Influencer Marketing – The Newest Hype In Social Media

If you ask any marketing expert about the types of marketing they find to be most valuable, you will find word-of-mouth marketing to be at the top of just about every list. According to AdWeek.com, word-of-mouth advertising has been proven to be twice as effective as advertising that is developed and distributed on behalf of the manufacturer or retailer. In other words, people trust information from other consumers more than they trust information from product makers or sellers.

The problem is that word-of-mouth is an organic form of marketing that is hard to purchase. Companies have been paying “regular people” to speak highly of products in public venues for years, but the results have been suspect. What advertisers need is a way to get what feels like word-of-mouth advertising on a large scale. The answer is influencer marketing.

What is Influencer Marketing?

Influencer marketing occurs primarily on social media and it is product endorsement done by people on social media who have large followings and are able to sway the buying opinions of those followings. The ironic thing about influencer marketing is that many of the more popular influencers are considered to be celebrities because of their massive followings. Despite their celebrity status, these influencers are still able to convince their followers to buy the products they endorse, and that is powerful.

The Rules of Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is very new, which means that marketing professionals have not had a chance to put any real constraints or rules on it just yet. Can an influencer be created? If so, how? Is an influencer’s appeal limited to certain types of products? The intriguing aspect of influencer marketing is that the rules are still being made, and it is not the corporate world making the rules this time.

The Effects of Influencer Marketing

One of the more significant effects of influencer marketing is that it can build up or destroy a social media platform. If a significant amount of influencers are attracted to a social media platform and they gain large followings, then that platform has a chance at success. But when those influencers start to abandon a social media platform because it no longer suits their needs, then that platform could be doomed to failure.

As far as advertisers go, the effect of influencer marketing is more focused web traffic and more revenue. Companies are paying large sums of money to influencers to get these social media celebrities to push products. In the end, it is the same as buying word-of-mouth advertising, and it is extremely effective.

The trick to using influencer marketing effectively is that you have to decide how many influencers to use and what kind of context you want your influencers to use to attract business. A clothing manufacturer is going to find more success utilizing an influencer who is known for their fashion sense, instead of one that gains popularity because of their scantily clad pictures.

Influencer content can be reused in many different ways, and that is something that brings sustained value to an influencer marketing program. As social media continues to develop, it is safe to say that the role of the influencer will continue to grow in the marketing world. Movie stars and rock musicians may wind up losing their endorsement deals to a mechanic from Illinois who has a social media audience larger than the population of many countries. It is a complete paradigm shift that the marketing world is still trying to figure out.

What To Do About The Facebook Algorithm Change

Back in 2014, Facebook dropped the not-so-subtle hint that organic news feed posts were going to be phased out in lieu of paid advertising. While Facebook justifies its move by saying that there are a minimum of 1,500 business posts that could appear in a user’s news feed at any one time, the fact is that Facebook’s ongoing money grab is soon going to make writing good posts obsolete as far as news feed exposure goes.

While your Facebook posts are going to get even less attention now without paying for some sort of service, that does not mean that you should give up on your Facebook page. If you have built a large following on your page, then you can still use that ability to attract new followers to your advantage despite the significant change in the way Facebook will be doing business.

Use Facebook To Enhance Your Email Marketing

Your posts can still be seen by your Facebook audience and you can still reach a target audience to a smaller degree. If you want to get more value out of your Facebook interactions without having to pay more in Facebook advertising costs, then use email marketing to enhance your Facebook posts.

You can use your Facebook posts as teasers for more information that will be delivered using email. Not only will this keep your current email list active, but it will also give incentive to new customers to join your marketing email list.

Tell Stories Instead Of Posting Advertising

Facebook’s algorithm change is going to put more emphasis on useful content for its readers. That means that you should consider telling stories in your Facebook posts that use popular current events instead of writing simple advertising posts. When you tie your Facebook posts in with the trending topics you see on the right side of the screen, you will get more natural interaction with the Facebook crowd than you would normally.

Telling stories using trending topics is not just a great way to beat the new algorithm, it is something that Facebook advertisers should be doing anyways. The one thing you have to be sure of is that your trending content ties naturally back into your product offering, and that you invite comments from your audience to gauge their interest in your products.

