Digital Marketing Classes Online

Full Video Transcript

Introduction to Digital Marketing

Welcome everyone to the pillars of digital marketing success. Today we're going to talk about digital marketing. I'm going to give you an introduction to digital marketing, do an overview of the different digital marketing channels, and then share a success framework for marketing. I will stress the importance of market research and share one market research tactic that you can actually utilize.

My name is Nichole McCollum. My company is Captivate Designs. I've been in digital marketing for over thirteen plus years. We provide digital marketing services to businesses involving web design, search engine optimization, and paid search. Those are some of our specialties. I'm also a digital marketing instructor at Noble Desktop, so every quarter or so I teach the digital marketing certificate. I'm also a bona fide foodie, hence some of you might have heard me speaking with John who is on the webinar from Chicago about one of my favorite Italian restaurants in Chicago, Pizzeria Portofino, which is a great restaurant with great food and great scenery. If you ever make it to Chicago, that's a plug for you guys, John.

What Is Digital Marketing

So what is digital marketing? Digital marketing is the marketing of products or services using digital channels, mainly online marketing, and then you have some mobile marketing in there as well. So what is the digital marketing landscape like? In the old days, I'm a two-time entrepreneur. I used to own a real estate school back in 2004 in Brooklyn where we did real estate sales training for salesperson, broker, and continuing education.

When I started that school, I paid $5,000 to throw up a website and I thought okay, that's what I'm gonna need to do and I'm gonna get all the business I can. I really couldn't get business from that. Back then I was really using ads in the Yellow Pages and buses and movie theaters as a way to get the word out about my business. Think about how drastic marketing has changed from the traditional way like Yellow Pages to now. There would be a lead time for me to put my ad in the Yellow Pages of at least a few months, and if I made a mistake I wasn't able to change it until the next time the directory was printed. Whereas now with digital marketing, I'm able to really adapt in real time. I'm also able to make changes in real time, and my advertising is more targeted. There's a lot of advantages to digital marketing.

The Growth of Digital Marketing

Not only that, but what we've seen is that the spend for digital marketing continues to increase worldwide. This year the ad spend was projected to be around 384 billion dollars. Now given the current situation that we are in and a lot of people have pivoted online with their business, I imagine that number is even going to be greater. There's never been a greater need for digital marketing than there is right now. I notice because I'm living it every day as someone who runs a digital marketing business.

I have my family calling me in the middle of the day thinking I'm just here home chilling, and to be honest I'm not. I'm busy. This is my second webinar for the day and probably my fifth webinar for the week that I'm teaching, in addition to doing my regular work. Digital marketing is in demand. In fact, for one of the webinars that I hosted earlier, they told me that today was one of their highest attendance ever, that the marketing topics really work well for them.

Digital marketing is going to continue to grow. If you're exploring a digital marketing career, this is a good time to get in because at least for the foreseeable future, a lot of spend is gonna move online because most people are shopping more online. Also, if you're a small business owner and you've always run it like a brick and mortar business, now is the time to lay the foundation for a solid digital marketing strategy. That's what I've been helping a lot of my clients do—really set a foundation for when we get out of this quarantine to get to a point of recovery, but also building a solid foundation that they can build on and grow their business.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

So why digital marketing? It's measurable. If you ever passed by a billboard, it's hard to tell really how many people are seeing that billboard. There's gonna be an educated guesstimate, I would like to call it. But if you run an ad on Google or on Facebook, you can tell how many people saw that ad and how many people clicked on that ad. You can also tell how many people took a specific action as a result of that ad—how many people made a purchase, how many people joined your email list as a result of that ad. So digital marketing is very measurable.

It's also highly targeted. Once you know who your ideal customers are and who your target audience is, you can plug that into platforms like Facebook, like Google, and say these are the people I want to reach. You're not throwing your money out there at different eyes and hoping that it's going to stick. You're doing highly targeted marketing, and I'm gonna share with you some of the ways that you can research to make your marketing even more effective.

Digital marketing also levels the playing field. It's just me and a team of five, and if I were to tell you some of my clients, you probably wouldn't believe it. Even as a small business, I am able to compete with the bigger guys. I am able to get clients at a higher level. I've consulted with companies at the billion dollar levels who are publicly traded, and I'm just a small company with just me and five people.

