If you are considering building a career in Digital Marketing, this video will help you understand the fundamentals of digital marketing, the buyer’s journey and the differences between Digital and Traditional marketing. This exhaustive course on Digital Marketing will equip you with the right tools and knowledge to kickstart your career. 

Transcript

Welcome to today’s session. What I am going to be teaching you today are the different fundamental concepts of digital marketing which I have practiced for the last four years. I am going to talk to you about buyers’ journey, about marketing functions and how it fits into barrel journeys, different digital marketing channels, about some tools you could use in fundamental digital marketing and we would also compare traditional and digital marketing. I hope you enjoy this video.

CONCEPTS

  • Inbound vs outbound marketing 

  • Digital Marketing

  • Types of media
  • Types of marketing

What is Digital Marketing?

It is the marketing of products or services using digital channels to reach consumers.  The key objective is to promote brands through various forms of digital media. In a layman’s term digital marketing is simply using the normal marketing, promotion of use of services, your brand using electronic devices, social media and other technologies and techniques that are available on the internet.

Inbound and Outbound Marketing 

It is the process of attracting leads by providing content that is helpful to them and will organically lead to engagement. What this means is that we are talking about inbound marketing they are focusing on generating content that your target audience, the people you want to reach would like, find interesting, relevant, educative or enlightening. When they consume your content; videos, images or audio they get drawn to your brand because you’ve given them some level of information that they already like. Think about inbound marketing as Paid media. The inbound marketing is a pull strategy because you are controlling your content and drawing people into your brand, getting them to:

  • Love your brand
  • Understand what you can provide to them using content

The outbound marketing is the opposite. It’s simply about showing content to as many users as possible to increase the chances of reaching an interested audience with a push. It is a push strategy. What this means is that you are no longer generating content to get people interested or to get people engaged with your brand rather you are just putting out your content, promoting your content to reach as many people as possible. Think about outbound marketing as blogging.  It’s important you understand these concepts and know when to actually use them.

Types of marketing:

  • Interruption Marketing – this concept is similar to outbound marketing, its simply interrupting what people are doing and showing them your Ad. The idea is interrupting what your viewers are currently doing, it works but it’s not the ideal world. The ideal is not to interrupt people with content they might not find relevant. The ideal is to understand their behaviors and get their permission to market to them and that is what leads to the other types of marketing.  
  • Behavioural Marketing – This is taking insights, taking data, understanding people’s behaviour, what are their interest? What are the things they like? How long do they spend on internet? What channels do they spend their time on? What kind of content do they like to consume? Understanding their behaviour, getting insights from it, feeding them with content adverts that fits their behaviour. This way, when people see these adverts, when they see your content it will no longer feel like you’re interrupting them because the advert is contextual or it’s relevant to them.          
  • Permission Marketing – This is about opt-in and opt-out. A very good example is Email marketing, when you sign up for a newsletter for any brand, they give you the option to opt-in or opt-out.

Types of Media

1.    Owned media is content you’re in full control of e.g. your company website, your blog, shared content and your social media.

2.    Paid media is media that you pay for to increase your reach and traffic e.g. PPC Ads, influencer marketing etc.

3.    Earned media is user generated exposure. Exposure that you can earn via word of mouth or referrals e.g. Press mentions, shares, likes and reviews.

TWO ASPECTS OF YOUR DIGITAL BRAND

Your digital voice & Your digital footprint

Digital marketing at the end of the day is about getting people to know about your brand and become paying customers who are brand advocates telling other people to come use your product or use your services. Now when you are building your digital brand it is very important to think about your content as an abstract term in a grand scheme which is made of two important aspects of digital brand:

  • Voice – the digital voice is the core of everything, it’s as a result of what you constantly communicate right and how you communicate it. Your voice is built overtime as a result of what you are communicating. How are you communicating? And when you are communicating?  As a digital marketer don’t think about your content as the solution, think about how this content, strategies will affect your brand perception. You must be consistent. You have to know the kind of brand you are working with - is it B2B brand or B2C brand, consumer brand, a corporate brand. What is their product or services?  How do your audience like to be spoken to?  What are their needs? Understanding this influences the kind of content you put out there, at what time you put out the content and what channels.  
  • Footprint – Your digital footprint is a compilation of everything you have done from the beginning of the unplanned as it pertains to the internet and all other social media or their web usage page.

