Digital Marketing Strategies - Going Beyond the Basics

1. Welcome to the course!: Hi, everyone. I am your host, Alexandra Coat and I will be your instructor for this digital marketing strategy course. I want to welcome you to this beautiful journey of learning how to create a fishing marketing strategies, generate profitable ideas and plan your marketing actions. This course is intended for anyone who is just getting started with digital marketing as well. As for those of you who have already worked in digital marketing with Haven't you have been in charge of building a digital marketing strategy and creating a marketing plan throughout the scores. To learn house to speed up the strategic thinking process, create new goals, set priorities and, most importantly, build a digital marketing plan with everything. This includes, from establishing a bite of persona to doing market research, keeping track of what your competitors are doing and creating efficient strategies for the platforms that will work for you and so much more. Having a solid marketing strategy and plan is vital for any business to succeed in an ever changing market, but sadly, not many understand its importance, and fewer marketing professionals will take the time to explain how this process is done. So I'm taking this course as a crucial opportunity to help you understand the importance of having a digital marketing strategy and how it's getting. Guide your marketing efforts while helping you save money. Learn how to use the best tools for researching the market and building a solid marketing strategy. Become an expert at research in your competitors, understand the needs of your clients and adapt to them. Distribute your budget according to your priorities on the channels that work for you and finally help you write your own first digital marketing plan, which you'll be able to later develop and used for your own business. All this in just a couple of hours and complete with real life examples of businesses who are using different platforms to turn their strategies into successful realities. I'll also take you to my process of building a digital marketing plan from start to finish , and I'll help you master all the tools you lied to get started with. Market and Ambassador Research. I've also prepared a couple of downloadable resource is such as a digital marketing plan outline and a lot of exercises and assignments you can complete to improve your strategic planning abilities. If you want to build a strong digital marketing strategy right now, I encourage you to move on to the next lecture, and then a couple of hours, you'll be able to put together your very first packing plan. Or just take your time and study little by little every day. As with this course, you'll get lifetime access and become eligible for a certificate. Once you complete the course to prove your knowledge of building a digital marketing strategy and plan, see you in the next video. 2. What is a marketing strategy?: welcome to our first lecture on understanding what the marketing strategy is. Marketing strategy is a plan that you follow to reach your business rules through marketing . A marketing strategy is in many ways similar to a business process you've got. Your inputs would goes into the plan the process, how you're going to transform your ideas and have them become reality and your outputs. The file results. So the general goals of using the digital marketing include bringing you potential customers to your website and bringing existing ones over and over again, raising brand awareness so your brand will become the first choice whenever somebody is looking for a solution and convincing your elites to get your product because it's a valuable one and can help them solve their problems or fulfill their needs and desires. Remember, you're not just selling to fulfill and need. People want things to examples of objectives you may want to. Targets through your digital marketing strategy. Include create excitement for a new product before its launch. Increased sales increase the number of lead you get. Lower your shopping cart, abandonment rate and others Taylor to your own aides In marketing, we generally refer to objectives as beings. Mart s stands for specific with clear goals in mind, such as we want to increase the traffic to our block so that we can create brand awareness . M stands for measurable again, going further into the specifics by answering questions such as how much or how many, like increased the traffic to our blawg by three times or by 1000 visitors each month that a refers to achievable. Make sure your goals are realistic and you have the right resource is to reach them within a set. Timeline, for instance, increased the traffic to your bog by three times by hiring a content writer to publish three articles per week and promote them via social media. You can adhere as many details as you'd like. In this case is going for something like five times or 10 times more would be too much to achieve in such a short time span, then our refers to relevancy. Any gold you set should match with your general business goals. You're not going to have a wall, such as becoming a global leader in an industry if you only sell something locally. A good example would be something like increasing traffic to our belong to bring brand awareness to our service and convert leads into customers and finally, timely or time bound. Now this just refers to the needs for you to set one, then line or time free. This ensures you will stick to working towards your goal and reaching it without postponing it indefinitely. One good example would be increasing your block traffic at all of the other details by the first of July this year. If you're starting a new goal at the beginning of the year, maybe I have prepared for you in the Resources Section, a Pdf file you can download to help you set your smart goals by answering straight to the point question. Here's another example for inspiration. My January 1st 2024 We will increase sales by 15% by raising our marketing efforts on social media networks such as Facebook or INSTAGRAM. Notice here how you've got the measurable, achievable and relevant aspect in one single statement that is increased sales. In the next lecture, we're going to have a look at how you can use these smart apples in a structured way by learning how to prioritize your goals 3. Prioritizing goals: Once you've set a couple of such smart goals, it's time to prioritize them. You're not going to get straight to creating strategy plans for each of your goals. Simultaneously, you need a strict order. The right resource is for each one and an appropriate budget. Knowledge enough professionals to take care of the entire goal reaching process, where that's increasing your profit, the worrying costs, getting more leads, advancing into a new market or anything else. I know prioritizing sounds like a lot to think of and might seem like a time waster. But really, it's the most important part of creating a marketing strategy in the first place. Without priorities, you've chaotically go over your plan and gets to know. Think of prioritizing as simply managing your tasks. It's essentially a way of handling all of your tasks from the moment you create them until they are completed. And you can say that you're happy with how the end results look like. Of course, that has provided your reached your goals rounding. So if you're like me and feel like everything is a priority, I've prepared a couple of actionable methods you can use to prioritize your rules. and even activities with minimum effort. But first, let's distinguish between two essential types of priorities. There are two main types of priorities you can take into account to help you sort your tasks and goals. Time based priorities are set according to each gold at night. In this case, you can also consider goals as milestones, which are important events on your company's timeline. That show you went a part of your roadmap has been successfully completed. These time based goals must be completed before a set ending. Examples include increasing yourselves in two months, getting a sponsorship by the end of the year, or bringing more subscribers to your newsletter by the end of November. Urgency based priorities, on the other hand, referred to any gold that must be completed. In order for you to move on to pursuing another goal or activity, you've got here goal that can the urgent with a high priority, normal priority or low priority. For instance, in urgent or high priority goal can be increasing your brand awareness in order for you to move on to growing your a number of leads, subscriptions, sales and finally, recurrent sales. One mattered. You can use to make the difference between what is urgent and what is just important is the Eisenhower decision. Metrics. Urgent goals are the ones that need to be completed as soon as possible, either because they help you solve a problem or because another cool depends on important goals. On the other hand, have to be completed at any time until the end of a milestone in order for the final goal, So the largest want to be reached. However, you do not have to pay immediate attention to these, and you can post phone number Onley for a short period of time. All we have to dio with the Eisenhower decision metrics is build a diagram such as this one and add the following First of all important and urgent goals. You need to work towards these goals immediately or as soon as possible. These air usually merger problems, issues or stages that you must by all means complete or else you won't be able to move on towards another stage of your marketing strategy. Examples include that laws or a customer group that needs immediate attention, then he important but not origin. Goals are the ones that can be completed any time. Until of that, you don't need to do them right now, like with the previous ones, but you still need to take care of them until a certain end date or before you move on to another goal. Examples include discussing a sponsorship opportunity or creating a video tutorial for using a new feature of a tool you're selling moving on to. They're not important, but urgent goals. While these are often urgent, they don't always contribute to your end larger goal so you can find somebody else to take care of them While you focus on the main target of your marketing campaigns, these goals are usually related to hiring new people in your team, holding meetings and any other secondary goals that are not related to your main one. Examples for this include scheduling an interview to find a new content writer or doing outreach work to get some back links for your website. Finally, they're not important or urgent. Goals are the ones that are usually considered a distraction. You can remove these altogether or postponed them for the time being. Examples include anything that is not related to your main goal, like slacking on Facebook or watching random YouTube videos just for fun. Another method you can use to prioritize your goals is the Pareto principle. You might already be familiar with it as the 80 20 rule. This principle states that 20% of your effort will account for 80% of your results. The whole idea behind this principle is starting with your most important goal, the ones you need to complete by all means. First, to help you identify this goal, you can consider either of the following two the ones that generates more profit and the ones you need to complete in order to start working on one of your main goals. It's normal to postpone Gold's you truly wants to reach just because you're afraid the process of getting there will be more difficult. And I used to do that, too. But for all of us, time is so precious. So I realized I was wasting too much time focusing on menial tasks because I couldn't finish important tasks as soon as I wanted. Then I was just too drained to focus on my real goals. So to fix this I redirected my whole attention to what needed to be taken care of and saved effort for smaller goals and tasks as well. And really, this method can be used for anything including gold setting, increasing your productivity and organizing your work activities. And the next lecture. We are going to focus on the importance of having a marketing strategy and making the right strategic decisions in the process. See you then. 4. The importance of having a marketing strategy and making the right decisions: before I move on to more straightforward hips of getting started with creating your marketing strategy. Let's first clarify why having a marketing strategy is so important. A digital marketing strategy can ensure in the fall that you have a clear image of the market you wants to be active in. You are one step ahead of your competition. You know what differentiates you from your competitors and what convinces people to buy from you rather than from them. And you are prepared to come up with new strategies as a response to your competitors. Advancements on the market Having clear marketing strategies can also help us increase some of profits, guarantee our leading position on the market, eliminate any risks and potential issues. Make proper decisions not only when it comes to marketing, but also to the development of your products and business in general. Visualize your marketing process from the very beginning, spot potential problems, transform your ideas into riel actions and would re sources such as the marketing kid from Google. You have no excuse not to do digital marketing the right weight. What this tool essentially does is that it gives you some of the resource is you need to promote your business. All you have to do is create a my business profile. UNGA will for your own business and then come here and enter your business name. Let's take one restaurant, for example, and you will get the series of window stickers, a personalized marketing kids to match your brand, some ready to share social posts and even business highlights. But what really insolence is our strategic decisions There are between key factories. First of all, the resource is, well, what we're capable of conducting a certain strategy or not. If we have to write people for a specific job to acknowledge and digital tools, then there is money. Having a solid budget is often the only thing you need to get started with a solid marketing strategy. And finally, our Brende. Imagine you're a company which sells flies. Even if you were to come up with the best ever strategic plan for selling dresses and fashion items, that plan wouldn't work for you. So any strategy you create should be tailored to your own brand voice and attitude. In the following two lectures, we aren't going to have a closer look at what you need and how you can build your digital marketing strategic plan. Meanwhile, if you have any questions related to what we have discussed so far in this course, let me know by sending me a message and I'll get back to us soon as possible. 