Module-01

Introduction to Digital Marketing

1.1 Motivation: Digital marketing helps the business to reach wider audience, scale up the
business and generate more revenue

1.2 Learning Objective: Understand the concept of Digital Marketing and learn the
basics of Digital marketing
1.3 Syllabus
Prerequisites Syllabus Duration Self-Study
Introduction of E- Digital Marketing Skills 1 Hr 1 Hr
commerce empowered by AI :SEO
Search Engine Marketing, Social 1 Hr 1 Hr
Media Marketing,
Email Marketing, Content 1 Hr 1 Hr
Marketing, Influencer
Marketing,
Conversion Rate Optimization 1 Hr 1 Hr

Web Analytics 1 Hr 2 Hr

Tools Based Marketing 1 Hr 2 Hr

Lifecycle Marketing 1 Hr 1 Hr
Automation.

1.4 DEFINITIONS:
1. Digital Marketing: Digital Marketing refers to advertising delivered through
numerous digital channels such as search engines, websites, social media, email,
and mobile apps.
2. Search engine optimization (SEO): Search engine optimization (SEO) is the
process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural”
listings on search engines.
3. Social media marketing (SMM): Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of
Internet marketing that utilizes social networking websites as a marketing tool.
4. Web analytics: Web analytics is the study of visitor, navigation, and traffic
patterns to determine the success of a given web site.
5. Google Analytics: It is a free Web analytics service that provides statistics and
basic analytical tools for search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing
purposes.
 6. Content writer: A website content writer or web content writer is a person who
specializes in providing relevant content for websites.

1.5 Key Definition:

1. SEO: Search engine optimization

2. SEM: Search engine marketing
3. ROI: Return on Investment
4. SMM: Social media marketing
5. PPC: Pay per click
6. ROI: Rate of investment
7. CRO: Conversion Rate Optimization
8. KPI: Key Performance Indicators

1.6 Theory:

1.6.1 Introduction:
Digital marketing is an umbrella term for the marketing of products or services
using digital technologies, mainly on the Internet, but also including mobile
phones, display advertising, and any other digital medium.
At a high level, digital marketing refers to advertising delivered through
digital channels such as search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile
apps. Using these online media channels, digital marketing is the method by
which companies endorse goods, services, and brands. Consumers heavily rely on
digital means to research products. For example, Think with Google marketing
insights found that 48% of consumers start their inquiries on search engines, while
33% look to brand websites and 26% search within mobile applications.
While modern day digital marketing is an enormous system of channels to
which marketers simply must onboard their brands, advertising online is much
more complex than the channels alone. In order to achieve the true potential of
digital marketing, marketers have to dig deep into today’s vast and intricate cross-
channel world to discover strategies that make an impact through engagement
marketing. Engagement marketing is the method of forming meaningful
interactions with potential and returning customers based on the data you collect
over time. By engaging customers in a digital landscape, you build brand
awareness, set yourself as an industry thought leader, and place your business at
the forefront when the customer is ready to buy.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

• Saves the time and effort
• Economical
• Has a greater impact on the masses
 • Flexible
• Real time analysis
• Instant feedback
Objectives of Digital Marketing
• Reach the correct audience
• Engage your audience
• Motivate your audience to take action
• Maximize the return on investment(ROI)

1.6.2 Digital Marketing Skills empowered by AI: SEO

SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” In simple terms, it means the process
of improving your site to increase its visibility for relevant searches. The better
visibility your pages have in search results, the more likely you are to garner
attention and attract prospective and existing customers to your business.
Search engine optimization is the process of getting traffic from the “free,”
“organic,” “editorial” or “natural” listings on search engines. For example,
whenever you enter a query in a search engine and hit 'enter' you get a list of web
results that contain that query term. Users normally tend to visit websites that are
at the top of this list as they perceive those to be more relevant to the query.
If you have ever wondered why some of these websites rank better than the
others then you must know that it is because of a powerful web marketing
technique called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). SEO helps to ensure that a
site is accessible to a search engine and improves the chances that the site will be
found by the search engine. It is a common practice for Internet users to not click
through pages and pages of search results, so where a site ranks in a search is
essential for directing more traffic toward the site.
The higher a website naturally ranks in organic results of a search, the
greater the chance that the site will be visited by a user.

How does SEO work?

Search engines such as Google and Bing use bots to crawl pages on the web,
going from site to site, collecting information about those pages and putting them
in an index. Next, algorithms analyze pages in the index, taking into account
hundreds of ranking factors or signals, to determine the order pages should
appear in the search results for a given query.
Search ranking factors can be considered proxies for aspects of the user
experience. Our Periodic Table of SEO Factors organizes the factors into six main
categories and weights each based on its overall importance to SEO. For example,
content quality and keyword research are key factors of content optimization, and
crawlability and mobile-friendliness are important site architecture factors.
The search algorithms are designed to surface relevant, authoritative pages
and provide users with an efficient search experience. Optimizing your site and
 content with these factors in mind can help your pages rank higher in the search
results.
Unlike paid search ads, you can’t pay search engines to get higher organic
search rankings.

Why is SEO important for marketing?

SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing because people conduct
trillions of searches every year, often with commercial intent to find information
about products and services. Search is often the primary source of digital traffic
for brands and complements other marketing channels. Greater visibility and
ranking higher in search results than your competition can have a material impact
on your bottom line. However, the search results have been evolving over the past
few years to give users more direct answers and information that is more likely to
keep users on the results page instead of driving them to other websites.
Also, features like rich results and Knowledge Panels in the search results can
increase visibility and provide users more information about your company
directly in the results.

1.6.3 Search Engine Marketing:

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that
involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine
results pages (SERPs) primarily through paid advertising. SEM may incorporate
search engine optimization (SEO), which adjusts or rewrites website content and
site architecture to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages to
enhance pay per click (PPC) listings.
Search engine marketing is a way to create and edit a website so that search
engines rank it higher than other pages. It should be also focused on keyword
marketing or pay-per-click advertising (PPC). The technology enables advertisers
to bid on specific keywords or phrases and ensures ads appear with the results of
search engines.
Search engine marketing is the practice of marketing a business using paid
advertisements that appear on search engine results pages (or SERPs). Advertisers
bid on keywords that users of services such as Google and Bing might enter when
looking for certain products or services, which gives the advertiser the
opportunity for their ads to appear alongside results for those search queries.
These ads, often known by the term pay-per-click ads, come in a variety of formats.
Some are small, text-based ads, whereas others, such as product listing ads (PLAs,
also known as Shopping ads) are more visual, product-based advertisements that
allow consumers to see important information at-a-glance, such as price and
reviews.
Search engine marketing’s greatest strength is that it offers advertisers the
opportunity to put their ads in front of motivated customers who are ready to buy
at the precise moment they’re ready to make a purchase. No other advertising
medium can do this, which is why search engine marketing is so effective and such
an amazingly powerful way to grow your business.
With the development of this system, the price is growing under a high
level of competition. Many advertisers prefer to expand their activities, including
increasing search engines and adding more keywords (fig 1.1) . The more
advertisers are willing to pay for clicks, the higher the ranking for advertising,
which leads to higher traffic. PPC comes at a cost. The higher position is likely to
cost $5 for a given keyword, and $4.50 for a third location. A third advertiser earns
10% less than the top advertiser while reducing traffic by 50%.

Fig 1.1 Search engine result and adding keywords

Investors must consider their Return on Investment (ROI) when engaging
in PPC campaigns. Buying traffic via PPC will deliver a positive ROI when the
total cost-per-click for a single conversion remains below the profit margin. That
way the amount of money spent to generate revenue is below the actual revenue
generated.

There are many reasons explaining why advertisers choose the SEM
strategy. First, creating a SEM account is easy and can build traffic quickly based
on the degree of competition. The shopper who uses the search engine to find
information tends to trust and focus on the links showed in the results pages.
However, a large number of online sellers do not buy search engine optimization
to obtain higher ranking lists of search results but prefer paid links. A growing
number of online publishers are allowing search engines such as Google to crawl
content on their pages and place relevant ads on it. From an online seller's point
of view, this is an extension of the payment settlement and an additional incentive
to invest in paid advertising projects. Therefore, it is virtually impossible for
advertisers with limited budgets to maintain the highest rankings in the
increasingly competitive search market.
 Google's search engine marketing is one of the western world's marketing
leaders, while its search engine marketing is its biggest source of profit. Google's
search engine providers are clearly ahead of the Yahoo and Bing network. The
display of unknown search results is free, while advertisers are willing to pay for
each click of the ad in the sponsored search results.

Comparison with SEO

SEM is the wider discipline that incorporates SEO. SEM includes both paid
search results (using tools like Google Adwords or Bing Ads, formerly known as
Microsoft adCenter) and organic search results (SEO). SEM uses paid advertising
with AdWords or Bing Ads, pay per click (particularly beneficial for local
providers as it enables potential consumers to contact a company directly with one
click), article submissions, advertising and making sure SEO has been done. A
keyword analysis is performed for both SEO and SEM, but not necessarily at the
same time. SEM and SEO both need to be monitored and updated frequently to
reflect evolving best practices.
In some contexts, the term SEM is used exclusively to mean pay per click
advertising, particularly in the commercial advertising and marketing
communities which have a vested interest in this narrow definition. Such usage
excludes the wider search marketing community that is engaged in other forms of
SEM such as search engine optimization and search retargeting.
Creating the link between SEO and PPC represents an integral part of the
SEM concept. Sometimes, especially when separate teams work on SEO and PPC
and the efforts are not synced, positive results of aligning their strategies can be
lost. The aim of both SEO and PPC is maximizing the visibility in search and thus,
their actions to achieve it should be centrally coordinated. Both teams can benefit
from setting shared goals and combined metrics, evaluating data together to
determine future strategy or discuss which of the tools works better to get the
traffic for selected keywords in the national and local search results. Thanks to this,
the search visibility can be increased along with optimizing both conversions and
costs.
Another part of SEM is social media marketing (SMM). SMM is a type of
marketing that involves exploiting social media to influence consumers that one
company’s products and/or services are valuable. Some of the latest theoretical
advances include search engine marketing management (SEMM). SEMM relates
to activities including SEO but focuses on return on investment (ROI) management
instead of relevant traffic building (as is the case of mainstream SEO). SEMM also
integrates organic SEO, trying to achieve top ranking without using paid means
to achieve it, and pay per click SEO. For example, some of the attention is placed
on the web page layout design and how content and information is displayed to
the website visitor. SEO & SEM are two pillars of one marketing job and they both
run side by side to produce much better results than focusing on only one pillar.
Examples
AdWords is recognized as a web-based advertising utensil since it adopts
keywords that can deliver adverts explicitly to web users looking for information
in respect to a certain product or service. It is flexible and provides customizable
options like Ad Extensions, access to non-search sites, leveraging the display
network to help increase brand awareness. The project hinges on cost per click
(CPC) pricing where the maximum cost per day for the campaign can be chosen,
thus the payment of the service only applies if the advert has been clicked. SEM
companies have embarked on AdWords projects as a way to publicize their SEM
and SEO services. One of the most successful approaches to the strategy of this
project was to focus on making sure that PPC advertising funds were prudently
invested. Moreover, SEM companies have described AdWords as a practical tool
for increasing a consumer’s investment earnings on Internet advertising. The use
of conversion tracking and Google Analytics tools was deemed to be practical for
presenting to clients the performance of their canvas from click to conversion.
AdWords project has enabled SEM companies to train their clients on the utensil
and delivers better performance to the canvass. The assistance of AdWord canvass
could contribute to the growth of web traffic for a number of its consumer’s
websites, by as much as 250% in only nine months.

Another way search engine marketing is managed is by contextual advertising.

Here marketers place ads on other sites or portals that carry information relevant
to their products so that the ads jump into the circle of vision of browsers who are
seeking information from those sites. A successful SEM plan is the approach to
capture the relationships amongst information searchers, businesses, and search
engines. Search engines were not important to some industries in the past, but over
the past years the use of search engines for accessing information has become vital
to increase business opportunities. The use of SEM strategic tools for businesses
such as tourism can attract potential consumers to view their products, but it could
also pose various challenges. These challenges could be the competition that
companies face amongst their industry and other sources of information that could
draw the attention of online consumers. To assist the combat of challenges, the
main objective for businesses applying SEM is to improve and maintain their
ranking as high as possible on SERPs so that they can gain visibility. Therefore,
search engines are adjusting and developing algorithms and the shifting criteria
by which web pages are ranked sequentially to combat against search engine
misuse and spamming, and to supply the most relevant information to searchers.
This could enhance the relationship amongst information searchers, businesses,
and search engines by understanding the strategies of marketing to attract
business.
1.6.4 Social Media Marketing:
Social Media Marketing: Social media marketing, or SMM, is a form of internet
marketing that involves creating and sharing content on social media networks in
order to achieve your marketing and branding goals. Social media marketing
includes activities like posting text and image updates, videos, and other content
that drives audience engagement, as well as paid social media advertising.

Social media marketing can help with a number of goals, such as:
 Increasing website traffic
 Building conversions
 Raising brand awareness
 Creating a brand identity and positive brand association
 Improving communication and interaction with key audiences

The bigger and more engaged your audience is on social media networks, the
easier it will be for you to achieve every other marketing goal on your list.

1.6.4.1. Best Social Media Marketing Tips

Here are a few social media marketing tips to kick off your social media
campaigns.

Social Media Content Planning —Building a social media marketing plan is

essential. Consider keyword research and competitive research to help brainstorm
content ideas that will interest target audience. What are other businesses in your
industry doing to drive engagement on social media?
Great Social Content — Consistent with other areas of online marketing, content
controls supreme when it comes to social media marketing. Make sure information
must be posted regularly so that ideal customers will find helpful and interesting.
The content shared on social networks can include social media images, videos,
info graphics, how-to guides and more.
A Consistent Brand Image — Using social media for marketing enables your
business to project your brand image across a variety of different social media
platforms. While each platform has its own unique environment and voice, your
business’s core identity, whether it's friendly, fun, or trustworthy, should stay
consistent.
Social Media for Content Promotion — Social media marketing is a perfect
channel for sharing your best site and blog content with readers. Once you build
a loyal following on social media, you'll be able to post all your new content and
make sure your readers can find new stuff right away. Plus, great blog content will
help you build more followers. It's a surprising way that content marketing and
social media marketing benefit each other.
Sharing Curated Links — While using social media for marketing is a great way
to leverage your own unique, original content to gain followers, fans, and
devotees, it’s also an opportunity to link to outside articles as well. If other sources
provide great, valuable information you think your target audience will enjoy,
don’t be shy about linking to them. Curating and linking to outside sources
improves trust and reliability, and you may even get some links in return.
Tracking Competitors — It’s always important to keep an eye on competitors—
they can provide valuable data for keyword research and other social media
marketing insight. If your competitors are using a certain social media marketing
channel or technique that seems to be working for them, considering doing the
same thing, but do it better!
Measuring Success with Analytics — You can’t determine the success of your
social media marketing strategies without tracking data. Google Analytics can be
used as a great social media marketing tool that will help you measure your most
triumphant social media marketing techniques, as well as determine which
strategies are better off abandoned. Attach tracking tags to your social media
marketing campaigns so that you can properly monitor them. And be sure to use
the analytics within each social platform for even more insight into which of your
social content is performing best with your audience.
Social Media Crisis Management — Things don't always go swimmingly for
brands on social media. It's best to have a playbook in place so your employees
know how to handle a chaos.

1.6.4.2 Choose the Best Social Media Platforms for Marketing:

Some of the best social media platform for marketing are listed, but the list doesn’t
ends here.(Fig 1.2)
Facebook:
Facebook is a place people go to relax and chat with friends, so keep your tone
light and friendly. And remember, organic reach on Facebook can be extremely
limited, so consider a cost-effective Facebook ad strategy, which can have a big
impact on your organic Facebook presence as well.

Fig 1.2 Social media marketing

Google+
On Google+ you can upload and share photos, videos, links, and view all your
+1s. Also take advantage of Google+ circles, which allow you to segment your
followers into smaller groups, enabling you to share information with some
followers while barring others. For example, you might try creating a “super-fan”
circle, and share special discounts and exclusive offers only with that group.

Pinterest
Pinterest’s image-centered platform is ideal for retail, but anyone can benefit from
using Pinterest for social media purposes or sales-driving ads. Pinterest allows
businesses to showcase their product offerings while also developing brand
personality with eye-catching, unique pinboards. When developing your Pinterest
strategy, remember that the social network's primary audience is female. If that's
your demographic, you need a presence on Pinterest.

Twitter
Twitter is the social media marketing tool that lets you broadcast your updates
across the web. Follow tweeters in your industry or related fields, and you should
gain a steady stream of followers in return. Mix up your official tweets about
specials, discounts, and news with fun, brand-building tweets. Be sure to retweet
when a customer has something nice to say about you, and don’t forget to answer
people’s questions when possible. Using Twitter as a social media marketing tool
revolves around dialog and communication, so be sure to interact as much as
possible to nurture and build your following.

LinkedIn
LinkedIn is one of the more professional social media marketing sites. LinkedIn
Groups is a great venue for entering into a professional dialog with people in
similar industries and provides a place to share content with like-minded
individuals. It's also great for posting jobs and general employee networking.
Encourage customers or clients to give your business a recommendation on your
LinkedIn profile. Recommendations makes your business appear more credible
and reliable for new customers. Also browse the Questions section of LinkedIn;
providing answers helps you get established as a thought leader and earns trust.

YouTube
YouTube is the number one place for creating and sharing video content, and it
can also be an incredibly powerful social media marketing tool. Many businesses
try to create video content with the aim of having their video “go viral,” but in
reality those chances are pretty slim. Instead, focus on creating useful, instructive
“how-to” videos. These how-to videos also have the added benefit of ranking on
the video search results of Google.
1.6.5Email Marketing:
Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group
of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or
current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to
send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations. Email
marketing strategies commonly seek to achieve one or more of three primary
objectives, to build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. The term usually refers to
sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant's relationship
with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat
business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase
something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.

1.6.5.1 Types of Email marketing:

Email marketing can be carried out through different types of emails:

 Transactional emails

Transactional emails are usually triggered based on a customer's action with a

company. To be qualified as transactional or relationship messages, these
communications' primary purpose must be "to facilitate, complete, or confirm
a commercial transaction that the recipient has previously agreed to enter into
with the sender" along with a few other narrow definitions of transactional
messaging. Triggered transactional messages include dropped basket
messages, password reset emails, purchase or order confirmation emails, order
status emails, reorder emails, and email receipts.
The primary purpose of a transactional email is to convey information
regarding the action that triggered it. But, due to their high open rates (51.3%
compared to 36.6% for email newsletters), transactional emails are an
opportunity to introduce or extend the email relationship with customers or
subscribers; to anticipate and answer questions; or to cross-sell or up-sell
products or services.
Many email newsletter software vendors offer transactional email support,
which gives companies the ability to include promotional messages within the
body of transactional emails. There are also software vendors that offer
specialized transactional email marketing services, which include providing
targeted and personalized transactional email messages and running specific
marketing campaigns.

 Direct emails

Direct email involves sending an email solely to communicate a promotional

message (for example, a special offer or a product catalog). Companies usually
 collect a list of customer or prospect email addresses to send direct promotional
messages to, or they rent a list of email addresses from service companies.

1.6.5.2 Advantages:
Email marketing is popular with companies for several reasons:
 Email marketing is significantly cheaper and faster than traditional mail, mainly
because with email, most of the cost falls on the recipient.
 Businesses and organizations who send a high volume of emails can use an ESP
(email service provider) to gather information about the behavior of the recipients.
The insights provided by consumer response to email marketing help businesses
and organizations understand and make use of consumer behavior.
 Almost half of American Internet users check or send email on a typical day, with
emails delivered between 1 am and 5 am local time outperforming those sent at
other times in open and click rates.

1.6.5.3 Disadvantages
 As of mid-2016 email deliverability is still an issue for legitimate marketers.
According to the report, legitimate email servers averaged a delivery rate of 73%
in the U.S.; six percent were filtered as spam, and 22% were missing. This lags
behind other countries: Australia delivers at 90%, Canada at 89%, Britain at 88%,
France at 84%, Germany at 80% and Brazil at 79%.
 Consumers receive on average about 90 emails per day.
 Companies considering the use of an email marketing program must make sure
that their program does not violate spam laws such as the United States'
Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act (CAN-
SPAM), the European Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003,
or their Internet service provider's acceptable use policy.

1.6.5.4 Email marketing tips to get you started

1.6.5.4.1Create an email marketing plan.

To make the planning part easier consider following best practices when
devising a strategy for your email marketing.

 Define your audience

No matter what you sell, you need to have a clear idea of who your
audience is in order to effectively communicate with them. A little deeper
to segment users within your audience so you can send
them personalized and targeted emails that help increase engagement,
build trustful relationships and generate greater ROI.

 Signup sources

Some of the most valuable data your signup form has to offer is how and
where subscribers sign up for your list. If you’re an e-commerce business
 with your store connected to, knowing where your customers joined your
list can give you a better idea of how to communicate with them and where
you might want to focus your marketing efforts going forward.

 Segments and groups

Once you’ve identified smaller collections of people within your larger

audience, you’ll be able to create groups and segments to send more
relevant and personalized emails to your recipients—and the more relevant
the campaign, the better the results.

 Decide what to write

Now that you know who you’re writing to, it’s time to think about your
content. What do you want to say to your audience? What is your content
marketing strategy? You’ll want to send emails with purpose that really
speak to your subscribers, so always keep in mind what they signed up for.

 Establish your sending frequency and goals

There’s nothing set in stone about how often you should email your
customers, but if you send too often, your subscribers are likely to tune out
what you have to say or unsubscribe altogether. Some users that run
a blog or news website might choose to send daily updates to their
subscribers, while other users only send twice a month so subscribers stay
excited about their emails. Choose to send your email campaign at your
own pace, and check the unsubscribe rates and the click through rates to
adjust the frequency if needed.

 Make a schedule

One way to make sure you’re staying on track is to create a content calendar
to schedule your campaigns, blog posts, social media posts, and more.

Your email marketing schedule will depend on your industry, the types of
content you send (content marketing strategy), and your sending
frequency.

1.6.5.4.2. Design your emails

Design tips

When designing email campaigns, focus on your message and keep your
design straightforward. We suggest laying out all the elements for your
 campaign in a hierarchy, putting your most important information or the
main takeaway toward the top so people can quickly scan your email if
they’re short on time.

Code your own templates

Code your own HTML template and import it.

1.6.5.4.3. Test your emails

 Test in different email clients and ISPs

All email clients are created differently, which means that the campaign
you designed might look slightly different in your subscribers’ inboxes. Be
sure to check the emails on mobile devices as well as they can look different
in responsive designs.

 Send test emails to friends and coworkers

If you have any friends or coworkers who can check your email for typos
and give you some feedback on the layout, you can send them a test email
so they can preview the campaign directly in their inbox.

1.6.5.4.4. What you can do with marketing automation

Unlike regular campaigns, an automation is a targeted email or

series of emails that you can set and forget. From a welcome email series to
follow up emails after a purchase to rewarding your customers with a
special incentive, automation helps you streamline your communications
with customers so you have more time to focus on creating content and
increasing return on investment (ROI). Plus, you can design, send, and
track order notifications to update customers on purchases they made from
your store.

1.6.5.4.5. Measure your performance

 Opens and clicks

These are the most obvious statistics for measuring campaign engagement,
as they indicate how well your subject lines and campaign content
resonates with a particular list. But it’s important to consider how your
open and click through rates compare to other companies in your
industry—otherwise you’re looking at your statistics in a vacuum.
  Website traffic

The campaigns you send can help you direct more traffic to your website
or online store.

1.6.6 Content Marketing

Content marketing is the creation and distribution of digital marketing
collateral with the goal of increasing brand awareness, improving search
engine rankings and generating audience interest. Businesses use content
marketing to nurture leads and enable sales by using site analytics,
keyword research and targeted strategy recommendations.

Creating a strategy that’s suited to your specific business and target

audience is how you stay true to your brand and make marketing materials
as effective as possible. It’s important to evaluate every asset for the value
it adds to the strategy as a whole, and
then make adjustments as needed. A 360-degree content marketing strategy
educates customers, nurtures prospects and closes sales.

1.6.6.1 Content Marketing and SEO

In a practical sense, search engine optimization (SEO) and content
marketing are one in the same.
To rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs), you need high-
quality organic content. To know which keywords to target in your copy,
you need SEO. SEO is a foundational component of content marketing in
that it is often the centerpiece of all strategies and campaigns. Optimizing
your content allows you the opportunity to update your brand messaging
for a modern audience, outrank competitors for high-value keywords and
keep your web pages aligned with Google’s sitemap preferences.
To achieve your content marketing goals, SEO is often the best tactic to start
with.
 Ranking factors

Within the practice of SEO, there are specific ranking factors to consider.
According to Google, there are more than 200 criteria the search engine
weighs when it crawls and indexes your web pages. Based on how your site
and your content fares in these assessments, an algorithm will serve your
pages to searchers.
Some ranking signals are stronger than others, and Google doesn’t often
reveal the exact weight of each one. What we do know is that the top factors
include:
1. Links.
 2. Content.
3. RankBrain.
4. Direct web traffic.
5. Mobile responsive design.
6. HTTPS.
7. Anchor text keywords.
8. User behavior signals
In layman’s terms, everything you publish on the web needs to 1) generate
reputable backlinks, 2) be useful to readers and 3) have a strong click-
through rate and dwell time.
You can’t do content without SEO, and you can’t do SEO without content –
they are inseparable.

1.6.6.2Benefits of Content marketing

 Cheaper conversation
 Faster sales
 Reduced marketing and sales overhead
 Low barrier to market entry
 Stronger lead, generation and qualification
 Measurable, actionable result
 Thought leadership
 More traffic
 Mind share
 Higher search engine ranking
 Reputation management
 Email list building

1.6.7 Influencer Marketing:

Influencer Marketing is like a hybrid of old and new marketing tools, taking
the idea of the celebrity endorsement and placing it into a modern day
content-driven marketing campaign. According to Adweek, Marketers
received $6.85 in earned media value for every $1 spent on influencer
marketing

1.6.7.1 What works in Influencer Marketing?

Carefully consider your approach in influencer marketing

 Be organized, put together a strategy, plan and budget, spend time on
research
 Be patient and be human – people talking to people, not companies
talking to companies

Develop a schedule
  Does the influencer prefer monthly/ quarterly/biannual calls or
newsletters?
 Integrate with your PR schedule, product release schedule, etc.
 Send emails on behalf of key executives. Plan travel schedules for exec
and arrange face-to-face meetings

1.6.7.2 Challenges in influencer marketing

 Identify right influencer
 Finding right engagement tactics
 Measuring performance of campaigns
 Keeping track of influencer’s activity

1.6.8 Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of optimizing your site

or landing page experience based on website visitor behavior to help
improve the probability of the visitor taking desired actions (conversions)
on the said page.
In today’s world, online traffic is highly inconsistent. If you’re unable to get
visitors to enter your conversion funnel in the first go, the chances of them
coming back and performing the desired action are quite low.
This is nothing but an opportunity lost for your business.
The best way to improve your chances and get more conversions is by
running effective conversion rate optimization campaigns. A good
conversion rate optimization campaign not only means saving high on your
time, money, and efforts but also exploring new growth strategies that were
unknown in the past.
In other words, conversion rate optimization helps you in understanding
your website’s usability better while giving customer behavior insights and
tips on how to make your UX better to meet your goals. At a strategic level,
conversion rate optimization or CRO is an ongoing process of learning and
optimizing.

