Lesson 6 moves on from the attract phase of inbound marketing to the convert phase. In the convert phase companies are looking to convert visitors into leads using forms, call-to-action, and landing pages.
In class 6 we will be taking a look at how to use a Call-To-Action (CTA). A CTA is a button that promotes an offer and links to a landing page. CTA's can be placed on your website or blog to attract customers.
On a blog post, it is best to place your CTA at the end of the post, or in the sidebar. This is so you are not interrupting the content. CTAs in an email can be placed at the end of the email, at the end of a paragraph, or sentence. They should be noticeable but not distracting. Your CTA must stand out, so visitors will click on it. You should consider your buyer persona when designing your CTA. Highly contrasting colors helps a CTA stand out.
As a review, the primary purpose of a call-to-action is to convert visitors into leads.
Chapter 5 of Hubspot covers why social media is very important to Inbound Marketing. 9 out of 10 U.S. businesses are active on social media. It helps keep content in front of the right people and spread the word of your business. You can use your content to generate new leads.
Social media is used in the attract phase to increase your exposure. Once you've exposed a new visitor to your site, social media can help you convert these visitors into leads by promoting your content. Social monitoring is a way of computing popularity of a company by taking information from social media channels. It is a great way to gather information on your buyer personas. Not only can you monitor what they are saying about you, but you can listen to industry trends that will help you attract more visitors and grow your business.
Businesses should make sure that they have SMART inbound goals. This acronym stands for: Specific Measurable Attainable Relevant Timely
SMART inbound marketing helps increase visitors, convert more leads, close more customers, and even make customers happy.
Just like the past two chapters, chapter 7 provides another way to learn about analytics in a live setting. The last two chapters talked about Shopify and AdWords, while this chapter will talk about Gumroad. Gumroad can be easily linked to Google Analytics, and it has its own built-in analytics.
Conversion analytics is very important to learn because they help you to optimize a campaign. It helps make campaigns more effective, and more efficient. In the process, generating more revenue and using the existing budget more wisely. Knowing a conversion rate helps you measure the effectiveness of your efforts to improve things, over time.
Let's get started with Gumroad! Go to: https://gumroad.com/ click "Start Selling:" then create an account. Next, name your store and enter a description. You will want to add a username, which will appear in the link. Once your account is all set up, you want to connect with Google Analytics.
Go to: https://www.google.com/analytics/ click "Access Google Analytics," click "Property," add your Gumroad website in, and copy the Tracking ID it gives you.
Now, you'll want to go back into Gumroad, and select "Settings." In the "Advanced" section paste in the Tracking ID, you just obtained from Google Analytics. Update the account details, then add a product into Gumroad. Once you have a product added in, share it on Facebook to generate some traffic. Once you have some traffic you can go to Analytics in Gumroad and see how your conversion rate is doing.
Google Analytics will allow you to dig a little deeper into the statistics than Gumroad will. You can use both websites to track your website, and make improvements to increase your revenue even more!
Chapter 8 is the last chapter in Surfing the Tsunami and it discusses what to do next. Now that you understand AI, the causes, and the effects, it's time to discuss what to do after you implement the three A's (adapt, adopt, and adept) into your life.
As a reminder, a couple great books to read about AI include Rise of the Robots, Master Algorithm, and 2nd Machine Age.
Once you've read these three books try Machine Learning and Deep Learning to help you become more adept in AI.
Books can only take you so far though, once you have read all these books front to back, your next step is to take courses in AI to further your understanding. These courses can be done at a local community college, online/book refreshers such as Khan Academy, or Coursera. Coursera offers free courses as well as courses for payment. Through Coursera you can receive actual certificates that will look great on a resume! They also offer online Master's Degree programs in Computer Science.
Another great option besides Coursera is Udacity. You can get their "Learn to Code" nanodegree. It starts with HTML and moves to python. They also carry an online Master's Degree in Computer Science.