5. Building your digital marketing strategic plan PART 1: So how do you create a strategy? The first step is to have a good product. A bad one can be saved with, no matter how good your marketing strategy is, then you've got the realistic method for creating a strategy and the right way. The realistic matter is what everyone does. Truth is, there is some kind of a strategy behind any brand, even if it was never written. Not having a written plan is a huge mistake, although it can work for promoting your personal brand as there aren't as many factors involved, such as the supply chain or production. One of the reasons why so many businesses fail is just this. They didn't write down all of the steps and details of their marketing strategy, and that's not just a couple of pages. A good plan can have 100 pages, including the market research and competitors analysis. No, think about it. Have you ever had a business debt sale? And did you plant it in great detail? Because if you didn't you had a dangerous sign from the very beginning. The right way is to put down all of your marketing ideas, tactics, tools, resources and budget in a clearly structured manner. Just be patient whenever you're developing in your strategy. It's really a scale you'll grow in time. In the past, marketing strategies were produced in years. Now you need to come up with a new idea by tomorrow. Just practice every day like you would work out. I, too, am in the process of launching an instagram page for my illustrations, and I have to go through the whole process of promoting my business from zero. Having to do this a couple of times can get tottering. But it's all about taking a systematic approach each day and not trying to do it all in one day. Now. First things first. What do you need before you start working on a plan To begin with, you need to establish exact business objectives and goals from the very beginning. Then gather all your marketing research related data. The topic we're going to discuss in great detail in another lecture in the scores. Look at the information you already own. Maybe you've tested a product or website before and already have some data to work with. Then the first step to building your old digital marketing plan is establishing one clear goal and a couple of secondary objectives. Coming up with an attainable goal can be harder once you get to think about it. That's why setting one central goal you must achieve is primary before you go on to set your secondary objectives. Among the questions you should ask yourself when choosing your key goal are we'll get the action on the side of your goal. How easy is it for you to achieve it? They have the right resource is capabilities and knowledge. How long would it take you to reach that objective? Most importantly, what are the steps you need to cover in order to leave the rewards? Then, is it a realistic goal? Do you have enough information on the market and potential buyers for you to start the business will be sustainable in the future. Often, products that are popular in the present won't be bought at all in two years or so. How well does your main goal hair with your secondary objectives? A secondary objective can be anything like reducing costs, increasing sales, getting your sponsorships and partnerships in your first year, becoming a leader in your market. Anything like this. So think about it and put now any ideas you have is your main goal. Help you reach your secondary ones, too. The aim is to get three or more objectives with one single strategy. Does your mingle really offer the benefits you're looking for? How can you grow after reaching the central goal? What are your next opportunities? Be prepared for anything coming your way, then the second step would be analyzing your own company and the market. From a marketing perspective, consider the following. First of all, define what marketing means to your company. Each marketing manager or CEO sees marketing differently, so marketing strategies mean different things to different people To marketing, you might want to gain more profit obtaining partnerships. Loyal eyes your customers get media attention or all of these factors at once. What external and internal factors have contributed to the development of your company? So far, External factors can be theme a graphical economical, social, cultural, technological, legal and also include competitors, the supply chain and stakeholders. Looking at the internal factors, you can take a closer look at resources and at how your marketing department is structured as the relations with in your team's departments and employees to spot any potential conflicts or different interests that could damage your business. Then consider your main problems so far. Think of how you're selling controlling the market, doing deliveries, building new products, fixing any problems managing your relationship with the clients, competitors and under stakeholders, find out where you were getting most of your profit from and where you can cut down on costs. What tactics have worked for you before? What opportunities you've taken advantage of what you missed on. Consider anything related to your company products market and Brenda or stakeholders as a side note for any of you who is just getting to know the digital marketing field or the business side of it. A stakeholder is any person or group of people who influence or are influenced by the success of your business product service or project. Examples include clients, management employees, administrators, suppliers, investors, community grooves and government organizations. I must go truce tap So many marketers and business owners skip is the SWAT analysis and usually skip this because they don't give it enough time to understand its importance. The SWAT analysis can offer important insights into the status of your business and its future. And believe it or not, taking a few hours to focus on this analysis process, we'll help you brainstorm some more ideas and come up with new strategies you wouldn't have otherwise created This what analysis is really simple to do? It's essentially a diagram divided into these four distinct areas. One first strength your best points with unique Sell it. Your best resource is one for weaknesses. The things you should improve and need to work on or bring more resource is for or anything your competition does better than you do. The third area of the swath analysis is four opportunities, the chances you need to take and the possibilities you have for further development or even markets you can enter as a quick mention. For me, it would be great if you could add a separate list to these opportunities to include friends and how they will evolve in the near future as well as in the next 10 to 20 years. And finally, the last area of the swamp analysis you should cover is any potential threats, issues and problems, including new competitors and negative press coverage. in this because they can negatively influence your business. Stay tuned for the second part of this building. Your digital marketing strategy plan Lecture to find out what the rest of the steps for you to complete your digital marketing strategic plan are. 6. Building your digital marketing strategic plan PART 2: welcome to the second part for helping you build your digital marketing strategic plan. We are going to move on after the SWAT analysis to the fourth step, which is writing down your expectations. Keep in mind that being prepared for the success or failure of a strategy also means you're going to write down any expectations, whether they are bad or good. So put down any faith you think you're going to get out of this business and especially out of your marketing strategy. Whether you're expecting a potential increase in sales after the launch of a new product or issues with your customer service or delivery time, maybe he wants to sell internationally. In this case, your orders will get to your customers slower or faster, depending on their country. Then be prepared for any changes on the market. Politically, maybe there is a new law and you compact ITER stealing your idea anything you can finger and prepare to tackle it before it happens, also always have consumers in mind. Their behavior can change each date and is so often influenced by external events and friends. There is always a new technology they might want or a new way they can use a product or service. Just think of a classic example. Newspapers Once something everyone got delivered to their own homes and you'd inevitably read them because there weren't other forms of entertainment. Most newspapers have now gone digital, I think The New Yorker, for example, people can now read on Lee what is of importance to them and the singles for magazines, publicity and video. The next step would be to move on to your marketing related objectives and strategy during the first stuff. We have a look at our general business objectives. Now that we also checked our own company's data and had a look at any market or competitors related statistics, we can come up with new, straightforward marketing tactics and goals. The marketing process by itself is so Vest in advanced you might feel like getting started with singles is difficult. But this is why the scores was created to ease your work during the marketing strategy creation process so you won't have to look to piles of paper while coming up with the perfect plan. So here are the directions. You should look toe words first of all your products and services. How are you going to promote your product? How will the packaging look like? Are there any complementary products that need to be bought? I want you to remember all of these questions. You can put them down either write them as I speak or open the captions for this video so you can clearly see what I am singing, and then keep them in mind for your final assignment and the end of the scores when you are going to write your own plan. Also in the assignment after this lecture, you'll have to answer all of these questions for a fictional business and brand so you can practice this step fully before getting toe arriving. The digital marketing Strategic plan now moving on to the costs. Are you preparing any promotions? Coupons? How often will you hold sales? Will you lower your prices in response to a competitor of yours doing the same thing? Will you have any loyalty programs for logistics? How and who will package your goods? How will you deliver your product? What are your return policies? Who will cover the costs for in return concerning the market? Is there already too much promotion going on for similar products. Are there any unique places where you can for month what you're selling? What sponsorship opportunities are there regarding your clients? Think about whether you can use segmentation to separate them into distinct carry worries. What will your relationship with your clients be like? And this most sauce to communication? How will you communicate with your clients who will make any official statements in case of a serious issue that affect the company? Will you post regular company updates on your blog's? They implant to open a YouTube channel? What's your position towards social media? Moving on to the sixth step? Make a list of secondary strategies as an alternative to your main one. Just to be sure you've got everything covered. Think of any changes you can apply to a strategy in case it doesn't work at first. If there's a different market, you can applied a strategy to perhaps you'll have more success selling your hand made soaps online than just locally differences between strategies, extra costs for promotional materials, marketing and Nevers or product enhancements, perhaps better materials or technology. Also, never forget about your marketing budget. Start by listing all of your objectives, dandy activities that will help you reach your goals and possible costs. Try to be as accurate as possible, but be prepared for unexpected costs. Finally, create a detailed schedule for one year. Let's say the first year of your activity again less your objectives for the first year. You might want to double your sales after 10 months while getting a collaboration with a leading corporation might be a goal that's not so realistic for your first year, then create detailed marketing strategies for each goal. At the end, all you have left to do is refine your plan as many times as necessary in order to get that perfect strategy you're looking for and remember that a perfect strategy doesn't exist. It's really a matter of getting as many details on paper and writing down possible alternatives in case one of your strategies fails. So you getting sure you're prepared for any situations, true your strategy and plan. In the future, you can think of recycling your strategy and using part of its ideas, the ones that worked for you just using them again for your future tactics as well 7. Making the right marketing decisions: The truth is that your entire strategy could be ruined by just one lead mistake you made on behind every mistake. There's a decision, but what exactly is a decision? It's not just something you come up with one second and then decide to pursue decisions are a mix of knowledge and abilities you required and learned throughout the years. Similar to what experiences? It's what we have previously acquired in our past that helps us choose what we are going to pursue in the future. So making the right strategic marketing decisions is all about having the right people in charge of the decision making process. Having an experienced person in charge of the strategy is really what makes the difference between an experienced friend and the new one. The new brand or business has to go through a series of trials and errors to find out what the experienced brand already knows about the market and clients. It is this decision maker who can suggest what is valuable, how to build a database of clients, how to retain customers and how to overall improve all marketing efforts. You don't have to gain that experience yourself, though you can I don't hire someone who has helped successfully developed brands before or just learned from the success in sales stories of other companies. Let's have a look at a typical example. Apple, for instance, analyze how they're building their products. Apple, for instance, has regular releases of new physical products, such as their smartphones and software. Like all the new I West updates, see how the generate profit. Apple has become such a solid brand that they can charge much more than a regular brand for the same technologies. Truth is, most phones have the same hardware, but Apple wins in the brand department by offering solid software with free updates and great customer support. I'm going to link an article in the Resource Is section so you can check out exactly how much it costs for big brands like Apple to build their products and how much more money they ask for them just because they have a solid brand, Then you can also have a look at how other successful companies produce their products, delivered them and just simplify all of their processes. Above all, when making a decision considered of value, you're offering to our clients what are the benefits they get, and at what costs will they receive them again? The article, I suggested, is a good read for this. Keep in line that you should always deliver what you promise. Clients create huge expectations once you promise something Peritus with a strong analysis of benefits versus costs. And that's why they decided to buy our product over someone else's. But how can you tell if a client is satisfied with the bridges based on your experience with using the breath? Of