Category: Entrepreneurs

It’s easier – and better – for someone else to tell your story
Since transitioning from a simple content aggregation publication into a content marketing service, I’ve had dozens of meetings with entrepreneurs and marketers about “telling their story.” A consistent pattern has emerged out of those meetings that has become predictable in all my initial consultations with potential clients:

It’s easier for me to tell your story than it is for you to tell your story.

Here’s why, and, while these reasons don’t apply to absolutely everyone, they are very consistent.
1. You’re too close to your product. You know it so well that you lose sight of what your audience doesn’t know. I liken this scenario to when I tried to teach my mom how to use Microsoft Excel a few years back. I’m going on and on about formulas and dragging cells and charts and stuff, and she stops me and asks, “what’s a ‘cell’?”
2. You don’t like to talk about yourself. Most people, despite the requirement of a solid amount of confidence and ego to start, run, and own a business, don’t really like to write or talk about themselves. However, in order to position you or the company you run as an industry authority, thought leader, or expert, you have to talk about you. It’s much easier for me to compliment you than for you to humble-brag about you. Sounds better, too.
3. A third party lends credibility. At the TAG Business Launch Competition finals in May, Gimme Vending reached the final round. Instead of taking the entire 10 minutes to present themselves, they put a customer on stage to talk about them. It was so much more powerful to hear someone outside the company talking about the company than to hear the longer version of their 3-minute pitch. The same thing applies to your marketing content.
4. From your audience’s point of view. This last point is actually the most important, and is related to point #1 above. The words we use inside our own teams are different than the words we use when speaking to our customers and prospects. We just use different language, and we see things from our side of the table, not theirs. Bringing in a 3rd party to voice your message enables that third party to see – and speak or write – from an outsider’s point of view, namely, your prospect’s point of view.
Again, these 4 reasons for third party content creation are not hard and fast, nor do they apply to absolutely everyone. However, the more potential clients I meet, the more I see this pattern. It helps to hear and tell your story from a fresh, different perspective.
July 10, 2015
How and Why to Segment Your Website Audience

This post originally appeared on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog.

When you go shopping for new clothes, online or in a brick and mortar store, which section do you hit first, the men’s or the women’s clothing? Good. OK, when you need a new power cord for your computer or smartphone, do you go to the Windows section or the Mac section? Finally, when you are in Europe at a great local restaurant, do you ask for the menu in English or in the local language?

Your specific answers to these questions are not the point. The point is that my answers may be the same or different from your answers. With that understanding, if you owned any one of the store types mentioned above – clothing, computer, food – you might ask me these types of questions when I walk in the door, or you might provide signage that shows me the way without having to be asked.

Do you do the same for your website visitors? I can almost hear the responses through the interwebz: “Wait…what?” Exactly. Whether we realize it or not, we segment our audiences into what we call “tribes” of people who have some characteristic in common. We do this segmenting because different people have different needs when they visit your

We do this segmenting because different people have different needs when they visit your website, and each visitor takes a different journey to get there. The difference to a digital marketer is that we actively segment and track our tribes because they exhibit different behavior, and we can market to them specifically, and more effectively.

Let’s use one of the examples above to illustrate the point further. Say you need a new charging cord for your phone. You know the store near your home carries them, so you go there. You ask where the charging cords are, and the person behind the counter points you to the back. There, you find all the cords in a big bin, all mixed up together, with nothing separating iOS from Android from Windows. Don’t you wish the store you visited had segmented their audiences by device type?

Google Analytics offers many different ways to segment your website visitors, mainly by demographics and acquisition. Demographics shows you who the visitor is, and acquisition is where the visitor came from. You can get very granular in segmenting your audiences, considering that you can drill down even deeper within these lists. For example, you can segment by what kind of mobile device and browser the visitors use.

Google Analytics is a very powerful tool and fairly easy to learn, plus it’s completely free; and because it’s Google, it’s also very well supported. Here is one of hundreds of videos available on the Google Analytics YouTube Channel that explains what segmenting is and how you do it.