Convert Facebook Traffic On Your Other Web Pages

The days of doing low-cost and organic marketing on Facebook are coming to an end, but you can still reach an audience of millions on a daily basis. Instead of looking to convert your Facebook traffic into buying customers on your Facebook page, you should send that traffic to landing pages that will convert them instead. This not only increases your conversions, but it also inspires your traffic to check your website instead of Facebook for product information.

When Facebook started limiting the exposure of business posts unless businesses paid a premium to boost their posts, the writing was on the wall for using Facebook as an inexpensive marketing tool. After Facebook altered its algorithm to favor paid advertising over organic business posts, the writing got a lot clearer. You don’t need to abandon your Facebook page in light of these new changes. But you do need to learn how to work a lot smarter on Facebook and get better exposure without paying extra.

What Is A Digital Agency?

We throw the term “Internet marketing” around a lot when we discuss what we do, but our purpose is actually much more focused than that. One of the things we like to remind our customers is that we are a digital agency, and that is a bit different than an advertising firm. While we also engage in comprehensive print marketing campaigns, our digital agency work is very different than what you would find from a standard advertising organization.

We Deal In The Growing World Of The Internet

It is extremely difficult for one marketing company to have a high level of expertise in traditional print media and digital media. As a digital agency, we focus our efforts on all aspects of digital media. From website development to social media management, we have experts who have spent years studying the best ways to really reach a target audience online and get results. It is our comprehensive understanding of digital media that helps to separate what we do from what a traditional ad agency does.

We Deal In Numbers

Standard advertising agencies deal in trends that occur before, during, and after they have launched an advertising campaign. While those agencies can track the revenue and sales numbers that occur during the same period that their advertising takes place, they have no way of really knowing how their work affects your target audience.

As a digital agency, we deal in analytical software that gives us very precise data about your target audience and how our efforts are affecting your audience. If we are not getting the results you want, then we check the data to see what is going wrong. More often than not, the data we collect gives us a comprehensive picture of what your customers are asking for, and we can alter your advertising immediately to be more appealing to your audience.

We Deal In Your Audience

If there is one thing a digital agency does much better than a standard advertising firm, it is develop the most comprehensive profile of your target audience that you have ever seen. We can tell you where every person in your target audience is located, how long they are reading your advertising, what types of computing devices are most popular with your audience, and a myriad of other details that we can use to create much more effective marketing messages.

The benefit of using a digital agency is that the feedback we get from your target audience, both direct and indirect, is immediate. It can take months for a standard advertising agency to develop an understanding of what gets your target audience to respond, while we can create those profiles in days. The information we gather and the things we learn about who is reading your advertising can help to develop marketing programs that will drive more revenue and help you to sustain your audience.

A digital agency focuses on getting the most from your Internet presence. We use all of the tools at our disposal to understand your audience, track your marketing efforts, and develop more effective ways to sell your products. The results are immediate, and the ability for a digital agency to adapt to a changing consumer trends means that your company will always be delivering a message your audience wants to hear in ways that your audience will hear it.

4 Ways To Increase Your Email Open Rate

There are a lot of hurdles you have to jump in an email marketing campaign just to get an email into the inbox of someone who might open it. First, you have to make sure that you have a valid email address. Then you need to find out if the person actually uses that email address, or if they use a different address. Once you have conquered all of the challenges involved with putting your email in front of the right target audience, then you have to start experimenting with your open rate to get the best possible results.

The open rate of an email campaign is the percentage of people who actually open the email when it is sent. If your target audience does not open your email, then all of the great content inside is pretty useless. There are some tactics you can use that will help you to increase your open rate, and drive more revenue with your email marketing campaign.

Try Sending Unopened Emails Again

Spam filters and lost connections can sometimes prevent your marketing emails from getting through when you start a new campaign. One way to help increase your open rate is to resend unopened emails and hope they get through the second time. Be sure to track your open rate with resent emails to see if resending unopened emails is a tactic you want to try on a regular basis.