course, if they had a positive experience and didn't encounter any issues or maybe had some problems but were easily fixed with the help of your customers port, the value they will give your product is likely a high one, so there are more chances that they will become strong supporters of your brand. Come back to your company or buy your product over and over again and even recommended to others and bring you in return. More sales. Once you find out which aspect of your product or service can create that positive experience, you only have to nourish those elements and use them in your marketing strategy to abstain . More profits this is where the decision makers in your company have a huge say again, they have a sign duty to turn. What your company is capable of doing that is your resource is knowledge and people into straightforward strategies that will most likely succeed for years to come. Maybe you don't have a big budget to spend on that, but have to write people to write valuable content for your bog and bring traffic and new leads via these sources. So I've said a lot about how the people in your company are so important to your marketing strategy. But what exactly should you consider with this case? First of all, there's the individual employees. You might have someone who is a break illustrator and can help you with Brendan or someone who is an analytical Venter and will help you make those right decisions I've mentioned. But regardless of how many professionals you have in your team, in the end, it's all about how they collaborate. Your teams should permanently discuss problems. Brainstorm ideas come up with new strategies. For instance, there are marketing team can talk to your salespeople and customer support representatives to find out the main pain points and needs of your clients. In the next part of this course, we are going to focus on how you can research your market in a bunch of actionable ways. Staking for more information on this 8. How to research your market: there are a bunch of actionable ways to get you started. With market research among all of its different elements, you can just get to researching the market without having a strict plan. But keep in mind, you still mean to have a general idea of the steps you'll be going true. This means you'll gain a lot of new information and data you need to sort out after this. That needs is a good choice only if you're looking to quickly analyze changes that have happened on the market since you last had a look at it. Make sure to focus only on understanding the market as you do no research letter than just trying to get as much information as possible. Just because you put down a lot of ideas and insights doesn't mean you'll be able to apply them in real life. This is also why the person in charge of research should be someone who is directly interested in the well being and evolution of the company, such as a CEO or maybe stakeholder. Your best option is to have a plan for the market research process by itself by covering five essential steps. The 1st 1 is identifying your problems, a step you've already covered. If you did the SWAT analysis, and you now have to create research questions to solve each one of these issues and reach your goals, then the second step would be to develop a planet for it. Your research. Put down all of the information you need and what techniques you are going to use, like interviews, surveys, focus groups or the simple observation method that's often the most efficient as it lets you see directly how essential clients interact with a website or plaque. Your turn stuff is to conduct the research, apply the methods we've mentioned or just one method and collector data. The fourth stuff is to analyze the data you've collected and creating ports that can be later used to create a strategy. And finally, for your less snap of the market research process, move on to develop your strategic plan. This is the part where you'll create the full digital marketing plan to help you tackle your issues and reach your objectives. So what else can you target? First of all, the market's capacity structure changes the Chazz new companies or emerging companies joint ventures bankruptcies. Eamon, a product or service that disappears from the market, is a great opportunity for you to focus on bringing their clients and turning them into your clients. Then target compactors, price changes clients and any changing friends or issues that might affect them. New Technologies Again, Which clients will most likely want to own your current problems and how your competitors are solving them, your suppliers, logistics, any legal aspect and, finally, resource availability. If there are enough people available to do a certain kind of job right now, for example, there aren't as many robotics professionals as there is a demand, so you can expect to find such employees in a more difficult way and to have to pay the more. Since there aren't as many people owning, that's knowledge. One tool you can use to ease your market research process is the past analysis, or PST. This mattered helps to identify any vital factors that might affect your company, according to four different categories. Political, for instance, new laws, government policies, corruption, even trade restrictions with certain countries and anything that you can't influence related to the relationship between a company and ruling government in terms of legislation , for example, a law that needs to be passed for electric cars to be exempt from any taxes. Then you've got the economic factors. This includes any financial changes going on at the national and international level, such as exchange interest and even unemployment rings. For example, a low inflation rate then for the social or cultural factors. They refer to any trends affecting the world population in general or certain age groups and cultures, as well as new demands and purchase patterns that virus display, for instance, more people looking to purchase plastic free press finally. But just as important, you've got the technological factories, any new or competing tech developments and trends that people will be looking into buying and keeping up with, for example, car batteries that can be charged in less than one hour. To tailor these factors there, cos markets run an industry analysis. In addition to your general market analysis, it's really a similar process, but you having a look at each factor instead from the perspective of your own industry. Of course, you can also do passive market research, which essentially means you're constantly staying updated with the latest changes as they happen by checking the news and your competitors daily. Sometimes this type of information is not something you look for directly as you might just hear something on the radio or from somebody else's discussions. But what's the purpose of market research? First of all, market research helps you identify opportunities and possible danger zones of the market you want to sell. You also get to keep up and responds to the latest changes that could directly impact you and even anticipate potential issues before they appear and serial your project. Additionally, you'll gain extra confidence in your business knowledge so you'll be able to adapt your marketing plans to any external or internal influential factors knowing what others are doing and what the market demands are can guide every aspect of your plan. For instance, you know where to put more money, which communication channels to focus on and what the product you can start developing and Sally are. It's not just all about your competitors and products. It's about the people. Great market experts are capable not only of reading the trends and needs of people, but also of creating them. Just think of when Apple launched their face i d. Recognition. All of a sudden, people felt they had a need for this feature. In the next lecture, we're going to move beyond the market into what's competitors analysis means and how you can use it to better understand what's the demands on the market are. 9. Competitor analysis PART 1: Now that you're done with the general market and industry research, let's focus more on how compactor analysis really works. Focus on your direct competitors, the ones your clients often mention have tried before or those they want to switch to. Usually, these companies follow similar strategies to the ones your life to use as they have a similar profile to your company and target roughly the same audience in clients to compare your brand or company to others have to following factors in mind. Industry company size. Target market resource is either the physical or technological ones or capabilities in terms of management, marketing, innovation and so on. Product range marketing channels brand image goals for the future. Even bear in mind, though, that companies constantly changed their objectives in case their current performance level doesn't match up to their expectations. So you lied to keep a close eye on these objectives at all times and keep up with them as a hint. Pay attention toe where your competitors are spending most of their budget and time, huge investments towards one direction. Perhaps advancements on a different market or the development of new products can show you what their main objectives are, and often companies will put down your objectives in a road map that's public, maybe on their websites, such as this case for a core group also having a look as their previous strategies can show you what worked for them and what did it. It's up to you to decide if you want to go further with applying some of the tactics that didn't work for them, provided you have the same market target and clients. Chances are these strategies won't work free it. Still, the reason why their tactics field might not apply to you Cos. Can drop strategies for a variety of reasons, like not having enough resource is or money. If one of your competitors dropped one tactic due to a low budget, you can still give that strategy a try as a side note. If you want to keep your competitors from reacting to your marketing strategies as soon as you launch them, make sure you don't publicly specify all of their details. Ideally, you shouldn't mention anything related to your new strategies in a public place. However, the problem here is that not talking about your new strategies also means you won't be able to create that much needed anticipation for your clients either. There are many businesses that pre sale their products before the official launch date. This means people will be able to buy a product such as a phone or a pair of shoes months in advance, and they will receive the product was the launches line. Just analyze the data you gain before you launch, get feedback and reach out to influence Aries, the best places to test your products. And yet new ideas before your launch include etc. Over low for drop shipping mainly and source five for data collection and interpretation will help you begin tracking success from now. Indiegogo is a great example for their strategy. Any type of crowdfunding is a good way of getting funds to make your product ideas become reality. Even if you don't have enough money to start producing your products in the second part of this lecture, we are going to focus more on some other ways in which you can do competitor analysis the right way. See, there 10. Competitor analysis PART 2: Now that you know what to focus on while analyzing your competitors business and activity along with their marketing efforts, let's have a look at the two most common mistakes even successful marketers make. The 1st 1 is not giving enough attention to your smaller competitors and newcomers on the market or neglecting them all together. This includes overlooking your local competitors who could advance towards a national and global market. As a matter of fact, few businesses are now entirely local, as the Internet is allowing any small or alarmed business to expand their audience and get her clients from anywhere. And then the second, the state refers to focusing only on your existing customers. While new brands could appear on the market and become your competitors, remember that any company can switch their focus. Let me just give you one example. Airbnb was essentially a website for less thing vacation homes and rentals and is now starting to highlight experiences, and even restaurants like Trip Advisor did before. The reason why so many marketers neglect these two types of competitors small and existing ones in particular, is really because, as a business, owners were always looking to get results as fast as possible, and the volume of data available on the market is often too large for us to analyze it in just a couple of months. There's always a new company setting shop or a new trend that's making existing businesses change their strategy. But regardless of the time you're putting into the research of your competitors, here are the benefits of this process. As they will result from a correct and consistent research. You will be able to tell what your competitors next moves will be, particularly if you pay close attention to the strong and weak points of competing businesses. You'll anticipate and keep up with any new in the street trends. This way, you'll also be able to satisfy the needs of your clients often even before they realize they have a certain kind of need. You will generate new, spontaneous ideas inspired by the actions and reactions of your competitors. In other words, you will be able to innovate. Knowing everything that's going on in the market allows you to come up with new solutions to people's needs and desires. Solutions which have never been created or sold before you're Brendel also become a better communicator. Just have a look at how other brands are talking to Dear Leans, existing clients and past customers. So many companies still don't answer enquiries as often is needed, leaving customers looking for alternative methods of fixing their issues. But let's look at some examples of companies who are nailing the art of communicating with their clients glass past. For example, if you go to their Twitter account to the tweets and reply section, you will see that day answer to all of their clients enquiries via Twitter messaging in a public place so you can check these even if you have a similar problem and find a solution . Then there's the Adobe customer care account, which is essentially an account where you can get any type of answers and help regarding the Adobe Cloud products. And the handle name for Twitter is suggested to because they, obviously, by answering to all enquiries, offer top care for their clients. And this just shows how much importance they put into each and every single one of their clients. Put ER is a good source. If you're looking into getting more information on how your competitors are handling communication, and benefiting from their lack of engagement. You can take the opportunity to reply to someone who has been looking for an answer from your competitors but didn't get it yet. Or you can find new clients or at least potential leads before your competitors do. Here is one great example where this Twitter user, Christina, is looking for an alternative to Evernote. And if you scroll down, you will see that some