Digital Marketing is the set of activities that a company (or person) performs online in order to attract new business, build relationships and develop a brand identity. Among its main strategies are SEO, Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing.
The concept of Digital Marketing may seem very clear, but at the same time, it is very subjective. How to understand such a broad subject? Any action of my internet company characterizes Digital Marketing? What are the best strategies? How to get the most out of these actions?
There is no doubt about the usefulness and growth of Digital Marketing in the coming years, and many people already know that. Is that you? Want to be prepared to know everything about this subject right now?
If your answer is yes, we will create this complete content so that you understand exactly what it is, its key benefits, the strategies you use, and how you fit in and can take advantage of it.
What is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is promoting products or brands through digital media. It is one of the key ways companies can communicate with the public directly, personally and at the right time.
Philip Kotler – considered the father of Marketing – conceptualizes marketing as “the social process through which people and groups of people fulfil wants and needs by creating, offering and freely negotiating valuable products and services with others.”
But the ways of making this happen change almost daily. That’s why it’s impossible to talk about marketing today and ignore that most of the world’s population is connected to the internet and shopping online.
This is why Digital Marketing is the main way to do and conceptualize marketing these days. The term is used to summarize all your marketing efforts in the online environment.
Using digital channels – such as blogs, websites, search engines, social media, email and others – companies try to solve the pains and wants of customers and potential customers.
Did you understand the “balcony” of the concept presented by Professor Kotler? It is a social process! It depends on the agreement between two people within a context.
Digital marketing can be done by people, companies, universities, NGOs, associations, churches… Thus, there are also cultural, psychological, geographical, legal factors that influence people when buying or selling a product or service.
And everyone must do what they can, by whatever means they have, to find the right opportunities in that environment!
Take a look at the concept of marketing and add an internet layer. This is the “spirit” of Digital Marketing! Digital media involve computers and the dominant form of digital communication is the internet.
The large flow of communication that the web provides today favors agile strategies such as Search Engine Optimization, Inbound Marketing and Content Marketing, as we will see in the next topics.
When we talk about growing our network, strengthening our brand and making better sales, these are all goals where Digital Marketing is an important tool to reach them.
To get there, digital media is the best way to observe and test the effectiveness of our actions.
That’s why Digital Marketing has the best available means of calculating the return on each investment, defining clearer and simpler metrics.
No wonder this concept is called new marketing.
Context
The nostalgia moment has come! In the 1990s, the internet experienced a wave of growth from which many of the world’s leading companies emerged (and many also disappeared).
We call this period Web 1.0 – when the first search engines, the first online sales, and the first communication software became accessible.
It was around this time that Google (in its most rudimentary form) emerged, as well as several other search engines, and ICQ, for example. It was during this period – the birth of the internet as we know it – that the term Digital Marketing began to be used.
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At the time, the web was only for the most enthusiastic people and companies, which is understandable. After all, there were also a few consumers there. But the network was acquiring traction and the technologies were getting sophisticated without our noticing.
In 1993, when the first clickable ad was published, the internet had about 130 websites up and running. By the late 2000s, when digital marketing became the foundation of what we know today, there were 17 million. It is worth mentioning that companies like Google, PayPal and Amazon already existed in this period!
Marketing Mix
Even being digital, we are still talking about marketing. And marketing, as a field of study, provides us with many tools that apply perfectly when we talk about Digital Marketing. Many of them can even be expanded to better fit the internet world.
For example, do you know the concept of 4 Ps of Marketing?
Also known as Marketing Mix, this concept refers to a product or service at four key points:
- Product;
- Price;
- Square;
- Promotion.
Thus, when applied to the digital universe, there are authors who extend this diagram to a few more elements.
5 Ps of marketing
Over time, the importance of valuing consumers as part of the strategy has added a new P to the concept of people.
In this context, companies began to consider more the purchasing power of the public when creating campaigns, understanding that these people need to be conquered not only by the product and what surrounds it but also by the brands.
8 Ps of Marketing
Finally, we reach the age of 8 Ps of Marketing, where besides Price, Square, Product, Promotion and People, we have:
- Processes;
- Positioning;
- Performance.
They became crucial to identify successful actions in Marketing.
In this sense, Digital was fundamental, because online actions allow people to evaluate the results obtained in a systemic and scalable way, contributing to making the actions even more targeted and strategic. We’ll explain later in detail how this works.
Key Digital Marketing Concepts
Just as each specialization has its specificities, digital marketing is a universe with its own terms. Before starting this post, let’s clarify each of these key concepts.
Persona
Contrary to traditional strategies, Digital Marketing works with the concept of personas, which are semi-artistic profiles based on their real consumers and who represent their ideal buyer. This way you can create more targeted and targeted actions for the right people, saving you time and money.
To create your persona and build your strategy, check out our Fantastic Person Generator
Lead
Leads are business opportunities. It is the contacts that, through an inbound marketing strategy, leave your key information so that you can identify your potential buyers and nurture them with relevant information until they are ready for the time of purchase.
