Digital Marketing

& SEO
Summary Notes
Creating a Digital Marketing Strategy
2

Content

3 Lesson Outcomes

3 Retargeting

5 Creating a Digital Strategy

9 Budgeting

13 Content Plan

14 Analyse Results

15 References

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Lesson Outcomes:
 Understand retargeting

 Discover the elements of a digital strategy

 Develop a content plan

 Create your own strategy

Retargeting
“Retargeting is the use of website trackers to target visitors elsewhere — for example, with display ads or email marketing
— and lure them back to complete the conversion.” (Gartner, n.d.)

And these trackers is what we already spoke about, the cookies! Simply put, your online activity is tracked, so that if you
look for a product or visit a website, you will see those ads or products again on other websites you visit, or you might
receive an email if you did not complete a purchase – that is retargeting, any additional contact with users who have
interacted with your business before.

Some marketers make a differentiation between retargeting and remarketing with retargeting referring specifically to
display ads and remarketing to emails only – though Google does call its retargeting options on Google Ads remarketing –
all a bit confusing, so do not worry too much about the names. the most important thing for you to remember is that this
option exists – in email and display ad format.

Why retarget?
What are some of the benefits of retargeting?

1. You know that retargeting targets users who are interested in what you have to offer as they have interacted with
your business before. This means that a conversion is much likelier to happen as your content is shown to
someone who you know is interested and who has heard of you before, which means there is a much higher
chance of leading them down the funnel.

2. You can reinforce your brand image and remind them of you. Very likely, users will not immediately buy off you
just because they see one ad. You will have to reinforce the message several times, and retargeting helps you
achieve that.

3. Retargeting is a great way to market your product or service across several devices and multiple channels. Say
someone visits your website on the phone, and then a while later they see you again on their computer browser,
on a different platform – a great way to get more coverage and position yourself where your users are!

4. Retargeting is cost-effective as you are not wasting budget on a broad audience who might have never heard of
you, but you are actually targeting people who are at least in the awareness, and more than likely in the interest
phase along your funnel.

The rule of seven

In marketing, there is this concept called the rule of seven, it is quite an old rule, but basically it means that consumers
have to see your ad 7 times before they make a purchase.

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Nowadays, with so much more advertisement, and placements everywhere, users get bombarded by marketing messages,
so that amount is probably higher – the number itself is not the most important thing, but the point is that users need to
see your message many times before making a purchase.

As with everything, I would suggest monitoring your performance, we also do not want users to suffer from ad fatigue,
which is where they see your ad so many times, the ads lose the effect – and retargeting helps you in spreading the same
message, but in different formats, on different platforms, so it does not get too bland.

Remember
One thing to keep in mind though when it comes to retargeting is that depending on the different platforms, you will have
different options to retarget – but no matter the platform, you will need to set up tracking first, otherwise you will not be
able to get any data – and if you do not know who the users on your website are, then it is impossible for your ads to be
displayed to them.

So, if you have not already done so, make sure to set up your tracking at least for Google Analytics, speak to your
developer if it is not something you feel comfortable with.

Lists and strategies

You would ideally want to split your audience up into different lists or segments, as people will interact with your brand in
different ways.

You could target people who viewed a specific page once – for example people who have visited the check-out page but
have not completed their purchase.

We could also target people based on how many pages they visited. So more than a certain number of pages, that would
signal that they are interested in the brand and might potentially be interested in making a purchase.

You could create time-based lists and exclude them from each other. For example, say you have a list of converters over
the last seven days and over the last 30 days. Exclude the seven-day list from the 30-day list because people who
converted less than seven days away are probably less likely to convert again

Then you could make a list with post engagers, you could exclude your page followers from that list and then encourage
whoever has engaged to join your page or sign up. So just to make you aware or to confirm that you do not have to like a
page in order to see its content. You could have a friend that follows it. It could be something that was quite viral or which
was quite popular among a few of your friends or friends of friends.

Then you could have a list of site visitors over the last 30 days and include engagers or social engages over the last 30 days.
And target them with a more aggressive sell than with others.

You could also take your converters over the last 90 days and exclude the 30-day converters. And then up-sell some
products to people who have converted between 31 and 90 days. Again, it depends on your business – this might not work
for you if you sell cars or other products with a very long conversion window.

Creating a Digital Strategy

A digital strategy is a form of strategic management and a business answer or response to a digital question often best
addressed as part of an overall business strategy. The scope of a digital strategy can vary hugely, but what we are focusing
on in this lesson is more marketing and customer focused efforts such as websites, mobile, e-commerce, social sites and
search engine optimisation and advertising.

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Digital marketing plan

A digital marketing plan is a document containing the details for all the planning for your digital marketing campaigns or
actions. It details, among other things, your short-, medium- and long-term business goals, the strategies to achieve the
goals at the digital level, the channels to use, the action and development plans. So, what you need to achieve your goals
and how you are going to action them. Investment and budget. And then the timing and road map, so timing is by when
and then road map is where does your particular goal or goals fit into the bigger picture? There are multiple things that
can be considered in a digital strategy, but do not feel that you need to include all of these steps as it depends on the stage
your business is in as well as your objectives. If you are not planning a business or are not already running one, then this
will be helpful for your clients.