Low Barrier to Entry

Digital marketing also has a low barrier to entry. If you're a small business, you can start advertising for a very minimum amount. You can start out trying as little as $500. In fact, when I teach Facebook advertising, I teach people how to start their Facebook advertising with as little as ten dollars a day and how to scale that. The barrier to entry for a small business is not very high.

If you're looking to get into digital marketing, you're lucky because you do not need to go and have a four year degree in marketing. Digital marketing is a relatively new discipline, a relatively new field. I am completely self-taught. Again, because paying companies to help me get results didn't work out, I had to really learn how to do it for myself. I learned, and that's why I walked away from my real estate school and entered digital marketing. I think it's safe to say 13 years later that I made the right decision.

I am so grateful that I chose this career because even as the world is turned upside down, I'm still able to continue working because I work remotely. Many of my clients are throughout the US, UK, Canada. I've worked with people from Prague. I have a client who owns a hotel in Marrakech. I work with people virtually all the time, and still my business hasn't been really affected that much. I also work with a virtual team. That's the great thing about it—if you are looking for a career where you can work from anywhere, digital marketing offers you that opportunity.

Digital Marketing Channels

There are various digital marketing channels, and a channel is really the vehicle used to get your products or services in front of your desired audience. How do you get people to discover you? How do you get people to know, like, and trust your business?

One of the main channels is search marketing, and search marketing deals with search engines specifically. You have Google, which is the number one search engine worldwide. You have Bing, which is owned by Microsoft. Yahoo is also a search engine, but they actually tap into Bing, so the results you see on Yahoo are actually populated by Bing. Then you have Baidu, which is the largest search engine in China, and Yandex, which is the largest search engine in Russia. DuckDuckGo is a small search engine here in the US that we see market share is going up, but it's not going up significantly. Their big thing is all about privacy, about securing your information.

Paid vs. Organic Search

With search engines, you have both paid and organic traffic. Paid traffic you can do on a search engine like Google, or you can do Bing Ads for example, and you basically have to pay per click. How that works is that you are able to bid on keywords that people are typically entering into the search engine as a query. You would tell the search engines how much you're willing to pay, and then your ads go into an auction. Once someone clicks on your ad, you pay per click.

The problem with pay-per-click is that sometimes it can be very costly. I have a client who is a plumber, and for plumbing you can pay as much as forty-five dollars per click. That's just per click—it's not necessarily a lead or sale, although Google does have Google Local Services Ads which you pay per lead. That's also a part of paid search. You know it's an ad because it's usually denoted with "Ad" at the top. Below that is the organic results, which is powered by SEO. So in search marketing, you have both paid and the SEO side of things, and you can do SEO on both Google and Bing and the other search engines as well.

The Power of Search Marketing

The thing I love most about search marketing is that it really brings people who are searching for your products and services to you at a time when they truly need it. I like to compare that to social media marketing, which is using social channels to increase brand awareness, build a community, and get the word out about your business to generate leads and sales. But with social media marketing, you're pushing your message out there and hoping that people are receptive to it.

Don't get me wrong, social media marketing has a place in your strategy. It can be excellent for building brand awareness and for nurturing your leads or getting people to come back and complete a purchase. But with paid search, people are already searching for you. They're just asking, "Which business should I do business with?" or "Who are the vendors available?" You can look at search as an online marketplace. Search is really powerful.

I am a big proponent of search marketing because it works. It works for me. Just last week I was able to get two clients just through my SEO campaign. I know this works, and I'm passionate about that. I love helping small businesses and other companies really leverage the power of this channel to grow. It's a long-term investment. With search engine optimization, you don't see results right away. It takes about three to six months or even longer for you to start seeing results. But if you are in it for the long haul, I like to compare it to an annuity—it's gonna keep providing you with results.

Social Media Marketing

I talked about social media marketing, which is really utilizing social networks. You have Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest. Now you have TikTok. You have LinkedIn, which is more of a B2B platform. Using social media is great for building brand awareness. If you've ever bought something online and left something in your shopping cart online, and you went to Facebook and then you saw an ad for it, that's a form of retargeting, which I think is a great and important element of social media marketing aside from just doing regular ads. I think that's where social media gets to be really powerful for platforms like Facebook.

