Digital Marketing For Dummies (For Dummies (Lifestyle))

by Ryan Deiss

Maximizing Profit

The cost of acquiring new customers is often the most expensive one that businesses incur. After you have a buyer, asking that buyer to buy from you again makes sense.

The marketing campaigns you employ to sell more, or more often, to the leads and customers you’ve acquired are called Monetization campaigns, and these campaigns have a number of different types of offers to employ.

Making an upsell or cross-sell offer

immediate upsell,

“Do you want fries with that?” offer made at McDonald’s.

The cross-sell offer, on the other hand, makes an offer related to the first purchase. For example, a clothing retailer might offer dress shoes

Because the cross-sell may not be as relevant to the first purchase, a cross-sell can feel like it’s

coming out of left field, which can be jarring to and unwanted by the customer. That’s why you have to be careful with cross-sells,

Building bundles and kits

A bundle or a kit is taking one of your stand-alone products and combining it with other like items that you or one of your business partners sell.

Tacking on a slack adjuster

A slack adjuster is a product

or service that you offer at a price point much higher than your typical offer. The price is generally 10 to 100 times higher than your usual offers.

Recurring billing

This may take the form of a club or some other type of membership, or a subscription such as a monthly gym membership.

Recurring billing can be a difficult sell because of the commitment that goes along with it. To overcome this issue, clearly communicate the advantage provided by the recurring billing offer and lower the perceived risk by clearly communicating the cancellation.

Use content to raise awareness, generate leads, segment your audience, move your audience through your marketing funnel, and ultimately generate sales.

Without content, Google has nothing to discover on your website, Facebook Fans have nothing to share, newsletters have no news, and paid traffic campaigns become one-dimensional sales pitches.

Knowing the Dynamics of Content Marketing

With the low-cost (or no cost) of publishing platforms such as WordPress, YouTube, and iTunes, even the smallest of brands can produce content for the web.

Marketers often confuse the term blogging with content marketing. Although blogging is a powerful and versatile content marketing channel, it’s only one part of a well-balanced content strategy.

Finding Your Path to Perfect Content Marketing

Content marketing is about anticipating the needs of your customers and prospects, and building content assets that satisfy those needs.

For example, the cloud-based software company Freshbooks anticipated a prospective customer’s need for pricing information.

Understanding the marketing funnel

Content can, and should, assist the prospect in graduating from one stage of the marketing funnel to the next.

A basic marketing funnel has three stages that take a prospect from stranger to buyer:

Awareness:

The prospect must first become aware that he has a problem and that you or your organization can provide a solution.

Raising problem and solution awareness is where your blog will shine. Use your blog to educate, inspire, or entertain...

Evalu...

Those who move through the awareness stage must now evaluate the various choices available to them, including your competitor’s solutions and, of course, ta...

Conversion:

Those who move through the evaluation stage are at the moment of truth — purchase. The goal at this stage is to convert leads into frequent and high-ticket buyers.

Content at the top of the funnel (TOFU) that facilitates awareness. Content at the middle of the funnel (MOFU) that facilitates evaluation. Content at the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) that facilitates conversion.

Top of funnel (TOFU) content marketing

The prospects entering the top of your funnel are unaware of your solution and often unaware that they even have a problem that needs to be solved. As a result, you need content that people can freely access, as opposed to content that requires prospects to give you their contact information or make a purchase.

Entertains Educates Inspires

Blog posts:

Social media updates:

Infographics:

Infographics are highly effective at delivering content that is both entertaining and educational, quickly.

Photographs:

With a photograph, a kitchen design company can show completed projects that effectively demonstrate what the company does

Digital magazines and books:

Audio and video podcasts:

Microsites:

Print magazines and newsletters:

Primary research: