Digital marketing is a fundamental part of every business but in today’s market, it’s unpredictable and evolving fast. It seems every day, there’s a new tool, a new tactic, and a new trend. So it’s no surprise that this makes it hard to know where to start, what actually works, how to spend your time and what you need to be doing to build the framework of a great marketing strategy. But together we’ll fix that. Hi, I’m Brad Batesole and I’ve been advising some of the world’s leading brands on marketing strategies for over 15 years. In this course, I’m going to cut through the noise dispel the myths, and give you a proven step-by-step approach to developing your digital marketing in a way that will not only grow your business but will also adapt with the times. This includes everything from developing your strategy to selecting the right marketing channels to capturing the key skills that you’ll need all along the way. Whether you’re looking to start your own home-based business or working for a large corporation, you’ll find the skills you need to feel confident to embark on your digital marketing journey right here. So let’s go.

What is digital marketing?

When we talk about digital marketing we’re essentially talking about promoting your business online using a multitude of channels. And these channels are how you make your buyer aware of what you’re selling. Some common digital channels might include your website, search engines, social media, online video and even paid ads. You see, your customer will intersect many channels in their day to day, and marketing is about finding the right message, to share with the right person, at just the right time, through the right channel. And that sounds like a lot to get right, but truth be told us marketers rarely get it on the first try. You see marketing is just as much a science as it is an art and the digital aspect of marketing lets us get really scientific. We spend a lot of time making a hypothesis, testing it and then using the data we collect to adjust course, and failure is going to just be part of the journey. Now it’s all of this data that makes digital marketing incredibly powerful. Just about every action you take on the web is tracked, collect enough data points and you can build really powerful predictions about people’s behavior. And because marketing is the act of persuading someone to take action, well then the more data we have the more successful we’ll be at that persuasion.

Getting started with digital marketing

Every marketer has faced analysis paralysis, essentially, when you get stuck in a state of overthinking to the point that you never take action, and usually this is because you’re overwhelmed with options on where to start, or you’re convinced that you must finish one thing before you can start on something else. So as you begin to navigate the world of digital marketing, I want to give you some pointers that’ll spare you from overthinking it, and save you a lot of time and headaches on your journey. First, just start, anywhere. It doesn’t matter. There are so many aspects of marketing, from defining your target market, to building your first campaign, to writing copy for your website. If you’re dragging your feet, just pick up the first thing that interests you and do it. It might be out of order, and that’s fine. Now, you’ll run into a roadblock, and then it’ll unlock something different that you need to solve, and before you know it, you’ll be putting the building blocks together. Second, everything doesn’t need to be perfect. You don’t need a finished website or exactly the right packaging. I am giving you permission to be okay with good enough. In fact, you’re wasting time if you’re not launching with partially baked ideas. Try things out once they’re mostly there, and then if they’re promising, and only if they’re promising, well, then you can improve them. Third, you’re going to screw up along the way. Don’t sweat it. I always say failure is just money spent on education, and education is never wasted. So keep at it. Oh, and one more thing, it’s by no means going to be easy or quick, or are the results going to be instantaneous, but if you apply yourself and work through the concepts of digital marketing, well, it’ll start to click. Things’ll fall into place, and you’ll be moving your marketing efforts forward, piece by piece until you pick up momentum.

The building blocks of digital marketing

Let’s talk about the three types of media you’ll be leveraging in digital marketing. Paid, owned, and earned. When we talk about paid media, this is well, everything that you pay for, and this will include channels like pay-per-click ads, affiliate marketing, and display marketing. Now, owned media will encompass channels that you directly control like your website, your list of customers that you use to send out emails, and maybe a blog that you host. Earned media is the world of organic mentions. This is posts by others on social media. Mentions on third-party blogs and any articles that were written about you. This all makes up the channels with earned media. Now all of these channels can overlap, just as a user will overlap as they interact with each. Social media, for example, can be a paid channel if you’re promoting posts. An owned channel if you’re publishing a post, and an earned channel if you’re receiving interactions and mentions from others. Together, these make up the foundation of digital marketing. Now these media types also exist in traditional marketing but we gain a huge advantage in digital marketing, personalization. Because we have a rich insight on our audience, we’re able to speak directly to the consumer by tailoring our message to them. So it’s really important you treat each channel with that in mind. Now the opposite of personalization is known as mass market. Say for example, you’re selling mattresses. If you used paid media in a traditional sense, you might put an ad in the local newspaper. Maybe some folks reading it are in the market, but most aren’t. In digital marketing, you’re creating a highly focused ad directly at individuals who are searching for that new mattress. Now there’s always exceptions in marketing. But for the most part, as you evaluate where to market digitally, remember to evaluate how you’re using personalization to your advantage. Don’t treat digital marketing with a mass marketing mindset.

