The Best Ultimate Digital Marketing Guide – All In One Place

A digital marketing guide is the most important part of the knowledge of every person who creates online marketing campaigns. I wanted to write a complete overview of marketing terms that will benefit everyone. Whether you are a beginner or someone who is an advanced marketer, this will help you.

After reading this, you should see the “Matrix” i.e., put together all the dice and fill in all the holes in the knowledge you have ever had.

If you are training new people to do marketing, send them to read this whole text first.

Let’s start …

For starters, the basic division in marketing: direct marketing and brand campaigns:

Direct marketing – Digital marketing guide

First, let me put you in context: In the world of marketing, there are literally “two schools.” Some swear by direct marketing, others like so-called brand campaigns (more on that below).

Direct marketing (also called direct response marketing) is actually any type of marketing in which we address people with specific offers and expect them to respond immediately (see below: “call to action”). Direct marketing relies extremely heavily on measurement and analytics, copywriting (writing), on all those sales methods I wrote about earlier: sales funnel, scarcity, landing pages, testimonials, and so on.

The focus is on sales immediately, as soon as possible of various promotions, cards, and discounts are given, prices stand out as an amazing opportunity, red is used intensively, and strong, saturated colors are used in general – especially for price tags and ribbons for discounts no in general, there is pressure on customers, and everything seems “selling”.

For example, Teleshop ads are classic direct marketing. There, for an hour, your brain will be brainwashed about how revolutionary a kitchen appliance is, how it saves time, pictures before and after, housewives’ testimonials that say they can no longer imagine life without that appliance, and then it will start “if you order in the next hour you will also get this set of knives ” etc.

The same principle is used to make sales pages on the Internet, it is a long story that is scrolled, and every detail is measured, how many clicks there were on the “buy” button, what are the conversions from which channel, and so on.

The goal of direct marketing is to sell, as quickly and as measurably as possible, creating a customer base and so-called “leads” (potential customers, see below).

Of course, now you’re probably wondering, “Isn’t the goal of every sales marketing, what’s the difference?” Therefore, we move on to the following term:

Campaign brand

Brand campaigns are the opposite of direct marketing. The only thing they have in common is that their goal is the same – sales. However, with direct marketing, the goal is to sell immediately, and with a brand campaign, the goal is to sell in the long run, months and years in advance.

If Teleshop is a classic example of direct marketing, then the classic example of a brand campaign would be an “artistic advertisement that no one alive understands.”

A brand campaign goes much more into some deeper emotions, and the focus is on getting people to tie the strongest emotions to the brand. Brand campaigns promise people’s life. It is usually an idea to make people feel more important, more beautiful, and more valuable if they buy a certain brand.

In brand campaigns, the visual part, good photography, directing, and the script are much more important. The copywriter (writer, see below) is equally important in both cases. Although copywriters are usually divided, or engaged in one or another type of marketing, dominantly.

You will most often see the brand of the campaign for fashion brands (high fashion), food, drinks, cigarettes…

People who deal with direct marketing will often hate the campaign brand – they will talk about how it is a waste of money, how only Coca-Cola can afford it, and so on.

On the other hand, people who engage in brand campaigns often consider themselves elite, artists and look at direct marketing from a height and with contempt (“cheap tricks for manipulating the broad masses”).

Then where is the truth? What to apply?

In the general case, we can say that small companies and companies that are just starting out should be engaged in direct marketing, and brand campaigns should be done by large companies that “do not know what to do with the money”.

But this is not always the case. There are also counterexamples to which this does not apply:

Today, there are a lot of micro-brands, small companies, and startups, which sell their product through a brand campaign. For example, they have an Instagram profile, and they have some kind of “passion product,” a product that is likable and viral. What they do is mostly run as brand marketing. So, you can do brand marketing if you are small, but then you have to start a new product that will be based solely on emotions and not on some rational need. Million Box Flowers is a good example. Such products have already been named “Instagram products”.

On the other hand, there are some large firms that still rely primarily on direct marketing. Zepter is such an example (direct sales on live presentations).

Another example of a large company that does direct marketing is, for example, Tehnomania. They are big, but they still have to rely heavily on Google AdWords ads that appear when people type “hairdryer” or “induction cooker”, which is part of direct marketing.

Often campaigns are a combination of direct marketing and brand awareness campaigns. E.g:

Car industry. You know all those commercials where a car drives a cowboy with a three-day beard, pronounced jaws and a grim look… he drives through some roadless, alone against everyone, and in the background HDR clouds and a drone circle around him as he comes out and looks thoughtfully into the distance… that is a brand awareness campaign. However, if a billboard appears “driving a new Ford for only 100 euros a month”, it is direct marketing.

If direct marketing is used too much by strong brands, it can damage their reputation and value, it should not be exaggerated. Imagine, for example, if Mercedes were constantly on some stocks scurrying around the city, over time one would get the impression that “every fool can buy a Mercedes” and its high price would no longer make sense.

For example, what would happen in this case?

There would probably be a queue in front of the Gucci store and sales would jump like crazy. In the short term.

However, if Gucci kept doing actions like this, then a pop star or a lady with a high budget would come and think “eh, I’m not going to buy what every poor thing can buy anymore, I’ll take Louis Vuitton.” In the long run, Gucci would lower its brand to the level of a “bag with the Chinese” and could not cost nearly as much as today.

So, the relationship between direct marketing and brand awareness marketing is an extremely subtle thing and there is no room for mistakes. This is why a marketing strategy is always entrusted to people with experience because every unmeasured move can drastically affect the entire company.

Digital marketing guide – Lead

Lead is a person who is interested in buying, a potential buyer.