Digital voice and footprint can be very similar, but voice is about what you are communicating while your footprint is every other thing. Everything you have on the web all accumulate to be your footprint. 

Channels & Activities

In traditional marketing the different channels that we have include TV, Print, outdoor display, radio and transit Ads. Example of channels for digital marketing includes:

  • Paid search
  • Search Engine Optimization
  • Content Marketing
  • Email Marketing
  • Lead Generation 
  • Content optimization
  • Web analytics
  • Marketing Automation 
  • Social Media Marketing

What are the key characteristics?

  1.   Mass/individual Media – How an audience consumes media
  2.  Passive/engaged audience – an audience’ level of investment or engagement on your content
  3.  One-to-one/One-to-many – Development and communication of content to either a niche or a mass audience
  4. Outbound/inbound – the strategy of acquiring audience attention.
Traditional vs Digital Marketing
Traditional Digital 

Mass – People consume media in mass model 

Individual – these are mass channels, but everybody relates on their individualistic personality

Passive Audience – consumers consume in a very passive way  

Engaged Audience  

One-to-many 

One-to-one – it’s an advertiser talking to a consumer 

Outbound

Inbound

Relationship between Traditional & Digital Marketing:

They can both be used for integrated marketing – they always find a way to work together. It is your job as a digital marketer to find the best way to make it work for your brand. Think about ideas, think about strategies on how to start a journey on digital marketing and how to take it offline and still take it online which all depends on you understanding your customers. 

Buyer’s journey- What is a buyer’s journey?    

The process a buyer goes through to become aware of, evaluate and purchase a new product or service. Each buyer advances through a research and decision process ultimately culminating in a purchase.  There are stages in a buyer’s journey which are:

  • Awareness – Consumer discovers that you exist and how your product may solve a problem they have
  • Interest – Consumer becomes more familiar with the product
  • Consideration – Consumer is ready to know more about the product and make comparative investigations.
  • Conversion – Consumer is ready to buy and convert their decision into a purchase
  •  Retention – Consumer and brand build a strong relationship as the product exceeds the consumer’s expectation.

Mental Model of Marketing

This has three stages; 

  1.  Stimulus – This is the awareness or interest stage where consumers know about your products and then want to get it. Which brings us to the; 
  2. First moment of Truth – taking the first step to purchasing it
  3. Second moment of truth – this is the conversion and retention stage (when you experience it)

The new marketing model has something we call Zmot which is the zero moment of truth, it is the constitutional stage that we are in. the pre shopping experience. The zero moment of truth for every user is as a result of somebody else’s second moment of truth.

Micro moments

There are 4-game changing moments that really matter. In these four moments, consumers want what they want, when they want it and are drawn to brands that deliver on their needs.

  •  I-want-to-know moments - When someone is exploring or researching, but is not necessarily in purchase mode.
  •  I-want-to-go moments - When someone is looking for a local business or is considering buying a product at a near-by store.
  •   I-want-to-do moments - When someone helps completing a task or trying something new.
  •  I-want-to-do moments - When someone is ready to make a purchase and may need help deciding what to buy or how to buy. 