Sales Funnel
The Sales Funnel, also known as the Consumer Journey, is the steps a person goes through during the buying process, from understanding a problem through buying consideration to decision making.
CRM
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a software that is responsible for effectively managing a company’s relationship with its potential and current customers. Among the many features that this type of tool has, the main ones are customer registration, registration of their information, preferences and last contacts made with your company and control of follow-ups.
These are lead capture pages, 100% conversion focused. The idea is that on these pages you offer valuable content or material and in return, the most interested visitors leave your contact information and thus become leads.
Search Engine Optimization or search engine optimization. These are the actions that help improve the ranking potential of your pages and content, helping you meet the main prerequisites required by search platforms.
CMS stands for Content Management System, or Content Management System, and is nothing more than a tool that enables the production, editing and publication of content in the online environment without the need for technical programming skills. This way, through a CMS it is possible to create websites, blogs and other portals in a simplified way.
CTA
The Calls-to-Action or CTAs are the buttons or calls that direct action that its users must meet to visit a page, to continue the flow of your sales funnel and to come to when buying prepared for consumption.
Nutrition Flow
It is a process of Marketing automation where a user action is a trigger for a message flow, usually by email, to help your visitor walk through the sales funnel.
Advantages of Digital Marketing
Why should digital marketing be a priority for businesses and what are the main benefits an online strategy can offer? In this topic, we will address this subject.
You may have realized how much Digital has changed the way you do marketing, and for the better, for both businesses and consumers. There are several advantages that can be economical for both of them, as well as closer relations between the public and brands.
Interactivity
One of the main reasons why Digital Marketing is increasingly adopted over traditional channels, especially offline channels, is interactivity with the public. The focus is no longer on the product but on the user experience on your shopping journey.
Companies run campaigns, publications and actions and, on the other hand, consumers can interact, give feedback and refer others with just a few clicks, increasing brand engagement as well as audience demands. Thus, it is increasingly necessary to improve the way you speak to your audience.
Analysis and measurement
Imagine the world in the 1960s, when the business model of marketing and advertising agencies was taking off. In this period, there were few methods of measuring the effectiveness of advertising campaigns and advertisements.
It can be said that, until the arrival of the internet, a lot of money was spent on inefficient actions! After all, if you can’t measure whether a customer has been convinced by your marketing activities to buy a product or service, it’s hard to tell if your strategy is effective.
In the world of online marketing, obtaining and analyzing data is a key step in continually improving your strategy.
Fortunately, today, absolutely everything must have its proven return. Metrics such as Return On Investment (ROI) and Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) can (and should!) Be analyzed in real-time.
Thus, companies can quickly identify failures by putting improvements into practice. That was unthinkable not long ago.
More Business Opportunities
On top of all that, narrowing the distances between companies and customers has literally helped a lot. After all, even small brands today can campaign well and attract consumers across town, across the country and around the world.
With that, consumers win. They have more opportunities to meet companies they identify with. The same goes for companies that can build good online positioning by increasing their selling opportunities across multiple channels!
Targeting
A lot of people might think, “Wow, I can talk to as many people as I can,” and yes, that’s great!
But one of the great advantages of Digital Marketing is that companies can now take actions to attract and win the right people! That is, those that really have the ideal profile to consume of your company.
This is a great benefit because, in addition to saving money – after all, you stop spending a lot of money on people who have no interest in your products and services through segmentation – you get to know your audience better and become more and more expert. in conquering it.
This is the secret behind the real value of digital marketing, and it is revealed for anyone to put into practice! Only one method is needed and we’ll talk about it now!
Digital Marketing Strategies
There is a multitude of ways to apply a digital marketing strategy. Understand what they are and how to make a choice that fits your business needs.
The increasing processing power of computers and Internet infrastructure has led us to a universe of possibilities. Just think about the volume and quality of content we have available today – most of it free.
Today, if I ask Google anything, there is a good chance I will get a satisfactory answer. And that answer will be contained in some content made available by a website. Isn’t it simple yet fantastic?
Following this logic, sites that contain lots of good answers are more likely to attract audiences and thereby gain more customers, increase their brand awareness and learn more about consumer behavior.
As mentioned in the previous chapter, many businesses are moving from offline to online marketing. Of course, this increases competition on the web.
As we said in the previous chapter, the secret is in the method. To reach your marketing goals, we need to find ways to get there.
But if the internet has infinite possibilities, how can I know I’m making the right decision? Don’t worry, you will now know the most current strategy in the world. Check out.
Inbound Marketing
Inbound Marketing is synonymous with attraction marketing. When creating an inbound strategy, your goal is to be found by people.
In inbound marketing, companies seek to understand the pains and needs of consumers and then establish a channel of communication with these people in order to offer a solution to their wants and desires.
Today, the Internet is full of tools to do research, discover public interests, and publish materials that help them satisfy them.
When this is continually practised, you create your audience by generating a constant channel of communication with them. In other words, the company talks to its audience, not just sends messages.
