online marketing 101, learn online marketing basics, fundamentals, and best practices

0:06 it's pretty easy to see the importance and the value of building out your online presence with the majority of online marketing being self-service it's easy to Dive Right In And honestly many businesses are in such a rush to take advantage of the opportunity that they fail to build out a proper strategy being digital for the sake of just having a presence in these channels is not the answer the key is to build out a dedicated strategy that results in a strong return on investment without investing time in a strategy you're not only going to miss great opportunities but you may find your business left behind because online marketing is so broad it's easier to look at your strategy as three distinct strategies that all share a common goal these strategies cover your business your customer and your marketing now I'll dig deeper into each of these in the next few movies and my goal is to help you develop a cohesive online

0:51 marketing strategy and to do that you'll need to understand the plan for your business at a high level how you intend to be perceived by your Market who that market actually is how your customers are using digital technology and what channels you'll build into having a clear and well thought out strategy keeps you focused and it serves as your roadmap as you explore new marketing channels now there isn't a one size fits-all solution here every business needs to create its own strategy and that makes sense if you're selling custom t-shirts to sports fans online your plan will bear little resemblance to a local restaurant your strategy will vary but the focus is always to create shared value and shared value is when the goals of your customer overlap with the goals of your business your entire marketing strategy should be built with shared value in mind forget for a moment that you're selling a product or a service and

1:37 instead adopt the mindset that you're marketing and experience so as we look at our three distinct strategies I want you to focus on building each of them out with the idea that at the end of the day you want to have a shared value experience and that experience will bring you positive Roi one the first of our three strategies is your business strategy and here we want to identify the mission statement objectives your value proposition and the elevator pitch these four elements help to focus our attention and they'll make it easier as we look at our customers and marketing strategies but before we get there we need to cross the basics off the list these are is your business digital do you have the right structure in place will your online marketing efforts fit into your existing process and do you have the time necessary to maintain your strategy we'll

2:24 talk about the minimum effort required in each Channel but you'll still need to know that you can maintain the day-to-day one of the big challenges of online marketing is keeping things up to date you can only plan an effective strategy if you have a clear understanding of your business from the start you need a big picture view to determine which route makes the most sense and when you hit a hurdle you'll need that big picture view to pick a new route that gets you to your destination so let's get back to building our business strategy over time you can refine your strategy to find a way to hit the bullseye so as I mentioned earlier we're going to identify the mission statement objectives your value proposition and the elevator pitch okay so we need to start by defining our mission statement this one sentence should summarize what we're trying to do it can be vague but it should be able to stand up on its own you'll use your mission statement to keep

3:11 everything else in check next we should Define at least three organizational objectives and you can have more if you're so inclined these should be the pieces that are necessary to keep the business running and to maintain your brand identity it can be anything from selling product to increasing signups next identify the value proposition of those objectives why do you stand out what makes you unique why would someone choose you over your competitor ideally you'll select one or two value propositions for each of your objectives finally add your elevator pitch your pitch helps you think concisely online marketing has many channels that limit the amount of information you can communicate so this is a great opportunity to practice thinking in a concise manner so pick and choose the elements that are specific to your business going through this process will

3:59 help you understand who your business is and where you want your online marketing efforts to take you next we'll be looking at how to add to the strategy with our customer strategy good so at this point we've got a good understanding of our business but now we need to understand who our customer is and where we'll find them with our customer strategy we're trying to do three things the first is to reach the correct audience it would be a waste of time and advertising spend to pursue the wrong audience the Right audience will have the best return on investment the second is to understand that audience what it is that motivates them as it relates to our objectives and finally we want to understand where we'll find that audience more specifically what marketing channel we can leverage to connect them with now when we talk about our online marketing audience

4:45 we aren't referring to some special class of consumer the truth is the customers that shop at a brick and mortar are the same people who order from an online store the major difference however is that the Digital customer is in control they're able to drill into a landscape that is more Niche and personalized than ever before this means that when you go to identify this audience you're blessed and cursed at the same time you have to be specific with who you're targeting there's no Street traffic to Market broadly to each view costs you time and money but because your audience expects Niche you're able to seek this Ultra refined customer out with ease unlike marketing efforts of the past next we need to put ourselves in the mind of the target audience what are their goals what are they looking to accomplish list each goal for that audience below it here you want to identify what mediums this audience is using is it social if so what network

5:36 is it a Blog are they likely to be searching on Google or visiting a particular website from here we need to drill in and understand our goals for each audience I'll be referring to these as our customer segment so we'll end up creating a new table to explore these segments in detail for each segment we need to understand four things first what is our business goal for this segment these goals are likely a more granular version of our overall business objective second what is the shared value for this segment if you recall shared value is when the goals of your customer overlap with the goals of your business next we'll look at the key performance indicators these will be what you're measuring it could be how many units you'll sell or how many people visit your website last we want to create a Target and this target will be directly related to our key performance indicator

6:26 next what we need to identify is how our business goals line up with the goals of our consumer so under each goal list why the customer is likely to see shared value finally let's create a Target what are you trying to achieve your target is directly related to your kpi so take your time and think through your core demographic the goals for each and what your final Target is in the next video we'll take that information and build a marketing strategy around it now that we understand our business and our customer it's time to identify how we're going to go about our online marketing each strategy Builds on a strategy that precedes it and each time we get even more specific our marketing strategy will actually be many individual plans each tailored to