competitors or similar products and services have already left comments guiding her towards their own. Pregnant. All you have to do to find such tweets is just go to your search and add something like your brand's name and then alternatives or your competitors name, alternative and any similar type of words, keywords and sentence structuring. Being the first to provide a solution or information can truly make the difference between one brand and another, as people remember those companies that have helped them before, those are always going to be the first choice whenever they are considering making a purchase. So where else can you find information on your competitors besides Twitter, which in my opinion, is the quickest and easiest way for you to get the clients of your competitors to become yours. You can search for more information regarding maybe the complaints of existing clients in the case of your competitors, anything they like about that product or service they sell and just any type of information which you can use to further grow your own marketing strategy. So some other sources for information such as this one include any public resource is their own reports, maybe marketing materials, online activities in groups, social media posts, then directly from them. You can reach us today or sail steam or customer support team either from your position as a company or as an individual. And finally, you can look for information on your competitors and even on their clients in other external sources that are not directly involved with your competitors. Those aren't market research companies that have already done the research in her place press, often in the first place, where any negative aspect of the company, along with their achievements, will come out. Rating Websites association and any other types of groups ruling on to the next lecture. We are going to focus more on the importance of understanding your client, knowing their needs and creating buyer personas and strategies for each buyers journey. See then 11. The buyer's journey and personas PART 1: buyers go through different steps from the moment they realize they have a problem and start researching it. So when they finally make a purchase or are completing anything you consider a goal. What are that? Subscribing to your newsletter, contributing to your project or just recommending your service to someone else? This is called a marketing funnel, and you can create one marketing strategy for each Such fun. Funnels are a series of stages all customers go true following the A I D. A model, which can be applied to offline and online marketing channels like a stands for attention. It's the moment when you should attract new customers by creating brand awareness so your potential clients can become aware of your product and brand. Then I stands for interest. It is the next stage where you need to maintain their attention, and he was a solid marketing strategy to present her own product or service as a solution to their problems. Then the representing the desire phase is when you convince prospects that your product or service is really the perfect solution for them and willing on to the final action step, when your prospects will finally decides to buy your product, especially if you give them a little boost, such as a bonus at this count or extra benefit. Alternatively, you can divide your funnel into three parts the top of the funnel, where he focused on a larger audience. Anyone that could be interested in what you are selling and can become a potential customer . It's really a time when you educate people and not talk about your product or service. For instance, you can create tutorials or even become the sponsor for an educational event. Then, for the middle of the funnel, it is when you move beyond just capturing new leads. You assume you already have those leads and can now focus on getting your brand out there. By continuing to educate audiences, you can start maybe a podcast for your brand, where you will discuss again educational content with mentions of your brand. With no direct promotion, you can introduce your own Westside product anything you own and later presents the value you provide to your potential customers. But remember to always focus on value first and sales later. Finally, for the bottom of the funnel, it is your last chance to convert leads into buyers and recurrent buyers. You can now start adding calls the action to your marketing tactics. You can directly offer a trial for your service and even presents the benefits of your product to does who show intend for buying your foot? Or even if you want to convince them to get what you're selling over the products and services of your competitors, it's important never to forget who you're targeting with your marketing strategy. Keep in mind you're not just putting together a plan for yourself, your employees or a higher executive Onley By having potential clients in mind, can you turn the strangers into customers and potentially brand ambassadors at all times? You should show you understand and wants to help my suggesting solutions and alternatives. If you don't know who your potential buyers are, in what they want or need, you're just going to try a lot of promotional marketing methods, hoping some of them will be of interest to anyone. And there are high chances this will happen. No matter what your industry is, you will have a target audience in mind. Imagine you sell or getting vegetables and your target aliens is anyone who is interested in offering a healthier lifestyle to their families. You have to come up with a fictional customer. In this case, you've got several options. Let's say mothers between the ages of 20 and 40. If you can visualize what these potential coins look like, what they do, what their needs are. You can know what's to sell to them and, most importantly, how to do that. Let's go our clients, Sarah, and create the basic profile for her. Sarah is 30 years old. She is the mother of two Children, and she's in charge of buying all the groceries for the family once a week. You will then have to consider her challenges. Pain points, dreams, goals. See what would moderate her or urge her to buy our vegetables over other ones. Now let's pause for a second. What do you think would hold her back from buying from you? This is not something you can just guess. You need to research it, and in the second part of this lecture, we'll see exactly how you can do that 12. The buyer's journey and personas PART 2: moving on with this lecture on understanding the buyer journey and creating buyer personas . There are many places where you can analyze your potential customers, and you probably already have access to these. Resource is whether it's social media reviews block Commons Block posts, talking to your colleagues, sales team and, most importantly, your existing customers. They're the world's who have bought something from before. So they best know what the reason behind the purchase once seeing how potential clients customers, existing ones and even those you lost right about their problems can identify future strategies for improving your marketing tactics and even products altogether and help you use their own language in your strategy. Let's take a look at some Amazon reviews, which are a good source for such insight and getting more feedback for improving both your brand, your product and your marketing strategy. First, this set of lip balms that was actually a best seller and is now one of Amazon's choice. All we have to do is go to the customer reviews, and here you can either select among whether he wants to see the good reviews or the bad ones, or just scroll to them. from the very beginning was you'll notice is that Amazon lists the good and bad reviews together so you can get both opinions before making a purchase. Let's just take a look at the 1st 1 Let me start by saying, I absolutely love this little. I just wanted people to actually see my review. I have gotten two packs of this now that the safety seal on some of them have been broken and the stick rolled up and clearly used. Now, this is the kind of review you can read to make sure that whoever is in charge of distributing your product and delivering them should pay closer attention to how the products are actually getting to the final customer. And so definitely this side of your business can be improved. Let's have a look at this next positive review. It's very helpful for him and enjoys the fact that it's organic for me. It definitely does help reduce my dry lips, but they're not completely sold. Most of the sense work well, the raspberry and mint wants, but the rest of the stents disappear pretty quickly. Now, looking at this review, you can notice that your product does work for some people. But maybe you can improve some of the scents and flavours for specific ones according to what your customers demand, and you can see that on Amazon. They can't even add it there reviews. And in this case, the person asked for a full refund because she was dissatisfied with the flavor of some of the bombs she ordered. And she was pleased with the customer service, who was attentive and quick to respond. And because they were so friendly, she actually changed her review, which was originally a more negative one. However, she won't be buying the product again in the future because of the flavor. In this case, you can see how there's a difference between what you are selling and how you are selling it. What you're selling, The flavors of the lip bulbs are not to the liking of all customers. However, you do compensate by offering great customer service. But this is still not enough for you to continue selling the same product to that specific customer. If you remember a few lectures ago, I mentioned how the first step to creating a good marketing strategy was to have a good product, and this is just another proof of that. Now, if you look at the one review under this one, you can see a comparison with their competitors stating that it's a better product and you can see why they prefer your product. In this case, the competitors are using one of the ingredients that the customer is not happy with, so he prefers more organic without soybean oil products. And if your school down, you will notice that usually, if there's one complaint, there will leave several different people noticing that same issue. For example, the smell of the product. Then, if you look at the negative reviews you've got again, the fact that most of them do smell like plastic, even though they're organic again, the scent is a huge issue, the flavor which essentially the same thing, and even other people who have had problems with the safety seal. Now you can take all of these good and bad reviews, analyze them, put down anything that is worth mentioning and try to improve first of all your product and then the way in which you deliver there and how you promote in this case, promoting the lip balms has organic and then delivering products that smell like plastic is definitely false advertising. Next, let's have a look at the face cream again. Go to do reviews. And again, from the very beginning you will see a negative view. This first customer is having issues with the fact that the product has changed. If you look at the ingredients in this picture, that is the picture death the seller posted on Amazon again, a case of false advertising and maybe they were just two ways into updates the product. You will see that the 1st 4 state and here she lists a few ingredients, which in the end on the real George she received are different and do not include the organic ingredients. She was expecting another customer, God for the same prize, a smaller container than the one she had previously bought. If you read her review, you can see that she loves the face cream, but she's only giving it please stars for now because she ordered a new one and paid the same price. But for a smaller container, actually half the size of what should previously not again. This is a common issue people who sell their product often change their prize or the quantity and even ingredients of what they sell just because they wants to earn more profit . But this is a terrible mistake to make if you want to have recurrent clients and buyers who will come and get your product over and over again, are the most valuable. So this is by no means something you should pursue as a strategy. And for this reason, among many others, remember never to get to creating a digital strategy until you identify your potential customer's needs, their pain points. That is a problem. Any driving force that makes them need a solution that's parks a buying process. For instance, if they feel hunger, they will go and needs to buy food. If they are bored of eating the same food over and over again, they will be looking for recipes. And if they don't want to waste time searching for the perfect recipe, they will need a non line service to send them regular recipes. When it comes to select in your niche, you can create products for a specific kind of audience, like Sika yoga does for anyone who is interested in yoga and living a healthier lifestyle. But you can also have a more general audience like Penn Asan IQ, for instance, offering technology for different kind of needs, people and industries and the same way you can create your marketing strategy. For Sika yoga, their main promotional channel is Instagram, where they post relevant content for their audience. That is, people who love doing, you know, while, in Panasonic's case, true Twitter, they focused on tech related posts and updates on their own advancements into different industries that anyone who is interested in technology can enjoy and learn from. The difference here is that there's a much larger markets for technology. Van yoga. Another interesting example is Bora cooking systems. They essentially sale kitchenware such as extractor hoods and cook tops. But with one look at their Twitter account, and you'll see they focus their marketing efforts towards one thing leaving and their sponsorships. In this case, they want to do target anyone who is interested in living a healthier life, so presumably they also cooked often at home. To reach this audience, they decided to sponsor a cycling team and are now reaping the seeds of the success as this method worked perfectly for them for the exercise. After this course, you will have to create your own first buyer personas. So I'm wishing you the best of luck with death. 