MODULE 3 - PLATFORMS AND CAMPAIGNS

1. Tools for Communicating with your Audience PAGE 3

1. Fit

2. Aligning Strategy with Goals (POST Refresh)

2. Marketing and Advertisement Channels PAGE 12

1. The PESO Model, with Pros and Cons of Each Channel

2. The Role(s) of Your Website

3. Major Types of Marketing Campaigns PAGE 16

1. SEO

2. SEO, SEM, and PPC

3. Display Ads vs. Native Advertising

4. Content Marketing

5. Three Essential Steps for Success

6. Sweet Spot

4. Digital Platforms PAGE 26

1. Social Media Marketing (SMM)

2. Ethics

3. Email Marketing and Mobile/SMS Marketing

4. Affiliate Marketing vs. Influencer Marketing

5. Future-proofing

6. Point/Counterpoint on Shiny Object Syndrome

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Introduction:

In this module, we will focus on:

● The application of platforms and campaigns to get your message out to your consumers.
● The current landscape of Digital Marketing: an industry leader insight and perspective
● The importance of emerging technologies (social media platforms) to communicate with your
audience.
● When and where is more effective? How to align your strategy with your goals, ensuring that
your campaigns go out across all channels and that you’re messaging is effective in each
environment.
● Ethical practices of each of these tools: How to ensure they align with our message, our
values, and the belief system of our customers.
○ This will ensure that we are associated with the type of audience we seek, the values we
want to embody, and what we are saying.
● How to deliver our message as it constantly evolves as a result of changing culture.

Once you find your audience, you must also choose the best places to reach and engage them
to invite that exchange of value. This mode will focus on the use of platforms and campaigns to
get your message out to your consumers. In order to explore the realm of platforms,

Learning Objectives
● Describe the current landscape of digital marketing channels and platforms
● Create a POST (People, Objectives, Strategy and Story, Tools/Technology) plan
● Investigate the alignment of digital channels with personal values and company
mission/purpose

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 1. TOOLS FOR COMMUNICATING WITH YOUR AUDIENCE

1. Fit

Interview with a Brand Strategist - The importance of technology to reach the public

Jason Shim serves as Director of “Digital Strategy and Transformation” at “Pathways to

Education”, Canada. The organization helps young people, who are living in low income
communities, to graduate from high school and reach their full potential. In this role, Shim works
with emerging technologies to ensure Pathway’s name and mission are heard through innovative
ways that effectively deliver their message to a wider audience. Pathways is an organization that
helps youth who are living in low-income communities to graduate from high school and reach
their full potential. In terms of my digital marketing zone of genius, it is using emerging technology
in ways that can help our organization better meet its mission. Specifically, implementing
technology in creative ways to help people really connect with their mission as well as to achieve
better outcomes to surprise and delight folks, wherever they may be.

As we discussed in Module 1, there are many qualities that a Digital Marketer can bring to the
table. Which skills may be more important than others is subjective as it depends on personal
experience and perspective.

What quality is essential for someone working in the field of Digital Marketing?

Digital Marketers should possess the ability to listen. This is an important skill in this field because
it allows one to really get a sense of how a message is landing, of how your initiative is being
received. It creates a feedback loop because if you are able to listen carefully, you'll be able to
make improvements over time. And truly, over an extended period of time, if you're listening
carefully and paying close attention, it will allow you to really improve quickly on the types of things
that you are developing, such as the messaging that you're putting out into the world.

Working with emerging technologies means that not every attempt to incorporate new forms
of communication will be successful. For example, social media platforms may or may not be
useful for an organization, as it depends on their needs which can sometimes be difficult to know.
Although emerging technologies may offer new and exciting ways to communicate with your
audience, they don't always have enough use history to decide if they are the right fit for you.
Nonetheless, every experience comes with lessons to extract, and information that can be applied
to future cases.

Shim discusses his experience with a particular platform and how he used this to guide
future decisions: The story that comes to mind in regard to a time that failed are the explorations
of social media platforms that are always fraught with new and exciting platforms that are coming
out. You know, I remember when Vine first came out; it was quite exciting. That was something
that I remember reviewing with my team, and, thinking, “Yeah, we should totally explore this, and
I think there could be some good potential around it”. So, we spent some time developing videos

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for Vine, and putting it out there, but it just didn't stick, we weren't seeing the numbers. After a few
weeks, we just had to call it and shelve it. I think what I took away from that, reflecting back on it,
it may have felt like a failure at the time, but really, the learnings we took away from it is , it did
allow us that opportunity to test it out and be nimble around it. It's actually more important that
we're able to do that quickly and take away the learnings from it. Vine wasn't the only platform
that was initially explored. Even prior to that, I remember taking a look at Twitter, and, at the time,
the assessment there wasn't a use case for it because it was way too early in Twitter's
development to see any kind of meaningful impact. But being able to document those learnings
for a future implementation, it wasn't necessarily like, “we're not doing it ever” it was just “not now.”
And so, in the years that have since passed, since some of these early explorations, what that
has allowed us to do is refine our approach so, when a new social media platform does emerge,
we have a better set of criteria, and we have a better sense of like, “okay, you know, we're clear
on how we test this” and how we will run a pilot around new and emerging platforms. What I've
learned from that is there is value to rapidly trying out these new things. It's just making sure that
there is an acknowledgment of what the threshold for success will be, and to make sure that it
doesn't keep dragging on so that it can also free up space to do other things to move your work
forward.

2. Aligning Strategy with Goals (POST Refresh)

An strategy to create a customer has to start with your customer! The POST model as a shorthand
for our digital marketing strategy:

P: People S: Strategy and Story

O: Objectives T: Tools/Technology

An important ingredient in defining your strategy is ensuring alignment. The digital age pushes
us to become more radically customer-centric in our marketing approaches, which means being
attentive to our customers, not only in experiences in one channel, but across all of them. This is
what’s referred to as Omnichannel marketing.

● Traditional Store → The good, old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar store

● E-commerce → Online shopping has skyrocketed in recent years

● Multichannel → Various, disconnected channels for customers to use independently

● Omnichannel → An integrated, seamless experience across multiple devices and

touchpoints

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What is Omnichannel and why is it important? Omnichannel retailing means selling to
customers through both traditional offline outlets (e.g., brick-and-mortar locations, mall order
catalogs, even direct-to consumer telemarketing) as well as online outlets (e.g., e-commerce
sites, social media, email marketing, marketplaces.)

Why It’s Important: Higher transparency - Channel blending - Omnichannel shoppers spend
more - Every channel has a unique role and can be profitable - Aligns perfectly with how
customers already shop

The Iterative Process of User Experience Design - For Omnichannel and Beyond.
Checklist

● Let the customer decide when/where they want to shop

● Provide multiple shopping options: in-person, mobile, online, or any blend of the three
(e.g., click and collect)
● Make the brand experience consistent
● Manage inventory centrally
● Translate loyalty programs across devices
● Accept multiple types of payment
● Provide excellent customer service in every channel
● Apply discounts and customize taxes
● Provide several receipt options
● Allow for several returns options
● Process refunds promptly and accurately

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Why Sephora Wins at Omnichannel

● Every channel has a clear role and maximizes its strong points
● Heavy use of technology across stores
● Personalized experience on every platform—from loyalty program to location services to
customized product recommendations
● Plenty of options to choose from and you can get the best product for your needs
● Excellent customer service before, during, and after purchase

Challenges of Omnichannel Marketing

● Logistics: How do we maintain a system that services all our channels, including shipping
directly to customers?
● Pricing: How do we charge consistent pricing without leaving money on the table or losing
sales?
● Technology: How do we allocate and effectively spend marketing dollars across multiple
channels?
● Attribution: How do we know which specific marketing triggers ultimately lead to the
purchase?

When Creating Distribution Strategy, Use Caution

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 ● Strategy needs to be consistent with the brand positioning, company’s objectives, market
realities, and capabilities
● Find your customers where they are
● Always plan for omnichannel
● Create a distribution strategy that creates the most value for your target customers

Why Some Things Catch On And Get Shared by Kare Anderson (FULL TEXT IN ANNEX 1):

1. High arousal negative emotions such as anger or anxiety can motivate people to share
messages.
2. Connecting a message to a familiar or frequent situation for the customer can be more effective
than a catchy slogan.
3. Using the six STEPPS principles of contagiousness can help to create a message that will be
shared.
4. Crafting an emotional story to wrap around the desired benefits of a product can help to create
a connection with the customer.
5. Attaching your message to a well-known story can help to create a trigger that will remind
customers of your product or message.
6. Anti-campaigns can backfire, as they give the habit more visibility and can evoke the opposite
reaction.
7. Most word of mouth messages happen offline, so focusing on real-life exposure can help to
transport your message.
8. Anyone can spark an idea that catches fire and spreads, regardless of fame or wealth.

Effective messaging: Omnichannel marketing requires strong, consistent messaging. But what
should that messaging be? As with everything, it should start with your customer. You should ask:
what is the benefit to them?

A quick differentiation: Features vs. Benefits

Products and services all have two important qualities for your audience to consider:
● Features are the components of a product and what they can do,
● Benefits describe how life will be different for the consumer when they use that product
or service.

● For example: a vacuum cleaner. Its features may include a long hose, or cordless
operation. Benefits, though, might include a deeply-cleaned carpet, or the sense of
satisfaction from knowing that you’ve sucked up every last bit of dust from your living room.

Emphasizing the features of a product often centers the company, while emphasizing the
benefits puts the customer, their experience, and the value (they ultimately derive from the
product), at the center of your messaging.

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Here are a few other important best practices for developing powerful messaging:

● Appeal to Emotion

“Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) shows that when evaluating brands,
consumers primarily use emotions (personal feelings and experiences), rather than
information (brand attributes, features, and facts).” (Murray 2013)

Different emotions cause us to take different actions. For instance, happiness makes us
share, sadness makes us empathize, and surprise makes us cling to the familiar. (Decker
2021)

Fitbit shares an emotional introduction to a longer customer story on Instagram,

encouraging them to visit the website to continue. The emotional hook creates empathy
and builds curiosity. (instagram)

● Surprise and Delight with a Publicity Stunt

Getting playful and surprising with your brand can help you rise above the noise—just
make sure it’s aligned with the brand's voice and positioning.
McCormick Spices did this well by creating a new job posting—“Director of Taco
Relations” (Pomranz 2021): Creating headline-worthy "dream jobs" has become a
popular marketing trend — featuring titles like Chief Noodle Officer (for Top Ramen), Chief
Biscuit Officer (for Red Lobster), and Chief Thirst Officer (surprisingly, not for Instagram).
But as these somewhat satirical names imply, the extent to which these positions are
actually real jobs with real responsibilities and real pay can vary significantly:

• Creative marketing trend of creating headline-worthy "dream jobs"

• Slice's Head of Pizza gets paid mainly in pizza
• Responsibilities include keeping tabs on taco trends, developing content for social media,
and consulting on recipes
• Must submit a creative video showcasing personality and passion for tacos
• McCormick's new "Director of Taco Relations" is a real job with real responsibilities and
real pay - $100,000 paid out at $25,000 per month.

