Content Marketing Fundamentals

Summary of Digital Marketing Essentials

• This document is a summary of digital marketing essentials, created by Louise Heerinckx. It's designed for students learning about digital marketing.
• Found on the Stuvia website, a platform for sharing study materials (e.g. summaries, notes, etc.) for exams and courses.

The "Digital First" Consumer

• Digital consumers prioritize the opinions of others, seeking reviews and following influencers to gauge preferences.
• They value convenience, desiring easy access to information and personalized experiences.
• Recommendations based on browsing history are common.

Digital Strategy: Building Blocks

• As Is: Current state analysis.
• Core Commitments: Key principles of the business. (e.g. mission, vision, values)
• Digital Maturity: Evaluation of current digital channels.
• Target Group Insights: Understanding target segments (e.g. demographics, behavior, interests)
• Competition: Understanding rivals in the market.
• Positioning: Defining the brand's place in the market relative to competitors.
• Objectives: Defining goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Chapter 1: Your Business

• Vision: A clear 'Why' statement defining the purpose of the business.
• Digital Maturity Check: Evaluating present digital channels to identify strengths, areas of improvement, and performance score using a digital maturity scale.

Target Group Insights

• Personalize your approach to resonate with variations in customer interests, behaviors, and preferences.
• Maximize relevance by keeping up with trends to ensure that your marketing content stays relevant for individual audiences.
• Optimize resources by focusing on the most important aspects and trends for each target group.
• Increase engagement by highlighting current customer interests.

Segmentation Criteria

• Objective: Factors like demographics (e.g., age, income, education)
• Inferred (Psychographic): Factors like personality, lifestyle, and buyer readiness to potentially purchase.
• Behavioral: Factors like loyalty status, user status, usage rate.
• Methods for consumer insights include desk research, interviews, and social listening.

Search Listening

• Define micro-moments = key moments when consumers search online.
• Analyze consumer journeys during research and use insights about behavioral patterns, trends, and customer segmentation to create detailed consumer personas.
• Assess the competition by identifying top competitors.
• Formulate a positioning statement with a clear, unique, and desirable brand position.

3C's → Consumer, Company, Competition

• This chapter focuses on business values, emotional & functional benefits and product attributes in a defined 'problem fixer' strategy, or a lifestyle positioning strategy.
• The chapter highlights the components of a positioning statement and what it means.

Chapter 2: Inbound Marketing, Objectives and KPIs

• Inbound marketing is an online strategy to attract customers via relevant and helpful content addressing problems and adding value throughout the buyer's journey.
• An outline of how to establish effective campaigns with objectives and key performance indicators (KPIs)

3 Ingredients for Successful Inbound Marketing

• Content strategy to meet customer needs & engage throughout the buying cycle.
• Context to adapt content throughout the customer journey.
• Objectives = to attract customers and drive sales/conversions.

Chapter 3: SEM, SEO, SEA

• SEM = Search Engine Marketing that promotes company/brand awareness and website traffic in the search engine results pages.
• SEO = Search Engine Optimization to increase organic ranking in the SERP and therefore visibility and traffic.
• SEA = Search Engine Advertising that provides paid search ads on the SERP.

Search Listening

• Identify micro-moments (key moments of searches) and how this information is essential for a user experience on a website.
• This analysis of searches helps produce high-quality content for audiences, and create new content ideas with different approaches.

Keyword Research

• Create a plan for keyword research = identifying the ideal keywords for your company's success and success metrics (e.g., conversion rate).
• Topics, needs of the target customers, what the competition suggests.

How to improve SERP results

• On-page content focuses on the actual content on the website e.g., text, images, titles, etc.
• Off-page factors focus on credibility and authority of a website/brand/company e.g., backlinks, external content, etc.

Chapter 4: Content Marketing

• Create valuable, compelling, and relevant content for a target audience.
• This content helps maintain or build relationships by addressing customer needs/interest, creating trust, and engaging the audience.
• Important aspects include thought leadership, maintaining relationships with existing customers, attracting new customers, creating smart and engaging content, and defining who creates this content.

Chapter 5: Social Media Landscape

• Describes various social media platforms and their strengths and weaknesses for different target audiences e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, TikTok, etc.

Organic & Paid Content

• Organic content focuses on engagement and attracting customers through valuable and relevant content, rather than directly paid advertising.
• Paid content = paid social media ads, display ads, or other advertising that can be used to attract customers to a product/service/page.

Chapter 6: Social Media Landscape

• Different social media platforms are discussed and how they differ in their user demographics, trends, and user experiences.

Chapter 7: Facebook

• Facebook is analysed as a social media platform and its focus on different audience engagement, and advertising strategies.

Chapter 8: Instagram

• Two types of accounts: creator (influencers, content producers) and business (businesses, brands, retailers).
• How to run advertising campaigns on Insta.

Chapter 9: YouTube

• Organic reach on YT = main objective to provide content viewers want to watch, and give the best experience.
• Content, performance, and external factors are discussed to increase views and content effectiveness.

Chapter 10: Online Advertising

• Different types of online advertising e.g., display advertising, programmatic advertising, mobile, native ads, and affiliate marketing.
• Different advertising targeting strategies e.g., demographic, contextual, and behavioral targeting.

Chapter 11: DCO (Dynamic Creative Optimization)

• The creation of variations for ads, each with different elements, is optimized in real-time to give the best performing result for advertising.
• Includes how the system works, why/when its used, and how to use the system to target audience behavior & performance, and generate conversions.

Tracking Performance

• UTM codes help track traffic performance, specifically for campaign effectiveness, and the elements which drive traffic, e.g. which links are clicked.
• In-depth analysis of different steps in a conversion funnel, showing how to measure success.

Mobile Based Advertising

• Mobile based advertising is a form of interactive mobile advertising integrated with location-based services.
• Types of ads include banners, video banners, expandable leaderboards, pop-ups, fold-over ads, and take-over ads.