Digital Marketing questions

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1. Class: Do you have any real-world examples of effective social media impacting and transforming the sales process? (Answer with 90 words or more)

2. Read attached reading and give your feedback. (Answer with 90 words or more)

3. Watch attached video and give your feedback. (Answer with 60 words or more)


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REACHING YOUR BUYERS DIRECTLY The frustration of relying exclusively on the media and expensive advertising to deliver your organization's story is long gone. Yes, mainstream media are still important, but today smart marketers craft compelling information and tell the world directly via the web. The tremendous expense of relying on advertising to convince buyers to pay attention to your organization, ideas, products, and services is yesterday's headache. Chip McDermott founded ZeroTrash 1 as a nonprofit organization to rid the streets and beaches of Laguna Beach, California, of trash. Population and tourism had exploded, and the city had not kept up in providing sufficient infrastructure for public trash and recycling. McDermott used the web to rally the community with a grassroots movement. “The spark of the idea was that trash was becoming commonplace on the streets and the sidewalks of Laguna Beach,” McDermott says. “We started to tackle the problem with a Facebook 2 page for ZeroTrash Laguna and quickly built it to hundreds of members.” People use the ZeroTrash Facebook page to organize events and to connect local store owners with residents. Facebook was instrumental in launching the ZeroTrash First Saturday movement, where store owners and volunteers walk the city and pick up trash on the first Saturday of each month. The store owners love it because people support local stores and keep the shopping areas clean. In turn, McDermott has tapped store owners as sponsors who fund the purchase of supplies and tools like trash pickers, Tshirts, trash bags, and gloves. McDermott also uses Twitter (@ZeroTrash) to get the word out. The social media sites serve to keep people updated about what ZeroTrash is up to. For example, on a recent First Saturday, the Laguna Beach community helped to remove another 590 pounds of trash and 375 pounds of recyclables from the streets; McDermott used the social media sites to report these totals to interested people. After the initial success in Laguna Beach, ZeroTrash now also serves Newport Beach and Dana Point in Southern California and Chico in Northern California, and is launching in Seattle, Washington, soon. “We want people to take individual ownership of each new local ZeroTrash community,” he says. “How can they get people with a passion to take control and start in their own communities? The obvious answer is to use social media to influence people.” There's no doubt that getting the word out about an idea, a product, or a service is much simpler when you can rely on social media sites like blogs, Facebook, and Twitter. The web allows any organization—including nonprofits like ZeroTrash, as well as companies large and small, candidates for public office, government agencies, schools, artists, and even job seekers—to reach buyers directly. This power is clear to nearly everyone these days, but many executives and entrepreneurs still struggle to find the right mix of traditional advertising and direct communication with buyers. The Right Marketing in a Wired World Century 21 Real Estate LLC 3 is the franchisor of the world's largest residential real estate sales organization, an industry giant with approximately 8,000 offices in 45 countries. The company had been spending on television advertising for years but, in a significant strategy change, pulled its national television advertising and invested those resources into online marketing. Wow! I've seen Century 21 TV ads for years. We're talking millions of dollars shifting from TV to the web. This is a big deal. “We are moving our advertising investments to the mediums that have the greatest relevance to our target buyers and sellers, and to where the return on our investment is most significant,” says Bev Thorne, chief marketing officer at Century 21. “We found that our online investments provided a return that was substantively higher than our more traditional TV media investments.” Thorne and her team learned that people who are in the market to buy or sell a home rely heavily on the web and that the closer they get to a real estate transaction, the more they use online resources. “We are embracing LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Active Rain, and others,” Thorne says. “YouTube is a central component of our activities, and we seek to utilize it even more.” Many companies spending large amounts of money on television advertising (and other offline marketing such as direct mail, magazine and newspaper advertising, and Yellow Pages listings) are afraid to make even partial moves away from their comfort zones and into online marketing and social media. But the evidence describing how people actually research products overwhelmingly suggests that companies must tell their stories and spread their ideas online, at the precise moment that potential buyers are searching for answers. It's an exciting time to be a marketer, no matter what business you're in. We have been liberated from relying exclusively on buying access through advertising or convincing mainstream media to talk us up. Now we can publish information on the web that people are eager to pay attention to. GROWING YOUR BUSINESS: HOW MARKETING