As a result, your publications are being sought by more and more people. Through this communication, it is possible to understand the increasingly specific interests of the public (and get ahead to serve them).
Today, the main way to get people to you is by creating content, that is, providing relevant information that solves real problems and is widely accessible. We call this strategy Content Marketing, which we’ll cover next:
Content Marketing
Consumers are daily looking for solutions on the internet, and most of the time, this search starts on search engines.
Content Marketing aims to position your brand in place at the right time of purchase journey to offer the best solutions.
Therefore, Content Marketing is the process of publishing relevant and valuable materials and information in order to attract, convert and delight an audience.
Remember that this strategy, if well done, can help triple Internet access to the company in less than a year, and bring many other benefits, such as brand recognition, authority creation and market education.
To do this, you need to spread your content across regions of the internet that appeal to your persona. There are some standard methods, such as a blog, company website, and social networking profiles.
However, there are ways to diversify your reach with different content channels. Here are some ways to do this:
Blog
The blog is the home of Content Marketing.
This is because it is exclusively your channel of communication with the public, without the interference and distractions that other channels such as social networks may have. That is, you can post anything you want, anytime you want, anytime you want.
Blogs are also very easy to edit and manage, making it easy for companies with small or large marketing teams to be able to tap into one strategy in a practical, cost-effective and fast way.
And last but not least, blogs are a great content optimization tool to improve your search engine rankings like Google. This improves the visibility of your business and extends your attractiveness to the right people!
Additionally, you can use some other channels like Medium and LinkedIn Pulse to build your audience accordingly. They work like blogs, with the disadvantages that they are not their own domains and have less ranking power, but are easier and more accessible.
Institutional Website
Many companies are content to have a blog or page on a social network. This is all very important, but it does not dispense with the need for an institutional website.
First, because it increases the credibility of your business. After all, when people come to you, they need to be confident that your business is serious and reliable.
Secondly, this becomes another channel where people can find you, and that is also yours and can help you get good search engine rankings.
It is also critical that your marketing actions direct people to a channel where they can request your products or services and finally consume from you, clearing their main questions. And this channel is, without a doubt, the institutional site.
Social networks
Few places provide both people’s interaction with brands and social networks. They are a channel created exactly for this purpose: communication, influence and dialogue.
Thus, having a page on the main social networks where your audience is has become indispensable: either to promote your actions and content or to let people know the “behind the camera” of your company.
In fact, this has become a pivotal point for consumers to choose a brand, which is to identify with companies beyond the product and service, but with the values and ideal behind them. And social networks are a great channel for this engagement to happen.
Social media is, as its name says, the media. However, the most important to cultivate are the nets.
And in the case of social networks, strategies have several purposes, as they are very important for branding and buzz and, at the same time, for traffic generation and conversions.
How to set a social networking strategy
An effective social networking strategy should generate significant participation in driving traffic to your domain, but at the same time, it is a channel for brand communication and outreach.
So let’s break it down into a few simple steps:
- Step 1 – Set goals and targets. Social networks also have a funnel and you should consider the relevant metrics at each step. The OKR methodology for measuring performance fits this case perfectly.
- Step 2 – Find the right networks. Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, Twitter etc. They are different channels and have their particularities, so the intention of users in each of them as well. Do research on audience profile, keywords and trends before creating a business profile.
- Step 3 – Create a Profile. Stay tuned for the correct sizes of posts and images on social media. Remember to use the design and tone of voice that meets your brand standards and focuses on the goals you set in step one.
- Step 4 – Perform a benchmarking. See what your competitors and related subject blogs are saying. If you have strong competitors, surely they publish a lot of relevant stuff that you should enjoy.
- Step 5 – Define a plan and an editorial calendar. This is necessary to organize the funds and to analyze the progress of the strategy. Apps like Buzzsumo are good trend and keyword research tools.
- Step 6 – Learn from the results. Just like blogs and websites, social media also have analytics tools. Use them to calculate your metrics and indicators.
E-mail marketing
Email Marketing is the process of sending commercial messages to a group of contacts obtained by a company on the internet.
It can be used as a method of strengthening your brand, sales, communication with customers and potential customers.
Direct user messaging is a unique tool and can bring very effective results. You can even segment your lists by following various factors, such as email open rate, responses, downloads of material, and more.
Building a mailing list
The first step to a good email marketing strategy is to build your email list, that is, to gain the contacts of the people who will receive your content. How to do this?
- Step 1: Choose good software to manage your lists.
- Step 2: Create an amazing offer such as a newsletter, discount or rich content.
- Step 3: Insert signup forms within your website or blog.
- Step 4: Develop a voice for your business and create engaging messages.
Email Types
Email is a channel of contact with customers and potential customers, right? This medium is a bilateral form of communication. After all, whoever receives emails can answer them!
That’s why there are several types of messages you can send, each with a different intent to your leads.
1. Informational Emails
This type of massage is intended to convey relevant information to contacts. If you have some firsthand news, want to spread a specific event or action, informational emails are a great method.
Generally, this type of email is shorter, seeking to send as much information as soon as possible. If possible, in the title of the message itself.