1.6.8.1 Importance of Conversion Rate Optimization

 Free customers - It draws your customers free of cost. You don't need to
spend so much on advertising like AdWords. Cost per click is rising with
a steep rise in the cut-throat competition in every area. Marketing channels
like AdWords sway away your budget quickly.
 Winner take it all - To compete with your customer, you don’t need
to strive hard. You only need to perform better than them. Conversion rate
optimization lets you understand your brighter side.
  Assist you financially - An increase in conversion rate adds up to 10%
increment in profit and that too without any extra spending.
 No scope of loss - Conversion rate optimization gives you no loss. You can
try it without hassles.
 Robust business - With CRO you can spend more on other marketing
channels. This makes your business stand out. It helps you get ahead in
competition.
 Customers’ short attention span - With rising social media, the number of
page views increase, but simultaneously the consumers have a short
attention span that did not prevail earlier. Now when you have listed
yourself, you need to differentiate to stand out. For this, you need thorough
conversion rate optimization to make customers place attention on your
product.
 Customer ease - CRO helps you legitimize and streamline your business.
It carves a clear path from the landing page to the buy button. A customer
expects a purchase in a single click and easy access. It actually improves
the layout of your marketing store or what-so-ever you are into. CRO
reduces friction and customers’ anxiety.
 Immediate results - It gives you immediate results unlike search engines.
You can see a higher rate of conversion. It gets your ball rolling for a long
term. The only thing required here is consistency.

1.6.8.2 Components of CRO

There are basically four components of CRO. (Fig 1. 3 )
 Message: What message your platform is trying to convey should be
relevant in terms of context. Your content, style option, color
schemes should be appealing, informative and meaningful.
 Usability: You need to make sure a customer converts without any
hassle. Accomplishing goals should be easy and just have to be few
clicks away. The layout, links and buttons should be tap-friendly and
enabled.
 Flow: The path to accomplish goal should be easy to traverse. There
should be flow in navigation and checkouts.
 Context: It is about providing your customer a tailored experience.
Like their geography, languages, history of purchases, their device,
operating systems, etc. You can offer promotions on the basis of it.
 Fig 1.3 Component of CRO

1.6.9 Web Analytics

Web analytics is the collection, reporting, and analysis of website data. The
focus is on identifying measures based on your organizational and user
goals and using the website data to determine the success or failure of those
goals and to drive strategy and improve the user’s experience.

Measuring Content
Critical to developing relevant and effective web analysis is creating
objectives and calls-to-action from your organizational and site visitors
goals, and identifying key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the
success or failures for those objectives and calls-to-action. Here are some
examples (table 1.1) for building a measurement framework for an
informational website:

Table 1.1 Building measurement framework example

Framework
What is it? Examples
Item

Goals Your site’s major goals  To educate the public about

should essentially safe handling of food.
outline why you have a
website.

Objectives Objectives help outline  To reach as many online users

what it takes to achieve looking for information on
your goals. food safety and convert them
into site visitors.

Calls-to- Calls-to-action are tasks  Online users come to the

Action that site visitors must website because it was listed
complete as part of your on search engines as a
sites’ goals and credible source for food safety
objectives. content.

Key Key performance  Website’s search clickthrough

Performance indicators are metrics in rate for keywords related to
Indicators which we can measure food safety
(KPIs) each CTA.  Search visits to the website for
keywords related to food
safety

Targets Targets are thresholds  Search clickthrough rate in

that determine whether queries for food safety should
be no less than 10%.
 Search visits show an
increasing trend.
1.6.10 Tools Based Marketing

It is a strategy that revolves around prospecting target companies and

creating campaigns designed specifically to capture them as leads and,
ultimately, turn them into customers.
Characteristics of tool-based marketing
 Accurate customer profiling, typically using your existing customer data and
available third-party data.
 Data-driven prospecting to ensure you identify valuable and relevant accounts for
your campaigns.
 Prioritizing high-value accounts in order to maximize ROI.
 Personalizing campaigns and content to address the unique needs of each target
account.
 Aligning sales and marketing activities to ensure prospects navigate the entire
sales funnel.
 Automating marketing and sales processes so you can handle more leads while
both teams focus their efforts on tasks that can’t be automated.
 Integration with traditional inbound marketing to capture leads that your ABM
strategy misses – and vice versa.

1.6.11 Lifecycle Marketing Automation.

Lifecycle marketing is the process of providing your audience the kinds of

communications and experiences they need, want, or like as they move
from prospects to customers then, ideally, to advocates. To be a master of
customer lifecycle marketing, one must possess a genuine understanding
of their target audience and be ready to work toward retaining and growing
customer value over the long term.
Generally, a lifecycle marketing plan is a three-phase framework,
Collect, Convert and Create(Fig 1.4). Each phase consists of three stages that
include basic strategies and tactics that coalesce into a single, self-sustaining
process. Rolling out a customer lifecycle marketing plan is a lot easier when
done in these phases and can be done quickly and affordably with easy-to-
use automation technology.

 The collect phase

The goal of the Collect Phase is to get the attention of the consumers you
want to buy your products or service. The stages include Target, Attract
and Capture Leads.
 Fig 1.4 Lifecycle marketing
Target – Targeting is when you identify specific types of individuals then
address them directly with your marketing. Most common ways to target
an audience are by interests, behavior, demographics, location, context,
(targeting by topic on the page, which is matched with the corresponding
message of your ad to reach and connect to an audience with an interest in
your product or service), device, etc.
Attract– Attract visitors to your website with great content like ebooks,
infographics, research reports, webinars, social media and blog posts.
Capture – Use a web form that includes offers, free consultations or
premium content to encourage visitors to sign up for your email list.

 The convert phase

Convert is the second phase of the Lifecycle Marketing model. This is your
unique strategy that makes your product or service the obvious choice
when those you’ve attracted are ready to buy. Convert Phase stages are
Engage, Offer and Close.
Engage – Create a consistent campaign of useful information with
automated, personalized follow-up messages.
Offer – The best way to craft an offer is to observe past customer actions
and create a buying process map, then provide an irresistible offer.
Close – Closing the sale is more than the transaction. The close involves
clear communication, good presence and written documentation.

 The create phase

Getting to create involves three key stages: Deliver and Offer More and
Referral.
 Deliver – Fulfill your commitments on time, follow through when and
where it is required. Offer to provide additional value that surprises and
delights customers.
Impress – Always be developing strategies, tactics, products, and services
to help generate additional sales and recurring revenue.
Multiply – Encourage referrals by creating incentives for customers and
partners.

1.6 Multiple choice Questions

1. Digital marketing is often referred to as___________.

A. online marketing
B. internet marketing
C. web marketing
D. All of the above
2. Which of the following is a type of digital marketing activity?

A. Email marketing.
B. Social web marketing.
C. Viral marketing.
D. All of the above

3. Which of the following is not a traditional forms of digital marketing?

A. radio
B. TV
C. billboard
D. All of the above

4. What is not true about digital marketing?

A. Digital marketing is any form of marketing products or services that
involves electronic devices.
B. Digital marketing can be done online
C. Digital marketing cannot be done online
D. Digital marketing is often referred to as online marketing, internet
marketing or web marketing.

5. What are the key considerations for people in sales while they use social
media for selling (Social Selling)?
 A. Check if their clients are on social media and then connect with them on
the relevant social networks
B. Avoid using social media to sell
C. Build their professional brand and then position themselves as subject
matter experts in their field to build credibility
D. Connect with their clients and prospects on LinkedIn and then start
liking/commenting/sharing their posts

6. Which one of the following statements is true?

A. LinkedIn works best for B2B organizations
B. Pinterest is great for driving traffic to your product catalog on your website
C. Facebook is excellent for businesses that operate in the consumer market
D. All of the above
7. Why did Internet Service providers clamp down on personal emails being
used for mailing purposes?
A. Because it would use excessive server resources
B. Because they couldn't check who was opening the email
C. Because it would slow down the network
D. Because it was against the email user guidelines

8. What are the two types of targeting that can be done with PPC advertising?
A. Reaching people by demography and reaching people by interest
B. Reaching new prospects and reaching prior visitors (Remarketing)
C. Reaching people who search and people who visit websites
D. Reaching people through Retargeting and reaching people through
Remarketing

9. What is the best way to promote a business with social media?

A. Choose the Right Platforms

B. Encourage Engagement
C. Provide Value & Don’t Over-Promote
D. All of the above

10. . Digital marketing is any form of marketing products or services that

involves ___.

A. electronic devices
B. pen
C. money
D. book
1.7 Short answer Questions
1. Explain search engine optimization in marketing.
2. What is email marketing? List advantages and disadvantages of email
marketing.
3. List and explain content marketing ranking factors.
4. List and explain challenges faced in influencer marketing.
5. Compare search engine marketing with search engine optimization.

1.8 Long Answer Questions

1. Explain conversion rate optimization. List and explain components and
importance of CRO.
2. Explain social media marketing. Which are different platforms can be used
for social media marketing. List social media marketing goals and
advantages.
3. Explain different web analysis measuring contents.
4. Explain in detail what tools based marketing is.
5. Explain in detail lifecycle marketing automation.
1.9 References
 The Art of Digital Marketing, Ian Dodson · 2016
 Understanding Digital Marketing: Marketing Strategies for Engaging the Digital
Generation, Damian Ryan, Calvin Jones
 Module-02
Full Funnel Marketing
2.1 Motivation: This module will help the learner to understand how full funnel
marketing concept is used in digital marketing domain. Various stages of Full-
funnel marketing are explained in detail in this module.
2.2 Learning Objective: Understand the concept of Digital Marketing and learn the
basics of Digital marketing
2.3 Syllabus
Prerequisites Syllabus Duration Self Study
Basics of digital Acquisition: Content marketing, 3 Hrs 5 Hrs
marketing landing page testing, campaign
optimization, conversion rate
optimization, lead scoring,
competition and trend analysis,
predict sales, optimize product
pricing, programmatic media
buying, segmentation and
clustering for targeting,
personalization.
Activation 1 Hr 1 Hr
Personalization, psychographic
segmentation, behavioral
segmentation
Retention 1 Hr 1 Hr
Predict churn, customer care
chatbot, sentiment analysis, visual
social listening, personalization

Referral 1 Hr 1 Hr
Predict whether user recommend
your product
Revenue 2 Hr 3 Hr
Predict and maximize customer
lifetime value, recommender
systems, market basket analysis

2.4 DEFINITIONS:
 Keyword: Keywords are single words or phrases that are used to target user
search queries on search engines like Bing.
  Lead scoring: Lead scoring is the process of assigning values, often in the
form of numerical "points," to each lead you generate for the business.
 Competitive Analysis: A competitive analysis is a strategy where you
identify major competitors and research their products, sales, and marketing
strategies.
 Sales Forecast: A sales forecast is a prediction of future sales revenue.
 Programmatic Advertising: Programmatic advertising is the use of
automated technology for media buying, as opposed to traditional (often
manual) methods of digital advertising.
 Market segmentation: Market segmentation is the process of dividing
a target market into smaller, more defined categories.
 Cluster: A cluster is a group of similar things or people positioned or
occurring closely together.

2.5 Keywords:
MVT: Multivariate Testing
CRO: Conversion rate optimization
RRP: Requests For Proposals
RTB: Real-time bidding
PMP: Private Marketplace
CPM: Cost per Mile
SSP: Sell-Side Platform
DSP: Demand-Side Platform

2.6 Theory:
Full-funnel marketing approach:
A full-funnel marketing approach reaches potential consumers based on where they fall
within the funnel. Because customers require a different approach at every stage of the
funnel (and therefore different messaging, creative, etc.) it’s important to adjust
marketing strategies accordingly. This strategic approach also carries over to the
marketing tactics you use for your campaign, as each tactic has a different objective and
goal. Following fig 2.1 shows full funnel marketing approach stages.
 Fig 2.1 Full Funnel marketing approach

1. The Awareness Stage (“top of the funnel”)

 This is first stage in the marketing funnel.
 Consumer mindset: “I want to travel to Hawaii for holiday.”
 Search queries: Generic (i.e. holiday in Hawaii, travel ideas when visiting Hawaii)
 The goal of this stage is introducing your brand to the potential customer, who may
not have known about your business or offerings.
2. The Consideration Stage (“middle of the funnel”)
 If the awareness stage was successful in pulling the potential customer further
down the funnel, then they will make it to the second stage in the marketing funnel,
the consideration stage.
 Consumer mindset: “Maui could be a great place to spend my holiday.”
 Search queries: Generic (i.e. hotels in Maui, beachside accommodations in Maui)
 This stage of the funnel means that the potential customer is interested in learning
more about your brand’s story or your business’s offerings.
3. The Conversion Stage (“bottom of the funnel”)
 This is the final stage of the marketing funnel.
 Consumer mindset: “The Marriott property ‘Wailea Beach Resort’ in Maui is
breathtaking. I’m booking my vacation there.”
 Search queries: Brand terms (i.e. Marriott Maui)
 This is the decision stage, where the consumer has finished researching and
learning all about your brand and is ready to contemplate purchasing.

Benefits of full-funnel marketing

 Reach new audiences - up to 21% more new-to-brand sales. ...
 Increase consideration - up to 2.5x more ad-attributed detail page views. ...
 Drive sales - up to 8% higher sales growth. ...
 Build loyalty - up to 1.9x more Subscribe & Save customers.
Stages in marketing Funnel
Dave McClure’s suggested Pirate Metric explaining stages in marketing funnel shown in
fig 2.2.
Following are five stages of pirate matric abbreviated as AARRR.
 Acquisition
 Activation
 Retention
 Revenue
 Referral

2.6.1. Acquisition
There is a simple explanation for Acquisition: Users hear about you and land on your site
from different channels. It doesn’t stand merely for that though; it also refers to the users’
first impression of your product.
Along with measuring how many people you acquire in a given time, you will also
have to measure how many of them subscribed for a free trial. Also how many got
converted into paying customers. There are several acquisition channels; you need to
track and find out which one is best in terms of volume, price, and quality. This will help
you in understanding where you need to place a greater focus on optimizing exposure
and engagement.
Example: You are running a handbag brand, and your target audience spends their
maximum time on Instagram and Facebook.
Instead of wasting time on Twitter or creating long videos on YouTube, you
should try posting on Instagram and Facebook using engaging campaigns. For
instance, Lululemon, a yoga, and sports apparel company from Canada. The brand used
Instagram to bring more users on board by posting impressive yoga poses and preaching
inspirational wisdom. According to Simply Measured, Lululemon doesn’t post every
day, still, its Instagram results are phenomenal. Their account has an average of 9.4%
engagement rate, more than 27,000 likes and 250 comments per photo. Instead of casting
your net wide, spend your budget and efforts on only a few channels that are effective.

The acquisition logic you must follow

The few things that you need to keep in mind-
 Market your product efficiently by identifying the right channel and persona
 Measure each step of your sales funnel
 Test various channels and eliminate the ones that don’t work
 Emphasize on channel segmentation and the type of customers you acquire
Let’s assume you have designed a product that makes a certain process/task easier.
Customers would like it and willing to pay for it. However, the challenge is to identify
the acquisition channel for bringing in those buyers.
For this, you need to create an impactful strategy from scratch. Research and explore
various tactics then start experimenting with each to see which one works the best.

Acquisition techniques you should start testing

Over the years, companies have tried a wide spectrum of techniques to attract the ideal
prospect. The acquisition techniques differ per industry.
SaaS and e-commerce companies might use the same technique, but their approaches will
be different. One focuses on acquiring business while the other on the customer.
Before moving to the techniques, it would be wiser to look at some statistics that provide
major lead generation insights:

 64% of B2B marketers generate leads via LinkedIn, 49% via Facebook, and 36% via
Twitter.
 67% of B2B marketers say their primary goal in measuring efforts is better quality
leads. — Formstack
 37% of B2B marketers are using marketing automation to generate leads
 Verifying business leads before passing it to the sales team is conducted by
only 56% of B2B companies

Three easy steps to get you started using digital marketing for customer acquisition.

Step 1: Know your audience:

This may seem obvious – how can you market at someone you do not know? – but when
you consider how many businesses do not have a strategy in place, it is not a big stretch
to imagine how little research they do into the purchasing behavior of their customers.
How you define your audience is essentially the foundation of any good digital
marketing strategy, so it is now time to become your customer’s best friend and
confidant.
Customers use digital channels for a whole range of different aims, and each
category can be given three or four broad characteristics.
Take customers in search of furniture online as an example. Research from
AudienceSCAN reveals some compelling statistics about this particular group:

• They are 35 percent more likely to have a Pinterest account

•Sixty-one percent have used their smartphones to compare prices online

• Two-thirds already have a business or brand in mind

This shows us that a customer looking to make big purchases relies on digital marketing
predominantly for inspiration and value. If you are not on creative channels such as
Pinterest, you might be missing out on a lot of customers.

Take action: Create a well-defined profile for your typical customer. Once you know
where they go, and why they go there, you can begin to craft a personalized strategy.

Step 2: Identify your customers’ channels:

The temptation to be everywhere when marketing your business is high, and the logic is
sound.
If you are on every channel that must increase the amount of potential customers seeing
your products, right? Probably not, actually. Based on the customer profile that you
created in the last step, identify the top three or four platforms that your customers are
most likely to frequent. For example, if you sell stair lifts, Facebook – with its relatively
young audience – probably is not your best marketing channel. By limiting yourself to
just a few choice channels, you will be able to pour your energy and resources into those
platforms. This means you avoid spreading yourself too thin and having a poor presence
on all the channels.
This strategy allows you to hone in on what marketing strategy will make
customers not only find your product but also want to buy your products.

Take action: Identify three top channels based on your customer profile. Different
channels need slightly different strategies, but your customer profiles will steer you in
the right direction.

Step 3: Collect data:

Without data, you will not be able to assess anything when it comes to your acquisition
strategies. Which campaigns did well? Which channel brings the most new customers?
Fortunately, these all-important questions can be answered if you have a little bit of a
data and a whole lot of analysis.
Using tools such as Google Analytics, SproutSocial or MailChimp can give you
fantastic insights into the behavior of your customers, enabling you to fine-tune your
acquisition strategy even further.

Take action: Link all of your marketing materials to an analytics engine.

When you next send out a newsletter or post to your social media account, link it up to a
reporting system and take the time to examine the data and draw conclusions that
influence your future marketing efforts.
The main aim connecting all three of these steps is linking your brand to your customers’
buying intent.
Know who your customers are and where they go to find what they want, meet them
there with the most compelling and persuasive message you can muster, and then
analyze the results.
With this simple formula – along with some persuasive flair – your customer acquisition
strategy should be well on the way to connecting you with new consumers.

2.6.1.1 Content Marketing: discussed in module 1

2.6.1.2 Landing page testing,

A landing page, like an elevator pitch, gives a crisp introduction to your brand, the
products or services you offer, and the problems that you solve. Also, they have a
common goal–to convert the visitor into a customer.
Just as a good elevator pitch takes multiple rounds of refinement, a landing page also
benefits from continuous testing and optimization.

Test a Landing Page

To begin with, it’s imperative to talk about the process of experimentation. Testing
anything is typically better than testing nothing, but a structured program will bring
predictability and long term gains to landing page conversion rates, rather than ad-hoc
wins here and there.

A comprehensive landing page testing methodology would look something like the one
below irrespective of what testing methodology, i.e., A/B, Multivariate, or Split, is used:

 A set of data-driven hypotheses with clear prioritization.

 Well-defined and important measurable conversion goals.
 Proper testing tools with a variety of testing options.
 Calculate the time and traffic required to run the tests.
 Create variations of different test elements and document them.
 Quality check and deploy tests.
  Analyze test results and findings.
 Deploy winning variations and discard the losing ones.
 Document learnings from the tests
Mature experimentation teams thoroughly analyze their test results across multiple
segments to uncover instances where the losing variation outperforms the winner to
extract more juice out of their testing and increase conversions.
Let’s get into some depth and analyze how landing page testing can help you
achieve your focused conversion goals.

Importance of Testing Your Landing Page

Fig 2.3 is explains why it is so important for your business to test your landing pages:

Fig 2.3 infographic on the importance of landing page testing

Types of Landing Page Testing

 A/B Testing
A/B Testing (also known as Split Testing) for landing pages is the most
straightforward and most robust approach to compare two versions of a landing page.
The changes between the two variants could be small (incremental) or big (radical)
depending on the goals of the test. A/B tests help to zero in on elements and changes
that impact a user’s behavior and continuously iterate towards the most effective
version of the landing page.

As an example, a common use case for A/B Testing on Landing Pages is to swap web
forms with chatbots. Most web forms are just repackaged versions of old paper forms.
New age businesses are continually experimenting with chatbots to replace web
forms to determine which among the two help increase conversion rates.
  Multivariate Testing
Multivariate Testing (MVT) builds on the core mechanism of A/B testing to test for a
higher number of variables on a web page as compared to A/B testing. As testing for
multiple variations requires more traffic to reach statistical significance, multivariate
tests are recommended for websites with high traffic.
Multivariate tests are a powerful weapon for landing pages that are seen by the
maximum visitors on your website, such as those coming from search engines. Testing
multiple elements such as hero image, headline, and website copy simultaneously
becomes a child’s play with multivariate testing, as you don’t have to create separate
versions of the same webpage for all possible combinations. Also, you can expedite
the testing and optimization process.
Hyundai used MVT to achieve a 208% increase in the CTR from the landing page
for one of their cars. Since Hyundai’s car landing pages had a lot of different elements
(car headline, car visuals, description, testimonials, and others), an MVT helped
understand which elements influenced a visitor’s decision to request a test drive or
download a brochure.

2.6.1.3 Campaign Optimization

Your campaign is now up and running, and you are ready to make adjustments as
necessary to improve its performance. This fine-tuning process is called campaign
optimization.
After reading this Study Guide, you will understand the basics of how to:

 Optimize PPC campaigns with keyword research, use of negative keywords and
segmentation into ad groups.
 Use ad extensions and adhere to ad writing best practices.
 Take advantage of audience targeting and dynamic search ads.
 Utilise the Microsoft Audience Network for search.
 Optimise for business success using Universal Event Tracking and conversion
goals.

Keyword optimization
Keywords are single words or phrases that are used to target user search queries on
search engines like Bing. When a customer’s search query matches your keyword, this
triggers your ads to be displayed. The most important tool at your disposal for building
a quality keyword list is brainstorming. Who knows your business better than you? Start
with what you know:

 Your brand.
 Your products.
  Your services.
 Review your competitors’ websites.
From here, shift your brainstorming to questions like these:

 Why do consumers need your products and services?

 Why would a consumer choose you over your competitors?
 What types of questions might a consumer ask to find your products and services?
The end result of this brainstorming exercise should be a seed keyword list. These seed
keywords will help you plug into actual tools to take your keyword research to the next
level.

2.6.1.4 Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the process of optimizing your site or landing page
experience based on website visitor behavior to help improve the probability of the visitor taking
desired actions (conversions) on the said page. In today’s world, online traffic is highly
inconsistent. If you’re unable to get visitors to enter your conversion funnel in the first
go, the chances of them coming back and performing the desired action are quite low.
This is nothing but an opportunity lost for your business. The best way to improve
your chances and get more conversions is by running effective conversion rate
optimization campaigns. A good conversion rate optimization campaign not only means
saving high on your time, money, and efforts but also exploring new growth strategies
that were unknown in the past.
In other words, conversion rate optimization helps you in understanding your
website’s usability better while giving customer behavior insights and tips on how to
make your UX better to meet your goals. At a strategic level, conversion rate optimization
or CRO is an ongoing process of learning and optimizing.
Unfortunately, the “ongoing” aspect often gets ignored while discussing conversion rate
optimization and its elements.

Benefits of Conversion Rate Optimization:

CRO enables you to optimize your website’s functionality while helping you
understand the whys and how’s of visitor behavior. The fact is, your site never reaches
its maximum potential until it’s rigorously experimented with. Broadly the benefits of a
CRO program can be categorized into two:

1. Improving Marketing ROI

A well-structured and well-thought-out CRO program based on strong analysis can go a
long way in improving return on almost all your marketing activities by:
 Improving the quality/speed of experiments run on your website: CRO allows you to
analyze the performance of your site by running tests and look for the best possible
variations which promise conversions. By experimenting with different elements
 on your landing pages, you can not only check the areas which are giving the best
results but also use the gathered data as a fundamental benchmark for your next
round of tests/experimentations.
 B. Better revenue with the same traffic/incremental business returns: One of the
prime benefits of running a CRO campaign is that every change you implement
on your site, which eventually increases your conversions, is an incremental win
for your business. For instance, an online eCommerce company planning to
enhance its customer experience in a way that it makes purchasing products easy
and convenient for its customers can immensely benefit from CRO. How? By
running an A/B test, if it’s able to enhance its conversion rate even by 3%, it means
that it’s getting 3% extra revenue day in and day out. Meanwhile, if it has a high
volume of sales, 3% improvement can effectively translate its sales into hundreds
and thousands of extra dollars for its business. Australian based eCommerce
company ShowPo saw a 6.09% increase in its revenue by running a series of A/B
tests and introducing new improved variants on its product pages!

2. Enhancing UX
Benefits of a CRO program spread well across just marketing ROI to give an improved
user experience across all lifecycle stages of a visitor whether they’re a first time visitor
or they’re a customer through:
 Personalizing Experience for Your Site Visitors: In today’s time, visitors are
too impatient. Unless you’re offering them a site that’s easy to navigate with
fewer clicks and make the entire process an easy breeze, they won’t stick
around and will eventually look for alternative options. By helping
personalize sections of your site based on the visitors’ geography, device,
local time or past browsing history, you can make the website that much
more relevant to them.
 Better Insights into Your Visitor Behavior: The CRO process begins with
understanding customer behavior through tools like heatmaps and
clickmaps. Such tools tell you which site sections visitors spend more time
on. Other CRO tools, such as user session recordings and session replays,
help understand their overall experience. They shed light on the exact
journey visitors took to accomplish a set goal on your website and even
highlight the friction areas that caused them to drop off and abandon your
site. Meanwhile, form analytics and website surveys also help understand
a visitor’s overall site-wide experience. Such qualitative data is enough to
create a good UX, further pave the way for conversions.

