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Crafting a Digital Marketing Strategy

Any activity with an end goal (whether it’s winning a war, building a city, or selling a product) should have a blueprint in place for every person in the organization to follow. In digital marketing, however, there is no single definitive approach—each business must create its own roadmap. However, there are questions you can use to guide the process.

A strategy needs to cover who you are, what you are offering and to whom, and why and how you are doing so. The steps and questions below cover what an organization should be aware of when creating and implementing a strategy that will meet its marketing objectives and solve its challenges.

Step 1: Examine the Context

The first step in crafting a successful strategy is to examine the context of the organization and the various stakeholders:

· What is the context in which you are operating (PESTLE factors) and how is this likely to change in the future?

· Who are you, why does your brand matter, and what makes your brand useful and valuable?

· Who are your customers, and what needs, wants, and desires do they have?

· Who are your competitors? These may extend beyond organizations that compete with you on the basis of price and product and could also be competition in the form of abstracts such as time and mindshare.

Thorough market research will reveal the answers to these questions.

Step 2: Examine Your Value Exchange

Once you have examined the market situation, the second step is an examination of your value proposition or promise. In other words, what unique value can your organization add to that market? It is important to identify the supporting value-adds to the brand promise that are unique to the digital landscape. What extras, beyond the basic product or service, do you offer to customers?

The internet offers many channels for value creation. However, the value depends largely on the target audience, so it is crucial to research your users and gather insights into what they want and need.

Content marketing is the process of conceptualizing and creating this sort of content. Examples of value-based content include a DIY gardening video for a hardware brand, a research paper for a business analyst, or a funny infographic for a marketing company.

Step 3: Establish Digital Marketing Goals

When setting your digital marketing goals, there are three key aspects to consider: objectives, key performance indicators (KPIs), and targets. Let’s look at each one in turn.

Objectives

Objectives are essential to any marketing endeavor. Without them, your strategy would have no direction and no end goal or win conditions. It’s important to be able to take a step back and ask several questions:

· What are you trying to achieve?

· How will you know if you are successful?

Objectives need to be SMART:

· specific—The objective must be clear and detailed, rather than vague and general.

· measurable—The objective must be measurable so that you can gauge whether you are attaining the desired outcome.

· attainable—The objective must be something that is possible for your brand to achieve, based on available resources.

· realistic—The objective must also be sensible and based on data and trends; don’t exaggerate or overestimate what can be achieved.

· time-bound—Finally, the objective must be linked to a specific timeframe.

Key Performance Indicators

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are the specific metrics or pieces of data that you will look at to determine whether your tactics are performing well and meeting your objectives. For example, a gardener may look at the growth rate, color, and general appearance of a plant to evaluate whether it is healthy. In the same way, a marketer will look at a range of data points to determine whether a chosen tactic is delivering. KPIs are determined per tactic, with an eye on the overall objective.

Targets

Finally, targets are the specific values that are set for your KPIs to reach within a specific time period. If you meet or exceed a target, you are succeeding; if you don’t reach it, you’re falling behind on your objectives and you need to reconsider your approach (or your target).

Example of Digital Marketing Goals

SMART objective: Increase sales through the eCommerce platform by 10 percent within the next six months.

KPIs:

· Search advertising—number of search referrals; cost per click on the ads

· Facebook brand page—number of comments and shares on campaign; specific posts

Targets:

· Search advertising—one thousand search referrals after the first month, with a 10 percent month-on-month increase after that

· Facebook brand page—50 comments and 10 shares on campaign-specific posts per week

Step 4: Establish Tactics and Evaluation

Tactics are the specific tools or approaches you will use to meet your objectives, for example, a retention-based email newsletter, a Facebook page, or a CRM implementation. As a strategy becomes more complex, you may have multiple tactics working together to try to achieve the same objective. Tactics may change (and often should), but the objective should remain your focus.

Many digital tools and tactics are available once you have defined your digital marketing objectives. Each tactic has its strengths. For example, acquisition (gaining new customers) may best be driven by search advertising, while email is one of the most effective tools for selling more products to existing customers.

The table below expands on some of the most popular tactics available to digital marketers and their possible outcomes.