Run Tests To Develop Better Delivery Times

You or your Internet marketing partner has software that can tell exactly when your marketing emails get opened, right down to the hour and minute. You should use that information to develop a database of the best times to send out your emails, and then use that database to increase your open rate. If you put your emails in front of your customers at times when those customers traditionally open emails, then you significantly increase your success rate.

Develop A Theme

As you send out marketing emails. keep track of the elements that appear to increase your open rate. If humor increases your open rate, then start to lean on humor more in your other email marketing campaigns. Keep track of everything from background colors to the way you present your message. Over time, you will start to see themes and trends that work in making sure that you have the highest possible open rates.

Avoid Spam Language

You already know that phrases such as “buy now” and “great free offer” trigger most spam filters and negatively affect your open rate. You need to keep track of the spam language that is getting your emails caught in spam filters and be sure to avoid that language in any of your email marketing pieces.

Email marketing is a science that needs to be constantly studied and altered to be successful. Each campaign is another chance to collect data that can make a huge difference on how successful future campaigns will be. The open rate of your marketing emails is an incredibly important number to monitor, and it is also important to find ways to positively affect your open rate as well. By watching your email marketing results, you can find ways to increase your open rate and get more engagement with your emails.

Four Fun Email Marketing Tactics That Work

When you work in Internet marketing, one of the first things you learn is that marketing has to be fun for the audience if it is going to work. If your marketing is boring or dull, then you won’t get nearly the response that you want. But when you take some time to make your marketing fun, you can get more responses, and you can get valuable input from clients as well.

Email marketing is an important way to stay in touch with clients and deliver critical product information. When you incorporate some fun elements to your email marketing, you can make it even more effective and get better results.

Create An Exclusive Club

Your marketing emails become much more effective if you can create a situation where your customers look forward to getting your newest emails on a regular schedule. The easiest way to create demand for your emails is to create an exclusive club that gets promotional prices and inside information delivered in every email.

You need to create a program where only people who join your email list get special pricing deals, and get information on new products before those products are released. The promise of exclusive information and great pricing deals is always an effective way to improve your email marketing results.

Make Quality A Priority

Each and every one of your email marketing pieces should have great information, and look extremely professional. One of the biggest mistakes companies make is building a big list of marketing email addresses, and then putting out boring text emails that are very different than the emails used to attract that audience. When you make quality a priority for each email, you will find it easier to maintain your audience, and add new email addresses as well.

Use Cliffhangers

Movies and television shows use cliffhangers to get people to tune into the next episode or buy a ticket to the sequel whenever it comes out. Believe it or not, cliffhangers can work just as well in email marketing to get customers to eagerly anticipate your next email.

When you announce a new product early to customers on your email marketing list, then leave off the one big feature they will all want to read about and say you will announce that feature in the next email. Little cliffhangers in each email will create anticipation for your next email and get you better results.

Get Customers Involved

If a customer sends you a positive comment in response to your marketing email, then quote that comment in your next email. When customers see that their input matters, you will be able to turn part of your marketing emails into interactive events with clients.

Another great way to get customers involved in your emails is to list content winners in your emails and congratulate those winners. Once again, this allows customers to see that your contests are real, and it also gets customers a little excited that they could have their name featured in your next email.

The key to a good email marketing campaign is to have fun with it. When it looks like the company is having fun, then customers will respond in a positive way and help your emails to be much more effective and productive.

5 Reasons Your Pay-Per-Click Campaign Failed Miserably pt1

After investing a significant amount of time and money into a pay-per-click campaign designed to introduce your newest product, you were disappointed at the lackluster results you saw. As with any type of Internet marketing, pay-per-click marketing is not for the faint of heart. It is as much an art as it is a science, and there are some very good reasons why your latest pay-per-click campaign failed miserably.

Your Timing Is Awful

Did you know that the best day of the week to search for new help wanted ads is Tuesday? Did you know that the best time on Tuesday to look for those ads is 11:00 a.m.? Recruiters know this type of information because they need to be able to maximize their efforts when it comes to finding the right candidates.

