Tuesday, March 14, 2017

The A to Z Guide to Digital Marketing




By Matthew Royse 
Director, Marketing Communications
Forsythe Technology


 







Whether you are just starting out or you understand the topic well, it is important to master the fundamentals. That is why I wrote the A to Z guide to content marketing and the A to Z guide to social media blog posts so people could better understand the fundamentals of content marketing and social media.
 

Now, the term digital marketing is being used everywhere. But what does digital marketing really mean? Digital marketing is an umbrella term for your online or digital marketing efforts. It is where companies use digital channels such as websites, Google search, social media, email and other digital channels to connect online with clients and prospects.
 

Here is Your A to Z Guide to Digital Marketing:
 

Automation
 

Marketing automation tools like Marketo, Hubspot, and Eloqua help automate, streamline and measure marketing tasks, actions, and workflows such as emails, social media and other website actions like landing pages.
 

Bots
 

An Internet bot, also called a web robot, is a software application that performs an automated task over the Internet such as setting you an alarm, telling you the weather, or searching online. It is like ordering something via text and having it delivered to you without ever talking to a human. Bots are used on the Internet where the emulation of human activity is required such as a chatbot. For example, a simple question and answer exchange could occur online and it may seem like you are interacting with another person but it is simply a bot you are talking to. 

Conversion
 

A conversion is where someone online responds to your call to action on your website, on your social media channels, on your application or on your landing pages. This metric does not necessarily indicate sales but rather that people are engaged and interested in your call to actions and what you have to say.

Data


How do you manage all of it? In today’s world, we are swimming in data ranging from website visit to personal customer data. A lot of people talk about the importance of big data, but small data is just as important. Whether it is big or small data, what you need as a digital marketer is the right data.
 

Email

Even with the growth of social media and content marketing, email is still one of the most effective ways to market digitally to your database of clients and prospects on a regular basis. Email has grown into a complex and sophisticated tool where 82 percent of consumers open emails from companies, according to Litmus.
 

Funnel

The purchase funnel is also referred to as customer funnel, the marketing funnel, the sales funnel or the conversion funnel. The funnel is a consumer-focused marketing model to illustrate the theoretical customer journey toward purchasing a product or service. With digital marketing, the traditional stages of the funnel have changed. What used to be a theoretical linear path from leads to converting those leads into customers, the path isnow a multi-faceted process that can start and stop in various parts of the funnel. The funnel has to come to a point where many are now re-thinking the digital funnel and to some people, the funnel has evolved into a digital ecosystem.
 

Goals
 

In order to measure your digital marketing performance, you need to set goals. Your goals should be SMART: specific, measurable, achievable, results-focused, and time bound. Your goals should cover a range of different measures to help you set, review and manage your performance across all of your digital marketing activities. Goals should be something like: increase your organic search traffic year over year, increase your click through rate on social ads, improve your email open rates by 10 percent this quarter, or grow social shares by 5 percent this year.
 

Hook
 

Everything starts with a hook. A hook is a tease, a sample, and a mental appetizer to give your clients and prospects just enough to leave them wanting more so they take action on your digital marketing call to actions. Your hooks bring people to your website, get them to read your content, and encourage them to click on your call to actions. Withholding some information is a great hook because developing the hook doesn’t cost much. When people take the hook, they give you permission to follow up and market to them more. Some examples of hooks are coupons, contests, free downloads, and free consultations.
 

Interactive
 

Interactive content is like a survey, a calculator, or an interactive infographic that engages participants in an activity such as answering questions, making choices, and/or exploring scenarios. Overall, the interactive content provides the participants with some useful answers or results. Interactive content helps enhance the level of user experience on your website
 

Jobs
 

Marketing is going through a transformation with the shift toward companies becoming digital businesses. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says employment in the marketing field is expected to rise 7 percent by 2024 and job security is strong because marketing is important to most companies bottom line. In today’s world, you have no choice but to get involved in the digital marketing if you want to continue to grow your career and be employable in the future. To have a job in digital marketing, professionals need to be agile, learn quickly, and be team-oriented.
 