Segmenting your audience helps you learn about your audience, but it also helps you customize the user experience for them, so it’s a win-win for digital marketers.

July 9, 2015
Digital marketing summed up in six simple points
Last Thursday, I led a 2-hour version of the six hour version of the 10-week Digital Marketing class at General Assembly. I really enjoy teaching these short, impactful sessions that serve as great introductions or primers for folks who want to learn to talk the talk in Digital Marketing or determine if they’d like to pursue a career in DGM. Last week’s class was no exception to the rule that these classes are always fun.

I’ll be teaching the DGM Bootcamp again at the end of July. That’s the six hour version that dives a little deeper and gets the attendees actually digging into their own digital marketing situations during class.

Here’s the summary of the class, which also happens to be the very high level summary of the 6-hour and 10-week version, if you just want to know what’s covered, again, at a very high level.
1. Your brand is everything you do. We start out every class asking “what is a brand?” and we always get lots of different answers. Logo, identity, perception, etc. Your brand is everything you do, from how you answer the phone to whether or not your personal email signature is branded. Everything you do includes every word on every web page, blog, and social post; every video, podcast, image, photo, and infographic. If you put it on the interwebz, then you just made it part of your brand. Digital marketing starts with your brand, and you must be intentional about defining and maintaining your brand.
2. Measure everything, but focus on a few KPIs. The biggest difference between what we call ‘digital marketing’ today and ‘marketing’ from yesteryear is that we have the resulting data immediately, so we can constantly run experiments and learn very quickly and inexpensively…IF we are setup to measure everything. It’s easy if you start off that way, but much more difficult if you are already marketing without the proper tracking and analytics. But it’s never too late to start. Build it into the DNA of your marketing organization that you will be setup to measure absolutely everything, and then focus on a handful of KPIs, which will change as you grow and succeed.
3. Do the math of the marketing funnel for every campaign. Every campaign is completely different, even if you’re marketing the exact same thing on Twitter vs. Facebook. Those users are different and they take a different journey to your web property, so treat each one as its own campaign. Then measure you reach, click through rates, conversion rates, orders, average orders, units per order, revenue per lead, and cost per lead for every campaign. Doing so gives you the ability to determine exactly which campaigns worked and which did not, and then be able to predict the outcome of every future campaign once you have a baseline of data.
4. Content is king, and you already have tons of it. Just like your brand is everything you do, every post, blog, video, podcast, image, and photo is your content. You may not think you have content, but you do. Everyone has a story, and every entrepreneur and startup has a very interesting story, as well as a reason for existing. You know something of value to someone. That’s your content. In addition, every event, product, team member, victory, feature, update, news, and market shift is your content. What happened yesterday and what are you planning for tomorrow? All of that is your content. Content is king in digital marketing, because when your audience consumes your content, they trust you just a little bit more, and are that much more likely to trust you when it comes time to make the purchase. Tell your story!
5. Digital ads are cheap, powerful, and hyper-targeted. Google Adwords, Facebook Ads, and Twitter Ads are very simple to purchase, very inexpensive to try, and so very targeted to use that any startup or small business can set aside a few dollars a week or month and make an impact on their business immediately. Every social channel will eventually offer ads, but for now, these are the big three, and each offers very specific methods for attracting users, promoting posts, downloading software, or generating leads. The best way to approach these very effective tools is to start small, experiment, learn, and then step on the accelerator with what works best for your goals.
6. Plan everything, so you have the freedom to win. I enjoy telling the #winning stories like the Oreo SuperBowl tweet and the Arby’s Grammys tweet, but I also have to throw in the IAC Justine Sacco nightmare, just to make sure people really understand the power of digital media, for better or for worse. The wins come when the organization has a plan, heavily relies on a content marketing calendar to plan nearly every post, and has a solid branding that its team understands and can execute. Oreo and Arby’s did well. IAC, not so much. It all starts with the brand, which leads to culture, which influences content. Then it comes full circle. The marketing calendar is your best friend, or your worst enemy, because nothing hurts like a date and nothing helps like a plan.
I’m looking forward to another 6 hour class in a few Saturdays, and also to the official 10-week class that starts on Tuesday night, August 18th.
July 7, 2015
Digital Marketing 101: Glossary of Digital Marketing Terms

This post originally published on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog.

