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Objective:
Apply key concepts from the Marketing
Communications Strategy to a real-world business or organization. The goal is to
analyze and develop a strategic marketing communications plan based on the theories and
frameworks discussed in class.
1. Select Business: www.wbcchurch.org (Example I want to use)
2. Conduct Research: Utilize course materials, case studies, and external sources to
gather insights on the company’s marketing communications strategy.
3. Develop a Strategic Plan: Apply key marketing communication concepts to
propose a comprehensive strategy that improves or expands the current approach
5. Sources from Textbook to use:
https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/foundationsindigitalmarketing/?s=types+of+mobile+marketing
Keep Calm and Be Platform Agnostic: A Content-First Approach
Reading: Cultural Factors Shaping the Global Marketing Environment
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business
Format: APA, 2000+ words (intro,body,conclusion)
NO Ai (Turnitin is used)
DUE: April 15, 2025
Digital Marketing Strategy
Digital Marketing Strategy
PIERRE-YANN DOLBEC
MONTREAL
Digital Marketing Strategy by Pierre-Yann Dolbec is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, except
where otherwise noted.
Contents
Introduction
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
1
Acknowledgments
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
4
List of Figures
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
5
Introduction to Digital Marketing
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Overview 11
Creating Value in the Digital Age 15
11
Understanding the Digital Consumer
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Overview 23
Understanding Consumers Through Personas 23
Rethinking the Consumer Journey 29
Understanding Consumer Journeys 31
Zero Moment of Truth 36
Journey Mapping 39
Exercises 41
23
Planning for a Digital Marketing Campaign
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Overview 45
SEO 46
Understanding How Consumers Use Keywords 62
Using Keywords to Analyze Competitors 66
Exercises 70
45
Introduction to Digital Strategy
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Overview 73
Inbound and Outbound Marketing 74
Paid, Owned, and Earned Media 75
Objectives, Goals, and KPIs 76
Strategy and Tactics 78
RACE Framework 79
From Persona and Journey to Strategy 83
From a Journey Map to a Conversion Path 86
RACE for Competitive Analysis 91
Exercises 97
73
Reach: Generating Awareness and Attracting Visitors
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Overview 100
Reach 101
Landing Pages 101
Paid Media Activities 111
Social Media and RACE 121
Exercises 129
100
Act: Creating Content
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Overview 132
Creating Content 133
Structuring Content Creation 139
RACE and Content Marketing 143
Pillar Pages 147
Content Calendar 156
Exercises 157
132
Act: Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Overview 160
ACT 160
Leads and Lead Generation 161
Lead Scoring 168
Lead Nurturing 172
Exercises 183
160
Convert: Conversion Optimization
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Overview 185
Convert 185
A/B Testing 190
Conversion-Centered Principles 193
Remarketing and Retargeting 212
Exercises 216
185
Engage: Building Loyalty and Co-Creating With
Customers
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Overview 218
Engage 218
Customer Lifetime Value 219
RFM Analysis 223
Net Promoter Score 226
Engaging Customers in Co-Creation Activities 227
Exercises 231
218
About the Author
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
233
Versioning History
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
234
Appendix: Text Descriptions of Figures
Figure 2.2 Types of Segmentation? 235
Figure 2.3 RV Betty? 236
Figure 4.2 KPIs Example? 237
Figure 4.3 AARRR? 237
Figure 4.4 RACE Goals? 237
Figure 4.8 Conversion Path – 2nd Example? 238
Figure 4.9 RACE? 239
Figure 5.18 Longtail Keywords and Conversion Rate? 240
Figure 5.19 Facebook Ad Objectives? 240
Figure 6.13 Content Calendar? 241
Figure 7.10 Email Automation? 241
Figure 8.2 Funnel? 242
Figure 8.20 Landing Page Evaluation? 243
Figure 9.2 Value Chain? 244
Table for Exercises in Chapters 4?, 5?, and 6? 245
235
Introduction
PIERRE-YANN DOLBEC
The internet has digitalized our lives: we now create and meet
others in online communities on websites such as Reddit, Imgur,
Facebook, or NikeTalk. Our relationships with our friends and
families have expanded to digital channels such as WhatsApp,
Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. We forge new relationships
through dating apps such as OkCupid and Tinder. We become
microcelebrities on Twitch and YouTube. We consume other
people’s lives, we talk to strangers, and we project public personas
on social media platforms.
The internet has also transformed how businesses conduct their
activities and how consumers go about buying products. Whole
industries, such as music and travel, have been radically reshaped.
In order to be successful digital marketers, we need to go beyond
simply translating the methods and processes that used to be
successful for traditional media. We need a drastically different way
of thinking about approaching consumers and selling products.
The objective of this textbook is to provide a way of
conceptualizing how to do marketing online and a strategic
framework to do so. Throughout, real-life examples, learning
exercises, videos, and additional resources are offered to cement
and expand your learning experience.
The first section of this textbook explains how the internet has
transformed the ways firms create value and how consumers
experience brands and products. In this first section, we focus on
understanding a shift in how firms communicate with consumers:
they have moved away from talking about themselves, which was
predominant in a pre-internet era, towards often offering free
resources to create value for consumers. We then explore how
the consumer experience has been radically altered and what the
implications are for firms’ strategies.
Introduction | 1
More precisely, Chapter 1: Introduction to Digital Marketing
discusses how digitalization is changing the ecosystem in which
we conduct marketing activities. In this chapter, we explore what
marketing is and how value is created online, and briefly touch on
consumer journeys.
Chapter 2: Understanding the Digital Consumer explores how
digitalization is transforming the journey of consumers. We learn
about marketing tools (persona, consumer journey, and journey
mapping) to help us understand consumer behavior and craft digital
marketing campaigns.
In Chapter 3: Planning For a Digital Marketing Campaign, we
cover basic notions of search engine optimization and then discuss
how, when creating content, keywords can be used to respond to
consumers’ needs and goals. We also discuss how keywords can help
us understand how our competitors are positioned online.
Chapter 4: Introduction to Digital Strategy presents some key
vocabulary associated with digital marketing and the framework we
are going to cover for the rest of the semester, the RACE framework.
We explain its relationship to persona, journey, and strategy and
how it can be used to perform competitive analyses.
The second section of this textbook provides an in-depth
presentation of a digital marketing framework centered on
conversion-based marketing. This framework echoes the work of
many digital marketing agencies. It is composed of four stages
through which firms can attract visitors, create leads, transform
leads into customers, and foster customer loyalty.
Chapter 5: Reach: Generating Awareness and Attracting Visitors
discusses paid media activities. We first emphasize the necessity
of building landing pages and describe what landing pages are. We
then turn our attention to the online ecosystem, discussing
elements such as types of paid media activities and expand on
payment models and types of targeting that are available online.
Chapter 6: Act: Creating Content covers some central activities
associated with content creation. We discuss how content creation
can be informed by the RACE framework, the difference between
2 | Introduction
gated and ungated content, how to build topical relevance, and
how pillar pages can help us do so. The chapter ends with a short
presentation of content calendars.
Chapter 7: Act: Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing looks at the
basics of lead generation and lead nurturing activities. We define
leads and lead stages, present a few ways to generate leads and
different types of opt-ins, explain how to score leads, and discuss
email marketing.
Chapter 8: Convert: Conversion Optimization examines what
conversion is and how to optimize web pages to convert better. To
do so, we discuss conversion rate optimization, how to identify what
to optimize as people move from one web page to another, some
conversion-centered principles, A/B testing, and retargeting.
Chapter 9: Engage: Building Loyalty and Co-Creating With
Customers deals with how to evaluate and encourage customer
engagement and loyalty and foster co-creation by engaged
customers. More precisely, we delve into customer engagement,
customer lifetime value, ways to measure engagement,
consumption communities, and co-creation activities.
Introduction | 3
Acknowledgments
PIERRE-YANN DOLBEC
Pierre thanks Alexandre Bustamante for the book illustrations,
Kelly-Anne Lemay for formatting and editing, and Chloe Lei for
academic support, as well as the financial support of Concordia
University and the Open Educational Resources initiative.
4 | Acknowledgments
List of Figures
PIERRE-YANN DOLBEC
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 The Evolution of WOM Theory
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Persona
Figure 2.2 Types of Segmentation / From University of
Minnesota’s Principles of Marketing / Text Description
Figure 2.3 RV Betty / Credit: BBH Singapore (@bbh_singapore) /
Text Description
Figure 2.4 Consumer Journey: The Funnel Model
Figure 2.5 Consumer Journey: The Circular Model
Figure 2.6 ZMOT
Figure 2.7 Four Types of ZMOT
Figure 2.8 Journey Mapping / Adapted from nngroup.com
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 Paid vs Organic Search
Figure 3.2 Top Ranking Factors
Figure 3.3 How Meta Tags Are Displayed on Google SERPs
Figure 3.4 Cross-Linking Example
Figure 3.5 Top On-Page Factors
Figure 3.6 Types of Search
List of Figures | 5
Figure 3.7 Journey and Searches
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Objective / Goal / KPI
Figure 4.2 KPIs Example / Text Description
Figure 4.3 AARRR / Text Description
Figure 4.4 RACE Ojbectives / Text Description
Figure 4.5 Journey and Searches
Figure 4.6 Conversion Path
Figure 4.7 Conversion Path – 1st Example
Figure 4.8 Conversion Path – 2nd Example / Text Description
Figure 4.9 RACE / Text Description
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 Examples of a Clickthrough Landing Page – Fit for Life
Figure 5.2 Examples of a Clickthrough Landing Page – Spotify
Figure 5.3 Examples of a Lead Generation Landing Page – Fit for
Life
Figure 5.4 Examples of a Lead Generation Landing Page – Uber
Figure 5.5 Shopify Ad
Figure 5.6 Shopify Homepage
Figure 5.7 AR Conversion
Figure 5.8 Shopify Landing Page
Figure 5.9 Landing Page – Attention Ratio
Figure 5.10 Basic Elements of a Landing Page – Shopify Example
Figure 5.11 Banner Ad
Figure 5.12 Interstitial
Figure 5.13 Pop-Up Ad
Figure 5.14 Floating Ad
6 | List of Figures
Figure 5.15 Wallpaper
Figure 5.16 Map
Figure 5.17 Native
Figure 5.18 Longtail Keywords and Conversion Rate / Text
Description
Figure 5.19 Facebook Ad Objectives / Text Description
Figure 5.20 Affiliate Marketing Example
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 Content Marketing
Figure 6.2 Exemplar and Prototype
Figure 6.3 Gated Content Example
Figure 6.4 Ungated Content to Gated Content
Figure 6.5 Topics
Figure 6.6 Funnel
Figure 6.7 Pillar Page Example
Figure 6.8 Traditional Approach
Figure 6.9 Pillar Approach
Figure 6.10 Pillar Page and Gated Content
Figure 6.11 Pillar Page and Gated Content
Figure 6.12 Pillar Strategy
Figure 6.13 Content Calendar / Text Description
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 Lead Generation Facebook
Figure 7.2 Marketo Form Fields
Figure 7.3Scroll-Down Pop-Up Opt-In on Zoella.co.uk
Figure 7.4 Bottom of Content Opt-In on fastcompany.com
Figure 7.5 Double Opt-In on Instagram – Part 1
List of Figures | 7
Figure 7.6 Double Opt-In on Instagram – Part 2
Figure 7.7 Double Opt-In on Instagram – Part 3
Figure 7.8 Drip Email Sequence Example
Figure 7.9 Drip Sequence
Figure 7.10 Email Automation / Text Description
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 Conversion Rate
Figure 8.2 Funnel / Text Description
Figure 8.3 Google’s Conversion Funnel Example
Figure 8.4 A/B Test
Figure 8.5 A/B Differences
Figure 8.6 Attention Ratio Works
Figure 8.7 Encapsulation Example
Figure 8.8 Encapsulation
Figure 8.9 Color Contrast
Figure 8.10 Directional Cues
Figure 8.11 Reading Flow
Figure 8.12 White Space
Figure 8.13 Information Hierarchy
Figure 8.14 Continuity
Figure 8.15 Message Match Failure
Figure 8.16 Message Match Success
Figure 8.17 Design Match Failure
Figure 8.18 Design Match Success
Figure 8.19 Congruence Example
Figure 8.20 Landing Page Evaluation / Text Version
Figure 8.21 Retargeting
Figure 8.22 Retargeting Example
8 | List of Figures
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 Net Promoter Score
Figure 9.2 Value Chain / Text Description
List of Figures | 9
Introduction to Digital
Marketing
PIERRE-YANN DOLBEC
Overview
In this chapter, we discuss how digitalization is changing the
ecosystem in which we conduct marketing activities. We start by
defining marketing, value, and how value is created. We then go
on to see how the media ecosystem and digital channels are
transforming the logic we use to create value, moving away from
representing the company to representing the customer. To set up
the next chapter, we conclude by briefly discussing the consumer
journey.
Learning Objectives
Understand that the main goal of marketing is to create
value and how the changing ecosystem is transforming the
ways we can achieve this goal.
Introduction to Digital Marketing | 11
What Is Marketing?
According to the American Marketing Association—marketing’s top
association—marketing is “the activity, set of institutions, and
processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging
offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and
society at large” (American Marketing Association 2013).
Our goal is to better understand how the consumer experience
has been transformed and why it has become necessary to adopt
a drastically different perspective on how to perform marketing
online. Thus, as we reconceptualize the ecosystem in which
consumers and firms operate, we concentrate on the following
elements of that definition: “processes for creating, communicating,
delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value.”
In other words, the role of marketing is to create value for a broad
range of stakeholders. In this textbook, we concentrate on value
creation for consumers. We concentrate on value creation because
consumers “do not buy products or services, they buy offerings
which … create value” in their lives (Gummesson 1995, p. 250).
Hence, our focus will be on understanding how firms can create
value in consumers’ lives—and how they can do so online.
Firms create value for consumers in many different ways. If we
rewind back a few decades, we find that our understanding of value
creation was tainted by the work of economists, and value was
mostly thought of as being based on products’ utility. Utilitarian
value, therefore, denotes the value that a customer receives based
on a task-related and rational consumption behavior (Babin et al.
1994). Since then, our understanding of value has vastly broadened
to include other types of value, such as hedonic value—value based
on the customer’s experience of fun and playfulness (Babin et al.
1994)—or linking value, which is based on the creation of
interpersonal links between consumers (Cova 1997). This is
important for digital marketers because it means that there are
numerous avenues to contribute to consumers’ lives through value
12 | Introduction to Digital Marketing
creation that expand beyond the use of a product by a consumer to
achieve a specific task.
Another important transformation of our understanding of value
creation over the last decade is the idea that value is always co-
created (Vargo and Lusch 2004). Value is co-created through the
meeting of consumers, with their own resources such as skills,
expertise, and existing possessions, with that of firms and their
resources, such as brand campaigns, service delivery models, and
the products they sell.
Let’s see these notions concretized through an example: Before,
we would have conceptualized a consumer as buying a car because
they wanted to extract the utilitarian value associated with the
product (i.e., moving from point A to point B). Value resided in
the car and was transferred to a consumer when they put that
product into use. Nowadays, we understand the purchase of a car
as conceptually very different. First, consumers can buy a car for
reasons other than going from point A to point B. Maybe they want
to belong to a community of other consumers, or what is referred
to as a consumption community, and buying this car allows them
to do so. This community-oriented strategy is employed by iconic
brands such as Harley-Davidson. Or maybe the consumers see the
car as a recreational object, where the end is not important (i.e.,
where they are going), but how they get there is. This has led
to many ads that emphasize the pleasure of driving, rather than
more utilitarian characteristics such as fuel economy. And we now
understand the value created by a car as emerging from the
interaction of a consumer and the car. For example, creating value
by consuming a sports car can be limited by the skills of the driver.
The car has a set of characteristics from which consumers can
create value, but they can only maximize value co-creation if they
possess the expertise to do so. Similarly, a consumer can co-create
value when buying a Harley-Davidson while riding it, but they might
leave undeveloped value when they do not participate in the
worldwide community of Harley-Davidson drivers.
To sum up, value exists in many different ways, and it is always
Introduction to Digital Marketing | 13
the result of the interaction between a consumer and a firm (and its
products and services). This has important implications for digital
marketing, one of them being the creation of content. Many firms
participate in creating value in consumers’ lives by offering free
content. This content can have hedonic value, such as a humorous
YouTube video. It can also help consumers better their skills and
knowledge, such as online tutorials. By increasing consumers’
expertise, firms allow consumers to expand their resources, which
can lead them to create more value when consuming products. We
will come back to this idea in the conclusion of this chapter.
How do firms create value? For the last 30 years, the dominant
paradigm for understanding how firms create value for consumers
has been market orientation. Market orientation refers to the “the
organization-wide generation of market intelligence, dissemination
of the intelligence across departments and organization-wide
responsiveness to it” (Kohli and Jaworski 1990, p. 3). By this, we
mean that organizations create value by generating information
and disseminating this information throughout the firm in order to
properly respond to it. This is done by generating and responding
to information about customers, or what is referred to as customer
orientation, and generating and responding to information about
competitors, or what is referred to as competitor orientation. For
this reason, marketing academics and practitioners typically aim
to identify and respond to customer needs as well as examining
and responding to their competitors’ efforts. Being market-oriented
has been found to be necessary for a firm to compete in markets
effectively (Kumar et al. 2011). For this reason, we will cover both
customers and competitors in the first few chapters, and the
strategic framework offered in this textbook is centered around
answering customers’ needs, goals, and desires, ideally more
effectively than the competition does.
Now that we have defined the bases of marketing, we turn our
attention to change brought about by the internet and how it
transformed the ways that firms create value for consumers.
14 | Introduction to Digital Marketing
Creating Value in the Digital Age
Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that “the
medium is the message” (McLuhan 1964). By this, he meant to
emphasize that the characteristics of a medium (e.g., TV vs. print vs.
internet) played an important role in communications, in addition
to the message. We conclude this chapter by showing how the
internet, as a medium, has played a transformative role in shaping
the message and what this means for marketing.
The ways messages are diffused to consumers have
been vastly transformed since the 1950s. In reviewing word-of-
mouth (WOM) models (Figure 1.1), Kozinets and co-authors (2010)
identify three periods that are useful in conceptualizing how the
diffusion of messages from firms to consumers has evolved.
Introduction to Digital Marketing | 15
16 | Introduction to Digital Marketing
Figure 1.1 The Evolution of WOM Theory
In the 1950s, the diffusion of messages echoed a view found in
the very successful series Mad Men: advertising firms would create
what they believed to be a message that could sell products and
would use mass media such as TV, newspapers, magazines, and the
radio to diffuse these messages. Word of mouth was organic, in the
sense that it happened between consumers without interventions
from firms. This is known as the organic interconsumer influence
model.
In the 1970s, theories started to recognize that some individuals
held more power than others to influence other consumers.
Increasingly, these influential consumers and celebrities were
leveraged by firms to diffuse their messages. This is known as the
linear marketer influence model because in these earlier efforts,
such influencers were believed to faithfully diffuse the message
created by firms and their advertising agencies.
The emergence of the internet led to a third transformation in
how we understand message diffusion and word of mouth and a
movement toward a network co-production model. In this last
model, consumers like you and me, online communities, and other
types of networked forms of communication (such as publics
created through hashtags, see Arvidsson and Caliandro 2015), have
an increasing role to play not only in diffusing messages but also in
transforming them.
Marketers have capitalized on this new mode of diffusion for
messages by directly targeting influencers who are part of
consumer networks and communities, which has resulted in the
explosion of influencer marketing and the rising influence of micro-
influencers. They have also developed capacities, such as social
media monitoring, to identify emergent discourses on and around
their brands, which sometimes completely reinterpret brand
meanings.
Introduction to Digital Marketing | 17
The increased power of consumers in creating, modifying, and
diffusing messages on and around brands has led, for example, to
the creation of doppelgänger brand images, “a family of disparaging
images and meanings about a brand that circulate throughout
popular culture” (Thompson, Rindfleisch, and Arsel 2006). Or, to
simplify, consumers now create alternative campaigns that tarnish
the intended image initially created by brands. Consumers using
Twitter to diffuse alternative brand meanings or groups of
consumers such as 4chan co-opting advertising campaigns are
examples of this. For firms, the increased role of consumers in
the creation and diffusion of messages has important implications
for value creation: firms now have to consider not only how their
messages can be amplified by consumers but also how they could
be co-opted, reshaped, and resisted.
Another transformation brought about by the internet is media
and audience fragmentation. In the 1970s, All in the Family was
for a few years the top-watched TV show in the US. At its peak, it
was watched by a fifth of the population. The 1980 finale of the hit
series Dallas was watched by 90 million viewers, or more than 75%
of the US television audience, while the last episode of M*A*S*H
was watched by 105 million people. The last finale to make the top
10 list was Friends, in 2004, as the adoption of broadband internet
accelerated.
Consumers have an increasing number of options for media-
based entertainment. Traditional media companies are now
competing against user-generated content found on social media
websites such as Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok. Younger
consumers have moved en masse to these new media, complicating
the creation of advertising campaigns. Media fragmentation and the
rise of internet in the lives of consumers has led to the emergence
of the concept of the attention economy.
This is not a new concept. In 1971, Simon was already discussing
how “information consumes … the attention of its recipients,” and
Bill Gates was stating in 1996 that “content is king.” The implications
for digital marketing had been recognized as early as the mid-1990s,
18 | Introduction to Digital Marketing
when Mandel and Van der Leun mentioned in their book Rules of
the Net how “attention is the hard currency of the cyberspace.”
Goldhaber (1997) would add that “as the Net becomes an
increasingly strong presence in the overall economy, the flow of
attention will not only anticipate the flow of money but eventually
replace it altogether.” This has led to a drastic rethinking of how to
do marketing online and is intrinsically tied to the rise of inbound
marketing and content marketing.
To recap, a few decades back, information was rather scarce;
people, for the most part, consumed information from only a few
sources, and companies could rather easily target consumers to
diffuse their advertising messages. Nowadays, information is
plentiful, consumers are diffused over a largely fragmented media
ecosystem, and it has become more difficult for companies to
diffuse their advertising messages to a mass of consumers, which
can work against them. That difficulty, and the development of
targeting technologies that have transformed how we can send
messages to consumers, have led to two important transformations
for marketers and how we understand value creation for
consumers.
Finding Consumers vs. Being Found
The first transformation was a movement away from finding
consumers toward being found by consumers.
What does this mean?
If we rewind history, it used to be that marketers would “find”
consumers: They would use market research reports in order to
understand where consumers hung out so as to place advertising
there, what they watched so that they could run ads during their
favorite shows, and understand their movements in a city so as
to put ads and billboards in the right places. Although this still
functions online—you can “find” consumers through online
Introduction to Digital Marketing | 19
targeting by placing your ads on relevant websites—there has been
an important switch toward consumers finding companies.
Consumers find companies through their normal everyday
searches. In the chapter on consumers and their journey, we are
going to see how finding companies expands the sets of brands that
consumers consider before making a purchase.
How does this work?
Think of a need or a problem you might have. How do you usually
go about answering this need or resolving this problem? Maybe
you will ask a friend. Maybe you will go to a store and trust the
salesperson. Or perhaps, as millions of consumers do every day,
you will turn to the internet to do a search about your need or
your problem. This is how thousands of consumers discover new
brands and products every day! This has strong implications for
digital marketers, one of the most important being content creation:
In order to be found by consumers, you need to create content that
addresses their problems. This is a topic we will explore in more
detail when discussing content creation.
In short, it used to be that companies would find consumers and
try to attract them to their stores or choose their brands through
traditional media and advertising. Nowadays, our job has moved to
creating content that informs, educates, and entertains consumers
so that they can find us when they are searching for solutions to the
needs they have or issues they are facing.
Representing the Company vs. Representing the
Customer
The second transformation has been a move from representing
yourself as a company to representing the customer.
What does this mean?
It used to be that, when finding consumers, companies would
talk about themselves. Take, for example, this ad from Home Depot,
20 | Introduction to Digital Marketing
which emphasizes how “Home Depot is more than a store … it is
everything under the sun … all at a guaranteed low price” where you
can save on flooring and where they have everything for your needs.
In short, the ad is presenting the company and explaining why the
company and its product are the best choice for the consumer. The
ad represents the company.
Representing the customer means switching the focus to
consumers’ needs and goals and the problems they are
experiencing—and helping consumers address those problems.
There are numerous ways to do so. Companies often create
resources, such as tutorials and infographics, to help consumers
solve their problems or achieve their goals. For example, Nike has
developed an extensive set of videos to help consumers work out
at home, train for running, or eat better (all of which can be found
on their YouTube channel). This obviously represents opportunities
for Nike to talk about their brand in every tutorial and connect with
consumers, but the main goal is not to talk about how great Nike
and its products are: It is to help consumers achieve their goals
of training, running, and eating. It still serves the company well,
though. When a consumer is searching for at-home exercises, they
might come across Nike, consume their tutorials, and then, when it
is time to purchase a new pair of sneakers or a tee to exercise in, be
more likely to buy from Nike rather than a competitor.
Some brands have taken this a step further by offering tutorials
tied with products they sell in-store, with a readily available
shopping list for do-it-yourself projects. Home Depot, for example,
offers tens of tutorials on their YouTube channel: This makes sense
since the home improvement store sells products for such projects.
By going a step further and representing the needs of the consumer,
Home Depot can bring potential customers to their website when
they want, for example, to build a fire pit. Within these tutorials,
Home Depot presents a list of “Materials You Will Need,” which
directly brings consumers to sections of their websites where they
sell such products. The tutorial has thus become a great resource to
create sales!
Introduction to Digital Marketing | 21
A Transformed Consumer Journey
What is a consumer journey? It is the experience of a consumer
across the different stages of their buying process, which then
extends to phases of relationships with a company. For example,
let’s imagine you want a new pair of sneakers. You might have an
existing pair. How satisfied were you with that pair? If you were
highly satisfied and you still love the brand, you might go buy the
same pair. This is partly why companies try to build loyal customers:
to foster repeat sales. If you were unsatisfied, this model is not
available anymore, or you want some variety, you might go and look
for another pair of sneakers. You will then go through different
stages: Having recognized a need you want to answer, you will move
to discover options to answer that need, evaluate these options,
make a choice and buy a new pair of sneakers, and then evaluate
how much you like or dislike this pair.
As we will explore in the next chapter, these transformations and
the new digital ecosystem in which consumers evolve have led to
a drastically different way to enter in relationships with brands:
Consumers now discover brands, rather than being discovered by
them, and they start their relationships with those brands with
online searches aligned with their needs, goals, and problems. The
objective of companies doing marketing online is thus to be there
when consumers need them. We will talk in the next chapter about
how we can conceptualize such changes in transformations in the
journey consumers take when buying products they want.
22 | Introduction to Digital Marketing
Understanding the Digital
Consumer
PIERRE-YANN DOLBEC
Overview
In this chapter, we discuss how digitalization is transforming the
journey of consumers. To better understand how to do marketing
online, we also cover basic marketing tools (i.e., persona and
consumer journey) to help us create digital marketing campaigns.
We conclude the section by discussing journey maps.
Learning Objectives
Understand the concepts of personas, journeys, and
maps, how to calculate customer lifetime value, and why it
is important.
Understanding Consumers Through
Personas
There are two broad approaches to conducting marketing: mass
Understanding the Digital
Consumer | 23
marketing (i.e., an undifferentiated approach where products are
simply sold to the masses) or targeted marketing (click here for
more information on these approaches). In the latter approach,
firms practice segmentation and tailor marketing communications
and products to segments. The digital ecosystem makes it quite
easy to address segments, even segments of one. Although it is
possible to practice mass marketing online, many processes unique
to digital marketing, such as web analytics, A/B testing, or the use
of online targeting platforms, work best when firms have defined
segments. For this reason, we are going to emphasize a targeted
approach in this course.
To practice targeted marketing, firms use segmentation to create
groups of consumers that are homogeneous (i.e., they have similar
characteristics to each other) but are heterogeneous from the rest
of the population (i.e., they are differentiated by their shared
characteristics).
A useful tool to help create and represent segments is personas.
Personas are semi-fictional, generalized representations of a
customer segment. They help you better understand your
customers (and prospective customers) and make it easier for you
to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of
different segments.
24 | Understanding the Digital Consumer
Figure 2.1 Persona
Personas are important because they help you understand who your
ideal consumers are, what their characteristics are, and how to
talk to them. The needs, desires, and problems of your personas
(or segments more generally) should be the starting point of any
marketing strategy. As a reminder from chapter 1, our goal as
marketers is to create value, and in digital marketing campaigns,
we create value by representing the customer. The only possible way
to do so is to understand who this customer is and what they
need. Personas can assist in a wide variety of marketing activities,
from creating campaigns and ads to guiding product and service
development to helping with customer support. We will see how
shortly.
