The 12 Elements of a Digital Strategy - Digital Minds Chapter Review

Greetings everybody. Welcome to the Wednesday, July 24th, 2019 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook over at WSI Digital, and I introduced our new tagline last week during our conversation, and I want to give it to you again with the slight adjustment which was made at the recommendation of one of our super duper smart Free Webinar Wednesday listeners, where we help you connect and engage with your customers online. Sounds pretty cool if you ask me, so I'm going to continue using it and I hope you like it. Today's show and all shows are recorded and made available at freewebinarwednesdays.com, and if you are attending live And you would like to chat, offer feedback, or maybe have another recommendation for our tagline or anything else that you'd like to share, please feel free to use the chat feature. That's one of the cool parts about doing a live show is the opportunity to interact and chat with you. One of the challenges of a live show is if I'm on the road or traveling or in a conference or teaching or just doing anything where I can't be at a computer, a live show is kind of hard to do. But we've had a pretty good run, and I think barring any unforeseen events taking place next week, I think I'm actually going to be able— To do a live show again next week. I know, shocker, that makes like 3 in a row, 4 in a row. Um, but speaking of recordings, I am super excited and a big shout out goes to Madison on our team who I have turned into a Typepad/webinar listening to/content writing, uh, maven. We now have all of our past webinars that have been on Free Webinar Wednesdays actually on our Free Webinar Wednesdays site. So if you go back in time, you can see here's the webinar I did last week about different ways to target your customers online. We talked about cookies and remarketing and digital ads. Prior to that, I shared the Amazon effect. I was in Kansas at a banking conference, going to be doing that keynote presentation for the Community Bankers Association of Kansas, and talked about Amazon. Also shared some of the new cool things that Twitter's got going on. We talked about content and engagement, not just producing content, but how do you actually use that content to build conversations and interact with each other. We also chatted a little bit about the Social Media Examiner's Social Media Marketing Report and kind of the insights that it shared of what marketers were planning on doing in their, I guess, in their online marketing activities. We chatted about web accessibility, and it's kind of interesting that later today I'm actually joining a friend of mine from another agency on an ADA and accessibility webinar because that continues to be a pretty hot button in the online world. So if you are wondering about web accessibility and how that impacts those that are visiting you or could be visiting you, whether you have any legal exposure or risk, that would be a good one. Chatted a little bit on May 15th about some of the cool new things that are rolled out into LinkedIn. This was right after they introduced Some of their reactions. So instead of just a thumbs up, you had the thumbs up, you had congratulate, you had celebrate, you had insightful. So just different ways that LinkedIn is kind of becoming a little bit more Facebooky, if that's even a word. And if it's not, I'm going to create it right here on Free Webinar Wednesdays. You've heard me use Facebooky. And then for a long, long time, and I was traveling a boatload in In June and most of the end of April. Don't have anything in May. Missed a lot of meetings, but was— I guess missed a lot of Free Webinar Wednesdays. Attended a lot of meetings, but wasn't able to do a whole lot as it relates to Free Webinar Wednesday. So prior to that, this was pretty much the lonely post that stayed at the top of the Free Webinar Wednesday site on chatbots. Interestingly enough, we just had one of our first conversations and kickoff calls with one of our clients moving forward with a chatbot technology. And of course, we do a lot of work with banks, so they don't move real fast sometimes. They're very concerned about compliance and security and whatnot. And so we've got one institution that we're gonna be kind of going through. We've implemented, or we are in the process of helping them implement, a solution from a platform called LivePerson. They actually have got a pretty good understanding and have done some work within the financial services and the banking space, even integrating their chatbot into online banking services. So the banks that we work with certainly like that capability. So if you're looking for an opportunity to catch up on some of the webinar goodness that's been going on here at Free Webinar Wednesdays but unfortunately hasn't been made available as part of the archive that I promise every week but just hasn't been there, hop over to freewebinarwednesdays.com and you can check those out. We've been keeping most of the webinars now in the half an hour time range instead of the full hour. Every once in a while we'll go for the full hour, but usually trying to make these a little bit shorter so they don't take up as much of your time and offer up some good stuff that you can kind of take back into your business and implement. And if you've got the whole hour reserved, That gives you a half an hour to listen to me and