2. Nutrition Emails
Nutrition emails are those that influence the reader to take a specific action on your website or blog.
Often the customer journey may take longer than you would like. Lead nutrition can, therefore, accelerate this process and make your base more prepared for the moment of purchase.
Such messages should also be objective and lead the inbox user to your domain, providing content that will lead them to continue in the sales funnel.
3. Educational Emails
Educational emails are very useful and should be most of the content you send. Simply because educational content is one that focuses on solving problems and doubts.
Basically, this is the main reason why the user subscribes to your content.
Use it to submit relevant posts, materials you select, unique content, and whatever else your audience seeks.
4. Transactional Emails
This type of email is very important and needs to be used wisely. Emails that suggest a transaction or offer need to be sent in such a way that the recipient doesn’t notice any hype.
A good practice is to keep your email base always clean, only with users who are really considered personas.
In addition, transactional emails should focus on user conversion, which defines the message’s tone of voice, good call-to-action, and a direct link.
5. Newsletter
Newsletters are a recurring type of mailing. By subscribing to it, you expect your messages to arrive at a certain frequency. It’s like a newspaper where you can offer content, spread materials, write messages and dialogue with your base.
SEO
In a digital marketing strategy, being found in search engines is essential, right? And for that, there is a specific concept to get results organically, ie without paying for ads.
This is what we call search engine optimization, search engine optimization or SEO.
Today, search engines hope to deliver the best results for the user experience. There are several techniques you should apply to show search engines that your site can provide the best experience and thus improve your rankings.
Optimizing your pages means making them understandable to both people and crawlers. And that will depend on your performance on a combination of several ranking factors. There are two groups of ranking factors, which we will explain below:
SEO On Page
On-Page factors are those that can be optimized within your pages, such as title, meta description, internal linking, use of heading tags, etc. All of this enhances the user experience, but it is also read by crawlers like Google Bot.
So you can have very attractive content, but you have to demonstrate it to robots through data structures. You need to use code to reference your title, your meta attributes, your images, hyperlinks.
SEO Off-Page
It does not stop there! External factors also influence your ranking, such as your site’s load time, security parameters, incoming links, etc.
If you want to understand more about SEO and the different ranking factors, I recommend reading the Complete SEO Guide.
WITHOUT
Search Engine Marketing. That name says it all. Search engines are useful for digital strategies that involve organic or paid media. When you do a search, these engines will return you with a list of useful links, and some of them will be advertisements.
Therefore, search engine marketing is a very comprehensive process. Even SEO is contained in SEM!
Today, it is virtually impossible that Search Engine Marketing is not an important part of any internet marketing strategy. And for that, you must attack from all sides! When displaying ads or organic links, above all, search engines are concerned about user experience and that is how users who have business intentions when performing a search are hit.
In addition to organic growth, paid media offers unique growth opportunities. Analytics tools and techniques enable you to find your way to a positive return on investment.
And if investing in internet ads can bring much more profits than costs, why not try? ?
If we haven’t convinced you yet, learn a little more:
publicity
On the internet today there are three types of media:
- Acquired media: come from interacting with the audience, representing engagement, sharing, commenting and mentions.
- Possessed media: These are the ones that belong to someone, websites, blogs, social media profiles.
- Paid media: This is the promotion of your content through advertisements such as pay-per-click (PPC), displays, retargeting, social media advertising and content promotion.
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This media combination is what will define the best way to win over your audience. Never disregard any of them.
Of course, organic results are great in the long run, but they don’t have the same speed and options as online advertising. Check out some ad modes now:
Pay Per Click (PPC)
PPC is the purchase of media that is charged by the number of clicks your ad receives. The most common type of pay per click ads is search engines.
So on the Google results page, for example, there are organic and paid links.
If you are an advertiser, you can position your ad using keywords and variations of them. And when searching, you will find these sponsored links on SERP.
Display Ads
A display or banner is a mix of images and text. Display ads usually do not appear on search results pages, but on sites that are part of the ad network of your choice.
Retargeting
Retargeting – do not confuse it with Remarketing – are banners that appear to the user after visiting a site or taking action. Here, the idea is to get your ad remembered by people by resuming engagement with your sales funnel.
When you visit a particular site, for example, possibly more ads from that site will appear to you when you visit a site that is part of the ad network.
Content Promotion
Promotion is an interesting paid media alternative for content marketers. The web is full of amazing content and gaining prominence can be difficult.
There are free media such as social media. However, if you want to speed up this process, you can turn the call to your content into an ad.
This gives you a privileged view on search engines and social networks, and you can target the audience to whom they are shown.
Social Ads
Just as there are ads in search results, they can also appear on social media. The Facebook network – including other media such as Instagram – has its own network of advertisements.
Thus, according to your preferences, interests, and profiles you visit, the network will display ads specific to that user. Each of the social media has different targeting options and this makes all the difference in the performance of these ads.