Common Tactics and Their Outcomes
Tactic	Outcome
SEO—This is the practice of optimizing a website to rank higher on the search engine results pages for relevant search terms. SEO involves creating relevant, fresh and user-friendly content that search engines index and serve when people enter a search term that is relevant to your product or service.	Customer retention and acquisition—SEO has a key role to play in acquisition, as it ensures your organization’s offering will appear in the search results, allowing you to reach potential customers. A site that is optimized for search engines is also a site that is clear, relevant and well designed. These elements ensure a great user experience, meaning that SEO also plays a role in retention.
Search advertising—In pay-per-click or search advertising, the advertiser pays only when someone clicks on their ad. The ads appear on search engine results pages.	Sales, customer retention, and acquisition—The beauty of search advertising is that it is keyword based. This means an ad will come up in response to the search terms entered by the consumer. It therefore plays a role in sales, acquisition and retention. It allows the advertiser to reach people who are already in the buying cycle or are expressing interest in what they have to offer.
Online advertising—Online advertising covers advertising in all areas of the Internet – ads in emails, ads on social networks and mobile devices, and display ads on normal websites.	Branding and acquisition—The main objective of display advertising is to raise brand awareness online. It can also be more interactive and therefore less disruptive than traditional or static online advertising, as users can choose to engage with the ad or not. Online advertising can be targeted to physical locations, subject areas, past user behaviors, and much more.
Affiliate marketing—Affiliate marketing is a system of reward whereby referrers are given a finder’s fee for every referral they give.	Sales and branding—Online affiliate marketing is widely used to promote eCommerce websites, with the referrers being rewarded for every visitor, subscriber or customer provided through their efforts. It is a useful tactic for brand building and acquisition.
Video marketing—Video marketing involves creating video content. This can either be outright video advertising, or can be valuable, useful, content marketing.	Branding, customer retention, and value creation—Since it is so interactive and engaging, video marketing is excellent for capturing and retaining customer attention. Done correctly, it provides tangible value— in the form of information, entertainment or inspiration—and boosts a brand’s image in the eyes of the public.
Social media—Social media, also known as consumer-generated media, is media (in the form of text, visuals and audio) created to be shared. It has changed the face of marketing by allowing collaboration and connection in a way that no other channel has been able to offer.	Branding, value creation, and participation—From a strategic perspective, social media is useful for brand building, raising awareness of the brand story and allowing the consumer to become involved in the story through collaboration. Social media platforms also play a role in building awareness, due to their shareable, viral nature. They can also provide crowdsourced feedback and allow brands to share valuable content directly with their fans.
Email marketing—Email marketing is a form of direct marketing that delivers commercial and content-based messages to an audience. It is extremely cost effective, highly targeted, customizable on a mass scale and completely measurable—all of which make it one of the most powerful digital marketing tactics.	Customer retention and value creation—Email marketing is a tool for building relationships with potential and existing customers through valuable content and promotional messages. It should maximize the retention and value of these customers, ultimately leading to greater profitability for the organization as a whole. A targeted, segmented email database means that a brand can direct messages at certain sectors of their customer base in order to achieve the best results.

Once the objectives and tactics have been set, these should be cross-checked and re-evaluated against the needs and resources of your organization to make sure your strategy is on the right track and no opportunities are being overlooked.

Step 5: Ongoing Optimization

It is increasingly important for brands to be dynamic, flexible, and agile when marketing online. New tactics and platforms emerge every week, customer behaviors change over time, and people’s needs and wants from brands evolve as their relationships grow. The challenge is to break through the online clutter to connect with customers in an original and meaningful way.

This process of constant change should be considered in the early stages of strategy formulation, allowing tactics and strategies to be modified and optimized as you go. After all, developing a digital marketing strategy should be iterative, innovative, and open to evolution.

Understanding user experience and the user journey is vital to building successful brands. A budget should be set aside upfront for analyzing user data and optimizing conversion paths.

Social thinking and socially informed innovation are also valuable and uniquely suited to the online space. Socially powered insight can be used to inform strategic decisions in the organization, from product roadmaps to service plans. Brands have moved from a mere presence in social media to active use, aligning it with actionable objectives and their corresponding metrics. This is critical in demonstrating return on investment (ROI) and understating the opportunities and threats in the market.

Managing the learning loop (the knowledge gained from reviewing the performance of your tactics, which can then be fed back into the strategy) can be difficult. This is because brand cycles often move more slowly than the real-time results you will see online. It is therefore important to find a way to work agility into the strategy, allowing you to be quick, creative, and proactive, as opposed to slow, predictable, and reactive.

Licenses and Attributions

2.7 Crafting a Digital Marketing Strategy from eMarketing: The Essential Guide to Marketing in a Digital World, 5th Edition by Rob Stokes and the Minds of Quirk is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. © 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013 Quirk Education Pty (Ltd). UMGC has modified this work and it is available under the original license.

All links to external sites were verified at the time of publication. UMGC is not responsible for the validity or integrity of information located at external sites.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer relationship management (CRM) has existed since people first started selling things. The first shopkeeper who stopped to chat with his customers, who remembered their names, and perhaps gave them a small freebie for continually using his services was practicing a form of customer relationship management by making customers feel special. He was also probably seeing the favorable effect on his bottom line.