7:13 one goal for an audience segment we specified from here we're going to look at the channels we intend to Market on and then develop a marketing idea for each of those marketing Medias available to us paid earned and owned now at this point you might not have a sense of all the channels available to you and that's okay take an educated guess for now and then refine this plan as you continue through the course next do the same for your earned media because this is our organic effort we're really identifying what we'd like to see happen we might need to Leverage The efforts in paid and owned to influence our earned media finally make note of what you can do with your owned media as it relates to each Channel this might be as simple as posting on Facebook or it might involve a complex email campaign remember online marketing is an iterative process and you'll work to continuously

8:02 approve upon these ideas as you build out a new audience new objectives and new channels you'll want to make sure you have your coverage with your marketing strategy it's important to be flexible as you collect more and more data you'll be able to get closer and closer to your real targets you may also learn that your plan was too aggressive or maybe it's even too conservative there's a lot to think about when you build your marketing strategy spend time doing research to further under and your business your customer and the marketing channels available to you you may choose to implement all of the strategies available to you or you may choose to ignore a few both are valid options depending on what you're setting out to do all in all your marketing strategy is the final piece of the puzzle build it last and revisit it often

8:49 throughout this course I'll be using terminology specific to online marketing I'll review these terms and their definitions with you now let's start with one of the most important pieces of online marketing your call to action this is an instruction provided to your audience as a way to provoke a response calls to action typically use a verb such as save now or buy today you'll find them in banner ads on website landing pages and in social media posts to name a few as you drive traffic to your site you'll encounter What's called the bounce rate and this is when a visitor arrives to your website but leaves after visiting only one page they're said to have bounced and your bounce rate is the percentage of these visitors and a bounce rate can apply to an entire website or a single page now the traffic that bounced had to come from somewhere whether

9:34 it was an advertisement or an email you'll want to be measuring your click-through rate as marketers will often measure performance by how many clicks an ad receives every time an advertisement is shown it counts as an impression and the click-through rate is how many clicks were received in relation to the amount of impressions so let's shift gears now and look at the term abandonment and this is when a user does not complete the goal you've intended for them so a user is following a particular path say to checkout from an e-commerce store or to complete an online form for more information and then they leave the process early in marketing we aim to reduce that and that's what we call abandonment as you begin to scale up your marketing efforts you'll encounter paid advertising and the term ad impression each time your advertisement is

10:20 displayed to a user it counts as an impression and impressions are often tied to frequency frequency is the amount of time a single user will see your advertisement so if you had 10 impressions of an ad with a frequency of 2 then 5 individual people will have seen that advertisement when a user completes your goal whether it's buying a product or downloading an application they're said to have converted your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors who entered into this experience and actually completed the goal to understand how a user converted or when we need to use what's called a tracking pixel and these are tiny one by one pixel images that are installed on your website to track conversions website visits and AD views now advertising only makes sense if it brings you a positive return on investment to discover that we'll look at our cost

11:08 per acquisition you may also hear this referred to as CPA or in some cases cost per action this is how much it costs you per goal completion so if you ran an advertisement with the goal of getting an application download and that ad cost you a hundred dollars then if one person downloaded the app despite the hundreds that clicked on it the cost per acquisition for that single user would be a hundred dollars that CPA will then be compared to your lifetime value or LTV every customer has a value some will buy once and never return others will become repeat buyers your lifetime value is a prediction of the net profit attributed to that relationship typically with paid advertisements you want your cost per acquisition to be lower than your lifetime value now later we're going to talk more about Banner advertisements and display ads and here I'll

11:57 be referring to visual images either static or animated that are used to generate brand awareness or entice a user to click most Banner or display advertisements will contain a call to action now when you run these advertisements or share an offer it's important that the user arrives on a page that is specific to your promotion if you don't use one it's unlikely they'll convert this page they first arrive on is called the landing page and finally let's look at an organic result when you conduct a search on say Google you have two types of results paid results which are typically the first couple of links and a handful of links on the right sidebar and organic listings which are not paid and instead achieve their rank through search engine optimization year over year more and more marketing opportunities present themselves online

12:45 and this is because people are creating and adopting new technologies and exploring new ideas the amount of options available to you as a marketer are almost overwhelming in this course we're going to explore the main components of digital marketing but the concepts will scale to other areas it's important to keep in mind that your strategy does not need to include every available marketing channel you may end up using a handful of the ones we discussed or you may find success in leveraging other avenues that are not part of these core components with such a wide array of choices it is important to evaluate which channels make the most sense if you're operating with limited resources you may need to prioritize which channels you want to start with and on the same vein if you're exploring a new channel it's a good idea to explore how it'll impact your day-to-day so to do that I like to evaluate each based on the effort required to