question and ask and hopefully learn, but then maybe do some implementation on your part to be able to put some of those things into play or at least do a little bit of brainstorming. What I want to talk about today is the book that I've mentioned a couple of times. This is the second edition. So for those of you that might be first-timers here on Free Webinar Wednesdays, the WSI brand that I am under. WSI is actually close to 25 years old, world's largest digital agency network with roughly 1,000 consultants like myself in probably 80 countries, give or take, around the world. And what we have done over the last several years, and we've actually got our 3rd book coming out, which I've also been asked to contribute to, and I wrote the chapter on chatbot and conversational marketing and its impact into the conversion process. Sounds really cool and official, but basically how chatbots and Messenger technology is building opportunities for one-on-one conversations and can help you nurture folks through the buying process in a more personalized, individualized experience. So that is scheduled to come out in October, same time as our global convention. But the Digital Minds book that's out there now, our second edition, I wanted to draw attention because we've had a couple of sessions that I've done, a couple of webinars that I've done that have expressed interest, and all of those chapters— so there's 12 things, it's Digital Minds: 12 Things Every Business Needs to Know About Digital Marketing. Consultants from all over the world actually were asked to write chapters in that book, and then those chapters, um, obviously were compiled. Uh, we've got a little bit of an issue right now with Amazon Kindle. I don't know what's going on there. So rather than direct you over to Amazon, you can get to poweredbywsi.com/whitepapers. We've also created a little Bitly link. So if you're familiar with Bitlys, and if you're not, Maybe I'll do a little blurb on why Bitlys are so cool. But you can see we've got Bitly WSI Book 2, and what that does, it just redirects you to the white papers page on our website. The reason that the Bitly is kind of cool is you can create a free account on Bitly. It's it's basically referred to as a URL shortener. So rather than me telling you go to www. Poweredbywsi.com/whitepapers, or maybe even in some areas that might even be a longer URL. Maybe it's .com/resources/books/individual-chapters. URLs can get really, really long and unruly. And then a Bitly link gives you the ability to shorten that down. By default, if you don't have an account, it'll just give you a random series of 6 or 7 letters and numbers, and that's a unique Identifier that goes to this. It's essentially a forwarding tool. What you can do when you create your own account is you can give them creative names, so they make it a little bit easier for you to remember and to share, and they make a little bit more sense. But the cool part about it is when you put that link someplace and you've created a free account, you now have the ability to track and do some analytics behind the scenes. So if I tell everybody to go to bit.ly slash WSI Book 2, I can go into my Bitly account tomorrow and I can see how many times that Bitly link was loaded, which will give me an indication of how many times people have visited my site and how many times people have actually maybe even downloaded the chapters. And you can use Bitlys for pretty much anything. So I could track and measure how many people are coming to this site based off of Google Analytics, of course. But if I wanted to drive people to my LinkedIn profile or a specific tweet on Twitter, I could create a Bitly link for each of those individual unique URLs at LinkedIn or Twitter or anyplace else. And then in Bitly, I could see how many times those links were loaded and forwarded people along. So as we think about tracking, we've kind of jumped down to chapter 12 where I get into analytics. And really knowing what's going on. But Bitly is a really cool tool that you can use for free that just allows you to shorten those URLs and to send stuff to different places, but gives you the ability to track without necessarily having to get access to the site for installation of things like Google Analytics code or tracking information. So totally didn't even plan on having a little Bitly blurb there, but I felt that the time was right and it would have been appreciated. So Hopefully you enjoyed that little Bitly info. When you get to the digital marketing white papers, certainly all of the book's chapters are here. What some organizations have done is they've actually, because we've got 12 chapters, there's 12 months in a year. If they've got a marketing committee or a group that gets together and chats about marketing-related activities, you could actually pull these chapters down, distribute them to the committee members. Everybody could maybe read through the chapter for the given month. And so if you started this month and, you know, July, everybody learned about competitor analysis and what sorts of things you could or couldn't do to start tracking what your competition is doing online, different ways to analyze that. Next month you talk about web development strategies. Even if you're not looking to build a new website, there's some tips in there about best practices. So you roll through each of those on a monthly basis. At the end of the year, you're gonna have