Platforms like LinkedIn can be really valuable. I use LinkedIn in a really strategic way to build partnerships. I'm not constantly posting content on there, but I'm using it more as a tool to source prospects, reach out to them, and build one-on-one relationships.

Email Marketing

Then you have email marketing, which I believe should be a part of just about everybody's strategy. I am really passionate about email marketing because whether you meet someone through a search engine, most people—less than 10% of people that come to our website—buy right away. The reason for that is because the average user compares up to seven different websites before they make a decision. Email marketing is a great way for you to continue to nurture that relationship and get people to buy from you. Email marketing is really using email to promote your products and services, but most importantly to build relationships with your email list or with your audience.

Display and Video Advertising

Display advertising is really using banner ads or other visual media to promote your products or services. Generally, display ads are seen on websites like the New York Times. Google has a huge display ad network that you can leverage. It's made up of millions of websites that you can choose to promote your ads on. Display advertising is really good for brand awareness and it's also very cheap, but the conversions on display ads are very low. If you're a new company and you want to create brand awareness, display advertising can be really good for that.

Feel free as I go along to ask questions in the chat as well. I'm gonna be taking some questions, so feel free to ask.

Then you have video marketing, which is another channel. Video marketing is really using video to promote your products and services. Video marketing is a very powerful channel as well because what we see is that video marketing tends to increase conversions. For example, 75 million people watch videos every day, so it's a really powerful platform. As we go through this pandemic, what we're seeing is more and more people are utilizing video. People are getting on IG TV, they're getting on Instagram Live, they're getting on Facebook Live. Then of course you have platforms like YouTube as well, which is in itself one of the top websites in the world.

There's a lot of different ways that you can leverage video marketing. Studies show that if you have an explainer video that explains your products or services, you're more likely to convert that person into a sale. That person typically will go on and make a purchase from you. Video is also a very powerful channel that you can leverage to continue to educate people and also to convert them into a sale.

Content Marketing

Then you have content marketing. Content marketing is really a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience and ultimately to drive profitable actions. Content marketing is great for building thought leadership, it's great for educating your audience, and it's great for just about every stage of the funnel which I'm gonna talk about—whether you're looking to create awareness or whether you're looking to move people to a purchase, content marketing can be extremely great for that. By the way, all of these topics, with the exception of video marketing, are covered and offered by Noble Desktop as individual classes.

So which channel is the best for service sales rather than product sales? I would always say search marketing is always a great channel to start with, but I'll show you how you can get to that point because it's not just about choosing a channel, but it's about making sure that it's backed by research. That's where a lot of people go wrong—they tend to just focus on executing a tactic without really doing the research to see if that is where their audience really is.

Earned, Paid, and Owned Media

There are three ways to leverage digital marketing. You can leverage digital marketing through earned media, paid media, and owned media. Earned media is media that you earn. You got mentioned in the press—you earned that. Someone came to your restaurant, they had a really good experience, and then they posted on social media—you earned that. You wrote a really great piece of content and people liked it and then they started sharing it—that is earned media.

Paid media is when you utilize search ads or social media ads. You're advertising on Google, on Facebook, on Instagram, on Twitter. You're paying for the opportunity to show your ads to those audiences.

Then you have owned media, which is media that you own. Your website—you have greater control. Your content that you produce that lives on your website, and of course your email list. That's why it's really so important for you to build an email list, because even if you have a social media profile, you don't own that. Facebook rules can change anytime and you can lose that. I know people who have been locked out. As a matter of fact, one of the companies that I consulted with, one of their clients got locked out from Facebook. They got put in Facebook jail and they reached out to me to see if I could help them.

That is one of the reasons why I am a big proponent of yes, go onto these platforms and build a community, build a following, but also make sure you're driving those people back to your website so you can collect their email address. Because you own that, and you can then follow up and market to those people at any time.

