How SEO And PPC Work Together

For years, digital agencies have separated Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) functions into two separate operations. Both SEO and PPC require similar process to complete, but many digital agencies avoid mixing the two together.

When you work with an agency that allows SEO and PPC to work together, you will get more comprehensive results and you will be able to identify your target audience more precisely. While SEO and PPC function well on their own, they are even more effective when you put them together.

The Differences Between SEO And PPC

The primary difference between SEO and PPC is time. An SEO project is a long-term operation that constantly gathers and analyzes data and makes content changes based on that data. A PPC project is generally a short-term operation that is focused on a single goal and collects and analyzes a lot of data to be used in future projects.

Using SEO And PPC To Build Demographics

With PPC campaigns, you can create keywords designed to target specific geographic regions or other precise parts of your target audience. A PPC campaign is built around a single purpose or message, which allows you to collect very specific information about how your audience reacts to certain keywords and phrases.

The data you collect on a PPC campaign can be used to enhance the effectiveness of an SEO project. The keyword data you collect from a particular PPC campaign designed to affect a very specific audience can be used to create keywords that will reach a similar audience with your SEO information.

Regulate PPC Budgets

Since an SEO campaign is ongoing, it has a very different budget structure than a PPC campaign. With PPC, you pay for every click you get on a particular link, which can sometimes create a tight budget situation.

By using the ongoing data on keywords you have gathered from your long-term SEO project, you can be more precise in what audience you want to reach with your PPC campaign and what message you want to deliver. This allows you to get better value for your clicks, and that helps to keep your PPC budget under control.

Creating Accurate Traffic Projections

The intent of a PPC campaign is to target potential clients that are close to becoming paying customers. With SEO marketing, the process is more gradual and reaches out a broader audience. But when you put PPC data together with SEO traffic data, you suddenly start to see patterns that allow you to make more accurate traffic projections for future SEO and PPC campaigns.

The PPC side of the process will show you how your audience reacts to various keywords and advertising text, while the SEO side will show real trends when it comes to your audience’s reaction to certain types of content. When you put this data together, you can get a surprisingly accurate projection on how much traffic you can expect from both PPC and SEO campaigns.

In a digital agency, there are good reasons for keeping PPC and SEO professionals separate from each other. Each group has its own way of collecting and analyzing data that is ideal for their marketing goals. But it also pays to bring the two groups together to give you the kind of accurate data you need to increase the return on investment you get with your marketing efforts.

What Is Your Target Audience?

In a broad sense, your target audience is the specific demographic that is most likely to find your product or service useful or appealing. The more precisely you are able to define your target audience, the more value you will get for your marketing efforts. In other words, if you know who you are selling to, then you can create messages and find advertising mediums that will reach that audience directly.

When you hire a qualified digital agency to handle your marketing, one of the first things that agency is going to do is work to identify your target audience. You can help the process along by understanding the methods used to develop a target audience, and the kind of information that is required to formulate your own demographic.

Be Practical

The best way to start understanding your customer base is to list all of the obvious people who would be interested in what your company has to offer. For example, if you sell protective clothing for industrial work, then you can safely assume that industrial workers are part of your target audience. When you start your target audience development with practical observations, it can inspire you to dig deeper and look for less obvious answers.

Look At Your Customer Base

One important part of the selling process that many companies forget is to collect as much demographic information on their customers as possible. With an online business, it is easy to get your customer’s address and phone number. But you should also develop client satisfaction surveys that ask for information such as your customer’s income, their age, their product preferences and anything else that will help you to clearly identify who your customers are. With that information, you can get a head start on identifying your customer base.

Conduct Market Research Surveys

Whenever you go to corporate websites, you will notice that there are invitations to take several surveys or fill out online forms. If you fill out a form, you get a free membership to the company’s online newsletter or some sort of reward like that. This is called market research, and it is a critical step in understanding your target audience. With this information, you can start to understand the people who are attracted to your product or service, but have not yet purchased from you.