Firms develop personas the same way they develop segments:
through market research and the use of internal data. Firms
Understanding the Digital Consumer | 25
typically segment consumers based on their behaviors (which are
also now trackable online!), demographics, lifestyles, or
psychographics (see Figure 2.2 for a brief summary or, for a text
description of the figure contents, click here).
Figure 2.2 Types of Segmentation / From University of Minnesota’s Principles
of Marketing / Text Description
Segmenting based on these variables is highly useful for informing
online targeting strategies. For example, on the Facebook Ads
platform, you can easily select to deliver an ad to people aged
between 18 and 25 years old living within a kilometer of Mile End
who like cycling.
However, these variables are less informative concerning how
to talk to these consumers. For this reason, we emphasize the
importance of intersecting segments with their goals, wants, needs
and motivators and the challenges they face.
In her book Introduction to Consumer Behaviour, Andrea Niosi
explains these as follows:
A goal is the cognitive representation of a desired state, or,
in other words, our mental idea of how we’d like things
to turn out (Fishbach & Ferguson 2007; Kruglanski, 1996).
This desired end state of a goal can be clearly defined (e.g.,
stepping on the surface of Mars), or it can be more abstract
and represent a state that is never fully completed (e.g.,
26 | Understanding the Digital Consumer
eating healthy). Underlying all of these goals, though,
is motivation, or the psychological driving force that
enables action in the pursuit of that goal (Lewin, 1935).
Motivation can stem from two places. First, it can come
from the benefits associated with the process of pursuing
a goal (intrinsic motivation). For example, you might be
driven by the desire to have a fulfilling experience while
working on your Mars mission. Second, motivation can also
come from the benefits associated with achieving a goal
(extrinsic motivation), such as the fame and fortune that
come with being the first person on Mars (Deci & Ryan,
1985). One easy way to consider intrinsic and extrinsic
motivation is through the eyes of a student. Does the
student work hard on assignments because the act of
learning is pleasing (intrinsic motivation)? Or does the
student work hard to get good grades, which will help land a
good job (extrinsic motivation)?
Consumer behavior can be thought of as the combination
of efforts and results related to the consumer’s need to solve
problems. Consumer problem solving is triggered by the
identification of some unmet need. A family consumes all of
the milk in the house; or the tires on the family car wear
out; or the bowling team is planning an end-of-the-season
picnic: these present consumers with a problem which must
be solved. Problems can be viewed in terms of two types of
needs: physical (such as a need for food) or psychological
(for example, the need to be accepted by others).
Although the difference is a subtle one, there is some
benefit in distinguishing between needs and wants.
A need is a basic deficiency given a particular essential item.
You need food, water, air, security, and so forth. A want is
placing certain personal criteria as to how that need must
be fulfilled. Therefore, when we are hungry, we often have
a specific food item in mind. Consequently, a teenager will
Understanding the Digital Consumer | 27
lament to a frustrated parent that there is nothing to eat,
standing in front of a full refrigerator.
Most of marketing is in the want-fulfilling business, not
the need-fulfilling business. Apple does not want you to
buy just any watch; they want you to want to buy an Apple
Watch. Likewise, Ralph Lauren wants you to want Polo when
you shop for clothes. On the other hand, a non-profit such
as the American Cancer Association would like you to feel a
need for a check-up and does not care about which doctor
you go to. In the end, however, marketing is mostly
interested in creating and satisfying wants.
Often discussion around needs will separate them into
those which are utilitarian (practical and useful in nature)
and hedonic (luxurious or desirable in nature).
To this list, we add the notion of challenges, by which we mean an
obstacle faced by a consumer in resolving a need or fulfilling a want.
This is important because consumers turn to the internet every day
to help them answer challenges they face in their everyday lives,
whether it is how to change a tire, how to have the perfect Friday
night makeup, or how to paint a room. Resolving challenges drives
the consumption of online content.
Hence, when creating a persona, you create a semi-fictional
representation of a segment by bringing together the following
information:
• Basic behavioral, demographic, geographic, and psychographic
information to facilitate targeting
• Needs and/or wants and/or goals and/or challenges to
facilitate the creation of your campaign
• Information that makes your persona feel real, such as
◦ a picture
◦ a quote from an interview with a real consumer
◦ a name
◦ examples of “real” problems
28 | Understanding the Digital Consumer
Take the example of RV Betty (Figure 2.3, text here).
Figure 2.3 RV Betty / Credit: BBH Singapore (@bbh_singapore) / Text
Description
Can you find the information mentioned above in this short
persona?
Rethinking the Consumer Journey
A consumer journey is the trajectory of experiences through which
a consumer goes: from not knowing they want something, to buying
this something, to performing post-purchase activities (the most
obvious being consuming the product). Put more theoretically, the
consumer journey is “an iterative process through which the
consumer begins to consider alternatives to satisfy a want or a
need, evaluates and chooses among them, and then engages in
consumption” (Hamilton et al. 2019). The journey is composed of
pre-purchase activities, that is, activities consumers engage in prior
to buying a product; purchase activities, or what people do to
acquire a product; and post-purchase activities, or what consumers
do once they have bought a product (Lemon and Verhoef 2016).
As a side note, we make a distinction in this course between
Understanding the Digital Consumer | 29
customer journey, which would focus on the journey of a customer
with a specific firm and would include, for example, touchpoints
solely associated with that firm, and consumer journey, which is
a broader perspective on consumers who “undertake [a journey]
in pursuit of large and small life goals and in response to various
opportunities, obstacles, and challenges” (Hamilton and Price 2019,
p. 187). By touchpoint, I mean “any way a consumer can interact with
a business, whether it be person-to-person, through a website, an
app or any form of communication” (Wikipedia).
Understanding the consumer journey is important because doing
so strongly contributes to firm performance. For example, a survey
by the Association of National Advertisers in 2015 found that top
performers in a market understood the journey better than their
peers and had better processes to capture journey-related insights
and use them in their marketing efforts (McKinsey 2015).
The journey varies greatly depending on which market a firm
evolves in. It also varies depending on personas and their specific
goals. For example, a survey by Google found that some markets,
such as banking, voting, and finding a credit card, will typically have
a longer journey than others, such as groceries or personal care
products. Variation also exists within markets. For example. Google
found three types of journeys for restaurants: one where consumers
pick a restaurant within the hour, one where consumers pick a
restaurant a day before going, and a last one where consumers pick
restaurants two to three months before going.
Can you think of what these relate to?
We can hypothesize: If you’re at work and looking for a place
to have lunch, chances are, you won’t dedicate much time to it
and will pick a restaurant within the hour before going. If you are
going out with friends or a Tinder date, you might be a bit more
involved in the process and pick the restaurant one or two days
before. Lastly, if you are going to travel (and are a foodie!) or you
want to make a marriage proposal, this will require more planning,
and you might start your journey much, much earlier. This also
has implications for restaurants! Some restaurants who cater to
30 | Understanding the Digital Consumer
downtown lunchers might be better off pushing Instagram ads with
the menu of the day, or some daily sale, around 11 a.m. or just
before lunch. Restaurants catering to groups or dates might want
to start campaigns on Wednesdays to capture Friday and Saturday
restaurant-goers. And restaurants that target the marriage proposal
or foodie crowds might need longer, “always-on” continuous
marketing activities to bring in patrons.
Understanding Consumer Journeys
Our understanding of consumer journeys has greatly evolved over
the last two decades, and there exist a number of ways to
conceptualize journeys. It is important to understand that these are
not perfect representations of reality. Rather, they are thinking tools
that help us create marketing campaigns. In real life, people tend
not to be so linear in their decisions.
A common conceptualization found in marketing textbooks is one
where consumers move between different stages, initially being
aware of a large number of brands and then slowly refining their
understanding of the options in the market to make their purchase.
McKinsey represents such a typical model here (Figure 2.4). In this
model, the consumer goes through five stages:
1. Awareness: the consumer is aware of a large number of
products or brands in the market that might help address their
need.
2. Familiarity: From this large number of brands or products they
are aware of, the consumer will perform some initial research
and become familiar with a subset of brands.
3. Consideration: From this smaller number of familiar brands,
the consumer will continue their research efforts, eliminate
some brands that do not fit their criteria, and narrow their list
to a smaller number of considered brands (i.e., a “consideration
Understanding the Digital Consumer | 31
set”).
4. Purchase: Once ready to buy, the consumer might try out a
product or seek in-depth information on an even smaller
subset based on their consideration set, from which they will
purchase a product or choose a brand.
5. Loyalty: Assuming their consumption experience goes well, the
consumer may become loyal to the product or the brand.
Figure 2.4 Consumer Journey: The Funnel Model
This understanding of the journey is based on a funnel model,
where consumers start by being aware of a large number of brands
and, over time, reduce their options as they go through each of the
stages. This has a number of implications for marketers.
A first central assumption is that, to ultimately be chosen by
consumers, companies need to make sure that consumers are aware
of them. This partly helps explain the prevalence of mass marketing:
it serves to create awareness.
A second central assumption is that consumers start with a large
set of brands that they are aware of and reduce this set over time to
a smaller and smaller set of brands as they search for and evaluate
options.
McKinsey introduced in 2009 a competing model for the
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consumer journey, based on the purchase decisions of close to
20,000 consumers across five industries. They found that these two
assumptions did not hold: First, consumers do not start with a large
set of brands they are aware of. Second, consumers do not reduce
their options as they go through the stages of the funnel. Rather,
the number of options they consider increases throughout their
journey.
If you think of some recent purchases you made, this makes sense.
Let’s say I want a pair of running shoes. I might be aware of some
brands and models, probably the ones that do the most mass
advertising: Nike, Adidas, Reebok. Then, I turn to the internet to
perform some searches. I’ll use general key terms like “what running
shoes should a beginner get” or “reviews for running shoes 2020.”
Through my search efforts, I will encounter new brands I had not
considered originally, for example, Asics, Brooks, and Saucony.
In this example, rather than following the funnel metaphor, where
the set of brands I was aware of reduced to a smaller set of familiar
brands and an even smaller set of considered brands, I added brands
to my consideration set.
This has important implications for digital marketers: First,
traditional, push, mass marketing media activities are not necessary.
Second, as consumers do research, they broaden the set of products
or brands they consider. We will see how this has led to the rapid
growth of inbound marketing activities that help consumers with
their problems and help consumers evaluate their options. This
is because brands now understand that by supporting consumers
throughout their journey, they can enter consumers’ consideration
set and ultimately make a sale.
McKinsey thus proposes a competing model, a circular model for
the consumer journey. The model is circular because consumers
enter a loyalty loop where they cycle between using a product or
brand, buying this product or brand again, participating in post-
purchase activities, and so on. The McKinsey model has the
following stages (also depicted in Figure 2.5):
Understanding the Digital Consumer | 33
Figure 2.5 Consumer Journey: The Circular Model
1. Trigger: The consumer experiences a need, a problem, or
wants to achieve a goal, which initiates their journey
2. Initial consideration set: The consumer considers an initial set
of brands based on their experiences, brand perceptions, and
exposure to recent touchpoints. For the initial consideration
set, the most influential touchpoint is company-driven
marketing, such as advertising, direct marketing, sponsorship,
and the like. See a graphic representation here.
3. Active evaluation: This is a new stage introduced by McKinsey.
At this stage, the consumer actively evaluates their options
through information gathering and shopping. Often,
consumers will do their information gathering online. It is at
this stage that consumers add brands to their consideration
set. We are not in a funnel model anymore. This is the first
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difference important to digital marketers: It means we can
enter consumers’ consideration set without having to conduct
awareness-generating campaigns. If we help consumers make
their decisions, or if we have reviews online, for example, we
can be considered by them. McKinsey finds that the most
influential touchpoint for this stage is consumer-driven
marketing, such as word of mouth, the information found
during online searches, and reviews.
4. Moment of purchase: The consumer selects a brand and make
a purchase.
5. Post-purchase experience: After purchasing a product or a
service, the consumer builds expectations based on their
experience. This will inform the loyalty loop. A second
important difference from the funnel journey happens at this
stage: Consumers start creating content for brands (i.e., the
“consumer-driven marketing” efforts I refer to in stage ‘3’).
Think about products or services you bought recently: Maybe
you posted a picture about it on Instagram, maybe you wrote a
review on Yelp!, or maybe you participated in some company-
supported marketing activities.
These two important revisions to the journey—the expansion of
the consideration set during active evaluation and the importance
of consumers participating in consumer-driven marketing at the
post-purchase stage—open up many content-based possibilities for
digital marketers. As we’ve discussed, our goal in digital marketing is
to represent the customer: What are their needs? Goals? Problems?
How can we support them in addressing these? Our objectives are
not to sell products or talk about our brand. Rather, we will see that
we make sales online by supporting consumers throughout their
journey—helping them understand their problem, helping them
evaluate solutions, helping them better understand our product.
Understanding the Digital Consumer | 35
Zero Moment of Truth
In an example of great content marketing for themselves (i.e., this
concept helps sell Google products!), Google introduced in 2011 the
concept of zero moment of truth (ZMOT), “a new decision-making
moment that takes place a hundred million times a day on mobile
phones, laptops, and wired devices of all kinds … that moment when
you grab your laptop, mobile phone, or some other wired device
and start learning about a product or service (or potential boyfriend)
you’re thinking about trying or buying.” It turns out to be quite a
useful concept to think about how consumers make purchases in
the digital era.
Figure 2.6 ZMOT
A moment of truth is a contact with a brand or a product during
which a consumer forms an impression (Carlzon 1989). To
understand the ZMOT, it is important to contextualize it historically.
Why is it called the “zero” moment of truth? Quite simply, prior to
Google introducing this concept, there were already two moments
of truth (Figure 2.6):
• First moment of truth: When a shopper notices a product in a
36 | Understanding the Digital Consumer
shopping environment which influences their buying decision.
• Second moment of truth: When a consumer experiences a
product following their purchase decision.
The ZMOT is the moment of truth—the context between a consumer
and a brand—that happens prior to a shopper noticing a product in a
shopping environment. Concretely, ZMOT “moments” could appear
while
• performing online searches,
• talking with family and friends,
• comparison shopping,
• seeking information from a brand,
• reading product reviews,
• reading comments online, or
• starting to follow a brand.
In contrast, the first moments of truth happen while
• looking at a product on a shelf,
• reading a brochure at the store,
• talking to a salesperson,
• looking at a store display,
• talking with a customer service representative, or
• using a sample in-store.
According to Google, the essential characteristics of ZMOTs are
that they happen online, when the consumer is in charge (and this
relates to inbound marketing), and during multiway conversations.
To capitalize on ZMOTs, Google recommends being present in
moments that matter. By this, the marketing juggernaut means that
you should have content and ads that respond to the needs,
problems, and goals that consumers are typing in the form of search
queries in a search engine. All of this requires, as you might have
guessed by now, a deep understanding of your consumers and their
journeys.
Understanding the Digital Consumer | 37
Google identifies four ZMOTs and briefly explain how these
interact with journeys here. The four types, also shown in Figure 2.7,
are the following:
• I-want-to-know moments, where consumers turn to a search
engine for a knowledge-based query
• I-want-to-go moments, when consumers turn to search to go
somewhere (e.g., “restaurant near me”)
• I-want-to-do moments, when consumers want help to achieve
something (Fun fact! For a while there, the most searched
‘how-to’ video was ‘how to kiss.’ Now, isn’t that sweet!)
• I-want-to-buy moments, when consumers turn to search to
help them make a purchase
Figure 2.7 Four Types of ZMOT
These are important conceptual tools. They represent opportunities
for companies online to create content. These are not simply ways
to understand how consumers use search engines and interact
online. Rather, they are tools to help us create better content. What
kind of content would you create for these four different ZMOTs?
38 | Understanding the Digital Consumer
Journey Mapping
Now that we have the vocabulary for these concepts, it’s time to
turn our attention to using them in practice. The journeys and
ZMOTs are generic ways to understand how consumers go about
buying products. Knowing how consumers conceptually move from
a trigger to making a purchase to becoming loyal to a brand or
product might be interesting in itself, but it is much more useful if
we can actually use this in real-life campaigns. Effective strategies
demand a tailored understanding. We cannot stay at a conceptual
level. We need to translate them to real-life experiences. To do so,
we can perform journey mapping.
A journey map is a visual representation of the journey of a
consumer. It brings together the conceptual tools we have seen in
this chapter: persona, consumer journey, and moments of truth.
Journey maps vary based on segments/personas. Each persona
represents a different consumer segment. These segments will go
about buying products differently. Think about, for example, how
you go about buying products and how your parents go about
buying products.
Understanding the Digital Consumer | 39
Figure 2.8 Journey Mapping / Adapted from nngroup.com
Journey maps exist in a wide range of shapes and forms. They all,
however, share some common elements:
• the persona
• conceptual stages from a journey (e.g., trigger, active
evaluation, purchase, and post-purchase; or awareness,
consideration, purchase, and loyalty)
• concrete actions consumers take at each of these stages
• touchpoints that they encounter (in this course, I strongly
encourage you to include yours and those of others, i.e., this is
a consumer journey, you should be thinking more broadly than
only your firm)
• opportunities associated with the aforementioned actions
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This page presents a clear example of this kind of journey template.
Journey maps are useful. They help you understand how
consumers move through their journeys to address their needs
and problems. Each action they take represents an opportunity
for your brand to create a connection with a consumer. A clear
understanding of the concrete steps that consumers take to buy
products should be the starting point of the creation of your
marketing campaigns. What do consumers do at the awareness
stage? How can your brand support their actions? Do consumers
search for specific things? What about at the active evaluation
stage? In the next chapter, we examine how firms can position
websites on specific searches. This will help create a bridge
between what consumers are doing online and how we can answer
their search queries.
Exercises
How to Use a Persona
Let’s take as an example the following persona, “RV
Betty”:
Understanding the Digital Consumer | 41
Betty lives in a suburb of a city. Her husband is also
retired. They have been talking about traveling in an RV
upon retirement for years—this is a long-time dream of
theirs. The kids are self-sufficient and have been out of the
house for long enough that Betty doesn’t have to worry.
She’s been retired just long enough to be bored. While she
doesn’t consider herself wealthy, she and her husband have
substantial savings and are prepared to enjoy their
retirement.
Betty is worried about the logistics of traveling in an
RV—how easy will it be to find utility hookups, where are
the best places to stay if you have one, etc. She also wants
something comfortable; she plans on spending a lot of time
in it. She has other retired friends, so she wants additional
sleeping space, and she wants to make sure they have
plenty of room for food and even cooking. She wants as
much ease as possible when traveling.
Based on this persona, briefly sketch three pieces of
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content. More precisely, concentrate on the general idea of
what this piece of content would be about and draft the
following:
1. a first piece that addresses a problem or a need she
is facing
2. a second piece that helps her evaluate her options
3. a last piece that sells your product
Tip: Make sure that your three pieces of content directly
address the RV Betty persona!
Creating a Persona
Sketch up a persona for a Montreal real estate company
specializing in first-time house buyers. To do so,
• identify a few sociodemographic characteristics
(e.g., age and revenue), and
• find one general need or problem they are facing.
Tip: Ask yourself why these people would need a house.
For example, you might ask yourself the following
questions:
• Why would people move to a house in Montreal?
• Are there different groups of first-time house
buyers? What differentiates them? Which one are you
concentrating on?
• Is there one need or problem that unites that
group?
Understanding the Digital Consumer | 43
Moving From Persona to Journey Map
• Sketch a journey map for your real estate persona
using the following journey stages:
◦ awareness
◦ consideration
◦ purchase
◦ post-purchase
• Identify two concrete activities that your persona is
engaging in for each stage
• Identify two touchpoints that your persona is
coming into contact with for each stage
• Identify one opportunity for your company per
activity
44 | Understanding the Digital Consumer
Planning for a Digital
Marketing Campaign
PIERRE-YANN DOLBEC
Overview
In this chapter, we discuss how to use keywords to create pages
and content that respond to consumers’ needs and goals and how
keywords can help us understand how our competitors are
positioned online. We start with a brief introduction to search
engine optimization (SEO) and why SEO is important online. We
then turn our attention to ranking factors in order to emphasize
why designing pages for people, by keeping people’s needs and goals
in mind is what makes pages rank high. We then cover customer-
related, firm-related, and competitor-related implications of SEO.
Learning Objectives
Understand SEO and keywords, and why they matter for
your firm, for consumers, and for competitor analysis.
Planning for a Digital Marketing
Campaign | 45
SEO
SEO is “the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or
a webpage in a web search engine’s unpaid results” (Wikipedia). This
differentiates SEO from the use of paid ads in order to appear at the
top of search engine result pages (SERPs). Take the following two
screenshots, for example (Figure 3.1). On the left-hand side, we have
paid results that appear at the top of the SERP because the company
has bid on certain keywords used in a search query (in this instance,
“car rental montreal”). On the right-hand side, we have organic
search results that appear because the company has practiced SEO
on similar keywords. In other words, they have optimized certain
pages of their websites to maximize the chances that these pages
would rank high when people search for specific keywords (e.g., “car
rental montreal”).
Figure 3.1 Paid vs. Organic Search
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Why is SEO Important?
People use keywords to interact with content online, and most
online experiences start with a search (Forbes 2017). As we will soon
see, people turn to search engines for a wide variety of reasons, and
these reasons provide opportunities for your firm to show up when
people are searching for something.
Ranking high in search engines also confers a competitive
advantage. In 2015, the first spot on Google received 35% of the
traffic for a specific search. More than 50% of the traffic went
to results located on the first result page (Advanced Web Ranking
2015). Search matters for physical stores, too, and local searches
lead 76% of mobile visitors to visit stores within the day. Of those
visits, 28% resulted in a purchase (Google 2016). SEO also matters
because most people ignore paid ads (User Centric 2011). Clearly,
ranking high can benefit a firm: Being well ranked provides a clear
advantage over competitors.
In order to understand how to rank high, it is important to
understand how Google works. Let’s watch the following video from
Google:
Planning for a Digital Marketing Campaign | 47
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the
text. You can view it online here:
So, How Do You Rank High?
The main job of a search engine is to serve results that best address
people’s search queries. Let’s say you want to know how to clean
your cat. You have questions such as what kind of soap to use, how
warm the temperature should be, and how you should wash their
paws. You can turn to a search engine to answer these questions.
People turn to search engines and use search queries, the “query
based on a specific search term that a user enters into a web search
engine to satisfy their information needs” (Wikipedia). For example,
you might turn to Google and type in “how to bathe my cat,” “easiest
way to wash my cat,” “wash a cat,” or “cat wash soap.”
We will use the term keyword to talk about the key terms people
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use in search queries. Keywords are central for digital marketers.
They are what we use to both talk to search engines in order to
‘tell’ them what search query a specific webpage is supposed to
respond to (and we are going to see shortly how to do so), but
it is also what we use to talk to consumers and make sure our
webpage shows up when they search for something. Keywords link
consumers’ search queries and whether or not our webpages show
up when they search for something specific. It is thus important for
us to think ahead when creating pages about what are the keywords
and search queries this webpage answers?
The search queries above all use slightly different keywords,
which might indicate that they are looking for slightly different
things: the first user seems to want a tutorial, the second an easy
way to wash a cat, the third is rather undefined, and the last one is
more specifically focused on soap. As a result, search engines will
deliver slightly different result to best address what they think the
person wants in terms of information (i.e., what exactly they are
looking for).
The role of search engines is thus to deliver the best result
possible for people who are making a specific search. Thus, in order
to rank high in search engines, you need to create pages that best
answer specific search queries.
You do so by creating specific pages for specific search queries.
Each page should have content that best matches that query and
keywords that are, ideally, perfectly aligned with the query you
believe people will be making. This reflects the importance of
representing (and understanding) the customer; your pages need to
address questions, needs, wants, and challenges that people have.
In addition, you should ideally write about topics you are
knowledgeable about (or an expert in), on which your site has
authority, and your information should be honest, accurate, and
trustworthy. This is summarized in the EAT acronym (expert,
authoritative, and trustworthy).
Planning for a Digital Marketing Campaign | 49
Understanding Search Algorithms to Rank High
As shown by the video explaining how Google works, there are
more than 200 variables that are taken into account when ranking
websites. Some of them, though, are more important than others.
Namely, we can identify three broad categories of highly important
ranking factors (Figure 3.2):
• User experience
◦ Direct visits
◦ Time on site
◦ Page per session
◦ Bounce rate
• Backlinks
◦ Total referring domains
◦ Total referring IPs
◦ Total follow-backlinks
• Keywords
◦ Keywords in anchor, body, density, in total, in meta
Note: A backlink is a link back to your website from another domain.
For example, www.othersite.com has a link somewhere on their
website that links to www.yoursite.com.
50 | Planning for a Digital Marketing Campaign
Figure 3.2 Top Ranking Factors
Search engines use these three broad types of factors because they
are trying to evaluate questions such as “For a specific search query,
which website should I show first? Which should I show second?”
Planning for a Digital Marketing Campaign | 51
And so on. Again, as a reminder, the goal of a search engine is to
show websites in the order it believes will best answer the search
query. As presented in the video, the role of search engines is to
make users happy: If you can easily and rapidly find an answer to
what you are looking for, you will continue to use this search engine.
Your job, as a digital marketer, is thus to create pages that best
answer the needs people have when they formulate specific search
queries. This is the key general idea behind SEO.
But search engines cannot read the whole web to evaluate how
well a webpage answers a search query. Rather, they base
themselves on a set of variables to rank webpages. Webpages are
ranked for each and every independent search query.
Let’s look at these three sets of factors one by one to understand
how this affects our work as digital marketers.
User Experience
The first and most important set of factors relate to user
experience, or “a person’s perceptions and responses that result
from the use or anticipated use of a product, system or service”
(ISO 9241-210, 2010). Put in very simple terms: Do your visitors like
the experience of your page, and does it meet their expectations?
Since we are looking at ranking pages, we can see expectations as
answering the need associated with the search people are doing.
Hence, this first set of factors, concerning user experience, relate
to whether or not your page answers the search that people are
making and whether it does so in a way that is enjoyable for visitors.
This is a crucial element in understanding SEO: We are not
optimizing pages for the sake of optimizing pages. We are
optimizing pages in order to answer specific search queries made
by people. Optimizing a page should thus be about creating the best
page possible to answer a specific search query. We should optimize
pages with users in mind.
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This approach makes sense if we look at the specific factors
above. Direct visits mean that people click on your link when they
are on the SERP. We can optimize our page to maximize site visits by
creating page titles and meta descriptions that incite people to click
on our links. Let’s look at the screenshot in Figure 3.3, which shows
a result for the search “how to bathe my cat.”
Figure 3.3 How Meta Tags Are Displayed on Google SERPs
If, as a user, I am searching for “how to bathe my cat,” my goal is
to find information that will help me achieve this task. As a website
owner (and perhaps, a brand that sells bath products for cats), your
objective is to provide me with a page that will help me achieve
my goal. By doing so, you are creating value in my life. Later, when
we introduce conversion-based marketing, we will discuss how this
type of value creation—offering free content to people—brings
visitors to your site and offers opportunities to turn these visitors
into leads.
When creating webpages and positioning them on specific search
queries, we have only a few options to communicate with
consumers. Three of these are the page URL, the page title (which
shows up on SERPs and is also what you read in your tabs next to the
website icon), and the page description. These are resources that
Planning for a Digital Marketing Campaign | 53
you create when creating webpages. They are part of what is called
the “meta element.”
Ideally, you want to write your page title and page description in a
way that will incite people to click on your link rather than the links
of your competition. Your title and description thus directly address
a specific search query, show that the page has the information
required, and provide a call to action to incite people to click on
your link. In this case, the page title repeats the exact same
keywords I used in my search. This is great! It makes me feel like
this page is exactly what I am looking for. The description could be
optimized, but it provides me with first-hand experience and the
start of a tutorial on how to bathe my cat. I at least know that, if
I click this link, I’ll be given instructions on how to bathe my cat.
Perhaps a better description could have been (keeping in mind that
a description should be limited to about 150 to 160 characters to
show in its entirety on SERPs):
Learn how to bathe your cat easily! Your cat will love it! No
scratches! Easy 5 step tutorial so that you and your feline buddy
have a fun time.