All of these books and websites are great sources to help you stay up to date with AI. While Artificial Intelligence does not seem to be affecting you, it affects everyone in some way, shape, or form. It is very important to address AI and understand the effects it has on everyday life.
Lesson 4 focuses on the fundamentals of blogging. It is an essential part of being an inbound marketer, helping you to easily and effectively reach prospects on your website. Business blogging helps you attract new visitors, and convert them into leads. Blog posts can help strangers by answering their questions and turning them into visitors. People who are interested in your blog will visit it, share it, and help promote it. The more you blog, the more people will look at you as a reliable and trustworthy source.
When creating a blog it is important to follow these simple and easy steps:
1) Pick a topic and title: When choosing your blog title it is important to use long-tail keywords. The keyword should fit as a description of what the page is about.
2) Format and optimize the post: When creating a blog it is important to focus on one topic. The more focused a blog is, the better because it will make posts clearer for readers and for search engines. Having empty space on your blog (whitespace) is a good thing, it helps visitors to focus on your content, not the clutter. Use short paragraphs, indents, section headers, and bulleted lists to make it easier to read.
3) Promote offers on your blog to increase lead generation: Use your blog to strategically promote your current offers. You want to attract someone and provide relevant information and offers. Feature CTAs on a blog sidebar, you want it to catch readers at the beginner of the buyers journey. Also, make sure that you make it easy for people to prescribe to your blog.
4) Promote your blog posts: Use your blog sidebar to promote your recent or most popular posts, and add your blog to your primary website navigation. Also, link internally to your blog posts, readers who are interested can click through to your blog. Sharing your posts on social media can help promote your product or service.
5) Analyze the performance of your blog posts: You will want to look at hte number of views for each blog post. It will help you determine which content is the most popular among viewers. Filtering your most popular posts by topic, author or channel of promotion. Last, look at the number of clicks on the CTAs at the end of an individual post.
Once you have done all of these steps, your blog will be even better! Just remember it is important to write consistently and frequently. Each new blog post is a new chance to reach new customers.
Lesson 3 of hubspot focuses on creating content with a purpose. Content is what your trying to deliver to your visitors through social media, emails, and more. Not all content is created equally, remember quality is always better than quantity! In the attract phase content is the driving force to the convert stage. It fuels the inbound methodology, and helps progress visitors from step to step.
Your content should make people want to come back for more, or refer others to you. Every piece is an investment in your future goals. When coming up with content it is important to take in consideration your buyer personas (who you're trying to reach) and the buyer's journey (what content will be most interesting or helpful for them).
If your content is in the awareness phase you should be targeting a problem your buyer persona is experiencing. In the consideration stage you should be targeting a solution to a problem. In the decision stage content should be about your product or service because they have already chosen you. Content should be created for all different stage of the buyer's journey. The picture below shows the best places content should be placed in each step of the buyer's journey.
When trying to convert visitors into leads, you should utilize content in all of the stages of the buyer's journey. It is more important to focus on the content first, and the design second. Products should not be discussed until the decision stage of the buyer's journey. Delivery of content makes it relevant, so you need to make sure you can get your content out in an effective way. Make sure you are promoting and distributing your content. Lesson 3 focuses on content because it is a crucial step in inbound marketing. Without it, inbound marketing would not be successful at all.
Last week we talked about Shopify and how it provides a foundation for e-commerce. This week we will move on and talk about how AdWords provides a way to advertise a site and track conversion.
To start off lets create an acount, go to http://www.google.com/adwords. Once your account is created go to tools and then to conversions. The goal is to set up a connection between AdWords and your e-commerce site. You can then code it with Shopify and it will allow AdWords to track your site. It will allow you to track how much money you spend on ads to the revenue you will make on your your e-commerce site.
Click the conversion button and ad Shopify in the box. Add the conversion channel as Purchase/Sale, the markup language to HTML, and last click "I make changes to the code." Click done and you are set. Take the code Google gives you, log onto your Shopify, click checkout, and paste the link into the additional content and scripts area.