Affiliate Marketing
A very common way to monetize digital marketing is through affiliates. If you sell a product or service, you can create a network of blogs and websites that can market your product in exchange for a commission.
Similarly, if you own a blog or website and get a lot of traffic, you can be paid to facilitate or generate sales for a producer. This is usually done through a banner or sponsored content.
Lead Management
Managing leads means tracking and leading prospects from the first conversion to sale and after-sales. This subject of digital marketing is also known as customer acquisition management or contact management.
Also, lead management is often confused with lead nutrition. We’ll see that lead nutrition is a part of the lead management process.
Check out the steps in this process:
- Lead Generation: This is the art of finding users potentially interested in your business. Lead generation occurs at tactically positioned conversion points in emails, ads, content, tools, etc.
- Generating Qualified Leads: More than simply generating new contacts, qualified leads are those identified as sales leads. They are more “advanced” people in the funnel.
- Lead Qualification: Qualifying leads means analyzing them more accurately, ranking the best opportunities according to their recorded behavior. Marketing and sales teams often have contact qualification specialists.
- Lead Nutrition: Nurturing leads means delivering relevant content to your contact base to get them going through the sales funnel. Today, email is a very effective method of lead nurturing, but there are some exciting new features, such as account-based marketing.
As your lead base grows, your lead management process needs to become scalable.
A contact base can reach hundreds of thousands and even millions of people. This leads to the need to deal with more robust systems, complex activity tracking mechanisms and standardization of sent messages.
It does not stop there. Even after the sale, customers are still leading within the base. After all, you need to find upsell, cross-sell, and customer retention mechanisms.
Keep in mind that the sales funnel doesn’t end with the sale, but at the moment when customers become brand advocates.
If you want to create custom messages, segmented according to the different contact profiles present in your base, you need to resort to technology. The higher the number of leads, the more complex this management becomes.
For this, automation software is essential from a minimal level of performance.
Automation
As we mentioned, managing a large lead base is very difficult. To communicate with thousands – maybe millions – of people, you need a tool that can organize and track all these records.
That is why, more than one technique, marketing automation is a type of digital marketing technology. Through it, you can expedite all these needs.
Often this software has solutions for creating workflows and communication. It’s like a mix between storage systems, data analysis and contact engagement.
In this way, you can segment your base in relation to your profile, behavior, and actions taken, and – for each of these criteria – provide a number of incentives for conversion and ultimately user enchantment.
The competition for the best automation tools has grown a lot and this market has been very promising in the marketing world. By 2025 this market is estimated to reach a capitalization of over $ 7 billion!
Conversion Optimization – CRO
One of the most used terms in digital marketing is conversion, right? The process of bringing the audience to your contact base and getting them to the bottom of the sales funnel.
The goal of conversion optimization – or Convert Rate Optimization – is to find out where conversions are not being leveraged properly within a blog or website. And the best ways to do this are data analysis and testing!
Before making a decision on what modifications to make to increase conversion rates, a CRO professional performs a logical diagnosis. It is divided into five steps, described below.
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1. Raising Hypotheses
CROs generally have means of obtaining data across all their channels. Tools such as Google Tag Manager allow users to install tracking applications on multiple websites and blogs at the same time.
Thus, it is possible to understand why there are people who visit the blog but do not proceed in the funnel. From there, simply create actions focused on the audience that really wants to be part of your network.
2. Key Metrics
Once you’ve raised a hypothesis, it’s time to turn that idea into a measurable one, and it’s not an easy task!
Using the right tools, we can get all kinds of data. So many, we can even get lost in so much information – and this is serious! Looking at the right metrics will save you a lot of time and money.
Of course, anyone wants to generate more revenue, have more and better customers. But to do so, you need to find out what generates the most revenue and break them down into measures for each step of the buying journey.
Marketing metrics can, therefore, be broken down by sales funnel from attraction to after-sales!
Conversion Metrics
Why optimization for conversion? It’s simple. There is a direct relationship between the number of conversions and the amount of revenue your business generates.
And on any page, there is a multitude of reasons why people don’t convert.
Therefore, investing in conversion improvement points will reflect on some important numbers, which are:
- Number of Leads: Represents the number of leads generated. This metric acts as a performance parameter over time. After all, your traffic tends to grow and your lead creation rate should keep up with it.
- Cost per lead: CPL determines the quality of the leads you receive. Therefore, the cost of generating a new lead should always remain low relative to the cost of acquiring a new customer.
- A number of users: Thousands, maybe millions of people will convert to your pages, but is this number large or small compared to how many users are browsing your domain? This is what this metric seeks to answer.
- The lead conversion rate for sales qualified leads: Finally, we can’t ignore the funnel. Not all leads are at the same stage of the buying journey, so this stage that moves between the middle and bottom of the funnel needs to be observed.
Revenue Metrics
Revenue metrics should not be viewed separately from conversion metrics. The purpose of the conversion is to take the user to the purchase and here we will differentiate them by methodological issue.
- Customer acquisition cost: A marketing strategy can have costs in time, money and other resources. Therefore, we need to calculate how much we spend on average to acquire a new customer.
