Shaw Academy Digital Marketing

Professional Diploma in

DIGITAL MARKETING

1

SUMMARY ​NOTES LESSON ONE

Your Introduction To Digital Marketing 

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Table of Contents: 2

SUMMARY NOTES 4
STUDENT GOALS:​
DIGITAL MARKETING DISCLAIMER! 4
THE THREE LEARNING OBJECTIVES FOR THIS LESSON ARE TO UNDERSTAND: 4
THE HISTORY OF MARKETING IN RELATION TO DIGITAL
WHAT IS DIGITAL MARKETING? 4
SOCIAL MEDIA:
PPC: 6
DIGITAL BILLBOARDS 6
DIGITAL TV: 6
ORGANIC: 7
COMMUNICATION: 7
COMMON DIGITAL MARKETING ACRONYMS 7
COMMON TERMS: 8
WHAT IS AN “OBJECTIVE”?: 9
WHAT IS A KPI?: 10
CLICKS - WHERE ARE THESE IMPORTANT? 11
LEADS - WHERE ARE THESE IMPORTANT? 11
SALES - WHERE ARE THESE IMPORTANT? 11
LIFE-TIME VALUE (LTV)
WHAT IS PERFORMANCE MARKETING? 11
PERFORMANCE MARKETING STRATEGIES
CONCLUSION 11
WHAT ARE YOU GETTING OUT OF MODULE 1?
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Student goals:

● P​rofessional self-improvement
● Starting a business
● Choosing a different career path

● Increase marketing knowledge

Digital Marketing Disclaimer!

Digital marketing is constantly evolving, at a much faster rate than its predecessors.
Algorithms, features, platforms and more are constantly changing, channels become
saturated as there are more advertisers, it is increasingly becoming more expensive to
advertise and therefore it is critical to get the “basics” right – an amazing site with great
usability and content, optimised landing pages, a good product/service that is competitively
priced, unparalleled customer service and more.

With that said, you don’t need to have a big budget to succeed in your digital marketing
efforts and one of the purposes of this course is to give you actionable skills and insights no
matter what you have to spend.

The three learning objectives for this lesson are to understand:

● The concept of digital marketing
● Learn about objectives and KPIs
● Applying objectives across performance-focused channels

The history of marketing in relation to Digital
(Wikipedia, 2019), (History Cooperative 2019)

● In 1840, the first advertising agency was setup in Philadelphia, with print

(newspapers, magazines) really being the only option at the time.

● Radio came out in the 1920’s, creating a big shift in marketing due to the different

format (audio) as well as reach
● Then TV came along in the 1950’s, expanding reach even further and introducing

another medium in which to communicate with people

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● 1980’s saw the launch of cable. Channels like MTV, Shopping Network changed
strategies and spend completely, as instead of advertising being forced onto people,
they were actually tuning into it.

● In the 1990’s what was first called the WorldWideWeb was launched. It took a few
short years to gain traction in terms of marketing as it was initially just for the purpose
of creating and sharing information but of course advertisers started taking notice of
this new medium. The first sms was also sent out in 1992, reading “Merry Christmas”

● In 1998, the first content was sold to mobile phones - ringtones. Google also
launched their search engine in this year, initially without paid advertising. SEO
already had a few years under its belt, but increasing website rankings only became
a core priority around this time.

● Two years later, Google started monetizing their search engine with “Adwords”, now
called “Google Ads”. They started with 250 advertisers and now have millions. The
majority of Alphabet’s (the parent company of Google) revenue comes from this
platform.

● 2006 saw the launch of Twitter, a very different social media platform to the
Facebook giant which went live in 2004. Due to the “live” nature of the platform and
the short bursts of information it saw a rapid initial growth. This declined in later years
but it is still a solid platform.

● In 2007, Facebook started monetizing their platform. They had around 20 million
monthly active users at the time, an increase of 1900% since their launch in 2004.
Monthly users are now in the billions!

● Google launched the Play Store in 2008, introducing downloadable apps to millions
of people. It started with 500 apps and now there are too many to count. The future
of the app is uncertain as we move to a more “responsive” website experience but for
the moment it is still widely used.

● In 2016, Pokemon Go introduced augmented reality on mobile, on a huge scale. AR
had been around since 1990 but only within the military and space travel industries,
for navigation.

● Today, looking at the period in which marketing has existed, Digital is still very young
and rapidly changing. New platforms, targeting options and tech are introduced all
the time and each time they have the potential to change what digital marketing is.

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What is Digital Marketing?:

Digital marketing is the promotion of products and/or services using electronic means. We
can’t possibly cover all digital channels - there are hundreds including some very niche (i.e.
small, work for very specific reasons/businesses) ones but we’ll go through the top / well
known ones.

Social Media:

The most well-known channels are:

Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, Pinterest, Tumblr
(more on these in lessons 5 and 7)

A note on social media as well as all other digital marketing channels - just because it is
there, you don’t have to use it. Would an insurance company advertise on Pinterest? Would
a B2B business allocate a big portion of their spend to social?

PPC:

Google Ads offers a ppc model as well as others.

Within Google Ads there are many different campaigns but the top three are: search
(keyword targeting), display (topic / audience / content targeting, with text and image ads)
and shopping campaigns (for ecommerce).

We will be looking at Google Ads in a bit more detail in lesson 6 and in a lot more detail in
Module 2

Amazon

Offers the same campaign options as the ones mentioned under Google Ads, with the
difference being that ads are served on Amazon only.

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Bing

Microsoft’s advertising platform, is often ignored due to the low popularity of
IE/Edge/Chromium but although traffic is lower than Google, for advertisers this means less
competition and lower cpc’s.

3rd Party Platforms

There are many 3rd party platforms which assist performance or targeting with their product.
AdRoll is an example and it bridges the gap between what some platforms don’t allow, for
various reasons. For example, as a finance company you can’t retarget/remarket to site
visitors on Search engines but a company like AdRoll can.

Digital Billboards

Digital billboards are really only for brands that have a big budget and there are various
types of ad formats accepted. Unless there is an interactive mechanism, like the image on
the right, you can’t track performance of this media type as accurately as others, though the
potential reach is undeniable.

