Table of Contents

Introduction 1


About This Book 1


Foolish Assumptions 2


Icons Used in This Book 2


Beyond the Book 3


Where to Go from Here 4


Part 1: Getting Started with Digital Marketing 5


Chapter 1: Understanding the Customer Journey 7


Creating a Customer Avatar 8


What to include in your customer avatar 9


Introducing Agency Eric: A customer avatar example 10


Getting clear on goals and values 11


Finding sources of information and entertainment 12


Honing in on demographics 12


Adding challenges and pain points 13


Preparing for objections 14


Getting Clear on the Value You Provide 14


Knowing the Stages of the Customer Journey 16


Step 1: Generating awareness 16


Step 2: Driving engagement 17


Step 3: Building subscribers 18


Step 4: Increasing conversions 19


Step 5: Building excitement 20


Step 6: Making the core offer sale and more 21


Step 7: Developing brand advocates 22


Step 8: Growing brand promoters 22


Preparing Your Customer Journey Road Map 23


Chapter 2: Choosing the Right Marketing Campaign 25


Establishing Marketing Objectives 26


Defining a Digital Marketing Campaign 27


Understanding the Three Major Types of Campaigns 30


Campaigns that generate new leads and customers 30


Campaigns that monetize existing leads and customers 32


Campaigns that build engagement 33


Balancing Your Marketing Campaign Calendar 35


Choosing the Campaign You Need Now 35


Viewing Your Digital Marketing through the Campaign Lens 36


Chapter 3: Crafting Winning Offers 37


Offering Value in Advance 38


Designing an Ungated Offer 39


Designing a Gated Offer 40


Zeroing in on what matters 41


Making a specific promise 42


Giving a specific example 42


Offering a specific shortcut 43


Answering a specific question 43


Delivering a specific discount 43


Generating leads with educational content 43


Generating leads with tools 46


Filling out the gated offer checklist 47


Designing Deep-Discount Offers 50


Using physical premiums 50


Employing a book 51


Leveraging the webinar 51


Selling software 52


Splintering a service 52


Brainstorming “little victories” to offer your leads 53


Filling out the deep-discount offer checklist 53


Discovering your deep-discount offer 55


Maximizing Profit 55


Making an upsell or cross-sell offer 56


Building bundles and kits 57


Tacking on a slack adjuster 57


Recurring billing 58


Part 2: Using Content to Generate Fans, Followers, and Customers 59


Chapter 4: Pursuing Content Marketing Perfection 61


Knowing the Dynamics of Content Marketing 62


Finding Your Path to Perfect Content Marketing 63


Understanding the marketing funnel 64


Exploring the prospect’s intent 72


Providing a path to the next step 73


Segmenting your marketing with content 74


Appearing everywhere your customer expects 75


Customizing your content 76


Executing Perfect Content Marketing 76


Step 1: Choosing avatars 77


Step 2: Brainstorming content assets 77


Step 3: Choosing the vehicle and channel 78


Step 4: Planning for ascension 78


Distributing Content to Attract an Audience 78


Marketing through email 79


Capturing leads through search marketing 79


Using social media to drive traffic to your site 79


Paying for traffic 80


Chapter 5: Blogging for Business 83


Establishing a Blog Publishing Process 84


Brainstorming blog post ideas 84


Establishing content segments 87


Working with content creators 88


Editing the first draft 92


Copyediting the post 92


Applying Blog Headline Formulas 93


Tapping into self-interest 93


Piquing curiosity 93


Employing urgency and scarcity 94


Issuing a warning 94


Borrowing authority 95


Revealing the new 95


Auditing a Blog Post 95


Presents an exceptional headline 96


Includes a strong introduction 97


Offers easy-to-consume content 97


Satisfies your goal 99


Includes quality media 99


Provides a compelling close 100


Uses search engine optimization 100


Categorizes your topics 101


Completely delivers on the promise 101


Keeps professional consistency 102


