How to Build a Complete Integrated Online Marketing Plan in 2022

Table of Contents

• Welcome
• The strategy problem
• 1. Find your business strategy
  • Knowing who you are
  • Defining your narrative statement
  • Identifying emotional needs
  • Create your value statement
• 2. Define your target customers
  • Identifying customer groups
  • Creating a customer persona
  • Measuring customer lifetime value
  • Quantifying customer loyalty
• 3. Research: Find What Your Customers Want
  • Researching keywords to find audience needs and interests
  • Using Google Trends to find market trends and customer insights
  • Developing your initial plan
  • Using micro-moments to create customers
• 4. Clearly Identify Business Goals and Build Processes
  • Defining your marketing goals
  • Differentiating between acquisition and engagement
  • Understanding messaging and objectives
• 5. Develop A Long-Term Marketing Plan
  • Understanding the purpose of content marketing
  • Planning content assets
  • Creating a long-term content calendar
  • Curating content
• 6. Turn cookies into customers
  • Getting the big picture
  • Retargeting visitors
  • Designing effective landing pages
  • Getting that email address
  • Stopping the blast
• 7. Measure and Modify Your Plans
  • Measuring the right things
  • Visualizing your measurement process
  • Developing a 360-customer profile
• 8. Next steps

Welcome

In a recent survey, 47% of marketers stated that their biggest obstacle to online marketing was a lack of strategy. I want to share with you ways you can focus on good data, predictable trends, and lessons learned to create your online marketing strategy. Many successful companies had something in common, all of them had a specific strategy that kept them on course despite changes, new technologies, and challenges. They had an internal directive coupled with an emphasis on data that allowed them to avoid mistakes, resist marketing fads, and focus on what works. In this post, I’m going to share successful methods with you. 
First, I’ll show you how to define your business and articulate a clear plan. 
Second, I’ll share ways you can identify and research your audience. 
Third, I’ll discuss ways you can incorporate different technologies. 
Fourth, I’ll explain how you can evaluate what is best for your business, and
finally, you’ll integrate your content marketing into lead generation.

Having a clear plan for success is vital with the overwhelming amount of marketing choices you have to make. I look forward to helping you build confidence in your marketing and improving your business as you’ll know what to do, when to do it, why you’re doing it, and how to measure and improve.

The strategy problem

Do you have a strategy? A strategy that explains what you are trying to accomplish, how it’s going to be accomplished, and how you measure success? If not, then you’ve got a problem. A strategy is not having a Facebook strategy or Instagram strategy. Those are channels. Now, what you do on Facebook, such as making a post, that is a tactic. A strategy is the singular, overarching principle that drives how to use tactics on specific channels and why. This is evidenced by the frustration people express about social media marketing. 

Two of the most common questions are, how do I know which social media to use? And how will I know it works? That’s a question of ROI, return on investment. Finding a return on investment of marketing is difficult without a strategy. This is evidenced by the number of searches for how to find social media ROI. In this graph from Google showing how people search and the related terms, we can see that people searching for the return or the ROI of social media marketing is nearly as high as the number of people searching for how to do social media marketing. In content marketing, it’s very similar to social media marketing in that no one seems to be sure how effective it is. In one study, it was found that 50% of content does not drive any engagement. It’s the age-old problem of half of my advertising doesn’t work, I just don’t know which half. But it’s no wonder. In asking marketers about strategy, only 32% said that they had a documented strategy that was communicated across their organization. 20% had no strategy at all. And about half had a verbal strategy, but nothing was written down or clearly communicated to the organization. I think we all know what happens to information if it is not written down or communicated clearly. This is why 46% of marketers cite strategy as their number one obstacle to effective marketing. Not only that, when the strategy’s a problem, then it leads to other problems. Anything that supports strategy suffers, such as training. How can you train your marketing team effectively when you don’t know what you want to achieve? And of course, it’s hard to find a return on investment if you don’t know what you’re doing or why you’re doing it. And it also exposes the metrics you are using to measure success if you aren’t defining what success looks like. 

A strategy is not having a Facebook strategy or Instagram strategy. Those are channels. Now, what you do on Facebook, such as making a post – that is a tactic.

Have you ever been distracted by something shiny? Like a penny on the sidewalk? It immediately distracts us because it’s shiny, but it’s usually worthless. This is what we call Shiny Object Syndrome in marketing. You’ll know you are suffering from this when you or your company get distracted by the latest fads, headlines, apps, or technology. When you look at a single tactic or channel to provide results rather than your total plan or you ignore internal data, but you rely on external headlines for decision making. In other words, when you are externally directed, you allow factors, such as headlines, media, and fads to drive your decisions. When you are internally directed, you use data developed through your own efforts specific to your business. It’s all about what influences your actions. Businesses that rely on internal factors for a defined strategy based on their own data, they find results. People focused on external factors for success jump from solution to solution-seeking immediate results. You have a strategy, everyone does. It’s really just a matter of whether it’s a good one or not. For example, Facebook posts? They’re a tactic. A strategy informs you as to why you are making that post and why you are using Facebook.

1. Find your business strategy

Knowing who you are

Before we even begin talking about customers and strategy, it all starts with knowing yourself and your company. How many times have you ever talked to a salesperson and after they’ve given their spiel, you’re still not convinced if it’s even worth listening to anything more they have to say? You see, that’s because they haven’t properly communicated their value statement. Sometimes we hear sales pitches that are more focused on the company than our needs. And so your customer needs to know what value you provide. 

So when asking, who are you, what I want to know is what drives you. As a business owner or working for a company, what makes you get up in the morning and tell the world about your company? Maybe you have a better product, maybe you just have a passion for this business or maybe there are other reasons that drive you to do what you’re doing. Because that will influence how you are the better option in the marketplace. When I ask people that question, why are you the best in your business? Or why should people choose you? I get a variety of answers about service, quality, our innovation, my experience. You see the problem with those responses is they’re very company-focused. They rely on our service, our quality, my experience. The problem there is it’s all internally focused. It’s all about the company. You’re not looking at it from a customer value standpoint. And so if your focus is service, show me a specific customer example. How do you deliver that service to the customer? If you say that our difference is quality, what is it about that quality that makes you better? What is it to the end-user that makes it better? Focus your response on the customer. Because this is what is in the customer’s head. They want to know what’s in it for me. What’s my value? 

So all of your presentations about how long your company’s been in business, or how many years the founders are there, or anything like that, people don’t listen to that. What people want to know is what’s in it for me? What’s my value? Because when they see the value, then they’re on board with what you have to offer. So look at what your company is doing, look at how you’re communicating. Is it a monetary value? Are you saving them money? Is it functional? Something that will save them time? Or is it tangible, just something to own? Or is it more of a deeper emotional need? Identify the value that you are giving to the customer. 

For this post, we’re going to use an example site. The site we’re using is ExploreCalifornia.org. Now I’m going to go to the mission page to get a sense of, number one, what makes them tick? What are they passionate about? And here we can see very early, that they’re passionate about California and the abundant resources that you’ll find there for hiking, biking, or simply enjoying the lifestyle there. Here’s their goal for you is that they want to transform your vacation into an adventure that will educate, inspire, and energize you. So it’s a more customer-focused satisfaction. Here’s what you’re going to get out of this. I like that example. Because it does focus on the end result of the customer. So when I ask you, what does your company do? Is your response customer-focused? Does it clearly define the value that I would see or experience as a customer of your company?

Defining your narrative statement

Many times when I work with companies, I find that when I ask them, “what is it that you do, “what do you want to produce in the customer” they have a hard time answering that. That makes things difficult because internally, you need to be able to describe your company’s purpose and what you want to produce with a customer. Your narrative statement is the story. It’s the story of why you’re in business, why you do what you do, and the value you provide for your customer. Now, it may not be shared publicly, but internally, it’s the measuring stick to everything that you do. 

Let’s evaluate how a narrative statement works, and I’m going to give you a little test with four insurance companies and a narrative statement that you’ll never see in their marketing but describes the character of who they are and how they communicate to you. 
One is the voice of reason. 
Another is your friend, your guide. 
A third is fast and fun. 
The last one is fear and uncertainty, selling what if. 

Let’s look at the different companies and see if you can’t figure out which is which. 

First, when we go to Progressive, we see Flo. Flo is the main character. She has been for years and what Flo does is she talks to customers. She gives them information and the customer determines what is best for them. The customer is the ultimate decision-maker. In this case, Progressive is the voice of reason. If you remember the commercials, the commercials show your interactions with customers. Progressive provides the quotes from themselves and from competitive companies. In that way, they are giving the customer all of the information they need, and the customer then is able to take that information and make a rational decision. 

When we go to State Farm, what we see is a very close bond between the agent and the customer. It’s closer than just that, they’re a friend or a part of the family. State Farm wants to emphasize the relationship between the agent and the customer. That it’s closer than just a transaction, that there’s caring involved. Their commercials all revolved around the agent being there immediately and they know each other’s names. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. They’re selling the relationship aspect of knowing you as a customer, what you need, and always being there. 

It doesn’t take much to figure out what Geico is all about. When you go to the site, you see the gecko and that should trigger all of the ways that Geico sells online and on TV. They sell themselves as fast and fun. Their tagline is, “in 15 minutes or less, you could save “so much money,” but it’s all about reinforcing that line through a variety of different characters in different situations. They are the fast and fun of the insurance industry. In looking at their commercials, they have a wide variety of characters, of storylines. They’re the entertainer. They want to use entertainment and characters to reinforce their message to go save money. 

Now that leaves us with Allstate. You go to the Allstate website and it’s very straightforward. It’s very clear what they’re all about and so it may not communicate the narrative statement right away, but if we look at Allstate’s commercials, one of their most popular characters is called Mayhem. Mayhem is the everyday accident that can happen in our lives and he always asks the question, “does your cut-rate insurance cover this?” What he’s talking about is the quality of what Allstate offers in its comprehensive coverage. That you may save a few bucks here or there, but is it enough? So they sell that uncertainty or that fear that I may not be getting a quality insurance product. 