Define short-, mid-, and long-term goals

Set the goals based on your data – evaluate the kind of growth you have been achieving and what is realistig.

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Strategy Sheet

Once you know what it is you want to achieve, you would generally summarise everything on one strategy sheet. You
would be able to split out what you need into a different format. So, for example, you could create something like the table
above, like almost a master document that houses everything. And then from there, you could go and create your content
plans or your schedules, etc. This is not the only way to keep track of information. You can track it however you like, but
just make sure that it is displayed in a way that would make sense to you and to someone who has not seen it before.

The information included here is the business name at the top, so Custom Comfort. Then the target market and then the
goals, the objectives, and the campaign dates.

Marketing Funnels
You may or may not have established the marketing funnel that you are most comfortable with, but if not, then now would
be a good time to decide. A quick recap: a marketing funnel is a collection of stages you ideally want potential customers
to move through towards your key objective. You would take each of your goals and apply them to your funnel.

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These are some examples of what these goals could look like applied to the funnel. Just to remind you why you are doing
this: you are looking at what people are doing in different stages of the funnel so that your marketing is targeted and your
content is relevant and guiding them, guiding them along to the next stage. So, for example, for view, you could serve ads
that either highlight your unique selling propositions or you could create a sense of urgency with things or copy like for a
limited time. You could target competitive search terms so that any time someone who is potentially going to convert on

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your site searches for a competitor, then your ad could appear under theirs. You know that there are various different
strategies, and this is what this whole thing is about to kind of react or at least cater for the different behaviours and
interests in the different phases of this funnel. Also, remember that someone can come in at any stage of the funnel and
convert, it does not mean you failed. If that happens, it is just because we are people and we do not all follow the same
path.

Buyer Personas
Once you have broken down your goals into the different stages of the marketing funnel that you have chosen, you need to
look at your buyer personas. And just to recap, a buyer persona is a fictitious character that represents your typical target
customer based on comprehensive audience research. If you are just starting out or you are relatively new, you will not be
able to have this comprehensive audience research. You will not have data. You might not have the budget to invest in
huge surveys or hold focus groups. You can still create the personas, but they are kind of the ideal or the imagined target
that you would like to do reach.

Example Buyer Personas for Custom Comfort:

1. Elegant Elizabeth: She lives in the city, likes having a classy environment around her, is married, and has a
demanding, but well-paying job.

2. Stylish Stan: He is 27 years old and is university-educated. He has been working for the last couple of years and is
slowly progressing into management level. He likes socialising with friends and inviting them over for drinks.

From this information, you can develop your target market statement.

E.g.: My target market is male and female professionals, aged between 25 - 55, who live in the city and like to stay up to
date with trends.

Existing touchpoints
Once you have thought about your objectives and your target market, you need to list your existing digital touch points
and how effective they are. Note that the customer journey comes in here. Once you have your touchpoints, make sure to
map them out and think about the journey consumers will take to reach the goal.

When listing your touchpoints, think about all the ways consumers interact with your business – and in this case I am
referring to digital only, as this course is about digital marketing. So, Custom Comfort has a website, and they are present
on Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest, they appear on Google search, and they send regular emails.

When you list your touchpoints, you do not only want to see which ones you have, you also need to evaluate their
performance. How many visitors or followers do you have? What is the engagement like?

Depending on your goals, you would add these different types of metrics to your document and then track the progression
– if you need a recap on some of the metrics and goals, please have another look at lesson 2 of this module. So, be aware
of your touchpoint, have a think about how you are using them, are they helping you towards your goals? What is the
purpose? And then monitor the progress and map out the different customer journeys. It is that kind of information which
will then inform you as to what you need to focus on, what you need to improve within your overall strategy.

Also, if you know that, for example, the chat bot has a lot of technical issues and there is currently no budget to fix it, then
you should not include the chat bot into your paid media strategy. You might still include it in your organic
communication, but not your paid. The same goes for any other channel.

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Budgeting
It often helps to look at what budgets you have available before looking into advertising on specific channels, because you
might have 10 channels in mind. But actually, you might only have the budget for three. When you set a budget, it should
remain flexible based on your performance (but more on that in Module 2).

There are a few ways that you can determine your budget. There are revenue-based industry standards, and then there is a
volume or target-based budget.

Young businesses
Young businesses, and those are businesses less than five years old, need to spend more aggressively as they rely much
more on branding and reputation. Experts suggest that between 12 and 20 percent of gross revenue should be going
towards marketing. Whether that all goes to digital marketing is another story. But that is the overall recommendation.

E.g.: if the gross revenue for the year is $100,000, then $12,000 - $20,000 of this should be invested in marketing.

5+ years in business
Older businesses would have hopefully established their awareness and become profitable and therefore need to be less
aggressive. Budgets can therefore decrease to between six and 12 percent of gross revenue.

