DIGITAL MARKETING FOR EVERYONE
Class Introduction
 Who are you? What is your business? What do you want to learn?
 We’re going to learn all the tools you need to be a complete digital marketer
 Make mistakes, keep learning and give feedback
 Recommended books: ericmorrow.com/books
Class 1 – Identifying your audience, how you can reach them, using email effectively
Class 2 – Connecting with your audience, blogging/writing, using social channels
Class 3 – Search optimization, goals and analytics
Class 4 – Lean Startup and your complete marketing strategy
Day 1 - Email
1. Introductions
Who?
2. TARGET DEMOGRAPHIC
Takeaways
 Who is most likely to buy something?
 Don’t be generic. Be very specific. Your demographic doesn’t include
everyone.
 What is your story? Why are you doing what you do?
In the chart below, circle the ONE word in each category that best describes the
person who is most likely to purchase your product. Make your own composite.
Stereotype
Location Income Age Sex Favorite Magazine
Soccer Mom
UWS
Corporate
Exec.
100K
35
F
Lucky
Financial 250K +
50
M
Economist
Hipster
Brooklyn 50K
23
M
Something you’ve never heard
of.
Student
NYU
10K
19
F
Wired
Retiree
Queens
30K
65
F
Golf Magazine
Sports fan
Bronx
40K
27
M
Sports Illustrated
Links
 Book: The Long Tail for internet niche - http://amzn.to/TYWAtT
How?
3. WEBSITE CONTENT
Takeaways
 Your website is home base for your company.
 Produce educational, interesting or helpful content for your customers.
 The four most common types of content are text, pictures, video and audio.
List one of each of these types of content for your website:
Writing _________________________________________________________________________________
Picture _________________________________________________________________________________
Video _________________________________________________________________________________
Audio _________________________________________________________________________________
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Links
Wordpress.com, SquareSpace.com
Book: Don’t Make Me Think (web usability and calls to action) http://amzn.to/13ct4Gf
Book: Advanced Web Analytics analyzing web visitor traffic http://amzn.to/Zzo7Hz
Book: Digital Body Language understanding web visitor traffic http://amzn.to/VH6kLl
4. EMAIL MARKETING
Takeaways
 Your customer database is the cornerstone of your business.
 Email has the best bang for your buck out of every tool in this book.
 Email campaigns create a relationship with your customers.
 Every email should be both a gift and actionable (Call-To-Action).
List two good reasons to send an email blast to your database.
1. _________________________________________________________________________________
2. _________________________________________________________________________________
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Links
Mailchimp.com
Vertical Response
Constant Contact
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Book: Don’t Make Me Think (web usability and calls to action) http://amzn.to/WFDpny
5. SOCIAL MEDIA
Takeaways
 Don’t sell on social media.
 Create a community.
 Bring your fans inside your process.
 Tell your story, show some personality.
What are three things you can do on social media?
1. _________________________________________________________________________________
2. _________________________________________________________________________________
3. _________________________________________________________________________________

Links
Book: Groundswell - http://amzn.to/13ct4Gf
What?
6. Email Campaigns
a. Lists
i. Contains all your people/customers.
ii. Add enough info about people to be useful (ie: are they
customers, website visitors, first point of contact, last point of
contact, purchases)
b. Subject lines (open rates) and Call to action (click-through rates)
c. Choosing an email provider (I use MailChimp)
d. Split testing subject lines, email content
e. Creating “campaigns”
f. Look and feel for emails
Email Exercises:
1) Who is going on your list? What info do you want to know about them?
2) Come up with three emails you want to send. Have two radically different subject
lines for each. Include the link or call to action.
Format:
Goal of email:
Subject line 1:
Subject line 2:
Call to Action:
3) Write an email. Include links and images. Analyze email with partner and
writing checklist.
