Many organization, however, don’t take this approach. They don’t really understand the gaps in the content they need, and the feel like they are constantly on the content treadmill, churning out article after article, with no end in sight. In addition, they can’t connect the dots between the content they produce and the results in the business. The result is that they often don’t care about the content and it ends up being poorly written or produced.

Content Marketing Introduction

Content marketing is everywhere. As the web and social media have become integral parts of all of our lives, large and small companies are using content to build engagement with both current and potential customers.

Developing great content is one of the most important functions of marketing. Providing excellent and relevant content to potential buyers establishes you as an expert and authority, and engages potential customers throughout the buying cycle. This creates brand loyalty, improves retention, focuses attention, and generates leads. Engaging new and existing customers by educating them is a great way to build relationships, and it helps you and your company become a thought leader and industry expert.

Consumer products companies as diverse as Kraft Foods and LEGO have been using content marketing for years to engage with customers, build their brands, and grow sales. Kraft started with recipe books and evolved into sophisticated websites and apps to help their loyal customers understand how to use food products such as Velveeta, Cool Whip and Jell-O in new and innovative ways. In the toy category, LEGO has a LEGO Club that produces a beautiful monthly magazine for LEGO fans and their parents. They also produce videos, games, and other content to make sure they are top-of-mind for their customers for every birthday or holiday.

Both B2B and B2C organizations are producing and promoting a large variety of content. Companies produce videos, white papers, articles, infographics, e-books, and more in order to engage potential customers at many points in the buying process.

Incredibly, 86% of marketers are using content marketing today. A recent Content Marketing Institute surveys show that the most popular types of content are social media content, website articles, newsletters, blogs, events, case studies, and videos.

Content Marketing Strategy

Many organizations simply create a bunch of content, but it’s important to move from just creating content to leveraging it as part of an integrated strategy. A good content marketing strategy will include designing the right content based on the needs of your audience, creating a manageable content program calendar, and promoting all of your content using social media and digital advertising in order to drive traffic, leads, and sales. Your strategy should also include ways to measure the results of your content marketing program so you can clearly demonstrate to the organization how you’re making an impact.

How effective is your content marketing program? It’s interesting that very few marketers feel that they are being effective in this area. According to the Content Marketing Institute, only about 8% of marketers rated themselves as very effective and 30% said they were somewhat effective. This means that only 38% of marketers felt like they are doing a great job with content marketing, and most marketers thinking they’re mediocre at best2.

Once you implement the program described in this chapter, you will have created a world-class content marketing program that’s directly tied to your organization’s marketing strategy. You will learn how to create the right content and develop the metrics to prove that it’s effective, so that you can be confident that you are making a positive impact on your organization.

Many organizations struggle with creating the content they need. Here are six steps that will help you build a comprehensive content marketing strategy and create content that delivers results:

1. Identify your content marketing goals, determine what you are trying to accomplish, and define the business benefits that you’re trying to achieve. In this step, you will also create the metrics you need to understand the impact you are making.
2. Review your website analytics, your competitor’s websites, and the content you already have through a comprehensive content audit. 
3. Understand your buyer’s journey and the process they go through to identify what they want to buy and who they want to buy it from.
4. Create personas for the market segments you want to address using market segmentation techniques to figure out who your best customers are and how you can speak to their needs directly. To create personas, you will need to understand your ideal customers, how they make buying decisions, the questions they ask, and the content they need.
5. Create an editorial calendar so that you have a solid plan in place to create the content for your program. This will include creating a specific plan for who’s going to write or create the content you need for your program.
6. Leverage your content for results. This includes using SEO, digital advertising, email, and a number of other programs to build your brand, engage with your customers, generate leads, and ultimately grow sales.

Content Marketing Goals

There are many things you can accomplish with your content marketing program, so it’s important to focus on the right goals for your organization. According to one study, one of the most popular goals for content marketing programs is lead generation. If your organization markets and sells to other businesses, you’re most likely going to be using your content to drive leads.

Another important goal for most content marketing programs is thought leadership, which establishes your company as a leader in the market. The third most popular goal is brand awareness, which involves breaking through the clutter to build your brand and grow the overall reputation of your organization. Other goals you may consider could include nurturing your leads, driving sales, and building website traffic.

After you’ve determined your overall goals, you’ll need to turn each general goal into specific metrics that you can measure and that your content marketing strategy can accomplish. In a recent survey, when marketers were asked about their most important metrics, they answered that they use website traffic, sales increases, social media sharing metrics, and time spent on the website to measure success3.

If you want to increase SEO visibility, you should set goals for specific keyword visibility and for increasing organic SEO traffic. If you want to increase social media engagement, you should set goals for how many followers or fans you want. It’s important to be as specific as possible about how you want to make a difference. As you plan your social media content marketing goals, you should first create a benchmark to see how much traffic is currently coming to your website from social media, so that you can plan your improvements.

If you want to increase the effectiveness of your digital advertising program, consider what you want your new conversion rates to be, how many leads you want, or how you want to change the cost per lead. If your goal is to improve your email program, you may want to increase your email click-through rates, open rates, or conversion rates.

There are so many goals that you can focus on, it’s best to get specific and create targets for yourself in each of these areas, so that you can demonstrate to the business that content marketing is having an impact.

Analytics Tools

In order to measure your success, you’ll need to install and use the right tools. Google Analytics is an excellent tool to help you understand the traffic that’s coming to your website and the source of that traffic.

Google Search Console is a great way to see your website the way that Google sees it. Among many other things, it shows your keyword visibility so that you can see the impact of your content marketing program on SEO.

Social Media management tools like Hootsuite and Spout Social can also be helpful to let you understand how your content marketing program is impacting social media followers and engagement.

Content Audit

Before you create a solid content marketing strategy, you have to do your homework and determine what you know, what you have, and what you need. To get started, you should conduct a content audit to understand the content assets you already have in your organization.

As part of your content assessment, remember to review your Google Analytics or other analytics tools and see what content is the most popular and effective, what gets the most mentions and retweets in social media, and which content gets shared and liked in your industry. Before you trust the raw statistics you find, remember that that popularity can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, since the most popular content may be the content that has been featured or promoted the most, not necessarily the content that is the best quality.

You may have been producing articles, white papers, or videos for years, but you may not feel like your content is high enough quality, or that it is addressing all the different market segments that you need to communicate to. As you do a content inventory, remember to rate the quality of your content and determine how it can fit into your plan.

Next, look at your competitors. What content do they have? Do they have more than you, or less? Are you playing catch up, or do you have an opportunity to go way beyond them in terms of your content marketing program? When you look at your competitors, try to understand the topics that are important to them and the types of media are they using.

While you’re looking at all this data, don’t forget to talk to your customers and your salespeople. Often, your salespeople or senior executives can tell you a lot about what they’re hearing, and what they’re learning from customers and prospects about the content, issues, and media.

Next, review industry research and look at the topics that are most important to industry analysts. Analysts have their finger on the heartbeat of new topics that can be important as you put your plan together.

Once you’ve done your homework and understand the topics that might be part of your content marketing plan, you need to look at your own team to assess the skills you have internally to create new content. Do you have great writers on staff? Do you have a video department? Do you have great people that can produce graphics and infographics? If you don’t have internal resources, you may need to find vendors or contractors to help you create all of the content you want as part of your plan.

Align Content to the Buying Process

In B2B organizations, content like white papers, articles, and webinars fits well in the awareness phase. They help people understand the problem, come up with potential solutions, and think about how to address the situation.

In the evaluation phase, people are more interested in case studies and social media content to help them understand how other people actually solved their problems with a particular product. They also look at product information and company information to understand who makes the best products or delivers the best services.

In the purchase phase, they might be interested in a live demo or trial, or an assessment to get some experience with the product before they make a final purchase decision.

Once you have a solid understanding of the buying process, you can plan your content more specifically. For each piece of content, you should ask yourself which stage of the buying process it addresses. Is it of the quality and timeliness that you really need? By aligning your content with the way people actually buy, you will be able to ensure you have all of the right content you need to win new customers.

Planning Your Content: Editorial Calendar

Once you create your buyer personas, you can begin to plan out the content you will need to produce in order to help your buyers make a buying decision. Your buyer may want to read white papers, blogs, how-to content, and educational content in the awareness phase. In the evaluation phase, you may want to offer case studies, samples, or product and company information that your buyer needs to properly evaluate your products and services.

In the purchase phase, you may want to offer specific engagement tools such as a live demo, a free trial, free assessment, or a coupon that the buyer needs in order to make a positive decision for you. As you plan your strategy and editorial calendar, remember that it all needs to be focused on your specific buyer personas so that you can tailor it to their specific needs.

Now that you have a plan and a strategy, you can focus on actually creating all of the content. The average B2B marketer uses twelve different content types, so how do you create all of this content efficiently and effectively? To get started, it’s best to use tools that are the most popular, such as social media, articles, newsletters, blogs, case studies, and videos.

To make content creation efficient and effective, you can also start with core ideas around your products, thought leadership issues that you want to address, client stories, or even events. Once you produce your core content, you can write more than one article about it and create derivative content and social media posts.

For example, if you’ve gone through the hard work of putting together an important thought leadership piece, the next step is to leverage that core content in as many different forms as possible. One way you can do this is by producing one solid white paper and then turning that into a series of articles. You can then use the articles to create shorter blog posts. From there, you repurpose the content for your website, use it in an email campaign, and leverage it for your digital ad campaign. You can also tweet about it, produce a short video, and even turn it into a podcast.

If you think about your editorial calendar as one continuous stream of content production, you can take one project, such as a white paper, and leverage it in many different ways to produce a wide variety of content for your program.

Once you understand how to use leverage to produce a wide variety of content, you can do the detailed work of creating the editorial calendar to get ready to produce the content itself. The editorial calendar is basically a spreadsheet or project plan to take all of these different ideas we’ve discussed so far, and put them into a detailed plan.

Your editorial calendar (see the chart blow) should include the topic, type of content, due date, the creator’s name, the buying stage, and the persona to which it is addressed. For example, if I want to build an awareness-level piece targeted at Harry, I might create the task and assign it to David. The plan is to produce a white paper on retirement plans, and we’re going to leverage that through a number of channels, including our website, digital advertising, and our email campaigns.

The plan also shows that we want Karen to write an evaluation-stage-level piece targeted at Joe and Deb. The piece is going to be a case study focused on company differentiation, and we’re going to leverage that on our email campaign, website, and blog. With this simple tool, you can create a detailed plan to describe exactly who’s doing what, so that you have a fully functional editorial calendar.

Editorial calendars are an often talked about, but little used technique, so I’d encourage you to get very specific in your plan to determine exactly who’s going to do what in building the content so that you can get it all done.

Ideas for Creating Content

At times, it might be difficult to think of new ideas for content, so here are a few techniques that might help you get new ideas.

• Interview your customers.
• Survey your readers to find out what they are interested in.
• Highlight case studies and customer stories.

• Share success and failures.
• Tell a personal story.

These are just some ideas that can help you come up with good content creation ideas.

Here are the most common types of content that you may use in your content marketing program.

White papers

White papers provide customers with information about, or solutions to, problems they might have. They serve in establishing thought leadership and expertise by showing how you can help solve a problem. A good white paper will capture the reader’s attention and draw in a large audience. The best white papers address the “pain” of your target audience in a powerful and provocative way. They can be focused on strategic issues or very tactical tips depending on your target audience.

Webinars

Like white papers, webinars provide information that promotes thought leadership. Webinars, however, offer a valuable chance to interact with potential and existing customers as well as others in your field. A good webinar has many of the characteristics described above, but it also should have engaging speakers.

The best webinars will feature an industry celebrity who people want to hear from and get close to. Imagine how differently you feel about going to a webinar featuring Larry Page, CEO of Google, vs. one of its many product managers. The actual content from one of their product managers may be more detailed and more useful to you, but don’t discount the value of using a celebrity in your webinars. Once webinars are produced, they can also be recorded and reused as offers and additional content. The content can also be turned into a white paper and provide even more leverage.

Case studies

Case studies can provide valuable content about your company and the impact that it can make on customers. They demonstrate your problem-solving skills and the impact you’ve had on real situations. The power of the case study is that it tells a story. Most people find it much easier to understand a story than a list of facts, features, and action items. The story can also have an emotional element or sense of suspense to make it more effective. People understand complex information presented in stories better, and they are also better at remembering stories.

Video

Video use on the Internet has grown exponentially over the past few years. It has the ability to tell a story and communicate information in a powerful, creative, and emotional way that cannot be matched by text or even live events. Video can be used to tell customer stories, educate your audience, or sell a product. It can be used alongside other content, such as when you include a one-minute promotion in front of a white paper, or as a replacement for a detailed product data sheet.

Both professionally shot video and personal video is acceptable on the Internet. Personal video has an amateur quality that people often find to be more real and authentic than the slick commercials seen on TV. These can also be much less expensive to produce so that you can create more of them. If you choose to use personal video, make sure that the sound and video quality is good enough so that your users are not annoyed by the video, and they can still get significant value.

Comparison Guides

A guide to help users make decisions about the types of products they need is a very powerful type of content. People often struggle with finding all of the information they need to make an informed purchase decision and need documents that put all of the issues together for them in an easy-to-use format. Keep in mind that a comparison guide can be written at several levels to help people at each stage of the buying cycle.

In the awareness phase, people need help understanding the types of solutions available. An example of this type of guide would be “Road Bikes vs. Mountain Bikes.” In the consideration phase, people need help understanding how your products are different than others. An example of this type would be, “Trek vs. Cannondale—Who has the strongest frame?” In the purchase phase, people need help understanding which of your products to choose. An example of this would be, “How to choose the right road bike for you.” Comparison guides are helpful because they address the core needs of the reader during the right phase of the buying cycle.

Leverage Your Content for Results

Content makes all of your digital marketing programs easier. From social media to SEO to email and digital advertising, this section will help you understand how and where to leverage your content.

Social Media

Once you’ve produced your content, one of the first things you can do is promote it on social media channels. You can push it out on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Google +, Pinterest, and more. To do this, you will need to host the content on your website, blog, or another place on the Internet, and then create a post and link back to it. The links will be visible to your followers and fans, and many people will see them. Of course the more fans you have, the more traffic and engagement you will have. The top social media sites are Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn and Pinterest, but don’t ignore some of the other social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon and Tumblr, that can provide great links back to your content.

SEO

There are many ways you can use your content to boost your organic search engine rankings (SEO). The most highly rated tool in SEO is content creation. Since Google has gotten better with their search algorithm, they have weeded out a lot of bad content and links. With recent Google changes, content creation stands out as the best SEO technique.

As you put your content on your website, you should include important keywords on the body copy as well as other html tags to make it look exactly like what the search engines want to see so that it can be effective for SEO purposes. You can also place your content on other sites or blogs and use it to link back to your website.

Email

Email is one of the most popular and important digital marketing techniques and a great way to leverage your content. If you have a multi-touch email campaign, you can use the buying process strategy that we’ve discussed to plan your email campaign content, so it will nurture prospects through the buying cycle. You might want to create a first-touch email that is awareness-oriented, in which you feature a white paper or webinar. Touch two might be an “evaluate” oriented piece that’s more case study oriented or product oriented, and in touch three, you might send a free trial offer or “get started” offer.

You can, of course, leverage the core content you have by targeting it at different personas. In order to do this, you will need to segment your house email list so that you can send specific content to specific people through the buying cycle. This will allow you to customize the email copy to the persona you are addressing, so that it feels personal. Segmenting the list and sending personalized email is going to dramatically improve your email marketing program.

Digital Advertising

The last technique we’ll discuss is leveraging your content for digital advertising. Strong content featured on well-designed landing pages can dramatically improve the results of your advertising programs. You can promote content using Google Ads Search and Display Ads, and also using social media ads through sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. You may want to use digital advertising to promote content such as white papers that can drive leads, or just get more engagement with your video or infographics content. The chapter on digital advertising will give you much more detail on strategies to drive good results.

I’ve seen advertising programs that leverage good content increase conversion rates by 500%. It can make a huge impact in your program if you’re promoting strong content versus just building traffic to your website. You can get more leads, and it can dramatically increase the ROI of the program.

Content Marketing Strategy Summary

This six-step content marketing strategy will help you create a world-class program that is efficient and effective, and makes a measurable difference to your organization. Remember to start with your content marketing goals, and then do your homework to analyze your buyer’s journey so that you can build personas. When you complete this work, you can build a very specific editorial calendar to get the work done. Once you have a plan, you can leverage your content in every part of your digital marketing program.

Digital marketing has never been more powerful—or more confusing. There are more channels, more tools, more data, and more ways to reach customers than ever before. Campaigns can be launched in minutes, dashboards update in real time, and results often look promising on the surface. And yet, many organizations still feel a persistent sense of uncertainty about their marketing: Are we doing the right things? Are we reaching the right people? Are these results actually moving the business forward?

That uncertainty is almost always a strategy problem.

Without a clear marketing strategy, even well-executed campaigns can feel disjointed or fragile. You may see leads coming in, traffic increasing, or engagement improving—yet still lack confidence that your marketing is truly aligned with your business goals. Worse, when performance dips or market conditions change, teams without a strategic foundation often respond by chasing new tactics, changing messages, or increasing spend, rather than addressing the root cause.

A strong marketing strategy provides direction. It clarifies where you are going, who you are trying to reach, and why your approach should work. With that clarity, setbacks become manageable, decisions become easier, and success becomes repeatable. Instead of guessing which channels or messages to try next, you are making informed choices based on a deep understanding of your customers, your market, and your competitive position.

This guide is built on a simple but critical belief: effective digital marketing starts long before the first campaign is launched. It starts with understanding your customers—what they care about, how they make decisions, and what truly differentiates you in their minds. It requires honest evaluation of your competitors, a clear definition of success, and a disciplined approach to focus. Only then can tactics, channels, and creative work deliver their full potential.

Too often, marketing teams are pressured to move quickly: launch campaigns, test messages, optimize ads, and “let the data decide.” While testing and optimization are essential parts of modern marketing, they are not substitutes for strategy. Testing can help you improve execution over time, but it cannot compensate for unclear positioning, poor audience focus, or misaligned objectives. Starting in the wrong direction and hoping to optimize your way out is expensive, time-consuming, and frustrating.

A well-defined marketing strategy acts as the foundation for everything that follows. It informs your messaging, your content, your channel mix, your budget allocation, and your measurement approach. It ensures that every campaign is not just performing well in isolation, but contributing to a larger, coherent plan. When strategy is done right, you don’t just know that your marketing is working—you know why it’s working.

This guide is designed to help you build that foundation.

It walks through a structured, practical approach to digital marketing strategy, beginning with an honest assessment of where you are today and ending with a clear path from strategy to execution. Along the way, it emphasizes focus over breadth, insight over activity, and alignment over volume. You will learn how to define meaningful marketing objectives, identify and prioritize your best customers, understand how buyers actually make decisions, and articulate a differentiated position in the market that can be consistently communicated across channels.

Importantly, this is not a tactical playbook or a checklist of tools. Platforms, algorithms, and best practices will continue to change. The principles in this guide are designed to endure. By grounding your marketing in customer insight, competitive understanding, and clear business objectives, you create a strategy that can adapt as tactics evolve.

Whether you are building a new marketing program from scratch, recalibrating an existing one, or trying to bring greater clarity and alignment to your organization, the goal of this guide is the same: to help you move forward with confidence. When you know where you are going—and why—you can invest in digital marketing with purpose, measure success more meaningfully, and build programs that drive sustainable growth rather than short-term wins.

Strategy does not slow marketing down. Done correctly, it accelerates it.