13:31 build out the channel and the value in doing so and from there we can plot them on a matrix so to show you what I mean let's look at four areas of our online marketing strategy SEO search marketing social media and video so the first thing we need to do is figure out what channel we're using for these areas so for SEO we're going to focus on Google for search marketing we'll use Google AdWords and with social media I'm going to start with Facebook and then for video we'll use YouTube so let's drop these four into a table next we need to score the effort on a scale of one to six six being the most amount of effort and one the least we'll also score the value so which of these are likely to have the biggest return on investment now these scores are specific to your business so I'm going to just assign some numbers here as an example now that we have our

14:19 scores let's visualize how we can spend our time and to do that we'll create a 6x6 grid with one axis for effort and one for value since we're using a scale of one to six we'll mark each row and column with a corresponding number now if we break these into four separate sections what we have is a visualization of effort versus value the top left is low value low effort and the bottom right is high value High effort taking our scores from the previous table we can plot exactly where these marketing channels land so since I scored Google a five for value and a four for effort I'll place that in the correct section I'll repeat this process for AdWords YouTube and Facebook with the complete matrix it's easier to decide how we'll spend our time start with things in

15:06 the high value High effort section and work your way back around the Matrix keep in mind that just because something is high effort and low value doesn't mean it's not worth exploring we're simply scoring these in relation to one another low value could still mean a significant return on investment it's just not as significant as something in the high value section first of all search is the number one source currently used when making a decision to purchase something this comes from consumers all the way up to high level business decision makers your website's visibility and search is likely the most valuable real estate online because Searchers are expressing intent and are of a niche they're an ideal Target paid search is a key piece of today's digital landscape and the current leader to buy ads from is Google AdWords now email was once

15:52 the marketer's dream a quality email list was extremely valuable in the early 2000s now it's still effective but it has to be mobile almost 50 percent of all emails are open on a mobile device so the landscape has definitely shifted with mobile email the digital Marketplace demands a mobile website we're seeing a huge Trend in marketing automation as well these Concepts involve automated bidding based on results automatically remarketing to people who visited your site and even creating custom advertisements specific to what a user was searching for automation will continue to evolve over the next couple of years and it's likely going to stay a key component to the marketers toolkit social media is still proving to be valuable for many Brands there has been some pushback from the consumer as it relates to advertisements and social but this marketing style is still relatively young and has room for improvement

16:39 we'll likely see social advertising remain very popular in today's landscape and finally we're in a mature stage of content marketing building high value content for audiences is proving to generate significant rois for those doing it well users report interesting content as being one of the top three reasons they follow a brand now content marketing might actually be in the early stages of reforming more and more consumers are becoming weary of Sensational headlines and may be responding less effectively to previously common techniques such as top 10 lists and weird tricks to solve a certain problem now it's important to stay in tune with the online marketing landscape I recommend that as new trends emerge test them out and see how they perform for your brand your website is an important piece of your digital marketing strategy it may serve as a gateway

17:27 to gather information or the actual destination where a sale takes place it's an opportunity for a visitor to discover what makes your brand unique to find the information they're looking for and to guide them in their decision to buy you may have all sorts of marketing campaigns running ads on Google posts on Facebook blog articles all of it is bringing in new customers that eventually end up on your website all of that attention on your website makes it one of the most valuable pieces of digital real estate you own the better your marketing the more visibility your website has online consumers of today are fickle and that's because digital interactions are so commonplace so users are spoiled by companies that are doing it well they're used to things just working and they expect that the information they want will be available and accurate when it's not they're disappointed and credibility is lost for whatever brand they're interacting

18:16 with the truth is if your website isn't good you're going to fall further and further behind as the landscape evolves and if you're website doesn't work on mobile you're already behind chances are there's a competitor with a better online experience and your customers will seek them out if they're fumbling with yours so let's talk about how to make sure that your experience is good enough it doesn't need to be perfect it just has to be successful an effective website is simple well thought out and highly functional it should be intuitive and eliminate any and all barriers so your visitor can accomplish their goals effortlessly in our marketing strategy we're aiming for shared value it's the same with your website your business goals and the needs of your target market should overlap and while we're drawing similarities to our marketing strategy I'll also point out that your website only needs to appeal to your target market so spend your

19:04 effort designing it to work for that audience as you evaluate your current website take some time to ask yourself the following questions one is it mobile friendly the amount of people using their mobile devices to browse the web is staggering so design with Mobile in mind now later in this chapter we're going to talk about something called responsive design and will help give you some more ideas around the topic of being mobile friendly now the next question is does it load properly in all modern web browsers if your site looks one way on Safari for mac and another way on Chrome for PC you're not really controlling the experience test it out on all of the modern browsers I recommend browserstack.com as a way to quickly test your site across platforms does it answer all the questions my users have or may have now a good practice is to write down things your customers

19:51 ask for via phone email or even in your place of business you can check to see if those answers are easily found on your website and if they're not then you should put that information online next is the site reflective of my brand within the first couple of seconds a user is going to decide how the site feels to them you need to make sure your brand is carried through luxury Brands need to feel elegant whereas discount sites can focus more on the current sales make sure your logo tagline and the color scheme all reflect your brand you definitely want things to be consistent is it up to date nothing is worse than information that's out of date it creates concern with users so be sure to keep information current if you have a Blog you should be using it weekly are all of your services and products easy to find because online marketing is so Niche