- Lifetime Value: Also known as LTV, it represents, on average, customer-generated revenue over its entire life cycle.
- Number of Customers: Since we are talking about a funnel, it is natural that there are far fewer customers than leads. As such, this metric answers which of your conversion points generate the most customers and whether the number of customers is aligned with revenue.
- Profit: Finally, conversion optimization should impact profit. This number will tell you if the investments and costs have been worth it. Remember that negative profits represent losses.
3. Calculating relevance
Before a conversion optimization process is implemented, you must first define what reliable results are.
Therefore, you must have a defined population and reasonably sized samples to conduct the tests.
And this is no easy task. In a very small sample, the results become very sensitive to variations, whether positive or negative. However, a very large sample – although not statistically bad – can be a waste of time and resources on testing.
4. Creating Tests
Creating tests is an art. In fact, this subject can yield an entire book. Thanks to digital media, you can perform dozens (sometimes hundreds!) Of tests at the same time.
Thus, the testing phase can be divided into other smaller phases.
Preliminarily, several hypotheses are tested. After collecting the results, the best ones are carried forward, but the process doesn’t stop there.
Then, assumptions are made as to how the best results can be worked on to generate even more results by restarting the cycle.
Only when the best results have positive improvements will the CRO professional have sufficient evidence that definitive improvements have been implemented.
5. Analyzing Results
Although it does not seem, this phase is quite complicated. Not only for data visualization but also for the confidence in the process. To achieve reliable results you need:
- Set up all conversion steps. This often involves a lot of software, and you need to make sure that the results that come to you are correct. An error at the beginning of the process will confuse who analyzes the data.
- Look at the correct metrics. Many leads do not necessarily mean more revenue. In contrast, leads that become customers whose acquisition cost is too high will not always be good business. This varies for each segment and only those who analyze the data can set the best parameter.
- The correct analysis of the results will define decision making. Analyzing them incorrectly can lead to inefficient or even harmful actions and, even worse, totally confuse the marketing team.
So you need to check each conversion point, make sure the information is coming correctly to your CRM or marketing automation software, and question even the most obvious assumptions.
Other channels
Podcasts and audio posts
Audio content is a growing trend, especially with the popularization of podcasts.
They allow for greater user-friendliness as they can be accessed, for example, from a mobile device for listening while walking, driving or just away from a computer.
In addition, it is worth remembering that Audio Marketing is one of the big bets of the future, mainly because of the emergence of virtual assistive technologies such as Alexa from Amazon and Cortana from Microsoft.
Tools and Apps
Applications are extremely interesting for many niches. They allow greater interaction between the user and brands, as well as being a unique space for the company.
With them, you can encourage the user to stay in touch with your domain longer and increase the value perceived by the public.
Push Notifications
An example of a definitive tool for improving your site results is push notifications.
Basically, they act as small clickable alerts that appear on subscribed users’ devices and may contain CTAs for blog posts, rich material, landing pages, and more.
By serving as an alert type, these notifications ensure high conversion rates and can work on both desktop and mobile.
Chatbots
The chatbots, robots automated communication, are excellent tools to add to your digital strategy.
In addition to assisting in the process of optimizing customer service on websites and social networks, these bots can be used to improve customer and lead relationships, disclose important information and even generate sales.
Blogs and partner sites
Posting materials linking to your domain on other blogs has become an essential digital marketing tactic. Remember that the volume and quality of backlinks are important ranking factors in Google.
So you can create relevant content to post to a partner’s blog, for example. So everyone wins.
Digital Marketing Plan
To create a digital marketing strategy, you have to start by setting goals, right? And for you to achieve your marketing goals, the best way is to plan different possible actions.
In trying to predict possible scenarios and document an action roadmap, we are talking about creating a marketing plan in which all possible sources of information are used.
For example, if you want to drive more sales, a marketing goal might be a percentage increase in the number of qualified leads.
From this, considering your persona, your available resources and the scenario your business is in, you can come up with a plan to make that goal happen!
But how to unite so many elements at once?
It may seem very complex, but there are some steps that are proven to help (a lot!) In structuring a plan.
1. Goal setting
When defining a plan, it is important to cover different types of goals. This is because often larger goals depend on the achievement of several small goals. This is what we call the main and secondary goals.
In addition to complexity, time is also very important. Therefore, good planning addresses short, medium and long term goals.
This being the first step in a marketing plan, its relevance is invaluable. Wrong goal setting can compromise the overall strategy.
And to eliminate this possibility, there is a very popular framework for this, SMART. SMART is an English mnemonic for the essential characteristics of a marketing objective.
Therefore, a marketing objective is relevant as long as it is:
- Specific: Everyone involved should have a clear understanding of what it is.
- Measurable or measurable: It makes no sense to create a goal if it cannot be measured or has subjective criteria, right?
- Actionable or attainable: Easy goals lead to wasted opportunities, and too hard goals can demotivate the team. The most elaborate goals are both challenging and realistic.