Digital TV:

Fire TV and Roku being two examples, are media players where you can stream audio and
video content. Video ads are sold on ad-supported channels and some media players allow
publishers to promote their channels on device home-screens.

Organic:

SEO
Like all things in digital marketing, SEO has changed quite dramatically over the years. New
updates are constantly released and it is no longer about adding a bunch of keywords to the
back of your site.

More on this in lesson 5 when we look at free advertising.

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Google My Business

Incredible for branding and necessary for everyone, claiming your knowledge panel or
creating a My Business page is critical as it is here that your reviews can be seen, your
address, social media profiles and a general overview of your business.

Direct Website Traffic
This means people who put your exact address in the browser bar. It’s in the “organic”
section of this lesson but please note that someone typing / bookmarking your website in
their browser is likely due to your marketing efforts. It’s a really good thing to track if you
have a product / site where users login or need to visit it often, as well as for branding
purposes.

Customer Reviews
You’d be surprised at what you can get when you ask. Think about asking your clients to
leave a review (Facebook reviews, Google reviews, etc) - this essentially does what “word of
mouth” does. If you have a lot of good reviews, there’s a higher chance of converting
potential customers.

Communication:

Email Marketing

Email has seen a lot of changes. From personal email addresses being introduced in 1991
(previously available to students and employees), to automation systems that enable
advanced segmentation that allows businesses or advertisers to send highly targeted
communication.

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Affiliate Marketing

Affiliates are essentially partnerships, ranging from paying a small company a % for every
lead they bring in, to multi-billion dollar partnerships that promote brands on a huge scale

Podcasts

Like radio, except you can download episodes to listen to. There are more than 550 000
shows, and hosts typically sell three slots for ads, generally read by the host as data shows
it is more well-received.

Chat Bots

When working effectively, they streamline communication and allow you to focus on refining
and enhancing your overall communication. You can integrate them with many different
platforms.

SMS/IM

Both are still widely used, though in many cases money could be better spent elsewhere.
Looking at WhatsApp as an example, you can integrate a Chat Bot within this and create a
business profile!

Common Digital Marketing Acronyms:

ROAS - return on ad spend
ROI - return on investment
CTR - click through rate
CPA - cost per acquisition
CPL - cost per lead
CPI - cost per install
CPC - cost per click
PPC - pay per click
CPM - cost per 1000 impressions

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CPV - cost per view
SEO - search engine optimisation
CRM - customer relationship management
CMS - content management system
SEM - search engine marketing
CTA - call to action

These, plus some bonus ones, are in your starter pack.

Common Terms:

Device
What you are using when performing an action. E.g. mobile, desktop, tablet.

Organic
Traffic to your site that you have not paid for. i.e. not through paid media

Channel
Where you are going to be advertising. E.g. Facebook, Google Search, etc

Ad fatigue
An ad that has been seen so many times it is no longer noticed

Frequency/Impression cap
The amount of times your audience sees an ad

Metric
Different indicators you can manage performance against

Segments
Customers or info grouped together based on different criteria

Reach
Describing the number of people who see your ad

Algorithm

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The method in which channels determine when/how to show your ad/content
Traffic
Visits to a website / physical location

What is an “objective”?:

Goals set by a business when promoting its products or services to potential customers,
which should be achieved within a given timeframe.

What is a KPI?:

A measurable value that shows how a business is achieving their objectives

Clicks - where are these important?:

● Traffic to site
● Awareness
● Branding

Leads - where are these important?:

● Branding
● Scale
● Sales

Sales - where are these important?:

● Everywhere
● Revenue
● Profit
● Increasing margins

KPIs for four common objectives

Branding
● Impressions
● Reach
● Traffic
● Engagement

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● Organic results

Awareness
● Impressions
● Frequency
● Reach
● Ad Recall
● Engagement

Sale
● ROI / ROAS
● Conversion rate
● Keywords
● Bounce rate

Retention
● Lifetime Value (LTV)
● Conversion rate
● Frequency
● Engagement
● Segments

Life-time Value (LTV):

LTV is the projected revenue that a customer will generate during their lifetime

Calculation for LTV

Calculate average purchase value and multiply by average purchase frequency

Multiply this by your average customer lifespan to determine LTV

What is Performance Marketing?

An umbrella term that refers to advertising on different channels and paying only when an
action is completed (e.g. a click, lead or sale).

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Click - You only pay for the click, not the impressions
Objectives where clicks are important:

● Traffic to site
● Awareness
● Branding

Leads - you set a target CPA and only pay for leads
Objectives where leads are important:

● Branding
● Scale
● Sales

Sales - you have a target ROI / ROAS
Objectives where sales are important:

● All of them
● Revenue
● Profit

Performance marketing strategies:

True performance marketing encompasses a variety of marketing strategies and analyses

Analysis
Continuous analysis of your marketing channels and site. Tools to do this include Google
Analytics - more on this in lesson 2 - reports within channels (e.g. Facebook Insights) and
3rd party partners if you use any.

Optimising

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Optimising based on data is really what puts the “performance” in performance marketing.
There are different optimisation techniques depending on the channel which we will be going
into later in this module and across the rest of the course.

Communication
You need to ensure that your communication is effective. How do you do this? The obvious
answer is that your content has to be relevant and regular. As you should have already
segmented your database/potential customers during analysis and optimisation, you are
then able to target them with different content/offerings. .

Budget efficiency
A big part of performance marketing and there are different ways to set/ calculate these,
depending on the channel. Be aware that just because you set a budget, it doesn’t mean the
platform will spend it. This is where all the above points come together, enabling you to set a
realistic budget which will cover what you need. We jump into budgeting in lesson 8 of this
module.

Initially the terms Affiliate Marketing and Performance Marketing were interchangeable but
Performance Marketing has grown to encompass many other marketing strategies and
channels.

