Digital marketing and e-commerce strategy

You will explore the relationship between digital marketing and branding, and how businesses can leverage both to be successful. You’ll investigate the elements of a digital marketing strategy, including goal setting, channel selection, and content planning. Then you’ll learn about commonly used channels and platforms, like search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), display advertising, social media marketing, and email marketing.

Dedication to study

• Videos: 40 min

• Leitura: 1 h 40 min

• Teste: 1 Teste com avaliação

Learning Objectives

• Identify leading brands and elements that make brands successful.
• Understand the elements and goals of a digital marketing and e-commerce strategy.
• Understand the elements of advertisements, advertising goals, and advertising channels.
• Define the difference between marketing and business goals and how they work together to help a business succeed.

Content

1. How companies use digital marketing to build their brands
2. Create a digital marketing and e-commerce strategy
3. Reach customers online
4. Engage customers through social media and e-mail marketing
5. Review: Digital marketing and e-commerce strategy

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1. How companies use digital marketing to build their brands

Welcome to week 3

Video. Duration: 1 minute

Hi there, glad to have you back. In the last part of the course, we explored what digital marketing and e-commerce can do for brands. You learned how customer journey maps can help companies understand their customers and nurture relationships over time. You also discovered how they use digital marketing funnels to raise awareness, encourage consideration, drive conversions, and foster loyalty. By learning about these concepts, you’re starting to build a strong foundation for the next phase of your career. In this part of the course, you’ll learn that a funnel fits into a larger digital marketing strategy. You’ll explore the relationship between branding and digital marketing and some specific ways companies can build their brands. You’ll also find out what goes into planning a digital marketing strategy and get to know some of the most common channels and tactics they involve, like search engine optimization, social media marketing, and email marketing. Using these channels, businesses can attract customers, drive sales, and maintain relationships over time. Creating a digital marketing strategy is one of the most effective things brands can do to reach customers. So, it’s crucial to understand how they work, even if you’re just starting out in the industry. In fact, one of the first things I did when starting out as a product marketing manager was collaborating on digital marketing strategies for social media. I worked hands-on in developing ways to reach and engage our target audience. Digital marketing strategies are so important because they ensure that a brand’s digital marketing and sales activities all work together toward a common goal. I’m so excited to get started, and I hope you are too.

The value of brands for digital marketing

Video. Duration: 3 minutes

So far, I’ve said a lot about brands, how they find their audiences, how they engage with customers, and how they build loyalty and boost sales. But what exactly is a brand? And how does it relate to digital marketing and e-commerce? In this video, we’ll explore why understanding brands is so important for digital marketing. A brand is how a business or organization is perceived by the public. There are a lot of factors that can influence a brand, like values, culture, design elements, and tone of voice. And companies can do things to build their brands. But a brand isn’t a physical asset, like a product or service. Products and services are the things that a business sells, like clothing, software, or entertainment. A brand is more like a personality or a reputation. It’s the sum of who you are and what people think about you and your products. So why is it important to know about brands and their value? Because a company’s brand guides all of their marketing and sales efforts. Before they can even start thinking about ads or promotion, companies need to understand their mission, values, and unique offerings. Marketing efforts can, and should, change with the times. But a brand identity is permanent. Think of it this way. If a brand is who you are, marketing is how you get people’s attention. So a company can pour tons of resources into a digital marketing strategy, but without a strong brand identity, no one’s going to remember who they are. Likewise, they can have great values and amazing products, but they still need marketing to build brand recognition and drive sales. A brand is the foundation of a successful digital marketing strategy, but digital marketing can also affect public perception of your brand. You can’t have one without the other. A strong brand can be incredibly valuable, and digital marketing can make it even stronger. For example, digital marketing campaigns can help increase value through brand equity. What is brand equity? It’s the value consumers attribute to one brand’s offering when compared with similar products from another brand. When a brand has positive equity, it means consumers feel good about the brand and might pay more for it than an identical product from another company. For example, let’s say we have two bottles of sunscreen with identical ingredients— one from a known and trusted brand, and the other from a lesser known brand. Brand equity is how much more customers are willing to pay for the brand they know and trust than the other one, even though they have the same ingredients. The trust people have in the familiar brand adds to its overall value. Digital marketing is one of the ways businesses build that trust. When they run an ad campaign, those ads don’t just get consumers to take notice. They can also help shape public perception of the brand. Digital marketing can communicate a brand’s values, personality, and perspective, which can influence how people think of them. All right, time to review. A brand is more than just another word for a business. It’s how customers think and feel about a company and its products. It’s also the foundation for successful marketing and sales strategies. Digital marketing, in turn, can help build brand equity, recognition, and trust. Moving forward, we will begin to explore how brands create digital marketing strategies that support their larger goals.

Brand safety

Reading. Duration: 20 minutes

Brand safety is a major priority for digital marketing teams. Ensuring a brand is in good standing with consumers is important to the heart and the mission of a brand. In this reading, you’ll learn what brand safety means, and how companies execute brand safety.

What is brand safety?

Brand safety refers to the practice of keeping a brand’s reputation safe when they advertise online. This might mean ensuring the brand’s ads aren’t placed next to or on inappropriate or inaccurate content and making sure no copyrighted materials are used without permission.

If you place ads within the display network, and those ads appear on a website that is spreading misinformation, your brand may be damaged because you are automatically associated with brands that are pushing inaccurate information. For example, if your brand values inclusivity, you wouldn’t want your brand’s ads to appear on a site that holds hateful or controversial views.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) has designated 13 topics that brands should avoid associating themselves with to maintain brand safety. Those are: military conflict, obscenity, drugs, tobacco, adult content, arms, crime, death/injury, online piracy, hate speech, terrorism, spam, and fake news. In addition to those, your brand might want to stay away from other topics. For instance, if your brand sells baby toys, you probably don’t want to appear on gambling sites.

So, as a digital marketer, how do you make sure you’re avoiding being associated with topics you would prefer your brand not be associated with?

Ensuring brand safety

As a digital marketer, there are steps you can take to ensure your brand is maintaining brand safety. First, you’ll want to define what is considered to be “unsafe” for your brand. Consider what topics might be harmful to your brand. Then, make sure you and your team understand that scale isn’t everything. Ending up on every single website on the internet isn’t worth the risk and harm done to your brand safety. Next, use trusted technology. When you’re submitting ads to display networks or social media, make sure you’re using brand safety tools to maintain brand safety. For instance, with the Google Display Network, you can opt-out of specific sites that you want to stay away from.