Now let’s take this and apply that to Explore California. We want to look at all the reasons why this company is here and what they want to accomplish. What’s the narrative of the company? Like I said, what makes them get up in the morning? A good way to work on a narrative statement is to gather people around you familiar with the company or in the company or on your team and let’s look at the value to the customer. What makes us unique. What value do we bring? Start brainstorming, you don’t have to do statements at this point, but just ideas. For example, something that comes up in the brainstorming session is that we have local guides. You’ll see places that most people won’t see. You’ll enjoy the California environment without leaving a bad footprint. That the customers’ control of their experience. That they’ll get a better value for their experience and they won’t miss out on things that others might. These are all statements that we’re just brainstorming as to the value of what drives us as a company and what the customer is going to experience. Then bring this down and try to decide on three or four statements that best define what the company is all about. We could focus on the environmental aspect or on the experience aspect, but ultimately, when we look at the goal of what we want to produce, we want to produce a change in the customer. Something, as we said, will inspire them, motivate them. Our product is California, ultimately. 

I love the narrative statement, “we want to create passionate explorers.” You see, this describes what I want to do as a company and the end result of what I want to produce for the customer. It communicates to my employees, to my team, that here’s what we want to do, and here’s how we’re going to measure it. Take your narrative statement and number one for you, how does it change you? How does it change how you direct your team, how you direct your marketing, and how you direct your customer interactions? Now, you take that narrative statement to your team and you ask them, “what does it mean to you? “How does that change our customer interactions, “and how does that change our language “or our desired outcomes in our experiences “with our customers?” Then, our narrative statement is a measuring stick for our entire business and all of our marketing. Anything we produce online, offline, or any articles we produce, we measure it according to that statement. Does it create a passionate explorer? Does it change our language? But ultimately, what do we do now? What can we do today to align our marketing to our narrative statement? The narrative statement is the story that drives you, your team, your business, and what it will produce in a customer.

Identifying emotional needs

To truly understand your customer, you need to understand their motivation. What do they really need? Let me give you an example of this. This really stood out to me when I took my teenage daughter shopping for shoes. Now, functionally, she needed shoes. And so as we’re at the store, she’s looking at all these different pairs and I got distracted by something else. Ultimately, I came back, and there she is taking pictures of the shoes, and I asked her, what are you doing? She was uploading pictures of shoes to Instagram and sharing them with her friends. She was getting immediate feedback from her friends about what they liked. It was then that I realized the difference between a functional need and an emotional need. 

The functional need was shoes. We could have done that in seconds. The emotional need was shoes that not only she liked, but her friends liked. And so that was what I like to call, the need behind the need, the driving factor in the decision of what causes a teenage girl to buy a specific pair of shoes. But it’s not just teenage girls, it’s all of us. We have basic needs that we look to fulfill beyond the functional need. 

In breaking down the different needs, Tony Robbins identified six basic needs. We have a need for comfort, variety, significance, connection, growth, or contribution. 

For example, certainty, you sell this when people like the way things are. They don’t like change, they like reliability, maybe nostalgia. You can sell cherished memories to this crowd because they like that certainty, that comfort in certainty. Also, we like variety. You see, we like things to remain as they are, but we also like things to be different. So depending upon what product you have, variety speaks to a number of needs, such as risk or chances. Maybe even a sense of rebellion, the unfamiliar, or challenge. We also like significance. A product can be positioned to show us our significance or to create significance. Maybe it’s social status. Maybe it’s our reputation or recognition by others. This is the need for celebrity in all of us. Another need is connection or love, and this is one of the strongest ones. It’s that sense of belonging. It’s attraction, it’s confidence because it’s a connection. It’s a sense of personal attraction that people like me. You can also sell a product based on making you a better person. Every January, people like to make resolutions to go to the gym, to get in shape, maybe before summer, they want to have a beach body. This is all about getting better, improving your skills, or reaching some sense of achievement. And finally, its contribution. It’s going beyond yourself and doing something for other people. Now, that could be for recognition or self-satisfaction. Now, there are many motivating factors behind contribution, but it starts with wanting to do something for someone else. Think about how people sell travel. They don’t sell it as get on a plane and go somewhere. Ultimately, they’re selling vacations as a way to reward yourself for working hard the rest of the year, and now you deserve it. Or, they sell it as a way to reconnect with your significant other, with your family, with relatives or friends. See, in that way, they’re not just selling the need for a vacation, they’re selling the benefits and the emotional satisfaction you’ll receive through a vacation. 

So when developing needs, think about the need behind the need, the emotional satisfaction that you can produce in your customer.

Create your value statement

When someone asks you, “What do you do,” or, “What does your business do,” How do you answer that question? Most times, we do what’s called our elevator pitch, our 30-second narrative of what the business is all about. Unfortunately, people sometimes aren’t interested. That’s because our attention span isn’t that great because most pitches we get are boring. We need to narrow our explanation, highlight the important customer benefits, and present real value. 

Can you explain your business and your value to a customer in a sentence or less? 

Now, before we do this, I want to look at some websites to give a sense of the value statement. as applied in their digital context. On a website, we have the advantage of imagery, style, and content, but we also have the necessity of navigation, utility, and information. You only have moments to communicate a functional aesthetic and value. 

Let’s look at the Salesforce website. Salesforce is all about growth, innovation, and inclusivity in business. This is reflected in the presentation of the homepage. Highlighted content is about growth, what’s new, and products to help your business grow. Not only this. Media, webinars, articles, newsletters, and virtual events reassure the prospect or customer that they are not alone and have an access to a wide variety of materials. 

Another example is the Harley-Davidson website. As an inherently cool brand, they present information and aesthetics. I love their marketing because black is the new black with Harley-Davidson. The headings all contain active motion verbs. The images are of motorcycles in motion and the stills are heavy with a black layer. The content is functional, accessible and clear. 

Back to a B2B aspect, Microsoft Dynamics, with their tagline. “Now’s the time to come together.” As a value statement, that’s very powerful. The Dynamics website focuses on large pictures of people, the software interface, and the applications to different industries. It’s very effective at showing how it brings people and technology together.

Here’s the last example. DeVry University uses the tagline, “Build a more powerful you.” It explains how their programs fit your life, find inspiration and take charge of your future. It’s all about empowering you. 

In reviewing this small sample of websites, a consistent theme emerges. There’s little emphasis on the monetary cost. The primary focus is on you, the customer, the value of emotional satisfaction. And did you notice there’s not a lot about, our company does this or that? It’s about what we can provide for you. 
Innovation and growth at Salesforce.
Cool at Harley-Davidson.
Connection and accessibility at Microsoft Dynamics, and
a better you at DeVry. 

It’s all about the customer’s emotional satisfaction. And if you can hit that factor, you will be more persuasive. Start with your 30-second pitch, which is typically about three or four sentences. 

In our example website, Explore California, we’ll look at the core business value that they have on the website. They are passionate about California, passionate about preservation, but also want visitors to engage in a unique and fulfilling way. Their tours are sensitive to the environment and they want to preserve those resources. They also want to enable their visitors to explore California in their own way. Now, it’s great, but it’s too long. We need to reduce it to one or two sentences or skip that and go right to what I call the Twitter pitch of fewer than 140 characters. Can they tell me, what I get from doing business with you? And that’s how they can bring it down to the tagline that’s on the site right now. “Explore our world your way.” That hits the evaluation questions that I have about evaluating the tagline and the value statement. Is your narrative reflected in that statement? Is there a clear, tangible customer benefit?

It’s about doing things the customer’s way, what they want to see, and guiding them. The emotional need of the customer is that they want to direct their own tour, see the things that they want to see and do it their way, but with guidance. And that’s the kind of company that is being promoted with Explore California. The emotional need is independence, exploration, and connection. The pitch is to direct your own experience. 

When developing your value statement, make sure that you’ve identified a clear emotional need that will connect to the customer. Make sure it reflects your business, and also make sure that your statement is universal for all types of customers that you’ll be dealing with. In our example, we have hikers, bikers, spa, and food tour customers. Our statement is universal for all those customer groups. So, be sure when you develop your value statement it is a clear and inclusive value for all customers.

2. Define your target customers

Identifying customer groups

An effective way to target different customers is by identifying their needs. I want you to do something as we start this video. I want you to take 30 seconds and draw a picture of yourself on a great vacation. So what did you draw? Did you draw yourself on the beach? Did you draw yourself golfing? Or hiking in the mountains? Are you alone? Do you have people around you? You see this is an interesting way to find out what people visualize as the perfect vacation. One company did this but then they also followed up with a series of statements where people had to agree or disagree. These are called needs-based statements. You can recognize them if you are to agree or disagree with the statement that starts with I do, I like, or I prefer.

Here are a few of the questions that were asked. I prefer to do my own vacation research. Yes or no? You see answering questions like this and giving a value statement, will help me understand what kind of person you are and what needs you have when you think about a vacation. 

The company that executed this survey found that travelers tend to fall into five categories. The recharge category was someone who wanted their itinerary taken care of, they wanted to have fun but still stay connected. The security segment didn’t want any surprises, didn’t want to have to deal with anything. These are the people that just like to sit by the pool and have a quiet vacation. Then there’s the traditional group. They go to the same destination every year. The variety group wants to see new things with every vacation. Then there are the self planners. They just want to get to their destination and they’ll figure it out when they get there. 

Now everyone has different needs. So our self planners that just want to get to the destination they’ll use their smartphone, they’ll ask locals, they’ll figure things out. They value independence. But you see, the shared need is with our variety group. A variety group, they want to see something different every time. So both them, while one group wants to do it on their own and the other group relies maybe on a travel agent, they both share the values of independence and variety. Ultimately they will share the same sense of accomplishment with the family that goes to the same destination every year because what they are looking for is to reconnect with each other.

So let’s go to our example site for this course, Explorecalifornia.org. What I like about the tagline on this site is Explore our world your way. We’re trying to get across a value statement that will speak to the needs of the visitors to our website. You see the statement Explore our world your way, does it reinforce our goal of creating a passionate explorer? Does it speak to the different needs of the groups that we’ve identified? We have hikers, bikers, spa-goers, we have people looking for food tours. All of them are exploring California in their own unique way and we’re assisting them to do that. The goal of that tagline is to provide the ultimate value to the end-user.

So we need to understand the emotional needs of our customers and there are some crossover needs. In hiking they want to see something new, they want to challenge themselves, but feel a connection to the earth and to other people around them and they want to experience the environment in their own way. There are a lot of similarities to our spa or food customers even though they want a more comfortable experience, in their own way they want to have a connection to the earth, to other people and they are just as concerned about the environment but in a different way. Understanding those needs will help us as we create content, as we communicate with people individually but also as a group. The better we understand our customer, their individual needs, the shared needs, but also the common needs which need to be reflected on the website because we’re receiving a wide variety of different kinds of customers. So start by understanding the common needs that people are looking for when they’re looking for a vacation or something specific to your business. Then start to segment customers based on their individual needs and you’ll be more effective in communicating to each group.

