Basic Digital Marketing

Social causes as a form of marketing is a controversial subject, with some describing it as misleading and manipulative. Regardless of what one’s take on using charity or a social cause marketing, there’s no questioning its effectiveness with younger generations.

Why we do it

Social cause marketing is believed to have begun in the mid-1970s through a joint campaign between the Marriot Corporation and the March of Dimes. The Marriot promoted their family entertainment complex in California while raising funds for the March of Dimes cause, which succeeded at promoting the corporation as well as the cause. Since then, so many others have followed suit with joint charity campaigns. In this era of increased consumer awareness and interest in causes such as the environment, brands win major points when they engage.

What is your brand doing?

Wait, do I have bad SEO? This is a question a lot of web designers, entrepreneurs, and business owners ask themselves. If you do find this to be the case, don’t worry. Though bad SEO has consequences long-term, the quicker you make a change, the closer you’ll to deriving some benefit from your strategy.

What is bad SEO?

Bad SEO can be happen out of clumsiness or lack of experience, more common than not. Alternatively, bad SEO can also happen with so-called ‘experts’ who use black hat SEO techniques. Black hat SEO are outdated strategies used to ‘hack’ SEO and often involve illegal means of ranking your site higher. In almost every case, black hat SEO strategies are eventually discovered and when they are, a site gets penalized. If you find your site has bad SEO, it’s no reason to panic.

KPI stands for ‘Key Performance Indicator’. They provide insight into how well a digital marketing campaign is working, measuring performance in very specific ways. On more complex campaigns, there are dozens and sometimes hundreds of KPIs being tracked. As you set up a strategy for your brand, knowing where to start with KPIs and what to choose count for a lot.

How important are KPIs in digital marketing?

KPIs can refer to any aspect of a digital marketing strategy, ranging from productivity to sales, revenues, consumer behaviour, and more. KPIs are important in digital marketing because numbers matter. If you launch a strategy that you don’t know whether it’s working or not, continually spending money on it could be going down the wrong path.

If KPIs aren’t producing the results you desire, you can adapt strategy or figure out where the problem is. For this reason, the KPIs you choose for your digital marketing campaign is highly important. Choose the wrong KPIs and you won’t have the information you need to make an informed decision on whether a given strategy is producing or not.

Keys to a healthy collection of KPIs

You won’t just be choosing one KPI to determine a strategy as a success or failure. Quality over quantity though. Choose metrics and KPIs that are clearly attached to a written out objective or target. You want objective data and ideally, a forecast for what you expect the data to be as well as where you want the numbers to go in the future.

Content marketing comes with a lot of formulas, advice, truths, and myths, all ready to lead brands down sometimes questionable pathways. Like other marketing channels, content marketing a la articles, blogs, guest blogs, social media content promotion, email content promotion, etc. is evolving. If the value your content brings isn’t immediate and aggressively apparent, you’re done.

Over the course of decades, in this evolution, many myths and misconceptions about content marketing have crept in. Old ideas have faded or outlived their usefulness, while others are hanging on waiting for any day now when they lose effectiveness. Here are some common content marketing myths to watch out for as well as advice on how to maneuver around them.

More is better

The more content you put out, the more noise you’re creating but noise isn’t always good, especially when it’s just noise. Go for quality over quantity. If you’ve got more content to put out, absolutely do it but be smart about when, why, and what. Don’t inundate your audience with massive amounts of low quality, generic content every day. Instead of investing all resources towards shoving out content after content, develop strategically chosen articles released on a schedule.

There’s no point in trying to rank for SEO

Keyword stuffing, amassing low quality backlinks, and other SEO strategies that no longer work might suggest to some that organic SEO rankings are a waste of time as a content marketing objective – wrong! Search engine algorithms are still very much responsible for what content is seen or ignored. Get yourself an experienced SEO team ready to elevate your content with engaging content approaches, properly written code, keyword optimization, and more. SEO is not a digital strategy to be forgotten about.

Chatbots have become an expected integration into most businesses’ web design, providing users the opportunity to find information that cannot be located on-site or gain access to a software-supported AI.

What is a chatbot?

A chatbot is a computer program that’s designed to communicate with human users. Programmed to work independent from any human interaction, a chatbot is essentially a type of artificial intelligence.