13. Convincing your clients: Whenever we're referring to a certain product category, there were always certain brands that will pop up in your mind. First, consumers make a decision in two main ways because they need something and usually spend a few days, weeks or months to do their research before a purchase for more because they simply want something. This is the stage where they usually make irrational decisions and become impulse buyers that can buy something without giving it much thought or researching it. In both cases, having a brand that can stand out among the others is essential. Let's try an exercise, which are the brands that you first think of when seeing the word smackem you're probably answered with Apple or Samsung, among others, is not as the only ones. Another example. Sportswear. Possible answers. Just think about them. Maybe Nike and Adidas. There are so many good brands out there that offer high quality products and value, but still are not the first choice for customers all around the work. Just because they mac legacy. Dominant brands are usually legacy friends, those friends, everyone knows, like Coca Cola or Livia. But what makes a legacy brands so great legacy brands create emotions. They make people happy, said excited, curious, scared. Even emotions are universal. So a brand that's festival in one country is likely to have the same success in other cultures are different. But emotions are so similar, of course, there are exceptions where a culture strongly influences our Bren decisions. McDonald's and Burger King, for instance, didn't get there a claim success in Vietnam because they have a different outlook at food and prefer buying from local street food sellers who offer food for their liking at much lower cost. Think about how you search for a product you usually start from a need or opportunity you recognize you have. Then you search for information. You evaluate your author things, and finally you make a purchase or buy something again. But beyond any culture or social influences, like our own beliefs and involvement with a practice, think about this scenario when you're young. There was probably the brand of chocolate you would always get in adulthood. That particular product is likely to bring back those nice childhood memories and the feeling of being young again. So you're going to buy that chocolate just because it brings that experience back to you, and this experience is essentially a mean. Always keep in mind what your audience needs and any need can translate into a benefit. If people need something, they're usually also looking to get a series of benefits from a purchase order that's easing your advice or just getting the best value for the money. Their pain. But few people know the exact differences between benefits and features, and distinguishing these concepts is essential to knowing how to promote or Brent my highlighting what your buyers will get by buying your product or service briefly. A feature is what your product or service is. So the fact while benefits referred to what your clients will get and how their purchase will improve their lives. If you were to check your previous marketing strategies, promotional materials and content you've written, chances are you missed to focus on these benefits. Let's use this page for promoting a car to spot benefits and features. Here is one example of a feature sun roof rain notification. So this is the feature, and the benefit is that if you have this notification, you will be able to return to your car just in time before the rain starts so you can close the sunroof. Another example. The driver Personalization feature. It can help you store up to four driver profiles so they will remember your personalization preferences each time. Then the automatic post collision braking system feature has, as a benefit, the fed that it can slow the beetle down after a collusion, helping reduce the chance of any additional impacts. Another example. The featured tire pressure monitoring system would its benefit. As in, you'll be alerted when you lose tire pressure so you know when to add air. Let's now have a look at a different industry, and that is antivirus stuffer we've got here. The feature Seek your VPN, and the benefit is that you can browse anonymously and securely. Another example. The feature password manager with the benefit easily create store and manage your passwords , credit card information and other credentials online, safely and securely. Another final example. The feature Parental controls with the benefit of helping you manage your kids activities online and help them explore, learn and enjoy their connected world safely. Websites such as this are great examples for you to find ideas of how to structure York features and your benefits together. But how do you turn a feature into a benefit? It's really so easy. Just think about how your product specific features can improve the lives of your customers . For example, a laptop with 500 s and the storage space means buyers will be able to store a lot of files on a single device and also open softer, much faster than with a hard drive. Free delivery implies he won't have to pay extra money for delivery, and you won't have to go to the store to pick up your purchase products. And finally, for a more straightforward example, the store that's open 24 7 allows people to buy from your store at any time during a day. I've also prepared an exercise at the end of this lecture so you can practice turning features into benefits a bit. Best of luck with this and see you in the next lecture 14. A closer look at the tools that can help you understand trends: at the base of each strategy lies one trend that determines your need to come up with a new strategy in terms of marketing. In other words, trends create the demand for new marketing strategies, and you need to fully understand these trends in order to create a successful strategy so that you can grow further. Luckily, there are plenty of tools available out there, some of them even for free. First of all, there's reddit. This is a good source for finding what possible customers have as a need. What their pain points are any issues they might encounter with one of your competitors or just with life in general. So you can find new product ideas and ways of promoting your own products, services and brands. For example, you can go to the technology, separate it and just check out some of the most common or trending topics in the industry. For example, giant batteries and chief solar power are shoving fossil fuels off the grid so you can see the preference for solar power. Then there's another issue, such as, yes, human workers air listening to recordings from Google Assistant that is concerning the privacy of virtual assistants such as the one from Google Assistant or Siri, and similar other news in technology such as Udrew begins blocking stream ripping sides. The German navy is building a laser cannon. Just keep in mind that Reddit is sometimes serious, but there's also a touch of trolling going on, so some of the news will be related to any trending topics. Oil. The others will just focus on ridiculous news and anything funny in general. Then Kickstarter, similar to Indiegogo I mentioned before is really a way of seeing with products or services might succeed in the future. For instance, these waterproof shoes made from hemp seeds or this multisensory meditation cushion. There's really a thing here for any industry or interests you might have at is another huge marketplace eyes mentioned before where individual creators and small businesses sell anything from jewelry, floating accessories for your wedding and parties to Arntz collectibles, craft supplies and so much more. So let's say you were starting a company that sells boys for maybes you would go through. It wasn't under game and section, maybe in toddler toys, and usually the first results will be the most popular ones. You can also look at the number of reviews for each product in particular. In this case, if you look at most of the results, you can see that a lot of people by wooden toys, which are considered healthier, safer and eco friendly and really you won't see anything made out of plastic. So this is an idea you can maybe take advantage of. Let's just look at another category. Let's say home and living candles and holders and again just check out the main results and see what people are interested. Maybe they want a scented candle or just an interesting one. And if you scroll down a bit, you will notice that in this case, indeed, most people are interested in scented candles and also in them having an appealing look so they can be used as homely core. Then, of course, you can use the classic trending topics on Twitter. In the right hand corner, you will have the worldwide trends, which you can tailor it to your own needs or just change the location for now. And the issue with these is that you only get the things that are trending at the moment, but it's a good way of keeping up with understanding what will be popular in the future. Leonard as a sporting event, the launch of new technology or just political news. Then there's Instagram, which is a better choice for visual topics like aren't fashion, beauty and travel. And let's imagine for a second that you run a travel company and wants to create new travel packages for your customers. You can just go to a trending hashtags like travel photography, and look for some of the most commonly liked photos and their destination. For example, this one is in South Wales, or this one in Japan and so on. You just have to scroll down, find some of the best ideas and have a look at what people are saying about that location to. And of course, this works for other hashtags as well. Let's just look for something like travel destinations, and again you will get some very interesting results, which you can later use to find and promote some of the best travel packages you are offering. Then, if I said that Twitter was only good for helping you spot current trends, you can also try glimpse. I would link to it in the resource is section. This tool helps you discover trends before they actually become a trend, whether it's in terms of companies, products or industries. So let's have just one quick look at the product friends. If we worried to look as just these six results, you can notice that most of these products already exists on the market. However, not all of them are sold as a large scale. For example, old milk is something you can find anywhere. However, canned wine is not really something you would find in any supermarket, and the same goes for a portable blender. But these are all things that people need, or at least they want, and you can definitely further grow your company from here. With this stool, you have to get a subscription so that you can receive the monthly email reports in time. But you can also go for the free version. However, this will only notify you regarding two of the friends as the best one you can use for any business is Googled friends. Let me just show you a simple example so you can understand how the tool works and why it's so essential. Think of a product or service that you would use most of the time, but maybe not during specific times like holidays or certain seasons. For instance, bikes are something which we presume you would normally use mostly when the weather is good . So considering this, you would assume that people don't look for bikes there in Christmas or the New Year's Eve . Let's just run a search for this term. Make sure you have the right country and the time frame you want and even category if you wants to. We don't have to do this, and in this result you will get see how the search results have evolved throughout one year for it. Term bikes. If you take a look, you will notice that summer months like June 2019 or July 2018 compared to December around New Year's Eve are much higher. Keep in mind that this number, like 67 in this case, does not represent the search volume. Instead, it's just a number that indicates the degree of popularity for that search term. Let's now compare this to something more time specific, such as some screen again. You wouldn't normally compare these two terms. But I'm only using this so that you can see how the tool works with sunscreen, which is the red line. In this case, you can notice that most of the time, especially as summer ends people's top looking for it because usually people by sunscreen at the beginning of summer. And if you scroll down a bit, you will. Yet the search results compared according to the country you have chosen and this case for each subregion. So maybe you want to sell Mike's locally, and you will also get the series of related queries for each of the terms. We can also use this for long tail keywords, which are essentially more complex keywords, and we'll discuss about them in one of the future lectures. So, for instance, let's say you're deciding what are you want to sell bikes in Los Angeles or New York? You would go for terms like bikes in Los Angeles and lives in New York, and you will see that the trends are actually shifting on. The tendency is towards the red line, which in this case is bikes in New York, and obviously more people are looking to either by or rent a bike in the city. You really need to see what the true intent of your buyers is. You can have a look as the first result in Google. But for this, make sure you use a tool like Sir Pro what? So that you will get the accurate results. So the search rankings that are not influenced by any previous searches or search preferences make sure you have the region, right. I recommend going for the global one. You can enter your domain name or just any random one, because this will only show you whether you rank for the keyword or not. And then enter your key work in this case, Vikes in New York. And once you get the results, you can actually see that an article from medium ranks for it. But click on run search, and if you scroll down a bit, you will notice that the first result is actually a bike sharing system. Then you've got an organization that promotes cycling a guides to using bikes in New York City, a bike shop, another bike rental facility, another bike shop. So in this case, for this particular keyword, it's pretty obvious that people are looking vote to buy a bag and friend of bags. So maybe you can consider how you can make these to work for you at the same time. Now, I will actually leave an assignment for you to task this tool. And I'm really excited to see how the results will turn out for you. See you in the next lecture. 