Basic Digital Marketing

Selling to the upper middle class and “the rich” isn’t an easy task. What’s effective in marketing towards them is not going to be the same as what worked for other demographics. The most effective offline or digital marketing approach for upper classes relies on you developing a thorough understanding of their buyer personas. Here are 6 things to know about Canada and the US’ super-rich, and their personalities, needs, passions, and desires.

Self-made wealth.

Analyzing the world’s 400 richest people, Forbes found that 71 percent of them more or less became rich based on their own ambition, drive, and hard work. They didn’t come from money, didn’t have large inheritances, and worked tirelessly to achieve what they have. In assembling marketing, you don’t want to assume the upper middle classes are unintelligent or spoiled. Absolutely, some are. A lot aren’t though.

Headlines are the ultimate decider between whether an email gets opened or if the content gets read. Did you know five times as many people will read your headline than the body of an article – it’s true. An ineffective headline that doesn’t grab a reader’s attention right away wastes the content it’s supposed to support. More than half of Internet users spend 15 seconds or less on reading an article online. Your focus on writing a high-value, impactful headline is key.

Your working titles.

If you know you’re going to be putting together a lot of headlines, come up with a list of basic templates for headlines. A magnetic headline is one that’s unique, specific, which conveys a sense of urgency, and which is useful to the reader.

SEO usually breaks down on keywords, image optimization, and coding principles. Not discussed nearly enough, search intent and the psychology behind it can be tremendously helpful to optimization methods.

Why search intent and SEO are intertwined is because of how understanding intent can set you up in front of the customer at any and all stages of the purchasing journey, just based off the knowledge of what keywords to use. Some consumers have no idea about your brand, while others are just becoming aware of your products and services. There’s a different SEO strategy customizable for each and it all has to do with intent.

With customers engaged in your Internet marketing, you’ll be shocked at the impact word-of-mouth can have on acquiring more leads. Referrals bring in big business and are sometimes referred to as the ultimate marketing tool. Consumers are more likely to buy a product when it’s been referred by a colleague, friend, family member, or influencer they trust. Social media campaigns, hashtags, email marketing tips, and elsewhere, when you get your customers involved, engagement soars, business peaks and profits hit new heights!

Events.

Customer engagement events – such as product training, roundtable discussions, peer-to-peer networking, or product showcases – can attract new customers and create a conversation on a brand. If this is appropriate for your company, use social media and email to get the word out while encouraging customers to bring a friend.

It can be time-consuming to keep up with your digital marketing campaign to meet objectives. Automation is a tool every marketer uses and with reason. It’s a software to help automate some aspects of a campaign, allowing a business to produce higher quality leads without having to invest any more time than they already are.

Up to 49 percent of companies use digital marketing automation regularly. There’s no reason not to jump on board with something that’s re-defining how we market on the Internet. Imagine how much time you could save if you had a single program to automate an email marketing campaign, sending out emails when you’re most likely to convert a lead. Alternatively, let’s say you’re managing a few different social media accounts, the software can help to make posts at the most opportune time when you know you’re most likely to attract and covert audience.

Are you launching a new email marketing campaign? Have you struggled in the past with creating effective, profitable email marketing messaging? If you answered yes to either of these questions, these are a few tricks to help maximize your results.

A/B testing.

How to get more email subscribers means nothing if your email marketing isn’t purposeful and effective. A/B test email copy frequency. Test subject lines, CTAs, and preview texts. See what works for your audience and follow it.

Snapchat has 100s of millions of daily users and over 10 billion video views per day. It’s an underrated and oftentimes forgotten about the way to generate leads, attract customers, and maximize brand awareness.

Although Snapchat maybe a little less friendly to advertising than Facebook or Twitter, the platform still has a huge audience to tap into. It’s a unique design, offering a different way to construct a brand narrative and to pursue digital marketing.

When you get Snapchat social media marketing right, the rewards can be astounding. Achieve a big return on your Snapchat spending by following what’s worked in the past for other brands and pursuing what works for you. Here are a few of the most successful Snapchat campaigns in recent memory.

Content is a powerful tool to reach prospects and convert leads into ready-to-buy customers. Content can exist in a variety of formats, from blogs to infographics to YouTube videos. One content type some brands discount is the power of downloadable eBooks.

eBooks can communicate a sense of value and importance a series of blog posts can’t. As a digital marketing tactic for lead generation, eBooks can be used to gather contact information and email subscribers while making long-term fans. eBooks are one of the most underrated yet effective lead generation tools a brand has and is supported by marketing storytellers like Neil Patel among others. Here are 3 ways of writing an eBook can elevate your business and drive more leads.

As daunting as it is trying to build a brand from nothing and with only a limited budget, it can absolutely be done. In the world of digital marketing, it’s not about who has the biggest pockets. It’s about the most effective messaging and the most efficient way at delivering this message outwards.

Against well-established competition with more momentum in the digital marketing game, you need to work harder, smarter, and be more creative. No matter your circumstances, here’s an opportunity to get some attention on you without much of a budget. Be it on social media, YouTube video marketing, email marketing campaigns, content marketing, SEO, or otherwise, there’s organic growth for you out there waiting to be had – all it takes is learning how.