Why Strategy Comes First

In digital marketing, speed is often mistaken for progress. New channels emerge, platforms release new features, and performance data updates by the hour. This constant motion can create pressure to act quickly—to launch campaigns, experiment with messaging, and optimize tactics in real time. While agility is valuable, activity without direction rarely produces sustained results.

Marketing strategy exists to provide that direction.

A marketing strategy defines the choices that guide all marketing decisions: who you are trying to reach, what problem you solve for them, why they should choose you over alternatives, and how success will be measured. Without these choices clearly articulated, marketing becomes reactive. Teams chase trends, campaigns compete with each other for attention, and performance metrics are evaluated in isolation rather than in the context of business outcomes.

Strategy vs. Tactics

One of the most common sources of confusion in marketing is the difference between strategy and tactics. Tactics are the actions you take—running paid search campaigns, publishing blog posts, sending email nurtures, or launching social media ads. Strategy is the logic behind those actions. It explains why you are using a particular channel, why a message should resonate with a specific audience, and how those efforts connect to broader business goals.

When tactics are developed without strategy, even well-executed programs can fall short. You may see strong click-through rates or engagement numbers, but little impact on pipeline, revenue, or long-term growth. Conversely, when tactics are guided by a clear strategy, performance improves not just because campaigns are optimized, but because they are aligned with real customer needs and meaningful objectives.

This guide focuses on strategy first—because tactics only reach their full potential when they are built on a solid foundation.

The Cost of Skipping Strategy

Organizations that skip or rush through strategy often pay for it later. Common symptoms include:

• Marketing spend spread across too many channels with little impact
• Inconsistent messaging across campaigns and platforms
• Difficulty explaining why certain programs are working or not
• Over-reliance on short-term metrics that don’t reflect business value
• Friction between marketing, sales, and leadership around priorities and results

In these situations, teams often respond by increasing activity—testing more messages, launching new campaigns, or investing in new tools. While optimization is important, it cannot fix fundamental misalignment. Without a clear understanding of your target audience, your competitive position, and your goals, optimization simply improves the efficiency of the wrong approach.

What This Guide Covers—and What It Doesn’t

This guide is intentionally focused on the strategic layer of digital marketing. It is designed to help you make better decisions before you invest time, budget, and resources into execution.

Specifically, this guide will help you:

• Define meaningful marketing objectives aligned with business goals
• Understand and prioritize your most valuable customers
• Map how buyers make decisions in your market
• Identify the criteria buyers use to evaluate solutions
• Clarify your competitive positioning and sources of differentiation
• Translate strategy into clear, consistent messaging
• Create a foundation for planning, measurement, and optimization

What this guide does not attempt to do is prescribe specific tools, platforms, or tactical playbooks. Those decisions should be made after strategy is in place—and they will vary based on industry, audience, budget, and organizational maturity. By focusing on principles and frameworks rather than tactics, this guide remains relevant even as technologies and channels evolve.

Strategy as an Enabler of Speed and Confidence

A common misconception is that strategy slows marketing down. In reality, the opposite is true. When strategy is clear, teams move faster because they spend less time debating priorities, reworking messaging, or second-guessing decisions. Campaign planning becomes more efficient, content becomes more consistent, and measurement becomes more meaningful.

Perhaps most importantly, strategy builds confidence. Instead of reacting to every performance fluctuation or market change, teams can evaluate results against a clear set of objectives and assumptions. They can adapt thoughtfully, knowing which elements are core to their approach and which are open to experimentation.

Marketing strategy is not a document created once and forgotten. It is a living framework that guides decision-making over time. The sections that follow outline a structured approach to building that framework—one that is grounded in customer insight, informed by competitive realities, and designed to support sustainable growth.

With that foundation in place, digital marketing becomes more than a collection of campaigns. It becomes a coordinated system designed to win.

Defining Success: From Business Goals to Marketing Objectives

Before deciding who to target, what to say, or which channels to use, you must first define what success actually looks like. Without clear objectives, marketing performance is difficult to evaluate and even harder to improve. Activity may increase, metrics may fluctuate, but the impact on the business remains unclear.

Effective marketing objectives start with the business, not the marketing team.

Understanding the Business Context

Marketing does not exist in isolation. Its role is to support the broader mission, vision, and growth priorities of the organization. Depending on the business, those priorities may include:

• Building brand awareness or credibility in a crowded market
• Generating qualified demand for sales teams
• Driving direct online revenue
• Retaining and expanding existing customers
• Supporting market expansion or new product launches

Each of these priorities implies a very different role for marketing. A company focused on brand leadership will invest differently than one focused on near-term revenue growth. A business entering a new market will prioritize different outcomes than one defending an established position. Without clarity at this level, marketing teams risk optimizing for metrics that feel productive but fail to move the business forward.

Translating Business Goals into Marketing Objectives

Once business goals are clearly understood, the next step is to translate them into specific marketing objectives. These objectives should describe the outcomes marketing is responsible for influencing, not just the activities it will perform.

Strong marketing objectives share several characteristics:

• They are clearly tied to business goals
• They focus on outcomes rather than outputs
• They are specific enough to guide decision-making
• They can be measured over time

For example, “increase brand awareness” is directionally helpful but insufficient on its own. A more effective objective might be to increase awareness within a specific target segment, improve brand consideration among qualified buyers, or increase inbound demand from priority personas. These refinements make it easier to determine whether marketing efforts are succeeding and where adjustments are needed.

Defining KPIs and Measurement

With objectives in place, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) provide the mechanism for tracking progress. KPIs act as signals, helping teams understand whether marketing is moving in the right direction and how performance is changing over time.

Different objectives require different KPIs. Brand-focused goals may emphasize reach, recall, or engagement within target audiences. Demand-focused goals may emphasize qualified leads, pipeline contribution, or conversion rates. Retention-focused goals may emphasize repeat purchases, expansion revenue, or customer engagement.

The most important principle is alignment. KPIs should reflect what the business values, not just what is easy to measure. Overreliance on vanity metrics—such as impressions or clicks without context—can create a false sense of success while obscuring real performance issues.

Balancing Ambition and Realism

Setting objectives is often challenging because it requires balancing ambition with realism. Goals that are too aggressive can demoralize teams if they are consistently missed, while goals that are too conservative fail to drive meaningful improvement. The most effective objectives are grounded in historical performance, market conditions, and available resources, while still pushing the organization forward.

Clear objectives do more than enable measurement—they provide focus. When marketing goals are well defined, they act as a filter for decision-making, helping teams prioritize initiatives, allocate budgets, and evaluate opportunities with confidence.

Situation Analysis: Understanding Where You Are Today

With objectives defined, the next step is to understand your current position. Strategy is built on insight, not assumptions. A situation analysis establishes a factual baseline, revealing opportunities to build on strengths and address weaknesses before new initiatives are launched.

An effective situation analysis looks outward to the market and inward at the organization itself.

Customer and Market Understanding

The most valuable source of strategic insight is your customers. Existing customers, recent buyers, and even lost opportunities can provide critical information about why people choose your solution, what they value most, and where expectations are not being met.

Customer insight can be gathered through many methods, including interviews, surveys, behavioral data, and feedback from sales and service teams. The goal is not simply to collect opinions, but to identify patterns: common motivations, recurring objections, and consistent triggers that lead buyers to take action.

This process helps clarify who your customers are today, how they perceive your offering, and where there may be gaps between what you believe you deliver and what they actually experience.

Competitive Landscape

No marketing strategy exists in a vacuum. Buyers evaluate options relative to alternatives, whether those alternatives are direct competitors, indirect solutions, or the decision to do nothing at all. Understanding the competitive landscape is essential for making informed positioning and messaging decisions.

Competitive analysis should focus less on copying tactics and more on extracting insight. Key questions include:

• How do competitors position themselves?
• Which audiences are they prioritizing?
• What messages do they emphasize repeatedly?
• Where are they strong, and where do they appear vulnerable?

Public-facing assets such as websites, content, advertising, and social presence often reveal how competitors view the market and where they believe they win. When combined with customer feedback and market knowledge, this information helps clarify where meaningful differentiation may exist.

Internal Performance Review

In addition to looking outward, it is equally important to examine what has already been tried. Past and current marketing programs contain valuable lessons—both positive and negative—that should inform future decisions.

Reviewing internal performance involves evaluating:

• Which channels and programs have performed well over time
• Where results have consistently fallen short
• Whether underperformance was due to strategy, execution, or resourcing
• How effectively insights have been captured and shared

This review is not about assigning blame, but about learning. A campaign that failed may reveal important information about audience fit, messaging, or timing. A channel that performed well may point to opportunities for expansion or refinement.

Establishing a Clear Starting Point

The outcome of a strong situation analysis is clarity. Rather than relying on assumptions or anecdotes, the organization gains a shared understanding of:

• Who its customers are and what they care about
• How the competitive landscape is shaped
• What marketing capabilities and constraints exist today

This clarity sets the stage for strategic focus. By understanding where you are starting from, you can make more informed decisions about where to invest, which opportunities to pursue, and which paths are unlikely to deliver results.

With objectives defined and the current situation clearly understood, the strategy can now turn to its most important decision: who to focus on.

Focus: Defining Your Best Customers

One of the most difficult—and most important—strategic decisions in marketing is deciding who to focus on. While it may feel safer to target everyone who could buy your product or service, broad targeting almost always leads to diluted messaging, inefficient spend, and weaker results. Effective marketing strategy is built on focus.

Defining your best customers is not about excluding opportunity; it is about prioritizing effort where it can have the greatest impact.

Market Segmentation: Creating Meaningful Distinctions

Market segmentation is the process of dividing a broad market into smaller groups of customers who share meaningful characteristics that influence how they buy. These characteristics should help explain differences in needs, motivations, decision-making behavior, or value perception—not just superficial traits.

In business-to-business markets, common segmentation dimensions include industry, company size, geographic location, organizational role, level of seniority, and operational complexity. In consumer markets, segmentation may involve age, income, location, lifestyle, purchasing behavior, or technical comfort. In both cases, behavioral and psychographic factors often provide more insight than demographics alone.

The goal of segmentation is not to create as many segments as possible, but to identify differences that matter. If two groups respond to the same messages, follow the same buying process, and value the same things, separating them adds unnecessary complexity without strategic benefit.

Choosing Where to Compete

Once potential segments have been identified, the next step is prioritization. Not all segments are equally attractive or equally well suited to your organization. Some may offer higher growth potential, better margins, shorter sales cycles, or stronger alignment with your capabilities.

Effective prioritization considers multiple factors, including:

• The size and growth potential of the segment
• The urgency and frequency of the buyer’s needs
• Your ability to differentiate meaningfully
• The cost and complexity of reaching the segment
• Alignment with long-term business goals

This process often reveals difficult tradeoffs. Saying “yes” to one segment may mean saying “no” to another. However, this focus is what enables clarity in positioning, efficiency in execution, and consistency in messaging.

Buyer Personas: Humanizing Your Target Audience

Once priority segments are selected, buyer personas translate those segments into usable, human-centered profiles. Personas are not fictional characters created for storytelling—they are strategic tools designed to help teams understand how real people make decisions.

A well-developed buyer persona captures:

• Core goals and desired outcomes
• Key challenges and obstacles
• Decision-making responsibilities and influence
• Triggers that prompt the search for a solution
• Concerns or objections that slow decision-making

Personas should reflect both professional and personal motivations, especially in B2B contexts where business decisions are made by individuals with career goals, risk tolerance, and emotional drivers.

Giving personas names and concise narratives helps teams internalize them, but the real value comes from the insight behind the profile. When personas are grounded in research and real-world observation, they become a shared reference point that guides content creation, campaign planning, and sales conversations.

Fewer Personas, Stronger Impact

It is tempting to create many personas to reflect every possible variation in the market. In practice, this often leads to shallow execution. Most organizations are best served by focusing on three to five core personas—the ones most likely to drive meaningful growth.

By concentrating on a smaller number of high-impact personas, teams can develop deeper insight, more relevant messaging, and more effective programs. Focus enables quality, and quality drives results.

The Buyer’s Journey: How Decisions Are Made

Understanding who you are targeting is only part of the equation. To communicate effectively, you must also understand how your buyers move from recognizing a problem to choosing a solution. This path—often referred to as the buyer’s journey—shapes what information buyers seek, which messages resonate, and when marketing can have the greatest influence.

The Stages of the Buyer’s Journey

While every market is different, most buying processes follow a similar progression. Buyers move from identifying a need, to exploring options, to making a decision. These stages are often described as awareness, evaluation, and decision, though the language may vary by industry.

In the early stage, buyers are focused on understanding their problem. They may not yet be aware of specific solutions or vendors. Their questions are broad, exploratory, and often educational. As they move into the evaluation stage, they begin comparing approaches, defining criteria, and narrowing their options. In the final stage, buyers focus on validating their choice, minimizing risk, and gaining confidence in their decision.

Marketing plays a different role at each stage. Content and messaging that are effective early in the journey may be ineffective—or even counterproductive—later on.

Information Needs and Decision Criteria

As buyers progress through the journey, they gather information and gradually build a set of criteria that will guide their decision. These criteria may include functional requirements, cost considerations, ease of implementation, credibility of the provider, or long-term support.

Importantly, these criteria are rarely fixed at the beginning. They evolve as buyers learn more about their options and clarify what matters most. Marketing that engages buyers early has the opportunity to influence how those criteria are formed, shaping perceptions long before a final decision is made.

Variation by Market and Complexity

The buyer’s journey is not one-size-fits-all. In complex B2B purchases, the process may involve multiple stakeholders, long evaluation cycles, and significant risk assessment. In simpler consumer purchases, decisions may be made quickly and emotionally, with limited research.

Understanding the specifics of your market is essential. Who is involved in the decision? How long does the process take? What sources of information are trusted? Answering these questions allows marketing to meet buyers where they are, rather than forcing them into a generic funnel.

The Strategic Importance of Early Engagement

One of the most critical insights from studying buyer behavior is the importance of early engagement. If your brand is not present when buyers are first exploring their problem and forming decision criteria, it may never be considered later. By the time buyers reach the decision stage, many choices have already been narrowed.

Effective marketing strategy prioritizes relevance over immediacy. By providing helpful, credible information throughout the buyer’s journey—especially early on—you increase the likelihood of being included in consideration and, ultimately, chosen.

With a clear understanding of who your buyers are and how they make decisions, the strategy can now focus on what matters most to them—and how you compare to the alternatives they are considering.

What Matters Most: Defining Key Purchase Criteria

Once you understand who your buyers are and how they move through the buying process, the next critical step is identifying what actually drives their decisions. Buyers do not evaluate every option equally. Instead, they rely on a set of criteria—conscious or unconscious—that help them determine which solution best meets their needs.

These purchase criteria form the lens through which all marketing messages are interpreted.

Identifying Decision Drivers

Key purchase criteria are the factors buyers consider when comparing solutions. Depending on the market, these may include functional capabilities, price, ease of use, speed of implementation, risk, reputation, customer support, or long-term value. Emotional factors—such as trust, confidence, and perceived credibility—often play an equally important role, even in highly rational buying environments.

The most effective way to identify these criteria is by listening to buyers. Customer interviews, sales conversations, win-loss analysis, and support interactions often reveal recurring themes. Buyers may not always articulate their criteria in marketing language, but patterns quickly emerge when feedback is examined collectively.

Ranking What Matters Most

Not all criteria are equally important. Buyers make tradeoffs, prioritizing some factors while accepting compromise on others. Understanding these tradeoffs is essential for effective positioning.

For each persona, purchase criteria should be ranked from most important to least important. This ranking forces clarity. It reveals which factors are truly decisive and which are merely table stakes. In many markets, organizations compete heavily on features that buyers assume as a baseline, while neglecting the criteria that actually influence decisions.

By ranking criteria, marketing teams gain insight into where focus will yield the greatest return—and where additional effort may have diminishing impact.

Differences Across Personas and Segments

Purchase criteria often vary significantly by persona, even within the same organization or market. A senior decision-maker may prioritize risk reduction and long-term impact, while a day-to-day user may focus on usability and efficiency. A growing company may value speed and flexibility, while a mature organization may emphasize stability and integration.

Recognizing these differences allows marketing to tailor messaging and content without fragmenting the strategy. Rather than creating entirely separate narratives, teams can emphasize different aspects of the same value proposition depending on the audience.

Turning Insight into Strategic Focus

Defining key purchase criteria is not an academic exercise. It is a practical tool for focus. When marketing understands what matters most to buyers, it can:

• Emphasize the right benefits in messaging
• Prioritize content that addresses real concerns
• Allocate resources toward areas of true differentiation
• Avoid competing on factors that do not influence decisions

With purchase criteria clearly defined and ranked, the strategy is ready for its most consequential step: understanding how well the organization meets those criteria relative to competitors.

Positioning: How You Win in the Market

Positioning defines how your organization is perceived in the minds of buyers relative to alternatives. It is not what you say about yourself—it is the space you occupy based on what buyers value and how you perform against those expectations.

Effective positioning is grounded in reality. It reflects both market perception and competitive truth.

Evaluating Your Position Against Competitors

To assess positioning, begin by evaluating how well your product or service performs against each key purchase criterion. Using a consistent scale, rate your organization and several key competitors on the factors buyers care about most. This exercise often reveals gaps between internal beliefs and market realities.

Some criteria will show clear strengths. Others may reveal weaknesses or areas where competitors have an advantage. The purpose of this analysis is not to appear superior across every dimension, but to identify where you truly stand out in ways that matter to buyers.

Identifying Competitive Advantage

Competitive advantage exists when your organization performs significantly better than alternatives on criteria that are highly important to your target buyers. These advantages form the foundation of positioning.

Strong positioning typically emphasizes:

• A small number of decisive strengths
• Clear relevance to buyer priorities
• Credibility supported by evidence

Attempting to claim leadership across too many dimensions weakens positioning. Buyers are skeptical of broad superiority claims and tend to focus on a few attributes that align most closely with their needs.

Understanding and Addressing Weaknesses

Positioning also requires honesty about weaknesses. Areas where competitors outperform you on important criteria represent strategic risks. In some cases, these gaps may be addressed through product improvement, service enhancements, or operational changes. In others, they may signal a mismatch between the offering and the target segment.

Not every weakness must be eliminated. However, ignoring them can undermine credibility and limit growth. Clear positioning acknowledges tradeoffs and emphasizes strengths in a way that reframes the conversation on favorable terms.

Positioning by Segment

Positioning is rarely universal. Different segments may value different criteria, leading to different competitive dynamics. A strength in one segment may be irrelevant in another. As a result, positioning should be evaluated separately for each priority segment or persona.

If multiple segments respond similarly to the same strengths and weaknesses, they may be combined into a broader target. If responses differ meaningfully, separate positioning approaches may be required.

Positioning as a Strategic Choice

Ultimately, positioning is a choice. It reflects where you decide to compete and how you choose to win. Strong positioning provides clarity for messaging, content, and campaign strategy. It guides creative decisions and ensures consistency across channels.

When positioning is well defined, marketing shifts from explaining everything the organization does to clearly communicating why it matters. With that clarity in place, the strategy is ready to be validated through research and translated into differentiated messaging that resonates with buyers.

Validating Assumptions with Marketing Research

Up to this point, the strategy has been built on informed analysis: customer conversations, internal experience, competitive review, and structured frameworks. While this approach is far stronger than relying on intuition alone, it is still based on assumptions. Marketing research provides the opportunity to test those assumptions and replace uncertainty with confidence.

Validation does not require perfect data. It requires enough evidence to reduce risk and sharpen focus.

Why Validation Matters

Even experienced teams can misinterpret what buyers value or overestimate their differentiation. Internal perspectives are often shaped by product knowledge, organizational history, or anecdotal feedback. Buyers, however, may see the market very differently.