Some strategies marketers take to maintain brand safety are:

• Buy ad space directly from reputable publishers. This will ensure your ads aren’t placed where you don’t want them.

Note: doing this may mean you miss out on potential sales since you’re limiting yourself to certain customers.

• Use image recognition. This will identify images that deem content unsafe for your brand.

• Select keywords to avoid. Publishers will allow you to choose keywords to avoid, so you can include those when you submit your content.

• Apply geotargeting. This means making sure you know which regions your ads are running in, which helps you make sure you are remaining sensitive and relevant to all your customers.

Key takeaways

Because it’s so integral to your brand’s success, brand safety is a topic that takes a lot of careful consideration. Make sure you know what types of topics and content you don’t want your brand associated with, and then take action. After you’ve carefully considered how to maintain brand safety, publishers and tools will help you take your brand safety measures to the next level.

Resources for more information

The following resources can help you maintain brand safety if you’re using them to publish your ads:

• Facebook brand safety controls

• Google Display & Video 360 help: Brand safety targeting

Analyze a successful brand

Discussion Prompt. Duration: 10 minutes

I’ve chosen Apple Inc. as a brand to analyze for its remarkable success in the digital era. I chose Apple because it has a perfect mix of new ideas, brand strength, and loyal customers. Apple’s brand equity is positive due to several key factors. , Apple delivers products known for their quality, cutting-edge technology, and aesthetic appeal. This unwavering commitment to excellence fosters trust and confidence among consumers.

Apple’s value system centers around simplicity, design, and a seamless user experience. The brand wants everyone to be able to use their products and think they look nice. Their dedication to a simple and stylish design makes them unique in the tech industry.

Apple is successful because it can predict what consumers want and shape market trends. Apple is famous for being innovative, reliable, and having high status. This is because they release new products, advertise them, and connect everything together. Apple’s smart approach has made loyal customers, and that’s why they’ve been successful.

Test your knowledge: The value of brands for digital marketing

Practice Quiz.5 questions | Grade: 100%

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2. Create a digital marketing and e-commerce strategy

The elements of a digital marketing strategy

Video. Duration: 4 minutes

Now that you understand the relationship between branding and marketing, it’s time to get deeper into how brands use digital marketing strategies to reach business goals. When you’re just starting out in digital marketing or e commerce, you probably won’t be responsible for creating a digital marketing strategy unless you’re working at a small company, setting a strategy is usually a broad collaborative effort. But, you’ll definitely help execute the strategy even if it’s set by others. That’s why it’s important for you to understand what a digital marketing strategy is and what goes into building one. Simply put, a digital marketing strategy is a plan for achieving specific goals through online channels to support and advance business objectives. So now, let’s discuss what actually goes into creating a digital marketing strategy. Before you can start planning things like ad campaigns or social media outreach, you need to research your audience and set meaningful goals. These steps will tell you who you’re trying to reach and what you want to accomplish. You’ll learn more about how to do these things later in the program. All you need to know right now is that they’re essential to the success of any digital marketing strategy. Once you’ve completed your research and set your goals, it’s time to work out a strategy. That means you’re using what you’ve learned to guide customers through each stage of the digital marketing funnel with the most effective tactics and media mix. Media Mix refers to the combination of digital channels used to reach your goals and how you divide your budget among them. These are all the activities that go into your marketing funnel. To select your media mix you’ll first review your existing media content to find out if there are any gaps after that, you can decide which channels to focus on what content and campaigns to run on those channels and how to allocate your budget. Let’s try an example. Imagine you’re part of a team that’s working with a high end jewelry retailer who wants to drive a 30% increase in revenue within three years. You know that jewelry customers can take a long time to go from awareness to purchase. So you pick marketing goals that support movement through the funnel, bringing in new customers and nurturing existing leads more effectively. These are upper and middle funnel concerns that should boost sales over time. That means you’ll need to concentrate on raising awareness and encouraging consideration to achieve them. Here’s a simplified version of a digital marketing strategy for these goals. To increase awareness and draw in new customers your team puts 40% of its budget towards upper funnel efforts. From your research you know that video ads are the most effective way for raising awareness among your target audience. Another 40% of your budget goes to driving leads in the middle of the funnel, use this money to engage customers across different channels like social media and a paid ad campaign to reach customers who are actively researching jewelry purchases. The last 20% is for serving product focused ads to website visitors and email marketing. The goal of the email campaign is to turn those leads you nurtured in the upper funnel into paying customers. Each part of your funnel is important, but most of your budget goes to the top and middle sections to help you reach new customers and nurture leads. Once you have a strategy in place, you can start creating the content you’ll need to run your campaigns. That includes everything from email templates to video animations, ad copy, and banner images. You’ll learn more about creating all that content later in the program. Lastly, you’ll need a plan to measure and analyze the results of your efforts so you know how you can improve in the future. That one is really important and we’ll explore some ways to do that later in this course and there you have it. There’s a lot that goes into creating a digital marketing strategy. But remember this is a team effort. You may only be responsible for things like aligning budgets to marketing activities or analyzing the results of a campaign. Let’s recap. To plan an effective digital marketing strategy: You first need to research your audience and set goals that support the business overall. Next, you review your existing media for gaps, select marketing channels and plan the content you’ll use to reach your goals. Finally, you’ll create a plan to measure and analyze results. And if all this seems like a lot, don’t worry, we’ll break everything down for you over the course of this program. Coming up, we’ll learn more about setting effective goals for your marketing strategy.

Find your audience and understand your customers

Reading. Duration: 10 minutes

In this reading, you will learn about creating customer personas to reach your intended audience. By analyzing certain customer data points, you will be able to determine the type of content your audience engages with.

Why is it important to know your audience?

When you identify your audience, you can create digital marketing campaigns that interest and engage them. This can lead to brand growth and increased awareness.

Knowing your audience involves learning details about their lives, such as their geographic location, interests, online activities, and preferences. It’s important to understand what content your audience likes and how they like to consume it. For example, do they enjoy receiving humorous content via email? Maybe they like to be introduced to new products via social media ads. Perhaps they are more likely to engage with an ad if they see it while they’re on a website they frequently visit. There is a lot to consider when you are thinking about your audience, but start by learning who they are.

Who is your audience?

Understanding customer personas

Customer personas represent a group of similar people in a desirable audience. They are profiles of your likely customers, based on data and research. Creating customer personas can help a company figure out how to reach people at the right time and with the right message, offer, or products. Personas allow you to focus your time and energy on prospective leads that may actually turn into customers, rather than random people who may not have any interest in your company at all.