The Marketing Funnel

That brings me to the different stages of the buying journey. Basically, this is referred to as a marketing funnel. At the very top you have awareness, and that's where someone has now become aware that they have a problem. This is when they start seeking a solution. You have to reach people when they are at that stage where they've identified they have a problem and they start looking for a solution. They may look in various places—they may go to a search engine and look, they may turn to friends and family for a recommendation. That's why it's important for you to understand who your audience is and where they're turning when they are in that stage.

Then you have consideration. Typically what happens is that they will have a lot of different options that they're gonna consider. What you need to do at the consideration stage is very different to what you need to do at the awareness stage. At the consideration stage, you might be providing different content or you might be using a different channel or tactic to reach your audience.

Then you have the decision stage. This is where they've evaluated all the options available to them, they've made a decision, and now they're ready to buy. Again, you might have a different strategy at this stage as well.

Customer Retention

Then you have the retention stage. This is when someone becomes a customer—they've already made a purchase from you. This is where a lot of people fail because they think, "Okay, I already got the sale, that's it." But this is where your marketing should truly amplify even more, because it's five times cheaper to keep your existing customer than to get a new one. If you've heard the saying, "It's cheaper to keep her."

When I look at my own business, I saw that 80 percent of my revenue came from my existing customers. I'm at a point in my business to develop what I called a customer success plan—to make sure that I had at least a 90 percent customer satisfaction rate, to make sure that I put steps in place to get my customers to refer me to other people, to make sure I put steps in place to let my customers know of the other products and services that I offer. At each one of these stages, you're gonna have a different strategy, a different tactic to reach the customer.

The Non-Linear Customer Journey

The other thing that you need to pay attention to is that the customer journey is not linear. Someone might initially find you through a direct mail piece that you might have mailed out, and then they'll go to your company website, and then they might attend an event, and then they might follow you on social media, and then they will move into the research stage where they're going back to your company site, and then they might go into social media.

This journey is not linear, and it's really important for you to understand all the steps and all the touch points that your customer takes before they make a purchase or before they become a customer. Because if you can do that, then you will be able to meet your prospects where they are. You'll be able to meet your audience where they are and really take them through that customer journey and ultimately lead them to becoming a customer.

According to Forbes, over 98% of customers are switching between multiple devices in a single day. What does that tell you? You need to make sure that you are not just focusing on desktop or just focusing on one channel, but you're also focusing on the different devices that your audience uses and the different channels that they may be using as well.

Example Customer Journey

This is an example of my customer journey. Typically someone will find me on Google and then they'll come to my website. When they come to my website, I'll capture a lead because most likely they're requesting a quote or they might be downloading a white paper from my site. Then I typically follow up with a phone call and an email. Again, I'm nurturing the relationship. Then they may go back and look at online reviews, so having an A+ online reputation is important. They may then search for a coupon to see if they can save by doing business with you, and then they may come back to the site to complete the transaction.

As you can see here, there's a lot of different touch points, and that's one of the reasons why you have to know so many different aspects of digital marketing. Now don't get me wrong, there are people that only specialize in one area, but it can be very beneficial to you if you have several of these different skills in your toolbox. That is why Noble Desktop offers a full digital marketing certificate that goes into all of these different skills to teach you hands-on skills that you will need to succeed at digital marketing.

The Hub-and-Spoke Model

The hub-and-spoke model is all about making sure that whatever channel you're utilizing, you're always driving people back to your website. The reason for that is because you have less distraction when you drive people back to your website. If your audience is on social media, they're being bombarded with a lot of different ads at different times of the day. But if you drive them back to your website, they're just focused on you and the action you want them to take. That's a really important part—always make your website the hub of where you drive your traffic.

Marketing Success Framework

Now I want to share with you this marketing success framework that I think is really important for building a successful digital marketing strategy. The first is to really define your business strategy, and your business strategy is really your overall priorities for your business. Then you have a customer strategy—who is it exactly you're trying to reach? And then you can implement a successful marketing strategy.

Your business strategy includes defining your mission statement. Why does your company exist? Usually when I teach workshops and I tell people to define their mission statement or why their company exists, some people say it's because they want to make money. But you got to have something that's greater than just making money. You gotta have something that consumers will truly buy into.