1. Analytics – information resulting from the systematic analysis of data or statistics. In digital marketing, analytics is the information resulting from systematic analysis of data gathered from marketing activity such as email marketing, landing page A/B testing, or Google Adwords purchases.

2. Average order amount – the amount of all orders divided by the total number of orders; used in digital marketing to help calculate the necessary reach, along with CTR and conversion rate.

3. Banner ads – also known as “display ads”, these advertising units are images that advertisers place on known publishers’ websites in order to attract or re-attract their target audience.

4. Baseline – an established level of normalcy; in digital marketing, for example, the normal or regular number of unique visitors per day to a website.

5. Behavioral email – an email generated when a known user performs a certain action – such as completing a video – on a website, and the owner of the website then contacts the known user regarding that video as a follow up to the user’s behavior.

6. Blogging – from the term “web log”, in which a user actively updates a visible section of a website in order to inform or attract users and customer on a regular basis.

7. Brand – a business’s brand is the sum total of all its users’ and customers’ opinion of that business; a business can choose to intentionally shape its brand or allow the market forces to shape its brand.

8. Business model – an entity’s business model defines how the business creates its product or service, delivers the product or service to the intended audience, and then collects payment for the service or product from the intended audience.

9. Channels – a delivery mechanism; in digital marketing, a business’s message is delivered via one or more marketing channel such as email, social media, blogging, advertisements, etc.

10. Click Through Rate (CTR) – the percentage of the targeted audience that is exposed to the marketer’s message that click on the link provided in the message and land on the marketer’s web property.

11. Consistency – the importance of continuing with a course of action, such as blogging, in a regular frequency in order to repeatedly expose the intended audience to the marketer’s message.

12. Conversion rate – the percentage of unique visitors to a website that are “converted” into customers, users, or leads.

13. Delivery – when the good or service provided by a business is provided to and accepted by the user or customer; in digital marketing, also the receipt of a message from the marketer to a group or individual in the target audience.

14. Digital marketing calendar – a tool that provides for time-based structure and discipline for the digital marketer in planning, assigning, creating, and delivering content to the marketer’s target audience.

15. Digital marketing funnel – a visualization of the calculations that starts with the total universe of targeted audiences, then measures those who click on a link from marketing content, the click through rate (CTR), the conversion rate, total conversions, order amount, and revenue.

16. Distribution – the means by which a product or service is delivered to its end user or customer

17. Earned content – content not created by the marketer, but rather created and shared by fans of the marketer’s message to the fan’s social and other digital connections.

18. Engagement – in digital marketing, the term for user interaction with a particular piece of shared content: Likes, shares, comments on Facebook; RTs, replies, favorites on Twitter, and link clicks on all social media.

19. Facebook Ads – the program operated by Facebook that enables paying customers to use hyper-targeting via Facebook profile tags and traits to reach a certain specific audience via advertisements placed in the users’ timeline.

20. Frequency – in digital marketing, how often a task is performed; for example, the frequency of a blog post or twitter update.

21. Google Adwords – the program operated by Google that enables paying customers to use hyper-targeting via Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) to reach a certain specific audience via advertisements placed at the top and right sides of the search results.

22. Google Keyword Planning Tool – a free tool provided by Google within the Google Adwords interface that helps users find and plan which keywords to target with their advertising campaigns

23. KPIs – Key Performance Indicators

24. Lifetime customer value – the total sum of all revenue estimated over the lifetime of a repeat customer; often used as a metric in evaluating the pricing and value of a SaaS business.

25. OODA loop – Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. A teaching tool originating from military training that promotes the use of a constant cycle of learning; in digital marketing, used to instill the use of hypothesizing, experimentation, data capture and measurement, and then re-stating a new revised hypothesis based on information gathered in previous experiments.