If you remember, you’ve often heard the word “lead” in detective movies. When Sherlock Holmes finds out important information that opens up ideas for further research, he says that he got a new “lead” in the investigation. You may remember that “lead” is a clue in search of customers.

When two marketers talk and one says “I got ten new leads yesterday via Facebook,” it refers to people who contacted him with a question about price, terms, etc.… and it could be that ten people left some of their data with the goal to schedule a conversation and so on.

Lead generation campaigns (abbreviated “lead gene”) are created to generate leads.

Example of a lead gene campaign:

Every day, 10,000 people on Google type “how to teach a parrot to talk”, from all over the world. I’m going to put up a Google AdWords ad that says “Teach your parrot to talk with our course!” Clicking on the ad takes them to a page that says “30,000 parrots from around the world have learned to talk with the help of our course.” There are pictures of satisfied parrot owners, and a field for entering an email address, where it says “Enter your email address and we will send you a free starter course”. People enter an email address and then they become our leads. These are potential buyers of our product – a paid parrot talking course. When they enter the address, they will receive an e-book or a 10-minute video in which we will teach them how to make their parrot speak 2-3 words. In the end, we will say “if you want your parrot to learn an even richer vocabulary, sign up for our premium course, which costs only $ 27”. Also, to the email address, they gave us we can now send parrot care tips, etc. These are now all the methods by which we try to convert our leads into customers.

If we had a site where this course is simply sold without any collection of leads through a free mini-course, then the number of customers would be much smaller.

Usually lead gene campaigns are done for products that are expensive or that require people to think carefully before “cutting”. Apartments, houses, cars, life insurance – these are all things where it is not realistic to expect that we have a site and that people click on “buy”. It is realistic to expect that we gather people here who are interested in talking, and asking questions. These are all leads and that’s where the lead gene campaigns are done.

The higher and higher the value of the product, the more and more it makes sense to run a lead gene campaign because people are changing their minds more and more. Of course, there are always those who come with a suitcase of money and say “give me an apartment” without any sub-questions, but these are marginal cases.

Now let’s see what cold, warm and hot leads are

Epithets: Hot, warm, and cold (hot, warm, and cold)

In marketing, these three terms are used for many things, but they always refer to how close someone is to the decision to buy something.

For example, a visit to a site (called website traffic). The visit can be cold, hot and warm “traffic”.

Take for example a site that sells a Nutribullet food blender.

Hot traffic is, for example, people who googled “where to buy Nutribullet” and came to the site. Hot traffic is people who “hold a wallet in their hand” and just look at whom they will give money in order to buy what they are looking for as soon as possible.

Warm traffic would be people who googled “food blender” and came to our site. We now need to convince them that our blender is much better than the others, and for that, we make landing pages and sales pages.

Cold traffic is people who do not think about buying a blender in their life but somehow came across our site. For example, the admin of the Facebook page “Daily dose of curiosity” shared the site. Or a banner is placed on the home page of Blic, where the “hook and hoe” comes, so maybe one in 10,000 wants to buy a blender. Or someone uses those forums “Click here to see the scandal of fallen pants in reality” and that actually leads to our site.

Now. It would be ideal to have only hot traffic, but that is not realistic, and there are the least of those people.

Some marketers will say that cold traffic is not of good quality and that only amateurs do it… but again, there are products that make serious money from cold traffic, so in the end, it all depends on the case.

Basically, cold traffic is brought to things that can interest everyone – weight loss, how to make money, and so on. For example, the site TruthAboutAbs earns a million dollars a month from cold traffic. Yes, when you open it, it seems amazing (“this ugly site earns so much ??”), but here’s the proof. Mike Geary, the owner of this site is a serious marketer and he has all these things I am writing about in his little finger.

Cold traffic is all those pop-ups and pop-under banners that pop up when you go to some pirate sites, porn tube sites, or trash portals with scandalous headlines.

However, for most products and services in this world, “cold traffic” is a waste of money and will have no effect. It only helps to deal with warm and hot traffic.

This is the reason why Facebook pages with a large number of “general fans” are useless. People often call me and ask how to monetize a Facebook page with 500,000 fans, which they have been building for a long time. And the page is something like a “Daily dose of curiosity”. He won’t be able to. It is more valuable to have a page with 100 fans who are, for example, people interested in smart homes.

As I said, the terms hot, warm, and cold are used for various other things. For example, the leads I just talked about. Let’s say we have an apartment for sale in the “A Blok” neighborhood. Hot leads would be people who want to buy an apartment in “A Block”. Warm leads would be people who are thinking of buying an apartment in the near future but do not know where, so they ask.

By the way, hot leads are also called qualified, although it can have other meanings.

Then, say, there is “cold calling”. That’s when you call people on the phone “out of the blue” and offer them a free dinner where they can win vouchers (and later they will try to give you some mattresses worth 10,000,000 euros). Or, say, a bank that calls people to offer them some new type of loan, even though they have no idea if that person needs a loan.

The movie “The Wolf Of Wall Street” is actually a true story about a man who found a way to sell shares to people through cold calling. The complete dialogue he has with people is called a “script”. It is actually an elaborate sales conversation scenario that contains all the development possibilities. This is like an algorithm consisting of a series of sentences, and if-then conditions (“if he says he’s divorced, tell him this and that”). Once he perfected this “script”, Wolf of Wall Street found the people he hired and learned to use his script, and scaled his sales business to unprecedented proportions.

By the way, when it comes to movies: Be sure to check out Glengarry Glen Ross, a movie about sellers that mentions all the terms in this text. The famous sentence from this movie is “ABC – Always be closing”. So let’s see what closing is.

Closing or conversion – Digital marketing guide

This is the moment when the sale is closed. Marketers deal with measuring conversions and optimizing conversions. If 2,000 people come to our site a day, of which 20 buy them, we are told that our conversion rate is 1%.