a pretty comprehensive digital marketing plan in place. And it's, it's probably not realistic to put all of these things in place very quickly anyway, because you'll find as you go through the chapters and you read the information and you get some ideas that they may require a full month's worth of activity just to understand and plan and implement. So while you can certainly develop a really comprehensive platform in less than a year, This gives it a nice logical flow. So next year at this time, you've been able to get through all of these. Of course, that doesn't take into consideration that in October you're going to have a whole nother book to take a look at with a whole nother set of chapters to review. But this at least could get you started in the right direction. So some of the other resources that are available out here you may be interested in checking out— there's some social selling stuff, buyer personas. None of this stuff is gated, which means you don't have to give me your name and email address to get access to it. That certainly is a good strategy for lead gen, and, you know, for organizations that are doing that, no, no judgment one way or another. And at some point we might do that for some of our even more valuable content. But you can hop over to this, download every single one of those PDFs, and unless you reach back out to me, I'm never going to know it. And gives you a really great anonymous way for you to get access. And then if it is something you'd like to talk more about, certainly let us know. We'd love to hear from you. But what I want to do today is just give you a high level of what you can expect from each of those chapters and some kind of main takeaways that you're going to want to maybe think about and then whet your whistle. And you don't necessarily have to jump through them sequentially. If you are at a point where your organic visibility in Google is starting to be noticed as not very good, you might want to just jump down to chapter 8, pull down that SEO chapter and dig in and try to figure out what sorts of things need to go on from an SEO perspective in your world. But I'm going to just walk through these at a high level just to give you an idea of what you can expect. And certainly if there's a question as I go through these chapters, let me know. Would happy to let you Well, what am I going to say there? Happy to answer those questions for you and kind of give you some more info. So competitor analysis. One of the things that's also a good thing to do before you start any digital project is to identify who your competition is. And it's not necessarily going to be just the business across the street. Depending on your industry, you may have competitors across the state, across the country, the the country, maybe even across the world. So spending some time just first thinking about who your competition is and then figuring out what are the metrics or the variables that you want to track on them to determine what they're doing and what they're trending. There's a lot of tools that are part of that chapter that talk about ways you can go in and do research. You can look at keywords, you can, you can look at site traffic through platforms. One of the things that I like to recommend when I do a presentation and I talk specifically about competitor analysis is there's a website out there called Fiverr. And if you go fiverr.com, you can create an account on Fiverr. This platform gives you the ability to contract to individuals from all over the world to do things that maybe you don't necessarily want to do, or to do things at a much less, uh, lower cost than what it would cost you to do either yourself or to do, uh, internally. So, um, so if we went and we did online research, for example, and we just did a search for that, you could create very quickly a list of things that you would want to know about your competitors. It's still going to be your responsibility to understand who your competitors are, but then you can build that in a Google Sheet. You can put all the competitors listed. You can say, I want to know how many web pages they have, how many fans they have on Facebook, how many blogs are in their blog, how many videos they have on YouTube— whatever variables you feel are important as you track your competition and your activity. Then you could go out and you could find individuals here that do online research. They've got reviews, 5 stars, the number, level 2 seller, level 1. You can go find somebody and for, you know, $10, $20, you can get someone to do research for you and populate the data in that sheet. And then that gives you a good starting point. At that point, you can determine if you'd like to continue that competitive research yourself next month. Or if you just want to continue to contract with that individual, if they did a good job and just have them update it on a monthly or a quarterly basis. So a real quick and simple and pretty inexpensive way to do your competitor analysis. It's important though that you spend time understanding and identifying who your competition is and what are the metrics and the variables that you want to track. And so that chapter goes into that. Chapter 2 is about your website, and this is probably one of the most important destinations that you have on the web. I know a lot of people put a lot of importance in social media, and they should because it's about brand building and communication. But at the end of the day, your website is your digital property. This is what you own and control, and nothing can change on your website unless you decide to change it. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter— we talked about that a couple episodes ago. Twitter completely changing its interface whether you like it or not. Twitter doesn't really care. They're gonna do what they're gonna do. Your website is ultimately your own property. It's your, it's your digital real estate. So getting people back to your website, making sure that it's an enjoyable experience, making sure that it's mobile responsive and it's easy to use, it loads quickly. A lot of those things are talked about in this chapter and just some best practices and tips. E-commerce, my world of being primarily focused on the banking space, not a lot of people go to their bank website. and get out their credit card and buy stuff. But in a financial institution, an e-commerce transaction could very well be a mortgage application, a savings account application, maybe they're ordering a debit card. But certainly in a traditional, they're going online and they're buying stuff, they're ordering things, whether it's physical products, virtual products, services, renewing retainers, subscriptions. So this chapter shares some best practices as it relates to e-commerce, different ways that you want to make sure you keep an eye on shopping cart abandonment and pricing strategies and different ways to lay out your products. So if you're coming from a non-banking world and you have more of a traditional retail focus, the e-commerce chapter should give you some really good ideas and tips on maximizing the likelihood that somebody that gets into your site finds your products, buys your products, gets to the checkout, and has an enjoyable experience. Content marketing, as you saw through the Free Webinar Wednesdays videos that are now on Free Webinar Wednesdays, talk a lot about content marketing, being able to tell your story. One of the things we like to try to remind our clients is you have to start thinking like a publisher, like a storyteller, and understanding different ways, not just regurgitating product and service information because nobody really cares about that. But how do you tell the story around what it is that you do? Maybe examples, even if you're not using actual customer or client names. Um, you know, recently we had a project where we were hired by, or we served a customer, or we did this. You could talk in theoretical terms, but if you paint a picture and you give somebody a scenario and they can put themselves in that other person's shoes and say, I can see myself being part of that process, um, that's going to make your content more effective. The other thing that we also try to remind people is while in the banking world, if you were to ask a banker what are the 3 most important things in real estate, they will probably tell you location, location, location. Well, if you think about establishing an identity or a brand, or what's the most important thing online, you're going to hear content Content, content. So the whole content is king rings true in a lot of blogs, and you'll see that populated throughout the internet. However, while content may be king, the other thing to keep in mind is engagement is queen, and she rules the castle. This was covered in a prior webinar, but it's important to mention here. Producing great content is certainly the first step, but please don't miss out on opportunities where you produce great content, somebody's read it and they post a note and say, wow, this is really good, or I've got a question here, or, you know, I love your tagline, but have you ever thought about maybe working in engagement? Being able to kind of work into that conversation and going back and forth shows the people on the other end of that content that there's a real person behind the scenes and you're not just pushing information out and hoping people read it and then really don't care. about anything after that, because that's really not the way that you start a relationship and build a conversation. So content's important, engagement is just as important, paying attention to all of that. Social media, that's a pretty broad chapter, but essentially in social media what we're really talking about is how do you leverage that to humanize your brand, to open up opportunities for conversation, and whether you're looking at social media from a individual business perspective or as an individual personal perspective as an employee within that organization, there's different strategies and different tactics that you can take to build your reputation in either one of those ways. And one of the things I like to say is people will choose to do business with you because you've positioned yourself as their banker, somebody that's there to take care of their needs and their wants, as opposed to just somebody that works at the bank. So are you their attorney, or do you just work at the law firm? Or are you, you know, their sales rep at XYZ Company, or do you just work at XYZ Company? Because you want people to ultimately build that relationship with you, and that's one of the ways that social media gives you the ability to do that very easily by sharing things, having conversations. You know, you will very quickly come to find out that I'm an avid cyclist. I love golden retrievers, and I'm