26. Owned content – content created or curated by the marketer in order to promote the marketer’s message to the target audience; owned content typically consists of blog posts and social media posts and images, but should also be applied to any message that proceeds out of the marketer’s company and into the target audience, such as email signatures.

27. Page views – the number of times a web page or set of web pages are viewed during a given time period.

28. Pages per visit – the average number of pages viewed by a single visitor during a given time period.

29. Paid content – content pushed out by the marketer via any paid means such as Facebook ads, Google Adwords, Twitter Ads, or banner (display) ads.

30. Persona – the ideal compilation of all the traits of the “perfect” user or customer for a marketer’s product or service.

31. Retargeting – the technology, driven by web browser cookies, that enables a marketer to continually put a digital message in front of a user who has visited that marketer’s web property.

32. Sales cycle – the time required for a sales conversion to be completed after the prospect initially becomes aware of the marketer’s brand or product.

33. Seasonality – a business cycle driven by calendar-based events during the year.

34. SEO – Search Engine Optimization – the practice of preparing a web property to be quickly, easily, and properly indexed by a search engine, usually Google.

35. SERP – Search Engine Results Page

36. Time on site – the average time that a website visitor remains active on a particular website.

37. Total reach – the total exposure (measured in web users or “eyeballs”) of an advertisement or piece of content.

38. Transactional email – automated email driven by a certain type of transaction on a web property; for example, an order or email subscription.

39. Twitter Ads – the program operated by Twitter that enables paying customers to use hyper-targeting via Twitter users’ profile data to reach a certain specific audience via advertisements placed in the users’ timeline.

40. Web copy – words that appear on a website that are aimed at the marketer’s target audience and represent the marketer’s brand.

Explore Digital Marketing At GA

July 5, 2015
Digital Marketing 101: Creating Your Digital Marketing Calendar
This post originally published on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog.

This post is part of our Digital Marketing 101 series. Sign up to get the full series!

Everything we’ve discussed so far in this Digital Marketing 101 series has focused on what to do and a bit about how to do it. But in marketing, timing is everything, and the two parts of timing in marketing are frequency and consistency. So here we’re going to move past what and how and look into when. The most valuable tool in your digital marketing arsenal will help you know when to do something, help you maintain your frequency, and, more importantly, your consistency. That tool is your digital marketing calendar.

Why do you need a content marketing calendar?

At the most simple level, it’s so you don’t wake up each morning and say, “Gee, I wonder what kinds of stuff we’ll tweet and blog about this morning?” As a professional digital marketer, you want to be thinking about what you’ll be doing 1, 2, 3, and 6 months from now, while today, you’re watching the events of the day to see how you can ride the social wave like Arby’s did at the 2014 Oscars. That moment wasn’t planned, but Arby’s was ready. You need a marketing calendar so you can plan your marketing year, down to the week and day, and be ready to participate in the events of the day via social media.

Where do you start?

My first rule of thumb for doing anything, and in particular creating a calendar of action, is the KIS rule: Keep It Simple. That said, use a tool you know and are familiar with, like a spreadsheet or Google Calendar or whatever calendar app you use all the time. There are dozens of really, really good and simple examples of marketing calendars available at the click of a mouse. Here are just a few:
Now that you’ve got a template from a 3rd party or you’ve made one yourself, here are the main points for each campaign or piece of content that you need to include.
- Date: when will this campaign or content be published?
- Name of the topic/campaign: A name for this content (blog, article, post, etc.) or the campaign
- Owner: Who is the owner or author of the content or campaign? This person will click “GO”.
- Status: The current status of the content/campaign as it moves through your process
You may or may not add to these points, and that is okay. The main point of this exercise is to create a calendar system that works for you and your marketing team, to keep you aware and accountable for when each item in the marketing campaign must be completed.

Planning & Creating Your Calendar

Every business has some sort of “season” or seasonality. For example, retail businesses are strongest between October and December. Software or SaaS businesses are slower in the summer and have high points at the ends of calendar quarters. What events does your business participate in? You may consider building your marketing calendar around those events, or around one particular event that really drives your business, like a tradeshow or annual conference.