Creating a customer persona

In our previous tutorial, we looked at grouping customers according to their needs. We developed this with a persona. You see, not all of your customers are the same. Just by looking at what people need or what needs they’re trying to satisfy, we can see that there are multiple motivations for what people are trying to achieve. Even with just a vacation, there are a number of reasons that people will use to go on a vacation, a lot of expectations as to what they want out of that. And so in order to market effectively, we need to understand what motivations people have and be able to speak to those motivations. Otherwise, our marketing is very broad and we don’t speak to the needs of anybody. The first way most people will try to group their customers is through demographics. Demographics are the typical age, income, region, social status, and more of a socioeconomic view of people. But what demographics fail to provide are motivations, needs, a specific identity to our typical customer.

It would look like this for our Explore California website. One of the demographics we want to reach are the 20s to 30s millennials, maybe we call them DINKs: double income, no kids. They’re from midwestern or western states, college-educated; they like the outdoors, they’re adventure seekers, and they’ll take two to three short vacations a year. That’s a demographic view of an audience. It doesn’t dive in as to what they want out of a vacation. What are they looking for? And what emotional triggers will cause them to choose one vacation provider or one destination over another? That’s why we focus on the persona.

You see, the persona gets into pain points, deeper emotional needs that drive their motivation, that drive their decisions. You see, even within a single demographic, we can have multiple personas because people make decisions based on different needs and motivations. So when we create a persona, really what we’re doing is telling a story about a specific group of people. And I like to start with a picture. A picture that properly shows a specific type of individual that I’m targeting. I’m also going to group them according to my customer segment. So this is going to be my hiking segment and I’m going to name them John and Jill. They’re probably in their early 30s and as you can see, I just start typing in some very basic information. I can put in that they are native Californians and we can go into jobs and the background of the person. This is where we start adding some emotional background. Maybe they met while they were hiking, developed a relationship from there. And so now we start developing a backstory. Demographics, you know what those are. But what I’m really interested in are motivations, what drives them to choose one destination over another. What drives them to choose a specific guide. One of the things that they’re interested in is the environment. They’re interested in preserving the environment because they enjoy hiking and they see it. And so, they’re going to be very interested in ecological factors, sustainability, and a focus on the environment. So when you are developing communications, specifically to John and Jill, you want to focus on those need-based factors of what are they trying to satisfy? What goals are they trying to reach? So we can say that they are looking to refresh and recharge over the weekend because this is their getaway. This is how they get rid of everything during the weekend and they’re fresh to go back to work and so this is the getaway but during that getaway, they want to know that they’re doing something good and viable in helping the environment. And so by understanding their needs and motivations, we can speak to them much more clearly.

I like to look at conversations, interviews, comments, anything from e-mails or calls from customers similar to John and Jill. That could be how they’ve reviewed our company or our service or concerns that they’ve raised. And then I also want to look at our message. Is it simple? Does it allow them to talk to their friends about our tour company? And so when our phrase is “Our world, your way,” how does it resonate with them?

Now, of course, you’ll want to create more personas because we do not just have a hiking segment, we have a spa and foods segment and we can’t speak to them the same way as our hiking segment. They’re interested in different things. And so, we’ve created an image here of Mark and Jenny. They’re in a completely different demographic but they also shop for their vacation in a very different way. The advantage of developing this persona is that it helps you to connect your marketing in a very personal and emotional way to different groups based on their needs. Ultimately, what a persona does is: it creates empathy. When you see the image, when you give your customers names, it makes it more real. You develop your marketing according to the needs of someone who’s much more real than just a customer. It creates that empathy that you and your group can use to connect more clearly to the needs of your customers.

Measuring customer lifetime value

When segmenting your customers, it’s important to understand that not all of them are the same. Some are more profitable than others. It’s important to understand who your best customers are and how much money do they spend? Now, when I say best customers, a lot of times people will define that differently. It could be based purely on profit or reliability or that they refer new business or simply based on their relationship. Based on the type of customer you’re trying to produce, you need to have a method of measuring that. 

One way of measuring profitability is the RFM analysis: recency, frequency, and monetary. Recency, based on when was the last time they were at your business? Frequency, how often do they buy from you? And monetary, how much? This helps us to understand the customer lifetime value equation.

The customer lifetime value is based on the average value of a sale, how many sales a customer makes, usually within a specific amount of time, a year or a month, and then how many years that customer is retained. You multiply all of those, you take away your cost of doing business and your cost of acquiring a customer, and that gives you your customer lifetime value. 

Let’s calculate a simple view of customer lifetime value. Take your average customer sale or profit, and for Explore California, the average tour, it’s $450. Our average customer retention length is about eight years. The cost to acquire a new customer is around $250. Now, that gives us an average customer lifetime value of a little over $3,000. This will help us as we develop more measurements and understanding of our customers. We can also use this to analyze different customer groups. 

For Explore California, we may want to have a customer lifetime value for our hiking segment and another customer lifetime value for our spa or food tour segment to understand which segment is more profitable. Now, depending upon the type of business you are in, let’s add a little extra. If you have a monthly subscription business or software as a service, then you’re more interested in what’s going on on a monthly basis. And so you can add your revenue per customer per month, the costs per customer per month, your monthly retention rate, and the cost to acquire a new customer. And that will give you your monthly customer value, which you can then develop into an annual customer value. 

Understanding the customer lifetime value will help you understand how different segments are more profitable than others and also what you can do throughout each stage to improve the customer lifetime value.

Quantifying customer loyalty

One of the surest ways to increase your business’s profitability is by understanding loyalty and leveraging it to build that within your current customer base. First of all, by understanding the value of loyalty, you’ll understand how it plays into your business as a whole. Do you know your customer lifetime value? Loyalty is one of those ways that you can increase the customer lifetime value. What happens if you were to increase your repeat customer business by just 5%? If you ran the numbers on that, you’d be convinced that this is a great idea.

So think about how much you market to your existing customers in developing brand advocates. People are loyal to a brand when they feel as though they have received value. When they’ve been recognized and appreciated. That’s what makes them loyal. And so the more you show that value, that appreciation, and also let the customer know at a personal level that you certainly appreciate their business, it increases their loyalty. This is valuable because every repeat customer is worth five new customers. That’s because the cost to acquire those new customers is completely eliminated when someone who you already know and who’s already in your database comes back and buys again. Also, loyalty drives referrals. People love to tell others when they’ve had a great experience. 

So how do you know when your customers are ready to be referral sources? There’s a simple question, and maybe you’ve received this question before. In some questionnaires, they’ll ask you, “How likely are you to recommend our product or our company to a colleague or a friend?” Do you remember seeing that? If so, you might also remember the answer scale. It’s from a zero to a 10. Now, if you are not likely to recommend, you’re a detractor. That means that you’ve answered somewhere between zero and six. If you answered seven or eight, that means you’re passive. That means you had an okay experience with the company, but you are not ready to commit to being an advocate. If you answered nine or 10, that means that you are likely to promote the company, given the chance. You come up with your net promoter score by subtracting your detractors from your promoters. The net promoter score is all based on the question, “Are you willing to provide a referral to a colleague or a friend?” Now, it’s very interesting because if you ask open-ended questions along with that survey, you’ll find that each group also uses a very different language. Your promoters are very excited. They use words that reflect that. Passives will always give a positive, but then a negative, such as the price. Detractors at least have tried the product, but they didn’t see the value.

Now what I love about promoters is that usually, when we perform this type of survey, we ask promoters, “How did you find out about this company?” Most promoters found out from other promoters, and so, it’s a logical step that promoters breed promoters, and it’s your least expensive marketing channel. It’s word of mouth. Customers developed from word of mouth are usually happier, more satisfied customers, and they stay longer. And so, in order to create loyalty, it comes down to rewarding your best customers, recognizing them, and responding to them when they communicate with you. Make it easy for them to share your brand message. Make it promotable, such as Nike’s Just Do It. 

On our example site, it is “explore our world your way.” It’s a simple way to communicate how we meet your need, and they can share it with their friends. You see, referred customers are 25% more profitable, 18% less likely to leave your company, they have a higher customer lifetime value than average, and because they’re referred, you didn’t have to spend the acquisition costs to get them, so they have higher margins. 

Listen and learn from your best customers. Know who your best customers are, and reward them. And also, focus on them. Give them a simple message to promote your company to their friends.

3. Research: Find What Your Customers Want

Researching keywords to find audience needs and interests

The best way to find out what customers need is to look at how they search online. What people type into the search box, is an honest assessment of what they need at that time. We call this part of the customer journey, that moment of discovery when they have an idea in their heads, and they make that initial search to start looking for what they need.

Now from a vacation or a hiking standpoint, they call this the zero moment of truth. When I start looking for a destination, the consideration phase is when I evaluate multiple options, look at all the information and make a decision. The second moment of truth is the experience. It’s my judgment right now at the moment, of how I am experiencing your company or product. And the ultimate moment of truth is when I share that with other people.

Now, how people search is dependent upon where they are in this customer journey. Early-stage, universal, or very general words, are early in the discovery process. When people are learning or educating themselves or looking for information, their search terms are a little longer, and more focused. Then, when they share their experiences, it’s very specific, and they tend to use emotional words as they share them. 

Now when researching keywords, it’s good to have a keyword tool. I use Wordtracker. And what I love about Wordtracker is I can go in and I can put a word like hiking, and I can see all the ways that people search for the word hiking. As you can see here, I’m well over 4,000 keyword suggestions. These are all the ways that people search for hiking, and the additional words that they use when they search for it. Now, this starts giving me ideas in order to understand what people need, and how can I meet some of those needs through my marketing. By helping to write articles or educate people, or point them in a specific direction, I can utilize the words that they’re searching for on my site and in my marketing in order to meet that need. Now I can also drill down, and look specifically at people looking for hiking and I’ll look at boots. How many people are looking for advice on hiking boots? And we can see here, the best hiking boots and boot reviews. So we can select the ones that we want to keep. And these are some colors, and let’s also look at women’s hiking boots. Now I can save those, and I’ll create a new list, and call it hiking boots. That way I can come back to it, and use it later when I want to develop content about that specific subject area. Now I can look at my lists, and if I want I can open up hiking boots and I can export that, and I can look at it now in Excel. Now you can export hundreds of keywords that cover a variety of subjects. This is where we need to start drilling down and understanding our keywords. 