Let’s break this down: [Start with a call to action] Learn how to
bathe your cat easily! [Express some benefit associated with your
content] Your cat will love it! No scratches! [Tell people what’s on
your page] Easy 5 step tutorial so that you and your feline buddy
have a fun time.
In short, optimizing for users means having people in mind when
creating your pages and considering what they are searching for,
how you can best answer their needs and goals, and how to tell
them that you are doing so.
This will help address the rest of the user experience factors: time
on site, page per session, and bounce rate.
Time on site is the time a user spends on your site. If your page
is well designed and readily answers a query, we can assume that
users will stay and spend time on your site.
Bounce rate is the “percentage of visitors who enter the site and
then leave rather than continuing to view other pages within the
54 | Planning for a Digital Marketing Campaign
same site” (Wikipedia). Again, if people have a nice experience, this
should lower the bounce rate.
Since bounce rate and page per session (the average number of
pages a person views in a given session, where session here can be
substituted to a website visit; i.e., the average number of pages a
person views once they clicked your link on a SERP) are associated
with moving between pages on your website, it helps if you provide
incentives for people to do so.
Typically, this is done by practicing cross-linking, or linking
pages of your own website with one another. We often see two ways
through which websites do this.
The first way is to insert links within your pages that bring visitors
to other pages of your website. Take this example for this page. The
page is on “How to do a mask,” and within the text, it provides a
link to a face mask sold by the website. If you click on this link, you
will be visiting another page on the same website, increasing the
average number of pages visited per session.
Another way that websites invite you to go through multiple
pages is through recommended articles. Having a lot of content is
quite important in maximizing your ranking for many reasons, but
one of those reasons is to keep people on your site for a longer
period of time by having them visit many pages. For example, at the
end of each page for blog posts, Zoella invites visitors to related
articles that might interest them (Figure 3.4).
Planning for a Digital Marketing Campaign | 55
Figure 3.4
Cross-Linkin
g Example
Backlinks
The second most important set of factors relates to backlinks, or
links back to your website from other websites. Backlinks can be
thought of as votes of confidence from other websites. It’s like a
popularity contest: The more people endorse you, the more others
think you are relevant in a given domain. Or, applied to the web, the
more backlinks to your website, the more relevant search engines
think you are in a given domain.
This is important for search engines because if you are providing
a good user experience and other sites link heavily back to yours,
chances are you are doing something that people like. People liking
you/voting for you/linking back to you thus become a good proxy
for how high you should be ranking for specific searches.
The list of factors above (Figure 3.2) offers three important
backlink-related factors, two of which we will discuss here.
Total referring domains represents the total number of domains
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(e.g., domain1.com, www.domain2.com, and so on) linking back to
your domain.
Total follow-backlinks represents the total number of links that
are allowed for web referencing that link back to your page. Without
getting technical, search engines differentiate between types of
links on websites so that they only consider “real” votes of
confidence. They thus exclude, for example, links back to your
website done as part of promotions. Follow-backlinks represents
these “real” votes of confidence, while nofollow-backlinks
represents links that are not taken into account for referencing.
Importantly, backlinks need to be earned organically, meaning
that they cannot be incentivized. Paid promotions with bloggers,
where bloggers link back to your website, for example, should be
tagged as “nofollow” links. This means that, to create backlinks,
firms need to think of strategies that will create links back to their
websites without paying people to do so. Other types of backlinks
that should be nofollow include links in blog comments, press
releases and most social media and forums, as well as links on all
of the following social media platforms: Quora, Reddit, YouTube,
Wikipedia, Twitch, and Medium. Interestingly, although social
media backlinks do not directly contribute to the ranking of a
website or webpage, they can do so indirectly by increasing web
traffic. Google is notoriously secretive about its algorithm and how
it ranks websites. Recently, it indicated that it may follow certain
nofollow backlinks, and several examples exist of backlink strategies
where webpages shot up in ranking even though the links that
contributed to the increase were nofollow links.
In addition to these two factors, which generally represent the
quantity of backlinks to your sites (i.e., the total number of domains
and the total number of links), it is also acknowledged that your
website ranking will also depend on the quality of the backlinks.
High-quality backlinks are “natural,” meaning that the referring
website (the website that links back to you) links back to your
website in a way that naturally makes sense in the context. For
example, it might use a relevant, natural anchor text. Anchor text
Planning for a Digital Marketing Campaign | 57
is the clickable text that is underlined for a given link. Most of
the hyperlinks in this chapter give examples of natural anchor text.
The closer the anchor text to the keywords on which you want to
rank your webpage, the better. For example, if you want to rank a
webpage on how to bathe a cat, it will help if websites link back to
your webpage with the anchor text how to bathe a cat. High-quality
links come from authoritative pages, i.e., pages that rank high on
search engines. They also come from sources that are topically
relevant to your webpage. For example, if you are creating a
webpage on fitness routines, backlinks from sites on fitness will
have a greater impact on your ranking.
Keywords
The last set of factors concern keywords. Keywords are terms you
include on your webpages to communicate with search engines and
with people. They help you clearly identify the ideas and topics
on your webpage. Keywords are what link your webpage to the
SERP through people’s search queries. Keywords need to not only
represent your content well and naturally but also address what
people you want to attract to your website are searching for.
The central implication of this is that you should be creating
webpages to rank on specific search queries that people you want as
customers are searching for. This is why representing the customer
and understanding the need, goals, and challenges of personas are
so important!
For example, for the search query “how to bathe a cat,” the
webpages that are positioned on these keywords are likely to rank
first. This is because these webpages are telling search engines,
“Look at our keywords, we have created a webpage specifically
for this search query.” As a result, search engines can assume that
these webpages will be better at answering the needs of people for
a specific search query. People who get good search results that
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answer their needs are happier about the search engine, and they
will continue to use it. The goal of search engines is to have people
coming back and use them again. By helping search engines answer
exactly what people are searching for, you are making sure you rank
higher.
How do you position webpages on keywords? Basically, by putting
keywords in a few key places on your website to “talk” to a search
engine and indicate what search query a certain webpage is meant
to rank on. To talk to a search engine, you want to put the keywords
on which you want your webpage to rank in the following specific
places (Figure 3.5):
• page title
• meta description
• page URL
• headings (the titles) in the webpage
• the body (that is, the text)
Figure 3.5 Top On-Page Factors
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Take the “What Are Keywords” page on Moz.com on as an example.
This page clearly aims at positioning itself on search queries related
to keywords, and more specifically, the search “what are keywords.”
How do we know this? Because it has those specific keywords
repeated over and over again in the five aforementioned places.
• The page title is “Keywords | SEO Best Practices [2021] – Moz.”
(You can easily find any page title by looking at the page source
by right-clicking within a webpage and then clicking on the
option “view page source” in the menu of your web browser.)
• The meta description is: “In terms of SEO, ‘keywords’ are the
words and phrases that searchers enter into search engines,
also called ‘search queries’ to find what they are looking for. A
well-optimized website will have keywords and related topics
in their content to make it possible for people to find their
website via…”.
• The page URL is https://moz.com/learn/seo/what-are-
keywords
• The phrase “What are keywords” is repeated three times in the
first three headings, which are
◦ “What are Keywords?”
◦ “Why are keywords important?” and
◦ “What are long-tail keywords?”
• These keywords, and related words, are repeated over and
over again in the body.
As we saw above, the top factors associated with keywords are the
following: keywords in anchor, body, density, in total, in meta.
Keywords in anchor are not controlled by the owner of a website.
Rather, as explained above, they are controlled by whoever is linking
to your site. Therefore, we won’t be considering them in this
section.
The rest of the keywords factors are controlled by the website
owner.
Keywords in body refers to the keywords used throughout your
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text in a given webpage. Ideally, you want to create a tight semantic
network of keywords that relate to one another. For example, let’s
say you are creating a page to rank on the keywords “best dresses
at the 2020 Oscars.” To indicate to search engines that this is what
you what to rank on, you can put these main keywords in the URL,
page title, and one or more headings. But repeating these keywords
over and over again in the body of the text won’t feel natural and
will hinder user experience. As a result, you can come up with
synonyms to use in the body. Here are a few examples of keywords
and possible synonyms:
• best: top, talked about, fashionable
• dresses: attire, robes, outfits
• Oscars: academy awards, red carpet, statuette
Using this approach will not only help you create a webpage that
fares better in terms of user experience, but it will also help you
have both a high density keywords in the body (i.e., a high ratio
of keywords to total number of words) and a high total number of
keywords.
Keywords in meta refers to having the keywords in the meta
elements of your webpage, which for the sake of this course will be
represented by page title and meta description.
To recap, search engines consider more than 200 factors, but
the top factors used to rank website can be grouped into three
categories:
• user experience
• backlinks
• keywords
When doing SEO, your role is to create webpages that directly
address specific search queries. This will help you craft content
that will provide a great user experience and tie your webpage to
specific keywords associated with a search query. In the world of
Planning for a Digital Marketing Campaign | 61
search optimization, this is referred to as on-page optimization,
which is achieved by making changes to the page code, content,
or structure of the website to make it more accessible for search
engines and improve the user experience.
The other type of optimization talked about is off-page
optimization, which focuses on improving the popularity, expertise,
authority, trust, and relevance of a website. For example, it includes
building backlinks, getting brand mentions, and increasing social
media shares. Strategies to improve backlinks might have to do with
creating highly shareable content and public relations activities to
bring attention to the content you have created. For example, a
strategy we used in a firm I worked in was to create benchmark
studies (studies that compare competitors based on a set of
variables and provide some baseline). These were heavily shared by
firms and discussed in the media, which drove a lot of traffic to our
website. Companies like McKinsey are continuously producing free
content, like their “Featured Insights” website section, to generate
discussions around their firm.
Understanding How Consumers Use
Keywords
Since user experience is central to ranking high, it becomes quite
important to understand how people search for stuff online. We are
going to talk about three ways of thinking about this.
A first way of thinking about how people search is to consider
the objective of their search. Three types of searches are typically
referred to by SEO professionals (e.g., Moz 2016; Figure 3.6).
Consumers perform informational searches when they are
looking for information about a specific topic. Examples might
include
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• “How to run a 5k?”
• “What are beginner’s running shoes?” or
• “Best beginner running shoes.”
Consumers perform transactional searches when they are looking
to perform a transaction. Transactions have been both narrowly
defined (i.e., buying a product) and more broadly defined (i.e.,
performing an interaction). Examples of transactional searches
might be
• “Cheap beginner running shoes”
• “Brooks Ghost 12” or
• “Buy Asics Brooks Ghost 12.”
Consumers perform navigational searches when they are looking
for a specific website. Such a search might look like
• “Sports Experts”
• “Foot Locker” or
• “Brooks website.”
Considering the objectives of people performing search queries is
helpful for us as digital marketers because it allows us to create
webpages to answer these specific objectives. The kind of keywords
on each page will be vastly different.
These objectives can also be placed in a process, where someone
moves from needing information about a specific need or challenge
to wanting to perform interactions (or a transaction) to address this
need to wanting to visit a specific website.
The key idea here is that, as digital marketers, knowing why
people are searching for something allows you to create pages that
more directly align with their searches. This helps you improve user
experience and choose the right keywords, both of which should
allow your webpages to rank higher.
Planning for a Digital Marketing Campaign | 63
Figure 3.6 Types of Search
A second way to think about why people are searching is to start
with their needs, challenges, and goals. This has a few implications:
First, as we have seen with RV Betty, different segments/personas
have different needs, challenges, and goals. That means that you
will need to create different webpages to attract different personas
to your website, where each webpage should address a specific
need, challenge, or goal (and, perhaps, could do so by targeting
different search objectives). Thus, when creating webpages, the first
questions that should come to your mind are the following: What
are the needs of my persona? What goal are they trying to achieve?
What challenges are they facing when trying to address their need
or achieve their goal? Answering these questions should allow you
to generate many different content ideas, from which you can think
of specific search queries. We will cover this in more detail when
we talk about content marketing. In this course, we will emphasize
how consumers’ searches vary depending on where they are in their
journey:
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• Early on in their journey, consumers are looking to find
information about a problem they are facing or a need they are
trying to address (e.g., “how to run a 5k,” “treating acne fast,”
“easy ways to gain muscle,” or “getting a job after college”).
• As consumers move to actively evaluating the options available
to address their need, they will start to weigh different options
(e.g., “best training plan for 5k,” “retinol vs. benzoyl vs. salicylic,”
“is creatine that good,” or “should I register on linkedin”).
• Lastly, once they are closer to making a purchase, they will
look at evaluating or accessing the specific product they
choose (e.g., “sales brooks ghost 12,” “where to buy benzoyl,”
“creatine online cheap,” “linkedin promo code”).
Similarly to the three objectives of searches, knowing that
consumers first concentrate on problems, then on potential
solutions, and finally on the product or service they are interested
in is the first step to creating a marketing campaign. Keeping in
mind that our goal is to create value for consumers by representing
them (rather than talking about our company), this means that we
will need to create ads and content that (1) inform consumers about
their problems, (2) help them evaluate their options, and (3) position
our product as the best or create product or service-specific
information. When we introduce the conversion-based framework
in the next chapter, we will see how each of these stages can also
be used for different strategic goals (namely, attracting visitors,
converting visitors to leads, and converting leads to customers).
This is visually represented in Figure 3.7 below.
Figure 3.7 Journey and Searches
Planning for a Digital Marketing Campaign | 65
We will cover the last way to think about searches very briefly,
since we discussed it in the last chapter: Google ZMOTs. As we
saw, Google proposes four ZMOTs: I want to know, I want to go,
I want to do, and I want to buy. Some of these overlap with what
we just saw. I-want-to-know searches are informational searches.
I-want-to-buy searches can be thought of as transactional searches
(a broader definition of transactional searches could also include I-
want-to-do searches). These moments again present opportunities
to create content. Google presents numerous ways for marketers to
capitalize on I-want-to-do moments here.
Using Keywords to Analyze Competitors
We conclude this chapter by examining how keywords can be used
to analyze your competition. To frame what follows, we will assume
that competitors know and follow the same rules as you should
when creating webpages and choosing keywords.
• Your competitors are creating specific webpages to rank on
specific search queries.
• They know where to put the keywords to communicate with
people and search engines:
◦ Page title
◦ Meta description
◦ Page URL
◦ Headings (the titles) in the webpage
◦ The body (the text)
• They write their page title, URL, and meta descriptions to “sell”
their webpage to people on SERPs.
This is useful from a competitive analysis viewpoint because it
means you can easily study your competition based on specific
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keywords. It is also important to understand here that you should
think of ranking on search queries in a way that is similar to selling
products: you need to find a positioning that optimal for your
webpage. That means finding a search query that is not overly
competitive, and on which you believe it is likely that you will rank
high. Hence, a first step is to understand how to analyze the
competitiveness of specific keywords and associated search
queries.
Keyword Competitive Analysis
We should understand well, at this point, that we are creating
webpages with the goal of ranking high on specific search queries.
We also understand that not all consumers will use the exact same
search query to address a specific need. Let’s go back to the search
queries we used to introduce this chapter and assume we are trying
to create a webpage that will address the consumer need of wanting
to know how to bathe a cat. As a reminder, those queries were the
following:
• “how to bathe my cat”
• “easiest way to wash my cat”
• “wash a cat”
• “cat wash soap”
These are different search queries, and how competitive they are
will thus be different. A few easy steps can help you understand
how likely you are to rank high on a specific search query. The first
step is to understand how old the domains that show up on the first
SERP are. This is because the older the domain, the more time they
have had to build content and backlinks, and the harder they will be
to displace from the first SERP. The older the domains on the first
SERP, the more competitive the search query.
Planning for a Digital Marketing Campaign | 67
To know how old domains are, pick the keywords you want to
rank on. Search these keywords on a search engine (e.g., Google).
Then, use a whois service (e.g., who.is) and check the “registered on”
date. For example, for the search “how to bathe my cat,” the first
domains are:
• wikihow.com, registered in 2004
• bhg.com, registered in 1999
• catster.com, registered in 2000
It seems that most domains for this search query have been
registered prior to 2010, which makes it likely to be a competitive
search query. Additionally, most of these webpages seem to have
been created to rank on this exact search query, or something
closely related:
• The Wikihow page title is “How to bathe a cat”
• The Bhg page title is “How to bathe a cat”
• The catster.com page title is “How to bathe a cat”
This combination of webpages clearly positioned on specific
keywords that compete against yours and older domains means that
trying to rank a webpage on “how to bathe my cat” might thus be
a rather difficult exercise. It doesn’t mean it isn’t possible to do,
but it would require a lot of work to create backlinks and a page
that answers consumer needs better than other pages. Trying to
position the webpage on other keywords might be an easier path.
You can repeat this exercise with new keywords until you find a
search that you believe consumers will be using and that is not
overly competitive.
Another approach to studying keywords is to search for webpages
that are exactly positioned on the keywords you are aiming for. A
few Boolean search operators can help you here:
• allintitle (e.g., allintitle:how to bathe a cat) returns results
68 | Planning for a Digital Marketing Campaign
where the keywords are in the page title
• allinurl (e.g., allinurl:how to bathe a cat) returns results where
the keywords are in the page URL
• allinanchor (e.g., allinanchor:how to bathe a cat) returns
results where webpages are linked to the keywords in the
anchor text
These are useful because, as we just covered, SEO should lead
webmasters to put the keywords on which they want to rank in the
page title and page URL, and because being linked to keywords in
anchor text helps our rankings. In short, by using these Boolean
search operators, you can get a clear list of exactly who your
competition is for a specific search query. This becomes useful, for
example, if you want to understand what kind of content their pages
offer, how the pages are structured, whether they have multiple
types of media, and so on. Or, put differently, you can analyze the
webpages of your competition to create a general benchmark to
beat and create a better webpage that will more clearly and fully
answer consumers’ needs.
Planning for a Digital Marketing Campaign | 69
Exercises
Background Persona
You are a real estate company located in Montreal that
specializes in first-time buyers.
Let’s assume a quick draft of a persona.
Bill and Jane are newly wed and are looking to start a
family. They want to have some space because they are
planning to have two kids, and ideally a backyard. They
would also like their house to become the family house. In
other words, they would like the family to grow in the
house. Ideally, that means finding a family friendly
neighborhood, where the schools are good and accessible.
Their budget is somewhat limited, because they are quite
young, which can be a problem when wanting to find a
home. Lastly, they are also first-time house buyers, and
they are quite unaware of the whole process of buying a
home.
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Understanding Searches
You are a real estate company located in Montreal that
specializes in first-time buyers.
• Identify an informational search your target market
might do.
• Identify a transactional search your target market
might do.
• Identify a navigational search your target market
might do.
Creating Content With SEO in Mind
Pick one search out of the three searches you have
identified prior. For this search, come up with an idea for a
webpage, concentrating on the following elements of the
webpage:
• Page title
• Meta description
• Headings
• URL
• Keyword synonyms in body
Backlinks
How can we boost backlinks for our real estate company?
Identify five concrete ways to do so.
Competitive analysis
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Reverse engineer the SEO efforts and content marketing
strategy of competitors. Again, consider the page title,
description, URL, headings, keywords in content, and alt
tags.
Then, go to news.shupilov.com and pick three blog
articles. Identify
• the keywords on which these articles are supposed
to rank and
• who you think they are targeting.
Finding novel competitive spaces
Based on the searches we previously talked about, find five
alternative, less competitive searches to rank on.
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Introduction to Digital
Strategy
PIERRE-YANN DOLBEC
Overview
In this chapter, we discuss some key vocabulary associated with
digital marketing, covering concepts such as inbound and outbound
marketing and paid, owned, and earned media activities. We then
turn our attention to the framework we are going to cover for the
rest of the semester, the RACE framework. We briefly cover the
four stages of the framework before turning out attention to how
to link persona, journey, and strategy. We conclude the chapter by
understanding how the RACE framework can support competitive
analysis.
Learning Objectives
Understand key terms associated with online strategy,
the objectives of the four stages of the RACE framework,
how it links to personas and journeys, and how to use it to
support competitive analysis.
Introduction to Digital Strategy | 73
Inbound and Outbound Marketing
Inbound and outbound marketing represent two broad approaches
to connecting with consumers. Inbound marketing aims at bringing
visitors “in,” drawing them to your company via, typically, content
marketing, social media, and well-optimized websites. In this first
approach, consumers find you because you represent them.
Outbound marketing is what we typically think of when we think
of advertising: the promotion of products or services through
advertising and promotions. In this case, a message goes “out” from
your company and stops consumers in whatever they were doing
(e.g., a consumer is “stopped” by an ad when scrolling on Instagram
or reading their Facebook feed; they are stopped by an ad at the
start of a YouTube video, or they are stopped by an ad which cuts a
newspaper article or a blog post in two).
Inbound marketing is also associated with permission marketing,
where advertising is welcomed because permission to be advertised
to has already been obtained and advertising is anticipated (e.g.,
email marketing), and two-way communication, meaning that there
can be an interaction between consumers and the brand (e.g.,
consumers can comment on social media posts and on blog
articles). A few further characteristics of inbound marketing are that
it is
• sought, meaning that consumers find you,
• one of the fastest-growing strategies for marketing online and
has been over the last decade,
• seen as cheaper to perform since companies do not need to
invest in ads (although there are costs associated with content
creation), and
• aimed at customer acquisition.
Conversely, outbound marketing is associated with interruption
marketing, where marketing efforts such as ads interrupt what
74 | Introduction to Digital Strategy
a consumer is doing, and one-way communication, because
consumers cannot talk to ads. Outbound marketing is also
• imposed, because consumers do not agree to be advertised to,
• decreasing in popularity, although this is debated,
• expensive, because there are fees associated with putting ads
online, and
• aimed at awareness creation, as has typically been the case
with traditional advertising.
Examples of inbound marketing include blog posts, infographics, e-
books, whitepapers, social media posts, tutorials, and the like.
Examples of outbound marketing include advertising of any sort,
which we are going to cover in more detail in the next chapter.
Paid, Owned, and Earned Media
We differentiate between three types of media online: paid, owned,
and earned.
Paid media are media activities you pay for. These media activities
are typically performed on a third party channel (i.e., not your own
website) that is paid by your company to conduct the activity. Your
company controls the content, but the third party controls where
this content is shown. Examples include search ads, display ads,
paid influencers, paid content promotion, social media ads, product
placements, and the like.
Owned media activities are media activities that are hosted on
channels that you own, i.e., on your own platforms. They include
your web properties (e.g., blog posts on your website) and social
media channels.
Earned media activities are media impressions that you earn
because your content is shared. Here, consumers (and sometimes
professionals) become the channel. Shared social media posts,
Introduction to Digital Strategy | 75
reviews, and other consumer-generated content such as ratings,
social recommendations, content created on wikis, or forum
discussions are examples of earned media activities. The coverage
of your company by journalists also falls under earned media
activities.
Very importantly, although these are conceptually distinct types
of media activities, an ideal campaign will integrate them. For
example, you can create content on your website and social media
channels that you will also push by advertising on social media
websites and other websites using banner ads, and you are making
these efforts in the hopes that your content will be widely shared
by others. This is the typical strategy underlying viral marketing
campaigns.
Take, for example, the widely successful ad for Doritos during
the 2020 Superbowl. Doritos created an ad that they hosted on
their website and social media channels (e.g., YouTube). The ad
was pushed as a paid media activity during the Superbowl to the
tune of several million dollars. It was also associated with a Tik Tok
hashtag campaign, #coolranchdance, which fueled earned media
impressions. It is this intersection of paid, owned, and earned media
activities that leads to the creation of successful online marketing
campaigns!
Objectives, Goals, and KPIs
Objectives, goals, and KPIs are the next set of concepts we will
cover. Objectives represent what you want to achieve for your
company. Ideally, objectives should be SMART:
• specific
• measurable
• attainable
• realistic
76 | Introduction to Digital Strategy
• time-bound
Goals are actions that you want users to take. We use the vocabulary
of goals to designate user’s actions since this is typically how goals
are positioned in web analytics (e.g., Google Analytics).
Distinguishing between objectives (what you want to achieve) and
goals (what you want your users to achieve) just makes things
clearer.
KPIs—key performance indicators—are metrics used to evaluate
the performance of your company based on a particular objective
or activity. KPIs typically have targets, specific values that your
company is aiming to achieve within a certain time period.
These concepts work together to help you plan campaigns:
Objectives can be used to identify goals for users to achieve, which
can be measured using KPIs (Figure 4.1).
Figure 4.1 Objective / Goal / KPI
For example, an objective for your company might be to increase
product awareness. In order to achieve this objective, you might set
up goals for your users, such as subscribing to email updates and
engaging in some key features you believe will help raise product
awareness. It is then possible to identify KPIs to measure your
success for these user goals, such as “number of contact forms
Introduction to Digital Strategy | 77
submitted” or “use of the key feature of the virtual mirror” (see
Figure 4.2 for an example or, for the text version, click here).
Figure 4.2 KPIs Example / Text Description
Strategy and Tactics
Strategy and tactics are the last key terms we need to better
understand the RACE framework. Strategy represents the path you
intend to take to achieve a specific objective. This aligns with Jain’s
(1993) understanding of strategy as “the pattern of major objectives,
purposes and goals, and essential policies and plans for achieving
those goals, stated in such a way as to define what business the
company is in or is to be in.”
In this course, we are going to emphasize how, to implement
a strategy and achieve specific objectives, a company deploys
tactics—tools used to meet objectives. Examples of tools we will
discuss include banner advertising campaigns, search ad
campaigns, and the use of content marketing on social media.
78 | Introduction to Digital Strategy
Let’s combine the vocabulary we just introduced in an example.
Objective
• Increase sales through our eCommerce platform by 10% within
the next six months.
Tactics
• Search advertising pay-per-click (PPC) campaign using specific
keywords, with a budget, time frame, etc.
• Social media campaign using the Facebook brand page, with
marketing material
KPIs per tactic
• Search advertising: clickthrough rate (CTR), bounce rate
• Social media campaign: clickthrough rate, share ratio/
amplification rate
Targets per tactic
• Search advertising: CTR of XX%, bounce rate of XX%
• Social media campaign: CTR of XX%, share ratio of XX%
We can now turn our attention to the RACE framework.
RACE Framework
Chaffey’s RACE framework is a conversion-based framework.
Conversion marketing is a strategic approach that explicitly aims
at increasing customers. The framework we will study here is part
of a greater set of strategic approaches, such as HubSpot’s original
“attract-convert-close-delight” strategy, which became their
Introduction to Digital Strategy | 79
“flywheel business model,” or the grandfather of conversion
marketing approaches, the “pirate metrics” AARRR model
(acquisition-activation-retention-referral-revenue) shown in Figure
4.3 (text version can be found here).
Figure 4.3 AARRR / Text Description
These different frameworks propose stages with different names,
but the central idea of this strategic approach is the same. To
convert, you need to move people through four stages:
• visitor (people come to your website)
• lead (visitors are converted into a qualified potential customer
i.e., somebody who is interested in your product and is also
somebody you are interested in selling to)
• customer
80 | Introduction to Digital Strategy
• repeat customer
Your goals at each stage are as follows:
• Visitors: In brief, you create campaigns to attract people to
your website.
• Leads: Once they are on your website, you want to (1) find ways
to see if they are interested in you, (2) find out if you are
interested in them, i.e., whether they can be a customer of
yours (because not all visitors are people who can buy your
product or service), and, if they fit these two categories, and
there is a mutual interest, (3) find a way to continue the
conversation with them (usually by collecting their email
address or making sure they follow you on social media).
• Customers: Once you have identified a mutual interest, you
move to accompany people on their journey so that you can
convert them from a lead to a customer of yours.
• Repeat customers: After their purchase, you capitalize on their
(hopefully) positive experience with your company so that they
can co-create on your behalf (e.g., write reviews) and continue
their journey as a customer of yours.
The RACE framework presents four stages that help us plan for
and coordinate different marketing activities to achieve these
objectives.
R stands for REACH
During the Reach stage, your company has two objectives:
• to build awareness about your brand, products, and services
through offline and online media activities, and
• to drive traffic using inbound and outbound marketing
Introduction to Digital Strategy | 81
activities and paid earned and owned media touchpoints.
At this stage, you will mostly concentrate on addressing people’s
problems.
A stands for interACT
During the Act stage, your company has two objectives:
• to generate positive interactions on your owned media and
• to create leads, i.e., identify potential customers and make sure
they can be your customer (we will call these “qualifying” leads
later on in the semester).
At this stage, we are going to emphasize how we should focus on
addressing consumers’ problems as well as helping them evaluate
their options.
C stands for CONVERT
During the Convert stage, your company has one objective:
converting leads into sales.
