Category: Digital Marketing
What is Data-Driven Digital Marketing?
Data-driven marketing is the latest buzzword in the industry, and for good reason. It is really all about driving more relevant conversations with your audience and the customers in your organization.
It makes a huge difference when you are able to give the right message to the right person at the right time and place. While this may sound simple enough, it can be tough to get right. When you are having conversations across so many different channels, you will quickly realize that you have opportunities on mobile, social media, through your website as well as your call centre.
Customers are looking for an experience that ensures regardless of on which platform (where) they are interacting with you, you need to know everything about them. They expect you to know that they were just on your website and are now calling the customer help-desk about a specific problem.
Most of us have had some kind of disastrous encounter with a call centre, where you explain your problem to one person, only to get put through to the next person (where you have to explain the problem yet again). It’s bad enough when this happens on one channel, but when it happens across multiple channels, the effects can be harmful.
This is the type of problem that data-driven marketing promises to solve. With the proliferation of data, the Internet of Things and cloud computing, we have more information on customers than ever before. We are now at the tip where the opportunities of what we can do to create better customer experiences will explode.
Data-driven marketing, when combined with smart digital marketing strategies, can help to set you apart from your competitors. Contact the Digital Marketing People for more information about small business marketing today.
A Practical Guide to Cross-Channel Marketing
If you are creating content online and want to attract new business online, you need a cross-channel marketing strategy. This type of strategy will set out to ensure that as many potential clients as possible are exposed to your brand and messages online, regardless of where they spend their time.
Before you start to create social media profiles on every platform available, there are a few things you need to determine, such as:
Who Are You Marketing To?
You not only need to know exactly who your ideal clients are, but also what their needs and desires are. By knowing who your target audience is, you will be able to create content that appeals to them specifically.
Where Do They Spend Their Time Online?
You likely have a few ‘ideal customers’, with some of them reading white papers and the others waiting for more visual content on Instagram. Knowing where your audience spends their time will help you tailor your cross-channel marketing strategy for your brand.
What Challenges Do They Face?
Instead of writing about how great your product is, write search engine optimized blog posts that address the problems they have.
A visual representation of this information will help you identify the trigger points where you can engage with the right customer at the right time. If a person has downloaded your mobile app, then triggering a push notification if they haven’t opened the app yet is a good example of a cross-marketing trigger point that can be automated as part of your digital strategy.
Customers expect a seamless experience with brands. According to Oracle, close to 80% of consumers now use at least two communication channels before making a buying decision. In addition, 30% use three or more channels before making a buying decision.
Map out every possible scenario of consumer engagement with your brand to find new communication opportunities. If you need help with your small business marketing, SEO or social media marketing, contact the Digital Marketing People today.
A How-To Guide to Interactive Email and Email Automation
Interactive email and email automation are both highly effective email marketing tools. They are used for reaching out to your desired target audience, through content marketing, and can drive sales and revenue to your business.
- What Is an Interactive Email?
An interactive email allows your reader to perform an action which activates or sets off an event within the said email. Using interactive email in email marketing is a very effective tool as it keeps the user intrigued and in the inbox for longer periods of time as they perform the required actions.
- Email Automation
Email automation allows for an email to be automatically sent when a specific trigger or action has been met. For example, when a user subscribes to your webpage an automated email welcoming them and helping them to get started might be sent.
Now that we understand what interactive email and email automation are, we can look at what steps need to be taken to ensure a successful email campaign.
- Step 1 – What Exactly Would You Like Your Email to Achieve?
It would be in your best interest to understand your goals and know exactly what you would like to achieve through your email campaign, as this will ultimately determine who needs to be targeted, what type of email is to be sent and what marketing automation content is required.
- Step 2 – Build Your List of Email Addresses
This can be done in one of two ways depending on whether you want to target existing users or rather obtain email addresses you might not have already:
- Existing Customers
If it is existing customers you plan on getting in touch with, you can simply import a list of your known contacts’ email addresses into your chosen email marketing tool.
- New Customers
On the other hand, if it is new customers you plan on acquiring, then this will be done by manually building a new list from scratch.
- Step 3 – What Type of Email Campaign Is Needed?
Should you be sending out a newsletter, a marketing offer, an event invitation or simply just an announcement? Ultimately what you decide on here will be influenced by the goals you decided on in step 1.
- Step 4 – Create the Desired Email Campaign
Now that your goals are decided on and you have built a list of email addresses and selected the type of campaign you would like to send out, you can begin to build your email. In short, it should be easy to read, have engaging images and visual content, be personalized and be relevant to each subscriber.