At this point, download Activity 0301 Researching Keywords. So as I’m researching my keywords, I want to divide them into different groups. As I export them, I can copy and paste, or I can just do this alongside the keyword research tool. And so, I can divide by locations, by products that people are looking for, or even the types of hiking such as trail hiking, or wilderness Desert shows up, as well as adventures. By understanding the words that people are using, I understand their preferences, their needs and motivations. And the more I divide, the more I can understand how people search within a specific group. The next thing I want to do is go to the next worksheet. In this worksheet, I want to then zero in on a specific type of keyword. This is where I take my group of keywords, and I want to try and divide them according to the customer journey. 

As I said, that zero moment, when people are just initially interested and look to see what’s available. They’re going to use very general words such as hiking, hiking California, or hiking vacations.

Now in that first moment, as they’re gathering information, they’re researching camping gear, they’re looking for a hiking checklist, researching supplies and tours that are available. 

The second moment, is while they are in the moment and experiencing it right now. And so, they’re looking specifically, Pacific Crest Trail, and shoes that are specific for that trail. Or bicycle trail and spots along the trail.

And then I like to look at the ultimate moments, the sharing moments. This is where I look to see on social media what hashtags are being used for this specific business, for this attraction. And we can see here that people are using a hashtag of Pacific Crest Trail. They’re uploading their pictures and talking about the moment. And as you’ll notice, there are more emotional words that they use in describing their experience.

Keyword research enables you to get into the customer’s mind. You can ascertain where they are in the journey, what they need at certain stages, and how to then develop your marketing to answer their needs, understand their motivations, and connect with them.

Using Google Trends to find market trends and customer insights

Google Trends is one of the primary tools I use in order to understand the trends around a certain industry. So for example, I’m going to look at some of the highly searched topics. Let’s start with the primary term, hiking, as a search term. I’ll enter that and what I see is the past 12 months of activity. Now initially, I can see the peak at around the end of May and into the summer. What I like to do now is look on either side of the peak to find the beginning and the end of the trend. It may not always be so obvious. Here, I can see the trend actually starting early in the year, dipping and then increasing around that April timeframe. The end of the trend seems to be around October.

Now we call these seasonal sides the shoulders, as the peak is the head, or trend of the season. Now this gives us a look at the past 12 months, but let’s see if there’s a predictable trend. Now in order to do this, we need to see the data over multiple years. Go up to the toolbar and find the time and custom date range. You can adjust it for the past week, past month, or even go into multiple years. I like to look at the past five years. Now in this view, I can quickly and easily compare every year to see if there is a specific repeatable and predictable trend, and that’s exactly what I see. Peaks in the early summer, May through June, and the end of the season in early October. Now that I know that there is a predictable trend, I can use this in multiple marketing tactics, paid advertising, search engine optimization, content marketing, email marketing, and more. I can reach people when they’re most interested in this term. Now let’s compare some of the terms that we found in our research. I’m going to compare hiking trips with hiking checklists. Now this shows me some very interesting data. First, searches for hiking trips begin early in the year, with some spikes as early as January. There is also another spike in the summer, around June and July. Comparing the searches for hiking checklists, I see almost an exact opposite trend. The searches for checklists are highest throughout the summer when the season is most active. Here’s what I can learn and apply from the trend’s data. People searching with the phrase “hiking trips” look to be early-stage researchers. It is a top-of-the-funnel term, as people are looking for options and ideas. The second trend in the summer may be a second trip in the year or late planners, last-minute planners. People searching for a hiking checklist are on their way out the door. They’ve already done their planning, they know their destination and simply need the reassurance of a checklist to ensure that they are prepared. They’re already through the funnel and about to start their experience. What do I do with this information? If I am an outfitter or a trip planner, I can provide a checklist as a value-added asset and provide that to my prospects and customers. I can also schedule my content to launch ahead of search trends, to get rankings at the ideal time for maximum visibility. I can also increase my spending on paid search ads that match these terms because I know when demand is at its highest.

Developing your initial plan

Let’s now take a lot of the research that we’ve already accomplished and start to put it down on a plan. Now, one of the things I love to do in developing a plan is to organize the keywords by popularity, when they’re popular, and also when the popularity starts. When do people start searching for the keyword? When does it peak? And then I also want to compare that to my own market data and also make a list of predictable events that will happen annually. Now, these can be national holidays, they can be local events or things that are specific to your business and industry. So I’m going to go back to my keyword lists and look to see when my keywords start becoming popular.

So in January, desert hiking starts rising in popularity. In February, hiking California starts to increase in popularity, as well as hiking clothes. In March, hiking trips starts to increase and hiking survival. Now, at its peak is desert hiking in March. That helps us understand that while it starts in January, it peaks in March, and that’s when the most amount of people throughout the year are most interested in that subject. And so if we’re going to develop content about that, we want to be sure that we’re doing it when it’s at its peak popularity or in rising popularity. In April, it’s hiking gear and supplies. And at that point, survival hits its peak. And then in May when people start going out and start hiking, then they’re looking for checklists. Do you see how the market is maturing throughout the year? Early in the year, people are investigating where to go hike. Later in the spring, people are gathering together all their equipment. In May and June, just before they’re ready for their hiking holiday, they start looking for checklists and maybe getting those last-minute supplies. And then they’re starting to plan on where they’re going to go. Because in June also, hiking trips is the peak keyword. So you can see a sequential build in this industry around this keyword theme, and by organizing it by month and then also comparing it with calendar events. So, for example, here in January is Walk Your Pet Month. We can develop content about that. And also when it comes to hiking gear and supplies and survival, in April is National Park Week. We can develop content about that as well. Because here I have another column called My Expertise, and this is where you, your employees, or your team look at the expertise you have in the house and look at the content that is popular throughout that timeframe, and think about the content you can develop in order to communicate when the content is most popular. The key in this tutorial is to start organizing content by your research to see when it is most popular and when it’s rising in popularity. Match it with evergreen events, things that happen every year, and then also match it with your own expertise.

Using micro-moments to create customers

In a very short amount of time, our behavior has changed drastically. Having smartphones at the ready, being able to look up information whenever want it, has changed our behavior. These are called micro-moments. Google is very interested in micro-moments because it drives their search engine activity. Google has classified micromoments under four primary areas:
people who want to go somewhere,
people who want to know something,
people who want to do something,
people who want to buy something. 

There are micromoments that follow the customer journey. 

So the customer journey of discovery, the moment that they decide to do something, or start investigating something. This is where they start investigating what they want to do, and what would it take to do it, and can they afford it? The next moment is – consideration – where they’re looking at all the options that are available, they’re researching what’s out there, comparing, and refining who they want to do business with and their options. The next micromoment is when people are in the experience. They are either on their trip, or on their vacation, and think about all the photos you see of people who post pictures of themselves on vacation. They’re in the experience, but they’re sharing it at the same time. Now at the moment, people also want to know what’s near me? Where can I go eat while I’m here? And also, when they post they have emotional words with that. The key here is that as people experience things, they share them at the same time. So the experience and the share are intricately tied together. Now the average length of a micromoment is only about 90 seconds. That’s enough time for you to pull out your phone, look it up on Google, see the answers that are there, and then put your phone back in your pocket or your purse, until the next moment of inspiration strikes. So what we need to do is know this behavior, and how our customers are searching for information. We’ve already started developing a plan and understanding their content needs and when they need it. Now we have to start thinking about how do we deliver the content that they want, and how do we make it easy to get it into their hands? And also, how can we make it shareable? So that while they are in the moment, they can recommend it to others. 

4. Clearly Identify Business Goals and Build Processes

Defining your marketing goals

Developing a marketing plan is the first step to success. Part of this also is understanding how your business works, and the goals you have for growing your business. This enables you to have a clear direction, clear measurements and goals to work for. So let’s ask, what are your business goals? Do they align with your marketing? If your goals are to develop new customers, are you then marketing to bring in new customers and measuring yourself according to that goal? If your goal is increased profitability, well you get there by increasing your revenue and decreasing expenses. How are you doing that? Is that part of your marketing plan and are you evaluating your business based on those goals? So it comes down to setting a goal but understanding the process that creates that goal. Identify what it is that you want to achieve specifically, and then look at the process that affects that goal in order to understand the actions and steps that you need to take to achieve that goal. 

I love to ask people, what do you want? Typically they’ll respond, I want more visitors, I want more leads, I want more followers. They’ll answer with a lot of things that sometimes have nothing to do with increased business. They’re looking for more visitors, they’re looking for more subscribers, but ultimately when it comes down to it, any business owner or any marketer is looking for increased profitability. They want to make more money and decrease costs. Because when there’s more profitability, the business grows. There’s more money available for reinvestment, additional marketing and business growth. And if that’s ultimately what you want as a business, then we need to look at everything. 

We can’t just look at the marketing, we can’t just look at your day-to-day activities, we’ve got to look at the entire process of business decision-making. We need to look at the workflow. We need to look at the marketing that you’re doing, your business operations, and the assumptions that you are making that are reflected in your marketing. What I like to say is, if you want to increase profitability then everything’s on the table. You’ve got to look at the entire workflow designed to achieve your goal. 

So we start by looking at, what is your goal? 

Do you want to increase revenue? 
By how much do you want to increase it? 
Do you want to increase it by new customers or do you want to increase it by developing existing customers? 
Do you want to increase the average order on your website? 
Or increase upselling or cross-selling or even increase your sales close rate from lead generation? 

You see, all of these will require a different process to follow up on the goal. 

Here’s an example for our ExploreCalifornia site. If we want to increase our revenue by 500,000, well that is directly dependent upon a number of steps in order to get to that goal. In order to increase our revenue by 500K, we need to look at the value of an average tour. The average tour at ExploreCalifornia is about $450. Now just simple math tells us that we need to sell over a thousand tours in order to attain that amount of revenue. Well, let’s take it one step further. About 80% of our bookings result in a tour. We’ve about a 20% cancellation rate and so that means, we need to have almost 1400 bookings this year in order to achieve that 500,000 revenue goal. We’ll look back even further in the step prior to the booking and that’s the number of people that make an inquiry through the website. About 60% of those people that make an inquiry through the website, end up booking. So now we need to target about 2300 inquiries. However those inquiries, because they come through the website, we need to take another step back and look at how many visits we need to have based on our current visit to inquiry rate. The website has about a 10% response rate of visitors making an inquiry which leads to a booking which leads to a tour, which leads to revenue. Everything is dependent upon a prior step. This is the process. And in order to set a revenue goal, you need to understand the process that it takes to get to that goal so that we can measure the entire system. 