AND PR DRIVE SALES Successful selling no longer follows the playbook that worked even just a few years ago. The rules have changed here, too, yet most organizations and the salespeople they employ haven't made the transition. Because of the wealth of information on the web, the salesperson no longer controls the relationship between buyer and seller. Now, buyers are in charge. They can see what your CEO is saying on Twitter and LinkedIn. They can check out independent blogs to learn what it's really like to be a customer. Buyers actively go around salespeople, gathering information themselves and engaging a company representative only at the last possible moment. By then, they are armed with tons of information. In the old days, salespeople controlled the information. Now it's the buyers who have the leverage. It gets worse. As you probably know, salespeople have a bad reputation in the marketplace. Except for salespeople themselves, almost everyone I talk to associates sales with being hustled and taken advantage of. They think of dealing with a salesperson as a purely adversarial relationship. The very word sales summons sleazy connotations, so people get defensive immediately to protect themselves. It's Time for a Sales Transformation During the past several years, hundreds of people have asked me to extend the ideas in this book to the area of sales. Almost every day, I hear from people who have transformed their organizations' marketing and public relations functions and are now ready to do the same with their sales departments. Like anyone following the new rules, I listened. In 2012, I began research on how the ideas in this book apply to sales. I found incredible examples of how content also influences sales, so I wrote a follow-on book to the one you're reading. Released in 2014, it's titled The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your Business (an excerpt from it is included at the end of this book). This chapter explains the basics of how to apply the ideas from the Sales and Servicebook. If you work in a larger organization, you'll learn how to work with your sales colleagues. If you're an entrepreneur, business owner, or employee of a smaller organization, you'll see how to integrate marketing and sales to grow your business. Before we dig in, let's take a moment to look at how these two disciplines differ. By making certain we understand the difference, we can then close the gap between marketing and sales and grow business faster. Marketing generates attention from the many people who make up a buyer persona. Sales content (and salespeople), on the other hand, communicates with one potential customer at a time, putting the buying process into context. Reaching many people: The job of marketers is to understand buyer personas and communicate with these groups in a one-to-many approach. That's what most of this book is all about. Web content as a marketing asset captures the attention of a group of buyers and drives those people into and through the sales process. The content marketers create—blogs, YouTube videos, infographics, e-books, webinars, and the like—can influence large numbers of people. Done well, with a research-based understanding of buyer personas, this content generates sales leads. Influencing one person at a time: The role of sales is completely different. The goal of a salesperson is to influence one buyer at a time, typically when the buyer is already close to making a purchase decision. While marketers need to be experts in persuading an audience of many, salespeople excel in persuading the individual buyer. They add context to the company's expertise, products, and services. Through them, the marketers' content fulfills its potential by connecting buyer to salesperson when the buyer is interested. If, like me, you run a small business, you're probably playing both roles—communicating to your wider marketplace and engaging with one interested buyer at a time. In this chapter, we're going to build on some of the ideas and concepts I've already introduced. In Chapter 3, we talked about reaching buyers directly with your organization's online content, and Chapter 10 was where we put together a detailed plan to identify and target buyer personas with individualized approaches. But to extend these ideas to sales, we're also going to talk about some new concepts, particularly how content influences individual buyers when they close in on a purchase decision. Let's start the chapter with some ideas for how you can build a website that walks buyers through the research process as they consider doing business with your organization and moves them toward the place where they are ready to buy (or donate, or join, or subscribe). Remember, that's the goal of all web content! We'll also spend some time discussing how you can work directly with the salespeople in your organization. How Web Content Influences the Buying Process As I've said many times in these pages, when people want to buy something, the web is almost always the first stop on their shopping trip. In any market category, potential customers head online to conduct research. The moment of truth is when they reach your site: Will you draw them into your sales process, or allow them click away? While many marketers now understand that content drives action, and quite a few have embraced the ideas in this book, the vast majority focus their content effort only at the very top of the sales consideration process. In other words, they create content to attract buyers but none to support the salespeople. That's a big mistake! People don't go to the web looking