At this stage, we are going to emphasize how we should focus on
talking about why your brand, product, or service is the best option
for consumers. We will also touch on how to optimize our owned
media order to maximize conversions, a process that is called
“conversion rate optimization.”
82 | Introduction to Digital Strategy
Figure 4.4
RACE
Objectives /
Text
Description
E stands for ENGAGE
During the Engage stage, your company has two objectives:
• to build customer advocacy and
• to foster repeat visits and sales.
At this stage, the idea is to build long-term engagement by
continuously contributing to consumers’ lives by creating value.
We also want to identify engaged customers in order to foster
their participation and engage them in co-creation activities to
participate in our campaigns and support our marketing efforts.
Figure 4.4 presents how these objectives evolve over time with
each of the stages (text description here).
From Persona and Journey to Strategy
As we discussed during the last two chapters, the goals, needs,
motivations, and challenges of consumers provide the raw material
from which to create content for each persona. Journeys tell you
what your content should be about (problem, solutions, and your
Introduction to Digital Strategy | 83
product), and how it addresses different stages of the journey. See
Figure 4.5 for a brief recap of Chapter 3.
Figure 4.5 Journey and Searches
Let’s take the example of making content and associated search
ads, i.e., creating a blog post and then deciding to advertise this
blog post on Google SERPs. As we discussed in previous chapters,
your goal when optimizing your webpages is to identify keywords
consumers will use to perform searches online. The idea behind
making search ads is similar. We covered a few ways to help do so,
including
• considering who they are/what they need (persona),
• how they go about solving their needs (journey), and
• what they search in order to do so (journey, ZMOT, types), as
well as
• benchmarking against competition.
Once you’ve identified keywords that your consumers are using
throughout their journey, you can start creating content or ads
based on these keywords so that you show up on a search engine
when a consumer does this search.
The concept of a persona helps identify general keywords based
on customers’ needs, motivations, challenges. Considering their
journey helps identify specific keywords based on how users go
about answering needs, motivations, and challenges throughout
that journey. Here are two examples:
84 | Introduction to Digital Strategy
• If a consumer has pain in their lower back, they might perform
a Google search to find out how to address this pain. This
presents an opportunity to create awareness around a back
pain–related product you are selling (e.g., a pair of sneakers).
• If a consumer wants to compare sneakers to understand which
pair offers the best support to address back pain, this provides
you with an opportunity to compare your product to those of
your competitors.
Introduction to Digital Strategy | 85
Table 4.1 Journey: From Awareness to Post-Purchase
Stage of Journey
Awareness Active
Evaluation Purchase Post-Purchase
Concrete
actions
Action: Goes to
Google to
search for
general
information
about their
problem
Search
(informational):
“How to
reduce back
pain”
Action: Goes to
Google to
compare
alternatives
Search
(informational):
“shoes vs.
posture vs.
exercise back
pain”
Action: Goes
to Google and
types the
name of the
brand and
product they
want to buy
Search
(transactional):
“Brand XYZ
best price
sale”
Action: Writes
product
review on
retailer’s
website
Opportunity
Create content
to inform and
educate
consumers
about back
pain
Create content
to inform and
educate
consumers
about back
pain solutions
Position your
product as the
best option for
back pain
Leverage
engaged
consumers to
create reviews
Tactic
Create a blog
post with the
keywords “how
to,” “reduce,”
and “back pain”
Create PPC
campaign on
associated
keywords
Create several
blog posts that
compare your
product vs.
competitors;
include
relevant
keywords (e.g.,
“best shoes,”
“posture,”
“back pain”)
Create PPC
campaign on
associated
keywords
Search ad
campaign on
keywords
(“Brand XYZ
shoes,” “best
price”) and
place an ad to
offer a 10%
rebate for
first-time
clients on your
website
Give a rebate
for a future
purchase
when writing a
review
From a Journey Map to a Conversion Path
A journey map is a visual representation of the consumer journey.
The map transforms a rather abstract way of understanding how
86 | Introduction to Digital Strategy
consumers purchase products (i.e., awareness, consideration,
purchase, and loyalty) to something concrete, with specific actions
and touchpoints, that a brand can use to create a marketing
strategy.
A conversion path is how a brand is thinking of enacting this
strategy. It ties together multiple tactical activities (e.g., search ads
and content marketing). It can be defined as a description of the
steps that a company wants consumers to take so that they achieve
a desired goal. In the digital marketing vocabulary, a conversion
occurs when a consumer achieves a goal you wanted them to
achieve. The nature of that goal can vary widely: it could be visiting
a page, clicking on a link, sending you their email address, buying
a product, spending more than a specific amount of time on one
of your pages, viewing a certain number of pages during a session,
using a key feature—the list goes on. To create a conversion path,
companies plan a set of steps that they want consumers to take
in order to achieve the designated goal. The shortest conversion
path that is typically presented in digital marketing leads from ad to
content to landing page (Figure 4.6).
Introduction to Digital Strategy | 87
Figure 4.6 Conversion Path
The planning of the steps consumers are going to take to achieve
what you want them to achieve is central to create digital marketing
campaigns. We do not simply create content and ads in the hopes
that consumers are going to visit our website or click on our ads,
without any idea of what will happen next. Rather, the best-
strategized campaigns always answer the question, What comes
next? For example, if you’re creating an ad to appear at the top of
a SERP, what comes next? What are you expecting people to do?
Where are you leading them? What should they be doing once they
get on this page? Why? Answering these questions is how you can
create highly converting campaigns because you have a clear idea
of the goal consumers should achieve, and you can therefore create
pages and ads that will lead them to achieve these goals.
Depending on who you ask, it takes between 5 and 13 touchpoints
(or interactions with your brand) to generate a qualified, sales-
ready lead (Salesforce 2015; Online Marketing Institute 2013). We
88 | Introduction to Digital Strategy
will come back to the notion of qualified lead (i.e., a lead that you
believe can be your customer) and sales-ready (i.e., a lead that is
at the purchase stage) later during the semester. For this chapter,
what is important to understand is that, without planning ahead
in advance what these 5 to 13 touchpoints will be, it will be quite
difficult to create sales. The task of a digital marketer is thus
understanding how to bring people through a set of smaller goals,
like visiting a blog post, spending 3 minutes reading the post, giving
the company an email address, opening the first email (and so on),
that will lead them to achieve certain milestones toward making a
purchase. Otherwise, a company will be flying in the dark, with no
clear strategy as to how to make sales, apart from putting ads online
and creating content.
For your term project, your goal is to create a clear conversion
path composed of three inbound and three outbound marketing
activities. They can be part of the same path (see the example
in Figure 4.7) or part of different paths (see Figure 4.8 or text
description), but you need to think ahead to a set of tactics and
associated marketing activities that are clearly linked to making
people “walk” along the path you’ve created for them. Ideally, your
path should indicate what you are doing (i.e., your tactic) and what
you expect consumers to do (i.e., a goal).
Introduction to Digital Strategy | 89
Figure 4.7 Conversion Path – 1st Example
90 | Introduction to Digital Strategy
Figure 4.8
Conversion
Path – 2nd
Example /
Text
Description
RACE for Competitive Analysis
The RACE framework (Figure 4.9; text description) is highly useful in
creating a strategy for digital marketing campaigns. It helps answers
questions such as the following:
• Reach: How do I bring visitors to my website?
• Act: How do I create a positive user experience? How do I
transform visitors into leads?
• Convert: How do I convert leads into customers?
• Engage: Once I have customers, how do I ensure repeat
purchases? How can I leverage my customers to participate in
my marketing campaigns?
The strategic value of the RACE framework also makes it a great
Introduction to Digital Strategy | 91
tool to guide competitive analysis. You can turn these questions
around to better understand the digital marketing strategy of your
competitors:
• Reach: How is my competition bringing visitors to their site?
• Act: Once they have visitors on their web properties, how does
do they create positive interactions? How do they transform
visitors into leads?
• Convert: How do they convert leads into customers?
• Engage: How do they ensure repeat purchases? How do they
foster word-of-mouth and other co-creation activities?
92 | Introduction to Digital Strategy
Figure 4.9 RACE / Text Description
Reach
Understanding how your competitors bring in visitors can be of
great use in crafting your own strategy for attracting people to your
web properties. Questions to ask include
Introduction to Digital Strategy | 93
• How frequently are your competitors running promotions?
What benefits do those promotions provide to their customers
and potential shoppers, as well as their business?
• Are they running contests online? What kind?
• How are they using their social media channels? How do they
drive people from their social media channels to their website?
• What information is included in their marketing banners and
callouts?
Act
Similarly, an analysis of your competition should include a better
understanding of the user experience on their website. For this
stage, you can answer questions such as
• How are they creating positive interactions on their properties
and transforming visitors into leads?
• Where are their calls to action throughout the browsing
experience? What are the calls to action about?
• Do they have a blog? How frequently do they post? What type
of information do they tackle?
• What is the role of content on their website? How does their
content differ from yours?
Convert
The next stage is to better understand how your competition
converts their leads into customers. To understand this, it is
important to take the same steps a customer would: Register for
your competitors’ newsletters, understand what happens once a
cart is abandoned, and analyze persuasion attempts within
94 | Introduction to Digital Strategy
webpages. To assist you, questions you should be able to answer
include:
• How do they display their products and communicate details?
• How detailed are their product descriptions? What information
do they include? What information is missing?
• Where are their calls to action throughout the browsing
experience? What are those calls to action about?
• What happens in newsletters? Is there a clear, planned path
created to maximize sales? What is that path?
• Do they have an abandoned-cart saver feature? If so, at what
point do they send the emails and what are the messages in
those emails?
• Is your competition retargeting visitors? Based on what
variables?
Engage
To conclude your competitive analysis, become a customer of your
competitors! Understand what happens once you buy a product.
See whether there exist forums for your competitors’ brands,
services, or products. How are consumers of your competitors
interacting online? What are your competitors doing to foster such
interactions? Here, you can ask
• What happened once you bought a product?
• Do your competitors have some sort of a club? Membership
program? Online forum?
• Do they request reviews? Are there consumer-generated
content (CGC) campaigns?
• Do they have consumer appreciation campaigns?
• Does their content always talk only to new consumers, or to
existing ones as well?
Introduction to Digital Strategy | 95
Bringing Competitor Analysis Together
A great approach to try to better understand your competitors
is to approach them as you would if you were a persona-related
consumer going through the motions of their journey. This is a
different logic from evaluating your competition based on other
strategic frameworks, such as SWOT. SWOT, indeed, can be used
to understand the strengths and weaknesses of your competition
as it relates to their digital marketing resources. But never before
were we able to analyze exactly how our competitors are operating.
Because everything is archived online, and because you can readily
have access to marketing efforts such as ads and content,
understanding your competitors’ strategic efforts has perhaps
never been more accessible. To conclude, to gather as much
(targeted) information as possible, be sure to
• subscribe to their newsletter/blog,
• follow them on social media,
• purchase a product, paying attention to packaging, buying
experience, and shipping time,
• put an item in your cart and abandon the checkout process,
• check their reviews,
• hunt for their ads,
• follow their publicity, and
• understand their backlinks.
96 | Introduction to Digital Strategy
Exercises
You are a fitness center creating a campaign for people
who want to get back into shape.
One of the personas you are targeting is Avery.
Avery is a person living in a major Canadian city center.
They are their late twenties to early thirties and are in the
top 20% in revenue in their city. With increased
responsibilities at work and a newborn, Avery had put
exercising aside for a few years. They feel sluggish, lack
energy, and miss having a stronger connection with their
body. With age, their body has also started to transform,
and they have started to feel self-conscious about it. To
remediate this, they want to get back into exercising
weekly. They don’t have much time, and they also don’t
know much about working out or the market—for example,
where to work out or how to work out.
Introduction to Digital Strategy | 97
Text Description
Social Media Analysis Using RACE
Using the RACE framework, analyze and compare the
following three Instagram fitness center accounts:
• @achievefitnessboston
• @lifetime.life
• @goodlifefitness
Can you group their posts into RACE stages? What are
the objectives of these themes? What are the goals for
consumers?
Think of the implications for generating awareness,
attracting visitors, creating leads, converting leads into
customers, and generating engagement.
98 | Introduction to Digital Strategy
Create a (Digital) Journey Map
Integrate paid, owned, and earned marketing activities
for a campaign for your fitness center based on the journey
map provided.
For one or two stages, accomplish the following actions:
• Start with the concrete actions of consumers.
• Identify opportunities.
• Translate the opportunities into concrete
marketing activities.
• Find a way to make each activity a paid, owned, and
earned media activity.
Introduction to Digital Strategy | 99
Reach: Generating Awareness
and Attracting Visitors
PIERRE-YANN DOLBEC
Overview
In this chapter, we cover the strategic bases associated with the
Reach stage. We start by covering the main objectives of the Reach
stage and some KPIs associated with goals for consumers. We then
move our attention to discussing paid media activities. To do so, we
first emphasize the necessity of building landing pages whenever
we are creating marketing campaigns and describe what landing
pages are. We then turn our attention to the online ecosystem,
discussing elements such as types of paid media activities (e.g.,
banner advertising, search advertising, affiliate marketing, and
influencer marketing) and expand on payment models and types of
targeting that the new online ecosystem allows.
Learning Objectives
Understand the Reach stage, landing pages, different paid
media activities, and key terms associated with payment
models and targeting approaches.
100 | Reach: Generating Awareness
and Attracting Visitors
Reach
Reach is the first stage in the RACE framework. It entails the
publication and promotion of content in order to draw visitors to
our website. The two main objectives at this stage are to build
awareness (about your website, brand, products, and/or services)
and to bring visitors in. We do so by using both inbound and
outbound marketing activities (although we will concentrate on the
latter in this chapter) and through paid, owned, and earned media
touchpoints.
The goals we have in mind for people at this stage might include
for them to come to our website from a SERP, stay on our website
once there, or click on our ads. Internally, we can have objectives
like creating high-ranking pages and ads with a good ad score
(briefly, an ad quality score can lead to lower prices for your ads and
better placements on SERPs).
Accordingly, examples of KPIs that are important at this stage
include number of unique visitors, bounce rate, clickthrough for
ads, page authority, page rank, and ad quality score.
In the rest of this chapter, we will cover outbound marketing
activities. Since you should Never Start A Marketing Campaign
Without a Dedicated Landing Page (NSAMCWADLP), we start our
review of paid marketing activities by digging deeper into landing
pages.
Landing Pages
A landing page is a campaign-specific page distinct from your main
website that has one goal and one link (ideally, a call to action).
• Campaign specific: It is associated with a specific campaign.
Ideally, you might also want to create specific landing pages for
Reach: Generating Awareness and Attracting Visitors | 101
specific ads. This allows you to better optimize conversion
rates by practicing some strategies we will cover during the
Convert stage.
• Distinct from your main website: you cannot access it from
any page of your main website, but it is still hosted on your
domain (e.g., www.yourdomain.com/landing-page-campaign-
A).
• One goal: Visitors should be able to achieve one thing and one
thing only. We will see shortly that landing pages can have as
an objective either to acquire leads or to redirect visitors to
some specific section of your website.
• One link: There is only one link that consumers can click on
that page.
Types of Landing Pages
Two main types of landing pages exist.
• clickthrough landing page
◦ The goal of this landing page is to have visitors visit a
specific section of your website.
◦ It is generally a sales pitch to warm visitors up to what is
to come.
• lead generation landing page
◦ Your objective here is to generate leads, and the goal for
people on this landing page is to give you their personal
information (e.g., email address).
◦ It is thus typically a form-based page.
◦ Sometimes, an email address is offered in exchange for
some piece of content or a free service, like a white paper,
a webinar, a free consultation, a discount, a contest, a free
trial, or the opportunity to order a product before others.
102 | Reach: Generating Awareness and Attracting Visitors
Figure 5.1
Examples of
a
Clickthrough
Landing
Page – Fit for
Life
Figures 5.1 and 5.2 present examples of clickthrough landing pages,
and Figures 5.3 and 5.4 present examples of lead generation landing
pages.
Reach: Generating Awareness and Attracting Visitors | 103
Figure 5.2
Examples of
a
Clickthrough
Landing
Page –
Spotify
Figure 5.3
Example of a
Lead
Generation
Landing
Page – Fit for
Life
104 | Reach: Generating Awareness and Attracting Visitors
Figure 5.4
Examples of
a Lead
Generation
Landing
Page – Uber
Why Use Landing Pages?
Ad campaigns can aim at building awareness, but they are typically
associated with making consumers achieve specific goals, such as
trying out software for free, registering for an account, sending an
email to a company, or downloading a free piece of content.
When running ads that have such goals, sending visitors to a
website is counterproductive: a website is not meant to convert,
i.e., to make consumers achieve a specific goal. If consumers are
directed to a website, they will be faced with hundreds of potential
actions (associated with the links available on a website), one of
which is the action they should be performing. It becomes easy for
consumers to get lost.
Reach: Generating Awareness and Attracting Visitors | 105
Figure 5.5
Shopify Ad
Inc comparison, landing pages are focused on help consumers
achieve only one goal. They facilitate conversion. They do so by
allowing to tailor the page to the exact goal that users should
accomplish. This can be achieved, for example, by offering a clearer
message to consumers (vs. bringing consumers to a website), by
minimizing the potential actions they can perform on the page, and
by matching the visuals of an ad with that the landing page. We will
delve in depth into some of these benefits of landing pages when
discussing conversion optimization in chapter 10.
Take, for example, the ad for Shopify shown in Figure 5.5.
The goal for consumers associated with this ad is to try Shopify for
free and create an online store today. How can we maximize the
chances that consumers will do so?
When creating this ad, the question that a digital marketer faces
is: where do I bring visitors? Ideally, you want to bring visitors to
a place that will ensure that they will achieve the goal of trying
Shopify.
A first option could be the homepage of Shopify shown in Figure
5.6.
106 | Reach: Generating Awareness and Attracting Visitors
Figure 5.6
Shopify
Homepage
Although this page has a box at the very top that incites people
to try out Shopify for free, visitors are also offered a wide array
of competing actions. They can click any of the links at the top of
the page (“Start,” “Sell,” “Market,” “Manage,” “Pricing,” and “Learn”);
they can scroll down to learn more about Shopify, and at the very
bottom, they can also access information such as “About” Shopify
and “Terms and Conditions.” In short, they can do a lot more than
simply trying Shopify for free.
Over time, digital marketers have learned that one of the easiest
ways to ensure that visitors will do what you want them to do is
to limit the possibilities to just the one action you want visitors to
take—in this case, signing up to try Shopify for free. The chart in
Figure 5.7 exemplifies this by showing the conversion rate vs. the
number of links on a page.
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Figure 5.7 AR Conversion
For this reason, the Shopify ad doesn’t redirect consumers to the
Shopify homepage. Rather, they created a dedicated landing page
where the only possible thing for visitors to do after clicking the ad
is to start their free trial. Figure 5.8 shows the landing page.
108 | Reach: Generating Awareness and Attracting Visitors
Figure 5.8
Shopify
Landing
Page
By focusing visitors’ attention to the task at hand (i.e., trying Shopify
for free), we can maximize the conversion rate, i.e., the number
of visitors who will achieve the goal we want them to achieve. A
metric created to better understand the relationship between the
number of possible actions on a website and the number of goals
for consumers is the attention ratio. Figure 5.9 demonstrates how
a website has a high attention ratio (i.e., many possible actions vs.
what you want consumers to be doing) and why a landing page
is ideal for pushing visitors to perform the action we want them
to perform. Landing pages should have an attention ratio of 1:1,
meaning one possible action to one goal.
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Figure 5.9 Landing Page – Attention Ratio
Building a Landing Page
A landing page has five basic elements: First, a unique selling
proposition (USP), a “unique” benefit offered by the product or the
service (I put unique in quotation marks because companies usually
present a benefit without it being unique). The USP is typically
communicated through a headline and a subheadline that explain
the value and purpose of the product or service. It is also sometimes
reinforced in a mid-page statement and a closing argument at the
bottom of the page. Second, a hero shot, which is a visual associated
with the product or service. Third, a benefit statement that explains
how the product or brand helps consumers, typically using bullet
points or small paragraphs. Fourth, social proofing such as
110 | Reach: Generating Awareness and Attracting Visitors
Figure 5.10
Basic
Elements of a
Landing
Page –
Shopify
Example
testimonials, awards, client list, or media logos, and finally, fifth, one
link, typically a call to action.
Let’s see these five elements in a recent Shopify landing page
(Figure 5.10).
Paid Media Activities
Digital marketers typically advertise online through advertising
networks, such as Google AdSense, and advertising exchanges,
such as Google AdX (the differences between these are summarized
succinctly here but are outside of the scope of this course).
Although these two approaches to providing advertising space to
advertisers differ, from an advertiser’s perspective, both provide an
entry point where advertising space can be purchased. Networks,
for example, aggregate ad space across websites and sells this
inventory to advertisers.
Nowadays, much of advertising space is sold through
programmatic buying, the automated purchasing of digital
advertising space. When marketers purchase space through the
Facebook Ads or Google Ads platforms, for example, they are
making use of programmatic buying. These platforms have been
transformed in recent years by the use of algorithms and predictive
analyses to help identify the optimal placement of ads to reach
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specific objectives. Facebook Ads, for example, gives advertisers
options such as reach, awareness, or lead generation campaigns.
Choosing a specific objective will influence where ads will be placed
(i.e., who will see the ads) to maximize the effectiveness of the ad
campaign.
We now turn our attention to different ways of reaching
customers. More precisely, we will briefly cover banner advertising,
search advertising, social media advertising, affiliate marketing, and
influencer marketing.
Banner Advertising
Banner ads are images or animations that advertise brands,
products, and services on websites. They can be likened to the ads
one would find in newspapers and magazines. Many types of banner
ads exist, including the following:
• standard banners: standard sizes (measured in pixels) for
static, animated, and rich media banner adverts
• interstitial banners: shown between pages on a website or,
more often, between screens on an app
• pop-up ads: pop up, or under, the webpage being viewed; open
in a new, smaller window
• floating adverts: appear in a layer over the content but not in a
separate window
• wallpaper adverts: change the background of the webpage
being viewed; may be clickable
• map adverts: placed on an online map, such as Google Maps;
usually based on keywords
• native content ads: the online version of advertorials, where
the advertiser produces content that is in line with the
editorial style of the site but is sponsored or in some way
product-endorsed by the brand
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Figure 5.11
Banner Ad
Figure 5.11 shows an example of a standard banner ad.
Figure 5.12 shows an example of an interstitial banner ad.
Figure 5.12 Interstitial
Figure 5.13 shows an example of a pop-up ad.
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Figure 5.13
Pop-Up Ad
Figure 5.14
Floating Ad
Figure 5.14 shows an example of a floating ad.
Figure 5.15 shows an example of wallpaper ad.
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Figure 5.15
Wallpaper
Figure 5.16
Map
Figure 5.17
Native
Figure 5.16 shows an example of a map ad.
Figure 5.17 shows an example of a native ad.
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Search Advertising
In comparison to SEO, search advertising entails gaining traffic on
SERPs by bidding on keywords. Search advertising is also referred
to as PPC advertising because of the mode of payment: Advertisers
typically pay search engines for each click their ad receives.
Search ads are sold and delivered on the basis of keywords.
Advertisers decide on sets of keywords they would like their ad to
show up for, and when users search for these terms, their ad might
show up. Keywords are sold through an auction process. As a result,
industries with very high customer lifetime value, such as insurance
or mortgage firms, can pay upward of $50 per click.
To better understand how to bid for keywords, let’s watch the
following video, which explains how the Google search ad auction
works.
A YouTube element has been excluded from this version of the
text. You can view it online here:
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Using search ads requires combining three main elements: the
keywords you want your ad to show for, your ad (i.e., a headline or
two, a URL, and a description), and a landing page. In short, you
buy keywords that will be used by a search engine to display your
ad when people search for those keywords. Your ad needs to be
relevant to the search and attractive to the consumer. When your
ad is clicked, you direct consumers to your landing page.
The guidelines for writing effective search ads are similar to those
for writing effective page titles and meta descriptions. This is the
only element that users will see on SERPs, and it is therefore
important to make it as attractive as possible. First, the ad should
ideally target a clear need or goal that consumers have, dependent
on where they are in their journey. Is the consumer looking for
information? Comparison tools? To purchase something? How can
your ad help the consumer achieve their goal? Second, the ad
should have a clear call to action.
Searches follow a long-tail distribution (Figure 5.18; text
description here). This has implications when doing search ads:
Most consumers might be using generic, high-volume keywords,
while others might be using hyper-precise, low-volume keywords.
Although bidding on high-volume keywords might seem like a good
strategy, it comes with drawbacks. First, these keywords are likely
more expensive. Second, they are less likely to bring quality traffic.
By quality traffic, I mean visitors who can eventually become your
customers. This is particularly important for search advertising,
because each visitor is associated with a specific cost. Devising
effective search advertising campaigns thus entails balancing
volume and quality: Bringing in enough visitors that can buy your
product or service but making sure that visitors who won’t buy it
don’t click on your ad.
To do so, firms typically combine high-volume and low-volume
keywords to tailor their search ads to visitors who can potentially
be customers. This helps lead generation efforts down the line while
ensuring more cost-effective search ad campaigns.
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Figure 5.18 Longtail Keywords and Conversion Rate / From
https://www.semrush.com/kb/685-what-are-long-tailed-keywords / Text
Description
After deciding on keywords, you can choose how keywords will be
matched to specific searches. Four main types of match exist: broad
match, phrase match, exact match, and negative match.
A broad match shows your ad for any search that contains the
keyword(s) you are bidding on, and any other keyword in any order,
as well as variations on your keywords such as misspellings,
synonyms, singular and plural forms, stemming (e.g., a search for
“flooring” will match “floor”), related searches and other variations.
For example, let’s assume you are bidding on the keyword “kitten”
using a broad match. Any search containing a variation on “kitten”
would show your ad, such as “kittens,” “kitten photos,” or “adopt a
kitten.”
Associated with broad match are broad match modifiers, which
allow more control over matches by including some other necessary
keyword. For example, if you want your ad to be shown only for
searches that contain both “adopt” AND “kitten,” you can specify
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that. Your ad could then show for searches such as “adopt a kitten,”
“how to adopt a kitten,” or “best kitten to adopt.”
Phrase match shows your ad only for searches that include the
exact phrase (or close variations of that exact phrase with additional
words before or after). For example, let’s assume you are bidding
on the key phrase “how to adopt a kitten.” Your ad could show for
searches such as “how to adopt a kitten now” or “best ways how to
adopt a kitten.”
Exact match only shows your ad for searches that use the exact
phrase, or close variations of it, and no other words. For example,
the key phrase “adopt a kitten” will match the searches “adopt a
kitten” and potential misspellings (e.g., “adopt a kitten”).
Negative match prevents your ad from being shown when certain
keywords are included, such as keywords that might cater to
customers searching for a different product. For example, let’s say
you’re an optometrist who sells eyeglasses. In this case, you may
want to add negative keywords for search terms like “wine glasses”
and “drinking glasses.”
A few metrics that are important for evaluating your success
when doing search advertising include the following:
• clickthrough rate (CTR): the percentage of impressions that
turn into clicks (clicks/impressions)
• conversion rate: the percentage of clicks that turn into
conversions (conversions/clicks)
• cost per click (CPC): the amount of money you’re spending on
each click (spend/clicks)
• cost per acquisition (CPA): the amount of money you’re
spending on each conversion (spend/conversions)
Social Media Advertising
Social media has become central to most consumers’ lives. In some
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countries, social media networks have become synonymous with
the internet, to the point where “many use the internet without
realizing it” (Pew 2019). Social media has also fueled consumer
content co-creation efforts (or “user-generated content”), and we
can now publish our own content and share the content of others.
Many social media businesses rely on the work of consumers (e.g.,
without us posting content and images, there would be no reason to
use Instagram or Facebook).
There are many platforms for advertising on social media, with
new ones accumulating millions of users in ever-shortening periods
of time (TikTok being a prime example of the latter). As we favor
a strategic outlook, a review of all existing social media platforms
is outside of the scope of this chapter, but the following links give
precise instructions on how to post an ad on each of the major ones:
• Snapchat
The variety of social platforms has an important implication when
using them to advertise: the importance of understanding social and
visual norms in order to create impactful campaigns. Social norms
refer to what is considered acceptable behavior on a social platform.
Understanding the social customs, shared actions, and behaviors
that are standard for a platform is also important. Marketers that
understand these have been able to create successful campaigns
around them, such as the Guess #inmydenim campaign that used
the “transformation” trend, the #JLoTikTokChallenge that used the
challenge customs, and the Doritos #CoolRanchDance campaign
that leveraged TikTok dances and the capabilities of the platform of
using songs.