Now we can look at our existing channels in order to see where we are and compare that with where we want to be. Now, this is an existing channel of subscribers that we have, about 10,000 subscribers to ExploreCalifornia, and about 98% of our emails are being delivered. About 2% are not being delivered because people change jobs, they change addresses and the email addresses just drop out. So about a 90% delivery rate. We can look at the industry averages of an open rate or a click rate on the email, however, we can see that we have about an 8% click rate off of the emails. The next step in the process is bookings. So out of a thousand people that will click on the email, that will result in about 200 bookings. That results in 180 tours and our current revenue from existing customers is about $80,000. 

By understanding the existing channel, we can now set goals for how much we want to improve our revenue by looking at all the steps involved that affect our final revenue number. Look at how your business goals are reflected in your marketing. Know where you need to improve in order to affect your final goal.

Differentiating between acquisition and engagement

Now as we are developing our content plan, before we start publishing anything, we need to evaluate where we are going to publish it and what we can expect as a result. You see, every channel is different. Most people are ready to rush and start posting content because we’ve developed somewhat of a plan at this point. People want to know where should I post, how much time I should spend there, and we need to slow down and consider what we are trying to achieve. 

The first thing to understand is that not all of these channels are equal. People use these channels in different ways to accomplish different things. This gets to the old adage of, “The Medium is the Message”, which means how you receive information whether it’s a means of communication, or a device, or even an electronic channel, it will determine how much you will engage and how much information you will receive. Just think about the difference of how you will receive something through email as deposed to seeing an online ad, or even if you will receive a flyer in your mail. You’re going to evaluate that information much differently based on how you receive it. 

An example of this is a survey that was done on multiple E-commerce companies. They were trying to evaluate how different channels affect the customer lifetime value. They found that Search is king when it comes to not only getting new customers but how value customers. People that initially found the company through Search tended to become a higher lifetime value customer than any other channel. Conversely, Twitter is a more passive activity than Search. When you have a problem, you search for it, and if you find your answer, that was because you took an active approach to find your answer. On Twitter, it’s a bit more passive. These customers didn’t have a need but they responded to a promotion, and because of that, they ended up not being profitable customers in the long run.

People engage differently on different channels. It comes down to the context of the content and the competition for the readers’ attention, and your motivation to find the answer. 

You see, if you’re reading news on a blog or a news site, you are paying much more attention to the content. You’re interested in the content and everything around that content is very high in context, meaning if you’re on a new site, the links, the images, they are all going to flow with the content, and there’s a lack of competition for your attention. If you see a link in the content you’ll know that you can click on it to get more information; it’s there for reference or to provide additional resources. So, blogs, news sites, editorial information, are very high in context and very low in competition, which is why you will engage more. You will spend more time, you will read more deeply on those types of sites.

Now on the opposite end of the spectrum are our faster social media sites; Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram. These are very fast-paced but context is very low because you go from one post to the next and they can be about drastically different subject areas, and the competition for your attention is very high. Everyone’s writing snappy headlines, uploading creative pictures, trying to get your attention and get you to click on their post. As a result, there’s a very little context from one post to the next, and there’s a lot of competition for your attention. The result is you don’t invest heavily when you click on a link. Most visits from these types of social media sites are one page for a few seconds and then people are back into their newsfeed.

So the effectiveness of the engagement is determined by what you’re doing, what you’re looking for, and where you are. So, evaluate media based on what you want to accomplish. Are you looking for more sales? Are you looking for a response or are you looking to engage? That will determine what channel you will use and how you will use it.

Understanding messaging and objectives

A common approach by marketers is to use every channel at their disposal, especially the bright new, shiny ones because they’re the most popular, right? Wrong. Each channel and its corresponding tactic have a place in the marketing mix. 

Let’s start with your stated objective. 

What do you want to achieve? More sales? More leads? Are you trying to reach buyers in a specific stage of the customer lifecycle? For example, the AIDA model, awareness, interest, decision, action. After this, target your audience based on their needs at that stage, then define your primary goal and measurement of the campaign. An amount or increase of sales or leads, a better return on investment, a better target on cost per lead. Set your goals first. Then we evaluate the right tools, the right tactics for the right job. 

Here’s an example. 

If I am attempting to acquire new customers, then organic and paid search should be the primary tactics in that approach. Search engines provide the highest quality, most relevant and the highest number of visitors. Of all channels, search has the highest ROI and organic search provides long-term search results, which increases the return on investment over many years. 

Why?

Because search solves problems. 

When you or I have a need, we go to search first. Both paid and organic search is effective because it provides people with an answer to their in-the-moment needs, and they find you. Search is a great medium across the entire lifecycle: Discovery, comparison, or decision. 

Next: Social. Organic social media excels in engagement. It is a powerful tool to communicate and engage with customers that know you and like you. People on social media respond to shareable content, lists and image-driven content. Bite-sized posts gain quick attention and a quick response, but then the user moves on and continues to scroll. This makes organic search a good tactic for engagement, but poor in moving people to take action. Also, it is difficult to get organic traction beyond your followers, as all social media is ad-driven. The most effective social media ads are first-party retargeting ads, based on reaching people who have visited your website previously. It’s an excellent channel for reaching those customers and recovering those visits of people in the consideration stage. Social advertising is also effective in reaching targeted segments with relevant messaging. Behaviorally-based ads target people who have expressed an interest through a site visit or search. Social media advertising is more effective than organic social advertising in moving people to action. The more timely, relevant, and personal the ad, the better it can move a person to action. This is what makes LinkedIn a powerful B2B tactic. Ads can be targeted to specific people and businesses by targeting relevant groups, such as the business type, a position, a title, a location, or an education level. Ads can be more personalized and specific to industry pain points, issues, and benefits. But social has one major drawback. Those audiences are not yours. You are able to reach those audiences by paying, which means that they don’t belong to you. You’re only renting the ability to reach those followers. Now, if you can drive those social followers to register and subscribe on your website, well, now they are your audience. So let’s evaluate the channel that you own. 

While certainly not the last tactic, this is one of the most effective and has one of the best return on investments: Email. With an average return on investment of $42 for every $1 spent, email is the best means of marketing directly to the best audience, yours. You control everything in email, the message, design, call to action, the timing of when it’s sent, and the analytics are yours. If you want to build a long-term audience and loyalty, email is a cost-effective and marketing-effective means.

Before you decide on a channel, think about your goal. Target your audience with the right message, and choose the right tactic to deliver the right message for the results that you want to see.

5. Develop A Long-Term Marketing Plan

Understanding the purpose of content marketing

We’ve done a lot of research and a lot of planning and now it’s time to create the big picture. Content marketing is not just about writing blog posts or Facebook posts. It’s about developing content that you can use and reuse in multiple applications and formats. If you are like me, you are tired and frustrated by the amount of advice given to simply create content. People are tired of writing articles, even if they like doing it in the first place and here’s the problem. Most people don’t have the time to sit and write blog posts all day. Let’s approach this differently. 

First, stop thinking in terms of a linear funnel process and developing content based on that process. People’s actual behavior is completely fragmented. Forrester’s research created this guideline for the customer decision-making process. This is called the messy middle. We go to different sources. We consume different media and importantly, we have different levels of trust based on what we see, where we see it and how we view it. Now, I like to think of content as a meal. A content asset is like a big meal presentation that has a lot of side dishes, starters, and entrees. Like a holiday meal, it’s the big picture. However, this content meal does not need to be consumed all at once. Some of these ingredients and side dishes can be enjoyed independently from the entire meal or better yet reconstituted for an entirely different meal the following day. You see, these are the stories and facts that make up a part of the big picture. When you assemble some of those facts and explain how they work together, it’s a side dish or how-to information. 

What would be involved in developing a large content asset? 
First, I need to identify what potential needs would be met.
Second, who will likely use it or benefit from it?
And finally, how can I use this to communicate my company’s story? 

To build this, I’ll need to gather all the ingredients, images, information for my trail guides, explanations of plants, animals, scenery, or even historical facts and stories from the trail that people would use. These are stand-alone ingredients and interesting on their own but together they make up the larger context of the nature guide.

I gather how-to information from the experts in my company, local knowledge from trail guides, and stories and experiences from past customers. In a business-to-business application, these are your best practices, thought leadership, and onboarding materials. Looking over all the ingredients now we decide on the presentation. What is the best way to combine all of these ingredients and communicate this to our audience, images, videos, articles, reviews, podcasts, lists, infographics? There are so many different ways that you can take these ingredients, combine them and deliver that to a reader. As you can see, one content asset can produce dozens if not hundreds of shareable or snackable bites of information. The purpose of the hiking guide and the contributing ingredients and presentation is to create hundreds of engaging opportunities through multiple channels, all designed to inform, engage or move my prospects to a decision point. The same content can be repurposed to educate, guide, and follow up with new and existing customers.

Planning content assets

In this tutorial, we’re going to take some time and decide what type of content we should focus on. We’re building a content asset. We’re building a trail guide for the Explore California website. We need to look at what types of media you might enjoy. Do you like pictures, videos? What types of content get your attention, that you’ll engage with? But then, also, we want to look at what resources we may have available in-house and what resources we may have to bring in from the outside and plan accordingly. You see, when we look at our content asset menu, we’re trying to create the nature guide, but it requires a number of ingredients. If we want to focus on plants or animals, then we need to have pictures, descriptions, and explanations of all these and then figure out how are we going to present that? We have numerous options when it comes to content. It’s not just writing a blog post. It’s images, graphics, high-resolution photographs, collections, or lists. You can even involve recipes, white papers, video, audio, podcasting, and stories. You can even look at what you’re pitching to local media in order to get coverage. The list of content goes on and on. And it’s up to you to decide what are you comfortable with and what do you see as an engaging method of reaching your customers? 

