Kat Fenton

Each year, typically around mid to late February, I experience a sense of restlessness—a feeling that something is missing and that I need to accomplish more. To address this, I have chosen to pursue several marketing courses to boost my UX Design Portfolio. While I have worked with several marketing teams in the past, it’s largely a passion that has gotten put on the back burner for me in recent years. As a starting point, I was recommended The Complete Digital Marketing Course by Rob Percival and Daragh Walsh on Udemy. Below are my notes and key takeaways from the course.

4 Steps to Grow with Digital Marketing

1. Define A Target Audience/Market Research
   • Determine age, gender, location to start with and then focus on their problems and solutions
2. Attract Your Audience With Free Content & Ads
   • There are several types of content you can produce including educational, brand storytelling, and entertainment
3. Make Sales
   • Building an email list and then retargeting your audience is one of the best ways to generate sales
4. Measure, Optimize, & Repeat
   • Find out what’s working and then continuously improve it for your users

Market Research

As a marketer, you need to understand your audience, mainly their pain points and desires. The primary way to do this is market research. Start by creating a survey with 3 simple questions: What is your biggest problem with [product type/category]? How would finding a solution to this problem benefit you? How difficult has it been to find an answer or solution to this problem? The first two questions should be short form/fill in fields. The last one can be multiple choice. Rob recommends using Google Forms to create, send out, and analyze this survey. You can also just raw dog the questions in person if you’ve got a brick and mortar store.

Once you’ve created your survey, there’s a few ways you can build an email list of potential audience members if you don’t have an audience already. You can always use your own personal email contacts, though it is highly recommended that you don’t spam everyone you know. Parse down your list to only people who match your target audience. There’s also Facebook and LinkedIn groups that you can post your link in as well. Just make sure the group is relevant to your subject and that you follow the group rules. If you still feel like you don’t have enough responses, check out a forum.

After you’ve gathered a list of emails, change the subject line of your survey link to be something intriguing like “I’m creating [XYZ/subject] and would love your input” or “Hey, could I try to solve your problems as a [subject matter expert]”. Continue running the survey until responses slow down, it usually takes a day or two.

Response Analysis

Now its time to analyze the responses. In google forms you can filter your survey by people who answered “Very Difficult” to your third question. Then create a table with their problems and how they would benefit from a solution. It may be helpful to reframe the problems as “How To” or educational content.

To gather feedback without a survey, consider the facebook or linkedin group again. You can filter through posts by searching terms like “Complaint”, “Hate”, or “Stress” to find similar problem statements as your survey. You can also look at reviews for other businesses or products on sites like Amazon, Google, and Yelp. Filtering by 3 star reviews often gets more comprehensive results that 1 or 2 star reviews.

In order to apply this to my UX design portfolio, I’ve started developing a mailing list. You can also take my survey here if you’re interested.

Email Marketing

This section mostly seemed to focus on getting set up with mail chimp and some basic statistics about using email to drive sales. It wasn’t as in depth as I had hoped. To be fair, I don’t plan to do much email marketing for my UX design portfolio. I have done some email design in the past though, and you can actually read about my case studies here. The statistics presented in the course included things like:

• “Email has the highest conversion rate of any marketing platform”
• “Social Media algorithms filter down content due to the shear amount of it. Email is all there.”
• “Email can be used to drive traffic, sales, and conversions regarding your products”

The course also went over some copywriting techniques for emails and blogs. To help write a better subject line, look at what emails you open on your own account. Using the customer’s name, hinting at the content with a phrases like ” A special surprise” and “Just for you”, and questions all caught my attention. Its also a good idea to use numbers and times. Some examples include “7 tips to help you with XYZ”, “2 trends in tech to look out for this year”, and “just 5 minutes can improve your reading comprehension”. You should also track how many characters you use in your titles. Titles that are too long can get cut off in a users email client.

