Marketing And Must-Know Rules

Have you heard about Hubspot? If you are a professional marketer, you probably know. But for beginners in marketing field, I highly recommend you to visit hubspot.com and its free online courses academy.hubspot.com. It is worthy for marketing students and beginners in this field to learn basic concepts about marketing. Also, at the end of the course, Hubspot will grant you a certificate for completing it. Guess what? You can put it in your resume if you plan to work in any marketing field. Among thousands of candidates, adding a certificate to your resume or profile is a bonus. It is free, convenient and very useful!

I have taken Hubspot Social Media Certification for my Digital Marketing class. It took me more than 5 hours to watch videos, review content and took an online exam.

I liked most the structure of content throughout the course. There are many short videos and quizzes so it makes me feel more focused on the content rather than lengthy videos. The content is very clear and precise. The instructors and guest speakers in the content are credible as they are mostly experts in marketing field. There are also reading resources including study guide, slides, transcripts and other related resources. Thus, I did not only have the chance to take the course but also had my eyes on other sources. That enhance the value of the course overall.

There was no disappointment but a little frustration in the calculating part of break-even point. But I was able to review it and search for more information, so it was not that bad.

I learned a lot about social media marketing, what tasks marketers should focus and avoid while engaging with customers and how to build persona, and sustainable relationship with customers through social media. Although content on social media looks short compared to blog posts or landing pages, there are a lot of work to do. Since there are many channels including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Snapchat, it takes time to upload content and engage with the audience, not to mention how to deal with negative comments or even during crisis. There are also a lot of tools for marketers to consider; it matters if you can choose which on is good for your business and persuade your senior executives to spend budget on it. The cost of these tools is actually much cheaper than paying for influencers in you ad. Again, it depends on your strategy and orientation in the long term.

Personally, the certification program is useful for beginners in marketing field rather than professional marketers as the concepts are very basic. However, I think professionals should still refer it as a reminder or even cornerstone in their career. Sometimes we make decisions based on our feelings rather than solid knowledge and trends in marketing. Therefore, enhancing basic conception is important to keep you stayed mindful and strong to deal with turmoil on the Internet.

On the scale of 1-5, I would probably grade 4 to recommend to my friend. As I mentioned earlier, the course is free, convenient and useful, especially with the certificate to enrich resume. Many short videos will not make it boring; instead they make the audience stay focused. Also, there are useful resources to review and save for future reference. overall, the course is necessary for anyone who needs to learn or reinforce essential rules and concepts in marketing.

It is no doubt that Nike is one of the most valuable apparel brands in the world. Going through just 55 years since foundation, Nike has proved its market leader with high stock value and a total of 1,152 retail stores in 120 countries.

Nike’s success is thanks to many factors and the most important factor is its brand strategy. Throughout development, Nike never loses but consistently develops the key drivers of innovation, efficiency and creativity. Since “Just Do It” trademark was first used in 1988, the slogan has evolved but been simple as always. Today Nike logo is just too popular, especially among young people.

Yet it is undeniable that Nike also faces chaos through its long history of controversial commercials. Being clear about its brand identity and brand equity, Nike has stepped into brand activism to stand for something that is important for the society. No matter how positive or negative it is from online commenters, Nike has still strongly remained persistent for what is right.

Yet it is not easy for any businesss to be bold and willing to go beyond the limit of tradition and majority of likeness to educate people something that is worth attention. Race and gender are among sensitive topics that are difficult to satisfy everyone. But Nike has done it very well. It is an art.

So, why Nike has mastered the art of online brand management?

Proper response to criticism

Being claimed for sweatshop and sexist working environment, Nike reacted by giving speeches to the press of promising to increase minimum wage, examine factories, expand education programs, strive for human rights, etc. Although some critics still doubt about the reality of Nike’s action, we need to acknowledge Nike’s effort in gaining back trust from the public.

Take responsibility

According to Nike news, Nike named top 10 for social responsibility report. The information is released to the public in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme, helping Nike to achieve the commitment of transparency and good value for the environment and society. This is also a proper response to people who have negative information about Nike’s impact on the environment.

