Why your digital infrastructure (website, integrations, CRM) matters. Most of us think of "digital marketing" as Facebook ads, SEO, and other content-driven tools. But to really exploit the power of digital marketing you need an infrastructure that drives conversions. Learn about why a strong infrastructure that integrates all of your digital tools is vital for success.
The Key To Digital Marketing Success: Infrastructure
1.
2. EARTHLING INTERACTIVE
MADISON, WISCONSIN
The Key To Digital
Marketing Success:
Infrastructure
Vince Rose
Director – Digital Marketing and CRM Solutions
rose@earthlinginteractive.com
3. The Key To Digital Marketing Success:
Infrastructure
Questions that might have brought you here:
• Why aren’t we on the first page of Google’s search results?
• Why are people not checking out or filling out our contact
form?
• After someone has bought something, how can I continue to
engage with them?
4. The Key To Digital Marketing Success:
Infrastructure
The Basics: Your Website
• Publish content without a developer
• Use a CMS like WordPress, Drupal, or Magento
• Select a theme that displays your content with proper semantic
markup (H1, H2, H3, etc.)
5. The Key To Digital Marketing Success:
Infrastructure
Level 1: See how you are doing
• Set up a Google Analytics account
• Set up Google Search Console
6. The Key To Digital Marketing Success:
Infrastructure
Level 2: Work on your SEO
• ScreamingFrog – Site spider for SEO
• Moz.com – keyword research
• Google PageSpeed Insights
• Plugins, extensions and modules
• Yoast SEO for WordPress
• Drupal has several different modules -
https://www.drupal.org/node/2571379
• Magento and Mageworx Magento 2 SEO Suite Ultimate
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8.
9. The Key To Digital Marketing Success:
Infrastructure
Level 3: Leverage a CRM with your website
• Get your clients into a CRM
• Start putting your forms from your CRM into your site.
10.
11. The Key To Digital Marketing Success:
Infrastructure
Level 4: Put it all together in sophisticated
ways
These questions, or maybe some different ones, are probably on your mind. [READ THIS SLIDE] and which part of SEO and digital marketing. I would say though that there is something that you think you could be doing better, but aren’t sure either how to find out, or maybe you’re not sure what to do differently. When I am using the term infrastructure, we’re not talking about digital marketing platforms like Facebook, Google Adwords. Digital Marketing could be a lot of things, but let’s start with the most basic piece of digital marketing infrastructure - the website because everybody has one.
This is the basics: a website that let’s you publish your content with an intuitive CMS, a Content Management System, gives you, your company, or an agency, control over the content and getting it published.
The CMS also will also set you up for consistency, Equally important for both SEO (and accessibility) is a theme that outputs proper html markup. A great looking theme without proper markup is going to hurt you when it comes to SEO. This is the baseline. If you don’t have these things to start, then it’s going to be really hard to build your digital strategy without a needing a programmer to do it.
These are the basic things that make your business run online.
Everybody has a website. You could even have an agency that makes the site look great. Unfortunately, th reality is that if Google can’t “see” it then a lot of other people won’t.
That’s where tools like Google Analytics and Google Search console come in, Google Analytics will tell you things like where are people coming from to the site, where are the going once they are there, and how much traffic is my digital marketing generating. Google Search Console will be able to tell you how Google ”sees” the site. Are there any problems accessing pages? Was there a huge increase in Page not found errors because you deleted a popular page? Can it even be spidered by google?
You could put $10,000 into digital marketing but if you can’t tell how people are getting to your site or what they are searching for to get to it, then you could be wasting money. To continue the car metaphor - You can tell what is what under the hood and how well those parts are working..
Google Analytics is pretty easy to get set up if you have WordPress, Drupal or Magento. Either you can send the code to your developer to add or there are plugins, modules or extensions that will make it easy to connect your site with Google Analytics.
ScreamingFrog is free for up to 500 urls and has a lot of features like checking the semantic markup
Moz.com has a free trial so you can do some keyword research
Your CMS might have some plugins, extensions, or modules. Do things like edit your snippets like Yoast SEO and generate your sitemap file. Then use Google Search console to get your sitemap submitted.
Do things like check URL structure , Titles and Meta information , Headings, Site organization, Crawling & Indexing, test Site speed
Shown here is Yoast SEO. It lets you set things like the description for Google and do some simple keyword testing of the content.