for advertising; they are on a quest for content. When buyers arrive at your site, you have an opportunity to deliver targeted information at the precise moment when they are looking for what you have to offer. By providing information when they need it, you can begin a long and profitable relationship with them. Editors and publishers obsess over maintaining readership. So should you. To best leverage the power of content, you first need to help your site's visitors find what they need. When someone arrives for the first time, he or she receives a series of messages—whether you realize it or not. These messages are answering the questions that matter to the visitor. • Does this organization care about me? • Does it focus on the problems I face? • Does it share my perspective or push its own on me? You need to start with site navigation that is designed and organized with your buyers in mind. Don't simply mimic the way your company or group is organized (e.g., by product, geography, or governmental structure), because the way your audience uses websites rarely coincides with your company's internal priorities. Organizing based on your needs leaves site visitors confused about how to find what they really need. You should learn as much as possible about your buyers' process, focusing on issues such as how they find your site or how long they consider a purchase. Consider what happens offline in parallel with online interactions. The two should complement each other. For example, if you have an e-commerce site and a printed catalog, coordinate the content so that both efforts support and reinforce the buying process: include URLs for your online buying guide in the catalog, and use the same product descriptions online, so people don't get confused. In the B2B world, trade shows should work together with Internet initiatives. For instance, you might collect email addresses at the booth and then send a follow-up email pointing to a show-specific landing page. For most B2B products and services, as well as higher-priced consumer goods, your buyers will at some point need to reach out to engage with a representative of your company. In that moment, you've gone from marketing to your buyers as a group to selling to your buyer as an individual person. While this process may happen via email, the phone, social networking, or an in-person visit, content still plays a vital role in getting the buyer ready to buy. But you have to understand the process to help shape it. Tips for Creating a Buyer-Centric Website The online relationship begins the second a potential customer hits your homepage. The first thing he or she needs to find is a self-reflection. That's why you must organize your site with content for each of your distinct buyer personas. How do your potential customers self-select? Is it based on their job function, on geography, or on the industry they work in? It's important to create a set of appropriate links based on a clear understanding of your buyers, so you can quickly move them from your homepage to pages built specifically for them. One way many organizations approach navigation is to link to landing pages based on the problems your product or service solves. Start by identifying the situations in which each target audience may find itself. If you are in the supply chain management business, you might have a drop-down menu on the homepage with links that say, “I need to get product to customers faster” or “I want to move products internationally.” Each path leads to landing pages built for buyer segments, with content targeted to their problems. Once buyers reach those pages, you have the opportunity to communicate your expertise in solving these problems—building some empathy in the process. Then you can move customers further along the buying cycle, handing them off to a salesperson when appropriate. As you build a site that focuses on your buyers and their purchasing process, here are some tips to consider. Develop a Site Personality It is important to create a distinct, consistent, and memorable site. The tone of voice of the content will contribute to that goal. As visitors interact with the content on your site, they should develop a clear picture of your organization. Is the personality fun and playful? Or is it solid and conservative? For example, when people search on the Google homepage, they can choose to click “I'm Feeling Lucky.” That's a fun and playful way for them to be taken directly to the top listing in the search results. That one little phrase, “I'm Feeling Lucky,” says a lot about Google. And there's more where that came from. For example, the collection of more than 100 Google-supported languages goes from Afrikaans to Zulu but also includes the language of Elmer Fudd.1 If you choose this option, you'll see everything translated into Fudd-speak, “I'm Feewing Wucky,” for example. You probably also know about Google's fun tradition of modifying its homepage logo to mark special events. Called Google Doodles, these whimsically altered logos vary around the world to celebrate everything from Australia Day to Cezanne's birthday. This is cool, but it wouldn't work for a more conservative company—it would just seem strange and out of place. Contrast Google's homepage to Accenture's.2 At the time of this writing, the Accenture logo appeared just above a tone-creating promise: “High Performance. Delivered.” The site features photos with messages such as “We have advised clients on more than 570 merger and acquisition deals in the last 5 years” and “Every year our systems process 300 million airline ticket reservations.” Both