Kraft, on the other hand, missed the mark with their cheeky #SendNoods campaign,
a mismatch for their family-friendly image. (Walansky 2020).

• Social media users said the "family company" had "sexualized" the classic dish.
• Kraft launched a #SendNoods promotion, which allowed fans to send a free box of mac
and cheese (or a coupon to redeem a free box) to a loved one.
• The promotion was meant to provide comfort in "strange times" but was met with
unexpected backlash from social media users who thought the promotion was sexualizing
the classic dish.

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 • Kraft removed the promotion and released a statement saying they appreciated the
feedback.

The article "Publicity Stunts that You Can't Lick " details some of the events that
caught the public's eye.

• Brooklyn-based Van Leeuwen introduced a limited edition Kraft Mac N Cheese ice cream
to celebrate National Macaroni & Cheese Day
• McCormick is hiring someone to be their Taco Sherpa for four months to guide them
through the world of taco flavors
• Publicity stunts can capture the consumer’s imagination and be used to get a brand on
the evening news and blow up the Internet
• Secrets to a great stunt include finding a shareable and newsworthy hook, taking the
brand into a new channel or category, and creating novel apologies to gain goodwill

● Create Positive, and Familiar, Associations

When you connect your product or service to something your customers already know
and have a positive connection to, those positive associations will translate to your brand.
In this example, an organization draws on the familiar act of checking your Instagram
notifications as a powerful reminder about women’s health.

● Appeal to the Bandwagon Effect

Also known as social proof, this is the idea that if everyone else, or at least everyone else
like you, is doing something, you should too. The bandwagon effect is built into the basic
functionality of social media. For instance, when you visit a Facebook page and it displays
how many of your friends also like that page, Facebook is showing you that you might also
be interested in this page.

● Lean on Expertise

Sometimes it takes the voice of an expert to help your audience see the value of the
product or service you offer. Unlike the bandwagon effect, leaning on expertise explicitly
brings in voices with different educational backgrounds and experiences to speak about
the value of your offering.

The nonprofit organization Make-A-Wish, which grants wishes to children with critical
illnesses, leaned on the role of expertise—specifically doctors—in order to move their
brand image from being “nice to have” to a “need to have” among their donors. (Make-A-
Wish 2021)

● Draw on User-Generated Content (UGC)

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 How better to speak with the voice of your audience than to use the very content they
create in your marketing? User-generated content campaigns encourage customers to
create and share content that reflects their own interactions with your product or service.
It turns every fan or follower into a potential influencer.

Airbnb consistently draws on UGC for their impressive social media presence, especially
on Instagram.

● Use Storytelling

Our brains make sense of the world through storytelling. So, to stand out, our messaging
needs to be memorable. Stories are remembered up to 22x more than facts alone (Aaker
2019) making it a fundamental part of strong marketing. When people think of advocating
for their ideas, they think of convincing arguments based on data, facts, and figures.
However, studies show that if you share a story, people are often more likely to be
persuaded. And when data and story are used together, audiences are moved both
intellectually and emotionally. When telling a story, you take the listener on a journey,
moving them from one perspective to another. In this way, story is a powerful tool for
engendering confidence in you and your vision. Stanford Marketing Professor Jennifer
Aaker demonstrates the importance of story in shaping how others see you and as a tool
to persuade. Aaker shares the elements of successful stories and makes the case for
developing a portfolio of signature stories. Harnessing the power of story will enable you
to be more persuasive, move people to action, and progress into your career.

When Huggies brand diapers saw a dip in their sales, they turned to the power of
emotional storytelling to re-engage their customers with their “No Baby Unhugged”
campaign. The campaign increased sales of Huggies by 30% (Clark 2017). During
pregnancy, there are many important purchase decisions, but the diaper brand a mom
chooses for her baby was not one of them. Most moms deferred to the diaper used by
their birthing hospitals, and Pampers had 100% of Canadian hospital contracts. We were
challenged to change third trimester mom’s behavior by getting her to embrace and
choose Huggies, even before she went to the hospital. To accomplish this, we knew we
had to give her a strong emotional reason to choose us. Solution & Cultural Context:
The solution to winning over moms emotionally lay right there in our brand DNA: a hug.
Over 600 studies prove that hugs help stabilize babies’ vital signs, build immune systems,
ward off illness, improve brain development, and that’s just the beginning. So we created
No Baby Unhugged, the world’s first brand-led initiative to: 1) educate mom on the power
of skin-to-skin hugs for her baby and 2) help put volunteer huggers in hospital Neonatal
Intensive Care Units for babies in need of hugs. Impact: In 2016, sales of Huggies
Newborn Diapers increased by almost 30%. Our online advertising achieved a click-
through rate 12x higher than industry benchmarks. Social media was the top driver of
database sign-ups, garnering over 2 million likes, comments, shares and re-tweets, and
an engagement rate 300% higher than industry benchmarks. We currently have 3 No Baby

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 Unhugged hospitals in Canada, with a 4th on the way. And our campaign is being adopted
by 16 countries worldwide, including the U.S.

CONSIDER: Bonus Best Practice

Especially in times of economic downturn, many people are unwilling to open their wallets and
buy anything beyond the absolute necessities. Studies have shown, though, that an appeal to
nostalgia can change that (Harvard Business Review 2014). Fast food giant Burger King’s first
rebrand in 20 years was actually a throwback to their logo from 1970—a wildly successful
nostalgia campaign that spoke to an audience suffering from the economic impact of the
coronavirus pandemic (Meisenzahl 2021).

HEINZ commercial, “Based on a real DM (direct message on social media) from Ed Sheeran
(worldwide popular musician)”: I have got an idea for a Heinz Ketchup commercial. I was at this
super posh restaurant, super posh. The type of place that has chandeliers and paintings on the
wall and way too many forks. Classical music was playing or maybe it was Jazz. No, definitely
classical. The hostess walked up to me and she said, “Mr. Sheeran, is this your first time dining
with us?” And I say, “Yep”. The waiter comes over. He is telling me about the specials: “Super
fancy, fancy vegetables, fancy sauces”. And I said “it sounds fancy”. So, fast forward and the food
comes. The waiter foes on to tell me “we are proud to present this farm to table blah blah posh
and fancy blah blah with a side of blah blah”. You know, the food good look. I just thought there
was something missing. So, I reached into my bag and I take out the only thing that can complete
me. And at that point, the whole world came to a stop. Posh people was straight staring at me,
with faces like saying “no way, you are not going to eat that here”. The waiter was screaming
through his eyes, meanwhile I put Heinz Tomato Ketchup on my food. So, that is my idea. Do you
want to do it?

This commercial demonstrates several best practices in digital marketing. First, it appeals to the
emotions of the audience by recounting a humorous story that is relatable to many people.
Additionally, it uses the power of celebrity endorsement by featuring a well-known musician.
Finally, it features a recognizable product that many people have a positive association with.

Overall, this commercial is effective in its use of digital marketing best practices. It appeals to the
emotions of the audience, features a recognizable product and a celebrity endorsement which
helps to further engage the audience.

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 2. MARKETING AND ADVERTISEMENT CHANNELS

1. The PESO Model, with Pros and Cons of Each Channel

In order to create the most effective digital

marketing strategy to support an Omnichannel
customer experience, let’s explore some of the
most important channels and platforms. The
PESO model is a model for considering the
balance among four different possible types of
media: paid, earned, shared, and owned.

Now, let’s discuss the pros and cons of each

type of media.

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 2. The Role(s) of Your Website

Digital Platforms and Channels: How You Show Up

In order to have an effective presence and invite the exchange of value with your customers,
digital marketers need to both:

1. Present their services and products effectively and consistently

2. Adapt to the culture and expectations of different digital channels

Much like your personal presence in real life, you’re always the same person, but you “show
up” differently depending on the space you’re entering. At home, you may dress more relaxed
and speak more casually than you would in school. At work, you may dress more formally and
use entirely different language than you would at a nightclub with friends. You’d present yourself
differently at a job interview than a date, but you’re always yourself. This is how we need to think
about building an effective digital presence. It’s about holding that tension between maintaining
consistent messaging while adapting to your surroundings. It’s about being you, wherever your
customer may find you.

Web marketing is a series of baby steps. Some get you further than others, but it’s mostly a lot of
little things that add up to something big.

Professor: If showing up online is like showing up in real life, your website is the equivalent of
your home. Its the place where you gave the most freedom and opportunity to really show your
customers who you are and what you’re all about. Building and maintaining a website that truly
represents your brand and provides a smooth, compelling experience for your customers can be
as simple as puting up a one page static site with nothing but a “contact us form” or as complex
as Amazon.com. As with everything in marketing, what your home base on the web does,
depends on your goals, audience, industry and strategy. There are a few website basics that
every digital marketer should be familiar with.

1º The Language: Websites are written into being. Everywhere you visit on the web is built with
code, and as a digital marketer, it is good to be familiar with the basics of how websites function
and some of the key terms.

The backbone of web development:

● Hypertext Markup Language (HTML): it was created in 1989 by web pioneer Tim Berners-
Lee, to help programmers describe the content of websites. It is used to publish online
documents, create forms, or retrieve information online through hyperlinks. It provides the
structure.
● Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): It is a language that complements HTML, by modifying
the display and design of HTML elements. It eases site maintenance and may be used to

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 design colors, fonts, layouts, or to adapt a web display across different devices. It provides
the style.
● Javascript, Python, Ruby, and many others: each has its strengths and weaknesses.
● Content Management System (CMS): Digital Marketers will be most familiar with it. It is a
software that allows to create, manage and modify all the content you need to build a
website without having to code. For example: WordPress (40% of all websites), Magento
(e-commerce), Squarespace, Wix.

The look of the website: it must reflect the taste or experience of the company. It must align with
your overall brand to make it easy to find what the visitor is looking for. And leaves them feeling
satisfied with the experience. The design must be planned, tested and continually adjusted. Web
designers takes into account the following factors:
● How information is organized
● The role of images, colour and white space.
● Responsivenes to various devices
● Create a path that guides the user to clear and intuitive steps.