Be Mindful Of The Competition

Your competition is not going to tell you what its target audience is, but you can find out for yourself simply by paying attention to who is buying the competition’s product. You may be out at a restaurant one day and see someone using your competition’s product that you would never expect to see using it. You can also go to online message boards and social media groups dedicated to your competition’s product to see exactly who is buying those products and why. This will help you to expand your own target audience, and to find new markets to explore for the future.

It is impossible to create cost effective marketing plans without knowing the target audience you are speaking to. When you understand your target audience, then you can create marketing that speaks directly to the needs of your customers and develop advertising that will be much more cost effective.

Double Down Your Online Marketing For Cheap

If you own a business that relies on website traffic for some or all of your revenue, then you need to become familiar with the idea of remarketing. The idea behind remarketing is that when someone visits your website, they get tagged with a cookie. Whenever they visit a website within that remarketing network, they will see ads from your website. If you use Google’s remarketing program, then your ads could be seen by thousands of people, several times a day.

Remarketing could be the least expensive way to gain your website the exposure it needs to generate more revenue. When you invest in a good remarketing program, you are developing sales leads that could turn in to buying customers over and over again.

Creating Warm Leads

A standard marketing program is designed to introduce your company to consumers who may or may not have heard of your business. But the process with remarketing is different and much more cost effective. With remarketing, you are showing ads to consumers who have already visited your website and have expressed some sort of interest in your company. Even if that interest was initially low, remarketing is still creating warm leads for your business that can turn into paying customers.

Exposure To Your Advertising

If you use Google’s remarketing program, then a user who visits your website will start to see your ads throughout the Google network. This means that high traffic websites such as YouTube and any Blogger website will start exposing your warm lead to a series of display ads for your business. The end result is constant exposure to a consumer who has a higher than average interest in buying from your company, and that leads to revenue.

Building A Loyal Customer Base

One of the biggest returns you get on your remarketing investment is that your current customers will also see the ads that your warm leads are seeing. This will help to reinforce your company name in the minds of your customer base, and that will help you to retain repeat business. The ability of remarketing to enhance customer loyalty is an extremely important feature that business owners should not ignore.

Show Off Your Creative Side

You should never take for granted the fact that remarketing creates warm sales leads for your company to work with. One of the best ways to increase your conversion rate with your remarketing program is to make your display advertising as creative as possible. Potential customers will remember your company when they see your ads constantly online, and when you put in some creative effort to make those ads memorable.

It is one thing to get your business involved in cheap online marketing, but it is quite another to get involved in cheap online marketing that works. When you use the services of a professional digital agency, you can use remarketing to do a lot of the qualifying and sales work for you.

Your traffic will get tagged before it leaves your website, and then that traffic will be exposed to repeated ads from your business. Over time, your business will become a fixture in the minds of your target audience and you will see a significant increase in your website traffic and revenue.

Pokemon GO Could Be A Marketing Blessing

In a very, very short period of time, the app known as Pokemon GO has already been downloaded more than the dating app Tinder, and it is on its way to eclipsing Twitter in the download world. Pokemon GO is a game that uses Google maps and real landmarks as places where players can go to catch Pokemon characters. Whether you understand the popularity of this app or not, you need to understand how you can use it to your business’ advantage.

What Exactly Is Pokemon GO?

Pokemon GO is an app created by a company called Niantic that uses real locations as places where players can go to capture a Pokemon character. It is similar to geocaching where people hunt down little capsules with information in them, except that there are no capsules in Pokemon GO. Basically, the player is chasing phantom images they can only see on their phone. Regardless as to how it works, Pokemon GO is wildly popular.

Why Business Owners Need To Download Pokemon GO Right Now

Have you noticed a strange increase in foot traffic to you business lately that is filled with people staring at their smartphones? If you have, then congratulations! Your business is either a gym where Pokemon trainers can work out their characters, or you are a PokeSpot where trainers can buy various accessories. If that is the case, then you could be sitting on a gold mine. The only way you will know is to download the Pokemon GO app yourself, and see if your business shows up as a gym or a PokeStop.