of these homepages work because the site personality is compatible with the company personality. Whatever your personality, the way to achieve consistency is to make certain that the written material, as well as the other content on the site, conforms to a defined tone that you've established from the start. A strong focus on site personality and character pays off. As visitors come to rely on the content they find on your site, they will develop an emotional and personal relationship with your organization. A website can evoke a familiar and trusted voice, just like that of a friend on the other end of an email exchange. For an example of a site with a very distinct personality, check out HOTforSecurity from BitDefender.3 BitDefender is a particularly interesting example because the online security market is very competitive, making product differentiation a challenge. A cornerstone of the company's marketing approach, HOTforSecurity was launched as a stand-alone site focused on key influencers within the information technology (IT) security community. The new site was not a redesign of the existing company site but, rather, an informational supplement to the main BitDefender product site.4 HOTforSecurity is for people who are interested in the latest information on Internet threats. The BitDefender team clearly understands that the best online initiatives are those that deliver specific information tailored to a particular buyer persona. The HOTforSecurity site was developed to appeal to three different buyer personas: 1. IT security press (both mainstream press and social media). 2. BitDefender users. 3. A group of “Internet security geeks”—the most important buyer persona for HOTforSecurity. The HOTforSecurity site appeals directly to the Internet security geek buyer persona. Who else would appreciate dryly incredulous headlines like this one: “Windows 8 Stores Logon Passwords in Plain Text.” The design is clearly that of an informational site that might be a media property—in stark contrast to the slew of boring corporate tech sites. It delivers valuable information to everyone interested in Internet security issues, not just BitDefender users. It is not a sales site, so people trust it. While there are identifiers that the site is an online property of BitDefender, it is a subtle tie. They don't brag about it, but they don't hide the association, either. With a growing audience of approximately 65,000 Twitter followers and 550,000 Facebook fans, HOTforSecurity from Bit Defender is a great example of online content that effectively reaches buyers. Photos and Images Tell Your Story GROWING YOUR BUSINESS: HOW MARKETING AND PR DRIVE SALES Successful selling no longer follows the playbook that worked even just a few years ago. The rules have changed here, too, yet most organizations and the salespeople they employ haven't made the transition. Because of the wealth of information on the web, the salesperson no longer controls the relationship between buyer and seller. Now, buyers are in charge. They can see what your CEO is saying on Twitter and LinkedIn. They can check out independent blogs to learn what it's really like to be a customer. Buyers actively go around salespeople, gathering information themselves and engaging a company representative only at the last possible moment. By then, they are armed with tons of information. In the old days, salespeople controlled the information. Now it's the buyers who have the leverage. It gets worse. As you probably know, salespeople have a bad reputation in the marketplace. Except for salespeople themselves, almost everyone I talk to associates sales with being hustled and taken advantage of. They think of dealing with a salesperson as a purely adversarial relationship. The very word sales summons sleazy connotations, so people get defensive immediately to protect themselves. It's Time for a Sales Transformation During the past several years, hundreds of people have asked me to extend the ideas in this book to the area of sales. Almost every day, I hear from people who have transformed their organizations' marketing and public relations functions and are now ready to do the same with their sales departments. Like anyone following the new rules, I listened. In 2012, I began research on how the ideas in this book apply to sales. I found incredible examples of how content also influences sales, so I wrote a follow-on book to the one you're reading. Released in 2014, it's titled The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your Business (an excerpt from it is included at the end of this book). This chapter explains the basics of how to apply the ideas from the Sales and Servicebook. If you work in a larger organization, you'll learn how to work with your sales colleagues. If you're an entrepreneur, business owner, or employee of a smaller organization, you'll see how to integrate marketing and sales to grow your business. Before we dig in, let's take a moment to look at how these two disciplines differ. By making certain we understand the difference, we can then close the gap between marketing and sales and grow business faster. Marketing generates attention from the many people who make up a buyer persona. Sales content (and salespeople), on the other hand, communicates with one potential customer at a time, putting the buying process into context. Reaching many people: The job of marketers is to understand buyer personas and communicate with these groups in a one-to-many approach. That's what most of this book is all about. Web content as a marketing asset captures the attention of a group of buyers