2.6.1.5 Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is the process of assigning values, often in the form of numerical "points,"
to each lead you generate for the business. You can score your leads based on multiple
 attributes, including the professional information they've submitted to you and how
they've engaged with your website and brand across the internet. This process helps
sales and marketing teams prioritize leads, respond to them appropriately, and
increase the rate at which those leads become customers.
Every company has a different model for assigning points to score their leads,
but one of the most common ways is using data from past leads to create the value
system. How? First, you'll take a look at your contacts who became customers to see
what they have in common. Next, you'll look at the attributes of your contacts who
didn't become customers. Once you've looked at the historical data from both sides,
you can decide which attributes should be weighted heavily based on how likely they
are to indicate someone's a good fit for your product.

2.6.1.6 Competitive Analysis

A competitive analysis is a strategy where you identify major competitors and
research their products, sales, and marketing strategies. By doing this, you can
create solid business strategies that improve upon your competitor's. A
competitive analysis can help you learn the ins and outs of how your competition
works, and identify potential opportunities where you can out-perform them. It
also enables you to stay atop of industry trends and ensure your product is
consistently meeting — and exceeding — industry standards.
Let's dive into a few more benefits of conducting competitive analyses:
 Helps you identify your product's unique value proposition and what makes your
product different from competitors', which can inform future marketing efforts.

 Enables you to identify what your competitor is doing right. This information is
critical for staying relevant and ensuring both your product and your marketing
campaigns are outperforming industry standards.

 Tells you where your competitors are falling short — which helps you identify
areas of opportunities in the marketplace, and test out new, unique marketing
strategies they haven't taken advantage of.
 Learn through customer reviews what's missing in a competitor's product, and
consider how you might add features to your own product to meet those needs.
 Provides you with a benchmark against which you can measure your own growth.

Competitive Analysis in Marketing

Every brand can benefit from regular competitor analysis. By performing a

competitor analysis, you'll be able to:

 Identify gaps in the market

 Develop new products and services

  Uncover market trends

 Market and sell more effectively

2.6.1.7 Predict Sale

A sales forecast is a prediction of future sales revenue. Sales forecasts are usually
based on historical data, industry trends, and the status of the current sales pipeline.
Businesses use the sales forecast to estimate weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual sales
totals. Just like a weather forecast, your team should view your sales forecast as a plan to
work from, not a firm prediction.
Sales forecasting is also different from sales goal-setting. While a sales goal
describes what you want to happen, a sales forecast estimates what will happen,
regardless of your goal.

Need For Accurate Sales Forecasts

Good data is the most important requirement for a good sales forecast. That means
that getting hold of good data is crucial.
New businesses that don’t have much data about their own sales process may need to
rely on industry averages or even educated guesses. On the other hand, more established
companies can use their historical data to model future performance.
Before you begin to think about how to forecast sales, here’s what you need to do, step
by step:
1. Document your sales process
Without a clearly documented sales process describing the actions and steps it
takes to close a deal, you’ll have difficulty predicting whether any single deal will
close.

2. Set your sales goals or quotas

While your forecast may be different from your goals, you won’t know if your
forecast is good or bad unless you first have a target. So each rep needs an
individual quota, as does the entire sales team. Read more about setting sales goals
or quotas here.

3. Set a benchmark or a current average of some basic sales metrics

Having easily accessible measures of the following basic sales metrics will make
forecasting much easier:

 The time it takes the customer to express interest

 How long it takes to close a deal
 The average price of a deal
 The duration of the customer on-boarding process
  Average renewal or rates, or how frequently you get repeat business
 Conversion rates at each stage of the sales process
Essentially, you want to define the average duration and performance of your
sales process.

4. Understand your current sales pipeline

Make sure you understand what’s in your current pipeline, and that your CRM is
accurate and up-to-date. If you don’t have a CRM, forecasting is more difficult, but
not impossible.

2.6.1.8 Price Optimization

Price optimization uses data analysis techniques to pursue two main objectives:
1. Understanding how customers will react to different pricing strategies for
products and services, i.e., understanding the elasticity of the demand.
2. Finding the best prices for a given company, considering its goals.
Pricing systems have evolved since the early 1970s until now, from applying very simple
strategies, such as a standard markup to base cost, to being capable of predicting the
demand of products or services and finding the best price to achieve the set KPI.
Price optimization techniques can help retailers evaluate the potential impact of
sales promotions or estimate the right price for each product if they want to sell it in a
certain period of time.
Current state-of-the-art techniques in price optimization allow retailers to consider
factors such as:
 Competition
 Weather
 Season
 Special events / holidays
 Macroeconomic variables
 Operating costs
Warehouse information
To determine:
 The initial price
 The best price
 The discount price
The promotional price

2.6.1.9 Programmatic Media Buying

Programmatic advertising is the use of automated technology for media buying (the
process of buying advertising space), as opposed to traditional (often manual) methods
of digital advertising. Programmatic media buying utilizes data insights and algorithms
to serve ads to the right user at the right time, and at the right price.

To understand programmatic media buying, you must know the terminology related to
this process. Firstly, programmatic media buying can be categorized into three different
types:

 Real-time bidding (RTB): Also known as open auction, RTB is when inventory
prices are decided through an auction in real time. As the name suggests, this is
open to any advertiser or publisher. RTB is considered to be a cost effective way
to buy media with a large audience.
 Private Marketplace (PMP): These are similar to open auctions, but PMPs have
restrictions on who can participate. Only selected advertisers have access to PMPs
on an invite-only basis. However, in some cases publishers may have a selection
process which allows advertisers to apply for an invitation.
 Programmatic Direct: This is when a publisher bypasses auctions, selling media
inventory at a fixed cost per mile (CPM) to an advertiser (or multiple advertisers).

The programmatic ecosystem also involves three main components:

 Sell-Side Platform (SSP): This is software that allows publishers to sell display,
mobile and video ad impressions to potential buyers automatically in real time.
This includes ad exchanges, networks and DSPs (see below). This gives publishers
greater control of their inventory and CPMs.
 Demand-Side Platform (DSP): This is software that enables agencies and
advertisers to buy ad inventory cross-platform.
 Ad Exchanger: This is how the supply-side feeds inventory into the ad exchange.
The DSP connects to the ad exchange, enabling advertisers, agencies, networks
and publishers to buy and sell ad space. Inventory prices can then be agreed upon
through the bidding process.

Ad inventory is usually bought via a real-time auction. Using programmatic channels,

advertisers can buy per impression, thereby targeting the right audience. Since the
process is automated, programmatic media buying guarantees speed and efficiency that
is not matched in the traditional media buying

Importance of programmatic media buying:

The traditional media buying process involves a lot of manual work, typically with
several requests for proposals (RFPs), human negotiations and manual insertions of the
orders (IOs), which makes it slow and inefficient. Additionally, ads are purchased in bulk
and advertisers have little control over the inventory and placement.
Benefits of programmatic media buying

 Precise audience targeting

 Automated processes
 Greater media Buying transparency
 Real time insights
 Campaign reporting & optimization

2.6.1.10 Segmentation And Clustering For Targeting

In Predictive Marketing the term ‘clustering’ gets thrown around quite a lot. It's the
predictive marketing version of segmenting. Instead of grouping people, clustering
simply identifies what people do most of the time. This allows us to predict what
customers are likely to do without boxing them into rigid groups.

Segmenting is the process of putting customers into groups based on similarities,

and clustering is the process of finding similarities in customers so that they can be
grouped, and therefore segmented. They seem quite similar, but they are not quite the
same.

2.6.1.10.1 Segmentation

Market segmentation is the process of dividing a target market into smaller, more defined
categories. It segments customers and audiences into groups that share similar
characteristics such as demographics, interests, needs, or location.

The importance of market segmentation is that it makes it easier to focus

marketing efforts and resources on reaching the most valuable audiences and achieving
business goals. Market segmentation allows you to get to know your customers, identify
what is needed in your market segment, and determine how you can best meet those
needs with your product or service. This helps you design and execute better marketing
strategies from top to bottom.

Eight Benefits of Market Segmentation

1. Create stronger marketing messages

When you know whom you’re talking to, you can develop stronger marketing
messages. You can avoid generic, vague language that speaks to a broad audience.
Instead, you can use direct messaging that speaks to the needs, wants, and unique
characteristics of your target audience.

2. Identify the most effective marketing tactics

 With dozens of marketing tactics available, it can be difficult to know what will
attract your ideal audience. Using different types of market segmentation guides
you toward the marketing strategies that will work best. When you know the
audience you are targeting, you can determine the best solutions and methods for
reaching them.

3. Design hyper-targeted ads

On digital ad services, you can target audiences by their age, location, purchasing
habits, interests, and more. When you use market segmentation to define your
audience, you know these detailed characteristics and can use them to create more
effective, targeted digital ad campaigns.

4. Attract (and convert) quality leads

When your marketing messages are clear, direct, and targeted they attract the right
people. You draw in ideal prospects and are more likely to convert potential
customers into buyers.

5. Differentiate your brand from competitors

Being more specific about your value propositions and messaging also allows you
to stand out from competitors. Instead of blending in with other brands, you can
differentiate your brand by focusing on specific customer needs and
characteristics.

6. Build deeper customer affinity

When you know what your customers want and need, you can deliver and
communicate offerings that uniquely serve and resonate with them. This distinct
value and messaging leads to stronger bonds between brands and customers and
creates lasting brand affinity.

7. Identify niche market opportunities

Niche marketing is the process of identifying segments of industries and verticals

that have a large audience that can be served in new ways. When you segment
your target market, you can find underserved niche markets that you can develop
new products and services for.

8. Stay focused
 Targeting in marketing keeps your messaging and marketing objectives on track.
It helps you identify new marketing opportunities and avoid distractions that will
lead you away from your target market.

2.6.1.10.2 Clustering
In its most general definition, a cluster is a group of similar things or people positioned
or occurring closely together. In market research, a cluster is a collection of data objects
that are similar and dissimilar to each other. The primary objective of cluster analysis is
to classify objects into relatively homogeneous groups based on a set of variables
considered. These variables (demographics, psychographics, buying behaviors,
attitudes, preferences, etc.) can be chosen according to the market research objectives;
which problems are needing to be solved and which hypotheses need to be proven or
debunked.
The clusters are not predefined, but rather naturally suggested by the data, revealing any
similarities or dissimilarities. Therefore, it is important that the researcher has a thorough
understanding of the objectives so that all pertinent data is collected and various cluster
analyses can be conducted to see what patterns emerge.

Applications for Cluster Analysis

Market Segmentation: Companies can’t connect with all of their customers, but by
dividing markets into groups of consumers with similar needs and wants, they can
position themselves to appeal to these unique segments. Consumers may be clustered on
the basis of benefits sought from the purchase of a product. Each cluster would consist
of consumers who are relatively homogeneous in terms of the benefits they seek, thus
allowing companies to deploy targeted marketing campaigns that promote the most
alluring benefits and products to this consumer segment.

Understanding Buyer Behaviors: Cluster analysis can be used to identify homogeneous

groups of buyers. Then, the buying behavior of each group can be examined separately
on measures such as favorite stores, brand loyalty, price willing to pay, frequency of
purchase, etc.

Identifying New Product Opportunities: By clustering brands and products,

competitive sets within the market can be determined. Brands in the same cluster
complete more fiercely with each other than with brands in other clusters. A company
can examine its current offerings compared to those of its competitors to identify
potential new product opportunities.
Selecting Test Markets: By grouping cities into homogeneous clusters, it is possible to
select comparable cities to test various marketing strategies.

Data Reduction: A researcher may be faced with a large number of observations that can
be meaningless unless they are classified into meaningful groups. Cluster analysis can
help by reducing the information from an entire population of sample to information
about specific groups.

Hypothesis Generations: Cluster Analysis is also useful when a researcher wishes to

develop hypotheses concerning the nature of the data or to examine previously stated
hypotheses.

2.6.2Activation

Activation in the sales funnel framework is all about providing your potential prospects
an excellent first experience when they land on your website.
96% of visitors that come to your website are not ready to buy. The initial few moments
need to be impressive enough for creating a lasting impact on the prospect so that they
purchase or return to your site.
Activation is a chance to display your product’s value proposition and acquaint
them with the top features. Like, SaaS companies offer 15 to 30 days free trial to give their
prospect the first-hand experience for understanding how they will benefit from the
product. Potential prospects can actually see what they are getting into before committing
to it. This increases the chances of conversions. As per a survey, 60% of SaaS companies
are deriving revenue from free trial “Try before you buy”. If your activation techniques
are right, then you won’t only convert them into active users but also get a chance to
reach their network through word of mouth. Acquisition and activation almost seem like
twin sisters so it is often confusing.
However, in the acquisition stage, you are attracting your target audience by
displaying the solution to their problems. While in activation, you are providing a sample
of your solution.
Example: Kissmetrics, a marketing analytics platform has a very alluring layout with a
simple yet catchy tagline ”Get, keep and grow more customers” that says it all. Moreover,
with a CTA (Call to Action) like “Request a Demo” they are motivating the visitor to take
an action.
So basically, the interesting homepage layout comes under the acquisition stage,
where Kissmetrics is trying to capture the attention of the right target audience.
When the visitor clicks on “Request a Demo” and explores the software then he enters
the activation stage.
Smart tips and tricks for activation
There are many tricks that can help you succeed in the activation stage of the sales funnel.
Below are the most successful ones that you can consider to give your new users more
reasons to stay with you for a longer time:
1. Effective drip campaign
 Don’t stretch and annoy your users with too many emails.
 Five to six emails are enough to provide the necessary information for generating
interest in your product.
 Avoid sending random emails, instead systematically plan your email strategy.
2. Exit-intent pop-ups
This is the best way to engage the visitors and increase their average time spent on your
website.
An exit-intent pop-up appears as soon as a user tries to leave your site. It reduces the
bounce rate and gives you one more chance to impress your visitors.
With exit-intent pop-up, you can –
 Provide special offers and discounts. Use the scarcity strategy to activate
the users by presenting an offer that won’t last for long. (Fig2.4 a)
 Build your email list by encouraging them to subscribe for a newsletter.
 (Fig2.4 b)

Fig 2.4.a Fig 2.4 b

 Promote an intriguing piece of content. (Fig 2.5)
 Fig 2.5
3. Live chat for excellent user experience
Potential prospect expects instant assistance or they will leave the website.
With live chat messages, you can connect with them instantly and solve all
their queries in real-time. With auto-triggers, send an automatic chat invitation
to the visitor to interact with them and provide more insights about your
solution. (Fig 2.6. a)

4. Explainer videos
It is the most effective way to explain the value of your product. For instance, SaaS
products appear as a complex maze for many new users.
With an explainer video, they will know how the product functions and gain a
better understanding of the solution without getting lost.(Fig 2.6 b)
In just a few minutes, you can tell your website visitors who you are. What is your
product about, and how will your product help them. The explainer video of
Dropbox contributed 10% increase in conversion rate, leading to 10 million
additional customers and $48,000,000 in extra revenue.
 (Fig 2.6. a) (Fig 2.6. b)

5. Testimonials from your customers

Find the best spot on your website and highlight the testimonials of your satisfied
customers. Testimonials have the power to influence a buyer’s decision; they tell
your prospect how well you are doing. Build trust and credibility by displaying
the positive experience your existing customers had with your product. 85% of
consumers said they read up to 10 reviews before feeling they can trust a business.
(Fig 2.7 a)

6. Freebies and free trial

A free product or service is the most widely used business strategy to attract the
target audience. If used wisely it can be very beneficial for your business. This
strategy can be played around in many ways. For example, offer a free plan for a
limited period like 15 to 30 days. The free trial to paid conversion rates goes as
high as 50 percent. (Fig 2.7 b)
 (Fig 2.7 b) (Fig 2.7 b)
The idea is to make users comfortable and give a chance to learn about your
product to see how it can be beneficial for their business. People prefer to purchase
from those they know, like and trust.
7. Optimized landing page
To keep your activation metric high you need to ensure your landing page is
optimized and performing well.(Fig 2.8)

Fig 2.8
For reducing bounce rate and increasing conversions, you will have to pay
attention to your landing page and optimize it by –
 Using the right keywords
 Minimizing loading time
 Adding compelling CTA’s
  Having attractive design and engaging content
 Using complementary color schemes and easy-to-read bullet points
 Including social share buttons
 Using relevant meta tags
 Adding images and videos
 Testing your page with A/B test

8. Anything else that is required

Unfortunately, there aren’t many playbooks that can introduce you to extraordinary
activation techniques to increase your conversions.

However, none of them know your product better than you. All the popular blogs,
books, and how-to guides will just show you a general path taken by most of the
entrepreneurs in various industries.
Ultimately, it is you who has to complete the journey by identifying and showcasing
the USPs of your product. Step into your customers’ shoes and find what will they
like. Think out of the box and experiment with different things to succeed.

2.6.2.1 Personalization

Marketing personalization, also known as personalized marketing or one-to-one

marketing, is the practice of using data to deliver brand messages targeted to an
individual prospect. This method differs from traditional marketing, which mostly
relied on casting a wide net to earn a small number of customers. With billboards,
cold calls, mailings, and more, traditional marketing emphasized quantity of
messages over their relevance. Later, analytics became more sophisticated and data
on individual prospects grew. Today, marketers take advantage of both to deliver
prospects the most relevant message at the ideal time.

Need of personalized marketing

If you’re a traditional marketing mind, you may wonder why businesses are out with
the old and in with the new. In plain terms, it started with consumers, who, after
years of bombardment with irrelevant marketing messages, began tuning out. They
hung up on the telemarketer, they flipped the channel as meaningless ads permeated
their lives: in cars, offices, even homes. Soon, they couldn’t escape the feeling that
businesses didn’t really want to help solve their problems. Businesses wanted to
make money, even if it meant interrupting a family dinner or the Super Bowl. That
perception lingers today. Research shows that 63% of consumers are highly annoyed
with the way brands continue to blast generic advertising messages repeatedly.
What customers want, instead, is marketing personalization. According to an Epsilon
survey of 1,000 consumers aged 18-64:
 80% say they are more likely to do business with a company if it offers
personalized experiences.
 90% claim they find personalization appealing.
More than half of consumers even say they’re willing to hand over their personal
information, so long as you use it to benefit them. So, how do you use it to benefit
them?

Marketing personalization strategies

It’s not easy to determine the benefits your customers are seeking at any moment.
The reason, primarily, is that those specific benefits vary from situation to situation,
business to business. However, there are three common strategies that every brand
can build of off of to ensure they create a strong personalized marketing plan:
 Know their needs. Every customer expects you to know their needs. When they
punch a long-tail query into your search bar, they expect content that answers it.
If they’re shopping in a brick-and-mortar location of yours, they probably want
details on a product. At every touchpoint throughout the funnel, ask yourself,
“What does the customer want here? What are they looking for?” Or, even better,
ask them. Surveys and user testing are an easy way to discover these answers.
 Remember who they are and what they’ve done, on any channel or device. On
the list of things that frustrates consumers, siloed communication is near the top.
If they’ve coordinated a date and time for a demo of your product via phone, and
the next day, they get an email aiming for a demo sign-up, that’s a bad user
experience. Not only is it annoying, but it has the potential to confuse the
prospect. He or she may think: “Did something go wrong? Was my demo
canceled? Are they trying to reschedule?” Or, another example: They download
an ebook, and later that week, get an email attempting to get them to download
that same ebook. Again, this is bad user experience.

Your personalization strategy should span every device and channel, and your
CRM should reflect anything you’ve learned about your prospect along the way.
Avoid scenarios like those above, and instead, aim to know exactly what your
prospects have done, the kind of messaging they’ve responded to, the type of
content they like, their communication preferences, and more.
 Anticipate their future needs. If you have the advantage of knowing their
personal details and browsing behavior, you have the power to predict what’s
coming next. Think of when you book a flight somewhere. Airlines don’t stop
after selling you a ticket. They ask if you want travel insurance; they ask if you
want to book a hotel room; they ask if you’ll need to rent a car, etc. They know
 you’re traveling, and they also know the experience is more than just flying.
The same goes for your product or service. What add-ons might they need?
What upgraded versions might they consider? And this extends before and
after the buying stage, too.

If you know they read a lot of your content on social media marketing, send them
more content about social media marketing. Send them blog posts, podcasts,
ebooks, and tip sheets. If they’ve already bought your product, make them aware
of newer versions, bug fixes, use cases that help them take advantage of its full
potential. Successful personalization in the funnel is like playing chess. You have to
think several moves ahead.

Benefits of personalized marketing

The preceding are strategies, and when you start perfecting them, tweaking them
with more data, your customers start to see the following benefits, which apply to all
businesses:
 They get relevant content. Consumers don’t hate advertising; they hate bad
advertising. They hate irrelevant brand messaging. Since personalized content is
based on past behavior, it’s more likely the consumer will respond favorably to
its message.
 They’re reminded of recent browsing history. Remarketing is creepier in theory
than in practice. Data has shown that, up to a point, the more you remarket your
products, the more likely your prospects are to buy them. The reality is, people
are distracted even when they’re buying. Their boss will walk in; they’ll get
phone calls. Maybe they realized, at checkout, that they didn’t have the funds
they thought. Whatever the reason, remarketing is a good way to combat it. When
done right, it’s not annoying or creepy — it’s simply a reminder that says: “Hey,
don’t forget, you were looking at this earlier. Maybe you’re ready to buy it now.”
 They receive valuable suggestions. Consumers don’t just benefit from reminders
of products they’ve already seen, but of new ones they may not have realized
exist. These could be add-ons, upgraded versions, or related content. Once
you’ve anticipated your prospects’ needs, the next step is showing them what
they need before they need it, with emails, ads, blog posts, etc.
 They get information when they need it. Content relevance is crucial, but
delivering it at the right time is even more so. Don’t just think “what?” Think
“when” too.

On a broad scale, this could be blog posts optimized for popular keyword search
terms throughout each stage of the marketing funnel. On a more granular level, it
may look like a chat module that allows your business to respond to customer issues
immediately. The sooner you make yourself available, the better, research has
found. According to a study on lead response time, the chance of converting a lead is
100x greater if contacted within five minutes. The more data you gather , and the
deeper you dig, the more you’ll discover what your leads are looking for when they
make contact. And once you’ve done that, you can serve them what they need the
moment they need it.

2.6.2.2 Psychographic segmentation

Psychographic segmentation capitalizes on this by dividing customers based on
psychological factors, which include behaviors, personalities, lifestyles, and beliefs. These
factors are then analyzed to predict how you, the customer, will respond to focused
marketing campaigns.
Segmenting consumers into these subgroups based on conscious and unconscious
decision-making processes was first proposed as an argument against traditional
behavioral and demographic segmentation. The question became: do age, gender, and
education level provide enough information to formulate a valuable targeted marketing
campaign? The answer may be yes.
In fact, early experiments in engaging customers segmented by psychographics
have seen an increase in conversions by a factor of five when compared to engaging
customers with no context. If you are wondering how you can implement a more
sophisticated method for market segmentation in your business, continue reading
or jump to our infographic at the bottom of the page.

Psychographic Segmentation Factors to Consider

The factors that marketing researchers take into account when implementing
psychographic segmentation can vary across industries and marketing teams. Below are
a few of the most common factors:
 Lifestyle
How a person chooses to spend his or her time and money on activities, goods, or
services combine to become one’s lifestyle. Lifestyle is the most concrete insight
into what customers actually value, compared to a customer questionnaire or
survey, which doesn’t always represent reality.
 Attitudes and Values
How an individual has been raised and the experiences they have been exposed
to mold their values. One’s attitude toward a certain event, product, or
advertisement will likely be a result of those values.
For example, if a person was raised to value frugality and conservatism, a mobile
brokerage firm launching a campaign to market risky investment vehicles to this
segment will likely perform poorly and reflect in the subsequent conversion rate.
 Personality
Knowing your user’s personality and character are important factors when
segmenting psychographically. Does a particular user have a sense of humor or
are they more straight-faced? Is your user analytical and numbers-based or do
 they prefer the human elements of a story? Insights into personality types are
important especially when considering the voice of marketing and advertising
copy.
 Social Status
When we marketers think of the class hierarchy in today’s society, we are mainly
concerned with purchasing power. This purchasing power is directly tied to your
marketing efforts since the goal is to reach and convince the decision maker to buy
your product or service.
This can also be applied to the power structure within the hierarchy of a
company. For example, if the marketing team of an enterprise software company
needs to reach C-suite level executives, they will need to segment based on higher
authority employees.
 Activities and Interests
Everyone has varying interests and hobbies, and being aware of them can bolster
your marketing efforts. If, for example, you plan to market your food delivery app,
then users who exercise regularly, use health-conscious meal plans, and have
dietary restrictions will likely be an important segment to target.
 Priorities and Motivations
While lifestyle is a good indication of what people actually prioritize,
understanding what people are motivated to prioritize is equally as important. If
you can paint a picture for your user that aligns with their priorities, it will likely
trigger a desired action.
Continuing with our food delivery app example, if a particular psychographic
segment is motivated to spend more time with family, marketing this delivery
service as a way to gain quality time with loved ones would be a win for the
marketing team

2.6.2.3 Behavioral segmentation

Behavioral segmentation is a form of marketing segmentation that
divides people into different groups who have a specific behavioral
pattern in common. Users may share the same lifecycle stage, previously
purchased particular products, or have similar reactions to your
messages.

Benefits of Behavioral Segmentation

 Improves targeting accuracy. Behavioral segmentation allows companies

to take advantage of behavioral differences, optimizing their marketing
messages based on that data. For instance, it helps to pick up the right
approach for loyal customers or newly subscribed users. It also clarifies
groups of people that make up your audience: adults from 20-34, people
keen on sports, or those who love traveling.
  Helps provide better-personalized experience. Mass emails with the same
message for everyone are outdated practice today. Instead, you need to
deeply analyze your audience and meet people’s demands in a
personalized approach based on social groups they belong to.
 Sifts engaged users from uninterested. Marketers filter the target audience
to work with by identifying the user’s level of engagement. It increases the
chances that your products will be found by people who need them.
 Saves money. Behavioral segmentation helps prioritize campaigns to make
your marketing more cost-effective. It allows you to spend less time and
fewer resources to warm up leads or trying to communicate with an
uninterested audience.
 Makes it easier to track success. You can track metrics inside
each segment and improve your results.
 Helps build loyalty to your brand. Behavioral segmentation helps you
realize how to support users along their customer journey and keep them
engaged all the time. People that are treated personally are more likely to
become loyal to your brand and be converted into brand advocates.

2.6.3 Retention
It isn’t enough to attract new users and give them reasons to use the product. For
steady business growth, you need to hold them for a long time by creating a long-
term relationship.
In fact, it costs more to acquire a new customer. 70% companies say it’s
cheaper to retain a customer than acquire a new one.

