Fast Track Digital Marketing March 2, 2010

This intensive two-day course will look at the key considerations for digital marketers, how to build the dream online strategy and assess what the future holds in store. This course will run through the acquisition tools (search, affiliate marketing, display advertising) and retention techniques (email, web personalisation) as well as some of the management issues (legal issues, data gathering, integration with off-line activity). It will also demystify the technical jargon commonly used in digital marketing: RSS feeds, mash-ups, tag clouds, AJAX, social bookmarking and more...all in a simple, easy to understand way.

Who should attend?
Marketers with some experience of offline channels but little or no exposure to online marketing channels, and people who need to know how all the pieces of the digital marketing jigsaw fit together, such as business owners and management teams.

How will I benefit?
You will gain a valuable understanding of the key differences between offline and online marketing, and how online can fit into a multichannel approach. You’ll understand which online channels are key in terms of customer acquisition, conversion and retention. Discover the success factors for different ecommunications techniques, and the influence of other key factors such as the design and creative process. Importantly, discover ways to improve results delivered by digital marketing for the same budget.

What will I learn?
Why online marketing is so important, and how you can use the major channels to improve your customer communications. It will also demonstrate best practice methodology for the major channels such as email, search engines and advertising, using case studies to illustrate the benefits that can be achieved through proper execution. The course is broken down into manageable modules most of which include either exercises or case studies for you to work through.



Setting the Scene
• What do we mean by Digital Marketing?
• Why integration is important
• Some key terms and definitions
• Who is online?
• How do they use the internet?
• Knowing your customers - external resources
• Knowing your customers - internal data

Planning and Strategy
• What is different about planning online?
• Some planning models to build with
• Budgeting - why it is different in digital marketing
• A few legal considerations

Gathering data
• Why you need to identify individuals
• What data do you need to gather?
• Click-stream data - you are what you click

Website Design and Usability
• Setting objectives
• Planning your website - functionality, navigation and content
• Customer personas and customer journeys
• Copywriting for the web
• Usability testing - how to make sure things are working
• What's new - on-demand video, mashups, UGC

Tracking and Measurement
• What can you measure and how do you measure
• What does ‘good’ look like - key metrics
• Traffic-driving - advertising, search, email, affiliates and referrals
• Web measurement - what you can track and how you can use it

Testing in Digital Marketing
• Why online is a testing paradise
• How do you test?
• What can you test?

Creative Considerations
• What can disrupt the user experience - browsers, firewalls and slow connections
• How is writing for the web different to offline?
• Costs, skills and time-scales - how to manage the creative process
• Tone of voice guidelines
• An integrated creative experience from offline to online
• Some great websites and emails to get you thinking

The Digital Marketing Toolkit
• Display Advertising – pricing, creative and optimisation
• SEO – what is it and how do you do it better?
• Paid Search – what is it and how do you do it better?
• Affiliate Marketing – what is it and how do you do it better?
• Email marketing - acquisition and retention
• Viral Marketing – why it’s hard to get right
• On-line PR – what are the secrets?
• Interactive TV – what can it do for your business?
• Mobile – acquisition and retention…anywhere!
• Other acquisition tools – gaming, blogging, podcasting

Summary
• Key considerations for digital marketers
• What will the future hold?
• How to build the dream on-line strategy
• Further reading and sites to keep an eye on.



Key learning outcomes

• Understand how to weave together acquisition and retention tools to deliver an efficient digital marketing strategy

• How to build great websites through content, navigation and optimising it using analytics

• Evaluating traffic-driving techniques to get more of the right people to your site, profitably

• Customer retention, using log-ins and email marketing to stay close and build long-term relationships