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As we discussed during the last two chapters, the goals, needs, motivations, and challenges of consumers provide the raw material from which to create content for each persona. Journeys tell you what your content should be about (problem, solutions, and your p...

A consumer journey is the trajectory of experiences through which a consumer goes: from not knowing they want something, to buying this something, to performing post-purchase activities (the most obvious being consuming the product). Put more theoretically, th...

The main job of a search engine is to serve results that best address people’s search queries. Let’s say you want to know how to clean your cat. You have questions such as what kind of soap to use, how warm the temperature should be, and how you should wash th...

People use keywords to interact with content online, and most online experiences start with a search (Forbes 2017). As we will soon see, people turn to search engines for a wide variety of reasons, and these reasons provide opportunities for your firm to show ...

SEO is “the process of affecting the online visibility of a website or a webpage in a web search engine’s unpaid results” (Wikipedia). This differentiates SEO from the use of paid ads in order to appear at the top of search engine result pages (SERPs). Take th...

How to Use a Persona Let’s take as an example the following persona, “RV Betty”: Betty lives in a suburb of a city. Her husband is also retired. They have been talking about traveling in an RV upon retirement for years—this is a long-...

Now that we have the vocabulary for these concepts, it’s time to turn our attention to using them in practice. The journeys and ZMOTs are generic ways to understand how consumers go about buying products. Knowing how consumers conceptually move from a trigger ...

In an example of great content marketing for themselves (i.e., this concept helps sell Google products!), Google introduced in 2011 the concept of zero moment of truth (ZMOT), “a new decision-making moment that takes place a hundred million times a day on mobi...

Our understanding of consumer journeys has greatly evolved over the last two decades, and there exist a number of ways to conceptualize journeys. It is important to understand that these are not perfect representations of reality. Rather, they are thinking too...

There are two broad approaches to conducting marketing: mass marketing (i.e., an undifferentiated approach where products are simply sold to the masses) or targeted marketing (click here for more information on these approaches). In the latter approach, firms ...

A journey map is a visual representation of the consumer journey. The map transforms a rather abstract way of understanding how consumers purchase products (i.e., awareness, consideration, purchase, and loyalty) to something concrete, with specific actions and...

What is a consumer journey? It is the experience of a consumer across the different stages of their buying process, which then extends to phases of relationships with a company. For example, let’s imagine you want a new pair of sneakers. You might have an exis...

The second transformation has been a move from representing yourself as a company to representing the customer. What does this mean? It used to be that, when finding consumers, companies would talk about themselves. Take, for example, this ad from Home Depot...

The first transformation was a movement away from finding consumers toward being found by consumers. What does this mean? If we rewind history, it used to be that marketers would “find” consumers: They would use market research reports in order to understand...

Canadian media scholar Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that “the medium is the message” (McLuhan 1964). By this, he meant to emphasize that the characteristics of a medium (e.g., TV vs. print vs. internet) played an important role in communications, in additio...

For the last 30 years, the dominant paradigm for understanding how firms create value for consumers has been market orientation. Market orientation refers to the “the organization-wide generation of market intelligence, dissemination of the intelligence across...

According to the American Marketing Association — marketing’s top association — marketing is “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, a...

  You are a fitness center creating a campaign for people who want to get back into shape. One of the personas you are targeting is Avery. Avery is a person living in a major Canadian city center. They are their late twenties to early thirties and a...

The RACE framework (Figure 4.9; text description) is highly useful in creating a strategy for digital marketing campaigns. It helps answers questions such as the following: Reach: How do I bring visitors to my website? Act: How do I create a positive user ...

As shown by the video explaining how Google works, there are more than 200 variables that are taken into account when ranking websites. Some of them, though, are more important than others. Namely, we can identify three broad categories of highly important ran...