Most of the work of a single marketer comes down to trying to increase the conversion rate, using the various methods described in this text.

The difference between closing and conversion is actually that the first term is used by sellers who sell one-on-one (“I closed the deal”), and conversion is usually used by marketers when referring to mass sales.

Landing page

This is a website that is made with the goal of informing people thoroughly about the product and ultimately making two possible decisions: 1) to buy and 2) to leave some information because they are interested (collecting leads). If the goal is to buy immediately, we call it the sales page.

Landing pages are usually pages that are scrolled for a long time, and where a story is told. I wrote earlier in more detail about landing pages, be sure to read that text, it is extremely important.

In fact, the landing page is crucial, it depends on whether the conversion rate will be 0.001% or 15%. The best marketers charge 10,000 euros and more for the production of such pages. Some even ask for a percentage of the increase in sales.

The misconception is that landing pages are made by web designers. A good copywriter is needed for landing pages. Let’s see that term as well.

Copywriter

A copywriter is a writer. A writer who writes for marketing purposes. He is an extremely important person in the campaign.

People who are not versed in marketing think that marketing is done by some people who make beautiful photos, design beautiful billboards, make beautiful advertisements… and someone writes the text “in passing” because it is irrelevant.

It really can’t get further from the truth. The hardest part is coming up with a story that sells. That’s what copywriters do.

For direct marketing, which requires a good story to get people into action, this is crucial.

For many brand campaigns, in which it is necessary to come up with an advertisement that arouses real emotions, again a lot depends on the copywriter. Only in cases when it comes to some 100% visual campaign (fashion brand, etc.), this does not apply.

Remember Don Draper from the “Mad Men” series, the most important man in the whole agency? He’s a copywriter.

There are various things that a copywriter writes, it’s not just “text that someone will read on the site”. A copywriter, for example, writes a screenplay for a TV commercial. The copywriter creates a complete landing page, the designer arranges it to look beautiful. A top copywriter also understands design, which makes the designer’s job easier because he won’t get any unrealistic requests from him.

A copywriter is a very specific person – he has talents for writing but also talents for selling. It is one of those “shadow” occupations that people do not even know exists, and in fact, their work can affect the brains of millions of people. Copywriters must know extremely well the psychology of the masses, human weaknesses, and fears, to have great empathy but also unscrupulousness at the same time. In a word, Don Draper 🙂

It is important to emphasize that there is no connection between the term copyright and copywriter. A copy is a text in marketing, which started to be called that because it is something that goes to print, is copied, and duplicated. So a copywriter is a copywriter.

Call To Action

A call to action is the moment when we ask people to do something – leave us an email address, call a phone, or buy a product. Every direct marketing campaign must have some kind of call to action, usually at the end of the landing page, but it can also be repeated several times during the text. A good copywriter knows at what point to put a call to action – usually the moment a visitor experiences the culmination of emotions that have slowly accumulated as he reads.

Title

When you say “title,” people usually mean some “scandalous” portal headlines that use it as bait to attract people to a click.

However, in marketing the title is something else. The website you bring people to must have a title. It serves to make people decide whether to read on or not. This is usually the title on the landing page.

In my experience, 95% of sites on the Internet do not have a title or have a bad title and this is one of the main reasons why their sales are going badly. A good copywriter can write a title that increases sales tenfold compared to the current situation.

The title must be a promise, a promise of a better life, a promise that some revolutionary change will happen in human lives if they continue to read beyond the title. Here is an example right away.

I will deliberately take something extremely boring and uncreative as an example, to see how even such a thing can turn into an “emotional title that sells”: a humidity meter.

99% of sites will write a headline like this, which does not promise anything, does not stir emotions, and makes a large number of people immediately turn off the page:

This is an absolute disaster and a missed opportunity to keep the people who came to us on this site.

I will write you the other way around now – the title that sells:

Do you notice a basic difference? The promise of a better life. As boring as the product in question is, one can find this promise, this hope that can be given to people, that some detail of their lives will get better.

In this case, I shoot what almost everyone has as a problem – coughing and dry sinuses due to dry air in the apartment, especially in winter when the heating is working hard. Using the rule of the inverse pyramid, I put at the very beginning of the title a reminiscence of this problem and strong emotion that is associated with eternity – “never again”.

Of course, this product is not enough for someone to stop coughing – it only measures humidity, and then it is necessary for someone to get a humidifier or find some way to humidify the air when this meter alarms that the air is too dry… but we explain it all in the text below – It is important that the title itself promises a better life without any doubt, once people are caught, we will easily explain the details and techniques in the text below.

Next, I removed the model code from the title (it may be somewhere on the page due to SEO but not in the title). I also dropped the word “air” and left only the “humidity meter”, because everyone knows that it refers to air, and every unnecessary word should be removed, so that the reader does not lose attention at any moment of reading the title. And in the end, I put a price – now that we have a dramatic promise of a better life, we “knock” the whole emotion to the end and say that a better life costs only $12.

As you can see, I changed the picture: In communication theory, it is said that I put the product in context. Context is an extremely important thing when marketing a product – I put the product on a table in the living room instead of standing “naked” on a white background. When you put a product in a visual context that is related to the title, the title works even better – immediately everyone thinks “aha, look, I’m putting this standing somewhere in my living room”. In the first example, when a product stands alone in the white universe, people have much less potential to imagine what it would look like if they had it.

Now, look again at example 1 and example 2. What do you think is the difference in the number of people who stay on the page in the first and second cases? What is the difference in sales? This is why the profession of a copywriter is important.

And of course, now it is important that the same copywriter “breaks” in the text below the title… that this huge hope that we awakened in people with a good title continues, that we maintain this high level of interest all the time, until the moment when it should click on “call to action” – “buy” button.