20:37 your targeting audience is likely looking for something specific can they find it on your website if they can't find it and they call and you say it's a service or product you do offer then it needs to be on your site are all of your policies easy to find that is to say if you ship or handle returns can a user understand the process clearly will they know how long shipping takes when they can expect a call back or a product to arrive you want to provide ample feedback so a user knows where they stand in the process and finally one of the best criteria for your site is how does it compare to your competitor are you proud or jealous if you're jealous it's probably time to seriously consider whether or not you need to patch up your website leverage your relationships with existing customers and colleagues as a way to get feedback on your site ask them what they like what they don't like and for any ideas as you go about

21:27 creating an effective website I also recommend hearing from someone outside your circle check out peak.usertesting.com for no charge they'll have a real person spend five minutes on your site and give you honest and unbiased feedback as I said earlier your website is possibly the most valuable piece of your digital marketing strategy take your time and conduct an honest evaluation having the right domain name is essential your domain name is how your visitors find your website it appears on your print materials and it's also shared both online and offline as your brand recognition increases a poorly chosen domain name will have a widespread negative impact on your online and offline efforts a good domain name is relevant memorable and usable so let's

22:16 talk about relevant your domain name should be relevant to your business typically it'll be your business name but in some situations it can be a bit more broad if your business name is too long you may need to creatively shorten it while still remaining on brand the more relevant your domain name the better even for SEO so stick with what makes sense to your target market next make it memorable and you'll do that by keeping it short using simple terms and by selecting the most common suffix now when I'm talking about suffixes I'm referring to Dot com.net.org and today.com is still King and most people instinctuallytype.com even if you're listed net or dot org it's ideal to always have.com now some countries have specific suffixes such as dot MX or dot Co dot UK use the one that is most widespread in your region if you have a difficult

23:07 dispel or pronounced business name you'll end up with a less than memorable domain name instead you'll want to try an alternative domain name that still maintains the feel of your brand and finally the domain should be usable if you're adding in hyphens or leveraging prefixes other than www you might be hampering a visitor's ability to arrive at your website the best domain names are short and free of special characters so after you select your domain name I recommend buying multiple variations and suffixes to prevent others from registering them also if you're using a number in your domain it's not a bad idea to buy the version with the number spelled out to avoid any complications when sharing a domain name through word of mouth if your domain name is unavailable it might be worth contacting the current owner to inquire about the cost of purchasing it if

23:53 you can't find their contact information on their website you can try identifying them by running what's called a who is this will query the registered owner you'll find the tools to do this at whois.net or who dot is it's hard to change a domain name once you've got your marketing underway so evaluate your options and make the best choice for your business if you're not doing the work yourself or if you don't have the luxury of an in-house web team you'll want to bring in a professional to help you build your site you might need a designer a developer or even both the truth is there's an endless amount of options out there and it can be challenging to find the right fit the number one complaint I hear from small businesses is their inability to find designers and developers that get the work done I'd like to provide you

24:39 with some ideas on how you can refine the list of potential resources to something manageable let's start by talking about graphic designers not all graphic designers are web designers and not all web designers have the skills necessary to build something that meets your requirements as you look for a designer I would start by reviewing their website how does it look is it appealing to you you are the target audience so if you find a designer that feels too edgy they're likely not going to produce the right result you want a website that achieves its goal if they've got an eye for good marketing it's a step in the right direction next look at their portfolio if they don't have a portfolio that's a red flag make note of the sites they worked on read through their comments and then visit each of those sites and explore them I like to double check the footer of each website to see if there's an attribution link more often than not I'll see a link attributing

25:28 a different design firm and that raises a red flag as well I would also check out the recency of their portfolio if you visit a website in their portfolio and it's completely redesigned it could raise some questions now some designers aren't in a hurry to keep their portfolios up to date so they could have conducted the redesign it's good to see relevant designs however the more up-to-date the portfolio the more likely that Designer is to be staying current with the latest trends and techniques now once you have a short list I'd review any online reviews you can find and then reach out to the designer and ask if you can talk to a few of their current or former clients talk with your designer and ask them if they're familiar with responsive design what software they use to design their sites and ask if you can see some of the process behind their Current Designs it's really helpful to see a designer's thought process if they're

26:15 creating wireframes and mock-ups you'll have some assurance that you'll be part of an iterative process if they seem hesitant they could be buying prefabricated templates and not putting much thought into it now not to say templates are bad they can be very useful for low-cost projects and as a way to build an initial Foundation finally ask them to review your project and provide you with a quote and a timeline a short turnaround and a low-cost bid might seem alluring but I'd be weary get a couple of proposals and compare them good designers aren't inexpensive the truth of the matter is good talent usually knows what they're worth but your website is so important so it's worth a sizable investment you can take a look at behance.com dribble.com and elance.com for designers share their portfolios with your friends and colleagues to get a second opinion

27:03 now looking for a developer can be an even bigger challenge the way your site is built will impact everything from your usability to your SEO skimp on development and you're going to find yourself with costly problems in the long run it's usually easy to get a sense of what you like in a designer but if you're not familiar with programming it can feel impossible to really vet them out start the same way as you did with the designer take a look at the projects they've worked on interact with the websites check the sites on mobile and in various browsers you're looking to see if the experience is fluid and smooth review the websites to see if they comply with web standards and you can conduct a search for that at validator.w3.org you're looking for a low number of Errors a few is fine but a handful might indicate some problems some developers might have a handful of Errors