Also, you want to have a strong value proposition. Your value proposition is your promise to your customers. What will people get as a result of doing business with you? This could be a tangible result, like you can say people will get a 50% increase in growth, or within 30 days they'll lose 30 pounds, for example. Your value proposition can be a number, something that's tangible.

Then you need to have a unique selling proposition. How do you stand out from your competitors? What sets you apart? This is gonna be one of your core positioning statements, so it's important for you to get clear on all these things before you decide to develop your digital marketing strategy.

Customer Strategy and Target Audience

Then you want to define your customer strategy, and the key part of that is identifying your target audience. Who is best suited for my products or services, or who are my products or services best suited for? Take me for example—I target small businesses. Small businesses are really my core target audience. But at a more granular level, if you were to ask me who are your ideal customers, I would tell you my ideal customers are small businesses who are 10 employees or less, where I get to work directly with the decision maker.

How do I know that? Because over time I found that these are the people that pay me my price, these are the people that value my services the most, these are the people that I enjoy working with because I don't have to go through a lot of red tape. It doesn't mean that I don't work with larger clients—I do. It just means that I have a primary focus audience.

There are some people out there who are best suited for your products or services, and you want to identify who those people are because that makes it a lot easier for you to sell your products or services. It makes it a lot easier for your marketing or your ad spend to go a lot further because you're targeting those people that are more likely to buy from you. And you want to follow up with your customer persona. Your customer personas are really characteristics of people who are in your target audience. You want to get to know your customer personas on a deep level because when you do that, you can create marketing that truly resonates with your audience.

Elements of a Digital Marketing Strategy

I'm going to share with you some elements of a digital marketing strategy. In the digital marketing certificate, we go into this as a workshop and go through all of these tactics specifically. Of course, we're just one hour so we don't have time to go into all of them. Your goal is that larger goal that you want to achieve for your organization. That might be to increase sales by 50 percent this year.

Your objective is a specific step that you need to take to achieve that larger goal. You might say, "Okay, my goal is to increase revenue by 50 percent this year," and you might look at your products or services and say, "I want to sell more of this particular product or service because that's going to get me to my goal faster, or that's what's more in demand."

Your tactic is how you're going to achieve your objectives. Your tactic would be like the platforms you use or how long you're going to run your campaign for. Then you have KPIs. KPI stands for key performance indicators, and these are really indicators of success. How are you gonna know that you're on track to achieve your objective? Are you performing below or above? That's really important to know.

Resources are what resources you're going to need to be able to carry out the tactics. That might include resources in terms of time or money. It may also include people—whether you have the talent in-house or you need to source outside talent. It can also include resources after your creative—what type of creative would you need, what type of content would you need? Those are the things that you need to build into your digital marketing strategy.

Measurement and Optimization

Then you have measurement. Did you reach your goal? Did you reach your target? Did you reach the indicators of success that you needed to reach? Then you have the final step, which is optimization. One of the things that's important about marketing is that you can always learn from a tactic that you've implemented. You can always learn from the results you get, whether the results were positive or negative. If you get negative results, you learn what's not working. If you get positive results, you learn what's working and what you should be doing more of.

I think this is where a lot of people fail, especially when it comes to small businesses. They will go on to social media, they might run an ad, the ad might not have performed for them, and then they throw up their hands and say, "I give up." The reality is it takes time for you to learn what's working and what's not working. You want to go through a process of refining your strategy until you get to an optimal area where you're satisfied with the results. We take you through that entire process in our digital marketing strategy class.

The Importance of Strategy

Why do you need a strategy? Sun Tzu said, "Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory, and tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat." You don't want to be defeated, so we want to make sure that you're setting yourself up for success. You probably hear that TikTok is hot right now and you're probably thinking, "Maybe I need to be on TikTok." Well, guess what—you probably don't need to be on TikTok if your audience is not on TikTok. I am not even on TikTok because I know that's not where my audience is. That is why you need a digital strategy, so you can really identify which platforms you should be utilizing to reach your ideal customers and your target audience.

Market Research Fundamentals

Where should you start? You want to start with market research. Market research is the process of gaining insight into your market to determine their needs, what they value, and the best tactics, channels, and messaging you should be using. As far as the research says, insights-driven businesses are growing eight times faster than global GDP. What that means is if you're using data and analytics, you're more likely to win customers by doing data-driven marketing.