Niche and micro-niche

This term refers to narrow areas and sites that specialize in a particular topic. For example, a niche would be “reptiles as pets” and a micro-niche would be “iguanas as pets”.

If you are dealing with a profitable micro-niche on a global level, it can be a very nice business. I emphasize, globally, not in e.g. Panama. There are not enough people in Panama for any micro-niche to be profitable. For example, an online shop for iguana equipment that is globally known could be stronger and more successful than most successful and well-known Panama companies. Conversely, an online shop for iguanas that is only for the Panama market… can probably earn more than washing windows at traffic lights.

Everything you do globally over the Internet has the potential for 1000 times more power and earnings than if you do the same in Panama. The reason why most people still work locally for Panama is that they are afraid and think that it is not possible otherwise – because they do not have knowledge about marketing. The moment you learn marketing, you gain great self-confidence and realize that it takes the same effort to sell something to young mothers in South Carolina, as well as to sell it to neighbors you know personally in your building in Panama. In fact, it’s incomparably easier for me to sell something to young moms in South Carolina, because I know for sure that they have more money.

Passion product

“Passionate products” are some interesting, viral products that provoke a lot of likes and comments on social networks.

For example, if you have a retail chain that sells things for the house, you have, for example, 10,000 items… then a good strategy would be to get as many of these passion products as possible and to force them on Facebook and Instagram. For example, this elephant for watering flowers is a passion product:

These are the little things that will get more likes, comments, and shares than all the other actions and discounts combined. These things are used as bait to get people to your store.

Most retail chains use Facebook to communicate only promotions and discounts, which is a terrible mistake. These things have no emotions, they are not viral. An annoying square chair that has been reduced from $28 to $22 is still an annoying square chair. People on social networks are “burning” on passion products and that potential is rarely felt and understood. Anyone who really understands the potential of this will make a strategy of finding and procuring passion products that will serve as baits on social networks so that people come to the store and buy a bunch of other “boring” things.

This mechanism is used today by people around the world who make online shops with passion products for a certain “niche” and thus earn serious amounts of money. For example, you now go to AliExpress and find 20 passion products for dentists (some creative mirrors, interesting teeth that can be hung on the wall in the office, etc.). Set up your shop on Shopify.com, and run a Facebook and Instagram ad for one passion product at a time targeting dentists on Facebook around the world. All orders go to the Chinese who packs and sends, and you install 3-4 times at his price and only deal with marketing.

This is what an ad from someone who specializes in a passion product niche for dog lovers looks like, in this case, a micro-niche of “women who own pit bulls” on Facebook:

Btw. this principle of “I do marketing and someone else has a warehouse and goods” is called drop shipping, and it is very common today. I wrote an extensive text about him here. People from the western world have websites, beautiful profiles on the networks, and so on, and the Chinese pack and send orders under their brand. By the way, that system when I have a brand and someone else produces and sticks my label is called white labeling.

Microcommitment

Breaking one big decision into several small ones. It generally increases conversions and reduces the number of people who pop out of a sales funnel before converting.

Opt-in page

This is a small and short website that only serves to let people leave us an email address or some other contact. You can view it as an ultra-short landing page.

It usually has a title, a little text, a field for entering an email address, or a button that opens a form for entering a name and email address. Here is an example:

Clicking the button opens a pop-up form for entering email addresses and names. Once people leave an email address, it can be used for a variety of things, for example, it can be inserted into a drip campaign (see definition below), a collection of addresses can be used as a target group on Facebook, and so on.

An opt-in site is actually a good example of micro commitment – breaking one difficult decision into several small and easy ones.

Positioning

Each brand must define its own position, and to whom it addresses exactly. It depends on what the writing style of the copywriter will be, what the design, photos, video, and so on will be.

For example, there are brands that appeal to wealthy people, and there are also those that appeal to the lower class (as cruel as it sounds).

Or, there are brands of women’s handbags that are for older ladies and those that are for young ladies. Well then, brands are for people who want to look serious and businesslike, and for those who want to look creative and wacky.

Each brand should define this position, and that document is the starting point for all future marketing activities.

A / B testing or split test – Digital marketing guide

Let’s play two versions of the landing page/banner/title/whatever, and see which version will bring more conversions.

Programmatic advertising

Complicated. This term has been quite popular lately, and it means a lot.

Maybe it’s easier to say first what programmatic advertising isn’t: Pera has a site that writes about raising cats, and I want to put my ad for cat food with Pera. I call Peru on the phone and ask “Pero, how much does my ad cost for a month on your site”, Pera says “200 euros”, I pay Peri 200 euros and send him my banner, and he manually puts it on his site.

Programmatic advertising is anything that doesn’t happen this way. For example, I have never heard of Pero in my life, but my banner will be on his website. How’s that? For example, Pera has space for a Google Display banner (AdSense ads) on her site, and I use Google AdWords to find my banner there.

So these are all cases where the purchase and selection of advertising space happen automatically. Machines decide for us, we just give them the initial parameters and principles of targeting.

Targeted group

Ok, sparrows on a branch also know this, but just in case: A group of people specific in some characteristics, which we estimate will buy our product.

One product can have several target groups. It is usually one primary and several secondary. For example, the target group for Jimmy Choo women’s heels is women who have a little more money and love branded things. The secondary target group would be men who want to buy a woman an expensive gift.

In the past, before digital marketing, target groups were quite broad (eg “middle-aged men”). Thanks to digital media that know much more details about us, today the target groups have become incomparably more focused (“women from Subotica aged 20-25 who do fitness, listen to Jelena Karleusa, access Facebook from the iPhone and have been engaged for the last year”) )

Remarketing or Retargeting

Ads that chase you once you visit a site.

