WHAT IS CRM?

Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to methodologies, software and Internet capabilities that allow companies to manage their relationships with current and potential customers. Companies often use CRM software applications to organize, automate and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support. These applications are available most often as on-premise or through software-as-a-service (SaaS).


CRM solutions provide companies with the customer data they need so that they can provide services or products that their customers want, provide better customer service, cross-sell and up-sell more effectively, close deals, retain current customers and better understand who their customers are.





CRM Capabilities

Most CRM applications include the following capabilities:

*Sales force automation (SFA): This integrates and automates sales processes,                including opportunity management, quote and order management, sales forecasting, order                    management, fulfillment, and incentive compensation management.
*Marketing automation: This software automates the entire marketing process, with            capabilities that include campaign and email management, lead reporting and analytics, website          search engine optimization and landing page and form creation.
*Customer support and service: These capabilities include case and ticket                         management, customer portals, time tracking and knowledge management.
Some CRM solutions also allow companies to better manage their channel relationships with functions such a secure partner portal and analytics.

The Rise of CRM

CRM applications can trace their roots back to the 1980s, when database marketing, which collected and analyzed customer information, emerged as a new, improved form of direct marketing. Robert and Kate Kestnbaum, pioneers in this area, introduced metrics such as customer lifetime value, and the application of financial modeling and econometrics to marketing strategies.2

In the mid-1980s, contact management software (CMS) applications such as ACT! appeared on the business software market. These programs let companies store and organize customer contact information—basically, they functioned as "digital Rolodexes."3

In the 1990s, CRM software made some major advances. Contact management software evolved into SFA software, with Siebel Systems becoming one leading provider. By 1995, the term "customer relationship management" came into use. In the last half of the decade, enterprise resource management (ERP) vendors such as Baan and SAP entered the market, and the competition led to more marketing, sales and service features being added to CRM. At the end of the decade, "e-CRM" vendors came onto the scene, and the first mobile CRM application appeared. Even more importantly, the first SaaS CRM applications were introduced.

The dot-com bust of the early 2000s hit the CRM industry hard, particularly e-CRM vendors. Influenced by Paul Greenberg's book CRM at the Speed of Light, the industry began focusing on more comprehensive CRM applications, as well as solutions that could interoperate with legacy systems.

At the end of the decade and through to the present, cloud-based and SaaS CRM solutions began to conquer the market thanks to their lower cost, speed of integration and flexibility. By the end of 2012, four out of every 10 CRM systems sold were SaaS-based, and the market experienced 12% growth in 2012, three times the average of all other enterprise software.4

With the rise of social media, the term "social CRM" came into play, referring to customer relationship management fostered by communication with customers through social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.5

Driven by high levels of investment in digital marketing and customer experience initiatives, the worldwide CRM software market reached $20.4 billion in 2013, up nearly 14% from 2012. More than 41% of total CRM software revenue in 2013 came from software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, as "organizations of all sizes sought easier-to-deploy alternatives to replace legacy systems, implement net-new applications or provide alternative complementary functionality."

Why CRM matters

If your business is going to last, you know that you need a strategy for the future. You’ll already have targets relating to sales, business objectives and profitability. But getting up-to-date, reliable information on your progress towards your goals can be tricky. How do you translate the many streams of data coming in from sales teams, customer service staff, marketers and social media monitoring into useful business information?

Using a CRM system can give you a clear overview of your customers. You can see everything in one place — a simple, customisable dashboard that can tell you a customer's previous history with you, the status of their orders, any outstanding customer service issues, and more.

You can even choose to include information from their public social media activity – their likes and dislikes, what they are saying and sharing about you. Marketers can use CRM to better understand the pipeline of sales or prospective work coming in, making forecasting simpler and more accurate. You'll have clear visibility of every opportunity or lead, showing you the clear path from enquiries to sales.

And though it’s traditionally been used as a sales and marketing tool, customer service teams are seeing great benefits from CRM systems. Today’s customer might raise an issue in one channel – say, Twitter – and then switch to email or telephone to resolve it in private. A CRM platform enables you to manage the enquiry across channels without losing track.

Life without CRM

More administration, less selling.