Is your market ready for a new product from your company? Are you overlapping product releases and flooding the market? Have your customers already spent their budgets and now have no money to buy your new product? With pay-per-click marketing, timing is everything. If your timing is off, then your results will not be what you want them to be.

Your Keywords Are Old

The Internet has created its own vocabulary that marketing experts struggle to stay up to date with each and every day. When was the last time you updated your pay-per-click keywords? Is there Internet slang involved in your marketplace that you are not using? If your keywords are old, then your results will be poor.

Your Campaign Did Not Run Long Enough

If your research shows that you need a pay-per-click campaign to run for six weeks to be effective but you only have the funds to run it for three weeks, then you should wait until you have the rest of the funds before you start your campaign. You can’t buy momentum for a marketing campaign, but you can lose all of your momentum if you do not run your campaign long enough.

Your Network Is Not Reaching Your Target Audience

Internet marketing professionals are constantly updating and changing their pay-per-click networks to make sure that they accurately reflect the trends of each network. If you are not using the right kind of pay-per-click network for your marketing campaign, then you will not reach your target audience.

Successful pay-per-click campaigns are created for customers by experienced and professional marketing organizations. If your campaigns are consistently not working, then it is time to question whether or not your marketing organization is getting the job done for you.

Good pay-per-click programs can significantly expand your company’s marketing influence, and boost your sales. But when things start to go wrong with your campaigns, you need to make changes if you want to get the best possible return on your marketing investment.

4 Ways You Can Improve Your Email Marketing Efforts

You put together what you thought was a great email with an enticing offer and then sent it out to your customers. But after a few days of waiting, you have almost no results to show for your efforts. What happened?

Sometimes people can make email marketing into something much more complicated that it was meant to be. If you want to make your email marketing campaigns effective, then you need to hire a professional Internet marketing organization to give you the right results. But there are four basics about email marketing that every business owner should know that will help them to better understand their email marketing efforts.

Know Your Customers

Your email marketing efforts all start by understanding what appeals to your target audience, and what type of message will entice your customers to respond to your emails. By collecting sales and customer service data through good contact management software, you can develop customer trends that are valuable in developing effective email marketing campaigns.

Learn From Your Previous Email Campaigns

For the last three email marketing campaigns, you used a blue colored background to your messages and the response to each message was disappointing. For your next message, try a green background and see if that inspires your customers to read your messages.

Every success and failure you experience in previous email campaigns can be used to enhance future efforts. You may use something as simple as changing background colors, or your lessons may be a bit more complex. But as long as you are learning how to succeed from each marketing campaign, then you are headed in the right direction.

Segment Your Target Audience

Your customer profiles are invaluable in developing email marketing campaigns because that data can help you to create focused target audiences. Instead of sending the same message to every customer, you should be segmenting your customer base and creating target audiences that will respond to different messages.

For example, you can group all of the customers together that have a history of buying new product accessories as soon as they are released and send out new product announcements to those customers first. An effective email marketing campaign tries to make each message specific and personalized for every customer.

Have A Schedule

Your email marketing campaigns should have a release schedule to make it easier to monitor the progress of each email piece, and to make sure that you are spacing out your emails properly. Over time, you will be able to develop an understanding as to how often and how many emails you should be sending out to get the maximum results.

It does not take long to realize that finding success with email marketing requires the experience of a professional Internet marketing organization. Good email marketing does not happen by accident. It is planned meticulously, and then the data gathered from each campaign is used to improve future messages. When you do email marketing right, it can be an effective marketing tactic that helps your company to grow.

How To Increase Web Traffic For Your Sales Promotion Using Pay-Per-Click

As Google and other search engines continue to put content ahead of keywords, the door has opened for Internet marketing companies that can create pay-per-click programs that reach very specific types of audiences. While Google has always been an effective pay-per-click platform, the truly creative Internet marketing companies are also discovering the power of Facebook in driving traffic to a customer’s website.

Facebook Is Becoming The New Google

The big reason why Facebook is becoming the new place to host pay-per-click programs is because more and more people are using Facebook to find information. Instead of going to Google, users are starting to use Facebook to look up companies and get breaking news.