Integrated campaign

A campaign that is orchestrated on multiple offline and online media at once. For example, there is an advertisement on TV with a mascot character, and on Facebook, he has a page where he humorously answers people’s questions every day. Hashtag campaigns are mostly integrated, or at least they try to be.

Sales funnel

An organized system for leading a huge number of people to sales. I also wrote about it in a special, long text, which is extremely, extremely important. Be sure to read it if you haven’t already. !

CRM

Phew. Again a term that is not easy to explain. If you try to google “what is CRM”, you will get dozens of definitions, which are perfectly clear to people who deal with CRM, but for everyone else, they are “Spanish villages”.

It is best to describe what an example looks like when someone uses CRM:

For example, you now call your mobile operator to ask them something. The man from a mobile company who is talking to you has a complete history of all communication and events with you from the first day written on his screen. He sees that you became a user in 2005 and that your average monthly bill is $40, and he sees that in August 2011 you angrily called and said that you would sue them and call journalists because you got a high roaming bill in Greece. He sees that you have changed the package four times so far and that you called them three times to threaten them that you would move to Telenor, exactly the dates when each of those calls happened. He knows all the things you forgot a long time ago, and it is written on the screen for every person who calls.

The software or system that enables this is called CRM (Customer Relationship Management). The example I gave is just one of the possible ways to use CRM, it can be set up for various other things. But the essence is to centralize the complete communication and relationship with the person in one place. Based on this large database, we can make individual decisions or program the system to send mass messages to people according to certain criteria.

For example, a sports equipment store can send a specialized newsletter to all people who have bought football equipment from them in the last five years, as well as for other sports. A brand that does not have a CRM system can only send one and the same newsletter to everyone.

Another example: Someone contacts you in the mail asking how much a certain product costs. If you have CRM, you see that person has already bought ten things from you, and exactly what and when. Or, you see that a year ago she sent an e-mail and said: “I’m going to Brazil for 6 months now, so when I come back I’ll let you know”. You can write “How was Brazil?” and so on.

People are generally thrilled to see someone take care of them and to remember what they said, and CRM can be extremely helpful in that.

Pixel marketing

A piece of code that is placed on a site so that a particular advertising platform can collect information about our visitors. Later it is used for remarketing, finding similar people, and so on.

Social proof

A phenomenon in which people assess the value of something based on ratings and comments, the number of likes. A typical example would be Booking.com or say TripAdvisor. There are people who choose hotels, restaurants and places to go solely on the basis of social professionals (I am one of them).

Social proof is also a phenomenon that people want to follow people who already have a lot of followers because “this must be good as soon as so many people follow them”. This phenomenon is exploited by buying likes, followers, “bot” comments.

Scarcity

Inaccessible things and inaccessible people are always more interesting than “easily accessible”. Offers that are limited in time (“this discount is valid until today at midnight”) or quantity (“there are only 10 copies left”). The great demand of other people is again a kind of social proof that gives us a picture of greater value. I wrote more about the application of this phenomenon earlier.

CPC and CPM – Digital marketing guide

When you pay to display an ad, you can do so with either of these two models.

CPC – you pay when someone clicks on your banner (cost per click). For example, 3 cents per click.

CPM – You pay a fixed price per 1000 views (cost per mile). For example, 10 cents for 1000 views, regardless of whether someone clicked or not.

CPM works well if you have an interesting and “once in a lifetime” opportunity that is “flammable” for a specific target group. For example, the banner reads “action – motorcycle helmet reduced from 150 to 20 euros due to the closure of the store” and the target group of bikers.

Affiliate marketing

I have a website or Instagram / Facebook page and I recommend other people’s products from an online shop. I get a percentage of sales, for example, 10% of everyone I send and who buys through me. This is recorded via affiliate tracking codes.

Early adopters and diffusion of innovation

Long story. I told it once a long time ago here. Useful for building a brand, but also for startups that want to break through.

Growth hacking

You come up with methods to get a huge number of new customers with an extremely small budget. It requires a lot of experience, knowledge of psychology, technology, and unused “paths that are rarely followed”.

SEO – Search Engine Optimization

How to be the first on Google. The most common misconception is that SEO is free. It’s free once you’re at the top of the search, but it often takes a lot of time and investment to get there, and time is money. Especially if measured in months, which is often the case for some tangible SEO effects.

Anyway, my text about SEO  is one of the most read (and exhaustive) on this site. It was recently updated for 2020.

Display advertising

Banners on sites, simply put. It can be various variations, animations, popup windows, and so on.

Banners usually bring cold or possibly warm traffic… the only case when banners bring hot traffic is when we use them for remarketing, and there really make a huge difference in sales.

Contextual advertising

Let’s say I have a site where I sell heating briquettes. I set my ad to appear on all sites where someone reads some text where “heating briquettes” are mentioned – whether it will appear on Blic, Kurir, some forum, blog post or where, I have no idea – it is decided by a robot that can to recognize what is being talked about in a certain text and on that basis decide to insert my advertisement in the middle of that text.

Google AdWords – Digital marketing guide

Google’s system from which ads are placed. You can place several types of ads on it.

First and foremost, these are search ads – paid ads that appear when someone “googles” something. The whole science of keywords, click optimization, and so on. Mostly when someone says “I pay Google AdWords” they mean these search ads, although the platform is also used for other types of ads.

In fact, Google AdWords is a system that allows you to place banners on sites – display advertising. You can choose the topics, specific sites, or keywords by which your ads appear on those sites (contextual advertising).

With the Google AdWords system, you can also place those ads on YouTube (which are skipped), according to various criteria. They can be extremely useful, but people have not yet realized their potential.

Advertising network

A system used to place advertisements on many sites at once. Google Adwords is one advertising network.

