Campaign name (utm_campaign) Campaign source (utm_source) Generally, the source of a UTM describes where your visitors come from. The source tells you the specific place where the referring link was shared, such as An email promotion A social network A referring website Common sources include Facebook Email newsletter Twitter Google YouTube The source enables you to know which email, search engine, or Facebook ad (or other source) a user came from. Knowing where traffic is coming from can be powerful because you gain insight into what your users are responding to. Campaign medium (utm_medium) This parameter identifies the medium or vehicle that the link was used on, such as email. Medium tells you how visitors arrived at your site. Some of the most common mediums include Email Pay per click (PPC) Banner-ads Direct (which tells you users directly typed in your site address) Campaign content (utm_content) Campaign content describes the specific ad, banner, or email used to share the link. It gives you additional details to use with A/B testing or content-targeted ads, as well as helps you determine what creative is working best at promoting an offer or distributing content. Be as descriptive as possible with this parameter's naming structure so that you can easily remember what email or ad this UTM refers to. Campaign name (utm_campaign) This parameter serves as an identifier of a specific product or promotion campaign, such as a spring sale or another promotion you run. The campaign name's basic purpose is to highlight promotional offers or content distribution strategies so that you can easily compare performance across time and platform. Campaign links should be consistent across all different sources and media for any given promotion to ensure that the campaign as a whole can easily be analyzed. Dissecting a UTM This section examines a UTM’s structure. For instance, here’s what a UTM looks like for a flash sale for one of DigitalMarketer's products, the Content Engine: http://www.digitalmarketer.com/lp/the-content-engine?utm_source=house-list-email-boradcast&utm_medium=email&utm_content=content-engine-flash-mail-1&utm_campaign=content-engine-flash-sale-1-1-16 Your UTM might look something like the preceding. Following is breakdown of this URL with a UTM by section: http://www.digitalmarketer.com/lp/the-content-engine: The hyperlink. ?utm_source=house-list-email-broadcast: The campaign source, which is the referring source of the traffic. In this case, it's an email to our “house” email list. &utm_medium=email: Campaign medium, which is how the user was referred. In this case it was via email. &utm_content=content-engine-flash-mail-1: Campaign content, which is the ad or campaign identifier you assign. In this case, this is the first email for the Content Engine flash sale promotion. &utm_campaign=content-engine-flash-sale-1-1-16: Campaign name, which is the specific promotion or strategy. In this case, this campaign is the Content Engine flash sale beginning on January 1st, 2016. Creating UTM parameters for your URLs Google makes building UTM links super easy with a free, easy-to-use UTM builder called the Google Analytics URL Builder. Visit the page, follow the steps, and plug in your information to automatically generate a hyperlink with UTM parameters that you can then track with Google Analytics — that is, if you've properly set up a Google Analytics account. If you haven't already, visit Google Analytics Help Center. This resource contains further instructions about how you can use each of the different UTM parameters. Creating properly attributed hyperlinks takes some time to get used to, but the data it provides is worth its weight in gold. To make consistency easy, create a unified document in which you track all the hyperlinks you use, which will make it easy to refer back to when you’re analyzing later. UTM parameters are case sensitive, so if you use abc for your utm_campaign tags on some links and ABC for your utm_campaign tags on other links, they show up as separate campaigns in your Google Analytics.