Going through the same process all over again is a cumbersome task. Besides, it’s
time-consuming; why not put in efforts on the customers who already know your
product.
As per a research, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by
25%.
Would you purchase a new car if the one that you bought a year back isn’t
working?
Any sensible person would try to fix it, rather than investing in a new one.
Similarly, work on your retention strategies for reducing churn instead of hunting
for new customers.
55% of SaaS companies rate customer retention cost as the key metric to measure.
Proactive customer retention is especially crucial for a SaaS company, as users
won’t take time to unsubscribe and turn towards the competitors if they are not
getting the desired results. Like, if you are disappointed with the streaming
content of Hulu, you will instantly switch to Netflix. As it has the best collection
of movies and it also streams a complete series unlike Hulu that only offers a
selected number of episodes from any given series.
2.6.3.1 Predict churn
Churn prediction is one of the most popular Big Data use cases in business.
It consists of detecting customers who are likely to cancel a subscription to a
service.
Although originally a telcom giant thing, this concerns businesses of all sizes,
including startups. Now, thanks to prediction services and APIs, predictive
analytics are no longer exclusive to big players that can afford to hire teams
of data scientists.
As an example of how to use churn prediction to improve your
business, let’s consider businesses that sell subscriptions. This can be telecom
companies, SaaS companies, and any other company that sells a service for a
monthly fee.
There are three possible strategies those businesses can use to generate
more revenue: acquire more customers, upsell existing customers, or
increase customer retention. All the efforts made as part of one of the
strategies have a cost, and what we’re ultimately interested in is the return
on investment: the ratio between the extra revenue that results from these
efforts and their cost.
There are a number of things you can do to improve customer retention
overall. But individualized customer retention is difficult because businesses
usually have a lot of customers and cannot afford to spend much time on one.
The costs would be too high and would outweigh the extra revenue.
However, if you could predict in advance which customers are at risk of
leaving, you could reduce customer retention efforts by directing them solely
toward such customers.
Churn prediction consists of detecting which customers are likely to
cancel a subscription to a service based on how they use the service. We want
to predict the answer to the following question, asked for each current
customer: “Is this customer going to leave us within the next X months?”
There are only two possible answers, yes or no, and it is what we call a binary
classification task. Here, the input of the task is a customer and the output is the
answer to the question (yes or no).
Being able to predict churn based on customer data has proven
extremely valuable to big telecom companies. Now, thanks to prediction
services such as BigML, it’s accessible to businesses of all sizes.

Steps to predict churn.

The process is as follows:
1. Gather historical customer data that you save to a CSV file.
2. Upload that data to a prediction service that automatically creates a
“predictive model.”
 3. Use the model on each current customer to predict whether they are at risk
of leaving.

2.6.3.2 Customer care chatbot,

Chatbots are programmed to sift chunks of data to provide you with quick
answers in nanoseconds. Hence, they are great for repetitive jobs that demand
simple tasks and questions. The game-changer, consequently, is the rare ability to
be in a continuous phase of work and availing businesses the advantage of
efficiency and productivity.
In a customer interaction platform, for example, chatbots eliminate
redundancy without pleading for a raise. Meanwhile, if your business invests
huge capital on customer service already, acquiring AI chatbots or customer
service chatbots can reduce operational costs, improve sales funnel, and encourage
seamless interaction with customers. More precisely, chatbots can improve
response rates, improve customer service, automate online purchases, and provide
better communication.

Benefits of using customer chatbots

1. Better customer communication
2. Round-the clock customer support
3. Everyone likes to save money
4. The right agent gets the right message
5. Getting rid of language barriers

2.6.3.3 Sentiment analysis

Sentiment analysis is the kind of tool a marketer dreams about. By gauging the
public’s opinion of an event or product through analysis of data on a scale no
human could achieve, it gives your team the ability to figure out what people
really think. Backed by a growing body of innovative research, sentiment-analysis
tools have the ability to dramatically improve your ROI — yet many companies
are overlooking it.
Sentiment analysis is a unique metric that provides a plethora of factual
information, oftentimes revealing the motivations behind customers’ purchasing
decisions or the intent behind their searches.
Although sentiment analysis gives us a closer look at past behaviors it can
also steer future strategies in the right direction. Perhaps the packaging isn’t up to
par or customer service is holding a brand back – both of these situations can be
identified and corrected with sentiment analysis. Moreover, sentiment analysis
discloses strategic information about competitor insights, which can be a game-
changer when formulating a plan to distinguish your brand from competitors.
Ultimately, sentiment analysis provides you with data-based insights on
which you can use to bring your marketing strategy to the next level. It’s nearly
impossible to succeed in business without fully understanding who your
 customers are. Audience perception tells us who we’re speaking to and what kind
of content is valuable for their needs.
Luckily, sentiment analysis focuses largely on how to target the right
demographics and monitor the overall tone of the conversation. This way,
sentiment analysis will help you get the most out of the content you post.

2.6.3.4 Visual Social Listening,

Visual listening is essentially social listening, but for images.

Brands and agencies can use visual listening to quantify and analyze the images
online that are important to them.
With 3.2 billion images shared each day, visual listening is essential to
anyone who cares about understanding their online conversation. And you won’t
find images important to your brand by just using text searches. In fact, 80% of the
images online that includes a brand’s logo don’t mention the brand in the
accompanying text.
Here’s an example: Fig 2.9

Fig 2.9

This tweet includes the Coca-Cola logo and an interesting looking hamburger, but it
doesn’t reference Coca-Cola in the tweet. Without visual listening, Coke would miss this
mention.
For brands, this is important because it helps them answer questions like ‘what food do our
customers drink cola with’.
And yes, one image won’t answer this question. But Coca-Cola generates 230,000 ‘visual
mentions’ a month, meaning they miss 184,000 images containing their brand.
Or in other words, they miss 200 ‘visual mentions’ an hour.
2.6.4. Revenue

This is an important stage of the funnel where you start generating the revenue. For a
consultant, this would be when you get the signature on the contract, and for a SaaS
company, this would be when your customers make their first payment for the
subscription. Whatever it is, but it is surely not the end of the customer journey. Don’t
stop here; you are only 4/6th of the way through the funnel.
Be very careful at this stage as it can have an impact on the bottom line of your
business.
You need to continue delighting your customers by offering attractive annual plans and
best-in-class support. 86% of customers will pay more for better customer experience.
Once someone makes the payment, your job gets much more comfortable as you
know who your customers are and what they need. It is cheaper to drive a repeat
purchase from a present satisfied customer then acquiring a new one.
Businesses have a 60 to 70% higher chance of selling to an existing customer while
the probability of selling to a new prospect is only 5% to 20%. Few mistakes and you will
get demoted to the acquisition stage of the funnel where you will have to start it all over
again with a new prospect. 33% of Americans say they’ll consider switching companies
after just a single instance of poor service.

2.6.4.1 Predict and maximize customer lifetime value

Customer Lifetime Value:

Customer value or Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the total monetary value of
transactions/purchases made by a customer with your business over his entire lifetime.
Here the lifetime means the time period till your customer purchases with you before
moving to your competitors.
Now let’s look at the general formula for calculating the Customer Lifetime Value:
Here’s the simplest customer lifetime value definition – it’s a metric that shows how
much net profit your company can make of one customer over time. Fig2.10

Fig2.10 Customer Lifetime Value

So, a high CLV means each customer will bring in more revenue for your company. Since
each client becomes more valuable, it means your company can afford to spend more to
acquire new users and retain the existing ones. Let’s say you run a classic, pure-play SaaS
service with monthly billing. We’re going to be using a single customer as an example,
one who stays with your business for 2 years, and who got a subscription plan priced at
$100/month.
The average customer lifetime value of that client would be $2,400 ($100 times 24 – the
number of months that person has been a customer). That number only gets higher as the
client gets to pay more over time, the expansion revenue from existing customers
exceeding the churn.
In general, there are two broad approaches to modeling the CLV problem:
Historical Approach:

1. Aggregate Model  —  calculating the CLV by using the average revenue per
customer based on past transactions. This method gives us a single value for the
CLV.
2. Cohort Model  —  grouping the customers into different cohorts based on the
transaction date, etc., and calculate the average revenue per cohort. This method
gives CLV value for each cohort.

Predictive Approach:

1. Machine Learning Model  —  using regression techniques to fit on past data to
predict the CLV.
2. Probabilistic Model  —  it tries to fit a probability distribution to the data and
estimates the future count of transactions and monetary value for each transaction.

2.6.4.2 Recommender Systems

Recommender systems aim to predict users’ interests and recommend product
items that quite likely are interesting for them. They are among the most powerful
machine learning systems that online retailers implement in order to drive sales.
Data required for recommender systems stems from explicit user ratings after
watching a movie or listening to a song, from implicit search engine queries and
purchase histories, or from other knowledge about the users/items themselves.
Sites like Spotify, YouTube or Netflix use that data in order to suggest playlists,
so-called Daily mixes, or to make video recommendations, respectively.
Need of recommender systems
 Companies using recommender systems focus on increasing sales as a
result of very personalized offers and an enhanced customer experience.
 Recommendations typically speed up searches and make it easier for users
to access content they’re interested in, and surprise them with offers they
would have never searched for.
 What is more, companies are able to gain and retain customers by sending
out emails with links to new offers that meet the recipients’ interests, or
suggestions of films and TV shows that suit their profiles.
 The user starts to feel known and understood and is more likely to buy
additional products or consume more content. By knowing what a user
 wants, the company gains competitive advantage and the threat of losing a
customer to a competitor decreases.
 Providing that added value to users by including recommendations in
systems and products is appealing. Furthermore, it allows companies to
position ahead of their competitors and eventually increase their earnings.
Recommender system’s Function
Recommender systems function with two kinds of information:
 Characteristic information. This is information about items (keywords, categories,
etc.) and users (preferences, profiles, etc.).
 User-item interactions. This is information such as ratings, number of purchases,
likes, etc.
Based on this, we can distinguish between three algorithms used in recommender
systems:
 Content-based systems, which use characteristic information.
 Collaborative filtering systems, which are based on user-item interactions.
 Hybrid systems, which combine both types of information with the aim of avoiding
problems that are generated when working with just one kind.

2.6.4.3 Market basket analysis

Market Basket Analysis is a technique which identifies the strength of association

between pairs of products purchased together and identify patterns of co-occurrence. A
co-occurrence is when two or more things take place together.
Market Basket Analysis creates If-Then scenario rules, for example, if item A is
purchased then item B is likely to be purchased. The rules are probabilistic in nature or,
in other words, they are derived from the frequencies of co-occurrence in the
observations. Frequency is the proportion of baskets that contain the items of interest.
The rules can be used in pricing strategies, product placement, and various types of cross-
selling strategies.
Association Rules are widely used to analyze retail basket or transaction data, and
are intended to identify strong rules discovered in transaction data using measures of
interestingness, based on the concept of strong rules.

An example of Association Rules

 Assume there are 100 customers
 10 of them bought milk, 8 bought butter and 6 bought both of them.
 bought milk => bought butter
 support = P(Milk & Butter) = 6/100 = 0.06
 confidence = support/P(Butter) = 0.06/0.08 = 0.75
 lift = confidence/P(Milk) = 0.75/0.10 = 7.5
This example is extremely small. In practice, a rule needs the support of several hundred
transactions, before it can be considered statistically significant, and datasets often contain
thousands or millions of transactions.

2.6.5 Referral
Referral is when someone refers your product or services to others, who might get
interested and take action. They don’t need to be a customer to do the referral, and the
action is not necessarily a purchase.
Why are referrals so powerful?
Referral is the best medium to reach new customers.
A message conveyed through an advertisement won’t be as impactful as the one
passed by a current user. Human referral is more trusted, especially when they are in
your networks. 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family over any
other type of advertising.
Referral between two known people increases the chances of lead conversion.
Don’t you purchase a product if you get a good review from your friend? Similarly,
people prefer investing in a tried and tested product.
Referral often happens spontaneously when a customer is impressed by the
features or benefits of a solution, but businesses can also influence it by using the right
strategies. Customers referred by other customers have a 37% higher retention rate.

Two metrics that needs your attention to referrals are:

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS) –
With NPS score, you can find out how willing users are to recommend your
products or services. The score comes from the Net Promoter Score question,
which is-
“On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely is that you would recommend our organization
to a friend or business associate?”
Based on the number the client selects, they are placed into one of the below
categories:
Score breakdown

 0-6: Detractors (unsatisfied customers who can influence others negatively)

 7-8: Passives (might not recommend but won’t even create a negative image
of your product)
 9-10: Promoters (happy customers who fuel growth by spreading positive
information about your product)
 Fig 2.11
2. Viral coefficient –
It is the number of new users a current referrer generates. For calculating the viral
coefficient of your products or services, you require three numbers:
 Number of existing users,

 Number of invitations sent (shares, referral, etc.) and

 Average conversion rate of those invitations.
Then multiply those three metrics and divide it by the number of existing users
for getting the viral coefficient. Your viral coefficient needs to be more than one to
experience growth.

To get more referral customers, you need to keep your existing clients happy. They
can save you from the tiresome task of hunting new prospects.
 Besides a referred customer’s lifetime value is 16% higher when compared to non-
referred customers. Positive word of mouth is the best, but sometimes negative
word of mouth can spread like wildfire.
So, make sure they share anything wrong about their experience with you first
before sharing with someone else.
Be cautious about the below point as they can create a negative impression on your
customers:
 Long wait time – as per a survey, 41% of customers expect a response from the
support team within six hours, but only 36% of businesses responded within that
time frame.
 Too many follow-up emails.
 Poor product performance (missing features, fewer benefits, etc.).
 Made a commitment and didn’t fulfill it.
 Being transferred from one sales rep/support agent to another – as per a study that
asked customers what annoyed them the most, saw 37% of respondents
mentioning “being passed around”.
 Complex website layout – researchers asked participants in an eye-tracking study
to use a website to locate the USA’s current population, and 87% of them failed to
find it even when it was presented in large red numbers
Don’t give them a reason to speak anything negative about you. Find the glitches
in your solution and fix it in real-time. Technologies can help you in identifying
the problem. Using the right software, you can track emails you sent and listen to
the conversation you had during the buying process to discover the problematic
areas. Ensure you build a consistent customer relationship by providing an
exceptional user experience for boosting referrals.

2.6.5.1 Predict whether user recommend your product

2.7 Multiple choice questions

1. What is a sales funnel?
a. A way to see where consumers are in the buying process
b. A way to generate leads
c. A way to calculate how much revenue a company will make
d. A way to market new homes
2. What happens during the awareness stage of the sales funnel?
a. Consumers learn about an item
b. Consumers purchase an item
c. Consumers request a return from customer service
d. Consumers decide to buy a product
3. What is the buying process?
a. The steps that lead from learning about an item to buying it
 b. The steps that lead from thinking of an item to making it available for
sale
c. The steps that lead from studying real estate to getting a license
d. None of these answers are correct.
4. _____ refers to the processes of building strong customer loyalty using a
variety of methods.
a. Customer Service
b. Retention
c. Money
d. Customer Loyalty
5. A restaurant offers a lunch card where every 10th lunch is free. This is an
example of a _____.
a. Loyalty Program
b. Contract Agreement
c. Quality of Service
d. Mixed Program
6. What is customer retention?
a. Acquiring a new customer.
b. The loyalty of a customer based on return business.
c. Stealing customers from competitors.
d. The loyalty of a customer based on how much they spend.
7. What is the customer retention rate?
a. The number of new customers you gain during a specified amount of
time.
b. The amount of money new customers spend over a specified amount
of time.
c. The number of customers you manage to keep during a specified
amount of time.
d. The amount of money return customers spend over a specified
amount of time.
8. Which is the calculation for customer retention rate?
a. ((Number of customers at the end of the period - Number of new
customers during that period) / Number of customers at the start of
the period) * 100
b. ((Number of customers at the beginning of the period - Number of
customers at the end of the period) / Number of new customers) *100
c. Number of new customers * 100
d. Number of old customers - number of new customers.
9. Which of the following options is the ultimate aim of marketing?
a. Production
b. Profit Making
c. Satisfaction of customers
d. Selling products
 e. None of these
10. Socio-economic classification, lifestyle and personality are major
segmentation
variables in which category?
a. Geographic
b. Behavioral
c. Demographic
d. Psychographic
e. None of these

2.8 Short answer questions

a. Explain market basket analysis
b. What is need for recommender system?
c. Explain types of landing page testing.
d. What is campaign and keyword optimization?
e. Explain applications for cluster analysis.

2.9 Long answer questions

a. List and explain metrics that needs attention to referrals.
b. List and explain different stages for activation.
c. List and explain benefits of market segmentation.
d. What is need for accurate scale forecasting?
e. Explain benefits of market segmentation.

2.10 References:
https://www.salesmate.io/blog/sales-funnel-series-phase-2-activation/
https://www.salesmate.io/blog/sales-funnel-series-phase-revenue/
https://www.salesmate.io/blog/complete-sales-funnel-series-referral/
 Module-03
Marketing Framework and Tools
3.1 Motivation: This module helps learner, to learn about the various tools used for the
functioning of the marketing framework.

3.2 Learning Objective: Learner will be able to study and practice the tools on stages like
planning, production, personalization, promotion and performance.
3.3 Syllabus
Prerequisites Syllabus Duration Self-Study
Digital marketing Planning:Hubspot, Brightedge, Node, 1 Hr 1 Hr
framework Crayon, Equals3,
Marketmuse, Pathmatics, Calibermind, 1 Hr 1 Hr
Alegion, Netra
Production : Acrolinx, Narrative 1 Hr 1 Hr
Science,Clarifai
GumGum, phrasee, curate 1 Hr 1 Hr
Attentioninsight
Personalization : Uberflip, Klevu, 1 Hr 2 Hr
Seventh Sense, Blueshift

Promotion : Yext, Albert, Onespot, , 1 Hr 2 Hr

Cortex, Siftrock, inPowered, 1 Hr 1 Hr
Performance :Monkeylearn, PaveAI 1 Hr 1 Hr

3.4 DEFINITIONS:
Social Media Marketing: Social media marketing (SMM) is a form of Internet
marketing that utilizes social networking websites as a marketing tool.
Search engine optimization (SEO): Search engine optimization (SEO) is the
process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial” or “natural”
listings on search engines
Web analytics: Web analytics is the study of visitor, navigation, and traffic
patterns to determine the success of a given web site.
3.5 Keywords:
PPC: Page per Click
SMM: Social Media Marketing
SEO: Search engine optimization
SEM: Search engine marketing
ROI: Return on Investment
3.6 Theory
3.6.1. Planning:
3.6.1.1 Hubspot
HubSpot has several tools to help you grow your business, no matter what stage
you're at.
Starting out, there are several tools available for free. You can set up web
forms, popup forms, and live chat software for lead capture. Then, you can
send email marketing campaigns, pipe all of your data into the free CRM, and
analyze site visitors' behavior.
When you expand into the paid tiers, things get really sophisticated with advanced
marketing automation.
From managing your content and social media to tracking emails and connecting
with your leads, HubSpot is an all-in-one solution -- although it works well with
other point solutions you may use (Typeform, HotJar, etc.).
Ultimately, the tool allows you to:
 Grow your traffic, convert leads, and prove ROI for your inbound marketing
campaigns.
 Shorten deal cycles and increase close rates with the provided sales tools.

Fig 3.1
3.6.1.2 Brightedge
BrightEdge is the global leader in enterprise content performance. As a SaaS
technology SEO platform BrightEdge enables marketers to drive traffic,
conversions, and revenue from their largest marketing channel – organic search.
With the advent of secure search, Google’s ‘not provided’ and the impact of
Google algorithm changes, search marketing now requires SEOs to work more
closely with their content marketing colleagues to target demand, optimize
content, and measure progress and results. Enterprises value BrightEdge SEO
Recommendations, Blended Rank, Trended Share of Voice, Content Optimizer,
Search Opportunity Forecasting, and ContentIQ features. BrightEdge’s Data Cube
also allows you to uncover your competitors’ content marketing strategies to
develop superior content and search marketing results.

3.6.1.3 Node
Node is an AI platform that leverages data from individuals and businesses
to predict how a brand can make smarter decisions about how to engage their
clients, employees, investors, and partners. The tool first identifies connections
between web entities such as people, products, and businesses, then leverages its
algorithm to identify the people most likely to convert or buy. These predictive
insights can be used for marketing automation, event management, job applicant
tracking, and much more.
One of the most powerful tools within Node is AIR (AI-powered Retention for
Customers). While the focus of many marketers is on acquisition, retention is just
as (if not more) important for long term success. Using machine learning, AIR can
identify the prospects and customers you’re most at risk of losing, allowing the
business to streamline their retention of them.

Fig 3.2

3.6.1.4 Crayon
Crayon utilizes AI to take the legwork out of competition analysis. Its platform
visualizes competition data in a single dashboard to keep marketers aware of the
latest industry updates and moves, helping marketers identify trends and make
quick and informed decisions.
The ultimate goal of Crayon is to help a marketing team spend less time on
research and more time on analysis and action. Their dashboards are fully
customizable, tracking everything from product and pricing changes to reviews to
content and campaigns launched.
 Fig 3.3

3.6.1.5 Equals3

Equals 3 uses 20 technology products and services including HTML5, Google

Analytics, and jQuery, according to G2 Stack.Equals 3 is actively
using 38 technologies for its website, according to BuiltWith. These
include Viewport Meta, IPhone / Mobile Compatible, and SPF.
It works as an AI-powered knowledge management assistant that reads and learns
every document and data asset that you feed her—she never leaves, never forgets
and becomes smarter every day.
Equals 3 uses a breadth of natural language processing technologies, machine
learning algorithms, visual recognition technology, and natural language
generation to build a proprietary engine that allows us to build a knowledge graph
to find answers from data which can be structured or unstructured.

Most of the out-of-box technologies have been trained on openly available datasets
(i.e. Wikipedia or other public sources). They tend to do a reasonably good job
when asking questions that are not domain specific. However, the traditional NLP
models fail to understand different concepts such as guerrilla marketing, paid
advertising, brand awareness, and other common marketing research concepts.
We created our own domain-specific models to train Lucy to understand the
vernacular of a marketer.
Unlike most AI engines, it has used a combination of deep learning models and
domain-specific subject matter experts to help us create the knowledge.
Understanding the intent of a question and which source is the best place to find
the answer required our team to build an ontology of intents across structured and
unstructured data sources. Now when a question is asked, Lucy has an intrinsic
knowledge to understand the best place to find the answer and directs the question
to be answered to the best possible repository.

3.6.1.6 Marketmuse
MarketMuse is the AI content intelligence and strategy platform that transforms
how you research, plan, and craft content. Predict content success and craft better
content faster.

It analyzes web data to build knowledge graphs, similar to the Google knowledge
graph. Knowledge graphs enable marketers to determine what relevant topics to
write about and how to write about each topic comprehensively.
Then, by comparing the knowledge graphs (the ideal set of topics) against their
site's content inventory, we build prioritized contssent plans that help marketers
make better decisions on where to spend their time and resources. As a result,
marketers are empowered to build engaging content consistently and at scale.

How MarketMuse Helps You Outperform the Competition

Predict Content Success
Personalized difficulty score, an industry-first, helps determine the topics for
which your site is most likely to succeed. Unlike generic keyword difficulty, this
score is based on your site and its contents.
Craft Better Content
Easily order MarketMuse Content Briefs directly within the platform. These fully-
outlined briefs contain everything a writer needs to create expert-level content
including topics to cover, word count to aim for, and KPIs to meet in their writing.
Create Content Faster
MarketMuse First Draft brings natural language generation to content marketing.
Each draft is meant to hit all the important metrics with minimal human editing
required.

3.6.1.7 Pathmatics
Pathmatics is a digital advertising intelligence solution used by brands, agencies,
ad tech companies, and publishers to build competitive advantages in their brand
management, advertising, and business development activities.
The company’s digital advertising intelligence solutions use machine learning to
show advertisers impressions and spend across desktop, mobile and video. But,
the company doesn’t just show you your brand’s ads—it also displays competitive
intelligence on thousands of major advertisers. The result is AI-powered
competitive intelligence into how and where brands advertise.
Pathmatics’ digital advertising intelligence solutions are used by brands, agencies,
ad tech companies, and publishers to build competitive advantages in their brand
management, advertising, and business development activities.
How does Pathmatics use artificial intelligence (i.e. machine learning, natural
language generation, natural language processing, deep learning, etc.)?

Machine learning is used in our models for impression and spend estimations.
Pathmatics samples digital advertising and uses a number of factors about each ad
occurrence along with external data sources to continually model market
conditions, as well as accurately estimate impressions and spend.

3.6.1.8 Calibermind
CaliberMind is a marketing analytics solution for B2B Marketers that spans
engagement scoring, marketing attribution, and end-to-end buyer journey
reporting. CaliberMind integrates with your entire go-to-market tech stack and
even fixes your data for you. Too often, companies don’t have the bandwidth or
skills to transform their digital marketing data into meaningful insights. Marketers
need real-time marketing analytics to supercharge their impact on pipeline and
revenue.
3.6.1.9 Alegion

Alegion provides human intelligence solutions designed for AI & machine

learning initiatives, digital content management and moderation.
The company provides a workforce that is able to assemble AI training data and
scoring at scale. Using a crowdsourced workforce from services like Amazon’s
Mechanical Turk, Alegion builds large-scale, custom datasets that brands then use
to train AI algorithms.

Publisher Conde Nast has used Alegion to tag images in hours instead of the
weeks it used to take. Charles Schwab leaned on the company to process
thousands of social media messages per day. These datasets were then used to
teach AI systems to produce superior marketing results. In some cases, that might
include predicting what content will work best based on past data. In others, AI
may be able to surface sales insights from data that human marketers can’t.
Alegion provides cloud labor solutions of unlimited scale to process large volumes
of data-intensive tasks, such as AI training data assembly and scoring, and user-
generated content management.

3.6.1.10 Netra
Netra helps brands and agencies better understand and reach their ideal
consumers by analyzing billions of consumers’ photos—and identifying their
activities, interests/passions, key life events, demographics of their tribe, and
brand preferences.
Netra uses computer vision, AI, and deep learning to essentially teach computers
to see. It has created models that detect objects and scenes (over 4,000, including
categories and hierarchies), humans (classifying age, gender, and ethnicity), and
brands / logos (over 2,000, including categories).
During the training process, it is feed with annotated imagery (a combination of
synthetic and real-world imagery) through convolutional neural networks. This
process enables the software to learn how to identify, localize, and classify objects.
These are all things that humans could identify—it’s just that our software now
enables performing these tasks at the scale of hundreds of millions of images per
day (which wouldn’t be manually possible).