Budgets and Performance Marketing - Recommendations

These recommendations will apply to everyone but in my experience there are priorities
depending on your budget

Smaller Budget
● Make your offering competitive and your website optimised and responsive
● Be selective about the channels you choose
● Optimise over a longer date range than usual due to potential limited data
● Consider ambassadors and small partnerships

Bigger budget
● Ensure all tracking is in place and data is accessible
● Choose many channels, then reduce

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● Ensure you have not capped reach or saturated a channel - this can happen if you
invest too much money into one platform. Eventually you will run out of people to
convert at your desired CPA/CPL. A sign of this is an increase in cost (aka decrease
in performance) with a stagnant or decrease in reach

● Wasted spend is harder to “find” - this can happen quite easily if you have big
accounts and multiple people managing them / too few resources.

Choosing performance channels based on Objectives

Branding and Awareness channels
● Google Display / Programmatic
● Remarketing across channels
● Facebook / Instagram
● YouTube
● Digital TV

Sales channels
● Google / Bing Search
● Shopping / Product campaigns
● Email marketing
● Remarketing across channels
● Lead-gen campaigns

Retention
● Google Display Remarketing
● Email marketing and segmentation
● Facebook / Instagram remarketing
● Apps

Challenge

Imagine you have a budget of 5000 a month for a lead-based company, for a 3 month
campaign.

● List what the top KPIs would be for this objective
● List the channels you would choose and why
● If you are feeling daring, allocate a budget to each channel

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Email your challenge in any format to m​ arketing@shawacademy.com

Conclusion

You now have a basic understanding of digital marketing, the top available channels and
performance marketing. You also learned what objectives and kpis are, plus common terms
and acronyms used in the digital marketing space. In lesson two, we learn about tracking
and how to determine your objectives using marketing funnels/cycles and research.

What are you getting out of Module 1?

By the end of this module, you will have a solid foundation of what you need to create and
implement effective performance-based digital marketing strategies.

References

● En.wikipedia.org, 2019
● History Cooperative, 2019
● Finance.yahoo.com, 2019

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Professional Diploma in

DIGITAL MARKETING

1

SUMMARY ​NOTES - LESSON TWO

Tracking and measuring your Digital Marketing efforts

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Table of Contents:

SUMMARY NOTES - LESSON TWO 2

DIGITAL MARKETING DISCLAIMER! 3

THE THREE LEARNING OBJECTIVES FOR THIS LESSON ARE TO UNDERSTAND: 4

CHALLENGE FROM LESSON ONE 4

WHAT IS A MARKETING SALES FUNNEL / CYCLE? 5

WHY DO YOU NEED ONE? 5

AIDA: 6

SIX-STAGE SALES FUNNEL 7

SEE, THINK, DO, CARE: 8

LIFECYCLE MARKETING: 9

VAC - A PERFORMANCE-FOCUSED MODEL: 10

WHICH IS BETTER? 11

FUNNEL EXAMPLES: 11

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A CUSTOMER JOURNEY AND A MARKETING 12
FUNNEL

B2B VS B2C FUNNEL DIFFERENCES 12

HOW TO DETERMINE OBJECTIVES: 13

DIFFERENT OBJECTIVES: 13

RESOURCES FOR MARKET ANALYSIS & DETERMINING CLEAR OBJECTIVES: 14

LAST-CLICK ATTRIBUTION: 15

ANALYTICS DASHBOARD 16

CREATING A GOOGLE ANALYTICS ACCOUNT: 17

CONCLUSION 18

WHAT ARE YOU GETTING OUT OF MODULE 1? 19

Digital Marketing Disclaimer!

Digital marketing is constantly evolving, at a much faster rate than its predecessors.
Algorithms, features, platforms and more are constantly changing, channels become
saturated as there are more advertisers, it is increasingly becoming more expensive to
advertise and therefore it is critical to get the “basics” right – an amazing site with great
usability and content, optimised landing pages, a good product/service that is competitively
priced, unparalleled customer service and more.
With that said, you don’t need to have a big budget to succeed in your digital marketing
efforts and one of the purposes of this course is to give you actionable skills and insights no
matter what you have to spend.

The three learning objectives for this lesson are to understand:

● Marketing funnels / cycles and how they assist with objectives and kpis
● The importance of tracking and an introduction to Google Analytics & UTMs
● Resources to help with research to determine if goals are realistic

Challenge from Lesson One

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Google Search​ has been given the bulk of the budget due to the higher cost but for
lead-gen in particular, lead-quality (as in, the likelihood that a person will convert) is much
higher due to the fact that people are actually searching for your business.

Display Text ads a​ ctually perform surprisingly well for lead gen. Quality is lower but so are
costs and it helps bring down the overall CPL.

Facebook​ - I have specifically excluded Instagram here as it does not really perform for
lead-gen. Like with Display, leads from FB will be of a lower quality but you can reach a
decent amount of people for a low cost, and there is the option of an in-platform lead form, or
a link to a landing page with a form. The latter is generally higher quality as they have had
the opportunity to see your site and your offering vs in-platform where they don’t see any of
that. Keep an eye out for lesson 7 for more in-depth info on social media.

The KPIs you would be looking at for this campaign would be:

● CPL - for obvious reasons. You might have a target volume or a target CPL - I didn’t
specify this in the challenge so don’t worry.

● Conversion rate - imperative to monitor. If it increases, why? Same with decreases.
You want to try and replicate the increase and get rid of the decrease.

● CTR - fluctuations are normal but if for example there is a high CTR but a low
conversion rate for an ad/campaign, it is worthwhile to check your ad text to ensure
that what it says, is what the user will experience.

● CPC - if your cpc goes up and conversion rate remains the same, you pay a higher
CPL. Simply reducing your CPC is not always the answer but is the easiest one.
Much more detail on this in lesson 6 and module 2.

What is a Marketing Sales Funnel / Cycle?

A collection of stages you ideally want potential customers to move through, towards your
key objective.

It’s called a funnel due to the volume of potential customers decreasing the further down a
funnel you go.
It’s important to remember that people won’t just do what you want them to do. There are
many different ways people browse and use the same site, and someone can convert
without going through all stages of the conversion funnel.

Why do you need one?

A sales funnel/cycle allows you to plan:

● How you will bring in website traffic

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● How you will manage and nurture leads
● How you will convert leads into customers

There are still many companies that don’t have a sales funnel or cycle in place and they are
still successful. However, as well as assisting with planning, it also assists with pinpointing
and solving issues (which will inevitably come).

