Intro to Digital Marketing With Bianca Nieves
Bianca Nieves, VP of Growth at text-message startup Arist, sat down with the Project W community to talk all things digital marketing. From a history of the industry to a deep dive into best practices, Bianca gave us the most comprehensive introduction possible. Here’s a not-so-brief recap of all the main points for those who couldn’t make it!
A Bit About Bianca
Bianca Nieves is a Texas native who’s spent the last few years gaining critical experience in digital media and marketing. She’s gained experience with well-respected companies such as the United States Olympic Committee, Facebook, NCAA Final Four, and various other major sporting event host committees. She’s since made an exit from sports and made the switch to technology. She is currently VP of Growth at YC backed startup, Arist.
The Evolution of Digital Marketing
Bianca started off by walking us through a timeline of digital marketing, a relatively new industry originating in 1970 when the first email was sent. We’ve come a long way since then with innovations like Google Adwords, cookies, and, of course, the release of the iPhone.
Digital marketing has had to constantly reinvent itself to keep up with changing technology, but the largest shift from its inception has been from singular wide-reaching creative campaigns to a hyper-focus on meeting target users where they are. But before we get more into that, let’s take a step back.
What is Digital Marketing?
“Digital marketing makes use of web-based technologies like email, mobile devices, and more to reach potential customers or users virtually. Digital ads are probably the most common face of digital marketing that we comes across in our day-to-day lives.”
Bianca identifies 3 key steps to digital marketing:
- Identifying target prospects
- Building a rich digital campaign to house key messaging
- Using dedicated tools to unpack and explore insights
In the presentation, she also noted that while digital marketing encompasses a wide range of web-based technologies, there’s a significant focus on the mobile experience given how much time is spent on smartphones.
User Personas
A crucial component of a digital marketer’s job is having a critical understanding of who their audience is. To do this, many construct user personas which are fictional characters that act as mockups of potential customers. Their profiles are constructed using aggregated demographic and psychographic data. Below are 3 different examples Bianca created.
Listed under each persona are questions a digital marketer might ask to get a full picture of the users day-to-day challenges. Bianca also emphasized the importance of environments around the user. For example, if your product is solving a problem for children, considering the adults in their lives and the key challenges they face in supporting their children are just as crucial. These insights can help structure solutions that are best fit for potential customers.
Process Flow
Next, Bianca dove into the process of executing a digital marketing campaign, identifying the 4 key steps pictured above.
- Keyword Research: “What types of keywords will your target audience use to find your product or service?” You want to be careful when choosing a name for your brand because if it’s too common, it will be much harder to cut through the noise. On the flipside, a unique or difficult brand name might not be well remembered.
- Distribution: “What channels should we use to reach our audience?”
- Define Success: “Determine what successful metrics are for each channel and estimate what ROI will look like for each product.” (Ex. metrics: profit, returning users, retention, etc.)
- Analytics & Tracking: “Track engagement and conversion metrics for each campaign, then revisit.” This step is extremely important because it tells you how successful your campaign is. You can extract impressive metrics such as 4 million impressions, but if your goal was to get 10K clicks, then the campaign wasn’t necessarily successful.
Now that we have the basics down, let’s dive into the most common buzzword heard in relation to digital marketing: SEO.
What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?
SEO refers to techniques that help your website rank higher in search engine results pages. It essentially makes your site more visible to people searching for words that relate to your brand/service.
There’s many methods you can employ to organically improve your site’s SEO. Bianca talked about elements including headings, keywords, image tags, inbound links, URL structure, and more. SEO strategy is about figuring out how to best optimize these elements to boost a site’s ranking.
There’s also many types of search listings that occur when you search for something. Bianca detailed 4 types here.
Types of Search Listings
- Paid Ads — “If you need to urgently promote a release or offering, paid ads may be the way to go. By paying Google, you can manipulate the listings.”
- Organic Rankings — “A company or piece of content can rank organically on Google by using content best practices and by earning links from others.
- Q+A — “Are there frequently asked questions that your product or service provides an answer to? Google may choose to include snippets of your content in their official answer.”
- Card Features — “If your company is publishing content around a specific item or a tutorial into how to do something, Google may choose to feature your content in a dedicated card.”