15. Using data to build your strategy: the accuracy of data we have in the past before the technological breakthroughs of today's ages of a tool. The same can be said about the motivation people had when it comes to analyzing the Selena . We could really call this a trend that started 15 to 20 years ago and became a norm today. But even now, people who are responsible for analyzing digital marketing data are still not fully knowledgeable on the stop it and frankly, don't have the right skills to get the right information from the mass of data they have access to you, you have to keep in mind is that it's not just marketers doing market research and data analysis. CEO's managers and team leaders often have to do this, and this fact is especially valid for smaller and medium businesses that don't always have someone employed from the very beginning toe work on marketing. For this reason, many are fine with using easily accessible tools like Google analytics just to get basics fast, like the number of visitors on a website without trying to understand what lies. That's the source of these numbers. A research run by the CMO survey in 2018 had a look, among other topics, at the reasons why companies were previously hesitant to use marketing analytics in the decision making process, and some of them included lack of tools. No be able to take charge of the analytics process. What just the entire procedure being too complex for their abilities and resource is. The CML survey runs this research several times each year, tackling different topics, the latest one. As a matter of fact, the debates very popular topic these days, and that is using artificial intelligence and when she learning for marketing, so you can check those if you're interested, I willing to them in the racial Since section comparative how consumers behaved before the digital era, today's average buyer has 24 7 access to the Internet, which allows him or her to have multiple digital interactions with a friend both before and after a purchase. The fact is that people spend more and more time on the Internet with a few select ones, spending all of their time as their computers that includes for work and leisure time. It's also easier for us as marketers to gather the information we need about our clients this also implies it will be much faster for us to put together irrelevant marketing strategy and keep up with their challenging the men's. In fact, in one of my own research studies ran on small and medium businesses, 73.3% of respondents were positive. Using analytics data for their marketing strategy was vital to helping them understand and keep up with the latest digital trends. They're in mind, with the remaining 26.7% being just not sure or undecided. We now have access to just enough data to put together an effective digital marketing strategy plan. Once gathered, all this data can be used over and over again for multiple strategies. For instance, if you once put together the data you had regarding your most popular website pages, you can re use this information to create future marketing campaigns on social media or even pay per click that will be relevant to your potential clients and even loyal eyes your existing runs and bring back previous clients. But technological advancements have also brought up some issues which marketers air still commonly struggling with. There's just too much later to analyze, and the bigger problem is that this data changes each date. You run your research today, notice you have a great collector rate, and the next week you check and realize you haven't sold anything in five days, and certain types of data are even harder to monitor. Quantitative data like number of visits, number of subscribers Time spent on website is easier to keep track of. Once we're trying to have a look at how our clients behave things. Change of it. Behavior related data like how our users interact with a website or app, is a bit harder to monitor, but it is so important to predicting how existing and future clients will act in the future while Google Analytics and show You the Path on Internet user went through on your website . So you can identify lending pages that page that they used to first enter your website pages where they spend most of their time and exit pages, which can be either a page where they couldn't find the information they needed. Somebody decided to go and look somewhere else for it, or a page where they made a conversion such as a purchase, a contact forms of mission or a newsletter subscription. If you want to go once the further and see how they moved their mouths on the screen where they clicked and which sections of a page they paid more attention to try tools that offer side overlays hostage are is a good example for this offering heat maps to see your most commonly clicked on elements on the website and even recordings. So you can see exactly how every single user, of course, anonymously interacted with your website and even check out those conversion funnels, which Google analytics can show you to. Then, for your newsletters, you can use mail chimp to see the overlays for your newsletter campaigns to data such as lakes on a specific link. So the marketing analysts can understand the needs of all subscribers and adapt future campaigns. And through any of these tools, you will be able to identify the most popular website pages. Here's full features and commonly access internal or external lakes. Really, any data you acquire can be analysed and used for future and strategic campaigns, a study by in Consultancy together with Red Eye in 2018 which I'm going to link to in the resource is section with the mention that they run. A similar study each year shows that, too turns that 66% of respondents say that analytics provided a greatest value, along with user research and customer journey mapping. In fact, the popularity of marketing Analytics, according to E consultancy and Red Eye, remains unquestionable ever since 2014. Obviously, we cannot talk about a future marketing strategy without looking back at past performance. The process of using past metrics is not so easy toe do do to increase the number of metrics and KP eyes like a number of clients. Profit conversion rate, leave number, customer lifetime value, number of leads, client satisfaction, be current visits, CART abandonment rate, number of visitors per day and so many more. The main danger you should never forget about is that there's a chance you'll miss out on a metric that's in fact, essential to your marketing strategies development. Just think about it. Each new technology is also bringing US marketers new metrics to monitor. While we're now looking at how people move their mouths around the website page, the future will definitely bring new advancements, and we'll be able to track eye movement when using the our glasses. If you're interested in more studies related to analytics, here's a list of articles you can check out pauses scores to save them, or you can look for these online right now. But keep in mind that you need access to certain databases, such as Research Gates in order to see them see you in the next electric. 16. Strategic prices, and budgets PART 1: Welcome back to this next section, where we are going to discuss everything you need to consider when setting strategic prices for your product and budgets for your marketing campaigns. But before we move on to them, let's discuss the four p's learning. You might already be familiar with the four p's concept. Every marketer she no product refers to any tenable or intangible products, including services that you want to sell and create a strategy for based on consumer demand . When considering the product for your marketing strategy into cover aspect, such as product life cycles, product need that is to see if there's any meant for your product, and how you can improve your product or service is to match a larger market. Then price, which we're going to discuss in part of this lecture, refers to how people are going to pay for your product. Place essentially refers to where people will be able to see and buy your product, whether that's a physical store, a Web site or just social media. And finally, promotion simply stands for any methods, channels, tools and people you used to get the message and benefits of your products services brand and company across to your idea buyer who soon now that we have defined these important aspect moving onto setting prices, I want you to look at the following two prices for the same product in this case, a notebook. You've got $7 versus $6.99 now, which one seems like a better deal? In other words, which one seems at first sight to be cheaper? 6 99 is a pricing set to get people into thinking that they're getting the cheapest version when it's really the same price. It's all based on psychological research, and I am going to Lincoln article and research on this topic from back in 1996. That proves how people are more likely to buy anything that has a price, which ends in 99 into resources section. So you can read more on this if you are interested. And it's not just extra small differences that can guide people compared to $7. We talked about the 6 99 to 6 94 6 84 6 81 and so on. From this entire list, buyers are likely to buy the cheapest option even if we're talking about just a couple of signs and you're probably making the same choices with the product you buy. And it's not just base prices with also promotions. Everywhere you go online to shop. For one thing or another, you will see differences between the original price and the current one. What are its something like the original price being $8 the sales 16 99 where you can notice that there's really just a difference of $1 or a more complex price that really plays with the mind of the potential buyer who is probably not going to do the Met Cindy Dale. Now keep in line. This next one is not a strategy I recommend, because it really implies lying to people and will in time make you lose the trust of your usual buyers. So let's say you've got one, so it's usual. Price would be somewhere around 300 whenever a sales happens. Retailers often change in states that the original price was a member like 327 and adds the decreased motor price as something like 289. Now, the difference between 302 189 is not that much. But if they state that the original price was even a bit higher than it really WAAS, it will essentially fool people into thinking that it's the right purchase for them. Of course, you are not going to use this technique in this case. A better option would be to just say the correct original price that is $300 just add either in the new price, you wanted to sell the phone for 289 or maybe even a lower price if your budget allows it and really the same. Since your approach applies to any discounts or coupons you want to offering, make sure they are real and can be applied to the real prices people will see on your website or in your store. There are several different money back websites, and maybe you have a similar service from your bank that gives you a certain a month like 5% 4% 15% money back from what you've bought already. But the catch is that you actually get access to the website via a link that is custom might to you. So the thing is that you will see a price that's actually higher than the rial one. So they fool you into thinking that you're getting it for a better price since you are getting some of the money back. Now, I'm not going to show you any really websites for this, since it's not ethical for a marketer to talk about the hidden tactics other websites use. So I'm just going to show you a fictional scenario so that you can spot issues like this in real life on your own. Let's say you've got this pair of shoes on fictional website A. The price shown for them in $79. You go through our money back service, activate your offer for 5% back. Click the link they give you, and you will commonly not with all of them, though as some are spillage, it get the price roughly like $82 which is the price he could be buying the shoes for instead of the $79. Just because you are using one of these services. If you are using these, I recommend you do some tests before you purchase anything. Try different I bees, different advices and user accounts to see if there is anything wrong with the price for the product. Who wants to purchase? Also, dont just test the service once for one product tested for every single one you want to purchase. As there are considerable differences from one retailer to another, stay tuned for the second part of this lecture, where we are going to go into much more detail on how you can set your own budget and not just the prices. 17. Strategic prices, and budgets PART 2: now, when it's austere budget for marketing, you don't need a large budget with digital marketing. That's why this type of marketing is so successful. Anyway. We've already discussed a big the topic of costs in the lecture for building a digital marketing plan. But let's see cell concrete examples of costs you should consider. Of course, it's a good thing that technology has also reduced the costs we put into using the data we acquire online for promotional purposes. The problem here is that once costs are lowered, become petitioned for a batter. Publicity spot is just getting bigger, particularly in industries where competition is tied. For instance, the cost for Google ads for popular keywords such as red shoes or smart TV. Thus, your visibility on the market from an advertising perspective and your sales increasing can be almost impossible. If you don't dedicate a significant amount of your budget towards ads and paid marketing methods, this is how long the keywords appeared and you might already be familiar with them. These are essentially keywords with a lower search volume, so obviously less computing companies are going to bid for these items to show you some examples, I will be using new Patel's tool. I would link it in. The resource is section first. Let's have a look at the keyword red shoes. Once you get the results, look at their volume and scroll down a bit to see some of the key words that have more to draw him. For example, red shoes for prom with 1000 and 600 or the search volume or red shoes, high tops, red shoes, low heel red shoes, knee gers and so on. These are all examples of long tail keywords. Let's have another look at a different keywords, such as smart TV again. Scroll down a bit and you've got anything from smarting. Be target, probably for people who are looking to get their smart TV from Target the store. Then you've got smart TV, 75 inches, smarting the abs and going even lower into the search volume. Smart TV. 22 inches. Swan TV, Remote app, Smart TV would WiFi and so on into the lowest keywords based on the search volume Smart TV Mobile labs. This actually has a low key were difficulty, which means that it will be easy for you to rank organically if you were to create content based on this key work, however, the cost per click is a bit hot, and you can just use this tool for any other types of keywords and find some of these long tail keywords for your own strategies. Although the number of searches and visitors for these keywords is lower, the value they offer is more relevant because people who look for these keywords usually know exactly what they want to purchase, So the chance of them buying from you is higher for ads on social media networks such as Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. It's all about getting the right audience, and this takes you back to our previous lecture on funnels and buyer personas. Getting them right is crucial once again, as it will prevent you from wasting money on impressions and views that won't bring you any sales. You can use certain kinds of tools to have a look at how your competitors are targeting their clients directly from Bayer Page One such tool you can use and honestly the best one if you are looking into getting insights on how your competitors used Facebook ads, is the ad library from Facebook you will find a length with in the resources section. All you have to do here is entering the name of your competitors. For instance, at sea, you select your competitors from the list and make sure you get the country right. Then you will get to see a series of ads. But make sure you choose the right country from this list. In this case, maybe United States and the ad library actually gives you some important insights into how this brand Spain's their money, including the total amount of money spent on ads. And, of course, if you scroll down, you will see every single post they boosted and used as a promotional condoms. So basically anything they used as an ad and all you have to do here is just analyzed. The ads, the words they use, the images and engagement rates. There is also a couple of networks where you should