An active sales team generates a flood of data. They can be out on the road talking to customers, meeting prospects and finding out valuable information – but all this information gets stored in handwritten notes, laptops, or inside the heads of your salespeople.

On top of this your customers may be contacting you on a range of different platforms – phone, email and social media. Asking questions, following up on orders or complaining. Without a common platform for customer interactions, communications can be missed or lost in the flood of information – leading to an unsatisfactory response to your customer.

Details can get lost, meetings are not followed up promptly and prioritising customers can be a matter of guesswork rather than a rigorous exercise based on fact. And it can all be compounded if a key salesperson moves on.

Even if you do successfully collect all this data, you’re faced with the challenge of making sense of it. It can be difficult to extract intelligence. Reports can be hard to create and waste valuable selling time. Managers can lose sight of what their team are up to in reality, which means that they can't offer the right support at the right time – while a lack of oversight can also result in a lack of accountability from the team.

Social Media

What Is a Content Marketer?

A content marketer is a master of many disciplines. But what exactly does that mean? What sort of disciplines and skills are we talking about? And what types of knowledge and experience are necessary to be a content marketer?

I’ll answer those questions and more, but before I do, I’ll first loosely define the term “content marketer.”

Then, I’ll tell you how I uncovered a successful content marketer’s five essential skills.

A working definition of “content marketer”

A content marketer is responsible for the planning, creating, and sharing of valuable content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of content the content marketer shares depends upon what he sells. In other words, he educates people so that they know, like, and trust him enough to do business with him.

If a content marketer is responsible for marketing content, then let’s look at the classic definition of marketing, which involves the four P’s:

*Identify, select, and develop a product
*Set the price
*Select the distribution channel to reach the customer where she is (place)
*Plan and execute a promotion strategy

Using this model, content would be the product. The price could range from an email address (to receive blog updates, join an email newsletter) to payment for access to a content library, ebook, or online training course.

The place would be your blog/website, email list, and social media channels. And promotion would be how you share the product.

A content marketer is someone who understands how to position and promote content so that it reaches the widest audience and converts those people from prospects to subscribers to customers — and keeps them coming back.

Now, the art of content marketing has been with us for a while, but an actual person who is a content marketer is a rather new phenomenon.

To put this list together, I had to draw from my own experience, the wisdom of content marketing authorities, and I even reviewed about a dozen job descriptions for content marketing positions.

Let’s explore five of the common core skills of content marketers.

1. Storytelling

First and foremost, a content marketer has a nose for a good story. She knows that a great marketing story involves a hero, mentor, goal, obstacle, and moral. And she can uncover her own business’s story — and even help other organizations do the same.

This is important because, as C.C. Chapman and Ann Handley write in their book Content Rules, “[Good content] creates value by positioning you as a reliable and valuable source of vendor-agnostic information.”

In other words, stories help an audience get to know you, like you, and, ultimately, trust you — before you sell them anything.

The content marketer studies the storytelling techniques of movie screenwriters, novelists, and short story writers, so that when she writes content (see skill number three below to learn more), she knows how to lift prospects out of their ordinary worlds and invite them to consider a journey that ultimately leads to a transaction.

One storytelling method we are quite fond of around here is the Hero’s Journey. It’s content marketing that educates your audience through the storytelling arc.

2. Strategy

A great content marketer is also deliberate: she understands and communicates the overarching objective of an organization’s content marketing strategy.

In addition, a professional content marketer will set editorial goals. She might:

*Work through these 13 questions
*Create an empathy map
*Put together a customer journey map

The content marketer will understand the need for buyer personas and create them, if necessary.

She will know how to audit a website in order to fix any broken, old, and neglected content.

And let’s not forget that all content marketers have exceptional research skills.

Want to take a closer look at that last point?

As Ann Handley advises in her book, Everybody Writes:

“Think before you ink means finding your key point by asking three questions about every bit of content you’re creating.

*Why am I creating this?
*What is my key take on this subject?
*Why does it matter to the people I am trying to reach?”

I’ll add a fourth: Who are you writing to? Know your audience. That is research at its essence.

