Digital Marketing For Dummies (For Dummies (Lifestyle))

by Ryan Deiss

Marketing is still about developing a mutually beneficial relationship with prospects, leads, and customers. We call the development of this relationship the customer journey.

The role of your digital marketing is to assist in moving a prospect, lead, or customer from one stage of the customer journey to the next.

Creating a Customer Avatar

you must first attain clarity on the characteristics of your ideal customers.

A customer avatar is the fictional, generalized representation of your ideal customer.

It is absolutely crucial that you

understand and make your customer avatar as specific as possible so that you can craft personalized content, offers, and marketing campaigns that interest members of your audience or solve their problems.

What to include in your customer avatar

Goals and values: Determine what the avatar is trying to achieve. What values does he or she hold dear? Sources of information: Figure out what books, magazines, blogs, news stations, and other resources the avatar references for information. Demographics: Establish the age, gender, marital status, ethnicity, income, employment status, nationality, and political preference of the avatar.

Challenges and pain points: What is holding the avatar back from achieving his or her goals? Objections: Why would the avatar choose not to buy your product or service?

Getting clear on goals and values

Finding sources of information and entertainment

The key to truly understanding where your customer is getting information and entertainment is in identifying niche sources. Identifying these niches is fairly simple using the “But No One Else Would” Trick. To use this trick, you simply complete sentences like: My ideal customer would read [book], but no one else would. My ideal customer would subscribe to [magazine], but no one else would.

Honing in on demographics

Adding challenges and pain points

The reasons your avatar doesn’t buy are called objections, and you must address them in your marketing.

Getting Clear on the Value You Provide

people don’t buy products or services at all; instead, they buy outcomes.

The shift from the Before state to the After state is what your customer is buying. This shift (or outcome) is the value that your business brings to the marketplace. Furthermore, the role of your marketing is to articulate this move from the Before state to the After state.

Knowing the Stages of the Customer Journey

We can’t overstate the importance of sequence in marketing, and particularly in digital marketing.

Step 1: Generating awareness

if awareness is your issue, you should employ the following digital marketing tactics: Advertising: Advertising, both online and offline, is a reliable and effective method of raising awareness. Social media marketing: Billions of people access social media sites such as Facebook,

Twitter, and LinkedIn every day. Social media marketing is an inexpensive method of raising awareness. Search marketing: Billions of web searches on sites such as Google and Bing are processed every day. Basic search marketing techniques direct some of that traffic to your website.

Step 2: Driving engagement

Blog posts Podcasts Online videos

Step 3: Building subscribers

A subscriber is anyone who has given you permission to have a conversation with him.

Step 4: Increasing conversions

At this stage, the goal is to elevate the commitment level of the prospect by asking him or her

to give you a small amount of time or money. Low-dollar products or services, webinars, and product demos are all good...

The goal of Stage 4 is not profitability, but rather an increased level of connection between the prospect and your business.

Step 5: Building excitement

The business term for getting your prospect to take advantage of an offer is customer onboarding.

By building excitement and teaching our customers to be successful, we’ve seen dramatically lower cancellation rates.

The value of the offers you make should far outweigh the price paid by your customer. Deliver great products and services and create marketing campaigns that encourage the use of those products and services. After

Step 6: Making the core offer sale and more

We call this jump from passive prospect to buyer ascension.

Step 7: Developing brand advocates

Brand advocates give you testimonials about the fabulous experience they’ve had with your brand.

You build this relationship by adding value, delivering on the promise of your product (meaning that it actually does what you claim it will do), and with responsive customer service.

Step 8: Growing brand promoters

The difference between an advocate (Step 7) and a brand promoter is that the promoter actively spreads the word about your business, whereas the advocate is more passive.

Preparing Your Customer Journey Road Map

Every business is interested in generating leads, making sales, retaining the customers they have, and selling them more of the company’s products or services.

Establishing Marketing Objectives

When you know what you want to accomplish, you’ll be able to direct your energy into the right marketing campaigns and employ marketing tactics that move the needle on the right business metrics.

Here are six common goals that your digital marketing strategy can affect:

Increasing problem and solution awareness:

Your online marketing can help prospective customers become aware of something they need, an effect called problem awareness. Your marketing can also make prospective customers aware that your company provides a solution to a problem — called solution awareness.