DIGITAL

MARKETING
STRATEGY
 DIGITAL MARKETING
STRATEGY
CREATE STRATEGY, PUT IT INTO PRACTICE, SELL
MORE

NIKO LAHTINEN
Principal Owner and Commercial Director, Suomen Digimarkkinointi Oy,
Finland

KIMMO PULKKA
Partner and Head of the Content Marketing Unit, Suomen Digimarkkinointi
Oy, Finland

HEIKKI KARJALUOTO
Professor, Faculty of Information Technology, University of Jyväskylä,
Finland

JOEL MERO
Assistant Professor of Marketing, School of Business and Economics,
University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Niko Lahtinen, Kimmo Pulkka, Heikki Karjaluoto and Joel Mero
2023

Cover image: mymind on Unsplash.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or
otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Published by
Edward Elgar Publishing Limited
The Lypiatts
15 Lansdown Road
Cheltenham
Glos GL50 2JA
UK

Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc.

William Pratt House
9 Dewey Court
Northampton
Massachusetts 01060
USA

A catalogue record for this book

is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023937048

This book is available electronically in the

Business subject collection
http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781035311316

ISBN 978 1 0353 1130 9 (cased)

ISBN 978 1 0353 1132 3 (paperback)
ISBN 978 1 0353 1131 6 (eBook)

EEP BoX
CO NT EN TS

To the readerviii
Glossaryxi

PART I STRATEGIC ANALYSIS AND PLANNING

1 An introduction to digital marketing 2

1.1 Digital marketing history and its current state 3
1.1.1 The first wave of digital marketing 3
1.1.2 The second wave of digital marketing 5
1.1.3 The third wave of digital marketing 5
1.2 Marketing models as part of digital marketing 8
1.2.1 Generic marketing models 9

2 Analysis of the digitalized business environment 14

2.1 Technological development 14
2.1.1 Front-end marketing technologies 15
2.1.2 Back-end marketing technologies 16
2.1.3 The selection and adoption of technologies 17
2.2 Changes in the competitive landscape 20
2.3 Changes in customer behavior and trends 23
2.3.1 The buying process 24
2.3.2 Research findings concerning customers in the digital era 25
2.3.3 Business buyers’ behavior 27
2.3.4 Consumers’ information overload 29
2.3.5 Customer empowerment 30

3 Digital marketing strategy 33

3.1 Setting digital marketing goals 34
3.1.1 The 5S goals of digital marketing 34
3.1.2 Setting objectives using SMART criteria 37
3.2 Determining competitive advantage 40
3.2.1 Buyer personas 40
3.2.2 Differentiation 47
3.3 Value proposition and value creation for the customer 50
3.3.1 Value creation strategies 52
3.3.2 Value creation strategy 1: targeted and
personalized marketing 52
 vi DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

3.3.3 Value creation strategy 2: a superior customer

experience54
3.3.4 Value creation strategy 3: value co-creation 56

PART II IMPLEMENTING MARKETING STRATEGY IN PRACTICE

4 Implementing strategy using the MRACE® model 60

4.1 What is the MRACE® model? 60
4.1.1 The MRACE® model and the continuous
development of marketing 62
4.2 The stages of the MRACE® model 64
4.2.1 Reach 65
4.2.2 Act 67
4.2.3 Convert 71
4.2.4 Engage 73
4.2.5 Measure 75

5 Digital marketing channels and tools 81

5.1 A company’s website or web service 82
5.1.1 The elements of a good website 83
5.2 Content marketing 86
5.2.1 A website’s textual content 87
5.2.2 Videos 91
5.2.3 Visual design 94
5.3 Search engine marketing and online advertising 97
5.3.1 Search engine optimization (SEO) 98
5.3.2 Search engine advertising (SEA) 103
5.3.3 Online advertising with Google’s services 107
5.4 Marketing automation and email marketing 118
5.4.1 How can a company acquire contacts for the
marketing automation domain? 119
5.5 Social media marketing 123
5.5.1 Social media advertising as part of the MRACE® model 124
5.5.2 Influencer marketing 125
5.5.3 Product reviews online 126
5.6 Analytics and measurement 128
5.6.1 The measurement process 129
5.6.2 Managing marketing activities with the MRACE ®

dashboard130
 CONTENTS vii

6 Digital marketing work in practice 133

6.1 A week in the journey of a digital marketer: the MRACE®
model as a tour guide 133

7 In closing: the future of digital marketing 141

Bibliography143
Index148
TO T H E R E A D E R
Digital marketing is a critical part of a business because its success largely determines the
success of sales. The success of the sales, in turn, determines the growth rate of the organiza-
tion. Therefore, digital marketing jobs are some of the most sought-after jobs and its experts
are some of the most sought-after employees. In addition, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced
organizations to digitalize rapidly (from spring 2020 onwards), further increasing the need for
digital marketing. Despite these factors, there are not many fresh books available on digital
marketing—until now. You are currently holding one of the newest books in your hands,
looking at it on your screen, or listening to it on your headphones. Great!
This book will teach you how to design a digital marketing strategy and measurably develop
digital marketing and sales processes in key channels. The lessons of the book are applicable
to the marketing of most companies but are especially well suited to those companies whose
purchasing of their product and service offerings requires judgment and is not based on an
impulsive “I’ll buy the same again” or “I’ll try that novelty this time” type of buying behavior.
Because of this emphasis, the core message of our book is related to buyer personas. With
buyer personas, you will learn to plan digital marketing better based on the behavior of
potential and current customers. In this case, marketing is not an intrusive sales speech to
customers, but a free and helpful service.
Our book consists of two parts (Figure 0.1). The first part deals with the strategic analysis
and planning of digital marketing. The second part consists of the operational activities of
digital marketing, which should be based on thorough strategy work. The second part also pro-
vides a practical description of how digital marketing is implemented in different channels and
how the results obtained in them are measured. At its heart is the MRACE® (Measure, Reach,
Act, Convert, Engage) model, which is based on the world’s best-known digital marketing
model, the RACE (Reach, Act, Convert, Engage) model, and serves as an excellent guideline
from digital marketing design to operational implementation. At the end of the book, we open
the door onto the work of a digital marketer and reflect on the direction in which digital mar-
keting will be evolving in the coming years.
Our frame of reference, which we explore in detail in this book, consists of two phases: (1)
strategic analysis and planning and (2) operational implementation. Together, they determine
a company’s ability to succeed in digital marketing. We mainly use the term company in the
book, but the issue of the book is also applicable to other types of organizations. What makes
the framework unique is that it combines strategic-level planning with practical action. Thus,
it offers a more holistic view of digital marketing than that found in previous frameworks,
which in our view focus either on the strategic level (leaving the reader responsible for plan-
ning practical concrete actions) or on the operational level (failing to provide the reader with
the tools required to build a strategy for operational actions).
The first step in digital marketing is therefore strategic analysis and planning. The first step
starts with an analysis of the company’s business environment and the changes that take place
in it. From the point of view of digital marketing, the most important variables of the business
environment are naturally related to the digital environment, and the most important of these
are changes in customer behavior and field of competition and, technological development. If
 TO THE READER ix

Figure 0.1 The structure of the book

a company does not understand how it will position itself for these changes in the operating
environment, it will be impossible to plan for the future.
After analyzing the changes in the operating environment, the company can begin to design
a digital marketing strategy. A digital marketing strategy refers to a company’s long-term plan
for how it will achieve its digital marketing goals in a changing business environment. The
strategy consists of the following three areas: (1) setting goals, (2) determining the competitive
advantage, and (3) the value proposition and value creation. The goals of digital marketing
are largely determined by the role that digital marketing plays in the marketing and business
as a whole. In any case, the objectives should be as specific as possible in order to guide the
company’s strategic and operational activities in a clear way.
Whatever the goals, achieving them requires that the company has a degree of competitive
advantage. The definition of this advantage is crystallized in the question: How is the company
able to meet customer needs in a way that competitors are unable to meet them? To answer this
question, a company needs to gain an in-depth understanding of customer needs (by creating
buyer personas) and the factors that set a company apart from its competitors (differentiation).
Once a company knows how it is able to meet customer needs in a way that sets it apart
from its competitors, it should make a clear value proposition in a way that turns the compa-
ny’s competitive advantage to the customer’s benefit. A good value proposition answers the
question of what kind of value a company offers to a customer, which is why it is worthwhile
for the customer to choose that particular company over its competitors. The promise of
value is at the forefront of the communication of digital marketing, but without value creation
strategies that support the fulfillment of the promise it is mere verbiage. The value proposition
creates expectations for the customer, and the ability of value creation strategies to meet those
expectations ultimately determines the customer experience. The customer experience, in
turn, determines the success of digital marketing, that is, whether digital marketing generates
 x DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

value for a company in the form of new customers, additional sales, referrals, and a higher
customer life cycle value.
After strategic planning, the focus can be set on the operational activities of digital market-
ing. In describing operational activities, we utilize the MRACE® model launched by Suomen
Digimarkkinointi, which is based on the RACE model and its basic elements: Reach, Act,
Convert, and Engage. The initialism MRACE® comes from the addition of Measure as a new
component to the RACE model, a component that we consider to be an integral part of the
implementation of digital marketing.
The book is primarily intended for those of you who want to gain a comprehensive under-
standing of what digital marketing is and how it relates to acquiring and maintaining customer
relationships. The book is written to be reader-friendly, contains little to no digital jargon,
and its message is easy to understand, even if you have not read any books on marketing or
sales before. Nevertheless, the book is also suitable for those who already have more in-depth
knowledge of this topic. We also warmly recommend the book to data analysts and others who
look at digital phenomena more from the technology perspective. With this book, you will
learn how to enable the operations of both a small and a giant organization to enter the era
of digital sales. If companies are already making single trades worth more than €100 million
completely online, what will be the situation in five years’ time?
Do we need a book on digital marketing? Would a book on just marketing alone not be
enough? In our view, traditional strategic marketing books work well in supporting strategic
analysis and the planning of digital marketing. However, as a whole, traditional marketing
books deal with marketing very broadly and do not highlight the specific features of the digital
environment in strategy formulation. An even clearer shortcoming relates to the tactical
implementation of digital marketing, which is covered very little in most marketing books.
Although marketing and business have digitized at a rapid pace and we can think of dropping
the digital from digital marketing as it will be implied, it is not yet time for that. Digital mar-
keting is talked about; it is being conducted and taught as digital marketing for the time being.
That is why our book also talks about digital marketing and not just marketing.1
Enjoy reading this book!

Niko, Kimmo, Heikki, and Joel

NOTE
1. The text has been through a double-blind review process.
GLOSSARY

DIGITAL MARKETING TERMINOLOGY

A/B testing A user research method that compares two dif-
ferent options and selects the one that works best
for them. Typically, users are shown two different
versions of a website or ad. A/B testing is done a lot
in different areas of digital marketing, ranging from
Google search engine advertising to Facebook ad-
vertising and improving newsletter content.
Algorithm A set of rules or process that describes how a task
is performed. In digital marketing, for example, an
algorithm determines what content is displayed to
users of the services. Examples of content generated
by algorithms include ad serving and newsfeeds in
Facebook and Google search results.
Bounce rate The percentage of users who leave immediately, for
example, users leaving a website.
Buyer persona The type of customer that a company wants to get
or a person that describes the target group.
Competitive advantage How an organization manages to meet customer
needs in a way that competitors are unable to meet.
Conversion Achieving a defined goal, such as downloading
a guide, subscribing to a newsletter, or making
a purchase.
Conversion rate optimization Optimizing the conversion to achieve a defined
(CRO) goal, such as getting users or website visitors to act
in a desired way. In digital marketing, it most often
means improving the saleability and ease of use of
a website through the information gathered through
various tools.
CPA CPA stands for cost per action. In digital marketing,
CPA refers to a bidding model in which the adver-
tiser only pays for a certain conversion, that is, for
a specific action to be completed. For example, CPA
is used in advertising, and the advertiser only pays
for the specified results.
CPC CPC stands for cost per click. In digital marketing,
CPC refers to a bidding model in which an advertis-
er pays for clicks.
xii DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

CPM CPM comes from the words cost per mille. CPM
tells you what it costs to reach a thousand people.
Also known as CPT (cost per thousand). CPM
refers to ad impressions and is a way to bid where
you pay per views.
CTR CTR comes from the words click-through rate. It
tells you how many readers of a particular piece of
content—such as a newsletter, an advertising cam-
paign, or content on a website—click on a particular
link.
Digital marketing All marketing that utilizes digital technologies.
A more precise definition is: Developing and com-
municating a value proposition in digital media to
selected buyer personas based on strategic analysis.
Digital marketing strategy An organization’s long-term plan for how it will
achieve its digital marketing goals in a changing
business environment.
The strategy comprises three areas:
1. setting goals
2. the determination of competitive advantage
3. the value promise and value creation.
Display advertising The visual advertising or marketing communica-
tions on a website. Display advertising includes
text-based ads, images, moving image (video), and
audio. The term is currently used for all banner
advertising.
Driver The factor that most influences the purchasing de-
cision of buyer personas. Most commonly, it refers
to the value that a product or service produces, the
problem it solves, or the need it fulfills.
Google Ads Google’s online advertising program, which manag-
es advertising on Google. It includes search engine
advertising, advertising on the Google Display
network, and YouTube video advertising.
Google Analytics Google’s analytics service, used for tracking website
traffic.
Hotjar User tracking software that visually displays what
the user has done on the website. It is most com-
monly known for heat maps and recorded website
visits.
Impression The number of times an ad or search result was
displayed.
 GLOSSARY xiii

Influencer marketing Collaboration with people who have influence

over other people’s behavior, such as their buying
decisions. In addition to celebrities, influencers are
bloggers and tubers who directly or indirectly pro-
mote their products and services to their followers,
especially through social media channels.
Key Performance Indicator (KPI) KPI refers to the most important indicator with
which to measure performance. The term KPI is
commonly used in business. In digital marketing,
it typically measures things related to the sales
process, such as the number of leads, the number of
users from a particular source, or purchases from an
online store.
Keyword A word that a user types into a search engine or
an internal search on a website when searching for
information about something. The term search term
is also used.
Landing page In digital marketing, a landing page is a single
web page that a user is directed to by clicking on
a link from elsewhere on the web (such as a link in
a search engine, newsletter, or advertisement). The
landing page is typically sales driven, directing the
user to a specific action (e.g., ordering).
Lead A potential customer—either a person or
a company—who has already shown some interest
in the company, for example, by leaving his or her
contact details with the company.
In marketing, a distinction is often made between
a marketing lead and a sales lead depending on how
far the potential customer is into the buying process
and whether the lead is processed by the company’s
marketing or sales.
Marketing Acquiring new customers and engaging current
customers.
Marketing automation Software and technologies that are used to automate
and streamline marketing. For example, marketing
automation software sends a thank you message
to a user’s email inbox after the user has made an
online purchase or downloaded a guide.
xiv DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

MRACE® model An operative tool for digital marketing.

The initialism MRACE comes from the words:
Measure
Reach
Act
Convert
Engage
The MRACE model was developed by Suomen
Digimarkkinointi.
Native advertising A form of paid advertising in which the content be-
ing advertised adapts to and is consistent with other
content in the publication. Native advertising can
therefore be difficult to identify as advertising. For
example, an online text about sleep problems may
include native advertising by bed stores.
Organic traffic Visitors coming to a website for free, for example,
from search engines.
Programmatic buying Buying advertising with an advertising tool from
around the web, from various ad networks and ad
auctions.
Remarketing Marketing to a user who has already visited a web-
site that happens outside of the website (e.g., in an
ad network, via email, or via social media).
Search engine A software system that systematically searches the
Internet (typically websites) for information.
Search engine advertising (SEA) Text and image advertising on search engines (such
as Google) where an ad is displayed in a user’s
search results based on the user’s keyword, location,
and the budget set by the advertiser.
Search engine marketing (SEM) The marketing done in a search engine.
Search engine marketing includes search engine
optimization (SEO) and search engine advertising
(SEA).
Search engine optimization (SEO) Improving the organic visibility of a website in
search engines.
Top-of-mind marketing Marketing that is used to keep the brand in the
minds of potential or current customers.
Website traffic All the visitors coming to the website.
PART I
STRATEGIC ANALYSIS AND PLANNING
 1
An introduction to digital marketing

Digital marketing has become a widely used term since the 2010s, most typically referring
to marketing that utilizes the most important digital platforms of our time. These platforms
include websites, email, search engines, social media, and mobile applications. In practice, the
term digital marketing does not differ significantly from other, previously used terms—such
as Internet marketing, online marketing, or e-marketing—and broadly means the same thing:
all marketing using an electronic device or the Internet.
Thus, digital marketing can be broadly defined as marketing that utilizes digital technolo-
gies. It is difficult to provide a more precise, generally accepted definition of digital marketing.
The concept is ultimately determined by what digital technologies an organization adopts
for its marketing and by what the organization means by the term marketing. This, in turn, is
primarily affected by the role given to marketing in the company. Marketing responsibilities
may include (1) making or supporting sales, (2) customer communications and/or brand
building, (3) customer relationship management, (4) gaining customer understanding and
implementing it in the organization, (5) creating value for customers, or (6) any mix of these
responsibilities.
The strategic level of marketing also varies across organizations. Marketing can be
understood as (a) a set of marketing activities, (b) an activity of an organization with certain
resources, or (c) the voice of the customer in the company, where every employee in the
organization is collectively responsible for gaining customer understanding and utilizing it in
business development.
Due to different conceptualizations of marketing, different individuals and organizations
can refer to very different things with the terms marketing and digital marketing, which can
lead to misunderstandings. To avoid this, it is paramount to say what digital marketing means
in each case. In this book, digital marketing means developing and communicating a value
proposition (based on strategy analysis) to selected buyer personas via digital media. It aims to
acquire new customers and engage existing ones.
Our definition of digital marketing above sums up the following three priorities of this book:

1. Our book underscores that digital marketing is not just the operational design and imple-
mentation of communications in order to drive sales—the core of communications is
based on market analysis, competitive advantage, and the value proposition built on the
analysis.
2. The book focuses on digital marketing communications, such as search engine marketing,
social media marketing, and website design. (We will review these in more detail in the
second part of the book.)
 AN INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL MARKETING 3

3. Our book emphasizes the sales revenue approach, where, as a result of marketing commu-
nications, a company increases sales by acquiring new customers or increasing the life cycle
value of its existing customers.

Digital marketing is also defined more comprehensively than developing and communicating
a value proposition (based on strategy analysis) to selected buyer personas via digital media.
For example, the American Marketing Association, the scientific umbrella organization
for marketing, has defined digital marketing from a more organization-oriented perspec-
tive, defining it as activities, institutions, and processes that leverage digital technologies
to communicate and create value for customers and other stakeholders. Similarly, digital
marketing researchers Kannan and Li (2017) defined digital marketing as an adaptive and
technology-assisted process by which companies collaborate with customers and partners
to create, communicate, share, and maintain value for all stakeholders. The overall strength
and weakness of these scientific definitions is roundness, which improves generalizability but
impairs comprehensibility; after reading such definitions, few of us really understand what the
definitions really mean. Therefore, we recommend using our own, relatively simple definition.

1.1 DIGITAL MARKETING HISTORY AND ITS CURRENT

STATE
The starting point for the technological development of marketing is difficult to determine,
but probably, the first major digital technology involved in marketing was the computer in the
1940s. This was followed by, among other things, barcodes in the 1950s, and bank and credit
cards in the 1970s (which set out to collect digital data on customer transactions and goods
flows for the first time). By far the most important technology related to digital marketing has
been the Internet, which was born in the late 1960s. However, its widespread use only began
after the World Wide Web and the first graphical web browsers were developed in the late
1980s and early 1990s.
We next divide digital marketing and digital business into three different waves to make it
easier to understand their development. The history of digital marketing and digital business
is built in these waves (Figure 1.1).

1.1.1 The first wave of digital marketing

Marketing on computers and mobile phones began to gain a foothold around the mid-1990s.
Soon, courses on e-business were offered at universities, addressing this rather significant
revolution. The emergence of graphic Internet browsers in the early 1990s ushered in the first
wave of what is today known as digital marketing. That is when many of the digital services we
still know first saw the light of day. These include banks’ websites and their affiliated online
banks, search engines (like Yahoo, Altavista, and Google), and the first online stores (like
Amazon and eBay). This new way of doing business was then referred to as electronic business.
Correspondingly, the term electronic marketing was used for matters related to the sale and
marketing of these services.
 4 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Figure 1.1 The history of digital marketing and business

The challenges of the first wave of digital marketing were particularly related to the uncertain-
ties of electronic business (or e-business): electronic commerce (or e-commerce). For example,
data derived from e-commerce revealed that nearly 70 percent of products were rejected at the
shopping cart stage due to uncertainties such as payment, delivery, and purchase risks. This
first wave, on the other hand, has also been seen as the golden age of digital marketing. This
was the time when the first websites were constructed, and e-commerce was launched. The
means of online marketing were mainly banner advertising, the websites themselves, and the
slowly emerging field of email advertising.
Early entrants were initially successful: they sold a lot and gained market share. However,
due to the large number of entrants, the situation began to change rapidly, and many players
were disappointed with the small revenue streams and the negative operating profit. Indeed,
in the early years of the millennium, the world’s first Internet bubble emerged as the market
began to better understand what digital business and marketing were all about and how huge
expectations resulted in successful or unsuccessful businesses. After the dot.com bubble burst,
only strong players and brands survived. It has been said that 30 percent of the disappoint-
ments during the first wave was due to the global recession in technology markets and 70
percent was due to the disappointments of online business itself.
Marketing returned to more traditional multi-channel thinking and multi-channel mar-
keting, where it was understood that buying would continue to take place in traditional
brick-and-mortar stores as well. It was realized that not all purchases would go online. At the
beginning of the millennium, for example, Levi’s completely stopped online sales because it
caused distribution channel conflicts (i.e., problems between stores and e-commerce) and was
inefficient. In the late 1990s, there was also a strong belief that clothes could not be sold online
because customers wanted to try them on. This estimate was later proved completely wrong as
clothing is one of the most purchased online products in the world.
 AN INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL MARKETING 5

1.1.2 The second wave of digital marketing

The second wave of digital marketing is considered to begin with the emergence of social
media services in the mid-2000s even though these platforms were hardly thought of from
a business or marketing perspective during this wave. At that time and shortly thereafter, the
world’s most used social media platforms were developed, such as LinkedIn (2003), Facebook
(2004), YouTube (2005), Twitter (2006), and Instagram (2010).
However, the number of users of these social media rulers did not grow as fast in the begin-
ning as they do on today’s fastest growing channels. For example, TikTok grew by nearly 400
million users between 2019 and 2020. It took Facebook four years to reach the 100 million user
limit, but in just about two years (2010–12) it increased its user base from 500 million to one
billion. In Finland, for example, Facebook only started to become more widespread a few years
after its establishment, in 2008–09.
The second wave is described as an era of more advanced business models, online searching,
brands, multi-channels, and follower strategies. It is worth remembering that although the
current giants of social media were born at this time, they had almost no commercial content
in these early days. Facebook, for example, was a network service with no advertising and no
content of any kind produced by organizations. Therefore, during the second wave, these
channels were hardly thought of from a business or marketing perspective and served other
purposes, mainly communication between people.
One thing that also contributed to the closure of Nokia’s mobile phone business happened
during the second wave. The first iPhone came onto the market in 2007, completely revolu-
tionizing the use of online services and giving birth to numerous new players in the industry.
The iPhone was the first phone with easy-to-download apps and a touch screen that worked
properly. With smartphones, the Internet came with us everywhere, forever. This development
laid the foundation for the third wave of digital marketing in which we are now living.

1.1.3 The third wave of digital marketing

The third wave of digital marketing began around 2015 and is centered on the transition of the
Internet to mobile devices. The key drivers of change are generally considered to be content
marketing, the transformation of social media platforms into advertising platforms, and
“mobile first” thinking (where websites and e-shops are primarily designed for smartphones).
The explosive growth of online content and online users has contributed significantly to the
emergence of the third wave.
User-generated content (UGC)—such as blogs, videos, product reviews, discussions, and
testimonials—has further enhanced the social nature of the Internet. This has led organiza-
tions to want more control over the publication of UGC in an effort to influence audiences
and get positive reviews. Many companies began to take the first steps towards utilizing UGC
in marketing. Over the years, this phenomenon gave rise to various commercial collaborations
and influencer marketing.
In terms of devices, in addition to the smartphone, the third wave has brought to our homes
the tablet, the smart TV (Internet-connected TV), and a number of other devices that allow us
 6 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

to access, for example, YouTube content. As smartphones have not changed very significantly
since 2007, we are eagerly waiting for one of the smartphone manufacturers to come up with
the next real breakthrough model that includes something completely new. It will create the
conditions for new mobile services.
The third wave has also brought to our consciousness new terms such as artificial intelli-
gence (AI), augmented reality (AR), and location services. In many contexts, what these terms
mean in practice has remained completely unknown for the end users. Most of the things
related to AI and augmented-reality applications are behind the services we already use. Thus,
AI, AR, and the applications we use are slowly being integrated; for example, Facebook uses AI
to select the ads that are displayed to each of us and mobile services use location information
to collect our location data on an ongoing basis.

Figure 1.2 Understanding digitalization

 AN INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL MARKETING 7

From fragmented mass advertising—which includes print advertising, TV advertising, and

radio advertising—we are entering an era of personalization, experiences, and recommenda-
tions (Figure 1.2). This era is further illustrated by the increase of automation and the con-
nection of 50 billion devices to the Internet (e.g., our refrigerators, telephones, and industrial
devices). Digitalization and automation are present everywhere in our environment.

BOX 1.1 THE EFFECTS OF THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

ON DIGITAL MARKETING
The global coronavirus pandemic has affected the marketing field in many ways. However,
it has had no effect on the main message of this book as the theories, frameworks, and
models we present have not lost their function due to the pandemic. Rather, the pandemic
has strengthened them as it has forced every organization to take the much-talked-about
digital leap. The whole world is now moving at a rapid pace towards digital sales.
From a digital marketing perspective, the pandemic has had an impact on the use of
digital services, which has increased in all respects since March 2020. The number of
website visitors has increased and e-commerce has grown across industries—in some
industries exponentially, especially in the home electronics and hardware. Toys, leisure
equipment, and products related to learning have also been sold significantly more than
before. Indeed, according to McKinsey (2020), the pandemic accelerated online shop-
ping by ten years in just 90 days. People’s shift to remote work has increased the sales
of home-related products. In Finland, for example, the K Group’s online food store sales
grew by 800 percent in the first six months of the pandemic and home electronics retailer
Verkkokauppa.com’s stock price rose by 70 percent between spring 2020 to the end of
the same year. On the other hand, victims have been, for example, luxury goods, tourism,
and the sales of new cars.
More generally, from a business perspective, the pandemic has affected companies in
many ways, and it remains to be seen how the sectors most affected, such as tourism and
aviation, will recover from the pandemic. In this pandemic, companies are divided into two
camps. The first camp consists of those whose products have more buyers than they can
in some cases sell to, such as those selling food, household goods, electronics, pet food
and supplies, and medicines and vitamins. The trade-in of used cars also exploded in the
summer of 2020, when people switched from public transport to private cars for fear of
coronavirus. The second camp is made up of companies whose demand for products and
services is constrained due to the pandemic, such as tourism and restaurant companies,
airlines, and event organizers.
The pandemic has also had a significant impact on marketing budgets, including dig-
ital. In the UK, for example, advertising fell by almost 50 percent in the spring of 2020.
Advertising budgets clearly reflect the above-mentioned effects of the pandemic on vari-
ous industries. McDonald’s advertising fell 97 percent while Microsoft increased its adver-
tising by 142 percent. In Finland, the total amount of advertising decreased by 28 percent
in June 2020, and in October, there was a further decrease of 7 percent compared with
the previous year. The amount of advertising in Finland has even followed demand during
the pandemic: media advertising has been boosted by advertisers in telecommunications
 8 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

services, pharmaceuticals, and the financial sector whose products are being more ac-
tively purchased during the pandemic. In terms of advertising, online advertising’s return
to a growth trajectory in Finland after the collapse of summer 2020 was noteworthy; at
the end of the same year, it had already grown by 4 percent. Advertising grew the most on
social media and search engines. Search advertising accounts for about half of the euros
spent on online advertising, while social media advertising is the second largest form of
online advertising, accounting for about 40 percent of online advertising in Finland.

1.2 MARKETING MODELS AS PART OF DIGITAL

MARKETING
Now that we have created a brief overview of the history and current state of digital marketing,
we turn our attention to something more permanent: marketing models. They form a very
central part of our book, which is why we will briefly explain them at this stage.
Many may wonder why we need to use marketing models. Do they not restrict activity? Yes,
marketing models limit activity, but that is only a good thing. In marketing and business in
general, it is as important to know what things can be left out as it is to know what to invest in.
Models provide a tool for understanding a particular phenomenon.
With the help of models, marketers and decision makers can structure their work more
clearly and always speak the same language. The models tell you how many different channels
an organization should be in and which channels will help the organization achieve its market-
ing goals. The models guide you to the correct marketing as performance declines and guide
you to pain points that, after being fixed, will lead to the greatest profit improvements.
The situation sometimes faced in marketing can be compared to the following situation
faced by a car repairman: If a car repairman is presented with a car and is told, “The car is
broken,” most of his or her time goes into troubleshooting. The same situation arises in the
context of marketing, for example, when a sales manager finds that there are not enough leads
(i.e., potential buyers). There is only a very circular problem that is impossible to solve imme-
diately without looking at the whole marketing process. However, if the problem is highlighted
using a model, it immediately leads to a solution, for example: The traffic to a company’s
website is clearly high quality because the content on the site is read for a long time and shared
a lot. The number of website visitors has also increased. However, there are too few leads, so
the company should focus first on how to turn the readers of the content on their site into
leads.
Similarly, an organization may set a marketing goal of increasing the number of invitations
to tender in a six-month period from one invitation to tender per week to five invitations per
week. While the goal is precise, it is very difficult to start creating a marketing strategy without
dismantling the current state with the help of a model. You can get more requests for quotes,
for example, by getting more traffic to your pages from Google search results, search ads,
banner ads, social media, or through affiliates. On the other hand, the number of requests for
quotations from the existing traffic can be increased by improving the usability and content of
 AN INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL MARKETING 9

the site. The utilization of existing customers and their recommendatory power must also be
taken into account. So, there are many options, and with limited resources it is not possible to
implement all of them.
For example, when you use a model to resolve an issue and take into account data from
a website visitor-tracking program, such as Google Analytics, your organization may notice
that most of the requests for quotes come from Google’s paid advertising for certain keywords.
Based on this information, it can close the worst-performing ads with confidence and use
the free budget to advertise using the keywords that perform well. In this way, the models
crystallize the problem directly into solutions. They tell you the steps you need to take to get
your customers’ interest and guide them from the first encounter to becoming your committed
customers. The models also make it easier to get the kind of customers that every organization
craves: satisfied, engaged, committed, and high-buying customers who act as referrers to the
company.
There are certainly hundreds of different marketing models, but in this book, we will focus
on the MRACE® model, which we think is the most useful digital marketing model of all. We
will cover the model in more detail in Chapter 4 of this book. However, at this point, let us
take a brief look at the general marketing models on which most of today’s most-used digital
marketing models are based.

1.2.1 Generic marketing models

Digital marketing models are based on traditional marketing models. We first introduce two
so-called marketing process models (Figures 1.3 and 1.4). They help you deepen your under-
standing of what marketing and sales are all about in the end. Digitalization has not changed
the basic theoretical assumptions of marketing science, such as those involved in these process
models that describe marketing.

Figure 1.3 Marketing Process Model 1

 10 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Figure 1.4 Marketing Process Model 2

Of the marketing process models, Marketing Process Model 1 is the basis of all marketing.
According to this model, marketing is managed through analysis, planning, implementation,
and control. The model states that the analysis phase includes an analysis of the industry,
company, customers, competition, technology, and operating environment. The planning
phase involves the selection of the target market as well as a plan for what kind of value will
be created for the customers. The implementation phase explains how this is done in practice.
The implementation phase is based on the definition and analysis of competitive means of
marketing, the so-called 4P model (that derives its name from the four words product, price,
place, and promotion), and customer relationship management. The 4P model was developed
in the 1960s and states that marketing is responsible for decisions related to products, pricing,
distribution, and communication to the market. The last step of Marketing Process Model 1
is the control phase, in which the achieved results are evaluated in relation to the set goals and
then actions are made.
Marketing Process Model 2 provides a more detailed description of the marketing process
than Marketing Process Model 1. Marketing Process Model 2 describes how marketing gener-
ates value for customers and ultimately for the company. For a company, value is created from
the value of customer processes, that is, from satisfied and loyal customers. In other words,
a company’s customer base is at the core of a company’s value creation process. Creating value
for customers always starts with understanding the customer’s needs and wants. It includes
 AN INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL MARKETING 11

customer and market research and the management of customer data and market informa-
tion. This knowledge is used to develop a customer-centric marketing strategy and to select
target markets. This value creation process involves segmentation (i.e., dividing a company’s
customer base into different parts according to certain selected criteria and serving selected
segments), as well as decisions related to value proposition, differentiation, and positioning
(i.e., how the company positions itself from a market perspective, such as image). Next, value
creation must develop an attractive offer for selected customer segments, that is, 4P decisions
are made. It is then decided how customers can be engaged and how profitable customer rela-
tionships can be developed. At this stage, the customer relationship management strategy is
decided. Finally, the value created for the customer is changed in order to develop the business.
In marketing thinking, the success of value creation is measured by market share growth, oper-
ating profit, the growth of the overall customer base value, customer satisfaction, the customer
life cycle value, and the share of wallet (i.e., how much a customer concentrates their purchases
on a particular product category in a particular organization).
Digital marketing models are also based on these assumptions as marketing on digital chan-
nels is in no way different from basic marketing. The starting points are the same regardless of
the channel or medium used for sales and marketing. Thus, the traditional marketing process
models work as well as universally valid theoretical models for digital marketing. Still, a few
more specific frameworks have also been created for digital marketing. These include the
digital marketing model of Kannan and Li (2017; see Figure 1.5) and the model presented in
Marketing 4.0, written by Kotler, Kartajaya, and Setiawan (2017; see Figure 1.6).
Kannan and Li’s model is based on the marketing process models mentioned above in which
marketing is seen as a function and activity that creates value for customers and translates
customer value into value for the company. According to the model, digital technologies
(such as devices and marketing technologies) affect all three marketing processes, that is, they
affect customer buying behavior, a company’s marketing decisions (such as 4P decisions), and
value generation. Kannan and Li’s model can be interpreted as relating a significant change in
the marketing process to a change in customer behavior, the effects of which are reflected in
a company’s marketing decisions and value generation. In terms of changed customer behav-
ior, they highlight, for example, the growth of search engines, social media, and UGC. These
factors increasingly determine how customers search for information and make choices.
In the model presented in Marketing 4.0, digital marketing is placed with traditional mar-
keting at the conceptual level. According to the model, traditional marketing thinking—such
as the thinking upon which segmentation, brand differentiation, the 4P model, and value
creation are based—is not disappearing and creates the basis for digital marketing thinking.
Digital marketing is thus built on top of traditional marketing, being an add-on to it. In the
model, digital marketing plays a more important role than traditional marketing in generating
so-called hard outcomes, such as sales, because digital marketing is more measurable. The
MRACE® model presented later in this book is based on this very idea of more measurable
marketing.
In the model presented in Marketing 4.0, traditional marketing involves segmentation,
brand differentiation, 4P decisions and sales, and value creation. Traditional marketing is
important (especially in the early stages of the buying process) for generating awareness and
 12 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Figure 1.5 The digital marketing framework of Kannan and Li (2017)

Figure 1.6 The digital marketing model of Kotler et al. (2017)

 AN INTRODUCTION TO DIGITAL MARKETING 13

interest. In this model, digital marketing includes a connected marketing approach, customer
communities, value co-production and discussions, and collaborative customer service.
According to the model, the importance of digital marketing increases as we move from the
inquiry, purchase, and recommendation stages of the purchasing process (we discuss the pur-
chasing process in more detail in Section 2.3). The combination of traditional marketing and
digital marketing thus provides the greatest benefits in terms of competitiveness and market
share.
 2
Analysis of the digitalized business
environment

Now that we have gone through the marketing models and processes, it is essential to under-
stand into what kind of business environment the models are being integrated. The analysis
of the digitalized business environment is an important part of the digital marketing strategy.
The analysis ensures that the digital marketing strategy is linked to changes in the business
environment that are relevant to the company’s strategy. In this case, digital marketing will not
become a separate tactical function but an integral part of the company’s business.
In this chapter, we focus on three factors that have a significant impact on the digitalization
of the market environment and thus on the design and implementation of digital market-
ing. These factors include changes in technology, the competitive landscape, and customer
behavior.
The fourth important factor is formed of regulatory changes, such as the General Data
Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union (EU) and changing policies regarding
using cookies. In the coming years, these will have a major impact on how digital marketing
can be measured, targeted, and implemented in general. However, we will not go into these
changes in more detail as the rate of change is such that there will have been so many changes
in regulation since the time of writing that the information will have become outdated. Instead,
up-to-date information on the EU’s GDPR and data security can be found, for example, on the
website of the Data Protection Commission.

2.1 TECHNOLOGICAL DEVELOPMENT

The development of technology is inextricably linked to digital marketing, and digital market-
ing is often defined as the use of technology in marketing. Marketing-related technologies can
be roughly divided into front-end and back-end technologies. The front-end technologies are
customer-interface technologies that are perceptible and available to the customer. Back-end
technologies, in turn, refer to the technologies used in the internal processes of organizations.
These technologies have an impact on the customer interface but are usually not directly per-
ceivable by the customer.
 ANALYSIS OF THE DIGITALIZED BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT 15

2.1.1 Front-end marketing technologies

Front-end marketing technologies are technologies that ordinary users can detect and utilize.
From the perspective of technological development, the most revolutionary front-end tech-
nologies have been web browsers, online stores, search engines, mobile devices, and social
media. Web browsers revolutionized the usability of the Internet and allowed people to access
the global information network. Online shopping revolutionized commerce and increased its
internationality. Search engines revolutionized the ability to find relevant information and
content on the Internet. Mobile devices, in turn, allowed access to the Internet regardless of
location. Social media increased the speed of information sharing and, at least to some extent,
democratized communication. Before social media, it was very difficult for the average person
to create and share content or opinions with the general public because media houses acted as
gatekeepers to published content. In the age of social media, anyone can publish content and
the community decides which publication deserves attention. There are, of course, pros and
cons to this, as many have certainly noted.
In the current technology environment, there are at least two new types of customer-interface
technologies related to marketing that have the potential to significantly change the business
environment. For the time being, however, their impact is limited to individual applications.
The first of these types of technology is formed of virtual reality (VR) and AR. “Many people
know of AR from AR games like Pokemon Go, which is why the impact of this type of tech-
nology is often most strongly associated with the entertainment industry. More broadly, the
idea of merging physical and digital reality is radical and may, in the longer term, make the
interfaces between the digital and physical worlds fuzzier. The importance of physical pres-
ence is diminished when you can sit in the comfort of your room in the physical world and
simultaneously be in a virtual world watching a real-time sporting event from the best seats in
the arena. The Facebook corporation, for example, renamed itself Meta after sharing its vision
of building a huge “metaverse” over the next 10 to 15 years, which refers to a next-generation
Internet based on VR that would blur the interfaces between the physical and digital worlds.
In practice, users of the metaverse could “hang out” in the virtual world and encounter other
people there in the same way as in the physical world. VR and AR can also facilitate the dis-
tance selling of complex offerings in business-to-business (B2B) markets. For example, it is
difficult to drag a paper machine to a customer meeting, but the customer can visit the virtual
world to learn about its physical details and how it would fit into their mill.
Another significant type of front-end technology that is in its early stages of development
is related to virtual or digital assistants. Most of us know these as Siri, Alexa, and the Google
Assistant. In practice, these digital assistants are so far mainly voice-based interfaces for
searching for information or performing simple digital actions, and their use does not yet
have very significant implications. However, as the applications evolve, their use will increase
significantly. Many of us may still be alienated from voice-based interfaces because chatting
with a computer or a bot feels weird. It must be borne in mind that listening and speaking are
the basis of human communication and thus much deeper in our inheritance than writing
and reading. When we encounter people in the physical world, we are more likely to exchange
 16 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

greetings by speaking than by writing. As digital barriers are removed, it is logical to think that
the interfaces of the future will be increasingly based on speech rather than on writing.
Why does this have business significance? Because, as digital assistants evolve, we can search
for information and make purchasing decisions without the need for a computer screen. “Siri,
what does digital marketing mean?”, “Alexa, which running shoes should I buy?”, “Google,
order me food for a week.” We will increasingly be able to perform such tasks in the future
with the help of digital assistants, which will reduce the need to stare at different screens. The
idea behind such a scenario is that personal digital assistants will get to know us thoroughly, so
their ability to complete tasks and make purchasing decisions based on our personal needs and
preferences will perhaps even grow to a proactive level. An assistant would procure products
for us that we might not realize we needed.
The scenario sounds futuristic, and many may even consider it dystopic. In terms of
research, however, it is fascinating in many ways. A digital assistant that would base product
recommendations on objective facts would, at least in theory, most likely lead to better pur-
chasing decisions and make brands virtually irrelevant. If the assistant were to dig up all the
information we needed from the depths of the Internet, what would happen to advertising?
Would the moment finally come when advertising—or at least advertising that the consumer
does not want—comes to an end? Hardly. As the old saying goes, “marketers ruin everything”
in the end by turning an authentic utility service into a commercial platform. This is what
happened to search engines and social media, so there is no reason to believe that this would
not be the case for digital assistants as well. In addition, it should be remembered that all the
leading players in the industry represent the world’s largest commercial technology compa-
nies. Indeed, this raises questions about data ownership, consumer espionage, and privacy
protection—the concerns these questions address have led to a significant slowdown in the
adoption and diffusion of digital assistants.