Google AdSense

It is a system used by site owners to monetize them through advertisements. AdSense actually runs ads on your site, the same ads that someone placed on the Google AdWords system. Generally, it comes down to getting one code from Google, putting that code in the places on your site where you want your ads to appear, and Google will display it according to the criteria specified by people who use AdWords for advertising. In practice, this means that an advertisement for Coca-Cola, for example, will appear on my site, although I have never spoken to anyone from the Coca-Cola company in my life.

So: there are people on the Internet who sell something, and there are those who write about something. The former use Google AdWords, and the latter use Google AdSense. Google connects these two worlds.

Let’s say you have a portal and a text about oily hair on it. In the middle of the text, you have a Google AdSense ad slot. Google understands what you are writing about and decides to insert an advertisement for an oily hair preparation in that slot. The ad was posted by someone from the other side of the world from the Google AdWords system and said it paid 3 cents per click. When someone clicks, you get those 3 cents and that’s it.

In fact, it’s not exactly “his three cents goes to me.” Google has to earn something too 🙂 You get 68% of those three cents, the rest goes to Google. Now it may be a little clearer to you why Google is one of the most powerful companies in the world 🙂

While tempting, this is actually the least effective way to monetize a site… but not bad to begin with.

Net Promoter Score

Surely you once popped up that pop-up window that asks “How much would you recommend this site/service/app to a friend,” on a scale of 1 to 10? Here’s what it looks like with the Adobe Premiere program:

The score that we will calculate with the help of this survey is called the Net Promoter Score.

The logical question that someone would ask would be “wait, so this is meaningless, if someone uses my product, of course, they will give it a good grade, the one who would give below 6 would not even use it”?

In fact, it’s not that simple. Many people are forced to use your service. For example, someone is employed by a company that orders all its employees to use certain software, ordering service, or whatever. Then, someone might use your service just because there is nothing better and there is no alternative (public transport, anyone? 🙂

Suma Summorum, it is possible that you have a large number of users who “have to put up with you” for who knows what reason. This survey serves to get a picture of what is happening.

Usually, people are estimated to fall into three categories:

Grades 9 and 10 – promoters. They go around and say “be sure to try it, I use them and they are great”

Grades 7 and 8 – passive. They will not recommend you, if someone asks them about you they will say “they are not bad, they are ok”.

Below 6 – detractors. From mild objections, to open calls that “no one ever uses this horror”

The Net Promoter Score is calculated by taking the percentage of the promoter and subtracting the percentage of the critics from it. For example, here’s a net promoter score for several airlines:

By comparison, Apple has a Net Promoter Score of 70, which is at the very top.

Finally, the additional question that people are asked when they give a grade is usually something like “What should we do to raise the grade by 1”? Based on this, you also have feedback. If you single out the most common answers, you can get direct guidance on what needs to be improved first.

You can find various services on the net that do this, and there is probably a way to easily integrate this into some of your existing systems.

Viral

Things that spread by themselves because they are extremely interesting to people. It seems easy, but it is extremely difficult to make it “fly”. I have a lot of successful viral campaigns behind me that people have talked about, but I also have some that no one knows about because they failed.

Meme

Gifs, pictures, and videos… that have a predefined “pattern”, or, as Richard Dawkins would say, the basic genetic code, and then various people across the Internet make their “mutation”, a variation on the theme.

The meme has some basic specificity of its own, which is remixed from case to case, but the basic genetic code is recognizable.

For example, “Confused Travolta” is remixed from case to case (by changing the background, ie the context), and the basic “gene” (Travolta’s hand movement) is always there.

Memes are important because by using them in communication with people, you act naturally, as a person who is part of the Internet culture.

Organic vs paid

Everything that appears on the Internet without being sponsored and paid to appear belongs to “organic”. “Paid” are paid posts and they usually carry less value and less trust.

The goal of digital PR is to see as many things as possible organically. On the other hand, advertising deals with paid advertisements, their targeting, and so on. This is the main difference between PR and advertising.

B2B and B2C

B2B (Business to business) means that we have a product that we sell to companies. B2C (Business to consumers) means we sell it to individuals.

Some companies may have a product that is intended for both, and some are just one of these two.

For example, Apple is primarily a B2C company, but they are also engaged in B2B marketing. On the other hand, Oracle is a classic B2B company (huge databases for huge corporations).

Churn and retention

Churn is the shedding of users. For example, we have an image editing application. We may have created an interesting campaign on Facebook that made a lot of people interested, and they downloaded the app to try it out. However, 90% of these people delete the application after the first use. This means that our churn rate is 90% and we need to work on making the application better (we have the so-called “overpromise – underdeliver” effect).

In contrast, retention is a number that shows how many people are left as loyal users.

Drip campaign

A drip campaign is a series of emails that are sent to people once they leave us an email address (lead). For example, someone left an email address on a vegan diet site. We already have ten emails ready to be sent every three days with tips for a vegan diet. This all serves to convert leads into customers. It is often part of a larger CRM system, but can also be set up from most email newsletter programs. I use ActiveCampaign for this because it is quick to learn and has everything you need.

For beginners in marketing, this may seem unimportant, but there are very serious businesses that do everything only with the help of a drip campaign. They have a single page where they collect email addresses (eg people who googled “how to lose weight”), and then through a series of emails they slowly build trust with the person through some good advice, and in some fifth or sixth email, they start subtly offering them some product or service (e.g. a nutritionist who writes a specific weight loss diet program for a particular person).

Marketing automation

A drip campaign is an example of something we call marketing automation – when some software does a “walking job” on a large number of people at once, without any clicking or tapping on our part. For example, if we hire Instagress to go and like people’s images instead of doing it manually, that also falls under marketing automation. There is some automation software for most “pedestrian jobs”. Look for it as soon as possible – you may be wasting an hour every day on some nonsense not knowing that there is software that does it.