Congrats, you have successfully linked your Shopify and AdWords, now you will have a better understanding when you are tracking your site!
Chapter 7 of Surfing the Tsunami focuses on diving into the AI field and learning a little bit about some of the industry leaders.
The first individual highlighted is Andrew Ng, he was based out of Stanford, and helped to launch the "MOOC" revolution, through co-founding Coursera. He offers courses at Stanford on machine learning that are very popular. He used to work in China at Baidu as the chief scientist,but he recently came back to the United States. Below is one of his recent videos where he discusses AI.
The second individual is Geoffrey Hinton, a British cognitive psychologist and computer scientist. He was one of the first researchers who demonstrated the use of generalized back propagation algorithm for training multi-layer neural nets. Blow is an interview Geoffrey recently had with New York Times.
Pedro Domingos was also sited as having a strong influence in the AI field. He wrote the book Master Algorithm, and teaches at University of Washington. His youtube videos for his online machine learning class, as well as several TEDx talks show just how knowledgeable on AI he is.
These are just three of the top individuals in the AI field. They are great sources to help further grasp your understanding of AI. Check out these videos, as well as other videos and books written by these influential individuals!
Growing up in a small town the food options in
my school district were very slim. There was one lunch offered a day, no
alternatives for students with allergies, intolerances, and no healthy options.
Without fail, year after year, the highlight of my day was chicken nuggets,
Bosco sticks, and pizza. Once we got to middle school, our school offered what
I thought was tons of options. The problem was the food they offered was pizza,
chicken nuggets, cheese fries, and hamburgers. I had no concept of the junk I was
putting in my body to fuel it.
In the link below, What’s
Wrong with School Lunches, Cooper states, “We're seeing sick kids get
sicker and sicker. And the reason this is happening, by and large, is because
of our food system and the way the government commodifies food, the way the
government oversees our food, the way the USDA puts food on kids' plates that's
unhealthy, and allows unhealthy food into schools. And by -- tacitly, all of us
send our kids, or grandchildren, or nieces, or nephews, to school and tell them
to learn, you know, learn what's in those schools. And when you feed these kids
bad food, that's what they're learning. So that's really what this is all
about” (Cooper, 2007). Cooper agrees that school lunches are not only
unhealthy, but they are, teaching students that eating those foods is good for
them. She says that the only way to fix this growing problem is for everyone to
step up and help stop it. Whether it’s petitioning for healthier schools in
your district or simply packing lunch for your child, anything will help.
When
thinking about the effects of eating unhealthy foods most people just think
about weight gain, but have you ever thought about the other effects these
children have? Think about the children who do not have consistent meals, the
only food they receive is food they get from school. They come to school, their
brains are foggy, and all they can think of is their next meal. These students
need nutritious, filling meals that will keep their mind and bodies fueled. In
his TED Talk, Kass talks about how he instituted a program for all schools who
had a forty percent more low-income kids. Every student in this school would
receive not only a free lunch, but also a free breakfast. These kids would come
to school and not have to sit and wait for their first meal of the day, instead
they would start off with a meal. Kass stated that, “The schools that have
implemented this program saw an increase in math and reading scores by 17.5
percent. 17.5 percent. And research shows that when kids have a consistent,
nutritious breakfast, their chances of graduating increase by 20 percent. 20
percent. When we give our kids the nourishment they need, we give them the
chance to thrive, both in the classroom and beyond” (Kass, 2015). When we think
about school lunches, we need to think about the effects that they have on
every child. Most importantly, the children who do not receive consistent meals
at home. They are the ones lacking the nutrients they need to grow and
function, they are the ones we need to make sure are receiving nutritious
meals.
I
believe that schools are starting to take the right steps towards improving
school lunches. If I were to look back at the school lunches I was fed as a
child, and now look at the one my brother receives, there have been vast
improvements. At my brother’s school there are four lunches served a day. The
normal lunch special, a vegetarian option, a gluten free option, and a salad.
