This document provides a summary of strategies for planning, executing, and optimizing e-marketing. It discusses gaining customer insights through surveys and online data analysis. Key aspects of planning include defining success metrics and using the DOMINATE framework to discover competitors' strategies, organize insights, identify strengths and weaknesses. Implementation involves creating content calendars and taking action on social media. Optimization centers around using analytics tools to measure performance and continuously improve strategies. The overall aim is to understand customers better than they understand themselves and use data-driven testing to evolve effective digital marketing approaches.

1. Planning, Executing, and Evaluating
E-Marketing
Simple Strategies for Digital Marketing Success
The University of Texas-Pan American, Office of Continuing Education.
By Alex Garrido, July 2015
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2. “Successful marketing in the 21st century
is at the intersection of
data and technology”
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3. We will cover
Insight
Understand your
customers
Planning
Create big picture report
Implementing
Take action and find
connections
Optimizing
Continue to improve your
strategy
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4. Insight: Your Ideal Customer
● Surveys: Understand your customer's perspective
of your business
● Online data: You must know your customers better
that what they know themselves
● Expanding analysis: Use online tools to further
analyze and segment your audiences
● Experiment: test different strategies with different
groups
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5. Getting to know your customer
Pen & Pencil Surveys:
● Work great to collect
information fast
● When handed out a
survey, most people feel
compelled to complete it
● Hard to collect large
amounts of data
Online Surveys:
● An affordable option where
you can collect large
amounts of data
● People usually ignore
online surveys unless
there is a strong
motivation to complete
● Great for sophisticated
analysis
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6. Google Consumer Surveys and Google Forms are two great platforms to
gain insight into what your customers think.
Free for simple on-site surveys, paid
option has robust targeting options.
$1.10 – $3.50 per complete answer
for 2 to 10 questions
Free. Great tools for customization
and can export answers to Excel for
further analysis.
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7. What to Ask?
● General Demographics
o Age, gender, race
● Communication Preferences
o How often do you use Facebook? Around what time do you usually
check your email? What kind of posts do you tend to like/share in
social media?
● FAQ
o What are some of the questions other customers like you might
have? What is one feature of X you would like to know more
about? What other questions did you have before you purchased
our product?
● Mindset
o What motivated you to visit our store on the first place? What would
motivate you to purchase X more often? When you think about our
Y product, what emotions come to your mind?
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8. “Customers generally can’t
understand or accurately explain why
they make choices in the marketplace.”
-Roger Dooley
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9. Online Data to See Beyond
Customers might not be aware of the mental
processes that led to their purchase/engagement.
Testing and evaluating different models can give you a
better picture of what is happening in the mind of the
customer.
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10. When asked if a baby picture could influence purchase behavior, most people
said “no”. However, a research study concludes that baby pictures are among
the most influential images in advertising (Morten 2008).
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11. Measuring Consumer Behavior
Here are some ideas on how to evaluate consumer
behavior:
● Time spent on web pages
● The number of times a male customer visits a store
before he buys something
● Types of images in social media posts that
generate the most comments
● Tone of voice in different tweets vs the average
response rate
● Background color in a promotional image and
number of people who interacted with it
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12. Expanding Analysis with Free Tools
Facebook and Google provide tools to further analyze
consumer behavior online.
● Facebook Audience Insights: provides a general
view of a specific audience and gives clues about
how that audience generally engages in Facebook
● Google Keyword Planner: can provide valuable
keyword insight (customer mindset)
● Google Trends: can provide historical data and
predictions about general online trends
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13. Facebook Audience Insights
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14. Google Keyword Planner
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15. Google Trends
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16. Planning: Define success
Determine how you are going to define success.
Online
● Increased website traffic
● Website retention
● Social sharing and engagement
● Online ad revenue
● Increase in online sales
Offline
● Increased store traffic
● Lower customer churn
● Increased product awareness
● Store sales
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17. Planning: the Big Picture
A good strategy to get started with a good digital
marketing plan is the DOMINATE strategy.