Keywords 

Keyword research is an important aspect of any digital marketing or search engine optimization (SEO) campaign. Search engines help users find content based on links and keywords. To make your content easier to find with the users you want to attract, it is important to understand what SEO keywords you want to rank for in the search engines and put the keywords in the title, URL, and headings of your content. But be careful not to overuse keywords. That is called keyword stuffing.
 

Landing Page
 

A landing page is any website page that you create that is designed to get traffic from different sources and prompt users to take an action such as download something, sign up for something via email, or join something.
 

Metrics

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” the old management adage goes. In digital marketing, it is important to measure and track the performance of your marketing efforts. These metrics could include cost per lead per channel, conversion rates for sales or leads.
 

Native Advertising
 

Native advertising is an umbrella term to label advertisements that are content-led and are featured on a website alongside other non-paid editorial content in the form of an article or video. One of the best examples of native advertising is BuzzFeed. Others consider media advertising on social media channels such as Facebook and Instagram as native advertising.
 

Optimization

Optimization is the process of improving the marketing efforts of your company. In digital marketing, it is optimizing content, landing pages, emails, applications, web browsers, mobile devices, and ads to increase traffic, clicks, and conversions.  Optimization has become required for successful digital marketers who want to reduce costs and increase sales.
 

Pay per click (PPC)

Pay per click is a model of digital marketing where advertisers pay a fee for a click. Each time an ad is clicked on it takes users to your specific landing page, and you are charged a specific rate per click. Pay per click is a way of buying visits to your websites instead of earning them organically with non-paid clicks. Search engine advertising or search engine marketing such as Google AdWords or Bing Ads is one of the most popular forms of pay per click.
 

Questions

The best digital marketing is where your digital presence is used to answer your client or potential client’s questions. When you use search using Google or Bing, you are looking for answers to a specific question. By answering questions about how your company can help people, search engines will serve up your content to people looking for answers to those questions.
 

Remarketing

Remarketing, also known as retargeting, is a form of digital advertising that uses a cookie-based technology to anonymously follow your audience around the web. The cookie then helps digital marketers target users through paid search and display ads as they go around to different websites. The effort can help you keep your company top of mind after leaving your website. Only 2 percent of web traffic converts on the first visit so remarketing is a tool to help companies reach users who don’t convert right away.
 

Strategy
 

Your digital marketing strategy is a series of actions based on your specific goals, targets, budget, and timeframe. In other words, a strategy is a plan of action to achieve your desired goals. One of your goals may be to generate 10 percent more traffic to your website this year compared to last year. According to Smart Insights, 46 percent of companies don’t have a defined digital marketing strategy. That is shocking since an effective digital marketing strategy will help you make the right decisions and make sure your company successful with digital marketing.
 

Team

The optimal structure of your digital marketing team varies from company to company but there are some common activities that need to be managed. That is why you need to have the right team with the right skill sets. It is important to hire specialists in specific areas with a broad understanding of the digital marketing landscape.
 

User Experience

User experience (UX) is the feeling that a user takes away with him or her after an experience in a digital environment. UX is one the most important things for developing and executing a modern digital marketing strategy. User experience should be customized and include personalization. According to Experience Dynamics, 96 percent of smartphone users have encountered websites that weren’t designed for their mobile devices and if content is not properly optimized, 79 percent of users will leave the respective page and search for another website to help them..
 

Visual

Content with relevant images gets 94 percent more views than content without relevant images, according to Kiss Metrics. People engage better with visual content. Visual content can be stand-alone images, videos, infographics, animated GIFs, and images in blog or articles. In fact, 35 percent of marketers selected visual assets as their most important content and 65 percent of senior marketing executives believed visual assetsis core to how their brand story was communicated.
 

Website

According to a recent survey, 52 percent of marketers surveyed expect to increase spending on their websites. Your websites reflects your brand and should offer high-quality content and should be easy to navigate. Not all website pages are created equal. Your home page should be the front door of your home, your content pages should tell your stories, and your landing pages should turn visitors into leads or get them to do more on your website. To take it a step further, there are two types of landing pages: click-through landing pages and lead generation landing pages. Your websites are one of the most critical parts of your digital marketing efforts because all of your other digital marketing activities should lead your users eventually back to your websites for conversion.
 