The use of chatbots among small business websites

The industry and market around chatbots is expected to grow to $1.2 billion by 2025. Why there exists this level of growth around chatbots has to do with many consumers’ preferences to communicate with chatbots for customer service inquiries. The demand of users has resulted in business website owners ramping up chatbot use, conducting AI-influenced conversations in greater numbers than ever. They are boosting sales and engagement in a big way, helping business achieve objectives in impressive fashion.

The love-hate of social media is what we thrive on, integral to the lives of millennials to seniors. Connecting us all to the ones we love no matter the distance, it’s that potential of connection which brings us together with it.

From a business standpoint, social media marketing campaigns have proven to be huge lead generators. Brands must divide their time, effort, and money strategically though. Some social channels simply aren’t going to work while others will show themselves to be optimal.

As an example, Facebook’s a very popular platform but even this channel can be a wrong investment for the right brand. Here’s the top social media platforms to watch for in 2020, in developing your campaign.

Questions to ask when building a social media marketing campaign

It’s no surprise digital marketing continues to take the business world by storm, growing and evolving every year. New trends, techniques, and strategies are on the rise all to counter new algorithms. To keep up with how to best reach audience, staying on the cusp of emerging marketing trends in 2020 is central.

VR/AR

Continuing to emerge as a major trend, augmented reality and virtual reality both are surging forward although are far from coming to reach their full potential. IKEA is one of the more publicized uses of AR, using it to help consumers visualize IKEA furniture in their own homes. How can you use AR or VR in a small business digital marketing campaign? 2019 never quite got us there, in terms of giving general websites and brands that opportunity. It remains to be seen if technology and coding will progress to the point where this is the case in 2020.

Is there meaning?

Consumers want to know the companies they’re buying from align with their views and understands their perspective. Is there meaning behind your brand, products, services or marketing – there should be. This may be attaching your brand to a non-controversial social cause, donating to a charity or cause, or building a community around something that’s passionate to you. A corporation that just exists to be a corporation is quickly losing favor in consumer eyes. Explode your growth and give a purchase from your brand meaning.

Instagram is the #1 social media platform in the world right now, with massive user growth, hundreds of millions of active monthly users, and a big youth movement. Attract customers through Instagram digital marketing, create conversation, and turn engagement into revenues. Here’s how.

Who’s on Instagram?

More than 35 percent of Internet users have an Instagram account. The majority of Instagram users are women between 18 and 29. A lot of Instagram accounts belong to users from outside the United States as well, which makes it an ideal platform to reach local and international audiences alike. That said, not everyone is on Instagram. Older audiences aren’t. Business professionals aren’t. Instagram is a specific platform, with an audience of under-30, visual-driven users. If this is the audience you are targeting, you’re in the right place.

Use Instagram software

Instagram apps, software, and tools exist to help you get posts out, grow followers, and get attention. There are tools to craft high quality images and video, editing them quickly to a professional level. There are content management software that allow you to post or time out postings. There are also media management programs that keep all your images and videos in one place. This is just where to start. There is a lot of other software and apps that do amazing things with social media platforms like Instagram. They’re well worth checking into.

In the world of search engine optimization or SEO as the digital marketing world has come to shorten it to, there is what’s called ‘white hat tactics’ and ‘black hat tactics’. White hat SEO represents good, reliable SEO work while black hat SEO stands for risky SEO hacks that could penalize your site or if Google finds out you’re using these strategies could result in really bad consequences.

For years, black hat SEO was a serious problem. Spammy sites would use black hat SEO to rank high on Google, until the popular search engine started to get smart about it. Algorithms slowly adapted and nowadays many say there’s pretty much no such thing as black hat SEO. This is because if an SEO marketing hacker tries anything of the sort, Google will probably catch it. Unfortunately, there are still some who think they can hack Google’s SEO algorithms and that tends to put your site at risk.

The relationship between black hat and white hat SEO explained further

Black hat SEO wasn’t always considered ‘cheating’. In fact, black hat SEO strategies like blog comment spam were widely used. It was only once Google’s algorithms started to change and the company began to address SEO techniques they would no longer tolerate that black hat strategies became banned.