Today, with business interactions becoming digital and more remote, and person-to-person contact becoming scarcer, CRM is more important than ever. Businesses need to build and maintain relationships with their customers. A faceless company is not personable or engaging, and it has to work harder to fill the gap between attracting and retaining customers (and their good will). The relationship a customer builds with a company is often the reason they return, but building it today is more difficult than ever, in a society where data is protected, customers are smart in their exercise of their right to choose, and a competitor can be just a click away.

CRM is a customer-focused approach to business based on fostering long-term, meaningful relationships. CRM is not about immediate profit. It's about the lifetime value of a customer, the purchases they will make in future, the positive word of mouth they will generate, and the loyalty they will show a brand. Effective CRM enables businesses to collaborate with customers to inform overall business strategies, drive business processes, support brand development, and maximize return on investment.

There is a truism that a happy customer tells one person, but an unhappy customer tells ten. With your customers' voices are being heard on blogs, forums, review sites, and social media, they can talk very loudly and impact your business much more easily.

Key CRM Terms

Customer

A person who buys or uses goods or services, with whom a company should develop a relationship.

Customer-centric

Placing the customer at the center of an organization’s business planning and execution.

Customer-driven

Allowing and encouraging customers to drive the direction of a business.

Customer lifetime value (CLV)

The profitability of a customer over their entire relationship with the business.

Customer relationship management (CRM)

A strategy for managing a company’s relationships with clients and potential clients. It often makes use of technology to automate the sales, marketing, customer service, and technical processes of an organization.

Data

Statistics and facts collected for analysis.

Data mining

The process of analyzing data to discover unknown patterns or connections.

Key performance indicator (KPI)

A metric that shows whether an objective is being achieved.

Metric

A defined unit of measurement.

Model

A strategic visual representation of a process to which a company adheres.

Prospect

A potential customer.

Stakeholder

A person or organization with an interest in how a resource is managed.

Resources

· The CRM Model: Analyzing Data and Understanding the Benefits

Licenses and Attributions

Chapter 8: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) from eMarketing: The Essential Guide to Marketing in a Digital World, 5th Edition by Rob Stokes and the Minds of Quirk is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. © 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013 Quirk Education Pty (Ltd). UMGC has modified this work and it is available under the original license.

All links to external sites were verified at the time of publication. UMGC is not responsible for the validity or integrity of information located at external sites.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

With millions of people performing billions of searches each day to find content on the internet (Sullivan, 2013), it makes sense that marketers want their products to be findable online. Search engines, the channels through which these searches happen, use closely guarded algorithms to determine the results displayed. Determining what factors these algorithms consider has led to a growing practice known as search engine optimization (SEO).

Search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing a website to achieve the highest possible ranking on the search engine results pages (SERPs). Someone who practices SEO professionally is also known as an SEO (search engine optimizer).

Google says it uses more than two hundred different factors in its algorithm to determine relevance and ranking (Avellanosa, 2012). None of the major search engines disclose the elements they use to rank pages, but there are many SEO practitioners who spend time analyzing patent applications to try to determine what these are.

SEO can be split into two distinct camps: white-hat SEO and black-hat SEO (with, of course, some grey-hat wearers in between). Black hat SEO refers to trying to game the search engines. These SEOs use dubious means to achieve high rankings, and their websites are occasionally blacklisted by the search engines. White-hat SEO, on the other hand, refers to working within the parameters set by search engines to optimize a website for better user experience. Search engines want to send users to the website that is best suited to their needs, so white-hat SEO should ensure that users can find what they are looking for.

Key SEO Terms

Alt text

The "alt" attribute for the IMG HTML tag. It is used in HTML to attribute a text field to an image on a web page, normally with a descriptive function, telling a search engine or user what an image is about and displaying the text in instances where the image is unable to load. Also called alt tag.

Anchor text

The visible, clickable text in a link.

App store optimization (ASO)

The process of optimizing mobile and web applications for the specific web stores they are distributed in.

Backlink

All the links on other pages that will take the user to a specific web page. Each link to that specific page is known as an inbound/backlink. The number of backlinks influences your ranking, so the more backlinks, the better.

Canonical

The canonical version is the definitive version. In SEO, it refers to a definitive URL.

Domain name

The easy-to-read name used to identify an IP address of a server that distinguishes it from other systems on the World Wide Web.

Flash

A technology used to show video and animation on a website. It can be bandwidth-heavy and unfriendly to search engine spiders.

Heading tags

Heading tags (H1, H2, H3, and so on) are standard elements used to define headings and subheadings on a web page. The number indicates the importance, so H1 tags are viewed by the spiders as being more important than H3 tags. Using target key phrases in your H tags is essential for effective SEO.

Home page

The first page of any website. The home page gives users a glimpse into what your site is about, very much like the index in a book, or a magazine.

Hyperlink

A link in an electronic document that allows you, once you click on it, to follow the link to the relevant web page.