Once you have identified those events or seasonal patterns, build your calendar around them. Also, for social media, you can engage your audience by sharing content that is related to certain calendar events like holidays or things like “back to school” or “Breast Cancer Awareness Month.” Take a 100,000 foot view of your brand’s annual cycle, and plan your marketing around it, then work backwards based on how long it will take to produce, approve, and launch each campaign or content.

You’ll be surprised at how quickly the calendar fills up, and then you’ll see where the gaps are that you can fill.

Execution is Everything

There’s a current adage in the startup world that goes something like this: “ideas are easy, but execution is everything.” In other words, it doesn’t matter how incredible your “change-the-world” idea is if you can’t execute on it, and a very simple idea executed really well can also change the world. Your calendar is a very prominent part of your ability to execute even the most complex of marketing campaigns.

It’s also helpful to remember that nobody is perfect. Life happens. You’re going to miss a deadline, misspell a word in a tweet, share a bad link or the wrong link, or think you posted to social media but, for reasons nobody knows, that fantastic image never makes it to Facebook. Your calendar is a reminder, not a taskmaster. It’s up to you to create the calendar system that works for you, and then abide by it.

Explore Digital Marketing At GA
July 4, 2015
Digital Marketing 101: Understanding the Digital Marketing Funnel
This post originally published on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog.

When we started our latest session of Digital Marketing at General Assembly’s Atlanta campus, I told the class, “the term ‘digital marketing’ is a misnomer. It’s marketing, but we focus on getting our message to our audience digitally. But it’s still marketing.” What I meant is that the fundamental purpose of marketing hasn’t changed, but the ways we communicate with our audience and the speed with which we reach them has changed dramatically.

In the first two posts of this series, branding and measurement, we built the foundation of how you’ll start your marketing campaign. This post focuses on how you will determine how much reach you will require to achieve the goals of each campaign. The following steps will begin at the very bottom of the funnel with “conversions”, which could be orders, email addresses, or registered users of a product. We’ll work our way up the funnel, and then explain the math. For this example, we will use orders of a widget that costs $50.
- Revenue: At $50 per widget, how many widgets do we need to sell to meet our revenue goal?
- Average order amount: We only sell one product, the widget, but how many does each customer purchase, on average?
- Orders: How many orders do we need, at the average order amount, to reach our revenue goal?
- Conversion rate: What percentage of our website visitors do we to convert into orders?
- Website visitors: How many prospects reach our website?
  Click through rate (CTR): What percentage of people who see our content in ads, email, blogs, or social media click through to the website?
- Total reach: How many total individuals need to see our content (ads, email, blogs, or social media) in order to meet our website visitors goal with our CTR?
- Time: Over what period of time are we going to measure these results?
- Budget: How much money will we have to spend to achieve our goals?
These are the terms common to all digital marketing campaigns, though there are other terms not covered here to keep the example simple. Below, we explain the math of each level of the funnel that is used to get to the next level of the funnel.
- Revenue: Our revenue goal is $10,000 per month.
- Average order amount: Historically, our customers, on average, purchase 1.75 widgets each time they place an order, or an average order amount of $87.50 per order.
- Orders: At 1.75 widgets per order, to reach $10,000 in a month, we need 115 (we rounded up from 10,000/87.50=114.29) orders each month.
- Conversion rate: Our historical conversion rate is 3.6%, meaning that, if 1,000 visitors reach our website, we will get 36 orders at an average of $87.50 per order.
- Website visitors: To reach our goal of $10,000 in revenue per month at $87.50 per order and a 3.6% conversion rate, we will need 3,174 website visitors each month.
- Click through rate (CTR): Our average historical click through rate across all content (ads, email, blogs, or social media) is .975%.
- Total reach: Knowing that our CTR is .975%, in order to get 3,174 visitors to the website, we will need to reach 325,538 prospects with our marketing (3,174/.00975=325,538).
- Time: We’ll need to reach this many prospective customers each month.
- Budget: Across Google, Facebook, and Twitter ads, or average cost per click (CPC) is $1.38; therefore, we will need to budget $4,380 (site visitors*CPC) to reach our goals each month, and our Return on Investment (ROI) on these ad dollars spent will be 128% (($10,000/$4,380)-1)=1.28 or 128%).
We’ve used the term “historical” here to demonstrate that the best measurement of future performance is past performance. All marketers would do well to know how their previous marketing campaigns have performed, so they can make a reasonable estimate of how future campaigns will perform, and know if they are doing better or worse than before. The historical numbers in this example are the things that we know about our existing marketing funnel. We use math or business goals to get the other numbers.