This approach of capitalizing on norms and customs is found
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throughout social media platforms. Old Spice, for example, tailored
its advertising efforts to each platform and offers many good
examples. The brand created one of the first iconic ad campaigns
by emphasizing two-way interactions and video sharing capabilities
on YouTube, with a response campaign associated with their ad
“The Man Your Man Could Smell Like.” They translated the Twitch
Plays Pokémon phenomenon, where thousands of users direct video
gamers to perform certain actions to create a campaign where
Twitch users could control the actions of a man for three days
for the Nature Adventure campaign. And they used the idea of gif
wars on Imgur and the platform’s upvote capability to create the
Smellmitment campaign.
These campaigns all followed the same precepts: They engaged
with the norms and customs of the platform they used. They
created ads that aimed to generate a conversation with users rather
than solely talking about the product. And they leveraged the
technological specificities of each platform (e.g., songs for TikTok,
turning comments into controller inputs for Twitch, and using
upvotes on Imgur).
Social Media and RACE
Social media has also become one of the main pillars for advertising,
and it can support most of the objectives of the different stages of
the RACE framework. That is, using social media for advertising can
help with increasing awareness, bringing visitors, creating leads,
converting leads to customers, fostering loyalty, and engaging
customers in co-creation activities. This is well exemplified by the
social media ad objectives that most platforms ask you to choose
from when starting an advertising campaign. Take, for example,
Facebook ad objectives (Figure 5.19; text description here).
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Figure 5.19
Facebook Ad
Objectives /
Text
Description
Facebook has divided its ad objectives into three categories that
almost perfectly align with the RACE framework: “Awareness” is
associated with Reach, “Consideration” with Act, and “Conversion”
with Convert. Let’s examine each objective in more detail.
Under the Awareness category, brand awareness “increases
overall awareness for your brand by showing ads to people who are
more likely to pay attention to them,” and reach “shows ads to the
maximum number of people in your audience while staying within
your budget.”
What is the difference? While both align with Reach objectives,
brand awareness is designed to help advertisers find the audiences
most likely to recall their ads. The goal is to increase brand recall,
and this ties to Facebook “Estimated ad recall lift.” Reach maximizes
the number of unique people who will see your ad while capping the
frequency of impressions (e.g., one a day).
Objectives in the Consideration category overlap with all three
stages.
Traffic addresses a Reach objective as it aims to grow “the
number of people who are visiting your site, app or Messenger
conversation,” but it is also associated with Act because it aims at
“increasing the likelihood they’ll take a valuable action when they
get there.”
Engagement can be seen as both an Act and an Engage activity: it
wants to “get more people to follow your page or engage with your
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posts through comments, shares and likes. You can also choose to
optimize for more event responses or offer claims.”
App installs can be seen as both Act and Convert activities
(depending on the strategic goal of having people install your app; if
the app is free and purchases happen within it, it’s a lead generation
activity; if it is a paid app, it’s a convert activity).
Lead generation includes a menu where users can directly enter
their personal information. It is an Act activity that aims at creating
leads.
In the last category, Conversion ads align with the Convert stage
by helping advertising to convert users into customers.
These categories use the Facebook ad delivery algorithm
differently, with Awareness objectives targeting ads to people more
likely to respond to Awareness generation and Conversion
objectives to people more likely to convert. Some objectives also
offer specific types of ads, such as a catalog (catalog sales), a form
(lead generation), or a redirection to app installs (app installs).
The last important strategic piece to cover associated with social
media is their targeting capabilities, or how they allow you to
display ads to specific groups of people. All platforms will allow
you to target your ads based on key customer variables, such as
demographics, location, and interests, and each also has some
specific targeting capabilities. For example, LinkedIn allows you to
use LinkedIn audience segments to programmatically reach
professional audiences based on their company size, seniority,
professions, and other key professional variables.
Most platforms allow for behavioral targeting, where ads are
delivered based on purchase behaviors or intents or people who
have a specific kind of connection to your page, app, group, or
event. For example, advertisers could target any users that have
engaged with their content across the Facebook family of apps and
services.
After Facebook introduced the highly useful Lookalike audience
option in 2013, other major advertisers such as Google followed
suit. Lookalike audiences use platforms’ algorithms to create groups
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on social networks that resemble other groups. This is a new and
unique way to target that was never before possible and can help
companies unearth some group of consumers who would be highly
qualified but have not yet been identified by the company. A
lookalike audience could be based on a previously highly engaged
audience (i.e., finding another group of consumers that shares some
commonalities that will also make them highly engaged) or an
existing segment of customers.
Payment structures for social media advertising are typically one
of the following:
• CPM (cost per thousand): Pay every time 1,000 users view your
ad.
• CPC (cost per click): Pay when a user clicks on your ad.
• CPA (cost per action or cost per acquisition): Pay only when
an advert delivers an acquisition after the user clicks on the
advert (definitions of acquisitions vary depending on the site
and campaign and may be a user filling in a form, downloading
a file or buying a product).
Influencer and Affiliate Marketing
Influencer marketing—a form of social media marketing that
capitalizes on people or organizations with large followings who
exert some sort of influence over others because of their expertise
or charisma—has become both a marketing and a societal
phenomenon. There were more than 3.7 million ads by influencers
on Instagram in 2018, and some estimate that the market will reach
US$10 billion by 2020 (Wired 2019). Ninety percent of Instagram
campaigns in 2018 used micro-influencers, influencers who have
somewhere between 1,000 and 100,000 followers (HubSpot 2019).
Micro-influencers represent about 25% of the Instagram user base,
or about 250 million people (Mention.com 2018). While most micro-
124 | Reach: Generating Awareness and Attracting Visitors
influencers charge a few hundred dollars per post, top ones can
charge upward of US$50,000.
Although influencers can be used throughout all RACE stages,
they historically have been used as an awareness generation
channel. Even today, most of the main objectives reported by brands
for the use of influencers relate to the Reach stage, such as
improving brand awareness, share of voice, reaching new audiences,
and managing reputation (Fipp 2017). Over the last few years, there
has been a trend toward moving marketing budgets away from top
influencers to micro-influencers, who are believed to have a
stronger connection with their followers and thus generate
stronger engagement (Wired 2017).
Ideally, when planning for an influencer campaign, firms should
aim to choose influencers who correspond to the size of their
business. It is easier for smaller firms to create relationships with
micro-influencers, and these individuals might support the firms’
goals if a trusting relationship can be established. To facilitate the
internal management of influencer campaigns, it can be useful to
create influencer personas, i.e., personas that represent the kind of
influencer the firm should aim to recruit for their campaigns. Firms
should aim to find influencers that align with their brand identity,
can resonate with the brand’s customers, and can help the firm
achieve their objectives (i.e., perhaps different influencers can help
achieve different objectives, whether it is reaching a wide number
of consumers, generating leads, or converting leads to customers).
Firms should also support influencers’ efforts by providing
marketing materials. Some influencers might want to work with
firms to align the firm’s interests and objectives with theirs. For
example, many influencers report only taking on clients that
represent their values or whose products they already like. When
choosing influencers, ask yourself:
• Who are their followers? Are their followers my targets?
• Are they real?
• Do they release quality content? (That can be matched with
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your product?)
• Have they worked with your category? With a competitor?
• Do they promote products often? How do their followers
react?
• What platforms are they on?
• Can you use their content?
• How long does their content stay online?
Two main routes exist for recruiting influencers: using influencer
agencies, networks, or platforms, which centralize interactions
between a firm and many influencers or contacting influencers
directly. If reaching out directly, make sure to send personalized
messages that clearly show that you understand who the influencer
is and why you see a fit between your brand and the influencer’s
brand. Different influencers have different goals: some might want
to push products they strongly believe in, some might want to be a
positive influence on their followers, and some might be in it for the
money (Kozinets et al. 2010). This should play a role in how you “sell”
your campaign to an influencer.
The main payment structure for influencers is pay per post,
which varies depending on the domain or the influencer. In 2017,
according to influence.co, payments averaged US$217 per post,
which could be broken down as follows, with influencers with fewer
than 1,000 followers commanding 83$ per post and those with more
than 100,000 followers, 763$ per post. Posts mediated by The
Influence Agency cost more, ranging from 2,000$ to 10,000$ per
post by influencers with more than 100,000 followers. Blog
collaborations are priced by the number of monthly impressions the
blog receives:
• 10,000 monthly impressions: 175$
• 100,000 to 500,000 monthly impressions: 500$
• 500,000+ monthly impressions: 1,000$ to 5,000$
Other payment structures include pay per lead, pay per
126 | Reach: Generating Awareness and Attracting Visitors
engagement (when a user performs an action associated with a
post, such as a click, a comment, or a share), or pay per view.
Influencers like Zoella often create a revenue stream by
participating in affiliate programs, an “agreement in which a
business pays another business or influencer (‘the affiliate’) a
commission for sending … sales their way” (Hubspot). There are
many different approaches to affiliate marketing, such as
comparison-shopping websites, coupon websites, email lists, or
reward websites (Authority Hacker 2020). Affiliate marketing differs
from influencer marketing in that it is overwhelmingly focused on
the Convert stage: Since pay is typically associated with making
sales, affiliates aim to convert people to sales. There are, however,
affiliate programs that pay per lead (and hence participate in the
Act stage) and others that pay per visit (and hence participate in the
Reach stage).
Affiliate marketing works as follows: An advertiser, a company
that sells a product or a service, offers to pay a third party (e.g.,
a blogger or a coupon website) to help them promote and sell
products and services. The affiliate conducts online activities in
order to sell products or services. For example, Figure 5.20 shows
a blog post in which Zoella presents her “10 scary reads” for
Halloween. Each book is associated with the affiliate program
Reward Style. Let’s say a reader reads this blog post, likes the sound
of a book, clicks on the link for that book, and purchases it: Zoella
will then receive a small percentage of the sale for helping make this
sale happen.
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Figure 5.20
Affiliate
Marketing
Example
You can typically easily identify whether a link is part of an affiliate
program or not. For example, for Zoella, the link looks like this:
https://rstyle.me/+U7XZh4aYDVf0s7elU5SykA. We can thus see
that it is associated with the Reward Style program. Affiliate
programs will create different types of links, which typically include
the publisher (affiliate) website ID (or PID), the ad id (AID), and the
shopper (or visitor) ID (or SID). This allows tracking of sales across
publishers, ads, shoppers, and reward affiliates accordingly.
The two main payment structures that exist for affiliates are the
following:
• PPS (pay per sale): The advertiser pays the publisher a
percentage of the sale that was created by a customer referred
by the publisher (revenue sharing model).
• CPA (cost per acquisition/cost per action/cost per lead): The
advertiser pays only when an advert delivers an acquisition
after the user clicks on the advert. Definitions of acquisitions
vary depending on the site and campaign. It may be a user
filling in a form, downloading a file or buying a product.
128 | Reach: Generating Awareness and Attracting Visitors
Exercises
As in the previous chapter’s exercise, you are a fitness
center creating a campaign for people who want to get
back into shape.
One of the personas you are targeting is Avery.
Avery is a person living in a major Canadian city center.
They are their late twenties to early thirties and are in the
top 20% in revenue in their city. With increased
responsibilities at work and a newborn, Avery had put
exercising aside for a few years. They feel sluggish, lack
energy, and miss having a stronger connection with their
body. With age, their body has also started to transform,
and they have started to feel self-conscious about it. To
remediate this, they want to get back into exercising
weekly. They don’t have much time, and they also don’t
know much about working out or the market—for example,
where to work out or how to work out.
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Text Description
1. First, create a search ad (headline, description, and
display URL, with a choice of keywords) for the
awareness stage. Use longtail keywords.
2. Then, for this ad, sketch a landing page, using the
five main elements we covered.
You should be asking yourself the following questions:
◦ What is the objective associated with
awareness for consumers? How does this
influence my search ad?
◦ What stage of the RACE framework does
awareness align with? What are the objectives
for my firm at this stage? How does that
influence my landing page design?
3. Next, using the ad you created in the first part of
this exercise, think of two ways to transform your ad
130 | Reach: Generating Awareness and Attracting Visitors
to fit the following social media platforms:
4. Identify which type of payment approach (e.g., CPC
or CPA) you should go for and provide a reason why.
5. Finally, find a couple of influencers on Instagram
that could help you with this campaign. Explain how
you’d find these influencers and why they are ideal
for your campaign, and decide which payment model
to adopt to create a campaign with them.
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Act: Creating Content
PIERRE-YANN DOLBEC
Overview
In this chapter, we cover some central activities associated with
content creation. We introduce the chapter by explaining the
importance of content creation and how content creation should
resemble what your competitors are doing but also be different
from them because of your own unique brand voice. We then turn
our attention to structuring content creation activities. We examine
how content creation can be guided by the RACE framework, the
difference between gated and ungated content and when to use
each kind, why and how to build topical relevance, and how pillar
pages can help us do so. Finally, we conclude the chapter by
discussing what a content creation calendar is and how it supports
content creation efforts.
Learning Objectives
Understand the basics of content creation, how it ties in
with the RACE framework, gated and ungated content,
pillar pages, and content creation calendars.
132 | Act: Creating Content
The Importance of Creating Content
Content creation is important for two main reasons. First, it helps
build a website’s relevance and authority, contributing to its ranking
on search engines—according to most marketers, content marketing
is the most efficient SEO tactic (Ascend2 2015, cited in
marketingprofs.com). Websites with blogs also have four times more
pages indexed on search engines, making them more likely to show
up during searches (Forbes).
Content is also a cornerstone of customer acquisition strategies,
and it is one of the most powerful tools for use in the RACE
framework. According to HubSpot, a consumer consults three to
five pieces of content during their journey toward making a
purchase. Leads generated using inbound marketing efforts are also
less costly by about half compared to leads generated using
outbound efforts. Inbound leads are also 10 times more likely to
convert (vs. outbound ones), and studies have shown that content
marketing efforts boost company revenues by an average of 40%
(Hubspot).
Creating Content
Before starting content creation efforts, a company should have in
mind a clear persona and associated journey, understand its own
website, and ideally understand how its competitors are positioning
themselves on search engines (i.e., have performed a competitive
keyword analysis).
Creating content is a balancing act. First, it is a balance in that
you must be similar enough to competitors to address the general
needs of the market and look like a trustworthy organization, while
being different enough to attract customers. This idea of standing
out while fitting in is termed “optimal distinctiveness.”
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Second, it is a balance between what you can offer and what
consumers want. When creating content, firms need to keep in
mind that they should represent the customer. This entails
understanding what customers are looking for based on their needs
and challenges and how what they need evolves throughout their
journey.
Creating unique and relevant content thus entails understanding
the market and knowing the codes that organize content
production, knowing what specifically about your brand gives it
a unique voice (or “brand voice”), and combining these pieces of
knowledge to create something unique that will interest consumers
and is based on your capabilities, i.e., what you are able to do (Figure
6.1).
Figure 6.1 Content Marketing
Let’s explore this further through the example of creating content
on Instagram.
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Understanding the Competition and the Market
Something to keep in mind when creating content for social media
platforms is associated with prototype and exemplar theories.
Without getting into too much detail, the central idea here is that in
order to stand out, you first must fit in.
The idea goes as follows: Each category has some sort of a
“standard” member, a “prototype” that people measure whatever
is in this category against (or, from an exemplar perspective, each
category has “dominant examples,” or exemplars, that are used to
evaluate whatever is in this category; Figure 6.2). In order to fit
in, such as to be considered legitimate as an Instagram account
on cosmetics, cars, or tattoos, you must share attributes with the
prototype or exemplar. This allows you to fit in.
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Figure 6.2 Exemplar and Prototype
For example, fitness accounts tend to share characteristics in terms
of what influencers look like (dressed in fitness attire and either
looking fit or really, really fit), the setting in which they create
their videos (typically, a gym), the kinds of things they post (how to
exercise, diet posts, motivational posts, etc.), and so on.
Yet within the fitness category, there exist subcategories
organized around different subtypes of fitness influencers. A first
example is the fitness therapy profile, a type of fitness account
exemplified by influencers such as achievefitnessboston,
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squatuniversity, and joetherapy. This type of account typically
emphasizes science-based knowledge and instructionals on how to
properly practice fitness and recovery.
A strikingly different type of profile, still within the fitness
category, is the “fitness motivational” account, exemplified in
accounts such as zacaynsley, joesthetics, mssannamaria, and
anna_delyla.
Knowing which subcategory a firm wants to participate in is
important because not all personas will be reading all subcategories
of fitness accounts. It also allows a better understanding of the
category as a whole and how to potentially mix and match
approaches, as exemplified by massy.arias.
Once you have gained membership by fitting in, your job is to find
ways to distinguish yourself from others. In short, you want to fit
in just enough that you are part of the category but you want to
differentiate yourself enough that people will want to follow your
Instagram account rather than one of your competitors. This is
where the uniqueness of your brand comes into play.
Using Your Brand to Create Unique Content
A brand is a name, term, design, symbol, and/or other feature (e.g.,
Off-White and Off-White “quotes,” Coca-Cola and the Coke red,
Bottega Venetta and its weave design) that identifies a company’s
products or services and differentiates them from those of other
companies.
Over the last three decades, practitioners and academics have
developed many terms to help us better understand brands. For
example, we now know what brands are more or less generally
understood in the same way by consumers who have a certain
image of the brands in their minds (brand image). The descriptive
features that consumers use to describe these images are called
brand attributes. We also know that marketers can play on this
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by assigning certain attributes—personality traits—to brands (brand
personality). Marketers also strive to position their brand in a
market in a way that is distinct and valued by consumers (brand
positioning).
The main messages here are that brands serve to differentiate
products and services, and, in our case, content created online,
from other companies; that consumers form images of brands in
their minds; and that, as digital marketers, we should strategically
think of how to use brands to position ourselves, our products, our
services and, importantly, our content.
Hence, once you have developed an understanding of the codes
used around content creation in a market and how your
competitors are uniquely positioned, the next step is to create
content that will uniquely speak to consumers. Ideally, you will want
this content to reflect who you are as a company, i.e., to reflect your
brand.
Let’s take the example of brand personalities. Aaker (1997)
identified five dimensions to the personality of brands:
• sincerity (honest, genuine, cheerful)
• excitement (daring, spirited, imaginative)
• competence (reliable, responsible, dependable, efficient)
• sophistication (glamorous, pretentious, charming)
• ruggedness (tough, strong, outdoorsy, rugged)
We would expect that brands that aim to show a rugged image
would create content differently from those aiming for a
sophisticated one. Think, for example, of the latest Jeep ad that you
might have watched and how it compares with the latest Mercedes
ad that you have seen. Over time, interactions between consumers
and touchpoints lead them to develop an image of your brand.
Representing your brand in ways that align with the image you want
to create in consumers’ minds is thus central.
Hence, to create unique content, ask yourself: What does my
brand stand for? What do I want consumers to think of when they
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hear my brand name? How can my content properly showcase my
brand?
Take Wendy’s, for example, which has become infamous for its
sassy, cheeky, in-your-face, bordering-on-trolling social media
presence. It, for example, challenged a teen to get a million retweets
in exchange for a lifetime of chicken nuggets (the #nuggsforcarter
campaign). It created a Spotify playlist taking shots at its
competitors (as the company regularly does on Twitter). All of
which, according to Wendy’s Chief Marketing Officer Kurt Kane, “is
a natural extension of the Wendy’s brand Dave Thomas founded in
1969” (Fast Company).
Keeping Consumers in Mind
Last, and to reaffirm what has been said throughout the last
chapters, your main role as a company when creating content is
to represent the customer. That means to understand their needs
and challenges, how what people look for varies throughout their
journey, the types of searches they do (e.g., information,
transaction, navigational; associated with ZMOTs; linked with their
needs and challenges), and how you can answer consumers by
providing them with content that is educational and entertaining.
Structuring Content Creation
In this second section, we are going to touch on a few key terms and
approaches to help structure content creation: gated vs. ungated
content and their respective roles in marketing campaigns, how to
build topical relevance, and pillar pages.
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Figure 6.3
Gated
Content
Example
Gated and Ungated Content
Gated content is “any type of content that viewers can only access
after exchanging their information. Essentially, the content is
hidden behind a form. Companies use gated content to generate
leads and, ultimately, sales” (Hubspot). In contrast, ungated content
is any content that users can freely access without having to
exchange information.
An example of gated content is shown in Figure 6.3, where
consumers are asked to “Download our exclusive trend reports.”
Gated content should be more extensive than ungated content,
harder to find, and rather unique, so as to entice users to exchange
their personal information for it. Examples include a white paper,
an e-book, a report such as the one in Figure 6.3, a template, or a
webinar—in other words, high value and rarer content.
You might ask why you should gate content, and the typical
answer is to generate leads, such as in a lead generation landing
page. Gated content should be thought of as the endpoint of a lead
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Figure 6.4
Ungated
Content to
Gated
Content
generation campaign, where consumers will provide their personal
information, which will then allow a firm to enter into lead
nurturing efforts, which we cover in the next chapter.
Typically, a firm will create ungated pieces of content (e.g., social
media posts and blog posts) that will drive consumers to a piece
of gated content. In other words, the content supporting the
campaigns is ungated, and the endpoint where a visitor is converted
into a lead is gated (see Figure 6.4, where a blog post is linked to an
e-book).
Building Topical Relevance
Over the last few chapters, we covered the basics of SEO, how to
think about content creation and ads based on consumers’ needs
and challenges, how to identify opportunities based on the concrete
actions during their journey, and how to respond with ad hoc
marketing activities.
Building topical relevance is part of a firm’s longer-term strategy
for positioning itself and its web properties. It entails breaking down
the general needs and challenges that consumers are experiencing
into key topics that will orient our marketing efforts.
For example, if we wanted to build topical relevance on the topic
of content marketing, we would come up with potential searches
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and areas of interest to create many blog posts, social media posts,
and pieces of gated content on this topic (Figure 6.5).
Figure 6.5 Topics
To start building a web presence around certain key topics of
interest to your consumers, the first step is to identify which topic
you are interested in. A first, customer-driven, way to identify
topics is by looking at the type of searches being carried out by
consumers, which can be done using tools such as Google Trends
or Search Reports in Google Analytics. Firms can also survey and
interview consumers to better understand what is relevant to them,
what their key needs and challenges are, and how they turn to
the web to help address these. A second way to identify topics is
through keyword analysis, as we discussed in Chapter 3.
Once a topic has been identified (e.g., content marketing), firms
will plan their strategy to slowly build their relevance on that topic.
Viewed from this perspective, each piece of content (e.g., a blog
post) aims at addressing one targeted search. For example, a blog
post positioned on the keywords “better writing skills” will answer
a piece of the puzzle of content marketing: how to improve one’s
writing skills. These might be hundreds of subtopics associated
with a specific topic, opening further opportunities for content
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marketing efforts. A topic is thus a general domain that can tie
together many specific searches (as exemplified in Figure 6.5).
Over time, building topical relevance will help a website, as a
whole, show up higher on SERPs. This is because it helps address
the main factors on which websites are ranked that we covered
in Chapter 3: It facilitates the creation of cross-links, will help
consumers spend more time on a website, boosts page views, and
so on. Consumers might enter the website on the page on how
to better their writing skills, for example, and once they are done
reading their blog post, see and click on a recommended post on
how to generate blog post ideas, increasing page views and time
spent on site.
RACE and Content Marketing
As we have briefly covered, the RACE framework helps our content
strategy by informing the type of content we should be creating for
each stage of the framework.
Content marketing professionals typically talk about three types
of content: top of the funnel (ToFu) content, middle of the funnel
(MoFu) content, and bottom of the funnel (BoFu) content. The funnel
represents the purchase funnel, or what we have referred to thus far
as the consumer journey (awareness, active evaluation, purchase,
and post-purchase).
We can easily map each stage of the funnel with RACE stages and
stages of the consumer journey.
ToFu content activities target the awareness stage of the
consumer journey and align with the Reach stage. At the awareness
stage, consumers are experiencing and expressing symptoms of a
need, problem, or challenge they are facing. The content aims at
educating them. The need, problem, or challenge that consumers
are experiencing can vary in abstractness. For example, they might
have lower-back pain and are looking for a solution. Or they might
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need a pair of new running shoes. Content should thus address
problems in ways that match what consumers are experiencing.
MoFu content activities target the active evaluation stage of the
consumer journey and align with the Act stage. At the active
evaluation stage, consumers are looking to evaluate solutions.
Content should thus speak directly to the solutions that consumers
can use to solve their needs, problems, or challenges. The goal of
the content is to facilitate active evaluation and to serve as a bridge
from education to your product or service. It is still important to
represent the customer and to limit persuasion efforts, but to
balance this with slowly warming consumers to what you have to
offer.
BoFu content activities target the purchase stage and align with
the Convert stage. At the convert stage, consumers are looking to
buy a product. Content at this stage should help consumers evaluate
your product or service to persuade them to buy what you are
offering over the offer of competitors.
Searches consumers might make throughout the funnel could
include the following (Figure 6.6):
1. ToFu (awareness/problem): “How to get dog hair out of my
carpet?”
2. MoFu (evaluation/solution): “Vacuum vs. sticky roll”; “Bissel
Dog Eraser vs. Dyson Top Dog”
3. BoFu (purchase/product): “Best price Bissel Dog Eraser”
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Figure 6.6 Funnel
Examples of content from a firm (e.g., Bissell) to match these
searches could be some of the following:
1. ToFu: “Everything you need to know about getting dog hair out
of carpets and furniture”
2. MoFu: “Why vacuums are superior to sticky rolls”
3. BoFu: “Save on the Price of Bissell Dog Hair Eraser”
Top of the Funnel
At the top of the funnel, content should educate and entertain
consumers based on the need, problem, or challenge they are
facing. If people don’t know they need your product or understand
what their problem is, it is crucial to educate them on it!
The types of content that typically help here (although this is not
a comprehensive nor an exclusive list) include blog posts, webinars,
pillar pages, and longer-form content such as comprehensive
guides, videos, and infographics.
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Middle of the Funnel
In the middle of the funnel, content should help consumers evaluate
their options and facilitate that evaluation by educating and
entertaining consumers on possible solutions. The firm’s objective
at this stage is to start generating leads.
The types of content that typically help here (although this is not
a comprehensive nor an exclusive list) include lists (e.g., “Top 10
solutions for lower-back pain”), case studies, how-tos, descriptions
of multiple products (aimed at educating, not selling), quizzes to
help consumers discover solutions, and other types of templates to
help consumers identify solutions for their problems.
Bottom of the Funnel
At the bottom of the funnel, content should inform and persuade
consumers about your product or service. The firm’s objective at
this stage is to convert leads into customers.
The types of content that typically help here (although this is
not a comprehensive nor an exclusive list) include testimonials and
reviews, product offers, trials, coupons, samples, demos, free
assessments or consultations, persuasive product descriptions, and
sales-oriented webinars.
Beyond the Purchase Funnel
Content strategy should not stop at the purchase stage. Beyond the
purchase funnel, firms should strive to create content that helps
retain and engage customers. This could entail, for example,
motivating social sharing, testimonials, and reviews, and
encouraging loyalty through online customer events.
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The types of content that typically help here (although this is not a
comprehensive nor an exclusive list) include customer support and
help documentation, contests, and giveaways based on product use,
community forums, and strategies to encourage user-generated
content. We will cover strategies for this stage in the last chapter of
this textbook.
Pillar Pages
A pillar page is a comprehensive resource page that covers a core
topic in depth and links to high-quality content created for the
supporting subtopics.
It helps achieve the following two important digital marketing
objectives:
• building topical relevance
• supporting content strategy RACE objectives such as
◦ attracting visitors
◦ converting visitors to leads
◦ converting leads to customers
Pillar pages come in all shapes and forms. The Content Marketing
Institute, for example, differentiates between 10x content pillars,
resource pillars, and service pillars. The following list presents a few
examples of pillar pages on a wide variety of topics:
• https://www.typeform.com/blog/guides/brand-awareness/
• http://www.theatlantic.com/sponsored/athenahealth/
population-healthier/598/
• https://zapier.com/learn/remote-work/
• http://kapush.org/cat-litter/
• https://slack.com/intl/en-ca/state-of-work
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• https://stronglifts.com/squat/
What do these pages have in common?
Typically, they are very, very long. They tend to use multiple types
of media (e.g., text, images, and videos). They are well integrated
within their domain and have many cross-links. They answer many
problems around a topic of interest for consumers. As a result,
they help boost SEO efforts. Remember the main factors on which
websites are ranked?