AIDA:

Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action

Traditional Sales Funnel

The AIDA concept was created in 1898 to describe the “theoretical journey” and assist in
targeting the right message to the right person at the right time.

Examples of what potential customers would do in each stage are:

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Awareness
● Seeing an ad, blog post, submitting a lead

Interest
● Looking up your brand, following social media pages

Desire
● Researching options, comparing against competitors

Action
● Making a purchase

Six-stage Sales Funnel

Here we have a six-stage funnel, which breaks down “Interest” into more stages.
Examples of marketing efforts or customer behavior would be:

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Awareness is at the top of the funnel, which we covered in AIDA. Marketing tactic examples
would be:

● Advertising, events, direct mail

In the interest phase, consumers learn about the company and its products. Tactics in this
stage include things like:

● targeted emails and encouraging newsletter signups

Consideration entails consumers who have become qualified leads (submitted during
Awareness or interest), which should be further nurtured with remarketing. More on
remarketing in the next lesson, lesson 3! In this phase you might offer:

● free trials, specials or a specific product push.

Intent means someone is interested in buying. Examples of consumer behavior in this stage
would be:

● Requesting a demo, adding items to a cart

Evaluation – making a final decision. Working with marketing and sales is required here to
show that your product/service is the best choice. Marketing tactics here could be:

● Targeted campaigns (for example, based on what they put into their cart - similar
items) and pushing USPs which are unique selling propositions - what makes you
better / stand out from the crowd? Remind them why they want to buy from you.

Purchase - making a purchase

The fault with this funnel is that it does not include retention and advocacy. Advocacy is a
fancy word for word of mouth/ people sharing their experience of your business with friends.
You obviously want to make sure that experience is as positive as possible. It is also much
cheaper to inspire repeat purchases from existing customers than new ones, particularly in
ecommerce / FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) and subscription businesses. But even if
it’s something like buying a car, it is worth keeping that database of information because
very few people will buy just one car in their lifetime. Here, the conversion window would be
much longer (conversion window is the average number of days it takes someone to

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convert) but it would still be valuable, and cheaper to ensure your existing customers are
shown quality, targeted content or offers.

See, Think, Do, Care:

See, Think, Do and Care is a model pioneered by Avinash Kaushik and Mark Grehan.

Avinash and Mark both argue that businesses only spend money on the “Do” stage, which
they say is the hardest “place” to have a presence. This is where performance marketing
would come in. As an example, It’s been recommended to have different Display strategies
for the first two phases of this model. Content that introduces your brand “softly” as opposed
to getting spammed with “Buy Now Buy Now” messages.

Lifecycle Marketing:

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Now we have Lifecycle Marketing, a relatively newly coined term but the methodology
behind it isn’t new as some previous funnels have included everything you’re seeing now.
Instead of it being seen as a funnel, it’s cyclical. Unlike AIDA, it takes into account loyalty
and advocacy and existing customers feed into further strategies.
There are different “versions” of this but they are essentially the same, for example a shorter
version is A​ ttract, Convert, Nurture, Keep

VAC - a performance-focused model:

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Just to show you the difference between a more traditional funnel (like AIDA) and confirm
how subjective digital marketing is, I’ve completely made up a funnel to illustrate what
“Performance-Based Marketing” means.

With something like VAC, All marketing efforts directed towards capturing the highest
percentage of qualified / high-intent users and driving them to convert

Which is better?

This is quite subjective as it depends on the product / service and what the long-term
implications are.

But let’s compare the more traditional funnel (AIDA) with a performance-focused one (VAC):

● Both traditional and performance-based models focus on conversion
● AIDA was too singular, assuming people take the same steps to get to the same

place. Here, VAC would try to control or at least limit the steps with specific landing
pages for campaigns.
● AIDA does not take retention into account
● VAC technically doesn’t either but with a performance-based approach you would
retarget existing customers / site visitors
● AIDA would measure some performance on impressions, engagements etc. whereas
VAC wouldn’t
● Conversions in AIDA would include newsletter sign-ups, clicking on “contact us” etc.
VAC would track these but purely for optimisation towards the final goal (ROI, ROAS)

Funnel examples:

Using car insurance as an example within the S​ ee, Think, Do, Care​ framework:

See
All eligible drivers with money

Think
People considering a car purchase
Existing car owners considering changing providers

Do
Take up car insurance / switch insurance providers

Care
Retention with good communication and content, upselling other products

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Comparing S,T,D,C to the VAC model:
View
People looking for car insurance
People “in-market” for buying a car
Act
Click on an ad and submit a lead
Convert
Take up car insurance / switch insurance providers
The main difference between the two is the targeting. STDC would target all eligible drivers
whereas VAC would target people looking for insurance or in-market for buying a car. These
are real targeting options and we will be covering these and more in lesson 3.
If the strategy you implement after determining your sales funnel/cycle is not producing the
desired results, then you need to look at your customer journey.

The difference between a customer journey and a marketing funnel

The ​customer journey​ is a detailed outline of every step a lead takes to become a paying
customer, while the m​ arketing funnel​ is a model that businesses use to market
appropriately to leads at different stages of the buying cycle.

B2B vs B2C funnel differences

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How to determine objectives:

If starting a business or guiding someone who is, consider:

● Where do you want the business to be in 1 year and in 5 years?
● What is the purpose of your product / service and is there a market for it, or do you

need to “create” one?
● What does this market look like?
● How much money do you have to spend for marketing your business, and which

organic / free marketing can you benefit from? (free marketing options are covered in
lesson 5!)
● If working for an agency / client-side, you will likely be told which objectives to work
towards.

Different Objectives:

Market Share
Increasing your market share, thereby decreasing competitors

Differentiation
Creating a bespoke identity in a competitive market

Customer reviews
Improving service or product ratings

Market Development
Expanding into a new market to increase revenue

Reputation
Establishing or building on a brand’s reputation

Brand engagement
Increasing the interaction rate with customers / potential customers

Margins
Improving margins, thereby increasing revenue at a lower cost

Retention
Increasing customer retention rate

Promotion
Reaching your target with marketing comms like promos, coupons

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Price Discrimination
Finding methods to charge varying prices based on target market/s

Resources for market analysis and determining clear objectives:

● Google Trends - ​https://trends.google.com/trends/​ - a search feature that shows how
frequently a given search term or topic has been entered over different periods.

