Timeless Digital Marketing: Consistent Principles for Consistent Results

Timeless Digital Marketing

Ahmad Abugosh

This book is for sale at http://leanpub.com/timelessdigitalmarketing

This version was published on 2019-12-09

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This is a Leanpub book. Leanpub empowers authors and publishers with the Lean Publishing process. Lean Publishing is the act of publishing an in-progress ebook using lightweight tools and many iterations to get reader feedback, pivot until you have the right book and build traction once you do.

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© 2019 Ahmad Abugosh

Table of Contents

About The Author

Introduction

Chapter 1 - Why Digital Marketing?

Traditional Marketing

Digital / Online Marketing

Chapter 2 - The Channels

Digital - Push Marketing

Digital - Pull Marketing

Digital - Long Term Marketing

Digital - Retention Marketing

Channel Conclusion

Chapter 3: Setting your foundations

Tracking Traffic

Tracking Conversions

Performance Goals

Awareness Goals

Focusing On Performance Goals

Tracking Performance Goals

Ad Platform Pixels

Tag Managers

Tracking B2B versus B2C

Chapter 4 - How to NOT waste money!

Budgets

You may already have a budget

You don’t have a budget

Planning Your Strategy

Chapter 5 - Getting Immediate Results

Creating Paid Campaigns

Targeting- Starting with a Niche

How to reach them

Pull Marketing

Chapter 6 - Getting Free Traffic

Long Term Marketing Strategy

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Organic Social Media

Email Newsletters

Chapter 7 - Measuring results

The Digital Ad Funnel

1 - Conversion Rate

2- CPA (Cost per acquisition)

3- Revenue, Margins and Profit

Action Plan

Chapter 8 - What do you do if it’s working?

Bringing down our CPA

Playing with your levers to find the optimal level

Beware of the budget plateau

Action Plan

Chapter 9 - What to do if it’s not working?

Change the targeting

Change the ads

Adjust the bids / budgets

Softer conversions

Change the landing page

Change the price

Change the product

Chapter 10 - Strategies for Growth

Strategy 1 Long term CLV

Strategy 2: The 20% approach

Strategy 3: The Inbound Approach

Strategy 4: The Hybrid Approach

Conclusion - Now what do I do?

Glossary of terms

Appendix of Tools

About The Author

Ahmad Abugosh has been working full-time in Digital Marketing since 2012. He is the current Director of Marketing & Learning Programs​ at AstroLabs, where he handles all marketing, running of academy programs and tech systems at AstroLabs. Ahmad graduated with a degree in Computer Engineering from the American University of Sharjah in 2011, and has been Google Certified (in Analytics & Google Ads) since 2012. Since then, he has worked at MBC, Namshi (Rocket Internet) and a digital agency in Dubai (RBBi, where he worked on Analytics and BI setups for some of the largest organizations in the region). His professional expertise is in Analytics, Digital Marketing, Fullstack Web Development and Tech Workshops.

This book is the culmination of his more than 7 years of experience working in the digital marketing field and training thousands of people through in-person workshops and online courses.

You can connect with Ahmad on:

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/ahmadabugosh/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/aabugosh

Personal Website: https://ahmadabugosh.com

Email: [email protected]

Introduction

If you had told me when I first graduated from university that I would be working in marketing, I would have laughed. Now, here I am 8 years later writing a book on marketing. How did this happen?

As someone that is technically minded (I made my first website when I was only 10 years old back in 1998), I was always into computers, the internet, and programming, but never understood marketing. I used to listen to the late Bill Hicks’ comedy sketch on marketing and laugh along at how inept and soulless marketing was as a profession. I studied Computer Engineering partly because of how much I loved computers and partially because of how much I disliked what I perceived as sleazy business and sales. One thing changed though since then, I got a job.

I started working as a web developer straight out of college. I initially really liked the job, but I found working on a large code base not very demanding. (In hindsight, I would have probably loved the field if the company and nature of the work was different.) That’s why when I saw an online ad for an eCommerce company looking to hire, I immediately applied to an entry level marketing position. I was more excited about the eCommerce part than the fact that it was a marketing role, since I was thinking that it would be cool to see how an eCommerce company is run. Little did I know that that one choice would lead me on a trajectory to getting immersed in digital marketing that would change my life forever, and without that one late evening decision, I think it’s safe to say this book wouldn’t exist.

After working in that eCommerce company for a couple of years, I learned a ton about digital marketing from some of the brightest people I ever came across. After that, I moved on to work at an agency helping other companies implement the digital marketing best practices I learned. I now teach and mentor companies and individuals at a company called AstroLabs located in Dubai, UAE and have shared what I learned in workshops and learning sessions with over 1,000 people (at the time of writing this book.)

My goal is for this book is to extend that knowledge to you and to teach you the fundamental strategies and techniques I learned (without getting into the weeds of too many details right away) so you can walk away with a practical roadmap to a timeless understanding of Digital Marketing.

Wait a minute,'' you might think. Digital Marketing is one of the most evolving fields in the world. Almost every day you hear about new changes to platforms, new companies, and new targeting strategies. What exactly is timeless" about that? Well, my friend, that’s exactly the point of this book. Since Digital Marketing is such a constantly changing field, you’re right, it is often hard to keep up. However, there are many things in Digital Marketing that do not change. These fundamental principles have been around for the last 10+ years, and they will most likely be around for decades more. Will the way you use these principles change? Of course. However, as long as you understand how these timeless strategies work, you’ll have a very strong base of understanding when it comes to Digital Marketing, which will allow you to always stay up to date, no matter how fast the industry changes.

Don’t be confused and think that this book is theoretical though. It is packed with practical exercises and action plans for you to follow (at the end of every chapter, as well as at the end of the book), and by the time you get through this book you will live the Timeless Digital Marketing principles, and truly be able to market any business!