The marketing funnel

Can we talk about funnels all the time in marketing? Purchase funnels, sales funnels, inbound funnels, but regardless of the name, they’re all ultimately describing the same concept. A funnel is really just a way to represent the customer’s journey as they move towards the purchase of your product or service. At the top, or the widest part of the funnel, is where a buyer starts their journey. And the bottom, the narrowest part, is where they complete it. So our goal as marketers is to funnel prospects into buyers moving them from the top to the bottom of the funnel. The shape reflects the fact that a large number of people will never complete the journey through the funnel. You’ll expose your product or service to a lot of people, the top of the funnel, but only a small fraction will actually convert. Now we tend to segment the funnel into four areas. Awareness, interest, desire and action. At the top, is awareness. A prospect has to become aware of not only what they want, but who’s offering it. This is when a prospect is introduced to your brand, but keep in mind, they’re also likely exposed to the competition as well. Now, below awareness, we have interest. At this stage, a consumer begins to explore the products or services available to them in more detail. Next, comes desire, which we can also call consideration. It’s here that the prospect wants to make a purchase but it may or may not be with your brand. They’re in the final stages of evaluating whether or not to commit. And finally, action. They’re either going to buy, or they’re not. They may select your company, another company, or based on their findings decide they’re not making a purchase at all. Now this is the foundational funnel, and we call it the item model. You may also see it with one last step known as loyalty. Essentially, the act of retaining the customer. We often reference these different segments as top of funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel. Towards the bottom of the funnel, you have a consumer who is really close to making a purchase. Bottom funnel marketing focuses on identifying consumers who are in buying decisions and then converting them. Search advertising is exceptional for this. At the top of the funnel, you’re focused on making leads aware of your solution. If there’s zero top of the funnel marketing, well, there’s nobody coming out the other side, you have to get them in the door before you can sell to them. And as you might expect, middle-of-the-funnel marketing is the nurturing process to keep the lead moving. It’s giving them a great experience and all the information they need at just the right time to make their decision. It’s crucial to understand which stage your customer is at so you can deliver marketing that helps them get to the next stage.

Creating a buyer journey map

One of the greatest challenges in marketing is knowing which marketing messages would be compelling to your audience, and also knowing when and where they should be delivered. As you begin to evaluate your customer journey, I encourage you to create a customer journey map. Now, there’s no one set form for this, but you can create a very simple template to get you started. Along the top as columns, I’ll list out the funnel stages. Awareness, interest, desire, action, and loyalty. Then I’ll create a few rows and give them labels. Start with activities. What is the customer doing in this phase? Then goals. This is what the customer wants to achieve during this phase. Next, thoughts. What are some questions or thoughts the customer might have? From here, emotional state. Is the customer happy, excited, sad, frustrated? Are they curious or interested? And how are they feeling during the portion of this journey? I usually draw a one to five scale using smiley faces, and then I’ll put a small quote reflecting on that customer’s feeling, such as a thought of, this seems interesting. Next, we’ll look at touchpoints and channels. What will the customer interact with and where? Is it your website, social media, email, and so on? And then objectives. What do you need to do to move this customer to the next stage of the funnel? Now, you might have multiple responses for each funnel stage, but this format will help you map out your fundamental buyer journey. Let’s fill out one of these columns together. Say we have a pet grooming business. For activities, the customer is searching Google for pet grooming near me. Goals. Well, they want to see what businesses offer this service. Thoughts at this stage might be, I wish I thought to do this sooner, or, I’ve never taken Fido anywhere before. Maybe we’ll give their emotional state a neutral smiley face. Next we’ll look at touch points within the awareness phase. This could be a Google map listing and our website. And then we have the objectives. We want to make the customer aware of our business, but most notably, we want them to be aware of how to book an appointment and see how well-reviewed our business is. with this first piece of the journey built, we can then move through the columns. And what’s great is now we can look at this column and see exactly what we need to do. It’s important that we consider how we might make the customer feel more comfortable about our grooming salon, perhaps making them excited about how easy it is to book. And it’s also evident that we need to be sure that our Google My Business listing and our website are ready to receive this customer. Consider the journey your customer’s experience and build a map. This way you can make it more delightful, less frustrating, and ultimately, successful.