X-factor
 

A x-factor is a special quality, especially one that is essential for success and is difficult to describe. For example, the X factor in better content marketing is agile marketing. Companies and people need to be ready for x-factors that influence the success of their digital marketing efforts.
 

Yield

The word yield, as it relates to digital marketing, is giving up or surrendering the power to your buyers. It is not the word yield, as it relates to finance, where an investment yields a good return. In today’s world, more of the buying process is done online so it is critical you excel in digital marketing in both the B2B and B2C worlds. For example, 94 percent of B2Bbuyers research online for purchase decisions and 81 percent of shoppers/consumers conduct online research before making a purchase. Are your digital marketing efforts helping your current or potential buyers when they are researching?
 

ZigZag

Taking an approach that differs from everyone else can help you stand out. As Brian Clark from Copyblogger says: “When I see everyone doing something, I know it is time to do something else. In other words, when everyone is zigging, it’s time to zag.” Are you zagging when it comes to digital marketing?
 

Now it is your turn, what would you add?

What words did you like or not like in this A to Z guide? What would you add? What letters would you replace? What other popular digital marketing terms would you add to this list?


To learn more, please visit: https://knowledgeenthusiast.com/2016/12/21/the-a-to-z-guide-to-digital-marketing

Matthew Royse is the Director of Marketing Communications for Forsythe Technology, one of the largest independent IT integrators in North America. He has more than 15 years of experience in marketing and communications, working in many different industries, including financial services, technology, media and entertainment.

At Forsythe Technology, Matthew oversees all content marketing and social media initiatives internally and externally, across multiple platforms and formats to drive sales, engagement, retention, leads and positive behavior with clients, partners, analysts and employees.

Matthew currently teaches a social media class for students in Duke's Event Development Certification program. He has spoken about social media and content marketing at numerous industry and regional events.

Top Three Ideas to Consider for Your 2017 Digital and Marketing Plan





By Paramita Bhattacharya
Director, Integrated Marketing
Hitachi Data Systems







Back in July, I attended Frost and Sullivan’s 17th annual Digital Marketing Conference as a member of their Digital Advisory Board and a thought leader. It was an exciting opportunity to participate in a small gathering of executives and marketing professionals from companies spanning technology, industry, manufacturing and financial services.
 

We spent two days tucked away in beautiful Asheville, amid the scenic Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina - exchanging ideas, insights, best practices and lessons learned around how best to lead marketing’s revolution in this digital transformation age.
 

As we came to the close of the event, and I sat on the panel to weigh in on the top takeaways in what turned out to be a very passionate and an interactive forum, I realized there were a few ideas that grabbed everyone’s attention more than others. It’s worthwhile to consider the implementation of the top few.
 

For the last year or so, there has been a lot of buzz around Customer Experience. And very rightly so. To be able to orchestrate a meaningful and friction-less experience for your buyers is extremely valuable. The impactful ROI it generates is undeniable. Of course, what you create depends on your company’s business goals and marketing landscape and maturity, but here are a few thoughts, especially for those in the B2B space. 

  • Multi-Channel Digital Connection: More and more buyers are starting their purchase journey digitally, even decision makers in traditional B2B. Having a presence on the digital channels is therefore critical, but what is more important is to begin a multi-channel connection and to rethink how to map that. How does your website page link to your digital ads? How does your SEO impact your PPC efforts? How does your social media advertising impact your digital advertising and account based marketing? And is it a single experience that connects all or is it a progressive one?

Interestingly, what drives your success and results with this integrated journey with digital is that you can employ an iterative process. Launch quickly, expand and then optimize as early results pour in. That is in stark contrast from when a long lead-time of many months is spent just preparing to launch. An IBM case study presented at the conference demonstrated how they rolled out a global digital campaign and brought a new offering to the market place in just 45 days.

