Tag: entrepreneurs

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

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:

• SensibleMarketing
• Far Reach
• Insightpool
• Moz
• CopyBlogger
• Content Marketing Institute

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

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