While it won’t be her chief skill set, an adept content marketer can also manage a content project through planning to execution to promotion.

People skills, like empathy, listening, storytelling, and negotiating, help her navigate those tasks.

3. Writing content

Often, content marketers will not only direct strategy and storytelling, but they’ll also be responsible for writing content for blogs/websites, ebooks, and infographics.

It pays to be a remarkable web writer — someone with essential traits like an:

*Average understanding of SEO
*Average understanding of usability
*Above average understanding of social media (see skill number four below to learn more)
*Outstanding understanding of copywriting (yes, copywriting is different from content marketing)

This is important because she will more than likely also be the one writing articles for other websites as a guest posting strategy.

A content marketer will master writing magnetic headlines, selecting old articles to update and republish, and reimagining old content in new formats (like flipping an infographic or blog post into a SlideShare).

She will naturally set and maintain the editorial tone and voice.

Since she’s an excellent storyteller, you might find her reading a selection of unorthodox books to help hone her craft and inform her creativity.

4. Social media

Content marketers understand social media.

Some content marketers might even make this their speciality, meeting the rising demand in the number and variety of different platforms. But most content marketers master one or two platforms and have a basic understanding of others.

See, a content marketer likes to tinker with the new shiny social media objects that come out. This allows her to evaluate a new platform’s potential and then translate this potential to the proper client.

She’ll understand which type of content works best on each platform. For example, Twitter is good for promoting new content. Facebook is good for engaging your audience in discussions and surveys. Pinterest is excellent for sharing images.

Of course, a smart content marketer is also aware of the dangers of digital sharecropping — and not afraid to warn clients.

In addition, “don’t waste time delivering content where your audiences don’t actually want you to be,” writes Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach, authors of Content Strategy for the Web.

Know where your audience hangs out. And get their permission to interact.

5. Subscription assets

Content marketers understand the need for building subscription assets, including email subscriber lists and private community memberships.

Not only will they be responsible for writing the content for these subscription models, but they may also need to have a firm understanding of how each one works — or even have the ability to manage, measure, and monitor each model.

For example, a small business might assign the responsibility of writing, editing, uploading, monitoring, and measuring the emails for their email marketing campaigns to just one content marketer.

So, dear content marketer, prioritize wisely. Otherwise, you’ll spread yourself too thin.

Stay one step ahead of your customers’ desires

Let me end with a quote from Catherine the Great, who took sole control of Russia in 1762 after deposing her husband, Emperor Peter III:

“One must govern in such a way that one’s people think they themselves want to do what one commands them to do.”

According to Robert Greene in his book The 48 Laws of Power, “to do this she had to be always a step ahead of their desires and to adapt to their resistance.”

Now, while Catherine the Great is talking about governing citizens, the core concept here is leadership. Thus, I think this advice applies equally well to the content marketer, who is, in a sense, a leader — a leader of content.

As a leader, she must champion the cause of content and then rally resources to create that content — and ultimately, create content that her audience wants.

Are you up to the task?

So, content marketer, keep this in mind: we must be one step ahead of our customers’ desires, and we achieve this by building an audience before creating a product.


And we must adapt to their resistance by becoming masters of empathy, which means understanding their hopes and fears. Stepping into their shoes

What is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is a way to reach consumers directly via electronic mail. Unlike spam, direct email marketing reaches those interested in your business’ area of expertise. The information is sent out more like a laser-guided missile than a bomb: No matter what you’re selling, it is a way to reach thousands of potential customers directly at a relatively low cost when compared to advertising or other forms of media exposure. It brings your business’ message through an attractive mix of graphics, text and links directly to people who may have never heard of your business or considered your products, but are knowledgeable and interested in your business’ area of expertise. Once you understand– what is email marketing?–you can start to implementing these practices to reach more customers.

Email marketing also provides an easy way to track how effective it is. By keeping track of how many hits your website gets after a mass mailing, it’s easy to gauge whether this technique works for your company. It’s also a good way to guide existing customers back to your business. Many companies also provide an “unsubscribe” option for viewers in an effort to focus only on interested potential customers. Also, your company can opt to have a feedback mechanism where potential customers can tell you directly what they liked and disliked about a particular advertising campaign.