2.1.2 Back-end marketing technologies

Back-end technologies are technologies that are not directly perceptible to consumers. These
technologies enable the background processes needed to measure, target, and personalize
digital marketing, for example. Most back-end technologies are related in one way or another
to data processing and management. The most significant back-end marketing technologies
include customer relationship management (CRM) systems, digital analytics tools, marketing
automation, and the Internet of things (IoT).
The widespread adoption of CRM since the 1990s has contributed to a shift in marketing
philosophy—it has shifted from transactional trading to gaining and growing profitable cus-
tomers. The emergence of digital analytics at the turn of the 2010s made it possible to track
digital footprints. It provided new ways to gather data about customers’ digital behavior, such
as customers’ navigation paths on a company’s website, the keywords used in search engines,
or the opinions expressed on social media. Web analytics (e.g., Google Analytics) and social
media monitoring software (e.g., Brandwatch) are examples of digital analytics tools that can
be used for collecting data on customer behavior.
 ANALYSIS OF THE DIGITALIZED BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT 17

Towards the end of the 2010s, marketing automation established itself as one of the
most widely used marketing tools. It enables companies to automate routine tasks and
decision-making situations, but also to target, personalize, and schedule marketing communi-
cations activities according to predetermined criteria. The IoT, in turn, has expanded the range
of devices from which data can be collected into the company’s systems. Importantly, while
most marketing technologies have traditionally collected data on customer encounters at the
pre-purchase and purchase phases, IoT allows data to be collected on post-purchase product
use. In the past, product usage data may have been collected from digital services, but the IoT
has made this same opportunity available to physical product manufacturers.
In recent years, the main drivers of the development of back-end technologies have been
the growth of (1) big data, (2) AI, and (3) the computing power of computers. By big data we
mean large and diverse masses of data that contain, in addition to numbers, unstructured data
types, such as texts, images, videos, or voices. In practice, unstructured data refers to the types
of datasets that are difficult to organize into a spreadsheet or formula. About 80 percent of
the data collected by organizations is unstructured,1 and as this data has been very difficult to
analyze, organizations have generally made decisions based on structured or numerical data.
AI and its subcategories, such as machine learning and deep learning, have developed sig-
nificantly in recent years and enabled the analysis of unstructured data, such as image recogni-
tion, audio-to-text translations, and text-based theme recognition. The exponential increase in
the computing power of computers, in turn, has made it possible for big data to be processed
in the first place. Without going into the technical details, an illustrative example of increasing
computer power is that a modern smartphone has more computing power than the combined
computing power of all the NASA computers of the 1960s. Yet people were sent to the moon
using those NASA computers.2
In terms of digital marketing, the growth in big data, AI, and computing power means we
can collect and analyze increasingly diverse data on customer behavior and market move-
ments in order to support decision-making. If the data used in digital marketing in the past
was largely based on customer clicks, likes, conversions, and sales figures, we will be better able
to interpret social media conversations and content related to customers or other stakeholders,
as well as identify new customer needs and problems from customer dialogues such as chatbot
discussions and customer service phone calls. These are significant opportunities and these
may change the marketing orientation so that it becomes more strategic, shifting the focus
from operational cost efficiency to identifying new growth opportunities and improving the
customer experience.

2.1.3 The selection and adoption of technologies

Digitalization has brought new technologies to marketing at an accelerating pace, which can
offer companies new opportunities to develop their competitiveness. However, in addition
to opportunities, they also bring new challenges to companies and force them to innovate in
order to remain competitive. The challenges are manifold, but the most important ones relate
to the selection and adoption of technologies.
 18 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Since 2011, the Chiefmartec blog3 has conducted an annual survey of marketing-related
technologies. In the 2011 survey, it identified a total of 150 marketing technologies and stated
that it is challenging for the organizations to be able to select the most appropriate of these
for their purposes. Year after year, the number of technologies has grown rapidly, and in the
2020 survey, it identified a total of about 8,000 marketing technologies. These technologies
are divided into six subgroups, presented here in order of magnitude: (1) social media and
relationship management, (2) content marketing and customer experience, (3) e-commerce
and sales, (4) data and analytics, (5) advertising and promotion, and (6) management and
processes.
The number of marketing technologies has thus been multiplied by 50 in ten years. The
result may be partly explained by more advanced methods being used for detecting technolo-
gies over the years. The fact is, however, that the number of marketing technologies has grown
exponentially over the past decade. While most of the technologies listed may not be ground-
breaking, the increase in numbers means that the technology landscape is becoming increas-
ingly fragmented, and there are more and more providers of different tools. Consequently, it
is becoming increasingly difficult for companies to conceive the big picture and choose the
technologies that meet their business needs.
The question, “Which technologies or tools should we choose for digital marketing?” is
one of the most common questions we encounter when meeting managers. As shown by the
diversity of the marketing technology landscape described above, this question is difficult to
answer without deep knowledge of the company in question. This is also, in most cases, the
wrong opening question when considering suitable technologies for digital marketing.
When there are many different technologies to choose from, the focus should be on the
organizational goals and problems that the company is trying to solve with the new tech-
nologies. It is also common that the solution to the problem is not a new technology but, for
example, a change in the organizational routines and processes. In fact, technology itself is
rarely the solution to any business problem, but rather, it is a tool that allows a company to
operate more efficiently or produce better quality. Thus, technology enables the change of
some activity. For example, there is a myth that the adoption of marketing automation would
somehow miraculously automate the whole marketing process and immediately improve its
effectiveness. In fact, marketing automation does not in itself automate anything, but the rules
built into it and the processes built around it can enable more efficient operations, such as
more personalized communication with current and potential customers.
In addition to the selection of technologies, their adoption has been found to be difficult.
Technological developments are increasingly offering new opportunities, but the ability of
organizations to adapt to the opportunities offered by new technologies has developed slowly.
In most cases, a technology is worthless if its adoption does not lead to a change in routines.
However, changing routines is notoriously difficult for people, and the integration of new
technologies into organizational workflows is typically a very slow process, especially in large
organizations. It is said that technology changes exponentially, organizations change logarith-
mically. Thus, the larger the organization grows, the slower the adoption of technologies in
organizational routines becomes. This is one of the main reasons why digital-born start-ups
are able to challenge dominant market players. They do not bear the burden of old routines,
 ANALYSIS OF THE DIGITALIZED BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT 19

practices, and a massive information system infrastructure; they are able to adopt new tech-
nologies and practices in a more agile manner. Large companies usually have a resource
advantage, while small companies have a speed advantage. A speed advantage is often crucial
when talking about a rapidly changing technology environment.
Traditionally, the process of adopting technology in an organization has been initiated
by first finding out the requirements and desires for new technology in the various depart-
ments or functions of the organization. The different options are then carefully assessed and
a detailed plan for implementation is made. Only then is a purchase decision made, after which
the actual adoption of the technology as part of the organization’s operations can begin. Such
an adoption process that emphasizes careful planning has been described as representing
a waterfall model. The metaphor comes from the fact that the process proceeds systematically
in one direction through defined steps, which eventually leads to adoption. The weakness of
the waterfall model is that the process takes a long time—often years—before the appropriate
technology is even selected. When the technology is finally adopted, it may well have been
replaced by better solutions. For this reason, large companies have also started to implement
more agile adoption processes as they have found that their traditional technology adoption
processes are no longer suited to a rapidly changing digital environment. Thus, if in the past
the adoption of a particular technology was considered, planned, and speculated about for
years, now the decision may be made very quickly. The focus has shifted from careful planning
to experimentation and continuous iteration.
The shift in focus in technology adoption processes is also due to the fact that many new
technologies today represent cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions. The cost of
acquiring SaaS solutions is usually low, and many vendors also offer free trials or demo ver-
sions that allow for agile testing of the technology before making a purchase decision. Indeed,
the adoption of technology is increasingly following a so-called agile model. Unlike the water-
fall model, the agile model is based on iterative and flexible testing and learning. In the agile
model, the technology can be tested in the planning phase before major investments are made.
In the pilot phase, firms can explore and test the features offered by the technology, analyze the
results, and learn from them. If the results are satisfactory, new use cases are gradually added
and the user base expanded. Notably, the technology can be rejected at any time if it appears
that it does not serve the needs of the organization.
The agile model of adoption also has its own pitfalls as it easily leads to technology-driven
thinking. In that case, the choice of the technology to be tested may be based on the hype
around the technology rather than on the actual business goal or problem. Another weakness
is that technologies that appear useful but to which the organization cannot afford to commit
resources may be chosen for the testing phase. As said before, technology is not the solution
but the enabler of the solution. At the heart of the solution are the changes in routines and pro-
cesses that are empowered by the technology. If an organization does not have the resources to
build the new processes, there is no point in adopting even the most promising technologies.
A technological orientation thus easily leads to the loss of the big picture. In the end, a firm
may notice that it owns a number of relevant technologies with expensive licenses but does not
make effective use of any of them.
 20 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

In summary, today’s marketing technology environment requires faster adoption processes

and bold experimentation. It is paramount to start with the problems and needs of the business
strategy in order to select the big changes in which the organization wants to be involved.
There are countless marketing technologies, but it is not possible to test them all. Nor can an
organization be involved in all technological changes at the same time. Instead, the focus must
be on those that bring the organization closer to its strategic goals. This is where marketing
models help a lot: they divide marketing activities into clear stages, and when the stages are
measured with the right metrics, the figures reveal concrete problems at different stages.
A well-defined problem cuts off a huge number of possible technologies, not to mention
a huge amount of thought work.
In addition, the existing technological infrastructure and resources of the organization
must be taken into account. It is important that it is possible to build interfaces between new
technology and existing technologies so that the new technology does not become a silo and
can be integrated into existing systems so that data moves from one system to another. A large
proportion of companies also underestimate the resource needs required to adopt new tech-
nology. If an organization does not have sufficient resources, it should find the new technology
so necessary that it will commit to acquiring the missing resources. As a result of these consid-
erations, an organization is able to significantly narrow down the range of technologies that it
sets out to experiment with using an agile model in order to adapt to the evolving technological
landscape.

2.2 CHANGES IN THE COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE

While digitalization and technological developments have shaped customer behavior, they
have also led to significant changes in the competitive landscape. The term hypercompetition
is increasingly being used to describe the competitive field globalized by digitalization, where
competition is extremely fierce and sustainable competitive advantages are becoming increas-
ingly difficult to achieve.
As early as the 1970s, Michael Porter developed the so-called five forces model (Figure 2.1)
that provides a managerial tool for understanding the forces that shape industry competition
and, on the other hand, help adapt strategy to the competitive environment. The five forces
of the model are (1) rivalry among existing competitors, (2) the threat of substitute products
or services, (3) the threat of new entrants, (4) the bargaining power of suppliers, and (5) the
bargaining power of buyers. The first force of the model, “rivalry among existing competitors,”
describes the prevailing competitive situation in the industry, which in turn is constantly being
shaped by the four other forces. Although the model is old, it is more relevant than ever and
provides a meaningful framework with which to look at the changes brought about by digital-
ization in the competitive landscape.
Digitalization has increased rivalry among existing competitors in many industries for the
simple reason that it has blurred geographical boundaries. The competition is no longer
limited to local players and has become truly international. In the context of physical goods,
longer delivery times and additional logistics costs could theoretically hinder cross-border
 ANALYSIS OF THE DIGITALIZED BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT 21

Source: Adapted from Porter (1979).4

Figure 2.1 The five forces that shape industrial competition

trade, but practice has shown otherwise. Many local traders are facing great challenges in
responding to fierce international competition over prices and delivery times. Cloud services
provide extreme examples of international competition because the purchasing process,
product delivery, and usage are often fully completed via digital means. When we decide to
acquire a new cloud service (e.g., Dropbox), from a technical point of view, it does not matter
where the provider operates the service as long as the service works as promised. Of course,
language skills can still be a barrier to buying if the service is not provided in a language the
consumer understands.
Digitalization has increased the threat of substitute products and services in the competitive
landscape. Technological developments are accelerating innovation cycles and new products
are entering the market at an accelerating pace. What is particularly noteworthy, however, is
that the product may no longer be replaced by a new and better physical product but may be
replaced by a digital product or service. These digital products and services have disrupted
many industries. A famous example of a digitizable product is digital cameras, which replaced
analog cameras in a relatively short time after they were launched. Indeed, Kodak is often used
as a warning example: it missed out on the development of digital cameras, with the result that
 22 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

its extremely strong international market position turned into bankruptcy in 2012. Similarly,
well-known examples of replacing a physical product with a digital service include Spotify
and Netflix, which have significantly disrupted the music and TV entertainment businesses.
When was the last time you bought a CD or DVD? More and more consumers already lack the
hardware to play them.
However, it is important to note that the threat of substitute products is also present in B2B
industries. For example, the products of industrial companies are increasingly augmented by
digital elements and additional services. Indeed, the servitization of industrial companies has
gained a lot of attention in the B2B literature recently. Among other things, more and more
industrial companies are collecting sensor data on the operations of their devices and building
data-driven services that provide added value to customers. For example, such sensor data
can be used to provide recommendations for more efficient use of the device or to anticipate
maintenance needs, which lead to a better customer experience. In other words, even indus-
trial companies no longer compete with the excellence of a physical product alone—they also
compete with a customer experience that can be supported by digital and smart services.
The threat of new entrants is growing in many industries as digitalization has provided
opportunities for new types of business models. The digital platform economy in particular
has affected the dynamics of many industries. In the hotel business, AirBnB has developed
a digital trading platform that allows individuals to provide accommodation to those seeking
it and thus compete with traditional hotels. According to statistics,5 the AirBnB platform had
7.7 million accommodation options globally in 2019, facilitating almost 430 million overnight
stays during the year. It is clear that AirBnB will not replace the role of traditional hotels, but
it will certainly affect their customer acquisition and pricing power. Uber has created a similar
new entrant threat in the taxi business, and FinTech companies have done the same in the
finance industry. Start-ups based on digital business models in general are constantly emerg-
ing to defy traditional players and their operating logics. Regulation often slows—but does not
prevent—agile start-ups when entering the market.
It is more modern to look at the growth of the bargaining power of buyers and the bargain-
ing power of suppliers as a whole and to talk about the changes in the power relations of the
value chain that digitalization has made possible. For product manufacturers, digitalization
has provided an opportunity to reduce the number and role of intermediaries in the value
chain. Any company that makes products can set up an online store and start selling their
products directly to end users instead of selling the products through wholesalers and retailers.
Such direct sales to end users are called the direct-to-consumer (D2C) strategy. A successful
example of such a strategy is the Dollar Shave Club, which grew into a billion-dollar company
by selling one-dollar razors online that are delivered right to your door. Excellent digital
marketing communications also played a key role in the Dollar Shave Club’s success story,
examples of which can be seen on YouTube.
However, succeeding in a D2C strategy is not easy as it requires a significant investment
in reaching customers, earning attention, and building a brand. Many of us want to shop in
online stores where competing brands and options can be compared. For this reason, in most
cases, digitalization has increased the bargaining power of online marketplaces with a large
and loyal customer base. An extreme example is Amazon, whose strong market position in
 ANALYSIS OF THE DIGITALIZED BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT 23

the digital age has decreased the bargaining power of many product manufacturers. With
Amazon’s market share of over 50 percent in the US, many manufacturers find it unrealistic
to opt out of the platform. Another example is DoorDash, which connects restaurants and
customers with a mobile app. The greater the proportion of customers who prefer DoorDash
as a digital marketplace for restaurants, the weaker the bargaining power of restaurants in
relation to DoorDash. The strong bargaining power of food delivery platforms is probably one
of the main reasons for their high market valuations.6

2.3 CHANGES IN CUSTOMER BEHAVIOR AND TRENDS

Digitization offers consumers and customers an unlimited variety of media, content, and other
offerings. Together, they offer new opportunities for information retrieval, enjoyment, taking
care of affairs, socializing, and so on. These opportunities have shifted customer behavior in
the digital direction. Although most use of digital channels is not related to purchasing or
other commercial matters, digitalization has still had a significant impact on customers’ pur-
chasing decision-making processes and customer behavior.
Understanding changes in customer behavior is one of the most important research topics
in marketing science. Some of the authors of this book are also part of a research team that
has been working for about 20 years on understanding the changes in buying behavior and the
growing role of digital tools and services in it. During this period, the importance of traditional

Figure 2.2 A buyer in the digital era

 24 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

marketing has steadily diminished in the world of the digital consumer. Recent textbooks on
marketing have shifted the focus of marketing from traditional marketing to digital interaction
with the consumer.
In this section, we focus in particular on changes in the customer’s purchasing processes. To
better understand digital age customers, it is worth looking at how shoppers today use digital
tools and services. In the buying processes of buyers in all age groups, they increasingly rely
on search engines, information on corporate websites, a brand’s website, price comparison
sites, booking sites, reviews and comments from other users, online discussions, social media
content, and influencers (Figure 2.2).

2.3.1 The buying process

The traditional idea of the customer purchasing process dates back to the 1960s and is based
on a five-step model. The five steps follow: (1) awareness, (2) an information search, (3) eval-
uation of the alternatives, (4) the purchase decision, and (5) post-purchase behavior (Figure
2.3). The model starts with the idea that the customer becomes aware of a need, either by
perceiving a problem or by getting some external stimulus (e.g., by seeing an advertisement
that makes him or her aware of the new buying need). The customer will then start looking
for information on potential offers and comparing different options until he or she ends up
making a purchase decision. Finally, the customer uses the product or service, evaluates the
success of the purchase decision, and possibly makes a positive or negative recommendation
to others.

Figure 2.3 The customer buying process

The model has persisted in the marketing literature and has lasted exceptionally well over
time. Although numerous variations have been proposed for the model, its basic idea has
not changed significantly. It is often argued that digitalization has revolutionized the buying
process. This is true, but looking at the big picture, it is hard to argue that the steps presented in
the model would still not be included in much of our purchasing decisions. Perhaps the buying
process is not always quite as straightforward as the model suggests, and we move back and
forth between evaluating alternatives and searching for information. Sometimes we may make
very impulsive or routine purchases, in which case we do not actively search for information
and actively compare alternatives. However, in purchasing decisions that require considera-
tion, the model still accurately describes the decision-making stages that the customer goes
through in her or his purchasing process.
 ANALYSIS OF THE DIGITALIZED BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT 25

Thus, digitalization has not so much revolutionized the logic of the purchasing process but
has rather affected the manifestation of the various stages of the purchasing process and the
activities associated with them. For example, digital advertising, content marketing, and social
media discussions have brought new stimuli to the customer with which she or he becomes
aware of her or his needs. Digital channels offer new ways to search for information and
compare alternatives. The purchase can be made digitally from an online store, in addition to
which, the customer has a better opportunity to share his or her experience of the product or
service that he or she purchased through a product review or social media post. In this way, the
customer can also influence other people’s purchasing decisions.
To understand the digital consumer and his or her buying behavior, we also need to under-
stand how purchasing decisions are structured: what facilitates buying, what factors slow down
buying, and what factors act as barriers to making a purchase. According to the book Marketing
4.0 (Kotler et al., 2017), rational purchasing takes place through the following five stages: the
awakening of awareness, appeal, ask, act (purchase), and ultimately onto recommendation.
Most of the change in the buying process takes place in the buyer’s network. Therefore, organ-
izations need to think about how they can get into the buyer’s network through marketing. At
least we can say that the solution is not product-centric pushing—it must purely be thought of
from a customer perspective. What content does an organization need to provide on different
channels at different stages of the buying process? What content arouses buyer interest? How
do you get a buyer to recommend a product or service she or he buys? Does the buyer act
rationally or do habits, emotions, and routines guide buying?
In order to identify potential buyers, it is necessary to know the different purchasing deci-
sion paths and buyer personas. At what stages of the buying process do customers experience
the biggest problems? How do you get a customer to move from one step to the next? How
do you get the customer to interact with the brand at different stages of the purchase? To help
answer the questions, you can use, for example, a funnel model that describes the different
types of digital content that are usually used at different stages of the purchasing process.

2.3.2 Research findings concerning customers in the digital era

According to research, consumers make extensive use of information available on the Internet
when making purchasing decisions. For example, 95 percent of car buyers use the Internet to
buy a car.7 The car is selected online, and the role of the car dealer is to act as the physical sup-
plier of the car. Most buyers have already made their decisions when they step onto the dealer’s
premises. In addition, kitchen buyers behave in the same way: 90 percent of kitchen renovation
buyers have been found to make use of online content, especially during the consideration
phase of their purchasing process.8 For larger purchases, about 80 percent of consumers search
the Internet for information before making a purchase decision.9 Digital content plays a huge
role in today’s buying process, even if the purchase itself is made through a physical channel.
Together with the market research company Taloustutkimus, we have been collecting data
on the purchasing behavior of Finnish consumers over a period of three years, including col-
lecting data on how much consumers use various sources of information when buying. More
 26 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

than 6,000 consumers have participated in the surveys, and the samples represent Finns by
gender, age, and place of residence.

Figure 2.4 The information sources used when Finnish consumers make purchases

According to adult Finns, the three most important channels in their search for information
are the Google search engine, a store’s website, and the manufacturer’s website (Figure 2.4).
In contrast, social media held very little importance as an information retrieval channel. Has
social media been overemphasized in recent digital marketing if its importance as an informa-
tion retrieval channel is minimal based on other surveys too? The answer is not unequivocal
as consumers using social media are currently being heavily exposed to advertising and other
commercial content, the effects of which cannot be fully captured in these kinds of surveys.
The effects are thus both subconscious and such that they may not be remembered or reported
in such surveys. Few of us read a blog to look for information about a product, but reading
a blog can actually give rise to an entire purchase intent.
HubSpot conducted an interesting consumer survey in 2017 by asking consumers where
they search for information about a brand they like. According to the survey, the brand’s
website is by far the most visited source of information (visited by 67 percent of the respond-
ents). Just under half of the respondents (41 percent of them) watched videos of the brand
and 37 percent liked the brand on Facebook. In contrast, only 16 percent of the people started
following the brand on Instagram, 14 percent followed the brand on Twitter, and 6 percent fol-
lowed the brand on Snapchat. Only 15 percent of them read a blog, 12 percent joined a forum,
 ANALYSIS OF THE DIGITALIZED BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT 27

and 12 percent posted about the brand on social media. Only 8 percent of the respondents did
not search for information about the brand at all (Figure 2.5).

Source: Modified from HubSpot (2017).10

Figure 2.5 Where do consumers search for information about a brand they like?

We collect here some fresh facts about digital consumers:

z 90 percent of Finns aged 15–25 use their mobile phone for searching for additional
information while visiting a store11
z 84 percent of US consumers aged 18–29 use their mobile phone to shop online
z 87 percent of US consumers aged 18–60 start their shopping journeys from either
Amazon or Google
z 77 percent of US consumers aged 18–60 search for information in store using their
mobile phone, while only 35 percent preferred to ask a shop assistant for help12
z 50 percent of Finns over the age of 65 often or almost always search for information on
Google when purchasing products or services.8

2.3.3 Business buyers’ behavior

The purchasing behavior of organizations has been studied much less than that of consumers.
The studies conducted still convey one main message about the behavior of business buyers:
The buying behavior of business buyers has been converging with the buying behavior of
the digital age consumer all the time. The business buyers’ purchasing process has been out-
lined as consisting of the following six steps: identifying the need, defining product features,
conducting research, making a selection, making a purchase, and conducting an evaluation.
However, the nature of the product or service being purchased has a significant impact on how
we understand the purchasing behavior of business buyers. It is a different matter to buy office
paper or hand sanitizer for a company than it is to buy a nuclear power plant or 60 fighter
 28 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

jets. The role of digitalization in companies’ purchasing decisions must always be understood
in terms of the nature of the solution that is to be purchased. Although we are not very well
informed about the purchase processes of nuclear power plants or fighter jets, digital content
is also expected to play a significant role in them.
Accenture conducted an extensive survey for business decision makers in 2017. According
to the study, business buyers go through more than half of their buying process before they
have any contact with the seller. More than half (61 percent) of B2B sales transactions start
online. One interesting consequence of the digital age is that, according to this study, 90
percent of business customers do not answer a sales call from someone they do not know (e.g.,
from an unknown number). This result reinforces the idea that organizations need to enter
the customer’s buying process through their marketing by creating engaging content, not by
trying to force themselves into the buying process.
Accenture’s survey interviewed 1,350 sales and customer service executives from B2B
organizations around the world. In the survey, 71 percent of B2B business leaders said that
their business customers increasingly want a similar service experience to what they get as
a consumer in a non-business context. Interestingly, half of the executives interviewed admit-
ted that they were unable to provide such a customer experience for their clients.
Toman, Adamson, and Gomez (2017) have investigated what slows down a B2B customer
at different stages of the purchasing process (Figure 2.6). According to the participants in the
study, in the early stages of purchasing, the problem is to retrieve useful information. There
is too much information and it is difficult to find useful information. Sound familiar? People
become a problem in the middle of the buying process: when sellers get involved in a custom-
er’s buying process, problems often arise. In the final stage, the problem is having too many
options. The majority (86 percent) of sellers consider it important to offer all possible options
to the customer. However, the more options there are, the harder it is to make a choice, which
slows down the entire purchasing process. In addition, the excessive number of options causes
nearly half (40 percent) of B2B buyers to experience post-purchase uncertainty (cognitive
dissonance).
Like the Accenture study, Toman et al. (2017) found that more than half of B2B buyers
spend a lot of time in the buying process before making first contact with a seller. In the survey
by Toman et al., 65 percent of B2B customers say they spent as much time on the initial stages
of the purchasing process (i.e., on searching for and comparing products or services) as they
expected to spend on the entire purchasing process. So, we should make purchasing easier as
few business buyers have idle time.
According to a recent survey,13 B2B buyers consider reviews (64 percent), product demos
(43 percent), and videos (33 percent) to be the top three forms of digital content they use in
the buying process. Just over half (61 percent) of B2B shoppers thought that relevant content
was the main driver for a certain behavior (such as a purchase or an invitation to tender). The
survey involved 500 B2B buyers and sellers from the US.
These studies are important for those marketers who want to reach B2B customers because
the studies provide a foundation for designing a content strategy. If you are a B2B business
decision maker, consider whether you offer content on your website or other digital channels
that is relevant to the information seeker or buyer and whether that content is easy to find. Has
 ANALYSIS OF THE DIGITALIZED BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT 29

Figure 2.6 Barriers to making a purchase among B2B buyers

information retrieval been made easy? Do you offer too many options online? Is buying from
your business made easy? Or is it as cumbersome as making an e-invoice? Actually, the easiest
thing to think about is: Does the content on your company’s website serve your customers as
well as your best customer service representative and your best seller? If not, then your compa-
ny’s website has huge development potential with which the company can snatch more market
share if it realizes this potential.
We will take a closer look at making buying easier, building a website, and the content of
a website in the second part of the book.

2.3.4 Consumers’ information overload

Increased information—especially on social media and in email and online content—has

created a whole new kind of problem and field of research. In the fields of information technol-
ogy, education, and psychology, the effects of the increased flood of online content on people’s
behavior and brains have been studied in recent years.
Psychological research shows that social media has several side effects on people’s mental
health. People who are on the verge of depression or who are already suffering from depression
are particularly vulnerable to these effects. The huge flood of information on social media and
in online content has led to the so-called fragmented attention phenomenon, where a person’s
attention is drawn to too many things at the same time and his or her ability to concentrate is
impaired. Fragmented attention negatively affects many of our practical matters, such as our
work. Nothing happens if we try to do too many things at once.
Often, consuming digital content can be a waste of time. Sometimes you find that you spent
hours searching for information about a product using website content and finding the cheap-
est place to buy the product when you could have bought it from a local market for one euro
more than the price on Amazon. On the other hand, for example, we spend less time buying
 30 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

a home, which is one of the biggest purchases of our lives, than we do on planning a kitchen
renovation (which studies show usually takes more than a year).
LEGO also provides a good example of the limited capacity of the human mind to handle
a large number of options. LEGO has a product called Creator that allows you to build several
different models from the same LEGO blocks. The Creator package can now be made into
three different models, which has made the product family very popular. Previously, the
Creator package was sold as a package with 12 models, but consumers did not buy it. LEGO
has justified the simplification of the Creator package by saying that the 12 options were not
understandable to consumers, so LEGO simplified the number of options to three. According
to the CEO of LEGO at the time, their starting point is to keep things simple and easy to learn.
The human brain contains 20 megabytes of RAM, which is no more than four typical digital
images. Our brains are only able to process a very small amount of information at a time, and
we are not as intelligent as we often think we are. With age, the ability to process information
deteriorates significantly, especially with regard to creative thinking. According to a study by
NASA, by the age of 25 we have retained only about 5 percent of the creative thinking we had
when we were five years old.
So, the human mind is often lazy and we do not always act rationally. Take this into account
and make buying as easy as possible on your website.

2.3.5 Customer empowerment

Digitizing customer behavior has significantly changed the power relations between compa-
nies and customers for the benefit of the customer. If we think about the customers’ buying
process before the Internet, the consumer’s options were narrower and the seller almost always
had more information about the products and services than the customers. If you needed
a new jacket, for example, you probably drove to the city center, where there were a few rel-
evant clothing stores from which to choose. There were a few jackets in the stores that suited
your needs, and the sellers provided more information and recommended certain products.
So, you relied heavily on your experience and the seller’s recommendations, unless you hap-
pened to be a particularly dedicated jacket expert. In other words, sellers had clear information
power over customers.
Today, the power relationship has turned in the customer’s favor, and the phenomenon is
called customer empowerment. The increased customer empowerment can be divided into four
sources of power:14 demand-, information-, network-, and crowd-based power (Figure 2.7).
Demand-based power suggests that, in the digital world, consumers have access to a vast
variety of alternative products and services. Thanks to digital channels, products and services
can now be purchased globally from a variety of players instead of from a few local players.
In the digital world, every competitor is, so to speak, one click away, increasing the range of
products and services available. From a business perspective, this means that competition has
become tougher and more international, highlighting the importance of genuine competitive
advantages.
Information-based power, in turn, suggests that digital channels make it easy to access
product and service information in a variety of content formats that help customers make
 ANALYSIS OF THE DIGITALIZED BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT 31

Figure 2.7 Four sources of consumer power

better purchasing decisions. For businesses, this means they need to produce content on
themes that customers are looking for information on and that will help them make good
purchasing decisions. At times, companies fear that sharing free information will also give
competing companies information that will benefit them or that it will help customers buy
from competitors as their understanding grows. While this fear may be partially justified, com-
panies should be more concerned that competitors will provide better content to customers,
making it difficult for the companies to get involved in the customer buying process. When
a company creates content and provides it for free to its target audience, it creates a routine in
which their customers visit their website. At the same time, it builds an image of the company’s
expertise.
Network-based power suggests that customers can also create their own (user-generated)
content and share their experiences and opinions about companies and their products. They
can also participate in the sharing and discussion of the content produced by companies and
write product reviews. By doing so, consumers have more power to influence other people’s
purchasing decisions. Network power can have a significant (positive or negative) impact on
a company’s success. Bad products and services are harder to market, and so, the customer
experience and fair treatment of customers play a big role. Negative experiences often spread
like wildfire, while a good customer experience often leads to positive testimonials and rec-
ommendations. One of the most interesting consequences of network-based power is that the
company’s most profitable customer may not be the one who spends the most money on the
company’s products and services, and may be the company’s advocate or an influencer who
has influence over other people’s decisions.
 32 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Crowd-based power is related to network-based power and refers in particular to the power
of customers to create their own communities and platforms or to participate in communities
and platforms created by companies that benefit all parties. Probably the best-known example
is Wikipedia, which is based on information created by users. Other examples include plat-
forms related to crowdfunding (e.g., Indiegogo), the sharing economy (e.g., Couchsurfing),
and consumer-to-consumer trading (e.g., Tori.fi). Platforms based on collective power often
benefit consumers and, on the other hand, affect the dynamics of some industries: Tori.fi offers
a virtual flea market that increases product lifetime, and the share of trading second-hand
goods increases at the expense of the share of new goods. Couchsurfing allows you to stay
overnight at the houses of the community members instead of booking expensive hotels when
traveling.
To sum up, digitalization has provided customers with more options and information at
their disposal than ever before, which significantly increases their bargaining power in relation
to companies. Customers also have a better opportunity to influence the decisions made by
other customers and, in some cases, the opportunity to ignore companies, allowing them to
buy a product or service from an ordinary person instead of a company. As a counterbalance
to customer empowerment, companies, in turn, have more data on customer behavior at their
disposal, which increases the companies’ opportunities to influence customer behavior.

NOTES
1. Forbes (2019).
2. ZME Science (2021).
3. https://​chiefmartec​.com/​.
4. Porter (1979).
5. Alltherooms (2021).
6. DoorDash acquired Wolt (valuation €7 billion) in November 2021.
7. Google & ComScore (2017).
8. Sawhney (2011).
9. GE Capital Retail Bank (2013).
10. HubSpot (2017), HubSpot Content Trends Survey Q3.
11. Karjaluoto (2021).
12. Salsify (2017).
13. Uberflip (2021).
14. Labrecque et al. (2013).
 3
Digital marketing strategy

A digital marketing strategy refers to a company’s long-term plan for how it will achieve its
digital marketing goals in a changing business environment. It is sometimes said that a com-
pany’s long-term strategic plans are no longer meaningful because the digitalizing world is
changing so fast that strategies become obsolete before they are implemented in the organiza-
tion’s operations. Many believe that in a digitalizing world, it would be wiser to just make bold
experiments and agile changes based on the data generated by the experiments.
We agree that the world is changing rapidly, and that is why it is critical to continuously
analyze the changes in the digital business environment that we described in Chapter 2 in
order to build a foundation for a digital marketing strategy. It is also very important to make
bold experiments and data-driven decisions, but these should be in line with the strategy.
Otherwise, marketing activities appear perplexing in the eyes of the customer, resulting in
a confusing customer experience and brand image. The strategy therefore provides clear
guidelines and boundaries for digital marketing, within which even quick experiments and
decisions can be made. While the details of a strategy can quickly become obsolete today, dif-
ferentiating yourself from competitors in a way that creates customer value remains the most
essential part of any marketing strategy.
Goals are the starting point for a digital marketing strategy. In Section 3.1, we present the
different goals of digital marketing and explain how to make them as concrete as possible.
Once goals are set, the digital marketing strategy culminates in a plan for how the goals will
be achieved. In practice, achieving the objectives requires a competitive advantage, which
generally refers to the characteristics of the firm that enable it to beat its competitors. From
a marketing perspective, competitive advantage means that a company is able to satisfy cus-
tomer needs in a way that competitors cannot match. Building such a competitive advantage
requires an in-depth understanding of customer needs as well as the ability to differentiate the
firm from competitors. In Section 3.2, we discuss the two cornerstones of building a competi-
tive advantage: creating buyer personas (see Section 3.2.1) corresponds to gaining an in-depth
understanding of customer needs, while differentiation (see Section 3.2.2) corresponds to
a firm’s ability to differentiate itself from its competitors.
Once a company has defined its competitive advantage—that is, once it has an in-depth
knowledge of customer needs and knows how to differentiate itself from its competitors—it
must turn that competitive advantage into a value proposition. A good value proposition is
based on the company’s competitive advantage, and its idea is to concretely communicate
the value that the customer receives when purchasing the company’s products or services. In
other words, it briefly answers the question of why a customer should do business with a given
company from among all the options. However, a value proposition is just a set of empty
 34 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

words unless the company is also able to deliver on its promise (i.e., to create the value that it
promises to the customer). For this reason, in Section 3.3, we present value creation strategies
that allow a company to deliver on its value proposition.

3.1 SETTING DIGITAL MARKETING GOALS

The goals of digital marketing provide the basis for strategy work. The goals must be relevant
to the business, and their main task is to clarify the strategic outcomes that the company wants
to achieve with its digital marketing. These goals cannot be too many in order for them to have
strategic weight. In setting goals, the main emphasis is on making strategic choices and setting
priorities. For example, if you set sales growth as the first strategic goal for digital marketing, it
is often unrealistic to set reducing marketing costs as the second goal, because increasing sales
usually requires financial investments that increase costs.
In turn, focusing on just one goal can lead to a narrow-minded approach in digital market-
ing. For example, simply having the goal of increasing sales may guide marketers to focus on
promotional campaigns that typically have a positive sales impact but a negative impact on
profitability and brand value.
As a rule of thumb, we recommend setting three to five goals for digital marketing so that
the goals have strategic weight but do not focus too narrowly on one area of improvement,
such as increasing sales. If there are more goals, you should try to prioritize them or divide
them into a few main goals and related subgoals, which can make them easier to manage.
However, it is important to note that goals should guide strategic choices—making a long list
of goals is just as ineffective as not setting goals at all.
Because digital marketing goals are based on a company’s business strategy and are there-
fore company specific, it is difficult to take a position on what the good or bad goals are in
digital marketing. However, in the following, we will review the main types of digital market-
ing goals (the 5S—sell, serve, speak, save, and sizzle—goals) and the criteria that can be used to
make the goals as concrete as possible (the SMART—specific, measurable, assignable, realistic,
and time-related—criteria).