3.6.2. Production :
3.6.2.1 Acrolinx
Acrolinx is an AI-powered platform for enterprise content governance that uses a
unique linguistic analytics engine to “read” all your content and provide
immediate guidance to improve it.
Artificial intelligence platform Acrolinx employs machine learning and natural
language processing (NLP) to improve the content of some of the world’s biggest
brands. Using Acrolinx, companies like Facebook, IBM, Nestle and Boeing make
their content better using AI-powered scoring and recommendations. Acrolinx
also keeps tabs on how compliant content is with a company’s brand and
standards.
Acrolinx uses a variety of techniques in its multilingual natural language
processing (NLP) engine, including machine learning and knowledge-based
approaches to ensure the best combination of scalability and precision, which our
customers demand.

3.6.2.2 Narrative Science

Narrative Science is the leader in Advanced Natural Language Generation for the
enterprise. Narrative Science is a rapidly growing SaaS provider of advanced
natural language generation (NLG) software called Quill. Powered by artificial
intelligence, Quill helps companies across multiple industries transform data into
narratives—stories—that improve decision-making, increase employee
productivity and provide a better customer experience.

3.6.2.3 Clarifai
Clarifai provides advanced image recognition systems for customers to detect
near-duplicates and visual searches.
Clarifai offers an AI solution that recognizes elements in images and videos,
tagging these elements appropriately and helping brands streamline visual search,
as well as personalize recommendations and moderate content.
Clarifai is a market leader in visual recognition technology, built on advanced
machine learning systems and accessible by an API that’s used by companies like
OpenTable, Trivago, West Elm and many others to improve the customer
experience.

3.6.2.4 GumGum

GumGum is an artificial intelligence company with deep expertise in computer

vision. It unlocks the value of images and videos.. Its mission is to unlock the value
of visual content produced daily across diverse data sets.
Computer vision company GumGum is using artificial intelligence to unlock the
value of every online image. They work with 70% of Fortune 100 companies, such
as L’Oreal, Disney, and Sprint, to reach targeted audiences in native and non-
intrusive ways.
With 10 years experience in proprietary technology and solutions, it’s no wonder
GumGum’s AI can process and identify more than 500 million images and videos
each month.
Since day one, GumGum’s vision has been to extract value from visual content
such as images and videos. This is done with computer vision. If you are not
familiar, computer vision is the ability for machines to translate an image (or
video) into pixels and interpret the big picture that those pixels represent. What
GumGum do is collect, train and classify as ‘big pixels’.
It processes more than 500 million images and videos each month, and over the
years and gotten pretty good at it. Within one image, it can identify celebrities,
scenes, the make and models of vehicles, even the color of your skin and hair. To
accomplish this at scale requires a robust combination of machine and deep
learning and NLP (natural language processing).

3.6.2.5 phrasee
Phrasee uses AI to write better marketing language than humans.
Phrasee is an AI-powered company that uses natural language generation and
deep learning to write creative and engaging marketing copy.
Phrasee uses their technology to help companies increase opens, clicks, and
conversions on marketing assets and to generate language that strikes the right
tone in the current climate.
Phrasee empowers brands with AI-powered copywriting, boosting marketing
performance, revenue and careers.
Phrasee uses a natural language generation system that writes human-sounding
marketing copy at the touch of a button—and in a brand’s voice. We also use a
deep learning engine that predicts what language will and won’t work with
greater accuracy than any human.

3.6.2.6 curate
Curata builds software to help content marketers grow leads and revenue.
It is a software that uses artificial intelligence to curate and distribute the most
high-quality content—then measure its impact.
The software uses machine learning and natural language processing to parse
through online content, and categorize the most relevant and popular options for
a company’s audience.
It then offers content marketing management and measurement to illustrate how
content marketing impacts company goals.

Curata software allows users to easily find and distribute high quality third party
content, to keep all relevant stakeholders on the same page throughout a project,
and to accurately analyze content’s impact on revenue through all stages of the
funnel.
Curata offers two products for content marketers: a content marketing platform
(CMP) and content curation software (CCS).
Curata utilizes informational retrieval techniques, machine learning and natural
language processing techniques for a variety of tasks:
 The discovery engine self-optimizes and learns a user’s content preferences.
 Detects duplicate and redundant content for curation.
 Extracts and infers metadata about content, such as who is being mentioned,
videos, images and relevant quotations.
 Automatically filters out irrelevant content.
 Automatically learns how to categorize and classify content.
 Predicts future content contribution to social, web traffic, lead generation, sales
pipeline and revenue.

3.6.2.7 Attentioninsight
Automated Insights is the creator of Wordsmith, the natural language generation
platform that enables you to produce human-sounding narratives from data.

3.6.3. Personalization :
3.6.3.1Uberflip:
Uberflip allows marketers to create, manage, and optimize content experiences so
they can leverage content throughout the buyer journey.
Effective content marketing requires a lot of legwork, including topic generation,
content creation, and promotion across channels. Artificial intelligence tools can
significantly streamline this process, bearing some of the burden typically placed
on the shoulders of human marketers. One such tool is Uberflip, an AI-powered
content personalization platform.
Uberflip uses natural language processing and sophisticated algorithms (both
types of AI technologies) to automatically analyze a company’s content, then
recommend additional content to website visitors based on what they’ve
consumed in the past.
Uberflip is a cloud-based platform that empowers B2B marketers to create
personalized content experiences at scale.
Uberflip leverages natural language processing to automatically extract features
and topics from our clients’ content. We use this data to power our machine
learning AI engine, which uses several different algorithms and patterns to
recommend content to visitors, based on their intent and the content they’ve
already consumed.

3.6.3.2 Klevu
Klevu is an AI-powered ecommerce search solution, designed to drive more
revenue for mid-level and enterprise-level online retailers through enhanced
accuracy and merchandising capabilities.
Klevu is an AI-powered ecommerce search solution that uses natural language
processing (NLP) and machine learning to assess customer searches and deliver
additional recommendations for products. The result? Consumers find exactly
what they’re looking for and things they never knew they wanted, boosting
revenue.
Natural language processing (NLP) is one of the core components of Klevu,
helping us to extract more meaning and context from search queries and match
terms to results that other technologies are unable to match. You can see an
example of how NLP can support search on the Zimmermann store (a Klevu client)
below. As you can see, the product names don’t contain the word “shoe,” but the
system is able to understand which products are shoes.
Klevu also uses machine learning to promote products based on how users are
interacting with them, providing more real-time promotion of items based on their
popularity and effectiveness. The key interactions that Klevu uses are completed
purchases, add-to-carts, and clicks. These actions give us an understanding of
popularity. This gives us a picture of short-term and long-term popularity and
allows us to add a layer of rankings on top of just boosting specific categories or
items.

3.6.3.3 Seventh Sense

Seventh Sense is an artificial intelligence solution uses data from marketing
automation and corporate email systems to help win attention in today's
overcrowded inboxes.
 The tool integrates with HubSpot portals, Marketo accounts, or company email
systems to build unique profiles of your contacts and learn their habits.
Seventh Sense is an artificial intelligence company that helps marketers increase
the ROI of their email channel by ensuring their emails have the highest chance of
being seen, read and engaged with.
Seventh Sense applies machine learning in two ways:

First, it uses statistical modeling to look at the open and click data in your
marketing automation system to identify each individual's unique pattern of email
engagement. Based on this data, we empower marketers with the ability to
personalize email delivery times at scale. Give us a window of time, and each
person on your list will get their email at the time when they are most likely to
open it in that given window.

Second, it helps marketers by creating dynamic segments based on who a machine

learning model predicts is more, or less likely to engage with your next email. This
is extremely important for minimizing email fatigue, maximizing reach,
deliverability / inboxing and ultimately driving more ROI from email.

Marketers put a tremendous amount of time and resources into growing their
email list, messaging and creative email content. But all of that can go to waste if
your emails don’t land in the inbox. A “99% delivered” message is meaningless if
those messages are delivered to spam

3.6.3.4 Blueshift

Blueshift uses AI to personalize the entire customer journey and continuously

determine the right marketing actions for each customer.
Blueshift is a next generation cross-channel marketing platform for engaging
today’s connected consumer, built with autonomous AI.

Blueshift uses patented technology for delivering AI to marketers in the form of

self-driving marketing campaigns. The technology automates personalization
along the entire customer journey and executes continuously to determine the
right marketing action for each customer.

With Blueshift, for the first time, marketers can use the full power of AI without
support from a data science or an engineering team.
The highlights of the AI include:
 Built on a unified customer view, leveraging historical and real-time customer
data: The system continuously listens to new data about customers (e.g.
website/app/PoS interactions) and updates the customer data index to reflect all
 the latest customer interactions. This 360-degree view of the customer, or the
“customer data index”, forms the basis for the AI.
 Adapts to your data: The system is flexible to work with the data semantics used
by your business, instead of imposing a rigid schema. This enables us to rapidly
onboard different types of customers, each having different complexities in their
data.
 Puts the power of AI in the hands of marketers: While the system does all the
heavy lifting to run different types of AI algorithms, we also expose an intuitive
user interface for non-technical marketers to understand the models and adapt it
to their use cases.

3.6.4 Promotion :
3.6.4.1Yext
Yext is a Digital Knowledge Management (DKM) platform that gives companies
control over their brand experiences across maps, apps, search engines, voice
assistants, and other intelligent services.

3.6.4.2 Albert
Albert is an artificial intelligence marketing platform for the enterprise, driving
fully autonomous digital marketing campaigns.
Albert is an AI-powered platform that automatically runs and optimizes paid
advertising campaigns.
The solution works with advertising across Google, Facebook, Instagram,
YouTube, and Bing. And it's used by brands and agencies to automatically allocate
budget, improve campaign performance, and discover new opportunities.
Albert is an artificial intelligence platform that plugs into a digital advertiser's
existing tech stack and operates it across paid search, social, and programmatic.
Albert is an autonomous AI that is the result of eight years of development by a
team of 80 data scientists and engineers. It is a collection of over 200 intelligent
skills working in concert that uses various machine capabilities learning to process
and analyze audience and tactic data at scale to autonomously allocate, optimize
and evolve paid digital campaigns.

3.6.4.3 Onespot
OneSpot allows you to distribute and sequence your content at scale and drive
business results.
OneSpot uses machine-learning algorithms to personalize content and match
individual user preferences based on their behavior and characteristics. That kind
of cross-channel personalization generates rich datasets that OneSpot’s algorithms
use to better target users with the right content again and again, helping brands
create deep relationships with users through repeated, sustained engagement.
Additionally, OneSpot’s solutions use all the data learned from consumer
preferences to supercharge content strategy, identify gaps in editorial strategy and
make recommendations about which topics work best.
OneSpot is a technology platform used by big brands like Nestlé, L’Oréal, IBM,
Whole Foods Market and Delta Faucet to personalize content across digital
channels. OneSpot makes extensive use of machine learning technology to
predictively personalize content based on user behavior, context and lookalike
analysis. While many marketing personalization solutions take a more segment-
based or rules-based approach, OneSpot is able to leverage machine learning to
deliver personalized experiences that are individually relevant to each person.
Since OneSpot works across different digital channels we get multiple “bites at the
apple” for data profiling and the ability to drive repeat engagement with content.
We call this unique approach Content Sequencing.

3.6.4.4 Cortex
Cortex helps marketers create engaging content. Cortex has an artificial
intelligence platform that predicts how humans react to content.
It is a suite of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and natural language
generation and processing technologies designed to turn creative content
marketing into a fully data-driven process. It helps social and content marketers
make the right decisions about content creation, deployment and promotion.
Cortex uses machine learning to predict what reactions consumers will have to
various aspects of content. What colors work best for photos, what timing works
best on Tuesdays, what the cost of promotion will be at that time of day.

3.6.4.5 Siftrock
Siftrock is a marketing automation plug-in that intelligently manages email
replies.
Siftrock is a machine learning tool that automatically manages and mines these
email Siftrock marketing artificial intelligence institutereplies for B2B marketers.
By integrating with marketing automation systems like HubSpot, Siftrock updates
databases, improves email engagement, and even finds new leads. This all occurs
without human oversight, freeing up marketing and sales teams to complete
higher-value activities instead of managing their inboxes.
Siftrock manages and mines email replies for B2B marketers; our product
integrates with your marketing automation platform to clean your database,
enable email engagement, and find new leads.

3.6.4.6 inPowered
inPowered, the programmatic content amplification company, enables advertisers
to drive consumer engagement with owned, earned, and sponsored content on
over 35 native advertising networks.
inPowered's artificial-intelligence-driven dynamic cost per engagement pricing
model (dCPE) is the only one of its kind. Engagement is defined as 15 seconds or
more. Using machine learning, its technology doesn’t optimize for clicks, but
rather, time on site. As the technology learns more over time it gets smarter and
smarter with how it bids and optimizes – resulting in the gradual reduction of cost
per post-click engagement by up to 80%. It can accomplish this by creating
thousands of permutations to find the best combination of content, audience, and
channel that are delivering post-click engagements most efficiently.

3.6.5 Performance :
3.6.5.1Monkeylearn
MonkeyLearn makes your teams more efficient by automating business processes,
getting insights and saving hours of manual data processing.
MonkeyLearn automates marketing and sales workflows and analyzes data using
the power of AI technologies that include machine learning, deep learning and
natural language processing (NLP).
The result is an AI-powered marketing and sales workflow that saves times and
money, freeing up professionals to perform higher-value tasks.
MonkeyLearn uses machine learning to allow users to build customized text-
analysis models. We abstract the complexity of machine learning and NLP with a
beautiful graphical user interface, API and third-party platform integrations. This
way, we allow developers without background in machine learning and even non-
technical users (e.g. marketers and sales teams) to create effective text-analysis
solutions in a very short time.

3.6.5.2PaveAI
PaveAI turns your Google Analytics data into insights using AI.
PaveAI (@paveAI) is a platform powered by artificial intelligence that aims to
answer those questions for us. Its algorithms comb through more than 16 million
possible combinations to produce data-driven reports with insights and
recommendations that help businesses achieve marketing goals. We learned how
by talking to Eric Ho, founder of PaveAI.
In a single sentence or statement, describe PaveAI.
PaveAI uses machine learning and data science to turn Google Analytics data into
actionable recommendations and reports.
 Fig 3.4

3.7 Multiple choice questions

1. This P is not a part of the 7Ps of marketing mix?
a. Promotion
b. Price
c. People
d. Purpose
2. “Many people want BMW, only a few are able to buy” this is an example of _______
a. Need
b. Want
c. Demand
d. Status
3. Good marketing is no accident but a result of careful planning and _____.
a. Promotion
b. Selling
c. Policies
d. Execution
 4. In Hubspot, Contact management is an important piece of lead nurturing because it
helps you understand the contacts you’re reaching out to.
a. True
b. False
5. A resource pillar page should only be made up of internal website links.
a. True
b. False
6. Personalisation is the characteristic of digital media which refers to ______.
a. profiling customers in real-time
b. the tailoring of content in real-time on the website
c. assessing the behaviour of website users in real time
d. including both a push and pull mechanism to communications
e. None of the above.
7. Monkeylearn is performance measuring tool
a. True
b. False
8. Which of the following is not production tool?
a. Acrolinx
b. Narrative Science
c. Clarifai
d. Hubspot
9. Which is not a stage in marketing framework?
a. Personalization
b. Promotion
c. Product
d. Planning
10. Tick out wrong pair
a. Planning- Equals3
b. Production-onespot
c. Personalization- Uberflip
d. Performance- PaveAL

3.8 Short answer questions

a. Explain phrase tool in short.
b. How Hubspot can be used in marketing.
c. Explain how artificial intelligence can be adopted in Blueshift?
d. Explain Monkeylearn and PaveAI tools used for measuring performance.
e. Explain any two tools used for promotion of product.

3.9 Long answer questions

a. Explain one-one tool for all phases of marketing framework.
b. List and explain different tools available for personalization in marketing.
c. List and explain tools for available for planning.
d. Explain any five tools available for promotion.
e. List and explain two tools each available for production and personalization

3.10 References
 Marketing Framework ,Noel Capon
 Managing Marketing in the 21st Century Developing & Implementing the
Market Strategy, Noel Capon
 Module-04
Predictive Analytics
4.1 Motivation: This module helps learner, to learn about the various tools used for the
predicting sales, increasing ROI and generating revenue using different prediction
algorithms and study different segmentation techniques.
4.2 Learning Objective: Learner will be able to study different models available for sales
forecasting and customer prediction and automated segmentation for customers.
4.3 Syllabus

Prerequisites Syllabus Duration Self Study

Machine learning Fundamentals of predictive 1 Hr 1 Hr
and data mining analytics
concepts and Prediction model for lead scoring 2 Hr 1 Hr
algorithms and sales forecasting,
Churn prediction model, 2 Hr 1 Hr

Predictive modelling for customer 2 Hr 1 Hr

behavior
Automated segmentation 1 Hr 2 Hr

4.4 Definitions:
 Predictive Analysis: Predictive Analytics is a sub-filed of Data Analytics and
Business Intelligence, which deals with an in-depth analysis of past events and
forecasts of future events.
 Prediction Analysis: Predictive Analytics relies heavily on the theoretical
foundations of statistics to enable modeling of future behavior based on historical
data.
 Predictive lead scoring: Predictive lead scoring is a novel approach to prioritizing
customers.
 Customer Churn: Customer churn refers to when a customer (player, subscriber,
user, etc.) ceases his or her relationship with a company
  Sales forecasting: Sales Forecasting is the process of estimating the number of
sales for your business over a future period of time.
 Segmentation: Segmentation is the strategy of segmenting prospects based on the
sort of information that is often in the public domain and is gathered through
online research or simple lead capture forms.
 Marketing Segmentation: Market segmentation refers to a strategy of separating
customers into distinct groupings based on shared characteristics.
4.5 Key Terms:
 PA: Predictive Analysis
 ROI: Rate of Investment
 CRM: Customer Relationship Management
 IoT: Internet of Things
 LTV: Life Time Value
 CES: Customer Effort Scores
 XM: Experience Management
4.6 Theory
4.6.1 Fundamentals of predictive analytics
Predictive Analytics is a sub-filed of Data Analytics and Business Intelligence,
which deals with an in-depth analysis of past events and forecasts of future events.
This specialized branch of Data Analytics combines the power of Data Mining,
Data Modeling, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning to make probabilistic
predictions of future events.
So, Predictive Analytics (PA) relies heavily on the theoretical foundations of
statistics to enable modeling of future behavior based on historical data. Global
organizations today depend on Predictive Analytics to better leverage their data
assets for business success.
Predictive Analytics is commonly used to detect fraud, predict customer churn,
plug revenue leakages, optimize marketing programs, setting product prices, plan
inventory, lowering operational costs, and reducing risks.
A Survey on Marketing Analytics
 A Forbes Insights article titled The Predictive Journey: Survey on Predictive
Marketing Strategies that Predictive Analytics is guiding marketing decisions in
all data technology enabled enterprises today. The survey included the feedback
from 308, North-America based, C-level executives of companies with $20 Million
or more annual revenue. The full survey Report is available for you from the above
link. In Maximize Conversions with Predictive Analytics, Gartner indicates that in
traditional marketing, customer buying patterns and purchase figures helped the
businesses to plan inventory. In the digital business planning scenario, marketers
have the support of advanced predictive modeling tools and IoT data to
understand customer behavior.

4.6.2 Prediction model for lead scoring and sales forecasting

4.6.2.1 Lead Scoring
Predictive lead scoring is a novel approach to prioritizing customers. No sales rep
wants to lose time with unqualified leads and these systems enable reps to focus
on qualified leads.
There are a few ways to name this activity: predictive lead scoring, predictive
scoring, and customer behavior modeling. It is a subfield of predictive sales
analytics.
Poor lead prioritization can decimate companies. Sales targets get missed, teams
get demoralized. Most importantly, sales personnel fail to learn from their
experiences. They can’t gain generalizable experiences as they encounter leads
with wildly varying intent. Even the greatest sales tactics will not work on a
customer who is not willing to buy. A sales person who has seen only customers
who are not willing to buy, can lose hope on even the best sales tactics and
processes.
Benefits of predictive lead scoring:
Now that you know about the relevant approaches, it is important to learn benefits
of lead scoring so you can convince sales leadership to invest in these systems.
Ultimate benefit of lead scoring is increased sales. With prioritized leads, sales
personnel will be able to spend more time on leads that are likely to convert which
will result in increased sales. Working with fewer customers, yet closing more
sales is a sales rep’s dream come true. This will result in increased morale for your
sales team, leading to improved retention of sales reps. and these predictive
systems improve with more data. As more data is accumulated in the system,
prediction quality will increase, further improving sales.
Working of lead scoring
The most critical data for lead scoring is of course sales data. All other data are
essentially indirect measures of interest and without sales data, no one can
scientifically tell whether your leads will collect. So the first step is always to sell
to a significant number of customers and then analyzing the data for patterns.

After such macro scale analyses, some obvious patterns became even more visible,
for example the correlation between a lead’s position in the account and their
likelihood to buy. These were used to build rules-based systems which historically
were prevalent in lead scoring. The lead’s location, company and position within
the company were used to determine lead quality.
Later, more dynamic criteria like behavior of the lead on the company’s website
started to get analyzed. Many parameters such as location, size, interest, historical
buying habits are also being analyzed. And this is only that company’s data.
There are limits to what one company can do with its own data. Data aggregation
can improve the quality of lead scoring. Online behavior of the lead on other
websites can reveal whether she is really interested in buying or just trying to learn
about a topic.

Probable users of predictive lead scoring

Ideal companies have

 a repeatable sales process that already sold to hundreds of customers

  well managed CRM data including all sales rep interactions like both
successful and failed sales
 not changed their target market or product recently
Unless you have high quality sales data for a few months covering hundreds of
sales, it is difficult to build a good system. Modern machine learning algorithms
that predictive lead scoring engines rely on are data hungry.

You should already be selling to your target customers. A company doing frequent
pivots with its product may not have enough sales data for a good lead scoring
system. Since system will work on existing sales and since existing sales are not
representative of the current direction of the company, the prediction system will
likely underperform.

Limitations of predictive lead scoring

As identified below, predictive scoring is not for all companies. Here are the
current shortcomings and how you can overcome them:
 Predictive scoring systems are data hungry: Until you have a few hundred
sales, your knowledge of the market, your sales force’s relationships in the
market, your product quality are far more important than sales systems.
Focus on the product while casting a wide net, selectively spending on
marketing and hiring the best sales reps that have experience with
emerging products
 Most predictive scoring systems are black-boxes: Your reps won’t know
why a certain individual is a qualified lead while another is not.
Prescriptive sales systems try to fix these problems by providing not only
data on leads but also recommendations on how to approach the lead. We
will be covering that category soon
 Your target market and product should be stable: If your target market
changes, your sales data loses its value for analytics. However, if you know
the critical junction after which your company decided to focus on a certain
 market, you could take data from that point on to have training data for
the prescriptive model.
4.6.2.2 Sales Forecasting:

Sales Forecasting is the process of estimating the number of sales for

your business over a future period of time. This forecast period can be
monthly, quarterly, half-yearly, or yearly.
Sales Forecasting can be done for an individual sales rep or a sales team
or a particular department in the company. It helps
managers/executives keep track of the performance and take corrective
action when needed.
Usually, sales forecasts are based on past sales data, industry-wide
comparisons, and current economic trends. It is easier to come up with
a sales forecast if you have a good amount of data in hand. However,
newly established companies who don’t have a substantial amount of
historical data are forced to depend on market research and competitive
intelligence to base their forecasts.

Importance of Sales Forecasting

Research shows that companies with accurate sales forecasts are 10%
more likely to grow their revenue year-over-year and 7.3% more likely
to hit their quota. Clearly, sales forecasting is important for every
business.
Sales forecasting is not just about predicting your sales numbers, it’s
about having the necessary information that enables you to make the
right decisions today that will help you in the future – that’s why
businesses should forecast.

 Spots Potential Issues: Sales forecasting allows you to spot potential

issues and gives you time to avoid or alleviate them. For instance,
 midway through the quarter, you notice that your sales team is not
hitting their targets. You dig deep and find out that there aren’t enough
leads being generated for the sales team to convert. Shift your focus on
to the marketing department and let them know that they’ll have to
ramp up their operations and improve their lead generation strategy to
bring in more leads.
 Hiring and Resource Management: Sales forecasts also help you with
hiring and resource/inventory management decisions. Assume that
your sales forecast predicts an uptick in demand. To meet that demand,
you’ll need to allocate budget and divert your effort towards hiring and
getting resources. And on the other hand, if it is predicted that there
will be a decline in sales, it is time to put a pause on hiring and resource
plans and shift your focus into bringing in more business.
 Drives Performance: Going by the popular saying, What gets measured
gets done; having a forecast report in front of you lets you know what
your goals are and keeps you focused. It gives you the necessary
information you need to make decisions that will improve your results.

Factors Influencing Sales Forecasting

 Economy Conditions: It goes without saying that the condition of the
economy has an impact on every business and market. If there is a
depression in the economy, people/businesses will lose money and
they’ll be more reluctant to purchase, and when the economy is strong,
people are most likely to invest and buy.
 Policy Changes: Changes in policies or the introduction of new
laws/regulations can either help or hurt your business. So, when
forecasting your sales for the next period, it is vital that you take these
into account.
 Industry Changes: Every industry has similar products made by
different organizations. Factors such as new tech improvements,
design, competitors running promotional campaigns, or new
 businesses entering the ring can change and affect the market share of
the industry – which in turn will factor into your sales forecasts.
 Product Changes: Changes in your product can heavily influence your
sales forecast. These changes may be rolling out a new feature due to
high demand or removing a useless feature or removing bugs.
Salespeople can leverage these product changes to shorten their sales
cycle and close more deals.

Sales Forecasting Methods

1. Length of Sales Cycle Forecasting

This forecasting method uses data on how long a lead typically takes to
convert into a paying customer. For example, if an average sales cycle lasts
four months and your sales rep has been working a prospect for two
months, there is a 50% chance that your rep will close the deal.
Forecasting using the length of the sales cycle is a great technique because
it’s completely objective, and your forecast isn’t dependant on a subjective
factor like, your reps’ gut told them that they’ll close or they’re feeling good
about this prospect.
Another advantage of this method is that it can be applied to a slew of sales
cycles, depending on the source. For example, a referral client might take
two weeks, while a cold email outreach client might take three months. All
these leads can be separated into various buckets according to their source
to give you a more accurate picture – forecast.
This method is most valuable for companies that religiously track how and
when prospects enter the sales pipeline. So it is essential that your sales and
marketing teams are strongly aligned with each other.
Pros:
 It’s completely objective.
 It can be applied to various lead sources to give you a more accurate
forecast.
Cons:
 The sales cycle can vary according to who you’re selling to. It will be
shorter for SMBs and longer for enterprises.
 Your sales team should relentlessly track data. Even a small error can
throw your predictions way off.

