I completed two certifications- the content marketing certification and inbound certification. I choose these two cause I think content marketing is interesting for me and inbound marketing is the basic knowledge for digital marketing.
I spent about 10 hrs watching lessons and passing the exams. Inbound marketing is shorter and easier than content marketing because some of the knowledge in the inbound marketing I’ve already learned from my digital marketing class. But content marketing lessons contain much knowledge that I did not know before.
The best thing during I took the lessons is the interesting and emotional speakers, their speaking is effective and attractive, they are not just read the theory without examples, so I would not feel bored and sleepy. However, I think if the video content can be briefer is better because there are too many and too long videos I need to watch, and some of them are not very important.
I do not have any disappointed because I pass these two exams in the first attempt, although the score is not the best, I got the certifications!
I learned a lot from these two certification learning. I think the most useful points for me are – storytelling; 5 types of content creators; how to effectively promote content; seven steps to creating a10x content pillar page;
Storytelling– it generates an emotional connection with customers. Stories are more effective, interesting, persuasive for people, people can remember stories more than anything.
5 types of the content creators
When you create promote content, ask yourself the four questions first.
What content do I have available to promote?
When will I promote this content?
Which persona can benefit from this content?
How and where does this persona consume content?
Seven steps to creating a10x content pillar page
Choose a core topic
Identify a topic cluster
Create blog posts for needed subtopic content
Repurpose subtopic content into a downloadable offer
Deconstruct downloadable offer into a 10x content pillar page
Link relevant owned media to 10x content pillar page
Create a conversion path for people to access your 10x content pillar page on your website.
I think we can learn a lot from these certifications, so I recommend marketers take the lessons and get the certification. On a scale of 1-5, I would say the probability that I recommend it to my friend is 3, because I think the certification is useful but may not suitable for everyone, some of my friends do not interested in this field, and some are professional marketers, they have already learned the basic knowledge of digital marketing, listening to these videos is waste time for them. So I think I only recommend the certification program for suitable people who are not experts but interesting in digital marketing.
Apple, as one of the big four tech companies in the world, today, it is a brand everyone knows. How did they achieve these- good brand reputation, high profits, and more loyal customers? I believe it is closely related to their online brand management capabilities. We can learn a lot from Apple’s online brand management, so I will illustrate and explain why Apple has mastered the art of this management skill below.
First, here are some keywords for Apple- iPhone; Airpods; IOS; Apple pay; Discount. iPhone is the most profitable product for Apple, so Apple should pay attention to this product more than other products. And because Apple released the newest Airpods recently, so it is important for Apple to collect the reviews and feedbacks. IOS system is the differential for Apple, the developing of the IOS system decide the future and development of Apple. And, Apple pay is a controversial payment method and it has not been fully accepted by the public, so Apple needs to care about it. Finally, the discount is the information that potential customers most interested in. I think these keywords that I listed are important to Apple. The sales, reputation, and future of Apple are related to these.
In my mind, I do not think a good company should try to hide negative information online.
Hide =Lie!
I think companies can explain or rebut if the negative information is unreal. And they can apologize and correct if they really did something wrong. Customers are not ruthless, they would like to give a chance for the business that made mistakes before but sincerely apologize and correct in time is necessary.
Put ourselves as customers think, do we want companies to hide the negative information no matter it is real or fake？
This is the age of information transparency, who can promise he can hide the information ever? The negative information will be exposed one day, after that, how the public keep to trust your company? Your business will be over on that day cause no one likes a liar.
Finally, I think Apple can get today’s achievements because its online management team understands how to monitor brand reputation online and how to respond to the negative information about Apple.
According to my research, I find Apple always respond to the negative information in time, and provide a good and persuasive explanation or apologies and make timely adjustments to this. For example, we can find when Apple updates the ios system, it always has some bugs, but Apple never hide it, they just tell customers to pay attention to these bugs and they will fix bugs in the next version. And when people doubt Apple has the users’ privacy problem as Google, Apple issue a statement and provide effective evidence to prove their innocence.
All of these can show why Apple has mastered the art of online brand management and as one of the best tech companies.
References
“Chapter 11: Online Reputation Management (ORM) ” Digital Marketing Essentials, by Jeff Larson and Stuart Draper, Publishing by Edify, 2018.
5 Trends in Online Reputation Management in 2019. (2019, February 8). Retrieved from https://boast.io/5-trends-in-online-reputation-management-in-2019/.
According to Forrester’s prediction, 146 million dollars will be spent on digital marketing by 2021. Although there are a lot of marketing strategies available, email marketing is an indispensable part.
“It seems like the entire world is online. In today’s world, everyone relies on digital channels for communication, education, entertainment, and shopping. The online world has become a crucial part of everyday existence.”