Email marketing is a popular way for businesses to reach customers. According to the Direct Marketing Association, research firms spent over $400 million in 2006 on direct email marketing.

Email marketing can be more than just text, rich media formats can provide images and give your product or service texture and flavor. In email marketing, you have the complete attention of the potential customer. Pop-up ads or other internet advertising often get in the way of what the potential customer is looking at: The content. But with direct email marketing the advertising is the content.

The internet is the most popular way for people to gather information about products and services he or she is interested in. Maximizing your business’ capability to appear in internet searches through press release distribution and email marketing are effective tools in reaching your current customer and potential customers with essential information about your products or services. It’s a technique used by businesses worldwide and it can help your enterprise grow and establish a presence on the web.

Email newsletters are an effective means of keeping your client base informed about the products and services your company offers. The email newsletter can be in the form of a press release, or it can include graphics and information about purchasing a product. Some email newsletters feature a coupon to entice customers to come back or take advantage of a special offer. It can be a regular way for your business to stay in contact with customers.
Email Surveys


An email survey is material sent to your clients or potential clients asking for their feedback. It’s a great way to test a new product, service or idea. It’s also a great way to show the customer that you care about their opinions and are willing to work with them.

What is facebook marketing?

What is facebook marketing?

Facebook marketing refers to creating—and actively using—a Facebook page as a communications channel to maintain contact with and attract customers. Facebook actively provides for this, allowing users to create individual profiles or business pages for companies, organizations, or any group attempting to develop a fan base for a product, service, or brand.

1. Who employes Facebook marketing?

Featuring nearly a billion potential customers, every business should be using Facebook. It is at least as essential as having a business web page—and actually much easier to create. Whether you represent a big brand or a small business employing only a handful of people, you can bet that some portion of your customers are already on Facebook. Commonly, Facebook marketing is used by:

Brands. Food, electronics, home goods, restaurants—nearly any kind of brand can be promoted through Facebook, turning passive customers into active fans who follow news of promotions and developments, and who share with their own friends.
Local businesses. Whether a business is family-owned, or a franchise of a larger company, a Facebook page can be used to turn a local customer base into a fan base that more commonly visits your store.
Personalities. Musicians, celebrities, authors, syndicated columnists—anybody who makes their money through being known wants to be known by as many people as they can on Facebook.
Non-profit organizations. Charities, political groups, and public service campaigns can all leverage the natural sharing capabilities of Facebook.

For what kind of customers is Facebook merketing effective?

While originally marketed to college students, Facebook has expanded well beyond that demographic (See also Campus Marketing). More than half of all users are in the 18-34 age range, and slightly

more than half of United States users are women. In the United States, about half of all user profiles are accessed through mobile devices as well as through computers. Due to its considerable amount of users, there is a wide variety of market segments that can be reached on Facebook, and an active fan base for nearly any niche.

A more helpful question about Facebook customers would be: When is Facebook marketing most effective? For brand and company pages, posts made in the morning attract more comments than posts made in the afternoon. Consumers at home may check Facebook at any time during the day (the peak traffic period is around 3:00 in the afternoon). However, working or school-going consumers commonly check Facebook before and after work/school; therefore, only posting during the 9-5 business day misses a lot of opportunities.

How is a Facebook marketing campaingn developed?

Facebook pages are often linked to company web pages elsewhere on the Internet; therefore, it’s often a good idea to use some of the same information in both places, in order to maintain a familiarity. A business page can be searched for as soon as it is up, but unlike a personal profile, you cannot invite friends through it. Business pages do not get “friends,” they get “fans”—and that distinction does make a difference.

To create an initial seed for the fan base, each member of the marketing team should begin by liking the business page on their own personal profiles; all employees, in fact, should be encouraged to join in. When an individual likes a page, Facebook immediately posts (read: advertises) this event to their profile—and this activity can be seen by every one of their friends. “Joe Smith likes [this brand].” The word begins to spread.