Today’s black hat SEO specialists try to find loopholes to exploit in the existing search engine optimization algorithms to get a higher ranking. Comparatively, white hat SEO specialist take a less aggressive approach focusing on how to satisfy the algorithm. A white hat SEO approach zeroes in on optimization on-site, keyword research, backlinks, high-value content, and more.

WhatsApp is the world’s #1 messaging application, exceeding the popularity of iMessage, Facebook Messenger, and other competing software. The app shows no signs of giving up dominance in this market which has led the digital marketing world to take notice. What if a company could take this platform and spin it into something that could generate clicks?

A little history about WhatsApp

WhatsApp was founded in 2009 as a means of sending text messages, photos, and voice messages through the Internet by encrypted means. In 2014, WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook for an estimated $19.3 billion which at the time made it the most popular messenger app of all-time. In countries like Brazil, India, Pakistan, the UK, and France, it continues to be a preferred method of communication.

WhatsApp consumer statistics

WhatsApp as a potential digital marketing opportunity and social media platform should be evaluated on its consumer base and its use. Here is a little bit about what we know in terms of WhatsApp user behaviour.

 WhatsApp has more than 1.6 billion monthly active users which is comparable to social platforms like Facebook and Instagram. More than 180 countries are represented in WhatsApp’s user base, and in 133 of these, it is the primary one-to-one messaging application.
 Every day, over 100 million videos and 700 million photos are shared on the app.
 WhatsApp’s messaging system handles more than 10 billion messages every day, which many have compared to WhatsApp being to SMS messaging what Skype is to video conferencing and international calling.

A decade ago, Facebook was a cool, young, and hip platform for millennials to get on and connect with one another. Then, everybody and their parents joined, and Facebook became a little less cool. Then, Instagram, Twitter, and other social platforms rose up and suddenly the concept of social media wasn’t so fresh anymore. The youth moved to these other platforms where growth in the user base among younger people continues.

This actually hasn’t been a bad thing for Facebook. Let’s face it. The world’s not only full of younger people. There are parents, grandparents, and plenty of other people who want to connect and enjoy social media. For all those other more mature, adult-oriented audience, Facebook’s still an important destination. The site remains one of the world’s biggest social platforms and one that every social media marketing campaign must have in its plan.

Why video is important to Facebook

There are so many areas to exploit in social media marketing on Facebook. Why video is so important is because this is where consumer behaviour is headed. More people are consuming videos in rising numbers. On social media, videos are the posts that get the most engagement and they are also what seems to have the most impact on consumers. As a high value digital marketing content marketing tool, video will be a key to going forward.

Facebook recognizes this which is why the platform has been feverishly developing its video functionality. Every social media platform from Instagram to Snapchat has tapped into video marketing but Facebook has something unique – an older, more experienced audience. If you want to reach younger people, there are better platforms to use. If you want to speak to a professional, family-oriented, or adult over-25 audience, Facebook’s exactly where to set your sights.

Social media’s a competitive place for influencers. Every account is on rented space. Every influencer’s competing for attention, likes, shares, and engagement. If you’re unfamiliar with influencer marketing as a tool for your brand to succeed in social media marketing, this may be a technique to go beyond the limitations of organic algorithms and PPC, and get you the revenues you want.

Why influencers are important?

Influencers are a sort of hack around the uncertainty of organic digital marketing strategies like SEO. Influencer marketing works from stone cold statistics. Here are 3 facts any brand marketer should remember about using influencers.

 Brands see a 37% higher retention rate when they receive a customer from a recommendation made to the customer from a trusted source.
 77% of influencers are more likely to buy from a sponsor, which means a paid influencer could potentially one day become a natural brand supporter.
 Word-of-mouth generates double the sales of paid advertising.

What is the best influencer for my brand?

There is no definite rule when it comes to which influencer is best for a brand. Something more appropriate to one industry may not be the same to the next. Ultimately, there are three types of influencers – micro-influencers which carry 1,000 to 100,000 followers, macro-influencers which carry 100,000 to 500,000 followers, and mega-influencers which have 500,000 to over 1 million followers. You don’t need a mega-influencer to succeed. Oftentimes a micro-influencer with a strong engagement level and one that’s relevant to your target audience is needed.