• direct visits
• time on site
• pages per session
• bounce rate
• referring domains, backlinks, follow-backlinks, and referring
IPs
• content length
• keywords in body, density, in title, and meta
• video on page
Pillar pages can help with all of these factors! By being long and
answering many problems and needs associated with a single topic,
they are more likely than “normal” pages to become references on
these topics. This should allow the reduction of bounce rate, since
consumers are almost certain to find what they are looking for!
These pages are also more likely to increase time on site because
they give so many resources for consumers to go through. By
allowing many cross-links, they can favor many pages per session.
They allow for writing extensive content with many keywords and
multiple types of media.
The main idea behind the creation of a pillar page is to identify a
core topic of interest for consumers and break down this topic into
topic clusters (or subtopics).
Take the Stronglifts squat pillar page, for example (Figure 6.7). The
core topic of interest is “how to squat,” a question often asked by
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people interesting in exercising, bodybuilding, powerlifting, and the
like.
When you enter this pillar page, you find a short summary on the
squat and a few cross-links to guide consumers to other pages on
the website, favoring higher page views. The summary is also useful
because it can be used to hook people in, encouraging them to read
on. The page then continues with several topic clusters organized
around “how to squat”:
1. Introduction
2. Safety
3. Technique
4. Common issues
5. Common squat pains
6. Stretches
7. Equipment
8. Variations
9. FAQs
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Figure 6.7
Pillar Page
Example
Each of these subtopics effectively represents subsections of the
pillar page and addresses different needs, but they are all grouped
into the same pillar page.
A pillar page can thus help build topical relevance because it
provides a central and extensive resource on a major topic that can
be well referenced (linked to) by other websites. It helps organize
a website content around a core topic. If a pillar page is done well,
the topic or problem it addresses should be one that a persona or
multiple personas care about. Lastly, pillar pages help people easily
navigate throughout multiple pieces of content on the same topic
on the same webpage, providing a great user experience.
This is quite different from a typical content marketing approach
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that would have favored separate blog posts on all of these different
subtopics and subsections of each subtopic!
Figure 6.8 illustrates the traditional content marketing approach
and Figure 6.9 the pillar approach.
Figure 6.8 Traditional Approach
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Figure 6.9
Pillar
Approach /
From
Hubspot
Pillar pages can also be used to support lead creation and sales.
A first way to do so is to use the pillar pages themselves. For
example, a pillar page could include gated content, opt-ins (forms
on the pillar page that ask for a consumer’s email address), and
calls to action. Pillar pages that follow such an approach include the
following examples:
• https://www.wildwewander.com/diy-truck-camper
• https://www.etuma.com/cx-professionals-guide-to-text-
analysis
• https://info.townsendsecurity.com/sql-server-encryption-
key-management-definitive-guide
Take Wild We Wander, for example, and its pillar page on “how
to DIY a truck camper.” This page (Figure 6.10) has all of the
characteristics of a pillar page, but it also redirects consumers to a
content asset (a free resource to become a digital nomad) that is a
piece of gated content (Figure 6.11).
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Figure 6.10
Pillar Page
and Gated
Content
Figure 6.11
Pillar Page
and Gated
Content
Second, pillar pages can also be thought of as part of a longer-term
strategy that includes other pieces of content. It often happens that
companies will initially gate a pillar page and use it to generate
leads. For example, the two pillar pages we presented so far could
have been initially offered as e-books that offered all the
information regarding “how to squat” and “how to DIY a truck
camper.” The firms could have used these two gated content assets
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as part of a greater content marketing strategy, breaking down the
e-book into smaller, more digestible pieces. Example of this could
include short blog posts (“3 tips for a better squat,” “3 reasons why
squats hurt your knees”), short videos (“the right squat position”),
short social media posts (e.g., statistics and quotes from the e-
book), and the like. Then, once the lead generation campaign was
over, the e-book could have been turned into an ungated pillar page.
Visually, this strategy can be represented as shown in Figure 6.12,
where all of these “smaller” pieces of content link back to the gated
e-book to generate leads.
Figure 6.12 Pillar Strategy
In fact, this is exactly the strategy that Unbounce used with their
Conversion Centered Design e-book. Originally an e-book, the firm
used it as a piece of gated content with supporting pieces of
ungated content, including
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• a blog post highlighting the main lines,
• a SlideShare deck explaining the main principles, and
• a guest blog post on HubSpot.
These ungated pieces of content drove consumers to the e-book. To
generate further leads, they also supported the launch of the e-book
through other pieces of gated content, including
• a webinar about Conversion Centered Design that captured
leads for registration (gated) and
• a landing page to watch the webinar recording after the event.
Then, Unbounce took their e-book and transformed it into a pillar
page (https://unbounce.com/conversion-centered-design/) and
broke down the webinar, making it accessible on YouTube in six
different videos.
Hence, if a firm plans to create pillar pages, it might be useful to
think of how the page can first be embedded in a lead generation
strategy before being made accessible more freely as a piece of
ungated content.
Here are a few tips for forming such a strategy:
1. Find the core problems of your persona.
2. Group these problems into core topics.
3. Build each topic with subtopics.
4. Identify content ideas for subtopics.
5. Write an extensive piece of content.
6. Fragment this piece of content into multiple pieces with
different formats and different parts that can be used to bring
people to the gate or foster interactions.
7. Extend the reach of these parts on owned media and using
paid activities.
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Content Calendar
We conclude this chapter by discussing content calendars.
Although pillar pages are a great long-term investment for web
referencing and lead creation, most day-to-day content activities,
be they posts on Facebook and Instagram or blog posts, are ad hoc
activities. However, they should still be thought of from a mid-term
perspective and integrated into a strategic approach to content
marketing. This strategy should think of ways to build topic
relevance over time, address many personas and stages in the
journey process, and address all objectives of the RACE framework.
A great way to develop this strategy is through a content calendar.
A content calendar maps future content creation activities. It
answers questions like these:
• Who is this content for (personas)?
• Which stage of the journey does this content address?
• What topic is it on?
• What keywords does it cover?
It can also help operationalize content marketing by providing
information including the following:
• date when it is supposed to go online
• author responsible for creating the content asset
• content type
• channel
• headline
• copy
• call to action
Figure 6.13 shows an example of a content calendar (text description
here).
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Figure 6.13 Content Calendar / Text Description
Creating a content calendar should be done with reflexive intent. A
firm should make sure that they are creating content for all stages of
the journey, all personas, and all objectives of the RACE framework.
By planning a month or two in advance and clearly mapping the
personas, topic, journey stage, and RACE objectives that each piece
of content addresses, a firm makes sure to create distributed efforts
that do not privilege certain personas, stages, or objectives over
others!
Exercises
As in previous exercises, you are a fitness center creating
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a campaign for people who want to get back into shape, and
one of the personas you are targeting is Avery.
Avery is a person living in a major Canadian city center.
They are their late twenties to early thirties and are in the
top 20% in revenue in their city. With increased
responsibilities at work and a newborn, Avery had put
exercising aside for a few years. They feel sluggish, lack
energy, and miss having a stronger connection with their
body. With age, their body has also started to transform,
and they have started to feel self-conscious about it. To
remediate this, they want to get back into exercising
weekly. They don’t have much time, and they also don’t
know much about working out or the market—for example,
where to work out or how to work out.
Text Description
1. Using the #fitness hashtag on Instagram, identify
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two exemplars of fitness accounts.
2. Out of the four exemplars that you have identified
in fitness (i.e., the two in the textbook and the two
that you found), find the one that is the most
appropriate for Avery.
3. Then think of a topic that would be important to
write about on social media for Avery.
4. Break this topic down into three potential
Instagram posts that you would create.
5. Try to target each post to a different stage of
Avery’s journey.
6. Think of an idea for a gated piece of content that
you can transform into a pillar page for your fitness
website.
7. Sketch a short campaign where you support your
gated piece of content with three ungated pieces of
content.
8. Explain in a short sentence what each idea is about.
9. Sketch (map in boxes and arrows) how these three
ungated pieces of content relate to the gated piece
(e.g., Where are they hosted? How are they linked
together?)
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Act: Lead Generation and
Lead Nurturing
PIERRE-YANN DOLBEC
Overview
In this chapter, we cover the basics of lead generation and lead
nurturing activities. We define leads and lead stages, present a few
ways to generate leads and different types of opt-ins, explain how
to score leads, and discuss email marketing.
Learning Objectives
Understand what a lead is and how to generate, score,
and nurture leads.
ACT
InterAction is about encouraging positive interactions on a website
and social media. Positive interactions facilitate the generation of
leads, which lead to acquiring customers. The two objectives at
the Act stage are thus to (1) encourage positive interactions and (2)
generate leads. The kinds of goals we can set up for consumers have
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Nurturing
to do with these two objectives. To encourage positive interactions,
we can set up goals such as spending a certain amount of time on
our website or viewing a certain number of pages. When consumers
achieve these goals, we can assume we are attaining this first
objective. For generating leads, the kinds of goals we can set up for
consumers are to register as a member or sign up for a newsletter.
Again, when consumers achieve these goals, we end up achieving
our objectives (i.e., acquiring leads). The KPIs to measure these goals
would then be time spent on site, page views, number of members
and newsletter subscribers (increase quarter-over-quarter), cost
per lead, and percentage of visitors converted to leads.
Leads and Lead Generation
The large majority of visitors to your website—some say up to
96%—will not buy anything. Given all the resources that go into
bringing visitors to your site, from writing content to publishing
ads, simply trying to get visitors to a website without having a
strategy of what to do once they get there will lead to many missed
opportunities.
To address this conundrum, digital marketers have turned to lead
generation to answer the question: How do we turn a visitor into a
potential customer?
Marketo defines lead generation as “the marketing process of
stimulating and capturing interest in a product or service for the
purpose of developing sales pipeline.” During lead generation, our
goals are to gather visitors’ personal information so that we can
start to market to them personally in the future—and to identify
whether or not we want to market to them. Not all visitors that we
gather information on are worth marketing to.
A lead is (1) a qualified potential buyer who (2) shows some level
of interest in purchasing a firm’s product or service. Note that this
definition has two components. First, the visitor who provided their
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information is a qualified potential buyer. This means that they
could eventually purchase our product. For many visitors to a
website, this is not the case.
Take, for example, the lead generation activity by Ferrari linked
here, which is quite common in the automobile industry: a car
configurator. During car configuration, visitors are invited to build
their own car based on a car model, choosing between options
to decide on things such as interior and exterior colors, engine,
wheels, and so on. At the end of the configuration, the visitor is
asked to create an account or fill out a short form and provide their
email address to receive more information about this model or save
the configuration. Doing so indicates to the firm that the consumer
is potentially interested in this vehicle.
But are all visitors who build their own Ferrari potential Ferrari
customers? Probably not.
Car configurators are probably used by many consumers who
either have no interest in buying the car and are doing this for fun
or, in the case of Ferrari, who have an interest in buying the car
but do not correspond to the Ferrari customer (e.g., they lack the
financial resources to buy a Ferrari). These visitors are not qualified.
A qualified lead is a lead that has been deemed likely to become
a customer. Firms qualify leads through lead scoring, which we
discuss further below.
Second, the visitor who provides their email address also needs
to be interested in becoming a buyer. Since many lead generation
activities provide, for example, hard-to-access information such
as market reports or extensive guides on topics, it often happens
that visitors will provide their email address without wanting to
become a customer. They do so because they want to have access
to the gated content or feature of a website. Lead scoring also helps
differentiate between these two types of potential leads.
Hence, a lead is a visitor that is interested in a company and that
the company is also interested in.
In the process of becoming a customer, a visitor will thus go
through different stages, from visitor to lead to qualified lead to
162 | Act: Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing
customer (an alternative to this model that you might come across
is lead, prospect, and opportunity). Two types of qualification exist:
marketing-qualified lead (MQL) and sales-qualified lead (SQL).
MQLs are viable leads that should be marketed to. In other words,
they are visitors who gave a firm their email address and who the
firm has established could be potential customers. They are visitors
that the firm is interested in. An SQL is a lead that is sales-ready. In
other words, a lead that is moving close to the purchase stage. This
is important because it gives an indication of what kind of marketing
activities should be conducted with these leads. As we have seen, we
talk differently to consumers depending on whether they’re at the
awareness, active evaluation, or purchase stages. Knowing which
stage consumers are at is highly useful for creating the right
marketing message.
How Do You Get Leads?
There are many, many ways to get leads. Generally speaking, any
marketing activity that leads consumers to give a firm a piece of
personal information qualifies as a lead generation opportunity.
Here is a non-exhaustive list:
• content with a lead magnet, such as a whitepaper, e-book,
checklist, demo, course, presentation, tool, or webinar
• online contests, giveaways, and so on
• lead generation on social media, either through dedicated
options such as lead generation ads on Facebook (Figure 7.1) or
Instagram or by redirecting users to a lead generation landing
page
• combined with traditional marketing initiatives such as
◦ collecting emails at trade shows
◦ including URLs or QR codes that direct to a lead
generation landing page in direct mailing campaigns
Act: Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing | 163
◦ collecting emails at a showroom
• opt-ins everywhere: on scroll down, in the footer, or midway
through blog posts
You can find a few more ideas here and here, and the Hubspot lead
generation guide here.
Figure 7.1 Lead Generation Facebook
Lead generation is typically associated with lead forms. Lead forms
are web forms that allow firms to capture consumers’ email
addresses and sometimes other information. They are a great tool
to build a mailing list and, when done correctly, help to score leads.
We will turn our attention to lead scoring later on in this chapter.
Designing lead forms, and most importantly, how many form
fields you decide to use, is a balancing act. It is generally argued
that consumers take less than 10 seconds to decide whether or not
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to give their email address to a firm. There is, however, a trade-
off between collecting many email addresses and collecting email
addresses from qualified leads.
Take the following study from Marketo (Figure 7.2), which found
that moving from five to seven to nine form fields diminished the
conversion rate (defined in this case as the percentage of visitors
who provided their email addresses and became leads) from 13.4%
to 12% to 10% and increased the cost per lead from $31.24 to $34.94
to $41.90. Clearly, choosing how many form fields to use plays an
important role in pricing and devising lead generation campaigns.
(Note: The cost per lead increases because it costs a certain amount
of money to run the ads associated with this lead generation
campaign. Hence, the lower the conversion rate, the higher the cost
per lead).
Figure 7.2 Marketo Form Fields
Now, if asked, “How many form fields should you use as a firm
in a lead generation campaign?” it might be tempting to answer,
“One.” Clearly, the fewer form fields, the more leads! Yet using fewer
form fields also precludes us from getting important information
Act: Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing | 165
Figure 7.3
Scroll-Down
Pop-Up
Opt-In on
Zoella.co.uk
Figure 7.4
Bottom-of-C
ontent
Opt-In on
fastcompany.
com
about our potential customers. In the case above, the form with
five fields did not get the number of employees of the firm, the
industry they’re in, the type of CRM system they use, or their job
function. These pieces of information are important because not
all email addresses are equal. If, for example, a firm specializes in
a specific industry and in companies of a specific size (e.g., SMEs
in the fashion industry), then collecting these pieces of information
might be worth the additional $3.70 that the lead costs. This is
because collecting this information will help qualify leads and will
save money in the long run when running a lead nurturing
campaign. We discuss this idea in greater detail when we look at
lead scoring later in this chapter.
Apart from longer lead generation forms, leads are also often
obtained when short opt-in forms are used in concert with ungated
content marketing efforts. We see this very often on blogs, for
example (Figure 7.3 and Figure 7.4).
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Lead opt-ins exist in many forms. They can be found in the footer of
webpages, in the middle of a blog post, or at the bottom of a content
page. They might appear as a welcome gate, a pop-up that appears
at the start of your web browsing experience on a specific site, such
as when you arrive on Neil Patel’s website for the first time. They
might take the form of a lightbox (overlay box) pop-up that appears
when a visitor performs certain actions, such as spending a specific
amount of time on a site, scrolling to a specific section of a page (for
example, scrolling all the way down on Zoella’s blog posts), entering
a specific page, or viewing a specific number of pages on a website).
Opt-ins can be characterized based on two dimensions: whether
consumers explicitly know that providing their email address will
enter them in a lead nurturing campaign and whether the opt-in in
confirmed by the firm, as follows (from Marketo’s Definitive Guide
to Email Marketing):
• Implicit opt-in: “When a website visitor fills out a form on
your site such as to download a content asset or register for a
webinar. Your website’s privacy policy must state that
performing this action automatically opts the user into email
marketing. This option is low effort, but also has the lowest
level of engagement.”
• Explicit opt-in: They “require the user to voluntarily sign up
and give their persona information. Often this takes the form
of a registration box or page that reads something like ‛I want
to receive news and updates’.”
• Single opt-in: “When a new subscriber enters his email
address and possibly other information (demographics,
preferences, etc.). He is immediately subscribed and will
automatically receive the next email in your nurture
campaign.”
• Double opt-in: “These occur when a new subscriber enters his
email address and, depending on your needs, other
information and content preferences. A post-subscribe thank
you page may alert him to look for an email conformation.
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Once he receives that email, he’ll need to click on a link or
button to confirm.”
Increasingly, transparency has become the name of the game when
practicing online marketing, and an explicit double opt-in is often
seen as a best practice. This is because consumers are more likely to
open emails that they receive when they clearly know that they had
signed up to receive them. Additionally, double opt-ins ensure that
consumers want to receive an email and that the email address they
gave was valid.
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring is an approach to ranking leads based on their value to
a firm, which supports marketing and sales activities. It helps qualify
leads and indicate whether efforts should be devoted to market to a
lead, as well as the movement of the lead throughout their journey
and, potentially, if and when they reach the purchase stage.
Many approaches exist to score leads, such as the following:
• BANT: budget, authority, need, timeline
• MEDDIC: metrics, economic buyer, decision criteria, decision
process, identify pain, champion
• CHAMP: challenges, authority, money, priority
• GPCTBA/C&I: goals, plans, challenges, timeline, budget,
authority/negative consequences and positive implications
• ANUM: authority, need, urgency, money
• FAINT: funds, authority, interest, need, timing
Lead scoring approaches use data collected by the firm (e.g., using
forms) as well as behavioral data collected during the interactions
of leads with the firm (e.g., whether or not the lead opens an email,
requests a call, or views a product). We will group these types of
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data under “observable or explicit characteristics” and “behaviors
or implicit characteristics.” Either type of data helps the firm know
whether a consumer is interested in them and whether it should
devote efforts marketing to them.
Observable or explicit characteristics represent data that a firm
can readily collect by asking consumers or observing them (e.g.,
on their LinkedIn profile). This data is typically collected by simply
asking consumers for it (for example, by using a form or during
a phone call) or by looking them up online. Examples of such
characteristics include the following:
• job title
• firm size
• personal or firm revenue
• company size
Marketo offers more than 50 observable/explicit characteristics in
their lead scoring guide (p. 18).
Behavioral or implicit characteristics represent data acquired
through the tracking of online activities to measure the interest of
a lead in a firm’s product or service. This data is typically collected
when a lead visits the firm’s website, interacts with its emails, and
responds to offers. Examples of such data points include the
following:
• clicking on a link in an email
• viewing a product page
• watching a video demoing a product
• viewing multiple pages during a session
Marketo offers more than 200 behavioral/implicit characteristics in
their lead scoring guide (pp. 19–20).
Lead scoring entails first identifying the data that a firm believes
is relevant to scoring leads. This process will greatly vary depending
on the firm. Questions such as “Who is responsible for making
Act: Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing | 169
purchases?”, “Does my consumer need to have a certain revenue to
buy my product?” or “What kind of actions can I make consumers
take that show that they have an interest in my product?” can
help identify how to score leads. Once the right characteristics
have been identified, firms will typically assign a weight to them.
For example, having the right job title might be worth less than
viewing a product demo or requesting a sales call. By assigning
points to each characteristic, a firm can establish whether a lead is
qualified and how a lead is moving through their journey. Leads with
a certain score can be identified as marketing-qualified, while leads
that later reach a higher score can be identified as sales-qualified.
An example of a lead scoring framework that has historically been
heavily used by firms throughout the world is the BANT (budget-
authority-need-timeline) framework. We use this framework here
to exemplify how to perform lead scoring when focusing on
observable or explicit characteristics. For example, to create a lead
score, a firm could create forms or collect data during calls with
potential customers and ask questions such as the following:
• Budget: What is the budget of the potential customer? How
does it align with my product or service?
◦ Questions to ask the lead:
▪ Do you have a budget set aside for this purchase?
What is it?
▪ Is this an important enough priority to allocate funds
toward?
▪ What other initiatives are you spending money on?
▪ Does seasonality affect your funding?
• Authority: Who makes the decision to purchase?
◦ Questions to ask the lead:
▪ Whose budget does this purchase come out of?
▪ Who else will be involved in the purchasing decision?
▪ How have you made purchasing decisions for
products similar to ours in the past?
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▪ What objections to this purchase do you anticipate
encountering? How do you think we can best handle
them?
• Need: What is the need of the lead? Can my product or service
answer this need?
◦ Questions to ask the lead:
▪ What challenges are you struggling with?
▪ What’s the source of that pain, and why do you feel it’s
worth spending time on?
▪ Why hasn’t it been addressed before?
▪ What do you think could solve this problem? Why?
• Timeline: What is the purchase timeline of the lead? How does
this align with my sales process?
◦ How quickly do you need to solve your problem?
◦ What else is a priority for you?
◦ Are you evaluating any other similar products or services?
◦ Do you have the capacity to implement this product right
now?
Last, it is important to emphasize the role of progressive profiling,
the idea that you should collect information from potential
customers throughout their interactions with your firm. As we saw
earlier, you can’t ask a lot from visitors when they fill out a form
without hindering the conversion of visitors to leads. How, then, do
you collect this information? By slowly collecting bits and pieces
over time. This can be done, for example, through the use of
progressive profiling technology and dynamic forms, where a firm
sets up ahead of time many forms that iteratively collect
information based on what a consumer will have provided on a
previous form. Put differently, if consumers give their name and
email in the first form, the second form will move to asking for
pieces of information that have yet to be obtained. Another
approach is to combine explicit and implicit scoring and score a lead
over time as they interact with a firm’s website.
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Lead Nurturing
Once a firm has acquired leads and qualified them (i.e., as MQLs), it
enters a process of lead nurturing. Lead nurturing represents the
“purposeful process of engaging a defined target group by providing
relevant information at each stage of the buyer’s journey,
positioning your company as the best (and safest) choice to enable
them to achieve their objectives” (Hubspot).
Let’s examine some of the key aspects of this definition.
First, lead nurturing is a purposeful process. In this chapter and
the next, we are going to emphasize how this intent translates to
always having a clear idea of what comes next for the consumer.
What happens when you receive an email address from a consumer?
What comes next? What email should you send them? What should
be in this email? What action should they be asked to perform then?
What should the lead be achieving there? This ties closely to the
idea of having clearly defined conversion paths. When doing lead
nurturing, the firm is interacting with the lead, but it has a clear
script in mind. It knows the steps the lead should go through to
convert them to customers.
Second, lead nurturing looks at engaging a defined target group.
That has a few implications. First, a firm should have clearly defined
personas that they want to engage. Second, lead nurturing
campaigns are persona-specific. They are persona-specific because
what makes a persona tick will probably vary between personas.
They are also at specific stages of the buyer’s journey, which brings
us to the third aspect of the definition.
Third, lead nurturing aims to provide relevant information at each
stage of the buyer’s journey. The only way to achieve this, i.e., to
create relevant content for leads that varies depending on which
stage of their journey they’re at, is to have in mind a clear persona
and a clear understanding of their journey.
Last, firms practice lead nurturing in order to sell products. Yet as
we have seen over the course of the preceding chapters, this should
172 | Act: Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing
ideally come at the end of the lead nurturing process, i.e., when the
firm believes that the lead has reached the purchase stage.
The following four main activities relate to lead nurturing:
• getting permission to market to consumers, or what we
achieve during lead generation
• educating and entertaining leads with relevant information
that aligns with their stage in their journey
• monitoring the progress of leads through lead scoring
• promoting your product once the lead has reached the
purchase stage
On average, consumers who provided you with their email
addresses receive ten marketing touches from the time they enter
the top of the sales funnel until they become a customer.
To facilitate segmentation for lead nurturing activities, firms
typically create extensive email marketing lists. These lists should
provide the information necessary to create campaigns that
correctly address the needs, challenges, and motivations of
consumers and the stage of the journey they’re in. Useful
information to for email marketing lists includes the following:
• sociodemographic information, which facilitates targeting
activities
• acquisition date, which helps to know whether the lead aligns
with how long it typically takes a firm to sell a product to that
specific persona
• frequency, i.e., how often the lead has indicated they would like
to receive emails
• lead score and assumed journey stage, which should help tailor
which email to send to which lead depending on their stage in
the journey
• persona, to help tailor the message
• how/where you acquired the lead
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Similarly to persona, this last point is helpful for continuing the
conversation a firm started with a consumer. For example, let’s
assume that a consumer signed up to an email list from a blog post
or a pillar page on the topic of ‘“back pain” from the website of a
shoe manufacturer specializing in back pain. Ideally, this consumer
should receive information that is different from another consumer
who signed up after clicking a search ad that offered “comfortable
shoes.” The better the information a firm provides caters to a lead’s
needs, motivations, and challenges, the more likely they are to
engage in a conversation and ultimately buy a product.
The main idea here is that one size does not fit all. Lead nurturing
campaigns should be clearly tailored to personas and the stages
they are in.
The metrics used to analyze marketing campaigns include the
following:
• bounce rate: the number of email addresses that had a bounce
back from the ISPs
• open rate: the percentage of emails opened out of the total
number of emails sent
• clickthrough rate: the number of subscribers that have clicked
on at least one link in your email
• click-to-open rate (CTO): the percentage of recipients who
opened the email message and also clicked on any link in the
email message
• unsubscribe rate: the percentage of subscribers who opted
out from your list (unsubscribed number/emails delivered ×
100 = unsubscribed rate)
These metrics should help gauge the level of engagement of leads
with our email marketing campaigns and where there might be
issues. For example, if our open rate is great but our clickthrough
rate is abysmal, this probably indicates that there is something
wrong with the way the email is crafted, or that the content does
not align with the subject line of the email.
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What Happens Once You Get a Lead?
Ideally, acquiring a lead’s email address should start a sequence
of planned emails and other marketing activities (such as ad
retargeting, which we will cover in the next chapter). This sequence
of planned emails should aim at transforming a marketing-qualified
lead to a sales-qualified lead (MQL to SQL), using targeted content
to move the lead from informing them about their problem to
helping them evaluate their solution to explaining why a firm’s
product is the best solution.
The first email in an email marketing campaign should be an
onboarding email. An onboarding email should guide leads and
educate them about what is about to come. This email should help
make a lead take the next step in the series of planned activities a
firm has sequenced. Often, onboarding emails will tell leads what to
expect, such as the content of future emails and how often they will
be sent.
Let’s take a look at Instagram’s onboarding email.
First, Instagram asks whether we indeed create an account with
them, i.e., they practice double opt-in (Figure 7.5).
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Figure 7.5
Double
Opt-In on
Instagram –
Part 1
Second, they push you to take the next step in order to maximize
your engagement on their platform. In the case of social media
networks, a threshold effect has been found to maximize
engagement, where following a minimum number of people greatly
boosts the chance that a user will come back. It thus makes sense
that this is first action that Instagram proposes users to engage in
(Figure 7.6).
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Figure 7.6
Double
Opt-In on
Instagram –
Part 2
Last, Instagram tells users to start using the product (Figure 7.7),
which is also quite well aligned with what we would expect people
to want to do once they have signed up for an Instagram account.
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Figure 7.7
Double
Opt-In on
Instagram –
Part 3
Here is another example, this time from a lead obtained from a
content opt-in newsletter subscriber who was reading a blog article
on Christmas decorations on the Crate & Barrel blog. Importantly,
we can see how Crate & Barrel continues the conversation that
started on a Christmas-related blog post by offering more
information on Christmas decorations (Figure 7.8).
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Figure 7.8
Drip Email
Sequence
Example
Act: Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing | 179
First, the onboarding email congratulates the lead for signing up for
the newsletter and explains what the lead will be receiving in the
future. Then, the first action offered to consumers is to explore new
articles relating to Christmas decorations. The email then breaks
down product categories that a user might be interested in.