The numbers: a website is a goldmine of insights into your audiences, interests and behaviors.
Tools like google analytics provide an immense amount of data, to let you listen to and learn from
your users. The key is not in the raw data itself, but in its interpretation and translation into action.
Data and Analytics will be in Module 4. Now, visit your favorite brands, notice what stands out to
you about them, the way the site feels and the journey they are taking you on. Are there good
elements to replicate or things yo avoid in your own marketing?

A Word On Websites and Accessibility

According to the World Bank, 15% of the world’s population (one billion people) live with some
kind of disability (The World Bank 2021). Regardless of who your target audience is, some of
them are living with a disability. Are those people able to read, navigate, and take action on your
website, just as any “typical” user would? This is the question at the heart of website accessibility.

When you look at the broad range of abilities and disabilities that people might have, you can see
that designing and building products only for people who have perfect vision, hearing, dexterity,
and cognition seems incredibly narrow. It's almost self-defeating, because we're creating a more
stressful and less usable experience for everyone, and for some users creating an experience
which actually excludes them altogether. Victor Tsaran - Technical Program Manager at Google

The more accessible you can make your digital presence, the wider your potential customer base.
In particular, making your website more accessible is an issue of equity, but it’s also just good
business practice.

There are lots of considerations to take into account when making your website accessible. Here
are the broad categories, as outlined by the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines:

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Perceivable: Can users perceive the content? This helps us remember that just because
something is perceivable with one sense, such as sight, it doesn't mean that all users can perceive
it.
Operable: Can users use UI components and navigate the content? For example, something that
requires a hover interaction cannot be operated by someone who can't use a mouse or touch
screen.
Understandable: Can users understand the content? Can users understand the interface and is
it consistent enough to avoid confusion?
Robust: Can the content be consumed by a wide variety of user agents (browsers)? Does it work
with assistive technology?

The organization WebAIM (Web Accessibility in Mind) has a robust checklist of tactics you can
implement to make your website more accessible: WebAIM: WebAIM's WCAG 2 Checklist. You
can also enter your website’s URL to test your website’s accessibility and generate a list of
immediate opportunities for improvement here: WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool.

CONSIDER: Just as your website can be more accessible to those with disabilities, the language
you use can also be more inclusive for all types of people. Digital agency Whole Whale developed
a tool to automatically review your website and flag any potentially offensive terms. Learn about
it here: About The Inclusivity Tool - Whole Whale.

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 3. MAJOR TYPES OF MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

1. SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization—the process of improving your website so that it
ranks higher in search results. In order to understand SEO, you need to understand a bit about
how search engines work, and how consumers behave while they are searching.

Search Engines: Search engines use crawlers (an internet bot that systematically browses the
World Wide Web) to delve into websites, gather information on the content housed there, explore
the internal and external links, and understand how that site is connected to other sites on the
web. That information is stored in the search engine’s database, called an index. When you enter
text into a search engine like Google, an algorithm then determines which information is most
relevant to your search, and presents the results on the search engine results page (SERP).

Consumer Behavior: When was the last time you looked something up online? When you did,
how many pages of results did you go through before finding what you needed? The vast majority
of consumers are only looking at the very top results, and rarely go more than a page or two
deeper. Being at the top of the SERP is the best way to get attention and potentially earn a click
through to your website.

The challenge for digital marketers is to understand how pages are ranked = what the search
algorithm thinks is important. If you understand what helps pages show up higher in SERPs,
you can adjust your website to align with that; this is “optimization” in SEO. 94% of all searches
happen on a Google property. SEO is what helps your website rank higher among organic
(nonpaid) search results. As Google dominates the search market, let’s take a more detailed look
at the different areas your business can feature in within Google:

● Organic search results. This is where your SEO strategy comes into play.
● Paid search results/Google Ads (Section 4 - Module 3)
● Shopping search results. If you are marketing a retail business, you can sell your products
through Google Shopping.
● Maps search results/Google My Business. If your business has a physical location, it’s a
good idea to set up and maintain a Google My Business account.
● Image search results. Optimizing your images for SEO can help your business appear at the
top of image search results, another channel where your potential customers may search.
There are lots of tips for optimizing images; start with ensuring all your images are sized
appropriately for your website and social media, and, where possible, make sure they have
appropriate names, captions, and ALT (short for alternative) text.
● Video search results. As the most emotion-rich medium for content, video is dominating the
digital marketing landscape more and more. If you create a video as part of your digital
marketing strategy, upload the video to YouTube, add a compelling title, thorough descriptive
text that aligns with your website SEO keywords, and, where possible, also publish the
transcript to make your content even more searchable.

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The next challenge is that Google and other search engines are constantly changing their
algorithm—hundreds of times a year according to most experts—and updating their service.
For instance, you may have noticed that Google, in response to the way most people use their
search engine, began functioning as an answers bank with suggestions of related questions and
quick responses available right on the SERP.

8 ways SEO has changed in the past 10 years (ANNEX 2): How has the search landscape
changed over the last decade? Columnist Jayson DeMers explores the biggest shake-ups over
the last 10 years and their impact on search engine optimization (SEO):

• The rise of content: Google's Panda update in 2011 served as the death blow to spammy
content and keyword stuffing, emphasizing the importance of producing high-quality content for
SEO success.

• The death of link schemes: Google's Penguin update in 2012 penalized participants in link
wheels and exchanges and paid linkers, emphasizing the importance of natural link attraction
and valuable link building.

• The reshaping of local: Google's Pigeon update in 2014 more heavily incorporated traditional
web ranking signals into its ranking algorithm, giving well-optimized websites a major edge in
local search.

• SERP overhauls: The SERPs have changed significantly since 2006, requiring SEOs to
consider different ranking factors.

• The rise of the Knowledge Graph: Google's Knowledge Graph, which first emerged on the
scene in 2012, attempts to provide users direct, concise answers to their queries, often taking
precedence over organic search results.

• Mobile prioritization: Mobile devices have exploded in popularity since the iPhone first
emerged back in 2007, and Google has done everything it can to emphasize the importance of
optimizing websites for those mobile users.

• The soft death of keywords: Google's Hummingbird update in 2013 introduced semantic
search, attempting to understand meaning rather than matching keywords.

• Update pacing and impact: Google's updates are now smaller, less noticeable, and roll out
gradually, giving them a much less dramatic impact on the industry.

The key to effective SEO is to understand your customers’ expectations when they search.
Are they interested in making an immediate purchase? Maybe. But probably not.

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Case of Olay: They realized that consumer behavior was changing, and that their SEO would
have to evolve as well. It was not the channel for a direct sale, but a place to be helpful, answer
questions, and start a conversation: “We started to see search as a direct dialogue with the
consumer,” said Spencer Kelly, brand manager for Olay e-commerce. “If they were standing in
front of us asking the question, how would we answer? We probably wouldn't respond with ‘Buy
Olay!’ But this is how most of our ads responded to consumers’ questions. So we started to rethink
how we respond back to consumers in a way that gets them what they need.” (Wiers 2019)

In approaching SEO, the question we must answer is: what are our customers searching for?

Let’s take a look at some tips for getting started with SEO.

1. Understand who your user is and what they’re looking for. This goes back to really
understanding your customer. Let’s say you’re a local bakery. Are your potential customers
folks with a sweet tooth looking for an everyday treat? Or are they health conscious
consumers who want organic ingredients? A tool like AnswerthePublic can help you uncover
what questions your audience might be asking.
2. Determine and prioritize keywords. A tool like SpyFu can help you get a sense of what
people are looking for. Those keywords can then be built into different places on your website.
3. Develop a strategy for backlinking. Backlinks, or external links, are the hyperlinks that
connect one website to another. When another site links to your site, web crawlers see this
as a sign of authority or trustworthiness and increase the ranking of the site. Proceed with
caution though! Backlinks need to be genuinely earned to drive the right traffic from potential
customers.
4. Implement your strategy, track your progress, and set a plan for reviewing and revising
your efforts regularly.

There is a lot more to explore when it comes to SEO; it’s even a career specialization you might
want to take on. Because it is such a specific niche, many companies have SEO specialists or
outsource SEO to digital agencies. If you’re interested in learning more about SEO, Moz.com has
a thorough beginner’s guide:

CHAPTER 0: QUICK START SEO GUIDE. Speed up to catch up: Go from zero to hero with our
step-by-step refresh on the core fundamentals for setting your site up for SEO success.
CHAPTER 1: SEO 101. What is it, and why is it important?: For true beginners. Learn what search
engine optimization is, why it matters, and all the need-to-know basics to start yourself off right.
Download your free Quick Start Worksheet.
CHAPTER 2: HOW SEARCH ENGINES WORK – CRAWLING, INDEXING, AND RANKING.
First, you need to show up: If search engines literally can't find you, none of the rest of your work
matters. This chapter shows you how their robots crawl the Internet to find your site and add it to
their indexes.

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CHAPTER 3: KEYWORD RESEARCH. Understand what your audience wants to find.: Our
approach targets users first because that's what search engines reward. This chapter covers
keyword research and other methods to determine what your audience is seeking.
CHAPTER 4: ON-SITE OPTIMIZATION. Use your research to craft your message.: This is a hefty
chapter, covering optimized design, user experience, information architecture, and all the ways
you can adjust how you publish content to maximize its visibility and resonance with your
audience.
CHAPTER 5: TECHNICAL SEO. Basic technical knowledge will help you optimize your site for
search engines and establish credibility with developers: By implementing responsive design,
robot directives, and other technical elements like structured data and meta tags, you can tell
Google (a robot itself) what your site is all about. This helps it rank for the right things.
CHAPTER 6: LINK BUILDING & ESTABLISHING AUTHORITY. Turn up the volume: Once you've
got everything in place, it's time to expand your influence by earning attention and links from other
sites and influencers.
CHAPTER 7: MEASURING, PRIORITIZING, & EXECUTING SEO. Set yourself up for success.:
An essential part of any SEO strategy is knowing what's working (and what isn't), adjusting your
approach as you go along.
THE SEO GLOSSARY. Understand key terms and phrases: Learning SEO can sometimes feel
like learning another language, with all the jargon and industry terms you're expected to know.
This chapter-by-chapter glossary will help you get a handle on all the new words.

2. SEO, SEM, and PPC

What are SEM and PPC marketing, and how are they distinct from SEO?

● SEM stands for search engine marketing.

● PPC stands for pay-per click, and is also called CPC (cost per click), paid search, and
search advertising.
The distinction is cause for debate among marketers (Hollingsworth 2019).