This transition to Facebook means that search terms are starting to become extremely important to Facebook users, and that opens the door for pay-per-click marketing. Internet marketing companies are starting to craft ways to use Facebook searches to drive more traffic to websites, and the success rates for growing web traffic are becoming extremely impressive.

Boost Your Latest Promotion

For businesses that truly want to reach a large target audience, investing in Google and Facebook pay-per-click programs will definitely get results. The idea of boosting a single Facebook post has been replaced with the concept of investing in full Facebook marketing programs. The return on that investment can be significant, and it can really help your latest promotion to succeed.

The reason that Facebook is so effective in boosting web traffic for promotions is the manner in which Facebook categorizes its users. Advertisers can break down a Facebook audience in a variety of ways and create a pay-per-click program that will reach a targeted audience that will be interested in your promotion. You can create specific ads for your promotion, or you can create entire marketing campaigns that will drive steady traffic to your website.

Google Can Still Run Your Web Promotion

While Facebook is picking up momentum in the Internet search area, it still has a long way to go to unseat Google as the Internet’s search engine of choice. The best pay-per-click program is one that is based on Google’s extensive network, and enhanced with Facebook’s many marketing options. By combining the power of these two Internet marketing giants, you can put your pay-per-click ads in front of millions of potential clients.

A significant advantage that Google offers is the ability to put your pay-per-click ad on search result pages ahead of even the top results. When your advertising is pushed to the very top of Google search result pages, you will definitely see an increase in web traffic.

These days, the Internet marketing firms that can combine Facebook and Google into a powerful pay-per-click campaign are going to get you the best possible results. Google’s enormous network of resources and Facebook’s ability to reach a very focused audience can be brought together to get you web traffic results that you have never seen before.

Four Quick Things You Can Do To Increase Web Traffic

It takes an Internet marketing expert years to understand and be able to manipulate the rules of gathering traffic that the search engines develop. To make matters worse, the search engines are constantly releasing new algorithms and changing the rules, which makes every marketing expert tense and on-edge.

While it can take years to figure out exactly what Google wants when it comes to good SEO practices, there are still plenty of small things a website owner can do that will increase and maintain traffic. Not everything about SEO is complicated, and you can do your part to monitor your website and make sure that you are getting the maximum amount of traffic each and every day.

Check Your Links

Part of a regular maintenance program for your website is to check your links to make sure that there are no broken or out of date links. A broken link on your website makes Google angry, and it can cost you positions on the Google search engine results page.

You can invest in a piece of software that will check all of your links and report any problems back to you. If you do come up with a problem, then report it to your Internet marketing expert so the issue can be fixed immediately.

Add A Piece Of Content Every Day

Google loves fresh content, and you can get Google’s attention by posting at least one piece of fresh content on your website every day. If you have a company blog on your website, then this is a great place to post fresh content and enhance your Google search results.

If you do not have a company blog, then talk to your Internet marketing company about adding one. You can buy blog posts written by professionals for reasonable prices and post those on your blog every day. If you do not want a blog, then post a piece of company news or something new about one product every day to bring in traffic.

Add Some Pictures

Some companies have pages on their website dedicated to the pictures their customers take of their products, and these types of pages are brilliant for Internet marketing. Not only do they get your customer base actively involved in promoting your product each day, but the fresh content will really help boost your Google ratings.

Pictures are going to be much more effective at bringing in new web traffic than written content, so adding new pictures is going to be extremely effective. When you can get your customer base to take the pictures for you, then you have created a very beneficial situation for your website.

Add Some Online Forms

Talk to your Internet marketing expert about adding forms to your website that collect information for your company’s online newsletter, product release information, and anything else you can think of that your customers would be interested in. By offering specific types of information to sign up for, your customers will get to choose what information they receive and avoid getting information they are not interested in. Forms increase traffic, so ask about them and have them added to your site.

Your website is a dynamic entity that should be changing and developing on a regular basis. The more interesting you make your site, the more revenue-generating traffic you will attract throughout the day. By doing the little things that bring in traffic, you are enhancing the marketing impact that your website has on your target audience.