There are a few ways to create customer personas. Marketing automation tools like HubSpot, Xtensio, and Up Close & Persona have persona generators built in. However, if you prefer to create your own, you will need to conduct some research.

Asking the right questions

Using surveys, interviews, and/or data that already exists in your automation tools, you can find the information needed to create your personas. That information will most likely be demographics like gender, age, geographical location, income, education, and job type.

If you collect this information through surveys or interviews, it’s important you ask questions based on your business’ goals. Sometimes, it’s as simple as finding out your customers’ personality traits, hobbies, and which social media platforms they use to engage with brands.

Note: Your customer personas may not look exactly like this. They may be more or less detailed or include different information. It’s all about what is right for your company. You will get more in-depth instructions on how to create customer personas in a later reading.

Key takeaways

Customer personas represent a group of similar people in a desirable audience. They:

• help a company figure out how to reach people at the right time and with the right message, offer, or products

• allow you to focus your time and energy on prospective leads that may actually turn into customers

• can be created manually or using automated tools

Define your marketing goals

Video. Duration: 4 minutes

So far, we’ve covered the basic elements of digital marketing strategy, the importance of customer research, and what goes into customer personas. Now, let’s think about the next part of the process: setting goals for a digital marketing strategy.

We all set goals, whether in our professional or personal lives, but we’re more likely to reach our goals if we’re clear about why they matter and what they involve. That’s as true at all levels of a business as it is for individuals. Every company, department, team, and employee benefits from setting clear and relevant goals to guide their work.

You already know that digital marketing goals should support a business’s larger goals. But what’s the difference between a marketing goal and a business goal? And how do you make sure they’re aligned?

Let’s start with business goals. Business goals are desired aims, achievements, or outcomes for a business. They are typically big, long-term, and have the potential to affect an entire company. They include things like increasing profits, gaining new customers, improving customer service, raising productivity, or launching new products or services.

Marketing goals tend to be smaller, more targeted, and—you guessed it— related to marketing activities. They’re specific objectives in a marketing plan or strategy that should support a business’s larger aims. Some common marketing goals include raising brand awareness, increasing web traffic, generating new leads, and driving sales or conversions.

So how do you connect a marketing goal like raised brand awareness to a business goal like increased profits? For starters, both your business goals and your marketing goals need to be specific and measurable. So, for example, let’s say there’s a company that makes photo editing software, and they want to expand their customer base. A well-defined version of this business goal could be something like: Grow our number of active customers by 25% over the next two years by adding five frequently-requested features to our software. That’s way more specific, right? It tells you what they’re going to do, how they plan to do it, and when they want to get it done. You’ll learn more about setting well-defined goals later in this course.

For now, let’s consider this goal from a marketing perspective. What kinds of digital marketing goals could help this company expand its active user base? How about increasing website traffic? After all, people need to visit the website to sign up for an account, but more website traffic doesn’t necessarily equal more new users. It would depend on how many of those visitors are new versus existing customers and what they’re doing once they get to the site. So increasing website traffic might work, but maybe there’s a better option.

What about generating new leads? Since a lead is someone who is already interested in a company, lead-generation is more likely to result in more signups than general website traffic. A well-defined version of that goal could be: We will increase our lead generation by 40% in the next year by running upper-funnel ads that highlight our new features and increasing our mid-funnel budget by 20%. By raising awareness of the new features and increasing the budget for activities that create new leads, the marketing goal supports the business goal of growing its user base. That’s one example of how a marketing goal can support a business goal, but there are a lot more. In fact, you can think of business goals like the top part of a pyramid— there are a lot of different goals below that support them. So a digital marketing strategy can even have multiple goals that build towards that top business objective. And you may also have goals for each part of your strategy. For example, you can set goals specifically for your social media or email marketing efforts. When all these smaller goals are aligned to the big things that a business wants to achieve, they are much more likely to reach those aims.

Let’s recap: Well-defined goals are important at all levels of a business. Business goals are long-term aims that can impact a company at all levels. Marketing goals are specific to marketing efforts, but should always contribute to business-wide aims. In the next lesson, we’ll explore some of the tactics and channels brands can use to advance their marketing and business goals. Meet you there!

The difference between business and marketing goals

Practice Quiz.4 questions | Grade: 100%

Quiz

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Case study: How MERSEA structures its marketing funnel

Reading. Duration: 20 minutes

Previously, you learned about the different stages of the marketing funnel. In this case study, you’ll learn the marketing strategies that the Lenexa, Kansas based e-commerce company, MERSEA , uses to attract potential customers, turn them into paying customers, and eventually repeat customers. This process represents MERSEA’s approach to the marketing funnel.

There is no standard approach to building a marketing funnel. The various marketing funnel models often share similar strategies and structures, but vary based on the needs of the business.

Company background

In 2013, Lina Dickinson and Melanie Bolin founded MERSEA, a lifestyle brand located in Lenexa, Kansas, offering clothing, accessories, and home fragrances. MERSEA’s products are rooted in the joy of travel and the tranquility of seaside escapes. Initially, Lina and Melanie focused on selling through retail partners, placing MERSEA in over 1,200 stores.

The challenge

1. Read the example goals below and decide if they are business goals or marketing goals. Then explain your reasoning. As a marketing and e-commerce professional it’s important to understand the difference between business goals and marketing goals. To recap: Business goals are desired aims, achievements, or outcomes for a business. They are typically big, long-term, and have the potential to affect the entire company. Marketing goals tend to be smaller, more targeted, and related to marketing activities. They are specific objectives in a marketing plan or strategy that should support a business’s larger aims.

2. Consider the following goal made by the software company: “Grow our number of active customers by 15% over the next year by adding three frequently requested features to our software”. Is this a business goal or a marketing goal? Explain your reasoning in 2-3s sentences.

Answer

The goal, “Grow our number of active customers by 15% over the next year by adding three frequently requested features to our software,” is a business goal. This is because it’s a high-level, long-term aim that directly impacts the entire company by focusing on customer growth and product improvement, rather than specific marketing tactics or activities.

3. Now consider the following goal made by a software company: “Increase our lead generation by 35% in the next year by running upper-funnel ads that highlight our new features and increase our mid-funnel budget by 20%“. Is this a business goal or a marketing goal? Explain your reasoning in 2-3 sentences.

Answer

The goal, “Increase our lead generation by 35% in the next year by running upper-funnel ads that highlight our new features and increase our mid-funnel budget by 20%,” is a marketing goal. This is because it’s a specific objective tied to marketing activities, namely running ads and allocating budget, with the aim of generating more leads. While it contributes to the broader business goal of growth, it focuses on a marketing strategy rather than a high-level business outcome.