HyperText markup language (HTML)

The code language predominantly used to create and display web pages and information online.

Internet protocol (IP) address

An exclusive number that is used to represent every single computer in a network.

Keyword frequency

The number of times a keyword or key phrase appears on a website.

Key phrase

Two or more words that are combined to form a search query, often referred to as keywords. It is usually better to optimize for a phrase rather than a single word.

Keyword rankings

Where the keywords or phrases targeted by SEO rank in the search engine results. If your targeted terms do not appear on the first three pages, start worrying.

Landing page

The first page a user reaches when clicking on a link in an online marketing campaign. The pages that have the most success are those that match up as closely as possible with the user’s expectations.

Link

A URL embedded on a web page. If you click on the link, you will be taken to that page.

Link bait

A technique for providing content that attracts links from other web pages.

Meta tags

Tags that tell search engine spiders what exactly a web page is about. It’s important that your meta tags are optimized for the targeted key phrases. Meta tags are made up of meta titles, descriptions and keywords.

PageRank

Google’s secret algorithm for ranking web pages in search engine results pages.

Referrer

When a user clicks on a link from one site to another, the site the user has left is the referrer. Most browsers log the referrer’s URL in referrer strings. This information is vital in determining which queries are being used to find specific sites.

Robots.txt

A file written and stored in the root directory of a website that restricts the search engine spiders from indexing certain pages of the website.

Search engine spiders

Programs that travel the web, following links and building up the indexes of search engines.

Universal resource locator (URL)

A web address that is unique to every page on the internet.

Usability

A measure of how easy a system is to use. Sites with excellent usability fare far better than those that are difficult to use.

XML sitemap

A guide that search engines use to help them index a website, which indicates how many pages there are, how often they are updated, and how important they are.

References

Avellanosa, N. (2012). Half of 200 signals in Google's ranking algorithm revealed [Web log]. Retrieved from http://blogirature.com/2012/07/01/half-of-200-signals-in-googles-rankingalgorithm- revealed/

Sullivan, D. (2013). Google still world's most popular search engine by far, but share Of unique searchers dips slightly. Search Engine Land. Retrieved from http://searchengineland.com/google-worlds-most-popular-search-engine-148089

Resources

· SEO: Rules, Tools, Benefits, and Challenges

Licenses and Attributions

Chapter 9: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) from eMarketing: The Essential Guide to Marketing in a Digital World, 5th Edition by Rob Stokes and the Minds of Quirk is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. © 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013 Quirk Education Pty (Ltd). UMGC has modified this work and it is available under the original license.

All links to external sites were verified at the time of publication. UMGC is not responsible for the validity or integrity of information located at external sites.

Understanding Customers

Customers can be seen as the most important stakeholders in a business. Without customers purchasing goods or services, most businesses would not have a revenue stream. But it can be difficult to shift from realizing this important fact to implementing it in day-to-day business decisions and strategies.

A successful relationship with a customer is based on meeting or even exceeding their needs—determining what problems the customer has and providing solutions, sometimes before the problem occurs. It depends on continually giving the customer a reason to transact with your company above any other.

CRM should not only mean implementing customer-centric processes and consider technology, but embracing customer-driven processes. Through innovations in digital technologies, enhanced customer engagement, and the introduction of mass personalisation, the customer can often drive the business.

Consumer Touchpoints

Consumer touchpoints are all the points at which brands touch consumers' lives during their relationship. This is the starting point for all customer relationship management (CRM)—a brand needs to speak with one voice across all of these touchpoints and deliver a rewarding experience every time it interacts with its customers. Touchpoints can be brand initiated (e.g., a brand sending an email newsletter) or customer initiated (e.g.,the customer making a purchase in a store).

People don't start out as customers; they begin as prospects—people who merely view a business's offering. Once a prospect has expressed interest, CRM can help to convert them into a customer. Some people will always shop on price and need to be converted to loyal customers. Here, brand perception and service are often the differentiators. Consider the prospect who walks into a car dealership and is given outstanding service. In this case, CRM in the form of an aware and trained sales force can help turn a prospect into a customer.

A consumer touchpoint can be as simple as a print or banner ad. It can also be as multifaceted as a conversation between a call centre agent and a customer. It can be a timely tweet, or an outbound email giving the customer details about their account. Even statements and bills are touchpoints that need to be managed carefully to ensure that the brand continues its relationship with the customer successfully.

Customer touchpoints can generally be divided into three spheres or phases.