Marketing is all about the numbers, starting with your “bottom of funnel” goal, which, in this case, is $10,000 per month in revenue from a $50 widget. To get that $10,000, we need to spend $4,380 and reach 325,538 people in our audience.plore Digital Marketing At GA
July 3, 2015
6 Best Practices for Social Media Marketing Newbies
This post originally published on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog.

You’re just starting out actually marketing a business or non-profit organization using various social media channels and tools. You’re not a social media marketing expert yet, but you will be very soon. What’s your next step? It’s wise to start off with some boundaries around your social media posts and content sharing.

In addition to maintaining your brand standards and representing your brand with excellence, here are six best practices that span all of the top five social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+, Instagram) and most other social media channels. In other words, if you start off using these best practices, your chances of early success will increase greatly.

1. Make it brief.

Make the text in your posts brief – under 100 characters – except on Instagram (see below for all the Instagram exceptions). Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+ have all conducted studies proving shorter is better.

2. Use attractive imagery.

Always include a beautiful, relevant image that reflects your brand and introduces the topic you’re sharing. Make sure you abide by updated social media image size dimensions. Note the slight difference for Instagram photos below.

3. Be inclusive.

Tag people in the image (to save characters on Twitter) or the post, letting them know that they are part of the content being shared or that they should pay special attention to what you’re sharing. Don’t use this method as a spammy tool.

4. Keep it short.

Always use shortened URL links using a URL shortener like bit.ly, goo.gl, ow.ly, wp.me, etc. You can also use branded links to increase brand awareness and trust. Facebook allows you to remove the link after it has retrieved the content, so you don’t have to worry about a shortened link with Facebook, especially now with Instant Articles. A recent study published in Social Media Examiner concluded that Facebook posts with embedded links actually perform better than those with links in the text.

5. Use hashtags (properly).

Hashtags are an integral part of almost every social network, thanks to Twitter; however, many people don’t use hashtags as they were intended. That’s fine for them as individuals expressing their feelings or frustrations, but as a digital marketer, you would do well to utilize hashtags for their intended purpose: search and discovery.

You can use tools like RiteTag to see which tags are getting the most traffic, or create your own unique hashtags that you use consistently for all your campaigns. You should useUse no more than two hashtags, except on Instagram. Twitter especially has demonstrated that two hashtags are optimal, engagement plummets when you use 3 or more hashtags.

6. Instagram is the exception.

All the exceptions go to Instagram because the follow best practices have proven successful on the photo sharing service:
- Share an exclusive image that nobody else will be able to see.
- Tell a brief story using about 200 words, almost a mini-blog post, about the image.
- Use at least three hashtags.
- Tag lots of people.
Perhaps Instagram is growing so fast— surpassing Twitter recently for the number of monthly active users (MAU) —because it’s just a little different, and the other main channels are more established. We’re now starting to see promoted (e.g., paid) posts in Instagram, so I expect to see fewer exceptions for Instagram. However, Instagram’s rapid growth and simplicity may be the new trend.

Either way, for the foreseeable future, working within these best practices will help you establish yourself as a savvy digital and social marketer.

Explore Digital Marketing at GA
July 2, 2015
Digital Marketing 101: Social and Search Paid Advertising
This post originally appeared on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog.