The onboarding email should be the first email in a sequence of
emails meant to convert leads to customers, which should ideally
follow consumers in their journey (i.e., moving from problem to
solution to product). This email sequence is often referred to as a
drip email sequence or drip email campaign. Here is how Hubspot
explains an email drip campaign:
An email drip campaign is a form of automated sales
outreach. It’s comprised of a series of emails automatically
sent to a specific audience after they take a specific action.
For example, if a lead downloads a whitepaper on recruiting
best practices, they might be placed in a drip campaign
sharing relevant recruiting content. The final email might
include a CTA to request a demo for your recruiting
software.
This is (very simply) represented in Figure 7.9 (text here). The exact
steps and content would depend on the stage at which a consumer
signed up. For example, were they reading an awareness post or
reading about potential solutions for their problem?
Figure 7.9 Drip Sequence
We can see how each email serves a dedicated function. The first
180 | Act: Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing
email is an onboarding email explaining the value of signing up
for the newsletter. The email that follows might be a problem-
or solution-focused email depending on where the consumer is in
their journey (since we’re at the lead generation stage, generally
the consumer should be further down the funnel, e.g., weighing
their options). The third email is a promotional product email to
conclude a sale, the fourth email is a reminder (if the sale hasn’t
been concluded), and the last email makes sure that the consumer
still wants to receive emails (since the sale still hasn’t been
concluded).
A simplified application of this sequence as provided by
dripscripts is as follows:
• Email 1: Bryan, All I can say is THANK YOU! (Thank you email)
• Email 2: Content w/ P.S. Mention of offer (Content email)
• Email 3: Did you get your Cup of Joe? (Promo email)
• Email 4: 1 DAY LEFT) Does anyone else have these questions?
(Q&A persuasion email)
• Email 5: [Disappears @ Midnight] 80% off my new Self
Publishing Course (…plus 5 free
• bonuses) (Promo email)
• Email 6: LAST CALL – Self-Publishing Training Bundle Closing
in 4 hours (Closing email)
Real life, though, is not as straightforward. Based on what we
learned in lead scoring, we could also leverage here the idea of
behavioral scoring and create decision trees to help strengthen our
chances of converting leads. Did they open the email? Click on the
link we provided? Read the blog post? Emails and other marketing
activities should be informed by what the consumer has done with
the last activity they interacted with. Marketing automation has
helped create more complex marketing campaigns based on how a
user will have interacted with a previous marketing activity. Figure
7.10 (text here) shows a flow chart for a simple example from Jacobs
Levenger/Smart Insights.
Act: Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing | 181
Figure 7.10 Email Automation / Text Description
A Few Tips for Writing Emails
The information should be well hierarchized, with the main message
and the call to action associated with the goal you want consumers
to accomplish located above the fold (i.e., before any scrolling
happens). Emails should be short, with little to no scrolling. The
subject line should include a call to action and be transparent about
the content of the email. Emails aiming at conversion with a clear
goal for consumers after the click can benefit from being associated
with a landing page (i.e., the click leads the user to a landing page),
and other landing pages tips, such as maintaining a low attention
ratio, can be useful to create highly converting emails. Mailchimp
provides its top tips and advice as well as design ideas in their email
design guide here.
182 | Act: Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing
Exercises
You are Paperlike, a company that specializes in an iPad
screen protector that replicates the paper experience.
One of the personas you are targeting is Alister and Alice.
A&As are illustrators eagerly awaiting their new iPad Air
2020 with the Pencil 2. They intend to use the Procreate
app to start doing digital drawings and designs. They are
new to illustrating in a digital environment and they have
never used a device like this to draw before. They are
reluctant to move away from pen and paper but believe that
this might help move their work online more easily.
Scoring Leads
• What are two different marketing activities you
could do to gather leads?
• You are creating a form associated with a piece of
gated content. How would you score potential leads?
◦ What would be the first three questions you
would ask?
◦ What would be an additional two questions?
• What could be a few ways to score leads
Act: Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing | 183
behaviorally (i.e., based on implicit characteristics)?
Email Campaigns
You have created leads with A&As using a bottom-of-
content opt-in. The blog post is problem-oriented. The title
of the post is “Becoming a digital artist,” and it addresses
some of the problems illustrators face when moving to a
digital environment.
Think of a series of five emails.
• What will be the general idea of each email?
• How can you score the lead behaviorally?
• How do you nurture the lead toward a sale?
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Convert: Conversion
Optimization
PIERRE-YANN DOLBEC
Overview
In this chapter, we cover what conversion is and how to optimize
webpages to convert better. To that end, we discuss conversion
rate optimization, how to identify what to optimize when people
move from one webpage to another, some conversion-centered
principles, A/B testing, and retargeting.
Learning Objectives
Understand what conversion rate optimization is and
some approaches to optimizing webpages and websites.
Convert
The convert stage is focused on increasing conversions to maximize
sales. It emphasizes both maximizing conversions across the
journey of consumers and improving conversion from lead to
customer. Since our main objective is to increase conversions, any
Convert: Conversion
Optimization | 185
indicator associated with measuring and improving conversion can
serve as a KPI here, depending on what exactly we are trying to
achieve. Examples of KPIs include sales, percent conversion of lead
to sale, average order, cost per conversion (per channel), average
conversion time, abandoned carts, and sales per source.
Conversion Rate Optimization
Conversion rate optimization is the process of improving webpages
and websites to increase conversions. A conversion refers to a user
achieving a goal by taking a desired action. Conversions can
therefore happen on any webpage of a website that has a goal that a
firm wants users to achieve.
Conversion rate is the percentage of people that visit a page and
achieve a desired goal or action (conversion rate = conversions/
number of visitors × 100).
Figure 8.1 Conversion Rate
Although we might tend to think of conversion as a consumer
completing a purchase, many other goals can be set up for them,
such as submitting a form, clicking on a link, reaching a particular
page, or spending a certain amount of time or viewing a certain
number of pages on a website. A distinction tends to be made
between goals that lead consumers to achieve certain critical
actions set up by a firm and goals that consumers complete in their
186 | Convert: Conversion Optimization
journey to achieving those critical actions. Optimizely talks about
common and ultimate goals. Google discusses micro and macro
conversions.
Conversion rate optimization is important because it helps firms
improve the number of users who might achieve specific goals. It
can lead to a higher number of leads, lower acquisition costs, and
increased revenue, for example. It is also usually cheaper to convert
more visitors than to attract more visitors, making conversion rate
optimization the more cost-effective way to improve a business.
A useful way to think about micro and macro goals or conversions
is to ask the question, “What are the little actions along their
journey that consumers need to take (micro goal/conversion) in
order for them to achieve what I ultimately want them to do (macro
goal/conversion)?”
These can vary depending on the type of website that a firm
is running. For e-commerce websites, purchases are the main
indicator of whether the site is performing well. Because social
media websites mostly make revenue based on ads and by making
sure that users are participating and returning, time spent on site
and engagement-related goals might be more important. News
websites might have a mix of both. Thus, goals for visitors vary
depending on the type of website and the business model of a firm.
Since conversions are calculated based on whether users achieve
a goal, the first questions to ask to practice conversion rate
optimization are “What are the goals I want users to achieve on my
website?” and “What are the goals users should achieve on specific
webpages in service of achieving the larger goal?” Many such goals
can be achieved, and as a result, conversion rate optimization might
touch many elements of websites, such as forms, carts, and content
on webpages. Other types of online properties, such as apps and
emails, can also be optimized. Last, conversion paths can be
optimized by identifying whether there are movements between
parts of a path (e.g., moving from an ad to a landing page or from a
landing page to a cart) that seem to be hindered.
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Understanding What to Optimize
To manage optimization, firms should first examine the general
path of a specific persona as they move from visitor to lead to
customer. This gives an overview of the strategic picture of our
overall conversion efforts. Trew Marketing provides us with an
abstract funnel as shown in Figure 8.2 (text here).
Figure 8.2 Funnel / Text Description
When we look at the journey of consumers this way, we see how,
out of all of the visits that we receive on our website, we convert
only a fraction to leads. Then, out of all of these leads, only a fraction
will be marketing qualified. We then market to these leads and
engage in lead nurturing, and only a fraction will move forward in
their journey and become sales qualified. Lastly, from these SQLs,
only a fraction will become our customers. Each of these moments,
where a person moves from one stage to another, might need our
attention. Is our conversion rate from visitor to lead good? What
about our conversion rate from SQL to customer?
Looking at the performance of a firm throughout its efforts
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Figure 8.3
Google’s
Conversion
Funnel
Example
associated with the consumer journey and what happens between
the different that stages a consumer goes through (i.e., visitor, lead,
customer, and engaged customer) is a good first step to identify
exactly where a firm should deploy optimization efforts.
Once a firm understands which steps in the journey seem to be a
bottleneck to acquiring customers, it can concentrate on optimizing
the specific elements of that step (e.g., a landing page, a shopping
cart, or a product page). Using software such as Google Analytics,
firms can set up steps for users to achieve on specific pages and
measure whether users are going through these steps. For each
goal, firms can link a series of steps to create conversion funnels
(here is an example for cart abandonment). An example of a funnel
for the goal of buying a product could be the following:
Homepage > [Step: Click on shop now] > Product categories page
> [Step: Click on a category] > Specific product category > [Step:
Click on a product] > Product page > [Step: Click “buy now”] >
Checkout page > [Step: Fill out form] > [Step: Buy product]
Analytics solutions then give output that shows the percentage of
people that achieve each step. For example, an example of Google’s
conversion funnel is shown in Figure 8.3.
This figure provides a few key pieces of information. On the top left,
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we see that 22 320 people reached the cart and that 14 709 exited
the funnel at this stage. 7 611 entered the funnel and move to the
billing and shipping page, or about 34% of the people who reached
the funnel. The bar in the ‘cart’ box represents this percentage
visually. On the top right, we see that, out of the 14 709 who exited
the funnel, 4 208 visitors left the website, 2 805 moved to the sign-
in page, 2 433 moved to the basket page, 894 went to the store
page, and 792 went back to the home page. We can infer from this
that many users wanted to sign in, perhaps to benefit from a loyalty
program (e.g., they will accumulate points on their purchase) or
some promotion (e.g., free shipping for members). Consumers who
return to the basket or the store might be undecided about their
overall order and want to add or remove items. Consumers who
exited the website, though, might be seen as worrisome, and there
might be activities to deploy here (e.g., retargeting ads, abandoned
cart email). It also serves to identify an area for conversion
improvement to minimize consumers who exit the website after
having put items in their cart. Next, we see that, out of the 7 611
users who reached the billing and shipping page, almost all (93%)
completed their transactions. This points to a well-optimized billing
and shipping page.
A/B Testing
One of the main tools in the arsenal of conversion optimization is
A/B testing.
A/B tests “consist of a randomized experiment with two variants,
A and B. It includes the application of statistical hypothesis testing
or ‛two-sample hypothesis testing’ as used in the field of statistics.
A/B testing is a way to compare two versions of a single variable,
typically by testing a subject’s response to variant A against variant
B, and determining which of the two variants is more effective”
(Wikipedia).
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In plain language, an A/B test compares two versions of the same
webpage where one element differs (e.g., a different call to action,
background image, or heading). Using software solutions, half the
traffic to this webpage over a specific period of time is sent to
version A and the other half is sent to version B. Then the
performance of both pages on whatever goal consumers were
supposed to achieve on this page is compared.
Let’s take the following landing page (Figure 8.4), for example.
The signup rate is lower than expected, and the firm wants to
test different elements of the page. Their first hypothesis is that
the headline is not convincing enough. They thus decide to test a
different headline with a clearer call to action: “Transform yourself
with Fit for Life” instead of “It has just become easier to develop
your fitness potential.”
Figure 8.4 A/B Test
They test both pages over a period of a week. After the week ends,
they compare version A and version B and find out that version B
performed better. They thus keep version B and move on to testing
other elements of the landing page.
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Optimizing through A/B testing typically leads to marginal gains,
meaning that it is rare to see a massive difference between two
versions. But, over time, these marginal gains can add up to
important differences. For example, let’s compare a website that
does not do any A/B testing on a landing page to one that does
A/B testing every week and makes small gains, improving their
conversion rate by a factor of one percent a week (e.g., moving from
8% to 8.08% in the first week). The second website, at the end of the
year, will have a page that performs 1.39% better. At the end of the
second year, 2.97% better. At the end of the third year, 4.76% better.
While the first landing page still converts, let’s say, 10% of visitors,
the second landing page now converts 14.76%. If the improvements
are by a factor of 2% per week, this difference moves to 21.77%. Like
compound interests, small differences add up to large differences
over time (Figure 8.5).
Figure 8.5 A/B Differences (adapted from Optimzely)
Anything can be A/B tested. If you want more information on how
A/B tests can be used in practice, I highly encourage you to read
one of the following three case studies from Optimizely:
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• how Secret Escapes A/B tested a mandatory signup for an app
• how Sony Vaio A/B tested a banner ad and a cart
• how ComScore tested social proofing (testimonials on product
pages) (note: ComScore used multivariate testing rather than
an A/B test by testing three variations of their page)
Conversion-Centered Principles
We will next cover principles for conversion-centered design
proposed by Unbounce. The main idea behind these principles is
to help create highly converting webpages by concentrating on key
design ideas that have less to do with creating aesthetically pleasing
websites and more to do with creating websites that help marketers
achieve their objectives.
The principles are as follows:
1. Create focus. Design pages for a single goal and minimize
attention ratio.
2. Draw attention. Use design tips such as color, directional cues,
and white space to direct visitors’ attention.
3. Build structure for clarity. Use visual/information hierarchy
to facilitate rapid reading.
4. Stay consistent. Match your ads with your landing page
through design and message matches.
5. Build trust. Use testimonials and social proofing to create
trustworthy pages.
6. Consider congruence. Align all elements of a webpage toward
achieving its goal.
7. Think continuity. Always know what the next step is.
For example, applied to the optimization of a landing page, these
principles suggest the following questions:
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1. Does the page have one goal and one associated link/call to
action?
2. Am I using visuals to clearly indicate what users should do?
3. If I scan the page quickly, is it clear and obvious what I should
be doing?
4. Are my ad and page visually and rhetorically aligned?
5. Would I believe this page was trustworthy if it were a
competitor’s page?
6. Do all elements work together toward helping visitors achieve
the page’s goal?
7. Is it clear what users should be doing once they have
completed the goal on this page?
Now let’s examine each principle in depth.
Create Focus
Although we think of choice as a great thing, more options are
associated with a breadth of negative consequences. According to
leading psychologist Barry Schwartz, offering more choices makes
people less likely to pick an option and more likely to be dissatisfied
with the option they picked (TED Talk). Think of the last time you
tried to pick a Netflix movie, for example. How long did it take you
to choose a movie? How long would it have taken you if you only had
two options? On webpages, more choices also mean more options
offered to visitors and more chances that they will not do what they
should be doing on a certain page.
For this reason, the first principle asks you to create focus on your
webpages. On landing pages, we saw that the lower the attention
ratio (the ratio between goals and links on a page), the higher the
conversion rate. In 2013, Unbounce analyzed more than 20,000 lead
generation landing pages and found a negative relationship between
conversion rate and number of links (related to attention ratio,
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Figure 8.6). Clearly, the more links on a lead generation landing
page, the less likely a firm is to create a lead. Thus, to create focus
on landing pages, firms should focus on a 1:1 attention ratio. To
accomplish this, landing pages should aim to make visitors
accomplish one goal and one goal only.
Figure 8.6 Attention Ratio Works
How does focus translate on other pages? Often, focus is achieved
by drawing people’s attention to the goal they are the most likely to
be wanting to accomplish by positioning this goal above the fold on
a firm’s page. Concretely, this often translates on having only one
call to action above the fold, where the call to action is associated
with the goal that consumers should be achieving.
Let’s see a few examples of top websites: Optimizely, Mint and
Discord, and fashion retailers.
Optimizely offers visitors personalized options depending on
their roles. Engineers are asked to create a free account, product
managers are invited to watch a demo, marketers can try a visual
editor, data scientists are offered a white paper, and team leaders
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are directed to a guide to experimentation. In short, what
Optimizely has done is (1) identify the main goal that each persona
is likely to want to accomplish when visiting the firm’s website and
(2) put this goal front and center.
Discord and Mint employ the same tactic: They offer visitors one
option above the fold, that is, to use or sign up for their product.
Below the fold, the strategy of both websites is also the same. They
expand on the benefits of their products, what users should expect
when they sign up, provide social proofing, and conclude this sales
pitch with, again, an option to sign up or use the product. This is
a typical homepage design strategy for firms that sell one or a few
products, such as Paperlike, which we discussed in our exercise for
the last chapter.
Altitude-sports.com, an online retailer, employs a strategy typical
for this type of website: They offer one or more links that will move
the visitor to a section of the website where they can shop (see
also FARFETCH). There are different approaches to doing this. MR
PORTER invites consumers to visit different product categories that
align with the season, such as rain jackets for Fall, as well as a link
to new items. END., a clothing retailer, pursues a strategy typical of
the niche menswear market and invites consumers to register for
drops. An alternative for retailers that have content-heavy websites
is to drive visitors to content articles (SSENSE follows this strategy),
probably in a bid to become a privileged source of information for
high fashion and turn readers into customers.
Importantly, for retailers and other types of websites, the number
of links that visitors can click above the fold is limited. In all of these
examples, visitors are offered a maximum of three options above the
fold (not including the menu).
Draw Attention
Once a firm has identified what goal visitors are supposed to
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achieve, it can use visual elements to draw the attention of visitors
to elements of the website that should lead them to achieve this
goal. A few visual principles can help us here (images from
Unbounce).
Encapsulation
Practice encapsulation by bounding an element you want to draw
attention to in a box or a figure. A typical example of encapsulation
is the introduction sequence of old James Bond movies, where the
gun barrel draws our focus to James Bond (Figure 8.7). On a
webpage, this can be done, for example, by putting an element that
visitors should focus on in a box (see for example Figure 8.8).
Figure 8.7 Encapsulation Example
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Figure 8.8 Encapsulation
Contrast and Color
Similarly, contrast and color draw the attention of the visitors to the
contrasting and colorful design elements, like a button, a specific
sentence, a title, or a form (Figure 8.9). Many websites now exist
to help with color theory and finding the best contrasting colors
(Coolors, for example).
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Figure 8.9 Color Contrast
Directional cues
Directional cues serve two purposes. First, they help direct visitors’
attention to the elements that are pointed to. Second, they help
create a reading pattern for your users to follow (Figure 8.10). Keep
in mind that reading patterns should also be supported by the rest
of your website structure, i.e., how your images and text are
positioned (Figure 8.11), but that is beyond the scope of this course.
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Figure 8.10 Directional Cues
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Figure 8.11 Reading Flow
White space
Lastly, white space is also a design tool that is useful to draw the
attention of visitors to specific webpage elements, as shown in
Figure 8.12.
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Figure 8.12 White Space
Build Structure for Clarity
Building structure for clarity is all about making sure the message of
a page gets across clearly and quickly. To do so, it is useful to follow
basic principles of information and visual hierarchy, where the more
important the information, the better positioned, bigger, brighter,
and/or more colorful it is on the page (Figure 8.13).
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Figure 8.13 Information Hierarchy
Follow the principle of Sullivan (the “father of skyscrapers”): Form
follows function. Gone are the days when we designed webpages
for purely aesthetic reasons. Webpages now have clear goals for
visitors to achieve. Our objective as digital marketers is to make
sure consumers achieve these goals. Design should support the
achievement of goals rather than serve solely aesthetic purposes
(i.e., designing a pretty website is not something we should solely
strive for).
A useful, quick test to see if a page achieves a clear structure is
the five second test. According to fivesecondtest.com,
Five second tests are a method of user research that helps
you measure what information users take away and what
impression they get within the first five seconds of viewing
a design. They’re commonly used to test whether webpages
are effectively communicating their intended message.
Stay Consistent
By consistency, we mean how all the elements of a campaign work
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together. Ideally, these elements should match. Answering the
following questions can help us stay consistent:
• What was the search that the consumer did that led them to
see my ad or search result?
• Is my ad or search result well aligned to answer that search?
• Is this information repeated on the page that they arrive on?
• Do I create expectations with my page title and description, or
headline and description that I thoroughly answer on the
page?
These ideas are expressed in Figure 8.14.
Figure 8.14 Continuity
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Message and Design Matching
Ensuring consistency can be supported by practicing message and
design matching.
Message matching entails repeating the copy or phrasing of your
ad or search page result in the webpage where users land. This
ensures that the user knows that the page they’ve ended up on
will answer their query. We are all kind of lazy when it comes to
navigating and looking for information online. The easier we can
make the lives of consumers, the more likely they are to convert.
Take the example in Figure 8.15, where the first image doesn’t
practice message matching, where the message changes from “Get
a dozen roses for $29” for the search ad headline to “Great deals on
beautiful bouquets” for the landing page headline. In contrast, in the
example in Figure 8.16, the message the ad and landing page here
are clearly aligned; in fact, in this example they are identical.
Figure 8.15 Message Match Failure
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Figure 8.16 Message Match Success
A similar idea has to do with matching the design of an ad and the
page on which users land, or design matching. Here, we want to
repeat the visual elements of the ad on the page. This can be done
by, for example, repeating the visuals, colors, and structure of the
ad.
Figure 8.17 shows an example where the webpage doesn’t repeat
the elements of the ad (or, in this case, the copy!), while Figure 8.18
shows an example of the design of the ad and landing page being
clearly aligned. The first image doesn’t practice design match and
the second does.
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Figure 8.17 Design Match Failure
Figure 8.18 Design Match Success
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Build Trust
In an age where fake news is rampant, almost half of Amazon
reviews are unreliable (AdAge), and when anybody, anywhere can
create an online shop, instilling trust is a key component to making
sales. This is especially true for smaller brands that consumers
might not have heard of. Some website elements can help us build
trust include
• testimonials and reviews,
• client logos,
• numbers (such as number of clients, downloads, or sales),
• awards and accolades, and
• media mentions.
Most of these elements are considered social proofs. Originally,
social proof related to the idea that we copy others, especially in
situations of uncertainty (fun fact: organizations do the same thing,
a concept called mimetic isomorphism). Online, this translates into
proving to visitors that something is noteworthy or trustworthy
because it has been adopted by others.
Here are a couple of tricks provided by Unbounce when creating
testimonials:
• Use a headshot to indicate that the testimonials come from a
real person.
• Use that person’s full name, because using names like ‘Andre H.’
might raise doubts as to whether Andre is real.
• Highlight some key feature of your product or software in the
testimonial.
• Use multiple testimonials.
And, importantly, use some of the principles we just covered to have
social proofing stand out so that it is easier for visitors to quickly
grasp that other people already believe in the brand.
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Consider Congruence
Congruence is particularly relevant when designing landing pages,
but its driving principles can be used when designing pages
throughout a website. According to Unbounce, Congruence refers
to
The alignment of every landing page element with your
single campaign goal. Congruence is a high-level
conversion-centered design principle. If a piece of copy or
image on your page isn’t aligned with your campaign, it’s
going to cause friction and hurt your conversion rate.
When designing landing pages, Unbounce proposes scoring a page
based on the congruence of its individual elements with the goal
that consumers should achieve. We saw that landing pages typically
possess some core elements—a unique selling proposition, a hero
shot, a benefit statement, social proofing, and a link, which is
typically a call to action. These core elements are usually
implemented in page elements, such as headlines, subheadlines,
pictures, introduction paragraphs, bullet points, and links. An easy
way to evaluate the congruence of a webpage with its goal is to build
a scoring sheet for each of these elements. Take the landing page
shown in Figure 8.19 as an example.
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Figure 8.19
Congruence
Example
Now let’s see how each element of the landing page is performing.
The first question to ask is, What is the goal that consumers need
to achieve on that page? In this case, it is to download the white
paper. Hence, all elements of this page should be talking about
the white paper. The headline and subheadline should offer some
unique selling proposition associated with the white paper. The
hero shot should be white-paper related. The benefits, in this case
explained in a short paragraph and bullet points, should explain
what the consumer will get by downloading the white paper. The
call to action should be white-paper related. And so on. Figure 8.20
shows an analysis of the webpage (text version here). How are each
of these elements performing?
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Figure 8.20 Landing Page Evaluation / Text Version
Generally, pretty badly: The headline is not aligned with the white
paper, the intro and benefits are not white-paper related, the
testimonial relates to the product rather than the white
paper, and so on.
To optimize this page, the firm should transform each individual
element to better represent the goal of this page.
Think Continuity
Ensuring that a persona achieves its macro conversion (e.g., making
a sale) entails having well defined, planned paths through which it
will go. This idea can be broken down into two main components.
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First, every conversion is an opportunity for another conversion.
This is the principle of continuance, as defined by Unbounce:
A conversion centered design technique that uses the
momentum of one conversion to drive a secondary
conversion request, like a social share or a newsletter
signup. Confirmation pages and thank you emails are prime
channels for continuance.
Second, this emphasizes the importance of clearly defined
conversion paths. In order to know what to optimize in a sequence
of steps, such as those we covered at the start of this chapter, we
need to know in advance what series of steps consumers should
take to complete an overarching goal or macro conversion such as
making a purchase.
To do so, it is important to ask, What comes next? If I have
consumers sign up for a newsletter, it should be because I
know exactly what I will be doing next and what the consumer
who signed up will be asked to do. Optimizing conversion is about
creating these clearly defined paths so that we can analyze each
step, and the relationship between these steps, to boost our
conversion rate over time, both for specific steps and for the path
as a whole.
Remarketing and Retargeting
Remarketing (sometimes called list-based retargeting) and
retargeting (also called pixel or behavioral retargeting) are forms
of targeting that serve ads to specific consumers, albeit differently.
Online, you might find varying terms for these two activities. For
example, Google places both under their remarketing tools.
Both strategies help during lead nurturing to maximize
opportunities for conversion by serving ads to the right lead at the
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right stage of their journey. Remarketing and retargeting typically
target qualified leads (MQL or SQL).
Although we discuss these two practices at the conversion stage,
they can be used to convert for any goal (e.g., having consumers sign
up for a webinar or visit a blog post, as well as making a purchase). In
short, these approaches can be used to generate leads, qualify leads,
or convert to purchase.
The main difference between the two approaches is how
targeting is put into action. Remarketing uses emails collected
during lead generation activities to target leads, while retargeting
targets consumers based on previous behaviors. In both cases, ads
are displayed to consumers.
To practice remarketing, a firm first needs to create an email
list. Then, using targeting options on advertising platforms such as
Facebook Custom Audience or Google Customer Match, a firm can
create an ad campaign that will be seen only by consumers with
these email addresses.
While remarketing can be useful for many strategic purposes,
it is often used during retention strategies (i.e., when customers
have already been acquired). This is, however, not the only use of
remarketing. Remarketing can be used as part of a greater lead
nurturing campaign to engage leads at any stage of their journey.
For example, as long as a firm is properly keeping track of the stage
at which the lead is located, it can use the emails associated with
a large number of leads at a specific stage to personalize an ad
campaign.
An advantage of remarketing is that it is highly customizable to
specific customers, since you are targeting based on their email
addresses. Two downsides, though, are that mismatch of email
addresses happens (e.g., a lead might have given you an email
address they do not use for their Facebook or Google accounts) and
that it is not automatic (as compared to retargeting).
Instead of targeting ads based on an email list, retargeting uses
previous behaviors, such as clicking a link, putting a product in a
cart, or liking or commenting on a post. This is why, sometimes,
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after putting an item in a cart and abandoning your purchase, you
might see the same article in the ads shown to you in numerous
websites, over and over again (Figure 8.21).
Figure 8.21 Retargeting
Because retargeting is automatic, and because it works on any
predefined goal that has been accomplished by a visitor or a lead
(e.g., viewing a specific page, clicking a link, spending time on a site,
or commenting on a Facebook post), it is a great tool to master
to perfect lead nurturing campaigns. Although retargeting is often
used to push consumers to complete purchases, its uses are much
more wide-ranging. Retargeting is a great tool to engage leads to
perform the next action in a planned path. For example, a firm could
create a blog post or a piece of gated content to generate leads and
retarget anybody who gave their email address on either in order for
them to accomplish the next goal the path set up for that specific
persona.
Retargeting can also be used for lead generation, where a
company could target people interested in a specific product
category. For example, car companies do retargeting campaigns
by advertising product reviews of their cars and those of their
competitors on social media and by retargeting anybody who clicks
on the ads to read the reviews. Such campaigns help generate leads
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Figure 8.22
Retargeting
Example
by identifying consumers who seem to be looking to make a
purchase in a specific product category and then targeting them to
engage in lead generation activities.