Article / Updated 03-10-2017

The first thing you should do as a business owner or digital marketer after you decide to start an email marketing strategy is come up with a promotional calendar. That way, you’ll know when to send the messaging your customers need when they want to receive it. Using a promotional calendar gives you the opportunity to elicit action. It mobilizes your subscribers to do something that you want them to do — buy something, ask for information, call you, or come to a store, for example. The right message delivered at the right time elicits action. Cataloging your products and services Before you can build an accurate, all-encompassing promotional calendar, you have to know exactly what you’re promoting. Spend some time carefully cataloging every product and service that your business offers and taking some time to understand how to promote it best. You can use a promotional asset sheet like this one. Be sure that whatever record you keep of your promotional assets contains the following information: Name of the product or service Price (both full price and sale price) Where the transaction occurs Whether you’ve sold this product or service via email before Whether past marketing efforts worked (and why or why not) When you last promoted this product or service How many emails you sent about this product Whether the product is currently available to promote (and if not, why not) You may be wondering why you should spend so much time cataloging your marketing efforts. Wouldn’t that time be better spent, perhaps, marketing those assets? The truth is that by carefully tracking the sales of your products, as well as the marketing campaigns that correspond with your sales, the job of marketing those assets becomes much easier. When you know what you have available to sell and the results of the promotions you've employed in the past, you can simply do more of what's working and less of what isn't. The time you spend cataloging and analyzing these assets and the campaigns surrounding them is valuable marketing time. All marketers should gather the promotional assets from all the products and services they offered so that they know exactly what they can sell, how they can sell it, whom to sell it to, and (perhaps most important) when to sell it. Creating an annual promotional plan After you catalog your assets, create an annual promotional plan. This plan aligns your 12-month revenue goals with your annual promotions and marketing efforts to help you reach your goals. Here is a sample worksheet. You can download your own 12-Month Promotional Planning Worksheet at DigitalMarketer.com. Developing a digital marketing plan Creating and developing an annual marketing plan takes some time, but after it’s done, you have a solid framework for building your promotional calendar. Follow these steps: Write your 12-month revenue goals. Consider your target revenue goals, and figure out where you want to be each month to reach those goals. List your nonrevenue goals. This list could include nonrevenue growth opportunities such as the launch of a blog or podcast, the release of a book, or the opening of a new location. Slot holiday promotions into the appropriate months. For many retail businesses, November and December are key sales times and thus require strategic marketing. Other businesses may have peak promotion at varying times, such as before a major conference or during a certain season. Slot annual promotions into the appropriate months. These promotions may include major sales, product releases, or events. Denote seasonality. Every business has slow and busy months, so note those months in your plan so that you can build appropriate promotion during those times. Slot nonrevenue goals into the appropriate months. Are you planning to release a new book or launch a new blog in March? You need space on the promotional calendar for these nonrevenue initiatives. Break your revenue goals into monthly allotments. Keep seasonality in mind (see Step 5). Add your standard revenue projections. Include promotional efforts, major events, standard rebilling contracts, and subscriptions. Subtract your expected revenue from the target revenue. After doing this, consider how you can fill in the remaining revenue needed. This step is where your marketing efforts come into play. Brainstorm additional promotional ideas that could generate the revenue you need to reach your goals. Will you need to add new products or services to promote to reach your target revenue? Can you find new ways to offer the existing products and services you already have? Spot-check and adjust. Ask yourself whether your calendar helps you meet your goals in a way that will be both effective and practical. List additional items that you need to meet your target. You may need to launch a new product or service, or to create a sales presentation, for example. Creating a 30-day calendar The next step is to get down into the nitty-gritty of what you’re going to do for the next 30 days. A promotional campaign should have three goals: Monetization: Making money or making a sale Activation: Moving your customer forward on the customer journey Segmentation: Becoming more aware of customers’ needs and desires so you can segment your list and deliver value For your first 30 days, try setting one of these promotional goals for each week and reserve the fourth week for a wildcard campaign. A wildcard campaign gives you the chance to try something new, get creative, test new ideas, or try to replicate your most successful campaigns. You can use a monthly planning worksheet so that you can easily track which promotions you’re running and how they do. You might also plan a backup promotion for each campaign in case the primary campaign falls, so that you still reach revenue goals regardless of how the campaigns perform. You can download your own monthly email planning worksheet at DigitalMarketer.com. Creating a 90-day rolling calendar When your 30-day promotional plan is up and rolling, you can plan a bit farther in advance with a 90-day rolling calendar. This calendar is referred to as a rolling calendar because by repeating similar promotions every 90 days or so, you keep your customers informed and engaged without making the same offers with the same campaign goals over and over again. Use a calendar application like Google Calendar or hang a dry-erase board with a 90-day calendar template on it in your office so that you and your team can routinely map out a schedule that meets your revenue targets without repeating the same promotions too often. When viewing your 90-day calendar, you might find that you have three monetization campaigns in April, but none in May. Moving a monetization campaign or two to May will make it more likely that you hit your revenue targets in May and reduce the number of monetization offers you send to your email list in April.