SEM
● is an umbrella term for maximizing the exchange of value through search by investing in
paid placements.
● isn’t limited to search giants like Google; it can extend to other sites that offer a search
function to their users, such as Amazon, Etsy, or TripAdvisor.
PPC

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 ● is a specific type of SEM in which the marketer pays for their placements based on the
number of people who click through the advertisement.

The most important distinction is this: SEO is focused on organic search, while SEM/PPC are
focused on paid placements.

3. Display Ads vs. Native Advertising

Display ads are a kind of online advertising in which an image or video is used to draw a user to
click through to another site, usually where a potential customer can learn more or make a
purchase. There are many different forms and types of display advertising.

Display advertising indicates an initial interest or curiosity in a product or service, but not
necessarily a readiness to buy. With that in mind, one of the most important reasons digital
marketers use display advertising is to create an audience which can be retargeted. Remarketing,
or retargeting, is the practice of focusing your advertising on those people who have already
indicated their interest by visiting your website.

EXAMPLE: 97% of people will not make a purchase the first time they visit a website. Retargeting
allows you to collect data on these users and remind them to return, often by showing them
additional ads on subsequent sites. This tactic allows you to personalize your marketing, use your
advertising dollars more efficiently (as they’re focused on those who are already curious), and
drive results. A 2019 study found that retargeted ads caused 14.6% more users to return to a
particular website within four weeks. (Conick 2019)

Very few consumers buy after the first exposure to an ad, so marketers use retargeting to increase
conversion. Retargeting is a cookie-based technology that uses simple code to anonymously
"follow" your audience on the Web.

20
Retargeting, though, has come under scrutiny. While consumers appreciate personalization, they
don’t necessarily want companies chasing them around the internet. “Retargeting is an intrusive
form of user surveillance that requires regulation,” said Jeffrey Chester, executive director at the
Center for Digital Democracy. “Digitally shadowing consumers for online targeting is an unfair—
and undemocratic—process. Retargeting works, but it shouldn’t mean that privacy and consumer
protection is tossed by the wayside for the gain of a few digital dollars.” (Abramovich 2012).

Digital Marketing in a Cookie-less world

While powerful, retargeting has come under serious scrutiny recently. While consumers
appreciate personalization, they dont necessarily want companies chasing them around the
internet. “Retargeting is an intrusive form of user surveillance that requires regulation” (Jeffrey
Chester - Executive Director of the Center for Digital Democracy).

Digitally shadowing consumers for online targeting is an unfair and undemocratic process.
Retargeting works, but it shouldn't mean that privacy and consumer protection is tossed by the
wayside for the gain of a few digital dollars. In fact, the tech industry is shifting away from tracking
and retargeting customers by means of what are called cookies, little bits of code that browsers
store to keep track of who has already visited a site.

Cookies can be very helpful. For instance, if you are shopping online and view certain products
on a particular website, cookies are what tell the website who you are when you come back, so
you can see those products again. They allow the site to remember you and create a more
personalized experience. Those arent the kinds of cookies that are coming under fire. It is third
party cookies, or tracking cookies, that are causing the bigger issue. These are cookies attached
to advertisements. Imagine you are reading the online new, you see a catchy add and you click
on it. If you find the same ad following you on the next website and on social media and seemingly
anywhere you go online, thats what tracking cookies do. These kind of cookies are automatically
disabled on safari, firefox and other internet browsers.

Google has also announced that the are phasing that out in 2022 as well. This shift from google
has significant implications for marketers who want to provide a personalized approach and
gather data on the effectiveness of their advertising spending.

What might digital marketing in a cookie-less world look like? Digital marketers putted lots of ideas
out there as to what the cookie-less world will be like. Everyone agrees that taking control of your
first party data is key. This means, it is necessary to work harder to develop real relationships with
their customers and capture the kind of data like email addresses and phone numbers that they
can carry with them from one place to another. That might mean creating more useful and
entertaining content in exchange for an email address or holding events to capture information at
registration or building and nurturing brand communities outside of Facebook groups or other
social media platforms, or any number of options. The shift to a cookie-less world is neither the
first nor the last time digital marketers will have to contend with major shifts in the industry and

21
learn how to adapt. Its those who embrance change, deepen their empathy, and lead with
creativity, who will survive and thrive through this change and whatever else is yet to come.

Forum: Retargeting. Discuss and share your thoughts on the topic of cookies and retargeting with
your peers. While answering the forum, consider: if third party cookies are being phased out, how
else might companies capture first.

Let’s now dive into embedded advertising. Embedded advertising includes two major types:

● Native advertising is a form of paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form
and function of the user experience in which it is placed and appears fully integrated in other
content.
● Product placement is a practice in which manufacturers of goods or providers of a service
gain exposure for their products by paying for them to be featured in movies, television
programs, video games, and other forms of visual entertainment.

CONSIDER: Native advertising is mostly digital while product placement can take any form.

To qualify as a Native Ad, the promotional material has to meet strict guidelines:

Form: Does the ad fit within the overall page design? Does it appear in-stream or out-of-stream?
Function: Does the ad function like other page elements? Does it deliver a similar content
experience compared with the rest of the page?
Integration: How does the unit’s behavior match surrounding content? Does it mirror page
content behavior or does it introduce new behavior (for example, linking to content off-site)?
Buying and targeting: Is ad placement guaranteed on a specific page, section, or website? Will
it be delivered across a network of sites? Is the ad narrowly or broadly targeted?
Measure: What metrics are used to judge an ad’s success? Does the ad result in brand
engagement or a direct response from customers?
Recommendation Widgets: Sponsored content is suggested to readers.
In Feed Ads: Sponsored content is staggered in between other articles and named as an
advertisemen.
Sponsored Content: It is presented alongside other content, and is designated as coming from
a particular (advertising) partner.

Product Placement: (1) Video games: The video game industry is massive and growing, likely
reaching over $180 billion by 2021, with 2.5 billion gamers around the world. Additionally, while
the stereotypical gamer may be a teenager, the reality is that the average age of a video game
enthusiast is 34. Product placement in video games can get you in front of highly engaged,
specific audiences. (2) Advertainment: Advertainment is the height of content marketing, in which
your product takes on a life of its own. The LEGO movies are an excellent example of
advertainment; the content itself then becomes a revenue generator.

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4. Content Marketing

What is the purpose of content marketing?

● Content is what people want online
● Marketing and advertising are what people want to avoid.

The purpose of content marketing is to add value to the potential customer’s life—to make them
appreciate your existence, and turn them into loyal, paying advocates.

When comparing content marketing to traditional advertising, you can identify the difference in
goals and outcomes:

● Traditional advertising casts a broad net, seeking to find its audience in order to push
content to this group. As a result, traditional advertising will reach fast outcomes that will be
expensive and shallow
● Content marketing looks for a more specific group and uses it to build an audience from, by
means of content. As a result, content marketing will result in deep engagement through a
cheaper, yet slower process
.

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5. Three Essential Steps for Success

Content marketing is about earning permission to enter someone’s personal space. In doing so,
there are three essential steps for success. Click on each of them to learn more.

What Goal By doing what?

Company Increase the

Mission/Objective number of young
users

Create relevant Company mission Provide healthy lifestyle

Content Target audience advice to 18–24 y/o
Mission/Strategy content in Business objectives demographic through blog
accordance with → Content objectives and social media to reach
desired level of health

Message: healthy attributes

of product with strong appeal
Content Choose the most to self-care
Marketing relevant platforms to create strong
Main platforms: own blog
Strategy and content engagement with
distribution the target audience. Social media amplification
cadence (Snapchat and Instagram)
Lebron James influencer
Call to action: try our product

Execute content to create the Blog: start the day in a

marketing calendar largest platform healthy way by using product
and optimize footprint at
content delivery minimum cost.
Snapchat: healthy routine
Content including our product
Marketing
YouTube: how LeBron
James makes a healthy
breakfast using our product

To get in front of the right customers in a Sea of Content, your content has to stand out. Two
strategies for doing so are the content sweet spot and content tilt.

24
6. Sweet Spot

Content sweet spot: Intersection of a company’s authority area and customer’s pain point

Content tilt: A twist on a familiar idea that makes your content unique

What is your organization uniquely good at, and how does it address a specific pain point for your
audience? This is the intersection where you want to focus your content.

Your passion, authority and expertise Your customers pain points and aspirations

Content Tilt → Four elements will help you find your content tilt

Audience - WHO Is your audience niche enough that nobody talks to them directly?
Is your audience large enough to support your business?

Story - WHAT Is the way you tell your story unique?

Is the way you tell your story different?
Does the way you tell the story resonate with your audience?

Platform - HOW Is there a platform that is being underutilized by our competitors?

Is there an emerging platform that is particularly relevant to our
audience?

Subject Matter - Is the subject matter we chose unique?

WHY Is it uniquely relevant to my specific chosen audience?

Example of Hitting the Sweet Spot and Finding Tilt

Andy Schneider, known as the “Chicken Whisperer,” started out as a hobbyist raising his
chickens, but has since turned his side gig into a chicken enthusiast’s empire. Learning that his
friends were also interested in raising chickens, he started a small meetup group, which attracted
media attention, and grew into a one-stop shop media platform for all things chickens. Looking at
his content now, you can see how the sweet spot of his existing expertise and his audience’s
desire to increase their own knowledge, as well as the content tilt of humor, storytelling, and
hyperspecificity, has come together to make an engaging experience for his thousands of
subscribers.

What is the right tilt? If your content can get you to the point where you can fill in the sentence:
“Only we can provide X customer with X.” That’s a great start!

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 4. DIGITAL PLATFORMS

1. Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Facebook

Audience:# of monthly active users: 2.7 billion. Largest age group: 25–34 (26.3%). Gender:
44% female, 56% male. Time spent per day: 38 minutes. Tactics that work/best practices:

● Ads: Facebook gathers an enormous amount of detailed user data, which translates into a
very powerful ad targeting platform. Create custom audiences based on your personas. Install
the Facebook Pixel on your website to retarget your audience.
● Going live: Livestream video is an effective method of engaging your audience with your
brand. Interviews, tours, and new product announcements all work well for live events.
Loosely script your event and be sure to build in interaction with your viewers as they comment
on the video.
● Groups: Facebook Groups are a powerful way to connect your customers not only with your
brand, but with one another. Effectively moderated, Facebook Groups can provide your
customers with a sense of community that builds trust and loyalty to the brand.