27:50 because their clients are using old Frameworks or they're not interested in paying for fixes in that case check the website of the developer it should be a solid representation of their talent next I like to run the sites through Google page speed insights you're looking for scores at least in the high 70s if you see something low make note and use that as a conversation point with the developer ask them if they know why one of the sites in their portfolio is poorly optimized and get a sense of how they might approach the problem it's also a great idea to ask the developer if they're contributing in any public repositories you can ask to see their bitbucket account and review their activity someone who is leveraging the latest technology and using repositories might be a step ahead of the others and just as you did with your designer Check reviews you can look at sites like odesk and Elance for programmers but

28:38 know that a good review doesn't necessarily equate to good code there are many agencies overseas that can crank out great customer service and a functional product but leave a tangled mess of code that just becomes difficult to deal with later again ask your developer for a quote and a timeline and shop around a mid-range web developer will likely cost you between 40 to 80 an hour with high-end development agencies charging in the range of 100 to 150 an hour I can't stress the importance of having good development Talent working on your project allocate plenty of time for your website project the best results come with the ability to review things conduct research and work alongside the team building your digital real estate every website has a goal it could be to distribute information capture an email address or sell

29:27 a product there's a reason you're putting an effort into online marketing your goal is for your visitor to take some sort of action after they land on your website now depending on your audience you'll have between two and six seconds to convince them to stay once they've arrived what happens is these visitors will click take a glance and then bounce from your site if they're not interested so ideally you're driving this traffic to a specific landing page having specific destinations allows you to reinforce the decision to click provide an attention grabbing visual or headline and frame the information in a way that helps you achieve your goal now some new visitors will inevitably arrive on your home page and that's okay but it's important to avoid campaigns that drive visitors directly to your home page it's the least conversion friendly page on your website since it tends to be fairly broad the key to making your website convert is to build goal

30:17 specific landing pages these landing pages come in a few varieties but I'm going to focus on the four most common types teaser Pages squeeze Pages infomercials and viral Pages these are all ones you've likely encountered as you've browsed the web the first is a teaser page the objective of a teaser page is to give your visitor just enough information to get them to click through to the next step of your process teaser pages are useful for products that are nearing launch by creating anticipation and excitement you can convince the visitor to take an action such as providing an email address or even pre-ordering you can also use these pages to tease out any unqualified leads if you have a special product for a select audience you can leverage teaser pages to ask them questions one step at a time slowly revealing more about your product or offering depending

31:06 on the answers next we have the squeeze page the goal of the squeeze page is to capture content and qualifying lead information typically a visitor exchanges their contact information for something of moderate value say a webinar ebook or an exclusive discount the lead information can be as simple as an email or as complex as four or five pre-qualifying questions a good squeeze page keeps the message above the fold stays on Target and has a strong enough value to be effective let's move on to the viral landing page the goal of this page is to invite your customers to enlist their friends you might have a reward that is earned through a number of shares for example for each friend who signs up you'll get a five dollar credit your viral landing page might include a funny video or an infographic now finally we have the infomercial page these are typically designed

31:56 in the same style as an infomercial you'd see on TV the idea is one page typically a long page and you'll share all the information about the product what it is how it works its benefits testimonials and a special offer if you buy it today infomercial pages are effective at driving sales for certain products and are typically used by affiliate marketers when running large campaigns to build your landing page select the right type and then focus on these five things you want to define the goal what needs to happen what information from the user do you need to accomplish that goal their email phone number credit card outline what the user needs to do do they need to fill out a form invite a friend and so on what information does the user need to be convinced what is of shared value to them and finally how will you track the results

32:45 it's important to make sure your landing page has your logo an explanation of the offer a very compelling headline related testimonials and links to reviews along with a strong call to action after you build your landing page or if you already have pages on your site executing these goals it's important to continuously improve them when someone starts by clicking on your link maybe fills out the first page but then never enters their credit card they've abandoned you want to fix abandonment by finding the pain point and we'll talk more on this later when we get into conversion funnels but here's why this is important if you fix conversions you can increase your Revenue without having to increase your traffic so 10 000 visitors at a one percent conversion rate would equal 100 sales and 10 000 visitors at a three percent conversion rate well that's 300 sales so focus on keeping your landing pages

33:33 concise just the right amount of information necessary to get the job done make sure you add confidence to your Visitors by linking to your email policy having a valid SSL certificate and including your contact information directly on the page there are many other ways to improve the conversion on your website obviously not every page can be a landing page but landing pages allow you to build isolated tests and you can then apply apply those learnings to the rest of your website here's the reality people just don't read on the internet they scan they'll jump from a headline to an image and then scan a few bullet points this means when it comes to the copy on your website less is more and with less words to work with it's important that you make each one count we'll call