Article / Updated 03-09-2017

Digital marketing evolves rapidly, and you often find yourself trying out new tools and tactics daily. When you're constantly venturing into uncharted territory, you're bound to make mistakes. Don't sweat it; making mistakes is how you learn. That said, not all mistakes are made equal. The mistakes listed here are more about your mindset than they are about a tactical error, such as sending out an email without testing the links. You'll inevitably make tactical mistakes in your marketing, and you'll bounce back. But making the mistakes described here limits your growth, and if you avoid them, you should see a significant positive effect on your results. Focusing on eyeballs instead of offers This might shock you, but you don’t have a website traffic problem. When you aren't making sales, the solution is not to get more eyeballs on the page. Eyeballs can be bought, but the messaging and offers that you deliver to those eyeballs are the biggest difference makers. When things go wrong, really wrong, don't spend energy on optimizing the landing page for more Google traffic or scheduling more tweets about the offer. Instead, change what you're offering to meet the desires of your market. First, prove the offer; then, turn the traffic on. Failing to talk about your customers (and their problems) People don’t care about your product; rather, they care about how your product can make their life better. Stop talking about your product’s features and instead describe how your product can transform the customer in a meaningful way. Business is pretty simple. You get paid to move people from a “Before” state to a desired “After” state. In the Before state, customers are discontent in some way. They might be in pain, bored, frightened, or unhappy for any number of other reasons. In the After state, life is better. They are free of pain, entertained, or unafraid of what previously plagued them. People don’t buy products or services; they buy transformation. In other words, they buy access to the After state. A great offer genuinely moves a customer to a desired After state, and great marketing simply articulates the move from the Before state to the desired After state. Most businesses that fail, particularly at startup or when entering new markets, do so because they fail to offer a desired After state (the offer is no good) or they fail to articulate the movement from Before to After (the marketing is no good). Needless to say, getting clear on the desired outcome that your offer delivers is fundamental to the success of your marketing. Asking prospects for too much, too soon Imagine that a nice, good-looking, successful guy walks into a bar and immediately proposes marriage to the first single woman he sees. Although she may want to get married someday, and from a pure “feature set” perspective he’s a good catch, that doesn’t mean she’s ready to commit to him. And it doesn't mean that she wants to commit to a marriage right now. This idea seems super obvious when you put it in terms of human relationships, but for some reason, marketers often “propose marriage” (ask prospects for a major commitment) too early when marketing. Your business might be marketing Business to Consumer (B2C) or Business to Business (B2B), but every business is actually marketing Human to Human (H2H). As a result, the offers you make to prospects and existing customers should progress in the same way that people develop normal, healthy human relationships. Human relationships go through a process, and the same is true of businesses and their customers. How can you structure the offers you make to prospects and new leads in a way that helps them progress through the relationship? Being unwilling to pay for traffic There was a time when search engine optimization (SEO) and social media was easy, and free traffic from the likes of Google and Facebook was reliable and plentiful. Now, however, although search and social media marketing are still important, the days of free-and-easy traffic are over. Today, reliable and high-quality website traffic is bought and sold like grain or gasoline. If you want a reliable source of gasoline, you go to the gas station and purchase it. Similarly, reliable website traffic is a commodity, and if you want to market at scale, you need to go to the traffic store and buy it. The web has no shortage of traffic stores (Google, Bing, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, and more) that are more than willing to sell you high-quality website traffic at a fair price. Being product centric When most businesses are marketing, they focus on the product. However, the businesses that last don't define themselves by the product(s) they sell. Instead, they define themselves by the market they serve. For example, in the 1920s, a French fashion designer and businesswoman published a picture of a simple black dress in Vogue magazine. Before this time, wearing black was reserved for periods of mourning. Since its introduction a century ago, however, the “little black dress” has become an enduring wardrobe staple for many women. The French fashion designer