To create an initial seed for the fan base, each memEvery Facebook user who likes a page will get to see any content a business posts, and be notified of posts through their news feed. If they are engaged by that content, they may comment on it, or like that item; and “Joe Smith commented on [this brand’s] status update” appears on all of their friends’ news feeds. Additionally, they may share this content, which will post (again, read: advertise) the entire content to their own profiles, and notify their friends to come look. The company's task, then, is to encourage this process as much as possible.

The most important aspect of Facebook marketing is consistency of communication. Creating a Facebook page and then leaving it alone will net a business nothing. To attract fans, a business should regularly post new content in a variety of different formats, so that more people will see and share the page. Content can announce upcoming promotions, spot-light specific products or people, share fun facts, provide incentive codes for discounts on products and services, and anything else that will catch the interest of fans.mith likes [this brand].” The word begins to spread.

Given the way Facebook’s news feed works, the recency of a post is a major factor in organizing what a user sees. The average user has more than 130 friends, and may be a fan of several brands, personalities, and organizations. When he or she logs in, there is no way to instantly see activity from every one of those sources.

The news feed shows them posts from the friends/etc. they interact with most, and which are more recent. Therefore, a company's post is only likely to be visible on their fans’ news feeds for about three hours after they post it. Furthermore, depending upon the time of day they post, it is likely to be seen by entirely different portions of their fan base.

In addition to varied content and formating, posts should invite customers to interact and respond. Businesses should present consistent calls to action, which can be as simple as “watch this,” “like this,” or “share this." Additionally, businesses can invite participation through contests and polls (which are also a way to collect market research). Such low-commitment investments encourage familiarity and affinity in their customer base.

This positive relationship can be further promoted through maintaining two-way communication. In other words, when fans post a comment on content, businesses should respond. How much they respond will depend upon how many fans comment, and how much time they can commit to Facebook marketing; but the more any particular fan interacts with a page, the more likely he or she is to buy.

What is keyword research?

What is keyword research?

It all begins with words typed into a search box.Keyword research is one of the most important, valuable, and high return activities in the search marketing field. Ranking for the right keywords can make or break your website. By researching your market's keyword demand, you can not only learn which terms and phrases to target with SEO, but also learn more about your customers as a whole. It's not always about getting visitors to your site, but about getting the right kind of visitors. The usefulness of this intelligence cannot be overstated; with keyword research you can predict shifts in demand, respond to changing market conditions, and produce the products, services, and content that web searchers are actively seeking. In the history of marketing, there has never been such a low barrier to entry in understanding the motivations of consumers in virtually any niche.

How to Judge the Value of a Keyword

How much is a keyword worth to your website? If you own an online shoe store, do you make more sales from visitors searching for "brown shoes" or "black boots"? The keywords visitors type into search engines are often available to webmasters, and keyword research tools allow us to find this information. However, those tools cannot show us directly how valuable it is to receive traffic from those searches. To understand the value of a keyword, we need to understand our own websites, make some hypotheses, test, and repeat—the classic web marketing formula.

A basic process for assessing a keyword’s value :

Ask yourself...

Is the keyword relevant to your website's content? Will searchers find what they are looking for on your site when they search using these keywords? Will they be happy with what they find? Will this traffic result in financial rewards or other organizational goals? If the answer to all of these questions is a clear "Yes!" then proceed ...

Search for the term/phrase in the major engines

Understanding which websites already rank for your keyword gives you valuable insight into the competition, and also how hard it will be to rank for the given term. Are there search advertisements running along the top and right-hand side of the organic results? Typically, many search ads means a high-value keyword, and multiple search ads above the organic results often means a highly lucrative and directly conversion-prone keyword.

Buy a sample campaign for the keyword at Google AdWords and/or Bing Adcenter

If your website doesn't rank for the keyword, you can nonetheless buy test traffic to see how well it converts. In Google Adwords, choose "exact match" and point the traffic to the relevant page on your website. Track impressions and conversion rate over the course of at least 200-300 clicks.

Using the data you’ve collected, determine the exact value of each keyword

For example, assume your search ad generated 5,000 impressions in one day, of which 100 visitors have come to your site, and three have converted for a total profit (not revenue!) of $300. In this case, a single visitor for that keyword is worth $3 to your business. Those 5,000 impressions in 24 hours could generate a click-through rate of between 18-36% with a #1 ranking (see the Slingshot SEO study for more on potential click-through rates), which would mean 900-1800 visits per day, at $3 each, or between 1 and 2 million dollars per year. No wonder businesses love search marketing!