● Keyword research - ​http://isearchfrom.com/​ - see who is bidding on your relevant
keywords. If covering multiple stages of your conversion funnel, split the keywords by
each stage as results (competitors you see) will vary.

● Social Media presence - visit a page and on the right side of the page you should
see:

When clicking on “See More”:

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Select “Go to Ad Library to view live ads from the chosen page:

These steps would fall under market analysis. The d​ ifference between market analysis
and market research​ – research is analysis of target markets and customers. Analysis is of
an industry. You need to know what’s happening in your industry in order to see if your
objectives are realistic.

Tracking beyond the “Nice to Know” metrics

What I mean by “nice to know” is that I’m not referring to the standard in-platform metrics for
example E.g. impressions, ctr, etc – those are available without any tracking. Here I’m
referring to tracking the actions beyond these metrics – tracking your
goals/conversions/objectives
Google Analytics
A free service that provides statistics and analytical tools for marketing and SEO purposes.
There are other analytics tools out there but Google Analytics is the most widely used.

Last-click attribution:

An attribution model is the rule, or set of rules, that determines how credit for sales and
conversions is assigned to touchpoints in conversion paths.

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Analytics has a last-click attribution model, meaning:
● All credit for the tracked conversion / interaction is given to the final click
● The results you see in in-platform reporting (e.g. Facebook Business Manager) might
differ slightly due to this
● If there is a big difference, installation of tracking needs to be checked, as well as
conversion setup

Analytics Dashboard

Analytics defaults to the Home “page”, which is a dashboard of the top metrics. You can
customise this dashboard depending on the metrics that are most important to you.

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The audience overview gives you information on demographics of your site visitors. Here
you can segment by goal, device and many other different metrics. We have more info on
Analytics in lesson 6 of module 1 and in module 2.

Creating A Google Analytics Account:

It requires a Google account (Gmail address or other). I recommend creating a business
account instead of your personal email.

1. Navigate to analytics.google.com
2. Click on “Start for free” on the top right of the page
3. Fill in your Account Name, using your business name
4. Website name can be the same as your business URL
5. When inserting your URL, be sure to select https from the dropdown if you have a

security certificate.
6. Choose your industry from the dropdown and select the correct time zone (where

your business operates or where you are, if different)
7. Select “Create”, accept the terms and conditions and there you have it, your Analytics

account is ready
8. Under admin, locate “tracking info” which is where you will find the Analytics script

which needs to be on every page of your site
9. The script needs to be placed in the head section of your site between <head>

(opening tag) and before </head> (closing tag). It can be placed anywhere in this
section. but it is best to add it before anything like an image / other script fires.
10. If you have a Wordpress site you don’t need to install the script. Login to WordPress,
go to “Plugins”, search for ​Google Analytics by Monster Insights, s​ elect “Install”
and when asked for your Google Analytics ID, copy it from the tracking section of
Analytics.

What is a UTM?

Urchin Tracking Software
UTM codes are one of the easiest ways to track performance from any digital marketing
campaign.

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You could even track offline tactics by creating online landing pages specifically for that
campaign.

There are other, more advanced ways to track offline activity which is something we will be
covering in module 2.

The Elements of a UTM tag

Website URL - the page/s on your site where your advertising directs potential customers to
Source - the platform where your campaigns are (e.g. Google Search, Facebook)
Medium - the category of the campaign from your source (e.g. PPC, CPM, Mailer)
Name - the name of your campaign (e.g. summer_mailer)

Tool to create UTMs (not good for bulk creation) -
https://ga-dev-tools.appspot.com/campaign-url-builder/

Naming conventions

Naming conventions are important to stick to as it allows for easier management of tracking.
Let’s say you decide to go with:
www.mywebsite.com?utm_source=search&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=digital_marke
ting
(all lower case, _ between words)

Consistent naming conventions shouldn’t just be applied to UTMs, consistency across ad
names, campaigns, targeting info etc will make your life much easier.

Conclusion

Digital Marketing is very subjective, but you now have an understanding of various sales
funnels that are all still in use, as well as knowing the difference between a traditional funnel
and a performance-focused one. You also have some free tools to flesh out your market
analysis to determine whether your objectives are realistic, and you’ve been introduced to
tracking and analysis tools - Google Analytics and UTMs.

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What are you getting out of Module 1?

By the end of this module, you will have a solid foundation of what you need to create and
implement effective performance-based digital marketing strategies.

References

● En.wikipedia.org, 2019
● History Cooperative, 2019
● Ardath Albee, 2019
● John Spacey, 2019
● BrightLocal, 2019
● Support.google.com, 2019

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Professional Diploma in
DIGITAL MARKETING

1

SUMMARY ​NOTES - LESSON THREE
Effectively define and engage with your Target Market

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Table of Contents: 2
SUMMARY NOTES - LESSON THREE 3
3
DID YOU KNOW? 4
THE FOUR LEARNING OBJECTIVES FOR THIS LESSON ARE TO UNDERSTAND: 4
WHAT IS A TARGET MARKET? 5
HOW DO YOU DEFINE YOUR TARGET MARKET? 6
IMPORTANT POINTS TO REMEMBER 7
SOURCES FOR CREATING BUYER PERSONAS: 7
I’VE DEFINED MY TARGET MARKET. WHAT’S NEXT? 10
TARGETING OPTIONS ACROSS CHANNELS: 11
THINGS TO REMEMBER WITH TARGETING: 13
CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAPS: 13
EXAMPLES OF BEFORE, DURING AND AFTER A SALE 14
ECOMMERCE TOUCHPOINT EXAMPLE: 14
LEAD-GEN EXAMPLE 15
REMARKETING
CHALLENGE:

Did you know?

● In August 1991, Berners Lee published the first ever website. The site was about the
worldwide Web project describing the Web and how to use it. It was hosted on a
NeXt computer, which was designed by Steve Jobs.

● 42% of small businesses fail because there is no market for their product or service,
and 14% fail because they ignore their customers.