who published that picture in Vogue was none other than Coco Chanel, founder of the Chanel brand. Although Chanel has sold many “little black dresses” in its time, the company has not defined itself by even this iconic product. Instead, Chanel sells everything from clothing and jewelry to fragrances and skin care products, all to women with a taste for fine fashion. A product does not a business make. Identify who you’re serving and advocate for that market by creating the products and services your customers want and need. Tracking the wrong metrics Digital marketing is trackable, almost to a fault. You can, for example, use Google Analytics (a free program) to determine the sales of persons visiting your website from Ohio, on Tuesdays, and when using an iPhone. Although that data might be absolutely relevant to your business, every business should be tracking two overarching metrics: Cost of Acquisition (COA) and Average Customer Value (ACV). Cost of Acquisition is the amount of money you must spend to acquire a single customer. For example, imagine that you sell men's dress shirts and acquire new customers by using Facebook ads. Say that you determine that it costs $40 in ad spend to acquire each new customer. You've therefore determined that the Cost of Acquisition (COA) for this offer is $40. Now, for this same shirt offer, you want to calculate the Average Customer Value, or ACV. You can calculate this in a number of ways, but our favorite metric is to calculate the immediate value of a new customer. In the example, each new shirt sale generates $20 in net profit (revenue minus expenses), and, on average, a new customer buys two shirts. So each new customer results in $40 in profit for the business. This is good news because it means that this business can generate new customers with this offer and marketing campaign at a break-even point. Any additional sales made to these newly generated customers result in additional profit for the business. There is a time and place to dive deep into the numbers, but always remember that the amount it costs to acquire a customer and the average value a new customer brings to the business are the most important metrics to track. Building assets on other people’s land Although networks like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube give you access to billions of people, focusing 100 percent of your attention on creating audiences on these platforms is dangerous. These platforms can, and will, change their rules from time to time, and those changes may not be in your favor. Instead, focus on building media assets that you own, particularly your email list. You should absolutely build connections on major networks like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, of course, but look to migrate those connections to an asset you have more control over. Focusing on your content’s quantity instead of quality The truth is that the Internet doesn't need another blog post, podcast, or YouTube video. Much has been written about the amount of content added to the web each day. It is, indeed, a staggering amount. Our social media feeds and email inboxes are crammed with content. That said, the Internet does lack remarkable content, and if you can provide it, you will get traction from it. Instead of creating ten new blog posts over the next month, put ten times the effort into creating a single remarkable post. Then, prime the pump by forcing some eyeballs on your masterpiece by buying traffic to it. Not aligning marketing goals with sales goals If you own or work for an organization with a sales and marketing department, you know that these two teams don't always see eye to eye. Marketing and sales fight with one another because they have different goals. Marketing thinks it’s all about “awareness,” whereas sales just cares about … well, sales. Marketing gets annoyed at sales for overpromising and under delivering, and sales gets annoyed at marketing because the leads aren't “sales ready” and there aren’t enough of them. The key to fixing this situation is to get marketing and sales on the same page. Literally. Both departments need to understand that they serve different positions on the same team, and the goal isn’t awareness, or sales, but rather happy, successful customers. To achieve this goal, marketing must generate awareness and leads, and sales must close those leads, but if the customer experience isn’t amazing, everyone has failed. Allowing “shiny objects” to distract you This mistake, more than any other, is responsible for the demise of businesses that market their businesses online. New channels, tools, and tactics spring up on a daily basis in this fast-moving industry, and your best bet is to ignore them. Digital marketing is less about the “digital” and more about the “marketing.” Instead of becoming distracted by the new, concentrate on what has always worked. Focus on acquiring new customers with great offers and supporting those acquisition efforts with high-quality content and a sound traffic strategy. Focus on improving your email follow-up and the measurement and optimization of your campaigns.