2. Lead-driven Forecasting

Lead-driven forecasting involves analyzing each lead source and assigning

a value based on what similar leads have done in the past and creating a
forecast based on that source value. By assigning a value to each of your
lead sources, you’ll be able to get a better sense of the probability of each
lead that can turn into revenue-generating clients.
For this method, you’ll need to have data on these metrics:
 Leads per month for the previous time period
 Lead to customer conversion rate by source
 Average sales price by source
This data-driven forecasting is susceptible to changes though. For example,
if your marketing team changes its lead generation strategy to align with
the latest trends, this can change the number of leads from different sources,
which will change your lead to customer conversion rates. These varying
end-results can be minimized by being updated on the latest changes and
by taking them into account when forecasting.
Pros:
 The lead value for each source gives you a more accurate sales forecast.
Cons:
 Highly susceptible to variance due to multiple factors being involved.

3. Opportunity Stage Forecasting

In this approach, you take a look at where the prospect is in your pipeline
and calculate the chances of the deal closing. Companies can break down
their pipeline into various stages; like prospecting, qualified, demo, quote,
closing, etc.. And generally, the further the prospect is down the pipeline,
the better are the chances of closing the deal.

To implement this technique, you’ll need to analyze and understand your

past performance so that you can get a good estimate on the rates of success
for each stage of the pipeline. For example, rep X is working on a $5000 deal
and has reached the stage where the prospect is done with his/her free trial
of the product, and the probability of them becoming customers is 60% after
the trial stage, your forecasted amount will be $3000.
However, despite being a data-driven prediction, it isn’t entirely accurate.
Opportunity Stage Forecasting doesn’t take into account the individual
characteristics of each deal like the age of the lead. For example, a prospect
might be at the trial stage for around two months and they’d have the same
success rate as a hot lead who reached the trial stage in a few weeks.
To counter this problem, the VP of Sales at FullContact, Mike Brouwer
developed a new methodology to forecast sales for his team.
Pros:
 The calculations are simple enough.
 This technique is highly objective.
Cons:
 It doesn’t take into account the characteristics of a deal like age, deal
size, and so on.
 Inaccurate data can give you inaccurate sales forecasts.
4. Intuitive Forecasting

Who better to ask whether the sale will happen or not than your own sales
guy?
The Intuitive Forecasting method is based on the trust you have on your
sales reps. You start by asking them how confident they are that their sale
will close, and when. It factors in the opinion of the sales reps who are the
ones closest to the prospects – they are most likely to know how things are
going.
You can certainly see the downside in this method. It’s entirely subjective.
The reps are naturally inclined to be optimistic and will likely offer
generous estimates. And there is no way to verify this assessment other
than going through all the interactions between your sales rep and the
client, which is just extra work.
Pros:
 It’s a great way for newly founded companies who don’t have historic
sales data to base their sales forecasts on.
Cons:
 It’s highly subjective. Reps tend to be more optimistic about their
chances with their opinions.

5. Test-Market Analysis Forecasting

With this method, you can roll out your new product/service to a certain
group of people based on their market segregation. For instance, you can
release the product to a limited, geographical area and see how it sells. This
result is then studied and can be used to make an accurate forecast for the
full release.
The Test-Market Analysis forecasting is useful for large companies who are
rolling out a new product and would like to understand the market
response, or a startup doing a soft launch to increase their brand awareness.
However, with this method, you should remember that not all markets are
the same – what happens in one market might not happen elsewhere.
Pros:
 You get to learn the market response first hand and fix any issues before
the final launch.
 Startups can give exclusive early access to their product. This exclusivity
increases brand awareness and brings in an air of mystery making your
product more desirable.
Cons:
 Releasing a beta version or doing a soft launch can be quite costly.
 Not all markets are the same.

6. Historical Forecasting

As the name suggests, with Historical Forecasting you take the previous
sales data for a certain time frame and assume that your sales will be equal
to that or greater.
For example, if your Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) in May was
$50,000, using Historical Forecasting you’d assume that the MRR for June
would be at least $50,000. You can add your average year-on-year growth
rate, say 10%, and the estimate for June would be $50,500.
There are issues with this method though. It doesn’t consider the fact that
that the market is always changing. For instance, during June if your direct
competitors ran a promotional campaign for their product, you will most
likely see a decline in sales and you could end up selling less than $50,000.
With that in mind, Historical Forecasting is a quick and easy way to
forecast, it can be used as a benchmark rather than the foundation for your
sales forecasts.
Pros:
 It’s quick and easy to do.
 If your market isn’t susceptible to many changes, Historical Forecasting
can prove to be highly accurate.
Cons:
 Doesn’t take into account the seasonality of the market.
 The sales pipeline isn’t taken into consideration.

7. Multivariable Analysis Forecasting

Incorporating various factors from other forecasting techniques like sales

cycle length, individual rep performance, and opportunity stage
probability, Multivariable Analysis is the most sophisticated and accurate
forecasting method.
Consider this simplified example. Two sales reps are working the same
account. Rep A is working an $8000 deal and has just finished the demo;
according to the opportunity stage forecasting, the win rate for a completed
demo stage is 60%, hence the sales forecast for this deal is $4800.
Rep B is working a smaller deal of $3000 and is earlier in the sales process,
but the Rep B’s win rate is around 80% making the forecast $2400. Now the
total sales forecast for this account is,
$4800 + $2400 = $7200
Unlike this example, forecasts based on Multivariable Analysis are highly
complex, it requires advanced analytics solution, making it impractical for
small businesses or startups. You’ll also need clean data – sales reps should
 track the deal progresses and activities or else your results will be
inaccurate no matter what software you use.
Pros:
 A highly data-driven method that produces accurate results.
 Despite the math being complex here, the sales rep need not learn them
as the analytical tools themselves will calculate and produce the forecast
results.
Cons:
 Advanced analytical tools are needed and they can be a bit heavy on the
company’s wallet.
 Presence of dirty data can give you inaccurate sales forecasts.

4.6.3 Churn prediction model

4.6.3.1 Customer Churn
Customer churn (also known as customer attrition) refers to when a
customer (player, subscriber, user, etc.) ceases his or her relationship with
a company. Online businesses typically treat a customer as churned once a
particular amount of time has elapsed since the customer’s last interaction
with the site or service. The full cost of churn includes both lost revenue
and the marketing costs involved with replacing those customers with new
ones. Reducing churn is a key business goal of every online business.
4.6.3.2 Importance of Predicting Customer Churn
The ability to predict that a particular customer is at a high risk of churning,
while there is still time to do something about it, represents a huge
additional potential revenue source for every online business. Besides the
direct loss of revenue that results from a customer abandoning the
business, the costs of initially acquiring that customer may not have
already been covered by the customer’s spending to date. (In other words,
acquiring that customer may have actually been a losing investment.)
Furthermore, it is always more difficult and expensive to acquire a new
customer than it is to retain a current paying customer.
4.6.3.3 Reducing Customer Churn with Targeted Proactive Retention
In order to succeed at retaining customers who would otherwise abandon
the business, marketers and retention experts must be able to (a) predict in
advance which customers are going to churn through churn analysis and
(b) know which marketing actions will have the greatest retention impact
on each particular customer. Armed with this knowledge, a large
proportion of customer churn can be eliminated.
While simple in theory, the realities involved with achieving this
“proactive retention” goal are extremely challenging.
4.6.3.4 The Difficulty of Predicting Churn
Churn prediction modeling techniques attempt to understand the precise
customer behaviors and attributes which signal the risk and timing of
customer churn. The accuracy of the technique used is obviously critical to
the success of any proactive retention efforts. After all, if the marketer is
unaware of a customer about to churn, no action will be taken for that
customer. Additionally, special retention-focused offers or incentives may
be inadvertently provided to happy, active customers, resulting in reduced
revenues for no good reason.
Unfortunately, most of the churn prediction modeling methods rely on
quantifying risk based on static data and metrics, i.e., information about
the customer as he or she exists right now. The most common churn
prediction models are based on older statistical and data-mining methods,
such as logistic regression and other binary modeling techniques. These
approaches offer some value and can identify a certain percentage of at-
risk customers, but they are relatively inaccurate and end up leaving
money on the table.
4.6.3.5 Churn Prediction Model
Optimove uses a newer and far more accurate approach to customer churn
prediction: at the core of Optimove’s ability to accurately predict which
customers will churn is a unique method of calculating customer lifetime
value (LTV) for each and every customer. The LTV forecasting technology
built into Optimove is based on advanced academic research and was
 further developed and improved over a number of years by a team of first-
rate PhDs and software developers. This method is battle-tested and
proven as an accurate and effective approach in a wide range of industries
and customer scenarios.
Without revealing too much about the “secret sauce” of Optimove’s
customer churn prediction technology, the approach combines continual
dynamic micro-segmentation and a unique, mathematically intensive
predictive behavior modeling system. The former intelligently and
automatically segments the entire customer base into a hierarchical
structure of ever-smaller behavioral-demographic segments. This
segmentation is dynamic and updated continually based on changes in the
data. The latter is based on the fact that the behavior patterns of individual
customers frequently change over time. In other words, the “segment route
history” of each customer is an extremely important factor determining
when and why the customer may churn.
By merging the most exacting micro-segmentation available anywhere
with a deep understanding of how customers move from one micro-
segment to another over time – including the ability to predict those moves
before they occur – an unprecedented degree of churn analysis accuracy is
attainable.

4.6.4 Predictive modelling for customer behavior

Customer Behavior Modeling

Customer Behavior Modeling is defined as the creation of a mathematical
construct to represent the common behaviors observed among particular groups
of customers in order to predict how similar customers will behave under similar
circumstances.

Customer behavior models are typically based on data mining of customer data,
and each model is designed to answer one question at one point in time. For
example, a customer model can be used to predict what a particular group of
customers will do in response to a particular marketing action. If the model is
sound and the marketer follows the recommendations it generated, then the
marketer will observe that a majority of the customers in the group responded as
predicted by the model.

The Difficulty of Customer Behavior Modeling

Unfortunately, building customer behavior models is typically a difficult and
expensive task. This is because the smart and experienced customer analytics
experts who know how to do it are expensive and difficult to find, and because the
mathematical techniques they need to use are complex and risky.
Furthermore, even once a customer behavior model has been built, it is difficult to
manipulate it for the purposes of the marketer, i.e., to determine exactly what
marketing actions to take for each customer or group of customers.
Finally, despite their mathematical complexity, most customer models are actually
relatively simple. Because of this necessity, most customer behavior models ignore
so many pertinent factors that the predictions they generate are generally not very
reliable.

Predict customer behavior

Leading organizations - including Uber, Chobani and Finder - are embracing
Experience Management (XM) not only to understand customer behavior, but
predict it and solve problems before they even occur.

Here are the ways that companies unlock the insights needed to win more
customers, increase their share of wallet, and boost workplace performance:

1. Reduce churn
Combining data from experience insights along the customer journey with
operational insights such as declining repeat purchases, reduced purchase
amounts, decreased purchase frequency etc, predictive software combines these
to help you predict individual customer behavior, and take action before it is too
late.

2. Increase retention
Customer retention software helps you measure and understand the customer’s
journey and their experiences, both relational and transactional such as purchase
or post-support follow-up. By combining X data with O data, you can identify
which customers are likely to stay and which will churn. With closed-loop and
action planning tools, you can follow up with at-risk customers to resolve their
problems and in turn encourage them to stay and reduce the need to acquire new
customers.

3. Improve customer satisfaction

Knowing, and understanding that your customers are satisfied with your brand is
essential to success. It will predict their likelihood to return, purchasing and
recommendation to others. Improved customer satisfaction will result in a higher
return rate, more customer loyalty and higher spending. CSAT is the key
performance indicator for customer satisfaction.

4. Increase customer engagement

Explore what motivates customers to engage with you by collecting experience
data from them via surveys, questionnaires and other feedback channels. After
exploring the types of engagement happening in your business, the next step is to
map them against business outcomes such as sales, NPS, CSAT and customer
effort scores (CES).

5. Triangulate CX data
Data triangulation is when you validate your data using two or more sources. This
approach ensures the insights captured are accurate and relevant. It’s therefore
critical when understanding and anticipating your customers’ needs.
Data triangulation relies on multiple methods to collect, analyze and act on CX
data to predict behavior before it occurs. For example, episodic NPS can unpack
brand perception using customer journey episodes (e.g. sales, billing and support)
alongside focus groups to build out regression models. This process helps
eliminate bias by cultivating empathetic research to analyze customers on their
terms.

6. Use product feedback

Making great products means creating great product experiences for customers,
listening to feedback and quickly acting upon it. If you create a great product early
on then you won’t need to react to the ongoing problems that occur from a bad
product. As the maxim goes, “buy nice or buy twice.” Getting it right may be
costlier to begin with, but this approach will pay dividends in the future. However,
it’s also likely that your products will evolve with time, so when the need arises
make sure that you’re incorporating customer feedback into those changes

7. Track brand health

The task of understanding your customer is never really over: expectations,
platforms, and needs are constantly changing. This is why measuring brand health
is vital when creating a sustainable CX program. Tracking your brand provides a
consistent benchmark for you to measure yourself against in fast-changing
economies, as well as mitigating future incidents before they occur. This will allow
you to track the impacts of the customer experience on the brand.

8. Embrace AI and machine learning

This turns ‘big data’ into ‘useful data’. Predictive CX needs to tell a simple story if
you want results. However, to take action, your brand needs to focus on critical
and creative thinking rather than drown in a sea of data. AI and machine learning
is your life raft. By automating research, you’ll be able to make faster operational
decisions to solve problems before they spread, simply because you’ll be able to
see what actions you need to take.
4.6.5 Automated segmentation
Market segmentation
Market segmentation refers to a strategy of separating customers into distinct
groupings based on shared characteristics. By creating these groups, you can send
messaging that is more targeted and is, therefore, more likely to nurture them
through the sales funnel. Because you have a better sense of what the people in a
particular group want to see, your marketing will address their requirements more
precisely.

There are a few different ways you can segment your prospective customers.

Classical Segmentation
This refers to the strategy of segmenting prospects based on the sort of information
that is often in the public domain and is gathered through online research or
simple lead capture forms. For example, you might segment based on their
location, their seniority within their organisation, their industry, or the size of their
company.
Lead Scoring
With a lead scoring strategy, you assign different weights to your leads based on
the characteristics that matter the most to your organisation. For example, if the
buying power for your products and services typically lies with the CEO or CMO,
then members of the C-suite would receive a weighted score higher than their
subordinates.

This score will help you estimate the value of particular leads and what should be
used to encourage them through the buyer's journey. It also offers clues about
what this lead might want to learn about through the content you send.

Relationship And Behavioural Profiling

Relationship and behavioral segmentation lists allow you to dynamically sort
people based on their relationship to you and the behaviours they exhibit on your
site. For example, the pages they visit, their level of social media engagement with
your organization, the emails they click on, and the products purchased can all be
used to determine how a lead should be segmented and the emails they receive.
For example, say you wanted to encourage people to sign up for a webinar. You
might invite people who belong to a particular segment because they've shown an
interest in a specific product by visiting production information and pricing pages
on your website. You can create a dynamic email campaign that delivers
personalized content based upon people's responses. One email can be sent to
people who have RSVP and a different one for those who have not. RSVPs who
have answered 'no' can receive an email tailored to their response, and a different
one sent to those who responded with a 'yes'. This allows you to send relevant,
intelligent and tailored communications to people.
Dynamically sorted lists also allow you to follow up after the event based upon
people's attendance, improving the user experience and building the relationship
with each individual.

Personal Preference
Finally, you can also offer segmented emails based upon the preferences of the
user. You can provide different levels of registration so that leads can select the
sort of interaction most suited to their needs. A basic example is allowing your
email subscribers to determine how frequently they want to hear from you. Some
customers might want to receive news and updates from you weekly; others might
only want a summary once a month. Offering customers the ability to personalize
their email subscription can allow for further segmentation based on their own
needs and desires.Give your customers control of their experience.

Importance of Market Segmentation

Segmenting emails makes it significantly easier to tailor the communications you
send based on an individual's unique needs and obstacles. It allows brands to take
their business marketing to the next level. Additionally, it accomplishes these
goals without the need for endless spreadsheets. Businesses find that it reduces
costs and saves resources. Nearly a third of marketers say that the most significant
benefit of marketing automation is the time savings. Allowing customers to
influence the segmented lists they end up receiving also helps them define the type
of experience they want to have with you. The average person today sees about
5000 ads a day. Brands who want to engage with their audience successfully need
to find a way to rise above this constant noise and produce relevant content that
customers want to see.
Not only does a higher degree of personalization help brands get the information
they want to their prospective customers, but it also fulfils the expectation that
many customers are beginning to have. Consumers want to see businesses
customize their sales process and communications for customers. Sixty-two
percent of customers report that they expect to receive personalized deals from
firms based on what they have already purchased. This explains why 65 percent
of email marketers say that dynamic lists and personalized email campaigns are
the most effective tool they have.
Studies have even found that effective email personalization can generate 17
percent more revenue for the organizations that use it. Ninety-six percent of
surveyed digital marketers report that personalization advances customer
relationships, with 88 percent saying that they have seen a quantifiable lift in their
business results since they began using personalization efforts.

How to Use Segmentation in Marketing Automation:

Every marketing campaign, even automated ones, should be relevant to the person
you’re targeting. The good news is that targeting your message through
segmentation is the fastest way to be relevant. That’s because segmenting your
database based on activity allows you to find core groups of people with similar
levels of interest.

Segmenting from email actions

Email actions are a segmentation most marketers are familiar with. Email opens,
bounces, and clicks are the standard email actions used for segmentation. Learning
to use, or not use, the following email actions will help you understand how to
segment correctly from these actions and increase the accuracy of your segments.
Segmenting on email opens: Email opens are a very bad segmentation to use in
most cases. Email opens are a false positive. It is better to segment on other email
activity. This has been used mostly because there were not better metrics to
segment from. Now you have better ones, so leave this one on the shelf.

Segmenting on email bounces: Segmenting your list on email bounces is very

helpful for cleaning your database. Many times, a bounce on an email requires a
manual effort to determine the validity of the email address. Bounces may also
signal sales to work other leads in the account.
Segment your email bounces into emails that hard bounce (which denotes a bad
email address) and emails that soft bounce (which denotes an out-of-office
response) four or more times.

Segmenting on email link clicks: Segmenting on email link clicks is the best way
to segment on email actions. A link click is a direct action that is very accurate,
revealing a specific interest in the content the link points to. Depending on your
type of email, segmenting on email clicks helps you
 Segment leads by product interest
 Segment leads by level of interest
 Move leads into different campaigns

Segmenting from prospect actions

If your goal is to have a segment of people with a specific interest, you can easily
accomplish this goal by segmenting based on one or more actions such as content
downloads, pages visited, and emails clicked. Understanding and segmenting on
multiple actions helps you understand your audience much better than
segmenting based on only one action.

Segmenting from prospect inactivity

Inactivity can tell you as much about a person as the actions the person takes,
because inactivity can give you insights into someone’s behavior patterns.
Learning how to correctly segment on the following behaviors is key to your
future success with marketing automation:

Segmenting on time: Create segments for inactivity time frames. Consider using
segments such as
 Date of last interaction
 No action within the past 60 days
 No marketing touch in past 60 days

Segmenting on lead score: Scores should be calculated based on a combination of

activity and inactivity. Consider these segments:
 Leads with no scores
 Leads whose scores have gone up the most in the past 30 days
 Leads with the highest score over a period of time
 Leads whose scores have gone down in the past 60 days

Segmenting off of CRM data

Marketing automation makes it easy to access customer relationship management
(CRM) data. Because CRM systems are usually central data repositories for a
company, your marketing automation tool won’t be the only system putting data
into your CRM system. Any data that is in your CRM system can be used for
segmentations by your marketing automation tool. Consider looking at data sets
that are helpful for more targeted campaigns:
 Segmenting on last purchase
 Segmenting on total purchase history
 Segmenting on lead stage
 Segmenting on opportunity stage
 Segmenting on a specific sales rep’s leads
 Sales activity is also recorded in your CRM and can be used for segmentation.
Segmenting on sales activity helps you pick up the slack when sales reps are too
busy to reach all their leads.

4.7 Multiple choice questions

1. Which of the following is not a criterion for successful market
segmentation?
a. there must be difference among consumers
b. each segment must be located within a geographical area
c. there must be consumer similarities within each segment identified
d. a segment must be large enough to cover costs

2. A products position is located in the minds of ______________________.

a. Advertiser
b. salesman
c. consumer
d. all of these

3. Readiness stage and attitude towards product are major segmentation

variable in which category?
a. Geographic
b. Behavioral
c. Demographic
d. Psychographic

4. Sales forecasting involves

a. sales planning
b. distribution channels
c. sales pricing
d. All of the above

5. A marketing plan is necessary for

a. to decide product strategy
b. to decide advertising strategy
c. to decide marketing strategies
d. having a focused approached to marketing
e. All of the above
6. A fall in the market share implies
 a. business is wound up
b. competition has increased
c. profit has gone up
d. prices are erratic
e. sales have gone up
7. Customer churn refers to ____.
a. customer defection
b. customer value
c. customer loyalty
d. customer anxiety
e. customer mix
8. Which of the following best describes predictive modeling?
a. A process marketers use to evaluate how factors influence future behavior
b. A process of building models that predict the future for businesses
c. A predictive analytics process that creates a statistical model of future
behavior
9. True or false? Creating predictive models is an iterative process that requires
ongoing development and refinement.
a. True
b. False
10. One recommended strategy for implementing predictive analytics without
breaking the bank is:
a. Hire a team of skilled analytics professionals to manage your predictive
modeling software.
b. Build and test prototype predictive models based on pertinent business
questions.
c. Choose a tool that can handle all potential needs so you don't have to make
future purchases.

4.8 Short answer questions

a. Explain predictive Analysis used in marketing.
b. Explain customer churm prediction model with its importance.
c. What is customer churm, explain in brief.
 d. List and explain importance of automatic segmentation.
e. What is importance of sales forecasting?
f. List limitations of predictive lead scoring.

4.9 Long answer questions

a. Enlist and explain difficulties occurred in customer behavior modeling.
b. List and explain different sales forecasting methods.
c. Which are the factors influencing sales forecasting, explain.
d. Explain predictive lead scoring with its working and benefits.

4.10 References
a. Artificial intelligence marketing and predicting consumer choice: an overview
of tools and techniques Struhl, S.
b. Artificial intelligence for marketing: practical applications Sterne, J.
c. Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, .. Eric Siegel · 2016
 Module-05
Psychographics, NLP and Computer
Vision
5.1 Motivation: Psychographics, Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision
broaden the perspectives of Human machine interaction. This module will discuss how
these can be further used in Digital marketing.
5.2 Learning Objective: Students will be learning about how user experience can be
enhanced while buying products using Digital marketing platforms.
5.3 Syllabus:

Prerequisites Syllabus Duration Self Study

Artificial Customer psychographics, 1 Hr 1 Hr
Intelligence, Natural
Language
leveraging personality traits to predict 1 Hr 1 Hr
consumption preferences using NLP,
processing, Detect emotions, assign labels, 1 Hr 1 Hr
Computer Vision
understand text from images, 1 Hr 1 Hr

detect news events, 1 Hr 2 Hr

logos using Computer Vision 1 Hr 2 Hr

5.4 Definitions:
 Psychographics: Psychographics is a qualitative methodology used to describe
traits of humans on psychological attributes.
 Demographics: Demographics deal with a specific segment of the population,
psychographics deal with what motivates their buying behavior.
 Artificial intelligence : Artificial intelligence is intelligence demonstrated by
machines, unlike the natural intelligence displayed by humans and animals, which
involves consciousness and emotionality
 Natural Language Processing : Natural language processing is a subfield of
linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence concerned with the
 interactions between computers and human language, in particular how to
program computers to process and analyze large amounts of natural language
data
 Computer Vision: Computer vision is an interdisciplinary scientific field that
deals with how computers can gain high-level understanding from digital images
or videos.
 Logo: Logo is a graphic mark, emblem, or symbol used to aid and promote public
identification and recognition.
 Label: Label is a piece of paper, plastic film, cloth, metal, or other material affixed
to a container or product, on which is written or printed information or symbols
about the product or item.

5.5 Key Terms :

 AI: Artificial intelligence
5.5.1 NLP: Natural Language Programming
5.5.2 SMM: Social Media Marketing

5.6 Theory
5.6.1. Customer psychographics
5.6.1.1 Introduction :
Business Dictionary defines the term this way: “Analysis of consumer lifestyles to
create a detailed customer profile. Market researchers conduct psychographic
research by asking consumers to agree or disagree with activities, interests and
opinion statements.” Rather than examining who your customer is, you’re
examining why they buy. Before we go any further, it’s important to note that
there are some distinct differences between psychographics and the much more
commonly used demographics. While demographics deal with a specific segment
of the population, psychographics deal with what motivates their buying
behavior.
 Fig 5.1 Difference between Demographics and psychographics

As you can see, psychographics focus on the underlying interests, activities,

values, and opinions that motivate consumers to buy.
This is important because it allows you to create a far more robust customer profile
and helps “scratch your audience’s” itch when marketing.

5.6.1.2 Obtaining Psychographics

So now that we understand what psychographics are, how do we go about
acquiring them? We outline two major methods below: interviewing your current
clients and investigating you website analytics.

1. Interviewing Existing Clients

Right now, take five seconds and think of your best current client. Next time you
talk, ask her a little more about herself. You can ask what she did over the
weekend, if she’s seen any good movies lately (no? you’re more of a tv or online
entertainment fan?), found any great holiday deals, made any New Year’s
resolutions.
 Depending on your relationship with the person, you can tell her exactly why
you’re asking and be more direct. If you’re not in a business where you have that
kind of relationship with customers, do you have any friends who are similar to
your ideal client? You could ask him or her the same questions.
When you ask the right questions, you can find out what she does for fun, whether
she’s a bargain-hunter, what motivates her and what her personal goals are.
Want a larger sampling? Send out a customer survey and be honest – tell them you
want to better understand what they care about. Most people are more than happy
to share.

2. Investigating Website Analytics

Prefer a more behind-the-scenes kind of investigation? Look at your existing site
content and previous special offers. What has moved people to click, call, or buy
in the past?
If you haven’t been paying attention to this, it may require some testing, but can
also be extremely effective, as people’s true motivations are revealed by the actions
they take. They may not think of themselves as bargain-hunters, but if that
discount code really worked, it’s good to know.

5.6.1.3 Using Psychographics in Marketing:

At this point, we’ve established the difference between demographics and
psychographics along with some of the most effective approaches for gathering
your data. But here’s the real question: How do you actually apply it? As it turns
out, there are several ways you can put this data to use.