3.1.1 The 5S goals of digital marketing

The 5S goals1 provide a concrete way to divide digital marketing goals into five different
categories. The 5Ss that give the typology its name are the different goal categories: sell, serve,
speak, save, and sizzle. We will introduce the goal categories in more detail below.
Sell is perhaps the clearest and easiest to understand goal of digital marketing—digital
marketing must generate sales in both the short and long term. As we will see later in the book
when discussing the MRACE® model, most of the practical implementation of digital market-
ing is related to the goal of increasing sales.
However, increasing sales may mean slightly different things in different industries and
contexts. When it comes to e-commerce for consumers, digital marketing is often aimed at
direct sales. In other words, a company performs actions that bring buying customers to the
 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY 35

company’s e-commerce store. In the case of the B2B industry, where final purchasing deci-
sions are often made in sales negotiations, digital marketing is more about supporting sales
and influencing the customer’s buying process. Sales are also supported by the presentation
of customer recommendations or references in digital channels. In customer references, the
customer typically describes his or her customer experience and the benefits he or she has
received from the firm’s product or service. Another concrete action is to digitize sales support
materials, such as product demos, videos, and animations.
In practice, supporting sales through digital marketing often refers to sales lead generation.
Sales leads are potential customers who have already shown interest and can be converted
into customers by sales representatives. A third different context is that of companies whose
revenue is mainly generated in offline points of sale, such as restaurants and grocery stores.
In this case, the sales goal of digital marketing is to attract customers to these offline sales
channels.
Serve refers to those digital marketing activities that aim to provide value-added services
to a customer. Broadly understood, serve covers all digital marketing activities that lead to
a better customer experience. Among other things, the usability of a website and its ability
to answer customer queries with information-rich content—such as videos, product demos,
and blogs—is part of serving customers. Some of the most concrete activities are related to
digital customer service, such as the frequently asked questions (FAQs) and virtual customer
service (via live chat or a chatbot) on a website or social media channel that can streamline the
customer encounters both during and after the purchase process. Many online services and
mobile applications that are developed by companies are also important ways to serve custom-
ers as they allow the customer to get additional value by, for example, receiving personal offers,
recommendations, and informational benefits.
Speak refers to a company’s efforts to increase customer dialogue and customer–seller inter-
action through the use of digital channels. The most common ways to increase customer–seller
interaction are related to customer communications via newsletters, text messages, webinars,
and web conferencing, but customer dialogue can also be fostered via social media, various
customer forums, and online customer feedback forms. Increasing interaction is critical,
especially because it is the best way to get to know your customers’ needs and problems in
depth. Acquiring such customer understanding, in turn, can be seen as a cornerstone of digital
marketing as digital marketing activities should be based on customer knowledge.
Many companies almost never connect with their customers, while others do so frequently,
even too frequently. For example, the sports retail chain XXL sends out a promotional news-
letter every day, which can be a little too much for many receivers. Also, on Black Friday
people receive more marketing messages than they are willing to receive and more than they
are even capable of processing. In contrast, sometimes you would like to receive more frequent
messages from, for example, your bank or electricity company. The challenge is often that
customers receive too much communication from unwanted sources and too little from the
sources they would like to hear from more.
Listening and dialogue are key to increasing customer–seller interaction. The goal speak
is therefore a bit misleading as the idea in increasing interaction is not primarily to talk but
specifically to listen to customers. You can listen passively, for example, by reading customer
 36 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

feedback and following social media discussions about your business. Sometimes it is also
worth building a more active dialogue, for example, by asking the customer directly, “Are
you satisfied with the product you bought?”, or “How has the product worked for you?” Few
companies communicate too much to their satisfied and long-term customers. Digital mar-
keting could be used more for maintaining and developing customer relationships by showing
customers that you care about them.
Save refers to increasing the cost efficiency of digital marketing and represents a key driver
of shifting budget allocation from traditional marketing to digital marketing. Save is often
manifested in a firm’s efforts to digitize traditional marketing. As a simple example, compa-
nies may replace paper brochures with digital brochures. More broadly, cost efficiency is also
sought by digitizing the company’s processes, such as developing self-service channels for cus-
tomer service and sales. Examples include online and mobile banking, e-commerce, chatbots,
and self-service kiosks.
When a customer is able to select and book tickets from an airline’s online service, check-in
via a mobile app, and print the labels they need for their belongings without assistance, it
is clear that over time there will be significant savings for the airline as the customer does
virtually everything for herself or himself. Equally, a retailer saves on postage costs if it moves
from direct mail to email and digital newsletters. Similarly, digital advertising is typically
significantly less expensive than advertising in traditional mass media, such as television and
newspapers. The smaller the target group, the greater the difference. For example, if you adver-
tise toothpaste, mass media may still be a relatively cost-efficient channel as the target audience
is very broad. If, on the other hand, you advertise an industrial vacuum cleaner, close to all (if
not all) of your mass advertising will be targeted at people who will never buy one.
However, the savings generated by digital marketing should never be assessed in isolation.
For example, an email campaign is probably always cheaper than a direct mail campaign, but
a direct mail campaign can be more productive if it significantly increases more sales than
an email campaign. Correspondingly, in the example of an airline, self-service surely saves
money, but if self-service were to lead to a deterioration in the customer experience and thus
to customer churn, self-service could decrease productivity in the long run.
Sizzle refers to brand building and includes increasing brand awareness and improving
brand image through digital means. In particular, social media have provided new ways to
build a brand by interacting with the customer and other stakeholders. Influencer marketing
is an example of one digital marketing tactic that often leverages the influencer’s sizable and
engaged group of followers in delivering a brand’s message. Of course, the same idea has been
practiced in traditional media with the support of media personalities, such as athletes and
actors, but social media offers room for deeper interaction and relationship building.
Viral marketing is also a phenomenon related to digital marketing, where social media users
voluntarily share the content produced by the company on social media. Companies can also
set up brand communities where customers can have a discussion about the brand. The most
successful examples are well-known global brands, like Apple and Starbucks, that have a large
enough number of enthusiastic brand advocates. For example, in Apple communities, peers
help other Apple users solve problems related to Apple devices and service. Starbucks, on the
other hand, utilizes crowdsourcing and gathers ideas and opinions from customers for service
 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY 37

development. In addition to big brands, brands that promote causes that go beyond making
a profit for shareholders are at the forefront of engaging brand advocates. For example,
the Finnish firm ResQ’s mission to reduce food waste has been addressed by thousands of
consumers who spread the brand’s message on social media. ResQ’s corporate customers are
also keen to promote ResQ’s brand because they are equally eager to highlight their efforts to
reduce food waste by being part of the ResQ network.
The 5S typology provides a good overview of the digital marketing goals that many compa-
nies are trying to achieve. The typology does not take a position on the order of importance of
the different target categories, something which of course varies according to the company in
question’s strategy. Ultimately, however, at least for-profit companies seek to either increase
their sales (they have the sell goal) or improve their cost-effectiveness (they have the save goal)
as these goals are directly reflected in the company’s earnings. It can therefore be said that for
for-profit companies, the sell and save goals are the end goals of digital marketing and that the
serve, speak, and sizzle goals are, in turn, indirect goals that help a company increase its sales
or improve its cost efficiency in the long run (Figure 3.1). A company will not benefit from
serving customers, developing customer dialogue, or building a brand if they do not increase
sales or improve cost efficiency in the long run.
Goal setting is often challenging because it is much simpler to measure the achievement of
end goals than the achievement of indirect goals. This is because the end goals can be measured
by objective numbers, while indirect goals are more abstract in nature and their achievement
often has to be measured by subjective, so-called mindset metrics related to customer atti-
tudes, experiences, and intentions. Although the positive relationship between indirect goals,
marketing, and overall business performance has been established via countless academic
studies, it can be very challenging for an individual company to measure the extent to which
improvements in brand and customer experience drive sales or cost efficiency. Partly for this
reason, companies tend to overweight end goals instead of indirect goals. This is problematic,
because too much focus on end goals can lead to the over-aggressive pursuit of sales and cost
efficiency at the expense of customer experience or the brand, leading to poor outcomes in the
long term both in relation to this and also in terms of sales and cost efficiency. For this reason,
in goal setting we always recommend striking a balance between end goals and indirect goals.

3.1.2 Setting objectives using SMART criteria

Now that the types of digital marketing goals have been introduced, it is time to turn our
attention to setting the goals. As a basis for this, we recommend the so-called SMART criteria
as they help the goal builder to formulate the goals as concretely as possible and thus guide the
digital marketing operations. The SMART criteria were originally designed for use in setting
business goals in general, but they are also excellent for setting marketing and digital market-
ing goals. The original SMART acronym as noted is based on the words specific, measurable,
assignable, realistic, and time related.2 Since then, countless versions of the SMART criteria
have been derived, which you can read more about on Wikipedia,3 for example. Regardless of
the exact version of the SMART criteria, its basic idea is to provide a tool with which to shape
goals as concretely as possible so that the goals do not remain at an abstract level and support
 38 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Figure 3.1 The indirect goals and end goals of digital marketing, derived from the 5S
model

a company’s practical operations. In the following, we describe the SMART criteria via each
letter of the acronym.

3.1.2.1 Specific
The objective must be well defined. It is sometimes characteristic of marketing that it unnec-
essarily focuses on cool phrases in setting goals, such as the goal “building an innovative
frontrunner image”; it sounds great as a goal, but it can be interpreted in many different ways.
According to the specific criterion, the marketer in this example should first define what an
innovative frontrunner image concretely means. Many other marketing goals may sound
more understandable, but they may suffer from the same syndrome as the example above.
For example, the development of customer relationships sounds moderately concrete, but it
also does not define the development target precisely enough. Reducing customer churn and
increasing customer life-cycle value or customer satisfaction are examples of more definable
goals related to the development of customer relationships.

3.1.2.2 Measurable
The objective must be measurable. Otherwise, its realization cannot be verified, and in that
case, it is a vision rather than a goal. The specific and measurable criteria go hand in hand as
the choice of metrics determines what the goal ultimately means. For example, improving the
brand image is not a goal until the target brand image is defined and metrics have been selected
by which to verify how to gauge if the brand image has improved. For example, if a company’s
brand image is intended to be associated with expertise and customer focus, brand research
can be used to measure customer perceptions of these attributes relative to competitors or
 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY 39

to take advantage of social media listening to monitor how often these attributes appear in
company-related discussions in comparison with discussions about competitors.
The measurability of the goal is particularly important because it is problematic for manage-
ment to focus digital marketing actions on goals that cannot be verified because then it is not
possible to know when the actions are taking the firm towards the selected goals. In contrast,
it is just as problematic to focus marketing actions on the goals that are easiest to measure as
they do not necessarily represent the goals that are most relevant to the business. Needless to
say, it is not equally easy to find appropriate metrics for all goals, but that does not mean that
a commercially relevant goal should be abandoned. Indicators can be found for each objective,
although in some cases it is necessary to settle for incomplete indicators or indicative indica-
tors. Brand-related goals are a typical example of this because, while brand metrics do exist,
not every company can afford to acquire comprehensive brand research in order to implement
measurement. In this case, it is necessary to rely on indicative indicators, such as the reach of
advertising and the organic growth of website visitors.

3.1.2.3 Assignable
The goal must be assignable, that is, a designated unit must have the responsibility for its
achievement. Depending on the goal, the responsible unit may be an individual or a market-
ing team, or it may consist of several different teams or business functions. When there are
several bearers of responsibility, it is important to agree on the division of responsibilities.
For example, marketing and sales functions may be jointly responsible for increasing sales,
in which case it is very important to agree on a clear division of responsibilities and roles.
The marketing team may be responsible for, for example, producing leads in accordance with
the agreed criteria, and the sales team may be responsible for converting the leads into deals.
Sometimes it can also make sense to break down responsibilities for individuals, for example,
with one marketer responsible for acquiring leads on social media and another for leads
acquired through search engines.

3.1.2.4 Realistic
The goal must be realistic. It is good to be ambitious, but it is pointless to set goals that are
virtually impossible to achieve. For a small brewery, for example, global market leadership is
unlikely to be an achievable goal—at least not in the short to medium term—making it a dream
rather than a realistic goal in the short to medium term. The realism of the goal must also
take into account whether the goal can be achieved through digital marketing. For example,
you might be able to double sales over a certain period of time with digital marketing, but if
production and logistics cannot be scaled at the same pace, the goal is virtually impossible to
achieve. The goals must therefore also take into account the realities of the business and, of
course, the marketing resources and budget.

3.1.2.5 Time related

The goal must be time related, that is, it must answer the question “When will the goal be
achieved?” For example, if the goal is to gain 100 new customers, in digital marketing plan-
ning, it is important to know whether it should happen in the next week, month, year, or ten
 40 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

years. If the time span is short, it may be wisest for digital marketing to focus on promotional
campaigns. On the other hand, if the time span is long, developing a customer experience,
content marketing, or brand building can be good ways to develop customer acquisition
without the negative impact of promotional campaigns on margins.
According to the SMART criteria, a good digital marketing goal is therefore specific, meas-
urable, assignable, realistic, and time related. However, the idea is not to abandon all objectives
that do not meet the five criteria. Instead, the idea is to provide a tool to make an abstract goal
as concrete as possible. For example, many companies state that digital marketing aims to
increase customer engagement. However, engagement can be defined in many different ways,
and SMART criteria force a company to consider what this goal means in practice and how it
can be measured. The end result can be increased interaction on social media, more regular
website visits or mobile app usage, a recommendation or positive word of mouth (WOM),
a higher buying frequency, or something else that the company thinks reflects customer
engagement. Thus, SMART criteria help to translate the marketing jargon into concrete goals
and ensure that different actors in the organization understand the goals in the same way, so
that they speak the same language. Even a seemingly concrete goal can be further concretized
using SMART criteria. It is a different matter, for example, to set the goal of digital marketing
to be “To increase sales” than it is to set the goal to be “To increase sales through digital chan-
nels by 20 percent in 2022 compared with 2021.”

3.2 DETERMINING COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

Once the goals are set, the digital marketing strategy work will get off to a good start. Goals are
relatively easy to set, while a plan to achieve the goals requires an in-depth analysis of a com-
pany’s competitive advantage, that is, how the company is able to meet customer needs in
a way that competitors cannot match. To determine a competitive advantage, a company must
therefore have an in-depth knowledge of (1) customer needs, (2) the strengths and weaknesses
of competitors, and (3) the company’s resources and capabilities. A company usually knows
its resources and capabilities best, so when determining a competitive advantage, the company
should focus specifically on identifying customer needs and how the company’s capabilities
are positioned against the strengths and weaknesses of its competitors.
As a tool for identifying customer needs, we recommend creating buyer personas that take
the traditional customer segmentation approach to a more individual level. In turn, the posi-
tioning of a firm’s capabilities compared with the strengths and weaknesses of its competitors
requires an analysis of the factors that set the firm apart from its competitors. In the following
subsections, we will tell you more about buyer personas and differentiation.

3.2.1 Buyer personas

Regardless of the goals set for digital marketing, a deep understanding of the customers
is the most important prerequisite for achieving them. How the goals will be achieved
in a customer-centric way can only be planned on the basis of customer knowledge.
 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY 41

Traditionally, the marketing strategy has highlighted market segmentation and targeting that
divides markets into smaller customer groups, from which the most relevant group or groups
are selected as the firm’s target group(s). Segmentation has typically been done on the basis
of general background criteria, such as demographic and geographical criteria, that lead to
segments such as 25­–35 year-old women who live in Helsinki (a business-to-customer or B2C
segment) or small- and medium sized central European electronics (B2B segment). There
are also much more granular segmentation criteria, but the end result is always some sort
of a group of individuals or companies whose purchasing needs can be very different. With
digital marketing, we have moved to more and more targeted and personalized communica-
tions for which traditional segmentation criteria are ill-suited. Alongside segmentation, there
is a growing need to define buyer personas that deepen our understanding of the target group
at the individual level.
A buyer persona can be defined as an individual representing the target group of a company
who has certain types of purchasing needs and criteria. A company may have one or dozens of
buyer personas, but at least initially, it is worth starting with a maximum of a few of the most
important buyer personas. Most often, an imaginary person, such as Simo Saver, is used as the
buyer persona, but the term “imaginary” must not be misunderstood. The most certain way to
fail in defining a buyer persona is to come up with the buyer persona by intuition—although
it should be noted that staff often have in-depth customer information that can and should be
used as part of creating buyer personas.
Buyer personas are also an essential part of brand development. The company’s brand also
develops based on what its customers are like. Namely, the company’s existing customers
attract more customers like themselves to the company. This is at the heart of branding: the
company positions itself as the best option for its chosen target group. However, it all starts
with creating buyer personalities and building marketing activities that suit their needs.

3.2.1.1 Creating buyer personas

Creating a buyer persona should be based on actual customer research and other data available
about customers (Figure 3.2). We especially recommend having dialogue with customers—
even with those who have not bought anything. Good ways to collect customer data include
interviewing the company’s salespeople, customer feedback and surveys, and researching cus-
tomers’ search behavior (e.g., by using Google’s keyword tools and monitoring social media
conversations).
A common mistake when creating buyer personas is that they just visualize the demo-
graphics of typical customers. Demographics do not help organizations build their marketing
to support the customer’s buying process. Another mistake is overreliance on web analytics
metrics, such as clicks, time on site, and conversions. These metrics provide an overview of
what people are doing in the digital environment but are ill-suited to creating buyer personas
for two reasons. First, they produce aggregate data on people’s average behavior, making the
data difficult to use to identify different buyer personas. Second, they only tell you about what
people are doing and therefore do not answer the question of why they are doing it.
The question “Why?” is particularly relevant to the creation of buyer personas as answering
it provides a better understanding of customer needs and the motives that guide buyer behav-
 42 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

ior. Buyer personas can thus be used to find out why people behave in a certain way at certain
stages of their buying process. In this way, marketing is able to steer customers in the desired
direction in the purchasing process.
There are two main components to creating
a buyer persona: (1) knowing the buyer persona,
and (2) modeling the behavior of the buyer
persona. Knowing the buyer persona is an
important prerequisite for marketing to be rel-
evant and relevant to the customer. Modeling
the behavior of the buyer persona, in turn, is
a prerequisite for targeting marketing activities
to the customer in a timely manner via the
digital channels in which the customer spends
his or her time.
By the phrase “knowing the buyer persona,”
we mean that the company has a deep under-
standing of the broad context of the buyer’s Figure 3.2 Buyer personas
persona, that is, understanding of the customer’s
everyday or business problems, goals, needs, purchasing criteria, preferences, and level of
product awareness. It is challenging to gain universally valid wisdom about the broad context
of the buyer’s persona as the broad context of the persona varies greatly depending on the
company’s industry, offering, and the customer base itself. However, the level of product
awareness is a variable in which generalizable features can be found, and therefore we will
open this up in a little more detail below.
The “product awareness of buyer persona” refers to how well the buyer already knows the
product or service sold by the company. The more familiar the buyer is with the product or
service sold by the company, the warmer the audience member is for marketing activities (i.e.,
the easier it will be to turn the customer’s purchase intentions into a deal). However, there are
usually a limited number of warm audience members, so it is important to also address colder
audiences (i.e., buyers with a low level of product awareness), especially from the point of view
of increasing sales.
The product awareness of buyer personas can be divided into five buyer categories: unaware
buyer, problem aware buyer, outcome aware buyer, product aware buyer, and fully aware

Figure 3.3 The five degrees of the product awareness of buyers

 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY 43

buyer (Figure 3.3). We will present the categories briefly below and explain their significance
for the implementation of digital marketing.

z Unaware: The customer does not recognize his or her problem nor its consequences. In
such a case, marketing and content should be designed so that the customer recognizes
his or her problem and its consequences as this is the first step in starting the buying
process. For example, a potential customer of a company focused on financial manage-
ment may be a company that records travel invoices manually, which is time-consuming,
but the customer does not perceive it as a problem because the process is well established.
In this case, the most important task of marketing is to make the potential customer
realize that its employees spend a lot of time posting travel invoices, which incurs costs
for the company.
z Problem aware: The customer recognizes her or his problem and its effects but does
not know what the solution is or whether there even is a solution. A potential customer
of a financial management company may be tormented by the manual entry of travel
invoices and the time wasted on it, but still does not think that there could be a solution
to the problem. In such a case, the focus of marketing and content should be placed on
the problem experienced by the customer and its consequences. The more accurately
the problem and its effects are described, the easier it is for the customer to identify with
the situation described and the more likely the customer is to believe that the company
understands his or her situation. In digital content, therefore, the most important thing
is to first show an understanding of the customer’s problem and only then sell her or him
the solution.
z Outcome aware: The client knows the end result she or he wants but does not know
how she or he can achieve it or it feels too hard to achieve it. For example, a customer
may know that the posting of travel invoices can be largely automated but is not very
familiar with the solutions involved or their implementation seems too laborious. In
such a case, the focus of marketing and digital content can be on what the automation
of travel-invoice posting requires in practice or how simple it is to implement a solution
provided by a company.
z Product aware: The customer knows the product (or service) but does not think it is right
for him or her. This situation may be caused by the customer’s previous bad experiences,
word of mouth about the product or service, incorrect beliefs, excessive pricing, or poor
website content. The cause must be identified and corrected. If the cause is a high price,
the problem experienced by the customer should be magnified and the benefit of the
product or service should be attractive and easy to achieve.
z Fully aware: The customer knows the product or service and wants it but has not pur-
chased it. Reasons for this can be, for example, the website of the product or service
provider is difficult to use, poor ordering instructions, the customer’s lack of initiative,
or the fact that the customer does not consider it important to purchase the product
or service. In these situations, purchasing should be made as easy as possible and the
importance of purchasing should be concretized with the help of digital content that
appeals to the customer.
 44 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

The level of product awareness also has a significant impact on how the customer’s purchasing
process takes shape. If the level is high, the purchasing process can proceed directly from iden-
tifying the need to evaluating alternatives or even making the purchase decision; if the level
of product awareness is low, the purchasing process often progresses slowly and the customer
may spend a considerable amount of time searching for information.
Modeling the behavior of a buyer persona allows us to take a closer look at what the cus-
tomer is doing during the buying process, such as seeking out information to support her or
his purchasing decision or comparing different options. With the help of modeling, digital
marketing is thus structured in such a way that the activities support the decision-making of
buyers.
In Section 2.3, we discussed the customer’s purchasing process and the changes brought
about by the digitalization of its various stages, namely, awareness, the information search, the
evaluation of alternatives, the purchasing decision, and post-purchase behavior. In the follow-
ing, we will explain in more detail how the steps of the purchasing process should be taken into
account when creating a buyer persona. When buyer personas are created according to the
stages of the purchasing process, the personas visualize how the customer’s purchasing process
is progressing and what things the customer is thinking about at any stage of the purchasing
process and with what people. Similarly, the marketing process can be designed to support
customer decision-making. When buyer personas are known, marketing becomes truly
customer-centric and does not feel like an intrusive sales talk but a customer-friendly service.

3.2.1.2 Awareness
At the beginning of the purchasing process, the customer becomes aware of a purchase need
that may be related to a problem, goal, or desire. The key questions in creating a buyer per-
sonality follow:

z What are the customer’s needs and the motives behind them?
z In which situations do the customer’s purchasing needs arise?
z How can the customer’s purchasing needs be aroused?
z In which digital channels does the customer spend time?

It is important to understand the nature of the needs of different customers, as well as the
situational factors that give rise to purchasing needs. Situational factors can be related to
a momentary emotion (such as pain, hunger, boredom, and despair) or an event (such as the
breakdown of a device, an action by a competing company, or the emergence of new technol-
ogy). If a customer has a low level of product awareness, they may also have an unconscious
need to make a purchase. For example, someone may hate vacuuming but still spend many
hours a week vacuuming because she or he values cleanliness at home and is unaware of
robotic vacuum cleaners. On the other hand, the customer may have heard of robot vacuum
cleaners but doubts their quality and has therefore not sought further information on the
subject. In such situations, it is especially important to identify the marketing angles with
which the customer’s need to purchase is best aroused in order for the purchasing process to
begin.
 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY 45

The more complex a company’s product or service is, the more carefully the purchasing
needs of buyers need to be determined so that they can be aroused with appropriate marketing
angles. In addition, it is important to know which digital channels customers spend their time
on so that they can be reached on those channels. For example, one prefers spending leisure
time on news sites, another on social media, and a third on mobile games.

3.2.1.3 The information search

Once the customer is aware of a purchasing need, he or she begins to actively seek out informa-
tion in order to meet the need. The key questions in creating a buyer persona are the following:

z From which sources does the customer look for information to support her or his pur-
chasing decision?
z Which keywords does the customer use to search for information?
z What is the customer’s expertise in relation to her or his purchasing need?

There can be significant differences between customers in terms of which channels they seek
information from and what sources of information they value. Search engines are by far the
most typical information search channel, but there are other digital channels as well. For
example, some people propose questions on social networking services and forums in search
of others’ opinions. Some also turn to influencers or read peer reviews of a product or service.
When using search engines, customers can also use a variety of different keywords and thus
end up with different sources of information.
The nature of an information search is significantly affected by the customer’s expertise in
relation to his or her purchase need. If a customer feels familiar with the options that meet his
or her purchasing needs, the information search and keywords used will often target specific
brands, products, and product models, as well as their pricing information (e.g., the “new
iPhone offer”). On the other hand, if the customer does not feel that she or he is an expert
and the purchasing situation is complex, the information search and keywords used by the
customer may be much more general (e.g., “utilization of artificial intelligence in the financial
sector”). From a marketing perspective, it is essential to understand what information custom-
ers are looking for, from what sources they are looking for it, and with what keywords they are
looking for it in order to design marketing content and keywords to suit their search queries.

3.2.1.4 The evaluation of alternatives and the purchase decision

After searching for information, the customer has narrowed down the set of options to a few
competing products or services and is now starting to evaluate the options in more detail in
order to make a purchase decision. The key issues in creating a buyer persona are the following:

z What criteria does the customer use to make a purchase decision?

z What are the barriers to buying?
z Who else influences the purchase decision?

Purchasing criteria are the factors on the basis of which the customer ultimately chooses
a product or service. There can be a wide variety of criteria, but most typically they are related
to price or quality. Quality can be related to the product or service you buy or to a more com-
 46 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

prehensive customer experience. Competition is often fierce, and it is difficult for the customer
to objectively compare the price–quality ratios of products. In this case, the decisive criterion
may be a factor related to the customer experience, such as active contact with the customer,
a clear offer, or some other factor that facilitates the purchase decision.
In addition to purchasing criteria, it is important to identify barriers to making a purchase
that prevent trade from taking place. These may be related to a missing feature in the product
or service, or poor communication, for example. Sometimes there is not enough information
about the product to make a purchase decision or there are uncertainties about the product’s
delivery fee or return policy. Barriers to buying are often simple in nature, but they still create
uncertainty for the customer and quench their enthusiasm for making a purchase decision.
Therefore, it is important to find out what kind of barriers to making a purchase the customer
has and why the barriers have become barriers to making a purchase.
Also, the purchase decision is not always personal as more than one person can participate
in making it. A new house, bathroom renovation, or holiday resort choice are examples of such
multi-person purchase decisions. In the case of firms’ procurements, having more decision
makers is more the rule than the exception. The size and composition of a company’s so-called
purchasing group varies depending on the size of the company and the type of procurement.
If the procurement is critical to the business, such as the purchase of a new factory or an ERP4
system, dozens of individuals can be involved in the purchasing group. On the other hand,
when it comes to purchasing new ballpoint pens for an office, there are not many decision
makers in the purchasing group.
The more complex and significant the procurement, the more important it is for market-
ers to outline the people who influence the purchase decision and their role in the purchase
process: Who identified the problem and the need to buy? Who started driving the matter?
and Who was involved in the final decision? From a marketing perspective, it is important to
create content that addresses each person who makes a purchase decision in the right way. For
example, the Chief Financial Officer may be interested in the cost of acquiring new software,
while the Chief Information Officer may be interested in integrating software with the compa-
ny’s information systems infrastructure.

3.2.1.5 Post-purchase behavior

The customer has purchased a product or service and switched to using it. The key questions
in creating a buyer personality are the following:

z What factors affect the value experienced by the customer about the product or service?
z What kind of support does the customer need to use the product or service?
z What makes the customer recommend the product to others?

The purchase decision is ultimately based on the value the buyer believes they will receive from
the product or service. Indeed, marketers tend to promise customers the value they want from
the product the most. When a buyer switches to using a product, she or he compares his or her
user experience to the value promised to him or her. If the product meets or even exceeds the
customer’s expectations for perceived value, the experience is positive, making the customer
more likely to buy from the company again and also recommend it to acquaintances.
 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY 47

Creating a buyer persona is largely focused on the pre-purchase stages of the buying process.
However, it is equally important to understand the factors that affect the value a customer
experiences with a product or service. It is especially important to know what problems the
customer may face when using the product or service and how he or she can be supported so
that he or she can get the most out of the product or service.
The more complex the product or service, the more critical this so-called aftercare is. For
example, if new software has been sold to a customer but its implementation is tedious, the
customer experience can be poor, even if the software itself is excellent. In this case, the mar-
keter should provide a better guide or provide personal support or training for the implemen-
tation. The most effective form of marketing is people-to-people recommendations, and the
company cannot get them without investing in customer relationship management. It is also
important to identify the phase of the customer’s purchasing cycle (e.g., when the customer is
planning the next purchase). This information can be used to schedule new sales efforts.
Without defining and knowing the buyer personas, the angle of marketing efforts can be
completely wrong. The wrong approach does not support the customer’s buying process but
tries to penetrate it by force. Once the purchasing process of buyers is known, marketing
can be built around this purchasing process to support buyer decision-making. In this way,
marketing helps the customer solve the problem he or she is experiencing and leads him or
her towards the goal he or she wants, such as experiencing pleasure. For this reason, buyer
personas are the heart of the entire marketing entity and are also the strategic backbone of the
MRACE® model discussed in Chapter 5.

3.2.2 Differentiation

Differentiation refers to a company’s ability to set itself apart from its competitors.
Differentiating from competitors is important because it gives the customer a reason to buy
from the company. By differentiating itself from its competitors, the company is thus able
to attract desired customers. On the other hand, differentiation also gives some of the target
group a reason not to buy, which can be just as good. Why? Each company has certain cus-
tomer personas in its customer base that the company is best able to serve in the entire market.
If a company is able to acquire customers that reflect its ideal buyer personas, customer loyalty,
company reputation, and profitability will improve. The best way to engage customers is to get
the kind of customers the company can best serve.
Differentiation can be seen as an alternative competitive strategy to cost leadership, where
a company strives to be the most cost-effective player in the market and thus offers customers
lower prices or earns higher margins on the products it sells. However, aiming for cost lead-
ership is rarely an ideal strategy as it increases price competition in the industry, decreases
margins, and degrades service quality and employer image. It therefore also makes it difficult
to create sustainable competitive advantages as it is usually easy for competitors to imitate
cost reductions. However, aiming for cost leadership remains a typical strategy in industries
where products or services are very homogeneous and therefore difficult to differentiate. For
example, for raw material producers and electricity companies, differentiating themselves
from competitors is considerably challenging.
 48 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Differentiation requires a critical analysis of a company’s similarities to and differences from

its competitors. In addition, which differences are relevant to the customer and how they are
communicated to the customer as clearly as possible must both be considered. Differentiation
therefore always requires knowledge of the buyer personas and the competitive landscape.
At its weakest, a company’s attempt to stand out is blunted into a circular slogan. These
include “good service,” “competent experts,” “long industry knowledge,” “extensive experi-
ence,” or “a customized turnkey concept.” The problem with these slogans is that they con-
cretely say little to the customer, and they often represent basic expectations in the customer’s
eyes. What else can a customer expect from an expert service than skilled experts, and long and
extensive experience, tailored to their needs? Another weakness lies in the fact that often many
competitors also try to stand out with exactly the same slogans, so that none of the competitors
clearly stands out from others. A company must therefore have full knowledge of the compet-
itive field in order for differentiation to be possible at all. It is hard to stand out if you do not
know from what you are standing out.
For example, a premium coffee machine brand, Moccamaster, would hardly cost €100 more
than a “regular” coffee machine if they were to advertise it with the phrase “You can get coffee
at the touch of a button in just a few minutes—just add water, filter paper, and ground coffee.
Designed by top experts!” Instead, Moccamaster communicates about the coffee experience
and the perfect coffee, where the time the water passes through the ground coffee is calculated
just right so that the customer always gets perfect-tasting filter coffee. The product is also dif-
ferent in appearance from other filter coffee machines, which is part of the storyline.
On the other hand, even if a company finds a very concrete way to differentiate itself from
its competitors instead of using a fuzzy slogan, the customer may not perceive it as relevant.
For example, a company may stand out from its competitors with a new cool logo, but its
significance to the customer may be negligible or non-existent, meaning it does not affect the
potential customer’s purchase intention or existing customer satisfaction. Every business is
unique, and it is easy to come up with a differentiator. In turn, it is often difficult to find a dif-
ferentiating factor that is relevant to the customer. The unfortunate thing is that a considerable
amount of time and money may be spent creating differentiating factors that are irrelevant to
the customer. For example, there are a huge number of business-created mobile apps in the
world that are hardly used by anyone.
The differentiating factors that are relevant to the customer are those that are not offered
by other companies and that are valued by the customer. Creating buyer personas is key to
identifying relevant differentiating factors. With customer-relevant differentiation factors,
a company can ask for a higher price for its product, engage its customers better, arouse the
customer’s desire to buy faster, increase the attractiveness of its brand, and even completely
stand out from the competition as a category above the market. Differentiation does not always
mean that a product or service needs to be clearly better than its competitors or better than
them at all, it just needs to be packaged and communicated in the right way so that it exactly
addresses the desired audience.
We next go through five key ways in which a company can differentiate itself from its com-
petitors. Some of these are things that can be implemented relatively quickly, and they relate to
marketing communications and brand image. On the other hand, some are more fundamental
 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY 49

things that require transformation to the whole business. These include creating a new cate-
gory for the market, product focus, and customer focus, which we will introduce first.

3.2.2.1 Creating a new category for the market

Companies can differentiate themselves from their competitors by adapting quickly to changes
in the market, but the clearest way to differentiate themselves from competitors is to reshape
existing markets by creating an entirely new category in the market. In this case, the company
effectively withdraws from price competition. If the product is in a completely different cate-
gory, why compare it with others?
A simple example of creating a new category for the market is Tesla, which can be consid-
ered to have introduced a completely new category in the car market for electric cars. Initially,
Tesla withdrew from price competition, and it took a long time for competitors to enter the
competition. Another example is HubSpot, which launched not just one new marketing
automation system but a whole new way of doing marketing, Inbound Marketing. This is how
HubSpot stood out from all other marketing automation systems, although technically it is
very similar to all the other leading systems.
Creating a new category is, of course, a difficult, expensive, and long-term task that requires
real professionalism from the entire company. The new category is not created in the blink of
an eye and requires excellent productization and a story in the background. If successful, it will
create a strong differentiating factor for the company.

3.2.2.2 Product centricity

Product-centric companies focus on making the best product on the market, trusting that
customers will buy the product because of its excellence. The challenge with this model is that
the features of products and services are often at least somewhat replicable, despite possible
patents. Consequently, the brand also has a strong role in product-centric companies. An
excellent example of a product-centric company is Apple, which strongly focuses on devel-
oping its products so they are better for their target audiences. “The best” is always a relative
concept, and no product can be the best for everyone. Apple has focused a lot on the ease of
use, design, appearance, and unique features of its products.

3.2.2.3 Customer centricity

In customer-centric companies, customer service and customer experience are at the heart of
everything. This can be reflected in the features of the product, as well as in the daily operations
of the company’s employees. For example, Netflix is a very customer-centric company as their
services are different for each customer based on, among other things, their viewing history.
Another example is the online shoe store Zappos, whose growth, especially in the early stages
of the company, has been due to high-quality customer service and the elimination of all risks
from the customer. Zappos offers free shipping, a 365-day money-back guarantee, and 24-hour
customer service every day of the year. According to Zappos, the longest customer service calls
have lasted as much as 11 hours as they are dedicated to solving customer problems.
 50 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

3.2.2.4 Brand appearance

A unified brand appearance can differentiate a company from its competitors. Few people buy
a product or service just because of the brand appearance, but a unified look creates recogniz-
ability, a quality image, and thus, also trust. Trust, in turn, plays a key role in generating sales
and customers. Coca-Cola is one example of a brand whose visual look has remained very
consistent over time, inspiring confidence in the minds of customers.

3.2.2.5 Marketing communications

Brand appearance is what the company looks like. Marketing communications, on the other
hand, are largely what a company sounds and feels like. Distinctive marketing communica-
tions focus on sharing useful information rather than telling customers about the excellence of
a company or its products. Would it not be more comfortable to take your child to a kinder-
garten that would concretely tell you on their website how the child’s first day is planned and
how the child is included among the other children rather than take your child to one that says
their kindergarten is full of educational professionals, has good customer-oriented service, and
many years of experience?

3.3 VALUE PROPOSITION AND VALUE CREATION FOR

THE CUSTOMER
Once a company has a deep knowledge of the needs of its buyer personas and has identified the
factors that allow it to differentiate itself from its competitors, it will be able to determine its
competitive advantage. The company therefore knows how it is able to satisfy the needs of its
customers in a way that competitors cannot match. However, even a clear competitive advan-
tage will only become a real competitive advantage if a company succeeds in communicating it
to the target group in a way that is memorable. Therefore, the company must be able to com-
municate the core of its competitive advantage in such a way that the customer understands
what value the company can create for him or her (i.e., why he or she should do business with
that company). This translation of competitive advantage into a form that is understandable
to the customer is called a value proposition and should guide the core messages of marketing,
regardless of tactics, channels, or campaigns.
The difference between competitive advantage and value proposition can be illustrated by
the following example. The competitive advantage of an airline may be that it is able to provide
its services more cost-effectively than its competitors. Through this competitive advantage, it
is therefore able to either offer the customer lower prices or sell flights with higher margins,
provided that the quality of the service is not significantly lower than that of its competitors.
Competitive advantage, on the other hand, could be translated into very different value
propositions depending on whether the company wants to increase its sales at lower prices
or improve its profitability with higher margins. An airline could translate the competitive
advantage of cost-effectiveness into, for example, the value proposition “we offer cheaper
prices than our competitors” or, more specifically, “our prices are always at least 1 percent
cheaper than the second-cheapest prices.” If a company does not want to engage in aggressive
 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY 51

price competition and prefers to focus on maximizing margins, its ability to communicate
a clear value proposition to the customer is significantly reduced. Partly for this reason, the
value propositions of many companies are full of beautiful and abstract words that do not
necessarily mean anything at all, such as “we provide sustainable service in a customer-centric
manner.”
In addition to low prices, a company’s value proposition can focus on the quality and range
of products and services sold, the experiential or smooth flow of the customer experience, or
more generally, the core benefits that the company offers to its customers. A good value prop-
osition highlights a company’s differences from its competitors, addresses the needs of buyers,
and concretizes the value the company offers. One clear value proposition is better than ten
unclear value propositions. You may have noticed smartphone ads that mostly advertise the
device’s excellent camera, even if the phone has more computing power than the laptops of
a few years ago. This is precisely because one concrete promise of value goes much further than
telling customers about all the possible good things about a product. The more value propo-
sitions and marketing angles that are highlighted, the duller and less effective they become.
A value proposition should be drafted carefully as it has a significant guiding effect on the
operational level of marketing—every marketing action should live and breathe the value
proposition you choose. Therefore, an airline that emphasizes its low prices in its value propo-
sition should not focus on promoting comfortable seats or having pleasant staff on the aircraft
as the aspects do not communicate the value and strength of the image of being the cheapest
airline on the market. The sole purpose of the marketing by such a company is to reach those
who want to get from Place A to Place B as cheaply as possible and to convince them that the
airline is indeed the cheapest.
However, adhering to marketing actions in line with the value proposition can also pose
challenges for the company. If there are very different buyer personas, creating a unified and
clear value proposition can produce difficulties. For example, many brands and retailers have
value propositions that relate to customer centricity, sustainability, and digitalization while
their marketing communications focus on price promotions that do not reflect the chosen
value proposition. Companies should therefore remember that providing something for
everyone is often the same thing as providing nothing for anyone and they should primarily
focus on the firm’s key buyer personas when making a value proposition. With a clear value
proposition, a company is able to differentiate itself from its competitors, create unique value
for its target group, and be the best single option in the entire market for the needs of its chosen
buyer personas.
Humorously, it has been stated that the deepest essence of marketing is crystallized in the
slogan “Overpromise and underdeliver,” which suggests that corporate marketing commu-
nications often promise too much and these promises are too often unfulfilled. In order for
a value proposition not to remain fuzzy buzzwords, the company must carefully plan how the
value promised to the customer is created in the day-to-day operations.
 52 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

3.3.1 Value creation strategies

Value creation for the customer is the core of the entire customer-centric business—a company
only creates value for its owners when customers are willing to pay for the value they create.
From a digital marketing perspective, value creation emphasizes how a company is able to
leverage data and technology to create value for customers. In digital marketing, three key
value creation strategies can be identified that create value for the customer and the company
in slightly different ways: (1) targeted and personalized marketing, (2) a superior customer
experience, and (3) value co-creation (Figure 3.4). Next, we will deal with these one by one.

Figure 3.4 Value creation strategies

3.3.2 Value creation strategy 1: targeted and personalized

marketing

3.3.2.1 The objective

Targeted and personalized marketing is a value creation strategy that aims to deliver the right
marketing message to the right customer, in the right place, and at the right time. Although
targeted and personalized marketing has taken place since the early days of direct marketing,
the potential of the strategy has exploded in the digital age as digitalization provides firms with
significantly more diverse data on customer behavior that can be leveraged for more accurate
targeting and personalization. In this context, targeting means that a particular marketing
action, such as an advertising message or offer, can be targeted at the buyers who are most
likely to be interested in it. Similarly, by personalization we mean that we can tailor the content
of the message or offer with a specific buyer in mind.

3.3.2.2 The means

The means comprise highly targeted digital advertising and communication, personalized
product recommendations, benefits, and offers.
 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY 53

3.3.2.3 The value to the customer

The value of targeted and personalized marketing to the customer is based on the idea that
a well-targeted message is a service. When successful, the idea is easy to agree on—few of
us get upset when, for example, we get an offer for a product we are currently looking for.
Unfortunately, there are probably more examples of failed targeted marketing than there are
of successful ones. Of course, this does not mean that targeted and personalized marketing
is a bad strategy; it means that putting it into practice is not always easy. On the other hand,
the irrelevant advertising messages we encounter every day also tell us that a large percentage
of companies do not even try to be relevant; many do digital marketing like mass marketing,
pushing messages into different channels without an idea of who might be interested in them.

3.3.2.4 The value to the business

Targeted and personalized marketing brings value to businesses in the form of better produc-
tivity as it both increases sales and reduces costs if successful. The more relevant the message,
the more likely it is to grab the customer’s attention, stay in her or his mind, and get her or
him to act in the way the company wants (e.g., they want him or her to make a purchase). On
the other hand, better targeted communication directly reduces costs because, for example,
the advertising budget is no longer wasted on making unnecessary impressions. Of course, it
must be mentioned that well-targeted and personalized communication requires the support
of know-how and technologies, the acquisition and implementation of which require financial
investment.

3.3.2.5 Who it is for

Targeted and personalized marketing is basically suitable for a wide variety of companies
that strive to streamline their marketing communications and make them more relevant to
customers. It is especially suitable for online retailers or other companies with a large number
of different products or services, a large number of customers, and a lot of data-accumulating
touchpoints between the customer and the company. This is because targeting and personali-
zation are done in a data-driven manner, and thus, the more data that is collected from differ-
ent customers and their touchpoints, the more accurate the targeting and personalization can
be. In addition, the implementation of the strategy is supported by the company’s analytical
expertise as targeting and personalization are largely based on analytics-based behavioral data.
Marketing automation and machine learning are technologically the solutions that increase
the economies of scale of targeting and personalization.

3.3.2.6 A practical example

An extreme example of a successful implementer of this strategy is Amazon, which has hun-
dreds of millions of customers, many of whom regularly use Amazon’s online services. From
these digital meeting points, Amazon accumulates a huge amount of data that it can use to
personalize product recommendations and other relevant communications based on automa-
tion and machine learning.
However, the Amazon example does not mean that targeted and personalized marketing
could not be implemented with smaller customer numbers and touchpoints. In particular, the
 54 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

targeting of communications can be successful even if there are few customers. Personalization
is also possible with a small number of customers, but in this case, the scale advantages brought
by personalization are reduced or, alternatively, the accuracy of personalization suffers.