● Studies show that between 70 to 80 % of people research a company online before
visiting a small business or making a purchase.

The four learning objectives for this lesson are to understand:
● How to define your target market using different methods
● Targeting options across different channels - an intro
● How to create a customer journey map
● Remarketing - an intro

What is a Target Market?
Your target market is the group of people who could benefit from your product or service.
Your target audience, on the other hand, are the people you're actively trying to sell to. If
you're starting a business, you can absolutely define an idealistic target market and
audience. But when we touch on customer journeys and buyer personas, you'll be predicting
as opposed to analyzing.

How do you define your target market?

Step 1
It is asking yourself, what problem is your product solving? If we look at clothing as an
example, it's solving the problem of being naked. If we look at an alarm system, it's solving

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the problem of building safety within a home or business. Entertainment, something like
Netflix, solves the problem of being bored.

Step 2
Step two would be to ask yourself, who are you solving the problem for? You can break this
down. So let's take clothing as an example. Are you selling women's, men's or children's
clothing, or a combination of these? Are you selling to any age or specific ages? Is your
clothing high end or affordable or cheap? Do you offer local, national or global distribution?
There are other questions you could ask yourself, of course. These are just some examples.
Be very specific in terms of what you think your product or service is solving the problem for.

Step 3
Step three is to try and identify any consumer behaviors or interests. Now, what I'm about to
take you through will look a lot like stereotyping, but they are sincerely not meant to be.
Unless you have thousands of data points on your customers, you can't possibly know all
their behaviors and having thousands of data points is more than frowned upon. You can
identify some traits based on their interaction with you and consistent behaviors, but if we
could all be cut down into four or five points, then we'd be incredibly boring and life would
just not be exciting. This step is easier to justify with pre-existing data, but if you're just
starting out, then you won't have this.

So using athletic wear, women's corporate wear and maternity wear as as examples, you
could assume that someone who's buying athletic wear is active. They like to keep healthy
and shop accordingly. They have disposable income dependent on the pricing and they
might be interested in healthy recipes and related content.

For women's corporate wear, you could assume that she is employed and educated and she
cares about looking professional. She wants low maintenance, long lasting wear because no
one has time these days, and she could be interested in beauty products.

For maternity wear, obviously, the woman is pregnant. They would be searching for and
purchasing baby goods. Likely willing to spend money on quality and comfort and possibly
looking at a new home or new car. Now, I'm hoping that you can already start seeing how
these kinds of assumptions / behaviors or interests, how they could benefit you in terms of
your marketing.

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Step 4

After you've done all that, then you would want to create your target market statement. This
should include your most important demographics and behaviors. A statement would look
something like my target market is female, aged twenty five, who live in the suburbs and like
to do yoga. That's just an example. You don't need to use these exact identifiers because
they might not apply to you. But it is important that you have three to four key points within
your statement.

Important points to remember

If you're providing more than one product or service, a target market needs to be defined for
each offering.

Your target market and target audience will differ as your targeting options won't always fit
your exact market. Try to see this as a good thing, as you will exclude low performers as you
accrue data and you may actually become aware of good performers you hadn't considered.

Buyer Personas

Once you've crafted your target market statement, you would ideally break that down even
more with buyer personas. Now a buyer persona is a fictitious character that represents your
typical target customer, which is generally based on comprehensive audience research.

How do buyer personas help?

You have clearly defined your target customers and can therefore customize your
communication more effectively across all channels. Very important to note, this does
require a lot of data and/or spend.

The insight into your customers allows you to increase performance of your various
segments with marketing campaigns and content that specifically speaks to them.
Remember here that if you don't have pre-existing data, you can still create different

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campaigns or content based on your predicted target market. And the performance of these
will show in the numbers. If they suck, for lack of a better word, you need to analyze and
change your strategy.

Sources for creating Buyer Personas:

Looking at some sources for creating buyer personas, first up would be analytics. You can
view and analyze demographic data from site visitors and social engagers. Using Google
analytics, like we went through in lesson 2, and any in-platform social media reporting tools.

In terms of employees, particularly the client facing ones, so sales or support, they likely
have a lot of insight into the customers that they talk to. It's a good idea then to ask them all
the same questions and aggregate the answers.

Create and send a survey to your existing database. Spend time on the questions first
asking yourself what information is valuable and then more importantly, what is actionable.
It's all well and good having nice to know information, but if it's not actionable, then it's not
really going to do anything for you.

If you have the budget, invest in one on one interviews or focus groups, as you could pick up
on specific motivations and challenges that are related to your offering. A focus group is
exactly that really. It's a group of people who you put together to focus on your product or
service. You generally have a set list of questions to ask them as well as relying on any
feedback that they give you.

I’ve defined my target market. What’s next?

● You need to look at the channels and their targeting options best suited to your
objectives.

● You need to determine your customer journey so as to help clarify and optimize your
marketing efforts.

● And remarketing strategies will assist with targeting people who did not convert upon
their first interaction with you.

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Targeting Options Across Channels:

Google ads

We touched on a few of these campaign types in Lesson 1, but this is the full list of available
campaign types in Google ads. We have Search, Display, Smart Display, Shopping,
Universal App. Gmail Sponsored Promotions and YouTube. Just to go through a few of the
lesser known ones, Smart Display is essentially or is the same set up as a display campaign
with the difference being that there is no targeting. It might sound strange, but it's done
automatically by Google and its algorithms. You set a target CPA or CPL and you only pay
for that conversion or that acquisition. Universal App campaigns are specifically for app
installs and engagement. Gmail Sponsored Promotions. If you have a gmail account, I'm
sure you are very well aware of the promotions tab that you can navigate to. And at the top
of that is where you would see the GSP ads.

The targeting options are keywords, so words people search for on the search engine.

Demographics, gender, age, location and income. Income is only available in certain
regions. In-market targeting is people in the buy phase.

Interest or affinity, this means different things on different platforms. For example, Google
ads determines this with tracking cookies. You know those things that you have to accept on
every website. Those those are cookies. They're annoying, but they're actually really
awesome, too. Facebook determines interests by what people include as interests on their
profiles. So you can see that they mean vastly different things depending on the channel
you're talking about. Website topics or content - pretty straightforward.