Technical
7. 10 minute walkthrough of setting up email campaign for World Café with
only stereotypes (French baguettes, Thai pad thai, etc)
a. Record to YouTube with screencasting software
b. Steps:
i. Campaign and design
ii. List
iii. Content
iv. Pictures
v. Links
vi. Call-to-Action
vii. Test email
viii. Scheduling
8. Setup personal campaign in class
Finish
9. Explain the rest of the course
10. What to work on during the week – write some emails, blog posts, have more
than one version, think about your goals for your business
Rules for Writing for the Web
The keys to writing everything: speak fearlessly from the heart, get to the point
immediately, keep the message simple and focused, and use the fewest words you
can. - Vivek Wadhwa
a. Rule #1: Make your readers care
b. Add value and educate your readers
c. Keep your writing short, simple and substantive
d. Avoid big words or jargon
e. Meet your audience where they are. (Beginner to advanced)
f. Follow your customers journey, write for all steps of customer journey
g. Frequency – Doesn’t matter! Be relevant and interesting
h. Length – Like a Miniskirt – Long enough to cover the subject, but short
enough to keep it interesting
i. Build editorial calendar, if you want, with themes
j. Where writing happens:
i. Social media sites
ii. Emails
iii. Web pages, product pages, Apps
iv. Blog
v. Search results
vi. Intro videos
vii. Tag lines
k. Where writing gets read
i. Computer
ii. Tablet
iii. Smart phones
Writing checklist - Oldies but goodies
One idea per paragraph
Break up blocks with headings and subheadings
Meaningful headings (not clever or cute)
Use bullets sparingly (to highlight key details)
Be direct, use the active voice
Use short, declarative sentences (makes a statement)
Use short, real, everyday words
Write for humans not machines (how you would actually talk)
Be brief for headlines, and allow space for re-sharing message
Make links count with descriptive keywords
Have a point of view, a personality, CARE about what you’re
writing about
If you can cut it without changing the meaning of the sentence –
cut it.
Email Blog
Day 2 – Blogs/websites
1. Recap Day 1
a. Who? Demographics
b. How? Website, email, social
c. What? Email test
2. What happens today?
Theory
3. EVENTS
Takeaways
 Add value, don’t sell—events should be fun, informative, or tasty and not
require anything to be purchased.
 Events get your customers offline so they can interact with you and each
other.
 Social—advertise events on Facebook, post pictures after the event.
 Email—notify mailing list before the event.
List 2 events you could do this month. Start small.
1. _________________________________________________________________________________
2. _________________________________________________________________________________
4. PARTNERSHIPS
Takeaways
 Partnerships are WIN-WIN situations.
 Overlapping demographics are essential for successful partnerships.
 Similar demographics, different products.
Describe a business you could partner with, their demographics, and an event or
project you could do with them.
5. REFERENCES/REFERRALS
Takeaways
 Do not make your customers work to refer you to their friends.
 Instead, make your customers WANT to tell others about you.
 Make it worth their while. Be awesome.
What is something you can do next week that would inspire your current customers
to tell their friends about your business?
6. PREFERRED CUSTOMERS
Takeaways
 Make your best customers feel special.
 Give your best customers what they need most.
 Ask your customers what they want - they will tell you!
What extra value can you provide to your best customers?
1. _____________________________________________________________________________________________
2. _____________________________________________________________________________________________
3. _____________________________________________________________________________________________
Blog Exercise
Why do I care? Start with a customer question you got in the last week.
1) Come up with 3 topics that you could write about over the next three weeks.
Make the topics very specific. They should only explain ONE idea per post. What is
the GOAL of each post?
Blog topic:
Goal:
2) Write a blog post (include a title, images, links)
Social Channels
1. What are the different social channels and what are they good for?
a. Facebook - Granddaddy. Unlimited users. Create pages for a business or
groups. Share all sorts of content, but mostly videos and pictures.
b. Twitter – short messaging service. Have public “private” conversations.
Very good as a responsive tool.
c. LinkedIn – platform for your professional self. Useful forums, frequently
connected with groups. Highlight your skills for other people to find.
d. Pinterest – Very artistic/creative. People can put Pins on Boards. Use to
curate what you find interesting, not just to promote your own stuff.
People will find and pin good content (all pictures) so take some good
pictures.
e. Instagram – a photo newsfeed. Similar to Pinterest but less browsing,
more of a newsfeed. Great for sharing photos of your work to your
followers, content gets stale a lot faster.
f. Google+ - limited people traffic, gearing up for SEO impact.
Promote your blog post in different channels
Facebook (300 characters)
Twitter (140 characters) (Tip: Leave room for “RT: <user name>”)
Google Search Engine Optimization (Title: 70 characters/Body: 155
characters)
(Title)
(Body)
Email Subject Line (50 characters)
Technical
7. 10 minute walkthrough of adding post to content management system
(Wordpress), link to from other social sites, for World Café with only
stereotypes
a. Record to YouTube with screencasting software
8. Add blog to CMS and share on social networks
Homework
9. Register for Google Analytics
10. Time to analyzes what you’ve done so far, how will you do that? What will
you look at? What are your goals, what do you care about?
Day 3 – Analytics
1. Recap Day 2
a. HW:
2. What happens today?
Theory
3. ONLINE CONVERSATIONS
Takeaways
 People decide if they want to buy your product or service before they ever
set foot in your store or meet you in person.
 Use the feedback you get online to improve.
What are the top three sites where people talk about your product or service?
