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 Drive PPC Conversions

While all marketing is designed to sell products or services, some forms of marketing are expected to get more direct results than others. For example, the investment a company makes in pay per click marketing is considered successful when the conversion rate is high. The conversion rate is the percentage of clicks that turn into sales, and the number needs to be high if a PPC campaign is going to be considered successful.

There is plenty of talk about how to improve PPC campaigns to make them more effective, but what clients really want is information on how to increase their conversion rate and get more sales out of their efforts. Increasing your conversion rate occurs when you improve your campaign, but there are other things you can do to increase conversions when you are using a PPC marketing approach.

Be Mindful Of How Your PPC Affects Other Marketing Programs

There are metrics you can use to see how changes in your PPC program not only affect your return on that investment, but also on how they affect other marketing approaches you are using. Does your PPC changes increase the effectiveness of your email marketing campaign? It is important to keep an eye on the dynamics between all of your marketing programs if you want to get the most out of them.

Are You Thinking For The Future?

Is your PPC campaign designed to appeal to the customers you have now and the new customer segments you want to attract? While good marketing is only done at an identified target audience, you can expand your marketing influence by including keywords in your PPC campaign that start to draw in audiences that you plan on targeting in the future. This is how you lay the foundation for future marketing success, and how you can use your PPC keywords to grab the attention of people who don't yet realize that they need or want your products.

Are You Relying Too Heavily On PPC?

The response from PPC marketing is meant to be immediate, but it is not always the best approach to take. When you spend time examining the effects of all of your marketing programs, then you start to see what types of effects your PPC campaign has on audiences and how you can enhance your marketing results by the proper balance of all of your marketing campaigns.

Which PPC Outlet Is The Best For Each Campaign?

A professional marketing organization will utilize all of the available PPC platforms to reach your audience, but you want to identify the best platforms to maximize your campaign. If you notice that Bing reaches a more technical audience, then you can use a PPC program based on the Bing search engine to sell your more technical products. By analyzing each platform and understanding the audiences they reach, you can get great results with each of your PPC campaigns.

The point of a good PPC campaign is to drive conversions and bring in revenue. More than any other form of marketing, a PPC campaign is expected to generate revenue almost immediately or else it is considered a failure. In order to increase your PPC conversions, you need to look at how your PPC campaign works as a part of your marketing efforts, and then maximize those efforts to get the best results.

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.

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.

Five Marketing Strategies To Use Starting In 2016

As each new year approaches, business professionals tend to look back on the current year to consider correcting their failures and replicating their successes. The key to business success is to always look to the future, but use your experience as the foundation for making good decisions. With marketing, we can take what we learned in 2015 and apply it to more successful tactics for 2016 and beyond.

Update Your Elevator Speech And Use It In More Places

When was the last time you took out the written text of your elevator speech and updated it to match the changes that have occurred with your company in the last year? If you don't have your elevator speech written out, then you should take the time to write it down and then update it.

When was the last time you put your elevator speech up on Twitter or any of the other social media platforms? Have you ever considered putting your elevator speech on the back of your business card? Your elevator speech should be the key to introducing your company to new customers, and you should use it more in 2016.

Update Your Company's Brochure

If you have never had a general company brochure that you hand out to prospects and clients, then 2016 will be the year that you finally get one. If you do have a general company brochure, then work with your Internet marketing company to update the information in your brochure and make it more effective.

The simple fact is that handing out a color brochure to people who are interested in your company is more impressive than writing down a website address. People can read the brochure whenever they want, and there are no pop-up ads to take away from your brochure's marketing impact.

Get New Business Cards

A new business card design for 2016 will invigorate your current customers and help impress your prospects. You will also have the chance to add important information to your business card such as your social media contact information and anything else that is currently not on the business cards you are using in 2015.

Clean Up Your Website

The start of a new year is the perfect time to hire a good Internet marketing company and have them clean up your website. No matter how effective you think you are as a webmaster, you are missing details that are frustrating your traffic and costing you precious rankings on the search engines. A professional Internet marketing company will clean up the coding on your site, get rid of dead links and make your site a hit in 2016.

Get To More Trade Shows

The only business resolution you need to make for 2016 is to participate in more trade shows with an improved trade show booth. Trade shows are great places to make new industry contacts, find new clients and network with the people who will make your business more successful. You already realize a positive return on the investment you make in the trade shows you participate in now, so it is time to increase that return by doing more shows.