Developing a marketing strategy

Developing a marketing strategy can feel overwhelming. But when you break it down, I trust you’ll come to recognize just how straightforward it really is. I think there’s a misconception that marketing strategies are multi-page intensive documents and that you need to solve for everything right now. And that’s just not the case. Marketing is always in motion. You’ll constantly be moving from one idea to the next and iterating along the way. Now, a great strategy starts with a really clear foundation. We start by understanding what it is you’re selling, what makes it unique, and what’s your value proposition. From there, it’s a matter of identifying who you’re selling to. And this is known as your target market. You’ll want to gain an understanding of who they are, what motivates them, and how your product or service solves their problem. Now you might think you already have this covered. But I encourage you to really think on this. A misplaced idea in your target market identification and the whole process comes crashing down. You can’t market to everyone. You’re working to figure out how what you sell fits with the market that you’re going after. And oftentimes, you might need to tweak your value proposition or your audience until you’ve dialed in the right fit. You’ll keep refining after your marketing cycle is up and running. There’s also the matter of looking at your competition, the market share, the opportunity within that market, and of course, how you stack up. Now at this point, you might be thinking, okay, it’s time to add in the actual marketing techniques into the strategy. But remember, developing the strategy is marketing. Your strategy and the evolution of that strategy is the very foundation of everything that you’re doing. So even though you might feel like you haven’t done anything at this point to move the needle, it’s all incredibly important. It’s here that you then begin to layer in your marketing channel selections alongside that customer journey so you can leverage an approach to how you’ll draft your marketing messaging. Now a good strategy is always evolving and the planning work is just as important as the execution of the strategy itself.

Defining your value proposition

At the center of your marketing is your value proposition. It’s a short, distinct statement that outlines exactly why a customer should buy your product or service. It should be something that can live as a headline with a supporting sentence or a few bullet points. It should be front and center in your messaging and be the foundation by which you build all of your marketing around. A value proposition is not a jargon-filled statement, nor is it your slogan. It must be simple, clear, and easy to understand in about five seconds. Now, the less known your brand is, the better the value proposition you’re going to need. When Uber launched, for example, it stuck to this value proposition, the smartest way to get around. One tap and a car comes directly to you. Your driver knows exactly where to go. Payment is completely cashless. Now, it’s tempting to create a value proposition that lists all of your key differentiators, but this isn’t the right approach. What you want to do is sell the result or the experience of interacting with your brand, not just what features you get as a result. You’re telling a story and focusing on the outcomes and in a competitive market you’re attacking pain points of any existing solutions. With Uber, they’re calling out everything people dislike about traditional taxis, but their main headline isn’t Uber, the on-demand taxi service. Instead, it’s telling you that your current way of getting around is dumb. And the outcome of Uber is that you picked the smart way. Stewart Butterfield, the co-founder of Slack, also has a wonderful approach to this idea. He said that Slack’s value proposition isn’t being the most user-friendly team chat system, or even being the highest quality, or having the best customer service, because people aren’t buying that. Slack entered a market where consumers weren’t even aware that they needed Slack, so they opted to sell the outcomes. They say things like 75% less email or all your team communication instantly searchable and available wherever you go. Again, you’re selling the outcome. Your product or service is just how the consumer gets to that outcome. Now, Stewart shares another great example in his essay on Medium titled “We Don’t Sell Saddles Here”. And he writes the following, “Consider the hypothetical Acme Saddle Company. “They could just sell saddles. “And if so, they’d probably be selling “on the basis of things “like the quality of the leather they use, “or the fancy adornments their saddles include. “They could be selling on the range of styles “and sizes available or on durability or on price. “Or they could sell horseback riding. “Being successful at selling horseback riding “means they grow the market for their product, “while giving the perfect context “for talking about their saddles. “It lets them position themselves as the leader “and affords them different kinds of marketing “and promotion opportunities, “such as sponsoring school programs “to promoting riding for kids “to working on land conservation or trail maps. “It lets them think big and potentially be big.” As you sit down to develop your value proposition determine not how your product will be better than the others in the market, but how your outcome is better. Write this value proposition down, make sure it’s distributed to everyone in the company, and reflect on it every time you produce any new marketing collateral.