Follow these four basic steps to be able to quickly and easily start your email marketing campaign, and send out that first email which will deliver amazing results for your business.
A Checklist for Your Christmas in July Content Marketing Campaign
Christmas in July is often unofficially celebrated by countries in the Southern hemisphere as their winter falls in July. By doing so, they are able to enjoy the winter feel commonly associated with the traditional Christmas in December.
That having been explained, July is around the corner and it is time to plan a successful content marketing strategy for the upcoming event. The average American will spend close to $1000.00 on presents during this time, and they are more than ready to start clicking and spending on their holiday shopping.
Let’s take a look at your social media marketing strategy together, shall we?
- Give Your Website That Holiday Feeling
Capturing the emotions and setting the festive and jolly mood commonly associated with the Christmas holidays are essential at this time of year. By bringing a sense of joy and festivity to each and every webpage you will ensure your visitors’ enthusiasm and keep them clicking on your website.
- Offer Prizes in a Contest
People love getting a little something extra such as a gift or prize at this time of year. What better way to do this than to hold an online contest. Extra traffic and higher engagement numbers will be seen as a result of a contest associated with the holiday festivities. Likewise, it will also encourage new subscribers to your webpage.
- Utilize the Power of Pinterest
Visual content is essential at this time of year as people search for gift ideas, recipes, handmade Christmas cards and ideas that might inspire them. Create a post that showcases your product in the true holiday spirit. And, do not forget to add a link to your website.
- Create a Sense of Urgency with Last Minute Gift Ideas
Gift buying can be a challenge when buying for certain people and this often means that it is left to the last minute. By offering last minute gift ideas you are giving your customers valuable advice and saving them from the embarrassment of not finding the right gift on time.
- Launch a High-Impact Email Campaign
Customers are eagerly awaiting your emails that offer pre-holiday discounts, especially if they are festive in nature, incorporate beautiful images and if they capture the Christmas in July holiday vibes. Stay cool and simply time a few emails effectively. Here are a few more tips:
- Offer early bird discounts a few months prior already,
- Offer online purchasing only discounts,
- Incorporate an exclusive discount code in the email,
- Create a sense of urgency by sending out a last chance for online ordering email, and
- Finally, send out a simple holiday greeting and merry Christmas email a few days before.
By following these few easy guidelines in your SEO and digital marketing strategies you will hopefully spark excitement and a sense of holiday festivities in your clients and your business brand.
How To Convert More Leads Without Generating Any New Traffic
When it comes to landing pages, the numbers are skewed. Landing pages do a staggeringly effective job at converting site visitors into paying customers. But directing customers to a standalone landing pages is an underused tactic.
We’ve touched on this concept before: when the numbers don’t add up, it means there’s an opportunity for businesses. Even though landing pages are slowly becoming the standard, implementing them now will still give you a significant edge over at least a few of your competitors. Leveling up your landing pages can improve your conversion rate, which impacts your bottom line. And the best part? You can do it without increasing the number of visitors to your site.
To give businesses an idea of how much of a difference landing pages can make, we found some stats highlighting Why You Need To Level Up Your Landing Pages.
Since you’re looking for information on landing pages, you’ve probably heard using a homepage as a landing page is a bad idea. Unfortunately, most businesses take this to mean they can create one landing page – a home landing page – as a catchall for every campaign they’re running. In fact, 52% of marketers (for shame!) don’t even create a new landing page for different marketing campaigns.
In the same way it’s suboptimal to send every single site visitor to your homepage, it’s a mistake to send email subscribers, social media follows and PPC traffic to the same landing page. Each of these channels has unique methods for getting visitors to click through, and different promises and goals once they do – so why would you send them to the same generic page?
Start embracing the power of landing pages by creating specific pages for each of your various traffic streams. It won’t be long before you experience more success and higher conversion rates!
The maxim “less is more” applies to many things – landing pages included. However, the fact that 48% of landing pages contain multiples offers suggests the majority of businesses haven’t yet made the connection. The temptation to cram more than one offer onto the page you know visitors land is strong – but don’t do it. Customers don’t want to be confused or oversold and offering something other than exactly what they’re expecting actually does both. Craft strong, confident offers and trust your landing pages to do their work! Oh and don’t forget to include a call to action as a single call-to-action button can increase conversions by 62%.
If you have a couple of landing pages and aren’t getting the results you want, don’t give up quite yet. As we’ve discussed, the more you connect the messaging of your landing page to the arriving audience (and the channel they used) the better results you’ll get. If this means creating more landing pages – even different ones for segments of the same audience group – then do it (the stats have your back).