The success of our marketing has a lot to do with the success of email marketing. As a qualified marketer, we need to know how to make an effective email marketing.
Persona
What is a persona?
The premise of making an effective email marketing is that understand what is a persona. Ardath Albee said that
A marketing persona is a composite sketch of a key segment of your audience. For content marketing purposes, you need personas to help you deliver content that will be most relevant and useful to your audience.
Why persona is important?
We only can guess what is appealing content for our customers’ if without personas. It is possible we follow the wrong direction, for example, you only transit the information which we think attractive but our customers do not interested in it.
How to Create Buyer Personas in 5 Simple Steps
Step1 Do customer Survey
Learning details about your audience.
Step2 Dig into our website and social analytics
Finding potential customers information from websites, social media or publications. It is not enough if only collect the information, we also need to make the connection between all of the information about one person.
Step 3: The Customer Avatar Exercise
Now we are ready to create a concrete character that everyone in our company can use it to better understand the potential customers.
Marketing Persona Template
-Name of the persona
-Job title （Key information about their company (size, type, etc.）Details about their role） -Demographics
-Age (Age, Gender, Salary/household income, Location: urban /suburban/rural, Education, Family) -Goals and challenges (Primary goal, Secondary goal, How you help achieve these goals, Primary challenge, Secondary challenge, How you help solve these problems) -Values/fears (Primary values, Common objections during the sales process) -Marketing message
-Elevator pitch
Beyond the above information, we also need to collect other detailed data, such as hobbies, real quotes from interviews with customers, computer literacy, where they get their news, blogs they read.
Here is a specific example.
Email offers an unbeatable ROI.
Email connects with more consumers than social media.
Email ties all your marketing techniques together.
CAMPAIGN MONITOR – JUN 25, 2019
REFERENCES:
Stukent. (2019). The New Way of Email Marketing – Stukent. [online] Available at: https://www.stukent.com/expert-sessions/the-new-way-of-email-marketing/ [Accessed 26 Nov. 2019]. OSU MediaSpace. (2019). MRKT 484
Lee, Kevan. “The Beginner’s Guide to Creating Marketing Personas: Buffer.” Buffer Marketing Library, Buffer Social Blog, 30 Nov. 2018, https://buffer.com/library/marketing-personas-beginners-guide.
How to Create a Concrete Buyer Persona (with Templates & Examples). (2019). Retrieved 30 November 2019, from https://optinmonster.com/how-to-create-a-concrete-buyer-persona-with-templates-examples/
Understanding the Importance of Email in Digital Marketing. (2019). Retrieved 30 November 2019, from https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2019/06/why-email-should-be-cornerstone-for-digital-marketing-strategy/
About the Author <!– Bio may contain link markup, a. (2019). How to Build a Buyer Persona (Includes Free Template). Retrieved 30 November 2019, from https://blog.hootsuite.com/buyer-persona/
With the development of the Internet, more and more online advertising in our daily life, what does this bring to us? Do you believe the current model of online advertising is dangerous for society?
Actually, there are many potential hazards that the current model of online advertising presents for society. For example, privacy leaks, gender stereotypes, consumerism, money first and error demonstration for minors (cigarette, alcohol, or sex ).
Today, I will talk about the most serious problem of online advertising – privacy threats. If the level of danger on a scale of 1-5 where 5 is highly dangerous and 1 is not dangerous, I would say the level of danger is 4. I think the potential hazards have already serious. Companies and customers, both are should change right now.
As we all know, the data privacy issues of Facebook last year. After that, Mark Zuckerberg said this problem had affected up to 6.8 million users. and developers of Facebook can get all uploaded pictures of users which are not posted. In fact, before it happened, many people did not realize the importance of their privacy when they are using an APP or the Internet or they never think about this problem. After that, people begin to feel nervous and dangerous. When we pay attention to the privacy problem, we find it happens always. According to my research, we can see a lot of data breaches of famous and big companies. For instance, 2013-14, Yahoo divulged 3 billion user accounts information, 2014-18, 500 million customers’ data in Marriott International was stolen, 2014, a cyberattack for eBay compromised 145 million users, 2016, Uber exposed the personal information of 57 million Uber users and 600,000 drivers and so many other examples…
As articles “Academic who collected 50 million Facebook profiles: ‘We thought we were doing something normal” and “The shady data-gathering tactics used by Cambridge Analytica were an open secret to online marketers. I know, because I was one” show, collecting users’ private data as a common thing in the data field, it seems like an open secret now. However, is it right? The answer absolutely is No!