Let people talk

Search engines have various content about good and bad Nike, and Nike just lets people talk about them without mass dictation. Some people might say it is hard to control everything on the Internet, so businesses cannot hide all criticisms. It might be true, but if you search something about Nike, it’s all from press and online comments. Nike did not stop the public from addressing their thoughts. It patiently hopes for people’s support and collects negative content to appear better next time. That’s why every time we see something new from Nike, it is almost good or towards good. For example, the most controversial topic people ever talked about Nike was probably 2018 ad involving Colin Kaepernick. At first, people criticized Nike for choosing a wrong spokesperson, and stock price started falling. But later, more people supported Nike for standing for racial justice, and sales increased. Until recent ad “Dream Crazier”, Nike has appeared again with confidence in supporting women.

Aspirational advertising

No matter what, we need to agree that Nike knows how to brand itself far beyond a shoes maker but towards the value of sport in people’s lives. All Nike’s commercials are appealing to people’s emotions, and people remember Nike as a brand standing for never-give-up dreamers, young athletes, woman, and social justice. Whatever topic that Nike raises, it stands out against the mass and bravely speaks out for someone that most brands are afraid to do. Yet it is risky, but it is worthy to fight for something that matters than just making money.

References

Beder, S. (n.d.). Putting the Boot In. Retrieved December 6, 2019, from http://www.herinst.org/sbeder/PR/nike.html#.Xes9EXdFw2w

Dator, J. (2019, February 24). Nike’s incredible new ‘Just Do It’ campaign gives women the spotlight. Retrieved from https://www.sbnation.com/2019/2/24/18238595/nike-new-just-do-it-campaign-women-serena-williams-simone-biles-chloe-kim

How Many Countries Does Nike Operate In? (n.d.). Retrieved December 6, 2019, from https://www.reference.com/business-finance/many-countries-nike-operate-aa95f37796162ae7

Just Do It. (n.d.). Retrieved December 6, 2019, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Do_It

Larson, J., & Draper, S. (2019). Digital Marketing Essentials. (Chapter 11). Idaho Falls, Idaho: Edify Publishing.

Nike’s long history of courting controversy through advertising. (n.d.). Retrieved December 6, 2019, from https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/nike-ads-social-justice-kaepernick-1.4810102

Nike Named Top 10 for Social Responsibility Reporting. (n.d.). Retrieved December 6, 2019, from https://news.nike.com/news/nike-named-top-10-for-social-responsibility-reporting

O’Connell, L. (2019, July 29). Total number of Nike retail stores worldwide from 2009 to 2019. Retrieved from https://www.statista.com/statistics/250287/total-number-of-nike-retail-stores-worldwide/

Ritson, M. (2008, July 25). Social Responsibility: The Nike Story. Retrieved from https://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com/2008/07/social-responsi.html#.XetOSHdFw2w

Selyukh, A. (2018, March 21). Section 230: A Key Legal Shield For Facebook, Google Is About To Change. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2018/03/21/591622450/section-230-a-key-legal-shield-for-facebook-google-is-about-to-change

While email marketing can boost sales effectively, it is challenging to get people open emails, appeal to call-to-action, and make purchase decisions.

Among thousands of emails that users get every day, how to make your emails stand out is a task that requires a lot of effort in understanding your customers. People can ignore, mark as spam, delete, or click on your emails.

Suppose you get a click, having users scroll down and read through your emails in just a few seconds, and click on your products sales is the next task that requires relevant and appealing content.

You can see that email marketing if is done appropriately, there are conversions waiting ahead. Nevertheless, email marketing is not that easy. How many opened emails do you have? How many clicks or sign-ups do you have? How many people who really buy your products?

If you are trying to massively sell, people will stay away from you. Instead, having personas in your email marketing. When users have a personal connection to your products, they are likely to spend their precious time to click on your emails, read and ultimately buy something.

Every single step in your campaign from having mailing list to creating subject lines and content needs the presence of personas of your customers. Here are the tips to build personas in your email marketing.

Have mail list capture

This is a basic tool on your websites. When a customer buys your products, your site must contain customer information before they can check out. If he permits you to send future sales by emails, you must put him in the mail list. If there is no purchase, make sure your customers sign up for your emails.

Email sign-up incentives

People know that when they sign up, they will receive your emails regularly. If it occupies one more spot in their inbox, you need to give them reasons why they should get emails from you. It can be free gifts, e-books or online webinar.

Have personas template

It is to answer who your customer is, what are his demographics, what goals and challenges he has, what he values and how your product can solve his problems. Buffer has framed an easy-to-follow template and demonstrated an example. You can also download free persona template from Hubspot.

