4 Signs It's Time To Hire A Digital Agency

It is understandable why so many small businesses attempt to market their products and services without hiring a digital agency to help. To many business owners, the costs of hiring an digital agency can be prohibitive. But that is only true when you do not understand the value a digital agency can bring, and the many ways that an agency can bring a significant return on your investment.

Your Online Presence Has No Focus

You spend a little time each day on social media, put up a blog post, and then add product information to your website about new and current products. But where is all of that getting you? If you have created the foundation of a good online presence, then it needs to be cultivated properly to help your business grow. In all reality, a business owner is wasting their time in this type of scenario by adding content to an Internet presence that has no focus.

A digital agency will talk with you about your goals, and give your online elements focus. You will be able to get the results you need from your online website pages to sell product, get customer feedback, and launch new sales endeavors.

You Don't Enjoy Online Marketing

If you don't enjoy online marketing, then you are not going to give it the attention it needs to be successful. Instead of bringing in revenue for your company, your online marketing tasks become a burden that brings nothing to your company's coffers.

A professional marketing company can set up a limited plan for you to show you just how effective professional marketing can be. Without paying a fortune, you can see how effective your online presence can be and make an informed decision on whether or not you want to get a massive return on your investment by hiring a professional.

You Are Ineffective At Troubleshooting Your Marketing Efforts

You put messages up all over your online presence about your new product release, but the results showed that the message was not received by your audience. Why? What did or didn't you do that caused these types of results?

The problem when you are not a marketing professional is that troubleshooting ineffective marketing practices is almost pointless. A digital agency can review what you have done, and then make the changes that will bring about the results you want.

The Reality Is That Your Content Is Poor Quality

Professional Internet marketing organizations have teams of professional writers and experts working for them that can generate content for your online presence immediately. While the content you are generating is written from an expert's perspective, it is not generating excitement because it is poor content. You need a professional team of writers and marketing experts behind you to make sure that everything associated with your company online is the highest possible quality.

The simple fact is that hiring a digital agency is an investment that will pay for itself several times over almost from the day you start. Instead of putting off the decision any longer, you need to do what is right for your company and bring in the experts to help your business grow.

4 Ways Remarketing Helps Improve ROI

Remarketing is the process of taking traffic that has already expressed an interest in your company but has not made a purchase, and turns that traffic into buying customers. This includes traffic that bounced from your site, traffic that requested information but went no further, and traffic that expressed an interest in products but failed to finalize a transaction. There are several ways you can use remarketing to improve your overall marketing return on investment (ROI), and most of these methods are easy to implement.

Turning Abandoned Shopping Carts Into Revenue

A big part of remarketing is to use those abandoned shopping carts for potential clients to create real revenue. Abandoned shopping carts represent great opportunities because they offer important customer information such as contact information and the products those customers are interested in. Not only can you send reminders about the abandoned carts, but you could also create focused ads to send to these customers that feature products they would be interested in.

Use Facebook To Its Fullest Potential

These days, social media is getting just as many search inquiries as the major search engines. When people do Facebook searches that lead to your Facebook page, then that is an interested customer you could remarket to through custom Facebook ads. When you work with an Internet marketing professional, you will have ways to collect that Facebook information and use it to increase the revenue that comes from your social media presence.

Use Your Blog More Effectively

Your blog is a place where information about your company and products is broken up into convenient categories. If you sell shoes, then the traffic that visits articles about dress shoes on your blog can be a target audience for your dress shoes marketing. Each area of your blog presents you traffic you can capture and use to create effective remarketing mailing lists.

Remarketing Through Google Searches

Remarketing software has become exceptionally sophisticated, and it allows you to reach out to targeted audiences through Google searches that are relevant to your company. For example, a person searches your site for your most popular product and then leaves. In a Google search, that potential customer searches for your competition and starts looking at what they have to offer. You can create a remarketing campaign that captures that Google traffic and sends it links to landing pages on your website that compare your product to the competition.

The key to getting the best ROI for your remarketing efforts is to target specific, yet broad, audiences of potential customers. You can use the traffic that has shown an interest in your company by capturing your own traffic, and you can also influence potential customer opinions by monitoring and utilizing Google search traffic.

Google, Facebook, and many other major consumer platforms offer programs companies can use to increase the ROI on their remarketing programs. When you team up with a professional and experienced marketing organization to help improve your remarketing, you will be surprised at how much revenue you can add to your bottom line with people who expressed an interest in your company, but just needed that extra push to make a purchase.

4 Common Misconceptions About Digital Marketing

One of the biggest challenges we face as a digital marketing agency is helping people to understand how what we do differs from a traditional marketing firm. Once we lay the foundation for understanding digital marketing, then we inevitably move to disputing the many myths that come with using a digital marketing firm. We understand that myths are out there and misconceptions can happen, but we encourage all of our customers to learn the truth about digital marketing so that they understand how it is used to advance revenue.

Digital Marketing is all About Doing as Much as Possible to Generate a lot of Numbers

The most popular misconception is that all digital marketing agencies do is throw out a bunch of paid ads and content to drive web traffic. The truth is that digital marketing agencies use the most effective types of online marketing methods to bring in traffic that will be most likely to purchase your product or service. Every digital marketing expert is looking for quality results, and not by using a large quantity of tactics. The process of digital marketing is very streamlined and precise.

Social Media is Just an Internet Toy

According to ExactTarget.com, nearly 50 percent of all corporate technology buyers are influenced by information they see on social media and nearly 71 percent of all consumers are influenced by social media advertising. Yes, social media is a great way to share cat videos and inaccurate memes, but it is also a powerful marketing tool that good digital marketing firms know how to exploit to the advantage of their clients.