Because it is highly customizable and automatic, the options
when using retargeting are almost limitless. A firm simply needs
to identify behavior that they deem interesting for scoring leads
or identifying their stage in the journey and use retargeting to
serve ads to the specific consumers who will have performed that
behavior. Retargeting campaigns work best when firms have a clear
idea of the path their persona should take to make a purchase,
because the campaigns can then be used to maximize the chances
that a persona at a specific step in that path will continue on and
perform the next step.
Lastly, it is important, though, to ensure you identify the right
actions! To finish this chapter on some laughs (or at least a smile):
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Exercises
Conversion Optimization
Based on this week’s chapter, optimize the landing page
located at bit.ly/34muGIR.
Explain your reasoning.
Retargeting and Remarketing
Assuming the following path, where could use your
retargeting ads?
1. User clicks on search ad problem
2. Arrives on clickthrough landing page
3. Clickthrough to blog, reading a few articles
4. Opts-in on scroll-down pop-up to newsletter
5. Receives onboarding email and access to blog
content
6. Receives second email and reads blog content
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7. Receives promotional offer
8. Clicks and converts
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Engage: Building Loyalty and
Co-Creating With Customers
PIERRE-YANN DOLBEC
Overview
This last chapter covers activities associated with the Engage stage:
how to evaluate and encourage customer engagement and loyalty
and foster co-creation by engaged customers. We discuss the
importance of customer engagement, customer lifetime value, ways
to measure engagement, consumption communities, and co-
creation activities.
Learning Objectives
Understand the concepts of engagement and loyalty, how
to calculate customer lifetime value and its importance in
marketing strategy, how to measure engagement, and how
to create value with consumers.
Engage
A widespread definition of engagement attributed to Forrester is
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Co-Creating With Customers
“creating deep connections with customers that drive purchase
decisions, interaction, and participation, over time.” Accordingly,
the two objectives of the Engage stage are to (1) foster loyalty and
(2) co-create value with customers.
Key performance indicators at this stage help measure a firm’s
success in attaining these objectives and the achievement by
consumers of associated goals. KPIs include the number of shares,
brand mentions, referrals, repurchases, and reviews as well as the
ratio of comments to posts, comments to likes, and reviews to sales.
The Engage stage is central for many reasons. Perhaps most
importantly, recent research shows that loyalty leaders “grow
revenues roughly 2.5 times as fast as their industry peers and deliver
two to five times the shareholder returns over the next 10 years”
(HBR). Working on increasing engagement is thus profitable. There
are a few factors that explain this.
Acquiring customers is much more costly than retaining and
selling to existing ones, and repeat consumers tend to spend more
than new ones (Forbes). Engaged consumers are also more willing
to interact with you, facilitating market research and leading to
groundbreaking insights. This is particularly true since you can
develop winning engagement strategies by identifying what makes
your loyal customers loyal. Last, engaged customers work on your
behalf, co-creating content that, as we’ve seen, is used by other
consumers throughout their journey.
To better understand the value of customers over their lifetime
with a company, we turn our attention to the concept of customer
lifetime value. We then look at two tools that can help us better
understand and measure customer loyalty. We conclude the
chapter by examining value co-creation.
Customer Lifetime Value
Customer lifetime value (CLV) represents a customer’s profitability
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over their entire relationship with the business. A straightforward
way of thinking about CLV is as follows:
CLV = average profit per sale (AP) × number of repeat transactions
in a period (RTP) × retention time (RT)
Please note, however, that this is a simplistic approach used to
illustrate this concept and not something we would recommend
using in a real-life setting.
Let’s use the example of a subscription business (i.e.,
period = 1 month). The business has a churn rate of 2%.
Churn rate represents the rate of customers leaving a
company per period (Wikipedia). In this case, the
company is losing 2% of its customer base every month.
Churn rate is useful to calculate the average retention
time of customers: By dividing 1 by the churn rate, we
obtain the retention time. In this case, customers stay
with the business for an average of 50 months (or 1
divided by 0.02).
The average profit per sale is $30.
The number of repeat transactions per period is one,
because customers are making one transaction per
month and the period we are looking at here is one
month.
The CLV is thus
CLV = AP × RTP × RT.
Since AP = $30, RTP = 50, and RT = 1,
CLV = 30 × 50 × 1 = $1,500.
Over their lifetime, each customer brings the business
$1,500.
220 | Engage: Building Loyalty and Co-Creating With Customers
CLV draws our attention to the importance of catering to the
lifetime of a customer with a business. The first sale to a customer
is not what typically brings revenue to a firm. Acquisition costs
for a customer are generally much higher than the revenue a firm
will make on its first sale. Thus, the objective of firms is to engage
customers to increase their lifetime value.
More concretely, CLV can play many roles for a firm. For example,
it helps firms price their customer acquisition strategies and
calculate their return on investment. This is important because it
helps evaluate whether acquisition strategies are profitable and
manage marketing efforts more generally.
Continuing with the example above, let’s assume the
firm is running a PPC search ad campaign to acquire
customers. In this simple example, let’s further assume
that people search for something, click on an ad which
leads them to a landing page, and convert to customers
from this landing page.
The total campaign cost is $20,000, including all
campaign elements (i.e., developing the landing page, all
costs related to ads, etc.).
The campaign gets 2,500 visitors on their landing
page.
The conversion rate is 5%, meaning that the firm
converted 5% of the 2,500 visitors to their landing page.
That works out to 125 customers (2500 × 5% = 125).
The cost per acquisition is thus $160, or $20,000/125.
Engage: Building Loyalty and Co-Creating With Customers | 221
At this stage, firms will be asking themselves, “Is this profitable?
What is my return on investment? Should I continue running this
acquisition strategy campaign?” CLV becomes useful at this stage.
As a reminder, this firm earns $1,500 per customer on average
throughout their lifetime with the company. Even if the company
only makes $30 on the first sale (meaning that they just “lost” $95,
since it cost them $160 to acquire the customer), two rules of thumb
help us see that this is a profitable customer acquisition strategy
over time.
The two rules of thumb to quickly gauge whether a customer
acquisition strategy is profitable are:
1. Am I recovering my cost per acquisition over the next 12
months of the life of the customer with my business? In this
case, the answer is yes: The company will make $360 per
customer (AP × 12 = $30 × 12 = $360).
2. Is my CLV more than three times my cost per acquisition (CAC)
(that is, CLV/CAC > 3)? In this case, the answer is also yes. CAC
is $160 while CLV is $1,500, and CLV/CAC = 9.375. In fact, the
firm should be happy to pay up to $500 per acquisition.
Among many other uses that CLV serves, it can also support
retention and customer support strategies central to the Engage
stage. By knowing the lifetime value of customers, firms can more
easily price retention and support strategies, i.e., how much to put
into trying to retain customers.
CLV varies per persona, where some personas will be worth more
over their lifetimes than others. This helps firms to decide where to
spend extra resources and which personas to pamper a bit more.
It can also help a firm see whether it should “fire” a persona, i.e.,
minimize the efforts dedicated to customers already acquired and
stop acquisition strategies for a specific persona if their CLV is
drastically lower than that of other personas.
Lastly, it is important to keep in mind that, apart from
subscription businesses such as the example above, customers
222 | Engage: Building Loyalty and Co-Creating With Customers
rarely bring in the same amount to a firm throughout their lifetime.
The relationship between a customer and a firm evolves over time,
and it is important to recognize that the journey of customers
expands beyond their first purchase with a firm. Not only does this
vary between personas, but it might also vary between markets. In
some markets, such as videogame consoles or eyewear, products
are seldom sold, with an extended period between purchases that
might encourage churn. In other markets, like groceries, consumers
are continuously making purchases over their lifetime. As is the case
in the market for diapers, other markets might see a significant
uptick at the start of the customer’s life with a company and then
declining sales over time as, in the case of diapers, the baby ages
into a child. Although the new approach is predictive analysis, some
earlier analytical tools, such as RFM analysis (discussed in the next
section), provide information regarding some of these aspects. They
also help us understand the basics of analyzing customer behavior
to make strategic decisions.
RFM Analysis
RFM, which stands for recency, frequency, and monetary value, is
a long-standing analytical method that helps analyze and segment
customer behavior based on the recency of their last purchase, the
frequency of their purchases, and their monetary value, i.e., how
much they spend with the firm.
By helping firms understand the purchasing behavior of acquired
customers, RFM analysis can help increase retention and purchase
per customer, identify which customers are not so great, better, and
best, whether we are experiencing issues with a specific persona in
terms of repurchase behavior, and so on.
To conduct an RFM analysis, a firm starts with its customer
database. The first step is to assign value to customers associated
with their recency, frequency, and monetary value. Since RFM
Engage: Building Loyalty and Co-Creating With Customers | 223
analyses can be done by operationalizing these variables differently,
let’s assume here that recency refers to the recency of the last
purchase in days, frequency to the frequency of purchases over
three months (or a quarter), and monetary value to the total amount
spent during this period.
Firms will often start by indicating the exact number associated
with each variable and move to create categories for each. For
example:
Recency Frequency Monetary
value
1 Very
recent
Very
frequent
High
value
2 Recent Frequent Medium
value
3 Not
recent
Infrequent Low value
They will perform their analysis with these categories.
We can then create segments by combining these together. The
following table shows examples of such segments, where “x” stands
for any number (i.e., its value is not important for defining that
segment).
Segment Recency Frequency Monetary
value
Best
customers
1 1 1
Loyal
customers
x 1 x
Big
spenders
x x 1
Lost or
almost
lost
customers
3 1 1
Thrifters 3 3 1
224 | Engage: Building Loyalty and Co-Creating With Customers
Then, each customer will be coded based on the categories created
above, as shown in the following table.
Customer Recency Frequency Monetary
value
Jack 3 3 1
Jill 1 1 1
Bill 3 1 2
Sean 3 1 3
Raymond 2 2 2
Tom 1 1 1
Tina 3 3 1
Mariah 2 3 2
Sanjit 1 3 3
Todd 1 2 3
Becky 1 1 1
Seth 2 3 2
Caroline 3 2 1
This allows firms to categorize customers into the categories just
created (e.g., best customers, loyal customers, etc.). These
categories of customers can help decide which segments to
concentrate on and what kind of strategy to use to engage
customers. Examples could include performing retention
campaigns with big spenders, recuperating almost lost customers,
or moving loyal customers to increase their monetary value over
time. A firm could also target its best customer segment: send
an appreciation letter, analyze their personal preferences for more
personalized offers, or generally develop strategies to keep this
segment highly satisfied.
Although simple, RFM analysis is a useful tool to foster
engagement. A more thorough analysis could combine RFM with
personas and evaluate whether personas also share commonalities
Engage: Building Loyalty and Co-Creating With Customers | 225
or differences in their purchasing behaviors, leading to the creation
of even more personalized campaigns.
Net Promoter Score
Another approach to measuring customer satisfaction and
engagement that is widely used is the net promoter score (NPS).
Described by the Harvard Business Review as “the one number you
need to grow,” NPS is associated with a single, one question survey
based on customer engagement that has shown over time to be a
great predictor of firm success.
To calculate the NPS, a firm first asks the following question
to its customers: “How likely is it that you would recommend our
company/product/service to a friend or colleague?” (Note: NPS has
also been used in the past with other types of respondents, such as
employees or resellers, depending on which population a company
wants to measure). Respondents are asked to answer using a 0 to
10 scale, with 10 being “extremely likely” and 0 being “not at all
likely.” The NPS is then calculated by subtracting the percentage
of detractors from the percentage of promoters. The result ranges
from −100% (all detractors) to 100% (all promoters) (Figure 9.1).
Figure 9.1 Net Promoter Score
Promoters are those who answer 9 and 10. They are satisfied, loyal
226 | Engage: Building Loyalty and Co-Creating With Customers
customers that will definitely recommend a brand to others. They
are considered to exhibit value-creating behaviors, such as repeat
buying, higher average basket, and longer retention time. They
account for most referrals for a brand. Firms are advised to learn
from promoters: What makes them so satisfied and engaged? Do
they belong to a specific persona? How were they acquired?
Promoters can be used to identify a winning formula that can
potentially be replicated with other customers.
Passives are those who answer 7 and 8. They are satisfied
customers who mostly neutral about their experience with a brand.
Firms are advised to work toward converting passives to promoters.
Detractors are those who answer 6 or less. They are generally
unhappy customers that will not recommend a brand to others.
They might engage in value destructive behaviors, such as negative
word of mouth. They have a high churn rate. Firms are advised to
recover detractors. They can also ask themselves questions similar
to those for promoters: What makes them unsatisfied with the
brand? Do they belong to a specific persona? How were they
acquired? For example, if a firm learned that specific a persona
was responsible for most detractors, that should affect its future
strategy in terms of where to dedicate customer acquisition efforts.
Engaging Customers in Co-Creation
Activities
Co-creation refers to the joint creation of value by a company and
its customers (Prahalad and Ramaswany 2004). Nowadays, most
marketing activities can be co-created with consumers, whether
those activities be market research, product innovation, advertising
campaigns, or customer support.
We can categorize consumers into two broad categories of co-
creators. The first category is composed of user innovators or lead
Engage: Building Loyalty and Co-Creating With Customers | 227
users, highly involved and highly competent consumers who
participate in co-creation activities to answer their own needs or
desires. This is the kind of co-creator that MIT professor Eric Von
Hippel has been studying since the mid-1980s. Lead users have been
found to co-create value with firms in diverse markets, such as
3M and surgeons in the medical industry, amateur and professional
athletes in sports as varied as windsurfing, rollerblading,
snowboarding, and rodeo kayaking (e.g., Shah 2003), or computer
geeks and open source software in IT (Von Hippel 2005).
The second category of co-creators is everyday consumers.
These co-creators are people who are not particularly involved in
a product category or particularly competent. They will probably
not benefit from their co-creation activities. They participate in co-
creation activities because it serves their needs (e.g., taking on the
role of a clerk when using an ATM or self-checkout), because it is
part of their activities with a company (e.g., co-creating content
when we post social media content), or because it is fun (e.g.,
participating in a contest where we can choose the name of a
product or redesign an ad).
A useful tool for thinking about how consumers can participate
in co-creation activities is the value chain. The value chain is a tool
that helps conceptualize where value is created in firm activities.
For example, the marketing function can be thought of as the set of
activities shown in Figure 9.2 (text version here), through which a
firm creates value for itself and its customers.
Figure 9.2 Value Chain / Text Description
228 | Engage: Building Loyalty and Co-Creating With Customers
Each of these activities can create value. For example, market
research creates value by leading to a better understanding of
consumers and their needs. Innovation helps create products that
address those needs. Production creates value by turning a concept
into reality. Marketing creates value by attracting sales and
customers, and sales create value by making these sales happen
and distributing products to consumers. Customer support creates
value by maximizing retention and satisfaction.
The value chain helps us understand how to co-create value with
consumers by emphasizing where they can create value. Let’s see
how value can be co-created during each of these activities.
For market research, one of the most obvious ways that
consumers co-create value is by sharing their opinions with firms.
For some companies, this mechanism has been formalized outside
of ad hoc research efforts. For example, DeWalt set up an “Insight
Community,” which they use to send several surveys per week to
interact with consumers. By using this community rather than
traditional market research firms, they estimate they saved about
$5 million in market research costs in 2016 alone. Another example
of value co-creation in market research is crowdsourced market
research firms such as Trendwatching. Trendwatching publishes
regular reports on emerging trends in different markets. To create
these reports, they rely on an international community of trend
watchers that are part of its TrendWatching Global Insight Network
(tw:in) who are tasked with spotting emerging trends and sharing
them with the company.
For design and innovation, there are many examples of companies
who have tasked consumers with coming up with innovative ideas.
Examples include initiatives where everyday consumers discuss
new product ideas with firms, such as Lego Ideas and BMW Co-
Creation Lab. Other initiatives pitch lead users in competition
against one another, such as the Heineken Open Design and the
Anheuser-Busch “King of Beers.”
At the production stage, examples vary. In our everyday lives, we
all contribute to co-producing social media content, which we then
Engage: Building Loyalty and Co-Creating With Customers | 229
consume from one another. Social media is mostly a co-created
activity. Although we all follow celebrities with audiences of varying
sizes, content producers are often other consumers like you and
me. The business model of social media firms aims to provide a
platform for co-creation (and monetize this platform with ads), but
users are those who produce what is consumed. For material
products, there is some hope that the rise of 3D printing will lead to
consumers being able to co-produce products at home. Even today,
designs can be downloaded online, and consumers are responsible
for manufacturing the product at home. This echoes other “maker”
activities, such as sewing or knitting, where making something is
the consumption activity (e.g., making a shirt from a pattern).
Product customization, such as NikeID, is also an example of the
co-production of products since consumers are tasked with making
design decisions.
For marketing, any marketing campaign based on word of mouth,
such as viral marketing, is a co-created marketing activity. In such
campaigns, consumers become co-creators of the campaign by
participating in its diffusion. Shareable content, such as Spotify
yearly “Wrapped” or more traditional entertaining advertisements
such as Dietz & Watson Dietz Nuts recruit consumers who become
channels through which ads are diffused. In other campaigns, such
as hashtag campaigns, consumers’ role as co-creator is heightened
as they also co-produce content.
Similarly, sales can co-created by consumers when they share
product links or promo codes or when they contribute to
companies’ sales pitches by writing testimonials or positive reviews.
Lastly, consumers regularly co-create customer support. Forums
where consumers answer each other questions, such as Apple
Support Communities or Tesla Forums, co-create customer
support. Consumers similarly answer one another’s questions in
different ways, such as in communities not directly owned by
brands. They also create content on blogs and social media channels
such as YouTube to explain how they address some issues they
might have faced.
230 | Engage: Building Loyalty and Co-Creating With Customers
Exercises
You are Spikeball (see the following video):
A video element has been excluded from this
version of the text. You can watch it online
here: https://opentextbooks.concordia.ca/
digitalmarketing/?p=406
We want to create co-creation activities along the value
chain.
Lead Users
1. Who could be lead users?
2. Find two co-creation activities that lead users can
participate in.
Engage: Building Loyalty and Co-Creating With Customers | 231
The Remaining Four Co-creation
Activities
1. Find a way to identify everyday customers who are
most likely to participate with you in co-creation
activities.
2. Find activities to integrate those everyday
consumers.
Note: These six activities (two for lead users and four for
everyday consumers) should target the six marketing
activities of the value chain independently, i.e., one activity
for market research, one for design and innovation, and so
on.
232 | Engage: Building Loyalty and Co-Creating With Customers
About the Author
PIERRE-YANN DOLBEC
Pierre-Yann Dolbec is an assistant professor of marketing and
Concordia University Research Chair in Complexity and Markets
at the John Molson School of Business, Concordia University. His
research tackles big questions to understand the complexity of
markets and how people and organizations manage complexity. It
has been published in the Journal of Retailing, the Journal of
Consumer Research, the Journal of Marketing Research, and
Marketing Theory, where it has received distinctions such as most
cited and most downloaded articles. Recent media coverage
includes the National Post, Channel News Asia, CTV News, Global
News, CBC, Journal de Montreal, Les Affaires, and Le Devoir.
He has received more than $700,000 in funding from varied
funding sources, such as the Social Science and Humanities
Research Council and the Fonds Société et Culture, is an editorial
review board member of the Journal of Consumer Research and
an instructor at the John Molson School of Business, where he is
responsible for the digital marketing undergraduate course.
About the Author | 233
Versioning History
PIERRE-YANN DOLBEC
This page provides a record of changes made to this open textbook
since its initial publication. If the change is minor, the version
number increases by 0.1. If the change involves substantial updates,
the version number increases to the next full number.
Version Date Detail
1.0 Fall
2020 Pilot version released
2.0 Sep 2021
• Overall book structure is reorganized (e.g.
Parts, Chapters, Headings)
• List of Figures is added
• Additional resources and exercises are added
234 | Versioning History
Appendix: Text Descriptions
of Figures
Figure 2.2 Types of Segmentation?
By Behavior
• benefits sought from the product
• how often the product is used (usage rate)
• usage situation (daily use, holiday use, etc.)
• buyer’s status and loyalty to product (non-user, potential user,
first-time user, regular user)
By Demographics
• age/generation
• income
• gender
• family life cycle
• ethnicity
• family size
• occupation
• education
• nationality
• religion
• social class
Appendix: Text Descriptions of
Figures | 235
By Geography
• region (continent, country, state, neighborhood)
• size of city or town
• population density
• climate
By Psychographics
• activities
• interests
• opinions
• values
• attitudes
• lifestyles
Figure 2.3 RV Betty?
Betty lives in the suburb of a large Canadian city. She and her
husband have both recently retired. One of their life dreams is
to travel across North America during their retirement. While she
doesn’t consider herself wealthy, she and her husband have saved
enough during their lifetime to make their dream a reality and enjoy
their retirement.
Betty is worried about how to travel in an RV: how to find utility
hookups, where to stay when you have an RV, what happens if
you blow a tire, how to plan her routes… She wants an RV with
certain characteristics. Since she is retiring (and older), it has to be
comfortable. She plans to spend most of her time in it! She also has
a great network of friends, and she would like her friends to spend
236 | Appendix: Text Descriptions of Figures
time with her in the RV, so she is looking at additional sleeping space
and plenty of room. Maybe she’d like to host dinner time! All in all,
she’d like an RV that makes her experience easy when traveling.
Figure 4.2 KPIs Example?
The objective is product awareness, which leads to the goals: to
have users subscribe to updates and to have users engage with
product types and features. Each of these goals is associated with
two KPIs. For the goal of having users subscribe to updates, the KPIs
are having contact forms be submitted and having email subscribe
forms be submitted. For the user engagement goal, the KPIs are
virtual mirror use and product content popularity.
Figure 4.3 AARRR?
Acquisition: How do your customers find you?
Activation: How quickly can you get to your customer’s “Aha
moment”?
Retention: How many of your customers are you retaining, and
why are you losing the others?
Referral: How can you turn your customers into advocates?
Revenue: How can you increase revenue?
Figure 4.4 RACE Goals?
1. Reach: Create awareness; drive visits; create positive
Appendix: Text Descriptions of Figures | 237
interactions.
2. Act: Generate leads.
3. Convert: Convert lead to paying customer; create loyalty.
4. Engage: Create advocates.
Figure 4.8 Conversion Path – 2nd Example?
Path 1
1. Reach
◦ sponsored Instagram ad
◦ outbound 1
2. Act
◦ giveaway on Instagram
◦ inbound 1
3. Convert
◦ retargeting email campaign
◦ outbound 2
4. Engage
◦ create entertaining content
◦ inbound 2
238 | Appendix: Text Descriptions of Figures
Path 2
1. Reach
◦ SEO keywords
◦ inbound 3
2. Act
◦ blog post with opt-in
◦ inbound 4
3. Convert
◦ retargeted Facebook ad
◦ outbound 3
4. Engage
◦ create informative content
◦ inbound 5
Figure 4.9 RACE?
1. Plan: Define your goals and strategy.
2. Reach: Grow your audience using paid, owned and earned
media.
3. Act: Prompt interactions, subscribers, and leads.
4. Convert: Achieve sales online or offline.
5. Engage: Encourage repeat business.
Re-automate: Continue to cycle through the stages.
Appendix: Text Descriptions of Figures | 239
Figure 5.18 Longtail Keywords and
Conversion Rate?
A graph showing search volume vs. conversion rate. In the upper
left, the search “tomato plant,” with an average of 22,000 monthly
searches, has a very high search volume and a very low conversion
rate. “When to plant tomatoes,” with 3,600 monthly searches on
average, falls more toward the middle of the graph. The long tail,
where conversion rate is high and search volume is low, is formed
by the search “why are my tomato plants turning yellow,” which has
only 390 average monthly searches.
Figure 5.19 Facebook Ad Objectives?
Awareness Consideration Conversion
Brand awareness Traffic Conversions
Reach Engagement Catalog sales
App installs
Video views
Lead generation
Messages
240 | Appendix: Text Descriptions of Figures
Figure 6.13 Content Calendar?
week network time content
type topic copy link
week
1 week 1: Monday, date xx/xx/xx
Facebook 07:00 New blog
post
silent
video
Are you optimizing your
video for viewing without
sound? You should be.
http://ow.ly
10:00 Curated
content
new
features
Infinite snaps, loops, and
a magic eraser? Woah http://ow.ly
12:00 Video music
resources
Don’t risk your video
being removed or your
account killed. Here’s the
full list of free resources:
http://ow.ly.tNx530bKlqN
(insert vide
15:00 Promotion product
launch
Liftmetrix – Hotsuite
impact – New name and
offerings to help you
measure and maximize
ROI: http://ow.ly/
zkjS530bKlqN
http://ow.ly
tNx530bKlq
17:00 Live news news
update
A lot of social media
updates happened this
month. Let us know your
reaction to these ones.
(include CT
Figure 7.10 Email Automation?
Week 1: Send email. Possible actions and their consequences:
• An Unsub triggers no further action.
• A Non-Open may optionally trigger resending the email.
• Open, Click, Subscribe moves on to Email 4 (loyalty).
• Open, Click or Abandoned Subscribe will move on to Email 2.
Appendix: Text Descriptions of Figures | 241
Week 2: Email 2 (extra incentive)
• An Unsub triggers no further action.
• Open, Click, Subscribe moves on to Email 4 (loyalty).
• Open, Click or Abandoned Subscribe will move on to Email 3
(extra incentive offer ending) and also receive Email 5 (survey).
• Non Open may trigger telesales or a DM
Week 3: Email 3 (extra incentive offer ending)
• Open, Click, Subscribe moves on to Email 4 (loyalty).
Figure 8.2 Funnel?
Goals:
• new customer revenue: $5M
• average sales price: $75,000
• closed won contracts: 67
Inquiries
and Web
Visits
Leads MQLs SQLs Opportunities Closed
Won
Target 9550 9550 1910 382 191 67
Conversion
Rate 10% 20% 20% 50% 35%
242 | Appendix: Text Descriptions of Figures
Figure 8.20 Landing Page Evaluation?
Page Element Element Content Score
Headline “Ocean of data instantly becomes
security intelligence” 0
Subhead Whitepaper download (“The next
generation firewall is here”) 2
Hero shoot Photo of a man holding some paper
which is partially obscured 1
Intro
“WatchGuard XTM is the Next
Generation Firewall of choice for
businesses and enterprises alike,
providing best-in-class network security
at affordable prices”
0
Bullets
“Blazing fast throughput”
“Best-in-class security solutions”
“Advanced networking features”
0
Form header “Download your whitepaper! Complete
the required fields” 1
Form fields Country, province/state, phone number 0
Testimonial “I began using WatchGuard products
more than eight years ago…” 0
Learn more “Learn more about WatchGuard
Dimension” 0
Why
“Best-in-class security”
“Easy-to-manage solutions”
“Take advantage of data for security”
0
Privacy statement “We will never sell your email to any 3rd
party or send you nasty spam.” 0
Call to action Get my offer 0
Total 4
Appendix: Text Descriptions of Figures | 243
Figure 9.2 Value Chain?
Activity Co-created value
Market search Online communities
Design and innovation Lead user innovation
Production User-generated content and
funding
Marketing Seeding on blogs
Sales eWOM
Customer support User tech support
244 | Appendix: Text Descriptions of Figures
Table for Exercises in Chapters 4?, 5?, and 6?
Stage of Journey
Awareness Active
Evaluation Purchase Loyalty
Concrete
actions
• check local
influencers
• search on
Google for
information
about
working
out
• compare
atmosphere
and
interiors of
different
gyms based
on pictures
• check
online
reviews
• get more
information
about
programs
• check for
promotions
• go online
and
complete
transaction
• share
referral
code with
friends
• post
pictures
from
workouts
online
Touchpoints
• Instagram
• Google
search
• Instagram
• Google
• Yelp
• direct visits
• coupon
websites
• direct visits
• Facebook
• Instagram
Opportunities
Appendix: Text Descriptions of Figures | 245
Digital Marketing Strategy
Digital Marketing Strategy
Contents
Introduction
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Acknowledgments
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
List of Figures
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Introduction to Digital Marketing
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Understanding the Digital Consumer
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Planning for a Digital Marketing Campaign
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Introduction to Digital Strategy
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Reach: Generating Awareness and Attracting Visitors
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Act: Creating Content
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Act: Lead Generation and Lead Nurturing
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Convert: Conversion Optimization
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Engage: Building Loyalty and Co-Creating With Customers
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
About the Author
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Versioning History
Pierre-Yann Dolbec
Appendix: Text Descriptions of Figures