- Relevant or relevant: When setting a goal, make sure it is crucial to your business.
- Time-bound or temporal: Every goal must have a deadline to reach. Of course, goals for a month, quarter, or year have different characteristics.
2. Creating Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Goals always come with indicators. However, in a sea of information, one needs to look for the right indicators. They will show if you are taking the right path to reach your goals.
KPIs or Key Performance Indicators represent exactly this concept. KPIs are absolute numbers or percentages that can be measured, analyzed and of direct importance to your business.
For example, do you have a goal related to traffic generation? So the minimum daily visits to your site or blog is a valid indicator.
Remember that KPIs can be indicators of any nature as long as they are measurable and relevant. Marketing metrics, for example, can be key indicators, as we will see below.
3. Persona Detailing
When we talk about personas at the beginning of this article, we highlight the importance it has for a strategy. Here the argument is a reinforcement: invest time and resources by working out a detailed persona.
Search for users in your lead base, social media people ( LinkedIn and Facebook are great for that), and internet searches. If you already have a documented persona, you can expand it!
In addition to questions such as “what are your problems?” Or “how can we help the persona solve these problems?”, Exploring extra topics can be very illuminating.
Want to complement your persona analysis? Ask “What books does she read?”, “What are her favorite influencers?”, “What events does she attend?”, “What software does she use?” And others. Deepening your persona will always result in identifying more and better opportunities.
Digital Marketing Metrics
One of the main advantages of digital marketing is being measurable. Thus, the ability to document and evaluate the strategies used enables an understanding of the strategy and data-based decision making.
Before the internet, proving the value of a marketing action was far more difficult. Lack of knowledge motivates bad decisions.
And, for you not to make them and make the best of all your efforts, setting measurement parameters is essential. It is impossible to succeed without using them correctly.
Listed below are some of the most important marketing metrics, but we also recommend that you study more when creating a strategy.
The best way to start looking at the right metrics is to get some data from your blog or website. Common metrics used in a strategy are:
- Unique Visitors: How many people visit your page. Each visitor is counted only once within the given time period.
- Sessions: This is the set of interactions, such as page views and clicks, that the same user performs over a given time period.
- Organic and Paid Traffic: Represents the number of sessions that originate from search engines and paid web campaigns.
- Bounce Rate: This is the percentage of users who visit only once without any other interactions, such as clicks and page views.
- Conversion Rate: This is the resulting percentage between the number of visits and the number of conversions made.
- External Links: This is the volume and quality of links coming from other domains that lead to your site or blog.
But these are not the only marketing metrics. In fact, knowing all the metrics and choosing the ones that best fit your business should be a step in your planning.
So let’s do a thorough study on some of them below:
Return on Investment
This is a factor that is directly linked to the profitability of your strategy. The ROI is a comparison between how much you’ve grown in sales and how much you spent.
Thus, the ROI formula is:
ROI = return – investment cost / investment cost
Suppose that, all costs together, your total content marketing investment was $ 100,000 over 1 year.
During this period, this strategy accounted for 120 sales with average revenue of $ 5,000, resulting in an ROI of 5 or 500%.
So, for every dollar invested in this so-called Content Marketing strategy, 5 dollars returned in the form of profit – which would be a great result!
Customer Acquisition Cost
CAC is nothing more than the relationship between the number of customers and their spending on digital marketing. This metric seeks to answer the question, “How much do I need to invest to attract a new customer?”.
Thus, it is calculated by dividing their costs for customer acquisition by the number of new customers in the period.
Assuming a company spent $ 100,000 on marketing in one year and acquired 120 new customers that year, its CAC is $ 833.33.
Recurring Monthly Revenue (MRR)
Also known as Monthly Recurrent Revenue, is a way to predict the revenue generated. This metric is very common in businesses that involve subscriptions, as they assume periodic payments.
This facilitates performance analysis, especially when your products come in a wide range of prices.
For example, think of a contract being paid in instalments. If a customer purchases a service for $ 5,000 for a year, divided into 12 installments, then the generated MRR is $ 416.67. Add that to all other customers and this will be your company’s MRR.
This calculation allows you to see the pattern in which your business is growing in terms of revenue.
Cost Per Acquisition
Unlike customer acquisition cost, this is a comparison that may vary. An acquisition is actually defined by the business owner. It can be a new contact, a new lead, or a qualified lead.
As mentioned, this metric is common in lead generation campaigns. This is the sum of your expenses and contacts acquired over a period of time.
An interesting tip is to compare your CPA with the revenue generated on each purchase. So if your CPA is higher than RPA, it is an indicator that your strategy is failing.
Cost Per Lead
Cost per lead, as its name explains, demonstrates how much you spend to generate a new lead. It can be a metric similar to CPA, but applicable to only one type of contact.
Lead generation is a recurring practice in digital marketing strategies. We already said how important lead management is, isn’t it?
More leads represent more opportunities, so we need to measure them! CPL is the metric for looking at your efficiency, your spend, and your projected lead generation.