And now, I will mention some tips to help protect your private information. First of all, you have to pay attention to your privacy. Some people think they are just ordinary people, no one care about their information and it does not matter if someone gets their data. However, it is every ordinary person who constitutes the whole society. Millions of ordinary people will have enormous purchasing power or influence. After that, we can talk about useful and convenient ways to protect privacy. Covering up the microphone and cameras on our cellphone and laptop is effective way. Some software get permission to access cameras or microphone, they can hear and see what are you looking for, your preferences and your plan from your devices. I think do not allow access to your location while you using is also a good method. Finally, I know it is hard for most people, but it is a very useful way – reducing to use of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and INS. Finally, once someone or companies breach your privacy or give away your data, taking up the legal “weapons” to defend their rights, do not be afraid, we have privacy rights, no one can use it without permission.
As a digital marketer, what can we do and what can we not do? We always stand in a grey area but acting ethically is our responsibility. We should observe some codes of ethics.
Here are some ethical codes I think it is important.
1. Never invade privacy
As I mentioned before, privacy threats are serious now, so first of all, digital marketers should never invade people’s privacy.
2. Do not lie
Also, we need to keep real, say the truth and do not lie to our customers. Reputation determines if a company’s success or not.
3. Put away biases
When we spread out information, we need to put away our personal biases and emotion, We should pass a fair and equitable message.
4. Be transparent
A secret cannot attract customers. We should provide reasons to support our idea or content.
5. Consider the impact
As professional digital marketers, we need to always keep in mind that all of our opinions and speech will cause an impact on people or society. We should try our best to avoid negative impacts.
6. Eliminate plagiarism
I think it is an important part for us, We should not copy others‘ ideas or words without consent. We should not look at what others say, and we say the same thing. We need to create everything from ourselves.
7. Hear advice
Don’t immerse yourself in your own world, other people’s ideas can help you do better.
8. Respect
Anytime, we need to keep respect, whether it is for our target customers or others.
9. Do what the laws prescribe
The law is above everything else. You will lose everything if you break the law.
All in all, a professional digital marketer should keep ethical codes in our minds anything and anywhere. I hope you can get insights after reading this blog.
References:
Akbar, T. A. T., & Israyelle. (n.d.). 7 Fundamental Ethics of Social Media Marketing. Retrieved from https://www.business2community.com/social-media/7-fundamental-ethics-social-media-marketing-01571504.
Armerding, T. (2018, December 20). The 18 biggest data breaches of the 21st century. Retrieved from https://www.csoonline.com/article/2130877/the-biggest-data-breaches-of-the-21st-century.html.
Boote, T. (2017, January 17). What Have Ethics Got to do with Digital Marketing? Retrieved from http://digitalmarketingmagazine.co.uk/digital-marketing-features/what-have-ethics-got-to-do-with-digital-marketing/4031.
Ho, V. (2018, December 15). Facebook’s privacy problems: a roundup. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/dec/14/facebook-privacy-problems-roundup.
Samuel, A. (2018, March 25). The shady data-gathering tactics used by Cambridge Analytica were an open secret to online marketers. I know, because I was one. Retrieved from https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/25/17161726/facebook-cambridge-analytica-data-online-marketers.
Today, I will talk about what should we do if our webpage does not rank. As a marketer, we should know the importance of SEO for marketing. Most of the website traffic is from searching. And SEO can help the website build trust and credibility. So the rank of our webpage is really important for our business. I will list 4 tips to increase the webpage rank below.
#1. Understand the Ranking Algorithm
Before we try to increase our webpage rank, the first thing is that we should know the ranking algorithm, and then we can target the algorithm to make changes. The most famous ranking algorithm is the Google algorithm, I would not go into the details of the algorithm here, it cannot be explained clearly in few sentences, we can find it from websites easily. Here is a link that may help you. https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/algorithms/
However, we should pay attention to the changing of the Google algorithm, it often changes.
#2. Optimize for Your Keyword
We need to set up keywords for our website to help people can find our webpage. We need a core keyword and a set of keywords that are related to searcher’s goals. When we got the keywords for our website, if our webpage ranking always low, we need to use some websites to help us to optimize our keywords. Here is a link that can help us explore keywords: https://moz.com/explorer
#3. Creating High-quality Webpages
1. short load times
Searchers do not have patience, if your website loading time is too long, they will switch to competitors’ websites. If our webpage does not rank we can find whether our loading time is too long, and here is a tool to test the loading speed of the website.
I’d like to mention three points about content – fresh content, quantity content, and quality content.
Fresh content means we should put the newest on our website and update the webpage regularly. In this way, the search engines can recognize we are an active and reputable company.
Quantity content -the number of pages and words also important for our webpage. We should know that it is better to include at least 100 words of content on our webpage.
Quality content -We should know that search engines cannot measure quality directly. So there are no clear requirements for a high-quality webpage. However, if we find our webpages do not rank, we should realize that we have to increase the quality of content.