If you are a PokeStop, then you can pay for in-app lures that last for 30 minutes and highlight your business. The marketing power of being spotlighted by an app that is on its way to being more popular than Twitter is not to be ignored.

You should also set up your business to be Pokemon friendly and welcome Pokemon GO players as they arrive. It is inevitable that some players will not patronize your business, but many will. If you are accommodating to Pokemon GO players, then you will see a benefit to being a PokeStop.

What If I Am Not A PokeStop Or A Gym?

Even if your business is not highlighted by the game (gyms and PokeStops are chosen at random by Niantic), you can still use Pokemon GO to bring in more business. Inevitably, people will find and capture Pokemon characters in front of your business. You can put up signs in your window offering a discount to any Pokemon GO player who successfully captures a character in front of your business. Not only are you catering to a huge and growing audience, but you are creating a positive bond between yourself and the players.

Pokemon GO is rapidly becoming a digital marketing dream, and you need to get in touch with a digital marketing agency immediatley to take advantage of this situation. You could be missing out on a great deal of business every day that you are not welcoming Pokemon GO players, and you could be left out of the loop when Niantic starts to sell the chances to be gyms and PokeStops at some point in the future if you don’t get on board right now.

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.

Your Website Is A Swiss Army Marketing Tool… USE IT

A good website is a mandatory marketing tool for any company, but that does not prevent many small businesses from either not having a website, or not updating their website regularly. These days, one of the first resources customers ask about when you mention your company is your website. If you want to bring in new customers and retain your current ones, then you need an effective website.

Not only is your website an effective marketing tool, it is also extremely versatile as well. You should consider your website to be a Swiss Army marketing tool, and you can maximize your marketing exposure if you use your website to its fullest potential.

Legitimize Your Business

If you do not have the web appliances of the most popular ratings websites available to your web traffic, then you are missing out on huge opportunity. From Yelp to Google Business, there are websites your customers can use to tell the world how wonderful your business is. Each time a new review is added that refers to your business, you can have it show up on your website and keep all of your new traffic updated on how great it is to be your customer.

A 24-Hour Sales Professional

Your website should be a sales professional that reaches a global audience 24-hours a day. Your website should have a library of reference documents that your customers can use anytime they want to learn more about your company, and an e-commerce segment of your website that is easy to navigate. An updated website can be your most successful sales professional, but it is only effective if you put in the time and effort to make sure that the information is always current.

A Website Keeps Your Loyal Customers Loyal

When you put the time and resources into making sure that your website is updated, then that helps your loyal customers to feel like you care about their needs. By offering constant information and updated support tools to your clients, you will help to enhance the bond you have with your customers without even having to pick up the phone.

Deliver Market Research Data

Your website is an excellent barometer for the popularity of your company and products in various geographic areas. You can also use analytical software to break down your traffic into various target audiences to see if it is a good idea to expand into new territory. You can also judge the effectiveness of new marketing campaigns, find very loyal customers to be a test group for new products, and stay ahead of consumer trends by keeping an eye on the treasure chest of market data your website offers.

It becomes easy to take your business website for granted, but it can be a steady source of revenue if you just put in the time and effort to keep it updated. Your website represents your company to the world and, when it is utilized properly, it can be one of the most powerful marketing tools your company will ever have.

The Importance of Brand Consistency for Your Business

What does brand consistency mean for your business? A consistent brand is easy for customers to recognize, and it is the result of having all of your marketing programs working together to develop a consistent image. That sounds impressive, but what does it really mean? It means that if you can develop a consistent brand, then you start to become recognized as an industry leader and your company will benefit from all of the perks that come from being considered the best at what you do.

Image Is Extremely Important

Your corporate brand is the reputation you have built throughout your target audience based on your marketing message and your company’s actions. When you talk about quality and dedication and back that up with good products and service, then that becomes part of your brand.