Research helps answer critical questions:

• Do buyers prioritize the criteria we believe they do?
• Do they perceive our strengths the same way we do?
• Are competitors viewed as we expect—or differently?
• Where do perception gaps exist that strategy must address?

Validating these assumptions early prevents costly misalignment later, particularly when marketing investments scale.

Research Methods and When to Use Them

The most effective research approach depends on the questions being asked, the complexity of the market, and available resources. Common methods include:

• Customer and prospect surveys to quantify priorities and perceptions
• One-on-one interviews to explore motivations and tradeoffs
• Focus groups to uncover shared language and emotional drivers
• Win-loss analysis to understand decision dynamics

Qualitative methods are especially valuable for uncovering why buyers think and behave the way they do, while quantitative methods help establish patterns and relative importance across a broader audience. Used together, they provide a balanced view of buyer reality.

Turning Data into Insight

Research is only valuable if it informs decisions. The goal is not to collect data for its own sake, but to translate findings into strategic insight.

Effective analysis focuses on:

• Confirming or revising purchase criteria rankings
• Identifying unexpected strengths or weaknesses
• Highlighting perception gaps between the organization and the market
• Revealing opportunities for clearer differentiation

These insights often lead to refinement rather than reinvention. Small adjustments to focus, messaging, or positioning can have an outsized impact when they align more closely with buyer reality.

Research as a Strategic Discipline

Marketing research should not be treated as a one-time exercise. Markets evolve, competitors adapt, and buyer expectations change. Organizations that periodically validate their assumptions maintain stronger alignment with their audience and greater resilience over time.

With assumptions tested and insights validated, the strategy is ready to move from analysis to expression—translating positioning into messaging that resonates clearly and consistently.

Differentiated Messaging: Turning Strategy into Communication

Messaging is where strategy becomes visible. It is the bridge between insight and execution—the mechanism through which positioning is communicated to the market. When messaging is grounded in strategy, it feels clear, relevant, and credible. When it is not, it feels generic, interchangeable, or overly promotional.

Effective messaging does not attempt to say everything. It reinforces what matters most.

From Positioning to Value Proposition

At the core of messaging is the value proposition: a clear articulation of why a buyer should choose your solution over alternatives. A strong value proposition is built on three elements:

• A deep understanding of the buyer’s priorities
• Clear differentiation on the criteria that matter most
• Credible proof that supports the claims being made

Rather than listing features or capabilities, the value proposition connects benefits to buyer outcomes. It explains not just what the organization does, but why it matters in the context of the buyer’s goals and challenges.

Message Pillars and Supporting Proof

To ensure consistency and clarity, messaging is often organized into a small set of message pillars. Each pillar represents a key theme or advantage that reinforces positioning. Together, these pillars create a cohesive narrative that can be adapted across channels and formats.

Each message pillar should be supported by proof points—evidence that builds trust and credibility. Proof may include data, customer examples, third-party validation, or demonstrated expertise. Without proof, even well-crafted messages risk being dismissed as marketing claims.

Adapting Messaging Across Personas and the Buyer’s Journey

While positioning should remain consistent, messaging must adapt to context. Different personas care about different aspects of the value proposition, and buyers at different stages of the journey require different levels of detail and emphasis.

Early-stage messaging may focus on framing the problem and highlighting relevant outcomes. Mid-stage messaging may emphasize differentiation and evaluation criteria. Late-stage messaging often addresses risk, implementation, and validation. The underlying strategy remains the same, but the expression evolves to match buyer needs.

Consistency Without Uniformity

One of the most common messaging challenges is inconsistency across teams, channels, and campaigns. When messaging is developed in isolation, it fragments over time. A clear messaging framework acts as a reference point, ensuring that all communications reinforce the same core ideas—even when tone, format, or channel varies.

Consistency does not mean repetition. It means alignment. When messaging is aligned, buyers encounter a coherent story wherever they engage with the brand.

Messaging as a Strategic Asset

Messaging is not simply a creative exercise. It is a strategic asset that influences perception, shapes expectations, and supports decision-making throughout the buyer’s journey. When grounded in validated insight and clear positioning, messaging becomes a powerful tool for differentiation.

With messaging defined, the strategy can now move toward execution—translating insight into programs, measurement, and ongoing optimization designed to drive sustainable growth.

From Strategy to Action: Planning, Measurement, and Optimization

A strong marketing strategy only delivers value when it is put into action. Once objectives, audiences, positioning, and messaging are defined, the focus shifts to execution—turning strategic clarity into coordinated programs that drive measurable results.

The role of strategy at this stage is not to dictate every tactic, but to guide decisions and create alignment across all marketing activities.

Building the Marketing Plan

A marketing plan translates strategy into a practical roadmap. It outlines what will be executed, when it will happen, and how success will be measured. The plan should be informed by strategic priorities, not driven by channel availability or industry trends.

Effective planning begins with establishing benchmarks. Understanding current performance levels provides context for setting targets and evaluating progress. Benchmarks also help distinguish between short-term fluctuations and meaningful change.

With benchmarks in place, teams can select channels and programs that best support strategic objectives. Rather than attempting to be present everywhere, resources are concentrated where they are most likely to influence priority personas and buyer stages.

Measurement and Accountability

Measurement is not about proving activity—it is about learning and improving. Metrics should be directly tied to the objectives defined earlier in the strategy. Each major initiative should have clear success indicators that reflect its role in the broader marketing system.

Because buyer journeys are rarely linear, measurement often requires looking beyond single-touch attribution. Trends, patterns, and directional movement are often more informative than isolated data points. Over time, this perspective enables better forecasting, smarter budget allocation, and more confident decision-making.

Accountability increases when goals, metrics, and ownership are clearly defined. When teams understand how their work contributes to shared objectives, performance discussions become more constructive and focused on improvement rather than explanation.

Optimization as a Continuous Process

Optimization is an essential part of modern marketing, but it is most effective when guided by strategy. Testing should be purposeful, informed by hypotheses rooted in customer insight and positioning—not random experimentation.

Well-designed tests help refine execution, uncover new opportunities, and validate assumptions. Importantly, optimization should focus not only on improving efficiency, but also on increasing effectiveness—ensuring that marketing is influencing the right outcomes for the business.

As insights accumulate, they should feed back into planning, enabling the strategy to evolve without losing its core focus.

Making Strategy a Living System

Marketing strategy is not a one-time deliverable. Markets change, competitors adapt, technologies evolve, and buyer expectations shift. Organizations that treat strategy as static quickly lose relevance. Those that treat it as a living system remain resilient and competitive.

Regular Review and Recalibration

A living strategy is reviewed regularly, not rewritten constantly. Periodic check-ins allow teams to assess whether core assumptions still hold true, whether objectives remain aligned with business priorities, and whether positioning continues to resonate.

These reviews are most effective when they focus on insight rather than activity. The goal is not to question every tactic, but to ensure that the strategic foundation remains sound.

Alignment Across the Organization

Marketing strategy is most powerful when it extends beyond the marketing team. Alignment with sales, customer success, and leadership ensures that the organization presents a consistent message and shared priorities to the market.

When teams operate from the same understanding of who the customer is, what matters most, and how the organization wins, collaboration improves and friction decreases. Strategy becomes a unifying force rather than a marketing artifact.

Learning as a Competitive Advantage

Organizations that systematically capture and apply learning gain an advantage over time. Insights from campaigns, customer interactions, and market shifts should be documented and shared, informing future decisions and preventing the repetition of past mistakes.

This discipline transforms marketing from a series of disconnected initiatives into a continuously improving system—one that becomes more effective with each cycle.

Strategy as a Catalyst for Growth

At its best, marketing strategy provides clarity, confidence, and momentum. It enables teams to act decisively, adapt intelligently, and invest resources where they matter most. Rather than slowing marketing down, strategy accelerates it—creating a clear path from insight to impact.

With a living strategy in place, digital marketing becomes more than a collection of campaigns. It becomes a coordinated effort designed to build meaningful relationships, influence decisions, and drive sustainable growth over time.

Ready to Turn Strategy into Results?

Building an effective digital marketing strategy takes more than frameworks and good intentions. It requires objectivity, experience, and the ability to connect insight to execution. That’s where Nowspeed comes in.

At Nowspeed, we help organizations move from uncertainty to clarity—and from activity to impact. We partner with marketing and leadership teams to define clear objectives, deeply understand their customers, sharpen positioning, and translate strategy into coordinated digital programs that drive measurable growth.

Whether you are:

• Launching a new marketing initiative
• Reassessing an existing strategy
• Struggling with inconsistent results
• Or looking to better align marketing with business outcomes

We can help you build a strategy that works—and make sure it actually gets implemented.

Our approach is collaborative, data-informed, and grounded in real-world experience. We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all playbooks or chasing the latest trend. Instead, we focus on what matters most to your customers, your market, and your goals.

If you’re ready to bring clarity, focus, and confidence to your digital marketing, let’s start a conversation.

Contact Nowspeed to schedule a strategy discussion and take the next step toward smarter, more effective marketing.

Social media traffic has accounted for almost all Internet traffic growth in the past five years. As newspaper readers and TV viewers decline, social media usage continues to grow rapidly. Today, 65% of the United States’ online adults use social media—a nearly 10-fold jump in the last 10 years. 11With so many users on social media sites, there’s no question that your target audience is using social media.

Social media can be a very powerful tool for every organization, from the very large to the very small. It lets you drive more traffic to your website, and engage with your customers and prospects in a more personal and powerful way. Because of all of this, social media marketing should be part of every high-performance marketer’s toolkit.

Social Media Marketing Goals

A high-performance social media marketing program is focused on leveraging the power and reach of social media platforms to achieve your business goals. The best social media goals are measurable and are tied to actual metrics such as “achieve 100 mentions of my brand on Twitter and blogs by the third month of the program,” or “increase traffic to my site from social media sites to 1,000 visits per month and convert this to 50 leads.” Or better yet, “get 50 leads that convert into 15 new clients in the next three months.” Once you have a good understanding of your goals, you’ll be better able to organize your activity around them to achieve business results.

When you focus on your goals, you’ll learn which posts drive the most leads and sales. You’ll also be able to grow the number of fans and followers with people who are most likely to buy your products. This approach is different from an activity-based social media campaign that measures success by the number of social media posts. It gives you the data you need to make good decisions that will bring in more customers over time.

Social Media Strategy

In order to create an effective social media strategy, you need to have clear goals, listen to what your customers and prospects are saying, understand your customers, and assess your own team and content. Once you have the strategy right, you can develop your platforms, create content, grow your followers, and engage your audience.

<<Place Image Social Media Strategy Page 94.png Here>>

Understand your Audience

Once you understand your goals, it’s critical to understand your audience. Will you be speaking to a B2B audience or B2C? Which industry, demographic, and locations do they represent?

Since social media communication can be personal and informal, it’s helpful to create several profiles or personas that represent the different segments you’ll be communicating with. By using the Persona development process I discussed earlier, you’ll be able to create a more nuanced view of your target audience and create better content for them.

For example, if you are selling to the IT market, you might invent “Susan,” the 45-year-old CIO of a medium-sized company, and “Terry,” the Database Consultant. When you start to think about the content that your market needs, it’s easier if you can personalize it by thinking of what Susan and Terry might need.

Active Listening

An important step in preparing to launch your campaign is listening to your market. What are they saying about your company, your competitors, and the issues you care about? To get a pulse of the market, subscribe to groups on LinkedIn or Facebook, and set up Twitter lists to get a constant stream of what the market is talking about.

Competitive Analysis and Benchmarking

Since most of the Internet is public, you can get a good understanding of what your competitors are doing with social media and learn from them before you launch. To get started, look at their Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and YouTube Accounts. Look at what they are saying, how many fans and followers they have, and who is following them.

Identify Available Content

Social media programs require a lot of content, so instead of planning to create everything from scratch, take an inventory of what already exists that you can use for this program. Do you have video, white papers, presentations, case studies, web pages, articles, or even press releases that can be repurposed for your social media campaign?

You may not want to take a two-year-old case study and pass it off as new content, but there is no reason you can’t repackage key facts in the case study for a series of Tweets, or even promote it again on Twitter. You should build as comprehensive an inventory of content as possible so that you can avoid recreating the wheel and hit the ground running with a stream of strong content.

Identify Internal Leaders & Spokespeople

Social media is very personal. Your readers will want to know who they are talking to, and learn as much about them as possible. It’s important, therefore, to recruit a group of internal leaders who can act as spokespeople for the campaign. It’s wonderful if your CEO is a gifted writer and can invest time for the social media campaign, but it’s also fine to have a group of other executives who will participate in the program over time.

Identify Influencers and Leading Sites

To get leverage in a social media program, you’ll want to get other industry influencers to talk about you and share your content with their audience. You can find these people by searching for Twitter or LinkedIn users in your industry.

You can also search for people in your industry in a service called Klout, which ranks their overall influence. Since you have limited time to build relationships with influencers, spend your time getting the most influential people in your industry with the highest Klout scores to like and promote your content.

Develop Policies and Workflow

The final step of preparation for a successful social media campaign is to develop the internal policies and workflow you’ll need to manage the program. For some companies, this is a simple as using the popular motto, “do no harm,” and setting them free to connect as they think best.

Other organizations, especially large ones, will need to create a social media policy document which defines what can and cannot be shared on social media. If you have multiple people involved in the program, or if you are working with an outside vendor, you’ll also need to create an approval workflow to make sure that the right people approve content that is posted on social media pages.

In a simple example, your Director of Marketing may be empowered to create and post content as she feels is appropriate, assuming full accountability for results. In a complex example, you may have a copywriter or outside agency create content, send it to the Director of Marketing for content approval, then to your in-house counsel for legal approval before it’s sent back to the agency to be posted. Obviously, the second approach won’t be as spontaneous and responsive as the first, but if legal approval is important in your industry, then you’ll need to live with it.

Whatever your policies or processes, it’s important to document them so that employees are protected and everyone is on the same page.

Creating Social Media Platforms

Now that you’ve build your strategy, you are ready for the next step of creating the actual social media properties. Many people think this is the fun part since it’s when your ideas turn into designs, graphics, content, and web pages on the social media sites.

The first step is to decide which sites you are going to use. The most popular sites are Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Instagram, Snapchat and Pinterest are gaining major popularity among brands. Even though these are the top sites, you don’t need to use all of these, and you can add others if you feel that there is a site that’s more appropriate in your industry. B2C firms often skip using LinkedIn and B2B firms often skip using Instagram. I believe that both of these sites can be used for any industry, but if you have limited resources, this is a good guideline.

With each of these sites, you’ll need to register and secure a page with the name of your company. If your preferred name is already taken, then choose something close that is short, makes sense, and is easy for your readers to remember.

Most of the channels allow you to create custom designs and graphics to improve your branding on otherwise bland pages. You should definitely take advantage of this option by creating a strong design that engages the user.

Each of the social media sites needs to be thought of as a unique “micro site” with special design and content needs.

Twitter and YouTube both offer the opportunity to create a custom design background to reinforce your brand and give the user additional information about you. Facebook lets you create banners and graphics that tell your story.

LinkedIn lets you create custom product pages that give more detail on your company, products, and services. In all of these sites, make sure you provide the user with all of the information you can. Writing the content for these sites is a little like writing a small website, so plan time to create the content you need.

Create Your Editorial Content Calendar

Once you have the sites set up, it’s time to develop a plan to create and distribute the content. For some companies, that means creating all new content, while others have a great deal of content that can be repurposed for the social media campaign.

Some organizations take a casual approach to creating content, while others are much more deliberate. In the casual approach, you may look at your accounts every day and decide what content to write and post. This approach allows you to be very dynamic and responsive to content you see across the Internet. Your content will be very fresh, but it can also be stressful to think of new ideas for content and posts each day.

A more deliberate approach would be to create an editorial calendar that will become your guide to the themes for each day or each week. You can organize your editorial calendar around content like white papers and webinars, or around events such as conferences and trade shows. By knowing what your core content or themes are each week, you’ll be able to be more thorough in covering your subjects. It’s also easier to include others in the content creation process, since you can schedule specific contributors into your schedule.

It’s helpful to manage the editorial calendar in monthly and quarterly views. By planning one to three months ahead, you can take into account new product launches, events, and other activities that will drive new content for you.

Just because you have an editorial calendar doesn’t mean that you won’t be dynamic or responsive to the market. It just gives you a framework to guide all of your content creation activities.

When you build your content plan, remember that you won’t need to develop all of your own content. It’s perfectly acceptable to repurpose other people’s content within your campaign. This serves two purposes. First, by posting links to other good content, you’ll position your company as a thought leader and expert in the industry. Second, the organization whose content you promote will recognize the traffic you are sending to them and be more likely to repost your content. This is a very important way to get broader distribution for your content.

Before you launch your social media properties, make sure you set up tracking so that you can see the impact of your work. Two tools that are very helpful here are URL shortening tools and website analytics tools.

URL shorteners allow you to track the number of people that click on the links in your Tweets and posts. They also shorten the URLs you use to make them fit in sites like Twitter that impose character constraints on the content you post.

Website analytics programs like Google Analytics enable you to see the impact of your work on website traffic and your goals. Once you set it up properly, you’ll be able to see how much traffic comes back to your website from each social media site, what those visitors did once they got to your site, and how many goal conversions resulted from your social media activities.

Another key step before you launch is to make sure that your website and landing pages are integrated with your social media program. It’s easy to put social media sharing tags on your landing pages, emails, and home page to allow people to share your content with their network. You should also give people the ability to follow you from your website and emails.

Grow your Followers

While you are posting content and interacting with your audience, it’s critical to build a base of fans and followers or you may find that your social media work will have very little impact on your business. Unless you have thousands of fans, it’s unlikely that your posts will generate much of an impact.

Let’s use a simple example to illustrate the math here. If you are posting two Tweets every business day (40 Tweets per month) and have 500 Twitter followers, then you have the potential to make 20,000 impressions per month. (In practice, you may get more because of retweets and search, but we’ll leave that out of this example.) If you can increase your follower base to 10,000 followers, then you have the potential to get 400,000 impressions with no additional effort.

If your click-through rate on Tweets is .1%, in the first example you’ll generate 20 clicks to your website per month and in the second example, you’ll generate 400. In order to make an impact on your business, you’ll need to get a large number of fans and followers.

Here are four ways to build you follower and fan base:

1. Follow the right people. When you follow people on Twitter, they often follow you back, so the key is to follow the right people. Start by searching for people with the right titles who are working for the companies you are interested in, and follow them. You can also follow people that post content at one of your industry trade shows or events. Another strategy is to follow people that follow your competitors or industry luminaries.  After you follow these people, monitor whether they follow you back. If they don’t, stop following them and start following others. You can repeat this process over and over as you build up your base.
2. Create content that is worth sharing. Great content can build your follower base exponentially, and we call this “going viral.” If you create a video, coupon, article, white paper, or other content that people get excited about, they will share them with their own friends and followers. This means that even if you only have a few thousand followers, your offer can be seen by millions of people within a few days. It’s often hard to predict the content that will go viral, but you should try to be a creative as possible to develop content that will reach this threshold, because it can dramatically accelerate your social media growth if you do.
3. Other Promotions. There are many ways to promote your social media presence in order to build your follower base. Before you use these other promotional techniques, be sure to think about what’s in it for the user, not just what’s in it for your company. Will they get access to great content, coupons, or inside information? If you have something special that you can offer them, then you’ll have a better chance of creating a meaningful and powerful call to action. One obvious place to promote your social media presence is on your website. It’s easy to put the icons for your social media sites in a prominent place on your website, but you should also consider ways to promote the social media icons to help improve the click-through rate and your overall followers. Email can be another important way to promote your social media presence. You should put the social media icons and links on every email to encourage content sharing and more followers. Another great place to promote your properties is by integrating them into your direct customer contact. By training your sales and customer service teams to point people to your social media sites, you’ll build up a base of very high-quality followers.
4. Advertise. If the previous three ideas don’t produce enough followers fast enough, then advertising can help. You can advertise on social media sites and link the ads back to your social media properties. The chapter on Social Advertising has more detail on this subject.