Article / Updated 03-09-2017

Three main players make up the search marketing landscape, each with a different motivation. Understanding who the players are and what they want gives you a better understanding of how to make search marketing work for your business. The important players in search marketing are Searchers: People who type search queries into search engines Search engines: Programs that searchers use to find products, services, content, and more on the Internet Marketers: The owners of websites and other channels that publish content and make offers to people on the Internet As a marketer and business owner, you want to maximize the amount of traffic, leads, and sales you get from search marketing. To do this, you must give searchers and search engines what they want. Understanding searchers’ needs The key for both marketers and search engines is understanding the mindset of searchers. By understanding what motivates searchers, marketers and search engines can serve them better. People use search engines every day for everything from researching a school project to looking for reviews for a big-ticket purchase like a car or home. What motivates searchers is simple: They want to find the most relevant, highest-quality web pages about anything and everything they’re searching for, and they want to find those pages now. If marketers and search engines can satisfy searchers, everyone wins. Searchers find what they want; marketers get traffic, leads, and sales; and search engines gain users. Knowing what search engines want A search engine company, such as Google, is a business, and like any other business, it must generate revenue to survive. As a result, it’s useful to understand how search engines generate that revenue. If you understand what motivates the search engine, you can plan your search strategy accordingly. Most search engines generate most of their revenue by selling advertising. Check out this typical set of advertisements in a Google search results page. As a result, it’s in a search engine’s best interest to serve the best, most popular, most relevant content to searchers. Failure to deliver what searchers want sends those searchers elsewhere to find what they’re looking for, which means less opportunity to show ads. Other search engines generate revenue by establishing affiliate relationships with the businesses to which they refer traffic. When a searcher visits one of these affiliate partners and makes a purchase, the search engine makes a commission on that sale. Black hats and white hats If you want to build a successful search marketing campaign, you need to stay within the borders of each search engine’s terms of service. Search marketing tactics that violate those terms of service are called black-hat; those that play within the rules are called white-hat. Black-hat search marketing tactics are not only unethical (and sometimes illegal), but also bad for business. Violating the terms of a search engine may create short-term results, but those results won’t be sustainable. Search engines like Google continuously update the algorithms they use to rank websites in an effort to squash black-hat methods such as link buying and keyword stuffing. Marketers who use white-hat search marketing strategies — those who follow the search engine’s terms of service and build a better user experience for searchers — are rewarded with higher rankings and more traffic, leads, and sales from search engines.

Article / Updated 03-07-2017

At the heart of digital marketing is useful content. When people do research, they search for useful content on the Internet. They look for how-to guides, case studies, and resources that can help solve their problems, inspire them, or point them in the right direction. Writing content that is both free and useful endears you to your market and establishes you and your business as the authority in your niche. List post The list post is simply that, a list. Some may affectionately refer to it as a “listicle.” A list post is one of the easiest to put together and can be very versatile. Not to mention that people just love lists — they're helpful and quick to read. For your blog, create a list of books, tools, resources, or any other topic that your market finds useful and is also relevant to your call to action. Typically, list posts have quick introductions and then get right to the body of the post. By their nature, list posts are text heavy, which can be intimidating to readers. Be sure to use images wherever you can, which helps to break up the text, making your post easier to read and more likely to be shared. Case study post The term case study carries more perceived value than the term article, blog post, or video. Case studies provide great detail and go beyond simple testimonials by showing real-life examples. Using case studies, you can highlight your successes in a way that helps you turn a prospective customer into a customer. In the case study post, get specific and talk strategy. Outline and unpack the details of something, such as a project, event, or process. Tell your story from start to finish, including the failures and “speed bumps” that you face; doing so offers authenticity to your case study post and makes your brand more relatable because it proves that your brand is composed of humans with faults, just like the rest of us. Finally, be sure to include real numbers, graphs, and figures that back up your examples. Here’s a case study post from ConversionXL. How-to post The how-to post is another staple blog post type. In the article, you describe how to execute a process and use images, video, or audio to enrich the post and make it as easy as possible for your reader to take action. This type of post contains a quick introduction and then gets into the process you’re presenting; you might outline your process in the intro in the form of a bulleted list before going into more detail in the body of the post. It can help to break the how-to