Automatic targeting, that's just what I was speaking about with Smart Display. It also
happens within Shopping and the Universal App campaigns.

Similar audiences, known as lookalike audiences on Social, are audiences which are
created based on the criteria you specify. For example, website visitors, a similar audience
would target people similar to those visitors.

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Custom audiences are lists that you upload into a platform. They are generally email
addresses and what people or brands like to do is segment those. So for example, you
would have your most valuable customers - a list of those. And perhaps people who have
subscribed to a newsletter.

Device - you know what this means - it's desktop, mobile or tablet.

Facebook and Instagram

Next up, we have Facebook and Instagram. They are lumped together as they are managed
within the same platform. Campaign types here include Brand Awareness, Reach,
Engagement, Lead Generation, Conversions, Catalog Sales, App Installs, Video Views,
Messages - messages within Facebook - so sending you something via Messenger, and
then store traffic. Store traffic is not available in all regions. Engagement campaigns include
post engagement, page likes and event responses. One of those three is something that you
would choose when setting up that campaign.

The available targeting options are demographics, interests - which we spoke about earlier -
behaviours, page followers, friends of followers, custom audiences, lookalike audiences and
device.

Just to explain a few things a little bit more, Page Followers is pretty straightforward. You
can target the people who are currently following your page. You can then also target the
friends of your followers. The custom audiences are the same as Google ads and then the
lookalike audiences is Google Ads', Similar Audiences.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn, despite its size, I would actually say that LinkedIn is quite a niche channel. You
can see from the list of targeting options that marketing on the platform is centered around
B2B, useful industry related info and events and talent acquisition.

The available campaign types on LinkedIn, are Website Visits, Engagement, Video Views,
Lead Generation, Brand Awareness, Website Conversions and Job Applicants. This last one

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here, Job Applicants - that's a new campaign type. I think it's pretty self-explanatory, but it's
about promoting your job opportunities to top talent. For Website Conversions and Brand
Awareness. You have to select Website Visits, automated bidding and then maximize
impressions or conversions depending on which of those two you are wanting to optimize
for.

The targeting options that you have are demographics, and then this is where it gets really
interesting. You can target companies. So either Connections, specific Industries, Company
Names (not all are available, but a lot are) and then Company Size. You can also target
Education Degrees, Fields of Study, Member Schools, Job, which includes things like
Functions, Titles, Skills and Years of Experience. And finally Member Groups and Member
Interests.

Can you think of how you could use this platform for yourself or a client, which targeting
options would you choose? And what do you think the benefit is?

Twitter

Now we have Twitter and the campaign options. They are Awareness, Tweets,
Engagements, Followers, Website Clicks and Conversions, App Installs, In-stream Video
Views and Quick Promote. Looking at the targeting options that are available, you have
Demographics as usual, Interests, Followers, Keywords, Behaviours, Tailored Audiences
and Movie and TV shows. The Behavior option is only available in the US and UK at the
moment. The Follower targeting works by displaying your Twitter ads to people who are
similar to the followers of the usernames you select. Keywords is based on tweets and
searches. Behaviour Audiences - they're supplied by Twitter Partners and are based on
actual online and offline behaviors, very similar to Google's. They won't fully ever share how
they do it, but it's got to do with the tracking cookies and their algorithms as well. Media and
TV show targeting is another newish campaign option. It allows networks and brands to
promote tweets to people engaged with specific TV shows and movies before, during and
after a telecast. You have two options here. There's either continuous targeting - so
regardless of whether there's a new episode or not, it will continue to target those people
interested in the movie or TV show you've chosen - and new airings only. This would only
serve ads just before, during or after a newly aired episode. If you combine those two
options, it could be an incredibly powerful strategy for various brands.

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Things to remember with targeting:

Interest targeting - I did mention this before, but within Social, Interest targeting relies on the
information that potential customers have provided. Due to this, it's not necessarily the best
targeting option because people don't always disclose all their interests on Facebook, but it's
worth testing and it could perform very well for you.

Behavioural targeting - there are different ones or different targeting options depending on
the channel that you choose. For example, within Facebook, you can target frequent credit
card users, but within Google ads, that's not something you can do, nor LinkedIn nor Twitter.
So it does differ depending on the channel.

Some platforms only enable Custom Audience targeting once you've reached a certain
spend or the account is older than the required timeframe. Google Ads will only allow custom
audiences after 90 days of the account being active and also a minimum spend of fifty
thousand dollars. That is quite a chunk of money. But depending on the size of the brand, it
can be very easily achieved.

With Age and Gender targeting, if you decide to target this, it's worth noting that in some
platforms you'll only reach people who have disclosed this info. On Google, unless you've
created a Gmail or Google account and specified your gender - as I'm sure you know, there's
also that option that says "I'd rather not say". If you're targeting a specific age, let's say
females who are twenty four years old on Google Ads, then you're potentially missing out on
a huge volume of people who fit that target just because Google isn't aware of everyone's
gender and age within the Google ads and analytics platforms. Then what you'll see is
something called "unknown" and that generally has the most volume. It applies across
multiple things - unknown keywords, unknown genders, unknown ages. So if you're going to
be targeting a specific age or gender, rather include the unknowns, but then exclude the
ages that are specified because then at least you're not going to be targeting people that
Google knows the age or gender of. It's never going to be fully accurate but that's just a
suggestion.

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Regional constraints - essentially not all campaign and targeting options will be available in
your region. As we saw earlier with Twitter, the behavioural targeting is only currently
available in the US and UK. What generally happens when a channel is rolling out changes,
they do it gradually, so they'll do one region at a time. In that way, even if you read an article
about something that's coming, you might only see it in your account in six months time.

Start off with broader targeting and decrease as you see what is and isn't performing. This is
my recommendation. It does sometimes require a bit more budget, but overall, it generally
does just help you make sure that you're getting the best and the most out of your
campaigns.

Finally, test, test, test. I don't know how much I can stress this. It is so, so important to test. If
you're not sure if something's going to work, test. If you say something isn't working, where's
the data?