  • Physical Channel Presence: Don’t discard your physical channels. Now that you are investing and focusing a lot of your spend and time on digital, it becomes ever critical to continue to focus on targeted events, trade shows, round tables, live-seminars, and communities/user group meetings, where you continue to increase your customer and prospect engagement beyond and alongside digital – to help with your long purchase cycle of B2B.   
     
  • Non-Traditional Channels: Don’t be afraid to take a leaf out of the B2C world and break into non-traditional channels. Perhaps it’s a brand engagement with an entity that helps you expand your business storyline in an unique manner; a syndication opportunity with a publisher that can excite your customer base; a webcast series embedded with synergistic platforms providing a fresh perspective; and a thought leadership initiative at an industry level with peers, experts and analysts that can drive strategic conversations and build ongoing engagement. 
     
  • Seamless Yet Tailored Experience: Your buyers are reaching everywhere and are on devices that are always connected, always on, so how can your customer experience initiatives be limited or fragmented? Deliver consistent but relevant experiences across multiple platforms and devices including mobile, website, communities and social, but your success is dependent on how you tailor for device, message, design and interaction along with target audience consumption and behavior. 

Now, do we think that a B2B buyer goes on this journey in a linear fashion? Instead of thinking of this as a linear funnel, we need to evolve our experience map into a multi-dimensional matrix and most importantly target for group decision-making for B2B, which is often no less than five persons.
 

Creating a breakthrough digital experience requires plotting it like a story arc along with visual delights and language to evoke emotion, and then to spur your buyers to take action by solving their challenges, anywhere from cloud delivery issues to big data applications. It was not surprising therefore to hear Content Marketing still dominate so many conversations at the conference. Based on one of the Think Tank sessions around how to build fast, iterative and smart content here are a few key nuggets that you may consider implementing in your Content Marketing strategy.

  • Personas and Themes: Personas continue to carry weight and importance. But instead of trying to build perfect ones, develop open-ended personas as well as broad story lines and themes with available research, what you know of your customers and marry that with data culled from your various data sources.
     
  • Agile Content Framework: Build an agile content framework where you have the ability to rapidly create and react to market forces. For e.g. add to your open ended personas based on new information from sources internal & external; update content with new insights based on your buyers’ interaction in the channels; tweak and revise as you gain usage feedback to formats & mediums; and evangelize expert and influencers content from inside and outside your organization.
     
  • Big Ideas: Creative concepts hold the key to differentiation and success. But don’t be remiss in evaluating creative concepts and content to ensure they are strategically and organizationally viable. Whether you are considering a mobile roadshow, a social media contest, or an interactive series led by luminaries -- make sure to establish a set of questions that help you determine success. How will you communicate to your decision makers? How memorable is this idea?  Can this idea be implemented with existing resources or do you need to onboard new talent? Is the execution timeline too long? And most importantly, how will it work in the context of larger marketing efforts?

Data and Analytics was the other third area dominating the conversation. While the MarTech landscape is teeming with tools and platforms to enable different aspects of data capture and customer insights, regardless of where you are with infrastructure and systems, there are few fundamentals that I think are crucial towards improving upon your organization’s data-driven decision making in reaching the omni-channel buyer and driving real business value.

  • 360-Degree View: Building a 360-degree view of the buyer for B2B marketers is key. Use big data and its applications in alignment with your sales, product and marketing teams to create an in-depth framework around customer insights and uncover new opportunities. This can drive significant impact as the GE keynote demonstrated where GE Power connected IoT with digital tools to deliver a tangible experience that created one of GE’s fastest growing businesses, rethinking products beyond the traditional use cases. 
     
  • Value: Demonstrating value, whether you are in an emerging or a mature B2B business is fundamental to your omni-channel buyer experience and building ROI. Based on your data, segment your audience, personalize your communications with valuable information, and enable it across multiple channels -- connecting dots between data gained from each and rethinking how to address their non-linearity and progress through the experience. This becomes a good basis for not just vast net fishing, but targeted execution of Account Based Marketing (ABM). 
     