Are you looking to kick-off the winter digital marketing season with a video strategy? What’s trending in the landscape of video marketing and beyond should lead the way in how you structure such a campaign. Across YouTube, Facebook, and other video sharing or marketing platforms, there’s a lot of similarities between content. Here are some top statistics in video marketing worth remembering.

 85% of Facebook users will watch videos with the sound turned off. For this reason, write captions and include them on your video. Find ways to get the message of a video across without having to use audio. Remember, a visual can speak a thousand words if you let it.

 Email marketing click-through rate increases by 63% on average when video is included within the email. This rate may fall as video becomes more popular however in the current landscape, it is one of the most high-performance techniques to up that click-through.

 The video marketing campaigns on social media that receive the most clicks and engagement come from Instagram. On average, videos on Instagram receive over 2 times as much engagement as other social media platforms produce.

 82% of Internet traffic next year will come from video. This says a lot about where content marketing’s headed and why it’s going to become more important to move to text communications to visual.

The world’s biggest corporations in marketing and business are making the most of virtual reality, integrating it into their digital marketing campaigns and beyond. A powerful engagement tool, they allow consumers get up, close, and personal with their favourite brands.

The top 3 ways VR is used in digital marketing is to increase brand awareness, accelerate a purchasing process, and to offer a more personalized approach to a customer. To understand how VR can apply to your brand, here are 7 examples to draw inspiration from.

Lowe’s

Lowe’s set up a virtual reality initiative in some stores in what they called a ‘Holoroom’. Customers could come in and see what their house would look like a post-home improvement. You could select designs and products to visualize placement in a home. Similarly, IKEA recently launched their own VR app which placed furniture in your room and allowed a customer to see the look, feel, and fit.

McDonald’s

McDonald’s created a Happy Meal Box that folded into a VR headset, providing a simple, affordable way for kids to experience virtual reality. This simple fun tool encouraged children to partake in the tech revolution. As evidenced in this campaign, incorporating VR into marketing doesn’t need a huge investment.

Social media has become all about the visual. Adding high-value visuals to your social media posts is a strong strategy to get clicks and see more attention. Images and video content fuels engagement. There are 7 main types of visual content for social media – shareable images, branded images, info images, print images, videos, PDFs, and other. Here are the best visual content ideas you can use on your social media marketing campaign to grow followers and acquire likes.

Shareable images

Shareable images make up a long list and focus on images that are most likely to be shared. Famous quotes, questions, a question and answer, affirmations, fun facts, helpful tips, reminders, short lists, teasers, controversial statements, written testimonials, or inspirational words all are images likely to receive the most clicks.

Branded images

Branded images put your brand’s logo front and center, communicating to others where an image’s from. Branded images include banners, buttons, badges, ads, cover images, promo images, blog post image links, physical product images, and more.

Simple, effective, and viable, email marketing is a way to reach out and bring subscribers back to your website. Strategies employed on email hinge around getting you that CTR, otherwise referred to as click-through rate. If your CTR is low, you know there’s a problem that needs correcting.

The ideal CTR varies according to industry. A lot of marketers will tell you 10% or higher is worth aiming for. This may seem low but you have to acknowledge that the vast majority of people won’t open your message. Even so, the higher your CTR, the better. Here are some ways to improve your email click-through rate.

A/B testing

There are a lot of variables affecting open rates and CTR. A/B testing can show a lot of insight towards what’s working and what isn’t. You may want to switch things around, test out different subject lines, sending out at different times of day, experiment with different CTAs, and more. Testing’s all about trying new things and seeing what sticks.

Subject line

Top strategies for subject lines include to write something urgent or time-sensitive, to ask a question, to be concise, and/or to incentivize. Also, studies show personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened. If/when possible, personalize your subject line. They matter! If you don’t capture attention in two seconds or less, you run the risk of having your email passed over.

If your brand stays relevant and of use to its customers, they won’t ever leave your side. Marketing’s an ever-changing minefield but if there’s one thing that hasn’t changed about content marketing it’s these 7 truths.

Content can sustain a business

Every brand is selling something and to some, what you’re selling is all in the content. Buzzfeed utilized content to build a multi-million dollar platform where it now exploits different product sponsorships and initiatives to generate further income. Content builds an audience. If you grab attention and you’re good at holding onto it with consistent content, you can make a lot from that.