● Discover major strategies
● Organize the data
● Mute assumptions
● Identify strengths
● Notice weaknesses
● Analyze and plan
● Test
● Evolve your strategy
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18. Planning: DOMINATE
Discover major strategies
1. Gather as much data as possible to find the major areas where
your competitors are spending their money online. Look for
particular and unique patterns, such as if they have a large
number of Facebook likes but very few Twitter followers
2. Get as much data as possible from different channels. The more
data that you can collect the better, since it might help to
understand the overall strategy that your competition is using
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19. Planning: DOMINATE
Organize your ideas
1. Data is useless if it doesn’t tell a story. Organize the data in such
a way that it allows you to understand the historical social media
trends
2. Try to match the data with major events in your industry like
major acquisitions, important events in the economy, and overall
customer trends
3. Understand your company and what makes it unique. This will
give you a general direction
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20. Planning: DOMINATE
Mute assumptions
1. Even if you have worked for or with your current competition in
the past, try to avoid making assumptions. Do not believe
anything that is not backed up by data. Use all the analysis and
historical information that you have gathered to create a bird’s
eye view of your market
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21. Planning: DOMINATE
Identify strengths
1. Find key strong points in your competitor’s marketing strategy.
Look for unique patterns and noticeable strong points. Analyze
projected website traffic with Alexa or look for major ranking
keywords using SEMRUSH, look for unique numbers that show
a particularly powerful/successful strategy
2. As much as possible, attempt to figure out what is working for
your competition. For example, perhaps a particular niche is
sharing with enthusiasm the blog entries of the company. Any
major strength must be taken into account
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22. Planning: DOMINATE
Notice your competitor's weak points
1. Once you understand the particular strengths of your
competition, take a closer look at their weaknesses. Even if they
have an entire marketing department at their disposal, they have
to be doing something wrong somewhere. With this mindset,
look at their strategy and the data gathered to identify the “low
hanging fruit”
2. Look at any market left-out by your competition, keywords that
are not optimized, pages without proper structure markup, and
dips in traffic or major search trends
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23. Planning: DOMINATE
Analyze and plan
1. Analyze all the collected data and insight and take time to create
a cohesive marketing plan. Create a plan that takes into account
all the aspects of your business where you can outshine your
competition. Find the uniqueness of your business and the
factors that make it remarkable
2. Take a few days off and let your subconscious mind process the
information you have gathered. Then revisit what you have and
start stitching everything together
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24. Planning: DOMINATE
Test
1. Once you have a plan developed, create multiple
marketing/strategy groups and test them. Create ad-copy
variations, different images, font-styles, timings/schedules, etc.
Look for patterns. Gather and analyze as much data as possible
to select the ads that do the best and discard those that
underperform
2. Do not spend all your resources here, simply test for a few days
or with a small group of people before launching the full
campaign
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25. Planning: DOMINATE
Evolve your strategy
1. Constantly look at the marketing plan and let it evolve. Keep a
close eye on your competition and look for any movements they
make. Also, take great care of your own marketing strategy and
continuously improve with a data-driven strategy in mind
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26. Implementing: Take action
Create a content marketing calendar and if possible
consider some level of automation (particularly for
static events/promotions)
Some great tools include:
● Buffer App (Automation and calendar)
● Hootsuite (Automation and calendar)
● ContentDJ (Discovery and calendar)
● Trello (Team planning calendar)
● Google Sheets (Team planning and reporting)
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27. As machines become more and more
efficient and perfect, so it will become clear
that imperfection is the greatness of man.
-Ernst Fischer
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28. Implementing: Take action
Do not be afraid of posting from your phone or tablet.
For social media, imperfect, real time, and relevant updates are
more important than flawless robotic posts.
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29. Optimizing: Continue to Improve
● If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it.
● Become familiar with online reporting tools like
Google Analytics, Twitter Analytics, and Facebook
Insights.
● There are several free tools you can use for data
analysis and visualization.
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30. Remember Watson? He now works as a full-time data analyst.
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31. Optimizing: Continue to Improve
Here are some great tools to analyze your data and
gain insight.
● Watson Analytics (free and paid)
● Tableau Public (free)
● Tableau Professional (paid)
● Google Sheets (free)
● Fusion Tables (free)
● Excel (free if you have Office)
● Microsoft Power BI (free and paid)
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32. Thank you for your time!
Questions?
Connect with me
Twitter: @MrAlexGarrido
LinkedIn.com/in/AlexGarrido
josse.garrido@utrgv.edu
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