3.3.3 Value creation strategy 2: a superior customer experience

3.3.3.1 The objective

The goal of a superior customer experience is to support the customer throughout the cus-
tomer life cycle. At the heart of the strategy is an in-depth understanding of the customer’s
problems and goals, which the company must be able to address with content and services that
benefit the customer. Building buyer personas is therefore an essential foundation for achiev-
ing a superior customer experience. Because maintaining a customer relationship in most
cases involves both physical encounters and digital encounters between the customer and the
company, a superior customer experience requires the successful integration of digital mar-
keting into the marketing, sales, and customer service processes. Thus, a superior customer
experience is not a separate value creation strategy for digital marketing but digital marketing
plays a growing role in digitizing customer encounters.

3.3.3.2 The means

The main role of digital marketing is to build a streamlined or smooth purchasing process. In
practice, this means directing the customer towards the purchase by answering the customer’s
questions through content marketing and enabling a low-threshold contact with the company
(e.g., through a chat service) when the customer needs advice. Even after purchase, it is
important to provide an easy channel for customer service and to respond quickly to problems
encountered by the customer. A superior customer experience also involves ensuring that the
customer receives the maximum value (i.e., the maximum benefit or enjoyment of the product
or service they purchase). This can be supported through content marketing and various
digital services, such as mobile applications. For example, the benefits of smartwatches are
quite limited without the additional digital services associated with them.

3.3.3.3 The value to the customer

A better customer experience saves the customer time when shopping and helps the customer
achieve goals and solve problems. Post-purchase support helps the customer get the most out
of the product or service they purchase. Of particular importance to the customer experience is
that problems encountered by the customer after purchase, such as delayed delivery or quality
defects, are solved promptly. A prompt response to problems is at the heart of customer focus.

3.3.3.4 The value to the company

Good customer experiences lead to customer satisfaction, loyalty, and recommendations.
These are of great importance to the long-term success of a company. Although the develop-
ment of the customer experience should not, in principle, be considered from the point of view
of cost-effectiveness, a good customer experience can at best lead to customers acting as the
company’s best advertising channel, which can also reduce the need for paid visibility.
 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY 55

Likewise, a good customer experience reduces angry phone calls to customer services
and thus also brings savings. On the other hand, customer service personnel need to be well
resourced so that customers do not have to queue to solve their problems. For example,
Zappos’ customer service staff are instructed to talk to customers for as long as the customer
wants to talk about something, such as fashion trends. The idea is that a company should
always have time for its customers. This embodies a customer-centric mindset and is far from
the following typical ways in which we measure the effectiveness of customer service staff: how
many calls a customer service agent manages to receive per hour, how many problems he or
she manages to solve in that time, and how much additional sales this generates.

3.3.3.5 Who it is for

A good customer experience benefits every company providing such an experience, but
the strategy is best suited to companies that (a) seek to differentiate themselves from com-
petitors by other means than price and (b) have an offering that represents the so-called
high-involvement category, which requires at least some degree of planning and reflection
from the customer. Such an offering is related to broader problem solving, such as the pur-
chase and adoption of a new device, which means that the customer has to spend more time
and energy in making a purchase decision and learning how to use the product or service they
are buying. In this case, supporting the customer during and after the purchasing process will
play a more important role than it does in routine-based purchases, such as when purchasing
a milk carton.
To succeed, a strategy requires an in-depth understanding of the buyer personas and their
purchasing processes. The company needs to understand the customer’s information needs
and critical encounters during the purchasing process as they determine the formation of the
customer experience. From an internal point of view, this requires the organization to embrace
truly customer-centric thinking in all of its operations, which is often a long process and
something that is not just in the hands of the digital marketing team. In terms of data, a supe-
rior customer experience requires qualitative data about the buyer and, on the other hand,
behavioral data from different touchpoints in the purchasing process. The use of technologies,
in turn, is determined by which technological solutions create value for customers and thereby
improve their experience.

3.3.3.6 Practical examples

An excellent example of a superior customer experience for a potential customer is provided
by the American company called Sungevity, which provides customized solar energy solutions
for households and commercial properties. Their main idea has been to build such a com-
pelling and value-creating customer journey that the customer would not even think about
competing alternatives. From the customer’s point of view, the path to purchase is described
step by step as follows:5
The customer receives a direct-mail letter titled “Open this to find out how much your
family can save on energy costs with solar panels.” The letter includes a personalized URL
that leads to a Google Earth image of the customer’s house with solar panels added. The next
click leads to calculations of energy costs that take into account the average energy costs of the
 56 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

household, as well as the estimated number of panels that can fit on the roof and the angle of
the roof relative to the sun. The next click will lead to a conversation with a sales representative
who can see the same images and calculations. The sales representative provides the customer
with more information and sends her or him links to videos that explain the installation
process in detail.
A couple of days later, Sungevity will send customer references from the surrounding area
with their contact information. When such a customer next contacts a sales representative, the
representative knows exactly what stage the customer is at in the buying process and is able
to make an offer immediately. The offer is emailed to the customer who can sign it digitally.
When a customer returns to the website, its home page is personalized to show the progress
of the customer’s ordering process, and alerts are also sent to the customer’s email about the
progress. After installation, Sungevity regularly informs the customer about the energy and
savings generated by the panels.
While this Sungevity example focuses on a superior customer experience in the pre-purchase
phase, Glaston,6 in turn, provides a great example of a superior customer experience in the
post-purchase phase. With the consent of its customers, Glaston collects global sensor data
on how customers use the glass-processing machines and technologies sold by Glaston. Based
on the data, they provide customers with a cloud service that helps them improve machine
efficiency, reduce emissions, and save on energy costs.
In addition to sensor data, Glaston utilizes machine vision to monitor the quality of the
glass produced and to report quality defects. In the development phase, there is an application
that investigates the causes of quality errors so that, for example, the maintenance needs of
the machine can be reacted to faster. Glaston also offers a free machine-based mobile app that
can be used to test the safety of glass. The company’s future goal is to build an AI solution
that makes recommendations for glass-processing recipes and, ultimately, automates all glass
production.
Through the actions described above, Glaston will be able to bring tangible benefits to
customers, such as energy savings and better-quality end products. Indeed, marketing often
devotes too many resources to measures aimed at acquiring new customers. The example pro-
vided by Glaston is a good reminder that the customer’s path to purchase is only the beginning
of the customer experience. The superior customer experience is not limited to the shopping
experience but deepens as the customer relationship develops.

3.3.4 Value creation strategy 3: value co-creation

3.3.4.1 The objective

The goal of value co-creation is to engage customers and/or other stakeholders in solving
problems that are relevant to all parties. At its simplest, a strategy can mean engaging cus-
tomers to develop or customize offerings for them. More broadly, such a strategy can mean
that a company is part of a larger ecosystem or network that aims to create value for the actors
involved in the ecosystem. A company can either strive to create new ecosystems or become
part of an existing ecosystem. Value co-creation is not purely a digital marketing strategy, but
it has significant implications for the implementation of digital marketing. At the heart of
 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY 57

value co-creation is not targeting, personalization, or even the customer experience on digital
channels—at its heart is a digital dialogue between a company and its customers and partners.

3.3.4.2 The means

The means include digital communities and innovation platforms, crowdsourcing, social
media listening, and dialogues on digital channels.

3.3.4.3 The value to the customer

In the value co-creation, the customer is not an object but an active subject in developing the
offer to suit himself or herself and/or finding solutions to social problems. Thus, in the value
co-creation, the communication is not tailored to the customer, but rather, the product or
service concept itself is tailored to the customer. The customer may thus have a significant
influence on the value offered by the selling party. In many cases, it is not so much about
a seller–buyer relationship but a real partnership in which a new innovation or solution to
a business or social problem is built together.

3.3.4.4 The value to the company

Cooperation with customers and partners helps to identify new business growth opportuni-
ties and the emergence of new innovations, offerings, and business models. In addition, the
customer’s involvement in value creation, such as offering development and customization,
increases the likelihood that he or she will also find it useful. Cooperation between a company
and a customer also often results in customers acting as messengers of the company’s brand
story.

3.3.4.5 Who it is for

Value co-creation requires, above all, strong and confidential customer and stakeholder rela-
tionships. Indeed, value creation is typically at the heart of digital marketing in B2B industries,
which often have a smaller number of strategically significant customer relationships. The
seller and the customer are often partners whose business relationship is not based on the
transaction but on the parties’ ability to benefit from each other’s business. In this case, in
digital marketing, the main focus is on building a dialogue between the parties.

3.3.4.6 Practical examples

At best, value co-creation is about solving a relevant problem. For example, on Unilever’s
website7 it lists challenges related to sustainable development, health, and other important
themes that they are committed to addressing for a better future. On their site, they invite
stakeholders to develop solutions related to the themes and provide an easily accessible inno-
vation platform on which to propose ideas and solutions. On the consumer side, crowdsourc-
ing is fairly common among large brands. For example, My Starbucks Idea is a well-known
example of a crowdsourcing platform where Starbucks gathered thousands of ideas from
consumers for product and service development and implemented the best of them.
Value co-creation works best for companies when the company’s customers commit to the
messengers of the brand story. This is only possible if the company is able to build a brand
 58 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

that makes the customer care about the brand (i.e., the customer creates emotional ties to the
brand). Indeed, there is talk in the brand literature that brand building should move from
storytelling to meaning making. A relevant brand means that a company generates benefits to
society that go beyond paying taxes, that is, it solves environmental problems or corrects social
disadvantages.

NOTES
1. Chaffey and Smith (2017).
2. Doran (1981).
3. Wikipedia (2021).
4. ERP: Enterprise Resource Planning.
5. Edelman and Singer (2015).
6. Mero, Karjaluoto, and Tammisalo (2021).
7. Unilever (2021).
PART II
IMPLEMENTING MARKETING STRATEGY IN
PRACTICE
 4
Implementing strategy using the
MRACE® model

In the second part of this book, we will look at how to implement a marketing strategy created
based on the previous chapters. As we stated at the beginning of the book, we use the MRACE®
model that was launched by Suomen Digimarkkinointi as the guiding model for this book.
Once a company has developed a marketing strategy and a value proposition based on a com-
petitive advantage and once it has clarified its goals based on these, the task of the operational
part of marketing is to create a competitive advantage that accelerates the company’s growth.
At its best, the operational implementation of marketing generates enough daily traffic to the
company’s website and daily leads that it keeps the sales team’s contact list of potential custom-
ers growing. In addition, the operational level of marketing produces softer results in the long
run, such as awareness and brand development. All this can be achieved through marketing
according to the MRACE® model. What is the MRACE® model and where did it come from?
Let us go through the answers to these questions next.

4.1 WHAT IS THE MRACE® MODEL?

One of the best-known names in digital marketing is Dave Chaffey, who has developed one of
the most widely used digital marketing models (see Smart Insights). The name of the model is
RACE, which comes from the words
reach, act, convert, and engage (Figure
4.1). The RACE model is described as
a so-called sales funnel, and although
it is more than a decade since its
launch, it is still a widely used digital
marketing model across industries.
The RACE model begins with
planning, which creates a compre-
hensive digital marketing strategy
that includes goals and a plan for
achieving them. We discussed this
in the first part of our book. The first
step in the model, Reach, means cre-
ating awareness. Creating awareness Figure 4.1 The RACE model
 IMPLEMENTING STRATEGY USING THE MRACE® MODEL 61

is related to awareness of a company’s brand, products, and services. The goal is to direct
visitors from elsewhere on the web to the company’s online content.
The second stage of the model is Act, which is an abbreviation of interact. The Act phase
means creating leads from the perspective of sales processes. Typical interactive elements
of the Act phase include signing up as a loyal e-commerce customer, adding products to
a shopping cart, viewing a product page, downloading a buyer’s guide,1 attending a webinar,
reading company blog posts, liking and sharing content on social media, and subscribing to
a newsletter.
Convert refers to conversion: purchasing in the context of the RACE model on either
a digital channel or an offline channel. In the Convert phase, the main task of marketing is
to convert a lead into a ready-to-sell lead through marketing automation and/or getting the
customer to request a quote. The task of marketing is also to support sales in closing the sale
by targeting the person requesting the offer, for example, by placing references to closing the
sale in various channels.
The last step in the model is Engage. In digital marketing, engaging means building
a long-term customer relationship using digital channels. Most often, this means newsletters
and social media, that is, the digital channels that committed customers use when interacting
with a company.
The MRACE® model is based on the RACE model, but MRACE® underlines performance
measurement as a crucial part of each phase of the RACE model (Figure 4.2). Only by meas-
uring digital marketing can it be continuously developed to be more effective. Thus, the
MRACE® model will guide the continuous development of digital marketing and the testing
of new ways of improving results. Continuous testing and development are important not
only because of profit development but also because they enable digital marketing to adapt to
a constantly changing operating environment, such as that resulting from changes in customer
behavior, technologies, and channels.
Clear and flexible models like the
MRACE® model help companies
evolve and move towards digital sales
and business. Currently, digital com-
merce is reshaping all businesses in
all industries faster than ever and no
slowdown is in sight. The speed of
change has meant that many compa-
nies lack a model suitable for today’s
needs upon which they could base the
development of their marketing and
sales in a systematic and measurable
way. In addition, with the continuous
development and growing number
Figure 4.2 The MRACE® model adds
of digital platforms, the challenge
a fifth phase to the RACE model:
has been to serve customers both
Measure
agilely and profitably. A clear model
 62 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

improves the understanding of how changes and development actions in marketing affect the
whole marketing process.
The MRACE® model is based on the idea of multi-channel marketing, and turning
multi-channel marketing into a measurable entity is the main goal of the model. In this case,
each channel and marketing tool works to its full potential in the marketing process with the
channels and tools supporting each other. Although different digital channels and marketing
tools are suitable for many uses, each channel and tool still has its own clear place and goals:
digging with a tape measure is slow and using a shovel for measuring is impractical. When
each marketing channel is only used for the purpose to which it is best suited, marketing
becomes a seamless and effective whole without the channels being siloed.
The MRACE® model has four significant benefits when looking at the operational perfor-
mance of marketing across the enterprise. First, the model guides action as it visualizes the
entire marketing process in a single image, making it easier to manage. When challenges are
identified in marketing, they do not raise questions but trigger action.
Another significant benefit is that the model makes marketing inherently very
customer-centric. The model is used to build marketing around the buying process of the
buyer personas. In this way, marketing is integrated as a natural part of the customer’s pur-
chasing process and does not remain a separate and pressing part of the process.
The third benefit is that the model transforms marketing into data-driven marketing.
Only by measuring and analyzing the data can the right actions be taken in order to develop
marketing. In addition, the model directs the focus of marketing so that the best-performing
actions are invested in and the weakest are developed or omitted. As the fourth benefit, the
model simplifies marketing management. The model connects different channels, prevents
them from being siloed, and allows marketing to be directed in the desired direction. In this
way, marketing is focused on the right things, and the focus does not shift onto thousands of
new-sounding marketing tricks and technologies.
Although the MRACE® model is extensive, it integrates with any company and strategy due
to its straightforwardness and universal nature. Its introduction also does not require a great
deal of implementation, only a change of mindset.

4.1.1 The MRACE® model and the continuous development of

marketing

Marketing must be developed not only because of the development of operating profits but
also because the world is different today. Customers are moving to new social media channels,
so advertising will no longer reach them, competition will intensify, buying behavior will
change, trends will evolve, and content will get outdated. Therefore, the MRACE® model is
never fully complete but guides you to constantly look for two critical things:

1. What factors slow down the return of marketing investments?

2. What improvements will lead to the greatest improvement in operating profit?

The whole of marketing is only as strong as its weakest part. For this reason, each step of the
MRACE® model is set with its own performance metrics (KPIs), according to which market-
 IMPLEMENTING STRATEGY USING THE MRACE® MODEL 63

ing is continuously developed based on data. KPIs make it possible to assess at an early stage
whether the set targets are being met. For example, if a company wants to make ten trades
a month and if each trade requires 1,000 visits to be directed to the company’s site, measuring
the number of visitors is a good KPI metric. If your website has only received 2,500 visitors by
the middle of the month, the goal is likely to be missed because it requires 10,000 visitors to
your site in a month.
The principles of the model are thus very similar to those of growth hacking, which consists
of setting goals and making hypotheses, analyzing the actions, and drawing conclusions based
on data (Figure 4.3). With the conclusions, new goals and hypotheses are set when the cycle,
the so-called development print, returns to the beginning. One development print is typically
short in duration and predefined. Continuous improvement, data integrity, and rapid experi-
mentation are at the heart of the operation.

Figure 4.3 A two-week development print that consists of four steps (setting goals,
implementing them, analyzing the results, and drawing conclusions), after
which the sprint will start again with new goals

It is easy to talk about continuous development and quick daring experiments, but implement-
ing them in reality in a busy day is challenging. Activities need to be planned and carefully
structured because otherwise they will only remain at the level of speech and things will not
be implemented—or if they are implemented, their impact on business will easily remain
a mystery if data is not collected and analyzed.
Agile methods form an excellent tool with which to support this kind of marketing that
aims for continuous improvement as we live in a complex world where a large part of the
cause-and-effect relationship can only be noticed in retrospect. In reality, most marketing is
just an expert’s best guess as to what measures could be taken to get the best possible result. It
 64 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

is therefore impossible to fully predict the market and the behavior of people. Thus, the sooner
cause-and-effect relationships are found in the market and in people’s behavior, the faster the
outcome of marketing can be developed.
Agility, growth hacking, and growth marketing may be reminiscent of a bunch of
super-creative people who develop the craziest ideas where only the sky is the limit. Crazy
ideas can be good, of course, but every idea and development print should be based on the
long-term goals of the organization.
It can be thought that today’s actions determine whether an organization will achieve its
goals over a longer period of time. If there are no clear goals and strategies behind the agility,
being agile will lead somewhere in the long run, but probably not to where one wanted to go
(Figure 4.4).

Figure 4.4 Daily tasks should contribute to long-term goals

4.2 THE STAGES OF THE MRACE® MODEL

At this point, you should have a clearer idea of what the MRACE® model is and what its stages
are. Next, we will delve into each individual step in more detail in order to get an idea of what
tools and channels work at each stage of the model. You will also learn about the typical chal-
lenges of the steps and how to solve them. We present the instruments of digital marketing in
more detail in Chapter 5.
 IMPLEMENTING STRATEGY USING THE MRACE® MODEL 65

4.2.1 Reach

As we said earlier, the Reach phase is about creating awareness (Figure 4.5). The goal of this
phase is to make the target audience aware of what the company has to offer and direct relevant
traffic to the company’s website. The Reach phase begins when a message reaches a potential
customer and ends when the customer visits the website. Thus, in the Reach phase, the largest
possible flow of visitors according to the buyer personas is directed to the site from the differ-
ent digital channels by communicating to them in the ways defined in the strategy phase. At
this point, potential customers falling within each buyer persona can be roughly divided into
three different segments:

1. Customers actively searching for

the product
2. Customers searching for a similar
product
3. Customers who are not searching
for the product but would benefit
from using it.

A product also means a service. The

following example illustrates the
segmentation of potential custom-
ers: Imagine you are selling oat milk.
In this case, customers in the first
segment are specifically looking for
Figure 4.5 The Reach stage oat milk, customers in the second
segment are looking for some kind of
milk to put in their coffee, and customers in the third segment are not looking for any kind of
milk.
These segments can be reached, for example, through search engine marketing (see Section
5.3) and social media marketing (see Section 5.5). There are two practical ways to actively
search for a product on the website of the company selling the product: searching for it from
Google Ads advertisements or from the organic search results that appear after the sponsored
ads on the search engine, thanks to search engine optimization (SEO). Sure, it is possible that
someone searching for the product will come across an ad for a product on social media, but if
they are currently looking for a particular product, the most likely first contact will be through
Google.
Those looking for a similar product are not looking for a product offered by a particular
company but are generally looking for a solution to their problem. So, for example, a customer
is only looking for some kind of milk to put in their coffee—be it made from oats, soy or made
by cows. In such cases, it is possible to target your advertising to different audiences on differ-
ent advertising platforms on Google, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.
For those who are not looking for a product but would benefit from it, it is most effective to
advertise through Google’s Display and Discovery networks, as well as through social media
 66 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

channels. Of the social media channels, in Finland, Facebook is usually the best (even for a B2B
target audience) because it is the most-used social media channel. Advertising on YouTube is
also a good way to increase awareness. Through Facebook, the target group can be communi-
cated to about the challenges or needs they experience. When a member of the target audience
identifies himself or herself in an ad post, his or her attention is earned and he or she can be
directed to the site to read more about the topic. In the content of the site, his or her need to
solve the problem is translated into a desire to buy just the product offered by the company. In
the example of milk for coffee, the ad could start with the question “Do you always burn your
tongue when you drink coffee?” or “Does your morning coffee taste too bitter?”
The most common problems in the Reach phase are that a company’s potential customers
do not know how to search for a product and the company’s website is not found by search
engines when the customers try to find the product. If the customer does not know how to
search for a product online, the solution is to place the product in front of him or her. This
is mainly done by advertising on social media, YouTube, Discovery, and Display. However,
this is not always enough as the customer may not know that he or she needs the product in
question. In this case, the advertising should communicate the end benefit of the product or
the problem that the product solves. If, on the other hand, the website’s search engine visibility
is poor, it needs to be improved. This is done through both SEO and search engine advertising.
You can read more about these in Section 5.3 (“Search engine marketing”).

4.2.1.1 The role of the brand in the Reach stage

A brand is a rather difficult thing to measure and verify, which is why there are many differ-
ent opinions about its importance in marketing. A brand can be a name, a term, a symbol,
a person, or any attribute that differentiates a product or service from others. When talking
about brands, it is generally thought that a brand is well known and evokes positive associa-
tions in the minds of customers. Indeed, the customers’ perceptions and mindsets ultimately
determine what a brand really is. Because a brand is a subjective view, some well-known
brands will be completely unknown to some. For example, China’s best-selling car brand is
a strong global brand and a well-known brand worldwide: Volkswagen. On the other hand, the
most-purchased Volkswagen model in China in 2019 was the Lavida, which is not a brand for
Finns because Finns have probably never heard of it.
However, a brand is known to have a clear impact on marketing performance as it can
increase trust in the company. Of course, the impact of a brand can also be negative if the
brand has a bad reputation. However, it can be said that companies with a strong brand do
not have to use their resources in marketing to tell them what they are doing. Instead, they can
focus on telling you how they are doing it. For this reason, we will go through each step of the
MRACE® model to see how important the brand is to the performance of each step.
A brand brings the following three benefits in the Reach stage:

1. A brand brings leverage and increases awareness. The brand image is much emphasized in
the Reach phase. If all of the company’s ads look visually consistent, each ad will enhance
the audience’s memory footprint of the brand. For example, in social media, the same
person sees the same ad or its variations multiple times.
 IMPLEMENTING STRATEGY USING THE MRACE® MODEL 67

2. A brand increases the consistency of advertising. When the brand image and the tone of
the company are consistent and carefully thought out, the company appears unified and
consistent to its customers. You can compare this to a restaurant visit: If the first waitress
who serves you is friendly and helpful and the second is rude and bored, it is hard to say
which of these represents the restaurant’s standards, leaving the image of the restaurant in
the dark.
3. A brand increases confidence. When a brand is strong, there is no need to build trust
between the brand and its customers from scratch. In this case, the company also does not
have to use its resources to build trust nearly as much as a company with a weak brand.
A new airline company may need to assure you that they are reliable and that their flights
are safe. In contrast, Finnair, for example, does not have to tell its customers about the
reliability of its flights, the professionalism of its personnel, or that the customer will be
able to get to their destination with their help as we Finns know Finnair’s long history and
solid experience in flying. With a strong brand, a company’s Reach phase advertising can
focus more on customer needs rather than building trust in the brand.

4.2.2 Act

The Act (i.e., a shortening of interact) stage begins when the information seeker arrives on the
website and ends when the visitor becomes a ready-to-sell lead (Figure 4.6). The main goal of
the Act phase is to turn a website visitor into a lead. Exceptions include companies for which
building a brand and attracting customers is more important than acquiring leads. This is the
case, for example, with most food
companies.
For those businesses that need to
generate leads and demand through
their website, the Act stage is the most
crucial step in the entire MRACE®
model. If it fails, there will be no
sales opportunities. At the heart of
everything is the technical function-
ality of the website and conversion
optimization (i.e., optimizing the usa-
bility of the website to make it easier
for the customer to request a quote or
make a purchase; see Section 5.3.1).
The traffic generated during the
Figure 4.6 The Act stage Reach phase will not turn into leads
without a purchase path created by
the content or a well-functioning website.
When the overall content offering that has been created forms buyer persona-specific
purchase paths, they lead the acquired traffic to take the desired actions, such as downloading
a guide, and make microconversions, which are small measurable activities that give an indi-
cation of a person’s interest in the company. A microconversion can be, for example, reading
 68 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

a blog article from start to finish. With the help of a consistently designed purchasing path
a single visitor will spend more time with the brand, reading or viewing more content (such as
blog articles, customer stories, or videos). This presupposes that each content item creates an
interest in reading or watching the next content item, otherwise the visitor’s path to purchase
will stop. The more content a visitor gets to read or view, the more he or she learns about the
products and services on offer and the more he or she becomes convinced that he or she should
buy a product from that particular company and not from a competitor.

4.2.2.1 Problems of the Act phase and their solution

The general challenge for companies in the Act phase is that while traffic to a site can be
obtained, it does not turn into leads or requests for quotes. In this case, it should be determined
whether visitors (a) spend time on the website or (b) leave it quickly.

Scenario “a”: The visitor spends time on the website but does not turn into a lead.

There are roughly four reasons for this problem:

1. The website is slow and does not work properly technically or in practice. In this case,
the best solution is to use SEO and conversion optimization together. SEO ensures that
a website is fast and that it works correctly technically. Speed and technical performance
have a big impact on search rankings so the website is ranked better in Google search
results. Conversion optimization helps ensure that traffic on the website is unobstructed.
It pays attention to, for example, the number of prompts, the length of the forms, and the
analysis of the text structures, as well as to how the buttons are placed on the page. The
so-called heatmap tools (see Section 5.3.1) show what each visitor is doing on the website,
what section the visitor is browsing, and what she or he is clicking on. The end result of
conversion optimization is an analysis of what issues identified on the website (based on
customer behavior) are worth correcting.
2. Content does not create a consistent buying path. If the visitor reads the content to the
end (i.e., if he or she is clearly interested in the topic) but does not turn into a lead, the
buying path will leak. Each item of content must link to at least three other content items
so that the customer’s buying path continues to the content that interests them most. It
often happens that the content of a website raises additional questions for the visitor, but
he or she cannot find the answer. This will cause the visitor to leave and search Google for
an answer to her or his question, which will most likely lead them to a competitor’s site.
So, there needs to be a lot of content on the site in order to answer all the questions that
concern the customer and thus guide the customer forward on the buying path.
3. Leads are not acquired aggressively enough. If a visitor is not redirected to the desired
action from each content item, the visitor will not become a lead. Lead acquisition can be
improved by improving the landing page (the page to which a person is directed through
advertising). Usually, the landing page has some specific goal, such as getting the customer
to download something, attend a webinar, or contact the company. In addition to improv-
ing the landing page, lead acquisition can be made more efficient by creating time- and
behavior-based pop-ups. Facebook’s Lead Ads ad format is also a great way to get leads
as it allows a potential customer to download the guide directly on Facebook by entering
their email address in the field provided on Facebook. The more downloadable content
a website has based on buyer personas’ drivers, the more leads are obtained, even if the
 IMPLEMENTING STRATEGY USING THE MRACE® MODEL 69

website’s traffic does not increase at all. For example, a company selling garden products
could make downloadable guides for sowing a lawn, caring for a flowerbed, and removing
weeds from an entire yard. The more specific the topic of the downloadable guide, the
better it meets the needs of a particular target group, which will increase the interest of the
target group and increase the number of downloads of the guide.
4. The customer is not returned to the website through remarketing. The customer’s pur-
chase path is not linear, and the customer leaves the website even though he or she is
interested in a guide or considering requesting a quote. None of this may seem appealing
to the customer at that very moment (e.g., due to urgency or fatigue), so he or she leaves
it for later. However, it is likely that he or she will not remember the topic later, in which
case he or she should be redirected back to the website through remarketing. The best ways
to get the customer back on their buying path are through remarketing on social media,
Display, and YouTube. Email marketing is also a good way to remarket if the customer has
previously subscribed to a newsletter, for example.

Scenario “b”: The visitor leaves the site quickly and therefore does not turn into a lead.

This problem is typically caused by three things:

1. The traffic directed to the website is incorrect. If paid advertising targets and commu-
nication angles are not created based on buyer personas, marketing often becomes too
circumspect. In that case, it will reach more people but the people it reaches may not be the
best people for the business. The first step is to adjust the targeting and messaging angles of
social media and Google ads in order to match the buyer personas so that the right people
can be reached with the right message.
2. The content is bad or inconsistent with the advertising message. We live in the midst of
a constant flood of information flow. If the content of a company’s website does not arouse
our interest immediately, we will not read it further and will leave the website. Therefore,
all content should be built on the basis of buyer personas so that it is fully focused on the
customers outlined in the buyer personas and on solving their problems. Talking about
a product alone does not interest anyone in general, but the fact that a company talks about
customer problems and how to solve them is of interest to most customers.
3. The website loads slowly. If your site is slow, your immediate bounce rate will always be
higher than normal. According to research, every tenth visitor leaves a website immedi-
ately if the page loads for more than two seconds. If the download time is seven seconds,
the number increases to one in three visitors.

4.2.2.2 What kind of website content is needed for the Act phase?
The content of articles encountered at the beginning of the buying path plays a key role in
the Act phase, ensuring that the customer is interested in reading more articles and moving
forward on the buying path. If the content only tells customers about the product itself, it
will only address a target group of people who already want to buy the product. This group
is usually quite small. Instead, the content at the beginning of the buying path should focus
purely on the customer. They should address her or his problems, needs, goals, and day-to-day
challenges according to the buyer persona. The more accurately customers are described, the
more likely they are to think that a company will be able to solve their problems.
 70 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

At the beginning of the buying path, customers search for information on search engines
with need-based, problem-, and motivation-based search terms or phrases such as “How do
I generate leads?” or “The car makes a weird sound when it starts.” If the content provided by
the company only deals with the company’s products, the company will not be found in the
search results with such motive-based keywords. The keywords used by customers should
therefore be clarified with dedicated tools such as keywordtool.io.
Let us take an example of how motive-based content can trigger the buying process. The
sales director of the company enters “How can I improve the closing percentage of salespeo-
ple?” in the search box of the search engine. He ends up with the content “This is how you
can improve the salespeople’s closing percentage through marketing,” where he is taught why
a poor closing percentage is not always due to salespeople and that it can also be due to poor
quality leads, for example. The sales manager gets interested and continues to read. He is
directed to the content “Generating Quality Leads for B2B Companies.” In this article, he finds
the downloadable content “Modern Sales Manager’s Toolkit: 37 Tools to Streamline Your
Sales Process and Improve the Quality of Your Leads.” The sales manager downloads the guide
and the company that created the guide receives the contact information of the sales manager
(who is their potential customer) and can thus send him emails with marketing automation
before contacting him.

4.2.2.3 The importance of the brand in the Act stage

In the Act phase, the customer begins to map out where she or he could buy the product or
service she or he wants. Dozens of companies can take part in the competition, and in this
situation, it is important to stand out.
A well-built brand offers the following three benefits in the Act phase:

1. The brand sets the company apart from its competitors. A brand is perhaps the best way
to stand out from the competition because it cannot be copied. In contrast, the features of
a product or service, website purchasing paths, the content of a website, and the angles of
advertising can be copied. Of course, differentiation itself is already a strong way to brand
a company.
2. The brand creates interest in the company. You are more likely to be interested in and trust
in someone who is nice and consistent. The same applies to companies, and consistency
and making a good impression should be quickly communicated to customers at all points
of contact between the company and the customer, whether the points of contact are phys-
ical or digital. A brand that looks interesting will increase the amount of time visitors spend
on the brand’s website. Thus, potential customers spend more time with the brand, which
makes them more likely to commit to the brand.
3. The brand appeals to the company’s dream customers. With a well-built brand, the
company arouses interest in the target groups and customer groups that it wants as its
customers. Such customers are more satisfied and profitable, take less resources from the
company (e.g., in the form of handling complaints), and attract more customers like them
to the company.
 IMPLEMENTING STRATEGY USING THE MRACE® MODEL 71

4.2.3 Convert

The Convert stage includes the time when the visitor is a lead but not yet a paying customer
(Figure 4.7). At this stage, the main task of marketing is to convert the lead into a ready-to-sell
lead with marketing automation and/or to get her or him to ask for an offer, and to support
sales representatives in closing the deal by offering, for example, customer references to the
person requesting the offer.
The nature of the Convert stage
varies greatly from industry to indus-
try. In some products, the biggest
responsibility in converting a lead
into a deal lies with the sales rep-
resentatives, while in others the
responsibility lies with marketers.
For example, buying windows for
a house is difficult for many without
the help of a sales rep, while Software-​
as-a-Service (SaaS) systems are often
purchased completely independently.
Multi-channel digital marketing
is important because the customer’s
Figure 4.7 The Convert stage path to purchase is not straightfor-
ward. Before requesting a quote,
a customer may visit a company’s website multiple times, subscribe to a newsletter, search
for information about others’ experiences with the company, and compare the company with
its competitors. The duration of the process ranges from days to years, depending on the
product: for example, consumers may take a long time to consider kitchen renovations and
B2B customers may take a long time to consider a new ERP system, while milk and copy paper
are purchased quickly, often fully automatically and routinely. You can think of any relatively
expensive purchase you make. How often have you immediately bought a sofa or car recom-
mended by a seller from the first store you visit when you have not familiarized yourself with
the market offerings in advance? The majority of people are afraid of making mistakes and
want to ensure that they find the optimal product or service for their needs.
In the Convert stage, one of the most effective ways marketing can support sales is to
promote your company’s customer testimonials and case examples to leads or quote request-
ers through remarketing on social media and Google’s Display and Discovery networks. In
this way, the company stays in the customer’s mind and at the same time convinces her or him
of its competence. If a customer has sent several invitations to tender to different companies,
reference stories that the customer can identify with will make a significant contribution to
closing the deal. Another good way is to create a series of emails for the marketing automation
system that are automatically delivered to the people who have requested a quote. Depending
on the industry, marketing automation can help, for example, justify a purchase to other
decision makers in the organization, tell reference stories, and list common mistakes when
 72 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

purchasing a product. With SEO, you should make sure that your business is well matched
with the keyword “[Company X] experiences,” among other search queries.

4.2.3.1 What kind of content does the Convert stage need?

In the Convert stage, the lead is already clearly interested in the company’s product. The cus-
tomer must therefore be convinced of why he or she should buy from that company and not
from a competitor. This decision can be supported by customer testimonials and case studies
that go through a successful collaboration between the company and the customer in the form
of a story, buyer’s guides to help the customer make a good purchasing decision, and content
that showcases the expertise of the selling company.
The contents of the Convert stage must enable a customer to identify with and remove
barriers to making a purchase. In addition, they should give the lead the feeling that she or
he wants the future that the benefits gained by the product adoption offers. Humans tend
to seek for convenience, so a “pretty good” current state is often perceived as a better option
than time-consuming information retrieval and a long purchasing process, even if these were
to make us better off in the end. So, we would rather lie on a pretty good couch than spend
our time and energy looking for, buying, and carrying the perfect couch up to the fifth floor
and taking the old couch away. Therefore, the content should also strongly communicate
what happens if the person does not make a change to her or his current state. What issues
are caused by lying on an old, good couch, and what would life be like if it were replaced by
a perfect couch?

4.2.3.2 Convert-stage problems and their solutions

There are two common problems with the Convert stage:

Problem 1: Leads are not converted into deals. In this case, the problem is (a) the quality of the
content or (b) the sales process.

Content-quality problems often occur when, for example, a buyer’s guide is downloaded a lot
but very few downloaders convert into customers who make a purchase. However, judging
by the number of downloads, the content in question is of interest to the customer base, so
only the quality of the downloadable content needs to be improved. At its best, downloadable
content paves the way for the first conversation between a customer and a seller. The content
provides a lot of useful additional information to the customer, but at the same time, it has to
make the customer’s current state feel bad compared with the future state the company offers.
When a seller contacts the downloaders of such content, a large proportion of those who read
the content are sales-ready leads.
Problems in the sales process can be, for example, technology or people oriented. The wrong
technology, such as a poor CRM system or the complete absence of such a system, make the
day-to-day work of sales slower and more difficult. An example of a people-driven problem,
on the other hand, is making too slow responses to requests for quotations. If a customer
urgently needs a product, she or he often chooses the provider who is the first to respond to
her or him and whose service and price match her or his criteria.
 IMPLEMENTING STRATEGY USING THE MRACE® MODEL 73

Problem 2: There are too many leads. Due to there being too many leads, the sales department is
unable to focus on their best leads with sufficient resources. If you have a lot of leads, you should
focus on marketing automation, conversion optimization, and content marketing.

With marketing automation, the company’s most relevant and sales-ready leads from masses
of leads can be directly filtered to the sales team. Conversion optimization and content mar-
keting, in turn, can be used for attracting the sales-ready leads in order to make a request for
a quotation so that the initial stage of the sales process requires less effort from the sales team.
Conversion optimization removes all technical barriers from the customer’s purchase path,
making it easier to submit a request for a quotation. Content marketing improves the quality
and quantity of content so that it resonates with the sales-ready leads, making them more
willing to request a quotation.

4.2.3.3 The importance of the brand in the Convert stage

In the Convert stage, it is time for the customer to make a purchase decision. A strong brand
has already had a positive impact on the customer in the Reach and Act phases, so these phases
also have a relevance to converting the leads into deals. In the Convert stage, however, the
following two things are heavily influenced by a strong brand:

1. The company does not need to prove its excellence. Well-known brands like Adidas or
Nike do not have to prove that they are good at making running shoes because every-
one already knows that. Therefore, in the Convert stage such companies can focus their
marketing and content-production resources on things other than content that is purely
intended for gaining trust. In contrast, the situation is completely different for less-known
brands.
2. A strong brand makes purchase decisions emotional. You may have experienced this your-
self: You are buying a product that requires moderate judgment. You know that Option
A has slightly better features and is even a little cheaper than Option B. You still buy Option
B because it feels like a better decision. This often happens, for example, in the acquisition
of smartphones. The flagship model of a new and unknown brand can be superior in terms
of features and price, but many times, a consumer still ends up purchasing an iPhone
because it feels like a risk-free option. Thus, a strong brand increases the desirability of the
product and reduces the desirability of competitive offerings.

4.2.4 Engage

The Engage stage begins when the lead becomes a paying customer (Figure 4.8). The goal of
the Engage stage is to get hard-earned customers to commit to the company as it is much easier
to sell to existing customers than it is to sell to new ones, and at best, they also act as brand
advocates and referees for the company. In addition, the sustainable business growth comes
from high customer retention and low customer churn.
The nature of the Engage stage varies greatly from industry to industry. For example, in the
software business, customer engagement begins immediately through a so-called onboarding
process, during which the customer learns to use the new software and gets the benefits he
 74 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

or she needs from it. In the service

business, the service itself plays the
greatest role in fostering customer
engagement.
In simple terms, marketing in
the Engage stage leads the customer
to use the product more often and
better. The best ways to do this are
remarketing on social media, Google,
and YouTube, and email marketing.
At the heart of it all, however, is
search engine-optimized content
to which the customer is directed
through the channels mentioned
above. When SEO is well designed, Figure 4.8 The Engage stage
visitors are steadily attracted to the
content from day to day, even if you do not invest any money into your marketing. Carefully
designed marketing in the Engage stage has another benefit: it helps in acquiring new custom-
ers by increasing the confidence of leads and site visitors in the company. They find that the
company takes good care of its current customers by guiding them in the use of their product
or service.
Engagement is often only considered to start after the first purchase, and we have placed
the Engage stage in the MRACE® model in the post-purchase phase. However, customer
engagement can be fostered from the beginning of the purchase process. Engagement before
the actual Engage phase is nurtured through positive experiences on the path to purchase and
through brand image. Creating a compelling path to purchase, brand building, and engaging
customers are therefore not separate activities and must be taken into account in all marketing
activities.
Learning to use a new product often feels cumbersome. We easily get excited about the
features of the product at the purchase stage but forget about them in everyday use. Therefore,
customers should be reminded of how they can make better use of your product or service.
Using even the smallest detail of every product or service commits the customer to the
company better. If a competitor’s product does not have a feature that the customer has
become fond of, the threshold to switching to competitive offerings will increase.
Actively sending emails to the entire customer base also increases the likelihood that
customers will commit to the company. However, there are differences between industries
and products regarding what things a company should communicate to its customers. The
customer is presumably more interested in hearing about the products related to her or his
hobbies from her or his seller rather than, for example, getting information on a monthly
basis from their electricity company about how to save electricity or how the electricity she or
he buys is produced. It is not advisable to send the same mass message to the entire customer
base; the content of the message should be tailored on the basis of the products and services
that a given customer has purchased. In that way, the message is more relevant to each recip-
 IMPLEMENTING STRATEGY USING THE MRACE® MODEL 75

ient, which makes the messages more valuable to him or her. This, in turn, makes customers
more receptive to the messages and more willing to act on them, attitudes that are reflected in
higher open and click-through rates of messages.