Examples: 8 of The Best Facebook Groups We've Ever Seen:

• HubSpot Academy Content Marketing Pros: Private group for members to share ideas about
content challenges and projects, use and plan to use HubSpot, share details about courses, and
list ideas for courses.
• Instant Pot: International community of Instant Pot users to ask questions, post recipes, and
share the joy of cooking with their products.
• Women of Impact by National Geographic: Group to celebrate world-shaping powerhouses and
encourage anyone passionate about women breaking barriers in their fields.
• Elementor: Private group for Elementor users to help each other learn how to use the page
builder and answer any questions or resolve any challenges.
• Official Peloton Member Page: Private group for customers and users to discuss Peloton
products, learn about latest announcements, feature roll outs, and product updates.
• MobileMonkey: Product-specific group for MobileMonkey users to ask questions and share
knowledge about Instagram and Facebook Messenger, SMS & Chatbot Marketing products.
• Canva Design Circle: Group to learn how to take advantage of Canva's product and its features
and functions through their Design School.
• Tasty: Group for members to share recipes, ideas for substitutes, and cooking tips; competitions,
incentives, and group activities to encourage members to interact and connect.

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Instagram

Audience: Nº of monthly active users: 1 billion. Largest age group: 25–34 (33.1%). Gender: 57%
female, 43% male. Average time spent per day: 29 minutes. Tactics that work/best practices:

● Your Instagram grid, the series of signature square images on every IG profile, is where
you make your first impression. Those images don’t have to stand alone; they can work
together to have a powerful, integrated effect. Check out how mineral water brand Jana
used IG for their campaign, “Deep” and created the “deepest” IG profile grid to-date.
● Instagram Live: Much like Facebook (both owned by parent company Meta), going live
on Instagram is a great way to connect directly with fans and followers in the moment.
● Stories: Use these fleeting, mini documentaries as an opportunity to offer your followers
a window into the day-to-day operations of your organization.
● Hashtags: Hashtags can organize information, pull together communities, or drive
momentum for a campaign. Research the hashtags your target audience is already using
to add to your posts, and bring in unique, branded hashtags for campaigns.

Examples: Instagram Powers Taco Bell's Innovation (businessinsider.com)

LinkedIn

Audience: Nº of total users: 738 million. Largest age group: 46–55. Gender: 51% male, 49%
female. 63% of LinkedIn users access the network monthly, and 22% weekly. Tactics that
work/best practices

● Teach fellow professionals: LinkedIn is the ideal space to reach other professionals and do
business-to-business (B2B) networking and marketing. But no one wants to feel like they’re
constantly being sold to. Instead, approach the platform as a place to teach: share your
insights and respond to others.
● Develop your team’s professional presence. As with so many social media platforms,
personal profiles tend to perform better than branded company pages—take advantage of
that! Work with your team to develop their personal profiles.
● Highlight your company culture and share open job opportunities: When talented people
are ready for their next job, they often brush up their LinkedIn posts and explore the
opportunities there. Use your LinkedIn page to show off your company’s people and values,
and entice the kind of talent that can help you grow.

Examples: WWF Company Page: (2) World Wildlife Fund: Overview | LinkedIn

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Twitter

Audience: Nº of daily active users: 187 million. Largest age group: 30–49 (44%). Gender: 32%
female, 68% male. Time spent per day/week: 3.53 minutes per session Tactics that work/best
practices:

● Keep it timely: Tweets have the shortest lifespan of any social media content—about 18
minutes. Timeliness is key; don’t be afraid to be responsive in the moment.
● Connect with the press: Twitter has become the go-to place for breaking news, and a great
platform for building relationships with journalists and influencers. Start by responding to them
and regularly offering value before requesting their support.
● Show personality: Twitter’s unique 280 character limit for posts means you need to get to
the heart of your message quickly. Use descriptive words, play on popular memes, and share
pictures and videos that help your followers get a sense of your brand’s personality in a short
period of time.

Examples: MoonPie (@MoonPie) / Twitter

YouTube

Audience: Nº of monthly active users: 2 billion. Largest age group: 15–25. Gender: 72% of all
female internet users and 72% of all male internet users. Time spent per day: 41.9 minutes among
viewers 18 and older. Tactics that work/best practices:

● Capture attention with a channel trailer: If you upload a channel trailer, when someone
lands on your channel's page it will automatically play for the viewer. This video is a perfect
opportunity to show off your personality and highlight the value of the channel.
● Be helpful: Many YouTube users visit the site for how-to content. What can you teach that
relates to your brand and product? These videos can then become helpful, entertaining pieces
of content that stand on their own and build trust and engagement with your organization.
● Consider SEO: YouTube is not only a repository of video, but the second largest search
engine on the planet. Use the descriptions of your videos, add hashtags where appropriate,
and link back to your own site to make your videos as rich as possible and build credibility
with your followers.

Examples: CHANEL - YouTube

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TikTok

Audience: Nº of monthly active users: 100 million. Largest age group: 18–24. Gender: 59%
female, 41% male. Time spent per day: 45+ minutes. Tactics that work/best practices

● Create for TikTok, share everywhere: Part of what makes TikTok content go viral so quickly
is the fact that sharing outside of TikTok is easy and encouraged. Once you’ve created a piece
for TikTok, don’t hesitate to post it to other social channels, especially YouTube, Twitter,
Facebook, and Instagram.
● Keep up with trends: Trends sweep across TikTok in all kinds of different ways: dances,
specific songs, filters and effects for videos. Keep an eye on what’s resonating for your
audience, and experiment with how those trends might align with your brand.
● Connect with microcommunities: TikTok’s unique algorithm makes it easy to find and
connect with very specific microcommunities. Think about your target audience, get a sense
of what they’re posting on TikTok, and consider ways you can contribute to the conversation
that’s already happening.

Example: “As lockdowns halted tourism, employees of Madgas Hotel, a small boutique hotel in
Vienna that originally made headlines for employing mostly refugees, put the time to good use by
creating a series of entertaining videos, one of which ended up reaching two million people around
the globe.” (Reitere 2021). Magdas Hotel (@magdashotel) TikTok | Watch Magdas Hotel's
Newest TikTok Videos

Snapchat

Audience: Nº of monthly active users: 265 million. Largest age group: 13–34 (75%). Gender:
58% female, 40% male. Time spent per day: 26 minutes. Tactics that work/best practices

● Create Snapchat-specific content: A big part of Snapchat’s appeal is the limited lifetime of
content. Take advantage of this angle and be creative and experimental, sharing content,
such as behind-the-scenes peeks, that fans and followers won’t see anywhere else.
● Use the code: Snapchat creates custom branded QR codes for each profile, which can be
scanned to access and follow your account. Use this code on your website and in printed
materials to build your following.
● Host contests: If you want to drive more engagement with your brand on Snapchat, try a
contest or giveaway to get people talking.

Examples: This LA art museum is pretty great at Snapchat - The Verg

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Pinterest

Audience: # of monthly active users: 400+ millions. Largest age group: 30–49. Gender: 78%
female, 22% male. Time spent per day: 14.2 minutes. Tactics that work/best practices:

● Focus on eye-catching graphics: What do your users see when they land on your Pinterest
page? Using a consistent, branded approach to your graphics makes the page feel more
appealing and inviting, and helps visitors quickly understand who you are and what you have
to offer.
● Use the “shop” tab: For retail brands in particular, Pinterest offers opportunities to drive
customers directly to purchase.
● Consider SEO: Consistently posting to Pinterest can improve your rankings in search
engines. Think about how your Pins can play into your SEO strategy to increase visibility and
drive more organic traffic to your website.

Examples: HonestlyWTF on Pinterest

2. Ethics

What happens when the policies and practices of a particular digital channel don’t align
with your organization’s values? A number of companies have found themselves in this
position, for many reasons (Lock 2021). Cosmetics company Lush recently announced that it
would be leaving Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, in light of the insights that social media use
can be highly detrimental to mental health, especially among young women. CEO Mark
Constantine shared that he would be happy to lose the money from the reduced exposure that
comes with pulling their brand from the platforms.

We're talking about suicide here, not spots or whether someone should dye their hair blonde [...]
How could we possibly suggest we're a caring business if we look at that and don't care? (Mark
Constantine - LUSH CEO, IN AN INTERVIEW WITH THE GUARDIAN).

Nonprofits too, struggled with the decision to stay or to go, especially since Facebook introduced
tools making it significantly easier for donors to contribute to nonprofit causes directly through the
platform. Amy Sample Ward, Executive Director of NTEN, shared her organization’s reasoning
for leaving the platform, and the struggles of the nonprofit community when potentially making the
same move (Ward 2020).

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 Essay

A. In digital marketing, we select platforms based on where our audience is. Should we
also select them based on what their values are?

Given the fact that in digital marketing, we select platforms based on where our audience is,
we must also select the platform based on the values1 of the customers who use a specific
platform. For instance, if we are a brainhunter company, we know that linkedin users give
importance to their professional career, ergo, we would be able to find our target audience among
the users of such a platform. 1. Beliefs people have, especially about what is right and wrong and what is most important in life, that
control their behaviour (source).

B. How do we evaluate where we spend our time and resources?

In order to decide where to spend our time and resources on Social Media, it is necessary to: (1)
conduct an audience analysis: This involves researching the demographics and interests of the
target audience, as well as the platforms they use and their engagement levels. This data can
then be used to determine which platforms and strategies are most likely to reach and engage
the target audience. Additionally, digital marketers should also consider the cost of each platform
and the return on investment (ROI) it may provide. By evaluating the cost-benefit of each platform,
marketers can make informed decisions on where to allocate resources. (2) Conduct an analysis
of the values and tools of each Social Media. In instance, we have a task which is to communicate
a political campaign message, and we already have female support, our target audience are
mainly males. We know that almost 70% of twitter users are males and that the platform works
well for showing ideas and connect with people using short messages. Then, twitter would be a
good option for our task.

3. Email Marketing and Mobile/SMS Marketing

Email and SMS advertising is about communicating to your current consumer base. Especially
in a world in which digital marketers can’t rely on tracking cookies to provide a personalized
experience for their customers, capturing first-person data like emails and phone numbers is
increasingly important. Nurturing those relationships is critical.

CONSIDER
● List opt-ins are highly regulated
● Consumers can opt out easily
● Frequency of messages also might be regulated
● Make sure you do A/B Testing—testing different elements of ads to find the winning
combination
● You will be reaching almost exclusively consumers who already know you

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32
4. Affiliate Marketing vs. Influencer Marketing

Let's now look into the similarities and differences between affiliate and influencer marketing.

Show influencers love, they’ll show it back. Ask for love, they’ll ask for money. (Peter Rahal - CEO
RXBAR).