This post is the fifth in a series of six posts we’re calling “Digital Marketing 101,” in which we have broken up the General Assembly Digital Marketing class into six bite-sized chunks for those who are considering entering the digital marketing space, or who need a primer on the basic building blocks of digital marketing. The first four posts covered:
Up to this point, if you were building a new business or a digital strategy for an existing business, you’ve determined your brand strategy, voice, and keywords, written down your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), have a solid grasp of the marketing reach you need to achieve to hit your revenue (or lead) goals, and you have a clear strategy for creating and publishing marketing content.

But you still haven’t spent any money on marketing. For many small businesses and startups, you might skip this 5th step if you simply don’t have the budget to pay for search and social marketing reach. However, if you have any budget at all, even just $25 or $50 of $100 per month, the reach you can achieve by targeting your audience on search and social has never been more cost efficient.

Here are the 5 questions you must answer before you engage in spending money on search and social advertising:
1. Budget – how much money can you spend each month? Spending a lump sum once is useless.
2. Goals – what specifically do you want to accomplish with your ad?
3. Audience(s) – who exactly are you trying to reach, and why?
4. Message – what is the message you want your audience(s) to hear?
5. Content – What types of content (text, image, video, or combination) will you show your audience(s)?
Once you’ve answered the points above clearly, concisely, and consistent with your brand and strategy, you should be well on your way to deciding which of the following advertising channels will work best to reach your desired audience. No channel is one-size-fits-all, so you should understand the strengths and weakness of each channel, and what they are good for. The chart below will help you through that decision.

Google, Facebook, and Twitter are usually regarded as the easiest to use because their processes for conducting an ad campaign are extremely simple. Google owns 98% of the search advertising traffic, so if you learn to use the Google Keyword Planning Tool in Adwords, you are almost guaranteed to get traffic, but you must remember that every click costs you money.

Facebook has 1.4 billion users, so the reach is fantastic (since you’re paying for it), and because Facebook knows everything there is to know about most of their users, the ability to hyper-target your audience is very powerful.

Twitter’s user base is much smaller than Facebook’s, but stronger in many market segments such as technology. Twitter’s campaign planner is very simple, and like Facebook’s, the first step asks you what you’re trying to accomplish.

Facebook Ad Campaign Twitter Ad Campaign

The key to any digital advertising campaign is test and measure, test and measure, test and measure until you determine the ad types, channels, message, and audience that get you the best results. What’s very advantageous about any digital ad campaign is that you can conduct a campaign for one day, one week, one month, or any custom length of time, then measure the results.

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June 30, 2015
Digital Marketing 101: Owned Content Marketing
This post originally appeared on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog.

In the first three parts of this DGM 101 series, we established that your marketing must start with your brand, and your brand is “everything you do.” Then you set up your web property and marketing plans so that you can measure everything and keep a close eye on your KPIs while you determine your budgetary needs by doing the math to get through the marketing funnel.

When you start your marketing strategy execution, the first place to start is by executing on the part of the marketing plan that requires no ad spend: owned content. To be clear from the start, we first need to have a firm understanding of what exactly is included in “owned content:”
- Email marketing:
Everything you produce and publish to your digital audience is considered “owned content” because, by definition, you created it, publish it, and own it. Owned content can be just as valuable as paid ads. One simple and powerful example is Arby’s tweet to Pharrell during the 2014 Academy Awards program, which continues to add to its 78,000 retweets to this day.

That Oscars moment is one in a trillion, so the more reliable plan will be to create and maintain an owned content calendar for every week, month, and year in your marketing plan, and abide by that plan. It takes lots of time, hard work, and collaboration to create such a calendar, but ultimately, creating and publishing your own content is the most efficient way to market to your target audience without spending any hard cash.

Finally, all the owned content you create, especially on your website and now on Twitter, has one very powerful benefit: SEO. Search engine optimization is what gets your site to the top of the Google results page when a prospective customer or user searches using keywords that you use every day in your owned content, because those are the words that describe your brand and the value you offer to your customers. Google loves fresh, consistently and regularly updated content on your website, blog, and now in your Twitter feed.

In your owned content, all of your words and your images matter, so plan them and execute them carefully, frequently, and consistently.ore Digital Marketing At GA
June 28, 2015
Digital Marketing 101: Measuring Your Digital Marketing Efforts
This post originally appeared on the General Assembly Digital Marketing Blog.