Digital Marketing Companies Unnecessarily Push Websites when Social Media Pages are Just as Effective

If your company does not have a website, then you do not exist to millions of customers around the world. Many consumers look at social media pages as partial representations of what a business has to offer, and they wonder where the rest of the information can be found. Social media pages also have a lot of rules that limit how you can market your company and how you can run promotions online. When you have a website, you are in complete control of all of your images, your promotions, your content, and your revenue-generating traffic.

My Target Audience is Really Not Using the Internet

Are you sure about that? According to Time Magazine, the number of people online worldwide went from 400 million in 2000 up to 3.2 billion in 2015. The Internet is now accessible on desktop computers, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Just because you and your immediate circle of friends are not partial to the Internet does not mean that your customer base does not use the Internet either. The chances are that you are missing out on a significant amount of business when you ignore the Internet. A digital marketing firm can get your company online and talking directly to your real target audience.

The world of digital communication and Internet connectivity is expanding rapidly, and you need a digital marketing firm to help you come into contact with your target audience. By casting aside the myths about digital marketing and understanding the truth, you will understand why investing in a digital marketing service is one of the smartest business decisions you will ever make.

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 Get People to Open Your Emails

You put all of that work into your marketing emails, but your research gives you a disappointing percentage of emails that actually get opened. You may not be able to find out exactly how many people are reading your emails, but you can at least increase the number of people who open them and give them a chance. Believe it or not, you have a lot of control over whether or not people open your marketing emails. All it takes is a few tactical changes to the way you present and send your emails, and you will see the number of emails opened skyrocket.

Do Not Come On Too Strong

Too many email marketing companies think that the best way to get a potential customer to open a marketing email is to include a strong subject line that includes lots of exclamation points. Your message is designed to inform your potential customers about the benefits of doing business with your company, so that is how your email should come across. Avoid the barrage of exclamation points and strong language that so many others use and create an informative subject line that will pique your audience's interest and get your message read.

Give People A Reason To Open Your Emails

In most cases, new information about your company is not going to entice too many people to click on your marketing email. However, an exclusive email offer that gives your customers a special discount is going to get plenty of attention. Instead of sending out what amount to boring emails, you should put something into your marketing emails that your customers will enjoy. If you give your audience a reason to open your emails, then they are more likely to want to look inside.

Limit Your Emails

Contrary to popular belief, good email marketing is not a numbers game. You do not want to send out countless messages to countless recipients and then hope for the best. Your target audience should be made up of customers you have already qualified, and your email schedule should be limited to avoid overwhelming your audience. If you send out too many emails, then your audience will simply start to ignore you. But if you send out targeted emails at reasonable intervals, then you will be better equipped to gain the interest of your audience.

Speak The Truth

If your subject line promises the secret of eternal youth in your marketing email, then that email better deliver. There is no faster way to lose an email marketing audience than to make claims in the subject lines of your emails that your emails cannot back up. Never over-promise in a subject line, and never use outrageous subject lines just to get the attention of the people you are marketing to.

Your email marketing campaign is only effective when you create messages that your audience will read. All of the work you put into creating effective messages is lost if you do not take the necessary steps to get people to actually open your emails. By attending to a few details, you can get people to open your emails and make your marketing campaign a success.

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 pt2

There are no absolutes in this world, but there are trends that we can use to avoid utilizing bad marketing tactics. When it comes to pay per click marketing, there are a lot of mistakes you can make that will cost you money. But there are four critical errors that are sometimes made in pay per click campaigns that not only diminish the results the campaign gets, but they could also damage future campaigns as well.

Not Matching Landing Pages With Ad Content

A well-written pay per click ad is going to get people clicking on the link to find a certain type of content. When people click on a link and wind up at a landing page that has nothing to do with the ad content, then consumers feel duped into seeing something they don't want to see. That is why you must be sure to create a relevant landing page for every pay per click campaign, and make sure that every link you use in your pay per click campaigns point to the right landing pages.

It is acceptable to keep old landing pages available on your website, but only if those pages are part of a pay per click campaign that is still going. Once you end a pay per click campaign, you should take down your landing page and develop a new one for your next pay per click campaign.

No Call To Action

A call to action statement at the end of your pay per click ad helps give your ad a sense of completion for the consumer, and it also inspires your audience to take action when they are done reading the ad.

A call to action can also be important if you want your audience to do something other than clicking on a link. For example, if you want customers to call a phone number or click a link for more information, then a quick call to action will make that clear and get you better results.

No Dynamic Development

When you first release a pay per click ad, it is not going to get you the results that you want. This is almost guaranteed in every campaign you will run. If you want better results, then you need to engage in ongoing development of your pay per click ad. If you are not using dynamic development to change your ad based on your results and the trends of your audience, then you will never give yourself the opportunity to maximize your results.

Not Analyzing The Competition

What is the competition doing with their pay per click ads? Is the competition doing something consistently that would indicate that it is working? In the business world, you cannot live in a bubble. You must analyze what the competition is doing, and use the competition's own success against them.

You Didn't Make Changes During The Campaign

If you are running a pay-per-click campaign and you are getting consistent data that tells you that a particular set of keywords is not working, then you need to change those keywords. Too many people allow a flawed campaign to run and then wonder why the results are not what they wanted. Monitor your pay-per-click campaign and make changes to improve its results as the campaign moves along.

You Didn't Hire A Professional Organization

A good pay per click campaign is developed over time and conditioned to reach a certain type of audience. When you find pay per click tactics that work, you should utilize those tactics and continue to develop them for future success. When your pay per click campaign starts to show poor results, then they are reasons for that. Your job is to find the reasons, correct them, and get your pay per click campaign back on a successful path.

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.