So starting with wildlife, wildlife is a part of the nature guide that we’re developing. And we know that probably within about 30 days, we can plan about two articles that would be ready for the nature guide, but we do need more content. I’m putting that in green because that’s something we need to do right now, and we can do that in-house. Now, we can also turn some of these into blog posts on our website. We can also look at what has been generated by our current customers or users through our social media or through direct communication. We also want to talk to our guides, get information from them so that we know what’s going on as it happens. From an images standpoint, we can organize a photo library of things that we already have in-house. We can develop a library of what’s being shared with us from existing customers or from others in the area. If we want to develop audio or video, what do we need to do? You may have a camera, but do you have competency when it comes to scripting or editing video? What can you do in-house? And what do you need to plan for as far as hiring additional resources? As far as our how-to information, that’s where we bring our expertise. So when it comes to wildlife, we can have information as far as wildlife that is safe to get close to and wildlife that you just want to stay away from. We can look at what to do or what not to do around wildlife on a hike.

The key here is to give yourself time to plan. Schedule a time to complete each of these activities, and put it on a calendar. My content development rule is that if you don’t put it on a calendar, you won’t do it. So be sure you know what you want to do in the immediate term, content that you can develop now. Also, what is content that you need outside resources, minimal resources from the outside, over the next three to six months and then long term? This is content where you need outside assistance, you need additional investment, and it may be six months or more before you can develop that. Developing this plan will help you focus on your content, how you want to present it, and what needs you have, as far as what you can produce now and what you need to plan on for producing later.

Creating a long-term content calendar

Now we’re going to start to bring things all together. This is where you can bring together all of the worksheets you have worked on as far as what type of content, the topics that you can write about, and your resources, what you can do now, and what you need to plan for later. We’re going to centralize everything so you can see it in a long-term format. Now I’m just presenting ideas. You can use these worksheets, but customize them to your own business and your own style. I’ve just found that when people look at things differently, they think differently. Some people organize much differently than others, and seeing content in different formats can trigger creativity differently in different people. Now if my strategy is for search, to use that as an acquisition mechanism, that means I have to have my content online two or three months prior to the search trend when those keywords become more popular, and so I need to plan for that accordingly in my plan. Now if my strategy is also for social posting, whether it’s for awareness or engagement, I need to know when those trends are happening, and so understanding the peak time that that demand is in force, that’s when I want to have those conversations and I can plan for those. Also, engaging with my customers – the best time to engage with them is when they are in the moment. As we talked about earlier, the experience is the share, and so if we can get them while they’re in the experience to use our hashtag, or take photos of what we want them to take photos of, if we want them to submit stories, or give advice to future travelers, we need to talk to them when they are in the moment. And then in order to follow up and enrich our current customers or past customers, how often do we want to communicate with them or how can we repurpose content to communicate more effectively with our existing customers or our non-active customers? Here is what you’re going to need, Creating Your Monthly Calendar, Creating A Monthly Plan, and Creating A Daily Plan.

Now as I said, seeing things visually can help people process information differently. Take the trends data and map it out on a calendar. So each column is a different month, and this will give us more of a visual representation of when certain topics trend according to how people search for them.

So we can see that hiking trips spike in February and March. That’s when people are most actively searching for hiking trips. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t happen the rest of the year. This is just when it’s most popular. Hiking California is from February to August, and so by color-coding everything, we can color-code our content as we plan it, as we develop our strategy, but then also, by month, I’m putting any specific holidays or events that happen every single year. So we can look at the month of February, we can see the content that people were talking about, the events that will happen that month, and we can plan accordingly. Now you can also break this down and this is our monthly plan. So here we’re looking just at the month of January, and not just looking at the content, but what are we going to do about that content? In the left column, I’m identifying the important, in-demand content, desert hiking and desert survival. I’m also identifying the events, the content we’re going to address, and preparing for next month, the content that I know will peak in interest in February. 

I’ve also broken down, by week, what we are going to do in our content, what content we’re going to post to the blog, what content we’re going to post on social, what we’re going to communicate in email, and then also, what do we need to do in search marketing to plan for the next few months. We can plan out any hashtags we’re going to use, and we can plan out the content and how we’re going to repurpose that, whether it’s for the blog, the email, or for social posting. Now if you really like details, you’re going to like the daily plan. So, Create Your Daily Plan.

Curating content

In this tutorial, we are going to look at what to do with the content you’ve already created. This is called content curation. Now, what is content curation? This is where you plan for repetitive events or repetitive content that you typically will publish every year, especially if you have those events that happen all the time. You’re also utilizing the content you’ve created to repurpose, repackage, and republish and also utilizing content from other sources, such as your user community, and develop new content.

As an example, how do you deal with annual events on your website? Because the search engines will tend to rate the past year’s events higher than the current year’s events. Older content seems to rank better. So how will you deal with that issue? Now, you can create archives, or you could create a single page and just update the content every year. It’s something you need to address and plan for.

Also, how can you take content that you’ve already created and then repurpose it across different media or channels? Tutorial content is great. You can repurpose that across any social media. You can also cut it up and use little snippets of tutorial content and break that across different media. You can also take the transcripts that you’ve created from a podcast or from a tutorial and use that as an article or an update or even screen captures. As you’ve developed content over the years, go back and look at the themes of your content, because now you can take all those themes and organize them and create an ebook or a guide or a how-to, especially for business-to-business content. If you have thought leadership articles written about certain ways to use the product, bundle those together and create a single document, and you haven’t had to work hard other than reformatting and republishing. If anything about your business is image-oriented, ask your users for their best photos. Ask them for stories. Ask them for advice that they would give others. The feedback that you get can help you create content for the next year. And you can highlight this, on social media,  in your email, and on your site. Reader favorites, 10 best, what I wish I know, 10 things to avoid. All you’re doing is asking for feedback from your user community, republishing it, and you can use it across multiple channels. Ultimately, plan for that content that’s going to be annual on your website so that you can deal with how search engines will look at it. But also utilize your community and utilize the content you’ve already published so that you can repackage, retrofit, reformat, and create new content assets.

6. Turn cookies into customers

Getting the big picture

Up to this point, I’ve presented a lot of front-end marketing to get people to your site. However, we need to pull back a little bit and understand a bigger picture of what we can do to build our business. In driving people to your website, most people will not take any actions whatsoever.

Search will provide a significant amount of visitors to your site, but a lot of them are going to leave as soon as they get there, maybe because they saw their answer, or maybe because they didn’t. In general, only a very small percentage of people will take action on our website and register, subscribe, or buy something. And a lot of that is dependent upon how they found the website. You see, content marketing is just the beginning of the process. It gets them to the site, but here’s the key. When they come to the site, it produces data. Now, this data is important because what happens is that a small file called a cookie is placed on the visitor’s browser. Now, a cookie tracks your behavior across websites, search engines, and your interactions with advertisements online. It’s how we can target people effectively.

So if you visited our example site, Explore California, you will have a cookie in your browser’s file. Now, it will help me to get better website analytics because I’ll know when you visited, what pages you looked at, how long you were at each of those pages, and if you looked specifically at any content. I can also see how you found the website, whether it was through a search, a link, or an ad. Regardless of how you find my website or find a landing page, you’ll get a cookie on your browser. That tells me how you found it and what you looked at. Now, because of that cookie, I can now target you with an ad. I can show that ad to any user anywhere who has been to my website because they have that cookie on their browser. I can do this by setting up an ad campaign that will only show these ads to people that have visited my website. This is called retargeting or remarketing. I can also do this in business-to-business. This is the most basic start to gaining data on a potential customer and then nurturing the relationship to drive ultimately a conversion and further actions. This type of marketing can be used throughout a customer’s life cycle. The content you generate is typically used as a bait for these campaigns that then can be used to recapture leads. It can be used to retain customers or reward loyal customers. You can’t look at content as a one-time activity that ends when you press Post. Successful organizations that use content see the Publish or Post as the beginning of the process. They have a plan for how to push, promote, and optimize the content. They also have a plan to use that content to drive new prospects, educate visitors, recapture anonymous visitors who have been to the site but didn’t take action, reengage them, and also nurture new customers. 

So content is just the beginning. And utilizing data and technology, we can get our content back in front of people who have visited our website but not taken action. This is important because they have expressed a need, they have seen our content, but something caused them to leave. Getting our ads in front of them or an offer they may respond to, we can recapture that lead and bring ’em back to our site.

Retargeting visitors

Have you ever felt like an ad was following you around online? That is retargeting. Because you visited a specific website, you now have a cookie on your browser from that business, and because of that cookie, they can place ads in front of you, attempting to persuade you to come back. Retargeting is all about getting back in front of people who expressed an interest in a business. Whether they clicked on an ad or a post, just if they went to one of my web pages, I can deliver advertising specifically to them. Now I need to be smart in how I approach people. Based on their behavior, I have to sell them differently. Now earlier we looked at the big picture of how content marketing is used across the board in acquiring new customers, growing current customers, and building sustainable business growth.

Let’s look more in detail at the technology of retargeting. Retargeting enables me to reach those people who left my website without registering or converting as a lead or a customer. Now that means they are undecided but I can’t react the same way to all of those people who are undecided. I need to understand their behavior in order to determine their level of motivation. Motivation is the key. What they did on the landing page or on the website helps me to assess their motivation level, and I can assess that through clickable, trackable actions. You see, the longer you spend on a landing page, maybe you watch a video, download a PDF, or click to open additional content, all of those clicks can be measured, and then I can look to see how many visitors took specific actions and I can utilize that as a measurement of how motivated you are to find an answer, or if you might still be searching. In assessing motivation, I’m going to group the people that visited this landing page. Now usually about 2% will convert. They’ll sign up and book a tour. Typically about 40% will bounce out immediately, usually within about two seconds of going to the landing page. I’m going to ignore them. 

I’ve got now a little around 50% of my visitors, but they act completely differently. I have one group that I would say is a strong, motivated group. They did more than three interactions, such as watch a video, view more pages, or download a PDF, but they’re not ready to commit. So if I’m going to approach them, I know that they’re interested and so I’m most likely going to utilize an offer to get them to come back, whether to save money or a limited time. Something is preventing them from taking action, even though they have a strong motivation. Now there’s my next group that only took one or two interactions. Maybe they just watched a video. They’re not ready to commit, they’re still learning. they’re still gathering more information, and so their content need is going to be based more on comparison, gathering more information, and so if I put an ad in front of them, it needs to respect that motivation level. It should focus on giving them additional information or some of my content assets that they can enjoy and learn more about the company. Then there will be some users that just don’t have many interactions at all. I’m only going to focus on my strong motivators and my middle motivators. 

