CM1 Study Guide PDF

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A study guide for CM1 certificate with knowledge relevant to the course...

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Certified Marketer Level 1 Study Guide

Getting Started What is this assessment? Certified Marketer Level 1 (CM1) is a 60-minute, 45-question assessment to evaluate essential marketing skills. It was created by General Assembly and the Marketing Standards Board, a group of leaders from top global companies working to establish clear pathways to success in marketing careers. Test-takers will see how they compare to an industry benchmark and identify learning opportunities. This guide contains a brief overview and relevant vocabulary for each assessment topic. Note: Reading the guide does not guarantee performance on CM1 or cover all topics/skills required to master the test.

What will I need? To complete CM1, you’ll need the following: • A computer or laptop: Don’t attempt this on a tablet or smartphone. • A fast and reliable internet connection: Once you begin, the timer can’t be stopped. • A Google Chrome internet browser: Make sure you use the latest version; CM1 is not optimized for other browsers. • Any spreadsheet application (e.g., Excel): Have a blank spreadsheet open and ready. You’ll need to do calculations for some questions. • Peace and quiet: Find a quiet area where you’ll be able to focus.

General Assembly Certified Marketer Level 1: Study Guide

What are the rules? • This assessment is open book — you can use reference materials and search the web. • Complete the assessment alone. • Do not share assessment questions or materials with anyone. • You have 60 continuous minutes to complete the assessment, with no pauses or breaks. • All numbers in the assessment are displayed using standard U.S.-English number notation. (e.g., One thousand dollars and 20 cents would be represented as $1,000.20.) • Correct answers that are formatted in either U.S. or European notation will be accepted (e.g., 50.10% or 50,10% are both acceptable).

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What skills are assessed? CM1 will test your knowledge in the following categories and problem-solving methods. Skills • • • • •

Consumer/Customer Insights Creative Development Channels and Execution Measurement and Analytics Marketing Technology

Problem Type • Conceptualize: Understand and apply marketing concepts. • Calculate: Use data to report on marketing campaigns. • Interpret: Translate results to make strategic decisions.

Dive deeper: digital marketing at GA. Discover the skills you need to thrive as a marketer through in-person and online courses and workshops at General Assembly:

General Assembly Certified Marketer Level 1: Study Guide

• Digital Marketing: Build a strong foundation in marketing channels, SEO, search, and analytics to power successful campaigns in our 10-week, part-time or 1-week, accelerated course. • Digital Marketing Circuit (online): Learn digital marketing fundamentals at your own pace, guided by a mentor, in our 5-week, online course. • Short-form classes: Discover valuable marketing skills spanning analytics, social media, and more, and connect with others in the field at expert-led evening and weekend workshops.

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Consumer/Customer Insights Overview Customers and consumers are at the heart of marketing. To be an effective marketer, you must know how to segment and target them, while also understanding how they interact with your brand. For some marketers, a “customer” is the retailer purchasing your products to sell them, while a “consumer” is the individual buying your product to use it. Below, we use “customer” to simplify the materials.

Key Concepts

General Assembly Certified Marketer Level 1: Study Guide

Conversion Funnel

• A framework that helps marketers understand the customer’s journey or experience with their brand, starting with how they learn about it and ending with retention and referrals. • Knowing this information helps marketers target their communications. • The six stages of a conversion funnel are: • Awareness: A potential customer is just learning about your brand/company and you need to actively engage them. • Consideration: The potential customer is willing to consider your product/service. • Comparison: The potential customer is evaluating your brand/company against competitors. • Conversion: The potential customer makes a purchase and becomes an actual customer. • Retention: Your customer has repurchased your product/service. • Referral/Advocacy: Your customer becomes an advocate for your brand.

Lead

• A prospective customer. • A qualified lead is a prospective customer who has shown intent to purchase or has requested additional information. Different organizations may have slightly different ways of determining whether or not a lead is qualified.

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Persona

• A written description of a brand’s ideal customer, informed by quantitative and qualitative data. • A persona typically includes details like demographic information, behavioral information, and motivations/goals. • Creating a persona can help marketers better understand and target customers.

Audience Segmentation

• The process of dividing groups according to shared characteristics. Some examples of audience segmentation include: • Behavioral: purchasing behavior, habits • Attitudinal: values, lifestyle, interests • Geographic: physical location or region • Demographic: age, gender, race, ethnicity etc.

Positioning

Unique Selling Proposition

General Assembly Certified Marketer Level 1: Study Guide

Market Research

• A way to distinguish a product or organization in the minds of their ideal customers. • David Ogilvy, founder of Ogilvy & Mather and known as the “Father of Advertising,” defined positioning as “what a product does, and who it is for.” • A type of positioning that focuses on a specific factor or consideration that differentiates a product or organization. • Valuable information that marketers collect and analyze to better understand their customers and how their product or organization fits their needs. • Market research can include: • Primary research data: Information that can be gathered firsthand and is “owned” by your organization. • Secondary research data: Information that can be gathered from outside sources. This information may already exist (e.g., public records) and be accessible to people outside your organization. • Marketers look at both quantitative and qualitative data. Different tools used in market research may include surveys, focus groups, observations, and government reports/data. 4

Creative Overview Bringing compelling messages to life requires many steps. From writing a brief to adapting content to different channels, marketers need to find ways to create content that aligns with organizational goals and appeals to customers.

Key Concepts Brand Definition

Creative Brief

Gated Content

General Assembly Certified Marketer Level 1: Study Guide

Campaign Objective

• The process of creating a defining name, symbol, feature, or quality that distinguishes an organization or product from competitors. • Brand definition should be consistent and reinforced in all messaging from an organization. • A document that defines expectations between a marketer and an agency. • As the name implies, a brief is concise but contains essential information. • It defines objectives and requirements for a marketing campaign. • Any resource that requires users to provide some information (such as name and email address) before they are able to access the materials. • A statement that establishes the intended outcome of a campaign. • It should be focused, clear, and measurable.

Differentiator

• A quality or trait that distinguishes a brand or product from its competitors. • It’s also known as competitive advantage.

Storyboard

• An early-stage visual representation of video content. • It includes a design of what each scene will look like.

Adapting Messaging

• Ways to effectively adjust creative materials to suit different channels and customers.

Benchmarking

• A practice of establishing foundations to make creative decisions based on past performance. 5

Channels and Execution Overview Marketers should have an understanding of different traditional and digital channels (e.g., print ads or social media) in order to achieve their objectives.

Key Concepts

General Assembly Certified Marketer Level 1: Study Guide

Awareness

• Whether or not people know about your brand/product. • Improving awareness means increasing the size or improving the quality of the audience. • Examples of awareness metrics include fans/followers and reach (the number of people who see your content).

Engagement

• The interaction between users and brands. • Some ways to measure engagement in digital media are: • Clicks (click-through rate) • Conversions (conversion rate) • Opens (open rate) • Unsubscribes (unsubscribe rate) • Shares (share rate) • Some ways to measure engagement on social media include: • Twitter: Replies, retweets, favorites • Facebook: Page likes, post likes, shares, comments • Pinterest: Repins, likes, comments • LinkedIn: Interactions, likes, comments • Instagram: Likes, comments, shares • Snapchat: Total unique views, story completions, completion rate, screenshots • WeChat: Follows, messages, open rates, purchases

Social Media Marketing

• The process of gaining traffic or awareness by using social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, Google+, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and Tumblr.

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Direct Marketing

• A form of direct outreach to individual consumers or customers. • Examples of direct marketing tactics include emails, physical mail, catalogues, and text messages.

Display Marketing

• Advertisements placed on different websites, apps, or platforms. The practice tends to use images, graphics, and sometimes audio and video to communicate a message. audio and video to communicate a message. • Types of display marketing ads include: • Static: An ad that does not change in appearance. • Rich media: An ad featuring video, audio, or other elements that encourage viewers to interact with the content.

Digital Video Marketing

TV Marketing

General Assembly Certified Marketer Level 1: Study Guide

Content Marketing

Paid Search Marketing/ Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

• Online video content designed to attract and appeal to customers. • Examples include testimonials, how-tos, training videos, and viral videos. • Advertisements and content that can be run as television commercials. • It requires the consideration of the audience most likely to watch television when the advertisement runs. • Targeted, valuable materials shared with relevant audiences to generate interest from potential customers. • Content marketing generally requires wait time before seeing results and works best over time. • Examples include blog posts, white papers, infographics, and more. • Advertising done through paying for sponsored listings in order to affect rank/placement in search results. • Paid search platforms include Google AdWords and Bing Ads.

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Organic Search

• The algorithmically generated results that come from someone entering terms into a search engine. It does not include paid placements. • Placement on a search engine results page is determined by factors such as relevance to the search query, links, domain authority, and other factors.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• The process of strategically refining online content to improve ranking placement in organic search.

General Assembly Certified Marketer Level 1: Study Guide

Influencers

• Individuals with a large following through a major audience channel, e.g., radio, television, or social media. • They don’t have to be celebrities; oftentimes they’re known only within specific communities. • Influencers with high recognition and reach (e.g., celebrities) are called macro-influencers.

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Measurement & Analytics Overview Using data to measure performance and impact helps marketers identify opportunities for improvement. Marketers need to understand how to collect and analyze relevant data in order to make informed decisions. Typical metrics measure a customer’s overall value, progression through the marketing funnel, and satisfaction.