4. Please consider the following goal made by a software company: ” Increase our website traffic by 30% this year by using paid search and social media advertising”. Is this a business goal or a marketing goal? Explain your reasoning in 2-3 sentences.

Answer

The goal, “Increase our website traffic by 30% this year by using paid search and social media advertising,” is a marketing goal. It specifies a measurable target for website traffic growth and outlines the marketing tactics to achieve it—paid search and social media advertising. While this goal ultimately supports the business by driving more traffic, it is a marketing-specific objective within the broader marketing strategy.

How to set SMART goals

Reading. Duration: 10 minutes

Throughout this program, you will learn about SMART goals. In this reading, you will gain a very broad understanding of what SMART goals are. Later in the course, you will build on that understanding with more in-depth readings, videos, and activities.

What are SMART goals?

Before you create marketing campaigns, you need to evaluate what your company’s goals are. You may want to boost brand awareness, increase customer satisfaction, or increase conversions, but those hopes aren’t necessarily your goals yet. For them to be goals, they need some additional details and specifications.

When you set your goals, you’ll want to refer to the acronym SMART. SMART stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Ensuring your goals meet this criteria will help keep you organized, give you a sense of direction as you move through your campaigns, and provide you with a time frame to work within.

SMART considerations

To make sure your goals are SMART, consider the following factors:

• Specific: What do you want to accomplish?

• Measurable: What are the success metrics that will determine whether the objective has been met?

• Attainable: Is this a realistic goal that you think you can meet?

• Relevant: Is this specific marketing goal aligned with your company’s overall objectives?

• Time-bound: What is a realistic time frame that this goal can be met within?

Example scenario

You’re a digital marketer for a photography and photo sharing company. Users can upload their photos onto your website and, using your design templates, make scrapbooks and other items to commemorate events, trips, loved ones, and more. You are setting new SMART goals in preparation for the upcoming financial quarter.

You know the company wants to focus on increasing scrapbook sales for this next quarter, so you start thinking about goals. You decide to set a SMART goal to give you something to compare your progress against. You come up with:

We aim to increase scrapbook sales by 15% by the end of the next quarter through a robust social media campaign where we focus heavily on influencer marketing.

This goal fits all of the SMART goal criteria, which means you’ll be able to easily track your progress and make adjustments as the social media campaign progresses.

Key takeaways

This is just the beginning of your journey in learning more about setting SMART goals. As you move along in the course, you’ll gain some additional context for your SMART goals. For now, remember that SMART goals should always be: specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.

Test your knowledge: Create a digital marketing and e-commerce strategy

Practice Quiz. 5 questions | Grade: 100%

3. Reach customers online

Paid, owned, and earned media

Video. Duration: 4 minutes

In the last lesson, you learned all about creating a digital marketing strategy. We covered customer and competitor research, setting marketing goals to align with business goals, and what to consider when selecting digital channels. Let’s expand on that last point. There are a lot of digital channels to pick from when planning strategies and campaigns—from email to social media to video and beyond. But all those channels fit into three main categories of digital media— paid, owned, and earned— and a strong digital strategy takes advantage of all of them. You’ll find out more about each one as you move through the program, but let’s start with a quick overview. First, paid media is exactly that— it’s any form of digital promotion a brand pays to put online. Some examples of paid media include banner ads, video ads, social media ads, shopping ads, and pop ups. You’ll learn more about some of these types of paid ads later in the course. The big advantage of paid ads is that they produce results quickly. The downside is that those results go away instantly when you stop paying for them— and paying for ads can get expensive over time. That’s why paid media is just one piece of a larger digital strategy. Paid ads can lead directly to purchases, but they also help drive traffic to a business’s owned and earned media channels, as well. Now, let’s move on to the second type: owned media. Owned media refers to all the digital content a brand fully controls. Owned media content can be persuasive, but unlike paid media ads, it doesn’t advertise or sell products directly. Instead, it provides value by giving customers what they need in order to make informed decisions. Think of it this way: If paid ads bring consumers to a company’s website, owned content is what convinces them to stay. Owned media includes things like website content, blogs, eBooks, and social media content. Documents like whitepapers and case studies can also inspire confidence by explaining why brands make certain decisions and conveying the results through real-world examples. The thing about owned media is that it can’t do much on its own. No matter how great a company’s website or case studies are, they can’t educate customers who don’t know they exist. Businesses can bring customers to their own content through paid ads and ranking highly on search engine results pages. We’ll break down some ways to improve search rankings in a bit. Right now, let’s move on to the last type of digital media: earned. Earned media is any positive digital exposure generated through personal or public recommendations. Companies don’t create or own earned media, and they can’t pay for it directly. It’s generated by customers in response to things like product quality and customer service, in addition to successful marketing campaigns. So, if a brand starts a formal partnership with an influencer, that’s paid advertising. But if a customer likes a product so much that they tell their friends about it for free, that’s earned media. Basically, it’s the reputation a brand builds for being great at what they do. Earned media can take the form of social media mentions, blog posts, written or video reviews, or positive press coverage, like product profiles or best-of lists.

Customer-generated content can help businesses sell products, but it does way more than that. It also helps brands reach new markets and build public trust. Before we move on, let’s review: To be successful online, brands use a combination of paid, owned, and earned media. Paid media is advertising you pay for, like banner or video ads. Owned media is content a brand creates and controls, like website content, blogs, or case studies. Earned media is positive, customer- generated content that raises awareness and enhances a brand’s reputation. Now that you know about the different types of digital media, you’re ready to learn more about the specific tactics and channels brands used to reach customers.