- Like a car – you can check the oil, replace the washer fluid, fill the tires using your own tools. The kind of stuff to make you car run better or, for your site, optimize it for hopefully a better position in Google.
ScreamingFrog Report
Moz keyword report
CRM is a loosely used term because so many of them have marketing automation tools like email, and drip campaigns but in the purest of terms it is a customer database. Some people might be using Excel to keep a list of their customers. This CRM software adds on additional features for communicating with customers and seeing how staff are engaging with them.
While you may only use it for keeping customer records at first, it opens up possibilities to see which customers are really interested themselves with the company. Lots of the CRM systems score customers by seeing how many times they visit the website or read your newsletter. You can use the information in it to see how ready a customer is to buy.
What it means to you for your digital marketing is that it drills down to the personal level and understanding of each customer.
Just to show an example, here is what Salesforce CRM looks like.
Hubspot, Sharpspring at the lower end to start, Salesforce being the big dog. Hubspot’s free tier has a lot of features.
You can create forms really easily in them, and add the forms to your site with, usually with just a copy and paste.
You can see how your campaigns are driving traffic to the forms.
Adding the CRM pixels to the site will also let you see specific customer’s activity on your site.
Hubspot wrote their own plugin so it is so easy to get your WordPress site talking to Hubspot.
This is where all the things come together to get a ton of value out of your efforts. Building the car that you want that gets you the most joy if sales and conversions are what brings you joy that is.
- UW Madison Division of Continuing Studies has a form pre-filled based on the campaign from a banner ad that a potential enrollee clicked.
Alter the copy to show more relevant copy for the campaign without creating a new page for each campaign.
When a prospective student fills out the form to submit it, then it goes into Salesforce and kicks off a workflow in Salesforce to put an advisor into contact with the Student and send them email with important dates, and other information, some of which is automated.
When a user lands on a particular program page, we use session variables to show posts on the home page that
In this simplified diagram, the Division of Continuing Studies has several engineering programs that they are promoting.
They also have a landing page where most of the content is the same - like broader content about Engineering programs on campus, deadlines, etc.
But, the person clicked on the banner ad because they are interested in Electrical Engineering.
So we pre-fill the program in the dropdown of the form to help tie the form submission to the campaign.
Behind the scenes, the WordPress theme recognizes the Electrical Engineering campaign and displays more detailed information about the Electrical Engineering Program. If someone came from a different campaign, they would see specific copy for that campaign instead.
Just the page visit to a particular program sets a cookie. WordPress recognizes the cookie whenever the enrollee comes back to the home page and displays the most recent blog posts that are part of that program. This tailors the home page to show posts for the program that we know they are interested in. If they visit another program then the posts for that program appear on the home page.
If a user fills out the form that they are interested in the program as well, then they are added to Salesforce and a workflow kicks off a “tThank you for your interest, how can I help?” email from the Enrollment Coach and begins the hand holding process with the enrollee to becoming a student.
Just to walk through the diagram again in steps:
Here are the campaigns that they might run for Engineering for example.
A potential enrollee for the Electrical Engineering program clicks on a banner ad.
The Engineering landing page shows both general content, but also content tailored specifically for Electrical Engineering.
Just by visiting the page, we know that they are at least researching a particular program
As part of that evaluation, we filter blog posts on the home page so they show the most recent posts for that program to put more details for the program in front of them if they are a returning visitor to the site. It helps give them a broader picture of all the things going on on campus for Electrical Engineering for example.
Now back to the landing page. On that page we also have a form to get more information about a program. Someone may be even deeper in the funnel and wants more information.
We prefill the program so it’s faster and they don’t have to remember what banner ad came up.
The user submits the form and they become a lead with an Enrollment Coach assigned to them with a ”Thank you for your interest” email from Salesforce and this continues as the move along to being an enrollee.
CRMs let you move people through the Sales Pipeline along with doing things like sending automated email.
Now back to the landing page. On that page we also have a form to get more information about a program. Someone may be even deeper in the funnel and wants more information.
One more quick example -
Filene checks if an org has an active membership in Salesforce when a user signs up or logs in using the Salesforce API. If they do, then the member org’s staff have access to Filene’s research.
-Filene also uses Pardot to see which Research reports are not only which reports are the most popular, but also who the most active Credit Unions are, and who the most active members are.