Engage your Audience

Now that you’ve created your presence on social media sites, you are ready to start syndicating your content and building your followers.

When you post content to the various social media sites you’ve created, it’s a good idea to customize it whenever you can. If you are posting to Twitter, you need to limit your post to 140 characters, but you’ll have more room on LinkedIn or Facebook, so use it if you have something important to say.

You can also take advantage of tools that allow you to post content once, and then have it automatically flow to other sites. For example, you may want to set up your Twitter account to automatically take your LinkedIn posts and display them there. This will save you time and make it easier to leverage the work you are doing to build content on various sites at the same time.

Most of your content will be appropriate for you own properties, but don’t forget to post content to groups or blogs where it’s appropriate. This can often give you much broader reach than posting only to your own properties, especially at first when you don’t have many followers and fans.

As you get more engaged with groups, you may want to alter your content calendar to develop more content that’s appropriate for groups, since it often needs to be less self-promotional. These groups can be wonderful places to build your reputation with your target audience and encourage them to follow you.

Interaction on social media sites is much more than a one-way conversation. In many ways, you should think of this as two-way conversation in a live group setting. If you walk into a networking event and only talk about yourself, you’ll be soon considered boring and self-centered. The result will be that you’ll have few friends and you’ll spend most of your time talking to yourself.

In a social situation, you’ll do much better if you listen as much as you talk, and if you’re as interested in commenting on others’ success as you are interested in your own.

These same principles apply to social media. The more interactive and interested you can be with others; the more engaged people will be with you.

All users, of course, are not equally influential, so pay special attention to people with large groups of fans and followers. It will make a much bigger impact if you can engage a person with 25,000 followers as opposed to a person with just 500 followers. Focus on the most important people, but engage with everyone you can, and you’ll be seen as a friendly, easy person to connect with.

As you interact with people, it’s also important to notice and respond to what others are saying with personal comments. These types of posts can make you seem real and approachable. It may feel like you are using social media site as you would email to say “thanks” or “nice work,” but remember that others will see this and it will enhance your reputation.

Optimize the Campaign

Once you have the campaign up and running and you’re gaining fans and followers, it’s time to start optimizing the campaign in both quantity and quality. By this I mean that you should look at the most important metrics and use what you learn to improve the results of the campaign.

To improve the campaign quantitatively, you’ll need to collect important metrics, including the number of content posts, followers and likes, website visits, and conversions. By tracking these metrics, you’ll be able to see how effective you are at driving fans and followers, and how people respond to your content.

Social media, of course, it not just about the numbers. You also need to see which content is most effective at driving results. You can track the click-through rate for various types of posts and then see which drives the best results.

For example, do press releases, product announcements, free content, or coupon offers drive the best results? Or is there a specific topic or message that people respond to? By tracking the response rate for these various types of content, you’ll be able to see which work best and adjust your editorial calendar accordingly.

Another important part of managing an ongoing social media program is responding to comments and feedback. The more interaction you have with your audience, the more effective the campaign. The interaction may take the form of comments on your blog or Facebook page, or direct messages on Twitter.

Whatever the interaction, it’s important to personally address each one to make people feel like you are listening and interested in what they have to say, since those people may be important influencers who could help spread your word to thousands.

Maximize Your Impact

In any social media campaign, you will create an impact through both high-quality and a large quantity of content. Every program starts with listening to the conversations about your brand and the issues you care about. Once you understand how and where to engage, you’ll be able to create and syndicate content to a variety of social media properties in order to drive traffic to your website.

As you work this engine, you’ll see that your social media marketing program can produce a measurable ROI. To start, you need to take your general business goals and translate them into specific, measurable goals that can be tracked and reported on. You also need to organize your activities and content to drive the traffic and the results you want.

Integrating Search with Social Media

Search marketing is critical to the success of any social media marketing program because you must be found in order for your content to have an impact. Social media can be a powerful accelerator to any paid or organic search marketing program.

Here are eight ways to integrate your social media program into your search marketing campaign:

1. Leverage video on search landing pages. If you are creating video for your YouTube program, you can also create short videos to promote the offers on your landing pages. Those offers might be white papers, free trials, offers for a consultation, or even a coupon, and they can all be promoted using a video. Video makes it more personal and engaging and will improve the conversion rate on the landing page.
2. Leverage offer comments and ratings on search landing pages. Just as people rate travel sites and other online content, you can let people rate the content and offers on your website. This builds trust and engagement. When people see the rankings on your content, they will have a much stronger sense of where to spend their time. Naturally, some of your content will rank high and others not so high, but this honesty will build trust with your readers.
3. Advertise on Facebook and other social media sites. Most of this chapter has been about using content to connect with your audience on social media sites, but you can also complement this free content with paid advertising. Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, and most others accept advertising and allow very specific targeting since they have detailed information on their users. You can use these ads for a variety of purposes, including bringing users back to your website, increasing engagement, and building your follower base.
4. Leverage social media sharing on landing pages. Most landing pages are designed to “convert” the user from a visitor to a customer or lead, so they are short and promote a specific piece of content. If the content is valuable, people will want to share it, so make it easy for them by including sharing tags on your landing page or thank you page.
5. Embed your SEO keywords into video posts and other content posts. It’s important for your social media content to get found, so use the keywords you’ve identified on all of your video posts or on specific social media content. When you include these keywords, add them to links if possible to make them more prominent to the search engines.
6. Write keyword-filled content for social media sites with links. Keywords are also important when you are writing content for your own sites, or posting as comments on other blogs. By including the keywords with links back to your site, you’ll be telling the search engines that you are an authority for these keywords. When you do this well, you’ll get more traffic from both the links you embed in other social media sites and also from the increased keyword visibility that comes indirectly from getting better link popularity.
7. Build links from social media—optimized press releases. Another great source of links are press releases. When you distribute a press release through a tool such as Business Wire or PR Newswire, you can include social media content such as videos and photos with links that will improve your search engine visibility.
8. Buildlinks from articles, blog comments, and content distribution. Along with press releases, you can also embed links in articles and blog comments that you can distribute for free. These articles can be repurposed from your blog or as part of a white paper or webinar. When you distribute them to article sites, include links with keywords embedded that make you look more powerful with the search engines.

How to Social Media Optimize your Website

Your website can also be an important way for people to get involved with your social media program. The first step is to let your website visitors share and bookmark your content with “add-this” www.addthis.com or “share this” www.sharethis.com. There should be persistent links out to social networks from every page of your website. When you do this, it’s important to make sure that your brand and social media presence is consistent on both sites.

Another way to build social media into your website is to build transparency and the human element with videos, photo sharing, profiles of your team, customer’s profiles, video case studies, and/or product reviews.

A prominent feature of all social media properties is that you feel like you know the person you are interacting with better when you see their picture and know something about their personal and professional interests.

Most websites, however, are very sterile, and tell you very little about the people behind the company or the website. By including more content about the management team (or others), it will make the website seem more authentic and approachable.

Social media programs are very dynamic, with new content being added every day. Websites, however, are often static. One way to leverage social media content on your website is to add unique RSS feeds from social networks like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and blogs in categories that align to your website’s content, and open your thought-leadership content like white papers and articles up for discussion on those networks. This will bring fresh content to your website automatically and give your users yet another reason to visit your pages.

Social Media is More Than Just Marketing

I’ve discussed a number of ways that social media can be effective as a marketing tool, but keep in mind that there are also very important ways to use it for customer service, product development, sales, purchasing, and recruiting. By thinking of social media holistically, you’ll realize that it can permeate every aspect of your company’s work.

Your customer service team is focused on responding to customer issues and resolving them quickly and cost-effectively. Today, customers may not only complain directly, they may also complain publicly on Twitter or other sites, so that their frustrations can reach thousands of other people who follow them.

It’s important for your customer service team to monitor your company’s brand on social media sites and then interact directly with these people to resolve the issues. One benefit of this approach is that their followers will see how you respond and may feel better about your product or brand. People often expect problems with products or services, but they can be completely blown away by excellent service to fix a problem.

Product development teams can monitor the same stream of content for insight into product usage issues or frustrations that may lead to new features, products, or services. They can also monitor what your competitors or their customers are talking about, and gain insight into their future plans. Social media can also be a great resource for getting feedback from the marketplace on potential new product features or service changes.

The sales team can effectively use social media in many ways. When prospecting, they can use tools like LinkedIn to identify potential customers, connect with them through their network, and then reach out to them. They can also learn more about their professional background and personal interests, which may make it easier for them to build a relationship and turn the prospect into a customer. By listening to their social media comments and posts, they will be able to get a better understanding of their needs and wants, which should also help build a relationship.

A note of caution here: if people feel that you are stalking them or they are being “spammed” because you’ve found them on social media, you can create a very negative backlash. People don’t want to feel that their privacy is being violated or that they are being manipulated, so be careful with how you use personal information.

Your purchasing team can use social media to find reviews and feedback before making important selections for products and services. Once they find relevant comments, they can also find other users and get personal feedback.

In the past, vendors would provide a list of references that were vetted and happy. Now your purchasing team can go beyond this sanitized list to find other customers and get the real story. This puts a lot of pressure on the customer service team of any company to manage their digital reputation to make sure that there are no lingering, unanswered negative comments, reviews, or ratings.

Social media sites can also be used by your recruiting team when they are looking for candidates. Just as the sales team can find potential customers on LinkedIn through targeted searching, the recruiting team can do the same. They can identify potential candidates and then approach them by phone or email to see if they are interested in exploring opportunities with your company.

Once you find people, you can learn more about them through their social media postings. Recruiters will want to see if the candidates have the kind of reputation that will make them a good employee or if there are any red flags that might need to be discussed during an interview. Candidates should make sure that they understand their privacy settings on sites like Facebook, so that they only share images and information that they want to share with the public—including potential employers.

Social Media Marketing Strategy

Because of its broad reach and immediate impact, social media marketing should be part of every marketer’s strategy. You can use it to broadly engage with your market, build your brand, drive leads, increase sales, and grow your business. If you take the steps I’ve outlined here, I’m sure you’ll soon be building a solid program.

Marketing Automation Strategy

A solid marketing automation program can shorten your sales cycle and let you generate additional revenue. The lead you collect today is a lead that may need to be gently and strategically nurtured to become a customer.

You will probably start implementing a lead nurture program using email, so it’s important to use all of the email best practices I discussed in the previous chapter. Keep in mind, however, that you can also nurture leads through search marketing and social media using many of the same techniques.

Market Segments

Before you sign the license agreement and create the PO for a new marketing automation tool to manage your lead nurture program, you’ll need to think about the goals of the program and the audience for the campaign. Are you going to focus on prospects who’ve signed up on your website, prospects generated by your sales team, an existing list of prospects, current customers, or new customers? Each of these audiences has a different relationship with your company and very different needs.

You may also want to look at different segments within these groups. Will the campaign be more effective if you address them by industry, or by their job function or level within the organization?

Your sales team probably does this very naturally, so you may want to interview them to see how it’s done. Before your best sales people deliver their pitch, it’s natural for them to ask a series of questions so that they can respond with a message that is specifically tailored to the prospect.

Marketing automation software for lead nurture can mimic this process and you can set it up so that it happens quickly and easily without human intervention. This way, your sales team can spend their time closing deals and working with their best customers, and not doing the mundane work of sending emails to each new lead.

The Buying Cycle

As I described in the chapter on content marketing, each product or service you sell has a specific buying cycle and companies describe them in variety of ways. A common way to think about it is using the following sequence:

• Awareness—In this phase, the prospects are trying to understand what they need, and what potential solutions exist.
• Consideration—In this phase, they are evaluating alternative solutions to their problem.
• Purchase—In this phase, prospects are evaluating products from different companies to decide which one to buy.

We all go through this decision process for our own consumer purchases, and organizations go through the same steps for larger business purchases.

Let’s say that I’m interested in buying a new video camera for personal use. I have a camera now that is five years old and somehow feel that there should be something better on the market. My first step in the awareness phase would be to do some research to see what’s new in video camera technology and features.

I’ll be asking questions like:

• What is the best screen resolution available?
• What types of zoom lenses are there?
• Who are the major manufacturers?
• How do cameras connect to social media sites and my wireless network?

Once I get answers to these questions, I’ll finish the awareness phase with a good understanding of what’s available and what I need.

After I do some research to understand these issues, I’ll move into the consideration phase. In this phase, I’ll look at different alternatives from the manufacturers I researched in the first phase, and get more detailed information.

I may watch a video showcasing how their current customers use the product and I’ll probably try one out for myself at a store. Ideally, I’ll come out of the consideration phase with a good understanding of the one or two products that I want to buy.

In the last phase, purchase, I want to buy the product I’m interested in at the best price. I might go to a store or two and shop online to find the best price from a supplier I trust with the service, warranty, and payment options that are best for me.

Once you understand the buying process, you can use this knowledge to design a series of emails to move the buyer through the process with the right content at the right time, so that they buy from you. If you don’t do this well, you may turn off your prospect and they may opt-out of your communication stream. For example, if I register to receive more information at the time I’m researching technology and features, and the manufacturer sends me a “coupon” deal, it might accelerate my purchase, but more than likely, I won’t be ready.

Ideally you should send a series of email messages and content that gradually moves your prospects through the buying cycle over time. In the example above, a series of content that might be appropriate would be a technology guide on HD video or lens quality, followed by a comparison guide or user testimonial, and finally a discount or a free shipping offer to encourage a purchase.

The manufacturer can’t know exactly how fast I will move through the buying cycle, but at least they will be sending me a stream of relevant content that’s appropriate to the way most people buy. They can also ask me where I am in the buying process as they send me more content.

Although this sounds simple enough, most companies simply send the same content to their entire list over and over again. Clearly, a personalized strategy based on the buying cycle stands a better chance of success.

Emails and Offers

The next step is to create emails and offers specific to the buying cycle for each segment you want to address with your campaign. For each phase of the buying cycle, you’ll need to create an offer, a landing page, and email that address the unique needs of the buyer.

As you can see, this can start to turn into a lot of emails. If you plan to send six emails to three segments, you’ll need to create 18 emails for the campaign. If you add another variable, such as customization by industry, or by size of company or job function, you will need to create many more. Fortunately, after you produce the emails, you can load them into your marketing automation platform, which makes it much easier to send individual emails to all of these types of people.

Touch Points, Timing, and Triggers

When you are setting up a nurture campaign, you need to decide how many touch points you will create for the program. Will you send three follow-up emails, or six, or 20? The number of emails you decide on will depend on the complexity of the sale and the length of the buying cycle. The longer the cycle, the more you’ll want to send over time.

Timing is also important. Will you send emails every day, every two days, or once a week? Again, that depends on how many messages you will be sending and over what time period. For most campaigns, weekly touch points work fine. You should avoid sending emails to your list too frequently, as this increases the risk of high opt-out rates. You’ll also need to consider how long the campaign will last. Will you send messages over two weeks, two months, or a year?

Triggers are additional emails that can be sent based on specific activity taken by the user. This activity can be a website visit, or even clicking on a specific page. For example, if I’m receiving early stage technology emails about my camcorder purchase and then one day I visit the pricing section of the website, the company can set up the system to automatically send me a “free shipping” message since I may be farther down the cycle than it thought.

Triggers can be powerful tools, but you should avoid making it feel too much like “Big Brother” is watching. In the example above, you would not want to say, “I noticed that you visited the pricing page and you may be interested in…” You can be more general and still make people feel that you are speaking to them personally.

One campaign we recently created for a client used four touch points sent over a two-month period of time with an additional trigger message that was sent the day after the user revisited the website.

Email Creative

Once you have your lead nurture strategy in place, the next step in the process is to actually design the email templates and write all of the content. This may include offers like white papers or user guides, or it could be more media-intensive with video, infographics, or other interactive tools. Remember that the stronger the offer, the better the response rate. In addition to creating the email, you may also need to create the landing pages and thankyou pages for the campaign.

Marketing Automation Software

Once you have the emails and landing pages written and produced, it’s time to load them into a marketing automation tool. These software platforms will connect to both your website and CRM system, and make it easy for you to set up the email campaigns, triggers, and move leads into the CRM system when they are ready.

Part of the setup will include linking the offers and landing pages on your website to the automation tool so that your lead nurture program will start when a new user registers. You can also load existing contacts in the system to move your house email list down the lead nurturing path.

The software will also give you the ability to set up the marketing automation rules I’ve discussed above. For example, you can tell the system to send the first nurture email two days after a user registers and the next touch point seven days later. You can also put in logic that prevents an email from being sent if the user visits a specific web page or is contacted by the sales team.

Many of these systems also include a lead scoring capability, which watches the user’s behavior as they respond to emails or visit the website and assigns the user a score based on criteria you define. You can then set triggers based on that score, such as asking a sales person to call.

Manage and Optimize the Lead Nurture Program

Once you have the strategy in place, the content created, and the system designed, it’s time to start using it. You can kick off the campaign with your in-house email list and start watching as emails get sent to people who register on your website.

The software will give you all of the reporting you’d expect from an email system, such as open rates, click-through rates, opt-out and conversion rates. Based on this data, you can continuously work to improve the program by removing emails and offers that are not performing well, and testing new content. You can also see if entire segments are not performing as well as others, and redesign the strategy for that group if necessary.

Accelerating your Lead Nurture Program

A fully implemented lead nurture program gives you the ability to quickly and easily follow-up with leads in a way that naturally moves them through the buying cycle. If designed properly, it will increase the number of quality leads and sales, and enable you to be as thorough as possible in communicating with your potential customers, all with much less time and effort than is required from traditional marketing techniques.

You will know you are on your way when you’ve covered the entire buying process and all of your target markets with strong messages and good offers. And you’ll be rewarded with good click-through rates, engagement, leads, and sales.

An effective email marketer is great at building the audience, creating fantastic emails, getting the emails delivered, achieving high open rates, creating calls-to-action that work, and optimizing campaign metrics.

When you do all of this well, people respond and your email campaign works. If you don’t do all of this well, it can be very quiet after you hit “send,” and it might seem like tens of thousands or millions of your emails went into a big void.

Email Strategy

To create a high-performance email program, it’s very important to focus on email campaign optimization techniques that will get more of your emails delivered, opened, and acted upon. When developing an email campaign, the most critical elements you can use to achieve these goals are using a good list, featuring a strong offer, and presenting a powerful creative.

Once you have your email strategy in place, it’s important to execute the campaign well by using a high-quality email tool and paying close attention to all of the details that make a program work, such as lowering your SPAM score to improve your deliverability.

As you send your email, you should test different elements of the campaign, such as the subject line, in order to improve your results. To make your email program even more effective, you can also integrate it with other online marketing activities such as search and social media marketing.

A high-performance email program will use the strongest email tools and best practices available to deliver the best results possible. By using the techniques described here, you’ll no longer be satisfied with just getting higher open rates and lower opt-out rates. You’ll be focused on getting more leads and sales, and with every email sent you’ll be learning more and more about what drives results.

Here are the steps you’ll need to take create a powerful email program:

Email Marketing Goals

When you start an email marketing campaign, it’s critical to have clear goals in mind. Do you want to simply inform your audience? Do you want them to click to your website to read content? Do you want them to watch a video, download a trial, or even buy something?