If all else fails, try adding some short explainer videos to your landing pages. Using videos on landing pages can increase conversions by 86% – anything capable of producing results that good is worth a shot!
One of the biggest factors that stunts the success of marketing campaigns is not testing vital components like landing pages! The fact is landing pages are where the magic has to happen, so absolutely need to be sure that every aspect of the page is contributing to conversion! You’ve spent the money and dedicated time to funnelling visitors to a certain page with an exact message – but then you don’t test to make sure the headline or call-to-action button isn’t confusing customers?
61% of customer do less than five tests per month on their landing pages; excuse me for saying it again but – this is an opportunity! Test your landing pages components, tweak based on your findings and enjoy the increased conversions with just a little bit of extra work.
Last but not least, we come to a pretty straightforward fix for an all-too-common landing page mistake: too many form fields. Yes, we live in the Information Age, which means every little detail you can pull from your potential customers can be used to your advantage. But you know what? One or two pieces of information are a lot better than zero, which is what you’ll get if you present customers with a 15-field form!
The proof is in the pudding: a company found that reducing the number of form fields to 10 or under increases conversions by 120%. I’ll go a step further and suggest you keep the number of form fields to less than 5 as I’m a firm believer in keeping things as simple as possible.
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That’s it for this infographic summary. Here’s the full infographic, for your sharing pleasure:
Unsubscribe Numbers Got You Worried? Here Is What to Do:
A great deal of time and effort has gone into building up your email marketing list and you have written amazing content. You have formatted an easy to use sign-up form and offered hard to resist deals to entice your audience. You send out your first email to your target market via your marketing automation system. Yet, people still unsubscribe.
Don’t panic! Every email marketing list has people who unsubscribe. The only way to avoid this would be to not have an email list at all.
Identifying the reasons for people unsubscribing from your email marketing list is key to bringing those numbers down. Here is what to do:
- Do Not Go Overboard in Your Subject Lines
Overuse of caps, emojis, exclamation points and keywords such as “free”, ”give away”, “sex”, “deposit”, and the like, can identify your email as spam and move it to your junk folder or cause your reader to hit the unsubscribe button.
- Write Engaging, Well-Thought-Out Content
Your content should have a clear and concise purpose, which starts with the subject line, is carried through in the following paragraph and continues to be elaborated on throughout the email body. Finally, your message or point should be brought to a strong conclusion in your CTA.
- Deliver on What You Promise
Your reader opens the email, intrigued by what is offered and clicks on the CTA link in the hopes of finding that something amazing – which was promised to them. At this point, if they are unhappy with what they find, they will hit the unsubscribe button without a doubt. Your subscriber needs you to deliver on what you promised – each and every time!
- Make Unsubscribing Less Obvious
Legally an unsubscribe option is required in your content marketing, but this can be done in less obvious ways. You don’t want to make unsubscribing too easy. Try writing it in smaller text next to other options such as “please provide feedback” and don’t allow too much white space around it.
Email marketing is highly effective and, therefore, important. By following the few basic guidelines above, your unsubscribe rates will drop for sure.
A Digital Marketing Guide to Google’s Mobile-First Indexing
Nearly 60% of Google’s searches are done on mobile devices, which is why Google gives priority to websites that have been optimized for mobile. Many people have even abandoned desktop computers in favour of phones and tablets. Here’s what you need to do to prepare your digital marketing strategy for Google’s mobile-first indexing:
- Speed
Speed is more important than ever, especially when it comes to mobile searching. Google knows that people aren’t as patient as they used to be, which is why they want your site to load within two seconds. This may seem ridiculously fast, but everyone expects things to be instant. So, what can you do to make your website load faster?
Optimize your images so that they are small and easy to load. There are a number of great WordPress plugins that can do this for you. If you don’t have a WordPress site, then you will need to edit your photos so that they are small for your website. A good rule of thumb is to compress the image to 400 pixels.
Other things that you can do is minify your code for faster loading (this also makes it easier for search engine crawlers to index your pages) and make use of website caching. What website caching does is store the website. If a person has visited your website before, then some of the files will be stored, making it easier and faster to load when they visit your website again.
- Remove Redirects
If you have a lot of redirecting pages on your website, then you need to remove them. Search engine crawlers and servers have to work extra hard to understand where all the content on your site is, so a high number of redirects can harm your SEO efforts.
These are only some of the steps that you can take to optimize your website for Google’s mobile-first indexing. At The Digital Marketing People, we specialize in small business marketing, SEO, and social media marketing. Contact us for a high-impact digital marketing solution today.