Content marketing

We create “content” (texts, images, videos, infographics) with the aim of letting people know about us through it. For example, Kurir News published the text “Eight tricks for beginners in graphic design”, which is actually a content marketing campaign for the IT Academy (the text is full of links to them). Content can also be daily posts on Facebook, Instagram, and so on. Often the goal is to optimize the content on Google and to be at the top of the search for some phrases. For example, if you write an extremely high-quality article on the topic “The best places for a romantic dinner in London”, it will sooner or later break through to the top of the search for “romantic restaurant London” and a similar phrase.

ROI

Return On Investment. Return on investment. For example, I spent 200 euros on a Facebook campaign, I earned 1000 euros. My ROI is 5: 1, so for every euro invested in marketing, I earn five.

ROI is often linear and is used for testing. For example, in a small sample, I concluded that for 10 euros I earn 50. Now I know that if I invested 1000 euros, the earnings would probably be around 5000 euros – of course, if I use the same ad, the same landing page, and the same target group with an increased budget.

KPI

“Key Performance Indicators”, are the main indicators that tell us “how we are doing” day by day, in relation to some goal we have set. KPIs can be anything we define in a particular case.

For example, the company has set a goal of increasing sales by 20% in the next three months. Until those three months are over, we must have something to measure how we are doing day by day. Logically, the first KPI we set would be the number of daily sales. Further, in this case, the KPI can be conversion rate, churn, retention, number of leads collected, and so on.

Marketing Agency

Everyone knows what a marketing agency is, but they don’t really know. So let’s see how a marketing agency actually works.

A client is a firm that hires an agency, usually for a longer period of time. Let’s say there is a “Fog Digital Agency” that works for Nestlé.

Nestlé is launching a new product, a banana-flavored plasma cookie. Marketing Director Nestlé sends an email to Magla Digital: “We need a campaign for a new banana-flavored Plasma, send us an offer by Monday.”

This email is called a brief. It is a task that the agency receives from the client, with a detailed description of the new product, the target group, and so on.

This brief arrives in the mail at the agency by a person called an account manager. It is the person who is in charge of communicating with the client on the one hand, and that person transmits the requests to his colleagues – copywriters, designers, and so on. This person is extremely important because if the creatives communicated directly with the client, they would quickly quarrel over blood and a knife and no job would last long. Thus, when the account manager comes to the designer and says “we have another fifteenth change for today, the director’s daughter doesn’t like the background color” the designer experiences a nervous breakdown in front of the account manager, and he tells the client everything in a nice way. The account manager is therefore like a kind of buffer zone, a UN peacekeeping mission between two warring parties – the client and the creatives.

The account manager also has a much better sense of time and organization. If the designer tells him “it will be over by tomorrow”, he tells the client “it will be over the day after tomorrow” because he knows in advance that a problem can happen and that it can take longer. The account manager responds to all clients’ emails immediately, regularly, and responsibly informs them about everything, and if that job were left to the creatives, it would be a disaster and the agency could close quickly.

For big jobs and campaigns that will cost a lot, sometimes one company can hire several agencies. The brief will be sent, say, to 5 agencies, with a clear indication that it is a competition – the agency that comes up with the best ideas and makes the best presentation will get the project. This competition is called the pitch. Usually, a date is set when one agency at a time will have a presence in that company, and in the end, the winner is chosen.

Of the other people in the agency, there are already mentioned designers, and copywriters…. then, there’s the creative director, who orchestrates the direction of the whole campaign (again Don Draper in the Mad Men series). Furthermore, there is an art director, who defines the style and direction of visual communication, typography, aesthetics of advertising, and so on. Digital agencies have people who deal with the maintenance of pages on social networks (community managers), as well as developers, this now depends on the case.

Usually, the agency hires a so-called studio to make some larger projects, it is a special company that does one specific job. For example, there is a studio that makes TV commercials and nothing else. Or, an app development studio, and so on. The agency can also hire so-called freelancers, are individuals who do some of these specific jobs. In that case, the studio can have its own account manager who agrees with the agency’s account manager, and he further with the client…

When a campaign is designed, usually all the creatives in the agency gather in a room and throw ideas there, until they come up with two or three of the best. This is called brainstorming. Before that, each of them should do research, look on the net for similar campaigns and get some ideas.

A proposal is sent to the client, which he can reject, accept, or modify – 2-3 proposals can be sent to him, so he can choose what he likes more, depending on the project in question.

For important projects, the agency can also hire external associates – consultants, people who will design the campaign, write a marketing plan, set a strategy, and train people to do some things – for example, I deal with that.

That’s about how the agency works…

ATL and BTL marketing

ATL (Above the line) are marketing activities that are done on the mass media for a multitude of people at once.

BTL (Below the line) are marketing activities that are done to communicate one on one with specific people.

For example, when you see a billboard for a new blueberry-flavored Jaffa cookie, it’s ATL. When a promoter approaches you in the supermarket and asks “do you want to try our new Jaffa blueberry-flavored biscuit” it’s BTL.

There are usually special agencies that deal with ATL and BTL marketing, but if the agency is huge then it can have special sectors for ATL and for BTL.

Customer Lifetime Value – the life value of the user

This is the total earnings that will come to us from one user during a multi-year relationship with us. Here’s why this matters:

Let’s say you have a massage parlor and you have Google Adwords ads for the keyword “massage Boston”. Let’s say that one massage costs $20, and bringing one person to the salon costs you the same $20 (the price is $0.1 per click and for every 200 clicks one person comes to the salon).