Now I can develop two separate campaigns, based on these two groups of people. So, my highly-motivated people, I’m just going to use an offer or an incentive, such as 20% off if you book in the next 48 hours. They’re highly motivated. They just need something to push them over the edge. Then, there is my medium motivation. They’re looking for more information, and so the ad that I will show them, based on their behavior, will focus more on listening to our local guides compare tours. Here’s what you’re going to see that’s going to be different. The beauty of retargeting is that: they are not just display-ads. You see, I can retarget people with a video. You’ve seen pre-roll videos. Before you watch the tutorial you want, you typically have a watch a 15- to 30-second tutorial of an ad prior to that. I can target an ad to a specific group of people based on their behavior, and give them a call to action. I can also target my ads to a device that you’ll only see on your mobile device based on how you’ve found my website. If you’ve found it on your mobile, then I can get an ad specifically for your mobile for you. I can control the time of day that my ad will show to you. I can control who will see my ad based on demographics and even your physical location.

Retargeting gives me an array of tools to reach you with a custom message based on the behavior that you exhibited on my website. Now I will say, this is marketing technology, so it does require technical expertise. In addition, it’s going to require those analytics to be set up properly on your website to track visitors, and their behavior so that you can have knowledge of what they’ve clicked on and what they’ve done while they are there.

Retargeting is a way to follow up with those anonymous visitors that leave your site, regardless of how they find it, but the key lies in understanding their motivation. If they are highly motivated, they’re going to take more actions that you can track, and then you can deliver a customized message based on their motivation level and bring them back to your website.

Designing effective landing pages

When driving people to your website, an effective way of getting them to take action is by sending them to a specific landing page that backs up the offer you made. This is your sales pitch. This is where you have got to present a compelling reason for them to take action. So your landing page is your primary sales pitch. This is where you want them to take action. You have literally seconds to get their attention and move them into a decision point. In order to do that, we need to present our offer very clearly.

The landing page has primary elements and these are really specific to not only the landing page but across our web pages as a whole, but here are some basic rules:

The heading at the top of the page.
This is where you can put your logo, a tagline, and a purpose statement. You can even put an image there. We call this the hero spot because it’s interchangeable and you can test it to find what works best. 

The call to action.
This is what you want people to do. Whether it’s register, subscribe, purchase, book, that is the big bold button that you present to people asking them to take action. Now, something to remember is we don’t always see the entire page at one time. If you have to scroll down, we call that below the fold, and so if your call to action is below the fold, most people may not see it. The content on the page. Now I don’t advocate having a lot of content, especially paragraphs of content because people won’t read it. They won’t spend enough time there. However, you do need to follow through with content that explains the promise you made in your ad, in your post, or in your offer. Secondary calls to action are things that we can track to find engagement to the page, to see if people are interested. These can be videos, downloads, or industry-specific pages, where they have to click to see more in-depth information. Now there are specific behaviors that are predictable. Believe it or not, we as humans can be predictable in how we look at web pages. One thing is the Z pattern. Our eyes tend to follow a specific pattern every time we go to a web page. They start in the upper left, go to the right, go down to the lower left, and then over again to the right. We don’t like to scroll a lot. We stay in that top spot, and because of that, we can do some predictable things. This is why you’ll usually see a call to action in the top-right because that’s where our eyes will naturally move. Now, something that can either assist that or hinder it is if you use pictures of people in your hero spot. Pictures of people will draw our eyes away from that predictable Z pattern because we always look at people’s faces, and even more, we want to look at their eyes to see what they are looking at, and if you can direct an image with pictures of people to your call to action, you can increase the efficiency of your landing page. If people are looking somewhere other than your call to action, it might actually damage your conversion rate.

The color red is good for getting someone’s attention. However, if you overuse the color red, that can distract people from the predictable browsing pattern because what you’re saying is, “Everything’s important,” rather than one thing being important. The great thing about landing pages is you can constantly test and optimize them. The worst thing you can do with a landing page is leave it alone. You can test your calls to action, you can test the size of your buttons, the color of your buttons, how much content you have, or test other ways that people can engage with your landing pages.

I’ve created a list of what you can do and what you should not do when designing your web pages or your landing pages even. They need to be big, they need to be bold, and what you want people to do needs to be obvious. Also, when using landing pages in an ad campaign, especially for retargeting, be sure if you make an offer to one group of people, that you send them to a landing page that reinforces and addresses that offer. Don’t send everybody to the same landing page. If you use a different offer or you have a different promise send them to that unique page that delivers on that offer or that promise.

A great example of a landing page is here at SalesForce. As you can see, they have their logo in the top-left, your eyes go to the right, and here they have their tagline, and then up in the top-right is the signup to watch free demo videos. What I love about this is they do use the color red but only in one place, and it’s critical. I’ll explain as we go on. Our eyes will naturally go down to the left, they define CRM, and then we go to the right, and here is our action button. Now it’s not highly contrasting but there’s a reason for this, and it’s because their conversion point is a form. This is typical for business-to-business. You are looking for registration and this way you can watch free demo videos. The reason why this is Red is that you have to fill out the form in order to see the content, and so it’s vitally important that they direct people back to the top of the form, get their information, and now they can have the conversion.

So your landing pages need to deliver on your promise and what you want people to do needs to be big, bold, and obvious.

Getting that email address

In all of your marketing activities, one of the most important conversions you can get is the email address. Email is powerful. It produces the highest return on investment of any digital marketing activity. It’s your audience, and you communicate with them whenever you want. It’s the audience you own. They have given you explicit permission to market. People prefer receiving promotional material through email rather than through their social channels. This is why people respond to email offers more than any other type of offer. The return on investment is incredible, especially compared to other channels. People see email as being the least intrusive of all channels. And because of smartphones, email usage is at an all-time high. This has led to companies trying different ways to capture emails on their websites, through the homepage, the email page, a checkout page. People are experimenting with all kinds of ways to get the email address.

One example of this is CheapCaribbean. And as you’ll notice, as soon as I go there, I get a homepage takeover. An image pops up asking me for my email address. Now, they’re not just asking for my email address. They are willing to give me $100 off my first trip. They’re exchanging value. This is the value of the email address. And in order to close this window, you have to click something that says I hate good times. 

You see, you can make your social channels work with your email channels. They don’t have to be at war. You can make them friends. A great example of this is Cook Smarts, when they are posting content, such as 10 Lessons I’ve Learned from Feeding my Daughter, and so they have something called raising healthy eaters. And if you want those resources, you have to visit this page. As you’ll notice, this is a landing page, and they are driving you to give your name and your email address. And so they are using Facebook, where maybe you’ll see the post, but driving people to become an email subscriber from Facebook. Now, also something you can do on Facebook is creating a custom audience. And in creating a custom audience, you can use your own customer file. This is where you take your own email list, and you can import it into Facebook. And in doing so, Facebook will match the accounts to the email address, and then you can develop an ad campaign that will go to only your subscribers. And because of that, you’re able to produce a multichannel campaign. And studies have shown that when you’re running both an email campaign along with Facebook ads to the same people, email openers were 22% more likely to purchase when they also saw Facebook ads. 

So realize that email marketing, while it might seem old and outdated, is still one of the strongest formats for nurturing customers and driving sales.

Stopping the blast

I think we’re all familiar with getting newsletters and blast emails from companies. I’m going to tell you why you shouldn’t do that. First of all, email is a toolset and it’s entirely possible to use a good tool improperly and that’s what happens with email. We have to understand how to use specific tools for specific purposes. My biggest rule about email is that it’s a conversation. Typically we use email as a blunt instrument and send the same thing to everybody rather than making it personal. In order to make the email personal, it needs to be conversational. And you can only be conversational when you speak to specific groups about issues they care about. 

You see not everyone cares about everything you publish. Here are my rules for making the email conversational. It has to be personal, it has to be relevant, and it has to be timely. You see being personal doesn’t mean I’m using your name. It means that I am answering a question that you have at that time, right now and I’m doing it in a way that’s respectful; that’s personal. Relevant means it’s important to you. You want this information in and timely means, I’m getting it to you when you want it. You see, when you produce communications that are personal, relevant, and timely, you do this through segmenting your email. You segment your emails to specific groups of people. This goes back to our personas; our need-based groups. And so if I email my persona group, and I give them the information they want, they’ll click on it. They’ll open it more than usual. Here’s a different kind of tool for email; and that’s the thank you email. I can send a thank you when people give me their email. A thank you when they book. A thank you after they have taken their trip. I can send multiple thank you emails and people respond to thank you emails. Thank you emails have two and a half times the open rate and three and a half times the click-through rate of regular emails. In fact, thank you emails produce six times the amount of revenue per email as other types of campaigns. 

A great way to use email is a welcome campaign. When someone gives you their email address, what do you do? It’s the start of a new relationship. You see a welcome series introduces your company to a new subscriber. Don’t think that they read all of the content on your website; this is where you can take some of your packaged content and repurpose it for a new subscriber. Educate them about your company. Tell them more about you, what you do, and sell them. This is where you can provide more thought leadership after a sale on how to get the most out of the product. You can develop again multiple welcome series based on what people have done. And also welcome series produce higher engagement. They’re more specific, they’re more timely, and they’re more relevant. As you can see here, people will open a welcome series more and they will click through a welcome series more than our traditional informational email or a promotional email. As I said, not everyone wants all of your content. You’ve got to segment your content to the right audience. 

For ExploreCalifornia, as I have news and information, I’m going to give specific hiking information to my hiking audience. I’m going to give spa and food content to my spa and food customers. If I have senior hikers, I’m going to produce very different content for them because I’m recommending different trails. And of course, family-based content, and activities for kids are going to go to my subscribers that have told me that they have families and they’re interested in family activities. And also when I send my emails, they’ve got to look different. You see, on the left is an email going out to my hiking audience; on the right, is an email going to my spa, and food tour audience. They look different, they use different images, and they have different calls to action because I want to tailor the message to the audience to whom I’m sending. 

Remember that email is a conversation; it works best when you are segmenting your list, and giving the right message to the right customer at the right time.

7. Measure and Modify Your Plans

Measuring the right things

What makes an overall campaign successful, as well as your business strategy, is measuring the right metrics that help you learn how you can improve your campaigns and adjust because it provides direct actionable information that points you to actions you can take to improve your campaigns. 