Grab audience that’s already there

It’s less expensive and carries less risk to tap into an existing audience than to build an entirely virgin one. Although content marketing plans work on momentum building and creating audience, you can tap into guest blogs, influencers, sponsorships, and other opportunities to popularize your brand and make people aware of your existence. If you want audience, don’t just rely on your own content marketing. Find a way to tap into others.

SEO performance hinges on dozens upon dozens of unique factors. Conducting an audit semi-regularly can help to determine how well your site’s SEO is doing and where improvements are needed.

A quick way to analyze your SEO is with an SEO audit. Google changes its algorithms with regularity, as consumer behaviours changes. Audits help site’s stay on top of what’s working and eliminates strategies that are failing.

There’s a lot that you can look at to determine how healthy your SEO is. Keyword usage, for example, should be on point and placed well. Organic search rankings, competition rank, and identification of any problematic code is a necessary examination to look at as well.

To start your SEO audit, what’s usually done is a full site crawl to help establish a baseline. Looking at analytics once a month can be the start to regular SEO audits. Looking at recent data, you should be able to tell where there may be broken links, issues with page titles, or issues with duplicate content. When doing a simple SEO check, going beyond your analytics, check the following:

 URLs should all be simple and clean.
 Content should be well-written, unique, and formulated with headlines and media to help break up the text.
 Meta descriptions should be include on each page, with everyone an appropriate length.
 Ideally, you want to link anywhere from 3 to 5 per page. Ensure all links work.
 Images should have appropriate keyword-rich descriptions with meta data written out proper.
 Website structure should also be easy to navigate with a site map installed.

Social media doesn’t often require a guide on how to use but when it comes to your digital marketing dollar, it’s heavily important to know where you’re spending is worth it. Doing social media right involves knowing your strategy. Driving conversions and sales is the center of many social media marketing plans. Here’s a few ways on how to maximize your time and effort, targeting customers successfully en route to leads, likes, and dollars made.

Questions and polls

Posing open-ended questions and providing polls is one way to get audience input, find out behaviour, and see preferences. In terms of market research, going directly to the customer’s valuable. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all make it easy to ask questions, create polls, and more.

What’s trending?

Keep track on trends. Social media isn’t set in stone. Instagram video, LinkedIn, and Facebook continue to grow. Snapchat and Twitter have stalled, for all intents and purposes. This is what’s happening now though it may not be the same six months from now. Know the trends and you won’t waste time.

Brands love to talk about how to market to millennials. Describing millennials in all sorts of ways, they can make or break a lot of businesses. They currently represent 27 percent of our population in North America, average a $55.45 average spend on every shopping trip which is $7 above general averages, and millennials tend to shop in less trips than prior generations. Contrary to information many assume, not all millennials are the same. In fact, myths about millennials are plentiful. Here’s some digital marketing millennial myths we think should be ignored.

Millennials all have the same politics

You may assume that millennials all have the same socio-political views and use this to inform marketing strategies however this isn’t accurate. Millennials are actually a very diverse collection of people, with beliefs running the gamut. They change depending on ethnicity, income, region, and other factors. The lazy thing to do is to assume – don’t. Take the time to get to know your demographic.

They hate advertising

Millennials routinely ignore some ads while being perfectly ok with others. Many spend hours on smartphones and other mobile devices. They appreciate marketing like emails, notifications, social media posts, and others. These work for some and for others, they do not. Traditional advertising certainly doesn’t work anymore, at least for this generation. If a millennial wants to shop with you, they will. Ultimately, this means digital marketing becomes a game of creating awareness.

Are you wanting to market your brand to an international audience? Appealing to people from all backgrounds, cultures, and walks of life can be a seemingly insurmountable mountain few companies actually make the climb.

An international digital marketing campaign is the easiest method to advertise and market worldwide as anyone with an Internet connection has the ability to see, follow, share, and bookmark your brand. If you can achieve exposure, it then becomes up to you to gather leads and convert them into sales.

There’s no shortage of possible channels to exploit in digital marketing with social media, email, website development, blog writing, and even podcasts and video streaming. So many options that it can feel overwhelming knowing where to put your dollar.