The first step is understanding your audience. Who are your ideal customers? What are their demographics? Are they consumers or are they businesses? You want to get clear on that. What are their pain points? What are the challenges that they're having in their life that they need to solve? And what is the outcome that they desire? Because when you determine that, you can create messaging that's truly gonna resonate with them.

Understanding Customer Outcomes

I'll give you an example. I love grilling branzino—and I told you guys I'm a foodie, so I use a lot of foodie references. I love grilling branzino in the summer. In fact, I'm already planning to have grilled branzino this weekend. I had a cast iron grill that I used, but the skin of the branzino kept sticking on it. One day I was watching Lifetime television and I saw the George Foreman Grill, the smokeless grill, and it said all these things about getting the marks just like if you were grilling outdoors, and it's nonstick and all these things. Guess what I did? I ordered it.

Why did I order it? Because it hit on all the key points of what I was looking for. Unless you know what the outcome and desire is that your audience needs, you're not going to be able to effectively connect and turn them into a prospect or lead or customer. You really need to understand at a very granular and deep level what is the outcome that your audience is seeking and what are the challenges that they're facing.

Then you need to know what platforms they're on. You want to look at it from an 80/20 perspective. You want to look at 80% of your audience—what's the number one platform they use? Because there may be 20% who are on Instagram, but 80% are actually on Facebook or LinkedIn. You want to know the majority of your audience and what's the number one platform they use.

Competitive Research

Then you want to research your competitors. Why do you want to research your competitors? So you can set yourself apart, so you can understand your key differentiators. You can look at what are their top online traffic sources because this is also going to give you insight into what channels you really should be leveraging as well.

You also want to look at what their strengths and weaknesses are because this can help you with your unique selling proposition. Here's a tip: if you want to really understand some of the weaknesses of your competitor, go on to review sites. Go into Google reviews, go into Yelp reviews, and see what are some of the complaints that their customers are complaining about. See if there's an opportunity there for you to fill that vacuum and make that one of your strengths, because that could be one way that you can differentiate yourself.

Then look at what is their value proposition, because you don't want to have the same claims as they do. You want to be able to set yourself apart in that way. Then you want to map your customer journey. How will potential customers interact with your brand at different stages of the funnel that I talked about, the marketing funnel? When you do that, you will know also what platforms you need to be on and what content you need to produce. That's a really important part.

Mapping the Customer Journey

How do you map your customer journey? You simply ask them. Ask them what are the steps they took before they became a customer. I told you I got two new clients last week, and yesterday I was speaking to one and I said, "Why did you choose me?" She went through all the different steps that she took before she got to me. She even told me what keywords she searched for, then she came to my website and filled out the form. A lot of this can be done just by speaking to your audience as well.

Types of Data for Market Research

Now where do you find this data? I'm sure that's a question that many of you have. There are three types of data that you can access. There's first-party data, which is data that you own. You can get this, for example, if you have a point of sale system where you're collecting information, or if you have a CRM, a customer relationship management tool. You can turn to that for some of the data. Just going through the history of your customers and looking to see their behavior, how much do they spend with you on average—these are some of the data that you can get that's within your own business, and this is some of the most high-quality data.

Then you have second-party data, which is data from strategic partners. Think about credit card companies who share data with airlines for the purpose of points programs. That's an example of second-party data.

Then you have third-party data. Third-party data is paid data, so you can gather that from both online and offline sources. An example of third-party data is Experian.com, which is a credit reporting agency. They do collect data on us as well.

Using SimilarWeb for Competitive Analysis

I am going to share with you a third-party data tool called SimilarWeb. Some of the information that you can access from SimilarWeb is competitive information. On SimilarWeb, you can look at your competitors. It's gonna give you some engagement metrics like estimated visits, time on site, pages per visit, bounce rate—these are some of the things that you can see for your competitor's website using SimilarWeb. You can see where customers came from, what traffic sources your competitors are receiving, where they're getting the most traffic from, what countries people are coming from, and also which sites are referring traffic to them.