Your goals for the campaign will directly influence the design, frequency, and messaging of the email program. It will also determine the reporting metrics you put in place during the campaign setup process to help you see if you are accomplishing your goals.

The Email Audience

It’s critical to clearly understand your audience when you begin your email program. Several different groups you may consider creating email programs for are:

• Your top customers
• All existing customers

• Partners
• Potential customers who have opted in to get information from you
• Other potential customers in your target market

You should plan to communicate with each of these groups using email in a different way. Your best customers may receive a personalized email from the CEO and be invited to special events or to provide product or service feedback.

All existing customers may receive a regular email newsletter with updates on the company, products and services, or other important announcements. They may also receive emails with special offers to encourage them to buy other products or services from you.

Partners may be interested in some of the same content as your best customers, but you need to speak to them as part of the team, not as potential buyers. A partner email newsletter can be an effective tool for this audience.

Potential customers who have “raised their hand” and opted in to receive your content may receive a stream of content designed to move them through the buying process. If this is a B2B audience, this content may include offers for white papers, webinars, demos, case studies, product information, or the opportunity to evaluate the product. A B2C audience may get special offers, discounts, or advance notice on promotions.

While some companies only send email to existing customers and people who have opted in, many organizations send email to potential customers. These emails may be highly promotional with strong offers that encourage the user to opt in to get deeper content.

It’s important to design an email campaign strategy that takes the specific needs of different audience types into account and then communicates to them in a personalized way based on their relationship with the company.

Email List

A strong email list is critical to any email campaign. When I say a “strong” list, what I really mean is one that is large, highly targeted, and with complete data. I’ve been involved in several campaigns where the client invests a lot of time, energy, and money into developing a beautiful email creative, but then only sends it to a few hundred people because they do not have a good list. This is obviously a waste of time and effort since it costs very little to extend a good campaign to a larger email list.

When you do the math, you can see why this can be a problem. If you spend $5,000 developing an email campaign (offer, email creative, landing page, etc.) and then send it to only 500 people, you may only get 5 people to respond if you get a 1% response rate.

Your cost in this case is a whopping $1,000/lead. If you have a list of 100,000 people, and you get a 1% response rate, you can yield 1,000 leads and drop your cost to $5 per lead. That’s a very powerful change in the effectiveness of the campaign, simply by leveraging the email campaign across a larger audience.

In a perfect world, your list should include everyone in your target audience. Yes, everyone! Your list database should also include information beyond their email address, such as whether or not they’ve opted in to receive your content, and their relationship to your company (customer, partner, potential customer, etc.). This will allow you to do some basic targeting.

Ideally, it should also have other data that will allow you to segment emails to them more effectively. This may include their name, company, location, industry, past purchases, how frequently they’d like to hear from you, preferences, and other variables that will allow you to personalize and customize your email.

Most organizations do not have anywhere close to this type of list, but if you do, it’s a powerful competitive advantage, since you can easily and inexpensively reach your target market.

You can build your list by collecting email addresses from trusted sources. First, make sure you get the emails of your existing customers and partners. Since these are your best contacts, it’s worth the time to contact them directly to make sure the information is accurate and complete. If you have offers and landing pages on your website, inbound leads can also be an effective source. If you have a sales team, they can also be a significant source of email addresses if they are using a CRM system to manage customer and prospect data. Your partners can also be a source of emails if they are willing to share them with you.

It can take a long time to build your list using the techniques above, so you may be tempted to buy a list to get faster results. There are many places where you can buy a list, but be careful. Even the best lists I’ve purchased have a significant number of bad email addresses. If you buy a list, make sure you only send emails to small batches of the list over a long period of time so that you can manage the opt-outs properly and don’t get tagged as a spammer and blacklisted by the Internet Service Providers.

Once you have a list, it’s very important to keep it clean and up-to-date. In some markets, 10% of the people change jobs or their email address every year and need to be removed from the list. Also, people will opt out from receiving your emails and will need to be removed from your list.

People will also change their relationship with your company and their records will need to be updated when they move from prospect to customer, or from customer to “important customer” so you can send appropriate messages to them.

From time to time, you may also want to remove people from the list who do not respond to your email programs at all. These non-responders lower your response rates and may cost you money to mail to. Continuing to send mail to inactive records over time can also get you labeled as a spammer and lower the response rates of your entire campaign. Rather than deleting these records, you may want to break them out into a different segment for occasional important promotions to see if you can reengage them with strong offers.

Once you have built a strong list, it will become a powerful asset for your company and must be protected and managed to keep it working effectively.

The Offer

Email campaigns should be designed around an offer. The offer is something special that you are giving to your audience in order to get them to respond. The offer should be strong enough that it gets people to open the email, read it, click through, and take the action you want them to take. The stronger and more relevant the offer, the better the response rate for the campaign.

When you are designing an email campaign, it is often helpful to think about how you react to receiving emails yourself. If you get an email that features an update on a company’s executive team, you’re less likely to respond than if you get one that features a free industry analyst paper, free software, a coupon, or the chance to win a valuable prize. Always try to put yourself in the shoes of the recipient when you design your offer strategy, and feature the strongest offer you can in each email campaign.

Email Creative Design

Although the design of the email won’t make as much difference to the success of the campaign as the list and the offer do, it’s still very important to design an email thatrepresents your brand well, clearly communicates your message and offer, and makes it easy to respond.

The best emails feature a clean, compelling design and engaging copy. The email should not be too long and easyto read, since people read emails very quickly to see whether or not they contain something of value for them.

The copy should be engaging and short, and it should be very easy to see the call to action or what to do next.As you write the copy for the email, make sure you include compelling headlines, strong copy, and a clear call to action to motivate people to take the action you want.

As you design the email, pay special attention to the call to action. If you want the user to do something, design it so that the action stands out with a special color or other design treatment to make it easy for them to see what to do.

It’s also critical to put the action above the fold at the top of the email so that the user does not need to scroll down in order to take the next step. You may also consider putting the call to action in multiple places, such as a button on the top right of the email and a text link within the body copy in case the recipient has images disabled.

A critical part of any email is the subject line. This is the headline that will determine if the email gets opened or not. Many people get dozens or even hundreds of emails each day, and if your email subject line is not compelling, it won’t even get opened and all of the work you put into the design and copy of the email and landing page will be wasted. Consider testing your emails by sending them to a small subset of your list using different subject lines to optimize open response rates.

After the email is designed and written, it must be turned into HTML in order to get ready to be sent. During this production phase, make sure you thoroughly test the email to see how it renders in various emails and browsers, since there is no way to know the environment in which the user will read the email.

Today, most emails are read on mobile devices, so it’s also very important to test the email on various mobile platforms such as iPhone, iPad, and Android devices to ensure that the email is readable and easy to use. It’s also important to think about how you want users to respond from their mobile devices.

Filling out a long form to get a white paper or download a free software offer is much more difficult on an iPhone than a PC or Mac. Consider reducing the amount of form fields to be filled out and making call-to-action buttons larger when you are designing for mobile devices.

Personalization and Customization by Segment

People naturally respond better to emails that are created personally for them. If I receive an email that is addressed, “Dear David,” I’m much more likely to pay attention than if it says, “Dear Sir.” Worse still are emails that are addressed to “dreske,” since it sounds like they just scrapped that from the first part of my email address.

If you have the names of your contacts in your list, definitely use them to personalize your emails. You can also use other information you have to personalize the email with their company name or the town they live in. Crafting a personalized email message will improve your results compared to generic messages.

Customization is when you send different emails to different users in your target audience. In order to do this, you first need to define your segments and then personalize your content accordingly in order to address their specific preferences.

In B2B markets, people commonly segment their audience based on industry and job function. This means that if you know that someone works in the financial services industry and is in sales, you’ll use this information to customize the email for them in order to get a better response rate. You can do this by either creating separate emails for each segment, or by creating dynamic emails that are assembled as the emails are sent based on variables you set up in each email.

If you do this well, you’ll create an email that is personalized and customized to the individual so that it’s more relevant and you get a higher return on your email investment.

Social Sharing  and Email

Social media is a very important tool to reach your audience and can be integrated into your email campaign in order to make each tool more effective. Sites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn are powerful ways to attract an audience and encourage the sharing of your content. here I’ll share several ways that you can integrate your email and social media programs.

Social sharing tags are links that you can put in each of your emails that allow people to easily share your content with their followers on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. With one click, each of your readers can easily share your email with thousands of other people, so it’s critical to make these links easy to see and encourage your readers to use them. Many email programs can track how many people share your email with their social media fans so that you can see the impact that these links have.

You can also send an email explicitly asking your email readers to follow you on your social media properties. This is like sending an email asking people to join another list, so include some kind of incentive if you can. This can take the form of a contest or small gift if they are willing to follow you. If you make this sound easy and fun, you’ll be more successful in getting people to respond.

Integrating your Email Campaign with Search Marketing

Search marketing and web marketing are important tools that can help you build your email audience. The first step in integrating these two programs is to put a strong call to action on your website, similar to the types of offers you are using in your email campaigns. Then use search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to make your website more popular with the search engines to get more organic traffic.

You can also use paid search marketing (PPC) to drive traffic to your website and landing pages. This traffic will respond to your offers, convert on your landing pages, and build the audience for your email campaigns.

Email Execution—Software, Deliverability, Quality, Testing

Once your email is designed and written, it’s time to send it. At this point it’s tempting to feel that your job is done and you just need to hit the “send” button, but it’s critical to work very carefully during this last phase of the email production process to ensure a high-quality campaign.

Once you send an email, there is no guarantee that it will be received by the user. Almost all organizations have spam filters that are designed to keep out unwanted email, but may also keep out your email.

All of the major Internet service providers (ISPs) also filter email. In the United States, the CAN SPAM law tried to define what spam is, but in practice, spam is whatever the Internet service providers stop from being sent to their users.

In order to ensure high email deliverability, you need to take several important steps. First, make sure your email is in compliance with the CAN SPAM law. This law has many provisions, but the most important provisions are that the subject line should not be deceptive, you must identify yourself with your company name and physical address in the email, and you need to give the user the option to opt-out of future emails.

Another key to high deliverability is to manage the quality of your list. If you have a very low open rate or response rate, the ISPs will consider your email to be spam. To keep this from happening, periodically purge from your list people who never respond. Why keep sending emails to people if they have not responded to any of your emails in the past year or two? This will also help boost your response rates in future email blasts.

A third key to ensuring high deliverability is to stay away from words and techniques which the spam filters looks for when deciding if email is spam or not. Some of these techniques include not using the word “free” in your email subject line, not using other phrases like “special offer” or “click here” or many words that are associated with sex or drugs. You should also avoid the use of all CAPS in your subject line. By staying away from this language, you’ll be more likely to get your email delivered and read.

Email Is a Relationship

When you are building an email program it’s important to remember that you are not shouting at your audience, you are building a relationship with them. As part of this relationship, you are giving them content and offers and asking them if they want to get more information or buy something that meets their needs.

This type of relationship works best when you give the recipient control over how often they hear from you, and what type of messages they will receive. One way to build this relationship is to use a “preference center” to let the user opt-out of some types of emails or get more or less frequent emails from you. If you don’t let the user control the relationship, you risk losing them altogether when they get fed up and optout.

Email Testing and Optimization

In every campaign, it’s critical to test your emails in order to improve your results. Fortunately, there are many ways to test and optimize your email program.

The first step is to test your subject line. Each email you send should be randomly split into at least two subsets of your full list so that you can A/B test them against each other. Since the subject line determines if your recipient will open and read the email, use the open rate to evaluate the effectiveness of your subject line.

Just because one subject line gets a higher open rate than another doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a winner. It’s important to test the result to see if it’s statistically significant. Even if you don’t have a master’s degree in statistics, you can use online tools to make sure you are getting good results in order to make a decision.

The variables you’ll need to include are the number of impressions and the clicks or click-through rate of each of the tests. Once you have this, you’ll be able to use an online calculator to get the degree of confidence that the winner is actually the winner.

You should look for 90–95% confidence using a statistical analysis tool before you can declare a winner.8If there is a winner, use it and create a new test to see if you can improve the results. If there is no clear winner, you may need to retest with a larger sample size or a different creative in order to get a winner.

Tracking Email Campaign Performance

Once you have your campaign running, you’ll want to track and report on the results in order to make informed decisions about how effective the campaign is. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are data about the campaign that you collect over time to decide if your campaign is on track. Some of the data you should track for in each campaign are:

• Email Sent—Your list should be growing over time with new people opting in.
• Open Rate—If your subject line is effective and relevant, your open rate will stay strong.
• Opt-out Rate—A high-quality list with strong emails will have a low opt-out rate.
• Click-through Rate—Well-designed emails with strong offers will have a high click-through rate because people will want to get more information.

• Conversion Rate—The conversion rate will tell you if your landing page and offers are strong.

It’s critical to collect this data over time and make decisions regularly to improve and optimize the results. You won’t always be right, but at least you’ll have very clear feedback on your decisions.

Email Marketing Summary

High-performance email marketing campaigns can be optimized to build your audience, improve deliverability, and get good engagement through email opens and conversions in order to drive good business results. By using the techniques described in this chapter, you can develop a strong and effective email marketing program.

In addition, I’ll show you how to integrate your organic or natural social media marketing program with your paid social media advertising program. I’ll also show you specifically how to use Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter campaign targeting, and give you a few tips that should help you be more effective with using targeting to get exactly the audience and the results you want.

What is social media advertising? As simple as it sounds, it’s really just advertising on social media sites. The advantage of social media advertising over other forms of digital advertising is that social media sites get a lot of traffic, and they have a lot of demographic information on their users, and you can use this data to target your ads very effectively.

Why Social Media Advertising?

Social media advertising is big, and it’s getting bigger. There are literally billions of people who are engaged with social media today, with over 2.8 billion users on Facebook, and 2.3billion users on YouTube.

There are also hundreds of millions of people on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and others. When I first started talking about social media advertising and social media marketing with my clients a few years ago, they often said, “I wonder if my customers are using Facebook?” or “I wonder if they’re on Twitter or LinkedIn?”

Today, that’s not even a question. If you are still wondering if your customers or your prospects are using social media, you don’t have to wonder anymore. They are using it!

The Growth of Facebook

Facebook has seen tremendous growth over the last few years and is now a part of the fabric of our daily lives. Because of this growth, Facebook is taking a huge share of total Internet traffic.

Social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter should be a part of your marketing mix so that you can reach your target audience and build an overall strategy for success. By using a mix of different digital advertising tools, you can easily shift your budget into what’s most effective and working best for your campaigns.

Growth in Social Media Advertising

Because of this new way of reaching specific groups of people and interacting with people through engagement and likes, social media is growing very rapidly. In 2020, over $40 billion was spent on social media advertising, and that is projected to grow to almost $56billion by 20224. We’re going to continue to see a strong increase in social ad budgets over the next few years as advertisers realize more of the benefits of social media advertising.

Social media advertising is growing rapidly, and 90% of US advertisers are using social media for marketing purposes.

While Google’s market share has been very steady over the last few years, Facebook has grown rapidly and is taking an increasing amount of overall digital advertising budgets.

.

Paid Advertising vs. Organic Social Media Marketing

How does this advertising strategy fit in with what you’re doing in social media? In a typical organic social media program, you need to do at least three things. First, you create a solid presence on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, etc., making these platforms look great, making them look powerful, and making them look professional. I’ll describe this in more detail in the chapter on social media marketing.

Once you have the platforms built, you need to fill them with content that might include Tweets, posts, and video. To make this work well, you need to create and send content about your company and products, as well as industry content so that your presence looks interesting and engaging.

While you are sending out content, you also need to build your follower base. In an organic social media program, having great platforms and pushing out content is meaningless if nobody’s listening to you, so it’s important to build your follower base so that you can generate business results. As you build followers and send out posts, you can integrate offers with a call to action. The outcome should be that you get more likes, more traffic, more leads, and more sales.

Here’s an example of how this works in a typical organic social media program: If you have a few hundred followers and you’re doing 20 posts a month, this could result in 10,000 potential brand impressions per month. If you had 10,000 followers with 200 posts a month, there could be 2 million potential brand impressions each month. This all can lead to likes, traffic, leads, and sales for your business. In practice, the number of brand impressions will be much lower, because people don’t read all of the social media content that is directed toward them, but it can still drive traffic and engagement.

How does advertising fit into this? Instead of doing all of the work to build your followers and push out a lot of content, you can just pay to promote your posts. Paid ads can take out all of the work of building followers and you can still get the same or even better results.

Paid social media advertising is a way to complement what you’re doing through organic social media. By leveraging the posts and content that you’re already pushing out with your organic program, you can get traffic and engagement when you might not have enough followers or the volume of content you need in your organic program. These two parts of your social media program can work well together.

One of the interesting things about social media is that you can use it for more than just direct response or brand building. Social media enables you to build and measure engagement by getting people to like you, follow you, comment, or even share your content.

With engagement metrics, you can measure the number of views that you get on social media, how many times people comment on something you’re talking about, and how many times they share what you’re saying.

You can also use social media to get more likes and followers for your organic social media program. Getting likes and followers is almost like getting someone to sign up for your email list because they’re volunteering to get more information from you.

Unlike an email channel, where you might send them an email a month or an email a week, in social media, you can push out content to them one to five times per day. Your followers are giving you permission to send a lot of content.

Facebook Targeting

Facebook is a powerful advertising platform because of its reach and its ability to direct your ads to a very specific target audience. While there are hundreds of targeting options, three targeting options—age, country, and interest are used by most Facebook advertisers.

Facebook gives you a lot of other targeting options because they know so much about their users. You can advertise and target by types of interests and you can be very specific about the kinds of interest categories that you want.

For example, if you are promoting a Chinese restaurant, you could choose the restaurant category, and then you can target people who are specifically interested in Chinese restaurants. As you select different demographic or interest categories, you can see your audience numbers change. This enables you to control the size of your audience—not too small or too big—and make sure that it fits your ad budget and your business objectives.

Facebook also provides conversion tracking in their ad platform to track the results of your advertising. By placing a conversion-tracking code on your website thank you pages, you can measure and track your conversions. Some of the options that you can choose are sales checkouts, registrations, leads, key page views, adds to shopping cart, or other website conversions. This tool lets you measure results for exactly the kind of conversions that you’re trying to get for your campaign.

Comparing Facebook to Google Ads

If you have been using Google Ads, you’re probably wondering how it compares to Facebook advertising. In Google Ads, people are searching, and your ads are a response to those queries. In Facebook advertising, your ad shows up in the user’s content stream even when they are not searching for your product.

In Google Ads, you filter users by keyword, and it allows you to design campaigns with positive and negative keywords along with many other targeting options. In Facebook, you’re targeting based on user demographics and interests. In Google Ads, your options are to get people to click on an ad and then send them down a conversion pathway. In Facebook, you get the option of starting a long-term relationship with someone by getting them to like you or to engage with you or to comment on your content.

In Google Ads, you can use several ad types such as text ads, product listing ads, or banner ads. You can use geo-targeting, language targeting, and other demographic targeting variables. As I mentioned earlier, you have a lot more targeting options within Facebook.

In Google Ads, Google assigns a quality score to your ads based on historical data, which determines your cost per click and ultimately your cost per conversion or cost per sale. Facebook determines quality based on user feedback, and Facebook tracks the user’s response rate, which will ultimately determine how your ads are displayed.

Google Ads is a cost-per-click (CPC) media, while in Facebook, you can use either CPC or cost per thousand, which gives you more flexibility. Campaigns in Google Ads and Facebook can both be effective, but there are some significant differences in how they work.