Fine-Tuning Your Brand’s Values

The way you position your brand can have an immense impact on how well you’re
able to connect with consumers. If you strike the right chords, this can help you
establish a loyal legion of brand ambassadors, which has its obvious benefits. One
of the first ways to apply your data is to examine the psychographic profiles of
your most loyal followers and fine-tune your brand’s values to match.
For example, some of the main points in our psychographic information example
earlier included:
1. Concerned with preserving natural resources
2. Seeks clothing that’s sourced from sustainable materials
3. Enjoys outdoor activities such as hiking, camping, and backpacking
4. You would want to take these findings and work on weaving them into
your overarching brand values. They would serve as your main touch
points.

For instance, a quick look at TOMS’ website(Fig 5.2), and it’s clear that there’s an
emphasis on philanthropy and helping others.

Fig 5.2 Toms_ Homepage

Looking at Burt’s Bees (Fig 5.3), and it’s obvious there’s an emphasis on sourcing
natural products.
 Fig 5.3 Burt_s Bees Homepage
You get the idea.

Optimizing Landing Pages

According to research from eConsultancy only 22 percent of businesses are
satisfied with their conversion rates? One of the most effective ways to improve
them is to make key adjustments to your landing pages. In fact, “Using correct
targeting and testing methods can increase conversion rates up to 300 percent.”
The psychographics data you generate can be instrumental in optimizing your
landing pages and should shed light on:

Which specific aspects of your product to focus on

 The right wording to use
 Images to use
 Etc.
Generating Content Ideas
This data can also spill over to the topics you cover on your blog and your content
marketing campaigns at large.
Although you probably already have a central theme that you base your content
around, you could definitely use your insights to launch into sub-categories that
may not have been on your radar previously. In turn, you can expect to increase
content engagement as well as your number of shares.
Keyword Targeting
Whether it’s for organic search or paid ads, choosing the right keywords is vital.
Alexandra Samuel also explains that “using psychographics allows you to do
smarter keyword targeting—for example, targeting one message about your
programming game to parents who are searching for ‘kids programming’ and
another message to parents who are searching for ‘kids video games fun.’”
Psychographics help you narrow down your keyword list to ones that are highly
targeted to your audience.

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

There are two ways that psychographics can impact your SMM campaigns.
First, you may be able to determine which specific networks your core audience is
most active on. In our example, we discovered that Instagram and Pinterest were
the two top choices. As a result, you would know that these two networks deserve
the bulk of your attention rather than others like Facebook or Twitter. Rather than
relying on speculation and mere guesswork, you would know for a fact where
your time and budget is best spent. Second, you can use psychographics data to
target customers more effectively. If you’ve ever used Facebook Ads, you know
that you can be incredibly granular about who your ads will appear to.
“Precise Interests”(fig 5.4) allows you to break down a broad topic into specifics:

Fig 5.4 Precise Interests

 This way you can get your ads in front of the right audience and ensure that you’re
not wasting money marketing to leads that are unlikely to convert.
You could always choose precise interests based on a hunch. Or you could select
them based on psychographics data.

Email Marketing
The points you address in your emails and the quality of your copy heavily
influence your conversion rate. You could argue that half the battle is simply
discussing the type of content that readers are legitimately interested in. If you’re
able to nail down their pain points, you can bet that it’s going to improve
engagement and increase the likelihood of subscribers taking action. It can also
impact the open rate.
And as you can see, there’s definitely room for improvement in this area,
especially in some industries.

Fig 5.5 Email Marketing Variance by Industry

5.6.2. Leveraging personality traits to predict consumption preferences using NLP

What makes up your personality? Are you extroverted or introverted? Some may
say personality starts with whether you’re one or the other. Others will add to that
and say it’s influenced by your temperament or general nature too.
A personality, regardless of what it truly is, affects our behavior. So it’s not
surprising to find that many psychologists’ research on personality has given birth
to trait theory. Trait theory is the study of human personality as it relates to their
behavior, thoughts, and emotions. The big 5 personality traits are a result of trait
theory and unlike the Buzzfeed quizzes we know and love, it’s likely a more
accurate description of personality—and more useful as a result.
Defining the Big 5 Model of Consumer Personality Traits
Though it’s not entirely clear, the big 5 model for personality first emerged in the
1960’s. However, it became a more researched and advanced model in the 1990’s
as more psychologists began studying it. Today, it’s a robust, empirical, data-
driven model. Many modern psychologists utilize the big 5 model because it can
apply universally and it provides a measurable means to understanding consumer
personality. The point of it is to measure the degree to which particular personality
traits are expressed in an individual. In other words, you exhibit each of the five
traits, but at varying levels. Essentially, this model helps you, and others,
understand what makes you tick.
The Big 5 Personality Traits
Sometimes referred to as OCEAN, CANOE, or the five-factor model, the big 5
model encompasses five key attributes of a consumer’s personality. Those five
traits are openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and
neuroticism.
Openness means being open to experiencing new or different things. Those who
score high on this trait tend to be intellectually curious, willing to try new things,
and more creative or unconventional. Those who score low on this trait are usually
opposed to change and struggle with abstract thought.
Conscientiousness refers to acting in an organized or thoughtful way. Those who
score high on conscientiousness tend to be self-disciplined, strive for achievement,
and follow a plan or schedule. Scoring low on this trait, you may be more
unstructured in your approach to tasks and procrastinate more often.
Extraversion is seeking stimulation in the company of others. Those who score
high on this trait don’t mind being the center of attention and tend to be very social
and energetic. Those who score low on extraversion often prefer to be alone and
may be anxious in social situations.
Agreeableness entails being compassionate and cooperative towards others.
Those who score high on agreeableness tend to get along well with people and are
more sympathetic and caring. Those who score lower on this trait can be less
empathetic and seem uninterested in others.
Neuroticism refers to emotional sensitivity—particularly when it comes to
environmental or situational factors. Those who score high for this trait can be
easily stressed and sometimes come off as worry-warts. Those who score low on
neuroticism, on the other hand, tend to be more emotionally grounded and laid-
back.
Curious to see where you land? There are a variety of big 5 tests available online
to understand where you score on these traits. And don’t worry, if you’re unhappy
with any of your scores, it doesn’t mean you’ll be that way forever. As people
mature or modify their lifestyle their scores can adjust—it’s not all biological—
personality can be influenced by environmental factors too. Thus, the old saying
nature versus nurture comes into play.
Either way, you can see the big 5 model is a great way to understand more about
a person. As a result, employers often use the big 5 personality test to ensure new
employees fit with a team—or employees can use it to understand more about
what career path they should take. But the big 5 model has a bigger purpose when
it comes to marketing, market research, and understanding consumers.

Leveraging the Big 5 in Marketing Research

As noted, the big 5 personality model helps understand consumer personality
traits. Specific to marketing, understanding consumer personality traits can help
identify and draw conclusions about consumer behavior, including preferences,
habits, and motivations. If you think about that in the context of new products,
branding, and advertising, it’s easy to see how leveraging the big 5 is a no-brainer.
In fact, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides evidence for
how psychological targeting—such as targeting by consumer personality—is a
proven approach to persuasion. Their research tests the difference between
targeting viewers with ads based on whether they are extroverted or introverted:
results show that when targeting viewers based on this, conversion rates double.

This shouldn’t be surprising—people are attracted to things that exhibit similar

personalities to them or brands that represent the way they are. Thus, it’s so
important to execute marketing activities as it relates to a target audience’s
personality traits. You wouldn’t target those who are high in one trait the same as
those who are low in it. For example, say a brand was looking to create ads for a
new pair of yoga pants. Women high in extraversion are likely to relate to the first
ad below. Women low in extraversion, but high in conscientiousness (Fig 5.6),
would likely relate more to the second ad.

Fig 5.6
In fact, in a recent study conducted by GutCheck that leverages big data and
survey data to gain a deeper understanding of consumers, personality was also
included. From the research, the favorable audience for a brand’s new product
concept scored highest on agreeableness.
 Using this insight, in addition to other data, it was easy to see how the brand could
determine what communications to use in their messaging and creative. In this
case, they should highlight how the product aids the consumer in helping their
family and promote any higher causes they support within messaging.
So as you can see, personality is instrumental to how we behave. By learning more
about personality trait theory in consumer behaviour, we can become more
effective in our marketing messaging and targeting.

5.6.3. Detect emotions

When companies connect with customers’ emotions, the payoff can be huge.
Consider these examples: After a major bank introduced a credit card for
Millennials that was designed to inspire emotional connection, use among the
segment increased by 70% and new account growth rose by 40%. Within a year of
launching products and messaging to maximize emotional connection, a leading
household cleaner turned market share losses into double-digit growth. And when
a nationwide apparel retailer reoriented its merchandising and customer
experience to its most emotionally connected customer segments, same-store sales
growth accelerated more than threefold.
Given the enormous opportunity to create new value, companies should pursue
emotional connections as a science—and a strategy. But for most, building these
connections is more guesswork than science. At the end of the day they have little
idea what really works and whether their efforts have produced the desired
results.
At the most basic level, any company can begin a structured process of learning
about its customers’ emotional motivators and conducting experiments to
leverage them, later scaling up from there. At the other end of the spectrum, firms
can invest in deep research and big data analytics or engage consultancies with
specific expertise. Companies in financial services, retail, health care, and
technology are now using a detailed understanding of emotional connection to
attract and retain the most valuable customers. The most sophisticated firms are
making emotional connection part of a broad strategy that involves every function
in the value chain, from product development and marketing to sales and service.
High-Impact Motivators
Hundreds of “emotional motivators” drive consumer behavior. Below are 10 that
significantly affect customer value across all categories studied.(fig 5.7)

Fig 5.7
In what follows we’ll describe our research and our work with companies—to our
knowledge, the first to show direct, robust links among specific emotional
 motivators, a firm’s actions to leverage them, consumer behavior, and business
outcomes.
Defining Emotional Motivators
Our research stemmed from our frustration that companies we worked with knew
customers’ emotions were important but couldn’t figure out a consistent way to
define them, connect with them, and link them to results. We soon discovered that
there was no standard lexicon of emotions, and so eight years ago we set out to
create one, working with experts and surveying anthropological and social science
research. We ultimately assembled a list of more than 300 emotional motivators.
We consider customers to be emotionally connected with a brand when it aligns
with their motivations and helps them fulfill deep, often unconscious, desires.
Important emotional motivators include desires to “stand out from the crowd,”
“have confidence in the future,” and “enjoy a sense of well-being,” to name just a
few.
Identifying and measuring emotional motivators is complicated, because
customers themselves may not even be aware of them. These sentiments are
typically different from what customers say are the reasons they make brand
choices and from the terms they use to describe their emotional responses to
particular brands. What’s more, as we’ll discuss, emotional connections with
products are neither uniform nor constant; they vary by industry, brand,
touchpoint, and the customer’s position in the decision journey.

5.6.4. Assign labels

Labels are a tool that enable you to assign a label value to a given property in the
account, allowing for better organisation and flexibility of management and
reporting in Bing Ads. As with Google AdWords, Bing Ads labels can be assigned
at the following levels:
 Campaign
 Ad group
 Keyword
 Ad
How To Use Labels
Assigning a label is simple. At Campaign level, simple select the tick box next to
the required campaigns and navigate to the Labels tab on the toolbar:

Fig 5.8
This expands a list of check boxes in which you can either assign an existing Label,
create a new label altogether or manage labels in the account. For now, we are
simply selecting the London label by ticking the check box and applying the label.

Fig 5.9
Now that we know how to assign labels, it’s time to put them to good use.
Filter by Label:
In the interface, you can filter by label to see a list of properties grouped together.
For example, if you have multiple London campaigns spanning numerous services
in your account, you can filter by the London label to see the campaigns all in one
place.
This will also provide a handy total for the selection at the bottom of the page,
allowing for a performance summary for your given campaigns, ad groups or
otherwise. There is, however, a far better way to get detailed summaries from
labels.
Dimensions Tab:
Labels were made for the Dimensions tab, offering a grouping system that works
well for seeing top level stats. You can access this using the top toolbar in the
interface:

Fig 5.10
Using the drop-down menu, you are able to choose to view labels at a certain level
in the account.

Fig 5.11
The Dimensions view then offers a summary of all properties in the account that
has labels assigned at the given level (e.g. Campaign level). The data is then
provided in a single table, with click totals for an example account shown below:
 Fig 5.12
Reporting:
The use of labels within Dimensions is crucial for us, providing a view that we use
regularly for account management and reporting. Using the above table as an
example, we are able to group campaigns together by location and provide a clear
summary of how our PPC marketing is performing in each area.
In other instances, we may compare keyword targeted campaigns against geo-
targeted campaigns, or to assess the outcome of ad text tests in a given ad group.
Labels provide a straightforward way of getting more granular data from your
Bing Ads account. It’s far easier to assign labels across an existing account in order
to refine and understand your performance, rather than manually searching and
calculating the totals – or worse, rebuilding your campaigns to see the data in a
new way.

5.6.5. Understand text from images

It is pretty much agreed that Google can and probably does read metadata
embedded in photos, though whether that influences SEO in any way is still
disputed. In fact, the conventional wisdom seems to be that search engines do not
take into account photo-embedded text (assuming they can read it at all) and that
the practice of embedding text in photos is generally a bad idea for a series of other
non-SEO reasons (mostly having to do with accessibility of the information for the
user). At the same time, the question if text embedded in photos “can’t be read by
search engines” remains. And as Google is making increasingly significant efforts
in the direction of image recognition technology, having recently acquired
DeepMind, it’s hard to believe that photo-embedded text is not an area of interest.
In this long and interesting article we did some interesting experiments in order
to understand how Google is approaching the image search matter and to see
what the implications for the SEO and digital marketing field are.

Fig 5.13
It has become a common place to say that an image is worth a thousand words.
It’s less common knowledge exactly how many words (and keywords) Google
makes of an image. What we can say with certainty is that in a lot of cases and in
most of our experiments, Google turned out to be pretty savvy in interpreting
images. It would explain why it interpreted the picture of a rear view of a red
sports car as “90’s cars” instead of a new Ferrari, which it is. Probably because in
most places the similar images were hosted, the text surrounding the image talked
about 90’s cars.
Admittedly, the design is fairly reminiscent of that era’s particular brand of
ostentatious sport cars. The adjacent text theory also explains the other
misinterpreted image, the one with the “Try it for free” text. It also supports the
idea that although reading image-embedded text may be in the books for Google,
it’s not yet at the level of mastery needed to be universally implemented.
Repeating the experiment for our logo (which contains no embedded text), the
search engine did a pretty good job figuring out that the logo is related mainly to
“cognitive seo”, probably by drawing conclusions from the text in the vicinity of
various image occurrences and compiling a best guess, based on the visually
similar images contingent on the order of the pixels in the image.

Fig 5.14
Image Search Aut omatic Keyword Identification The tumbler-wielding youth
of today are pretty tired of having to look for hours and hours for that particular
funny cat gif (yeah, you know the one, that one) that has something written all
over it with none of the desired results. We probably wouldn’t care about that
either, but they are not only the consumers of tomorrow, but already the
consumers of today. According to the data at least, the 18-29 demographic is
knocking at 90% Internet usage worldwide. If the even-younger are at all different,
it’s probably upwards, not downwards. Ultimately, so much of Internet content is
images, that you just can’t ignore it. Neither can search engines. People are drawn
to images (when they’re relevant) more than they are to text . So being able to put
text on images as opposed to below or near them might just be the next best thing.
How Does Google Decide Which Image to Rank Higher (from the same
site/URL)

Still, that’s not what really interests us. Is there something more beneath the
surface, just like with the overused cliche of an iceberg? Or is there less than we’ve
assumed to the subject, just like with the ever shrinking arctic ice cap? Speaking of
which, how do we know how much ice there is in the polar caps at any given
time? Unlike Google ranking algorithms, the answer to this question is pretty
straightforward: scientists use what’s called the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling
and Assimilation System (in short: PIOMAS). Aside from the perk of being an
interesting piece of trivia, this is also useful to our SEO-related queries. We tried
to do an image search for “piomas arctic sea ice volume”. Of the images that the
search returned, there was one in particular that had this exact phrase inside it, as
picture-embedded text.

Fig 5.15

In the site it is found, there is no mention of the exact keyword match we looked
for. According to the official story, this is easily explained by the fact that the site
had the text “arctic sea ice volume” in the vicinity of the picture, and the picture
itself had the title “PIOMAS Spiral”. Which is probably the case.
With one exception, all the other pictures on top of that search have “PIOMAS”
somewhere in the name or Alt Text and “arctic sea ice volume” somewhere in a
text in the vicinity of the picture. And that one exception has this the other way
around. It’s all reasonable here folks, nothing to see, move along. But on your way
 home, take into consideration the fact that of the seven top pictures, five also
happen to have 4 of the 5 search words as embedded text, and two pictures have
3 of the 5 search words as embedded text. Not enough to prove the case, but
enough to support it in the light of the fact that there are quite a few search results,
but those particular pictures came up first.

Fig 5.16

5.6.6. Logos using Computer Vision

The central technology which enables logo detection is called computer vision
(CV). It analyzes the recorded images frame by frame to identify significant bits,
in this case logos. The challenge these systems face is to determine the graphical
representations on a wide array of objects of various shapes and sizes, captured
under diverse lighting conditions. There is a tremendous variability regarding the
support and also the use of the logo since sometimes it has slight color or tilting
variations from the standard.
The system classifies the detected logos by appearance time and dimensions. As
you can imagine, it is a different story if, for example, you have a pocket-sized logo
versus a full t-shirt back logo.
More advanced systems can also create a heat map of each brand to see if the
appearances are equally spread on the available screen space and if the larger sizes
appear in the best spots.
Artificial Intelligence can be a beautiful thing, especially when it comes to your
logo. As machine learning and AI have become more and more prominent and
intelligent, software-like logo recognition has grown too. With a solid logo
recognition software, you can see where your logo is popping up on social media,
television or elsewhere, how consumers are responding to or interacting with it
and if there are any nefarious or counterfeit uses of your logo in play.
What is logo recognition? Logo recognition tools allow you to detect where on the
internet your logo appears. Logo recognition is a must-have for any brands with a
unique logo. Keep reading to see how it can benefit your company.
There are many ways to use logo recognition software, so for simplicity’s sake,
we’ve distilled them into three main categories.

Brand recognition
Logo recognition is a great way to figure out how often your brand is appearing
online. With today’s sophisticated algorithms, logo recognition software can see
how often your brand is being mentioned across social media platforms.
This sort of software can also see when your brand’s being used out in the real
world. For example, if you have a banner promoting your company at a baseball
stadium, logo recognition software can tell how often the logo is appearing on
television when a game’s being broadcasted. That way, you’ll know if your
advertisement is in a prime spot so the viewers at home can see what you’re all
about.

Counterfeit detection/brand protection

The second way that logo recognition is used is for more nefarious situations.
Sometimes, with both big brands and up-and-coming companies, people use logos
in counterfeit or illegitimate ways. They could be making bootleg products and
ripping off your company’s logo. A well-known fashion company like Supreme
often sees its logo used on bootleg products.
Logo recognition software lets a company find these kind of products and handle
the situation appropriately.
Sometimes people produce harmful content about a brand online. They could be
spreading false information about your company or using your logo with a social
media post that has inappropriate content or just doesn’t align with your message.
Logo recognition is a great way to root out these situations and take care of them.

Understanding the user experience

How exactly are people reacting to your brand? Online and real-world reviews are
one thing, but logo recognition software lets a company see what consumers really
think about their product or service, checking social media posts, blog articles and
other mentions of a brand.

This is great for measuring ROI, as a company can assess whether their marketing
efforts are bearing any fruit. If a company is promoting its product as one thing,
and people are seeing it as another, it could be wise to reevaluate the marketing
plan.
Logo detection can help companies monitor their marketing efforts and measure
brand awareness, especially during sponsored events. However, it is not the best
 idea to scrape social media for references unless the brand is an aspirational one,
which people are eager to display.

5.7. Multiple choice questions

1. What is the last stage of the consumer decision process?
a. problem recognition
b. post purchase behavior
c. alternative evaluation
d. purchase
2. ________ markets are made up of members of the distribution chain.
a. Consumer
b. Business-to-business (industrial)
c. Channel
d. Institutional
3. A transaction in which the organization is making an initial purchase of an item to
be used to perform a new job refers to which of the following purchases?
a. Straight rebuy purchase
b. Delayed purchase
c. New-task purchase
d. Modified rebuy purchase
4. Customer’s evaluation of the difference between all the benefits and all the costs
of a marketing offer relative to those of competing offers refers to which of the
following options?
a. Customer perceived value
b. Marketing myopia
c. Customer relationship management
d. Customer satisfaction
5. . ________ is the study of how individuals, groups, and organizations select, buy,
use, and dispose of goods, services, ideas, or experiences to satisfy their needs and
wants.
 a. Target marketing
b. Psychographic segmentation
c. Product Differentiation
d. Consumer behavior
6. A person’s ________ consist(s) of all the groups that have a direct (face-to-face) or
indirect influence on his/her attitudes or behavior.
a. culture
b. subculture
c. psychographics
d. reference groups
e. demographics
7. ________ is a set of distinguishing human psychological traits that lead to
relatively consistent and enduring responses to environmental stimuli.
a. Image
b. Personality
c. Beliefs
d. Heredity
e. Culture
8. ________ portrays the “whole person” interacting with his or her environment.
a. Attitude
b. Reference group
c. Lifestyle
d. Culture
e. Subculture
9. The five-stage model of the consumer buying process includes all of the following
stages EXCEPT ________.
a. problem recognition
b. information search
c. social interaction
d. purchase decision
 10. Which one of the following factor relates to family that influences consumer
behavior?
a. Cultural
b. Social
c. Personal
d. Business

5.8. Short answer questions

a. Explain importance of logo in digital marketing.
b. Explain how text can be detected from images.
c. What is emotional motivators? How to define emotional motivators for customers.
d. Explain psychographics. How it defers from demographics?
e. How logo detection can be used for brand recognition? Explain with example.

5.9. Long answer questions

a. How does Google help to rank the contents based on the text detected from
images?
b. List and explain different emotion motivators which significantly affect customer
value.
c. List and explain different levels that are used in different adtools like Google
AdWorld, Bing.
d. List and explain different personality threats of customer.
e. What is logo detection? Which are different categories of logo detection software?
Explain.

5.10. References
 Digital Marketing in an AI World: Futureproofing Your PPC agency, Frederick
Vallaeys
 Artificial Intelligence for Marketing: Practical Applications, Jim Sterne
 https://www.silverdisc.co.uk/blog/2017/06/16/bing-ads-get-organised-labels
 https://sleeknote.com/blog/psychographic-marketing
 Module-06
Futuristic Marketing
6.1 Motivation: Learner will be able to touch upon the future technologies that will be used
to enhance purchasing of products along with security and automated software.
6.2 Learning Objective: Learner will study about augmented reality, block chain technology
and Chatbot’s with AI.
6.3 Syllabus

Prerequisites Syllabus Duration Self Study

Virtual and IoTs Augmented Reality, 1 Hr 1 Hr
Augmented Virtual Reality and XR for 2 Hr 1 Hr
Reality Digital Marketing
marketing Blockchain and smart contracts 2 Hr 1 Hr
for marketing
NeuroMarketing 1 Hr 1 Hr
Wearable Tech 1 Hr 2 Hr
Personal Chatbots 1 Hr 2 Hr

6.4 Definitions:
 The Internet of Things: The Internet of Things refers to a system of interrelated, internet-
connected objects that are able to collect and transfer data over a wireless network without
human intervention.
 Virtual reality: Virtual reality is a simulated experience that can be similar to or
completely different from the real world. Applications of virtual reality include
entertainment, education and business.
 Augmented Reality: Augmented reality is an interactive experience of a real-world
environment where the objects that reside in the real world are enhanced by computer-
generated perceptual information, sometimes across multiple sensory modalities,
including visual, auditory, haptic, somatosensory and olfactory.
 Extended reality: Extended reality (XR) is a term referring to all real-and-virtual
combined environments and human-machine interactions generated by computer
technology and wearables, where the 'X' represents a variable for any current or future
spatial computing technologies.
 Neuromarketing: Neuromarketing is a commercial marketing communication field that
applies neuropsychology to market research, studying consumers' sensorimotor,
cognitive, and affective response to marketing stimuli.
 Wearable technology: Wearable technology refers to mobile electronic devices that are
comfortably worn on the user's body or attached to their clothes.
 Smart Contracts: A smart contract is a computer program or a transaction protocol which
is intended to automatically execute, control or document legally relevant events and
actions according to the terms of a contract or an agreement.
 Blockchain: Blockchain is a system in which a record of transactions made in bitcoin or
another cryptocurrency are maintained across several computers that are linked in a peer-
to-peer network.
 Chatboates: A chatbot is a software application used to conduct an on-line chat
conversation via text or text-to-speech, in lieu of providing direct contact with a live
human agent. A chatbot is a type of software that can automate conversations and interact
with people through messaging platforms.

6.5 Key Definitions:

 AR: Augmented reality
 VR: Virtual Reality
 XR: Extended Virtual Reality
 IoT: Internet of Thing
 RACE: Reach-Act-Convert-Engage
6.6 Theory:
It is required to be visible to existing and future potential customers, instill
trust in your brand, and once converted, engage them to retain them and
promote advocacy. But creating an integrated, omnichannel marketing
strategy is hard, and time consuming.

So, there’s a solution to this problem.

The Smart Insights RACE Growth Process enables you to define and
implement a market leading omnichannel marketing strategy for the IT and
High Tech sector, focused on your customer lifecycle.(Fig 6.1 )
 Fig. 6.1 Customer lifecycle Model
The RACE Framework is composed of 5 essential stages (Fig 6.2 ) that break
down into the 25 core activities which must be optimized to achieve
integrated marketing across your customer lifecycle. Each of these areas is
supported by comprehensive online training, tools and templates which
will help you upskill your team, plan and implement your strategy, and
achieve your goals.

Fig. 6.2 Stages in RACE framework

6.6.1 IoTs and Augmented Reality

6.6.1.1 IoTs
 The Internet of Things is affecting virtually all industries, has a
tremendous impact on the volume of data and on network traffic (and how
we handle them) and is increasingly popular in a consumer context. The IoT
is also revolutionizing business operations that are maybe less attractive for
consumers but very real and tangible, from logistics to marketing.
Marketo defines the Internet of Things (IoT) as “the interconnectivity of our
digital devices that provides endless opportunities for brands to listen and
respond to the needs of their customers – with the right message, at the right
time, on the right device”.
The Internet of Things also will impact customer experience, the amount of
data gained through connected devices and analytics. In a consumer and
marketing context, Big Data and (predictive) analytics are never far away.
According to the infographic 51% of the world’s top global marketers expect
that IoT will revolutionize the marketing landscape by 2020. After looking
at some consumer evolutions Marketo resumes the ways marketers will use
IoT (mainly in a data-driven marketing view) as follows:
 Analyzing customer buying habit across the platforms customers use.
 More and previously unobtainable data regarding the ways consumers
interact with devices and products (the “connected devices” themselves).
 Getting a better insight into the buying journey and in which stage of it the
customer is.
 Real-time interactions, POS notifications and of course targeted (and even
fully contextual) ads.
 The customer service field whereby issues can be quickly resolved.