Affiliate Marketing: Affiliate marketing is an approach typically used in e-commerce in which an

affiliate is given a unique link to sell a particular product or service. That individual then earns a
commission every time someone uses that unique link to make a purchase. For instance, online
course platform Skillshare offers an affiliate program that encourages users to make referrals:

Influencer Marketing: is a strategy in which a brand partners with a digital creator who already
has a significant following in order to create unique content and campaigns. Bedrock Real Estate

33
hit all the right notes with this campaign, “Anthem of Us,” in 2016. In an effort to encourage real
estate purchases in Detroit, the company worked with Detroit-born rapper Big Sean to do the
voice-over for a celebration of the city, its businesses, and people. The video was successful not
only because it utilized influencer marketing well, but because it featured, and resonated with, the
local community, instilling a sense of pride that resulted in social sharing. Before you consider
influencer marketing make sure that your team can handle nurturing the relationship, you have
content worth sharing. Your KPIs 1 will be different depending on the goal of your engagement.
Be ready to give away your content and share influencer’s content without asking anything in
return.

Anthem of Us | A Short Film About Detroit | Presented by Bedrock: The core message of the
video is that hard work, dedication, and perseverance are necessary to achieve one's dreams. It
also emphasizes the importance of appreciating where one comes from and the lessons that can
be learned from life's experiences. Finally, the text conveys a sense of pride and joy in being able
to make one's dreams come true.

The Poetic Justice of Amanda Gorman’s Estée Lauder Contract - The inside story of how it
happened and why it matters. How brands choose influencers and why it is important: In
today’s digital age, brands are increasingly looking to influencers to help promote their
products. Influencers are people who have a large online presence and can influence the opinion
of their followers. Brands are increasingly turning to influencers to help them reach a larger
audience and to create an emotional connection with their consumers. The decision of which
influencer to partner with is a critical one for brands. They must consider the influencer’s
reach, their audience, their values, and their content. Brands must also consider how the
influencer’s message will align with their own brand values. It is important for brands to choose
influencers who are authentic and who will be able to effectively communicate their message to
their followers. The choice of influencers is also important for brands because it can help
them reach a larger, more diverse audience. Brands should look for influencers who have a
wide reach, but who also represent the values of the brand. For example, if a brand is trying to
reach a younger audience, they might look for influencers who have a large following of young
people. Similarly, if a brand is trying to reach a more diverse audience, they should look for
influencers who represent multiple cultures and backgrounds. In addition to considering the
influencer’s reach and audience, brands should also consider the influencer’s content.
Brands should look for influencers who create content that is in line with their own values and
mission. This can help ensure that the brand’s message is communicated in a way that resonates
with the influencer’s followers. The right influencer can help brands reach a larger, more diverse
audience and create an emotional connection with their consumers. Brands should consider
the influencer’s reach, audience, values, and content when selecting an influencer to partner
with. By doing so, brands can ensure that their message is effectively communicated to their
target audience.

1
A performance indicator or key performance indicator is a type of performance measurement. KPIs
evaluate the success of an organization or of a particular activity in which it engages.

34
35
5. Future-proofing

In much of this module, we’ve discussed best practices for a variety of digital channels. But
as with any creative work, sometimes the point is to learn the rules in order to break them
better. For instance, think of a press release. It has a very specific format, and it takes time,
skill, and lots of practice to be able to develop an effective release. That’s why it was so surprising
when, in 2015, Chevy puts out a press release entirely in emoji. As the Business Insider article
stated, this was “an appeal to a younger generation of buyers.” (Green, 2015) To attract this age
group, Chevy first sent the emoji press release, and challenged its readers to decipher the
message before sending the translated release a few days later. The press release was the
centerpiece of a bigger campaign, #ChevyGoesEmoji, which followed the announcement from
Oxford Languages that 2015’s “Word of the Year” was, in fact, an emoji. Chevy knew the rules of
a press release. The emoji press release got attention because it broke those rules in a fun,
engaging way that captured people’s attention.

CONSIDER: How might you turn the rules of digital platforms on their head to capture the hearts
and minds of your audience?

6. Point/Counterpoint on Shiny Object Syndrome

Digital marketers are often accused of having “shiny object syndrome”: an insatiable attraction
to cool new tools and technology. For many, this is seen as a sign of lost focus and it takes away
from the need for strategic decision-making.

“If you’re constantly chasing new ideas and being distracted by the latest strategy, you’ll find
yourself hopping around from one method to another and never really focusing on your core
content marketing strategy.” (Brenner 2019)

On the other hand, the digital marketing world moves quickly, and it’s a marketer’s job to
stay on top of new trends: “I see a lot of posts about how marketers shouldn’t get distracted by
“shiny new things” in marketing. That tried and true is always better. I disagree. I think looking into
“shiny new things” is actually a core part of the job. How will you ever know if there’s a new tool
or platform that will work well for your business if you aren’t testing the latest tech? At one point
Google AdWords was a shiny new thing that marketers were skeptical of. The same can be said
for WordPress, marketing automation, SEO, and pretty much every social media network. Sure,
tried and true approaches shouldn’t be discounted, but sometimes the shiny new thing is exactly
what you need. #marketing”. Statement from Matt Chiera of Ice Nine Online

CONSIDER: Is shiny object syndrome detrimental or necessary?

36
 Glossary

● PESO: Paid Earned Shared Owned media

● POST: People, Objectives, Strategy & Story, Tools/Technology
● PPC: Pay-per click, also called CPC (cost per click), paid search, and search advertising
● SEM: Search Engine Marketing—focused on paid placements
● SEO: Search Engine Optimization—focused on organic traffic
● SERP: Search Engine Results Page
● WebAIM: Web Accessibility in Mind
● Affiliate Marketing: An approach in e-commerce where an affiliate (individual) is provided
with a unique link to sell a product or service. The individual earns a commission each time
someone uses the link to make a purchase.
● Bandwagon Effect: The idea that it is good to do something that everyone else is doing. Also
known as social proof.
● Benefits: Aspects of life that will be different after the consumer uses the product or service.
● Display Ad: A type of online advertising in which an image or video is used to draw a user to
click through to another site.
● Earned Media: Related to others talking about the product or service and public relations.
● Features: The components and functions of a product.
● Influencer Marketing: When a brand partners with a digital creator with a significant following
to create compelling content and campaigns.
● Multichannel Marketing: Various, disconnected channels for customers to use
independently. (Kaushik 2017.)
● Native Advertising: A form of paid media where the ad experience follows the natural form
and function of the user experience.
● Omnichannel Marketing: An integrated, seamless experience across multiple devices and
touchpoints (Kaushik 2021).
● Owned Media: Channels that belong to the company, such as the website and email list.
● Paid Media: All advertising regardless of the channel.
● Product Placement: When a product or service gains exposure by paying to be featured in
movies, television programs, video games, and other forms of visual entertainment.
● Retargeting: The practice of focusing your advertising on those people who have already
indicated their interest by visiting your website.
● Social Proof: The idea that it is good to do something that everyone else is doing. Also known
as bandwagon effect.
● Shared Media: Shared media platforms allow brands and individuals alike to post their
content; the platform itself is not owned by the brand, but by a third party. Social media is
shared media.
● User Generated Content (UGC): Content that is created and shared by customers.

37
 References and Resources

The content of this module was informed by the sources listed in the References section. Please
consult the Resources section for a complete list of required and recommended materials as well
as additional resources.

References
● Abramovich, Giselle. 2012. "Why Retargeting Is The Hottest Area Of Ad Tech -
Digiday". Digiday. URL.
● AirBnB (@airbnb). 2021. " ¡Oye! @Daddyyankee, Recibe A Sus Fans En Su Casa
De Retiro En Puerto Rico...". Instagram. URL.
● Anderson, Kare. 2021. "Why Some Things Catch On And Get Shared".
Linkedin.Com. URL.
● AnswerThePublic. 2021. "Search Listening Tool For Market, Customer & Content
Research". Answerthepublic.Com. URL.
● Bedrock Detroit. 2016. “Anthem Of Us | A Short Film About Detroit | Presented By
Bedrock”. Filmed May 2016. Video, 4:01. URL.
● Brenner, Michael. 2019. "5 Ways For Content Marketers To Avoid Shiny Object
Syndrome". Marketing Insider Group. URL.
● BroadbandSearch. 2021. "Average Time Spent Daily On Social Media (Latest 2020
Data)". Broadbandsearch.Net. URL.
● Byford, Sam. 2014. "This LA Art Museum Is Pretty Great At Snapchat". The Verge.
URL.
● Ceci, L. 2021a. "Most Popular Social Media Apps In The U.S. 2019, By Session
Length". Statista. URL.
● Ceci, L. 2021b. "Youtube Usage Penetration In The United States 2020, By Age
Group". Statista. URL.
● Ceci, L. 2021c. "Youtube Usage Penetration In The United States 2020, By Gender".
Statista. URL.
● CHANEL. 2021. "CHANEL - Youtube". YouTube.com. URL.
● Clark, Kimberly. 2017. "No Baby Unhugged". Dandad.Org. URL.
● Conick, Hal. 2019. "Retargeted Ads Work". American Marketing Association. URL.
● Decker, Allie. 2021. "The Ultimate Guide To Emotional Marketing (Blog)". Hubspot.
URL.
● DeMers, Jayson. 2016. "8 Ways SEO Has Changed In The Past 10 Years". Search
Engine Land. URL.
● Devos, Eva. 2021. "New Work. Simple And Powerful. The Idea And The Act.".
Linkedin.Com. URL.
● Dopson, Elise. 2021. "Multi-Channel Retail: How To Decide On Sales Channels For
Your Business". Shopify Plus. URL.
● Enberg, Jasmine. 2020. "Global Instagram Users 2020". Insider Intelligence. URL.