Chapter 6: Taking Stock of 57 Blog Post Ideas 103


Defeating Writer’s Block 103


Writing useful content 104


Being generous 108


Entertaining the masses 111


Capitalizing on the timely 113


Showing your humanity 113


Getting promotional 115


Stirring the pot 117


Engaging the audience 118


Multiplying your blog ideas 119


Creating Stellar Content without All the Fuss 120


Curating and aggregating content 120


Reacting to popular content 122


Crowdsourcing content 124


Part 3: Generating Website Traffic 127


Chapter 7: Building High-Converting Landing Pages 129


Exploring the Types of Landing Pages 130


Creating a Lead Capture Page 132


Creating a Sales Page 132


Writing a sales letter 135


Understanding the elements of a product detail page 141


Grading a Landing Page 144


Chapter 8: Capturing Traffic with Search Marketing 147


Knowing the Three Key Players in Search Marketing 148


Understanding searchers’ needs 148


Knowing what search engines want 148


Targeting Search Queries 150


Defining a search query 151


Choosing the right queries to target 153


Satisfying searchers 155


Optimizing Your Assets for Specific Channels 157


Optimizing for Google 157


Optimizing for YouTube 160


Optimizing for Pinterest 162


Optimizing for Amazon 164


Optimizing for iTunes 165


Optimizing for review sites 166


Optimizing for search engine robots 167


Earning Links 168


Step 1: Cross-link your own content 168


Step 2: Study your competitors’ links 169


Step 3: Create generous content 169


Step 4: Create content worthy of a link 169


Step 5: Publish primary research 169


Step 6: Keep up with the news 170


Chapter 9: Leveraging the Social Web 171


The Social Success Cycle 172


Listening to the Social Web 174


Choosing a social listening tool 175


Planning to listen 176


Listening without paid tools 177


Utilizing the feedback loop 178


Handling customer service issues 180


Influencing and Building Brand Authority 182


Growing your social following 183


Bouncing followers 183


Keeping your content interesting 184


Socializing blog content 184


Networking That Moves the Needle 188


Tapping into niche media 189


Reaching niche media 189


Networking by topic 190


Creating a social media “short list” 190


Flipping the script on media outreach 191


Staying compliant with the law 192


Selling on Social Channels 192


Leading with value 192


Designing “value first” offers 192


Avoiding Social Media Mistakes 193


Knowing When to Automate 194


Chapter 10: Tapping into Paid Traffic 195


Visiting the Traffic Store 196


Understanding Traffic Temperature 196


Choosing the Right Traffic Platform 198


Introducing the Big Six traffic platforms 198


Setting up Boomerang Traffic 213


Defining ad retargeting 213


Setting cookies and pixels 214


Segmenting with content 214


Troubleshooting Paid Traffic Campaigns 215


Strengthening your offer 216


Tweaking your targeting 216


Scrutinizing your ad copy and creative 217


Checking the congruency of your campaign 218


Chapter 11: Following Up with Email Marketing 219


Understanding Marketing Emails 220


Promotional emails 220


Relational emails 221


Transactional emails 221


Sending Broadcast and Triggered Emails 222


Broadcast emails 222


Triggered emails 223


Building a Promotional Calendar 224


Cataloging your products and services 224


Creating an annual promotional plan 225


Developing a marketing plan 226


Creating a 30-day calendar 228


Creating a 90-day rolling calendar 229


Creating Email Campaigns 229


Indoctrination campaigns 230


Engagement campaigns 231


Ascension campaigns 232


Segmentation campaigns 232


Reengagement campaigns 233


Writing and Designing Effective Emails 234


Harvesting proven email copy 234


Answering four questions 235


Knowing why people buy 235


Writing effective email subject lines 236


Writing body copy 237


Cuing the Click 238


Getting More Clicks and Opens 238


Ensuring Email Deliverability 241


Monitoring your reputation 242