4.2.4.1 The importance of the brand in the Engage stage

In the Engage stage, the brand’s role is to get more customers to commit to the company more
strongly. The impact of a brand is created in the Engage stage with very little work if the pre-
vious stages have already created a consistent brand image. In the Engage stage, it is important
for a company to communicate in line with its brand image (i.e., to use the same tone of voice
and continue its customer-embracing attitude) so that the customer experience remains just as
good after the purchase as before it.
The brand brings the following benefits in the Engage phase:

1. Customers are more engaged with the brands that fascinate them. With the help of the
brand, the company has attracted its ideal customers and they have become real custom-
ers. The best way to engage customers is to initially acquire customers whose problems
the company can solve. In addition, the brand has a big impact on how strongly these
ideal customers engage with the company. Commitment is really important for business
predictability and profitability as high commitment means high customer loyalty, even in
difficult times. During the toughest times of the COVID-19 pandemic, you may have been
wondering how your favorite brand or restaurant will survive and how you could support
them. If so, the companies you thought of were probably the ones to which you had an
emotional connection.
2. A fascinating brand is more likely to be recommended and talked about. Referral is one
of the most powerful forms of marketing. Referrals are not directly controllable, but
a fascinating brand increases the likelihood that customers will recommend it to their
acquaintances because brand engagement turns customers into fans of the company and
this is reflected in how they talk about the company.
3. Customer churn is reduced. Stronger customer engagement in itself reduces customer
churn, but an emotional connection to the brand increases a customer’s willingness to
forgive mistakes. All companies sometimes make mistakes: the product was defective, the
customer service representative had a bad day, or someone simply made a clear mistake.
If the customer has no emotional connection to the company that made the mistake, his
or her perception of the company easily becomes negative. If, in turn, the company has
a strong brand, the customer knows what the company represents, what its normal perfor-
mance level is, and is engaged with the brand and one or two mistakes will not drive the
customer to a competitor. So, a strong brand is more easily forgiven.

4.2.5 Measure

In digital channels, everything can be measured, which offers a lot of opportunities for market-
ing development (Figure 4.9). At the same time, however, it also creates big risks. The amount
of data is easily overwhelming, and the wrong numbers can distract you. In addition, the
quality of the data is very often poor, so interpreting it can even lead to erroneous conclusions.
Measurement should not only be done for the joy of measuring; measures should be planned
 76 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

to be company and channel specific. What metrics tell us today that a company is moving
towards its five-year goal? In addition, it is a good idea to look critically at selected metrics
from time to time as the business
evolves when sales and market pro-
cesses evolve.
When measuring the results of
marketing, it is important to con-
sider the big picture. Good or bad
results for a single channel or a single
MRACE® model phase may not move
sales up or down. Therefore, it is
important to ask yourself what the
development in a particular channel
ultimately affected or will affect. Is
increased website traffic reflected in
increased requests for quotes? Will
paid advertising produce as good
a result if its cost is reduced by 30 Figure 4.9 The Measure stage
percent? Will the leads from a new,
very successful campaign turn into transactions, or will the leads from that campaign be
completely useless? Marketing is often blinded to its good results and forgets to engage in
a dialogue with sales, in which case improvements in marketing results may not be reflected
in increased sales.
We have compiled the most important metrics to measure for each step of the MRACE®
model and outline them below.

4.2.5.1 Reach-phase metrics

Reach-phase metrics are always selected on a case-by-case basis, according to the business. The
most common metrics for the Reach phase are the following:

z The number of new website visits

z The total number of website visits
z A higher placement in Google’s search results and the number of brand searches
z Social media reach
z Cost per click (CPC) and cost per mille (CPM; the cost per thousand impressions).

The Reach phase measures the reach and cost-effectiveness of advertising and the number of
visitors to your website. However, the Reach-phase metrics require a lot of further interpreta-
tion as the affordability of advertising or the increased traffic to your website alone can appear
to be big disadvantages in the Act-phase metrics. For example, if low-cost website traffic has
been completely irrelevant and visitors are not even the company’s target audience, they will
leave the website quickly and the end result is only increased total advertising costs.
So it is worth considering whether the traffic you get is relevant, whether your site has risen
higher in Google’s search results (when using important search words), and whether cheaper
 IMPLEMENTING STRATEGY USING THE MRACE® MODEL 77

advertising has yielded at least the same number of results as before or whether the results have
dropped in relation to the costs. Interpreting the results of the Reach phase is made easier by
looking at the metrics in the Act phase that tell you about visitor behavior on your website.

4.2.5.2 Act-stage metrics

In the Act phase, the quality of the traffic received is measured. In addition, indicators that
look at how to improve visitor flows can be considered. For example, if visitors who come to
the website through a particular advertisement spend a lot of time on the website, you can try
giving that advertisement even more visibility.
Typical Act-stage metrics include the following:

z The time visitors spend on the website

z The bounce rate
z The exit rate
z Scroll depth
z The pages visited
z The number of products that visitors added to their shopping cart
z The number of newsletter subscriptions
z The number of downloaded guides
z The price per lead
z Engagement in social media posts.

The indicators of the Act phase tell a lot about the quality of the website traffic gained, as
well as the functionality and ease of use of the website and the interest in it. If a visitor on the
website spends an average of just a few tens of seconds on the site, the bounce rate is high, and
the visitors are not turning into leads, then the traffic you get and the content on your site are
not likely to be in line; your visitors are looking for something other than what the website
offers them.
Find out which channels, campaigns, and search keywords drive the highest-quality traffic
to your website. What content do visitors read and is certain content read for longer than other
content? Things like this tell a lot about what interests your customer base.

4.2.5.3 Convert-stage metrics

The most important measure of the Convert phase is to track how much profitable revenue is
generated by the visitors you acquire. Typical metrics for the Convert phase are the following:

z The number of contacts made via forms

z The number of clicks on emails and phone numbers
z Transactions made
z Purchases
z The average order price
z The return on ad spend (ROAS).

In the Convert phase, we will start to see what kind of results the marketing has achieved in
euros. While the metrics for the Convert phase are straightforward and contacts or requests
 78 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

for quotations can always be imagined to be good things, this may not always be the case.
For example, the number of requests for quotations may be too small in size, unnecessarily
burdening sales and taking up their time from key customers. It is therefore good to remember
that indicators and figures always require interpretation and evaluation of their real impact.

4.2.5.4 Engage-stage metrics

Engage-stage metrics measure customer engagement with the company. Typical indicators
include:

z Repurchases (i.e., customers buy more than once)

z Product recommendations
z Product reviews
z The email open rate (as a percentage) (i.e., the percentage of recipients that open the
emails sent by the company)
z The number of visitors returning to the website
z The number of active customers (i.e., the number of customers the company has repeat-
edly invoiced).

The Engage-phase metrics also tell a lot about the success of other phases in the MRACE®
model. If customers engage with the company and frequently purchase its products or ser-
vices, the company has been able to acquire a customer base in the Reach stage for which the
company can add value that competitors cannot. When customers commit to a company’s
products and services because of the value they generate, it is very difficult for competitors to
attract those customers to themselves, even with clearly lower prices. Engage-phase metrics
are also a good indicator of business profitability. If customers only buy once or do not recom-
mend the company to others, the company will not be able to grow as fast as it could.
In the Engage phase, look specifically at what kind of customers buy the most, are most
satisfied, and recommend the company to their acquaintances. This also provides good insight
into the types of customers you want to reach with advertising in the Reach, Act, and Convert
stages.
You can read more about measurement and the tools that apply to it in Section 5.6 on
analytics.

CASE STUDY
CASE EXAMPLE: THE INSURANCE COMPANY VARMA DIGITALIZED ITS
SALES NETWORK
Varma is a pension insurer for work in Finland whose basic task is to secure pensions.
Varma takes care of the statutory employment pension security of private entrepreneurs
and employees. Companies take out earnings-related pension insurance (called TyEL) for
their employees, while entrepreneurs insure themselves with pension insurance for the
self-employed (called YEL) insurance. Funds raised as pension contributions are invested
productively and securely for both current and future pensions. The goal of Varma’s mar-
keting is to increase its market share, especially among small companies because Varma’s
 IMPLEMENTING STRATEGY USING THE MRACE® MODEL 79

market share is already strong in large companies.

HOW DID VARMA START TO INCREASE ITS MARKET

SHARE AMONG SMALL BUSINESSES?
Traditionally, the sales network in the employment pension insurance industry has been
built on intermediary insurance brokers and agents. Today, the Internet, smartphones,
and digital marketing tools have made it possible to move to an efficiently scalable
direct-to-consumer business model, that is, to create a direct customer relationship be-
tween a pension insurance company and a customer without intermediaries. The sales
network was rebuilt where customers are, namely, on Google, social media, and Varma’s
website.
However, occupational pension insurance involves a wealth of detailed information that
is unknown to customers beforehand, which the customers then search for independently
online. This has turned Varma’s mindset of marketing upside down; from Varma’s point
of view, the customer’s purchasing process is the customer’s service process. It is more
important to help the customer than to just offer their products and services. With this
change in mindset, the marketing process began to be made more small-business friendly.
Varma’s marketing relies heavily on Google, both in the preliminary information search
phase (the Reach phase) and in the subsequent purchasing phases (the Act and Convert
phases). Active content production was brought to the center of Varma’s marketing. Prior
to that, Varma invested a lot in knowing its buyer personas and its target group because
knowing the target group is an absolute prerequisite for effective content production and
digital marketing. Measuring the effectiveness of marketing and the data generated by
analytics made it easier to get to know buyer personas and understand customer behavior.

A FEW KEY FIGURES

REACH
With SEO, organic traffic (i.e., free traffic from search engines) accounts for 55 percent
of website traffic. That is a very good figure because if Varma stopped all marketing, 55
percent of their website traffic would still be retained.
Social media reached 684,194 people in six months.
Ads placed on social media were watched over 10 million times.

ACT
The bounce rate was just 37 percent, so the traffic is very relevant.

CONVERT
Hard conversions, such as direct invitations to tender and lead volumes, increased by 106
percent compared with the previous year.
80 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

The conversion rate increased by 26 percent compared with the previous year.

ENGAGE
Returning visitors to the website account for 32 percent of the website’s traffic, mean-
ing that the website’s content engages visitors well as one in three visitors return to the
website.
The number of brand searches increased by 50 percent compared with the previous
year, so awareness and interest in Varma increased.

NOTE
1. A buyer’s guide refers to, for example, a 15-page downloadable pdf file in which a company gives its custom-
ers information about a topic they want to know about.
 5
Digital marketing channels and
tools

When it comes to digital marketing, we are constantly faced with the question of what chan-
nels and tools should be used. In the MRACE® model, different channels play a key role as
marketing is largely about publishing and sharing content on the right channels. The tools
of digital marketing are referred to by many names: means, channels, instruments, tools, plat-
forms, and so on. Usually, however, the names all refer to the same thing, that is, the ways in
which a company publishes and distributes digital content and performs other marketing and
sales activities. In our book, we use the words channels and tools to also describe the publishing
and sharing of content.
In this chapter, we will cover the most important tools for digital marketing and their
suitability for use in the stages of the MRACE® model. The main tools of digital marketing
are the company’s website or service, content marketing, search engine marketing and online
advertising, customer relationship management (such as marketing automation and email
marketing), and social media market-
ing (Figure 5.1).
As a whole, a company’s website
or web service is often the most
important means of digital market-
ing as building a digital presence
begins with creating a website for the
company. The structure and content
of a website can only be determined
once the most important question has
been answered: Who is the website
meant for?
Another important tool is content
Figure 5.1 Digital marketing tools marketing. Content marketing means
all the content that a company pro-
duces intended to stimulate interest in products. In this book, however, we focus on the textual
content of the company’s website, the videos, and the visual look of the company. With the
help of content marketing, the company is able to exactly address the target groups and buyer
personas they want to address.
The third key tool is search engine marketing and online advertising. These include, among
other things, advertising on ad networks such as Google, banner advertising on various
 82 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

websites, and appearing on search engines (SEO) and advertising on them (search engine
advertising).
The fourth key tool of digital marketing is customer relationship marketing, a subcategory
of CRM, that is, marketing from a digital marketing perspective, email advertising, newsletters,
and instant messaging services. Typically, all of these are related to developing an existing
customer relationship when a company communicates offers or news. The goal of customer
relationship marketing is to introduce and ultimately sell the company’s products to existing
customers.
The fifth key means is marketing on social media. Social media is a broad form of media and
covers a wide range of things and channels. As a rule, social media refers to communities and
discussion forums outside a company. The most well-known social media platforms are very
familiar to most of us; Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn are the most well
known and largest in terms of the number of users. In addition, in recent years Snapchat and
TikTok have also gained a strong foothold as social media channels used by companies.

5.1 A COMPANY’S WEBSITE OR WEB SERVICE

A company’s website or web service is typically the basis of all digital marketing. A website
usually contains at least the following:

z A presentation of the company and its products and services, with options to order them
online
z References (i.e., listing a more detailed presentation of existing customers)
z Current affairs (blog, webinars, and other databank-like content)
z Links to social media channels
z Investor communications
z Analytics
z Contact information.

The importance of the website is constantly being emphasized as buying decisions and sales
are increasingly taking place entirely through digital channels. A website is often the first place
in which a potential customer starts to create an image of a company. For example, a company
can invest a lot in the sales material of its sellers, as well as in meeting the needs of its custom-
ers, but is it evident on the company’s website? If not, based on its website, the company will
look worse and more unreliable than it really is. In that case, the first impression is also weaker
than it could be.
It is also noteworthy that a company’s website is the only digital marketing channel that
the company owns in addition to a possible mobile app and an email list. Marketing channels
owned by third parties, such as Google and Facebook, may change at any time and may become
more expensive to advertise in, but the website will remain under the control of the company
regardless of the situation. There are a few instances in history of major third-party platform
upgrades: for example, Google Ads, at that time known as Google AdWords, became so much
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 83

more expensive overnight with a new upgrade that many companies lost their primary source
of traffic from Google as they could not afford the service.

5.1.1 The elements of a good website

The ability of a website to generate sales will be emphasized in the future as advertising on
Facebook and Google, for example, becomes more common. It will lead to an increase in
advertising costs as more companies compete for the same visibility. If there is no return on
higher advertising costs, advertising will no longer be profitable. You can think of it along the
lines that the expensive rental of a brick-and-mortar store does not hurt if the store really sells
a lot; however, if there are no sales, the expensive rent is a problem. The same goes for high
advertising costs in online sales—they do not hurt if a website generates a lot of leads, requests
for quotations, and sales.
The elements of a website that support digital sales can be roughly divided into three sec-
tions: flawless technical functionality, appearance that creates a feeling of trust, and content
created for the buyer personas (Figure 5.2).

Figure 5.2 A website that supports digital sales

The first step is to make the website work exactly right technically. The technical implementa-
tion serves as the basis for the website because if the foundations are not in order, the website
may not work well enough to maximize digital sales. The technical implementation ensures,
among other things, that the website works quickly and correctly on all devices, that it is search
engine-friendly, and that it enables the measurement of marketing results. If a site is not search
engine-friendly, it will not show in the search results and customers will primarily only find the
website through paid advertising. In this case, the advertising costs are easily higher than those
of the company’s competitors, but the result is the same.
 84 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

A website visitor will also trust your business more when everything is working properly.
What kind of picture would you have if a seller came to a meeting late, forgot some of the
materials, and sent an offer a couple of days later than he promised? A similar image is trans-
mitted from a website that is slow, where form submission does not work, and where some
of the text runs off the screen when browsing the website on a mobile phone. Even if that
company has the best solution for your needs, it will not be relayed from an incomplete and
poorly functioning site.
In addition to technical functionality, the layout of the site must be clear so that people
know how to use the site properly. A good and branded look increases trust in the company,
which is especially important for first-time visitors to the company’s website. A carefully
planned and clear layout also communicates the company’s operating models regarding
whether things in the company are done somewhat in the right direction or if they are done as
well as they could be.
The third element that supports digital sales is good content, which can be considered the
spearhead of a website. Well-designed content is like a skilled and pleasant solution vendor
brought onto the website. It clarifies the customer’s current situation and helps the customer
solve her or his problem or fulfill her or his needs (Figure 5.3). The content also determines
a large part of how reliable a company feels to a customer and how expert it seems. Without
good content, it is impossible to make digital sales. We describe the textual content of the
website in more detail in Section 5.2.1.

Figure 5.3 The website guides the customer towards a purchase when it adapts to the
customer’s needs

A well-functioning website generates leads and customers from website visitors, for example,
in the following way. When a visitor searches for information on a search engine, he or she
ends up on the website because it is well search engine optimized (i.e., easy to find). Once the
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 85

visitor arrives at the website, he or she starts looking for the additional information he or she
needs. With a consistent and clear website structure, the visitor is more likely to find what
he or she is looking for and spend more time on the website. However, the time spent on
the website does not directly translate into revenue, which is why the visitor must be able to
contact the company easily and quickly in a number of ways, such as through clickable phone
numbers, a chat feature, or forms in the footer.
LEGO provides an example of how to make shopping easier on a website. By visiting the
LEGO website, you will get a good idea of how the target groups have been taken into account.
When you reach the LEGO website, you will first encounter a banner from which you can click
to choose to either play games or shop on LEGO’s official website. Young children presumably
choose to play games and watch videos. An adult, on the other hand, is more likely to choose
to go to the shop so that he or she can shop or ask for support for the products.

BOX 5.1 WORDPRESS: A WEBSITE PUBLISHING

PLATFORM
About a third of all websites on the Internet are already made with WordPress, making
it the most widely used website platform in the world. With its high popularity, its open
source is surrounded by a large number of people, keeping it constantly updated and
keeping its features and security up to date. WordPress is easy to maintain, so anyone in
your company can enter textual content, such as blog posts, on your company’s website.
WordPress does not tie a company to a single service provider or marketing partner as
many people already use WordPress.
The visuals and functionality of WordPress pages are almost limitless, so you can make
them look just the way you want them to look. Different add-ons allow you to add various
required features to your website, such as counters or a chat add-on. WordPress pages
are also search engine-friendly because they load quickly and it is easy to edit page titles
and meta descriptions for search engines. In addition, the WooCommerce add-on makes
it easy to connect your e-commerce site to your WordPress site.
Especially for larger website implementations with a budget of over €50,000, the Drupal
publishing system has been used more than WordPress in the past. Today, WordPress is
also increasingly used to build large websites, and for example, the redesign of the Finnish
Road Safety Council website was implemented with WordPress.

CASE STUDY
CASE EXAMPLE: RENOVATION OF LEHTO’S WEBSITE
Lehto is a Finnish construction and real estate group whose motto is “a forerunner of
a better tomorrow.” Lehto’s operations are driven by the desire to be ahead of its time
and to renew the construction industry and thereby generate value, that is, a better tomor-
row for its customers. In practice, it means high-quality, affordable, fast, and ecological
construction.
 86 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Lehto sets the goals of its marketing as being to increase direct sales and increase brand
awareness in the longer term. Without a clear marketing model, it would be impossible
to systematically lead the marketing of such a large company towards set goals. That is
why Lehto chose the MRACE® model to support the implementation of its marketing. The
implementation of the MRACE® model began with the redesign of Lehto’s website because
the old website did not serve its goals properly. In connection with the website reform, dig-
ital customer paths for different buyer personas and a social media strategy were created
and systematic campaigning was continued.

THE NEW WEBSITE IS A SOLUTION VENDOR ONLINE

The task of the solution vendor is to propose the most suitable solution for the customer’s
needs. Lehto’s new website was built on the same principle. Its task was to help and guide
Lehto’s customers when the seller is not available or when the customer wants to search
for information independently.
At the heart of the website reform were customer paths, whose importance is stressed
in Lehto’s industry sector. In the construction and real estate sector, it is typical that the
information-search and evaluation phases are very long, leading to a situation where the
purchasing process is interrupted many times before the actual decision is made. Clear
customer paths make it easier for a customer to continue her or his purchasing process,
search for information, and get to know the company, regardless of whether she or he has
an active conversation with the company.
Thanks to the new website, Lehto took a big step towards even more digital sales. In
many cases, a company website is the first meeting point between a customer and a com-
pany. Therefore, one should invest in its ease of use as it shapes the brand image in the
desired direction.

5.2 CONTENT MARKETING

Content marketing is a very broad concept that everyone seems to interpretate differently.
Basically, content marketing can mean everything a company does in terms of producing
content, ranging from their PowerPoint presentations to social media posts and from giant
blog articles of 10,000 words to a one-minute brand video. In this book, we focus on three
themes of content marketing: the textual content written on a company’s website, videos, and
visual design.
Properly done content marketing affects every step of the MRACE® model. A company
reaches more customers with search engine-optimized content (in the Reach phase), good
content and logical buying paths make site visitors more likely to become leads (in the Act
phase), landing pages that encourage selling and are impactful make the website visitor behave
on the website in the manner that the company wants, for instance, the visitor requests an
offer (in the Convert phase), and by using content that teaches customers how to use a product
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 87

or service and by providing expert content, the customers become more engaged with the
company (in the Engage stage).

5.2.1 A website’s textual content

All digital marketing relies heavily on the content marketing on the website. As we have
emphasized in this book, if the website’s content marketing does not get the customer to act in
the way the company wants, the entire marketing process is practically wasted. The company’s
reputation is growing, but it cannot be used to pay employees’ salaries.
Let us take an example. Imagine there are two doors in front of you. You open the first door.
Behind the door is a salesperson who starts presenting a product he is selling to you quickly
and in a vague tone. He constantly fails to answer your questions, and the pushy attitude makes
you feel uncomfortable. You move to the next door. The seller of this room starts by asking
about your needs and the challenges you want to solve. You answer, and the seller tells you
what results others with the same problem have had with his product. In addition, the seller
can read the situation and answer your questions even before you have asked them. Would you
not rather buy the product from the latter seller?
Most of the content on companies’ websites represents one of these vendors. When
a visitor arrives at a company’s website, does he or she encounter a pushy salesperson or
a solution-focused salesperson? The content of the website determines who wants to collabo-
rate with the company, as well as how many are converted to sales leads and how much sales
are generated.

5.2.1.1 Building a buying path to your website using buyer personas

It is important for a company to remember that all the content is created for its customers.
That is why it is important to know what things a company’s buyer personas want more
information on and what things they need help with. When doing content marketing, the
most important thing is to find out the factor that drives the purchase decisions of the buyers
most (i.e., the driver). Once the driver for a buyer persona is known, it should be highlighted
in the content intended for that buyer persona. In this case, the buyer persona begins to want
more value offered by the product or service and is not just looking for the lowest price on the
market. Customers who buy a product because of the value it produces are also much more
likely to commit to the company selling the product.
Once the company’s buyer personas have been identified, separate purchase paths are built
for them, based on the driver guiding each buyer persona. The goal is to guide the customer
from being an information seeker to being a committed customer. Purchasing paths are best
built when the driver that guides the buyer persona is kept at the center of all the content on
the buying path. The company must therefore systematically make use of the buyer persona’s
driver and turn it into willingness to buy the product offered by the company. In this way,
a company does not gather one-time buyers but customers who want to buy a product or
service because of the value it produces.
Take an example where one person wants to save on heating costs in his or her home and
another person wants to reduce her or his carbon footprint. The needs of these two buyer per-
 88 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

sonas are completely different, but a geothermal heat pump, for example, can be one solution
for both needs. Due to the different drivers, two purchase paths have to be built in this case, so
that the need of both buyer personas is channeled into the desire to buy a geothermal pump.
Content marketing that is based on drivers also develops the brand. When the driver
guiding the buyer persona is also present in the content of the website, the customer compares
her or his user experience to the promise made on the website. If the product meets her or
his expectations, the experience is often powerful. In this case, the image of the company in
the customer’s mind develops in accordance with the value of the product and the custom-
er’s experience. The company’s brand also develops based on the kind of customer base the
company manages to attract. Many customers wonder what kind of people prefer certain kinds
of product or service, or a certain brand. When a company gathers the desired customer base
through content marketing, its brand develops in exactly the desired direction.

Figure 5.4 Through purchase paths, website visitors become leads no matter how they
have arrived at the website

Carefully constructed buying paths generate leads from website visitors no matter how they
enter the site (Fiigure 5.4). Purchasing paths are built on the website so that all the content
intended for a specific buyer persona is linked. It is also important that each content item
creates the desire and interest to read the next content item, otherwise the customer will not
move on to the next content item and the purchase path will stop.
Let us take an imaginary example of what a buying path might be in practice. A customer
searches for information online by typing “How to save on heating costs in a detached house”
in the search box of a search engine. She ends up at a blog that discusses five different ways
to save on heating costs. Readers of the blog are segmented by links to slightly more specific
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 89

content so that they are directed to the next, slightly more specific content item by links. For
example, the resident of an electrically heated house is directed to the content “How do you
save on the heating costs of an electrically heated house?” from which she is led to the next,
more detailed content item “How much does a geothermal pump save on the cost of electric
heating? Read five examples.” The content on the geothermal heat pump already provides the
customer with a product selection guide entitled “Choose the correct geothermal heat pump to
maximize energy savings: Five criteria for purchasing a geothermal heat pump.” The customer
stays on the website for half an hour and ends up buying a geothermal heat pump.
Properly made buying paths are of great importance to the functioning of marketing in
its entirety. The previous two examples were, of course, rough simplifications of purchas-
ing paths, and especially in the B2B industries the purchasing paths are often much more
complex as numerous people are involved in decision-making who all look at it from different
perspectives. In B2C industries, too, the acquisition of more valuable products can easily be
considered for years. However, it does not remove the importance of the buying path, on the
contrary, it increases it.

5.2.1.2 Channels bring visitors, the website generates leads

Currently, paid advertising is becoming more common, which is why the importance of
content marketing is further emphasized (Figure 5.5). The more competition there is in paid
advertising channels, the more expensive paid advertising will become. Within a few years, we
will probably be in a situation where poorly converted pages are simply not worth promoting
in a competitive industry until the website generates leads with the desired conversion rate.
In the US, for example, advertising on digital channels is already significantly more expensive
than in Finland.
Let us take an example of how website development improves the cost-effectiveness of
advertising. Imagine that Google and Facebook drive a total of 6,000 visitors to your site each
month. If your site has a conversion rate of 1 percent, you will generate 60 leads per month.
To double the number of leads, you can either try to double the number of visitors to 12,000
per month or improve your website’s conversion rate from 1 percent to 2 percent with content
marketing. Developing a conversion rate is always a more sustainable and affordable choice,
and one of the best ways to do that is through content marketing.
The result of content marketing scales strongly over time as new content is always built on
top of previous content (Figure 5.6). This creates a certain kind of compound interest rate
effect. Let us think that the same amount of resources are used for content each month, be the
resources time or money. The content produced in previous months will yield results each
month after it is produced. The content can also be imagined here as sellers: If there is one
seller in the first company and 100 sellers in the second, which company will make more sales
assuming the sellers are equally good?
Another thing worth noting is that if content marketing is done in a search engine-optimized
way, its impact will go a long way. Thus, if content marketing is done for ten years and is
suddenly stopped, the content marketing that has already been done will generate revenue
for several more years. If, on the other hand, paid advertising is carried out for ten years and
is suddenly stopped, no more revenue will be gained from the paid advertising. Of course,
 90 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Figure 5.5 All digital marketing eventually directs the potential customer to the
company’s website; creating a website that is as sellable and easy to
use as possible is the best way to improve the cost-effectiveness of your
advertising

Figure 5.6 Scaling the results of content marketing

this does not mean that paid advertising should be stopped and that all resources should be
devoted to content creation; properly done paid advertising is very profitable, and in many
industries, it is a lifeline. The example illustrates how long-term results are generated by
content marketing and how its nature differs from that of paid advertising.
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 91

There is confusion about content marketing when it is just seen as writing that anyone who
is literate can do. It is true that anyone can write content, but very few can write it in a way that
produces results. In other words, anyone can write a text about the benefits of jogging. Very
few can write it so that the reader goes for a run after reading the text.
We live amid such a huge flood of messages that we do not want to read a text or watch
a video if we do not find it useful or entertaining. Therefore, buyer personas need to be created
accurately as this is the only way to build interesting content around customers’ problems and
needs. When the content speaks to the customer and focuses on solving his or her problems,
the customer will read the content for anything up to several hours if necessary.

5.2.2 Videos

Most buying decisions are fundamentally driven by emotions. Without emotion, there would
be no temptation to buy. A video tells the story of a service or product precisely in a form that
evokes emotion. It can nail a customer’s attention, entice her or him to visit a website, and
teach her or him how a product or service works. With a video, a company can give a flying
start to a new product launch or rebrand an old product. A video is also a powerful tool for
recruiting new employees as it attracts the attention of potential employees with proven
effectiveness. A video can also provide a peephole to the company’s culture and introduce the
company and its staff, promoting the image of the employer.

5.2.2.1 The production of marketing videos

The production process for marketing videos involves four main stages: production planning,
video filming, post-production, and feedback and follow-up (Figure 5.7).

z Production planning: The production plan explains why the video is being made, what
or who is being filmed, and where and when the video is being filmed. Setting a goal is
the most important step in a production plan. The goal of the video should go hand in
hand with buyer personas and the different stages of their path to purchase. The target
audience is defined through the identification of buyer personas. Publishing channels
are also directly related to the buyer personas. Ask yourself in which channels customers
can be reached with video. Based on the publishing channels, it is known how long the
videos can be in the first place, in what aspect ratio the video must be produced, and the
available advertising options. Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and other channels have
their own rules that define video production from a technical standpoint.
Only after setting a goal is it decided what will be filmed, where, and when. In
addition, when designing a video, it is important to consider your target audiences and
publishing channels in order to identify a suitable video genre, ambience, and highlights.
When designing videos, you also need to know the marketing strategy because the
videos are designed entirely with the company’s other marketing efforts in mind. The
call to action for the video must be clear and in line with other marketing activities. A call
to action could be, for example, “Read more on our website and request a quote.” Of
course, a lot of videos are also produced for other use cases, such as various brand videos,
 92 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

educational videos, and employer branding videos. Even then, it is helpful to know if
your video is intended to be used for paid advertising.
At the end of the production planning, the videos are scripted, the project is sched-
uled, the background music for the video is selected, and the audio clips are recorded.
z Video filming: Usually, filming days include filming several interviews and events. The
aim is to make the stored material match the predefined plan as closely as possible.
Filming is the only step in the video production process that usually requires simultane-
ous physical presence and schedules from videographers and customers.
z Post-production: After the video material is filmed, its post-production begins.
Post-production involves all the activities related to the processing of video material:
video cutting, color definition, sound design, special effects, subtitles, etc. This is the
most arduous step for videographers. Once a draft of the video is complete, the customer
will review and comment on the video, after which the necessary tweaks and changes will
be made. The end result is a finished video production.
z Feedback and follow-up: About a month after the video production was completed, it is
good to go through how well the results met the set goals and what was learned from all
this.

Figure 5.7 Things to consider in the production of marketing videos

5.2.2.2 Videos in the different stages of the MRACE® model

The different stages of the MRACE® model require different styles of video because the buyers
are at different stages in the buying process. Slightly longer and slower-paced videos are suit-
able for the Act and Convert stages, but do not work for the Reach stage. In contrast, the fast
and short videos typical of the Reach phase do not add any value to the buyer in the Act phase.
In the Reach stage, the only function of a video is to nail down the viewer’s attention and
get them to click on the ad link. The optimal duration for a Reach-stage video is 5–30 seconds.
Since there is only a negligible time window in which to convince the viewer, the video needs
to go straight to the point. So, you especially have to focus on the first seconds of the video;
the viewer’s attention needs to be nailed down visually as (on most channels) the video starts
without sound by default. If there is speech in the video, it is necessary that the video is also
clearly subtitled.
In the Act stage, the most important function of a video is to engage the viewer with a service,
product, or brand. The optimal duration for an Act-stage video is 1–5 minutes. An Act-stage
video is often embedded in landing pages or in paid advertising. On the landing page, the
performance of a video can be measured, for example, via downloads of a specific publication
(a guide, whitepaper, digital magazine), as a result of which, the viewer becomes a lead. In
advertising, the percentage of video consumption by viewers can be used as a measure of video
performance. On Facebook, for example, follow-up action can be targeted directly at an audi-
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 93

ence that has viewed a specific percentage of the video (e.g., at least 50 percent). An audience
that has watched a long video at least halfway is likely to be interested in the product, service,
or brand and thus may represent a potential customer.
In the Convert phase, the main function of a video is to convert the viewer into a customer.
What is essential in the video is that the call to action is clearly visible to the viewer. A Convert
video can be used on a landing page or in advertising. The content of such a video depends
on what type of product is being marketed in the video. When marketing a simple consumer
product to the general public, such as toothpaste or a soft drink, the video should be short
and concise, lasting about 10 to 30 seconds. When selling a specialty product to an enlight-
ened audience, such as a camera backpack, an air-source heat pump, or educational course,
the video must have enough substance to convince the audience. This inevitably also means
a longer video.
An Engage-stage video promotes customer retention by teaching the customer to use
the product or service better. It can also produce additional sales by providing an existing
customer with information about a new product. In addition, videos that guide you through
the use of a product or service serve as content marketing for new customers. Engage-stage
videos can be used on a website or blog and in email marketing, advertising, or the company’s
customer portal.
A video is a great way to remind a customer about a product, service, brand, or job vacancy.
The role of remarketing is to grab the viewer’s attention, remind them of the offer, get them
to click on the ad, and return them to the landing page where conversion can take place. In
general, remarketing should favor short, 15–30-second videos as the viewer is already familiar
with the offer (the viewer has either visited the company’s website before or watched a certain
amount of some previous video).
It is also possible to build video series on Facebook and YouTube. Video ads can be trig-
gered so that when a viewer watches a certain percentage of the ad, they will be shown a new
video next time. The customer can thus be guided along the purchase path one video at a time.
From the same video material, it is possible to produce both longer and shorter videos for
different stages of the purchase path. This saves time and production costs compared with
producing videos for each stage separately. We recommend a minimum of three videos for
each marketing and recruitment campaign:

1. A Reach-stage video that brings visitors to the landing page.

2. An Act-/Convert-stage video that tells the visitor on the landing page more about the
offering.
3. A remarketing video that returns interested visitors back to the landing page.

Diversifying video content can also be used for testing different sales arguments. For example,
a long video of more than a minute in the Act or Convert stage often includes three to five
different selling points. Each of these can be cut down to a short 5–30-second video ad that can
be used in the Reach stage. By A/B testing the ads (i.e., by comparing the performance of two
different ads) you can get an idea of which arguments will best resonate with your target audi-
ence and what angles your videos and other marketing activities should adopt in the future.
 94 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

5.2.3 Visual design

The visual look of a company determines what kind of first impression the company gives to
its customers. A first impression can only be given once, which is why it is important that the
customer’s thoughts on the brand are heading in the right direction from the very beginning.
In addition, a unified visual look strengthens the brand and increases its recognizability in
various channels and media. The purpose of visual design is to support and clarify commu-
nication through colors, layout, fonts, photographs, and other graphics. On the website, it
enhances the customer’s user experience and guides his or her actions as desired.
Most purchase decisions are made when the buyer’s perception of the product matches the
buyer’s desired perception. Creating the right kind of image is important because it makes the
customer engage with the brand longer, in addition to making the brand promise stronger.
For example, what is the image of a cleaning company with a dark brown and blurry website
compared with one with light and fresh pages? Because brown, murkiness and ambiguity
signal dirt and clutter, the latter company is likely to create a better image for the customer. In
reality, companies can be very equal in terms of competence, but their visual image may differ
greatly. It is very common for the visual appearance to create a worse image of the company
than actually is the case. The visual design therefore plays a crucial role in how the customer
perceives the competence of the company.
A unified visual design can also help a company to engage the buyers as its regular cus-
tomers. By maintaining a unified visual look, the company helps the customer recognize the
company in all channels, from social media to the company’s website. Recognizability is one of
the most important indicators of brand value. For example, if you are buying new sports shoes,
you will probably pay more attention to shoes that are offered by the brands that you recognize
as most people are more likely to buy from a company they are familiar with and recognize.
The more often a customer comes across the brand look of a particular company, the better
it stays in the customer’s mind and the more familiar it begins to feel. A feeling of familiarity,
in turn, is key to building trust, which in turn is a prerequisite for trading. A unified look across
all channels is therefore the easiest and also the most effective way to increase the customer’s
impression that a company is familiar and reliable. With a unified look, the entire brand’s look
is also more manageable (Figure 5.8).

Figure 5.8 With a unified look, a company creates recognizability

 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 95

A visual look can also be used to communicate a company’s values to a target audience as
a person whose values match the company’s values is more likely to end up as a paying cus-
tomer. By the combination of appealing visuals and content, values are made visible, which
engages customers in the company and promotes customer acquisition. If, for example, one of
the company’s values is environmental friendliness, a mere green leaf near some text reinforces
the message.
The customers of competing companies are often very similar to each other. Therefore, the
visual appearances of companies in the same industry may also resemble each other. When
designing a visual look, it is important to adopt the predominant look of the industry, yet
clearly different from your competitors. One good way to do this is to highlight the company’s
values in the visuals because they allow the company to develop its brand and appeal to the
target group it wants.
If the look of the company is similar to that of its competitors, the company will appear to
be equal to everyone else in the eyes of the customer. When a company stands out, it gets more
attention and becomes a more identifiable player. When designing a visual look, other players
in the industry need to be thoroughly analyzed: What is the look of the competitors? And How
can you build a recognizable look that stands out from theirs?

5.2.3.1 Visual design as part of the MRACE® model

Visual design is connected to and affects every step of the MRACE® model.

z Reach: A company that strongly stands out visually from its competitors immediately
gets a competitive advantage. Even if the customer does not yet know the company, the
likelihood of a purchase increases when the advertising and website grab the customer’s
attention and look trustworthy.
z Act: Visual design makes it possible to build a priority order between the elements of
a website. By talking about creating a priority order, we refer to visually emphasizing the
elements to which the visitor should pay attention. Such highlights guide the customer
forward on the purchase path.
z Convert: The buying experience is made user-friendly and easy to understand by
clearly highlighting all the things that facilitate purchasing. This will remove barriers to
purchasing and generate interest, even when the customer is simply browsing the site
quickly.
z Engage: From the very first stage, customers have built a strong image of what the
company looks like. Once the image of the company’s visual look is fixed in the custom-
er’s mind and she or he comes across the company’s ad later, she or he recognizes the
company.
z Measure: A visual look can be considered successful when it creates the desired image
of the company for customers. Success or failure is tested with surveys that find out
customers’ opinions about the company’s visual look. Alternatively, the customer may
be asked to list, for example, seven adjectives that he or she believes best reflect the look
and feel of the company. A/B testing can be used to find out which style of ad works best
on Facebook, for example, in terms of its visual appearance.
96 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

CASE STUDY
CASE EXAMPLE: THE POWER OF SIPARILA’S MULTI-CHANNEL CONTENT
MARKETING
Siparila offers the most comprehensive range of wood construction products in Finland.
The range consists of interior, exterior, and sauna panels, as well as yard construction
products. The company’s main target groups are all people working in wood construction,
from consumers and architects to large nationwide timber and construction stores.

INCREASING PRODUCT AND BRAND AWARENESS IS AT

THE HEART OF MARKETING
Siparila has been in business for a long time, but their challenge in marketing was very
typical: excellent products had not been communicated in a memorable way. Therefore,
the most important goals of marketing were to increase product and brand awareness.
With the help of these two goals, demand was increased in all target groups both via
Siparila’s channels and its reseller network.
Due to the wide range of products, it was initially decided that marketing should focus
on certain top products. The landing pages of these products were carefully finalized—
both visually and in terms of content (the Convert stage)—and various blog posts (in the
Reach, Act, Engage stages) were built around the products for different buyer personas.
With these activities, demand for the products increased and resellers learned to sell
Siparila’s products better to consumers. The leverage that content brings to sales thus
extends to the sales speeches of the resellers.
A major role in raising the awareness of the company was to create a thought leader po-
sition by taking a stand on the major themes surrounding wood construction. Making val-
ues visible in marketing and in a firm’s operations makes any business more approachable
and interesting. In this way, the company is able to strengthen its position as an industry
expert, which increases the customer’s interest (in the Convert stage) and commitment (in
the Engage stage) to the company.

HOW WAS THE CONTENT DISTRIBUTED TO BUYERS?

Siparila’s products are both beautiful and highly technical. Thus, communication could be
designed in a variety of content formats using images, videos, and informative text. The
Reach stage was designed so that Instagram acted as a source of inspiration and as a com-
munity builder, Facebook was deployed for results-based advertising in order to reach
new interested audiences, and Google Ads and SEO were used to respond to customers’
product and problem queries.
When the product range is wide, not everything can be fixed right away. Therefore,
Siparila’s approach to marketing was a wise choice from a strategic point of view; concen-
trating on one product group at a time will get its marketing off to a good start, after which
supportive activities are enough to maintain a good performance level.
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 97

A FEW KEY FIGURES

REACH
The amount of organic site traffic increased by 74 percent compared with the previous
year.
Social media reached 297 percent more people (700,000) than in the previous year,
although the budget was only increased by 98 percent.