34:19 all the text on your website copy now I'm not going to be discussing blog articles that's a whole different Beast for now we're going to focus on your web copy writing engaging web copy starts with knowing your audience you're writing specifically for them and no one else you need to deliver your information in a way that meets their needs and you have to be mindful of the fact that for whatever reason they're likely in a hurry to find that information the goal is to write great copy not just content it's different so as you approach your project start by getting rid of any long introductions and word heavy descriptions stick to clear concise and punctual copy use clever headings to your advantage and break up your text with bullet points building on topic and relevant content will not only help your users but it'll help you out as you work to rank in the search engines as well one thing I see often is pages that put their

35:08 headline as about us or contact us for the page you're on now those are helpful in the title or the breadcrumb but save that heading space for something captivating and attention grabbing especially on your landing pages As you move into the content deliver the most important points of your story first and then add the supporting details as you go this way if a user stops reading early they've got a gist of what you're trying to say now before you get started look at each page of your website and answer these questions who will read this copy why are they reading this what should they feel when they read this page what am I trying to accomplish with this copy and what benefit and feature do I need them to really understand use these answers to build your

35:53 first draft save it and then write it again with half as many words compare the two and only add back in what you need to reinforce the points that are lacking now at some point you might decide it's a good idea to hire a professional copywriter I can't stress the importance of good copy enough this is a worthwhile investment if you aren't able to spend the time to refine your own copywriting skills when you look for a copywriter read through their work copywriters often write in specific niches and while they're happy to address their tone and style for your needs it's often better to find someone who understands your audience a copywriter should be invited into the project at the beginning this way they can gather all the facts understand the challenges ahead and build you exactly what you need you can utilize a copywriter to write slogans add

36:39 ideas entire websites or focused landing page copy most work on a daily or half daily rate and expect to pay anywhere from 600 to 800 per day write with the approach of connecting your audience to your business convincing them to take the next step and affirming their conversion over the past few years we've seen impressive growth of tablets and smartphones all coming with different screen sizes it would be an incredible amount of effort to build a design for each screen size and then try to keep up with new devices on top of it that's where responsive web design comes in this approach allows your site to be adaptive the page responds automatically based on the screen size and even the orientation a user is viewing it in it works because a responsive website is designed around building blocks these blocks can break and collapse under

37:28 one another stretch and shrink and even adjust the font sizes and image sizes based on the available screen real estate what's great is that the same code is served to all the devices you won't need to build multiple code bases you'll instead rely on your style sheets to handle the scaling Advanced responsive design can even adjust elements on the page adding an additional content or removing it based on The View you'll have to decide if responsive design makes sense for your business personally I'd lean heavily towards making the investment in this style of web development it's almost a necessity if you want to compete in today's digital Marketplace it'll help future proof your brand and it'll give you amazing flexibility as you expand your marketing and improve your customers experience as they interact with your site from various devices now responsive design sounds relatively simple but it's a fairly complex Endeavor

38:15 if you've built your website on a framework or a paid template you might be able to find an update that includes responsive elements if you have a more complex project including say e-commerce websites it's probably best to enlist the help of a professional use responsive design as a tool not a cure-all fix you'll still need to take usability into consideration and that might mean changing certain interactions on your website to accommodate a responsive experience the data you collect on your website your campaigns and your social media efforts will determine the overall health of your digital marketing the data is your map without it you're Flying Blind you'll be using your data to improve your experience listen for untapped opportunities and pull the plug if you have to on any failing ideas the amazing thing with digital marketing is

39:06 we can track just about every action a user takes there are a number of tools available that help marketers understand both the qualitative and the quantitative we can track what's happening now and even model what is likely to happen in the future let's dig a little deeper into measuring data by looking at how we can capture data within our three Medias paid owned and earned so the easiest place to start is with your own website here you can track how many visitors where they're coming from what pages they're visiting how long they've stayed and even what page they left from by reviewing your analytics you'll get a sense of how your users found your site if they're finding what they want and if you're advertising objectives are driving a meaningful amount of traffic with a resource like Google analytics you'll install a tracking code on every page

39:51 on your website from there you'll have a gold mine of data to leverage segment and correlate for example if you made a change to your website design and noticed on that day web traffic dropped dramatically you'll have a sense of where to start looking for the problem if you roll out a new landing page you might see an increase in conversions resulting from that specific page or you may see a sudden spike in traffic and by drilling into it you can identify the source say a social media post or a mention or even an online blog now your paid analytics are typically tied to a reporting platform provided by the tool you're using to run those ads this data is extremely useful as it can give you granular details on which ads are working what targeting makes sense and more however you'll want to track as much data as you can in another tracking tool independent of

40:39 that provider this way you can check the accuracy and evaluate things from different perspectives this is important because more often than not the way your platform will report conversions is different than how you report them and this works by installing a small pixel on your conversion page which informs the platform that a sale happened so if you have an advertisement on Facebook for example driving traffic to your landing page you'll want to use campaign tracking tags or goal tracking in Google analytics and the Facebook advertising dashboard simultaneously this way you can compare the data identify any discrepancies and test if your conversion pixel is actually working now the final part of our measurement will come from earned media and this one is typically the most difficult here your outcomes aren't necessarily determined by spend