What is YouTube Marketing?

What is YouTube Marketing?

Youtube has massive traffic and viewers, with over 1,325,000,000 people using Youtube. There are currently 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day – 5 hours of video content every second! Which only validates the fact that video marketing is the latest trend – the numbers said it all.

In fact, Cisco is scrambling to re-engineer its routers to deal with what they call the “video onslaught”. By 2015 at least 80% of all internet traffic was video. More than half of all web traffic after 5PM is ALREADY video traffic — YouTube, Netflix, and other companies serving as prime video platform.

Video is where the web is going. The move toward video has reached critical mass, a tipping point where the momentum will swing and things will all start to speed up.

For online and offline Business owners and internet marketers, YouTube Marketing is an essential strategy to take advantage of the web’s massive shift toward video. That’s why it’s so important to learn and test some strategies and to get help from Digital Organics right now. It will give you a huge leg up on your competition, making your business move forward.

Think about it: As others struggle to establish their presence on YouTube, you could have an established position with a top ranked video. Believe us, it’s hard to knock a popular YouTube video out of the number one spot, but our Online Marketing techniques can get your listed and ranked in Google and bring your website more visitors. You’ll benefit from a rise in your Bing or Google ranking. And it goes without saying that a front page Google rank is as good as gold.

Did you know that the top listing in Google’s organic search results gets an average of 50% of the clicks? The second gets around 25%. The third gets 10%… That means all the rest of the results on page one (paid and organic) fight over the remaining 16%. The paid results only get about 5% of the traffic — it’s a horrible affliction referred to as “ad blindness.”

The Best Marketing Practices on Youtube

It’s important that you reset the way you look at YouTube channels versus YouTube pages as you begin to think about YouTube strategically. You need to think of YouTube as a kind of second website. Your channel is the homepage that anchors your YouTube website. Your videos are the webpages.

Every video you have on your channel strengthens the website, because every video points back to your channel page. The more authoritative your channel/homepage becomes, the easier it becomes for your site to rank.

Here’s a key thing to remember, the rules of good web design apply in YouTube the same way they apply elsewhere.

To build authority, you need to keep your videos relevant to the theme of your channel. Whether your niche is model trains or growing azaleas, you should create a specific channel for each major topic.

In other words: There’s no benefit to throwing a ton of unrelated videos on one channel. That would simply dilute your channel’s

authority.

Video Creation

This is usually the first big challenge that comes up when a first-timer wants to launch a YouTube Channel.

Most people are a bit camera-shy and don’t feel comfortable having their face plastered all over YouTube. Well, here’s the good news – you don’t have to become a YouTube celebrity. In fact, it might actually be better if you don’t appear in your YouTube videos.

But before you even begin the creation process, you have a very important decision to make: What purpose should your video serve?

Here’s a list of goals you might want your video to achieve:

To build your website’s readership – Your video is a great opportunity to encourage viewers to check out your “real” website. This move can often lead to an opt-in or even a sale down the road.

To capture a lead – You can also ask for an opt-in directly in the video. Simply draw attention to a link listed below your video, and explain what visitors will get once they’ve opted in.

In addition, it’s really important that you track all of the leads you get from YouTube – because they’re educated about your product. And an informed lead is worth roughly 10 times the value of an uneducated lead.

To build your website’s brand – While most brands do this almost exclusive, it’s really hard to tell if you’re accomplishing anything, because it’s not measureable in any way.

To make a direct sale – There’s absolutely no reason you shouldn’t present a CALL-TO-ACTION in your video and provide a link that goes directly to an order form. We’re actually shocked to see how few people actually do this!

To sell an affiliate product – Here are the three best affiliate marketing strategies used on YouTube.

1. Open box buy – In these videos, affiliates will simply open a product in a YouTube video, showing viewers exactly what’s inside the packaging. Then, they’ll provide their affiliate link to that product on Amazon or elsewhere.

