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Inbound and outbound marketing represent two broad approaches to connecting with consumers. Inbound marketing aims at bringing visitors “in,” drawing them to your company via, typically, content marketing, social media, and well-optimized websites. In this fir...

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...

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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

We differentiate between three types of media online: paid, owned, and earned. Paid media are media activities you pay for. These media activities are typically performed on a third party channel (i.e., not your own website) that is paid by your company to co...

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 ...

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...

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...

Chaffey’s RACE framework is a conversion-based framework. Conversion marketing is a strategic approach that explicitly aims at increasing customers. The framework we will study here is part of a greater set of strategic approaches, such as HubSpot’s original “...

Strategy and tactics are the last key terms we need to better understand the RACE framework. Strategy represents the path you intend to take to achieve a specific objective. This aligns with Jain’s (1993) understanding of strategy as “the pattern of major obje...

Objectives, goals, and KPIs are the next set of concepts we will cover. Objectives represent what you want to achieve for your company. Ideally, objectives should be SMART: specific measurable attainable realistic time-bound Goals are actions that yo...

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 ...