Top 10 Cheat Sheets And Infographics To Help You Master Digital Marketing

Since digital marketing first exploded into the marketing scene, it has been growing at an exponential rate, which can make it difficult for an aspiring digital marketer to become a master in the field.

Though marketing resources vary widely and include television, billboards and radio, what comes to mind when people are talking about digital marketing platforms are the internet, social media and mobile. The latter three platforms are subject to many changes and it is for this very reason that marketers find themselves struggling to stay on top of every trend and change.

This post comprises 10 digital marketing cheat sheets and infographics, which will help any aspiring marketer to get into the digital marketing field and capture relevant audiences.

Affiliate marketing

This is a form of internet advertising that allows individuals to market a company’s products and get paid when they generate sales, leads or traffic for a website. There are four key players in an affiliate program and these include:

• The affiliate, who is the person marketing the product

• The merchant, who is the owner of the website or product

• The network, which is the company running the affiliate program

• The customer

Affiliates are paid commissions whenever visitors take a desired action. Affiliates can also join multiple tier programs that allow them to earn commissions from anyone they introduce into an affiliate network.

Common terms used in affiliate marketing

Cost per sale/ acquisition (CPA): Payment model where commissions are paid only when a purchase is made.

Cost per lead (CPL): Where payment is done when a visitor subscribes for a product or service.

Cost per click (CPC): A payment model based on clicks generated by an affiliate’s efforts.

Pixel code or tracking code: This is a small-sized, transparent graphic that accompanies every affiliate link and is meant for tracking performance.

Banner Ad: A flashy electronic advertisement that is placed on a website.

Cookies: Text files that allow the affiliate software to track origins of conversions and which banners or links get conversions. Tracking can also be done using unique affiliate IDs that are embedded into the ad.

Direct linking: Where affiliate links don’t redirect but go to a landing page.

Email link: An affiliate link contained in an email signature or newsletter.

Text link: An affiliate ad that contains only text.

Here’s an infographic detailing everything about Affiliate Marketing.

Email marketing

Among the most important but sometimes undervalued digital marketing resources is email marketing. By moving marketing into your inbox, you make communication personal as you can communicate directly with your target audience.

Why you need to learn about email marketing

• With one click of a button, you’ll educate your whole subscriber list about your products and brand.

• Email is targeted, hence has a higher likelihood of generating conversions, creating relationships and building loyalty.

• Landing straight into your audience’s inboxes ensures you remain top-of-mind.

Terms to make you sound like an expert email marketer:

Above the fold: This is the part of your email that is visible without any scrolling necessary. All relevant information should be in this section.

Bounce: This is when emails are rejected as spam or if they are undelivered to invalid addresses.

Open rate: This is the number of people who open your email and is calculated as a percentage of all the emails sent out.

Click through rate (CTR): Number of clicks generated by the link in your emails. If for instance you send 1000 emails and 100 people click on the link, your CTR is 10% (100/1000).

Larry Kim from Wordstream and Brian Dean from Backlinko came together to create this Infographic on CTR.

Subscriber: These are visitors who fill in a form on your website in order to access what you are offering. Subscribers become part of your email marketing list.

Email Marketing Cheat Sheet (infographic courtesy Marketo)

SEO

When you post your content to the web, or market any products online, you have to work at making that content or product visible to internet visitors. This is achieved through a process known as search engine optimization (SEO). You optimize by linking keywords or phrases that web visitors would often use when searching for your service or product.

Key SEO terms that you should always have on your finger tips

SEO is very wide and the terms below in no way represent all there is to learn about this fundamental resource for digital marketing. For a more in depth study into SEO, you can check this guide:

White hat SEO: these are approved methods for SEO, whose aim is to generate traffic and increase conversions for your website without compromising on user experience.

Black hat SEO: This is unethical SEO practice such as keyword stuffing or links that misdirect to other websites. Black hat is not allowed by search engines and could even lead to websites being delisted.

Search engine results page(SERP): If you query the search engine, the results it returns are referred to as SERP.

Keywords: These are commonly searched words or phrases related to a product or service. Linking content and products to keywords allows internet visitors to easily find them.

Long-tail keywords/keyword phrases: These are made of more than one word

Call-to-action: Messages that ask visitors to take action on your owned media. Examples include: ‘click here’, ‘download’, ‘buy now’, ‘subscribe,’ among others.

Link building: refers to efforts to get more inbound links to your owned media from other external media such as guest blogging sites or social media.

Metadata: This is data that summarizes your content. It provides information about your website to the search engine, making it easy for search engines to find the content and rank it. Metadata and metatags are displayed in search engine results, and determine the decision by an internet browser to visit your website.