Proving subscriber engagement 242


Part 4: Measuring, Analyzing, and Optimizing Campaigns 245


Chapter 12: Crunching Numbers: Running a Data-Driven Business 247


Leveraging the Five Google Analytics Report Suites 248


Understanding Where Your Traffic Is Coming From 249


Tracking the Origins of Site Visitors 250


Campaign source (utm_source) 251


Campaign medium (utm_medium) 251


Campaign content (utm_content) 252


Campaign name (utm_campaign) 252


Dissecting a UTM 252


Creating UTM parameters for your URLs 253


Creating Goals to See Who’s Taking Action 253


Segmenting Your Audience with Google Analytics 256


Creating audience segments 256


Honing In on Your Audience 259


Drilling into demographics 260


Drilling into psychographics 262


Putting It All Together 266


Chapter 13: Optimizing Your Campaigns for Maximum ROI 267


Understanding Split Testing 268


Obtaining the tools you need to run split tests 268


Following the split test guidelines 270


Selecting Page Elements to Optimize 272


Considering qualitative data 273


Using qualitative tools 274


Getting Ready to Test 274


Developing an optimization hypothesis 275


Choosing the metrics to track 275


Calculating your test timeline 276


Preparing to Launch 276


Defining goals in Google Analytics 276


Checking that your page renders correctly in all browsers 277


Ensuring that you have no testing conflicts 277


Checking links 277


Keeping variation load times similar or identical 277


Calling a Test 278


Knowing How a Test Performed 278


Analyzing the Test 279


Part 5: The Part of Tens 281


Chapter 14: The Ten Most Common Digital Marketing Mistakes 283


Focusing on Eyeballs Instead of Offers 284


Failing to Talk about Your Customers (and Their Problems) 284


Asking Prospects for Too Much, Too Soon 285


Being Unwilling to Pay for Traffic 285


Being Product Centric 286


Tracking the Wrong Metrics 286


Building Assets on Other People’s Land 287


Focusing on Your Content’s Quantity Instead of Quality 287


Not Aligning Marketing Goals with Sales Goals 288


Allowing “Shiny Objects” to Distract You 288


Chapter 15: Ten Trending Digital Marketing Skills to Add to Your Resume 289


Content Marketing 290


Brand journalist 290


Managing editor 291


Content marketing manager 291


Media Buying and Traffic Acquisition 291


Search Marketing 292


Social Media Marketing 293


Community Management 294


Video Marketing and Production 295


Video production specialist 295


Video marketing manager 296


Web Design and Development 296


Front-end developer 296


Back-end developer 297


Email Marketing 297


Direct-response copywriter 298


Email marketing analyst 298


Data Analysis 298


Data analyst 299


Data engineer 299


Data scientist 299


Testing and Optimization 300


Chapter 16: Ten Essential Tools for Digital Marketing Success 301


Building a Website 301


WordPress.org 302


Shopify 302


Hosting a Website 303


WP Engine 303


Rackspace 304


Choosing Email Marketing Software 304


Maropost 304


AWeber 305


Klaviyo 305


Considering Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software 305


Infusionsoft 306


Salesforce 306


Adding a Payment Solution 306


Stripe 307


Square 307


Using Landing Page Software 307


Instapage 308


Unbounce 308


Sourcing and Editing Images 308


Canva 309


SnagIt 309


Pixlr Express 309


Managing Social Media 309


Hootsuite Pro 310


Edgar 310


Mention 310


Measuring Your Performance: Data and Analytics 310


Google Analytics 311


Google Data Studio 311


Google Tag Manager 311


Optimizing Your Marketing 311


Visual Website Optimizer 312


TruConversion 312


Index 313

About the Author

Ryan Deiss is Founder/CEO of DigitalMarketer.com. His pioneering digital marketing strategies have been directly responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in online sales. Russ Henneberry is Director of Editorial at DigitalMarketer.com. His team generates thousands of leads and sales per month by executing "full funnel" content strategies.