A.I.D.A

For content its easier to use an acronym: A.I.D.A (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action). Attention is pretty straightforward. You need to grab your reader’s attention as quickly as possible, otherwise they won’t continue to read. Then peak your reader’s interest by engaging with unusual, fresh, and/or counterintuitive ideas. Continue with desire, write about benefits, results, or life changes of your subject and finally, create a CTA (Call-To-Action). Give the reader something to do next. Everything you write should have a CTA to boost engagement. Use action verbs like ‘Try’ or ‘Start’ to encourage but not intimidate. Most importantly, make your CTA visible. If your reader can’t see it, they won’t click it. Some other writing strategies for engaging content includes using relevant imagery, flipping features into benefits (example 1 gb storage = 1,000 songs), finding inspiration from your competition, and modeling the best in the business.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO has always been a bit hard for me to grasp so I was pretty excited about how extensive this section of the learning was. For those that don’t know, Search Engine Optimization helps users find your site and better SEO puts your site higher on search engines. The algorithm uses relevance, authority, and rank to place a site. How relevant is your site to the search (Relevance)? How many links are on your site and where do they go (Authority)? Where does your site fall on the search engines page (Rank)? Ideally, you want your site to be on the first page of a search. 31% of users click the first link on Google. Some of the tools in this section where Google Analytics, Yoast SEO, Google Search Console, and Google Page speed. To start my SEO journey, I’m using my own UX design portfolio as an experiment.

There are 5 metrics to track the success of your SEO.

1. Website Traffic – This can be tracked in Google Analytics. In the dashboard your can see how much traffic your site gets from google, social media, and other sites.
2. Conversions – Another analytic you can track with Google, this metric shows how many people are meeting the goal for your site (sales, sign up forms, emails, etc.)
3. Revenue – The final metric you will want to track in Google. This is how much money your site makes.
4. Ranking – You can use ahrefs for this metric or you can just google search your keyword and see where your site ranks on the pages.
5. Links – This metric you really will want to use ahrefs for. This is how many external sites link to your site.

Keywords

The next portion of the SEO course goes over using Yoast SEO on WordPress. It also talked about how to create a list of keywords. Below, you’ll see that I created about 60 keywords in relation to this site and then analyzed them using WordStream. Much of the generation took place using Wikipedia and Google Autocomplete. This let me choose keywords that would be most relevant to my site and boost my Search Engine Ranking. For example, the one that I’m focusing on for this post is “UX Design Portfolio”.

There are 3 types of keywords; head, body and long-tail. Head keywords are generally 1 word. Body keywords are 2-3 and long-tail are any keywords containing more than that. Its best to focus on body and long tail as you’ll have a better chance of ranking higher with more specific keywords. You can see all of my green keywords contain at least 2 words.

Authority

Another thing to pay attention to when it comes to SEO is page authority and domain authority. Page authority is the number of links pointing towards a specific page. Domain authority is an aggregate of all the pages on a website. Newer sites will not have much domain authority, but you can boost your page authority by linking your site to your social media. You can view these by using a plugin like MOZ.

A way to build your page authority is through links. Whenever you post, add at least 2 outbound links to bigger sites like newspapers, blogs, etc. This shows you’re referencing already established sites to increase your reputation. You should also link internally to other pages on your site. Anything that may be relevant to your post will boost your authority. Longer blog posts will also help with authority. 300 words at least, 1500 words to really boost your SEO. Add social sharing buttons as a final boost.

Backlinks

Backlinks are links from other sites to yours. They raise your domain authority and page authority. You can use a couple different strategies to get these going. One of the easiest is to do is link your site to your social media. Unfortunately you wont get a lot of DA and PA through this due to these being no-follow links. To get do-follow links, you’ll need to focus on your competitors. Model your content after what already exists, Buzzsumo is a good resource for this. Just type in your keywords and it will list the top content on Google.

“Best of” lists will also generate a lot of backlinks. Just make sure to link out to the other sites first. You can also crowdsource other content by reaching out to other creators or use your survey results. A final option is to create infographics. As a UX designer, I can vouch for this one as there’s always a demand for quick, consumable visual content.

Image Searching

Apparently you can also use images to boost your SEO. When you add an image to your posts or site, rename the file to contain a keyword. This will get your image listed under a google image search for that keyword. You can also add your keyword to the Alt Text of an image, but I disagree with implementing this. Alt text is meant to be read by screen readers and tell the person listening what is happening in the image. Using it to boost your SEO destroys that purpose and takes away from the experience of a sight impaired person. You should however, use your keyword pretty much everywhere else. Titles, subheadings, tags, and meta-descriptions for pages should always contain your chosen keyword.