If you’re working it internationally, first and foremost, set up a website. A high-quality website provides anyone anywhere the opportunity to connect with your brand, read about you, see products and services, and from your users, you can gather a lot of information in analytics software. See where users are coming from, what products or services are most popular, who is converting, who isn’t converting, and what digital marketing channels are working.

A marketing budget of only $1. Where would you put your money? Facebook paid ads to seem attractive, sure. Alternatively, you could put it towards a future purchase on analytics or automation software. Do you know what we would do with it? One of the highest returns on investments in digital marketing is email. If all you have is $1, put it there.

Creating your first email marketing plan

Email subscriber lists start small and then, they accumulate momentum. You don’t need a big list to get started. You also don’t need any fancy software to get going and see optimum results via email. All you need is a plan. For example, on your website, encourage readers of your blogs, visitors, and users to sign up for email updates. You may promise them a discount code or promotional free item to get them to opt-in. Once you have them, now’s your opportunity to impress.

Your subject line is what will get you your click

Once you start sending emails, it doesn’t count for much if no one is opening your messages. Subject lines are integral for this very purpose. You need something intriguing enough to get a subscriber to click and read. Pay special attention and write carefully. Creating subject lines, you can pull from all types of strategies, including building on curiosity, fear of missing out, humour, vanity, greed, pain points, and more.

Traditional offline advertising is old news and like old newspapers, they’re being done away with for what’s present in the digital field. Consumer attention has moved from offline to online. Established businesses with decades of success behind them are now having to make the move to digital platforms, social media, email marketing, and having thoroughly developed websites. For a lot of these business owners, they’re unfamiliar with the digital environment. If that’s you, allow us to help.

Digital is a positive, not a negative. You can reach more people in a single minute digitally with smart planning than you can in a month with traditional ads. The environment is rife with opportunities to advance sales, success, and growth.

If you’re not already set up in digital marketing, the most important thing to recognize is the consumer’s in charge. They have more power than they ever did offline and where they go, marketing’s lead. Empowered consumer trends mean marketing strategies are always moving. For example, social media wasn’t really a thing fifteen years ago. Yet today, social media marketing’s a huge channel on which businesses routinely make millions daily by connecting to users on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and similar platforms.

As we touch down in September, we’re now well on our way to come through the fall holidays, starting with Thanksgiving and then, Halloween, the first day of winter, and then Christmas and holidays are right around the corner. This doesn’t even mention the Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales events splashed in before December.

This time of year, a lot of businesses pick up sales that help to even out their revenues and push them into a profitable territory for the year. eCommerce marketing kicks into high gear, taking advantage of all this activity as well.

If you want to leverage these holidays to power a strong SEO campaign, starting now’s a good plan. SEO rank improvements don’t happen in a day. They can take months to arrive at. Start optimizing today though and you should be on your way. First things first, do you have any old holiday content still on your site from years’ past? If so, you can update and repurpose this content. This is the most cost-efficient holiday SEO strategy and is an easy way to bring up an increase in organic traffic. Once you’ve done this and have these pages re-listed, the next steps can prove to be where the challenge is.

Anyone can write compelling content. As long as you can string a sentence together, even the most inexperienced can learn how to write and deliver high-value digital marketing writing or content marketing that cuts right to the point.

What is the best marketing writing? Stuff that inspires but which doesn’t go overboard, which contributes value and information on a product or service but which doesn’t sell it, and which articulates clearly what action the writer wants their reader to take. Here are some of the finer points on content marketing and blog writing every brand should know.

Be specific

If you’re speaking to every person in the population, your message won’t land to anyone. Be specific and make a decision on who you’re writing for. Don’t just say something like ‘women under 35 years of age’. Delve deeper into details of who you want to attract, such as ‘women under 35 years of age with at least one child and in an unhappy marriage, with a desire for something more’.

Your target audience is human

Build a profile of someone in your target audience, as you go into this detail. You should be able to answer questions such as what motivates them, what’s their deepest fear, what excuses or barriers could prevent them from taking action on your product or service, what are their ultimate life goals, where do they want to be five years from now, and more. The better you understand your target audience, the more likely the way you write digital marketing articles will connect to them.