ACT
The total number of site visitors increased by 181 percent compared with the previous
year.
The number of product page views increased by 42 percent compared with the previous
year.

CONVERT
As many as 418 requests for quotations were received in half a year, which is almost twice
as many as before.
The number of people who went to reseller pages through Google increased by 57
percent.

ENGAGE
There were 22,129 returning visitors to the site during the first half of the year, which
means that the site engages visitors well.

5.3 SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING AND ONLINE

ADVERTISING
Search engine marketing (SEM) is the marketing of a website or service on search engines.
The search engine in the Finnish market is almost always Google as it is by far the most used
search engine in Finland. Other search engines include Yahoo, Yandex, Bing, Baidu, and
DuckDuckGo. Due to Google’s overwhelming popularity, we will only focus on Google in this
book when it comes to SEM.
SEM involves two major marketing techniques: SEO and SEA. After that, we will cover
Google’s core online advertising services including the Google Display Network, Google
Discovery Ads, and YouTube advertising.
We are probably right to claim that you use Google to search for information when you
make an informed purchasing decision. Let that be a good justification for the importance of
SEM because we can guarantee that if you are, you are not the only one doing so.
 98 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

5.3.1 Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO improves and increases the amount and quality of organic traffic to a website by improv-
ing the search engine visibility of the site. SEO is not a quick action as search engines take
numerous factors into account when determining search rankings, in addition to which, com-
petition for free or organic visibility is constantly increasing. Still, SEO is considered the cor-
nerstone of digital marketing because the more organic traffic a website has, the more digital
marketing is on stable ground. If a company’s marketing relies entirely on paid advertising and
the money taps suddenly have to close (as happened in the spring of 2020 due to COVID-19),
marketing will stop completely. Good organic search visibility is not affected by global crises.
SEO has traditionally meant technical SEO as well as the creation of search engine-optimized
content. Today, Google values more and more sites that are easy to use and have a great user
experience. Therefore, SEO now needs to be accompanied by a third component, conversion
rate optimization (CRO) (note that the term conversion optimization is also used). The better
user experience created by CRO is likely to be further emphasized in the future as the amount
of content is predicted to explode with content written by AI. If anyone can write a 5,000-word
blog post in minutes with the help of AI in the near future, Google will have to change its
search-ranking algorithm, even radically. It is exciting to see how AI content is going to trans-
form SEO and digital marketing overall.
The main goal of SEO is to increase the traffic to a website. Getting organic traffic to your
website is, of course, important, but getting your visitor to behave in the way you want on
your site (e.g., getting her or him to download a guide or request a quote) is more important.
Therefore, SEO needs to be linked to buyer personas and buying paths. With CRO, traffic to
your site is finally taken advantage of with a better user experience, turning as many visitors as
possible into paying customers.
When SEO, CRO, and quality content production are combined, a website achieves its full
conversion potential. The ability of a website to generate leads and trade is one of the most
critical stages of digital marketing because all marketing ultimately leads to a website. For
example, if you get a recommendation from a friend about a company while jogging together,
that too will often lead you to that company’s website in the end. Therefore, how well a website
directs site visitors towards requesting a quote, purchasing a product, or getting in touch
affects the overall outcome of your marketing, regardless of how the visitor came to your site.

5.3.1.1 Improving search rankings

The first goal of SEO is to make your site perform better and rise in Google search results. This
occurs in the Reach phase of the MRACE® model. The following are three things you need to
do to get a better position in the search results (Figure 5.9):

1. Create content based on keyword research.

2. Have a website with first-class technical functionality.
3. Have a strong domain.
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 99

If you want to increase your search ranking, these three areas must also be continuously devel-
oped. Otherwise, rankings in the search engines will not rise, they will fall.

z Content based on keyword research: Keyword research finds out what terms customers
use to search for a company’s products. The better the content of your site matches
your customers’ searches, the more traffic your website receives. However, a high search
ranking alone does not mean that visitors will turn into business as website traffic alone
will not put a single euro in the cashbox. Therefore, in the strategy phase, buyer perso-
nas are created so that the content can be built around the buyer personas’ purchasing
processes. In this case, the content systematically directs visitors to, for example, request
a quote or download a guide.
High search rankings can be compared to a brick-and-mortar store: how high
a website appears in the search results corresponds to how well a brick-and-mortar store
is located. However, the central location of a brick-and-mortar store does not guarantee
that customers will buy anything. Therefore, the store needs to be made consistent and
all barriers to buying need to be removed; on a website, this means creating buying paths
with content and CRO of the site.
z The first-class technical functionality of the website: By technical functionality, we
mean that the website works properly for both the user and Google. Under the hood
of a website, there are hundreds of small factors that affect search rankings. Even the
slightest mistake can prevent Google’s crawler from accessing your website, meaning
that your entire website will not be able to appear in search results at all. When a website
is technically working properly, it also becomes much faster, which has a positive effect
on search rankings and the customer experience.
z A strong domain: If the domain is strong, search engines will see it as trusted and
popular. So, the stronger the domain, the more likely Google is to promote your website.
A strong domain is most affected by how many other websites link to that website as the
links appear to Google’s search algorithms as recommendations for that website. When
other websites want to link to your website, it makes your website trustworthy in the eyes
of Google. Who would want to link to a bad website from their own website?

Such links can be acquired both actively and passively. Active link acquisition means, among
other things, that if a company is mentioned on a website, the company contacts the website
and asks the website to add a link to the company’s website. Passive link acquisition is done
through quality content. When high-quality content is produced for a website, those who write
about similar topics can, if they wish, create a link to the website to add value to their readers.
SEO should be developed by first analyzing the data collected from the website in order
to make a plan and hypotheses. For example, a company may find that key blog posts on its
website have not risen in Google’s search results. Based on this, a plan is made in which the
links to these blog posts are added to the footer of the site. The plan is put into practice, after
which its success can be accurately measured. After a month, the company notices that these
blog posts have started to rise in Google’s search results, so they decide to apply the same
tactics to a few other blog posts. When the results of SEO are constantly monitored, as in the
previous example, and based on the results, hypotheses and plans are created, development
 100 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Figure 5.9 The three most important areas of SEO are keyword-based content,
first-class technical functionality, and a strong domain name

becomes an ongoing part of marketing. Continuous improvement allows you to find the best
SEO techniques for your site as quickly as possible.

5.3.1.2 Conversion rate optimization (CRO)

CRO in this context means improving the salability and ease of use of a website with the help
of information gathered through various tools. In practice, this means that the website is con-
stantly evolving to better meet customer needs, making customers find what they are looking
for faster and making asking for a quote or buying a product more likely. If your business
website receives a lot of visitors but no purchases, leads, or contacts, CRO tells you where to
find the problem. CRO supports digital sales because it makes it easier for the customer to
progress along the purchase path by removing barriers to purchase. Developing your website
to be more customer-friendly through CRO is extremely important as even very small changes
can make a big difference in regard to achieving a more positive customer experience.
CRO also has a significant impact on SEO. The longer visitors spend on a website and the
more pages they browse, the better Google interprets that website. In that case, Google is more
likely to rank that website higher in search results because it wants to direct its customers to
the best possible websites.
Conversion means achieving a measurable goal, such as sending a form, buying a product
from an online store, or joining an email list. The conversion rate, on the other hand, refers to
the percentage of visitors to your website who act as desired and accomplish one of your con-
version goals. However, a website’s overall conversion rate is usually a pretty poor metric that
does not say much. For example, an ongoing recruitment campaign may completely confuse
a website’s overall conversion rate. Sure, that metric gives an indication of how well a website
engages visitors and how well paid advertising has succeeded in getting the right kind of visi-
tors to your website, but it does not tell you anything very specific or concrete.
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 101

CRO should always start with strategy work because hundreds of website details can be filed
better, but in reality, only a handful of changes are important for the end result. The strategy
is used to collect data about users in order to be able to really improve the business-relevant
sections of the website.
As part of your CRO strategy, you will find out what your website’s worst pain points are
and how you can improve the customer experience. To this end, the website should be audited
in order to gather quantitative and qualitative information about the activities of website visi-
tors. The result is a comprehensive plan with which to solve challenges related to the usability
of the website, content, and technical functionality. Before you begin CRO, you should answer
at least the following questions: Where are we now? What problems need to be solved? What
is needed to solve the problems? What are the obstacles to the proposed solutions? Once these
questions have been answered, CRO will be easier to implement.
The data collection process for CRO (Figure 5.10) begins with an analysis of the data col-
lected from the website and, based on the analysis, the development targets for the website are
found, which will be achieved by testing various remedies for the website; finally, the effects of
the actions are measured and analyzed.

Figure 5.10 The data collection process for CRO

In a quantitative study, a website is initially covered by a comprehensive technical review

that identifies the website’s problem areas: Does the website work properly with all devices
and their different browsers? Does the website have technical issues that cause website users
headaches or even prevent conversions? Are there any challenges to website speed—especially
during mobile usage—that should be addressed? Following the technical review, user activity
is mapped using a survey of Google Analytics to determine the stages of a customer’s purchase
path and their conversion rates. In addition, the bounce rate of the main landing pages from
different traffic sources is examined to see if, for example, traffic from social media has a higher
bounce rate than traffic from Google. If the difference is significant in favor of one source of
traffic over another, it is worth considering how the less well-functioning source of traffic
could be improved.
 102 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Qualitative research examines the reasons behind users’ actions: What do users think when
they see a product? What do users want? Why are users on the website? What do users do on
the website? Information is collected from other contact channels, such as chat logs, contact
forms, and customer surveys.
Website changes should not be made at will, they should be done with CRO tools. The
tools can be used to track the behavior of visitors to a website. Valuable information to collect
includes information on what your visitors are doing on the website, the most popular landing
pages, and the biggest pain points on your website that are preventing a conversion from
taking place. One of the key tools for website analysis is Hotjar.
Useful features of the tools include the following:

z Heatmaps: Heatmaps visually show which points users click on and where on the website
they lose interest in the content and stop browsing. If most visitors stop reading a text
in the middle of it but one of the most important things in the text comes at the end, the
structure of the text needs to be changed.
z Recordings of visitor movements on the website: The recordings concretely show how the
visitor navigates the website and whether he or she gets stuck somewhere in the buying
process due to a poorly designed buying path.
z Form analysis: This feature reveals how users enter information into forms and whether
there are sections in the forms that can be developed to increase the form-fill rate.
z Page-specific queries: The surveys ask the customer directly about the pain points, about
what could be better on the website, and about whether they found what they needed.
This simple measure often results in excellent development proposals.

Based on the information gathered, it is advisable to prioritize issues that require action. At
the same time, development suggestions are created to solve the problems: Is this a usability
problem? Is the information provided by the website unclear? Is the solution provided by the
website useful to the user? Is there a technical issue with this website? Sometimes even very
small changes result in a percentage increase in conversions. Sometimes the solution may
require significantly more work, such as a complete overhaul of the product page or a redesign
of the top navigation of the entire site. If possible, development suggestions should be reviewed
with a larger team so that in addition to the information gathered, different perspectives on the
situation are obtained.
Figure 5.11 shows what CRO can accomplish, for example, for an online store. Based on the
analysis, the following problem is found: products are added to the cart, but there are few pur-
chases. Hotjar recordings show that some products are not stored in the shopping cart, which
impairs the usability of the store. When the problem is fixed, the conversion rate increases
from 1.5 percent to 2.6 percent.
It is important to understand that if no improvements are made, it will put a brake on all
marketing. The website is at the heart of all digital marketing, and traffic from other marketing
channels—such as television, radio, and print media—also comes to the website. If a website
does not work the way your company wants it to, a large portion of the sales potential it gen-
erates is wasted.
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 103

Figure 5.11 A practical example of what CRO can accomplish

Websites need to be continuously improved based on data and changes in customers’ pur-
chasing behavior. Customers are rapidly embracing new technologies that they can leverage in
their purchasing process. For example, a few years ago, chatbots seemed strange to many, but
at the moment, companies that do not take advantage of chatbots are likely to lose business.
You should feel free to try new tools and channels to find out if they are suitable for marketing
your business.
The purpose of continuous CRO is for the company to constantly test something new and
thus be among the first to find the best ways to increase the result generated by marketing
(Figure 5.12). In continuous CRO, hypotheses are first made about how a bottleneck noticed
in the buying path could be avoided. The hypotheses are then tested in collaboration with the
website developers and their effects are measured. A report is then made on the change, and it
is reflected in how the company acts in similar situations in the future. After this, the process
is started again from the beginning. In this way, the customers’ purchasing path is constantly
improving and as many of the website visitors as possible become paying customers.

5.3.2 Search engine advertising (SEA)

SEA is advertising on search engines where the ad shown to a user is determined by the
keyword and location used by the user. SEA ads appear at the top of a search engine’s search
results page. In SEA, an advertiser pays a certain amount to the search engine each time
someone clicks on the ad’s business page. The amount varies a lot depending on the region,
keyword, season, and industry. As we said earlier, in this book we only deal with the most-used
search engine in Finland, Google.
 104 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Figure 5.12 The process of continuous CRO

5.3.2.1 Google Ads SEA

Google Ads SEA is one of the most effective and measurable forms of marketing. A potential
customer can become a paying customer very quickly if a visitor is directed directly from the
ad to the correct landing page.
When planning your advertising, you need to carefully analyze what kind of pages a visitor
is directed to and from which ad. If the right landing page is missing, it is a good idea to build
it in order to improve your advertising performance. Naturally, the ads must be such that they
attract clicks to the company’s pages from a number of competing ads.
Advertising on the search network brings a lot of opportunities for a skilled actor as small
margins in advertising make a big difference in the end result. For example, if the landing page
that your ad directs visitors to converts better than a competitor’s page, the company may pay
more per click than the competitor. When you pay more for a click, your ad will appear higher
on Google’s search page, prompting potential customers to click on your company’s website
and click more rarely on a competitor’s site.
The price of advertising is also affected by Google’s quality score for advertising. The quality
score is improved by improving your advertising, for example, through more accurate target-
ing and through better and more informative landing pages. The better your quality score, the
less one click costs and the more likely your business is to reach the top of the Google search
page, resulting in better advertising results.
The cost-effectiveness of advertising is largely determined by the keywords that trigger the
ad. However, just as important for the cost-effectiveness of advertising is which keywords
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 105

do not result in customers seeing your ads. Such keywords are called negative keywords and
are used to avoid unnecessary clicks that would be unnecessarily costly. For example, if a car
dealer does not add the word “toy” as a negative keyword, those looking for toy cars may end
up on the car dealer’s website. On the other hand, just “car” is a fairly vague search term, and
not many people thinking about buying a car start their search process with the word “car.”
So when thinking about keywords, you need to step into the customer’s boots and carefully
consider the different scenarios that can be referred to by a particular keyword.

Figure 5.13 SEA can be done for both the Reach and Convert phases

The purpose of SEA is to direct the company’s website to read-ready audiences, information
seekers, and audiences seeking competitors. SEA is most effective when the customer is in the
selection and evaluation phase. In this case, the customer is ready to buy but still compares
the service providers before making a purchase decision. In contrast, Google Ads advertising
makes it very difficult to reach customers who have not yet begun their purchase process. In
such a situation it is better to advertise on YouTube, Discovery, Display, and social media
advertising.
If a customer is directed to the website through advertising while their purchase process
is in the selection and evaluation phase, the purchase decision may still be interrupted for
one reason or another. In this case, as the service is already familiar to them from a previous
website visit, the customer will be redirected directly from the Reach phase to the content of
the Convert phase in order to request a quote, make a purchase, or download a guide (Figure
5.13).
Let us take an example of how the use of search terms tells you how close a customer is to
making a purchase decision. When a customer uses the search term “loan” on Google, they
 106 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

know they need a loan but do not yet know what type of loan and where to get it. With such
a general search term, search volumes are plentiful, but making a purchase decision still has
many twists and turns. Your website should be very well conversion optimized so that you can
even advertise to customers using such a very general search term. When a customer uses the
search term “mortgage,” he or she already knows what loan he or she needs but does not yet
know from which bank to get it. For such a slightly more detailed search, where the customer
is still in the evaluation stage, an extremely good landing page should be created that justifies
why it is worth taking a mortgage from a particular bank. When a person uses the search term
“mortgage + [the name of that bank],” the applicant has already defined exactly what he or she

Figure 5.14 The closer the customer is to making a purchase decision, the better the
advertising result
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 107

wants and where he or she wants to get it. The buying potential is high if the website manages
to quickly direct the applicant towards making contact, for example, requesting a loan offer.
So, it is a good idea to start with SEM by targeting audiences that are as close as possible
to purchase because they are most likely to bring in quick sales (Figure 5.14). Therefore, it
is also worth paying more for such audiences. Once advertising is effective for an audience
close to making a purchase decision, it is a good idea to start scaling your advertising to an
ever-widening and colder audience as long as it is clearly profitable for the advertiser. The
role of measurement and data integrity in the scaling of advertising is emphasized. However,
gaining transactions from a cold audience (consisting of people who have not yet shown inter-
est in a company’s products, but whose online activities show that they are potential customers
for the company) often also requires developing a website so that its content creates buying
paths that are specific to certain buyer personas.

5.3.3 Online advertising with Google’s services

Online advertising means all paid advertising that utilizes the Internet. In this book, we will
only cover Google’s online advertising services under online advertising. Google’s online
advertising services are listed below:

z The Google Display Network

z Google Discovery Ads
z YouTube advertising
z Google Shopping.

Each of these four services is at its best when used in the Reach phase to reach new customers,
but each can also be used in the Convert phase as a means of remarketing. However, we will
not go into more detail about Google Shopping in this book as this channel is practically only
suitable for the marketing of online stores.

5.3.3.1 Google Display advertising

The Google Display Network is the world’s most comprehensive ad display network, reaching
more than 90 percent of Internet users. The Google Display Network has evolved tremen-
dously in recent years, especially in terms of identifying people and targeting advertising as
Google provides more tools for identifying audiences. It allows advertising to be designed to
reach different buyer personas. The Google Display Network’s CPCs are also affordable com-
pared with the Google search network, making it a cost-effective advertising channel when
used properly.
Google Display Network ads can appear on a variety of websites, video content, and mobile
applications. A display ad can be in the form of a text, image banner, or video ad. Almost all the
banner ads you see online are Display Ads; you can look at them a little more closely next time
and think about what the advertiser is trying to accomplish with that particular ad.
Google Display advertising is based on two components:

1. Directing potential, but cold, audiences to the website.

2. Returning warm audiences to your website through remarketing (Figure 5.15).
 108 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

As previously noted, cold audiences consist of people who have not yet shown interest in
a company’s products, but whose online activities show that they are potential customers for
the company. These activities include visiting certain pages or performing certain searches.
Display advertising reaches cold audiences and directs them to a website. Opportunities to
target cold audiences in Display advertising include demographic targeting, such as targeting
by age or gender, and targeting interested people or people with purchase intentions using
Google’s data.
Warm audiences, on the other hand, are made up of people who have visited the company’s
website or purchased the company’s products in the past. Returning these people to your
website is usually the most profitable part of Google Display advertising. Warm audiences are
made up of all the visitors who return to the website, as well as people who have completed
microconversions, such as those who have watched a video. With warm audiences, advertising
can be targeted to visitors who have visited your website within a month, browsed a certain
page, or browsed a certain page for a certain period of time and then returned to your website
and completed a certain conversion goal.

Figure 5.15 Targeting ads to cold and warm audiences

Display advertising can be targeted very precisely to a wide variety of audiences. Google
already has a huge number of ready-made audiences, and it has been said, for example, that
when someone was dating her partner, Google had known about her intentions long before
the person began dating her partner, based on the person’s search behavior. In addition, the
company can customize audiences based on its own data.
In display advertising, as in all other advertising, it is important to consider the stage of the
person’s purchase process. The same ad should not be shown to the same audiences all the
time, the ad should change according to the online behavior of Internet users. We will next
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 109

go through how to do display advertising at the different stages of the buying process (Figure
5.16).

Figure 5.16 Planning for display advertising at the different stages of the buying process

z At the stage of arousing interest and solving the problem, potential customers who are
not yet familiar with the company’s brand or products are targeted. The goal is to make
your ad as accessible as possible to as many people as possible and to gather a remarket-
ing list of all the people who have shown a genuine interest in the ad. The aim is not to
direct a potential customer directly to making a request for a quotation, but to get him
or her to read, for instance, a blog article to the end and get to know the website in more
detail. As with first dates: first, greetings are exchanged, and marriage is not immediately
proposed. Still, the advertisement should not be blindly targeted at all possible audiences
but at genuine potential customers in a cost-effective manner and utilizing previous
customer information.
● Targeting: Custom affinity audiences and similar audiences.
● Advertised content: General blog posts on “Did You Know That?” articles. The aim
of the content is to arouse interest and highlight a possible problem of the customer
that the customer does not yet know exists.
z The information retrieval phase is aimed at customers who are already looking for infor-
mation about the products offered by the company. The targeting used in advertising
is based on the remarketing list created at an earlier stage (i.e., people who have shown
interest in the company’s products are targeted). The goal is to guide the customer
forward on their purchasing path and get her or him to learn more about the product.
Suitable content for the information retrieval phase is, for example, buyer’s guides that
gather the contact information of those who download the guide—this information can
be used later for email marketing.
 110 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

● Targeting: All users in the previous step who read the whole blog post or visited the
company’s website are targeted. To keep the targeting from being too low, it will also
be extended to in-market audiences who have recently shown interest in the product.
In this way, the message is delivered both as remarketing to those who have seen the
previous ad and to new people who are already aware of their needs but do not yet
know about the company’s products.
● Advertised content: Buyer’s guides.
z In the selection and comparison phase, the customer is already aware of their needs and
actively compares different service providers. The goal of advertising in this phase is to
take the customer forward on his or her buying path and get him or her to choose the
company that just advertised from among all the competitors.
● Targeting: People who have downloaded a buyer’s guide.
● Advertised content: Product information pages, price information, reference stories,
financing, a photo gallery.
z In the decision phase, the customer looks for the best possible solution or service to meet
her or his needs. At this point, she or he is already ready to make a request for a quotation
and work out a final price with the seller. The targeting targets a very warm audience,
so we can already talk about real targeted marketing. The ad directs the potential buyer
towards submitting a request for a quotation.
● Targeting: All the visitors involved in the previous stage who read more detailed
information about the products, examined the price information, and got acquainted
with the presentation of the company are targeted.
● Advertised content: A free consultation page that explains the benefits of a consul-
tation visit. A request-a-quote page for customers who already know exactly what
they want.

5.3.3.2 Google Discovery advertising

Discovery advertising is advertising on the Google Discover platform. In the MRACE® model,
it focuses on the Reach and Convert steps. The Discover platform includes the Google Discover
Feed, Gmail, and YouTube. The Discover Feed is the feed of news and advertisements that
Google brings to the user in the context of Google’s mobile app.
Discovery advertising is similar in style to social media advertising and has been seen as
Google’s counterweight to Facebook and Instagram advertising. Discovery ads appear on
Google’s Discover platform, like native ads among news articles, so users do not get bored
of banners in the same way as they do on many news sites and they have less ads to process.
Discovery ads also do not look like ads, which is why they often have high click-through rates.
This is also due to the fact that the ad content displayed to each user is based on user activity
on Google services and recent interests.
Discovery advertising quickly became a popular form of advertising in 2020, not only
because of the good results it offers, but also because it is straightforward to get started. All you
need is a few images and captions to get started advertising. Your ads will then be shown to
interested customers based on your cost per action (CPA) and budget. Discovery campaigns
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 111

can reach up to 2.9 billion customers on popular Google feeds. The large size of the audience
also means that advertising needs to be targeted wisely so that the budget is not wasted in an
instant.
Google Display and Discovery ads are often compared because they have very similar poli-
cies and targeting patterns. However, Display ads only appear on the Google Display Network,
for instance, in websites and apps. With Discovery advertising, your advertising is much more
visible in Google’s services: the Discovery Feed, Gmail, and YouTube (Figure 5.17). This
makes Discovery advertising more
multi-channel, relevant, and effective.
Discovery advertising therefore ben-
efits every organization when it is
done properly. It can be used in both
B2C and B2B industries, in recruit-
ment advertising, in the advertising of
blog articles, and in the acquisition of
leads (e.g., by advertising a guide or
webinar). Discovery advertising is also
a good option when your SEM clicks
are high.
In the Reach phase, Discovery adver-
tising works very well for increasing
brand awareness because the ads are
visual, inspiring, and based on user
Figure 5.17 Multi-channel Discovery interest and behavior. Therefore, an ad
advertising seen on the Google Discovery Network
will feel very relevant and appropriate
to the user, especially if the ad is well produced. Discovery campaigns make it possible to
arouse the interest of potential customers before they begin the information retrieval phase in
their purchasing process. This allows the company to connect with a potential customer before
its competitors.
In the Convert phase, Discovery advertising works best when you want to reach your most
important customers again. When consumers return to search for content on their favorite
Google feeds, Discovery campaigns can increase the number of conversions among customers
who know the brand best and are more likely to stay active.
In Discovery advertising, the possibilities for targeting your ads are very similar to those of
other Google advertising technologies. Advertising can use Google’s ready-made audiences
that it has created in order for advertisers to take advantage of the vast amount of data it
collects. In addition, audiences can be customized based on the advertiser’s needs, which gives
advertising more opportunities to stand out from the competition.
A very simple way to implement advertising targeting is to divide your audiences into the
above-mentioned cold and warm audiences. In many cases, the company gets the fastest
visible results from warm audiences, but in the long run, they may not be better than the results
from cold audiences. The potential of Discovery advertising to increase brand awareness
 112 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

among cold audiences is high, which can yield significant results in the longer term. That is
why data integrity, its interpretation, conclusions, and testing are essential parts of Discovery
advertising (like all other digital marketing).
For achieving the best results, Discovery ads should also be designed to support the cus-
tomer’s purchase process and targeted at the right place on the customer’s purchase path. For
example, if you are very stressed without being aware of it, you should see an advert for an
article about the harm of stress or telling you how to eliminate stress. In contrast, your interest
could be aroused by an ad addressing topics that you can identify with, such as an article enti-
tled “Do you sleep worse than before? Five tips on how to get better sleep” that explains that
stress can cause sleep disorders. In this way, for example, a company that offers meditation
courses gets the attention of its potential customer. If the customer has not yet noticed the
meditation guide offered by the company on his or her first visit, the company can advertise it
through Discovery advertising with the title “Five minutes of meditation will give you half an
hour of deeper sleep.”
Targeting Discovery advertising at different stages of the buying process can be summarized
as follows. Once a customer has just identified her or his problem or need, he or she should
be targeted by adverts for a relevant product or service. In the information retrieval phase, the
customer is actively looking for a solution to his or her problem, so he or she should be pro-
vided with more information related to solving the problem. In the selection and comparison
phase, the company should emphasize the benefits of its product in advertising as the customer
compares different products. In the final decision stage, it is worth encouraging the customer
to buy the product, for example, by raising the benefits of the product or by telling good cus-
tomer stories in advertising (Figure 5.18).

Figure 5.18 Discovery advertising in different stages of the buying process

 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 113

5.3.3.3 YouTube advertising

YouTube advertising is used to promote a company’s brand and product. It adheres very well
to the principles of Display advertising. Their target audiences are similar, and both channels
direct visitors to the landing page best suited for advertising. The absolute benefits of YouTube
advertising are that video can communicate things that cannot be done with images and text
alone. On the other hand, video is slower to edit than either image- or text-based advertising,
so videos need to be carefully designed.
YouTube is the world’s most popular website and, according to several rankings, the world’s
second largest search engine. In addition, Google is increasingly placing relevant video results
in the list of Google searches. As a result, high-quality, regular video production that provides
useful information to its potential customers also helps your company’s search engine visibil-
ity in Google services. Excellent video content is content in which the company answers the
most common questions from its customers as the purchase process for many products or
services is very long, so there are a lot of questions.
YouTube is not just a video service for teens; people over 35 are the fastest growing user
base on YouTube. Therefore, the question is: What kind of video content can a company use
to attract the interest of its potential customers on YouTube? Once the issue is resolved and
a high-quality video is made to target a specific activity, YouTube advertising will be easier to
target. If a video does not have a clear goal and is not designed specifically for YouTube, it will
be very difficult to get results with YouTube advertising.
At its best, YouTube advertising occurs in the Reach phase of the MRACE® model, where
product or service videos that focus directly on the problem work best. Such videos first
present a solution to a customer’s problem and only then explain the benefits of the product
or service. In the Reach phase, product videos that focus solely on providing the solution and
its benefits can also be used. The main goal of video advertising is therefore to arouse interest
and make the brand known.
YouTube advertising can also be used a little bit more sophistically to generate leads and
thus promote sales. In generating leads, a typical tactic is to advertise downloadable content,
such as guides. Act- and Convert-stage videos are suitable for lead generation, where the goal
is to get the viewer to perform some desired action before the actual transaction.
The easiest way to approach YouTube advertising that is solely meant for the Convert phase
(i.e., advertising directed to a straight transaction) is with a video that has a clear offer and
encourages you to buy right away. By only using YouTube advertising, it is difficult to make
sales, but advertisers who take advantage of YouTube and SEM at the same time have an
average conversion rate that is 3 percent higher than advertisers who take advantage of SEM
alone. Such a large difference in the conversion rate has a clear impact on business. YouTube
advertising strongly supports other marketing channels and enables highly visual advertising
for a precisely segmented audience.
Targeting YouTube advertising is remarkably effective compared with TV advertising, for
example. YouTube advertising can target a specific audience based on a user’s specific interests
(such as custom or Google-ready audience ratings) but also based on a user’s location, age, or
a combination of these. The targeting of video ads on YouTube is very similar to that of Display
advertising, but on YouTube, the advertising can also be targeted to, among other things, life
 114 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

events. For example, advertising can be targeted at people who have set up a business. Video
ads can also be targeted to a specific YouTube channel or in relation to an individual video;
similarly, certain channels can be excluded from targeting.
When used properly, YouTube advertising is a powerful tool for remarketing. It is a good
idea to target users who have previously visited your organization’s website or its YouTube
channel, for example. Advertising to such an audience is typically effective and relatively
inexpensive as advertising is better received by a warm audience than it is by a cold audience,
so advertising to a warm audience is more likely to bring about results. Remarketing can also
engage existing customers with the company. It acts as so-called top-of-mind marketing (i.e.,
marketing that keeps the brand in mind for a potential or current customer).
Utilization of YouTube advertising can be roughly divided into the following four main
categories, depending on the industry and need of the business: brand advertising, product
or service advertising, lead generation, and remarketing (Figure 5.19). The optimal campaign
structure takes advantage of multiple categories of these, allowing video content to be targeted
to people at different stages of the buying path.

Figure 5.19 Using YouTube advertising

YouTube is great for brand advertising because it allows a company to increase its brand
awareness and strengthen its brand image. Pre-roll ads that last 5 seconds can be precisely tar-
geted to the desired audience, and the viewer can continue to watch longer if the video catches
her or his attention. Pre-roll ads run on YouTube before the actual video.
It is recommended that you use both long and short videos to promote your product or
service. Long videos are apt to guide and teach the customer about the company’s product.
In this case, the benefits of the product should be presented to the customer during the first
few seconds so that the customer becomes interested and she or he clicks on the company’s
website. Product demos can be implemented in a shorter format and can direct the customer
to go to the website to continue the purchasing process. Product and service advertising uses
either Reach- or Act-phase videos, depending on the business of the company and the infor-
mation needs of the customers.
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 115

Generating new content or marketing a webinar, for example, are commonly used to gener-
ate leads. Leads can also be generated by using offers with precise targeting in order to get the
offers to the right customers. Act- and Convert-stage videos are suitable for lead generation.
Remarketing is at its most effective in top-of-mind marketing, as well as in engaging cus-
tomers with a service. By using top-of-mind marketing, a brand remains well known and is
kept in the mind of the potential customer. This is especially important for companies whose
product is purchased frequently. Top-of-mind marketing is also useful in long purchasing pro-
cesses because the more often a customer encounters a company while the purchasing process
is in progress, the more familiar and reliable the company begins to feel.
The customer’s commitment to the service is most likely when the purchase decision is
still fresh because then the customer will be the most likely to receive and process marketing
communications from the brand. The targeting of post-purchase videos is based on conver-
sion data collected from the website, and the video is designed so that it supports serving the
customer, while at the same time taking into account additional sales opportunities.

5.3.3.4 Optimizing SEA and online advertising

Implementing SEA and online advertising is an ongoing process that needs to be improved on
a weekly basis by optimizing advertising. Advertising optimization consists of four important
parts: data collection, analysis of results, taking the necessary actions, and concrete develop-
ment (Figure 5.20). Data is constantly accumulated as advertising is done. The data shows, for
example, which campaigns are performing best, to what pages directed visitors bring the best
results, and which pages are performing the worst. The results are analyzed from the perspec-
tive of the collected data and advertising is developed on the basis of the analysis.
Advertising development includes monitoring cost-effectiveness and optimizing it, famil-
iarizing yourself with search terms, finding new keywords and adding negative keywords,
A/B testing of ads, testing new targeting methods, creating ad extensions, experimenting with
campaigns, following competitive situations, and responding to competition. For example, if
you find that people who search with certain keywords never convert to making a purchase,
you should remove those keywords from your advertising and move that media budget to
well-performing keywords.
With the continuous development of advertising, advertising becomes cost-effective. If
advertising is just built up and then forgotten, its quality will decline, it will incur a lot of
unnecessary costs, and your keyword ads will show less well on Google’s search results page.
The ever-changing competitive situation then drives competitors to gain higher placing on the
search results page.
Data and AI also play an increasingly important role in the development of advertising.
Historical data and AI software enable you to quickly process large amounts of data so that
they are saved in your campaign’s change history for later review. The utilization of machine
learning and AI will only become relevant in advertising when sufficient data has been col-
lected from advertising. In some smaller industries in Finland, machine learning can only be
used to a very limited extent because Finland’s search volumes are very small compared with
countries with a larger population.
 116 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

However, if advertising does not bring good results, the poor results are not always due to
the quality of the advertising and can also be due to a poor website. Websites and landing pages
should be developed when the site or page receives a lot of traffic through advertising but the
traffic does not result in purchases or contact requests. In this case, the advertising works, but
the website or landing page does not do its job.

Figure 5.20 The competitive situation: the market and the tools are constantly
changing, which is why the performance curve of advertising built on the
“build and leave to roll” principle points downwards

CASE STUDY
CASE EXAMPLE: SEM AND SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING IN
LÄMPÖYKKÖNEN ENABLING SALES
LämpöYkkönen is a company specializing in energy renovation and the energy efficiency
optimization of homes and properties. It generates savings for its customers and improves
the competitiveness and profitability of customer companies through energy efficiency.
The company’s vision is to produce the same amount of renewable energy with its custom-
ers as a large nuclear power plant by 2030. Because LämpöYkkönen is a sales organiza-
tion, the success of salespeople largely determines the company’s growth rate.

HOW DO YOU INCREASE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF

YOUR SALES ORGANIZATION THROUGH MARKETING?
Salespeople are most time efficient when they talk to a ready-to-buy customer. It is even
better if the customer does not talk to any competing company at the same time. Based on
this idea, LämpöYkkönen’s marketing function generated four main goals:
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 117

1. Reaching a potential customer before she or he even thinks about energy renovation
because at that stage she or he has not started a conversation with competitors (this
covers the Reach stage).
2. Increasing customers’ trust in LämpöYkkönen, which increases the company’s
attractiveness at every meeting point between the customer and the company (this
covers the Reach, Act, and Convert stages).
3. Generating as many good quotes as possible for salespeople so that they can focus
on selling instead of nurturing cold leads or focusing on customer prospecting (this
covers the Convert stage).
4. Harnessing existing customers to add value to potential new customers. References
and satisfied customers are the most effective ways of marketing (this covers the
Engage and Reach stages).

HOW WERE THE GOALS ACHIEVED?

Three issues were brought to the forefront of the Reach phase: organic social media (i.e.,
postings published on the company’s social media channels), SEO, and paid advertising
on Google. Content that aroused interest and reactions was chosen as the main focus on
social media. Organic content was then easy to boost with paid advertising because the
hardest part is creating good content, not distributing it.
With the help of social media, LämpöYkkönen reached customers who had not yet even
considered energy renovation. Instead, through SEO and Google’s paid and personalized
advertising, they caught customers who had embarked on an active buying process and
were looking for information or a partner to support it.
When the Reach phase generates a lot of visitors to a website, it needs to run smoothly
and direct visitors towards a call for a quotation, otherwise the visitors will not benefit
the company. That is why the site invested in CRO so that visitors could quickly request
a quote from any page. In addition, the personalized content for the information retrieval
phase (the Act phase) and the purchase phase (the Convert phase) was carefully designed
using, for example, heatmaps: they showed how visitors behaved on the website, what
they were paying attention to, and what important things the visitors did not notice. The
more customers know and independently search for information to support their purchas-
ing decision, the more they are ready-made leads for sales.
Information retrieval and purchasing decisions were also supported by marketing au-
tomation, wherein each contact was provided with personalized content based on his or
her behavior. In addition, existing customers were harnessed to acquire new customers
through a referral program.

A FEW KEY FIGURES

REACH
The amount of organic traffic from search engines increased by 29 percent compared with
the previous year.
 118 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

ACT
A survey aimed at customers and leads generated more than 300 different questions that
led to the creation of more than 100 blog articles.

CONVERT
The number of invitations to tender received through organic transport increased by 87
percent compared with the previous year.
The number of requests for quotations received through SEM increased by 80 percent,
although only 3 percent more money was spent than in the previous year.

ENGAGE
The size of the email list increased by 12,000 contacts in six months.

5.4 MARKETING AUTOMATION AND EMAIL

MARKETING
As stated, marketing automation refers to the automated distribution of content to customers
and the scaling of personalized marketing. Marketing automation systems can be used for
collecting customer-related data and for segmenting firms’ contacts based on data and sending
them relevant and timely messages. When a customer responds to messages as desired or when
she or he performs desired actions on the site, salespeople can contact her or him to inquire
if she or he needs help with any matter. Thus, marketing automation plays a significant role
in the digital sales process. Despite its name, the adoption of marketing automation does not
fully automate marketing or reduce the amount of time or money invested in it—it eliminates
routine work and frees up time from segmentation and content distribution for content cre-
ation and strategic planning. In the MRACE® model, marketing automation primarily affects
the Convert and Engage phases. In the Convert phase, more leads can be turned into deals,
and in the Engage phase, the existing customer base is engaged via relevant communications.
The importance of personalized marketing is also emphasized in the digital environment.
You only click on a link, read an email, or watch a video if they (a) come to you at the
right time and (b) arouse your immediate interest. Marketing automation opens a channel
for the company in which marketing is timely, personalized, measurable, and automated.
Personalization cannot be overemphasized: for example, you can imagine that if a cat owner
constantly receives messages from a pet store about dog food or dog-related things, he will
not continue to subscribe to that company’s newsletter for very long. In contrast, if he were to
constantly receive personalized messages about cats, he would be more likely to welcome them
(Figure 5.21).
The importance of marketing automation is emphasized when a company uses paid adver-
tising from which it wants to make the most profit. Only about 1–3 percent of site visitors are
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 119

Figure 5.21 The more precisely segmented an email list is, the more relevant marketing
a company can do

willing to talk to the company in more detail when they visit the company’s website. If the
company does not offer any lighter conversion points, such as the opportunity to download
a guide or attend a webinar, to the other visitors to its site, up to 99 percent of the traffic has
been wasted. If, in turn, a company gets some visitors to download a guide or otherwise leave
their contact information, they end up in the realm of marketing automation where these
contacts are nurtured in order to become sales-ready leads. The cost-effectiveness of paid
advertising is enormously improved in this way.

5.4.1 How can a company acquire contacts for the marketing

automation domain?