Organic traffic: This is traffic that originates from internet search results. The opposite is paid traffic, which is generated from paid adverts.

Page rank/ranking: A number between 0 to 10 that shows how your website ranks on search engines.

Here’s Rand Fishkin explaining how Old-school SEO myths still are around and he busts them in this Whiteboard Friday.

Learn more about SEO in this infographic which comes courtesy of: Webydo.

Content marketing

Another effective hence increasingly relevant digital marketing resource is content marketing. It’s been tried and tested by small businesses and large corporations such as Microsoft and John Deere, and proven instrumental in generating large amounts of traffic and increasing customer retention. Internet Marketer, Neil Patel, explains how anyone can create a money-making blog in less than an Hour!

Key buzzwords of content marketing

Content: This is any type of written, visual or audio material available on electronic media such as websites, blogs or social media platforms.

Content curation: This is different from content creation in that instead of creating new content, a content curator finds existing content on the web, extracts useful parts from it and then presents it to readers.

Content distribution: This refers to the many ways that you can distribute content to your audience. You can find more in-depth information about content distribution in here.

Buyer persona: These are fictional characters that you create as a representation of the audience your content is targeted for. Working with personas in mind will help you to create the right content.

Editorial calendar: Refers to a road map that guides you on the type of content to create, the personas you’re targeting, when to publish and which methods to use for distribution.

Evergreen content: this is content that stays relevant for many months or years to come. This type of content is extremely helpful as it continues to attract traffic without needing to create new content.

Influencers: These are people whose expertise or experience shapes an industry. Collaborating with influencers, will help your content marketing efforts.

A Beginners Guide to Content Marketing [INFOGRAPHIC]

via: Demandmetric.

Social media marketing

This is the use of social media platforms such as twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, and others, to gain traffic for your owned media. When used together with the other methods discussed in this digital marketing cheat sheet, social media creates a robust marketing strategy that allows your content to be shared, get followers, backlink to your media and increase real time engagement with your audience.

Key buzzwords used in social media marketing

Each social media platform is a monstrosity and has its own terminology unique. But to get you started, here are some of the terms you might come across or need to use often:

Comment: A response to a social media posting.

Reach: Number of times a post has been received and read by unique viewers/readers.

Social media optimisation (SMO): Practices used for generating traffic for posts through social media.

Social listening: Monitoring what people are saying on social media.

Social retargeting: Consolidation of potential customers into a pool that you can target with social media messages in future.

Trending: When a topic achieves a lot of popularity.

Vanity metrics: Metrics that are viewed as intangible and immeasurable and whose ROI is difficult to determine. Examples include likes, shares and retweets.

Viral: When content is shared across social media platforms at a fast rate, this is called going viral. You can’t predict or plan for your content to go viral.

Apart from this, having the right mindset of a Social Media Marketer is important and here are few social media skills that can prove to be helpful.

How to Feel Like a Social Media Professional (Infographic)

via: hostingcaptain.

Paid advertising/SEM

This is a marketing effort that involves paying for online advertisement in order to generate more traffic. Paid advertising is effective, but it should only be used to support and grow your other media. This is because when you stop paying, traffic could easily disappear.

There are 3 main payment models used in paid advertising:

CPM (cost per 1000 impressions): Under this model, an advertiser will pay every 1000 times an ad is displayed to a user, whether or not they clicked on it.

PPC (pay per click): Also known as CPC (cost per click), advertising costs are incurred when people click on an ad. This model has higher chances of conversion if the clicks are from people who are interested in your offering.

CPA (cost per acquisition): With this model, an advertiser only pays when a lead is generated. Though it tends to be more expensive than CPC and CPM, it has more guarantee of conversions.

Common terms used in paid online marketing

Bid price: This is the price you set as the budget you are willing to spend for an ad.

Ad copy: This is the advert. It includes the header, short description and URL. It displays at the top of the results page in the search engine.

AdWords: This is an ad network owned by Google and is the most used form of pay-per-click advertising. Other popular alternatives from other search engines include: Bing Ads and Yahoo search ads.

Landing page: This is the page that an ad link directs to.

Impressions: This is the number of times your paid advert displays on the SERP when related keywords or terms are searched.

AdWords Infographic – A Beginner’s Guide

via: Doyledigital.

Video advertising

A report by BI Intelligence shows that video has the highest click-through rate compared to other digital advertising resources.



It’s no wonder then, that video has grown tremendously in its relevance as a resource for digital marketing.