2. Reviews – YouTube reviews are another great way to relieve buying anxiety and provide an affiliate link.

3. Training videos – Lastly, many affiliates make money by simply training viewers how to use a complicated product, and then sending those educated leads to their affiliate link.

Video Sequence

Timing is everything, and sequencing is the key to making sure your timing is perfect. While we’re on the subject of timing, the ideal length of your YouTube video is right around 3 minutes.

If yours is an in-depth training video, you may have to go considerably longer. Still, we recommend that you keep it under 10 minutes if at all possible.

Also, don’t forget to include a call-to-action every 3 minutes!

Here’s a 7-step sequence you can use in your video marketing strategy:

Intro and branding – In the first step of this sequence, you’ll want to inform viewers about who you are and where else they can connect with your brand – e.g. Facebook or Twitter.

Tell them what’s in it for them – Immediately after your brief intro, you need to explain 2 things: WHY they should watch AND how long the video is going to run (most people don’t like open-ended commitments).

Give them the value – The third step is where you actually deliver whatever information you promised in your title. YouTube videos are great places to explain concepts.

So if your video is titled, “What Is Facebook Timeline?” this is the part where you’d explain all the key ins and outs of Facebook’s latest overhaul.

Recap with a conclusion – Referring back to our old marketing proverb, this is the part where you, tell them what you told them. You may say something like, “Today we learned what Facebook Timeline is and how it works.”

Advise them – Offer some advice based on the information you just gave the viewer. It may be a recommendation, encouragement, or even a warning; you just need to impart some form of helpful advice.

Call to Action (CTA) – You didn’t produce this video just because you had some extra time to kill, did you? Of course not. That’s why you need to memorize this mantra: READ, LEAD, or BUY.

ALL of your videos should have a CTA that asks viewers to become a reader, subscribe to your list, or buy something. It’s amazing to see how many YouTube marketers miss out on this step completely!

Drag at the end – Once you’ve delivered the CTA, leave a little dead time for emphasis, maybe a minute or two. It may just be silence with an arrow pointing down to the link you’re promoting.

You don’t want the video to simply end, because Google will immediate suggest other videos inside the player – and your link will disappear.

What Is Digital Marketing?

Digital marketing is an umbrella term for all of your online marketing efforts. Businesses leverage digital channels such as Google search, social media, email, and their websites to connect with their current and prospective customers.

The reality is, people spend twice as much time online as they used to 12 years ago. And while we say it a lot, the way people shop and buy really has changed, meaning offline marketing isn’t as effective as it used to be.

Marketing has always been about connecting with your audience in the right place and at the right time. Today, that means that you need to meet them where they are already spending time: on the internet.

So What Exactly is Digital Marketing?

From your website itself to your online branding assets -- digital advertising, email marketing, online brochures, and beyond -- there’s a huge spectrum of tactics and assets that fall under the umbrella of digital marketing. And the best digital marketers have a clear picture of how each asset or tactic supports their overarching goals.


Here’s a quick rundown of some of the most common assets and tactics:

Assets

Your website
Blog posts
Ebooks and whitepapers
Infographics
Interactive tools
Social media channels (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)
Earned online coverage (PR, social media, and reviews)
Online brochures and lookbooks

Branding assets (logos, fonts, etc.)

Tactics

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The process of optimizing your website to ‘rank’ higher in search engine results pages, therefore increasing the amount of organic (or free) traffic that your website receives.

Content Marketing

The creation and promotion of content assets for the purpose of generating brand awareness, traffic growth, lead generation, or customers.

Inbound Marketing


Inbound marketing refers to the ‘full-funnel’ approach to attracting, converting, closing, and delighting customers using online content.

Social Media Marketing

The practice of promoting your brand and your content on social media channels to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for your business.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

A method of driving traffic to your website by paying a publisher every time your ad is clicked. One of the most common types of PPC is Google AdWords.

Affiliate Marketing


A type of performance-based advertising where you receive commission for promoting someone else’s products or services on your website.