information in the body of the piece into steps, phases, or categories so that your readers can digest the information more easily. Frequently asked question (FAQ) post The FAQ post is a great way to bring traffic to your website from search engines. If you continually get repeat questions from customers or prospects, there is a good chance that people are using search engines to find the answers to these same questions. Create articles with detailed explanations around these FAQ topics. The should-have-asked-the-question (SAQ) post The SAQ post is a variation of the FAQ post. This is a question that customers or prospects don’t ask — but they should. For example, a real estate company could create a post called “Questions You Should Ask Before Hiring Any Realtor.” Your SAQ post should center around questions that customers should ask before they buy your product, or questions they should ask to learn more about your industry. Checklist post As the name suggests, a checklist post lists the steps a person should take to complete a specific task. For example, an airline blog might post a checklist containing the items people should bring when traveling abroad, or what parents should bring to keep young children entertained on long trips. If you can break your content down into a checklist, it often performs better. People like the checklist format because it’s easy to digest, and people find taking action easier when you itemize the content in this way. Problem/solution post This type of blog post has an easy format: First, define a problem; then present the solution. The solution to the problem might take the form of a product or service you sell, or it may be something that people can freely obtain. The problem/solution post is a valuable piece of content because people are always looking for ways to solve their problems. If you can provide a real solution for someone, that person will be grateful to you. The problem/solution post can cross over into the territory of other blog post types such as the FAQ post, the how-to post, or the checklist post. Research post Conducting your own primary research around a topic in your niche is one of the best ways to build blog content that gets attention. That's because primary research is hard to gather and extremely time consuming. Collecting all the research for someone and providing it for free all in one place is a great way to endear your brand to prospects as well as establish your brand as an authority on the particular topic. That said, you don't have to do all the research yourself. You can simply curate research from third parties and pull it together into an article, infographic, or other type of content that your market will find valuable and intriguing. Stat roundup post This post (like the research post) works best when you can use statistics that you have produced because it adds to your authority. That doesn't mean you can't use third-party information, but if you're looking to build awareness and clout around your brand, using your own statistics is the way to go. That said, don't ignore other resources altogether. Consider pulling together stats from multiple locations to create a very solid, well-rounded statistics post. Ultimate guide post The ultimate guide post is just what it sounds like: a detailed, comprehensive post on a topic in your niche. An ultimate guide post done right is an article that people will bookmark and continuously return to, so don’t skimp here — take your time and deliver the definitive post on the topic. This type of post helps to bring people back to your site, establish you as an authority in your market, and prove that you know what you're talking about. The idea behind the ultimate guide is that the reader shouldn't have to go anywhere else to gain more information on this topic. This post will be long, with thousands of words, and many figures and examples. If people can read and digest this post in ten minutes, it's probably not the ultimate guide. Series post Look for opportunities to break a topic into a series. An exceptionally lengthy or complex piece (such as the ultimate guide post) is a good candidate to be broken into parts and distributed as a series post. Announce in the introduction of the post when readers can expect the next article in the sequence to be published. Also, you should have set days when you publish the series. For instance, make it each day over the course of a week, or every Monday over the next month. By announcing and having a set time frame, your readers know when to expect the next part, which helps to maintain engagement in the post. Be sure to link these articles together as you publish them. That way, if people miss the first or the second part of the series, they can easily find the post(s) needed to catch up. Here’s an example of a series post from the health club chain LA Fitness. Definition post In niches in which the market needs to be educated, the definition post is an absolute must. As the name suggests, it's an article that defines a topic, and it works well in industries and markets that have their own terms and lingo. For the definition post, you can create content around a particularly confusing or complex topic and then explain and inform your readers about that topic. For the definition post, consider creating a series of posts that define aspects of your niche. You get bonus points if you can logically define something in your market that is unique, unusual, or controversial. Presenting one or more of these aspects helps you stand out while also creating engagement in your post. YouTube cut-up post This post leverages a popular YouTube video to create stellar content. It can be your video or, if you have permission, someone else's video. To create this article type, take screenshots at different stages during the video and add text explanations. Then embed the entire video into your post. This is a super-fast and easy way to create high-value and engaging content from video.