Prepurchase or pre-usage covers the various ways brands and prospects interact before the prospect decides to conduct business with a company. Here, the brand has several goals:

· gain customers

· heighten brand awareness

· shape brand perceptions to highlight the benefits it offers over competitors

· indicate how the brand provides value and fulfils the needs and wants of consumers

· educate consumers about products and services

Purchase or usage covers the touchpoints at which the customer decides to purchase a product, use a service or convert according to set criteria, and initiates the brand-customer relationship. The key goals are to:

· instill confidence

· deliver value

· reinforce the purchase decision

· heighten brand perceptions

Postpurchase or usage covers all the postsale interactions between the brand and customer. Now, the brand wants to:

· develop a relationship

· maximize the customer experience

· deliver on the brand promise

· increase brand loyalty

· remain top of mind

· invite repeat purchases

Customer Loyalty

The main objective of any CRM strategy should be to gain customer loyalty over the long term. But what is loyalty? This may mean different things for different organizations. Ultimately, it is about acquiring and retaining customers who meet the following criteria:

· have a projected lifetime value that makes them a valuable prospect to your business

· buy a variety of your products or use your services repeatedly during their time as a customer

· share their positive experiences with others

· provide honest feedback on these products and services, and their experiences

· collaborate with you on ways to improve their experiences

Licenses and Attributions

All links to external sites were verified at the time of publication. UMGC is not responsible for the validity or integrity of information located at external sites.

Social CRM

Widespread social media usage means that customer relationship management (CRM) has to be conducted in this forum in order to deliver an encompassing experience for the customer. Not only should social media be integrated into any existing CRM strategy and looked at from a touchpoint and channel perspective, but social media can also be used to drive CRM.

CRM should embrace the social customer—a stance effectively summed up by social CRM expert Paul Greenberg as follows: "Social customers are not the customers of yore. They trust their peers, are connected via the web and mobile devices to those peers as much of a day as they would like. They expect information to be available to them on demand….They require transparency and authenticity from their peers and the companies they choose to deal with" (Greenberg, 2010).

Social media platforms allow customers to easily share their brand experiences (good or bad) with their online social connections, who in turn can share this experience. This means a potential word-of-mouth audience of millions could witness a single user's brand experience and weigh in on the situation. Social customers place a great deal of value on the opinions of their peers, and are more likely to look favorably on a brand, product, or service if a peer has recommended or praised it. In fact, the 2012 Edelman Trust Barometer, an annual trust and credibility survey, saw trust in social media increase by 75 percent, noting that respondents are placing increasingly more importance on information gathered from this space (Edelman, 2012).

Brands have realized that they need to leverage this in their CRM strategies and now understand that communication is not one way (from brand to consumer), or even two way (between consumer and brand), but multidirectional (brand to consumer, consumer to brand, and consumer to consumer).

The convergence of social media with CRM has been termed social CRM or CRM 2.0, and has developed into a field on its own.

Social CRM and Support

Social customers are increasingly turning to social media channels for support. With the immediate accessibility offered through mobile devices, they see this as a convenient channel to communicate with brands. This means that brands need to respond quickly and transparently to consumers' questions, gripes, and even compliments. A support query going unanswered on Twitter, for instance, is likely to cause frustration for the consumer, and prompt them to take a situation that is already visible to other consumers even further, potentially causing a brand crisis. Brands should carefully consider whether all social media channels are appropriate for them, and be prepared for any eventuality. Brands that are well liked will generally have positive responses on social media, those that receive a mediocre response from consumers will have a bit of a mixed bag, but those that have a lot of support issues are likely to experience very large numbers of complaints that need to be addressed.

Social support staff should have access to all the historical data relating to customer issues—such as all the data collected about previous complaints and reference numbers. In this way, they can respond directly to the consumer in the social channel that they've selected and escalate the problem appropriately.

Social CRM and Online Monitoring

Social CRM can also make use of online reputation management and monitoring tools. Online monitoring, or reputation management, entails knowing what is being said about your organization and ensuring that you are leading the conversation.

By using these tools, brands can rate and sort these mentions based on their sentiment. This allows them to effectively test the temperature of the online community's feeling towards the brand, which can then guide any future action.

Customer-centric vs. Customer-Driven Organizations

Effective CRM places the customer's needs first in all dealings with the brand. However, there is a vast difference between a customer-centric organization and a customer-driven one.

Placing the customer at the center of an organization's business planning and execution is different from having customers drive the direction of a business. Many new, web-based businesses rely on the latter, and actively encourage customers to take the lead and add value to the business.

Services such as Flickr (www.flickr.com) and Twitter (www.twitter.com) are user-driven rather than user-centric. They provide tools that enable users to make the service their own, often by allowing outside developers to create supplementary services. Flickr users can export their images and use them to make custom business cards on Moo (www.moo.com). There are many auxiliary services based on Twitter, such as analysis services and access services. Savvy organizations can also provide tools to customers to drive their business, passing on tasks to customers that might ordinarily have been performed by the organization.

Customer-centric strategy, on the other hand, uses data to present the best possible experience to the customer. Amazon's collaborative filtering is an example of a customer-centric approach. Using customer data, Amazon will share products that you are more likely to prefer.