In order to stay competitive in your marketplace, you need to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to marketing. The more you do now to get ready for 2016, the more profit you will be able to add to your bottom line.

Five Tips For Changing Your Website

Most website owners have no problem overhauling their website once in a while to try and update its functionality and make things interesting for their web traffic. While updating the website once in a while is essential to its operation, actually changing the site is something that should be planned and done properly.

It is true that making a wholesale change of your website could positively impact your web traffic, but it could also temporarily derail your traffic if you are not careful. There are some tips you should consider before you make significant changes to your website to make sure that you maintain your flow of web traffic and sustain revenue.

Group Changes Together

If you have a list of changes you want to make to your website, then your best bet is to group them all together and launch the changes all at once. If you have a wish list of things you want to do with the website that would lead to a complete overhaul, then you may want to consider doing all of those changes at once and launching a whole new website. It is easier for users to handle a large group of changes, instead of trying to adjust to changes happening in rapid succession over the course of several weeks or months.

Make A Big Deal Out Of It

For the most part, people love changes to websites and you can use that to your advantage. Once you have decided to make your website changes, you should create a little marketing campaign to create some excitement over the launch date. You can create pricing promotions and use other marketing tactics to turn your website change into more traffic.

Do A Test Run Of Your Changes First

Few things are more annoying to website users than a website that took out a perfectly fine website function and replaced it with something that does not work as well. New does not mean better and you need to make sure that you do a test run of your changes to make sure they enhance the functionality of your website before you allow them to go live.

Get Customer Input

Before you start doing any detailed planning for your website changes and long before you start doing any programming, you should utilize social media to see what your customers think of your website. If there are certain features or aspects of your site that are getting a lot of attention from people on social media, then you may want to consider making changes to those aspects during your website overhaul.

Consider Whether Or Not Change Is Necessary

If your website is generating good web traffic, then any changes you make are going to disrupt that. In business, you definitely do not want to fix something that is not broken. Write out the changes you want to make to your site and determine if they are really necessary, or if they can wait until you get more ideas.

Making any change to a website, positive or negative, is going to initially cause your status in the search engines to suffer. If you made good changes, then you will see your search engine results exceed what your previous web traffic numbers. But if your changes upset your traffic, then your website may not recover. Plan your website changes carefully and be sure that they are necessary before you make them.

Four Things You Need At Your Next Trade Show

There is plenty of detailed information on this blog and others about how to create the best trade show materials to show-off your booth. But it would probably be helpful to know which tools, of all the tools that get mentioned, you really need when you start to put your trade show presentation together. Along with your modern booth and all of its attractive accessories, there are four other pieces you need to bring if you want to find success at your next trade show.

Banners

You may have the best light show and the loudest sound system a trade show has ever seen, but all of those trappings are only doing half of the job. There will be a lot of people at your next trade show who are looking specifically for your company's booth. If you took the time to market your appearance at your next trade show, then there will be a flock of potential customers who want to talk to you. Banners let everyone know where your booth is located and act as unwavering reminders as to where people can find you and your sales team.

Custom Pamphlets

Too many companies avoid getting custom pamphlets printed for each trade show, which means they are missing out on an opportunity to capitalize on their trade show investment. When attendees get back to their offices, it may be some time before they review the material they collected. They may even go to other trade shows before they get a chance to look at your pamphlet. When you create a custom pamphlet, your audience will be reminded of exactly where they saw you and exactly why they liked your company in the first place.

Business Cards

Your business card acts as a pocket-size d billboard that advertises your business to anyone who sees it. If you do not take a full box of business cards to every trade show with the intent of giving every one of them away, then you are not going to be able to maximize your trade show investment.

Focused Product Information

Not only do you need to have new and customized product information printed for each trade show, but that information needs to be focused on the details that the attendees are looking for. A convention of engineers will not want to see the same information that purchasing managers will need. Each trade show you attend needs to have information that is focused on that trade show audience if you want people to be able to use your information to buy your products and get interested in your company.

When you decide to present your company at a trade show, you have made a significant financial commitment. Not only does it cost you a lot of money to present at trade shows, but it also requires a considerable investment of your time to plan each detail and make sure that the show goes off as you want.

Prior to putting together your trade show presentation, you will make a long list of the things that you will need. Each company's list varies for every trade show, but there are four elements that every company needs to bring to every trade show if they want to find success. Without focusing on the basics, it is hard to generate the kind of income you need to justify your trade show investment.