Article / Updated 03-06-2017

Although you may have many business goals that you want to affect through your digital marketing, you'll find that you can meet most objectives with three broad categories of digital marketing campaign: Acquisition, Monetization, and Engagement. Each of these types of digital marketing campaign has a very specific role to play in your business, as follows: Acquisition campaigns acquire new prospects and customers. Monetization campaigns generate revenue from existing leads and customers. Engagement campaigns create communities of brand advocates and promoters. Campaigns that generate new leads and customers If your goal is to raise awareness for the problems you solve or the solutions you provide, or if you're just looking to acquire new leads and customers, you need an Acquisition campaign. The role of your marketing is to help move a prospect, lead, or customer from the awareness stage of the customer journey to brand promoter. You deploy Acquisition campaigns to do the work on the front end of this journey, taking the prospect from Aware to Converted. The stages of the customer journey that Acquisition campaigns complete are the following: Make Aware: To bring in new leads and customers, you need to reach out to what amounts to complete strangers. You should structure Acquisition campaigns to reach prospects who are completely unaware of the problem you solve or the solutions you provide. Engage: The movement from Make Aware to Engage is often accomplished by providing value to the prospect, usually in the form of entertainment, inspiration, or educational content, before asking her to buy something or commit a significant amount of time. This is known as content marketing, a strategic marketing method focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent material designed to attract, retain, and ultimately drive a customer to a profitable action. Content marketing consists of a broad spectrum of activities and types of content, including blogging, videos, social media updates, images, and more. Subscribe: At this stage, the prospect has given you permission to market to him. At the very least, he has connected with you on social channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, and others) or, ideally, has become an email subscriber. The Subscribe state is a critical stage to reach in the relationship because you can now continue the conversation with more content and offers. Convert: The transformation of a prospect from being merely interested and subscribed to converted is the final stage of an Acquisition campaign. At this point, the prospect has placed trust in your organization by giving you either money or a significant amount of her time. Don't forget that your marketing should be gradual and seamless, particularly online, where you must often build trust with someone you've never actually met. If this final stage of your Acquisition campaign involves a sale, it shouldn't be a risky (think expensive or complex) purchase. The goal here is to simply transform the relationship from prospect to customer. Note that Acquisition campaigns are not about profit. Although you might be making sales at the Convert stage, the goal of those sales is not return on investment (ROI) but on acquiring leads and buyers. This idea can seem counterintuitive, but keep in mind that customer and lead acquisition is different from monetization. These two campaign types have different goals, tactics, and metrics. Most of the campaigns that you create to acquire new leads and customers can also work to activate leads and buyers who have never purchased from you, or haven't purchased from you in a while. Campaigns like this are referred to as Activation campaigns. A healthy business has a large number of recent and, if applicable, frequent buyers. Deploying campaigns to activate dormant subscribers and buyers is a good use of time and effort. Campaigns that monetize existing leads and customers If your business objective is to sell more to the customers you already have or to sell high-dollar, more complex products and services and profit maximizers, you need a Monetization campaign. In short, the goal of a Monetization campaign is to make profitable sales offers to the leads and customers you acquired with your Acquisition campaigns. Don't build a Monetization campaign first if your business has no leads, subscribers, or existing customers. Monetization campaigns are meant to sell more, or more often, to those who already know, like, and trust your business. The stages of the customer journey completed by Monetization campaigns are the following: Excite: You target Monetization campaigns at customers who have already spent time learning something from you, or have already purchased something from your business. Savvy digital marketers build campaigns that encourage prospects or customers to get value from the interactions they've already had with your business. Cause customers to ascend: For every group of people who purchase something, some percentage of them would have bought more, or more often, if given the chance. For example, for every buyer of a Rolex watch, some percentage would buy a second (or third or fourth!) watch, or would buy the most expensive Rolex watch if presented with the opportunity. This concept is critical not only to digital marketing but also to your business goals. Your Monetization campaigns should capitalize on this concept by making offers that increase the value of your existing leads and customers. Campaigns that build engagement If your business objective is to successfully get new customers on board and move new leads and customers from being prospects to fans of your brand, or to build a community around your company, brand, or offers, you need an Engagement campaign. The most beloved companies create online opportunities for customers and prospects to interact with each other and with the brand. Companies that build engagement into their marketing enjoy the benefits of customer interactions that go beyond the simple transaction of buying goods and services. The stages of the customer journey completed by Engagement campaigns are the following: Advocate: You can create marketing campaigns to give your best customers the ability to recommend your business through testimonials and customer stories. These advocates defend your brand on social media and recommend your products and services to their friends and family when prompted. Promote: Customers who actively seek to promote your business are worth their weight in gold. These are the customers who create blogs and YouTube videos about your products and services. They tell the story of your brand and their success with it on social channels, and do everything they can to spread the good word about the value you provide. These people are your brand advocates. Creating brand advocates and promoters begins with having a superior product or service, coupled with a customer service experience to match. Word travels fast in the digital world, and if you aren't providing value, you find that your marketing creates the exact opposite of advocates and promoters. Instead, your marketing only speeds the spread of information about the poor experiences your customers have had. Before attempting to build engagement and community, optimize the amount of value you bring to your customer. When done right, Acquisition, Monetization, and Engagement campaigns seamlessly move people through the customer journey. These three strategies help people go from their “Before” state in which they have a problem to their desired “After” state of having gained a positive outcome through your product or service. Check out all the stages a person goes through, ideally, in the customer journey.