Attract customers with search engine optimization

Video. Duration: 4 minutes

Have you ever wondered how a search engine decides which results go at the top of the page and which go at the bottom? What about the results that end up on page 2, 20, or 200? Search engines work by exploring and indexing the content of billions of webpages across the internet. When you search for a term, the search engine uses an algorithm to rank the results by relevance and quality. Those rankings matter because search engines are the most common method people use to find products and services online. And the internet is a crowded place. Let’s try an experiment. Say that I want to buy a plant for my home office, maybe a small cactus. If I search the web for the phrase “potted cactus for sale,” I get over 26 million results. That’s more than two million pages of links. And just how many of those results do you think I’m going to click on before I find the cactus I want? It’s a lot less than 26 million. So ranking in search results is essential for reaching customers. But how do you make sure you’re producing content that a search engine recognizes as relevant and high quality? The answer is a process called search engine optimization, or SEO, for short. SEO is a set of practices designed to increase the quantity and quality of traffic to a website. At the most basic level, it involves optimizing content around commonly-used search terms, also called keywords, to improve a website’s position in search engine results pages. Search engine results pages, or SERPs, are the pages of results produced when someone performs a search. Typically, the higher a site ranks in these search listings, the more likely customers are to click on it. And the more visitors you have, the more chances you have to drive sales, establish authority, and build your brand. SEO and paid ads each have advantages and disadvantages. You’ve already learned that ads produce results quick, but those results disappear when you stop paying for them. With SEO, it’s the reverse. The exposure you get from good SEO can last much longer than paid ads. But rising in the search rankings can take time and effort, which is why SEO and paid ads are often used together. SEO has been around since the early days of the internet, and it’s evolved a lot in that time. These days, it involves a lot of different activities. Let’s go over a few SEO basics now: keyword research, quality content, and website structure. First, keyword research is the process of identifying common search terms and phrases consumers use to find products or services online. For example, some common keywords for a company that sells musical instruments might include “guitar,” “drum set,” or “grand piano for sale.” Part of SEO is finding the keywords that are most relevant for your audience and products and making sure they’re part of your content. But you can’t just pack your website full of keywords and expect good results. You also need quality content that’s useful and usable for your customers. That means not only writing great content but keeping it up to date. You want website content to match your business’s current offerings and reflect keyword trends. Quality content is a win-win because it’s helpful for customers and tends to rank better in SERPs. Your content should also be easy to find, so organizing the site in a user- friendly way is important too. A well-structured website makes it easier for both search engines and customers to navigate your content. Time to recap: SEO is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic to a website from search engines. Businesses can improve their search engine results, page rankings, or SERPs in a few different ways, including keyword research, creating useful, usable content, and a clear website structure. Of course, there’s a lot more to good SEO than we’ve covered here. In the next part of the course, you’ll find out more about SEO, as well as some paid advertising strategies.

Reach customers with search engine marketing

Video. Duration: 4 minutes

So far in this lesson you’ve learned about three types of digital media: paid, owned, and earned. You also discovered how brands use SEO to rank in search engine results pages and increase traffic to their own content. Now we’re going to explore paid advertising in a little more depth. You’ll recall that paid advertising is any form of digital promotion a brand pays to put online. A big part of that promotion is Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. SEM is the process of generating traffic to a website through paid ads that appear on search engine results pages. SEM ads are the ones that appear above or below the regular search listings in a SERP. A quick note on terminology here. Some companies think of SEM as a broad umbrella that includes both paid ads in search engines and SEO. We’re going to simplify things and say that SEO has to do with the ranking of search listings within SERPs, while SEM happens through paid ads. SEM starts out the same way that SEO does: with keyword research. So, if your company sells vitamins you might want to serve an ad to customers who search for the phrase “vitamin C.” Once you have your keywords you enter an ad auction to bid on them. An ad auction is how a search engine determines which ads to display, and the order they’re shown, When someone performs a search. When you bid on a keyword, you decide how much you’re willing to pay when someone searches for a term and clicks your ad. This is known as pay-per-click, or PPC, because you pay only when someone clicks on your ad. The amount you pay when someone clicks on a PPC ad is called the cost-per-click, or CPC. Now just like in every other auction it’s possible to lose your bid. That means your ad won’t come up every time someone searches for your keyword. Search engines decide which ads to display based on factors like quality and maximum bid amount. And you’ll learn more about them later on in the program. SEM is a great way to reach specific customers quickly, but it has other advantages too. When a customer finds a website through search listings, they’ll usually end up on that website’s homepage. But paid ads give you control over where those visitors land on your site, whether that’s a sign up form or a specific product page. But one of the biggest benefits of paid ads is that they create opportunities for remarketing. Remarketing allows you to identify previous customers or visitors to your website and serve them paid ads on other sites and social media platforms. Have you ever browsed the website for a pair of jeans and then noticed those same jeans popping up on other sites? That’s remarketing. It’s a way of recapturing the attention of people who are already interested in your brand. And that’s really important because most website visitors leave before completing an action, like making a purchase. Maybe they want to consider their options or do more research before buying. Remarketing encourages those people to come back by reminding them why they clicked on your ad in the first place. Website visitors and previous customers are also the segment of your audience that’s most likely to convert. So those extra reminders can have a big impact. You’ll be able to explore all of these concepts more later in the program. Right now, it’s time to review. SEM is a way for brands to generate traffic to their websites by placing paid ads on search engine results pages. It uses a model called pay-per-click advertising, which charges you when someone clicks on your ad. Paid ads have some big advantages like reaching customers quickly, controlling where visitors land on your site, and remarketing. Next up, you’ll learn about some other types of paid advertising for attracting and converting customers.

Display advertising

Reading. Duration: 10 minutes

The purpose of this reading is to introduce you to a common type of advertising: display advertising. Display advertising is used by millions of companies around the world because of its effectiveness.

What is display advertising?

Display ads are visual ad formats placed on webpages or apps. Display ads are images, text, videos, or GIFs that are submitted to display networks and then placed in front of your ideal audience to promote your brand, service, or product.

A display network is a group of websites, videos, and apps where your ads can appear. Some display networks may include up to two million websites. Display networks allow marketers to target ads to particular audiences, contexts, locations, and more. Some examples of display networks are the Google Display Network, Taboola, and Criteo. However, there are many options, and we encourage you to research as many as you can in order to determine which is best for your company.

There are also ad exchanges, digital marketplaces where buyers and sellers come together and enter into a real-time bidding process to buy and sell ad space. Ad exchanges pull ad inventory from multiple publishers and display networks. Agencies and advertisers typically bid on impressions from ad exchanges via a tool called a demand-side platform. Xandr, OpenX, Magnite, Pubmatic, and Google Ad Manager are examples of ad exchanges.

Types of display ads

• Image ads are static JPG, PNG, or animated GIF files that appear on websites. Reaching customers through visuals is an effective approach because users can see the usefulness of your product.

• Text ads are general ads that appear on websites as text only. These aren’t the most dynamic ads, since they are text only.

• Responsive ads automatically adjust their size and format to fit the available space around them. The flexibility and capability of responsive ads makes them very popular. They can also appear as native ads, which means they are designed and formatted to look like a native piece of the website’s content.

• App promotion ads are ads that drive app downloads and engagement from users by getting them to download apps. App promotion ads are great because when clicked, they send users straight to their app store to easily get whatever app your company wants them to download. These ads will only appear on devices compatible with your content.

How do display ads fit into the marketing funnel?