#4. Have the most Authoritative Person to Create Content
In this section, I would say we should invite famous or credible people to create content to meet searchers’ demands.
Whether it is searchers, visitors or Google, they all will think our webpage is credible because of our content from a famous and authoritative person. So if our ranking always bad, we can try to find an authoritative person to create content for our webpage.
References：
Gabbert, E. (2019). How to Rank for a Keyword in 10 Steps. [online] Wordstream.com. Available at: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2012/11/14/how-to-rank-for-a-keyword [Accessed 26 Oct. 2019].
Michigan Technological University. (2019). Five Ways to Improve your Site’s Ranking (SEO). [online] Available at: https://www.mtu.edu/umc/services/digital/seo/ [Accessed 26 Oct. 2019].
Coyle, J. (2019). Why Your Website Doesn’t Rank Well. [online] Marketingaiinstitute.com. Available at: https://www.marketingaiinstitute.com/blog/why-your-website-doesnt-rank-well [Accessed 26 Oct. 2019].
BuildFire. (2019). 15 Reasons Google Doesn’t Rank Your Site (And How To Fix It). [online] Available at: https://buildfire.com/reasons-google-doesnt-rank-site-and-fix-it/ [Accessed 26 Oct. 2019].
BuildFire. (2019). 15 Reasons Google Doesn’t Rank Your Site (And How To Fix It). [online] Available at: https://buildfire.com/reasons-google-doesnt-rank-site-and-fix-it/ [Accessed 26 Oct. 2019].
We face countless landing pages in daily life, some pages make us feel attractive and comfortable but others make us want to turn off as soon as possible, why?
I did not think the reason deeply but now I understand the factor that good landing pages need to have from marketing management class. In this blog, I will introduce the 5 ways to increase landing page conversions. I hope it can help you to create an excellent landing page.
1. Attention-driven design
-Visual hierarchy
Visual hierarchy means using a way to show the important content or element intentionally. I want to mention two principles in this section-size and contrast. If we want customers to notice the information or content that we want to show, we should make it bigger and colorful on our landing page, so it can attract customers. For example, as the below showing:
When we design a landing page, we should keep an idea that less is more. Because more content means more distraction for customers. For example, sometimes we just need to show a button for people to let them click without any thinking and choosing.
2. Content match
The content displayed in the ad link should be obvious on the landing page. In addition to product content matching, you should show the pre-click promise, such as the discount rate, the free delivery or special events. If you show totally different content on your landing page, people will doubt they click false one. Also, people click the ad link because they see something they are interested in, if they do not see related information or that product after clicking the link, they will feel disappointed and uncomfortable.
3. Clarity
We should present everything clearly. When we build a landing page, first we have to assume that people do not know anything about us, and then we should think about what we want to offer, why customers want to pick us and what do we want people to do next. We should provide our information definite and explicit. Even if only a few people think our landing page does not clearly, we should think about rebuilding the page.
4. Testing
How can we know is our landing page clear? We should test it. First, we need to identify important elements to test and find proper testing tools. Next, according to the testing content, we should choose A/B or multivariate testing. Finally, after the testing, we should follow-up on the results and update the landing page. Here is an example of what content we need to test.
If we have evidence to show our credibility, like customers’ positive reviews or our award, we can list it. If we do not have, please do not lie. We can be sincere and keep real when we promote our products. Customers can accept “novices” but can’t tolerate lies.
And then there are two things that will “kill” our credibility. Wrong words and grammar, and unrealistic headlines. We must avoid these mistakes. It is fatal to a landing page.
Generally speaking, a lot of principles that can help us to make an excellent landing page, in this blog, I just mentioned 5 ways to increase landing page conversions, attention-driven design, content match, clarity, testing, and credibility.
References:
Patel, N. (2019). 4 Landing Page Credibility Killers You Should Eliminate Right Now. [online] Neil Patel. Available at: https://neilpatel.com/blog/4-landing-page-credibility-killers-you-should-eliminate-right-now/.
Saleh, K. (2019). How To Test Your Landing Pages [Infographic]. [online] The Invesp Blog: Conversion Rate Optimization Blog. Available at: https://www.invespcro.com/blog/test-landing-pages/ [Accessed 11 Oct. 2019].
Lile, S. (2019). 12 Visual Hierarchy Principles Every Non-Designer Needs to Know. [online] Visual Learning Center by Visme. Available at: https://visme.co/blog/visual-hierarchy/ [Accessed 11 Oct. 2019].
Gardner, O. (2019). The 7 Principles of Conversion Centered Design – Stukent. [online] Stukent. Available at: https://www.stukent.com/expert-sessions/the-7-principles-of-conversion-centered-design/ [Accessed 11 Oct. 2019].