They can choose their sides and can opt for healthier options. His school even
offers breakfast to students and healthy snacks for students who do not have
one, or who forgot theirs at home. With the option of these healthy meals, the
real question is, are these students picking the healthier option? Thanks to
the Obama administration, school lunches are starting to become healthier with
less options of junk food. “The amounts of fat, sugar and salt were drastically
reduced. Portion sizes shrank. Lunch trays had to hold more fruits and
vegetables. Snacks and food sold for fund-raising had to be healthier”
(Severson). If we want children to live longer, grow up healthy, and perform
well in school, we need to make sure they are receiving proper nutrition to
fuel their bodies. While I believe that school lunches are not perfect, I
believe there have been steps made towards a healthier future of school
lunches.
References
Cooper, A. (2007, December). What's wrong with
school lunches Retrieved February 12, 2018, from https://www.ted.com/talks/ann_cooper_talks_school_lunches/transcript?
Kass,
S. (2015, November). Want kids to learn well? Feed them well. Retrieved
February 12,
Hubspot lesson one focuses on the essentials of an effective inbound strategy. An inbound strategy is less interuptive than traditional marketing, focusing on SEO, blogging, and the attraction of customers. Instead of creating commercials, they create videos to attract customers. It is much more customer focused, and inbound marketing wants you to find them, not the customers to find you.
The first step in inbound marketing is attract. You take strangers and turn them into visitors. This can be done through a blog, keywords, or social publishing. Next you convert them from visitors to leads. This is done through forms, calls-to-action, and landing pages. The last step is to close, this takes the leads and turns them into actual customers. This is done through CRM, email, and workflows.
The buyers journey consists of three stages: the awareness, consideration, and decision stages. This is the active research process someone goes through leading up to a purchase. Buyer persona stories should contain information about their background, their demographics, and their goals and challenges. These are all topics that were touched on in lesson one. It is important to have these concepts memorized because they are essential in inbound marketing.
Hubspot is a developer and marketer of software products for inbound marketing and sales. Inbound marketing is drawing customers to products and services using content marketing, social media marketing, search engine optomization and branding. Hubspot offers a certification that will be a great resume builder. It consists of 12 video sections that give you information on ways to help improve your knowledge of Hubspot. The first section talks about the essentials of an effective inbound strategy. Section Two talks about optimizing your website for search engines.
Hubspot helps you with SEO, the process of improving your website so it attracts more visitors to increase the clicks on your webpage. Having a solid SEO your page will get ranked higher and higher on a page. The use of keywords is first and most important step in SEO. In order to find more keywords for you to use is type one of your current keywords into the internet. This will help you find what keywords lead you to and help you find more leads. It is important to have keywords that optimize the amount of clicks, you should research your keywords and only use words that will get you lots of clicks. Try general words as well as more specific keywords to help target broad and specific audiences. One things that a lot of people forget to do is to optimize your website for mobile phones. Pages that are not mobile friendly lose lots of traffic. Hubspot is a great tool that will help you optimize your website. Look into getting Hubspot certified not just for your resume, but to help yourself grow your business.
In the book Food Justice by Gottlieb and Joshi,
they talk about multiple issues within the food system that have affected the
world. On pages 59-73 and 87-91 they specifically talk about the issues of
standardization of food, cooking becoming a lost skill, the increase of
obesity, fast food companies targeting children, and school lunches. These
issues are still issues today and these authors want to point out the problems
they have noticed in hopes of changing the way food is looked at.
Fast food over the
centuries has led to a standardization of food. There are many critics who say
that fast food is changing the way food is viewed. The growth in the fast food
industry has led to the loss of home cooked meals. School lunches sped up the
decrease of home-prepared meals because children now had a readily accessible
meal waiting for them at home (Gottlieb, 2013).
Post-World War II
cooking started to become a lost skill. This is largely due to an increase in
products such as microwaves and instant cookers that were made to speed up the
cooking process. During World War II women were not only homemakers, but they
worked jobs while their kids were at school. These convenient foods helped
women save time and energy. There was also an increase in the number of
convenient foods and fast food options. Foods such as dried soup mixes and
canned soups were emphasized over homemade soups with fresh ingredients
(Gottlieb, 2013).