A sample figure of Amazon.com showing products that a user might be interested in based on what they are shopping for.

Uses of Customer Data

Amazon provides recommendations based on what customers with similar profiles are looking at.

Customer-centric experiences are about personalization: using data to create a tailored experience for the customer. Customer-driven experiences are about customization: providing the tools that let a customer tailor their own experience.

References

Edelman. (2012). Edelman Trust Barometer 2012. StrategyOne. Retrieved from http://www.scribd.com/doc/79026497/2012-Edelman-Trust-Barometer-Executive-Summary

Greenberg, P. (2010). The impact of CRM 2.0 on customer insight. Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, 25(6), 410–419.

Licenses and Attributions

All links to external sites were verified at the time of publication. UMGC is not responsible for the validity or integrity of information located at external sites.

Implementing a CRM Strategy

Step 1: Conduct a Business Needs Analysis

A major part of determining where to begin with a customer relationship management (CRM) implementation is having a clear understanding of business needs and where CRM would most benefit the organization. CRM touches on sales, marketing, customer service, and support both online and offline. It’s important to review the needs of each business area so that you can determine your strategy for CRM.

Ideally you should have individual goals for each department, and all members within the organization should buy in to the strategy in order to drive it successfully, from the highest rank to the lowest. Implementing successful CRM across the organization is a process, with stakeholders making decisions collectively and sharing their views and needs. Decisions should be based on realistic budgets and resources, and full calculations should be carried out before any kind of loyalty currency is decided upon.

Step 2: Understand Customer Needs

CRM is about the customer. you might have identified a range of business needs, but what about the needs of the customer?

Two elements of CRM in particular— service delivery and customer support—are actually all about meeting the needs of the customer. And what’s the best way of determining customer needs? By asking them, of course. There are various ways to find out what customers want, but in all of them, it is important to listen. Use online monitoring tools and insights from social media to gather a more rounded view of what your customers think, feel, and want. Look at past behavior, churn rates, and successes; a detailed data mining exercise could also be on the cards, as you will need to understand which of your customers is the most valuable and why.

Step 3: Set Objectives and Measurements of Success

CRM is a long-term commitment, and you need to consider a long-term approach. Depending on the business needs, your objectives and success measures could include the following:

· increasing customer numbers

· increasing profitability per customer

· increasing market share

· improving responses to campaigns

· raising customer satisfaction

· improving end-to-end integration of the sales process cycle

The metrics you select for measurement will depend on these objectives. There are numerous metrics that you can choose from when measuring your performance, and the actual metrics you choose are generally referred to as your key performance indicators (KPIs).

Step 4: Determine How You Will Implement CRM

Once you’ve identified all of the objectives of your CRM implementation, you will need to determine how you are actually going to roll it out. What channels will you use? What touchpoints will you leverage? What data will you need for this? And what tools will you need to gather this data and implement your initiatives across these channels? How will you address the shift and communicate with your internal stakeholders before you launch the initiative to your external ones?

You will need to make choices based on what is available to you, or what you intend on embracing. The digital space offers a range of innovative spaces for CRM delivery; you simply need to get creative in your execution.

Step 5: Choose the Right Tools

There are lots of excellent CRM tools available, but these are useless without a clear CRM strategy in place. You can only select your tools once you know what your objectives are, what touchpoints and channels you are going to use, and what data you need to collect and analyze. CRM systems that gather information on customer preferences and needs, as well as information on competitors and in the industry in general, let organizations focus on providing customer solutions instead of simply pushing products.

Licenses and Attributions

All links to external sites were verified at the time of publication. UMGC is not responsible for the validity or integrity of information located at external sites.

Link Popularity

Links are a vital part of how the internet works. The purpose of a link is to allow a user to go from one web page to another. Search engines, doing their best to mimic the behavior of humans, also follow links. Besides allowing search engine spiders to find websites, links are a way of validating relevance and indicating importance. When one page links to another, it is as if that page is voting or vouching for the destination page. Generally, the more votes a website receives, the more trusted it becomes, the more important it is deemed, and the better it will rank on search engines.

Links help send signals of trust. Signals of trust can come only from a third-party source. Few people will trust someone who says, "Don't worry, you can trust me!" unless someone else, who is already trusted, says, "Don't worry, I know him well. You can trust him." It is the same with links and search engines. Trusted sites can transfer trust to unknown sites via links.

Links help to validate relevance. Link text such as "Cape Town hotel" sends the message that you can trust that the destination site is relevant to the term Cape Town hotel. If the destination web page has already used content to send a signal of relevance, the link simply validates that signal.

The Parts of a Link

Here is the HTML code for a link:

<a href="http://www.targeturl.com/targetpage.htm">Anchor Text</a>

You can decipher the meaning of this string of text as follows:

· <a href> and </a> are HTML tags that show where the link starts and ends.