Contacts are the fuel of marketing automation. If a company is not able to add contacts to
the marketing automation domain, it is a mere expense and of no benefit to the company.
Therefore, you need to invest in making contacts.
The most typical way to do this is to use the various lead magnets (i.e., the targeted content
that is directed at potential customers when they give the company their contact information,
such as their email address or phone number). Examples of lead magnets include webinars,
webinar recordings, downloadable guides, e-books, online magazines, and downloadable
reference stories. Contacts can also be made for marketing automation, for example, through
pop-ups, raffles, chatbots, and newsletter subscription forms. Once the company has created
sufficient methods to acquire contacts into the marketing automation domain, the actual
marketing automation process may begin.
Imagine a person visiting a company’s website for the first time and deciding to subscribe to
a newsletter by entering her email address. At this point, the company knows little about the
contact, such as what product or service the contact is interested in or why she subscribed to
the newsletter in the first place. However, with the help of marketing automation, it is possible
to start finding out about this person’s background and areas of interest. The moment she
sent her email address to the company using the subscription form for the newsletter, a cookie
was placed in her browser. The marketing automation system can then see what she does on
 120 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

the company’s website: which subpages she visits, whether she opens the emails sent by the
company, and whether or not she clicks on their links.
Subscribing to a newsletter also triggers an automated series of emails that have two func-
tions: to familiarize the company with the contact and to find out what interests the contact.
Such an automated series of emails typically last from a week to a month, depending on how
the contact responds to the emails he or she receives. You can think of this type of automation
as a situation similar to arriving at a shoe department in a sports shop, for example. The seller
greets you, briefly tells you about the company and the selection, and asks what kind of shoes
you are looking for. You tell him or her that you need new running shoes, and then you start
looking for the right shoes with the seller.
In marketing automation, the equivalent process proceeds by presenting the company and
its range of offerings in emails. When a contact clicks on a link in an email related to a certain
product and is directed to a relevant web page, this already indicates that he or she is interested
in that product. If he or she also reads other content on the site about the same product, the
marketing system will learn that he or she is interested in the product. This event launches
interest-based automation that aims to tell the contact more about the product, help the
contact solve his or her problems, and transfer the most engaged contacts to the salespeople. In
this way, the subscriber of the newsletter becomes a potential and identified sales opportunity.
However, marketing automation will not work without a sufficient amount of content. If
a company’s pages only have one service page and a few blog articles about one service, the
content is not enough at all. Why? Such a scarcity of content means that the marketing auto-
mation system is unable to identify whether or not the contact is interested in buying from
the company. If a contact can only read one article about the offering provided by a company,
the system cannot say whether or not the contact who visited this page twice was interested or
not. In contrast, if a company has dozens of different articles about their service and a contact
reads half of them, the system will immediately recognize that the contact is clearly interested
in that service.
In addition, the role of marketing automation is to provide the right content to your con-
tacts at the right time. If there is no content, automation has nothing to offer to the contacts.
Content pieces must also cover the entire purchase path (from the beginning to the end).
Content in the early stages of the path includes articles that focus on the customer’s problem.
Content in the later stages of the path includes well-made reference stories and service or
product pages.

5.4.1.1 Segmentation revolutionizes the effectiveness of marketing

automation
It is possible to segment contacts based on demographic information and contact behavior.
Segmentation works best when the two methods are combined. This makes emails and cam-
paigns feel much more personal and relevant to the recipient.
A commonly used method of segmenting contacts is to divide them into a square diagram
with a vertical axis from A to D and a horizontal axis from 1 to 4, resulting in 16 squares
in total (Figure 5.22). In the graph, the A–D axis represents how good the contact appears
based on demographic data. A is the best and D is the worst. For example, A could be senior
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 121

management, B middle management, C an expert, and D a student. The 1–4 axis, in turn,
represents how active the contact has been recently. The most active level is rated as 1, and the
most passive level is rated as 4. The A1 contacts are thus the best and the D4 contacts the worst.

Figure 5.22 Contact segmentation in marketing automation

With clearly segmented contacts, it is easy to send them personalized campaigns. The mar-
keting approach of the email should be completely different for a student interested in the
company than for a marketing director interested in the company. It is easy for sales to use
their resources to only contact certain contacts, such as those categorized as A1–A3 or those
categorized as B1–B2. In this case, each conversation is held with a relevant and recently
active contact. The seller will also be notified whenever a new contact reaches one of the above
segments. In this case, the time spent on sales prospecting and other routine work is reduced.
Thanks to segmentation and automatic profiling, the seller also knows the contact a little
before the first contact. The seller can see from the contact’s profile what content he or she
has read and which topics are clearly of interest to him or her. Customer services can also
take advantage of the data generated by marketing automation in a similar way, allowing the
customer service representative to serve the contact much more personally.
122 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

CASE STUDY
CASE EXAMPLE: HOW VIA TRIBUNALI CREATED A NEW MARKET IN
FINLAND
Via Tribunali is Finland’s first certified Neapolitan pizzeria. The art of Neapolitan
pizza-makers is on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage List, and certificates are issued
by the True Neapolitan Pizza Association.
The primary goal of Via Tribunal’s marketing has been to teach Finnish consumers to
understand the difference between a high-quality Neapolitan pizza and an “ordinary” piz-
za and thus create appreciation of high-quality pizza. The ways in which Neapolitan pizza
is made differ significantly from what many are used to in terms of the ingredients and the
taste. The whole of their marketing is built around the following question: How can some-
thing as familiar as pizza sound so new and exciting that everyone wants to try it?

HOW WERE CUSTOMERS EDUCATED TO BUY SOME-

THING NEW?
Via Tribunali brought Neapolitan pizza to Finland. The market was therefore completely
new and customers did not really realize they would need this product. For this reason, the
most important thing was to tell customers why a Neapolitan pizza is different and better
than the pizzas the customer knows. Therefore, a decision was made to focus strongly on
the Reach and Act phases in order to increase market awareness and interest.
The heart of the marketing was formed of a variety of downloadable recipe books that
teach customers how to make Neapolitan-style pizza at home. With downloadable mate-
rials, Via Tribunali has succeeded in adding value to its target audience and teaching how
Neapolitan pizza differs from regular pizza. At the same time, Via Tribunal’s mailing list
has grown significantly, creating a direct connection for the company to its customer base.
Three spearheads were chosen to feature in the communication, which appear in recipe
books, social media advertisements, and in the contents of the Via Tribunali’s website: a
450-degree (Celsius) oven and a 60-second baking time, a delicious dough that has risen
for 20 hours, and carefully selected ingredients. When one of these communication spear-
heads is always highlighted, the distinctiveness of Neapolitan pizza remains in the minds
of customers and the product awareness of the target group grows.

HOW SHOULD MARKETING DEVELOP IN THE FUTURE?

The awareness of Finnish people about Neapolitan pizza has grown a lot in recent years.
When the market is new, “technical” features (like a 450-degree oven) sound exciting and
raise interest. As the market evolves, product features begin to become self-evident be-
cause customers are already familiar with them. That is why Via Tribunali has increasingly
shifted the focus of its marketing to the brand and its appeal, as well as to the creation
of a customer community. In this way, the company is ready to take the market maturity
and product awareness to the next level as it always requires a change in the marketing
approach as well.
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 123

A FEW KEY FIGURES

REACH
Social media advertising reached 329,936 people in six months.

ACT
The website’s Menu page was visited by 13,776 visitors during six months.

CONVERT
The company has an ever-growing mailing list of about 10,000 subscribers.

5.5 SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

There are numerous different platforms on social media upon which a company can produce
content and advertise. The social networking service Facebook is the largest social platform
with almost three billion users. The number of Facebook users has decreased among younger
people, but in turn, has increased among those over 45 years of age.
The image-sharing service Instagram has almost 1.5 billion users, while the rapidly growing
video-sharing service TikTok has exceeded over one billion users. There are about 740 million
LinkedIn users in the world, while Snapchat has about 600 million, Twitter about 500 million,
and Pinterest about 400 million users.
In this book, we will primarily cover social media marketing from the perspectives of
Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, as the potential for doing paid advertising on these
channels is the most advanced and established. At the time of writing this book, for example,
TikTok advertising has only just become available in Finland.
At a general level, social media marketing involves an ongoing optimization of ad content,
the audience, and the advertising budget as designing an advertising message for the target
audience is critical to advertising effectiveness. At the heart of social media marketing is
knowing the advertising’s target audience. This knowledge of the target group grows as data
accumulates from advertising; you can see which messages interest the target group the most,
and this data can be used to make advertising more effective. With machine learning solutions,
campaigns can be optimized around the clock and AI can automatically increase its budget, for
example, when there are more conversions than normal.
The unified and recognizable look of a brand is emphasized on social media as one of the
important goals of social media advertising is to increase brand awareness while generating
leads and generating interest. The social media budgets of large companies easily reach more
than €10,000 a month, and especially with such a large investment, the advertising space
must definitely look coherent, interesting, and recognizable. It not only creates clarity and
confidence in the customer’s mind, but also produces a better result in terms of the figures (see
 124 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

also Section 5.2.3). However, not every potential customer is interested in the same ad, which
is why you need to create a sufficient number of different ads that can be targeted to different
buyer personas.

5.5.1 Social media advertising as part of the MRACE® model

In the MRACE® model, the role of social media advertising is to arouse interest in the company
among new target groups and to have people who have already started their purchasing process
return to the company’s website (e.g., through remarketing). Thus, social media advertising is
an important part of the entire MRACE® model, from the Reach stage to the Engage stage.
In the Reach stage, social media advertising is aimed at reaching people who are interested
in the company’s products or services and creating interest towards the company in com-
pletely new target groups. If the target group already knows the company’s product or service,
you can directly advertise the product or service and its benefits. If the target group does
not already know the product or does not know that they need the company’s product, the
advertising directed at it should focus, for example, on a problem with which the target group
identifies themselves as having. If a company sells pillows, an ad for social media could start
with the question “Are you sleeping poorly?” or “Is your neck sore when you wake up?” After
this, the company can tell a potential customer why this happens and direct her or him to their
site, moving her or him towards solving the problem (i.e., buying a new pillow in this case).
In the Reach phase, CPC and the click-through rate are used as the key metrics of social
media advertising. It is also advisable to look at the average cost of one thousand ad impres-
sions (the CPM), what kind of a relevance score the ad has received, how many times the ad
has been clicked, how many people who clicked on the ad leave the associated landing page
immediately, and whether the ad receives comments or likes. These all indicate whether the
advertising is well targeted and whether the content resonates with the buyer persona. If
a potential customer is directed through an ad to a site where they watch a short video or read
a blog post, they may be a relevant audience for Act-stage advertising.
In the Act stage, the target group is familiar with the product or service offered by the
company. Therefore, social media advertising can focus on showcasing the benefits of
a product or service as well as its ability to solve a problem experienced by a customer. In the
Act phase, it is important to direct the customer from ads to website content that provides
comprehensive additional information that will support the purchase decision as in the Act
phase the customer wants to compare service providers and find out if the product or service
offered by the company is best for her or him. A company that sells pillows could tell you how
the material, shape, and stitching of their pillows will help relieve neck pain and for whom each
pillow is particularly suitable.
From the Act stage onwards, measuring social media advertising will no longer focus as
much on the internal metrics of the social media platforms but will focus on what kind of
actions the people referred to the site take on the site. In the Act phase, it is a good idea to track
microconversions (such as the reading time for blog posts and material downloads) when
measuring social media advertising. Clicks on contact information pages also show interest
in the company, so they should also be considered. In an online store, adding products to the
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 125

shopping cart and browsing product pages are good metrics for determining a customer’s level
of interest.
In the Convert stage, we recommend purely doing product and reference advertising. With
advertising, the customer can be directed directly towards making a purchase or requesting an
offer because at this stage the customer already knows that the product or service is a potential
option for him or her.
The Convert stage measures how many macroconversions—such as requests for a quota-
tion, contact requests, or purchases—have been generated through social media advertising.
In the Engage stage, firms should do top-of-mind advertising for customers as that keeps
the company in mind. The purpose of this is to engage the customer with the company’s brand
and strengthen the customer’s sense of a good purchasing decision. In addition, in the Engage
stage, you may want to promote content that will help your customer learn to use your product
better or more often.
The Engage stage measures how many repurchases, product reviews, company reviews, ref-
erences, and returning customers to a website are generated through social media advertising.
Please note that the social media ads for the different stages of the MRACE® model are
not rigid in style and communication. Often, for example, advertising that uses customer
testimonials is a great way to both gain new customers in the Reach phase and engage existing
customers in the Engage phase.

5.5.2 Influencer marketing

Have you ever wondered if your company should partner with social media influencers?
Utilizing influencers in marketing is a very relevant and topical issue and has also attracted
the interest of marketing researchers. In the MRACE® model, influencer marketing can signif-
icantly increase the awareness of a company and its offerings in the Reach phase. In addition,
the product reviews and user experiences made by influencers are content that supports the
purchase decision in the Convert phase.
The majority of influencer marketing research gives a positive picture of the meaningfulness
of influencer marketing. In 2019, a survey was conducted involving 600 Americans who fol-
lowed at least one influencer on social media. In the survey, 70 percent of participants trusted
influencers as much or more than the opinions of their friends, and 78 percent trusted the
content produced by influencers more than advertisements. According to the survey, more
than half of the respondents considered influencers as their friends. In addition, almost 80
percent of the respondents had purchased a product due to a post published by an influencer.
On the other hand, according to the world’s largest influencer marketing survey,1 only 4
percent of Internet users trust what influencers say online.
According to various sources, influencer marketing is considered to be the most effective
form of advertising. Half of consumers say influencers guide their purchasing decisions. About
70 percent of marketers say that influencer marketing has helped them reach their target audi-
ence effectively. The trend in influencer marketing is to use influencers over a longer period of
time, not just in one campaign. The most important thing in influencer marketing cooperation
 126 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

is the similarity of the values of the company and those of the influencer who is advertising the
company—the fit of the influencer to the context of the advertised product is crucial.
Influencer marketing has grown exponentially in recent years and is projected to generate
more than €20 billion of business in 2023. However, nearly half of marketers spend less than
5 percent of their marketing budget on influencer collaboration. The popularity of influencer
marketing is likely to grow as customers value UGC more and more in the midst of a constant
flood of advertising.
Of the euros spent on influencer marketing, the lion’s share has gone to cooperation with
the biggest so-called macro influencers, such as footballer Cristiano Ronaldo and the reality
TV family the Kardashians. However, the influencer marketing industry predicts that cooper-
ation will turn more and more towards micro-influencer cooperation. Companies are looking
for collaborators who have relatively few followers on social media, typically less than 10,000,
but who are significant and followed by a certain limited target group.
These micro influencers are effectively identified through social media monitoring, which
shows, for example, the people who have written and commented the most on a particular
forum, such as on LinkedIn. In addition, nano influencers with less than 1,000 followers can be
distinguished from micro influencers. Nano influencers are unknown to the general public but
are well known in, for example, sports and hobby circles, which makes them valuable partners
for companies. Today, there are also several websites through which influencers are recruited,
suggesting the proliferation and growth of influencer marketing.
The most popular social media influencers in Finland are, for example, Mmiisas, Lakko,
Mariieveronica, Hermanni, Roni Bäck, and PewDiePie. The last one, PewDiePie was reported
to have earned €14 million in 2014 from his influencer cooperations, mainly in the video game
industry. Today, many influencers in the digital world are also heavily featured in traditional
media, such as on television, making them more widely known to the general public.
One interesting future scenario for influencer marketing is the use of virtual influencers.
A virtual influencer is an invented character used in influencer marketing. The virtual influ-
encer can be like an ordinary person or like a cartoon character. There is still relatively little
research on virtual influencers, so we will not discuss the phenomenon further here.

5.5.3 Product reviews online

Closely related to influencer marketing are product reviews collected on e-commerce websites
or on social media. They have a strong impact in the Convert phase, when the customer is
still considering making a purchase decision. As we mentioned at the beginning of the book,
recommendation is a significant factor in attracting customers and speeding up purchasing
processes.
However, product reviews also have their downsides. In 2018, the Washington Post pub-
lished an article2 alleging that half of Amazon’s product reviews were fake. According to the
article, it is hard to sell anything through Amazon today if you play an honest game. If you
want your product to be competitive with Amazon’s huge offering, you have to start falsifying
product reviews. According to Amazon itself, 99 percent of their product reviews are real
because they are written by real buyers who have not been paid anything.
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 127

However, paying for product reviews has been commonplace for both online stores and
many other players. In the context of product reviews, it would be important to tell other
customers if the product review was based on a reward or free product in a similar manner to
online advertising content (such as that created by influencers) that must have a #ad tag.
An important question for the credibility of digital marketing is how many of the ratings
are true ratings, how many are bought with money, and how many are created by robots. Is
the digital marketing world shooting itself in the foot by tarnishing its reputation with fake
product reviews?
Product reviews have a significant impact on the visibility of products on Google and an
online store’s own search engines. The better the reviews and the more reviews a product has
received, the better search visibility it usually has. Thus, falsified reviews entice many compa-
nies to act unethically. A similar phenomenon is observed in increasing the number of social
media followers as money can be used to buy social media followers. For example, it is esti-
mated that around half of many celebrities’ followers on Twitter might be fake.3 Confidence
in the accuracy of online content is one of the biggest problems with digital marketing as the
threshold for publishing content online is just a click.

CASE STUDY
CASE EXAMPLE: SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING AS A DRIVER OF 24RENT.FI’S
GROWTH
In Finland, 24Rent.fi is a car sharing service that offers shared cars for both individuals
and companies. The cars can always be found close to the customers and can be pur-
chased as a self-service for any length of time and at any time of the day or night.
The goal of 24Rent.fi’s marketing has been to increase the utilization rate of cars by
acquiring new customers (covering the Reach, Act, and Convert stages) and ensuring the
return of existing customers (in the Engage stage). The challenge for the company has
been that almost the entire customer base, from consumers to companies, has not been
aware of the existence of shared cars, and a large proportion of customers have sought
a car rental or leasing service. The identification of the challenge has created a direct op-
portunity to increase the market share of shared cars by acquiring new customers from the
target groups of car rental and leasing services.

HOW DID THE NEW SERVICE GAIN A MARKET SHARE

FROM TRADITIONAL SERVICES?
When people are not searching for a particular product or service, it must be taken to po-
tential customers. In the case of 24Rent.fi, paid advertising on social media and Google (in
the Reach stage) played a key role in reaching potential customers. It was also considered
important that the advertising is personalized and precisely targeted in order to make it
more effective.
The targeting and personalization were taken to such an advanced level that a potential
customer saw the price, availability, and location of a nearby 24Rent.fi car when they
opened Facebook or searched for information on Google. This kind of hyper-targeted
 128 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

advertising produced excellent results, especially in social media advertising.

Content was also produced for the company’s website from a number of different per-
spectives in order to highlight the benefits of the new service to different buyer personas
(covering the Act and Convert stages). For one buyer persona, price is the most important
factor, for another, availability is the most important factor, and for a third, the ease of the
process is the most important factor. All the benefits of the service must be clearly stated
on the website so that the investments made in advertising are not wasted due to the un-
clear description of the service, especially when the awareness of the service is increased.

A FEW KEY FIGURES

REACH
Social media advertising reached 536,231 people in six months.
Ads were viewed on social media 3.8 million times in six months.

ACT
Social media advertising directed 22,600 people to the site in six months.

CONVERT
The ROAS of social media advertising was up to 1,345 percent over six months.

5.6 ANALYTICS AND MEASUREMENT

One of the cornerstones of effective digital marketing is the reliable measurement of its effec-
tiveness. The measurement framework for the MRACE® model covers, at its broadest, all the
marketing efforts of a company. At best, the information gathered can be used not only to
maximize advertising revenue but also to develop business more holistically. Measurement
processes should be integrated into all digital marketing at the earliest possible stage so that
the effectiveness can be evaluated over time. The primary goal of measurement is to direct
resources to the activities that produce the best results. As a whole, firms should make the
marketing channels work together to achieve business goals.
Every marketing campaign is an investment with an expected return. By understanding
which channels deliver the best return on investment, decisions can be made about the optimal
allocation of your marketing budget. The aim should therefore be to understand the digital
business holistically, to select the most appropriate performance indicators for it, and to strive
for continuous improvement through testing.
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 129

5.6.1 The measurement process

The strategic measurement process consists of the following seven phases: situation analysis,
a measurement plan, technical implementation, reporting, analysis, optimization, and busi-
ness development (Figure 5.23). The situation analysis examines the amount of existing data
and the reliability of its collection methods. The situation is often that the basic installation
of analytics software has been completed but it has not been modified to provide important
information to the company beyond providing basic data on pageviews.

Figure 5.23 The seven steps of a strategic measurement process

After situation analysis, it is vital to determine what information is important and relevant
to the company’s business. To this end, a measurement plan is drawn up that includes the
business objectives that are to be monitored and the requirements and details of their technical
implementation. All parties involved in marketing are involved in designing the plan as the
entire marketing organization must take the measurement requirements into account in the
future.
In the technical implementation, the installation of an analytics tool is modified to meet
the requirements of the measurement plan, the technical infrastructure, and data protection
legislation. The installation takes into account any other information systems that can or must
be integrated.
Reporting provides results that are typically obtained using a browser-based tool that pro-
vides up-to-date information about analytics and other connected systems. The dashboard
that visualizes the data provides both a general understanding of the digital marketing situa-
tion and the more accurate, platform-specific reporting of all the available advertising chan-
nels. Therefore, it serves as an effective tool for the various decision makers in an organization.
In the analysis phase, the realization of the objectives defined in the measurement plan is
monitored. When interpreting the data, one takes a stand on the ability of different channels
to attract potential customers as measured by MRACE® stage metrics. Instead of averages,
 130 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

the most efficient and the weakest customer segments are identified and their strengths and
weaknesses are analyzed. By focusing on these, the average figures will also rise. In the optimi-
zation phase, it is possible to use the information to optimize the functionality of the website,
its ability to turn visitors into leads and customers, and the optimal distribution of the budget
between different marketing activities, leading to continuous business development.
The measurement plan is visible to all parties. It is a good idea to guide marketers to tag
incoming links to the website correctly so that the different channels and campaigns can be
identified correctly. This is called Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) tagging. Care should be
taken to ensure that the data collected by analytics does not contain personal information. In
general, we recommend that you keep abreast of evolving data protection laws and, if neces-
sary, respond to any changes.

5.6.2 Managing marketing activities with the MRACE® dashboard

Central to the job of a modern sales and marketing manager is managing operations through
the MRACE® dashboard (Figure 5.24). The dashboard shows the ongoing sales and marketing
activities and their effectiveness in, for example, lead and transaction generation. Especially
when a lot of data is collected, it is a good idea to visualize it according to the MRACE® model
on the marketing dashboard: this facilitates sales and marketing management, budgeting, and
decision-making. The dashboard keeps you informed about what is happening on the website
and with the marketing at the different stages of the MRACE® model. In this way, marketing
can be managed in a way that genuinely supports business goals and ensures that marketing
euros go where they bring the best results.
When marketing is done in a versatile and multi-channel way, marketing data easily
becomes fragmented across different marketing platforms. The marketing dashboard gathers
information in one place in an easy-to-interpret visual format, making it easier to perceive the
overall picture.
The MRACE® dashboard is backed by Google Data Studio, a data visualization tool devel-
oped by Google. With a variety of integration capabilities, the dashboard can be connected
to almost any structured data source, starting with a simple Excel spreadsheet. This gives the
dashboard all the data you need, and the numbers can be conveniently viewed on a browser
on any device. The dashboard also speeds up decision-making as the data is updated in almost
real time.
Different users need different key figures to support decision-making. For this reason,
several views are built into the dashboard (Figure 5.25):

z There is a comprehensive managerial overview that shows what is going on at the differ-
ent stages of the MRACE® model at a glance. You can also find costs and conversions in
this view.
z There is a summary view of marketing channels that makes it easy to compare the results
from different marketing channels and identify which marketing channels work best
at each stage of the MRACE® model. This helps to outline the customer buying process
more holistically.
 DIGITAL MARKETING CHANNELS AND TOOLS 131

Figure 5.24 An overview of the MRACE® dashboard

Notes: In the Reach phase, we measure how we have reached potential customers, for
example, in the form of site visitors and sessions.
In the Act phase, we measure the number and rate of desired actions taken by site visitors:
for example, microconversions such as content downloads. Using these metrics, we can
also determine the quality of visitor traffic. Act-phase metrics include, for example, average
session duration and pages per session.
In the Convert phase, we measure how a site visitor turns into a buying customer. Metrics
include, for example, requests for quotations, conversion rate, and cost per acquisition.
In the Engage phase, we measure how visitors and customers engage with the site and
the company. Metrics include, for example, returning visitors and the growth of brand
searches.
Pie charts show which channels the visitors come from and which channels the conversions
in the Convert phase come from.
Trend charts show development in the long term, for example, the development of visitor
traffic or the development of the number of requests for quotations.
Conversion breakdowns give insight into the quality of generated leads and show which
microconversions have been performed on the website.
 132 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

z There are marketing channel-specific perspectives (e.g., Google Ads and social media
advertising) with which you can dive deeper into the details of a particular marketing
channel and look at it in more detail.

The different views and filters built into the dashboard allow you to perceive, for example, the
performance of a particular promotional campaign across all marketing channels, rather than
trying to get an overall picture based on reports from individual marketing channels. The time
period under review can also be easily changed, and the figures can be compared with either
a previous time period or the corresponding time period last year.

Figure 5.25 Digital marketing channels and tools at different phases

NOTES
1. UM (2019).
2. Dwoskin and Timberg (2018).
3. Boostlikes (2013; updated 2022).
 6
Digital marketing work in practice

Competence in digital marketing is now a necessity in marketing work. Companies are hiring
people as marketing leaders and experts with titles such as “Digital Marketing Specialist”
and “Digital Communications and Marketing Manager.” Almost all marketing job postings
emphasize the word “digital marketing.” Typically, the job description of a person doing or
leading digital marketing includes developing and updating an organization’s website, pro-
ducing content on social media channels, and digital advertising. Most often, organizations
are looking for people who are also able to report on the results of their digital marketing
efforts. The person must have experience and understanding of the use of data and analytics in
communication and marketing. As with all marketing work, understanding the topical market
trends is one of the key factors in conducting digital marketing.
However, it should be noted that one person cannot manage all the channels of digital
marketing so well that she or he could be classified as an expert in all of them. That is why com-
panies seek help from marketing agencies in order to develop marketing and sales. Large-sized
marketing agencies usually provide the customer organization with a team of experts, each
member of which focuses on improving the performance of only one channel. In such expert
agencies, expertise can be illustrated using the so-called T-model (Figure 6.1). The T-model’s
vertical line describes the depth of the expert’s competence in his or her core field, and the
horizontal line describes the broad understanding of the entire marketing domain and the
influence of other channels on the expert’s core working field. In this way, marketing can be
managed holistically so that each channel is primarily used for the goal it fits best while the
other channels support the same main goal.

6.1 A WEEK IN THE JOURNEY OF A DIGITAL

MARKETER: THE MRACE® MODEL AS A TOUR
GUIDE
The MRACE® model guides all levels of digital marketing: strategic planning, tactical imple-
mentation, and the analysis of results. It is just as suitable for social media advertising and SEO
as it is for content production or email automation. Thus, it is a truly holistic way to see the
digital marketing as a whole rather than as individual, perhaps competing, channels. When
the MRACE® model is combined with agile project- and customer-relationship management
models, many pitfalls in customer work can be bypassed, such as wasted advertising euros,
escaped sales opportunities, and untapped potential.
 134 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Figure 6.1 The T-model of digital marketing

Agility arises not only from thought patterns but also from processes that sometimes may even
feel rigid. Let us take a closer look at a few of the core components on which the agile project
management model is based.
A weekly meeting is a weekly 15-minute progress meeting that deals with the marketing
conducted for a specific client. The weekly meeting reviews the activities per channel that have
already been performed and their impacts, as well as the client’s possible new ideas and news.
The purpose of the weekly meeting is to keep the entire client team aware of the overall picture
of the project and what other team members are doing.
A monthly meeting is a customer-specific monthly meeting that highlights key findings
from last month’s results and the lessons learned. Typically, a monthly meeting does not cover
individual figures in the reports as platform-specific metrics rarely indicate the achievement of
business goals or bring in any extra euros to a customer’s cash register. The monthly meeting
focuses on the future and ensures that the different stages of marketing are mutually support-
ive and that the channels in use have the desired balance. At the monthly meeting, marketing
planning and implementation are also adapted to the client’s business cycles, for example, they
are adapted for seasons or product launches.
A retrospective review is a review after the monthly meeting, and it has three main dimen-
sions: what has gone well, what has failed, and what could be done better in the next period.
By articulating these dimensions and analyzing the customer feedback collected, both the
customer team and the whole company consistently achieve better results.
Trello is a project management visualization tool. With Trello, everything you do is made
visible to both the client and your colleagues, and no one has to ask about the stage of a single
task as it is visible to all with a glance on a Trello card. For example, when a content producer’s
Trello card that relates to the task of designing downloadable material for use as the spearhead
of a social media campaign changes from review status to done status after the guide has been
approved by the client, a social media expert knows that the guide is ready for use in advertis-
 DIGITAL MARKETING WORK IN PRACTICE 135

ing. The purpose of Trello is to make information transparent and thus reduce unnecessary
waiting, bottlenecks, and siloed communication.
Slack is an instant messaging application that swept through the ICT world a few years ago
and integrates seamlessly with Trello. With Slack, it is possible to communicate with both the
team and the client without the messages being lost in an email inbox or other similar chan-
nels. Trello also sends notifications to Slack about new cards and the people tagged on them or
the comments received. In this way, both the information on the updated Trello cards and the
communication between people are available on the same communication channel.
What is it like to do digital marketing in practice? What is a typical week of a digital
marketer like and what skills does it require? As a way of answering these questions, in what
follows, Lasse, the team coach of Suomen Digimarkkinointi (SDM), talks about his typical
working week, which combines agile project management methods with the MRACE® model.

CASE STUDY
CASE EXAMPLE: TYPICAL WORKING WEEK OF A DIGITAL MARKETER

MONDAY: MEETING DAY

I start the work week with a bowl of porridge while preparing for internal meetings. The
team’s weekly meeting begins at 9 a.m., and before that, I make sure there’s enough cof-
fee and that the meeting memo template I prepared the previous week can be found on
the Trello board of our team. I decide to add to the agenda a good article that I spotted
during the weekend on the challenges and attribute models of measuring multi-channel
advertising. I want every team member to at least skim through the article and make notes
on the most important findings and new lessons learned to bring to the next week’s team
meeting. Before the meeting, I still have time to respond to a few Slack messages before
it’s time to open the Teams connection for the weekly meeting.
The meeting proceeds through a well-honed agenda effortlessly and on schedule, and
we will share both customer information and experiences from our newly launched in-
ternal quarterly theme. This time the team survives with a fairly small number of tasks,
but still, my heart flutters when I see the Trello cards already start popping up during the
meeting into the to do column on the team wall. I record my own tasks as Trello cards and
add a deadline for them, and the team meeting is wrapped up.
I have a couple of hours before the next calendar entry, the team coaches’ weekly meet-
ing. Trello’s doing column starts to get crowded with several small cards, and I’ll complete
the tasks by reviewing a couple of e-commerce campaigns to ensure that nothing unex-
pected has occurred during the weekend and that the budgets are adequate for the days
to come. The ads I designed for my e-commerce client have produced great results over
the weekend, so I’ll continue to monitor them later this week.
The content team sends a notification to the client’s Slack channel from a blog posted
on the website that I will pick up for the Act-stage advertising. The blog will drill down to
the client’s market and the outlook for the coming year that is aimed at building the cli-
ent’s thought leadership brand positioning. So, I decide to target the ad at both cold and
136 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

remarketing audiences to spread the firm’s expertise also to those who don’t yet know this
particular brand.
After lunch, I jump into the team coaches’ weekly meeting. Team coaches develop the
company’s processes and solve the challenges that are identified by different teams. We’ll
go through a couple of questions from the customer base and delve into a messy diagram
that some people call a plan to production process. From this cause-and-effect jungle, we
eventually find some logic, and relying on the process, the diagram that initially seemed
challenging is again much clearer and more resistant to human error. Next week’s meeting
will once again feature a few tasks that will be added as cards that will wait in Trello’s to
do column.
I will dedicate the rest of the afternoon to the client’s strategy work. Before that, I quick-
ly respond to countless Slack messages, make the required Trello cards, and silence my
notifications because my concentration suffers from continuous distractions.
The strategy work focuses on the current state of the client’s digital marketing, the vis-
ibility of competitors, the quality of competitors’ marketing, and in particular, how these
can be used to identify the client’s competitive advantages. Putting this strategy into prac-
tice involves the design of content for each stage of the MRACE® model and the advertis-
ing message appeals to several different buyer personas, which in turn are defined with
the client during in-depth buyer persona interviews. The model allows me to define and
design engaging and insightful content and advertising that matches all possible stages of
the buying process for different buyers. That’s how we manage to communicate the right
message to the right person at the right time.

TUESDAY: MEETINGS WITH CUSTOMERS AND BRAIN-

STORMING
As we have tried to push as many internal and administrative meetings as possible to
Mondays, I have three client meetings today. The day starts at 8 a.m. with a client’s
weekly meeting, where we gather with the client team on the shared Trello wall. We got it
quickly started, going through the latest done column cards related to different channels.
Lots of small tasks have been completed along with the weekly optimization cards, so we
can move on to planning for the next couple of weeks’ sprints before this client’s monthly
meeting.
A member of the Google Ads team has noticed that certain new keywords are becoming
popular, which immediately gives our copywriter an idea for a blog post theme for the Act
stage. We decide to make the implementation of this blog post as a top-priority task so
that we can get new, search engine-optimized and sales-oriented content for the client’s
site. We also build up a fast and straightforward social media funnel in which the readers
of the blog will be shown a Convert-stage ad on Facebook and Instagram that aims at lead
generation because there is clearly interest in the topic. Fifteen minutes is enough for this,
and we will continue the discussion in Slack as the blog topic will immediately spark other
thoughts as well. We’ll record them on Trello’s backlog as there is nothing worse than
a forgotten idea.
There will be a short break between meetings. I use it to my advantage by taking a small
 DIGITAL MARKETING WORK IN PRACTICE 137

mind-opening walk. Fifteen minutes of aimless wandering does its job, and I now know
how to plan a future recruitment campaign for a client in the ICT industry so that it both
supports the employer image and generates high-quality applications. My idea is to hide
a few consecutive riddles in the source code of the site, the solutions to which will form the
address of a separate landing page. In this way, we can be sure that the candidates who
have found their way to the page are both motivated and inventive. I post a campaign idea
on the backlog of the client’s Trello and tag him on the card. As long as I think the excellent
idea resonates with the client as well, the card can be moved from the to do column to the
doing column and production.
After that, the calendar reminds me of a sales meeting that will start in a moment,
in which I will participate in the role of an expert in support of the sales rep. We open
the Teams connection in advance and make sure that there are no changes to the pre-
vious week’s Slack discussions and that the customer’s needs and goals have remained
the same. We’re still tweaking the presentation quickly, and soon there will be a beep in
the waiting lobby. After the initial chatter and creating favorable atmosphere, we intro-
duce our company to the customer and go through the values on which we base all our
work. They seem to resonate particularly well with the client as he admits to emphasizing
a value-driven partner in his choices.
We tell him how to reach as large a share of a potential market as possible through chan-
nels that interest the client. We find that the customer has not taken content production
into account in a recent website overhaul and that it is not very easy to build customized
landing pages for campaigns, for example. So, we immediately develop a solution based
on search advertising, email automation, and social media that allows us to keep the cus-
tomer touchpoints on more customizable platforms, and we only use the website for the
final conversion where it works. The client also gets excited and promises to get our ideas
through to the management team.
The good sales meeting leaves all parties feeling inspired, and I move on to a coffee
break with a smile. I quickly scroll through my social media feeds and get back to work.
Before the next weekly meeting of the day, I have time to go through several client proj-
ects and make sure the budgets are at the agreed level and advertising is running normally.
A few mistakes by artificial intelligence have disapproved products from dynamic ad feeds,
so I send a message to Facebook support about these issues. Thoughts about the battle
between artificial intelligence and humans come to mind, but I am still not worried about
the future.
In the last weekly meeting of the afternoon, I remind the client team about the idea of
an e-commerce promotion-code campaign, something that was planned earlier but not yet
implemented. Coincidentally, our email campaign expert had also just thought of a similar
campaign. So, we decide to combine the power of email and social media to get more sub-
scribers to the Act stage with a newsletter (scheduled for a month later) and to get more
audience for social media remarketing campaigns. We’ll move the campaign straight to the
doing phase, and I’ll do my share this afternoon. I add the Trello card to the done column
and the notification to Slack and shut down the computer.
138 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

WEDNESDAY: 100 PERCENT PREPARATION, 100 PER-

CENT PERFORMANCE
By far the biggest focus of the day is on a large-sized client’s monthly meeting that will be
on Thursday. I want to prepare for the monthly development meeting carefully, so I will
open the client’s monthly report. At the same time, I open the client’s advertising account,
website, and Trello wall on another screen to remind me of the big picture.
The figures show what has already been discussed with the client throughout the pre-
vious month—the volume of traffic has grown relatively well, but conversions are not fol-
lowing. Conversions are generated, but not in the same proportion to the growth in the
volume of traffic. We’ve launched a couple of different Reach-stage campaigns that are
targeted to lookalike audiences, where Facebook uses hundreds of different metrics to
find Facebook users who are similar to the current customers and to whom it’s worth
showing advertising. The quality of traffic generated from these campaigns seems to leave
much room for improvement. I plan a few actions to fix the situation and post them on the
backlog on their own cards.
On the bright side, a downloadable guide is converting better than in previous months,
so there is something positive to say. The advertising for this guide designed for the Act
stage has been effective, inexpensive, and comprehensive, so I’ll leave it on and reduce
the budgets for the Reach stage because traffic alone won’t run the client’s business. I will
invest the saved euros in the Convert-stage campaign, which at least has a large warm
audience that has browsed several sub-pages of the website. However, I switch this cam-
paign off for now as I want to hear the client’s thoughts in tomorrow’s monthly meeting.
I also make sure that the backlog contains the development suggestions I made earlier in
addition to this Convert-stage campaign, and I decide to take one suggestion for the Trello
wall’s to do column as it could help scale conversions alongside new campaigns. The oth-
er Trello walls have new cards that are expecting new material for the advertisements of
several customers. I take care of them during the morning and enjoy the feeling of accom-
plishment as the cards mostly start to be in the review phase, waiting for client comments.
After lunch, there are two weekly meetings in a row, and they proceed on schedule. The
second meeting also includes a client who tells me about a product group whose stock
turnover is not satisfactory. We take this group as a target product group in advertising and
run a small discount campaign to make room for next season’s products. The campaign
is run on both Google Ads and social media, but we decide to allocate more budget to the
social media because search volumes have started to decline as the season draws to an
end. The Trello cards are scheduled to be completed within a week and a half, which is
when we agreed to have an interim review of the sales of the product group and decide
whether there is still a need to continue the campaign.
After the weekly meeting, I continue my strategy work for a while and build an annual
marketing calendar for the client in which big events and trends can be recorded. While
certain campaigns should no longer be locked in to certain weeks in the fast-moving and
almost chaotic world, it’s important to keep in mind the broader understanding of a cus-
tomer’s business environment and customer behavior. For this, the marketing calendar
provides a framework in which the predesigned themes, contents, and marketing messages
 DIGITAL MARKETING WORK IN PRACTICE 139

can be flexibly deployed at the right time.

THURSDAY: CONTINUOUS FEEDBACK FACILITATES

LEARNING
I take a look at countless emails and Slack messages and take care of the most acute ones
before the monthly meeting. A few posts lead to the creation of new Trello cards, most of
which are pinned to my wall. Task and time management is made easier when you don’t
have to memorize everything—the cards remind you of the tasks waiting for you and their
due dates.
I jump into the monthly Teams call a few minutes in advance, and we exchange quick
thoughts with experts before the client joins the meeting. The team’s Growth Owner acts
as a facilitator for the meeting and assigning turns to speak, starting with the client, so they
can talk about their latest news, business situation, and general mood.
We then review the activities conducted during the previous month, one by one, empha-
sizing their implications and the lessons we have learned from them. Yesterday’s thoughts
on the emphasis on the Reach stage are reinforced by speeches from Google Ads and
search engine-optimization experts, and when it comes to the time to go through future
plans and ideas, I’ll introduce the Convert-stage campaign I have planned. We’ve also
noticed that social media results, in particular, show a growing trend in the number of
abandoned shopping carts, and we decide to design an email automation that reminds
customers to complete a purchase and offers a discount code if the messages alone don’t
get the desired result. So, we’re lifting the Convert-stage campaign from Trello’s backlog
to the top of the to do list as the customer also thinks there should be more conversions.
At the same time, a card made by the content team about the email automation appears in
the to do column, so the idea is almost implemented on the fly.
Other experts are also consulted on bold development proposals regarding the layout of
the website, the service promise made there, and the purchase process. Some are imme-
diately taken into implementation, some are left to wait for free resources for the backlog.
However, the client’s website and digital marketing activities overall are constantly ad-
vancing as the backlog feeds in new ideas and ensures that there is fuel for development.
Despite its efficiency, the hour-long meeting is slightly extended. However, we still ask
the customer for feedback on our operations and the smoothness of our cooperation be-
cause if the feedback cycle remains frequent, possible negative feelings are not enlarged
into bigger problems. The customer is also prepared to give feedback, this time mostly
positive. It feels good and encourages us to keep up the good work—although there is
always room for constructive criticism that facilitates learning and development.
After the meeting, we will have a retrospective meeting regarding the previous month
in which we will stop to look back on the period and try to see where we succeeded and,
above all, what we could develop in the future. This time we are focusing on the team’s
views. We unanimously state that the client’s goals have remained well at the center of our
efforts and we have taken the right steps but could put even more effort into developing
multi-channel campaigns. The client also provides a large amount of individual advertising
material, the processing of which in social media could well be automated, which would
140 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

free up resources for optimizing and developing advertising from the manual construction
of advertisements. I’ll make this a card for myself in Trello’s backlog so I can go through
it with the client later.
The rest of the day is based on sales support and customer work. The sales team have
come to Slack with good questions about a few interesting customers, and I’m pleased
to notice that other experts on my team have filled the Slack chain with their posts.
Experiences and observations from different industries are rapidly appearing in the mes-
sage chain and my responsibility is limited to formulating appropriate service packages
and budget recommendations.
I’m still doing a regular review for my clients and making sure the campaigns are alright,
budgets remain at the agreed levels, and that the results are coming in. There are no sur-
prises, so the day can be wrapped up.