a little bit of a geek, and I really love this digital marketing thing. If you happen to check out my Instagram this week, you're going to see an awful lot of mountain bike pictures as I'm joining you today from the table in my RV down in Pennsylvania. So I'm a little bit of a digital nomad, and I travel, and— but I'm fortunate to be able to work from pretty much wherever. But that's me building my personal brand and leveraging social media technology to help get that out there. Chapter 6 is digital advertising, which is essentially paying for awareness and visibility online. Last week's show really went into that into great detail. I'm not going to spend a ton of time going through that, but suffice to say, one, watch last week's show and that'll bring you up to speed. But different ways that you can assign a budget, pick a geographic target, go after a particular Segment, remarket for relevancy. And the cool part about digital advertising is everything can be tracked and measured and monitored. You can put tracking codes and scripts and conversion tags and all sorts of other cool stuff that give you a really good perspective of what is and isn't working for your digital ad spend and making sure that what's working you repeat and do more of, and what's not working you fix or do away with it. As a separate part, even though it's got its own chapter, one of the things that's also important, especially in the world of digital advertising, because when you produce an ad, you can specifically drive them back to a page. Search engine optimization, you don't really have a lot of say in what Google ends up finding and indexing and where they're pointing traffic to. But digital advertising, if you're selling a widget and you want them to buy that widget, You want to make sure that you bring them back to a dedicated landing page that focuses on getting that person to buy that widget. You have testimonials of people that have bought that widget before. You've got nice images, maybe some frequently asked questions if it's a complex transaction, but that landing page really needs to do its job of converting that person because you may have paid $15, $20, $300, whatever the case is, to get them there depending on the competitiveness of your advertising campaign, that landing page sole focus should be to get that person to do what you want to do. It may be a purchase, so you're gonna want their credit card. It might be signing up for a newsletter. You need their email address. The digital marketing white papers is a landing page to an extent because my goal here obviously is to get you to download the, the chapters, even though I'm not collecting Your name and email address. My goal with that Bitly link is to get you here to pull down the chapters, and obviously you'll read them and go, wow, these guys are pretty smart. Or you might maybe think that we're not, but hopefully you think we are. And maybe this is an opportunity for you to reach out and say, hey, I really enjoyed your stuff. I appreciate all the free information. We'd like to chat with you further about what you could do for our company. So kind of rolls in content, it rolls in advertising, maybe it rolls in landing pages. So you can get an idea. And if you're spending money to drive traffic to a page, you really want to make sure you understand how that page is set up to convert as efficiently and effectively as possible. Chapter 8 is search engine optimization, also referred to as SEO. These are the organic listings on Google and Bing and Yahoo and any other search engine out there that people go to to search. Um, YouTube being the number 2 search engine on the internet right behind Google, which is also owned by Google. There's optimization tactics for YouTube videos. There's optimization tactics for apps in the app stores. So there's a lot of different ways to organize and optimize content so that whatever search engine somebody is using, you increase the likelihood that your result, your business, your article, your product, your service shows up at the top of the list. And so the SEO, there's probably close to 200 or so different variables that Google uses in its search algorithm. We don't know what they are. There's a lot of speculation and reverse engineering that people do in the SEO space to try to determine, you know, is it page load speed? Is it title tags? Is it descriptions? Is it inbound links? Is it content? Is it freshness of site? Is it words on a page? Is it keyword density? There's a ton of different things, and that's just a sampling of some of the ones that I can think of off the top of my head. But the SEO chapter will give you some best practices of how to make sure that you're at least positioning the content on your website and your website in general to be found by Google and other search engines and hopefully come up. So over time, maybe the amount of money that you're having to spend in digital advertising to build awareness can be offset by the organic visibility that is being generated due to your SEO efforts. Chapter 9 just happens to be the chapter that I wrote, so of course it's my absolute favorite. But the mobile device— this book's a few years old, so mobile devices were, I don't want to say in their infancy, but they were just now starting to take stride. I think in today's day and age, the mobile device is Pretty much synonymous with online. Most of us are using a mobile device for almost