LinkedIn

If you’ve got a B2B product or service, LinkedIn (owned by Microsoft) can also be very effective for you. LinkedIn has about 740million members today, and 30 million businesses. LinkedIn knows a lot about their users, such as name, position, company, and location. They know the groups we’re part of and the things we post and share, as well as our interests. LinkedIn offers advertisers a lot of different targeting variables that are unique to their network.

With LinkedIn advertising, you can do geographic targeting and targeting by company. You can even target your ads to a specific company, so that you can reach out specifically to people who work for General Electric, IBM, or Microsoft, for example.

You can also target people by type of company, industry, or size of company. You can also target people by job function or seniority. Seniority targeting here is another very powerful option, for example, if you only want to reach senior executives.

LinkedIn also offers other targeting options because many people use it to store their resumes and other personal information. This gives you the ability to target people by school or by job skill. You can also target by group so that you can get a very focused audience for your ads.

Twitter Advertising

Twitter, as you saw from the statistics I shared earlier, is a smaller player in digital advertising, but it’s coming on strong, and its market share has tripled in the last few years.

In Twitter advertising, you are promoting Tweets, and these are the same Tweets you post in your organic campaign. You can target by location, by category, and by users with the same interests, and you can get very specific within your campaign.

You can target by interest, and also target users with the same interests as other followers, which is a great way to find people that have the same interests as people that are already following you. As you build your target audience, you can see how large your audience is.

You can use advertising to promote all kinds of Tweets. You can promote Tweets with a call to action. You can promote Tweets that go back to your website. You can build your budget around the number of impressions or the number of clicks that you want from your campaign. You can also control all the different bidding options, your budget per day, as well as your budget per engagement.

Accelerating your Social Media Marketing Program

Why advertise on social media? First, there is a huge audience, literally billions of people, so if you’re selling any kind of a product or service, you will find an audience on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. There’s also very strong momentum, and your fellow marketers are using these tools in greater and greater numbers.

Social Media advertising also gives you advanced targeting options that allow you to use many targeting tools to match your ad to your target audience. Facebook also gives you multiple engagement and conversion options to make it easier to match your advertising program to your business goals.

You can generate engagement. You can generate views. You can generate comments. You can generate likes and followers, as well as traffic leads and sales, and you can measure all of it.

You can also focus on mobile users. More and more of us are using our mobile devices to access content on the Internet, and today about 98% of Facebook users are mobile, so it’s a great way to engage with the mobile user.

Perhaps the most important business reason to use social media advertising is that you may experience a lower cost per click and lower cost per conversion compared to other types of digital advertising campaigns.

For all of these reasons, it makes sense to leverage social media as part of an integrated, optimized advertising campaign because it can be very effective.

When you’ve implemented a strong social media marketing program, you will be confident that you are reaching the target audience that is best for your products and services. You will see consistent and strong results and intuitively be able to test new social media sites and use them successfully.

Digital advertising is one of the most powerful and adaptable marketing tools available to businesses today. Unlike traditional advertising, which typically relies on broad audience assumptions and fixed placements, digital advertising allows companies to reach specific audiences, control spending in real time, and measure results with precision. Most importantly, it enables advertisers to connect with people based not only on demographic characteristics, but on behaviors, interests, and intent.

At its core, digital advertising is about delivering the right message to the right audience at the right time. Modern platforms allow businesses to place ads across search engines, social networks, websites, and video platforms at key moments—when potential customers are researching solutions, comparing options, or ready to take action. This alignment between message and intent is what makes digital advertising so effective.

Search advertising was one of the first major breakthroughs in digital marketing because it allowed advertisers to present ads to people who were actively searching for products or services. Google pioneered this approach by introducing an auction-based system that considers bid amount, relevance, and performance to determine which ads appear. While this model still powers search advertising today, digital advertising has evolved far beyond keywords alone.

Today’s digital advertising ecosystem includes paid search, paid social media advertising, display and remarketing campaigns, video advertising, and increasingly, AI-driven and automated campaign types. These channels are no longer used in isolation. Instead, they work together to support the entire buyer’s journey—from creating awareness and demand, to generating leads, driving sales, and building long-term customer relationships.

What makes digital advertising especially valuable is its flexibility. Campaigns can be launched quickly, paused or adjusted at any time, and scaled as performance improves. Advertisers can test messaging, creative, audiences, and offers, using real data to continuously improve results. This makes digital advertising accessible to small businesses, scalable for growing organizations, and powerful enough for large, global brands.

When executed strategically, digital advertising becomes more than a traffic-generation tactic. It becomes a measurable, repeatable growth engine that supports broader marketing and business goals.

The Digital Advertising Landscape

The digital advertising landscape is made up of several core channels, each serving a different role within a broader marketing strategy. Understanding how these channels work—and how they complement one another—is essential to building effective campaigns.

Paid search advertising allows businesses to show ads on search engines such as Google and Bing when users actively search for specific keywords or phrases. Because search ads are triggered by explicit queries, they are often associated with high intent and are especially effective at capturing demand when prospects are ready to take action.

Paid social advertising enables businesses to reach audiences on platforms such as LinkedIn, Meta, Instagram, Reddit and TikTok. Unlike search advertising, paid social is primarily audience-based rather than intent-based. Advertisers can target users based on demographics, job titles, interests, behaviors, or past interactions. Paid social plays a critical role in building awareness, shaping consideration, and supporting lead generation earlier in the buyer’s journey.

Display and programmatic advertising place visual ads across networks of websites and apps. These ads are often used for brand awareness, retargeting, and reinforcing messaging across multiple touchpoints. While display ads typically have lower direct conversion rates than search, they are highly effective at staying visible and supporting longer buying cycles.

Video advertising, including platforms such as YouTube and connected TV, allows advertisers to deliver rich, engaging messages at scale. Video ads are particularly effective for storytelling, product education, and brand building, and they increasingly play a role in both awareness and consideration stages of the funnel.

What makes modern digital advertising different from the past is not just the number of channels available, but how they work together. A prospect may first encounter a brand through a social or video ad, later search for the company or its solutions, and finally convert after seeing a remarketing ad. Effective digital advertising strategies recognize this interconnected journey and design campaigns that support it at every stage.

Push vs. Pull Marketing in a Digital World

A helpful way to understand digital advertising is through the lens of push and pull marketing. Traditional advertising methods—such as print, radio, television, and many forms of display advertising—are often considered “push” marketing. In these models, advertisers push messages in front of audiences who may or may not be interested at that moment. While these approaches can build awareness, they often suffer from low engagement and limited targeting precision.

Pull marketing, by contrast, is based on responding to expressed interest. Search advertising is the clearest example of this approach. When someone types a query into a search engine, they are actively looking for information, a solution, or a product. If an ad directly addresses that need, it feels helpful rather than intrusive. This is why search advertising often delivers higher conversion rates than many traditional media channels.

Modern digital advertising blends push and pull strategies. Paid social, display, and video advertising can introduce brands and solutions to new audiences, effectively creating demand. Search and remarketing campaigns then capture that demand when users take action. Rather than relying on a single tactic, successful advertisers use push and pull together to guide prospects through the buying process.

The power of digital advertising lies in its ability to combine intent-based targeting with audience-based reach. By understanding what prospects are searching for, what content they engage with, and how they move across channels, advertisers can deliver timely, relevant messages that feel aligned with the user’s needs. This shift—from broadcasting messages to responding to intent—is what makes digital advertising one of the most efficient and effective marketing approaches available today.

The Modern Buyer’s Journey and Digital Advertising

Today’s buyers rarely follow a simple, linear path from awareness to purchase. Instead, they move through a series of touchpoints across multiple channels, devices, and timeframes before making a decision. Digital advertising plays a critical role in supporting this journey by delivering relevant messages at each stage of the decision-making process.

The buyer’s journey is often described in three core stages: awareness, consideration, and conversion. In the awareness stage, prospects may not yet be actively searching for a specific product or service. They may be experiencing a problem, researching a topic, or encountering a brand for the first time. Digital advertising at this stage focuses on education, visibility, and demand creation through channels such as paid social, display, and video advertising.

As prospects move into the consideration stage, they begin actively evaluating options and comparing solutions. They may engage with content, visit websites, sign up for newsletters, or search for more specific information. Digital advertising supports this stage by reinforcing messaging, introducing differentiators, and staying visible through remarketing and targeted search campaigns.

The conversion stage occurs when prospects are ready to act—requesting a demo, filling out a form, or making a purchase. Search advertising and high-intent remarketing campaigns are especially effective at this point, as they respond directly to expressed intent. Strong offers, clear calls to action, and highly relevant landing pages become critical to driving results.

Importantly, the buyer’s journey does not end at conversion. Retention, upsell, and repeat engagement are increasingly important goals for digital advertising. Remarketing, customer targeting, and personalized messaging help businesses maximize lifetime value and strengthen long-term relationships.

Because buyers interact with brands multiple times before converting, it is rare for a single ad or channel to receive full credit for a sale. Modern digital advertising strategies account for assisted conversions and recognize that awareness and consideration campaigns play a vital role in driving downstream results. By aligning campaigns to the full buyer’s journey, advertisers can build more sustainable, predictable growth.

Building a Digital Advertising Strategy

An effective digital advertising program begins with a clear strategy. While digital platforms provide powerful tools and automation, success depends on aligning those tools with business objectives, audience needs, and realistic performance expectations.

The first step in building a digital advertising strategy is defining clear goals. Some organizations focus on brand awareness and visibility, while others prioritize website traffic, lead generation, or direct sales. In many cases, multiple goals exist simultaneously. The key is to clearly define what success looks like for each campaign and ensure that performance is measured accordingly.

Once goals are established, advertisers must determine how digital advertising will support different stages of the buyer’s journey. Awareness campaigns are typically designed to maximize reach and engagement, while consideration campaigns focus on driving qualified traffic and interactions. Conversion-focused campaigns prioritize efficiency, cost per lead, or return on ad spend. Allocating budget intentionally across these stages helps ensure that short-term performance goals do not undermine long-term growth.

Budget strategy is another critical component. One of the advantages of digital advertising is the ability to start small, test performance, and scale based on results. Early campaigns should be designed to generate insights as much as outcomes, allowing advertisers to learn which channels, audiences, messages, and offers perform best. As confidence and performance improve, budgets can be increased strategically to amplify what works.

Targeting and messaging must be aligned with strategy. High-intent search campaigns require precise keyword selection and tightly matched ad copy. Audience-based campaigns rely on clear definitions of who should see the ads and why. Across all channels, messaging should be relevant to the audience’s needs and aligned with where they are in the buying process.

Finally, an effective digital advertising strategy recognizes that optimization is ongoing. Competitive dynamics, platform algorithms, and user behavior change constantly. Successful advertisers continuously review performance data, test new approaches, and refine campaigns to improve results over time. Digital advertising is not a one-time setup—it is an evolving system that rewards attention, learning, and strategic adjustment.

When digital advertising strategy is built on clear goals, aligned with the buyer’s journey, and supported by continuous optimization, it becomes a powerful driver of measurable business growth rather than a collection of disconnected tactics.

Targeting in a Privacy-First World

Targeting is one of the defining advantages of digital advertising, but the way advertisers reach audiences has changed significantly in recent years. Increased privacy regulations, browser restrictions, and platform changes have reduced the availability of third-party data, forcing advertisers to rethink how they identify and engage potential customers. Successful digital advertising strategies now balance precision with privacy, using a combination of intent signals, first-party data, and platform-based targeting.

Search advertising remains one of the most effective forms of intent-based targeting. By bidding on keywords that reflect what users are actively searching for, advertisers can align their ads with real-time needs and interests. This form of targeting is inherently privacy-friendly because it is based on the user’s immediate behavior rather than personal data.

Audience-based targeting plays a larger role in paid social, display, and video advertising. Platforms allow advertisers to reach users based on demographics, job titles, industries, interests, behaviors, and engagement history. While these targeting options are powerful, they must be used thoughtfully to ensure relevance and avoid wasted spend. Broad targeting combined with strong creative and algorithmic optimization is increasingly effective in a privacy-conscious environment.

Remarketing remains a critical tactic, allowing advertisers to re-engage users who have previously visited a website, interacted with content, or converted in the past. As cookie-based tracking becomes more limited, first-party data—such as CRM lists, email subscribers, and customer records—has become even more valuable. Integrating this data into advertising platforms allows businesses to maintain continuity across the buyer’s journey while respecting user privacy.

In a privacy-first world, the most effective targeting strategies focus less on tracking individuals and more on understanding intent, context, and aggregated behavior. Advertisers who invest in clean data, strong messaging, and thoughtful audience design are best positioned to succeed as platforms continue to evolve.

Core Campaign Building Blocks

Every successful digital advertising campaign is built on a set of foundational components. While platforms and formats may change, these core building blocks remain consistent across channels and play a critical role in performance.

Keywords and intent mapping form the foundation of search advertising. Selecting the right keywords—and organizing them based on user intent—helps ensure that ads are relevant and aligned with what prospects are looking for. Strong keyword strategy balances reach with specificity, capturing valuable demand without wasting budget on irrelevant searches.

Ad copy and creative translate strategy into messaging. Effective ads clearly communicate value, address the user’s needs, and include a strong call to action. Across search, social, display, and video, messaging should be tailored to both the audience and the stage of the buyer’s journey. Consistency between ads and landing pages is essential to maintaining relevance and driving conversions.

Offers play a central role in motivating action. Whether the goal is to generate leads or drive sales, compelling offers provide a reason for users to engage. The most effective offers are aligned with intent and deliver clear value, such as educational resources, demos, consultations, discounts, or free trials.

Landing pages are where advertising results are ultimately realized. Rather than sending traffic to a general homepage, high-performing campaigns direct users to focused landing pages designed to fulfill the promise of the ad. Clear headlines, concise messaging, intuitive design, and simple calls to action help reduce friction and increase conversion rates.

Bids, budgets, and delivery settings control how and when ads are shown. These variables determine competitiveness in auctions, influence reach, and shape overall performance. Geographic targeting, device targeting, scheduling, and placement controls further refine campaign delivery, ensuring ads reach the right users in the right context.

When these building blocks are aligned, campaigns become easier to manage, optimize, and scale. When they are misaligned, even well-funded campaigns can struggle to deliver meaningful results.

The Role of Automation and AI in Digital Advertising

Automation and artificial intelligence now play a central role in how digital advertising platforms operate. Modern systems use machine learning to optimize bids, select placements, and determine which creative variations to show to different users. While this automation has increased efficiency and scale, it has also changed the role of advertisers.

Smart bidding strategies allow platforms to adjust bids in real time based on signals such as device, location, time of day, and user behavior. Automated bidding can outperform manual approaches when conversion tracking is accurate and goals are clearly defined. However, automation is only as effective as the data and strategy that guide it.

Responsive ad formats, such as responsive search ads, dynamically test combinations of headlines and descriptions to identify top-performing messages. Performance-focused campaign types, including highly automated formats, are designed to simplify campaign management while expanding reach across multiple channels.

Despite these advances, automation does not eliminate the need for human oversight. Strategic decisions—such as defining goals, selecting offers, structuring campaigns, and interpreting performance—remain essential. Advertisers must monitor results, ensure that automation aligns with business objectives, and intervene when performance drifts or platforms optimize toward the wrong outcomes.

The most effective digital advertising programs combine human strategy with machine efficiency. By providing clear inputs, high-quality data, and strong creative, advertisers can harness automation to scale performance while maintaining control over direction and results. In this balanced approach, AI becomes a powerful accelerator rather than a replacement for strategy.

At the most advanced level, leading advertisers connect Google Ads directly to their CRM using GCLIDs to enable offline conversion tracking tied to true lead quality. By feeding back outcomes such as qualified leads, sales acceptance, revenue, or deal value—not just form fills—campaigns give Google’s algorithms visibility into what actually drives business impact. This allows smart bidding and automated optimization to train on real downstream performance rather than surface-level conversions, dramatically improving the platform’s ability to identify high-intent users. When automation is fueled by CRM-backed quality signals, campaigns evolve from volume-driven lead generation to precision revenue engines, capturing more of the right prospects and maximizing long-term return on ad spend.

Creating High-Performing Offers

A strong offer is one of the most important drivers of digital advertising success. Even the most sophisticated targeting and automation cannot compensate for an offer that fails to resonate with the audience. In digital advertising, the offer gives users a clear reason to click, engage, and take the next step.

Many advertisers make the mistake of using ads to promote themselves rather than to provide value. Messages such as “We’re the best” or “Learn more about our company” tend to underperform because they place the burden of motivation on the user. High-performing digital advertising focuses instead on what the prospect gains by engaging—whether that is information, savings, access, or convenience.

Effective offers are closely aligned with intent and stage in the buyer’s journey. Early-stage prospects may respond best to educational resources such as guides, webinars, or checklists that help them understand a problem or opportunity. Mid-stage prospects often engage with more solution-oriented offers, such as case studies, demos, or consultations. Late-stage prospects may be motivated by incentives such as free trials, discounts, or limited-time promotions.

One of the advantages of digital advertising is the ability to present different offers to different audiences at the same time. Advertisers can tailor offers by keyword group, audience segment, industry, or campaign objective, increasing relevance and improving performance. The more closely an offer matches what the user is searching for or interested in, the more likely it is to generate strong click-through and conversion rates.

Offers should always include a clear call to action that tells the user exactly what to do next. Ambiguous or passive language creates friction, while specific calls to action reduce uncertainty and encourage engagement. Over time, testing different offers and calls to action helps identify what resonates most with each audience segment.

Landing Pages and Conversion Optimization

Landing pages play a critical role in turning advertising traffic into measurable results. While ads capture attention and generate clicks, landing pages determine whether those clicks turn into leads, sales, or other meaningful actions. A disconnect between the ad and the landing page is one of the most common reasons digital advertising campaigns fail.

Sending paid traffic to a general website homepage is rarely effective. Homepages are designed to serve many audiences and objectives, offering multiple navigation options that can distract users from taking action. In contrast, a dedicated landing page is designed to support a single goal and fulfill the promise made in the ad.

An effective landing page delivers clarity immediately. When a user arrives, they should instantly understand what is being offered, why it is valuable, and what they need to do next. Clear headlines, concise supporting copy, and visual cues help guide attention and reduce cognitive load. The call to action should be prominent and easy to complete, whether that involves filling out a form, scheduling a call, or making a purchase.

Trust and usability are also critical factors in conversion optimization. Elements such as testimonials, case studies, logos, and security indicators help reassure users that they are making a safe and credible decision. Page speed, mobile responsiveness, and simple form design further reduce friction and improve performance. These principles become most effective when applied through a consistent set of landing page optimization criteria.

When evaluating or optimizing a landing page, advertisers should assess a defined set of core elements that directly influence conversion performance. Navigation should be clear and intuitive, while PPC-focused landing pages should limit navigation to reduce distraction. Forms should be streamlined to capture only the minimum required information, supported by keyword-rich copy that clearly communicates features, benefits, highlights, and unique selling points through concise bullet points and callouts. High-quality imagery should reinforce the message, while social proof such as testimonials, reviews, or case studies builds confidence and reduces hesitation.

Calls to action should be prominent throughout the page and clearly communicate what the user will receive from the offer. The overall design should remain uncluttered, load quickly, and deliver a strong mobile experience. Message match between ad copy and landing page copy is essential for maintaining relevance and intent. Supporting elements such as pricing transparency, thoughtful internal linking, and selective use of social links should be included only when they reinforce trust without pulling users away from the primary conversion goal.

Conversion optimization is an ongoing process rather than a one-time effort. Small changes to messaging, layout, form length, or calls to action can have a significant impact on results. Digital advertising provides a steady flow of traffic, making it an ideal channel for testing and refining landing pages over time.