and drives those people into and through the sales process. The content marketers create—blogs, YouTube videos, infographics, e-books, webinars, and the like—can influence large numbers of people. Done well, with a research-based understanding of buyer personas, this content generates sales leads. Influencing one person at a time: The role of sales is completely different. The goal of a salesperson is to influence one buyer at a time, typically when the buyer is already close to making a purchase decision. While marketers need to be experts in persuading an audience of many, salespeople excel in persuading the individual buyer. They add context to the company's expertise, products, and services. Through them, the marketers' content fulfills its potential by connecting buyer to salesperson when the buyer is interested. If, like me, you run a small business, you're probably playing both roles—communicating to your wider marketplace and engaging with one interested buyer at a time. In this chapter, we're going to build on some of the ideas and concepts I've already introduced. In Chapter 3, we talked about reaching buyers directly with your organization's online content, and Chapter 10 was where we put together a detailed plan to identify and target buyer personas with individualized approaches. But to extend these ideas to sales, we're also going to talk about some new concepts, particularly how content influences individual buyers when they close in on a purchase decision. Let's start the chapter with some ideas for how you can build a website that walks buyers through the research process as they consider doing business with your organization and moves them toward the place where they are ready to buy (or donate, or join, or subscribe). Remember, that's the goal of all web content! We'll also spend some time discussing how you can work directly with the salespeople in your organization. How Web Content Influences the Buying Process As I've said many times in these pages, when people want to buy something, the web is almost always the first stop on their shopping trip. In any market category, potential customers head online to conduct research. The moment of truth is when they reach your site: Will you draw them into your sales process, or allow them click away? While many marketers now understand that content drives action, and quite a few have embraced the ideas in this book, the vast majority focus their content effort only at the very top of the sales consideration process. In other words, they create content to attract buyers but none to support the salespeople. That's a big mistake! People don't go to the web looking for advertising; they are on a quest for content. When buyers arrive at your site, you have an opportunity to deliver targeted information at the precise moment when they are looking for what you have to offer. By providing information when they need it, you can begin a long and profitable relationship with them. Editors and publishers obsess over maintaining readership. So should you. To best leverage the power of content, you first need to help your site's visitors find what they need. When someone arrives for the first time, he or she receives a series of messages—whether you realize it or not. These messages are answering the questions that matter to the visitor. • Does this organization care about me? • Does it focus on the problems I face? • Does it share my perspective or push its own on me? You need to start with site navigation that is designed and organized with your buyers in mind. Don't simply mimic the way your company or group is organized (e.g., by product, geography, or governmental structure), because the way your audience uses websites rarely coincides with your company's internal priorities. Organizing based on your needs leaves site visitors confused about how to find what they really need. You should learn as much as possible about your buyers' process, focusing on issues such as how they find your site or how long they consider a purchase. Consider what happens offline in parallel with online interactions. The two should complement each other. For example, if you have an e-commerce site and a printed catalog, coordinate the content so that both efforts support and reinforce the buying process: include URLs for your online buying guide in the catalog, and use the same product descriptions online, so people don't get confused. In the B2B world, trade shows should work together with Internet initiatives. For instance, you might collect email addresses at the booth and then send a follow-up email pointing to a show-specific landing page. For most B2B products and services, as well as higher-priced consumer goods, your buyers will at some point need to reach out to engage with a representative of your company. In that moment, you've gone from marketing to your buyers as a group to selling to your buyer as an individual person. While this process may happen via email, the phone, social networking, or an in-person visit, content still plays a vital role in getting the buyer ready to buy. But you have to understand the process to help shape it. Tips for Creating a Buyer-Centric Website The online relationship begins the second a potential customer hits your homepage. The first thing he or she needs to find is a self-reflection. That's why you must organize your site with content for each of your distinct buyer personas. How do your potential customers self-select? Is it based on their job function, on geography, or on the industry they work in? It's important to create a set of appropriate links based on a clear