Chapter 1 - Why Digital Marketing?

Before we can get into Digital Marketing, let’s talk about marketing in general, since I often feel like a lot of people have a negative opinion on it, and feel it's a sleazy profession.

Let’s first define marketing. Marketing is the way in which you promote something (usually a product or a service). That’s it. I think marketing can be a very manipulative and disingenuous field, but it’s something that we as humans have to do in every aspect of our lives. If you zoom out even more, it’s about persuasion and convincing people that you can help them improve their lives, and it’s something we all do on a daily basis. For example, if you want to have your friend go out with you somewhere you have to persuade them of your plan (or market the idea to them), in order to convince them. It’s not manipulative, as long as your intentions aren’t manipulative, and you have the other person’s best interests at heart. Ok, so you might be saying, this got into the weeds really quickly, why are we talking about persuasion, I want a practical guide for my business? You’re right, but it’s important to establish a common language of understanding to start.

What is marketing? Marketing is the process by which you promote goods and services. That’s the textbook definition, but for me, I believe that marketing is showing people the value of what you can offer to help them improve their lives.

Marketing can take many forms. What I want to cover in the next section is what are the main types of marketing, to set the context into our wider discussion before we get into digital marketing.

Traditional Marketing

Before I get into digital marketing, let me first talk about how marketing worked in the pre-digital age (in other words: the age before the internet). Before computers and the internet, how could you get the word out about something you were selling? You had four main ways.

Push Marketing

The first way was to push your ad in front of others. This is also often what people refer to as advertising, since you are actively promoting what your product or service (most likely by paying for the privilege). This could be by buying a billboard ad, tv, or radio commercial, or by distributing a flyer. The problem with this way is that you had to incur a lot of cost to get the word out, without knowing exactly what worked and what didn’t. There is a saying attributed to John Wanamaker which states, Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half. That was the problem in this type of push marketing.

Pull Marketing

The second way that you could traditionally market your business was to hope that people come to you (by convenience of your location, or a listing somewhere). This form of marketing is often called pull marketing, because you are pulling in people to your business, as opposed to pushing your ad out to them. You don’t just have to wait around though, there are active ways for you to get people to come to you. For example, you could list your business in a directory (like the yellow pages, or through local business listings), and wait for people to contact you. What you should keep in mind though, is that this form of marketing generally is one that has less volume (since you are only in contact with people that are already looking for you or your service); however, on the flip side, it’s a way of marketing that generally has a lot more qualified interest. In other words, the people that come to you are generally a lot more interested in your product or service than a random person who may see an ad.

Long-Term Marketing

The third type of marketing relates to building consistent growth over time. This includes building your brand to an extent that people know about you (also known as branding), and growing through sustainable long-term efforts, like building trust, word of mouth, attending trade shows, community events etc. There are no shortcuts here— it’s all about building trust and focusing on long term gains and efforts.

Retention & Loyalty

The fourth and final main way to market to people is not really to market to anyone new at all, but just to keep serving people that already know about you. This is often a good strategy because it is far less expensive to keep a current customer than to get a new customer. (Conservative estimates are that it is 5 times cheaper.) So, oftentimes, if a business has enough customers in the door, all they have to do is keep them coming back to stay in business. Think about the local corner grocery store. They probably don’t have to do much marketing because they have people coming in that already know about them, are loyal, and consistently purchase their weekly supplies there. Of course, this requires some initial marketing to build the initial pool of customers, but once a business establishes a base of loyal customers, it can be sustainable just to focus on retaining them.

Digital / Online Marketing

Now let’s switch back to the digital world. First of all, let’s define what digital marketing is. Digital marketing is basically marketing done through digital means, which in a practical sense means any marketing that is done over the internet or online. That is why people often use digital marketing and online marketing interchangeably.

So, what makes digital marketing different and by most accounts a much more effective way to do marketing than traditional offline marketing? It has to do with the nature of the platform, which can take advantage of the following levers:

1. You can track everything. This is the most important factor that gives digital marketing an immense advantage over other forms of marketing. You can measure exactly who sees, engages, clicks, contacts, and buys online so you know exactly what marketing efforts had a positive effect on your business. Going back to the quote Half the money I spend on advertising (marketing) is wasted…while that may have been true for traditional marketing, with digital marketing, it is not the case. Nearly everything can be tracked, and you can know what money you spend is working and what is not.

2. You can start now. You don’t need 1000’s of dollars in capital upfront to launch an online campaign. Many of the techniques in this book are 100% free; even the ones that are paid, don’t require large investments, since for most businesses you can set things up in a way where you make back what you spend so you don’t need a large amount of capital.

3. You can target anyone. You are not tied down like you are in offline marketing. You can be in India and market to people in Mexico. You can also be super-specific, like only show ads to moms interested in home cooking that recently moved houses (I’ll explain how to do that later in the book).

4. You can easily make changes. You are agile! With digital marketing, it is completely up to you whether you start or stop a campaign. If something is not working, you can immediately turn it off. If something is working, you can scale it up. You have complete control.

5. You get a better ROI (Return on Investment). As a result of all the reasons above, digital marketing has a much better ROI compared to traditional marketing. From a business standpoint, this is perfect, as it allows you to know the direct return on everything that you spend. For example, if you spend $1 on marketing, you can know that it brought you $10 in revenue. As a result, you can easily project your revenue and costs in a much more efficient manner.

Chapter 2 - The Channels

Before we get into specific recommendations and how to implement each channel, let’s first make sure that we understand the main areas that we can work with in digital marketing. There will always be new channels and strategies within these areas, but you will find that all digital marketing has to fall under one of them