Using of IoT in marketing: following are some examples of IoT and IoT
devices used in marketing. (fig 6.3)
 Fig. 6.3 The Internet of Things in a marketing consumer and application

6.6.1.2 Augmented Reality

Augmented reality (AR) is an emerging trend in marketing and sales

strategies. It allows brands to give customers unique experiences with the
convenience of tapping into their mobile devices.
AR gives you another tool when it comes to driving sales and enhancing
brand value through mobile devices.
Brands can use AR to allow consumers to try products before they buy
them, with augmented shopping experiences becoming increasingly
popular. From testing makeup to test driving a possible new car!
 Fig 6.4 Benefits of AR retail

Fig 6.5 Example of Augmented reality

6.6.2 Virtual Reality and XR for Marketing

6.6.2.1 Virtual Reality

Virtual reality is a computer-based simulation of an interactive environment.

It feels real and physical by using electronics like headsets, glasses, and phones.
But it isn’t.
VR marketing allows companies to bridge the gap between experience and
action. You can use VR to offer a digital experience in place of a physical one,
which can promote products and services.
As well as promoting existing products, you can also use VR to showcase
development. This will help to get customers invested in what you are creating
- as well as give you a source of feedback.
Most importantly, VR changes the dynamic between brands and consumers.
Rather than using ad blockers or clicking out of ads as quickly as possible,
people seek out VR brand experiences. Here, your consumers come to you,
rather than you needing to attract them. Pokémon Go was one of the first, most
popular versions of a virtual-reality mobile game.(Fig 6.6 )

Fig 6.6 Pokemon Go example of VR

Virtual reality drives emotional engagement
It’s no secret that emotions are a big factor in driving marketing engagement.
Just look at storytelling for example.
People love hearing stories and connecting them to real-world applications like
growing your business. Storytelling is powerful and it can drive big
conversions for one simple reason: people resonate with it. They get
emotionally attached to it.
The findings were incredible.
Virtual-reality study participants were more engaged when compared to other
platforms of content consumption.
These participants were actually in a highly engaged state for 50% of the
experience, whereas video content only kept them engaged for 34% of the
experience.
And that’s not all. Virtual reality drove a 17% higher emotional response than
video and a 27% higher response than 2D.
Overall, virtual reality drove higher engagement and emotional response than
any other platform it was tested against.
And that’s great news for marketers. Emotion-based marketing is a powerful
method of connecting people to your brand in ways that traditional product-
based ads can’t.
VR will bring better content marketing
Virtual reality opens the doors to more interactive, creative, and engaging
content. With almost limitless possibilities, VR will change marketing by
altering the content marketing game.

Following are some examples of virtual reality used in marketing.

One of the best examples of this comes from Ikea. If you’re not familiar
with Ikea, it’s a home-furnishing store that has massive shops in dozens of
countries worldwide. And they’ve utilized virtual-reality marketing tactics
to bring in tons of new sales. They do all of this using their iPhone
app called “Ikea Place.” (Fig 6.7 )

Fig 6.7 Ikea Place

You can use the application to test different pieces of furniture in your own
home. This means you don’t even have to travel to the store to see if the
furniture would work in your new house.

Here’s what it looks like:

 Fig. 6.8 Content marketing

This is content marketing on steroids.

Instead of blogging about the best types of couches and important
home-design features, you can have a customer virtually test tons of
different products.
You can actually get consumers to enjoy testing your products for free
instead of having to convince them with blog posts.
Content marketing could change forever with big implementations of
virtual reality. People are already reading less and less. In fact, 43%
would like to see even more video from marketers. That means content
marketing will have to adapt to survive, and with the invention of
virtual reality, it could very easily shift to virtual video-style content.
Even StubHub, a ticket-selling platform, has taken advantage of virtual-
reality content marketing. They allow users to interact in virtual
environments based on the concert venues they want to purchase
tickets for.
 Fig 6.9 Virtual view of seats

This allows users to test the exact seat they will buy before they even
make the purchase.(fig 6.9 )

Shopify is starting to take advantage of virtual reality to drive sales

with content, too.
They’re currently building an application that allows users to walk into
a virtual store and design T-shirts for e-commerce sales.(Fig 6.10)

Fig 6.10 designing T-shirt for e- commerce sale

And they convert users of this free experience by allowing them to

purchase their designed shirt directly from the virtual experience.
Content marketing will likely change a lot in the next 5-to-10 years. It’s
inevitable as technology starts to improve, change, and progress. VR
will have a big impact on how we deliver and optimize content for the
user experience. Instead of focusing on writing long-form blog posts,
we’ll be focusing on creating virtual, interactive videos.

One of the biggest virtual-reality marketing strengths will be an

expansion of content marketing.

It will enable users to connect to your content in a virtual way that feels
and looks real. And brands are already finding success with this content
marketing strategy. For example, Destination British Columbia used VR
content marketing to create virtual-reality content.
 Users could virtually travel to British Columbia to explore the
wilderness.
This is putting content marketing on the next level. They didn’t write a
blog post about things to do in BC, and they didn’t create a basic video.
They enabled users to emotionally connect to the experience to the
point where it made people want to visit and see even more of BC. And
it worked. They drove 5% more visits with the virtual-reality
campaign.

Another awesome use of VR to create content was done by the Thomas

Cook travel agency to showcase their products for new customers.

Fig 6.11 Virtual ride

They called it the “Fly Before You Buy” experience where VR users
could take a virtual ride (fig 6.11) in their planes and helicopters over
New York City. Pretty cool, right?
 With this piece of content marketing, Thomas Cook was able to
increase their ROI by 40% and saw a 190% increase in bookings in New
York City.

One of the best examples of virtual-reality content marketing that, was

done by Marriott in 2015.

Fig. 6.12 VR head set

They started to add virtual-reality headsets into each one of their hotel
rooms to give users the experience of traveling to new destinations (Fig
6.12).
Hotel room guests could simply slide on the headset and virtually
travel to London, NYC, and Beijing in a matter of seconds.
Of the new guests that used their virtual-reality content, 51% said they
wanted to stay more often at Marriott hotels.

Content marketing on virtual reality will open the doors for creativity
and exploration.
These experiences and personalized activities will assist as big drivers
of sale.
 Think of it like the free trial of virtual reality.
People can test your product and service. And they can virtually
experience it before they buy the full product. It bridges the gap
between hesitation and conversion. Virtual reality is growing fast, and
content marketing needs to grow with it. All kinds of products,
services, and games are starting to take advantage of the technology.

Every day, virtual reality becomes more of a real-life reality as

companies grab onto the quickly growing trend. And consumers are on
board, too. Pokémon Go took over the lives of millions of people using
virtual-reality gaming. And companies are starting to develop virtual-
reality devices that can connect to your mobile phones. The technology
is expanding and growing, and so is the user base. And when it comes
to marketing that means we have a new channel for delivering
marketing messages. If you want to take advantage of a new medium,
however, you need to know how it will impact the future of marketing.

Virtual reality is growing fast. More companies are producing VR -

based products, and more firms are investing in the development of the
technology. Pokémon Go already showed marketers that VR can be
huge for your brand. Virtual reality drives higher emotional
engagement than any other form of content. On top of that, it’s
changing content marketing as we know it.

6.6.2.2 XR for marketing

It’s now possible to go beyond the limits of physical “try and buy”
scenarios or static digital representations. AR, VR, and MR – under the
unified umbrella of Extended Reality (XR) – can power futuristic
marketing campaigns that leave a lasting impression.

20 years ago, the idea of experiencing digital content as if it was part

of our physical surroundings seemed truly like science fiction. Even
until the last decade, VR hardware was expensive, not to mention
cumbersome, with a poor user experience. Today, XR technology
looks very different – 360-degree videos on YouTube, AR filters on
Snapchat, and DIY VR equipment like Google Cardboard have
changed our conception of immersive experiences.
That’s why in 2019, we stand very close to XR implementation in
marketing that meets the high standards set by science fiction. Here
are three trends to note:

 Sales and marketing/external communication is among the

most common fields of VR implementation. 84.2% of
respondents in a 2019-2020 report covering 750+ industry
professionals mentioned this as a focus area.
 56.6% of professionals in sales, marketing, and external
communications use AR/MR technology as well, according to
the same report.
 The global startup landscape in XR is heating up, and
marketing technology giants are taking notice. For instance,
Facebook acquired CTRL-Labs in September 2019, adding the
startup’s neural monitoring wristband to Facebook’s XR
capabilities.
4 Futuristic Ways to Use XR
XR helps to create a powerful impression in the consumer’s minds,
urging them to look at your brand from an entirely new perspective.

Here are four tips for leveraging XR in 2020, with examples from
leading brands.

1. Launch a mixed reality (MR) popup

This is particularly relevant to B2C service industries such as

hospitality and F&B. We have all heard of AR and VR, but MR is
probably less common. In MR scenarios, consumers can interact with
physical elements and digital representations at the same time.

The hologram is a good example, as it superimposes a digital graphic

onto a physical setup. You can use MR to create popups where
customers can experience your products in ways that are impossible
in a purely physical world.

Take the example of Swedish beverage brand, Rekorderlig, which

opened its first MR bar in the UK this year. The bar features
holographic visuals and real ambient sounds, recreating the traditions
of the Swedish Midsummer.

2. Let customers experience remote and exciting terrain

This one applies to hospitality brands, tourism companies, and even

e-commerce stores selling outdoor equipment. VR allows customers
to explore remote surroundings that they might want to visit – or can
only dream of!

You can create VR stores where visitors walk on the polar icecaps or
explore the depths of the Grand Canyon. This puts a whole new spin
on infotainment, as visitors can gain a hands-on understanding of
unfamiliar terrain.

Take the example of NASA which collaborated with Samsung in 2018

to create a 4D lunar gravity experience in VR. Consumers could
virtually “walk on the moon,”, actually feeling the sense of
weightlessness experienced by astronauts.

3. Insert your product in a surprising virtual location

XR gives you the opportunity to place your product in surprising and

memorable contexts. This is almost like science fiction – imagine if a
futuristic pair of sneakers sold by a luxury brand appears when a
consumer is playing a video game set in space. With the latest AR/VR
technologies, innovations like this are already possible.

For example:

Pokemon Go brought AR ads to local businesses, and Fossil extended

this to 3D video ads inside games. The company worked with Unity
Technologies to ensure that its ad content seamlessly blends with a
user’s virtual gaming experience.
 Take a look at platforms like Admix to explore how you can convey
your brand’s messaging in the virtual world in 2020.

4. Make your store entirely virtual, with no physical products

This strategy is right out of the science fiction playbook. You can have
a physical space that’s populated by empty shelves, with nothing but
a QR code embedded on shelf labels. Once customers walk in, they can
use their smartphones to scan the label and view products in a virtual
format. This combines the convenience of a digital showcase (you can
constantly keep changing your products) with the hands-on
experience of a physical store. Take inspiration from LEGO, which
used scannable codes and Snapchat to turn its blank floor space into
an immersive digital experience. This is a great example of leveraging
mixed reality techniques. Customers could walk around in the store,
talk to other shoppers, and ask attendants questions – but the product
was accessible only in an AR format.

6.6.3 Blockchain and smart contracts for marketing

6.6.3.1 Blockchain:
The Blockchain is a relatively new technology and is the way digital
information is stored and distributed technically. Blockchain in digital
marketing provides transparency, security, and accessibility of monetary
and data flows. It can improve digital marketing for the consumer,
benefiting businesses not to spend humongous amounts of money on
digital advertising campaigns. With this newly introduced technology,
consumers can own and sell their data directly to advertisers and
marketers.

Blockchain in Digital Marketing

 Improving Marketing and Digital Advertising Campaigns: With
Blockchain, it is possible to link merchants with marketers providing
data transparency, clicks, and interactions, preventing fraud, and
eliminating the middleman. The data from digital advertising
campaigns can sometimes be inaccurate, so improvement can be
difficult. Monitoring marketing campaigns in real-time is achievable
with Blockchain for obtaining trustworthy metrics. Top brands such
as Unilever are applying Blockchain for improving digital
advertising efficiency successfully. The technology will move to full
 production, and it will launch a Blockchain advertising solution later
in 2020 with IBM.

 Fraud Prevention: A Blockchain network authorizes to record

authenticated digital outlets and test verified advertising measures
against the registry for preventing fraud. These measurements can
be securely shared with only permitted stakeholders. There are
probable areas such as digital advertising, bots, click farms, and
ghost websites where fraud can happen.Involving a third party can
increase the risk of data breaches and cybersecurity as well as human
error. Major brands such as Toyota have been applying Blockchain
applications in digital marketing for reducing fraud in its digital
advertising campaigns. They have witnessed a cumulative 21%
improvement in website visitor traffic.

 Establishing Trust and Credibility:Businesses prefer the reason

Blockchain is because it can securely verify, store, and share data
across several parties, gaining trust eventually. Blockchain has been
really proven to be helping in building trust in the past few years. It
can be difficult for small businesses to make a mark in the market
when there are already players existing in the industry. With
Blockchain, business owners will be able to prove where their
products are coming from and show the supply chain forging
willingness among customers to buy from them.

 Boosting Transparency: With online advertising, it is impossible to

know if the stats are accurate with the site clicks or Instagram
followers. Even bots used to boost the ad stats artificially give
incorrect results. Research has shown that bots alone have cost
companies more than $7 billion in damage in 2016. But, with
Blockchain, the chain is transparent and encrypted because of the
digital ledger system.The transparency is inviolable for every
product moving through the supply chain. Organizations can save
millions in ad spend by ascertaining the people viewing their ads are
their targeted audience. Companies can be assured they are getting
the advertising for what they are paying for.

 Strengthens Content Monetization :Content is one of the most

important components of a business when it comes to marketing.
Solid content is necessary for promoting products and services.
Blockchain allows consumers, bloggers, and streamers who create
content regularly to get rewarded directly rather than the third party
content platforms.By providing a space to the advertisers, the social
 media giants make millions as the audiences observe them while
visiting a website. Many platforms are eliminating third parties by
rewarding users directly with crypto micropayments for content
creation. For instance, content sharing platforms such as Steemit and
PodMiners are applying Blockchain solutions and gaining rewards
in the form of STEEM tokens and incentives.

6.6.3.2 Smart Contracts

Smart contracts are applications that run exactly as programmed without
any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third party interference.
Working of smart contract (fig 6.13)

Fig 6.13 Working of smart contract

In short, you can setup a digital, binding agreement between a stranger and
yourself. You do not care to trust this stranger. And that’s okay! Because
with smart contracts, they require no trust, as in a trustless agreement. The
agreement is public knowledge (via the public ledger) and is fully
transparent so both parties know what they are agreeing to. It’s all
programming logic at the end of the day. The outcomes are predefined in
the contract which are dependent on the actions of the parties involved in
the smart contract. When both parties fulfill their obligations, the smart
contract will know which action to take. For example, releasing funds to the
seller once the buyer confirms the delivery of the package. Take it a step
further and have the funds release automatically by means of tracking the
shipment via the tracking number. Want more security or peace of mind?
One can require this smart contract to hold escrows by both parties to
ensure no foul play is involved or they risk losing their escrow deposit.
 Smart contracts have the power to automate processes and streamline
operations. Currently, most use cases deal with financial services, but smart
contracts can also extend into many business activities, such as, but not
limited to: share holdings, voting, audit trails, document of records,
auctions, etc…
The best part about smart contracts is that it doesn’t require the need to pay
a middle man to handle your agreements. You save time and money! Also,
with it being on the public ledger, you don’t have to go through a 3rd party
to look up records. You have direct access to any and all records of your
choosing.
Here are some example use cases:
 Crowdfunding
 Crowdsales
 Insurance
 Auto Title Registrations
 Land Title Records
 Digital Identities
 Derivatives
 Auctions
 Waging|Betting
 Savings
 Investment Strategies
 Prediction Markets
 Scheduled payments
 Payments on delivery
 Internet of Things
 DAO — Decentralized
Autonomous Organization
 Fig 6.14 Smart contract use cases for small business

6.6.4 Neuro Marketing:

Neuromarketing is a field of marketing which aims to study brain

responses to various marketing stimuli using technologies such as fMRI,
EEG, eye tracking, facial coding, biometrics. It includes the direct use of
brain imaging, scanning, or other brain activity measurement technology to
measure a subject's response to specific products, packaging, advertising,
or other marketing elements. Neuromarketing is a recent emerging
disciplinary field in marketing.

Fig 6.15 Overview of neuroscientific methods

157
Benefits of neuromarketing
1. More efficient and effective marketing campaigns and strategies.
2. Fewer product and campaign failures.
3. Manipulation of the real needs and wants of people to suit the needs and
wants of marketing interests.
Working of neuromarketing:
The concept of neuromarketing combines marketing, psychology and
neuroscience. Researchers investigate and learn how consumers respond
and feel when presented with products and/or related stimuli.
Observations can then be correlated with a participant's surmised emotions
and social interactions. Market researchers use this information to
determine if products or advertisements stimulate responses in the brain
linked with positive emotions.

Fig 6.16 working of Neuromarketing

Applications:
1. Branding
2. Product
3. Publicity
4. Digital surrounding
5. Other applications

158
 Limitations of Nueromarketing:
To run a complete marketing research, the usage of both neuromarketing
and traditional marketing experiments are necessary. Neuromarketing is
also limited by the high costs of conducting research. Research requires a
variety of technologies such as fMRI, EEG, biometrics, facial coding, and
eye-tracking to learn how consumers respond and feel to stimuli. However,
the cost to rent or own these technologies and even then a lab may be
needed to operate the aforementioned technologies.

6.6.5 Wearable Tech

Wearables are impacting how people interact with technology, which in
turn changes how digital marketers target consumers. Like many other
emerging technologies, wearables are still in their infancy, which is the
perfect time for marketers to begin learning new tactics for them. Preparing
for a future filled with wearable like smartwatches (Fig 6.17) , smart glasses,
and shoes that connect with the internet can ensure you profit heavily from
new marketing trends.

Fig 6.17 wearable- smartwatch

Of course, many of the current wearables in the market are quickly fading
from popularity, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from there. When
they do start becoming more popular, here are some ways you’ll need to
update your strategies to flourish in a world of wearable technology.

Keeping Your Messages Short

A computer has a large screen, giving digital marketers plenty of space to
work with. They can include extra things on a screen to accompany their
message, and can even have just plain white space to make pages
aesthetically pleasing. Then, tablets and smartphones came out, with
smaller screens. Marketers were forced to shorten their messages to be more
effective, and remove those unnecessary extras on pages.

159
Now people are using devices with even smaller screens, requiring
marketers to update their tactics. It’s unreasonable to expect a consumer to
read paragraphs upon paragraphs of text on a smartwatch with a 38mm
screen. It’s even unlikely they’ll want to read something more than a few
sentences.
Wearables like smartwatches may require adapting your content to better
fit their screen sizes. Instead of answering a question in around 500 words,
shrink it to about two to three sentences. That way, people receive what
they want from your site without extra frustration.
Chatbots and Voice Search
Many wearables make it more difficult to type and in turn make voice
commands and voice search options much more attractive. This eventual
shift will result in changes in keywords, increases in long tail searches, and
the rise of chatbots.
Let’s talk about voice search. Already with smartphones, the ability to
search with your voice is possible and used. As more people use wearables,
they’ll find that if they have a quick question they want answered, they’ll
use that rather than their phone simply because it’s so handy and easy to
access. That means talking to it to search, which can be a big impact on
keywords and search queries. When people ask Siri or Google voice to
search something, they often pose it as a question. This trend will only
continue to grow with more people search through voice commands
Other new technologies will blend well with wearables in the future,
especially chatbots. Tech companies are building chatbots with advanced
AI that could have a big impact on how we do web searches. The difference
between these and programs like Siri is that these chatbots will remember
and learn each user’s personalities and preferences. These chatbots will
change up how people receive content and marketers will need to include
chatbot strategies.
Even More Connected
Wearables connect consumers even more to the web and, in turn,
businesses. Before smartphones, people could only check their email at a
computer. Now, it’s possible to check email at any time thanks to
smartphones. But, it’s possible to miss things if the phone is in a pocket or
purse. The average person checks their phone about 85 times a day, which
might seem like a lot, but means there is plenty of chances to miss things.
A smartwatch, though, can give immediate notifications for emails, apps,
and even text messages.
With this ability, consumers are going to see and respond to notifications
much quicker. That gives marketers quicker access to data, especially if they
track email open rates, and allows them to be more responsive and flexible
during campaigns.

160
 As more marketers learn that they have quick and almost constant access
to consumers, those notifications will become too much. Every company
will try to be noticed and cause a lot of noise, similar to how email and spam
was until spam filters became efficient. That requires marketers to become
even more creative and interesting to stand out in a constant stream of
notifications.
Users of wearable Technology:
Like most new technologies, the biggest adopters are younger generations.
While some wearables are only fads that last a year at most, many will have
lasting effects on future consumers. As target markets change and who
makes decisions in the workplace evolve, the effects of lifestyles with
wearables will be felt everywhere.
Analysis of target markets will have to include what wearables they are
using and how it impacts their buying habits. This is similar to how now,
marketers have to look what types of smartphones and tablets consumers
use and finding patterns in their behaviors.

Wearable tech is a fantastic addition to the modern world and certainly

opens up clever and creative avenues for digital marketing. Not only are
these advancements fascinating to watch, they also help marketers track
user motives. The wearable technology we are seeing today is only the
beginning. As technology continues to advance, marketers continue with
new and innovative strategies to match the times.

6.6.6 Personal Chatbots:

Chatbots can improve and benefit your marketing and sales in many ways.
They apply to support requests, e-commerce and even personal or
informational websites. Chatbots can even talk between them, but most of
the time they chat with humans and try to imitate real persons. Designers
focus on passing the Turing Test with their bots. A bot passes the Turing
Test when humans think they’re actually talking to another human.
The most popular online chatbots developed so far are mostly for fun. You
can have basic conversations with them, but you will get bored pretty fast
(fig 6.18) . Some will even perform a few basic tasks, such as searching the
web for you and displaying images.

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 Fig 6.18 chatboat
Bots have unlimited potential:
Right now, it’s hard to understand the full scope of just what bots can do.
Sure they can save you time and stress by making mundane, repetitive tasks
a thing of the past.
But imagine an AI-enabled bot that can help keep track of health conditions,
refill prescriptions, and automatically alert medical professionals if it senses
something is off.
Today’s bots are often divided into two categories: Informational bots and
utility bots.
 Informational bots give users a new channel to consumer
information, such as breaking news alerts based on your interests.
 Utility bots help users complete an action or solve a problem via a
user-prompted transaction.
This might include enlisting a bot to deal with the nightmare of updating
an airline reservation or pulling up your Google analytics data, so your
campaign stats are always at your fingertips.
For the first time, that’s not just a figure of speech. The world, and the
market, is ready for bots. Just look at WeChat.(Fig 6.19)

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 Fig 6.19 China’s WeChat shows the way to social media’s future.
The app’s 700 million users return to it up to 10 times every day to do
everything from conduct business calls to manage their personal finances.
What can you do to make your bot that streamlined and useful?
If you’re a good marketer, you’ll do your best to build a tool that feels
welcoming without being imposing and helpful without being
overwhelming. You’ll understand that bot communication should solve
one problem really well — and do it only when prompted.
It’s not that people don’t like bots. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. When the
basic rules and boundaries are respected, people are pleased to work with
bots. They fill a need. They provide value and delight at the same time.

6.7 Multiple choice questions

1. A(n) _____ product exceeds customer expectations.
a. Strategic
b. Superior
c. Augmented
d. Anticipated
2. This game launched augmented reality (AR) into the spotlight in recent years...
a. Super Mario
b. Pokemon
c. World of Warcraft
d. Fortnite
3. Augmented reality (AR) provides features that are...
a. Visual, interactive, and 3D
b. Collaborative, virtual, and simulated
c. Computer-generated, sensory, and virtual
d. Sounds, sensory, and cost-efficient

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4. AR technology allows students to interact with the physical world by ________.
a. Moving around to change perspectives
b. Moving closer/further to change scale
c. Select virtual objects by pointing to them
d. All of the above
5. How is augmented reality used in watching a football game?
a. The scoreboard
b. Replays
c. Yellow 1st Down Marker
d. For the coaches to communicate
6. What is the best use case for smart contracts?
a. Digitalize and automate legally binding contracts using artificial
intelligence (AI)
b. Enforce the execution of contracts in the legal system using
cryptocurrencies
c. Ensure automatic payments by predetermined actions or events in
insurance contracts
d. Extend the Bitcoin blockchain, the best-known smart contract platform,
to the judicial system
7. In which scenario is a smart contract the best solution to the problem?
a. A bartender wants to force customers to pay for their drinks by
transferring cryptocurrency to his wallet.
b. A chief financial officer wants her smart watch to notify her when her
partner enters their front door.
c. An energy company wants to automatically buy power when the price
reaches a predetermined rate.
d. An insurance company wants to pay out a farmer whenever the case
manager feels it is best to do so.
8. Blockchain technology has made decentralized marketplaces possible.
What is a benefit of a decentralized marketplace?
a. It is based on open-source technology, so it can be used without any
investment.
b. It is not under a paid license to operate and therefore it is managed
better.
c. It is relatively cheap due to the use of cryptocurrency and is very
accessible.
d. It is tamper-proof, resilient to being shut down and trustworthy due to
smart contracts.
9. How does blockchain improve supply chains?
a. By automatically creating trade agreements between two parties
b. By creating safe centralized marketplaces to trade goods on

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 c. By stabilizing the national currencies of the countries involved
d. By transferring tokenized ownership through a software system
10. IoT is an advanced automation and analytics system which deals with?
a. sensor, networking
b. electronic
c. cloud messaging
d. All of the above

6.8 Short answer questions

a. Explain working of neuromarketing.
b. List and explain essential stages in PACE.
c. What is wearable technology? How this can be used in marketing ?
d. Explain how blockchain can be used in small business?
e. Explain how smart contracts works ?

6.9 Long answer questions

a. How VR, AR and XR is beneficial in marketing? Explain with examples of each.
b. Explain PACE model in marketing with essential stages of PACE.
c. Explain use of personal chatbot in marketing. How it can be helpful?
d. Explain nueromarketing methods that can be used in marketing.
e. Give examples of use cases where small smart contracts are used in small
business.

6.10 References:
1. Voicebot and Chatbot Design: Flexible Conversational Interfaces with Amazon
Alexa, Google Home, and Facebook Messenger
2. Blockchain Technology and Applications, Pethuru Raj, Kavita Saini, Chellammal
Surianarayanan
3. Virtual Reality Technology and Applications,Matjaž Mihelj, Domen
Novak, Samo Beguš

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