understanding of your buyers, so you can quickly move them from your homepage to pages built specifically for them. One way many organizations approach navigation is to link to landing pages based on the problems your product or service solves. Start by identifying the situations in which each target audience may find itself. If you are in the supply chain management business, you might have a drop-down menu on the homepage with links that say, “I need to get product to customers faster” or “I want to move products internationally.” Each path leads to landing pages built for buyer segments, with content targeted to their problems. Once buyers reach those pages, you have the opportunity to communicate your expertise in solving these problems—building some empathy in the process. Then you can move customers further along the buying cycle, handing them off to a salesperson when appropriate. As you build a site that focuses on your buyers and their purchasing process, here are some tips to consider. Develop a Site Personality It is important to create a distinct, consistent, and memorable site. The tone of voice of the content will contribute to that goal. As visitors interact with the content on your site, they should develop a clear picture of your organization. Is the personality fun and playful? Or is it solid and conservative? For example, when people search on the Google homepage, they can choose to click “I'm Feeling Lucky.” That's a fun and playful way for them to be taken directly to the top listing in the search results. That one little phrase, “I'm Feeling Lucky,” says a lot about Google. And there's more where that came from. For example, the collection of more than 100 Google-supported languages goes from Afrikaans to Zulu but also includes the language of Elmer Fudd.1 If you choose this option, you'll see everything translated into Fudd-speak, “I'm Feewing Wucky,” for example. You probably also know about Google's fun tradition of modifying its homepage logo to mark special events. Called Google Doodles, these whimsically altered logos vary around the world to celebrate everything from Australia Day to Cezanne's birthday. This is cool, but it wouldn't work for a more conservative company—it would just seem strange and out of place. Contrast Google's homepage to Accenture's.2 At the time of this writing, the Accenture logo appeared just above a tone-creating promise: “High Performance. Delivered.” The site features photos with messages such as “We have advised clients on more than 570 merger and acquisition deals in the last 5 years” and “Every year our systems process 300 million airline ticket reservations.” Both of these homepages work because the site personality is compatible with the company personality. Whatever your personality, the way to achieve consistency is to make certain that the written material, as well as the other content on the site, conforms to a defined tone that you've established from the start. A strong focus on site personality and character pays off. As visitors come to rely on the content they find on your site, they will develop an emotional and personal relationship with your organization. A website can evoke a familiar and trusted voice, just like that of a friend on the other end of an email exchange. For an example of a site with a very distinct personality, check out HOTforSecurity from BitDefender.3 BitDefender is a particularly interesting example because the online security market is very competitive, making product differentiation a challenge. A cornerstone of the company's marketing approach, HOTforSecurity was launched as a stand-alone site focused on key influencers within the information technology (IT) security community. The new site was not a redesign of the existing company site but, rather, an informational supplement to the main BitDefender product site.4 HOTforSecurity is for people who are interested in the latest information on Internet threats. The BitDefender team clearly understands that the best online initiatives are those that deliver specific information tailored to a particular buyer persona. The HOTforSecurity site was developed to appeal to three different buyer personas: 1. IT security press (both mainstream press and social media). 2. BitDefender users. 3. A group of “Internet security geeks”—the most important buyer persona for HOTforSecurity. The HOTforSecurity site appeals directly to the Internet security geek buyer persona. Who else would appreciate dryly incredulous headlines like this one: “Windows 8 Stores Logon Passwords in Plain Text.” The design is clearly that of an informational site that might be a media property—in stark contrast to the slew of boring corporate tech sites. It delivers valuable information to everyone interested in Internet security issues, not just BitDefender users. It is not a sales site, so people trust it. While there are identifiers that the site is an online property of BitDefender, it is a subtle tie. They don't brag about it, but they don't hide the association, either. With a growing audience of approximately 65,000 Twitter followers and 550,000 Facebook fans, HOTforSecurity from Bit Defender is a great example of online content that effectively reaches buyers. Photos and Images Tell Your Story
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Digital Marketing
Question 1

Social media impacts and transforms the sale process and there are real-world examples.
Many companies have websites that explain the services and goods that they offer. Companies
also have social media accounts o...

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