Customer Journey Maps:

As I mentioned in the previous lesson, a Customer Journey is a detailed outline of every step
a lead takes to become a paying customer.

The first step is to set clear goals for the map. What goals are you directing this map
towards? Who is it about and what experience is it based on?

Defining goals could be things like subscribing to a newsletter, or submitting a lead, or
putting items in a cart.

For who it is about, this would be going back to your buyer personas and your different
target markets, if you have more than one.

The experience is based on how they got to your site. Was it through social media channels,
Search or Shopping? A different Customer Journey Map would be created for each of these
if they differ.

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The next step would be to list all the possible touchpoints from view to sale. Now, a
touchpoint is all the places on your website and marketing and content channels that your
potential customers can interact with.

You need to list all the touch points they're using as well as the ones you believe they should
be using. If you have too few touch points, then you need to ask yourself, are they getting
turned away and therefore leaving your site early? If you have too many, is your site
complicated, requiring too many steps to get to a goal?

Next step is to take the customer journey as if you were a customer. The questions that you
need to keep in mind as you go through this process are, where do you go when you have a
problem that needs to be solved? How do you discover the product or brand that will solve
your problem? How do you make your purchase and how do you interact with the brand?
And after the purchase?
Then finally, you would make changes based on your findings. Ideally here you would
conduct an experiment or an AB test to measure whether your changes improve the
experience. Examples of improvements would be, is your lead form too long or complicated?
Are your product descriptions unclear? Are there too many steps to complete a purchase?
Does your sales team need to offer better support?

The reason why I mention the testing or experiments is because it's a really good,
measurable way to see whether the changes that you've made are actually improving
performance. So a test would basically be splitting traffic between your old content. To just
use content as an example, your old content and your new content, you would monitor the
results of both and push whatever's performing better to 100 percent of the traffic as
opposed to splitting it. We are going into experiments in lesson six, but it's a good idea if you
already have a Social Media or a Google Ad account. Play around with it. You'll see
somewhere in the menus, there's a test or experiment. It's sometimes also called a draft.
Look at those things and see what it can actually achieve.

Examples of before, during and after a sale
So Before Sale would be things like your social media channels, your PPC campaigns, word
of mouth, any reviews that are left for you, events that you create, and perhaps your
newsletter. During the sale, the touchpoints would be a physical store, your website, any
promotions, your sales team, the point of sale, and then your online cart if you're an

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e-commerce site. After Sale would be things like invoicing, marketing, emails, support team,
online assistance, upselling (serving or advertising relevant products to someone who's
already converted), and newsletter subscriptions. That's just a general overview.

Ecommerce touchpoint example:
A potential customer searches for a product and sees your ad (1). She visits your website
(2), browses through your products (3) and puts items into her cart (4) She fills in her
information (5) and makes payment (6) for which she receives confirmation (7). A few days
later, her purchase is delivered (8) and she gives a review based on her experience (9).
Sometime later she receives an email with a discount (10) which she chooses to use. She
clicks on the link, leading her to your landing page.(11) And she then logs into her profile
(12) and adds the products to her cart with the discount applied. As you can see here, within
that one so-called interaction, there are 12 touch points.

I could go even more granular. But this is just to give you an example of how many steps
there are within one interaction.

Lead-Gen Example
Looking at Lead-Gen, a potential customer sees your ad (1), he clicks on the ad directing
him to your landing page (2). He completes the form (3) and chooses his preferred method
of contact (4). Your sales team or staff, contact him (5) and provide clear information,
hopefully.(6) He needs time to make a decision, so to keep your brand top of mind, you
re-market to him (7) with relevant content (8) that reminds him why he should choose your
product or service(9) He requests a callback (10) and takes up your offering (11). He submits
all the required info (12), receives confirmation (13), and when billed (14) he makes a
payment (15). As you can see here, there are 15 different touch points. So what do you do
when people have fallen off the customer journey? How do you target them again? It's a little
something called remarketing, which is fantastic. We're going into this in a lot more detail in
lessons six and seven and module two.

Remarketing
Remarketing is serving targeted ads to an audience that has interacted with your site or
engaged with your social media ads. They are essential as it's a cost effective way to
increase your sales as you're targeting people who have already expressed interest in your

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products or services. In other words, something interested them enough to click on your ad
to direct them to your site. But for whatever reason, they weren't able to convert or didn't
want to convert. Target them again with other copy that might make them convert.

The standard remarketing lists are, All Website Visitors - that is pretty straightforward. Then,
your Website visitors excluding your converters. And finally all converters. Remarketing lists
generally need a thousand people in order to start running. If you don't have a thousand site
visitors yet I'd still recommend creating the list because it will build up as you get more
volume and then as soon as you hit a thousand people, it's ready to go.

Slightly more complex lists are: Demographic Segments, Time on Site segments and Social
Engagers. The process of creating remarketing lists differs depending on the channel that
you are using. Creating a list within Google Ads is different to creating one in Analytics, even
though they fall under the same umbrella. It's different to creating a remarketing list within
Facebook. Like I said, we're going into more detail in future lessons, but just to explain, the
reason why that is the case is because each channel has its own tracking pixel, no one can
kind of piggyback on the other. Facebook uses its Facebook pixel to determine the tracking
and the metrics that it has in the platform.

It's all very well and good knowing these lists are available. But what can you actually do
with them? Looking at the standard lists, examples of strategies for these could be for All
Website Visitors, you could observe how site visitors perform against your other targeting.
You could target them with different ad copy to your prospecting campaigns. And another
common one actually is that you just increase your bid for all your website visitors versus all
your new visitors. So you're paying more. But it's generally from a performance perspective,
better because you're targeting people who have already expressed an interest in your
product or service. Looking at All Visitors Excluding Converters, you could target them with
special offers or discounts or free trials. For All Converters, you could upsell other products
and you could maintain and increase brand affinity.

Looking at the more complex lists, Demographic Segments could be used to target people
with more relevant ads or products based on the demographics chosen. For example, if
you're selling shoes, you would sell them differently to an 18 year old than you would to a 50
year old. You can also observe performance of certain demographics within your
prospecting campaigns. What I mean by prospecting is that these are campaigns specifically

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