Obtain personas information

The more detail personas you have, the better segments you can target. You can group people with similar demographics, behaviors, psychological and geographic segmentation. It is not only the task of marketing department but also the involvement of the entire personnel. Sources are focused on but not limited to your site analytics, interactions with customers in person and on social media, surveys and interviews.

References

Digital Marketing Essentials (Larson & Draper). Chapter 8: Email Marketing

How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business [Free Persona Template]. https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/buyer-persona-research

The Complete, Actionable Guide to Marketing Personas. https://buffer.com/library/marketing-personas-beginners-guide

How much data about your customers do you think you have? Are you aware of trust crisis happening in the past few years with Facebook scandals and other online platforms? It is urgent that customers have begun to distrust online advertising because their data is rapidly spread by unauthorized parties with unexpected purposes. As a marketer, you need to perceive the ethical role of marketing and advertising in this modern time when technology if not being used properly can be harmful to our customers.

There is any evident proof to conclude that current model of online advertising is dangerous for the society. In the scale of 5, I would give a score of 3 as moderately dangerous for following reasons. First, most people are paying attention on their personal privacy for any online activities. If you follow the case of Facebook in the past year, you properly know that Facebook has been encountered privacy issues when data of Facebook users were used for political campaigns through unauthorized third parties. Because of this, people are afraid of giving their information to online advertisers through thousands of online channels.

Second, information can be stored with cookies and algorithms, and online advertisers has been taking advantage of that very well. It sounds like a joke when Jaron addressed in his TedTalk that advertising and social networks are not intrinsic themselves anymore, but behavior modification instead. It is true! Today your go online and buy a watch, then tomorrow the very first thing showing in your search engines or any sites you go to is watch advertisings – exactly the same style and color, plus coupon and promotion codes. What a good deal! Now are you thankful for that, with the deal keeps following you wherever you browse even? Well, this can be very personal as we are different. Nevertheless, if you stand in the shoes of your customers, you need to change or else they will leave you one day as they do not trust you anymore.

It is time to stop trust crisis from online advertising and deal with it. A truly marketer must truly have lifetime relationship with her customers through true value and privacy respect. This will help you stand out against the trust crisis and keep your customers being loyal and intrigued to know more about your products. Business is about making money, yet a sustainable business has its ethic responsibility towards its only source of surviving–customers. Having said that, here are codes of ethics for digital markets to avoid distrust and gain trust from customers.

Have democracy–it’s not politics, its striven duty

There is nothing to do with politics here. Everyone likes to live in liberal condition where their desire is met and free of any dictation. But, desires of a business owner and customers are different. So, make sure you give your customers democracy, not for your business. If someone says business is devil, then it is up to you to counter him that you delivery democracy desire for people.

Be patient in building love

Jaron is right when he said building love is long and ruining love is short. And yet making money easily can ruin love. You want to walk with your customers long and long, then remember to be patient. You can not be patient if you do not have love, so it matters that you want to take your love to give love, or you do want to give love to ruin love. It is your relationship with your customers, do not lose it!

Spend your budget on credibility

Being a profession marketer, you must know credibility is important to refer to your customers. It can be a trustworthy spokesperson or writer. It can be the trustworthy content itself. It can also be long history of having good feedback from customers. Whatever it is, keep building your credibility is a key to keep you mindful about what is right or wrong and genuine in what campaign you are doing.

Genuine motive

Having a genuine motive is important to stick yourself to be customers-centered. You are driven by helping people and delivering true value for people, that is why your business was founded. Whenever you get stuck, do not forget to ask yourself a question of what reason it was that you started your business. Time flies, but it is never too late to be right.

Profit striven but be human beings

This is related to democracy but in an upper level. Psychologically, you want to treat people the same way you want them to treat you. So, if you do not protect your customers from the threat of privacy issues, your customers may sue you. That sounds serious but do not let your business in that situation ever. You are also human beings, so love people as you love yourself.

Control your retargeting/remarketing

With the support of cookies, you are of course able to retarget your customers whenever they go online. But because of above mentioned codes, remember to control your activity by employing frequency caps. It is simple and easy to do, so do not let your customers leave you for obsessively repeating advertising.