everything that we do now. I know a lot of the millennial generation maybe don't even have, unless they've got a job that requires them, they don't even own a laptop or a personal computer. Everything they're doing is either through a mobile device like their iPhone, or maybe they've got a tablet of some sort. But the mobile device is a very important element, and there's certainly things that you need to keep in mind as it relates to the mobile device. As people are using smaller screens, pages may need to load a little bit faster. How is somebody entering in information on a mobile device versus a regular desktop? You know, taking a long application that you have somebody fill out on a desktop and just squishing it down on a mobile device may not necessarily be the best experience. So how can you improve that experience for mobile users? So a lot of kind of tips and suggestions in there of ways to make sure that you're getting the most out of your mobile device. If you've got Google Analytics installed on your website, and hopefully you do, you're going to definitely want to check your device information and take a look at your trends over time to see what your site traffic looks like from desktop, tablet, and mobile. And what we're seeing, maybe not so much in the banking space, because I think there's still a lot of people that jump on their computer and go to their bank website and hop into online banking. And so it's the gateway into the online banking, and a mobile bank, unless you're using the mobile banking app, is still best viewed on a desktop. But take a look at the percentages, and we've got some consultants within the WSI world that certainly don't work in the banking space that are seeing numbers of 60 to 70% of website traffic is coming from a mobile device. Yet the website might be 3 or 4 years old, was primarily designed as a desktop solution first with the ability to adapt to a mobile. You may be at a point in your business where you may decide, you know what, maybe we need to redesign our website, which goes back up to chapter 2. But we might need to redesign our website for a mobile experience first because most of our customers are coming to us from a mobile device. And that's our primary form function and user interface. And then if 30 or 20% of people are coming on a desktop, then that's maybe the secondary design component. And, and we're starting to see people actually flip. I know Google's index is actually being switched over to the mobile first for a lot of businesses. And when we log into Search Console, which is part of analytics there in chapter 12, We're seeing notifications from Google that has said, hey, you've been moved over to the mobile-first index, just because it knows so many people are on a mobile device, and Google looks at search differently desktop versus mobile. So definitely mobile is something you do not want to ignore, pay close attention to. Chapter 10 is on email marketing and communication. I know the running joke that I oftentimes, you know, I Email is kind of the bane of my existence. I'm not going to show you my, uh, I'm not going to show you my inbox because I don't know how many thousands of, uh, of emails I've got waiting for me. Um, but email communication through newsletters, when done properly, is still one of the best forms of digital marketing. And when I say done properly. I'm not talking about dumping everybody into a BCC field and blasting it out. One of the things you need to think very carefully about from an email marketing perspective is, um, the topic of segmentation and list cleansing and making sure that the people that want to hear from you on particular topics are only hearing about information on particular topics. And so giving them the ability to maybe access a profile page. So If, if I'm a customer of a bank, for example, and I would suspect most of you, even though you're maybe not working at a bank, you probably have a relationship with a bank or a credit union. If, if all your bank did was send you just generic information that's not really tailored to what you want to know about, you may or may not read that, and over time probably become disinterested. But if you have the ability to go to a profile page And for me, I'm a small business owner. I love technology. I'm interested in community events, but I don't have children. So don't tell me about college planning. I have a house, so I'm not interested in mortgage loans. If I have the ability to tailor what it is that you're going to provide me, then when you send out emails, you don't send me information about college planning. You don't send me information about mortgage rates. But if there's something technology related that you've just introduced, like a cool new app that you can use to take a picture of a check and put that in my account, and I don't have to come to the office to make a deposit, I am going to be super interested in that. I'm going to open the email, I'm going to click on the link, I'm going to download the app, I'm going to use the service. But you do that because you've profiled me, and the email is just delivering only the information that I've asked for or that is relevant. And all too often when we talk to people about email marketing, it's one group, everybody's a subscriber, and you try to talk about everything that you do, and there's so much information. It's not tailored and relevant, and it just gets lost. Your