As you create digital marketing campaigns and aim to introduce your company and engage with potential customers, you may opt into using display ads to ensure an effective and successful marketing strategy. At Google, display ads are employed during the awareness and consideration buckets of the funnel because of the potential to drive awareness and increase the customer base. However, we also enlist display ads further down the funnel to remarket. Remarketing delivers paid ads to customers who have visited your website or social media profile. This helps increase conversions and keep loyal customers.

Test your knowledge: Reach customers online

Practice Quiz. 6 questions | Grade: 100%

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4 . Engage customers through social media and e-mail marketing

Introduction to social media and email marketing

Video. Duration: 1 minute

Now that you’ve learned about SEO, SEM, and display ads, it’s time to introduce two more channels businesses can use to reach their digital marketing goals: social media marketing and email marketing. Social and email each have different strengths, which makes them much more effective together than separately. So before we discuss each channel on its own, let’s go over what they do well and how they can work together to raise awareness and maintain customer relationships over time. Brands can do a lot on social media. Because so many people are on social media, it’s one of the most effective channels for finding new audiences. With social media accounts, companies can engage with customers, run ads, and even generate earned media through viral content. But social media also has one big drawback: businesses can control what they post to their accounts, but they can’t control the platforms themselves. So if a particular platform shuts down or changes their algorithm, it can affect a brand’s ability to reach their followers overnight. The good news is that social media can help brands grow their email lists which they own completely. Email marketing doesn’t have the reach of social media, but it also doesn’t need to. That’s because email marketing is about nurturing relationships with people who are already interested in a brand. And because businesses control their email lists, they can nurture those relationships over time. Email marketing is also incredibly cost effective. On average, it brings in more than $40 for every dollar spent. And there you have it. Together, email and social media marketing helps brands increase their reach, raise awareness, and connect with customers online. You’ll learn more about both of these channels and how they work together in just a bit. Meet you there.

Social media marketing basics

Video. Duration: 5 minutes

Throughout this course, we’ve stressed how important it is to find and connect with target audiences where they are online. One of the best places to do that is on social media. Well over half the people in the entire world are on social media, and that number is only growing. Maybe one audience likes Twitter more than Tiktok or another prefers Facebook to Instagram. But no matter what a business sells, chances are good that social media is a key part of their marketing strategy. Social media marketing is the practice of creating and publishing content for social media platforms in order to drive engagement and promote a brand or product. Creating social media content might seem simple. After all, people post interesting, funny, or touching content to their personal accounts every day. But there’s a lot more to social media marketing than writing clever or informative posts. Social media marketing involves a lot of the same concerns as a company’s overall digital marketing strategy. Like increasing engagement, expanding their reach, and building their brand. It just that all of those activities happen on social media platforms. Now, let’s explore some of the ways businesses use social media to amplify their efforts and reach their digital marketing goals. We can break down these activities into five categories, known as the five pillars of social media marketing. These pillars include: strategy, planning and publishing, listening and engagement, analytics and reporting, and paid social media. Let’s start with strategy. Before planning your content or campaign, you need to know who your audience is, and which social platforms they use. If your audience is mostly interested in content about home decorating, you might not post on a platform that caters to business and networking. Posting the right content in the right places can save both time and money. To know what types of content to create, you’ll also need to understand your goals. For example, if you want to build community around your brand, you might focus on interactive content like polls or questions and answer sessions. But if your goal is to promote a new product, running a contest or giveaway might get better results. Understanding your audience and having clear goals will help you create effective, relevant content. Once you’ve set your strategy and content, you’ll need to consider planning and publishing. That means deciding when to post content and how often to post content. The goal is to engage followers enough so that they remember you, but not so often that you overwhelm them. Next up is social listening and engagement. Once your content is out in the world, you can track and analyze social conversations and mentions related to your brand. This could mean monitoring direct responses to a brand’s social content or earned media, like posts about its products, which are great ways to find out how customers feel about your business. The insights you gain can help you decide how to respond to and engage with customers on social platforms. Those responses are important because they can affect your brand image and customer relationships. Think of social listening and engagement like a conversation. First, a business publishes content. Then they listen to how their audience responds. By paying attention to what their audience says, they can determine the best way to reply. For example, if someone posts about how helpful they find a particular tool, like a habit tracking app, the brand could respond with thanks and encouragement. But if they post that the app isn’t working correctly, they could share troubleshooting tips instead. Next, you’ll use analytics and reporting to find out how your content or campaigns are performing and communicate results to others. Social media analytics tools can track and measure things like comments, shares, follows, or clicks. They can tell you how many people are using a hashtag or the number of positive mentions over time. Businesses can use these insights to respond to trends, or guide future strategies. Finally, there’s paid social media. Paid social media ads have a lot of the same benefits as paid ads for other channels. It can expand a brand’s reach beyond its existing customer base and allow them to remarket products. But advertising on social media has some other advantages, too. For one thing, social platforms provide more detailed user information than search engines. That means brands serve ads to highly specific customer groups. Finally, paid social media is a good way for brands to grow their email lists. By linking ads to email sign-up forms, businesses can contact their followers directly and send them special offers. Like any digital marketing strategy, social media marketing involves getting to know your audience, finding them online, and setting meaningful goals. Only then can you plan, create, and publish content. Next, social listening and measurement can tell you how to engage with your audience effectively and refine your strategy. Lastly, with paid social ads, you can expand your reach, address specific customers, and grow your email lists. Coming up, you’ll learn more about social media marketing and how to use email to maintain customer relationships.

Choose the right platforms for your target audience

Reading. Duration: 20 minutes

Even if you have used social media platforms personally, it’s important to understand that using them as a digital marketer is very different. This reading will introduce how to set and achieve goals using specific social media tools and platforms.

Goal 1: Build connections with your audience

One goal of brands is to build relationships with their audience. If your brand or business has chosen to prioritize this as a goal or objective, you will want to consider which social media platforms are best for relationship building. For example, interactive, word-based platforms where people interact in short messages and where open communication is encouraged—like Twitter—are well suited to relationship building. This is because the art of conversation is so encouraged and prioritized on Twitter. It is perhaps one of the only platforms where a brand may post dozens of times a day, without overloading its followers.

To build relationships with your audience on a platform like Twitter, you will want to be responsive and engaging. If someone is interacting with your brand, feel free to reply promptly and keep the conversation going. If they are mentioning you because of an issue with an order, provide them with helpful, empathetic, and supportive customer service. Possibly the most important thing to remember while engaging with users online is to always make sure you are being authentic to your brand’s voice. Your followers will come to expect a certain voice, and they will recognize you for it.