Inspire your team to be ethical

Only you being aware of privacy issue is not enough; involve your team! Inspire them the role of ethic marketing. One change is weak, but together your team can create a healthy, safety and sustainable online environment for your customers.

Communicate with your entire company

Has your CEO understood the consequence of trust crisis and the role of ethic marketing? Has your entire company perceived the long-term value of sustainable relationship with its customers? Tell them, inspire them and change them. You can do that because you are a truly ethical marketer!

References

Can Marketers Repair Social Media’s Crisis of Trust? https://medium.com/ama-marketing-news/can-marketers-repair-social-medias-crisis-of-trust-6d7f3fb1f797

Digital Marketing Essentials (Larson & Draper). Chapter 7: Display Advertising

Facebook faces a reputational meltdown. https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/03/22/facebook-faces-a-reputational-meltdown

Millennials Have Greatest Trust In Ads, Yet Are Among Heaviest Users Of Ad Blockers. https://marketingland.com/millennials-have-greatest-trust-in-ads-yet-among-heaviest-users-of-ad-blockers-147911

Jaron Lanier’s TED Talk: How We Need To Remake the Internet

Before getting frustrated about your poor page ranking on Google or any other search engines, you need to make sure your primary consideration in designing and formatting your website is accomplished. In short, you need to have a good website before showing it to the world, or else every SEO effort is useless as searchers will immediately leave your page and try a different link.

When you are confident about your website, it’s time to gain position 0 where your short content and web link are showed in the Answer Box above organic results on Google. In this case, you are trying to answer queries for searchers when they search “what is…”, and ultimately to gain traffic and conversions on your landing page. For general keyword search, it is important to do some tactical steps to make sure your page is on the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) or at least rank on page 1.

1. Accessible URLs

The very first thing is to have accessible URLs to your webpage so that Google can easily access, understanding your content and put it into their web index.

2. Keyword research

To know what searchers are looking for when they type queries, you need to do keyword research. This is extremely important to remove your irrelevant content and replace it by correct answers. Here, a primary keyword together with related secondary keywords are highly needed to target your audience.

3. Maximizing relevance

You want your webpage to rank well, then you must provide an entire relevant setting in which URL, title tag, header tags, main content, image, video, file name, and internal links share the same or related content to a search phrase. Also, consider where to repeat the search phrase in your page to maximize your relevance score.

4. Meta description, snippets and title tag

Meta description the short description of your webpage content that is displayed together with title tag on search engines. A well-written meta description and a compelling title tag can efficiently contribute to the click-through rate. You also need to see how Google snippet displays on search results to have the best combination of headline, URL, description and other additional information. Again, all elements need to be relevant to the search keyword.

5. Mobile optimization

To take advantage of users of mobile devices, your webpage needs to optimize mobile-friendly design. This is important to track conversion on your landing page, and thus, rank your page higher compared to a less mobile-friendly page as users will not waste their time struggling with the inconvenience. Remember, you want to track as many users as possible, therefore, do not neglect the impact of mobile devices.

6. Page speed optimization

Your webpage needs to be fast enough to save searchers’ time and goal in an efficient and convenient way. This is also an impression that people tend to have connection with your page after a fast click and the click, in turns, quickly leads them to a relevant and well-designed webpage.

7. Regular updating

If you do not regularly update your page with up-to-date information, its rank will drop. The digital era enables us to update as much as we can. When you are confident with above tactics, updating your webpage should not be a difficult task.

8. Backlinks

Backlink is a link from other webpages that refer to your page. This unpaid channel is extremely convenient to direct prospective users to your page, thus increase your ranking on search engines.

References:

A Little More Detail On Google Snippets. https://www.predikkta.com/help/definitions/google-snippet.html

Digital Marketing Essentials (Larson & Draper), Chapter 4: On-Site SEO.

Expert Interview: Position 0 and The Answer Box. https://media.oregonstate.edu/media/t/0_7in427is

How to Improve Your Page Rank. https://www.wikihow.com/Improve-Your-Page-Rank

Whiteboard Friday – How to Rank in 2018: The SEO Checklist. https://moz.com/blog/rank-in-2018-seo-checklist

9 Important Tips On How To Increase Website Ranking In 2020. https://thekeyideas.com/website-ranking/

13 Super-Easy Ways to Immediately Improve Your SEO Rankings. https://www.jeffbullas.com/13-super-easy-ways-to-immediately-improve-your-seo-ranking/