open rates are terrible, click-through rates are bad, unsubscribe rates start increasing. It does take more work. It is a little more effort to spend the time to clean your lists and organize, or to, to use a technology that gives people the ability to pick what it is that they want to hear from you. But the reality is, if you spend the time up front to do that, Your success from an email perspective, regardless of what industry you're in, is going to be drastically different. So email's still very, very powerful. Marketing automation is somewhat tied into email in the sense that marketing automation technology oftentimes will include email as part of the process. But marketing automation is almost like an analytics meets digital marketing meets email meets customer profiling. One of the platforms that we use here within our office is called SharpSpring. There's other platforms out there. Salesforce has their Marketing Cloud. Microsoft Dynamics has a marketing automation component to it. HubSpot's another really popular one. Act-On, Infusionsoft. So there's a ton of marketing automation platforms out there, but at the heart of it What a platform should do is take a look at the activities that you do as an organization on a repetitive recurring basis and how can you automate that without making it feel robotic or impersonal, but how can you automate those things so that in the absence of human involvement those important tasks still get taken care of. So somebody, so let's say I put a payment or a personal, maybe an information gate on this where before you download any of these white papers, I want to make sure that I get your info. And if I'm not using some sort of an automation tool, I could put a form on here. Hey, I'm interested in getting information about your book, and I and you fill that out without marketing automation in place. I would get that form submission or somebody from our team. We would take a look at that. We would grab your information. We'd create an email. We would attach a document to it, whatever chapter you're looking for. We would send that email out, and then if we wanted to make sure we followed up with you in a week to say, hey, you downloaded the chapter on email marketing, what did you think? Did you have any questions? Or maybe it would be nice to know, is there a way maybe we tie that download to a Bitly link or some sort of a tag in Google Analytics? So maybe if you didn't download the attachment, we maybe would want to send you another email to say, hey, Just want to make sure you got the chapter on email marketing or social media. But if we don't have a marketing automation system in place, that means somebody has to remember to do that. So you've got checklists and sticky notes and reminders. In a marketing automation world, we upload all the documents into the automation system. We create a workflow or a process with different points. So it almost looks like a flowchart. And we have different triggers that are set in place. And typically when working with clients, we'll start with the highest revenue opportunity or the most cumbersome or time-consuming processes, and we'll flowchart those first. So when somebody goes to the page, okay, if you fill out the form, then determine what chapters you want, create this email, which is already done in draft form, that's personalized. That then sends back a note. Hey Eric, thanks for your interest in our digital marketing book. We've attached the chapter that you've requested, chapter 10 on email marketing. Download it here. If you have any questions, let us know. And that email automatically goes out. You could send that email instantaneously. You could make it wait 60 minutes so it doesn't seem like it's just a totally automated process. But then the system can also then have decisioning behind it. That says if that email doesn't get opened within 24 hours, send a gentle reminder. If it does get open, then don't send the reminder. If the email gets opened but the link to download the Chapter 10 email marketing PDF doesn't get clicked on, send a different reminder. And then if the email gets opened and the chapter gets downloaded, then send this reminder. So you've got all those different options that can be done The other cool part about marketing automation technology is because the code that's tracking all of that also sits on your website. If I open the email and visit the website, that is now associated my device, whether it's my laptop, my Android phone, my iPad, it's associated my device with my email address and my name. So then if I come back to that website in the future, Instead of it just being an anonymous visitor that maybe stops by and takes a look at the webinar section or the infographics area, I now can attribute that visit to that specific individual. And knowing that information, there's ways that you can use marketing automation technology to assign different values, scores if you will, to those pages and those activities. So if somebody fills out a form or downloads something off of our website, I can say that's worth 20 points. And then if they come back within 48 hours, that might be worth another 20 points. If somebody just goes to our homepage, that might not be worth any points because there's a lot of people that just go to the homepage and then leave. But as somebody interacts with your website, they read your blogs, they fill out your forms, they download your stuff, you