Google USP

Slack

Identifying your target market

It’s no mystery that the success of a business hinges on having customers and in order to have customers, you need to find them and in order to find them, you have to message to them and to message to them, well, you have to know them. If you’re marketing without really knowing your customer, stop. The process of finding and knowing your customer is accomplished through customer segmentation. What you’re doing is taking your broad target market and breaking it down into smaller groups of people that have a lot in common. When you have focused customer segments, you save money because your marketing is more effective. So, to start segmenting, you need to define your ideal customer. Take the broad market and divide it into segments organized by multiple attributes. These attributes can combine demographics, psychographics, behaviors and needs. Demographics factor in age, gender, marital status, income and education level and this is your broadest targeting. You might target say 24 to 45 year olds who make less than $50000 annually and are single, but this isn’t quite specific enough of a segment. If we put that audience in the room, how similar would they be really? Would they all love sports for example? Probably not, so you need to layer. One approach to layering is by looking at psychographics and this classifies a group of people according to opinions, beliefs, values, attitudes and interests. So, we might create a customer segment based on initial demographics and then add in that this audience values environmentally conscious companies and likes reading books. Members of that audience will have a lot more in common with one another. You can also use relevant behavioral attributes to describe your target customer. Here, you might identify consumers based on an action they take and how frequently they take it. This could be say, people who buy a cup of coffee every day or those who watch at least three YouTube videos per week. Another market segmentation technique is needs-based segmentation. And with this approach, you divide the market into customer segments that each have distinct needs. Take the Nest thermostat for example. For some, it’s valuable as a way to reduce their energy usage. For others, it’s useful to turn on the heater at a vacation property. And for others, it might be a way to monitor the temperature in a child’s room. Same product, but with consumers that will receive different messaging based on their need. You want to identify segments that you feel have a high likelihood of needing or wanting what you’re selling. Once you have your segments, you’ll be able to build campaigns that speak directly to that customer. To succeed at marketing, you must have specific segments. You can always add more as you find success.

Creating your persona

Marketing is all about getting the right message in front of the right people. Your customer segments are who you’d like to get your message to. But to figure out how to message, you need to truly understand your customer segments and that’s where personas come in. A target persona is a fictitious person that you describe that represents your target group really well. So instead of figuring out how to message to customer segment 1A, you’re building a campaign for new graduate, Jenny. Every customer segment you create needs to have a persona attached to it, and persona should fit on a single page and provide a snapshot of the customer that’s quick to digest, and they usually look something like this. Let’s build one together. You’ll start with these four questions about your ideal customers. Who are they? What are their demographics, psychographics, behaviors, and their interests? What needs do they have? What barriers do they need to overcome? And what motivates them? Imagine you’re marketing for a company that sells eco-friendly organic diapers. Here’s how you might answer these questions. One of my ideal customers might be a woman, between 28 and 35 years old, who lives in an urban area, works full-time, and has an interest in healthy living, yoga, and connecting with other moms. Her needs are to be environmentally responsible, increase her free time, and to continue to advance in her career. She also wants to get outdoors more. Now she faces some obstacles, a lack of time, which often makes it harder to find eco-friendly products, a general distrust of big box retailers to source responsibly, and anxiety around what products are safe for her child. She is motivated by advice from moms in her peer group, validation from certification organizations, easy and quick shopping experiences, and companies that align with her values. Once you complete this exercise, you want to make this fictitious person feel real. So add a picture and a name. Creating a target persona makes it easier to imagine the person that you’re marketing to. You’ll find creating marketing campaigns and crafting messaging is much more enjoyable and easier when you have a persona. It’s a powerful exercise that you can do even with limited time and resources.

Establishing goals

You likely have a vision of what you need your marketing to accomplish, but how are you getting there? One of the most common mistakes in marketing is not setting goals. You can’t just start marching forward. You need a plan. Now, a common approach is to align your goals with an acronym called SMART. And this means that for a goal to be effective, it must be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. The approach that I use to map out goals, which is also in use at companies like Google and LinkedIn, is to use OKRs. And the acronym stands for objectives and key results. It looks like this. First, you set the objective. Objectives answer the question where do we want to go? And then two or three key results. The key results define whether the objective was met. They answer the question how do we know that we’ve gotten there? This is important because otherwise you can’t decide if you’ve achieved your goal or not. Let’s say we want to increase online sales for a coffee shop. Here’s how we’d set SMART goals inside the OKR framework. I’ll start by setting my objective, and it’ll be specific: increase online sales for filters and mugs. Next, we’ll set our key results, and these are measurable, relevant to the goal, and attainable. For this example, let’s say sell 100 packages of coffee filters and sell 250 coffee mugs. Now, all goals should be time-bound. Traditionally, OKRs are time-bound by a quarter. So we might say this objective is due by end of Q1 of next year. As you can see, the key results are how I’m qualifying that we’ve increased sales. I’ve decided that if I achieve each of those key results, well, then we’ve hit our goal. If you’d like to learn more about OKRs, I recommend John Doerr’s book, “Measure What Matters,” or check out Jessie Wither’s course on Goal Setting: Objectives and Key Results. There are many ways to set goals. What matters is that you commit to setting them and measuring your progress. Failing to do so, well, that’ll put you at a serious disadvantage.