41:25 but how interesting people think your product and services are here you're tracking things like your social media fan base mentions and interactions on tweets and video views on YouTube you may have many dashboards that you collect this data in and you'll want to look at it alongside all your other advertising metrics the best way to measure results with earned media is to have your own goals and objectives that you can measure against so if for example you decide that 10 000 Facebook fans would increase your Revenue potential by a thousand dollars then you can track how you're trending towards that goal and the effort you're investing there's an endless amount of data providers out there investigate them against your needs and keep a system in place that provides you with the necessary checks and balances

42:13 I find interpreting your data becomes easier and more meaningful if you understand the pieces that make data collection possible every action you take on the web is tracked one way or another the pages you view the files you download and even demographic and interest data can be recorded and this data is captured through the use of what are called cookies and pixels a cookie is a small file that a website stores on your computer this file might contain the pages you visited and when a unique identifier and even if you're authorized to view certain logged in content typically a Cookie doesn't have much identifying information the website itself will store its own corresponding file and match your cookie ID to the records on the server and this is useful for knowing whether a visitor is returning for the second time how long between visits and even what

43:00 advertisements they've clicked into speaking of advertising ad platforms such as Facebook Atlas or Google AdSense use cookies to identify the same user as they browse the web so you might see an ad from Google on the New York Times and then another ad from them while you're browsing a food blog as you continue to browse the web and load advertisements from the same publisher they'll see a list of the type of sites you visit and how you interact with these ads this information can then be used to sell ads that you're likely to engage with so beyond cookies we have the tracking pixel and a tracking pixel stores information on your web server not your computer a pixel is really just a one by one transparent image and they're often used to see if users convert after visiting a particular ad here's how they work the server stores a small file call it pixel.gif and every

43:49 time the server asks for the file it's going to log that request now instead of just asking for pixel.gif we'll instead add custom variables to the request say pixel.gift question mark ID equals one two three and so on and so forth the server will be successful in delivering the image because all that extra text is irrelevant so the user won't see any issues but it does keep a log of that unique URL and it can use those variables to then match that transaction back to a particular user or advertising event to put this another way let's say you click on an ad to buy movie tickets as soon as you click you're going to receive a cookie the cookie will include information on the time where you clicked what Banner was clicked and so on now at this point the advertising platform knows that the ad received an impression and a click but it has no record of the sale so now

44:37 let's say you continue on and buy those tickets on the confirmation page the website is going to read the cookie on your computer pull the information from it and send it back to the server through the conversion pixel and now the advertising platform will connect the dots and indicate a sale for that ad we'll talk more about how these sales are attributed later there's some other factors such as how long it's been since the click if the click came directly from the last click or maybe if a user saw an advertisement and purchased without actually clicking but again more on that later I could go deeper and deeper into the technical aspects of how cookies and pixels work but the truth of the matter is you really don't need to know all the nuances with this high level overview you'll be able to make sure yours are set up properly and tracking the right information

45:25 conversion funnels help us see the sales process or the specific route a user takes to arrive at a sale they're A visual representation of each step of the process and they can be fairly generic referencing sales in general it's wide at the top because that's where most of our users are in the process and narrow at the bottom because we lose people at each step in the process which is shown through the use of the arrows on the edges of the funnel funnels actually come in all shapes and sizes a perfect 100 conversion funnel would look like a straight cylinder a typical funnel is really wide at the top and very narrow at the bottom a well optimized funnel has a more gradual shape suggesting very limited abandonment and poorly optimized funnels might have bulges or aggressive drop-off indicating an issue your online marketing funnel will be specific so we wouldn't track things so broadly instead

46:14 our funnel for a shopping cart might be product page at the top payment form in the middle and completion as the last step there we could track how many visitors saw our product page versus how many completed the sale in this example a visualized funnel will show what steps might cause problems if people aren't reaching the payment page or if we have high abandonment right before checkout we have a problem you'll use your funnel to test page variations the copy and language used and even identify bugs or browser issues with Google analytics we can create our own visual funnels now once there's data in this section you'll be able to see how many people come in how many people exit on this particular step and how many move on to the next step in the flow this helps you identify where issues exist if we notice that a lot of people are making it

47:03 to the payment page but then abandoning we'd know that we need to optimize the payment page perhaps there's an issue with that page the way that we're asking for data Maybe the page itself is broken maybe we don't have a security certificate maybe people are concerned about their information but we'd identify that something is happening that prevents people from finalizing that goal now keep in mind Google analytics doesn't calculate funnels retroactively so you need to set them up from the start and the data will then start collecting into that funnel moving forward your analytics will have all the information of what's going on across your marketing channels but your kpis will refine that information to give you a clear view of how you're performing

47:48 the kpis will help tell the story of how your online marketing is doing at a glance if you don't have them you'll be overwhelmed with the amount of data Available to You by monitoring your kpis you'll see what's working what's not and what is impacting something else when you go about creating your kpis make sure they are aligned to your business goals they need to be measurable and easy to understand so a good kpi might be increased traffic five percent month over month whereas a bad kpi would be increased traffic each month if you don't have a quantifiable goal it's not easy to interpret the results sure you might be satisfied with growing traffic but if you're only growing by a few visits per month you've got a problem and that problem wouldn't be visible if your kpi got a check mark because it was simply to increase traffic you want

