Where we’ve been so far…
We’ve covered how the web world works in the Foundations section and explored some fundamental online laws like Metcalfe’s and Moore’s Laws which tells us about growth in online networks and change. Next, we covered how to study and research your target market using a design tool called a User Persona. This simple exercise helps us empathize with our ideal user and ensures we take off our personal filters for what our digital presence should be. In short, we get as close as possible to understanding what they want online from us and not what we want for them.
Next, we learned about the Long Tail and how it rules everything online from inventory turns on Netflix and Amazon to keyword search volume. The Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) lays out why the world is ruled by search and how a customer is influenced by the first page of results on Google. This is the battleground for brands today. From our search engine optimization section we now understand how the power for driving quality traffic comes by targeting these Long Tail keywords. While we may never rank for the first three results for the “fat head” of a topic, which makes up roughly 30% of search volume, we can indeed rank on the remaining 70% of traffic for the trailing keyword phrases around that subject.
All this research around keyword search trends further helps us empathize with our ideal user – a nice added benefit for tweaking our user persona. We start to get a sense of what they want when they are online based on search trends using tools like Google Keyword Tool, Insights for Search, and Trends. This further informs part of our hypothesis on the user persona (the Art of marketing) and the data we’ve collected using keywords and social technographics (the Science of marketing).
We also learned how marketing is critical to the success of a business by driving sales – it is really no more complicated than that. ZMOT research shows that digital marketing in particular is an initiative that can have tremendous impacts on a business’s bottom line given how B2B and B2C consumers start almost every purchase decision by researching on a search engine.
The Strategy section covered how to take apart different business models and think more entrepreneurially about how to identify business drivers like profitability through customer retention (bearing in mind, this is where you must dig in and ask insightful questions of your colleagues on the business drivers). As savvy digital marketers, we have the opportunity to think beyond fuzzy terms of “building brand equity” and drill down to the concrete details of how to move the business forward. This ensures we always have employment and the trajectory of our career moves up and to the right.
By understanding these business objectives, we can begin defining a smart strategy for how digital marketing can help achieve these goals. We used the POST and SMART frameworks as filters for helping us think through ideas and also use these as tools to communicate with our colleagues. Part of the job of a digital marketer today is educating colleagues on the technology and how it can help achieve a business goal.
Let’s dive into the fun stuff – executing on all these ideas.