  • Step Ladder Measurement Approach: If you are serious about executing on the omni-channel buyer experience, start with building a discipline of measurement in the organization. Set up dashboards with primary, secondary and tertiary KPIs that behave like a step ladder to broader goals and functions as intelligence tools to continue to provide data around buyer needs and wants as well as outlining your progress to the broader organization. Each measurement metric has a role to play. Your PPC impressions can ladder up to awareness KPIs which form a core of your buyer experience and that in turn ladders up to your business goals such as market share or pipeline goals of MQLs and SALs.  

Needless to say, there were many other Digital Marketing topics discussed that marketers and organizations are focused on as well. I would love to hear thoughts around what you are considering to be your top areas for 2017.

Can Health Care Providers Use Digital Approaches for Growth and Engagement?




By Vicki Amalfitano
Vice President for Marketing and Planning 
Brigham and Women’s Hospital







Health care has been at the top of the national political agenda for over two decades. Hospitals in particular are in the cross-hairs of the debates over cost, quality and efficiency. At the same time, health care is one of the country’s most heavily regulated industries. Can such an industry one that relies heavily on bricks and mortar plus a large and diverse professional staff that provides the most personal of all services and  must adhere to the strictest privacy standards use digital approaches to grow and engage its target markets?  It can because of the industry’s long standing involvement in advanced technology and data management.


Secure Patient Portals
 

Today’s electronic health record system provide secure portals for patients to view their data (aka personal health information), communicate with their physicians and office staff on questions, appointments, prescriptions and referrals.  Health care providers can push information on a patient’s health care risks, conditions and treatment, making patients apart of their health care team. Portals have led to enhanced patient engagement and retention by hospitals and health systems.
 

Distance Health
 

Telehealth is a term that encompasses a wide range of business-building technologies for hospitals and their physicians. Large teaching and referral hospitals routinely provide remote consultations to more remote and smaller organizations. Telestroke services, as one example, provide consultations to other electronic data based on images and other clinical information on patients presenting with complex stroke symptoms, and can facilitate transfers of patients as needed.  Online second opinion services assist physicians and patients who upload diagnostic information for remote sub-specialist review at leading hospitals and which often results in referrals. Virtual visits are being quickly adopted for a variety of more routine patient-physician interactions, and even virtual urgent care visits are available in more advanced programs, creating access, efficiency and new clinical volume.
 

Websites
 

Effective healthcare provider websites should be the digital experience for all constituents. Patients and families should be able to research their health issues, find a specialist, make an appointment, pay their bills, schedule educational events, and find all the information they need to navigate the system in a logical manner. Physicians should be able to also find a consulting specialist and refer a patient digitally, register for continuing medical education programs and apply for training programs. Everyone should be able to locate clinical trial and enrollment information.
 

Synchronous and Asynchronous Online Education
 

Information and education is a core service of health care organizations.  Leading programs now offer patients the ability to avoid trips to the hospital or doctor’s office for information sessions. They can attend surgery preparation classes, childbirth education and a variety of prevention and wellness programs online with an expert, where Q&A takes place seamlessly, or on demand at their convenience.  Online testing modules facilitate confirmation that the patient is informed and ready for the planned intervention. Increasingly, physician continuing medical education can take place on an organization’s website, increasing engagement between the medical community and the health care provider.
 

Content Marketing: Digital and Social Media
 

Content marketing across social media and all digital platforms suits healthcare organizations because of the plethora of content they develop and curate everyday on topics of great personal interest to consumers and the biomedical community. Social media platforms and digital marketing encourage all audiences to engage with the healthcare brand. Personalization and automation technologies bring the audience from the top of the funnel through opting in for more interaction and ultimately connection.
 

As these examples indicate, even highly regulated and bureaucratic organizations like large health care providers are capitalizing on digital technologies in their direct to consumer (DTC)  and business to business (B2B) marketing to engage, grow and retain their customer bases.

Vicki Amalfitano has been a strategic marketing leader in complex health care systems for over 20 years.  Her interests include building brand and business for health care providers and academic enterprises, to strengthen their ability to advance medicine and science. She is currently responsible for market planning and execution at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a major teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School, and is an instructor in strategic marketing management at the Harvard School of Public Health.