Developing your KPIs

As you move your marketing forward, you may have established objectives and key results for your quarterly performance, but you’ll want to establish granular success metrics for each of your marketing objectives. A nimble and common approach for this is through the creation of key performance indicators, or KPIs. KPIs let you measure the performance of a particular activity such as an outbound email campaign or a fall sales event. By monitoring your KPIs, you’ll see what’s working, what’s not, and what is impacting something else. Now, when you go about creating your KPIs, make sure they’re aligned to your business goals. They need to be measurable and easy to understand. So a good KPI might be increase traffic 5% month over month, whereas a bad KPI would be increase 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 the check mark because it was simply to increase traffic. You want your KPIs to be tied to your marketing objectives because then they’re 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 to an acceptable level, you might want a KPI that says, achieve a $40 CPA, or cost per action. If you went with achieve 100 sales, well, you’d be focusing on measuring something you’re not actually trying to achieve. You could succeed at that $40 CPA and then scale your KPI to be generate 100 sales per month at a $40 cost per action. 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 or action. For broader marketing objectives, set a KPI for total revenue and even the ratio of new to returning 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, or if the content isn’t relevant 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 a Google spreadsheet, but you can also look at software from geckoboard.com or cyfe.com to build out really meaningful KPI dashboards that give you at a glance information. Take your time and pick the metrics that are relevant to you and then organize them in a way that makes sense for your business.

Drafting a one-page marketing plan

As your marketing strategy shapes up, you’ll need a place to park that information. It needs to be agile, easy to update, and very simple to distribute. Now, I use a format called the Lean Canvas, and it serves as a visual guide and also helps as you consider what marketing efforts you want to deploy. Now, the Lean Canvas is a one-page document that was adapted from Alexander Osterwalder’s “Business Model Canvas” by Ash Maurya. Now, it’s great for taking all of your marketing knowledge and research and organizing it into one central document. Here’s what it looks like. You have a series of boxes that you’ll need to fill out with the corresponding information. If you were to fold this paper in half where the left side is all about your product or service and the right side is all about the market. Let’s walk through these fields together. In the problem box, list one to three high priority problems that your customer has. And below them, list any existing solutions that try to solve those problems. In the customer segments box, list the personas that you’re targeting. Now, the problem and customer segments are intrinsically connected. From here, the solutions box is where you’ll list one to three ways that your product or service solves the consumer’s problems. Now, from here, you’ll fill out your unique value proposition. And this is right in the middle, as it lives both between your product or service and your market. Next, list all of your channels. This is your path to the customer, and it’s how you’ll communicate the existence of what you’re selling. Pick the channels that your customer segments are spending the most time with. Now, moving on, you’ll need to outline your revenue streams. How are you going to make money? What’s the lifetime value of your customer? What’s the gross margin on whatever it is you’re selling? Now, just to the left is your cost structure. And this is where you’ll list the operational costs for making the business get all the way to market. How much will it cost to acquire your customer? How much does it cost to run the business? How much are you going to be spending on marketing? Next up is key metrics. Every business must have key metrics that are used to monitor performance. List what activities you’ll measure that are going to demonstrate that you’re successful in your marketing efforts. And finally, the unfair advantage. The job of your value proposition is to grab your customer’s attention. Well, an unfair advantage’s goal is to deter copycats and competitors. It must be something that cannot be easily replicated or purchased. Spend 20 minutes or so filling out a Lean Canvas. And if you’re looking to do this online, you can check out miro.com, or just Google Lean Canvas templates and you’ll find plenty of resources. And as with everything, once you put your canvas together, start to test it. keep evolving it until you find the model that works for your product or service.