5 Reasons You Need A Killer Company Brochure

There is plenty of information on how to introduce your company with a brochure, and how brochures add value to your product presentations. But it is hard to find convincing information on why you really need a company brochure as a means of general introduction.

Most business owners understand the value of brochures designed specifically for certain products, and the need for having brochures that are customized for each trade show. But there are plenty of good reasons for your company to print up and use general company brochures every day of the year.

An Elevator Speech With Pictures

Every corporate executive, business owner and sales professional prides themselves on having a great elevator speech. A corporate brochure is an elevator speech with effective pictures in a glossy and professional package. When a business professional understands the potential of a good corporate brochure, it is easier to see why they are so valuable.

No Bounce Rates

When you hand a prospect a brochure, there is no other brochure for that prospect to bounce to and put yours to the side. With a website, thousands of people a day will bounce from your website to other sites in seconds and take away your chance at telling your company's story. But with a brochure, the audience is captive and will read your story without jumping to read the story of the competition with the click of a button.

Show Your Professionalism

While there is absolutely nothing wrong with handing a prospect who is interested in your company a nice business card, the impact of a professional brochure is worth the investment. As with any marketing piece, think of how you would react if a business owner was able to give you a colorful brochure of their company along with a business card. You would not only be impressed, you would immediately have a positive impression of that company.

Highlight Your Company's Strengths

In the marketing world, a picture is worth 1,000 words and the picture you put on the front of your company brochure can make a strong first impression on any prospect. If you have a product your company is known for that has a sleek look that appeals to clients, then make that the cover of your brochure. Your company brochure should use your company's biggest strength to make a first impression your audience will never forget.

Give Them Something To Look At Later

Your prospect may listen to your pitch and take your brochure, but they may also fold up that brochure and put it away without reading it. But hours later, when they are flying back to their office, they will reach into their pocket and pull out your professional brochure and spend some time actually reading it. One of the most valuable aspects of a brochure is that it cannot be turned off or ignored like an online ad. Once your prospect has your brochure, the marketing impact can be felt at any time.

A good brochure can be an invaluable corporate marketing tool that you should carry with you at all times. A brochure can enhance other marketing pieces, and it can be that professional first impression your company makes that sets your organization apart from the competition.

3 Ways To Strengthen Your Remarketing Program

Remarketing is the process of taking visitors who have bounced from your website and turning them into buying customers. It can be an immediate result, or remarketing could take weeks to bring in a sale. But by staying touch with everyone who expressed some sort of interest in your company's Internet presence, you will be able to maximize your revenue and achieve your business goals.

Make Immediate Remarketing Contact

When a consumer is looking for products, they will usually go through several websites before they make their final decision. If your website is one of many that a consumer is using to get pricing and product availability, then you are definitely in the running to get the business. If that consumer does not place an order on your website during their initial search, then you must respond quickly with your remarketing program to bring in that business.

It is common for consumers to go through a list of websites looking for the best price and then settle on the last website they visit to place their order. When you have an aggressive remarketing program on your website, those consumers that left your site without placing an order will start to see ads on the other websites they browse. With this kind of exposure, you significantly increase the chances that the consumer will click on your ad and place the order on your website.

Get Involved In Google's Remarketing Program

Google's remarketing program is so comprehensive and effective that it is almost impossible to describe in this article. Not only can you customize what types of customers your Google remarketing program targets, but you can also collect a lot of marketing information that will allow you to update and improve your website.

Google allows you to create marketing programs based on remarketing data from past campaigns, and Google also has several different types of remarketing programs for you to choose from. When it comes to getting the most from a good remarketing campaign, it is important that your Internet marketing firm utilizes Google.

Separate Your Mobile And Standard Website Remarketing Programs

Many website owners either try to combine their mobile and standard websites into one remarketing program, or they choose to not put a remarketing program on their mobile website at all. Since the majority of consumers access your Internet presence through their mobile devices, it would be a very bad idea to ignore the remarketing potential of your mobile website.

Work with your Internet marketing team to develop very unique remarketing plans for your standard website and your mobile site. You will want to collect different types of information for each type of site, and you will want each site to utilize that information in different ways and react differently to remarketing opportunities. The best way to maximize your remarketing revenue is to develop focused plans for standard and mobile websites.

If you are not utilizing good remarketing programs, then you are letting revenue slip away. When consumers use your website, they are doing so for a reason. While that reason may not lead to a sale at that particular moment, you can use remarketing tactics to keep your company's Internet presence in front of interested customers and grab the revenue that you would have otherwise left behind.