38
● Fitbit (@fitbit). 2021. "After Bringing Her New Baby Home From The Hospital,
Rachael Got Another Surprise". Instagram. URL.
● Friedman, Vanessa. 2021. "The Poetic Justice Of Amanda Gorman’S Estée Lauder
Contract". Www-Nytimes-Com.Cdn.Ampproject.Org. URL.
● Google for Retail. 2021. "Get Started". Google. URL.
● Google My Business. 2021. "Manage Your Business Profile". Google.Com. URL.
● Green, Dennis. 2015. "Chevy Put Out A Press Release Entirely In Emoji — And Now
We Know What It Means". Business Insider. URL.
● Harvard Business Review. 2014. "Science Shows Why Marketers Are Right To Use
Nostalgia". Harvard Business Review. URL.
● Hollingsworth, Sam. 2019. "SEM Vs. SEO Vs. PPC Defined: What's The
Difference?". Search Engine Journal. URL.
● Holmes, Ryan. 2019. "Is Tiktok A Time Bomb?". Fast Company. URL.
● HonestlyWTF. 2021. "Honestlywtf". Pinterest. URL.
● Investor Relations. 2021. "Snap Inc. - Investor Relations". Investor.Snap.Com. URL.
● Jana - Natural Mineral Water (@ deepest_insta_profile). 2017. "Deepest Instagram
Profile By Jana". Instagram. URL.
● Jones, Ryan. 2021. "Top 8 Skills Every Great SEO Professional Needs To
Succeed". Search Engine Journal. URL.
● Kaushik, Ankita. 2017. "Omnichannel Marketing: A Complete Guide For 2021 And
Beyond". Moengage Blog. URL.
● Kearney, Meggin, Dave Gash, Alice Boxhall, and Rob Dodson. 2019. "Accessibility".
Google Developers. URL.
● LinkedIn Pressroom. 2021. "About Us". News.Linkedin.Com. URL.
● Lock, Samantha. 2021. "Every Major Company To Leave Facebook So Far".
Newsweek. URL.
● Magdas Hotel (@magdashotel). 2021. "Tiktok - For You". Tiktok.Com. URL.
● Make-A-Wish. 2021. "What Is The Impact Of Granting Wishes?". Wish.Org. URL.
● Mallard, Andréa. 2020. "Pinterest Tops 400 Million Monthly Active Users—With Gen
Z, Men And Millennials Driving Growth". Pinterest Newsroom. URL.
● Marketing Charts. 2021. "3 Interesting Study Findings About Tiktok’S Adult User
Demographics". Marketing Charts. URL.
● Meisenzahl, Mary. 2021. "Burger King's Nostalgic Rebrand Was A Huge Hit. 2
Designers Explain Why It Was A Success.". Business Insider. URL.
● MoonPie (@MoonPie). 2021. "Moonpie". Twitter. URL.
● MozPro. 2021. "Beginner's Guide To SEO [Search Engine Optimization]". Moz. URL.
● Murray, Peter Noel. 2013. "How Emotions Influence What We Buy". Psychology
Today. URL.
● OxfordLanguages. 2015. "Word Of The Year 2015". Languages.Oup.Com. URL.
● Pomranz, Mike. 2021. "Mccormick Is Hiring A 'Director Of Taco Relations' With A
$100,000 Paycheck". Food & Wine. URL.
● Reitere, Sarma. 2021. "10 Brands That Rule On Tiktok". Socialbakers.Com. URL.

39
● Sample Ward, Amy. 2020. "NTEN Says Goodbye To Facebook". NTEN. URL.
● Schneider, Andy. 2021. "Home". Chicken Whisperer. URL.
● Schomer, Audrey. 2020. "US Youtube Advertising 2020". Insider Intelligence. URL.
● Sherman, Alex. 2020. "Tiktok Reveals Detailed User Numbers For The First Time".
CNBC. URL.
● Slater, Jeff. 2021. "Publicity Stunts That You Can't Lick". The Marketing Sage. URL.
● Smith, Brad. 2020. "The 17 Best Display Ads Of 2020 (And Why They Work)".
Wordstream.Com. URL.
● Sonnemaker, Tyler. 2021. "The CEO Of Cosmetics Retailer Lush Says He's 'Happy
To Lose' $13 Million By Deleting Facebook, Tiktok, Snapchat Accounts Over Teen
Mental-Health Harms". Business Insider. URL.
● SpyFu. 2021. "Competitor Keyword Research Tools For Google Ads PPC & SEO".
Spyfu.Com. URL.
● Statista Research Department. 2021a. "Average Daily Time Spent On Social Media
By U.S. Adults 2017-2022". Statista. URL.
● Statista Research Department. 2021b. "Facebook User Share In The United States
2021, By Age Group". Statista. URL.
● Statista Research Department. 2021c. "Facebook: Distribution Of Global Audiences
2021, By Gender". Statista. URL.
● Statista Research Department. 2021d. "Facebook: Number Of Monthly Active Users
Worldwide 2008-2021". Statista. URL.
● Statista Research Department. 2021e. "Instagram User Share In The United States
2021, By Age Group". Statista. URL.
● Statista Research Department. 2021f. "Instagram User Share In The United States
2021, By Gender". Statista. URL.
● Statista Research Department. 2021g. "Linkedin Usage Frequency In The United
States 2020". Statista. URL.
● Statista Research Department. 2021h. "Linkedin Usage Penetration In The United
States 2020, By Age Group". Statista. URL.
● Statista Research Department. 2021i. "Linkedin: Distribution Of U.S. Audiences
2021, By Gender". Statista. URL.
● Statista Research Department. 2021j. "Mobile Pinterest MAU User Ratio In The U.S.
2021, By Gender". Statista. URL.
● Statista Research Department. 2021k. "Pinterest Usage Reach In The United States
2021, By Age Group". Statista. URL.
● Statista Research Department. 2021l. "Snapchat: Distribution Of Global Audiences
2021, By Gender". Statista. URL.
● Statista Research Department. 2021m. "Tiktok MAU User Ratio In The U.S. 2021,
By Gender". Statista. URL.
● Statista Research Department. 2021n. "Twitter: Distribution Of Global Audiences
2021, By Gender". Statista. URL.

40
 ● Taylor, Kate. 2017. "Instagram Powers Taco Bell's Innovation Machine — And It's
Completely Changing The Fast-Food Menu As We Know It". Business Insider. URL.
● The World Bank. 2021. "Disability Inclusion". The World Bank. URL.
● Topkin, Dayne. 2021. "8 Of The Best Facebook Groups We've Ever Seen (Blog)".
Hubspot. URL.
● Twitter Investor Relations. 2020. "Investor Fact Sheet". S22.Q4cdn.Com. URL.
● Walansky, Aly. 2020. "Kraft Removes 'Send Noods' Campaign After Backlash:
'Listen To All Of These Moms!!'". TODAY.Com. URL.
● WebAIM. 2020. "WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool". Wave.Webaim.Org.
URL.
● WebAIM. 2021. "Webaim: Webaim's WCAG 2 Checklist". Webaim.Org. URL.
● Wiers, Ahsley. 2019. "How One CPG Brand Turned Search Into A Useful Dialogue".
Think With Google. URL.
● Wojcik, Stefan, and Adam Hughes. 2019. "Sizing Up Twitter Users". Pew Research
Center. URL.
● World Wildlife Fund. 2021. "World Wildlife Fund: Overview". Linkedin. URL.
● YouTube Official Blog. 2021. "Youtube For Press". YouTube Official Blog. URL.

Resources
Recommended Reading and Media

● Anderson, Kare. 2021. "Why Some Things Catch On And Get Shared".
Linkedin.Com. URL.
● Bedrock Detroit. 2016. “Anthem Of Us | A Short Film About Detroit | Presented By
Bedrock”. Filmed May 2016. Video, 4:01. URL.
● DeMers, Jayson. 2016. "8 Ways SEO Has Changed In The Past 10 Years". Search
Engine Land. URL.
● Friedman, Vanessa. 2021. "The Poetic Justice Of Amanda Gorman’s Estée Lauder
Contract". Www-Nytimes-Com.Cdn.Ampproject.Org. URL.

Additional Resources

● CHANEL. 2021. "CHANEL - Youtube". Youtube.Com. URL.

● Google for Retail. 2021. "Get Started". Google. URL.
● Google My Business. 2021. "Manage Your Business Profile". Google.Com. URL.
● HonestlyWTF. 2021. "Honestlywtf". Pinterest. URL.
● Investor Relations. 2021. "Snap Inc. - Investor Relations". Investor.Snap.Com. URL.
● LinkedIn Pressroom. 2021. "About Us". News.Linkedin.Com. URL.
● MoonPie (@MoonPie). 2021. "Moonpie". Twitter. URL.

41
 ● SpyFu. 2021. "Competitor Keyword Research Tools For Google Ads PPC & SEO".
Spyfu.Com. URL.
● World Wildlife Fund. 2021. "World Wildlife Fund: Overview". Linkedin. URL.
● YouTube Official Blog. 2021. "Youtube For Press". Youtube Official Blog. URL.

ANNEX 1

An anger-evoking true story that spread quickly, “Exec loses job after allegedly slapping toddler
on plane,” quickly moved Dan Schawbel to write on Facebook, “The headline should read ‘Exec
gets deported from America after being a complete ass on a plane.’” That response wouldn’t
surprise Jonah Berger, author of Contagious, who discovered that “high arousal” negative
emotions like anger or anxiety spur us to share messages with others.

1. Surprisingly Some Emotions Stifle Our Desire to Share: “A healthy attitude is contagious but
don’t wait to catch it from others. Be a carrier,” suggests Tom Stoppard, yet not all positive
emotions that we feel actually motivate us to share ideas with others, Berger discovered. “Low
arousal” positive emotions in response to a message, such as contentment, actually stop us from
passing them along.

2. Tie Your Product to Familiar and Frequent Situations: What’s more valuable than clever
slogans to spur sales? “Kit Kat and coffee” is a rather bland brand message. Yet sales
skyrocketed. Why? Because the company tied its ad campaign to a frequent habit for many
people: drinking coffee. Anyone who sees the spots with the companion message, “a break’s best
friend,” may be triggered to think about eating a Kit Kat bar whenever they take a coffee break.
Conversely, GEICO’s attention-grabbing TV ads, suggesting that switching over to their auto
insurance was so simple that even a caveman could do it, were not as successful. As Contagious
author, Jonah Berger points out, “We don’t see many cavemen in our daily lives. The
advertisement is unlikely to come to mind often, making it less likely to be talked about,” writes
Berger.

Hint: Connect your message to a situation that your kind of customer frequently experiences so
it triggers them to think of your brand whenever they are in that situation. As Berger notes, “a
strong trigger can be much more effective than a catchy slogan.” I wonder what contagious
campaigns he’ll use to spur sales of his book.

3. Use Some of the STEPPS Elements in Contagious Messages: Berger wrote Contagious as a
follow-up to Made to Stick, which provided a method for getting people to remember ideas: Berger
offers six key STEPPS to making “products and ideas spread, or getting people to pass them on.”
Here are his principles of contagiousness:

42
Social Currency — We share things that make us look good: Can we look good (smart, rich,
wise, helpful, kind, hip, in-the-know, etc.) insiders…) when we share your message?

Triggers — Top of mind, tip of tongue: Does your message relate to something familiar, or
frequent situation for them?

Emotion — When we care we share: Will your message evoke a visceral reaction, so we can
deepen our bond with those with whom we share it?