Maybe they're getting traffic from the New York Times. You can also gauge audience interest—what are some of the affinity categories, what are the different topics that people who visit that specific site are interested in.

So I'm gonna take you to SimilarWeb and just show you what I'm talking about. Let me know if you can see my screen in the chat. I just want to make sure you should see SimilarWeb. Okay, good. Great, thank you so much.

SimilarWeb Demonstration

I have Zoom.us here. I came to SimilarWeb, I entered Zoom.us, and as you can see here there's some KPIs, some metrics here. You can tell this is pretty reliable because it shows in February that Zoom's traffic just took off. Right now it's showing you that back in February they had over 106 million visitors, and in March they had over 803 million visitors. It tells you the average duration that people spend on Zoom is five minutes, and average pages per visit is 3.87. So people on Zoom are pretty engaged.

Also, it tells you their bounce rate. Bounce rate is when someone visits a site and they leave without visiting any other page. Generally, you want to be concerned if this number is 60 percent or greater in most cases, but as you can see, Zoom doesn't have a huge bounce rate issue. It also tells you that the majority of Zoom traffic comes from the United States, but also the United Kingdom as well.

Then as you scroll down, it tells you the traffic sources. It says the majority of Zoom traffic comes from direct traffic, meaning someone basically went directly to a browser and typed in Zoom.us. Which is true because actually that's how I tend to access Zoom. But what's even more telling is it tells you that Zoom has really great brand name recognition. That's why people are able to go directly to the site—because they're familiar with the brand. That makes a lot of sense because Zoom has been in the news a lot lately. Zoom has gotten a lot of social media mentions online, so they've gotten a lot of free press, which is earned media. Some of it negative and some of it positive—positive because they're giving free access to schools, but negative because they've had quite a bit of security issues.

It shows you they have some referral traffic, about 8.69 percent, and then 14.23 percent from search. So search is the second largest. Social media is very little, and this is important to note because we all hear about social media and we find social media to be very sexy, but in most cases social media is not driving a lot of traffic to websites. Social media, as I said, has a place in your strategy, but it works well for certain specific tactics. You have to know the right tactics to really leverage social media.

Then email marketing—they have about 3.6 percent email, which I expect as well because I actually do use Zoom and I've never recalled getting an email from them, so they probably don't do a lot of email marketing. And their display advertising is very low.

Applying Competitive Insights

Now if you are one of Zoom's competitors, you might want to ascertain that maybe you should be putting a lot of money into creating brand awareness, and maybe you should also be investing in search marketing, which is search engines like Google or Bing, because those are the two top traffic sources.

Then you have the referral traffic, and the referral traffic tells you what websites are sending traffic to Zoom's website. We see here Messenger, and then UCLA, and then you have Facebook and YouTube. These are some of the sites that are sending traffic to Zoom.

Then if you look at search, it tells you like what are their top organic keywords, meaning SEO—what are people searching for. Again, it shows you that Zoom has very good brand awareness because they're doing what we call branded search in SEO. You learn all about this in our SEO class as part of the certificate. Zoom is not spending a lot of money on paid search. You can see that paid traffic is 0.05 percent, which is extremely low.

Then again it shows you what social media platform Zoom is leveraging—they're actually doing WhatsApp, and Facebook is the number one platform. So again, you're gaining a lot of insight from this, and you can use this to build your digital marketing strategy, to understand better which platforms you should be using. Display advertising—they're really not doing a lot of that as well.

Then if you come down here, it shows the audience interest, the affinity categories—what are they interested in. A lot of people are interested in computer electronics and technology, news and media. This changes depending on the website that you enter. Then it tells you what topics are surrounding Zoom with this topic cloud here. You can gain insight here in terms of content topics that you might want to utilize. Then it also provides you with similar websites so you can look at other competitors.

One note I want to tell you: when you're evaluating competition, you want to evaluate competitors who are actually investing in digital marketing. If you consider someone who's a brick and mortar a competitor and they're not doing any digital marketing, that's not really gonna benefit you. Your competitors are people who are doing digital marketing as well, and that's why SimilarWeb is a good place to start because you can get a feel for what type of digital marketing your competitors are doing, if any at all.