· http://www.targeturl.com/targetpage.htm is the page that the link leads to. You should make sure that you are linking to a relevant page in your site, and not just to the home page.

· Anchor Text is the visible text that forms the link. This is the text that should contain the key phrase you are targeting.

The link sends a signal that the target URL is important for the subject used in the anchor text.

There is a lot more information that can be included in this anatomy, such as instructions telling the search engine not to follow the link, or instructions to the browser about whether the link should open in a new window or not.

In the link

<a href="http://www.targeturl.com/targetpage.htm" rel="nofollow">Anchor Text</a> ,

rel="nofollow" is included when you don't want to vouch for the target URL. Search engines do not count nofollow links for ranking purposes. This practice was introduced by Google to try to combat comment spam.

Not All Links Are Created Equal

Of course, not all links are equal. While link volume is the number of links coming to a specific page of your site, link authority looks at the value of the links. Some sites are more trusted than others. So, if they are more trusted, then links from those sites are worth more. Likewise, some sites are more relevant than others to specific terms. The more relevant a site, the more value is transferred by the link. Well-known and established news sites, government sites (.gov) and university domains (.edu) are examples of sites from which links can carry more weighting. Links from websites that have a higher PageRank also carry more link weight.

Search algorithms also consider relationships between linked sites. By analyzing various factors, the search engines try to determine if the links are natural links, or if they are manipulative, artificial links created solely for ranking purposes. Manipulated links are worth very little compared to natural links and may even lead to a drop in search engine rankings.

The search engine algorithm will also determine the relevance of the referring website to the site being linked to. The more relevant the sites are to each other, the better.

Also consider that linking to valuable, relevant external resources can help to improve the visibility of a site.

How Does a Website Get More Links?

With links playing such a vital role in search engine rankings and traffic for a website, everyone wants more of them. There are certainly dubious means of generating links, most of which can actually result in being penalized by the search engines. However, the sections below outline some ways for ethical and honest website owners and marketers (and that's what you are) to go about increasing links to their websites.

Create Excellent, Valuable Content that Others Want to Read

If people find your site useful, they are more likely to link to it. It is not necessary (or possible) to try to write content that will appeal to the whole of the internet population. Focus on being the best in the industry you are in, and in providing value to the members of that community. Make sure that valuable content is themed around your key phrases.

A segmented pyramid showing that emotive, entertaining, and useful content contribute to great content.

Creating Great Content

Ensure that you create remarkable, valuable content that people want to link to.

Infographics are visual and graphic representations of data. They are a popular type of content that is useful to users and can encourage lots of traffic and inbound links.

Create Tools and Documents that Others Want to Use

Interview experts in your field and host those interviews on your website. Create useful PDF guides for your industry that people can download from your site. Think outside the box for quirky, relevant items that people will link to. Calculators are popular tools, and we don't just mean the ones that add two and two together. If you have a website selling diet books, for example, create a tool that helps users calculate their body mass index (BMI) and target weight. Importantly, be unique!

An image of BMI calculator graph.

BMI Calculator

The BBC website has several interactive elements, such as this BMI calculator.

Create Games

Creating a game that people want to play is a great way to generate links. Make sure that the theme of the game is based on the key phrases for your website, so that when others talk about and link to the game, they are using your key phrases.

Capitalize on Software and Widgets

Widgets, browser extensions, and other software that users love to use all help to generate links for a website. Quirk has released a Mozilla Firefox extension called SearchStatus that is exceptionally useful to the SEO community. Each time someone mentions this SEO tool, they link to Quirk. People also like to include fun widgets in their forum signatures. Create a widget, make sure that the link is included, and let people spread these around the web for you.

Competitor Analysis

You can find out who is linking to your competitors and which noncompeting sites are ranking highly for your key phrases. Use this information to identify sites to target for link requests.

Using Google search, the following search operators can be used to find these links and websites:

· Link:url.com

· Link:http://www.url.com/page.html

· Link:url.com –site:url.com

With all link-building tactics, make sure that you use your key phrases when communicating. You will be telling people how to link to you and ensuring that search engines notice your authority.

Licenses and Attributions

All links to external sites were verified at the time of publication. UMGC is not responsible for the validity or integrity of information located at external sites.

User Insights

Search engines want their results to be highly relevant to web users, to make sure that those users keep returning to the search engine for future searches. And the best way to establish what is relevant to users is by looking at how they use websites.

User data is the most effective way of judging the true relevance and value of a website. For example, if users arrive on a website and leave immediately, chances are it wasn’t relevant to their query in the first place. However, if a user repeatedly visits a website and spends a long time there, it is probably extremely relevant. When it comes to search engines, relevant, valuable sites are promoted, and irrelevant sites are demoted.