be more careful with your money and how you set your spendings. One such place is you two bads Well for most ads, you will only pay if people watch more than 30 seconds of your video or if they engage in utter interactions with your video, such as clicking on card teasers or Aikins and banners, which essentially means leads won't really buy anything from you or convert, but you can still create brand awareness this way. There's also up to 15 seconds ads YouTube uber it's can skip for these non skip what ads you will usually pay based on impressions. But this means that everyone who gets the ad will automatically be counted as an impression . So you will essentially pay as much as you do once you two would know really outlook and whether you will or not score any sales after such network, where your results for spending a lot of money are not always guaranteed is whatever involves influencers. Most influencers get the one off payment when they boast an image or talk about a product. But there's no guarantee that their audience will purchase your product, either because they are just not interested in it or they don't have enough money. Take this example. Oven insolence, sir. Promoting Land Rover cars How many of her followers, the you think will actually end up playing a car from them? Chances are few, if non so. Keep this in mind when tailoring your influence or strategy, usually with campaigns such as this one for cars. Influencers are used to expand an audience in terms of brand awareness, and not just to get money and sales. I've mentioned before how important it was for people to name your brand as one of the first when you're referring to one word in this case, Although Land Rover is likely not the cell too much from this campaign, doing such campaigns will help them become one of the first brand. Everyone were mentioned when asked to name a few car brands and men. Rover is already lightweight, however, not for all countries and people. That is, in fact, the goal for influence or marketing. Getting your brand out there in front of new audiences as you expend your marketing efforts towards new markets. In this study from emarketer dot com, you can see how the expending budget for digital media is increasing in time, while traditional TV, print radio and others are on Lee going to be lower for years to come. But it's not all about putting money from your marketing budget into promotion. A study by Gartner in 2018 shows that the budget also goes into paying people to do marketing activities, so salaries and any office costs will be going into your marketing plan it strategy than agencies. Not everyone has an in house marketer. That means you'll often pay more for outsiders agencies, in this case to do the marketing for you. Martek refers to any software tools. Resource is even the stock photos you buy and need to create your marketing promotional materials. Analyze your data even of course, there are free tools like Google Analytics. But if you want a bit more information on what your competitors are doing online, you'll have to pay for a tool like a drafts that can show you, among other details, like what your competitors and do your best Ranking websites are with keywords. They rang for any back wings you got and their value and so much more. Notice how compared to 2017 when only 22% of the budget. Whence the words technology in 2018 this tech accounted for the majority of the budget with 29% which is a lot when you consider your companies that pay more for using professional software then they pay their employees or in charge of using these tools. I will link the study in the resources section, and I recommend your bookmark and get back to it each year to see if anything has changed. Indiana setting alleged is all about naming the priorities we previously talked about and making a broke free of calculations to see your fixed and potential extra costs as a starting point. If you're already working for a company, I recommend you get this free budget calculator from grab strategy. The only catch is that need a business email to use it, and it will work best if your business generates at least $1 million each year and profit so as an alternative. Regardless of all this, you can also try this one from whom network is just a marketing budget calculator. If you need to include in your strategic marketing pun 18. Which platforms and channels to use for your strategy: now you don't need to be on all platforms. Keep in mind what you want is The Grand, for instance, is not for everyone. It's a highly visual network, so you're not going to sell your law for services here. Pinterest and tumbler again utter visual networks. So when coming up with your strategy for one specific network, ask yourself next question. Why is your brand unique? What makes people want to interact with your brand? Let's try award association exercise. Think of your brand, come up with all the words that can define it. For instance, there in edgy, friendly, bold, dependable, caring, fresh, tough in elite of feisty sweets or conservative anything. Really, I have created a full list with more positive Brent trades. You can their mood for free in the resources section. Remember, you'll be putting all of these personality traits into the marketing activities, your showing to the world. Whether that's writing a long post or promoting yourself by a unique channel, people have the ability to associate one brand with a person and turn your product or service into their best friend. Let's take your favorite chocolate with mentioned before, as an example, a simple bar of chocolate can become the food choice you will always go back to when you need to take a break or relax after a long day and eating it can be as therapeutic as talking to a friend. And it's not just the case for adults. Children can turn their toys into ideal best friends to having a voice. What are serious or fund is why people follow brands. They want to also see a consistent brand, and nobody wants to follow one brand for a reason and find out they start posting utter stuff in time or even using a different voice. So which platforms do you to go where your audience already is? Remember, you're not building a new social network. You're joining it. Instagram, for instance, is a good opportunity for you to show your brand hold contests, promote your visuals before your brand in German. Let's have a look at some examples. Catherine from Cabinet illustrations, for instance, is an illustrator who sells cute illustrations, stickers, pins in her at the shop, and just her entire feed is based on this idea of cute pink pastel colors. Anything that would appeal to how she has created her brand and her audience. Of course. Another example. This time a celebrity is Halle Berry. Not only is her feet just so consistent and pleasing to the eye, but she also is a strong supporter of fitness. And so she has a lot of stories on instagram debating these topics, including fitness and cooking healthy foods. Then you've got a dog influencer on Instagram. The account is run by a photographer who has a dog and is essentially getting paid to travel mostly across Switzerland and take photos of his dog in certain hotels and other landmarks. And finally, you've got the honest company again. The same idea, this time for baby product is kept throughout the entire feet, and I want you to notice how all of these accounts have a single team. For instance, if you post photos of babies, you are not going to go the next day and start promoting fashion items for women or mad, and the same goes for your own strategy. If you wants to sell your shoes, you're not going to post images of what you ate for dinner. Then there's Twitter as a network, which is surprisingly visual it makes it easy for you as a brand to talk to people, thank them, praise them, as her questions ask questions. And yet feedback and some examples include the ones we've discussed in a previous lecture. For instance, Adobe Care, then lengthen is really a time relevant network where business related topics are usually posted. This is where you are commonly going to find opinion seekers, and also you get the chance to participate in a couple of groups where you might find amazing insights and people to talk to, but remember to choose them wisely. And some of them can be spammy. You've also got YouTube, of course, which is useful for educational and entertaining content. In general, video marketing has just exploded, and it's a great opportunity for you to learn a lot from successful people. For instance, the channel I've been following these days is The Dave Ramsey show, and you have to admit it that people on YouTube, especially the successful ones, are drake of personal branding. So I definitely recommend you also have a look at the channel and how it looks overall and not just at each video, in particular. Another great example and want to show you again from Adobe because they have nailed their marketing is the adobe creative cloud account, where they hold regular life streams, showing you how other designers are doing their work, how they're editing images, creating illustrations, Markov's and so much more. And on top of this, for each life stream, they offer challenges and contests so you can win something if you are successful lenders Facebook, which is a perfect place for posting brand updates, friendly content contests and especially for creating and holding events, whether online in real life or just as light streams. Also, you can consider podcasts. These are on the man's. They're different from radio, and it's so easy to get your podcast out there. On Spotify, for instance, there are podcasts for all kinds of professions and topics from different types of people who have the no heil in a certain industry. You can use these podcasts to hold interviews by choosing people you know, not just for the sake of having a guest. Several podcasts don't have a guest when there's just nobody to talk about a specific subject. That's why having two hosts for one podcast is a good choice. Then there is also lending pages. Thes are a possible clients. First, interaction with your websites and possibly with your product. So most sending pages should focus on the benefits of what you're selling, as well as having one call to action. One will be more than enough as having multiple calls to action can distract people and make it harder for them to choose between one or another. Lending Folio is a great websites where you can find lending page examples for design inspiration. But let's see some real examples of landing pages because the website won't tell you why a landing pages good or no, for instance, this lending page for unicorn, which is an electric scooter from the very beginning. One thing you can notice is that there is no menu on top, so there is no distraction for you keeping you on the landing page where there is Onley. One call to action that one, which leads to you as a possible buyer. Toe wants to get the scooter for a cheaper price, and it's just this same CT A that stays with you throughout the entire lending page, with a couple of frequently asked questions on Lee at the end and other types of terms and services at the very bottom in the food er. Besides these, you gets to see large images of the product. You can also see some of the companies and sponsors of this friend and a list of features and benefits. Remember, we've talked about thes along with the images showing you watch the scooter does and how you can use it. This is just a perfect example of a simple lending page straight to the point, with some large headings highlighting the most important part of the product offer. They are showing you now. Here is another example. This time it's a home page, so you will obviously have your menu on top. And then again, you've got all features, steps, benefits resumed, everything in a clear manner, explaining what their service does. The whole idea behind a lending page is that it should help you understand what their product or offering does just from a couple of looks. So it should take you roughly less than five seconds to realize what the website is about. You can also add some recommendations from existing users or supporters of your brand and, of course, another call to action, even if it's just acting and just add your calls to action as many times as possible. Notice how in this gaze after each paragraph, there is one link needing to you creating an account for dinner service. Lappin Ninja is another similar website you can use for inspiration. And trust me, you will need these websites more than anything because otherwise you'll just be staring at an empty document where you should instead have a lending page. In fact, this is what websites such as these can do for you. They give you those great ideas to get you started with whatever it is you have to build a leading beach or even a newsletter. There is also free landing pages you can download in the freebies section, but I do recommend you customize these and never used them as the art. Just because offering unique content is much better for keeping your brand's image and getting the trust of your audience as a leader in your field. Whatever death is for news letters, you can use really good emails dot com. It's similar to the previous websites, but showcasing newsletters and other types of email messaging, then for promotional and sometimes educational purposes. So let's have a quick look at some of these examples. Here is an example from Alaska on Airline Company, which was sent at the end of the year highlighting some of Bayer stats, such as how many flights they had, how many bags they flew, how many movies people watched on their flights and other such details. And really, the entire newsletter is very fun and appealing, so it's something you might want to read. It's not just a simple black and white message you would get otherwise. And, of course, after all of these data, you get one call to action through which you are encouraged to take a quiz and even when a discount for a flight during the next year, because remember that people are less likely to contribute and help you if you don't give them something back. You can also use really good emails for inspiration when it comes to creating your automated email campaigns to, for example, an email from Airbnb letting users know that they received their customer support west with a few other lengths containing common questions users, my town. Just consider all of your goals and what benefits you're looking for when picking the right platform to use for position and your products in this or brand. Also, stay tuned for the next lecture where we are going to ride your first digital marketing plan together Windy. 