Public — Built to show, built to grow: Will others see us in a becoming way, when using your
product or adopt the behavior you seek to encourage?

Practical Value — News you can use: Will sharing your message enable us to give specific,
perhaps also timely help that they will appreciate us more for sharing it?”

Stories — Information travels under the guise of idle chatter: Like a Trojan horse, can your story
get others to open the “gate” of their mind to hear it, share it, buy it or take another action to
spreads it?

4. An Emotional Story Can Carry the Benefits You Want Them to Feel Good About: Peel away
the layers of the onion — the features that a company often cites to sell something. Look for the
underlying emotional need or desire that people could have for your product so you can start the
conversation about them. Craft a story to wrap around that desire so we get an emotional
experience of using the benefits you want to tout. That’s why Google’s Creative Labs member,
Anthony Cafaro, resisted creating the usual, pithy and factual description. Instead he concocted
a romance story, Parisian Love. We get pulled into the unfolding romance, voyeuristically
watching the search unfold as the characters use the tools the project was supposed to tout. They
represented the expanded functionality in Google’s new search interface. “Features like finding
flights, autocorrect, and language translation,” cites Berger who goes on to describe how the story
unfolds and triggers us to share. Side story: When you experience success in creating a
contagious story you are sometimes tempted to seek more work independence to create others.

5. Look Out for Others’ Successful Triggers to Which You Can Attach

There’s a contagious story that triggers me to think about REI when I am outdoors, hiking on Mt.
Tamalpais or taking walk/talks with friends up and down the steps of Sausalito. I wonder how
many people have stepped inside an REI store for the first time after reading Wild. In that popular
book about personal salvation, Cheryl Strayed describes her naïve, courageous 1,100 mile hike
on the rugged Pacific Crest Trail, a story that evoked in me, the emotion of awe about which
Berger writes.

Soon, her feet become bloody, crammed as they were in the boots she bought at REI, one size
too small. Six of her toenails gradually blackened and fell off, an image that I cannot get out of my

43
head. When she worked up the gumption to buy new ones with her meager remaining money,
she called REI to order them to be sent to the next stop on her trail.

To her surprise, she was told that their policy, in such situations, was to provide replacement
boots for free, which they did. REI smartly piggybacked on her story, to highlight a customer-
delighting policy, hosting her to speak about her book at their flagship store. Being reminded of
REI’s generous policy did trigger me to return to the store sooner than I otherwise might have, to
purchase durable hiking shorts.

Hint: Stories sometimes contain situational triggering incidents, causing us to remember the story
and thus the product whenever we are in that situation. It pays to look out for a well-known story
to which you can attach your message. That story may be in a book, trending news or other
brand’s popular ad campaign. Attaching to a story with a trigger gives you two of the STEPP
elements Berger describes.

After moving from California to the East Coast, Berger’s cousin buys a winter jacket from Lands’
End that he is gratified to find, keeps him warm in the freezing weather. Mid-winter, he breaks the
zipper. As you’ve probably anticipated, his cousin’s story, like Strayed’s has an unexpectedly (to
him) happy ending when he calls in to ask if he can mail the coat in to be repaired. Land’s End
could piggyback on that story, as REI did. The retailer could also reach out to columnists and
reporters that cover retail or books, sharing a description of the book, including the winter coat
story. Lands’ End could also highlight Berger’s cousin and his story on their web site, Facebook,
Twitter, and in their print catalogue, with an invitation for other customers to share their Lands’
End stories.

Hint: Berger adeptly describes how the Land’s End story has five elements of Practical Information
— one of the elements of STEPPS that makes the true story contagious.

6. Danger: Don’t Do This. Translation: But Many Others Are.

Some widely visible “anti” campaigns that attempt to stop certain behaviors, such as kids using
drugs, actually evoke the opposite reaction because they give the habit more visibility, thus social
currency. Public service announcements that warn of such dangers, actually evoke “social proof”
that many people appear to be doing it, so it must be ok, thus encouraging young people to use
marijuana.

7. Focus on Real Life Exposure to Transport Your Message

Most people believe that at least 50 percent of word of mouth messages happen online. “The
actual number is 7 percent,” writes Berger, citing Keller Fay Group research. That may be
because, “it is easier to see,” adds Berger. “Social media sites provide a handy record of all the
clips, comments, and other content we share online. But we don’t think as much about all the
offline conversation we had over the same time period because we can’t actually see them.”

44
Honest Tea launched an eye-catching, offline “experiment” in several U.S. cities, tying their
unusual brand name and the action of consumers choosing the bottle with the flavor they most
wanted, to two familiar triggers: city sidewalks and store shelves. It also created a real life multiple
story-generator, with consumers as the actors in it, capturing our voyeuristic interest in others’
honesty. Each incident in each experiment became a vessel to carry a story that featured all kinds
of people picking up Honest Tea bottles, imprinting that action in the views’ minds. Here’s the
experiment. The company created unstaffed, pop-up sidewalk stands where passersby could pick
up as many bottles as they wanted — and pay by the honor system. People anywhere in the world
could watch how people responded to the tempting opportunity to cheat. That’s because of live
streaming, broadcast quality video snooping, via hidden cameras, in the cities where the
experiment was held. Quirky, admittedly unscientific story angles abounded. What city has the
most honest people? Are blondes more honest that bald people?

8. We Don’t Need to be Famous or Rich to Instigate a Contagious Idea

It is exciting and gratifying to know that each of us can spark an idea that catches fire and spreads,
as Berger demonstrates in this book. “Some forest fires are bigger than others, but no one would
claim that the size of the fire depends on the exceptional nature o the initial spark. Big forest fires
aren’t caused by big sparks. Lots of individual trees have to catch fire and carry the flames.
Contagious products and ideas are like forest fires. They can’t happen without hundreds, if not
thousands, of regular Joes and Janes passing the product or message along.”

What contagious message have you concocted or heard about that you’d like to share here? Or
care to suggest a “what-if” scenario that would spur others’ desire to share or buy something?

ANNEX 2

Few marketing channels have evolved as quickly or as dramatically as search engine

optimization (SEO). In its infancy, SEO was the shady practice of stuffing keywords, tweaking
back-end code and spamming links until you started ranking well for the keywords you wanted.
Thankfully, Google stamped out those practices pretty quickly, and its search algorithm has
never really stopped evolving.

Much of Google’s foundation was in place by the mid-2000s, but how has its algorithm — and
as a result, our approach to SEO — changed in the past 10 years?

1. The rise of content

First, there’s the rise of content marketing as part of a successful SEO strategy. Google has
steadily refined what it considers to be “good” content over the years, but it was the Panda
update in 2011 that served as the death blow to spammy content and keyword stuffing.

45
After Panda, it was virtually impossible to get away with any gimmicky content-based tactics,
such as favoring a high quantity of content while forgoing quality and substance. Instead, the
search engine winners were ones who produced the best, most valuable content, spawning the
adoption of content marketing among SEOs — and content is still king today.

2. The death of link schemes

Google has provided its own definition of what a “link scheme” actually is, along with some
examples. Many find the guidelines here somewhat ambiguous, but the simplest explanation is
this: Any attempt to deliberately influence your ranking with links could qualify as a scheme.

By the late 2000s, Google had worked hard to stamp out most black-hat and spam-based link-
building practices, penalizing participants in link wheels and exchanges and paid linkers. But it
was in 2012, with the Penguin update, that link building really became what it is today. Now,
only natural link attraction and valuable link building with guest posts will earn you the authority
you need to rank higher.

3. The reshaping of local

Compared to 2006, local SEO today is a totally different animal. There have been dozens of
small iterations and changes to the layout (such as the local carousel, and today’s modern “3-
pack” layout), but the biggest recent change to ranking factors was in 2014, with the Pigeon
update.

With this update, Google more heavily incorporated traditional web ranking signals into its
ranking algorithm, giving well-optimized websites a major edge in local search. Google also
boosted the visibility of high-authority directory websites in its search results.

More generally, local searches have become more common — and more location-specific —
over the last few years, thanks to mobile devices.

4. SERP overhauls
I can’t tell you how many times the search engine results pages (SERPs) have changed, and
not many people could; some of these changes are so small, it’s debatable whether to even
count them. But take a look at a SERP screen shot from 2006 and compare it to today, and
you’ll see how different your considerations must be.

5. The rise of the Knowledge Graph

Another major influencer in modern SEO has been Google’s Knowledge Graph, which first
emerged on the scene in 2012. The Knowledge Graph attempts to give users direct, concise
answers to their queries, often presenting them with a box of information about a general
subject or a succinct answer to a straightforward query. This is great for the user but often takes
precedence over organic search results.

46
Accordingly, optimizers have had to compensate for this, either by avoiding generally
answerable keyword targets altogether or by using Schema.org microformatting to make their
on-site content more easily deliverable to the system.

6. Mobile prioritization
Mobile devices have exploded in popularity since the iPhone first emerged back in 2007, and
Google has done everything it can to emphasize the importance of optimizing websites for those
mobile users. Indeed, in 2015, mobile queries officially surpassed desktop queries in Google
search.

Optimizing for mobile has become not only common, but downright required these days, in no
small part due to Google’s continuing and escalating insistence. Its mobile-friendly update,
which occurred in two separate phases, has been a major enforcer of this new standard.

7. The soft death of keywords

Panda and Penguin killed off the practice of keyword stuffing, but a smaller, more curious
update in 2013 spelled the “soft” death of keyword optimization altogether. Hummingbird is the
name of the update that introduced semantic search, Google’s way of deciphering user intent
rather than mapping out individual keywords and phrases.

Today, Google attempts to understand meaning rather than matching keywords, so keyword-
centric optimization doesn’t work the same way. However, keyword research is still relevant, as
it can help guide your strategic focus and provide you with ranking opportunities.

8. Update pacing and impact

It’s also worth noting that for a time — in the few years following Panda — Google stressed out
search optimizers by releasing seemingly random, major updates to its search algorithm that
fundamentally changed how rankings were calculated. However, now that the search engine
has reached a strong foundation, the significance and pacing of these updates have declined.
Today, updates are smaller, less noticeable, and roll out gradually, giving them a much less
dramatic impact on the industry.

Final thoughts
Understanding where SEO has come from and where SEO stands today will help you become a
better online marketer. Hopefully, by now you’ve long ago eliminated any black-hat techniques
in your strategy.

Google — and we, as marketers alongside it — are constantly pushing this now-fundamental
element of our lives forward, so if you want to stay relevant, you’ll need to keep focused on the
next 10 years of search engine updates.

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