Pro tip: Sometimes, it’s best to be proactive about relationship building. Instead of waiting for users to reach out to you, actively seek out authentic connections and communication within your community of followers.

Goal 2: Target new customers

If your goal is to target new customers, you may find some success on an image-based photo and video sharing platform like Instagram. This is a good place to show people your product, rather than telling them about it. To target new customers, it is a good idea to tell your brand’s and products’ stories using interesting and dynamic visuals.

Instagram is effective for telling your brand’s story because its users spend significant time on the platform learning, being inspired, shopping, testing new things out, and so much more. And, it is a unique platform because brands can leverage other users with large followings to tell their story as well.

For example, leveraging a strategy like influencer marketing is an effective tactic to target new customers. Influencer marketing involves a brand collaborating with an online influencer to market one of its products or services. When an influencer introduces your brand to their followers—a group of people who may not know about you yet—this can be really helpful for targeting new customers. Another example of an effective strategy is running social media ad campaigns, where your brand’s reach is sure to increase.

Pro tip: If you prioritize influencer marketing, make sure your partners have audiences that will be interested in your product once introduced to it.

Goal 3: Drive traffic to your website

If you want to drive traffic to your website, consider a social media platform that allows you to share articles, links, products, images, and reviews, like Facebook. If the content you are sharing feels fresh, informative, and links back to your landing page, users will be more likely to click on it and end up on your webpage. If users like what they see on your page, they may share your content themselves, possibly resulting in even more website traffic.

When using a platform like this, it’s especially important to couple your brand’s voice and visuals together in a cohesive way. Your content all needs to feel purposeful and relevant, and draw users in, if you want to encourage website visitors.

Pro tip: Not all social media platforms allow you to easily share links to landing pages and other content, but doing so can be a great way to drive traffic to your site.

Key takeaways

You will likely choose to prioritize certain platforms over others depending on what your company’s goals and objectives are. However, you should feel free to push the same initiatives and campaigns on varying social channels as well. If you have goals that you think can be achieved on a few different platforms, you will still want to customize the content to be exactly what your audience on each platform wants.

Build relationships with email marketing

Video. Duration: 3 minutes

So far, you’ve learned that social media marketing enables brands to extend their reach and build a list of email subscribers. In this video, we’ll discuss some of the things brands can do with those subscriber lists once they have them. But before we get to that, let’s define what email marketing is and what it isn’t. First, most importantly, email marketing is not spam. Spam, also known as junk mail, refers to any unwanted emails sent out in bulk to a mass recipient list. These are the emails that land in your inbox, even though you never signed up for them. Spammers might make claims that are too good to be true or send the same content to everyone on their list, regardless of their interests. They’ll often send so many emails that they end up annoying potential customers. How is email marketing different from spam? Email marketing is when a brand sends messages to a list of existing subscribers to share information, drive sales, or create community. That means sending relevant, helpful content to people who’ve agreed to receive it. When it’s done well, email marketing helps brands build and maintain relationships with potential and existing customers. How do brands avoid coming across like spammers? How do they make sure they’re sending the right content, to the right people, at the right time? They use segmentation and personalization. Let’s take these ideas one at a time. First, segmentation. Email segmentation is the practice of dividing an email subscriber list into smaller groups or segments, based on criteria like interests, location, or purchase history. It allows brands to customize emails for different groups and send subscribers content that’s relevant to them. The more brands learn about their subscribers, the more they can segment their lists, which makes it easier to build relationships with customers. So if someone buys cat food from a pet store, they might appreciate getting ads about other cat-related products like treats or toys. But if they get a coupon for birdseed, they might delete that email, and they could even unsubscribe altogether, which is the opposite of what the pet store wants. Let’s move on to personalization. While segmentation helps marketers decide what email content to send to which people, personalization is a process of customizing email content for individual subscribers. That doesn’t mean running a different email for every single subscriber. If email marketers did that, they wouldn’t have time for anything else. But there are some things they can do to deliver an experience that feels specific to each individual. Here are a few examples: email marketers can address each recipient directly by putting their name in the greeting or subject line. Send promotions for special events like birthdays, holidays, or anniversaries. Send messages that match where customers are in the marketing funnel. For example, an email about a loyalty program probably shouldn’t go to subscribers who are still at the consideration stage. Finally, they can follow up on previous interactions, like asking a customer to share their opinion on a recent purchase. Now you know the difference between email marketing and spam, and how brands use techniques like segmentation and personalization to build and maintain customer relationships. Coming up, you’ll learn about some different types of emails that can engage, convert, and retain customers.

Types of email campaigns

Reading. Duration: 10 minutes

As a digital marketer, you will come across dozens of types of email campaigns that achieve different goals for your company. The way you define and name them may differ from organization to organization. However, this reading will give you an introduction to the main types of email campaigns and what they accomplish. In later materials, you will go more in-depth about each type of email.

Real-life applications

As you are guided through the various types of email campaigns, think about emails you’ve received recently or in the past. Consider what the sender was trying to accomplish in emailing you. Did it work? Why or why not?

Note: A large portion of email marketing is testing out different tactics to learn what works and what doesn’t. You might use all or just a few of the email types below, depending on what is most effective for your audience and marketing goals.

Types of email campaigns

The following are the most common types of email campaigns:

• Acquisition emails are sent out to acquire new customers. They fall into the awareness section of the marketing funnel because they engage potential customers.

• Welcome emails are sent out to brand new customers or subscribers. The welcome email most commonly exists within the consideration stage of the marketing funnel because it encourages deeper engagement and specific actions.

• Newsletters are sent to subscribers regularly. They contain news and informational content relevant to the company and of interest to subscribers. Newsletters are versatile campaigns because they can fall into several funnel stages. Newsletters fit in the consideration stage when potential customers are getting to know your brand. They are part of the conversion stage when customers have decided they like your brand and want to support it, and they fit the loyalty stage when customers keep coming back for more products and content.

• Promotional emails are sent to inform subscribers of new or existing products or services. Promotional emails usually fall into the consideration and loyalty buckets of the marketing funnel because they encourage subscribers to take some kind of action.

• Retention emails are sent to a current customer with the intent of keeping them as a customer. This type of campaign fits into the loyalty portion of the funnel.

Key takeaways

Although these common email types are trusted by industry experts, you will still need to test out different tactics to determine which types your subscribers engage with the most. Consider what you have learned here, but make sure to be adaptable when something isn’t working.

Review: Marketing channel concepts

Ungraded Plugin. Duration: 10 minutes

Digital marketing and e-commerce basics

Flashcard exercise

Recall the definition for each description.