19. My process for writing a digital marketing strategic plan PART 1: forget your started with coming up with a marketing strategy. I will take you with me as I create a simple marketing plan for a fictional brand. But keep in mind, this will be just the rough outline, and you will have to get into the details. Depending on the needs of your own brand, you will have access to dis template I am using from the resources section where you can find it yourself and then use it to create your own plan, either as I create my outline or after you watch these two lectures, the first section of the digital marketing plan is the executive summary. Here you will introduce your companies goals, marketing successful in the past, future development plans and other important factors related to your company products, previous achievements and similar objectives for the future. Notice how for each section I've added in blue some of the questions that you might want to consider for each section in particular, so you will have a hint of what each section should contain. Now, for the executive summary notice that I have listed the importance of goals, important company milestones and any other facts about a company brand and main products or services. I'm just going to delete this and inside this table, I am going to add the executive summary. Something like Company A. Just add your own company's name here offers rode bikes to Children and adults who are passionate about living a healthy and act you life so they can keep their fitness levels cats the top. This would be the goal, and here you can add any of the smart goals we talked what else to such as increase our sales by 3% through sponsorships by the end of the year so we can invest in new product development. Then just name your top product and maybe some complementary products like Helmet A and so on do to our leading position on the market. We can easily benefit from our relation ship with our partner, and here you will insert Partner's name could help us from mouth our products as well as bites sponsoring cycling team. And here you will add the cycling teens name. Just keep this simple and develop upon these ideas to make sure any stakeholder who is reading it will be interested in front the very beginning You can also use this section to ride your current status in terms of business, what you have achieved so far and how you did it then moving on to the next section is the business mission statement where you should focus on the purpose of your marketing. Glad how you are already reaching your goals and what you will do in the future to target more objectives. And what's the top value is for your business? For instance, true, this marketing plan company A. Again just add your company's name is looking to distinguish itself from competitors by appealing to our customers needs and pain points by creating a more effective content marketing strategy that will use the words of our leads and existing customers. My communicating how our bikes or just add here your specific product name. Help our customers commute to work and spend their free time in an active manner. Here, you can add one or more goals. Obviously, you can further develop on these ideas and then maybe starting new paragraph like upon the release of our new electric Rome like and insert here that name you can find here what distinguishes your product from the utters whether it's using a new technology, new materials, anything innovative that can make the difference between your product and those your competitors offer. Just developed further on was, you are bringing new to the market, which your future goals are and how they will help your customers. Now I'm just going to skip some parts because they really depend on your own business, product and service. So you just have to develop upon them yourself with your only details. And we're going to move on to the next section for products and services where you essentially name your products and services and what defines each product, right? Anything like bike aid? Let's say this is the name of your product, and then you can focus on color shape features, benefits, how much it costs to produce them, what its prices and so many more details. And of course, you will do this for all of your other product, then moving on to the target market or vital persona section. Here you can focus on the general aspect of the market you're targeting and add the buyer persona or personas. One more you created in a previous assignment in this course by answering questions such as , Who are you targeting? How can you reach your audience? What are your customers need? What are the factors that includes anything external, internal or even people that influence the purchase decisions of your potential customers? And finally, what are some market friends? This is to identify journal information regarding the trends on the market and helping you spot anything that might influence the appearance, evolution and possible disappearance of some trends. Because let's say you start selling plastic free kitchen where and in 10 years time there's no more demand for this. So you have to close your business. I want you to go back to the assignment where you established your buyer persona and take all of the information from their. Put it here instead of these questions, either for one buyer persona or more, and develop upon them by making sure you have covered all of the aspect that could influence your buyers decisions. We'll move on with creating this digital marketing plan in the second part of this lecture . Make sure you complete all of these first before you move onto the next lecture 20. My process for writing a digital marketing strategic plan PART 2: Welcome back, assuming you have completed the first part of your digital marketing plan and you should now have a few pages, not just the outline I'm showing you. We can move on to the next section, and that is your competition again. For this. I have a previous section in the course, which I recommend you go back to check. Put down anything that might concern your own brand business, product or service and and your competitor analysis data in here. You will see there some websites and methods you can use to effectively see how your competitors are nailing were failing and their marketing tactics. Then again, for the SWAT analysis, you have done this in a previous lecture. You can just insert all of your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, tracks and also good friends. I've recommended you also put down, in addition to your SWAT analysis, can come in here and moving on to the next section when it comes to products distribution. Even if you're doing digital marketing, you can still sell your product in a physical shop along with it online. One. It's just the way you're promoting it. That's on the Internet. A few of the questions you can answer here regarding the way in which you are going to take care of product distribution are Where do you sell your product or service is. What are your distribution general? And what are your distribution costs again? I'm just going to skips and sections because each one of them will be different, depending on your own business. For example, you can offer your services locally or digitally. For distribution channels. You can sell them directly to your client or use a retailer, a different online shop or anything that might help you get your product or service in front of a larger audience. Then, when it comes to costs, just think about anything like What are you? Pay rent or you pay for hosting your Web site or any kind of fee you ask from your retailers or when they asked for it from your side. Just consider anything like this regarding the pat your product will follow from the moment you created, whether that's by your own hand. So if it's a handmade product or from a manufacturing company, for example, a factory or a small business that creates your products in your place and just follow this path until the moment the product finally reaches your customer, then moving on to promotion and strategy. Start from defining how you are received at the moment and where you want to get true promotion. After all, you're probably looking to promote yourself for a good reason. So some of the questions you can keep in mind here are What is your current image? How do you get and wants to get more sales? Subscriptions leads depending on Watcher Target is, if you are creating a strategy for a non profit organization, your goal might just be to get more volunteers and not sales. Then what are the main sources for your traffic leave in sales? What is your company's message? What activity are you doing to support your promotion goals? Here? You can go into detail for anything, including offline ads, sponsorships. Who will add social media content, marketing sort of agenda, not organization newsletters, video marketing, influencer, marketing and many more that how do these activities and advertising channels bring you benefits For each promotion strategy, you needs to have one goal and one benefits. Then you can finally move on to your pricing strategy. Consider what you're pricing format is by taking your costs into account. What discounts and special offers do you allow either from yourself or from your retailers ? Do you plan on changing your prices depending on what goes on in the market, that is to respond to your competitors raising or lowering the prices. Just keep in mind that any price change should be justified. So if you're raising enterprise, you should also offer extra value, whether it's better materials, a larger quantity or just extra breaks. Then also consider the budget you are putting into your digital marketing strategy. But make sure you go in great detail for this step. Consider any of your costs and expensive and try to be as accurate as possible while keeping potential extra costs in mind, You can have a second look at the lecture on budgeting and use the tools I recommend to make sure you get an accurate estimate, especially if this is your first time building a digital marketing plan. Then, finally, your last section would be to build a detailed plan for one year, preferably the first year. For each stage you are going toe put in detail everything you are going to do for one year with corresponding dates, goals needed, resource is and costs. For example, let's say your goal is to increase traffic to your website by 9% fruit guest post until the and of the year. For your strategy. Let's see, we're going to higher two people as content writers and another person to do the outreach and pitching for leading websites such as. And here you can add a couple of websites you have in mind. But of course, the people you hire will take care of these, so you don't need to think of everything now, for instance, forms and Cycling Weekly, and then add some more details regarding this strategies such as guests. Both will be submitted each day with the goal of being published twice a week. All guest ALS will include at least one ling to our what site and this wait. Make sure you have any kind of benefits and gold you have in mind for your strategy, even if they are secondary wants, didn't wants. You have already mentioned we'll all still improved. Our search engine optimization tactics and Google ranking have any secondary goals here If you want Teoh, then we'll also hire freelancers. Make sure you cover all aspect of your strategy in this case, if you want to post yes, both, you need someone to write them, someone to create your images and anything that has to do with your ankle. Create illustrations for us, so the guests still will be more engaging. And we'll also buy a maximum of 20 stock photos from Shudder Stock. Now, when it comes to the time frame, just on something like the fifth of July 2020 until the fifth of October 2020 and move on to your budget something like, depending on cough for each website where you want to publish your guest both although their most free then salaries. Freelancers whom you have to pay stock images and videos. Although you might not have videos in mind now you can just put them down in case you will ever need one video just estimated these and below. You are just going to write a lot of other similar strategies again. Just take all of this and put down all of the details for all of your strategies. But keep in mind what you've discovered in your market and competitive research as well. But most importantly, your squat analysis. If, for example, there is one issue that demands attention, you can also detail upon strategies to tackle them. For instance, a problem like low sales in Germany can have as a solution, perhaps increasing the magic for Google and targeting German customers. Now I want to wish you the best of luck with finishing the plan. Make sure you review any of the lectures. You find it necessary. And if you have any questions or need more help with building this, plan yourself, just let me know. Remember that while there is no unique format, each business and marketing strategy is unique. So feel free to personalize the plan with as many details and unique ideas as you'd like, while also keeping in mind any instructions you might have from executives or anyone who has guided you to start building this marketing plan. 21. Yay! Conclusion: we're finally at the end of our course. I want to congratulate you for making it to the end and completing the final assignment. After we are going to review some central ideas, you should have access to your certification, but make sure you have completed 100% of the course first before I sign off. I want us to review the key takeaways from this course, and these are first of all, in case you're not sure where to start. Just get her your inspiration from competitors and other industries and brands as well. Brainstorm. Judge your ideas down, right? Anywhere is that. Define you and build a story. Remember not to limit yourself. Ask your team members or other industry professionals for day or feedback. Any new idea is good. Also get involved. If you think about it, it's natural for you to be involved in your industry and community so you can get your brand in front of larger onions. True, your online presence, which you can mix with an offline want. It's also find toe have multiple goals. But, sir simple. With one large key goal from where you can grow, they focused on your end goal, but make a change Every once in a while, all famous artists, businesspeople and just successful people in general went to changes in time. So be prepared to change every evaluate your priorities. Bulls changing is actually desirable. It means your evolving. But being confused from time to die is still fine. Just set specific goals and reflect on them. Don't forget to develop yourself and your brand before you want your business. Build your soft and hard skills alike. Keep in mind that anything can be achieved if you have strong research skills. ESO promote before you start. This can so difficult when you're incredibly excited to start your business as soon as possible and to sup, but you must gain trust before your launch. Making people wants to be eager to get in touch with you. Find out more about your brand and make a purchase overall. Just stay positive. Don't be afraid. Only this way will you be able to succeed. It's really all in the mind set and being able to keep it up. Even when you feel like your business is not doing well enough, don't put pressure on yourself. I'll go as far as to say that you can't succeed without a strong digital strategy, but there is no such thing as perfect marketing plan. Now, if you have any questions related, the building your own digital marketing strategy and plan, feel free to message me any questions concerning this topic. I hope you have a wonderful day and continue your learning journey. Sees to be for more updates on the scores and in future courses on similar topics. I wish you the best.