Key Concepts

General Assembly Certified Marketer Level 1: Study Guide

Key Performance Indicator (KPI)

• A measurable value that indicates progress toward meeting key objectives. • A KPI should be “SMART:” • Specific • Measurable • Attainable • Relevant • Time-bound

Attribution Modeling

• A tactic that determines which interactions a customer has had with different channels, or touchpoints, that have influenced a consumer conversion. • Marketers decide which type of attribution model (e.g., single- or multi-touch) is aligned with their data capabilities and will best help evaluate progress on campaign goals.

Single-Touch Attribution

• A practice that assigns 100% of conversion credit to one touchpoint. • Some examples include: • First-touch attribution: Credit is assigned to the first touchpoint in the customer journey. • Last-touch attribution: Credit is assigned to the last touchpoint in the customer journey. • Last non-direct click attribution: Ignores direct traffic and gives full credit to the last channel before conversion.

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Multi-Touch Attribution

• Assigning values to several touchpoints that occur before a potential customer converts, i.e., becomes an actual customer. • Some examples include: • Linear attribution: Distributes the credit of the sale evenly to all of the touchpoints along the conversion funnel. • Time-decay attribution: Gives more value to the touchpoints that happen closer to the sale. • Position-based attribution: Credits more to the first and last touchpoints. • Algorithmic attribution: Uses statistics and machine learning to determine the weight of the different touchpoints.

Customer Lifetime Value (LTV or CLTV)

• A prediction of how profitable a customer’s long-term relationship with the company will be. • CLV = (Customer Value) x (Average Customer Lifespan)

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

• The cost of converting a potential client to a customer. • CAC = (Total Marketing Costs) / (Acquisitions)

General Assembly Certified Marketer Level 1: Study Guide

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)

Click-Through Rate (CTR)

Cost Per Thousand/Cost Per Mille (CPM)

• The cost of acquiring a potential customer. • CPA differs from customer acquisition cost because an acquisition may not necessarily be a customer. For example, an acquisition could be confirmed interest from a potential customer (e.g., a subscriber to your newsletter), or a user who signed up for a free trial. • CPA = (Campaign Costs) / (Number of Conversions) • The percentage of users who clicked on a specific link in your marketing materials. • CTR = (Clicks) / (Number of Impressions) • The cost to have 1,000 impressions (i.e., views of your ad) on a webpage. • CPM = 1,000 x [(Total Cost) / (Total Impressions)]

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Return on Investment (ROI) Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

General Assembly Certified Marketer Level 1: Study Guide

Data-Driven Decision Making

• The profit made from an investment. • ROI = (Investment Gains - Investment Cost) / (Investment Cost)

• Helps measure the performance of a paid marketing campaign. • ROAS = (Gross Revenue) / (Total Costs) • Marketers collect data from different sources and must be able to apply this information toward reaching their goals. They’ll want to consider: • The accuracy of the data. • The size of the sample represented in the data. • Whether or not the sample is representative of the target population.

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Marketing Technology Overview Knowing how to use the right digital tools can make it easier for marketers to launch effective campaigns. The wealth of technology currently available can help marketers with a variety of tasks, such as data collection and customer experience improvement.

General Assembly Certified Marketer Level 1: Study Guide

Key Concepts Marketing Automation

• Software that helps reduce the amount of human labor required, e.g., sending automated emails based on where a customer is in the customer journey. • While marketing automation tools are intended to save time and streamline processes, marketers need to think critically about how to properly integrate them.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

• Software that helps marketers effectively manage customer relationships. • Different systems will vary in features, but all are designed to help store customer data at different points in the customer journey. • CRM software is a key tool that facilitates collaboration between marketing and sales teams by keeping information organized and accessible.

Web Analytics

• Statistics that help marketers understand and quantify performance. Marketers often measure factors like traffic (visitors), leads (potential customers), and sales (purchasers) on their website. • Examples of common web analytics platforms include Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, and Looker.

Programmatic Advertising

• The use of software to streamline and automate elements of digital advertising purchasing. • Programmatic advertising software helps with search engine marketing (SEM).

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Machine Learning (ML)

• A branch of data science that gives computers the ability to analyze massive data sets and predict increasingly accurate outcomes. • Machine learning can help marketers analyze results faster, automate certain processes, and optimize campaigns in real time.

Personally Identifiable Information (PII)

• Information that can be used to identify a specific individual, e.g., home address, email address, full name, or national identification number. • There are certain restrictions on how marketers can collect and use personally identifiable information.

General Assembly Certified Marketer Level 1: Study Guide

A/B Testing

• The practice of showing two versions of something (an “A” and a “B”) to different sets of users to see which one is more effective at driving behaviors, like opening an email or clicking on a call-to-action button. • Also known as split testing, this is one of the most common and effective ways to get the right message to the right consumer. • Multivariate testing uses the same mechanism as A/B testing but compares more variables (e.g., versions “A”, “B”, and “C”).

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