So, what do we measure? First off, key performance indicators. These are the metrics that surround the entire campaign but they provide an indicator of how things are going. They may not provide a direct count of success but it’s all of the surrounding information that points us towards the direction. Engagement tells us how much people are interacting with our content. But we need to look at it in terms of how it’s contributing to the overall campaign and ultimately, to our business objectives. Our ultimate measurements are how well we are increasing our business objectives of sales, gaining leads, and increasing registrations for gathering email addresses from subscriptions. 

In a survey where businesses were asked what they measure, I was amazed to see the top four things that businesses measure are key performance indicators: Website visits, social sharing, time on site, and SEO rankings, these are key performance indicators because they do not have a direct impact on the ultimate goal of your business. That is sales leads and subscriptions. They are extraneous factors that may have an impact but it’s not direct. The last two items, subscriber growth and sales leads, have a direct impact on your revenue. And I’m amazed that they are measured less because of the high value of impact when measuring those two areas. 

So where do we start with analytics? Most people are completely overwhelmed when they open up their analytics portal to see what’s happening. Measure your analytics alongside your marketing plan. Measure it alongside your content marketing schedule to see when certain content should be popular, and make sure your analytics show that people are coming to your site more frequently for that type of content. See what worked well, what drove actions, what landing pages drove people to conversions? See what content was shared and also, was it popular in driving people to your ultimate business goal?

One thing I do want to stress is the concept of engagement. Do you understand what engagement means? I think engagement is one of those words that has almost lost its definition because it means so many things. So I want to walk you through how to measure a specific campaign post.

For example, on Facebook. Now, here is our typical boosted post on Facebook where we’re trying to get people to download our spring nature guide. Now, a lot of people, they’ll post this, and they’ll look at the typical Facebook data, but if we want to track this to our ultimate business goals, there’s a lot we have to take into consideration. First of all, when we look at all the ways that people can engage with this post, it might be overwhelming. You see, typically we look at the likes, comments, and shares, but this is a campaign. We want to drive people to a landing page, but people can also like the page, they can go to our website, or they can go to our Facebook page. If I’m going to measure engagement, and I’m going to report on it, this is a key performance indicator. I take the cost of the overall campaign, and I divide that by the total amount of engagement, and that gives me my CPE, cost for engagement. In this case, the cost of the campaign is $2500, and I have 400 engagements. That means that I have spent $6.25 per engagement on this post. Now, the goal of my campaign is to get people to click on this Facebook ad and go to the landing page. And on the landing page, I want them to register. So the next stage in the process is the click. How many people clicked on the ad and how much did it cost me? So that’s where I will start measuring clicks. I’ll take the total amount of clicks on my ad and divide that by the number of impressions, or reach. That will give me my click through rate. In this example, I have 200 clicks on my ad, I divide the clicks by the number of impressions. In this case, dividing 200 clicks by 10,000 impressions gives me 0.02 or a 2% click through rate. That means on average about two out of every 100 impressions results in a click. In order to make this a bit more tangible, I can go beyond a rate of click calculation and measure my costs per click. The cost of the campaign was $2500, we received 200 visitors that clicked on the ad and went then to the landing page. That cost us $12.50 per click. Now, of course, this is a process, and it leads to our ultimate goal. They go from the ad to the landing page and then to the conversion. 

Now, the conversion is whatever you want people to do. Whether it is a subscription, a sale, a registration, or whatever type of conversion it is, we’re going to measure the goal. We start by taking the number of conversions and dividing that by the number of clicks. In this example, we have 10 conversions from 200 clicks on our ad. That gives us a conversion rate of 5% from our landing page. Now, again, to bring this into tangible costs, we take our $2500 campaign cost, we divide it by the number of conversions, and that gives us a $250 cost per lead. That means for 10 new names, we spent $250 for each new contact or name. This helps us when we are trying to optimize our campaigns or test different versions of landing pages, calls to action, or types of campaigns. 

By understanding the measurement and what you’re measuring, and how it then compares to other campaigns, you’ll be able to test and see what is more engaging, what is a good key performance indicator, and which campaigns ultimately contribute the most to your overall business objectives.

Visualizing your measurement process

In order to make measuring your goals easy, I find it better to visualize the entire process of what you’re trying to produce. If you’ve ever been in a meeting, and the focus of the meeting is a spreadsheet or a boring presentation, you know what I’m talking about. People don’t like analytics, because it’s rows of numbers. It’s endless charts. The key is to bring these numbers to life and show the context of what the numbers mean, the relationship to actionable information, and what you can do to improve your business. That’s what gets people excited. You see, the key is understanding the relationships between the numbers. Otherwise, it’s just useless, and it makes us fall asleep when people try to present a spreadsheet. Effective measurement has to have context of what you are trying to produce. 

If all your doing is an awareness campaign, then you are going to measure that by impressions, views, or recall. Do people remember seeing your ad? Because that was the goal of the campaign. 

If your goal is to engage, then we’re going to measure likes, shares, watches. We’re going to see how many people interact with the initial post because your goal is engagement.

If your goal is lead generation, you’re going to track how many downloads, how many click-throughs, how many sign-ups, how many registrations. You’re going to track the ultimate goal of your campaign, which is getting leads. 

Then, we get to return on investment. And that is our sales, our profitability, our revenue. And, when that is your goal, you are going to track that, and everything else above it is then a key performance indicator. It is a relational measure, but it doesn’t have a direct impact on sales. 

A good report shows the relationship from the impression level through the engagement level, to the lead generation, and the ultimate revenue produced. It shows the relationships from one stage to the next, and how your prospects moved through that funnel. Don’t let this overwhelm you. 

This is a visual representation of how most companies can visually track their marketing. 

For example, starting in the top left is Paid Media. If you’re doing paid display advertising, you can start by reporting the number of impressions, the typical click-through rate, and then compare to the industry average click-through rate, how many people went to the landing page, and then the average bounce rate. Then you can track that to visits to the website, and if they bounced, how well are you re-targeting them and bringing them back to the website. How many responses are you getting from the re-targeting campaign? How many of those move into leads, and ultimately into sales. On the left are all the different ways that you bring people to your landing pages and to your website. And then, as they register, they go into our email promotions, across the bottom of the page. And we can send different campaigns, and you track how influential the different campaigns are to bringing in your prospects back to the site or even delivering better messages to the customers that are already in your database. 

By understanding the relationships between the measurements, you’ll be able to see what’s working, what’s not working, and what are your most influential channels in producing revenue. 

Understanding the relationships is critical. 

Knowing that you have low impressions on an ad means that you’ve got to improve your targeting criteria. 
If you have low click-through rates on an ad or a social post, then it could be your headline, or it could be the image. 
Low engagement means that the content just isn’t strong enough. 

Understanding the relationships between the measurement and an action you can take to improve it is critical to improving your campaigns over the long term. So, be sure as you measure, that you associate the relationships between the numbers, and always provide actionable information as to how to improve your campaign.

Developing a 360-customer profile

As your business grows and as your marketing increases, you’re going to have to become more dynamic in retaining customer information. This is the importance of developing a good customer database. It’s going to answer the question of how to keep everything organized. Understanding who’s in what segment, what people want, what their interests are, and what they prefer is going to become more and more important as you try to deliver personalized communications. This is where the ability to store customer records, preferences and sales history is becoming more critical. 

The CRM, Customer Relationship Management software, is the next step in understanding and knowing your customers, predicting their needs, and rewarding your preferred customers. It is a centralized location to store your data and interactions with customers. Even CRM solutions can also bring in data from additional sources to provide an even more comprehensive view of your customers, tying in website behavior for your customers and merging it into their profile is one way to round out the complete view. For example, if I have a customer that has been a hiking customer for years but all of a sudden starts browsing the spa in the relaxation pages of the website, I can initiate a cross-selling campaign to that customer. I can add additional demographics as I gain more information through a point-of-sale system, surveys or interviews. And I can also create fields and categories specific to my business. If a customer provides a review or other social conversation about my business, I can add that to their record for additional insight. Building the database just enables a better understanding of the customer, the primary way this will result is in personalization, where you not only know the customer and refer to them by name, but you understand their preferences, their needs, their sales history and you respond to them personally rather than through a bulk newsletter email.

Businesses have found that when the customer feels that the business knows them that they have personalized experiences, it contributes to higher sales, more sales and increased loyalty. So when tracking behavior you can start to predict what content or information people will need. When you have the data in your CRM you can start to develop automated communications based on these customer behaviors. If an existing customer visits a specific tour page but does not book, I can trigger an offer to go out by email that same day with a limited-time offer. In this way, we’re having a conversation because I’m responding to the needs of the customer. 

As an example of an automation trigger, I can develop a triggered communication based on an action a user takes on the site. So if they subscribe and download the Nature Guide then the CRM will add them to my hiking list or subset and send them the nature guide and also put them on the thank you list and then a welcome series of emails to go out at an automated interval. The goal of a dynamic CRM system is to accumulate enough data on your prospects and customers that you can intelligently communicate with them on a personal level. The main thing is the ability to have that conversation with a customer because you have access to their data, their information preferences, their past transaction history, and expressed needs, and that way you aren’t guessing what they need; you can see it. 

The better you know your customers, the better you can anticipate their needs and communicate effectively. This allows you to also develop a loyalty and rewards marketing program because you have all of the history and sales history at your fingertips.

8. Next steps

Congratulations, you made it. You now have a better understanding of building an integrated, online marketing strategy. I hope this blog post has taught you that a few days spent in research and planning can save hundreds of hours of pointless activity. First, by planning your content, you can target specific marketing across the right channels and extend beyond your initial post. Feel free to modify, to make your plan work for your business. Second, don’t be afraid to fail. Learning from your attempts and applying those lessons will increase your effectiveness, as long as you know why it failed and what to do about it. Third, always let data be your guide. There will be no shortage of articles and headlines shouting about the next big marketing fad. Evaluate them in terms of what works for your business. Next, keep learning about human behavior. Test your ads, landing pages, content, and calls to action. Testing and improving your own marketing is the surest way to find success. Finally, customize the spreadsheets and organizational ideas I’ve provided. Make them work for you. If you’re struggling with any of the concepts in this course, go back and watch the videos again for clarification. Have fun telling the world about your business. And remember, when you know what works for you, why it works, and how to leverage data for increased profitability, you’ll be less prone to look outside for solutions.