Micro-moments

  • Be there – Anticipate the micro moments for your target audience and commit to being there to help when those moments.
  • Be useful – Provide a digital experience that’s relevant to consumers’ need in the moment, and quickly connect people to the answers they are looking for.
  • Be accountable – create a seamless experience across all screens and channels and measure the collective impact across them

Digital activities & the buyer’s Journey

Aligning the buyer’s journey

  • Awareness stage
  •  Interest
  • Consideration
  • Conversion
  • Retention

PART 4: Marketing Functions

There are five different marketing functions

  1. Planning – Analyze business needs, research and develop objectives, set goals and deadlines, communicate planning and budget   
  2. Awareness – Identify market opportunities, Develop and test creative concepts, create media strategy and develop content & leverage event, PR, influencers, buzz etc.    
  3. Conversion – Set quantitative goals aligned with business needs, develop offer and messaging, test and adjust content and Leverage paid search, social advertising, remarketing, email marketing etc.   
  4. Retention – identify buyers’ needs & expectation, develop nurturing strategy, develop customer specific content and minor post -sale activity  
  5. Analysis & Optimization – gather marketing campaign performance data, pause under-performing campaigns, reproduce successful campaigns, adapt new strategies based on previous testing and results.

360 Marketing Campaign

A 360-marketing campaign covers the entire buying cycle from discovery to purchase to repeat costumer; where every marketing (traditional & digital) medium is utilized in an integrated, consistent marketing and branding strategy. It is a holistic campaign that covers all bases.

What are the benefits of 360 marketing campaign?

  • Covers the entire buying circle
  • Uses every customer touchpoint
  • Implement both traditional and digital marketing
  • Optimize for scale and relevance
  • Effectively measure results

PART 5: DIGITAL CHANNELS

The different digital channels are;

  • Email marketing – delivering content directly into the hands of the audience at the right time via emails
  • Paid search – is driving interested audience to your site using their search queries and only paying when they click on your Ad
  • Organic search - increasing visibility and searchability of your online assets by optimizing your website to rank organically on search engine
  • Website optimization – providing better user experience and getting better site authority
  • Web analytics
  • Display advertising – Generating leads and traffic to a high targeted audience by advertising to them on blogs, website and YouTube
  • Content marketing – increase your brand personality and likability by creating, curating and publishing highly relevant content. 
  • Social media marketing – creating visibility and interactivity with your audience via social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, twitter, YouTube & LinkedIn
  • Mobile Marketing – reaching a target audience on their mobile devices, via website, email, SMS and MMS, Social media and Apps. Mobile is disrupting the way people engage with brands.

There is something called Convergence in digital marketing – it’s when personalities beginsto come together in one device. Smartphones now have MMS and SMS integration, has camera integration, music, browsing, GPS, Email. Mobile has been able to converge different personalities into one device which makes it a lot easier for brands to utilize these activities and increase their engagement with their brand.         

Tools to conduct research and there is something called Market reality under this session.

Market research VS Market reality 

Market research is simply finding out things about your consumers than the normal traditional methods like polls, questionnaires, history, focus group etc.

Market reality uses the reality of the customers. It helps you start with the customers and work backwards. It is a better indicator of consumers’ needs and wants because you are using tools that give you real life information and gather data about what your customers think. Examples are Keyword research tools (this gives you result as of now), you ca also use the same keywords to get better results on PPC. When you use social media listening tool like TweetDeck or Social Mentions or Google Alert or Google Trends to find out what your consumers are currently talking about, weigh their interest over the period of time and find out what they are saying, negative sentiments and positive sentiments about your brand, you can use these trends to effect changes in your brand and become more contextual and more advanced and we have analytical tools like Google Analytics, KISSmetrics  gives you insight on your brand, how audience interact with your brand, what pages they are looking at? Which helps you improve your website and get more people engaged with your website.

Market research is very good but it’s important to focus on market reality, know what your customers are doing now and what they like now

Examples of Market Research tools are:

  • Survey Monkey
  • Google forms
  •  Type forms

These are types of forms you can use online to conduct your own research or questionnaires and polls for people to input what they think and feel about your brand just to basically, market research.

Examples of Market Reality Tools are:

  1. Listening tools: Tweetdeck, Google Alert, Google Trends, Hashtags, Brand watch
  2. Keyword Research Tools: Social media inbuilt, Analytics, Google analytics and KISSmetrics
  3. Market Research: Euormonitor, Emarketer, Neilsen 

 

 

 

 

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