48:34 your kpis to be tied to your marketing objectives because then they are influenced by your effort they'll let you know when to celebrate and when to make something better so for example if you're running an advertisement as a test to see if you can get acquisition costs at an acceptable level you might want a kpi that says achieve a 40 CPA if you went with achieve 100 sales you'll be focusing on measuring something you're not actually trying to achieve you could succeed at that forty dollar CPA and then scale your kpi to be generate 100 sales per month at a 40 cost per acquisition to help get you started here's some items to consider creating a kpi around for online sales look at your conversion rate and the cost per acquisition for broader marketing objectives set a kpi for total revenue and even the ratio of new to returning

49:22 visitors if you're using a landing page set a bounce rate kpi this way you can identify if your inbound traffic isn't targeted enough as you consider your kpis do yourself a favor and avoid worrying about things that aren't impacting your bottom line page views might be impressive but only if they're actually driving Revenue I track business and marketing kpis with an Excel spreadsheet but you can also look at software from geckoboard.com or scythe.com to build out kpi dashboards giving you at a glance information take your time and pick the metrics that are relevant to you and organize them in a way that makes sense for your business a lot of online marketing revolves around encouraging a direct response from a prospective

50:08 customer we'll show them an advertisement a tweet or a special offer via email and measure success based on the click and subsequent conversion this is what is referred to as last click attribution the entire value of the customer's conversion is placed on the marketing channel or campaign that delivered the customer last click attribution is easy to measure because it involves a very clear process the user takes however this is a really flawed method we know that customers take a much larger Journey they might see an email then read through a few brand tweets Check reviews online and compare prices prior to purchasing add offline influences and second screen interactions on mobile or tablet devices and you can see how attributing all the value to a single Source isn't going to cover it so what do we do from here truthfully it's an iterative

50:55 process unique to each brand so you start with your last click wins and then apply some weight to your other attributions your view through conversions a view through can be measured when an advertising platform places a cookie when a user receives your ad impression now if they don't click but later come to your site and buy your product then it'll be tracked as a view through but not all ad impressions are single-handedly delivering sales again there might be social media or search playing a role as well but applying some weight to view through conversions will help balance the attribution model even further with your paid advertising you might adjust the view through conversion by reducing the window of time that you'll accept the sale is being attributed to an ad impression some Brands might be willing to accept the idea that a 30-day window is reasonable While others might prefer a much shorter time period be sure

51:45 to review your cookie durations with any paid advertising that you're conducting as with most everything in marketing the idea is test optimize and test again you might notice patterns emerge where you're taking a loss on your search marketing that is to say your cost per acquisition on a last click attribution is higher than anticipated but if you stop your search marketing you can see that your display advertising suffers significantly this might suggest people see your banner ad search for your brand and click on your paid result if your banner advertisement was relatively inexpensive your attribution model might allow you to share some of the costs making both campaigns pencil out in the green you can boil attribution models down and do a wholesome model or a fractional model so in a wholesome approach you'll give all the credit

52:31 to last click or first click in a fractional model you'll spread that attribution out and give credit to certain channels that might only be assisting on the final decision there are many ways to build out your attribution models you can track the metrics individually in Excel and make comparisons between each Channel there are also third-party attribution tools or if you're using Google premium you can modify your attribution on the fly now if you're not on premium you can still get a good idea of various attribute models by using multi-channel funnels this way you can start seeing which channels are actually bringing in the most revenue and drive your efforts in that direction or you can identify which channels aren't driving a lot of value and see if you can work on those channels to increase their value it's important to understand how you're attributing your sales so don't pull the plug too early on various marketing efforts instead

53:20 use this data to see if you can identify why or why not various sources are working now your model might change so continue to keep tabs on this data and look to see if any patterns emerge search engine optimization is all about impacting how visible your website is in a search engine's organic results you'll be making changes to your site's technical setup as well as the content on the page in an effort to improve rank to better understand optimization let's start by looking at how search engines work a company like Google will have a bot basically a software program that crawls the web it does this by following links and links from your site to other pages on your site and even links from one site to another the crawler arrives at a page reads the code

54:10 and stores the information that stored information is called the index and your initial goal is to get indexed by Google if you're indexed you'll Rank and you might not rank well but you have the potential for ranking and when I talk about rank I'm referring to which position you appear in for particular search query so when you enter a search term Google will do its best to provide the most important and relevant answers and then rank them from best to worst the better Google is at their job the more likely you are to use them and the more money they make so it's in Google's best interest to deliver the best content and because Google drives a mind-boggling amount of traffic each day it's in your best interest to rank well for Relevant terms and rank is determined by importance and relevance a complex algorithm turns through hundreds of variables to

54:56 decide where your page lands many of those variables are what you're aiming to optimize these variables might include the topics you're writing about who is linking to your page how your website is programmed and even if you're mobile friendly Google even evaluates the quality of the pages that are linking to you if they're on brand relevant and popular it's going to assume you're more credible than if off topic unpopular pages are linking to your content variables that you can't control might include where a user is searching from trending topics and any current events that could skew results SEO done well can provide an impressive Roi done

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