Search engines use cookies to maintain a history of a user’s search activity, including keywords used and websites visited from the search engine. Search engines gather data on the clickthrough rate of results and on bounce rates.

Site speed, that is, the performance of your website, is a contributing factor to ranking in Google. Google confirmed in April 2010 that this was one of over two hundred ranking signals (Singhal, 2010).

The following characteristics of website will help enhance its search engine optimization (SEO):

· It is valuable enough to attract both visitors and links naturally.

· It retains visitors and makes sure they return to the website.

· It converts visitors.

Social and Search

Social information is playing an ever-increasing role in search. Social content, such as Twitter messages or YouTube videos, can appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs), and there is a growing indication of social influence on search rankings.

A screenshot of Coca-Cola’s social media profiles

A Google search for Coca-Cola turns up several social media profiles.

There are several social factors to consider when it comes to social and search:

· use of social media properties to dominate brand SERPs—When someone searches for your brand name, you can use your social media properties to own more of the results on that page, reducing the likelihood that a user will end up on a competitor’s website instead. Use your brand name when naming Twitter and Flickr profiles, and Facebook and YouTube pages.

· social links used as signals of relevance—Links from social sites such as Twitter include rel="nofollow" tag. However, there is a strong indication that these links are in fact followed by search engines, and are used to determine relevance. If you focus on creating great content on your site and making sure that it is easy to share socially, you should see a result in your SEO efforts.

· personalized results influenced by your online social network—If you are logged in to a social network while searching (Facebook for Bing, or your Gmail account for Google), you could see results from or influenced by your social circle. In Bing, for instance, results can include indications of what your friends have previously liked or shared via Facebook. On Google, you may be more likely to see your friend’s blog for relevant searches.

· optimization for social search engines—While Google is the biggest search engine worldwide, YouTube is the second biggest. Even within social properties, users still use search to find the content they are looking for. Content that is housed on these properties should be optimized for the relevant social search engine as well.

Mobile Search

As web-enabled mobile devices continue to grow in the market and become easier to use, mobile search remains a key growth area. Mobile searches tend to be different from desktop searches. They are more navigational in nature (users tend to know where they want to end up) and users are often looking for concise, actionable answers.

Mobile search input can also be different from desktop search. In addition to typing in search keywords, mobile users can search by voice, or by using images or scanning barcodes.

As with mobile web development, mobile SEO is a little different from desktop SEO, although the fundamental principles remain the same. Build usable and accessible sites with great content, and you’ve already come a long way.

Differences in approach for mobile SEO are largely caused by the following factors:

· Search engines have the ability to deliver precise location-based results to mobile users.

· Usability is critical in sites for mobile devices.

· Search engines have less data to work with (compared to traditional web) in terms of site history, traffic, and inbound links.

The fundamentals of mobile SEO are not so different from those of desktop SEO.

· A usable, crawlable site is very important—Build mobile versions of your website that cater for mobile users, using simple navigation and content stripped down to only what is required.

· Content is important and should be formatted for mobile usage—Text and images should be optimised for the mobile experience—so no large file sizes! The metadata still matters; titles and descriptions are what users see in the SERPs.

· Links are important—You should link to your mobile site from your desktop site and vice versa. Submit your mobile site to relevant mobile directories.

· Submit a mobile XML sitemap—Mobile-specific sitemaps use the same protocols as standard XML sitemaps, with the addition of a mobile tag.

· Use the word mobile on the mobile website, or use mobile top-level domains —Make it explicit to search engines that this is the mobile version of your website, and they are more likely to prioritize it as such.

Local Search

Local search refers to search behavior and results where location matters. Either results returned are local in nature, or results returned can be map based.

With blended SERPs, map-based results can be returned together with other types of results, depending on the type of search. As search engines become ever more sophisticated, location can be inferred and influence the type of results.

A screenshot a google search results for pizza.

A Google search for pizza in Florence turns up a range of location-based results, displayed on a map.

For example, a user may search for plumber London, and the search will know to return results for London plumbers. These may even be returned on a map. However, a user in London may search just for plumber. The search can infer from the user’s IP address that the user is in London, and still return results for London plumbers (since someone searching for this term is likely to be looking for a nearby service).

For search engines to return location-relevant results, they need to know the location of things being searched for. This is often determined from sites that include the name and address of a business. Note that this site may not be yours. Location results are often determined from various review sites, and the results can include some of those reviews.

Search engines also allow businesses to claim their locations. A business can verify itself through a process with the search engine and ensure that location information is correct.

References

Singhal, A. (2010). Using site speed in web search ranking [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-websearch-ranking.html

Licenses and Attributions

All links to external sites were verified at the time of publication. UMGC is not responsible for the validity or integrity of information located at external sites.

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