Questions and Answers

Let me see if I have any questions here. "Do you tend to hire out for market research or somehow figure it out on your own?" Some people hire for market research, some people do it themselves. I tend to do it myself.

"I'm a freelance filmmaker and motion graphic designer. Should I get into digital marketing or content marketing?" Content marketing is a channel of digital marketing. Content marketing is built into digital marketing. In fact, content marketing and SEO go extremely well together because with SEO you do need to create a lot of content.

"Can you put your own website into SimilarWeb? Would that be helpful?" Yeah, you can, but if you have your website with Google Analytics set up, you will be getting this data in Google Analytics as well. It's just that you don't have access to your competitor's Google Analytics, and so that's where SimilarWeb comes in handy.

"How do you do market research yourself?" Surveys, absolutely. I also do interviews—phone interviews with my customers, with my prospects, just like I talked about. You'll be surprised how much information you can get that way.

Building Your Marketing Strategy

At this stage, you're better prepared to develop your marketing strategy once you've conducted your market research, because you'll be able to get greater insights on your audience and your competitors. You should now be able to better identify what channels and tactics you should be leveraging and the type of messaging that will resonate with your audience. Then you can build your customer persona.

What is made up of your customer persona? Demographic data—things like age, gender, location, marital status, and other demographic data. Then you have firmographic data, and firmographic data is if you're in the B2B sector, meaning you're a business that targets other businesses. You want to know what is the size of the business, what is the annual revenue of the business, how many employees does your ideal target audience have, who is the decision maker in the company, what's their title. It's so pivotal to know this information because then when you do know that information, you can target them more precisely.

You also want to understand their behaviors. What are the sites they visit, what are the things that they do, what are they interested in, who are they interested in? Do they follow Oprah, for example, or are they interested in wellness and health? These are really important. And what are their goals, and again, what are their pain points.

Customer Persona Example

Typically what you do is you would develop several customer personas—at least maybe three to five customer personas that you might create. This is an example of a customer persona by Venngage that they did for an app that allows people to read and write. As you can see here, they plotted out the demographics, the goals, and the reading habits. This customer persona is a working document for when you are developing your digital marketing strategy because you can use it to develop your creative, you can use it to develop your content, you can use it to identify the different audiences that you're gonna target on different platforms as well.

Digital Marketing Certificate Overview

If you want to take this even further and go beyond the seminar, I want to invite you—I'm stretching a hand to you to basically enroll in the Noble Desktop digital marketing certificate, where we cover website fundamentals. You're gonna learn what it takes to build an effective website that's gonna convert. Content and email marketing—we're going to show you how to do that, and these classes are very hands-on and practical. You have a lot of workshops in the class. SEO—you work on an SEO project, either your own or for a company. Google Ads—you're gonna learn how to run Google Ads. Social media marketing—we cover Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. And then of course Google Analytics, because once you're running these campaigns, you need a way to measure your results so that you can improve and optimize your results.

Right now all the classes are online, but you have the benefit of retaking the class for up to one year. The next digital marketing certificate starts next week, which is the 28th. As I said before, digital marketing is more important than ever before. Web usage is up 50 percent from the same period last year, and The Drum did a survey and they found that 14% of client leaders said that they will be moving their budgets from offline to online marketing.

Now is really the time if you're considering a career in digital marketing, or you want to leverage digital marketing to grow your business, to take part and really capitalize on the opportunity that digital is offering right now. Now is a great time to set that foundation.

Special Offer and Closing

I've also spoken with Noble Desktop, and just as a one-time offer—because Noble Desktop doesn't really give these type of discounts—they are offering two hundred and fifty dollars off the digital marketing certificate if you register by tomorrow. This is a one-time offer, it won't come again. So if you're interested, I would like to invite you to register.

I'm happy to stay for a few more minutes and take some questions. If you want to ask me about a digital marketing career, if you want to ask me about starting a digital marketing business, I'm happy to give you some feedback on that as well. And if you want to know how to use digital marketing to grow your business, I can talk to you about that as well.

If you're interested in registering, you can go to the link that I just shared with everyone and you can sign up. Yes, I do consult, so feel free to reach out to me. Thank you all for attending, and have a wonderful holiday weekend and be safe.