To get a little more technical, Bianca touched on domain and page authorities which determine the “value” of your website.
Domain Authority Vs. Page Authority
- Domain Authority is “a commonly used technical term for the way a search engine interprets the authority of your website as a whole. This number is an aggregate of earned links.” (How Google views your website essentially; are you spammy or credible?)
- Page Authority is “a search engines interpretation of authority as it relates to an individual landing page.”
Domain authority is more important given it measures the amount of engagement with your website as a whole. However, both are crucial in gauging site performance and SEO effectiveness.
Most Important Digital Marketing Metrics
- Impressions: “You can think of this as literally your brand, company, or product being shown in a digital campaign and leaving behind an impression. How many times was this ad shown?”
- Clicks: “A great part of digital marketing is that these labels often tie directly into their intention. A click is each time someone clicks or interacts with your ad via web click.”
- Conversion Rate: “If 100 people see your ad for a new social platform but only 10 sign-up, you have a conversion rate of 10%. A conversion rate is the percentage of eligible traffic that ended up converting.”
- Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC): “When running paid ads, you will want to be mindful of the amount you’re spending. You can use CAC to determine the amount you must spend to acquire one customer or user.”
Bianca noted that clicks and impressions, while important indicators, can be vanity metrics. Some platforms will inflate these metrics in ways that can be misleading to a digital marketer trying to draw product insights. For example, a platform might define a “click” as a person hovering over an ad for more than a few seconds rather that an actual click.
Conversion rate and CAC are important metrics to consider when creating a digital marketing budget. Bianca brought back the user persona example of the SoHo fashionista. She might use Instagram the most frequently, but if her CAC is 30% greater on that platform than on another which could reach a wider audience, would it be worth it for the team to concentrate spending dollars on IG? It’s important to weigh the benefits and tradeoffs using this data when creating a cost-effective digital marketing strategy.
Extracting Product Insights
A Quick Primer on Google Tag Manager (GTM)
Bianca recommends anybody looking to break into the digital marketing space to familiarize themselves with Google Tag Manager. It’s used to quickly and easily update measurement codes and related code fragments collectively known as tags on your website or mobile app. This becomes useful when you’re using many different tools. (Basically, it makes things a lot easier for engineering teams.)
There are 3 different things important to know in GTM: tags, triggers, and variables.
If this part seems a little confusing to you, don’t sweat it! It’s a step deeper than just the basics, and not really required for a big picture understanding of how executing a digital campaign works.
Now that we’ve gotten a comprehensive overview of digital marketing, you can start exploring by playing around with some popular tools. Here are Bianca’s go-to’s.
Bianca’s Digital Marketing Toolkit
- Google Analytics — Web analytics service offered by Google that tracks and reports website traffic.
- HotJar — Web analytics tool to analyze traffic data (great heat maps).
- MixPanel — Product analytics tool that enables you to capture data on how users interact with your digital product.
- Google Tag Manager — Without editing site code, you can use GTM to add and update Google Ads, Google Analytics, Floodlight, and non-Google tags. This reduces errors and allows tags to be deployed tags on sites quickly.
- Twilio (Segment) — Unifies customer’s touch points across all platforms and channels. (Main benefits include email personalization, frequency caps, & propensity modeling).
- Webflow — No-code web design and development platform.
The Future 🔮
Bianca also touched on two major trends she sees picking up steam in the digital marketing space: User Generated Content and AI for Content Creation.
- User Generated Content lets companies market content created by consumers for free. For example, Twitter uses funny tweets as billboards and Starbucks led a marketing campaign that leaned into the trend of customers posting pictures of their drinks with their names spelled comically wrong.
- AI content creating tools such as GPT-3 use keywords to construct copy that can be used for marketing purposes (and other applications). How much of a threat will this pose to copywriters in the industry? Only time will tell. Here’s an example of what was created when Bianca plugged in some keywords about Project W. We were blown away at just how good it is. This technology is only getting better, and is certain to be disruptive to the industry.
That’s all for now folks, thanks for tuning in! Bianca is THE person to go to for all things digital marketing, so don’t hesitate to reach out with any additional questions. You can connect with Bianca on LinkedIn or follow her on Twitter.
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