can give value to those relationships, which is referred to as a lead score. And you can determine based off of your own preferences and maybe some of the formulas that will help you create. But you can determine, hey, if somebody gets 200 points on our website because they're doing a ton of stuff, I want to know. I'm the CEO for this company. I want to know if there's somebody that's opening email, downloading forms, filling out information, accessing our blogs, leaving comments. I want to know who that person is. And they may already be a customer of your business, which is great. And then you can just maybe Give them a thank you. Maybe you don't want to tell them that you're tracking all this information because sometimes that may creep people out, but you should at least know who the highest engaged visitors to your website are. Because if you had a physical store, you would know who those people are. If you ran a bike shop, you know who walks in the door, you know what areas of the shop they're spending time. Are they interested in road bikes or mountain bikes, triathlon bikes? So you know that in a physical environment, marketing automation gives you that capability to do it in a virtual environment. There's other things that you'll learn about in that chapter, like developing personas. I already talked about automation, lead scoring, kind of sales management, CRM. Marketing automation is a pretty huge thing, and SharpSpring, one of the platforms that we use quite a bit, is making some pretty significant updates. We sat in on a webinar a couple of weeks ago about a brand new service that they're rolling out for sales managers. So just some really cool things going on in the marketing automation space. And then lastly, the final chapter is really tying it all together, is analytics. You know, if you don't measure it, you can't manage it. And so while Google Analytics is certainly what everybody thinks of, I've shared with you the Bitly analytical statistics that you can get in if you create a Bitly shortcut. You've got analytics on Facebook, through Insights, you've got analytics.twitter.com, you've got email open rates and click-throughs. Setting up the analytics to be able to capture and monitor the information that is coming in as part of all of this is one of the ways that you can make sure that what is working you do more of, and what's not working you either fix or get rid of it. And I don't know as if it's specifically mentioned in the analytics chapter, but one of the tools that we're starting to use to help us visually understand the analytics is a service that's available through Google called Google Data Studio. And this allows us to tap into analytics and other third-party services where we can bring in data, and it's almost like building graphs and pie charts and histograms and whatnot that you would do in Excel, but it ties that in to an online reporting format that then gives you the ability. So as data comes in, you can, you can pull up your Google Data Studio report on analytics, and you can pull out the key metrics from Google Analytics that maybe you want to pay attention to instead of jumping in like most clients and going, oh my gosh, how do I even find anything in here? There's so much information. You can work with someone that understands GDS and identify the 7 or 8 key metrics and their trends over time. So you've got one report that you go to that shows you everything and it automatically updates. So when it rolls into August, then Jan— or then July becomes the prior month and August becomes the current month. So there's a lot of really cool ways that you can report that data. There's no shortage in data in today's world, and that's why analytics is so important that you're capturing it all. But then figuring out a way that you can easily digest it and make intelligent business decisions around it to help give you an idea of kind of what's going on. So that, that is, I would say, probably a quick— considering you could read the book and it'd probably take you a lot longer than that, maybe not as quick, but that is a relatively quick overview of what you're going to find in all the chapters. I would encourage you to pull down whatever chapter floats your boat, or maybe start the process of going right with chapter 1 and building through an annual marketing plan process. Whatever your preference is, hopefully the chapters here have been beneficial. I can guarantee when we launch our new book in October— hopefully we're still going to be able to meet that deadline— we'll be doing another one of these webinars where we talk about the new chapters in the new book. But until then, You've got access to all the Digital Minds chapters here. I hope you enjoy. And certainly if it sparks a thought or you'd like to have a conversation, by all means, get in touch. We'd love to chat. With that, I'm going to wrap today's session. Went a little bit longer than half an hour, but I got on a roll and, you know, I had 12 chapters to go through. So thanks for hanging in there with me. If you've got any questions, reach out, get in touch. Otherwise, hop over to Free Webinar Wednesdays. Check out all the awesome webinars that we've done in the past, and now that the archives are up there for you to access. And we will plan on seeing you next week, Wednesday, 1 PM Eastern time, right here at freewebinarwednesdays.com. Until then, have a great week, everybody. Bye-bye.