FRIDAY: A FLOW STATE

Friday is a meeting-free day, when you can usually delve into larger entities for as long as
you want without external interruptions. We found out earlier that short interruptions are
the worst time thieves and that it took a tremendous amount of time and mental resources
to move from one task to another or to reassemble an interrupted idea. So, we liberated
Fridays from meetings, which has worked.
The morning goes by normally, responding to messages, but after ten I turn off Slack
and email and switch the phone to silent mode. This allows me to focus on strategy work
without interruption. Buyer personas are starting to take shape one by one. Deepening the
client’s business and its development is so immersive that I must force myself to interrupt
my work for lunch.
In the afternoon, I have set aside time to develop the campaign structures for two dif-
ferent clients. The MRACE® model works optimally when you can provide interesting, in-
sightful, and relevant content to the buyer at every stage. For both of these clients, it is
beginning to feel that the contents of the different stages are not fully balanced. So, I map
out the content pieces in use and the social media campaigns that drive traffic to them, as
well as their budget weightings. However, I notice that no exact content has been created
for the Convert stage in either client case for a while.
Through Slack, we devised a few article topics and process descriptions with the con-
tent team to help a customer who is on the verge of making a purchase figure out respons-
es to the last counter-arguments and barriers to making a purchase on the website. I post
the topics at the title level as Trello cards in the client’s backlogs, and in the second case,
the customer himself gets so excited that he promises to write the raw version himself
during the weekend.
The working week is coming to an end. I’m still taking a look at the deadlines of my own
Trello wall doing cards and make sure I’ve had time to do all the most urgent tasks this
week. Next week’s meetings don’t require special preparation this time, so I’ll shut down
my computer and work-related communication channels and leave for the weekend!
 7
In closing: the future of digital
marketing

Not even half of today’s digital marketing could have been made five years ago. Tools and
marketing technologies are evolving at such a tremendous rate that it is hard to imagine what
kind of situation we will be in five years from now.
It is said that the golden age of marketing technology began in the early 2010s. At that time,
forms of marketing that are taken for granted today—such as marketing automation, chatbots,
Google advertising, and social media advertising—began to become more common. Since
then, various SaaS-type marketing tools have been released on a practically daily basis, which
is mostly a good thing but also a bad thing. Namely, we humans love different tools, which in
the context of marketing easily leads companies to buy great-sounding tools and technologies
without even thinking about whether they will solve the real problems the company has in its
marketing. The plethora of tools and technologies easily overwhelm you, making the overall
picture of marketing forgotten.
But why was the golden age of marketing technology in the early 2010s when technologies
are being developed every day more and faster than before? It is true that the tools have evolved
a lot in ten years, but no new and groundbreaking tool has emerged in recent years. It has been
said, therefore, that we are currently living in the backwaters of digital marketing and market-
ing technology. However, we firmly believe that today’s trends—such as AI, 5G, blockchains,
and digital ecosystems—will revolutionize digital marketing in a few years, just as today’s
self-evident tools did in the early 2010s.
Indeed, the second golden age of marketing technology is expected to begin by 2025 (Figure
7.1). Companies that do not develop, manage, and measure their marketing based on a par-
ticular model will not be able to adopt new technologies with the efficiency required by change.
The second golden age of digital marketing and marketing technology will change digital mar-
keting more than we can imagine. The best way to prepare for it is to put in place a marketing
model that will withstand change. You have just learned one of these models from this book.
Now that you have read the entire book, you should have a better idea of how to create
a digital marketing strategy for your organization, how to implement it, and how to measure
its results. Remember that not everything can and should be learned at once. If you feel like
there was a lot in this book, keep in mind that good marketing only requires the following
three things: the customer’s identified need, the product, and the story of how the product
solves the customer’s need. Everything is built around this frame. So, keep going on your
learning path because knowing the things in this book on a practical level will open countless
new doors in your life.
 142 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Figure 7.1 The golden age of marketing technologies

Marketing is a skill that requires a deep understanding of, among other things, business, the
competitive field, trends, buying behavior, technologies, and human psychology. Marketing is
no longer a support function on the periphery of the business but one of the pulsating cores
at the heart of the business. Marketing has gained its rightful place. Now it is your turn to take
your rightful place as a marketing professional.
B I B L I O G R A PH Y

BOOKS
Chaffey, D. & Ellis-Chadwick, F. (2019). Digital marketing (7th edn). Harlow: Pearson.
Chaffey, D. & Smith, P.R. (2017). Digital marketing excellence: Planning, optimizing and integrating
online marketing (5th edn). London: Routledge.
De Pelsmacker, P., Geuens, M., & Van Den Bergh, J. (2021). Marketing communications eBook ePub:
A European perspective (7th edn). Harlow: Pearson.
Godin, S. (2018). This is marketing: You can’t be seen until you learn to see. London: Penguin Books.
HubSpot (2017). Content trends: Preferences emerge along generational fault lines (author Mimi An),
November 6, available at: https://​blog​.hubspot​.com/​marketing/​content​-trends​-preferences (accessed
March 1, 2023).
Hu, H.-F. & Krishen, A.S. (2019). Information overload in the digital age. In A.S. Krishen & O. Berezan
(eds), Marketing and humanity: Discourses in the real world (pp. 185–203). Newcastle upon Tyne:
Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Jackson, S. (2015). Cult of analytics: Data analytics for marketing (2nd edn). London: Routledge.
Karjaluoto, H. (2010). Digitaalinen markkinointiviestintä—Esimerkkejä parhaista käytännöistä yritys- ja
kuluttajamarkkinointiin. Jyväskylä: Docendo.
Karjaluoto, H. (2021). How consumer attitudes and values change (In Finnish: Miten kuluttajien asenteet
ja arvot muuttuvat?), Foundation of Retail Research & Finnish Commerce Federation (In Finnish:
Vähittäiskaupan tutkimussäätiö & Kaupan Liitto), survey study, available at: https://​vkts​.fi (accessed
March 1, 2023).
Kotler, P. & Keller, K.L. (2021). Marketing management (15th edn). Harlow: Pearson.
Kotler, P., Kartajaya, H., & Setiawan, I. (2017). Marketing 4.0: Moving from traditional to digital.
Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Mero, J., Karjaluoto, H., & Tammisalo, T. (2021). How a glass processing SME developed its Big Data
competence. In Carsten Lund Pedersen, Adam Lindgreen, Thomas Ritter, & Torsten Ringberg (eds),
Big Data in small business: Data-driven growth in small and medium-sized enterprises (pp. 117–27).
Cheltenham, UK and Northampton, MA, USA: Edward Elgar Publishing.
Opresnik, M.O., Kotler, P., & Hollensen, S. (2021). Social media marketing: A practitioner guide (4th
edn). Lübeck: Opresnik Management Guides.
Peppers, D., Rogers, M., & Kotler, P. (2017). Managing customer relationships. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
Porter, M.E. (2008). Competitive strategy: Techniques for analyzing industries and competitors. New York:
Free Press.
Sawhney, M. (2011). Lowe’s Companies Inc.: Optimizing the marketing communications mix. Kellog
School of Management.
Solomon, M.R., Hogg, M.K., Askegaard, S., & Bamossy, G. (2019). Consumer behaviour. A European
perspective. Harlow: Pearson.

SCIENTIFIC ARTICLES
Aslam, B. & Karjaluoto, H. (2017). Digital advertising around paid spaces, e-advertising industry’s
revenue engine: A review and research agenda. Telematics and Informatics, 34 (8), 1650–62.
Avery, J., Fournier, S., & Wittenbraker, J. (2014). Unlock the mysteries of your customer relationships.
Are you connecting with consumers the way they want you to? Harvard Business Review, 92 (7/8),
72–81.
Carrozzi, A., Chylinski, M., Heller, J., Hilken, T., Keeling, D.I., & de Ruyter, K. (2019). What’s mine is
a hologram? How shared augmented reality augments psychological ownership. Journal of Interactive
Marketing, 48, 71–88.
 144 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

De Haan, E., Kannan, P.K., Verhoef, P.C., & Wiesel, T. (2018). Device switching in online purchasing:
Examining the strategic contingencies. Journal of Marketing, 82, 1–19.
Djafarova, E. & Rushworth, C. (2017). Exploring the credibility of online celebrtities’ Instagram profiles
in influencing the purchase decisions of young female users. Computers in Human Behavior, 68, 1–7.
Doran, G.T. (1981). There’s a S.M.A.R.T. way to write management’s goals and objectives. Management
Review, 70 (11), 35–6.
Dwivedi, Y.K., Hughes, L., Ismagilova, E. et al. (2021a). Artificial Intelligence (AI): Multidisciplinary
perspectives on emerging challenges, opportunities, and agenda for research, practice and policy.
International Journal of Information Management, 57, 101994.
Dwivedi, Y.K., Ismagilova, E., Hughes, D.L. et al (2021b). Setting the future of digital and social media
marketing research: Perspectives and research propositions. International Journal of Information
Management, 59, 102168.
Edelman, D.C. & Singer, M. (2015). Competing on customer journeys. Harvard Business Review, 93 (11),
88–94.
Foltean, F.S., Trif, S.M., & Tuleu, D.L. (2019). Customer relationship management capabilities and social
media technology use: Consequences on firm performance. Journal of Business Research, 104, 563–75.
Fulgoni, G.M. & Lipsman, A. (2017). The downside of digital word of mouth and the pursuit of media
quality. Journal of Advertising Research, 57 (2), 127–31.
Gu, X. & Kannan, P.K. (2021). The dark side of mobile app adoption: Examining the impact on custom-
ers’ multichannel purchase. Journal of Marketing Research, 58 (2), 246–64.
Gu, X., Kannan, P.K., & Ma, L. (2018). Selling the premium in freemium. Journal of Marketing, 82 (6),
10–27.
Gupta, S., Leszkiewicz, A., Kumar, V., Bijmolt, T., & Potapov, D. (2020). Digital analytics: Modeling for
insights and new methods. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 51, 26–43.
Haenlain, M. (2017). How to date your clients in the 21st century: Challenges in managing customer
relationships in today’s world. Business Horizons, 60 (5), 577–86.
Hepola, J., Karjaluoto, H., & Hintikka, A. (2017). The effect of sensory brand experience and involvement
on brand equity directly and indirectly through consumer brand engagement. Journal of Product &
Brand Management, 26 (3), 282–93.
Hollebeek, L.D. & Macky, K. (2019). Digital content marketing’s role in fostering consumer engagement,
trust, and value: Framework, fundamental propositions, and implications. Journal of Interactive
Marketing, 45, 27–41.
Huang, M.-H. & Rust, R.T. (2021). A strategic framework for artificial intelligence in marketing. Journal
of the Academy of Marketing Science, 49, 30–50.
Iacobucci, D., Petrescu, M., Krishen, A., & Bendixen, M. (2019). The state of marketing analytics in
research and practice. Journal of Marketing Analytics, 7 (3), 152–81.
Järvinen, J. & Karjaluoto, H. (2015). The use of Web analytics for digital marketing performance meas-
urement. Industrial Marketing Management, 50, 117–27.
Järvinen, J. & Taiminen, H. (2016). Harnessing marketing automation for B2B content marketing.
Industrial Marketing Management, 54, 164–75.
Kannan, P.K. & Li, H.A. (2017). Digital marketing: A framework, review and research agenda.
International Journal of Research in Marketing, 34, 22–45.
Karjaluoto, H,. Hänninen, N., & Ulkuniemi, P. (2015). The role of digital channels in industrial market-
ing communications. Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, 30 (6), 703–10.
Labrecque, L I., vor dem Esche, J., Mathwick, C., Novak, T.P., & Hofacker, C F. (2013). Consumer power:
Evolution in the digital age. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 27(4), 257–69.
Lafley, A.G. & Martin, R. (2017). Customer loyalty is overrated. Harvard Business Review, 95 (1), 47–54.
Lamberton, C. & Stephen, A.T. (2016). A thematic exploration of digital, social media, and mobile mar-
keting research evolution from 2000 to 2015 and an agenda for future inquiry. Journal of Marketing,
80 (6), 146–72.
Lee, D., Hosanagar, K., & Nair, H.S. (2018). Advertising content and consumer engagement on social
media: Evidence from Facebook. Management Science, 64 (11), 5105–31.
Lee, J., Park, D.H., & Han, I. (2008). The effect of negative online consumer reviews on product attitude:
An information processing view. Electronic Commerce Research and
Applications, 7 (3), 341–52.
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 145

Lemon, K. & Verhoef, P. (2016). Understanding customer experience throughout the customer journey.
Journal of Marketing, 80 (6), 69–96.
Li, F., Larimo, J., & Leonidou, L.C. (2021). Social media marketing strategy: Definition, conceptualiza-
tion, taxonomy, validation, and future agenda. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 49, 51–70.
Lipiäinen, H. & Karjaluoto, H. (2015a). The usage of digital marketing channels in SMEs. Journal of Small
Business and Enterprise Development, 22 (4), 633–51.
Lipiäinen, H. & Karjaluoto, H. (2015b). Industrial branding in the digital age. Journal of Business &
Industrial Marketing, 30 (6), 733–41.
Liu, Q.B. & Karahanna, E. (2017). The dark side of reviews: The swaying effects of online product reviews
on attribute preference construction. MIS Quarterly, 41 (2), 427–48.
Mero, J., Tarkiainen, A., & Tobon, J. (2020). Effectual and causal reasoning in the adoption of marketing
automation. Industrial Marketing Management, 86, 212–22.
Munnukka, J., Karjaluoto, H., & Tikkanen, A. (2015). Are Facebook community members really loyal to
the brand? Computers in Human Behavior, 51, 429–39.
Namin, A., Hamilton, M.L., & Rohm, A.J. (2017). Impact of message design on banner advertising
involvement and effectiveness: An empirical investigation. Journal of Marketing Communications, 26
(2), 115–29.
Porter, M.E. (1979). How competitive forces shape strategy. Harvard Business Review, 57 (2), 137–45.
Rai, A. (2020). Explainable AI: From black box to glass box. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science,
48 (1), 137–41.
Ritz, W., Wolf, M., & McQuitty, S. (2019). Digital marketing adoption and success for small businesses.
Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, 13 (2), 179–203.
Saarijärvi, H., Karjaluoto, H., & Kuusela, H. (2013). Extending customer relationship management: From
empowering firms to empowering customers. Journal of Systems & Information Technology, 15 (2),
140–58.
Salonen, V. & Karjaluoto, H. (2016). Web personalization: The state of the art and future avenues for
research and practice. Telematics and Informatics, 33 (4), 1088–104.
Salonen, V. & Karjaluoto, H. (2019). About time: A motivation-based complementary framework for
temporal dynamics in web personalization. Journal of Systems and Information Technology, 21 (2),
236–54.
Salonen, V., Munnukka, J., & Karjaluoto, H. (2020). The role of fundamental motivations in
willingness-to-pay online. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 52, 101930.
Sanakulov, N., Kalliomaa, S., & Karjaluoto, H. (2018). Salesperson adoption and usage of mobile sales
configuration tools. Journal of Systems and Information Technology, 20 (2), 168–90.
Shaikh, A.A. & Karjaluoto, H. (2015). Making the most of information technology & systems usage: A lit-
erature review, framework and future research agenda. Computers in Human Behavior, 49, 541–66.
Shareef, M.A., Mukerji, B., Alryalat, M.A.A., Wright, A., & Dwivedi, Y.K. (2018). Advertisements on
Facebook: Identifying the persuasive elements in the development of positive attitudes in consumers.
Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 43, 258–68.
Shareef, M.A., Mukerji, B., Dwivedi, Y.K., Rana, N.P., & Islam, R. (2019). Social media marketing:
Comparative effect of advertisement sources. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, 46, 58–69.
Shiau, W.L., Dwivedi, Y.K., & Yang, H.S. (2017). Co-citation and cluster analyses of extant literature on
social networks. International Journal of Information Management, 37 (5), 390–99.
Simons, R. (2014). Choosing the right customer. The first step in a winning strategy. Harvard Business
Review, 92 (3), 48–55.
Singh, J.P., Irani, S., Rana, N.P., Dwivedi, Y.K., Saumya, S., & Roy, P.K. (2017). Predicting the “helpful-
ness” of online consumer reviews. Journal of Business Research, 70, 346–55.
Sivarajah, U., Irani, Z., Gupta, S., & Mahroof, K. (2020). Role of big data and social media analytics for
business to business sustainability: A participatory web context. Industrial Marketing Management,
86, 163–79.
Sousa, M.J. & Rocha, Á. (2019). Skills for disruptive digital business. Journal of Business Research, 94,
257–63.
Sun, S., Hall, D.J., & Cegielski, C.G. (2019). Organizational intention to adopt big data in the B2B context:
An integrated view. Industrial Marketing Management, 86, 109–21.
Syrdal, H.A. & Briggs, E. (2018). Engagement with social media content: A qualitative exploration. The
Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice, 26 (1–2), 4–22.
 146 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

Taiminen, K. & Karjaluoto, H. (2017). Examining the performance of brand-extended thematic-content:

The divergent impact of avid- and skim-reader groups. Computers in Human Behavior, 72, 449–58.
Toman, N., Adamson, B., & Gomez, C. (2017). The new sales imperative. Harvard Business Review, 95,
118–25.
Tyrväinen, O. & Karjaluoto, H. (2019a). A systematic literature review and analysis of mobile retailing
adoption. Journal of Internet Commerce, 18 (2), 221–47.
Tyrväinen, O. & Karjaluoto, H. (2019b). Omnichannel experience—towards successful channel integra-
tion in retail. Journal of Customer Behaviour, 18 (1), 17–34.
Tyrväinen, O., Karjaluoto, H., & Saarijärvi, H. (2020). Personalization and hedonic motivation in
creating customer experiences and loyalty in omnichannel retail. Journal of Retailing and Consumer
Services, 57, 102233.
Wang, Z. & Kim, H.G. (2017). Can social media marketing improve customer relationship capabilities
and firm performance? Dynamic capability perspective. Journal of Interactive Marketing, 39, 15–26.
Zolfagharian, M. & Yazdanparast, A. (2017). The dark side of consumer life in the age of virtual and
mobile technology. Journal of Marketing Management, 33 (15–16), 1304–35.

INTERNET SOURCES
Alltherooms (2021). April 21, available at: https://​www​.alltherooms​.com/​analytics/​airbnb​-statistics
(accessed March 1, 2023).
Boostlikes (2013; updated 2022). 10 Celebrities that have bought Twitter followers, available at: https://​
boostlikes​.com/​blog/​2013/​10/​10​-celebrities​-bought​-twitter​-followers (accessed March 1, 2023).
Braineet (2021). My Starbucks idea: An open innovation case-study, available at: https://​www​.braineet​
.com/​blog/​my​-starbucks​-idea​-case​-study (accessed March 1, 2023).
Chaffey, D. (2021). Introducing The RACE Framework: a practical framework to improve your digital
marketing, May 27, available at: https://​www​.smartinsights​.com/​digital​-marketing​-strategy/​race​-a​
-practical​-framework​-to​-improve​-your​-digital​-marketing/​ (accessed March 1, 2023).
Chiefmartec (n.d.), blog text, available at: https://​chiefmartec​.com (accessed March 1, 2023).
Dwoskin, E. & Timberg, C. (2018). How merchants use Facebook to flood Amazon with fake reviews,
Washington Post, April 23, available at: https://​www​.washingtonpost​.com/​business/​economy/​how​
-merchants​-secretly​-use​-facebook​-to​-flood​-amazon​-with​-fake​-reviews/​2018/​04/​23/​5dad1e30​-4392​
-11e8​-8569​-26fda6b404c7​_story​.html (accessed March 1, 2023).
Forbes (2019). The 80% blind spot: Are you ignoring unstructured organizational data? (author Adam
Rogers), January 29, available at: https://​www​.forbes​.com/​sites/​forbestechcouncil/​2019/​01/​29/​the​-80​
-blind​-spot​-are​-you​-ignoring​-unstructured​-organizational​-data/​ (accessed March 1, 2023).
GE Capital Retail Bank (2013). Second Annual Major Purchase Shopper Study, July 12, available
at: https://​www​.ge​.com/​news/​press​-releases/​ge​-capital​-retail​-banks​-second​-annual​-shopper​-study​
-outlines​-digital​-path​-major (accessed March 1, 2023).
Google & ComScore (2017). Automotive Shopper Study (N = 3,165 consumers 18+, who had purchased
a car duing the last three months), January, available at: https://​www​.thinkwithgoogle​.com/​consumer​
-insights/​consumer​-trends/​digital​-car​-research​-statistics/​ (accessed March 1, 2023).
HubSpot (2017). Content trends: Preferences emerge along generational fault lines (author Mimi An),
November 6, available at: https://​blog​.hubspot​.com/​marketing/​content​-trends​-preferences
MRACE-malli (2021). https://​www​.digimarkkinointi​.fi/​mrace​-malli (accessed March 1, 2023).
Salsify (2017). Second Annual Cracking the Consumer Code (N = 1,000), available at: https://​www​.salsify​
.com/​content/​ebook​-2017​-consumer​-research​-report​-cracking​-the​-code (accessed March 1, 2023).
Uberflip (2021). The Experience Disconnect: B2B Marketing Report, available at: https://​www​.uberflip​
.com/​the​-experience​-disconnect​-2021​-b2b​-marketing​-report/​ (accessed March 1, 2023).
UM (2019). Wave X Remix Culture Study, available at: https://​wavex​.umww​.com
Unilever (2021). Innovate with us, available at: https://​ www​ .unilever​
.com/​
brands/​innovation/​open​
-innovation/​(accessed March 1, 2023).
Wikipedia (2021). SMART criteria, available at: https://​en​.wikipedia​.org/​wiki/​SMART​_criteria (accessed
March 1, 2023).
 BIBLIOGRAPHY 147

ZME Science (2021). Your smartphone is millions of times more powerful than the Apollo 11 guidance
computers, May 13, available at: https://​www​.zmescience​.com/​science/​news​-science/​smartphone​
-power​-compared​-to​-apollo​-432/​ (accessed March 1, 2023).
I NDEX
4P model 10–11 in customer purchasing process 24, 25, 44
5G 141 traditional marketing for generating 11–12
5S goals 34–7, 38 see also brand awareness; product awareness
24Rent.Fi case study 127–8
B2B (business-to-business) industry 15, 22, 28–9,
A/B testing 93, 95, 115 35, 41, 57, 66, 71, 89, 111
Accenture 28 back-end marketing technologies 15–16
Act stage Baidu 97
in 24Rent.fi case study 127, 128 bargaining power
and content marketing 86 of buyers and suppliers 20–21, 22
in digital marketer case study 135, 136, 137, digitalization increasing 32
138 of food delivery platforms 23
Google services 113, 114, 115 of online marketplaces 22–3
importance of brand in 70 big data 17
in LämpöYkkönen case study 117, 118 Bing 97
metrics 77 blockchains 141
in MRACE dashboard 131 bounce rate 69, 77, 79, 101
in MRACE model 67–70 brand appearance 50
problems and solutions 68–9 brand awareness 36, 66, 80, 86, 96, 111–12, 114,
in RACE model 61 123
in Siparila case study 96, 97 brands
social media advertising 124–5 benefits in Engage stage 75, 125
in Varma case study 79 comparing competing 22
in Via Tribunali case study 122, 123 and content marketing 86, 88
videos in 92–3 and digital assistants 16
visual design 95 in digital marketer case study 135–6
website content for 69–70 importance in Act stage 70
agile marketing team 134–7, 139–40 importance in Convert stage 73
agile methods 61, 63–4 importance in Engage stage 75
agile model of adoption 19, 20 in information search 45
agile project management model 133–40 role in Reach stage 66–7
agile start-ups 22 searching for information on 26–7
AirBnB 22 in second wave of digital marketing 5
Alexa 15, 16 and value co-creation 57–8
algorithms 98, 99 value propositions 51
Altavista 3 videos 91–3
Amazon 3, 22–3, 27, 29, 53–4, 126 and viral marketing 36–7
American Marketing Association 3 and visual design 94, 95
Apple 36, 49 and YouTube advertising 113–15
arousing interest phase 109 Brandwatch 16
artificial intelligence (AI) 6, 17, 45, 56, 98, 115, buyer personas
123, 137, 141 building buying path to website using 87–91
assignable (SMART) 37, 39, 40 content created for 83, 99, 107, 128
augmented reality (AR) 6, 15 and content marketing 81
automation 7 creating 41–7
see also marketing automation definition 41
awareness in digital marketer case study 136, 140
creating, Reach as 60–61, 65, 125 in digital marketing definition 2–3
 INDEX 149

and Google advertising 107 nature of 33

importance of knowing 42, 47–50, 55 and Reach 95
and marketing video production 91 and value proposition 50–51
in MRACE model 62, 65, 67, 68, 69, 86 competitive landscape
need for link with SEO 98 changes in 20–23
product awareness of 42–5 differentiation requiring knowledge of 48
in Siparila case study 96 consumer’s information overload 29–30
and social media advertising 124 contact acquisition 119–20
and superior customer experience 54 contact information 56, 70, 82, 84, 109, 119, 124
as tool for identifying customer needs 40 contact segmentation 120–21
and value proposition 51 content marketing
in Varma case study 79 affecting every step of MRACE model 86–7
buyers as bringing new stimuli to customer 25
business, behavior of 27–9 case study 96–7
buying/purchasing processes of 24, 47 conceptualization 81, 86
in digital era 23, 25 as digital marketing tool 81
distribution of content to 96 helping provide superior customer
potential, leads as 8 experience 54
product awareness of 42–4 as key driver of change 5
purchase decisions of 87 as one of top marketing-related technologies
unified visual design for engaging 94 18
buying process and sales-ready leads 73
in B2B industry 28, 35 scaling results of 90
and buyer personas 41–2, 44, 47, 62 textual content of websites 87–91
customer 24–5 videos 91–3
digital content playing huge role in 25 visual design 94–5
Discovery advertising at different stages of as way of developing customer acquisition 40
112 conversion definition 100
first step in starting 43 conversion rate definition 100
in LämpöYkkönen case study 117 conversion rate optimization (CRO) 67, 68, 73,
motive-based content triggering 70 89, 98, 99, 100–103, 104, 113, 117
and MRACE model 62, 92, 130, 136 conversions 17, 41, 79–80, 93, 101, 102, 111, 119,
planning for display advertising at different 123, 130, 138, 139
stages of 109 see also macroconversions; microconversions
pre-Internet 30 Convert stage
and sharing free information 31 in 24Rent.fi case study 127, 128
in superior customer experience example 56 content for 72
traditional marketing important in early and content marketing 86–7
stages of 11–12 in digital marketer case study 136, 138, 139,
and website analysis tools 102 140
Google services 107, 110, 111, 113, 115
chatbots 17, 35, 36, 103, 119, 141 importance of brand in 73
click-through rate (CTR) 75, 110, 124 influencer marketing 125
clothing 4, 30 in LämpöYkkönen case study 117, 118
cloud services 19, 21, 56 marketing automation 118
cold audiences 42, 107–8, 111–12, 114, 135–6 metrics 77–8
company website or web service 82–6 in MRACE dashboard 131
competitive advantage in MRACE model 71–3
core of communication based on 2 online product reviews 126
determining 40–50 problems and solutions 72–3
importance of genuine 30 in RACE model 61
 150 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

search engine advertising 105 history (first wave) 3–4

in Siparila case study 96, 97 history (second wave) 4, 5
social media advertising 125 history (third wave) 4, 5–7
in Varma case study 79–80 marketing models as part of 8–13
in Via Tribunali case study 123 T-model of 133, 134
videos in 92, 93 digital marketing agencies 133, 134
visual design 95 digital marketing models 11–13
cost per action (CPA) 110 see also MRACE model; RACE model
cost per click (CPC) 76, 107, 124 digital marketing strategy
cost per mille (CPM) 76, 124 and analysis of digitalized business
Covid-19 pandemic 7–8, 98 environment 14
creating new category for market 49 context 33–4
Creator package 30 determining competitive advantage 40–50
crowd-based power 31, 32 nature of 33
crowdsourcing 36, 57 and RACE model planning 60
customer behavior setting goals and objectives 34–40
business buyer’s behavior 27–9 value proposition and value creation 50–58
buying process 24–5 digitalization
consumer’s information overload 29–30 and competition 20–23
data on 16, 17, 52, 79 and customer behavior 23–32, 44, 52
empowerment 30–32 pictorial representation 6
in marketing process model 11 and technological development 17–20
research findings re purchasing decisions as ubiquitous 7
25–7 and value propositions 51
understanding changes in 23–4 digitalizing sales network case study 78–80
customer centricity 49, 51 direct-to-consumer (D2C) 22, 79
customer experience 18, 22, 28, 31, 35, 36, 37, 40, display advertising 108–9
46, 47, 49, 51, 75, 99, 100, 101 see also Google advertising: Display Network
see also superior customer experience Dollar Shave Club 22
customer relationship management (CRM) 2, 10, DoorDash 23
11, 16, 47, 72, 81, 82, 133 drivers
customer relationship marketing 82 of back-end technologies development 17
customer relationships 36, 38, 54, 56, 57, 61, 79 of budget allocation to digital marketing 36
of buyer personas 68, 87–8
decision phase 106, 110, 112 of change 5
deep learning 17 content marketing based on 88
demand-based power 30, 31 relevant content as 28
differentiation 11, 33, 47–50, 70 social media advertising as (case study)
digital analytics tools 16 127–8
digital assistants 15–16 Dropbox 21
digital cameras 21–2 DuckDuckGo 97
digital content 25, 28, 29–30, 43, 81
digital ecosystems 141 e-business (electronic business) 3–4
digital marketer (typical working week) case study e-commerce (electronic commerce) 4, 7, 18, 34–5,
135–40 36, 61, 85, 126, 135, 137
digital marketing e-marketing (electronic marketing) 2, 3
5S goals of 34–7, 38 eBay 3
channels and tools 81–132 email automation 133, 137, 139
definitions 2–3 email marketing 4, 36, 56, 69, 70, 71, 74, 81, 82,
effects of Covid-19 pandemic 7–8, 98 93, 109, 118–21, 137
future of 141–2 email open rate 78
 INDEX 151

Engage stage in Via Tribunali case study 122

in 24Rent.fi case study 127 Google 3, 9, 27, 41, 55, 65, 74, 79, 83, 89, 97, 99,
and content marketing 87 100, 117, 127, 130
importance of brand in 75 Google advertising 9, 81, 111, 117, 141
in LämpöYkkönen case study 117, 118 Discovery Network 65, 71, 110–12
marketing automation 118 Display Network 65, 71, 107–10, 111, 113
metrics 78 Google Ads 65, 69, 82–3, 96, 104–7, 132, 136,
in MRACE dashboard 131 138, 139
in MRACE model 73–5 Google Analytics 9, 16, 101
in RACE model 61 Google Assistant 15, 16
in Siparila case study 96, 97 Google search 8, 26, 68, 76, 98–100, 104, 107, 113,
social media advertising 125 115
in Varma case study 80 growth hacking 63, 64
videos in 93 growth marketing 64
visual design 95
engagement 40, 73–4, 75, 78 heatmaps 68, 102, 117
ERP systems 46, 71 Hotjar 102
evaluation of alternatives 24, 45–6, 86 Hubspot 26–7, 49
hypercompetition 20
Facebook 5, 6, 15, 26, 65–6, 68, 82, 89, 91, 92–3,
95, 96, 110, 123, 136, 137, 138 impressions 53, 76, 124
feedback influencer marketing 5, 36, 125–6
continuous 139–40 information-based power 30–31
customer 35–6, 41, 134, 139–40 information overload 29–30
on videos 92 information retrieval 23, 26, 72, 117
FinTech 22 information retrieval phase 109, 111, 112, 117
five forces model 20–21 information search 24, 45, 79, 86, 106
followers 5, 36, 126, 127 Instagram 5, 26, 65, 82, 91, 96, 123, 136
form analysis 102 insurance company case study 78–80
front-end marketing technologies 15–16 Internet 3, 5, 7, 15, 25, 79, 86, 107
fully aware buyers 42, 43 Internet browsers 3
funnel model 25 Internet bubble 4
fuzzy buzzwords/slogans 48, 51 Internet marketing 2
Internet of Things (IoT) 16–17
Glaston 56 Internet users 107, 108, 125
goals and objectives iPhones 5, 45, 73
in 24Rent.fi case study 127
of advertising 109, 110, 113, 123 key performance indicators (KPIs) 62–3
and conversion 100 keywords 9, 16, 45, 70, 77, 104–5, 115, 136
of customer relationship marketing 82 Kodak 21–2
in LämpöYkkönen case study 116–17
of measurement 128 LämpöYkkönen case study 116–18
MRACE model 62, 63–4, 65, 67, 73 landing page 68, 86, 92–3, 96, 101, 102, 104, 106,
in production plans 91 113, 116, 124, 137
RACE model 60–61 leads 8, 35, 39, 60, 61, 67, 68–9, 70, 71, 72–3, 74,
of SEO 98 76, 77, 83, 84, 86, 87, 88, 89–90, 98, 100,
setting digital marketing 34–40 111, 113, 115, 117–18, 119, 123, 130, 131
in Siparila case study 96 LEGO 30, 85
as starting point for digital marketing Lehto’s website renovation case study 85–6
strategy 33 Levi’s 4
in value creation 52, 54, 56–7 LinkedIn 5, 65, 82, 123, 126
 152 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

listening 15, 35–6, 39, 57 role in scaling of advertising 107

location services 6 strategic process of 129–30
technical implementation enabling 83
machine learning 15, 17, 53, 123 use of indicators 39
macroconversions 125 Meta 15
marketing microconversions 67–8, 108, 124, 131
continuous development of 62–4 mobile devices 5, 15
as having gained its rightful place 142 “mobile first” thinking 5
as often blinded to good results 76 monthly meetings 134, 138, 139
understanding of 2 MRACE dashboard, managing marketing
marketing activities activities with 130–32
digital 35, 139 MRACE model
managing 130–32 case study 78–80
marketing as set of 2 and continuous development of marketing
marketing models dividing into clear stages 62–4
20 description 60–62
targeting to customer 42 and digital marketing tools 81
marketing analytics 128–32 as guiding all levels of digital marketing
marketing automation 16–17, 18, 49, 53, 61, 70, 133–40
71–2, 73, 81, 117, 118–23, 141 in Lehto case study 86
marketing channels and tools and RACE model 60–61
analytics and measurement 128–32 see also Act stage; Convert stage; Engage
company website or web service 82–6 stage; Measure stage (MRACE); Reach
content marketing 86–97 stage
marketing automation and email marketing multi-channel advertising 111, 135, 139
118–23 multi-channel content marketing case study 96–7
and MRACE model 62 multi-channel marketing 4, 62, 71, 130
overview 81–2
search engine marketing and online NASA 17, 30
advertising 97–118 native advertising 110
social media marketing 123–8 Neapolitan pizzas in Finland case study 122–3
marketing communications 2–3, 17, 22, 50, 51, Netflix 22, 49
53, 115 network-based power 31
marketing models 8–13, 20 Nokia 5
see also MRACE model; RACE model
marketing process models 9–11 objectives see goals and objectives
marketing strategy implementation see MRACE online advertising 8, 81–2, 107–18, 127
model online and mobile banking 36
marketing technologies online marketing 2, 4
as affecting marketing processes 11 online product reviews 126–7
back-end 16–17 online stores 3, 15, 22–3, 107, 127
front-end 15–16 organic traffic 79, 98, 117
golden ages of 141–2 outcome aware buyers 42, 43
selection and adoption of 17–20
marketing tools see marketing channels and tools page-specific queries 102
mass advertising 6–7, 36 Pinterest 123
measurable (SMART) 37, 38–9, 40 post-production (videos) 92
Measure stage (MRACE) 61, 75–8, 95 post-purchase behavior 24, 46–7
measurement problem aware buyers 42, 43
with MRACE dashboard 130–32 problem stage 106, 109, 112, 113
primary goal of 128 product aware buyers 42, 43
 INDEX 153

product awareness 42–5, 96, 122 retrospective review 134, 138, 139, 140
product centricity 49 rivalry among existing competitors 20–21
product reviews 5, 25, 28, 31, 78, 125, 126–7
production save (5S goal) 34, 36, 37, 38
of content 73, 79, 98, 133, 137 search engine advertising (SEA) 66, 82, 103–7,
of marketing videos 91–2, 93, 113 115–16
production planning 91, 92 search engine marketing (SEM) 65, 66, 81–2,
purchasing decisions 97–107, 113, 116–18
in B2B industry 35 search engine optimization (SEO) 65, 66, 68, 72,
and barriers to buying 46 74, 79, 82, 96, 98–103, 117, 133
criteria for 45–6 search engines 2, 3, 8, 11, 15, 16, 24, 39, 45, 66, 70,
in customer buying process 24–5 85, 97, 99, 127
and digital assistants 16 search rankings 68, 98–100
influencers guiding 125 selection and comparison phase 106, 110, 112
and information-based power 30–31 self-service kiosks 36
in LämpöYkkönen case study 117 sell (5S goal) 34–5, 37, 38
and network-based power 31 serve (5S goal) 34, 35, 37, 38
research findings on 25–7 Siparila content marketing case study 96–7
role of digitalization in 28 Siri 15, 16
situation analysis 129
qualitative research 102 sizzle (5S goal) 34, 36, 37, 38
quantitative research 101 Slack (instant messaging application) 135, 136,
137, 139, 140
RACE model 60–61 SMART criteria 37–40
rational purchasing 25 smart TVs 5
Reach stage smartphones 5–6, 17, 51, 73, 79
in 24Rent.fi case study 127, 128 Snapchat 26, 82, 123
and content marketing 86 social media 5, 15, 18, 24, 25, 26–7, 29, 35, 36–7,
in digital marketer case study 138, 139 39, 40, 57, 61, 69, 71, 74, 76, 77, 79, 82, 97,
Google services 107, 110, 111, 113, 114 101, 117, 126, 134–5, 136, 137, 138, 139–40
influencer marketing 125 social media advertising 8, 66, 105, 110, 116–18,
in LämpöYkkönen case study 117 122, 123, 124–5, 127–8, 132, 133, 141
metrics 76–7 social media channels 35, 62, 65–6, 82, 117, 133
in MRACE dashboard 131 social media followers 126, 127
in MRACE model 65–7 social media influencers 23, 24, 45, 125–6, 127
in RACE model 60–61 social media marketing 2, 65, 81, 82, 123–8
role of brand in 66–7 social media monitoring 16, 41, 126
search engine advertising 105 social media platforms 2, 5, 82, 123, 124
search engine optimization 98 software-as-a-service (SaaS) 19, 71, 141
in Siparila case study 96, 97 speak (5S goal) 34, 35–6, 37, 38
social media advertising 124 specific (SMART) 37, 38, 40
in Varma case study 79 Spotify 22
in Via Tribunali case study 122, 123 Starbucks 36–7, 57
videos in 92, 93 Sungevity 55–6
visual design 95 superior customer experience
realistic (SMART) 37, 39, 40 examples 55–6
recognizability 50, 94–5, 123–4 means 54
regulation 14, 22 objective 54
remarketing 69, 71, 74, 93, 107, 109–10, 114, 115, value to company 54–5
124, 137 value to customer 54
ResQ 37 who it is for 55
 154 DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY

T-model of digital marketing 133, 134 Varma case study 78–80

tablets 5 Via Tribunali case study 122–3
tactical implementation 133 video filming 92
Taloustutkimus 25–6 videos
targeted and personalized marketing in different stages of MRACE model 92–3
example 53–4 marketing, production of 91–2
means 52 use in buying process 28
objective 52 YouTube 113–15
value to company 53 viral marketing 36–7
value to customer 53 virtual reality (VR) 15
who it is for 53 visual design 94–6
technical implementation 83, 129
technological development 14–20 warm audiences 42, 107, 108, 110, 111, 114, 138
technology adoption 17–20 waterfall model 19
Tesla 49 web analytics 16, 41
threat of new entrants 20–21, 22 web browsers 3, 15
threat of substitute products and services 20, 21–2 website content 29, 43, 69–70, 83, 87–91, 124
TikTok 5, 82, 123 website traffic 7, 8–9, 31, 39, 40, 60, 63, 65, 76, 77,
time-related (SMART) 37, 39–40 79, 99
top-of-mind marketing 114, 115, 125 websites
Trello (visualization tool) 134–5, 136, 137, 138, building buying path to 87–9
139–40 company 82–6
Twitter 5, 26, 82, 123, 127 elements of good 83–5
generating leads 89–91
Uber 22 history 3–4
unaware buyers 42, 43 as marketing platforms 2
Unilever 57 recording visitor movements on 102
unstructured data 17 renovation case study 85–6
user-generated content (UGC) 5, 11, 31, 126 usability 8–9, 35, 67, 101, 102
videos on 91–3
value co-creation visual design 94–6
and brands 57–8 weekly meetings 134, 135–6, 137, 138
examples 57 Wordpress 85
means 57
objective 56–7 Yahoo 3, 97
value to company 57 Yandex 97
value to customer 57 YouTube 5, 22, 69, 74, 82, 91, 93
who it is for 57 YouTube advertising 66, 105, 107, 110, 111,
value creation 10–11, 52–8 113–15
value proposition 2–3, 11, 33–4, 50–51, 60