When strong offers are paired with well-designed landing pages, digital advertising becomes significantly more efficient. Higher conversion rates reduce cost per lead or sale, improve return on investment, and allow campaigns to scale more effectively. In this way, landing pages are not just a support asset—they are a core component of digital advertising success.

Testing and Experimentation

Testing is one of the greatest advantages digital advertising has over traditional media. Unlike static advertising channels, digital platforms allow advertisers to experiment continuously with messaging, targeting, creative, and landing pages, using real performance data to guide decisions. Effective testing transforms digital advertising from a guessing game into a disciplined optimization process.

At the most basic level, testing involves comparing two or more variations to determine which performs better against a defined goal. Advertisers commonly test ad copy, headlines, images, calls to action, offers, and landing page layouts. Over time, these incremental improvements can produce significant gains in conversion rates and overall efficiency.

Digital advertising platforms support both simple A/B testing and more advanced experimentation. Responsive ad formats dynamically test combinations of creative elements, while dedicated experimentation tools allow advertisers to run controlled tests with clear measurement frameworks. Because results can be gathered quickly and at relatively low cost, digital advertising enables faster learning than most other marketing channels.

Effective testing requires focus and structure. Each test should have a clear hypothesis, a defined success metric, and sufficient volume to produce meaningful results. Testing too many variables at once or drawing conclusions from insufficient data can lead to misleading outcomes. Successful advertisers prioritize tests that are most likely to impact performance, such as offer changes or landing page improvements, before refining smaller details.

Importantly, testing should be ongoing. Markets change, competitors adjust strategies, and audience behavior evolves over time. What works today may not work as well six months from now. By embedding experimentation into regular campaign management, advertisers can stay ahead of changes and continue improving results.

Measurement, Attribution, and Key Performance Indicators

Digital advertising generates a significant amount of data, but data alone does not create insight. Effective measurement focuses on tracking the metrics that align with business goals and using them to inform decision-making. Clear measurement frameworks allow advertisers to understand performance, justify investment, and optimize campaigns with confidence.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) vary based on campaign objectives. Awareness campaigns may focus on reach, impressions, and engagement, while traffic campaigns emphasize clicks and cost per click. Conversion-focused campaigns prioritize metrics such as leads, sales, cost per conversion, and return on ad spend. Defining KPIs upfront ensures that performance is evaluated consistently and meaningfully.

Attribution plays a critical role in interpreting results. Because buyers interact with multiple ads and channels before converting, assigning full credit to a single click can oversimplify the impact of digital advertising. Modern attribution models consider multiple touchpoints and help advertisers understand how awareness and consideration campaigns contribute to downstream conversions.

For many organizations, integrating digital advertising platforms with analytics, marketing automation, and CRM systems provides deeper insight into performance. These integrations allow advertisers to track outcomes beyond the initial conversion, such as qualified leads, opportunities, revenue, and customer lifetime value. This is especially important for B2B companies with longer sales cycles.

As privacy regulations and tracking limitations evolve, measurement strategies must also adapt. Using first-party data, enhanced conversion tracking, and aggregated reporting helps maintain visibility into performance while respecting user privacy. The goal is not perfect measurement, but reliable and actionable insight.

When KPIs are aligned with business objectives and attribution is approached thoughtfully, digital advertising becomes easier to manage and optimize. Measurement shifts from simple reporting to strategic guidance, enabling advertisers to make smarter decisions and maximize long-term impact.

Ongoing Optimization and Campaign Management

Launching a digital advertising campaign is only the beginning. The dynamic and competitive nature of digital advertising requires ongoing optimization to maintain and improve performance over time. Platforms, audiences, and competitors are constantly changing, and campaigns that are left unmanaged quickly lose efficiency.

Effective campaign management involves regular review and adjustment at multiple levels. Budgets and bids must be monitored to ensure spend is aligned with performance and business priorities. Keywords, audiences, and placements should be refined based on what is driving meaningful results, while underperforming elements are paused or reworked.

Creative optimization plays an equally important role. Ads can experience fatigue as audiences are exposed to the same messages repeatedly. Refreshing creative, testing new offers, and evolving messaging helps maintain engagement and prevent performance decline. As insights are gained, winning messages can be scaled across additional campaigns or channels.

Optimization is not limited to ads alone. Landing pages, conversion paths, and tracking setups should be reviewed regularly to ensure accuracy and effectiveness. Small improvements in conversion rate can have a significant impact on overall return on investment, especially as campaigns scale.

A structured optimization cadence—daily monitoring, weekly adjustments, and monthly strategic reviews—helps advertisers stay proactive rather than reactive. This disciplined approach allows campaigns to adapt to market changes, capitalize on new opportunities, and sustain consistent performance.

Ultimately, successful digital advertising is not about achieving a single strong result, but about building a system that delivers predictable, repeatable outcomes over time.

Common Reasons Digital Advertising Campaigns Fail

Despite the power and flexibility of digital advertising, not all campaigns succeed. In many cases, failure is not due to the channel itself, but to how the strategy and execution are approached. Understanding common pitfalls helps advertisers avoid wasted spend and frustration.

One of the most frequent causes of failure is unclear or misaligned goals. Without a clear definition of success, campaigns may optimize for the wrong metrics, such as clicks instead of qualified leads or short-term conversions at the expense of long-term growth. Clear objectives are essential for guiding strategy and measurement.

Weak offers and poor landing page experiences are another major issue. Even well-targeted ads cannot perform if the value proposition is unclear or the user experience creates friction. Campaigns often fail because they focus too much on driving traffic and not enough on converting that traffic into meaningful outcomes.

Over-reliance on automation can also undermine performance. While automated bidding and targeting are powerful tools, they require accurate data, clear goals, and ongoing oversight. When campaigns are set up and left unattended, platforms may optimize toward outcomes that do not align with business priorities.

Inadequate tracking and measurement further limit success. Without reliable conversion tracking and performance data, it becomes difficult to understand what is working and where improvements are needed. Decisions made without accurate data often lead to inefficient spend and missed opportunities.

Finally, many campaigns fail due to lack of ongoing management and optimization. Digital advertising is not a one-time effort, and results rarely improve on their own. Advertisers who treat campaigns as static assets rather than evolving systems are unlikely to achieve consistent success.

By avoiding these common mistakes and approaching digital advertising as a strategic, data-driven process, businesses can dramatically improve their chances of long-term success.

Who Digital Advertising Is For

Digital advertising is not limited to companies with massive budgets or global reach. One of its greatest strengths is its scalability, making it accessible and effective for organizations of many sizes, industries, and business models.

Small and midsize businesses can use digital advertising to compete with larger brands by targeting specific audiences, controlling costs, and focusing on high-intent opportunities. Campaigns can be launched with modest budgets, tested quickly, and expanded as results improve, reducing risk while maximizing learning.

B2B organizations benefit from digital advertising’s ability to support long sales cycles and complex buying decisions. Paid search, paid social, and remarketing campaigns help generate demand, nurture prospects, and stay visible throughout the evaluation process. When combined with CRM and marketing automation systems, digital advertising can also provide insight into how marketing efforts contribute to pipeline and revenue.

E-commerce brands rely on digital advertising to drive traffic, sales, and repeat purchases. With the ability to measure revenue, return on ad spend, and customer lifetime value, advertisers can make data-driven decisions that directly impact growth and profitability.

Local businesses can use geographic and intent-based targeting to reach nearby customers at the moment they are searching for products or services. At the same time, global organizations can deploy coordinated campaigns across regions, languages, and markets, all managed through centralized platforms.

In short, digital advertising is for any organization that wants to reach the right audience, measure results, and scale growth efficiently.

The Role of a Digital Advertising Partner

While digital advertising platforms have become more automated and accessible, expertise still plays a critical role in achieving consistent success. Effective digital advertising requires more than launching campaigns—it requires strategic alignment, ongoing optimization, and the ability to interpret data in the context of business goals.

A digital advertising partner helps organizations translate objectives into actionable strategies. This includes selecting the right channels, defining targeting approaches, developing compelling offers, and designing conversion-focused experiences. Experienced partners also understand how platforms evolve and how to adapt strategies as algorithms, privacy standards, and competitive dynamics change.

Transparency and accountability are essential components of a strong partnership. Clear reporting, regular communication, and a shared understanding of success metrics help ensure that campaigns stay aligned with business priorities. Rather than focusing solely on activity or surface-level metrics, an effective partner emphasizes meaningful outcomes such as qualified leads, revenue, and long-term growth.

In an increasingly automated environment, the value of a partner lies in providing strategic oversight and human judgment. By combining platform expertise with business insight, a digital advertising partner helps organizations avoid common pitfalls, maximize return on investment, and build sustainable performance over time.

Conclusion: Turning Digital Advertising into a Growth Engine

Digital advertising has evolved into a sophisticated, multi-channel system that supports every stage of the buyer’s journey. When approached strategically, it allows businesses to reach the right audiences, deliver relevant messages, and measure impact with unprecedented clarity.

Success in digital advertising does not come from any single tactic or platform. It comes from aligning strategy, creative, targeting, automation, and measurement around clear business goals. It requires continuous testing, thoughtful optimization, and a willingness to adapt as markets and technologies change.

When these elements work together, digital advertising becomes more than a marketing expense—it becomes a predictable, scalable growth engine. Organizations that invest in strategy, data, and execution are best positioned to turn digital advertising into a long-term competitive advantage.

Ready to Turn Digital Advertising into Measurable Growth?

Digital advertising is most effective when strategy, execution, and optimization work together. At Nowspeed, we help organizations move beyond isolated campaigns and build digital advertising programs that are aligned with business goals, supported by data, and designed to scale.

Our team partners with B2B and B2C organizations to plan, launch, and manage digital advertising across search, social, display, and video channels. We focus on what matters most—driving qualified leads, increasing revenue, and improving return on investment—while providing transparency and insight every step of the way.

Whether you are launching your first digital advertising campaign or looking to improve the performance of an existing program, Nowspeed brings the strategy, experience, and ongoing optimization needed to turn digital advertising into a predictable growth engine.

Interested in improving your digital advertising results?

Contact Nowspeed to schedule a consultation or request a digital advertising assessment. We’ll help you understand what’s working, where opportunities exist, and how to move forward with confidence.

I’ve found that many people are confused about their website. Some see it as a simple brochure, and others see it as a place to display cool designs or content without much in-depth information. Others don’t think its relevant at all, and are satisfied with having a design with content that’s three, five, or even 10 years old.

When your website is well-designed, you can be confident that all of your target audiences will be able to get the information they need in a quick and easy way, and have a clear path to the next step in doing business with you. You’ll also be able to document the success of the website with clear metrics about traffic, engagement, and leads. In addition, you’ll have a clear understanding of where the website fits into the rest of your digital marketing program.

Website Strategy

In order to create a high-performance website, you need to fully optimize the experience for your audience so that they take the actions you want. Websites often have many audiences, such as existing customers, potential employees, and even investors. In this chapter we will focus on potential customers as the most important audience for the website.

Most B2B companies want their website to convert visitors to leads, which usually happens when visitors fill out a form and give you their contact information, start a chat session, or call on the phone. For most B2C websites, the goal is to move the visitor quickly through the buying process so that they will make a purchase.

The marketing goal of the website in general, and the home page in particular, is to present offers that are appropriate to users and encourage them to learn more by clicking to a landing page and entering their contact information, or going to a catalog page to make a purchase, or making a phone call. In order to do this effectively, everything about the site must be fully aligned – from the messaging to the design, the content, and especially the offers.

Here are the steps you’ll need to take to create an effective website:

Strategy, Brand, and Messaging

The first element to consider about your website is the way it reflects your brand and messaging. Nothing is more frustrating than going to a website and hunting around for several minutes before you figure out what the company does.

It’s critical that your headlines, photos, and copy clearly describe your category as well as the products and services you offer. It’s also critical to select a design style with graphics that complement your brand and messaging to help your users quickly understand your company and the products and services you offer.

We’ve all visited websites that make it very difficult for their users. I recently visited a company with a large aloe plant on the home page and general statements about their commitment to client satisfaction. It took me several minutes to see that they were in the business of taking over and managing company mailrooms and other facilities.

Another website I visited recently showed a picture of a man with an umbrella under a shower of paper falling all around him. This website was promoting an online translation service, but it was very difficult to make the connection between the photo and the headline and service.

In the chapter on Content Marketing, I describe the process of understanding your target audience and creating personas that make it easy for you to think about your target market. This same process can be used to help you build your website. If you can put yourself in the shoes of these buyer personas, it’s much easier to see the website from their perspective and design it around their needs instead of your own.

A well-designed website has clear messaging that anyone can understand within a few seconds. In addition, the layout and graphics will support the messaging and make it easy to understand what you do and how you can help the visitor get what they want.

Information Architecture

In order to build a high-performance website, you need to have an effective information architecture. The information architecture describes the layout of the website, including the site structure and how the pages are linked to each other. This will ultimately be turned into the navigation structure, links, and offers on each of the pages. The information architecture is critical since it will determine the size of the site and all of the content that needs to be created for the site. Many firms also build the SEO plan into the information architecture of the site.

Getting the information architecture right is critical to making the website design work. In the process of creating it, you will make decisions about how much content to put on the site and how to organize it. As you organize the content, you should follow basic rules that make it easier for people to find your content. For example, drop down menus with more than six or seven items are hard to use. If you have a lot of content on one page, you may want to break it into more than one page.

As you make decisions about the type of content, the amount of content, and its organization, you’ll be able to determine how to organize the menus of the website to make it easier to navigate the site. Many sites have four or more levels of menus on each page to make it easy to find content and navigate to the right place.

Home Page and Secondary Page Design and Architecture

In addition to the site architecture, it’s important to carefully think through the home page and secondary page architecture. By this I mean the layout of the content on the pages and the placement of offers and your calls to action.

The home page structure is especially important, since most of your users will start there. The home page gives you the opportunity to present key messages, news, product offers, and information offers such as white papers, demos, and videos. Since the location, color, size, and presentation of each item on the page will determine how visible it is and how much traffic it gets, it is very important to think about what’s most important to you.

Do you want people to learn about the product, or select an offer? Do you want people to read the CEO’s letter to shareholders, or read your press releases? If you want leads, you’ll need to make your best offers very prominent and make it easy for users to get them. If you want sales, you’ll need to make it easy to buy.

For example, if the primary goal of the home page is to drive users to see a demo and download a trial of your product, you should present your offer in the most visible place with the most eye-catching design possible. If you want people to sign up to get a discount coupon, make that offer the most prominent.

This thinking should also apply to the secondary pages on the website. If you do your SEO job well, you’ll be generating more and more traffic directly to interior pages of the site since the users will be bypassing the home page when they come from a search link. It’s very important to think about how users will experience your site if they go directly to these secondary pages. Will they understand your business and where they are on the site? Will they be able to navigate easily to other parts of the site? Will they find an offer that engages them and makes it easy for them to buy something or give you their contact information? Those are the challenges you’ll need to overcome as you create your secondary page designs.

Integrating Offers into the Website

As you create your architecture, it’s important to think deliberately about which offers to place on each page of your website. By placing relevant offers on each page, you’ll increase the click-through rate and conversion rate, and improve the overall effectiveness of your website. As tempting as it can be to offer many things on each page, you can actually confuse your website users with too many offers. It’s best to select the most appropriate offer for each page on the site and then test other relevant offers over time to see if you can improve your conversion rates.

In addition to content about your company, your products, and your services, you should also include other content to make your website valuable to people and position you as a thought leader. This content might include:

• Blog
• Directory
• Glossary
• White papers
• Articles
• Video
• Infographics

Your website is the natural place to showcase the thought leadership content you create, so plan for a resources section of your website that is alive with new content that you create and post frequently. The easiest place to start is with a blog where you write articles at least weekly. The resources section of your website will allow you to engage your users, build your brand, and get more SEO visibility since search engines love fresh content.

Selecting a Content Management System

Once you launch your new website, you’ll need to make frequent changes as your business changes and evolves. A content management system (CMS) is software that enables you to easily manage and maintain a website once it has been created. It works by presenting your content through a series of templates for the website design.

In a CMS, all of the content for each page is in a database and only displayed to the user through the template when they visit the site. This means that you can easily make changes to the content and certain other site elements quickly and easily without redesigning the page. You can also entrust site editing to people with little HTML experience, since it is difficult to break the templates.

Popular content management systems like WordPress and Squarespace make it easy and less expensive to create a beautiful and effective website that can be easily managed. When you work with a product like WordPress, you can either create a custom design or work with an existing template. If you choose a template approach, your design will be limited, but you will get many features at a very low cost. Choose your template carefully, because once you build your website in a template, you will be committed to it for a long time.

Before you select a CMS, however, makes sure it meets all of your requirements. If you are building a complex e-commerce website or have thousands of pages of content, then WordPress may not be best for you. There are many commercial CMS products that have robust features and may be a better long-term alternative.

Building a Mobile-Friendly Website

Since many people today browse the web from smartphones and tablets, you should design your website to be as easy to use on these devices as on a PC or Mac. In the past, companies would build two different websites, one for mobile and one for desktop users. Today, a modern CMS allows you to build using “responsive design” so that the website automatically reformats based on the size of the user’s browser. To do this, you will need to build templates for each size of browsers you expect to visit your site. Many companies build for three sizes including smartphones, tablets, and PCs.

By doing this you can deliver an excellent user experience for mobile users, while not taking the time and expense to build and maintain two completely separate websites. Managing content is easier with this approach too, since if you make a change in your content, it will instantly appear in both the mobile and PC version. Search engines reward you for showing mobile content correctly, so building a responsive website should also increase your SEO visibility.

Your website will be the core of your digital marketing program, so it’s critical to take the time to do it right. By starting with your brand, developing a strong information architecture, and creating an excellent design, you will lay the foundation for a strong website program.

Landing Pages

Landing pages are where “conversions” happen. A conversion may be someone completing a form to give you their contact information before downloading content, or it may be an e-commerce purchase from a catalog. Well-designed landing pages can improve conversion rates tenfold compared to poorly designed pages, so it’s critical to create them with care and use best practices to get the best results possible.

Even before you start to think about the design and copy of a landing page, it’s important to put yourself in the shoes of the person who will be “landing” there. Are they responding to an email you sent to them, or are they responding to a search marketing ad? Are they visiting after exploring your website, or is this their first experience with you? In order to create the best landing pages possible, use the work you did on personas to make sure you get the message right.

If they are coming from your website to a landing page, you should make the experience consistent with the rest of the website. It should include all of the website’s navigation to make it easy for them to move around the site, since you don’t want them to feel as though they are leaving your website when they respond to an offer. It should also include the entire brand and core design elements of the website to deliver a consistent user experience.

If the landing page is a link from the website, you’ll need to include information on the offer on the landing page, but you’ll need less information to build trust and sell the company itself, since they are coming to this page from another page on the site. On the other hand, if the landing page gets a significant amount of organic website search traffic directly from the Internet, then you’ll need more content in order to build trust just as you would if they were coming from an online ad.

Build Trust

If people arrive on your landing page directly from an online ad, you’ll need to build trust and make sure they understand who you are and how you can help them. You’ll not only need to sell the offer, but also communicate information about your company. No one will want to give you their contact information or buy from you if they are not sure want you’ll do with the information. These trust building strategies are especially important if you have a brand that is not well-known. For example, it’s easier to trust IBM or Coca Cola than it is to trust Bob’s Consultants or Ben’s Software.

There are several ways to build trust on a landing page. First, clearly tell the visitor who you are and what business you are in. You can also build credibility by showing them who your other customers are, and giving them quotes or testimonials. It’s also important to highlight your privacy policy and let them know that you won’t sell or give away their contact info. No one wants to feel that they are going to join a SPAM mailing list just for downloading a white paper.