Now, someone would say, this campaign is not worth it because I am at zero (ROI – Return Of Investment is 1: 1). However, if we look at what is happening in the long run, the picture is different: many people will return to the salon. Let’s say that in the next year, on average, everyone will come ten times for a massage (someone will never come again, someone will come 20 more times, let there be an average of 10 returns a year).

This means that my ROI is already 10: 1 for a year, which is already very profitable. If we further know that the average user comes to a massage parlor for the next five years (based on the “churn rate”), we can say that our customer lifetime value will be 10 arrivals x 5 years = 50 arrivals, or $1000.

Thus, ROI is not only measured by sales that happen immediately but also in the long run. I have now “broken” this example, but real numbers can be extracted from some CRM software that remembers who was with you when, so make a realistic calculation of what pays off for you.

Scale of values

Plan to gradually drag customers through the levels, to start slowly, and then climb higher and higher.

Native advertising

Advertising is immersed in the nature of a particular medium so that it does not act as advertising.

For example, you are now hiring a well-known YouTuber to advertise some anti-dandruff shampoo.

It would be non-native for that someone to appear nicely dressed in front of the camera, with make-up on, with studio light, and say like a robot: “Hi, I would like to recommend this new shampoo that removes up to 99% of dandruff, it can be found in all pharmacies. ” His followers would react with comments “HORROR”, “FAKE”, “KILL YOURSELF” and the like, and you would have no effect.

Native would be for that someone to show up in his pajamas in his bedroom and say “Hi, how are you, what’s up… here today they squeezed me to try this shampoo which is supposedly anti-dandruff… I was a little skeptical but said come on… and really is good I can tell you, it didn’t burn my head like when I use Head and Shoulders or something like that trash… I understand that there are better ones but they are terribly expensive, and this one is only $3.66, there are some combinations of herbs inside… all in all ok is shampoo, if you want something for a class above the industrial ones to check this…. and let’s move on now, we’ll talk about today…

SLA – Service level agreement

An SLA is an agreement between marketers and vendors in a firm. This is extremely important for things that are sold by first picking up a contact (lead) over the net (this is done by marketers), and then that person is dragged into a live conversation (this is done by salespeople). For example, apartments.

Take, for example, the sale of new apartments in the “A Block” neighborhood in Madrid. Maybe I as a marketer figured out a way to draw 100 leads a day. However, my salespeople tell me “hey, easier a little, we can process a maximum of 20 people a day”. If we don’t synchronize the action, it will happen that my leads will cool down and get angry that no one called them for days.

Or, let’s say it can happen that the leads I send them are bad. Of those 100 people a day, one or none decides to buy an apartment, and the sales team spends a lot of time. It could be, for example, because I made a campaign in which I promise people some madness from the offer, and when people come to talk, they realize that this is not the case. This is a sign that I need to lower my expectations a bit in the text on the landing page – fewer people will apply, but better quality leads.

So marketing and sales teams need to talk constantly and both correct their actions based on feedback. If they view each other as a “black box” with which they have nothing to do, it is very likely that the whole campaign will have no effect.

User Experience

The complete experience and emotions that a person experiences on the way through our sales funnel. Drops in mood and emotions can drastically affect our people falling out of the funnel.

Customer Journey map

A folder used to repair user experience.

Reach

How many people saw something? Marketers like to flaunt reach, especially in situations where the campaign has not yielded sales results – reach is an ideal excuse. “Well, you know, but we still had a reach of a million people, it’s good for brand awareness.”

Boost Post on Facebook

Increasing the number of Facebook posts by paying Zuckerberg. It is mostly used by beginners because it is simple. If you want something more serious, Ad Manager must be used.

Community management

Running a page on social networks. Have a person sit down and figure out how to entertain people and make it related to the brand.

This is not always profitable to do. It depends on the type of product, sometimes it makes sense, and sometimes it doesn’t. Ask for the advice of an experienced person, because you may be wasting time on this without even knowing it… or you may not be dealing with this and it would bring you tremendous progress if you did. Ask for advice. It takes me 5 seconds to tell you YES or NO.

Microcontent

Content made for posting on social media is what a community manager posts. One image, short video, status…

Editorial calendar

Content and microcontent setup plan for the next week, two, or month… Allows things to be produced in advance.

Many brands stick to this calendar “like a drunken fence”, which is a mistake because then everything seems fake and out of all current. One should always leave room to react to some things spontaneously and to make posts (primarily microcontent) in synergy with the current vibrations on the networks, according to the things that happened suddenly today.

So, if today everyone is talking about a spaceship that landed on a comet, and the editorial calendar tells you that today you have to set up a cat that eats your biscuits, then you will leave that cat for another day, and give your designer the task to in the next hour he did some trick with a cookie and a comet. This is called NEWSJACKING.

If everything is ironed and prepared for you a week in advance, then your page will be boring and will exude isolationism, as if you really care what is happening outside your world.

Storytelling

Oratory skills, holding attention through copy. If the landing page has a good story that just “flows” if the person reads all the time and keeps the attention with undiminished intensity, it means that it is good storytelling. Good copywriters know the so-called narratives – “patterns” in which stories fit to hold attention. Playwrights have this in their little fingers.

Just as there are established narratives for films, for example, there are also narratives for certain types of products. Strong books have been written about this and it exceeds the possibilities of this text. If you want to be a good copywriter, you need to know these narratives.

Infographics

…Visual storytelling.

Stereotypes

Basic elements of interesting and witty writing that hold attention. If you use them sparingly when writing sales pages, people will be much more willing to stay until the end of the text.

Web writing rules

The style and format in which texts are written so that texts can be read online. You can be a genius at writing printed books if you don’t follow these rules on the web no one will read you. Text in preparation!

Upsell

When someone has already bought, we offer him something else, so if he buys that too, then something else …

Okay, that’s it for now.