The increase in fast
foods and convenient food options lead to a major increase in obesity. There
was an emphasis on fast and convenient with little to no emphasis on the
nutritional value. Fast food companies have specifically targeted two
vulnerable groups- children and low income residents. With the huge portion
sizes and the low prices low income residents are drawn to fast food to fill
their stomachs. "According to the County Public Health Department, the
area in South Los Angles with the highest rate of poverty and food insecurity
in the county also had the highest rates of obesity among adults (68)."
A major problem is the
targeting of fast food restaurants to children. These kids see these delicious
foods advertised and get hooked on the brands. Companies like McDonalds build
product loyalty and establish effective viral marketing to draw in children.
These parents like the convenience and ease of these restaurants as well as
making their children happy (Gottlieb, 2013).
School food politics:
During World War I school lunches became under scrutiny when a third of those
called to serve the country were considered malnourished. President Truman
signed the National School Lunch Act in 1946 saying that the welfare of farmers
directly correlated with the health of children. While programs like these
helped feed our youth, they did nothing to ensure the quality of the meals they
are being fed. The meals were focused on providing the right number of
calories, not the proper nutritional value. In 2009 Obama and his agriculture
secretary pushed to make changes in the broader food system, and help increase
the nutritional value of school lunches (Gottlieb, 2013).
Gottlieb and Joshi make
many valid points that should be analyzed even closer. The only way to increase
the longevity of life is to ensure that we are fueling our body with the proper
nutrients. I think the first step in fixing this is looking at the way
companies target young children, as well as the addressing the nutritional
value of school lunches.
References
Gottlieb, R., &
Joshi, A. (2013). Food justice. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Tracking ROI is a very important skill because it helps businesses make huge profits. This week we will be talking about Shopify, which is one of the easiest ways to set up an e-commerce system to learn about tracking ROI with analytics. Shopify costs $29.95/month and is the best and easiest way to track ROI. Conversion tracking is important because it helps ensure that you are actually making a profit, and if you can confidently increase or decrease your budget to help grow sales.
Lets get started by going to shopify.com and click get started. There is a free 14-day trial available so make a login and hit "create your store now." Pick your name, click the online store checkbox and proceed by click next. Enter in your current address, answer the questions displayed on the next page, and last enter your product. You can add images to make your product pop even more.
The next step is to customize your navigation. Go to the menu on the side of the screen and click navigation, you can now edit your page. Another feature that is important is adding your product to the front page. Go to Collections, then click front page collection, select the product you added, and then hit save. After you have added your product to the front page go to your dashboard. You can add your business address and bank information, remember Shopify is not free. Click through the different tabs and you can discover dozens of ways you can customize your page. The more time you spend customizing it, the better it will look!
Last week we talked about the second step in responding to AI, adopt. This week we will be discussing the last, and best step, adept. Adept means getting directly involved with developing AI, by learning coding and how to work with related data. While you may not think getting involved in AI is easy, it will get easier with the use of assistive tools that make the technology more accessible. Theses assistive skills are ways to help you, not a way to replace learning the core skills. The more knowledge you can gain the better.
DataRobot is an advanced automated machine learning platform that can be used to help you learn about AI and machine learning. Machine learning is a core part of AI. It is not the only form of artificial intelligence, but it is the one that is having a huge impact now.
AI and machine learning relate very closely to data science. Coursera, DataCamp, and Khan Academy are all great tools to help learn about machine learning. Some books offered are Machine Learning for Dummies and Data Science for Dummies. These are all great sources to help you move from adopting AI to becoming adept. Hopefully you are starting to take AI More and more seriously and will look into these resources provided above!