1. _________________________________________________________________________________
2. _________________________________________________________________________________
3. _________________________________________________________________________________
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Links
Zero Moment of Truth - zeromomentoftruth.com
4. CURATION
Takeaways
 Top ten list
 Highlight what other people like.
 Helpful for people who don’t have a lot of experience in your field.
What are things your customers want to know that you can make a top ten list
about?
5. SEARCH (SEO AND SEM)
Takeaways
 Searcher’s intent (keywords)
 SEO = Content and links
 SEM = buying relevant traffic
What keywords is your target demographic using to search for your product or
service?
6. PRIZES, GAMES, GIVE-AWAYS
Takeaways
 Prizes should be of tremendous value to your potential customers.
 Information obtained in exchange for a prize should be of value to your
business.
 The prize should make your potential customers identify themselves.
Come up with your own “oldest boiler” contest.
Exercise
7. Analyzing website traffic so you can build a better website
a. What does better mean to you?
i. Make it more effective at meeting your goals
ii. Better at generating visitors
iii. Better at converting visitors to customers
b. Basic questions of web traffic
i. Where do my visitors come from?
ii. What do they do on my site?
iii. When do they leave?
c. http://ericmorrow.com/2012/12/04/understanding-the-traffic-onyour-website/ (intro primer)
Web traffic Exercise:
1) What is your GOAL? What do you want visitors to do when they come to your
site?
2) What questions are you trying to solve with Analytics? What do you want to
know?
3) Write a paragraph talking about where your visitors come from, what they will
do on your site and what you want them to do before they leave. Be specific and
tightly focused. Go step by step, explaining the purpose of different content. Explain
what value visitors get from using your site.
Technical Demonstrations
8. Walk through analytics (Screencast)
a. Show importing “reports” along with basics
9. Goal – setup a goal on Google Analytics
HW
10. Setup goals, start watching traffic
11. What would you look at? Which reports?
Day 4 – Optimization and Strategy
1. Recap Day 3
2. What happens today?
a. Lean Startup
b. Marketing strategy
Stop wasting people’s time
Value hypothesis - whether a product or service really delivers value to customers
once they are using it
3. Cohort Analysis (with whiteboard example)
a. Instead of looking at cumulative totals or gross numbers such as total
revenue and total number of customers, one looks at the performance
of each group of customers that comes into contact with the product
independently in a given time
b. Once your efforts are aligned with what customers really want,
experiments are much more likely to change their behavior for the
better
c. Split testing is your most valuable tool
d. Sign of a successful pivot: the new experiments you run are overall
more productive than the experiments you were running before.
4. Types of MVP
e. Customer interviews
f. Smoke test (also video)/presale (kickstarter) - Done with marketing
materials. Customers are given the opportunity to preorder a
product that has not yet been built. A smoke test measures only
one thing: whether customers are interested in trying a product.
g. Prototype/Model/Popup shop – Small-scale investment
h. Concierge minimum viable product - make sure the first few
participants had an experience that was as good as possible,
completely aligned with vision
i. Wizard of Oz - customers believe they are interacting with the actual
product, but behind the scenes human beings are doing the work.
5. Build-Measure-Learn
j. Build - minimum viable product (MVP). The MVP is that version of the
product that enables a full turn of the Build-Measure-Learn loop with
a minimum amount of effort and the least amount of development
time.
k. Measure - determine whether the product development efforts are
leading to real progress
l. Learn - whether to pivot the original strategy or persevere.
m. Planning really works in the reverse order
i. Figure out what we need to learn
ii. Use innovation accounting to figure out what we need to
measure to know if we are gaining validated learning,
iii. Decide what product we need to build to run that experiment
and get that measurement
6. Jedi marketing: Combine into a marketing strategy
a. Example of World Stereotype Café
b. Tom Goss example: You’ve also probably realized that many of the
tools I recommend are intimately related. Here is how it works for
Tom, the barista-turned-rockstar. He starts by creating a new album
(content). He talks about the creative process of writing the music and
making the CD jacket on Facebook with his fans (social). He lines up
all the venues that he will play in during a tour for his fans
(partnerships). He releases tickets to the shows and offers a “Buy One,
Bring One” deal (referrals). He advertises his tour dates on Google and
Facebook to his core demographic and people searching for live music
from gay musicians (demographics and search engine marketing). He
sends an email to his mailing list inviting them to buy the CD before it
is released to the general public (preferred customers). He goes on
tour, meets his fans and writes about his traveling experiences on his
blog and for the local newspaper (events, SEO). He offers to play live
at the wedding of a couple with the best story about how they met
(prizes). And he always writes about all of the above and
communicates with his fans on Facebook and through email (email,
social).