Retention Rate and Churn
No one wants to get rid of a customer, right? Therefore, it is important to look at how many of them are leaving any month, year or period.
Retention can be calculated using the total number of customers at the beginning and end of the period along with the number of new customers.
Retention Rate = ((End-of-Period Customers – New Customers) / Early-Period Customers) * 100
The retention rate is always equal to 1 – churn rate. That is, these numbers represent the same thing from different perspectives.
Here’s an example: If you start a month with 120 customers and close it with 130. In that interval, you have gained 20 new customers and 10 cancellations. The result will be 10 extra customers.
This means a retention rate of 91.67% of your customers, or a dropout rate of 8.33%.
Channel Traffic
A digital marketing strategy today uses multiple acquisition channels. Several of them are available and have a consolidated audience volume.
From organic searches to social media, paid campaigns, etc. Each of these channels will have a stake in the number and quality of visits your domain receives, and hence the number of sales it generates.
Therefore, it is important to check how well each of your channels performs to understand how your results are doing.
New Sessions
Sessions are calculated, by default, by engaging a user for up to 30 minutes. Therefore, if you visit a site twice within 30 minutes, this is counted as one session only.
However, after 30 minutes from the first visit, it will be counted as a new session. When your content is highly attractive, new and returning users will often visit it.
Digital Marketing Tools
Another aspect that positively differentiates Digital Marketing from traditional options is the various tools that can help you manage and measure your results across all channels.
Digital marketing tools will help you filter the most important information, understand strategy development, generate reports, and track numbers. But this is only possible if you understand exactly what your goals are with each marketing strategy and focus on the numbers that really matter.
So let’s list some tools and their different uses so you know exactly what and how to choose the best options for your team.
Check out these and other marketing, management and sales tools.
SEO Tools
SEO involves a number of strategies and therefore there are different purpose tools to be able to execute a good optimization plan to achieve good search engine rankings.
Keyword Search
These tools allow users to find keyword opportunities for their strategy and identify the competitiveness and search volume of those words.
Some of the main keyword tools are:
Technical SEO tools also have various functions such as checking domain authority (yours and your competitor), finding and correcting SEO errors and finding duplicate content, among other functions.
For technical SEO, good tools are:
Backlinks
Backlinks tools are important for checking the links you receive, the quality of those links, and analyzing links that should be removed or redirected.
Good tools for checking your website backlinks:
Analysis Tools
Analysis tools are fundamental to understanding strategy success and results.
Metrics Analysis
In addition to tools that already have their own analytics, which is increasingly common, some analytics tools can be used strategically to understand different points of the strategy and have an understanding of the whole.
They allow tracking factors such as traffic, source of traffic, the path of users through the site, among others.
Good examples are:
Concurrency Analysis
To keep track of the results your Digital Marketing strategy brings to your business, it’s critical to analyze your competition and identify points for improvement and learn from them.
These tools serve to make comparisons of keywords, backlinks, traffic, engagement, and more.
Some of the most popular tools are:
Design Tools
Design is critical in our daily lives and would be no different in a digital marketing strategy. Visual content is increasingly a trend for online communication.
Imaging Tools
The look of a website or blog is critical to success and to generate a connection with the reader. Finding a visual identity for your business is important and design is key to that.
Many companies struggle to make an initial investment in design, so good tools are free image banks.
In addition to these, we have some essential tools for editing, creating and processing images such as:
Video Tools
Besides images, videos are one of the most consumed types of content on the internet and one of the most loved by the public.
Investing in a video strategy can greatly enhance your marketing strategy.
Tools for editing videos, adding effects, creating vignettes, making motion graphic, among other things
Among the most popular are:
CRO Tools
Understanding the conversions of your site and your online strategy as a whole is essential.
Good tools that enable this are:
While the former makes it possible to integrate information and track your contacts along the journey in your domain, the latter offers heat maps to identify which are the best points of your site or blog and which ones can be improved.
Automation Tools
Automation tools are used to integrate your strategy, send emails, manage your leads, and facilitate contact between marketing and sales. They also allow the creation of A / B tests, creation of workflows etc.
Good automation tools are:
Internal Relationship Tools
Internal relationship tools are very important to facilitate communication between different sectors of the company. The two most suitable tools are Slack and Zendesk.
While Slack is a messaging channel, functioning as a corporate WhatsApp, Zendesk allows ticket opening to troubleshoot and centralize information.
Social networking tools
Social Networking tools are critical to the success of a Digital Marketing strategy. They allow post scheduling, metric tracking and strategy centralization across different networks.
To professionalize your social media strategy, it is a good idea to use tools like:
This topic is especially important for big teams, but it is important for all companies. Integrating different sectors and coordinating the tasks that are required to achieve a goal becomes easier when there is a timeline and good planning.
In this sense, good tools are
Email Marketing Tools
We could not leave out the tools of Email Marketing, because this is one of the most fundamental elements of every successful digital strategy.
With that in mind, check out the tools we like best and use here at Rock:
In addition, some automation systems, such as RD Station and Hubspot, can also be used for automatic email triggering.