This week we will be talking about some of the ways you can track the performance of a website or campaign, as well as some related terms, and the idea of ongoing reporting. Go to http://www.google.com/analytics/. and click on the overview tab. This tab will show you recent data, based on sessions (technical term for a visit). There will also be a part of the page which lists sessions, users, page views, and a couple other sections. If there are more page views than sessions that is because people often view multiple pages while in a session. You are also able to see the average time a viewer spends on your page. The bounce rate represents the number of visitors who enter the site and then leave rather than continuing to view other pages on the same site.
Another fun thing to look at is the location of people who are viewing your site. If you click on Geo, then location a map will pop up with a break down of session with the area it was in.
Another fun thing to look at is trends. It helps you look at how well your website has done over time. To do this in Google Analytics simply go to Acquisition and then click All Traficc. You can look at the percentage of traffic from computers or mobile devices. Doing this can help you tell if you need to make your site more mobile friendly. One thing to be aware of when viewing your traffic is automated bots that appear like regular users.
Chapter 5 of Surfing the Tsunami is dedicated to the second step of excepting AI. Last week we talked about the first step, Adapt, but this week we are moving on to Adopt! As a review adapt means to learn to pay attention to AI, and to be aware of where things are headed. Adopt means to adopt AI-related tools and platforms, so you can be involved in managing AI. AI is already starting to be used in eCommerce, in most of the major social media platforms people use, in devices, digital assistants, and even more. Trying to resist AI is not going to help you, instead it is best to adopt the principles even if you do not like it.
The first place to look for AI is in routine work that is redundant and boring. Tools and platforms can be used to make this work done faster and easier. In order to fully accept AI you should advocate for it so your company takes it seriously. If you take AI seriously but your company does not, that will not help you. AI is not just automation, it can do a lot of complex things as well.
AI has impacted Google in a big way. Think of AdWords, it helps companies track results of advertising. There are platforms that help simplify working with AdWords, such as Marin and Kenshoo, where companies with enough to spend can automate the process of working with many keywords and bids. Optmyzr is an example of an AdWords tool that already has automization in it. It allows developers to connect to Google and make us of machine learning.
Step one and two of AI include adapt and adopt. Next week we will move on to the third and final step of becoming adept. Adept means to get directly involved with developing AI, by learning coding and how to work with related data.
The next couple chapters of Surfing the Tsunami talk about the three suggested options for responding to AI. Chapter 4 will specifically talk about Adapt. This principle is a good start to responding to AI, but it is the most basic and hopefully will lead you to move onto the next two steps. Artificial Intelligence is taking over the world and it this Chapter is to help you go from being passive to more pro-active about AI.
The first step in educating yourself about AI is reading articles. You do not need to dedicate hours upon hours to this, just a couple articles after work everyday is enough to get you thinking. New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC News, Wired, MIT, Technology Review, and TechEmergence are all great sources.
The second step is to read books. Rise of the Robots, Master Algorithm, and 2nd Machine Age are all great books that will help spark your curiosity on AI and help you to adapt. Once you have read articles and books you will start to fully understand AI and the importance of adapting to it. Once you start to adapt it is important to keep moving forward and head to the second phase, Adopt. In next weeks blog post I will be discussing the importance of the word adopt.
By now all of you should have created your own blog. It could be about cooking, traveling, your favorite sports team, or even digital marketing. This blog post is to help you learn how to gain more traffic for your blog. The most simple way to gain traffic is through your social media platforms. This includes Facebook, twitter, Instagram, or another social media you use. All you have to do is post a link and your friends and family will view your blog. The best way to draw in viewers is to post a text blur with your link. Don't just post a link, include a general overview of your blog post with something to grab your readers attention.
If you want to do more than just posting your blog on social media, you can try making a Facebook ad campaign. Go to https://www.facebook.com/ads/create and click on the Clicks to Website option. Copy your blog link into the field and upload an image relevant to your campaign. Once this is all done you will type in a header as well as text for the ad. The next step is to select an audience, add interests that you think people who would enjoy your blog have. Select your budget, place your order and your campaign is good to go!