A How-To Guide To LinkedIn Sponsored Content Ads
Creating sponsored content ads on LinkedIn is a great way to make sure your content reaches your target audience. In this blog post, we discuss how you can go about creating LinkedIn sponsored content ads:
- Choose The Content
The first step is to choose what content you want to promote. It may be a blog post or a web page featuring a promotion. Copy the URL, go to your company page on LinkedIn and paste the URL into the update box where it reads: “Share an article or photo” and post the article, photo or link.
The post will now appear in your timeline. Above the post, you will see a grey arrow with the words “Sponsor now”. When you click on the link, you will be taken to your LinkedIn campaign manager.
- The Campaign Manager
Once you are in your LinkedIn campaign manager, you can go through all the processes you need to in order to promote your content. LinkedIn’s campaign manager is very similar to Facebook’s campaign manager. Click on the article link that you want to promote and click on “create a campaign” in the top right corner.
You can choose whether you want to promote your content with targeted native advertising, drive traffic from the desktop with ads, or send targeted messages directly to people. If you want to sponsor the content, click on the top option that reads: “Promote your content with targeted native advertising”.
Next, you will name your campaign, choose your objectives, select your audiences, the location you want to target, and how you want to target them. You can target people by fields of study, member groups, job titles, job function, years of experience, and a host of other options that aren’t available to you with Facebook ads.
If you want to improve your social media marketing strategy or your online reputation management, then LinkedIn Sponsored content ads are a great way to do this. Contact The Digital Marketing People for advice today.
Essential Marketing Tips For Travel And Tourism Businesses
If you own a business that operates within the travel and tourism industry, you are probably wondering how you can make sure digital marketing works for you. So, where do you start? And how can you really make the most of your efforts? We have got some helpful tips for you below:
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Get Involved On Social Media
The only thing bigger than travel related photos, quotes and videos on social media is #foodporn. Basically, social media is the biggest and most advantageous tool at your disposal when it comes to generating interest in your travel and tourism business. If you are not using social media to promote it and attract followers, you are missing out on a world of opportunity to grow your online reputation.
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User-Generated Content
Why not run a competition where you encourage your followers to send through their best travel snaps? You can use these inspirational pictures in future campaigns, as long as you tag the person who sent them to you and get their permission first. Studies have shown that user-generated content marketing gets more engagement and interest – which is great news for your business!
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Optimize Your Website
Seeing as though most people will use your website to browse information about certain destinations and, most importantly, for making bookings, you will need to ensure that it is fully optimized to accommodate heavy traffic, as well as a wide variety of devices that may be used for browsing. This includes smartphones and tablets. A responsive, easy to navigate website will enhance user experience and give you a boost in Google rankings.
When it comes to expert digital marketing, social media marketing and content marketing, The Digital Marketing People have got you covered. For more information, do not hesitate to get in touch.
Inspirational Valentine’s Day Marketing Ideas
The most romantic day of the year is fast approaching, and it is the perfect opportunity to give your digital marketing efforts a boost, from email marketing to content marketing and everything in between. Regardless of whether your business is big or small, here are some inspirational Valentine’s Day marketing ideas to get you started:
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Charm With Email Marketing
Email marketing is the easiest way to use Valentine’s to your advantage. How about roping in a designer to create a new, more romantic look for your mailer? Perhaps it is a good idea to run a few Valentine’s promotions and discounts? Or start a Valentine’s themed competition to up engagement on your social pages. Whatever you choose to do to generate some extra love for your brand, email marketing is a great way to let your followers know all about it.
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Carry The Theme Through
It is the little things that are sure to get you noticed. By adding a bit of Valentine’s flair to your brand’s logo or name and carrying it through across all digital marketing platforms, from your social media pages to your website and blog, you are bound to get plenty of attention as a result. It can be as simple as adding a few hearts to your design, or going the whole hog and changing your logo’s colour and font.
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Create A Valentine’s Catalogue
If you happen to offer products or services that one might choose to give as a Valentine’s Day gift (even if it might be considered slightly unconventional), now is the time to capitalize. Take the time to create a Valentine’s catalogue detailing a wide range of gift ideas ‘for her’, ‘for him’, and so on. You might want to throw in a few enticing specials or two-for-one deals for good measure. Do not forget to share the catalogue on social media and via email marketing to ensure it reaches as many people as possible!
For expert assistance when it comes to making the most of email marketing, content marketing and marketing automation this Valentine’s Day and beyond, do not hesitate to get in touch with The Digital Marketing People.