1. SEO (search engine optimization)

• SEO, or search engine optimization, is a set of practices designed to increase the quantity and quality of traffic to a website

2. SEM (search engine marketing)

• SEM, or search engine marketing, generates traffic to a website through paid ads that appear on a search engine results page. This is also known as paid search.

3. PPC (pay per click advertising)

• PPC, also known as pay per click, is a form of advertising where a company pays each time someone clicks on its ad.

4. Social media marketing

• Social media marketing is creating and publishing content on social media platforms in order to drive engagement and promote a brand or product.

5. Email marketing

• Email marketing consists of sending messages to a list of existing subscribers to share information, drive sales, or create community.

6. Search engine results pages (SERPs)

• SERPs are the pages of results produced when someone performs a search.

7. Social listening

• Social listening is the process of tracking and analyzing social media conversations and mentions related to a brand.

Test your knowledge: Engage customers with social media and email marketing

Practice Quiz. 5 questions | 100%

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5. Review: Digital marketing and e-commerce strategy

Wrap-up

Video. Duration: 1 minute

You made it. You’ve learned so much about attracting, engaging, and communicating with customers through digital channels. Let’s sum up what we’ve done so far. First, we found out why digital marketing is essential for building a strong brand. Next, we covered the basics of creating a digital marketing strategy. We explored the foundations of a digital marketing strategy, learning about your audience and setting goals that support to business’s larger aims. Then we discussed picking channels and creating content to carry out that strategy. We went through some of the most common channels and tactics that marketing and sales teams use in their strategies. Like search engine optimization, which helps them reach audiences through search results. We also discussed search engine marketing, pay-per-click advertising and display ads. Finally, we explored how companies expand their reach and engage with customers through social media, and how they build relationships using email marketing. Remember that even if you never write an acquisition email or do keyword research, understanding these concepts is an important foundation for your career. By now, you may be starting to get a better idea of which parts of digital marketing and e-commerce interests you the most, but there’s still more to come. In the next part of the course, you’ll learn about some of the ways companies measure and improve their marketing and sales strategies so they can better meet their goals.

Glossary terms from module 3

Reading. Duration: 20 minutes

Terms and definitions from Course 1, Module 3

Brand: How a business or organization is perceived by the public

Brand equity: The value consumers attribute to one brand’s offerings when compared with similar products from another brand

Brand safety: Keeping a brand’s reputation safe when they advertise online

Business goal: A desired aim, achievement, or outcome for a business

Content marketing: A marketing technique that focuses on creating and distributing valuable content to a specific audience

Cost per click (CPC): The amount an advertiser pays when someone clicks on a PPC ad

Customer persona: Represents a group of similar people in a desirable audience

Display ad: A visual ad format placed on websites or applications

Earned media: Positive digital exposure generated through personal or public recommendations

Email marketing: Sending messages to a list of existing subscribers to share information, drive sales, or create community

Keyword: A search term people use to find information, products, and services online

Media mix: A combination of digital channels used to reach goals and how the budget is divided among them

Owned media: All the digital content a brand fully controls

Paid media: Any form of digital promotion a brand pays to put online

Pay-per-click (PPC): A type of advertising that allows the advertiser to pay only when someone clicks on an ad link

Search engine marketing (SEM): Generating traffic to a website through paid ads that appear in search engine results pages

Search engine optimization (SEO): The process of increasing the visibility of website pages on search engines to attract more relevant traffic

Search engine results pages (SERPs): The pages of results a search engine produces when someone performs a search

Segmentation: Dividing an email subscriber list into smaller groups based on criteria like interests, location, or purchase history

Terms and their definitions from previous module(s)

A Agency: An outside partner that fulfills a company’s digital marketing and advertising needs

Awareness stage: The first stage of the marketing funnel, when a potential customer first becomes aware of the product or service

B Business-to-business (B2B): Refers to when businesses sell products or services to other businesses (when businesses purchase from each other)

Business-to-consumer (B2C): Refers to when businesses sell products or services to consumers (when consumers purchase from businesses)

C Consumer-to-business (C2B): Refers to when individuals (consumers) sell products or services to businesses (when businesses purchase from consumers)

Consumer-to-consumer (C2C): Refers to when individuals (consumers) sell products or services to other consumers (when consumers purchase from each other)

Consideration stage: The second stage of the marketing funnel, when a potential customer’s interest builds for a product or service

Conversion: The completion of an activity that contributes to the success of a business

Conversion rate: The percentage of users or website visitors who completed a desired action, such as clicking on a link in an email or purchasing a product

Conversion stage: The third stage of the marketing funnel, when marketers capitalize on the interest people have already shown

Customer journey: The path customers take from learning about a product, to getting questions answered, to making a purchase

Customer journey map: A visualization of the touchpoints a typical customer encounters along their purchase journey

D Digital channel: Any communication method or platform a business can use to reach their target audience online

Digital marketing: The practice of reaching consumers online through digital channels with the aim of turning them into customers

E E-commerce: The buying and selling of goods or services using the internet

Engagement marketing: (refer to experiential marketing)

Experiential marketing: The process of encouraging consumers to not only purchase a brand or product, but to experience it

F Frequency: How many times an individual encounters an ad

I Impressions: The total number of times an ad appears on people’s screens

Inclusive marketing: The practice of improving representation and belonging within the marketing and advertising materials that an organization creates

Influencer marketing: The process of enlisting influential people to endorse or mention a brand or product to their followers on social media

In-house: Within a single company

L Lead: A potential customer who has interacted with a brand and shared personal information, like an email address

Local search: A search query that generates local-based search results

Local SEO: Optimizing content so that it displays in Google’s local search algorithms

Loyalty: The fourth stage of the marketing funnel, when customers become repeat customers and brand advocates

M Marketing funnel: A visual representation of the process through which people go from learning about a brand to becoming loyal customers

O Omnichannel: The integration or synchronization of content on multiple channels

P Pain point: Problems customers want to solve

R Reach: The total number of unique individuals who encounter an ad across their different devices

S Social media marketing: The process of creating content for different social media platforms to drive engagement and promote a business or product

T Target audience: The group of people most likely to purchase a company’s products; often defined as the combination of customer personas

Touchpoint: Any interaction a customer has with a brand during their purchase journey

Transferable skills: Skills from other areas that can help someone progress in a career in marketing

Module 3 challenge

Due, Oct 29, 11:59 PM WET | Quiz. 11 questions | Grade: 90,90%

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END! - Week 3 - Course 1