Volume- and target-based budgeting

Let us look back at our examples. First of all, we have our lead generation, and let us just say that a 10% increase in leads,
means that we want 200 additional leads. So, we have 200 leads at a target cost per lead of $30. This means we need a
budget of $6,000.

If we split that out over three months, we need a budget of $2,000 a month. We split evenly for now, but depending on
tactics and performance, this might change. For example, if we retarget aggressively to non-converters in the second
month, we may require more spend in that month versus the first month.

If we have a budget of $40,000 over the year to reach our sales goal, which is a 20% increase – so say an increase in
$400,000 of sales for the year, which is $33,333 per month – with a budget of $40,000 over the year, we would have a
monthly budget of $3,333.

Now, in this case, say we have an average order value of $600, which is something you would calculate by adding all of
your orders and then dividing it by the number of orders.

If we then divide our monthly revenue, we want to achieve of $33,333 by $600, we will get 56 orders a month – and then if
we divide our monthly budget of $3,333 by the number of orders, we get a Cost per Acquisition of $5.55, so this is what we
would spend for a purchase.

These figures are just made up, usually you would base all of this on real figures – this is just to show you how you can
calculate your budget to reach your goals. You can either start from a point of: ok, I know one lead or whatever you want to
measure is going to cost me this much, meaning I can afford so and so many leads or whatever, or, as in the second
example, you can start with your goal, apply your budget, and then figure out how much of a budget you have available to
make that goal come true. More on this will be coming in Module 2.

Remember

Your targets will not be achieved through paid media. We need to get quite creative with our organic options and even
then, it might not be possible to achieve them. That is why it is called a target at the end of the day.

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Tips for budgeting

 There is no magic amount

 Budgeting can be a lengthy process

 Understand your circumstances

 Prioritise

 Do not spread the budget too thin

Next Steps

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As you know, we would select the channels and types of content based on our buyer personas – we need to be where they
are. We know who our customers are, and our target market spends their time on Facebook and Instagram and seeing as a
lot of people who are into home-improvement spend their time on Pinterest, we want to be present there as well.

Now, of course, we need to work on SEO and Google. And then the type of content we would produce – again, based on
our buyer personas, we want to solve their problems and demonstrate we can do that through Search Engine Marketing,
Social Media Marketing, and of course organic content. Remember our copywriting formulas (for a recap see lesson 6).

Especially for branding purposes, organic content is vital – and in this case, we want to establish ourselves as a high-
quality brand, so we need high-quality content. We need to be visual, educate users, build relationships.

We have a budget of $6,000 for our short-, $40k for our medium-term goal, and then for our long-term goal we do not have
a set budget just because it is something that should be included in all campaigns, we should really incorporate this goal
into all of our communications – especially since it is not a fully tangible goal, it is about building a brand, and that is done
through our communications, the way we position ourselves (more on this in Module 4).

On the next page, you will see an example of how you could start populating your marketing strategy document, for a
thorough explanation, please refer back to the lesson.

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Content Plan
You might not decide to create a crazy spreadsheet like the one above, and you might just want to stick to a content plan,
or you might have a sheet like that, as well as a content plan and a strategy and all of that. Again, it is completely
dependent on the business. But your content plan or the content creation around that should be based on your personas
and your objectives. You should determine how often and at what time you will post – all depending on when your
audience is active, as you know, this is something you can easily find out with in-platform analytics. The number of times
you post is less critical than the consistency – so whatever you do, be consistent at it.

Simple content calendar examples

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Analyse Results
What does good performance look like?
 Use KPIs to determine metrics you need to pull.

 Segment results by target audience.

 Use Google Analytics & in-platform analytics tools.

Analyse
 Which channel performed best overall?

 Which channel didn’t perform and why?

 Which audience performed the best?

 What were the top keywords?

 What were the most expensive keywords?

 What gave the highest conversion rate? And the lowest?

 Did device performance differ? Why?

 Which ad copy/creative saw the highest CTR / engagement?

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References
Criteo. n.d. What is retargeting? Your definitive guide. [online] Available at: <https://www.criteo.com/what-is-
retargeting/>

Gartner. n.d. Definition of Retargeting - Gartner Marketing Glossary. [online] Available at:
<https://www.gartner.com/en/marketing/glossary/retargeting>

Godfrey, T., 2021. Your Brand and the Marketing Rule of 7. [online] Story Bistro. Available at:
<http://storybistro.com/your-brand-and-the-marketing-rule-of-7>

Karpenkova, A., 2019. Top 6 Components of a Strong Digital Marketing Strategy. [online] Joinative. Available at:
<https://joinative.com/top-six-components-marketing-strategy#>

Lin, Y., 2021. Top 10 Digital Marketing Statistics and Facts for 2021. [online] Oberlo.com. Available at:
<https://ie.oberlo.com/blog/digital-marketing-statistics>

Lokmanoglu, Z., 2019. How to build a digital marketing strategy. [online] 99designs. Available at:
<https://99designs.ie/blog/marketing-advertising/build-digital-marketing-strategy/>

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