“You can manage only what you measure.” There are many different versions of that mantra, and all of them hold true. Just as in fitness and weight loss, if you don’t start with a baseline, take regular measurements, and see what’s working, you can’t make data-driven decisions.

In this second post of six in the series “Digital Marketing 101,” we’re offering up highly practical tasks for you to determine how best to grow your digital presence using data backed by marketing analytics.

Getting Started

The center point of everything is a high-quality web analytics tool like Google Analytics. There are other tools out there like KISSMetrics, but Google Analytics is free (Google wants you to know how well you’re doing!) and easy to setup and connect to your web property.

Knowing that you can only manage what you measure, your first mindset should be to measure everything. You’re not going to report on everything, but your entire web property or mobile app should be connected to your analytics package from day one, and you should have a long list of metrics that you think you may need to keep a close eye on now or at some point in the future.

Establishing Metrics

From the “everything” pile, your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should be your top 3-5 metrics that you will probably look at every day, or at the very least once a week. For an ecommerce site, these metrics may, and probably should, include the following:
- Page views (how many products visitors viewed)
- Click Through Rate (CTR from various ads)
- Conversion rate (orders / visitors)
- Average order amount (are they buying one widget or several?)
For a media site, your KPIs will be different, and include things like:
- Pages per visit (how many articles did they read?)
- Time on site (how long did they browse and read on the site?)
- Conversion rate (email subscribers / visitors)
Keep in mind that, especially if you’re starting from ground zero, your KPIs will change over time. For example, your measurement of “New Visitors” will change, because in the first month, almost ALL your visitors will be new. After you ramp up (ramp up time depends on how well you market the site and the total size of your audience), you’ll set a monthly average goal for how many new visitors you want to bring to your website. Also, once you know your baseline average order amount, you’ll want to set a goal to increase that average each month because that means an increase in revenue.

How will you measure and mind all these numbers? Google Analytics. Once you’re set up, this fantastic tool will have all the data you need; however, you owe it to yourself as a digital marketer to immerse yourself in learning Google Analytics. The Google Analytics team has set up, and continues to add to and maintain, a huge and robust library of videos on the Google Analytics YouTube channel. You should bookmark this channel and commit to learning the tool inside and out as you grow your digital marketing expertise, because, as we’ve already mentioned several times, you can manage only what you measure, and if you don’t know how to measure it, you’ll never be able to change it.

Finding Insights and Taking Action

Once you’ve set your digital site in motion, you’re going to want to change it to make it better. Another adage that is at the heart of all web software is this: all software is 85% complete. Always. That means it’s never, ever “done.” You will eventually get from v1 to v40, like Google Chrome has done in just 10 short years, but your software is never done. But how do you know what to change next?

You measure everything. In Digital Marketing, we teach the “OODA” loop. OODA stands for Observe. Orient. Decide. Act. That’s how you measure your digital marketing efforts.
- Observe – this word is another word for “measure”, and you accomplish this task in Google Analytics. All your data is in your analytics tools. Make them a part of your daily life.
- Orient – what ‘orient’ means in Digital Marketing is to determine what happened. Why did you get so many visitors at 3pm last Tuesday? Why did your email subscribe rate drop? Why did you sell 3X as many widgets this week as last?
- Decide – what are you going to do next? Change the email signup process. Reduce the steps in the checkout process from six to two. Add beautiful images to your blog posts. But make these decisions based on data, not whether you like it or not.
- Act – implement what you’ve decided based on the data that you collected by creating and measuring a new experiment.
In digital marketing, it’s easier than ever to make data-driven decisions and support them with data. It’s also easier than ever to make changes to any website, and measure the effect of the changes instantly through an online analytics tool. And the OODA loop is the process by which we as digital marketers determine what works, what doesn’t, what to do next, and when to change it. We make decisions based on data because we have that data at our fingertips, because we have immersed ourselves in Google Analytics.

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June 27, 2015

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