Native Advertising

Native advertising refers to advertisements that are primarily content-led and featured on a platform alongside other, non-paid content. BuzzFeed sponsored posts are a good example, but many people also consider social media advertising to be ‘native’  -- for example, Facebook advertising and Instagram advertising.

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation refers to the software that exists with the goal of automating marketing actions. Many marketing departments have to automate repetitive tasks such as emails, social media, and other website actions.

Email Marketing


Companies use email marketing as a way of communicating with their audiences. Email is often used to promote content, discounts and events, as well as to direct people towards the business’ website.

Online PR


Online PR is the practice of securing earned online coverage with digital publications, blogs, and other content-based websites. It’s much like traditional PR, but in the online space.

What’s the Difference Between Digital Marketing and Inbound Marketing?

On the surface, the two seem similar: Both occur primarily online, and both focus on creating digital content for people to consume. So what’s the difference?

The term ‘digital marketing’ doesn’t differentiate between push and pull marketing tactics (or what we might now refer to as ‘inbound’ and ‘outbound’ methods). Both can still fall under the umbrella of digital marketing.

Digital outbound tactics aim to put a marketing message directly in front of as many people as possible in the online space -- regardless of whether it’s relevant or welcomed. For example, the garish banner ads you see at the top of many websites try to push a product or promotion onto people who aren’t necessarily ready to receive it.

On the other hand, marketers who employ digital inbound tactics use online content to attract their target customers onto their websites by providing assets that are helpful to them. One of the simplest yet most powerful inbound digital marketing assets is a blog, which allows your website to capitalize on the terms which your ideal customers are searching for.


Ultimately, inbound marketing is a methodology that uses digital marketing assets to attract, convert, close, and delight customers online. Digital marketing, on the other hand, is simply an umbrella term to describe online marketing tactics of any kind, regardless of whether they’re considered inbound or outbound.

What Are the Main Benefits of Digital Marketing?

Unlike most offline marketing efforts, digital marketing allows marketers to see accurate results in real time. If you’ve ever put an advert in a newspaper, you’ll know how difficult it is to estimate how many people actually flipped to that page and paid attention to your ad. There’s no surefire way to know if that ad was responsible for any sales at all.

On the other hand, with digital marketing, you can measure the ROI of pretty much any aspect of your marketing efforts.


Here are some examples:

Website Traffic

With digital marketing, you can see the exact number of people who have viewed your website’s homepage in real time by using digital analytics software like HubSpot. You can also see how many pages they visited, what device they were using, and where they came from, amongst other digital analytics data.

This intelligence helps you to prioritize which marketing channels to spend more or less time on, based on the number of people those channels are driving to your website. For example, if only 10% of your traffic is coming from organic search, you know that you probably need to spend some time on SEO to increase that percentage.


With offline marketing, it’s very difficult to tell how people are interacting with your brand before they have an interaction with a salesperson or make a purchase. With digital marketing, you can identify trends and patterns in people’s behavior before they’ve reached the final stage in their buyer’s journey, meaning you can make more informed decisions about how to attract them to your website right at the top of the marketing funnel.

Content Performance and Lead Generation

Imagine you’ve created a product brochure and posted it through people’s letterboxes -- that brochure is a form of content, albeit offline. The problem is that you have no idea how many people opened your brochure or how many people threw it straight into the trash.

Now imagine you had that brochure on your website instead. You can measure exactly how many people viewed the page where it’s hosted, and you can collect the contact details of those who download it by using forms. Not only can you measure how many people are engaging with your content, but you’re also generating qualified leads when people download it.

Attribution Modeling

An effective digital marketing strategy combined with the right tools and technologies allows you to trace all of your sales back to a customer’s first digital touchpoint with your business. We call this attribution modeling, and it allows you to identify trends in the way people research and buy your product, helping you to make more informed decisions about what parts of your marketing strategy deserve more attention, and what parts of your sales cycle need refining.

Connecting the dots between marketing and sales is hugely important -- according to Aberdeen Group, companies with strong sales and marketing alignment achieve a 20% annual growth rate, compared to a 4% decline in revenue for companies with poor alignment. If you can improve your customer's’ journey through the buying cycle by using digital technologies, then it’s likely to reflect positively on your business’s bottom line.