A consistent brand is much more than a good logo and a corporate color scheme. It is the way that your customers identify your business, and it is the image your business projects. If you want to build a successful company, then broadcasting a consistent and positive image is extremely important.

Agencies Are The Key

If you want to create a consistent brand, then you need to develop consistent marketing messages across a variety of platforms. The materials you bring to trade shows need to deliver the same message in the same way as your magazine advertisements. The best way to keep all of that information organized and deliver consistency is through an agency.

Maintaining and building your company brand is a full-time job that you simply do not have time to perform. If you want to do it right, then you need to work with a professional agency that knows how to build your brand and deliver a consistent message across every marketing medium that you use.

Make Your Marketing More Powerful

A strong brand makes your marketing more effective and powerful. When your target audience is constantly exposed to your brand building efforts across a variety of platforms, then your marketing becomes recognizable. Your company logo becomes a symbol of quality to your customers that increases sales through your normal distribution networks. Your company name is the only reason customers need to buy your products when your brand is consistent and strong.

Enhance Your Marketing Investment

As you can imagine, a strong brand means that you can start to diversify your marketing programs and spend less money on basic brand building activities. An agency knows how to sustain your brand once it is established, and then continue to grow your brand to make it more valuable.

Expand Your Exposure

A consistent brand can withstand exposure to industries and markets that are outside of your normal target audience. For example, consider the insurance company that is seen advertising at professional hockey games. While the idea of an insurance company and professional ice hockey are not consistent, the strength of the brand means that the added exposure brings in more revenue. Your brand can benefit from the same type of cross-industry exposure when your marketing is strong.

Growing a business becomes a little easier when your target audience recognizes your company’s name and associates that name with quality products and services. The only way to have a positive reputation precede your company is to have a consistent brand that creates excitement in your target audience.

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.

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.

The 5 P’s of Why People Buy

No matter what industry you’re in, people buy for many of the same reasons – some of which we’ll cover here today. So no matter what platform you’re using, no matter what product you’re selling or who you’re selling it to – just remember these handy motivations and you should be well on your way to turning a profit.

When studied and applied, here’s how you can help yourself win that next big order!

Protection

Above all else, people have an intense desire to shield themselves from risk. They buy products for the same reason. They want to protect property, fixtures, health, their job, etc. In fact, many times employees are judged strictly on their performance – and as we all know – the better performance – the better the job protection. How you present the protection piece is up to you and the demeanor of your customer, but never underestimate people’s desire to want to be safe.

Profit

There isn’t a single thing that the old ‘what’s in it for me’ saying applies to more. Not only does something that helps people generate more income sell easily, but something that helps them SAVE money – in many respects – can be just as valuable. Resources are finite these days and being able to shift resources to an area of need is at a premium.

Pride

People want to be proud of their accomplishments, proud of their appearance and proud of the things they have. If you feel confident about your product, you need to convey that sentiment to your customers to make THEM feel proud of your product. If it helps enhance their image, be sure to stress that point.

Pleasure

People buy things because of how it makes them feel. In this case, they buy things that make them happy. With things like boats and cars – the pleasure quotient is obvious. In terms of B2B sales, it’s a little more subtle, but still exists. I’m sure you’ve heard ‘it’s a pleasure doing business’ many times. If your product helps make their lives easier, a little less stressful or their work-flow more enjoyable, you’re selling pleasure.

Price

Everything has a price – but more importantly, everything has value. Price and value really aren’t a number on a piece of paper, but really more of a representation of how someone views something else. Not only does it dictate how important something is to them, but how much or how badly they want or don’t want something. Understanding value helps you understand price. Understand price and you’ll be able to sell significantly more than you are currently.

For the heck of it – think of all the things you’ve purchased in the past and why you’ve purchased them. We’re willing to bet that more often than not – it was because of one of the five ‘P’ reasons we listed here. Your job is to consider your product and take into account which ones are in play and determine how best to operate within that space. Happy selling!