Key online video advertising terms

Rich media: Ads other than still images, but containing features such as video and audio.

Streaming: Transfer of data that allows for real-time video watching.

Autoplay video: Video that plays automatically once a page is loaded

Cue point: A marker that triggers the point at which an ad will run within a video.

Bumper ad: A short brand advertising video that appears within another video and plays for less than 10 seconds

Linear ads: Ads scheduled within video content and will play before (pre-roll ad), during (mid-roll ad), or after (post-roll ad), the main video content.

Non-linear ads: These ads are placed within or over the video ad and run at the same time as the main video content. A good example of non-linear videos is overlay ads.

Overlay ads: An ad that shows at the bottom of the screen when the video is playing.

Interstitial ads: Video ads that load when transitioning from one web page to another.

In-banner videos: Videos embedded within an ad banner. The video plays when a viewer clicks on the banner.

Marketing automation

Due to the many marketing platforms at the consumer’s disposal today, the buying cycle for any product will involve different touch points.

For example, a consumer’s first point of contact with your product might be through an advertisement on TV. She may then turn to Facebook to learn more about the product and view customer comments. Eventually_ and maybe after a couple of days_ she’ll go to your website or a store near her to make a purchase.

This is just but one scenario; each conversion journey will take on a unique path. To keep track of all these conversions paths, you need to automate.

Marketing automation is the key to connecting all your marketing channels, allowing you to chase immediate sales while nurturing future prospects. Automation also makes your analytics more efficient and dependable, it can allow you to integrate systems and undertake any customizations you want.

There’s a wide variety of marketing automation tools to choose from and many give a free trial which gives you an opportunity to try them out before committing to a budget.

Retargeting

Retargeting (or remarketing) is a marketing strategy that works magic for websites that attracts a lot of traffic (approximately 5000 visitors monthly).

Retargeting is best put to use when you find that though other digital marketing resources such as content marketing are generating traffic, they are not retaining it or leading to conversions.

Retargeting uses cookies that anonymously track your target audience’s web activities. Cookies allow you to serve ads whenever people who’ve visited your site are surfing the web as such people are more likely to take an interest in your offers.

Website

We cannot conclude this digital marketing cheat sheet without talking about your website.

All the marketing strategies that you invest your time, energy and budget in serve one main purpose: to increase conversions on your website. Your website forms part of your owned media and this means that have direct control over the kind of experiences you want to give your audiences. This therefore means that your website is the most important part of any digital marketing strategy.

Important website-related terms

Website terminology is very vast but for the purpose of this article, we’ll restrict ourselves to a few marketing-related terms:

Accessibility: The ease with which your site is accessible on different interfaces and devices and to different people even those with physical handicap.

Anchor text: Text that refers to your webpage and accompanies a hyperlink.

Backlinks: Links that direct from other websites to your website.

Bounce rate: The rate at which people are leaving your website without navigating to other pages. A high bounce rate means that your navigation is not good or you don’t have good content.

Conversion: This is when visitors become buyers. Conversion is the main goal of all digital marketing efforts.

Landing page: This is the page that a visitor arrives at first when entering a website. Advertisements are usually designed to direct traffic to a landing page.

Website optimization: This involves structuring a website to make it search-engine friendly in terms of faster loading and good quality.

Here’s the anatomy of a perfectly optimized page which will prove to be handy.

Essential Digital Marketing tools [Infographic]

Click image to enlarge.

Source: Smartinsights.

In conclusion

Digital marketing resources are growing at a dizzying rate. Mastery in this field therefore requires taking part in a comprehensive and current course. Deep-diving into the resources and strategies discussed in this online marketing cheat sheet will allow you to:

1. Keep up with current trends and changes taking place in the field of digital marketing.
2. Stand out from the crowd. Marketers find themselves battling to get their brands noticed as more companies turn towards digital marketing. A digital marketing course will give you better understanding of how to use the resources available to you to capture consumers’ attention and get noticed in your industry.
3. Make use of digital analytics. By learning digital analytics, you will be able to monitor and collect the large train of online data left by customers, analyze it and apply insights to making decisions.
4. Become an effective marketer by finding the right digital mix for your company. The resources discussed in this digital marketing cheat sheet will not work in the same way for every business.
5. Create loyalty for your brand through intensified direct engagement with your customers.
6. Identify areas of overlap among the different strategies in order to maximize on budgets, time and human resources.

About author:

Mohammad Farooq works as an Analyst. When not working, he goes backpacking around India. He regularly blogs about Travel, Movies, Socio-Political Issues and a lot of other things on his blog, ReveringThoughts.