Remember that you’ll need do this in a very short space, so be brief. On a landing page the only space that matters is “above the fold”, which is the visible part of the screen that a user sees when they arrive on your page. In many cases, it’s unlikely that user will scroll down and see the rest of the page, so make sure you give them everything they need at the top of the page.

Sell the Offer

When creating a landing page, it’s important to focus on only one thing. Internet users are easily distracted, and if you give them more than one thing to do, they will easily lose focus and move on. Even though you need to build trust, as I discussed above, don’t include so much information on your company, products or customers, that you encourage them to move on before they “convert.”

Landing Page Design Principles

When you start to design the landing page, make sure that the offer is clear and tangible. The graphic should make the value of the offer easy to understand. The headline and subhead should position the offer and make it easy to understand what you get. Most importantly, the form needs to be placed above the fold and be easy to fill out so that the user can get what they want. Following are some of the most common elements of landing page design:

• Layout—The entire layout should be easy to see and use within the screen users see when they arrive at the page.
• Mobile Design—The mobile design can allow more scrolling, but since space is limited, the offer should be very clear and the call to action should be obvious.
• Form Placement—The form should be on the page, above the fold, and at the top right of the screen. People generally read from left to right, so they should read about what they get before they are asked to fill out a form to get it.
• Form Length—The form should be as short as possible, but include all of the information you need to move the lead to sales. If this is an e-commerce transaction, you can break it up into separate pages to make each step easy to fill out.
• Make the offer tangible—If you are selling a product, include a picture, video, and enough information to help them make a purchase decision. If the offer is an information asset such as a white paper, then include a picture and something about the offer to help them understand how valuable it is.
• Headline and Subhead—The headline and subhead copy is important, since people need to be able to very quickly understand the offer and what they will get out of it.
• Copy—The copy should be short and easy to read to help the users quickly understand the offer and make a decision to request it.
• Navigation—If the user is coming from an ad, there should be minimal navigation so that they are not distracted and will move forward to get the offer.
• Call to Action—Instead of a “Submit” button, include a phrase like “Download Now” to encourage them to move forward.
• Trust Language—Include a short summary of your privacy policy such as, “We promise not to sell or share your contact information with anyone.”

By using these principles, you’ll be able to write and design a landing page that performs well. Keep in mind that all of these items can be tested to improve the results.

Website Analytics

Today’s website analytics tools can provide you with a huge amount of data on what’s happening on the website. You can get very detailed data on visits, page views, clicks, and conversions. You can also see where the traffic is coming from by referring website and often by keyword.

This data can tell you very important things about the effectiveness of your marketing programs and help you answer key questions such as:

• How effective are your home page and your landing pages?
• How effective is your website information architecture?
• How effective is your search engine optimization program?
• How effective is your social media marketing program?
• How effective is your email campaign?
• How effective is your content?
• How effective are your paid search or online advertising programs?
• What is not working well on the website?

Understanding your website analytics data is critical to helping you measure the ROI of your marketing programs and building a high-performance website.

When you start to use a tool like Google Analytics, it’s easy to get lost in the overwhelming amount of data instead of focusing on what matters. While it might be interesting to know what percentage of your users are still using Internet Explorer 6.0,it’s more important to know which websites are referring traffic and driving conversions, or which pages are driving the most conversions.

Once you determine the metrics that are most important, you can build a dashboard that summarizes those metrics and helps you quickly find the data you need.

Website Analytics tools are limited by the type of data they can get. There is a lot of data available, but the most important data I like to see includes:

• Traffic Sources—Where did the traffic come from and which traffic converted best?
• Visits to Pages—How many visitors went to each page?
• Goal Conversions—How many people converted to the goals you set?
• Referring Sites—Where did users come from?
• Geography—What countries, states, and cities did they come from?

You generally cannot see who came to your site unless the user provides their contact information. You also cannot see where they go after they leave your site.

Rather than focusing on what each metric means on the reports, I’d recommend that you focus on the decisions you want to make about your website each month, and then look at the data that can help you make those decisions. When you are building a high-performance website, you need to focus on:

• Home Page Performance
• Landing Page Performance
• Search Engine Optimization
• Social Media
• Email
• Paid Search or Digital Advertising

Home Page Performance

The goal of your home page is to clearly communicate your brand and product information, and then strategically lead people to learn more about your products, your company, and download an offer or buy something. Even though you may have many links on your website to news, events, customer stories, and other things, you should decide what you really want prospects to do from the home page and then track this metric to see if that’s happening as you expect.

By measuring the click-through rate (CTR) from your home page to your product pages and your offer landing pages, you’ll be able to see if the home page is doing its job effectively.

Landing Pages

The goal of your landing page is to convert the user to download something in exchange for their contact information, or to buy something. You can measure this by looking at the goal conversion rate for each of your landing pages. If you find that one landing page is converting more traffic than another, you can often increase the lead flow of your website simply by featuring the landing page with the highest conversion rate in the most prominent position.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

In the SEO Guide, I discuss many ways to measure the effectiveness of your efforts to improve organic visibility. Website analytics give you an important perspective on your efforts and will help you see if the time and effort you are putting into SEO is making a difference.

Website analytics will tell you which organic search keywords are actually driving traffic to your website, which pages they are going to from their search, and if they are converting to one of your goals when they get there.

Google hides some of the information on organic search keywords, but you can still infer which keywords are best by looking at the keyword data that is provided. By looking at this data, you’ll be able to see the most effective keywords in terms of your business goals, not just in terms of visibility.

The data from your analytics program will give you the information you need to improve your SEO results. If you are getting traffic from a keyword, but the conversion rate is low, take a look at the offer on the landing page to see if it’s relevant to the keyword that the user is searching on. If not, test another offer to try to improve results. Remember that this may not be the only keyword that is driving traffic to that page, so take care when making offer changes. You may improve the conversion rate on one offer, but lower it on another one.

Another way to use the SEO conversion data is to make changes to your SEO keyword strategy. Instead of guessing about the keywords that you think are going to make a difference for your business, website analytics will tell you which ones are actually working. You can adjust your SEO keyword efforts to build content or create links for keywords that are working so that you can get even better results.

Social Media—Social Media is often criticized for being an unmeasurable marketing activity, much like PR. While some of the value of social media cannot be measured, you can clearly see the impact that social media can have on website traffic and conversions. For example, you can track the number of clicks and goal conversions to your website from major sites like Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Twitter to see how your content-sharing and fan-building activities are turning into traffic, leads, and sales. This data can help you build a clear return on investment plan for social media and help you justify your budget.

Email—Email campaigns often include many metrics, such as the open rate or click-through rate, that are not visible to a website analytics program. Your website analytics software does not know how many emails have been sent, so it can’t calculate these two metrics. It can, however, track the number of clicks and conversions generated by each email blast. By adding a unique tracking code to each link, it can measure the results from each individual email campaign.

Paid Search—Since Google Analytics is integrated with Google Ads, it’s easy to see the important metrics from your Ads search program in Analytics. The important things to track here are the click-through rates and conversion rates to help you see if your investment in search is driving the return on investment you want.

Other Website Performance Goals

In addition to the other specific campaign metrics I’ve discussed, there are several other important metrics that you should track to see if your website is performing well.

The first one is overall traffic growth. Whether you are using organic search, paid search, email, PR or social media, you should be growing your overall traffic from month to month. More traffic means more opportunities to sell your products and services. Of course, traffic by itself is meaningless, but it’s a great starting place, and it’s difficult to accomplish your goals without traffic.

Two other general metrics to look at are average visitors’ time-on-site and the bounce rate. The time-on-site is the number of minutes and seconds each user spends when arriving at your site before leaving. If people are spending time on your site, it will tell you that your website content is helpful and engaging.

The bounce rate tells you how frequently people are leaving your site, just after they arrive. If your bounce rate is 25%, then a quarter of the people that come to your website are leaving immediately. If you have not filtered out your own employees from your website traffic, then you may create an artificially high bounce rate because people may have their browser home page set to the company website. If this is the case, every time they open their browser they will create a website “click” and a “bounce.” In most website analytics programs, it’s possible to filter out your own employees’ traffic.

Another challenge with the bounce rate is the source of the traffic. A well-designed home page may have a bounce rate of 30–40%. A well-designed landing page from an online ad may have a bounce rate of 90%, which means that 10% are going deeper or converting to a goal. Both of these metrics are healthy given their traffic source.

When building a high-performance marketing program, it’s crucial to have a high-quality analytics tool installed on the website to give you the data you need to make decisions and drive continuous improvement.

A well-designed website using modern technology can make it much easier to drive traffic, engagement leads, and sales. You’ll be happier and more confident in your digital marketing if you like the design of your website, it has all of the content your prospects need, and it’s producing the results you want.

Just because you can test anything, however, does not mean you should, and what you test and how you test will determine how effective you are at improving your results. After all, no one has an unlimited testing budget, and even if you did, it’s important to test the variables that can have the largest impact first in order to use that information to get better results faster.

Here are the steps to creating an effective testing program.

Test Strategy

Before you begin creating your first test asset or installing testing software, you need to identify clear goals for your tests. Do you want to improve click-through rates, lead conversion rates, or increase actual sales revenue? Are you trying to learn which messaging is most effective or drive more leads? Once you identify your goals, you’ll be able to create a test plan that achieves your goals. As you do this, you should also do the math to see the impact that you might make with your test plan. In other words, how much more money would you make if you improve your conversion rate by 25%, and is this worth the cost of the test?

Test Ideas Hypothesis

When testing, you must start with a test hypothesis, which is a question you want to answer. If you can’t frame your test into a meaningful question, then you can’t really develop the test properly. The test hypothesis might include tests of the design, structure, copy, or offers on your website or the ads you are running. The goal of this exercise is to identify the most likely changes that are going to have the greatest impact so you can test them first.

What Not to Test

The first thing you need to understand when building a test plan is what not to test. Don’t test things that are unlikely to make a difference. Should your banner be red or blue? Should the submit button be round or rectangular? These changes are unlikely to produce significant results, so test them after you test the biggest, most important questions you have.

Another place to avoid testing is an area we call “best practices.” If other people have already tested something and published data that tells you it works, then use their experience and don’t make these things the first thing you test. An example of this would be landing page design. A best-practice landing page should have a good offer with a strong call to action, the form above the fold at the top of the page, and a limited amount of copy.

Don’t start by testing a bad offer, with no call to action, a form buried deep down the page and thousands of words of copy against the good page. You’ll just be wasting your time.

By leveraging experts in design and direct marketing you can save yourself tens of thousands of dollars and many hours, and arrive at the answer much faster. So do your homework first and leverage all of the expert advice and best practice experience that you can.

After you’ve done all of this, you’ll still find that there are many things you’ll want to test.

Everyone Gets an Opinion—Then Test

A good place to start building a test plan is the disagreements you have with your team on what will make a strong campaign. One person will often feel strongly that one topic or offer is best. Another person might strongly believe that one media type is best. Still another person will feel that certain creative designs will perform best.

Many times these arguments can be diffused through testing. People often believe strongly that their ideas are best because they’ve had experience doing something that’s worked or not worked, even though they have not really tested it scientifically. These ideas are often good, and it’s fine to build them into your test plan.

Good Things to Test

In my experience, the best things to test are the things that are likely to make the most difference the fastest. In most programs, this includes the offer itself, the advertising media, the targeting variables, and the creative.

The Offer

The offer is almost always the most important element of the campaign. What are you asking the user to do? What is their incentive to do it? If you are running a B2B campaign and offering a white paper in exchange for the user’s contact information, then it’s critical to offer content that is valuable, timely, and important. An offer can be early-stage content such as a white paper, mid-stage content such as a case study or demo, or a late-stage offer such as a sales meeting.

The Media

The media you choose to use for your campaign is one of the most important decisions you will make. If you choose to advertise on billboards when newspaper ads, tradeshow ads, or Internet banner ads would have been more effective, you can waste a lot of money quickly.

The problem with media decisions is that they are often relatively expensive and any one item can take a large portion of your budget, so unless you have a very large budget, you can only choose a few items to test. It can also take a lot of effort to evaluate and then manage each media purchase, and then collect and analyze the data.

When choosing media, it’s important to evaluate each option on similar criteria, and then make decisions based on your ultimate goal. This will make it easier to set up the tracking mechanisms you need to evaluate the results once the campaign is over.

If your goal is to drive qualified leads for your sales team, then create a simple table to evaluate all of your media choices. The table will include the name, cost, number of impressions, clicks or contacts expected, leads expected, and cost per lead expected. By collecting the data across your media options based on your goals, you’ll be able to rank order the use of media based on which will produce the most leads or which will produce the lowest cost per lead.

Paid vs. Earned Media

Today, paid media are only a small portion of your media options. If you are active with your website or social media, you’ll also need to manage your investments in time and energy in non-paid media such as social networking sites, your own website, micro sites, partner sites, and press activity. These activities may take very little money, but they all require time, and it’s important to evaluate these investments in the same way.

If one of your marketing people is spending eight hours per week on social media, then allocate the time they are spending to each of the social media activities to make sure you understand the cost per click or cost per lead from these activities, just as you would from other paid media placements.

Once you have a good list of media options, it’s important to make small bets with your limited marketing dollars on new media until you have a solid understanding of the cost per lead you can expect from each type of media.

I’ve seen marketing managers get very excited about a new type of Internet marketing program and allocate 75% of their budget to the media without any experience on how well it would perform. Making small bets is critical to testing. If you need to commit large dollars to one media just to buy in, it’s very difficult to test it against other choices efficiently.

Creative Testing

There are a limitless number of creative options you can test in any given campaign. The concept, headline, graphics, photography, copy, and layout can all be tested.

When testing creative designs online, you can A/B test or multivariate test. A/B testing simply means that you position two fully designed creative options against each other. The critical part of this testing is that the creatives need to be seen by different parts of the same population at the same time in order for the test to be meaningful.

If you send the “A” email on Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. and the “B” email test on Saturday night at 10 p.m., you won’t be sure if it was the time of week or the creative that determined the success of the design. If you show one website ad on the home page and another on an interior product page, the results won’t be meaningful. If you run an ad on one keyword and the test on a different keyword, again, you won’t get meaningful results.

You also need to make sure your test results are statistically significant. To do this, you’ll need to do a little math to make sure you showed both ads enough times and that the results were different enough to tell you that one ad was the winner and the other was the loser.

Building the Plan

Once you have these elements in place, you are ready to develop the plan. The plan should start with a hypothesis that should give the rationale for the test, the test budget, how you plan to run the test, and the outcome you expect. In the hypothesis, I like to add a statement explaining the business impact so that you can start to make decisions about which tests you should run first, second, and so on.

Some tests are very expensive, and can be conducted quickly, and others need more time. For example, creating two competing TV ads might be a very expensive test, but might result in a strong ROI. Other tests can be run on less expensive media to learn something that can be used later on more expensive media.

In other words, you might run a test on your website to see which type of offer, an eBook or a white paper with the same title, is more effective. Based on this test, you can use the outcome to position the winner in an email campaign, a banner ad campaign, or a direct mail campaign, which is more expensive to run.

Record the Test Results

After you run a test, make sure that you document what you learn. A year or two in the future, a new team may be considering more options for testing and you want to make sure that they don’t spend money to repeat a test you’ve already completed. If you are running tests on a regular basis for every campaign, you’ll soon amass a steady list of results that will help you get better and better at producing consistent results.

Email Testing

Email is an important part of almost every online marketing program. Because of spam filters and because of how easy it is to opt out of email campaigns, it’s important to make every email valuable and professional. You don’t want to antagonize your users with miscellaneous testing emails that cause them to opt-out.

A key part of every email creative is the subject line. This is the headline for the email campaign that will either get the reader’s attention or cause them to delete the email before they open it. Because of this, you should test the subject line first. The best way to measure the subject line is to evaluate the open rate. Even though it’s not completely accurate, it’s a good gauge for you to see if the subject line is doing its job.

Another important part of email testing is to evaluate the click-through rate. If they user opens the email, the click-through rate will tell you if the email itself is doing its job to get the user to take an action.

It’s important to test both the open rate and the click-through rate to help you see if the email is effective.

Website Testing

Many organizations don’t think about testing their own website, although this can be the most productive and lowest cost marketing vehicle to test. You should be tracking marketing results on your website with the same metrics you are using to evaluate other media. Impressions, clicks, and conversions can all be easily tracked.

Your website gives you the ability to rapidly create and deploy tests with no media costs. These tests can take the form of creative elements or ads on your homepage or other pages, and you can vary the design, offers, or messages on these ads, just as you do with other media.

Once you have your hypothesis and your ads developed, you can deploy them and get results on the click-through rate in order to see which message or creative is best.

The power of website ad testing is that you can learn quickly and then deploy these tested ads to other paid media.

Testing can drive a very high ROI for your marketing campaigns. If you use your imagination and then deploy the tests in a systematic and disciplined way, you can generate better results.

Marketing and Branding

Marketing is the most obvious department where social media is used. It helps build brand awareness, drive traffic to your website, and generate leads. Regularly sharing valuable content can establish your brand as an industry authority. Paid social media advertising can help reach a larger audience and achieve specific marketing objectives.

Sales

Social media can be a powerful tool for the sales department. Salespeople can use social media platforms to find and connect with potential customers, understand their needs, and provide personalized solutions. LinkedIn, for instance, can be a goldmine for B2B sales.

Customer Service

Customers often use social media to ask questions, report problems, or share feedback. By actively listening and promptly responding to these comments or direct messages, you can enhance customer service and boost customer satisfaction.

Product Development

Social media provides a wealth of information about what your customers want and need. By analyzing the conversations, feedback, and discussions related to your products or your industry, you can gain insights that can be useful for product development and innovation.

Human Resources

Social media can be an effective tool for the HR department for employer branding and recruitment. Showcase your company culture, share behind-the-scenes content, celebrate employee milestones, and post job openings to attract potential candidates.

Internal Communication

Platforms like Facebook Workplace or Slack can be used for internal communication, improving collaboration and knowledge sharing among teams. They can also foster a sense of community, helping remote or distributed teams feel more connected.

Training and Development

Social media can also support the training and development of your employees. For instance, LinkedIn Learning offers a plethora of professional courses. Webinars on YouTube, expert talks on TED, or industry-specific discussions on various platforms can all contribute to the continuous learning of your employees.

Implementing Social Media Across Your Company

To successfully use social media across your company, it’s crucial to have a company-wide social media policy. This policy should outline how employees should conduct themselves on social media, how to handle confidential information, and the procedures for responding to customer complaints or negative comments.

Training sessions can ensure everyone understands how to use social media effectively and responsibly. Designating a social media manager or a cross-department social media team can help coordinate efforts, maintain consistency, and monitor performance.

Concluding Thoughts

Integrating social media across your company is the final step towards comprehensive social media success. It’s not just about marketing or branding; it’s about creating an interconnected ecosystem that leverages the power of social media to achieve diverse objectives.

By using social media across different departments – from marketing to sales, customer service, product development, human resources, internal communication, and training & development, you can foster a cohesive, collaborative, and customer-centric organization that thrives in the digital age.

About Nowspeed: As a pioneer in the ever-evolving world of digital marketing, Nowspeed distinguishes itself by delivering cutting-edge marketing strategies that accelerate growth for businesses worldwide. With a comprehensive suite of services, from SEO and social media marketing to pay-per-click campaigns and content creation, Nowspeed offers tailored solutions that align with your unique business objectives. Our dedicated team of marketing experts is committed to using data-driven insights and innovative tactics to help you maximize your online presence, boost customer engagement, and drive sustainable business growth.