For consumers searching out products or services like yours, the first place they go is Google. If your website is not included in the first page of search engine results pages (SERPs), you more or less don’t exist.

Did you know the first rank on a Google search enjoys a 33 percent uptick in traffic compared to other listings – it’s true? As important as branding, social media, quality of product and other factors are at publicizing your business, organic reach is still so important. It provides significant momentum which you can ride for months and even years, always finding new leads. Increase the organic reach of your website by following these tips, tricks, and strategies as a guide.

In its simplest definition, digital marketing is a series of strategies designed to engage existing customers and prospects. This can be accomplished through content marketing like blogs, web design, social media, video, email, podcasts, and more. For beginners all the way through to expert digital marketers, there are a number of tools which can make the job so much easier. Here’s just a few.

Buffer

Buffer is a social media marketing scheduling software that can help distribute content across numerous platforms, allowing you to also set times for posting. On top of that, Buffer also has extensive analytics that gives you the opportunity to see clicks, likes, shares, and so much more.

Hotjar

Hotjar is a very interesting digital marketing tool that provides visualization analytics, monitoring interactions on-site and with your content. See heatmaps, video recordings, and more. Hotjar makes for a unique presentation tool, for the most part, but is still preferred by some websites.

Buyer profile + buyer insights = all the information you need to cultivate leads, conversions, and sales.

That’s the equation the most successful digital marketing companies have used to plan campaigns and create content. Engaging your target audience is a necessity to any sort of success in business. A buyer persona is where this starts. ‘Buyer personas’ represent different segments of your customer base, identifying their needs, lifestyles, and how your products or services solve their problems.

The first step in the ultimate guide to buyer personas is one has to invest in doing the necessary research to understand their audience. Identify who they are, what they want, and the types of products they’re looking to buy. Launch surveys and polls if you have an existing customer base, interview customers one-on-one if you have a brick-and-mortar location, and/or look at your competition’s clientele to see where customers are coming from.

Few people out there aren’t carrying around a smartphone on their person when they leave home. This just goes to show how interconnected the offline and online world is. For digital marketing, this has also opened up whole new avenues for brands and websites to explore.

Mobile Internet use surpassed desktop back in 2014, believe it or not. A few years after that, Google made the decision to adopt mobile-first indexing in their SEO algorithm. Mobile-first indexing means that sites that are equipped to be mobile responsive will rank higher than sites without this ability.

Prior to this switch a few years ago, Google valued desktop websites more however as the usage trend has changed, the algorithm has had to adapt. So what does this mean for your website – well, if you have an SEO digital marketing strategy and your site is not mobile responsive, you may be wasting your money.

Have you recently started your first website? Are you wondering why it’s not ranking as high as you’d like on search engines like Google, Yahoo, or Bing? Sometimes even the simplest mistake can completely jeopardize a website’s SEO rank. Here’s the most common SEO mistakes new websites make and more importantly, how to fix them.

Bad title/content.

Sometimes a website doesn’t rank well because, plain and simple, the content’s not very good. Producing visually attractive content that’s meaningful, informative, and authoritative is what drives organic SEO growth and ranking your site on the first page of Google.

Attracting and engaging youths under-25s keeps a brand connected to what’s trending in culture, something very important to some companies. With billions of people online and competition up the ying-yang vying for their attention, strategizing for under-25s is a challenge.

Fortunately, there are numerous digital marketing channels and platforms to use, and plenty of ways to reach out. If you’re looking to increase your audience of university-age youths under 25 years old, here’s 7 ways to get it done.

Mobile.

Under-25s are flooding their smartphones every day with queries and searches. Few of them use desktops. If you’re not already on a mobile-first mindset, get on one. Every digital marketing campaign should be mobile-first.

Developing a successful Instagram marketing strategy can be hard to come by in the busy landscape of the social media platform. There are still ways to cut through the noise though. Instagram marketing can elevate a brand, growing them in size, popularity, reputation, and revenue-wise. Here are the five basic steps towards leveraging Instagram to build your ideal community of buyers, clients, and long-term customers.

Hashtags.

So much of Instagram's popularity is built around hashtags but remember to choose yours wisely. They should be relevant, creative, and hopefully recognizable. Constantly, brands should be optimizing their hashtags. Use general ones year-round, campaign-specific ones that engage specific segments of the audience, and always ensure you’re tracking hashtags. There are Instagram hashtag tracking tools to help analyze and optimize a brand’s page. The more analytics you have on what’s working, the more guidance you’ll have on what to pursue.

The right marketing moves will bring in the audience you want. For new small business owners, entrepreneurs, and marketing managers, money might be tighter than you’d like. Even on a smaller than preferable budget, we believe you can still get results. By investing smartly, you don’t need $1,000s to see your revenues climb with a smart digital marketing campaign. Too many companies find out too late that, even when their momentum is down, if they don’t market properly soon they may not have a company to work with at all.

Personalization.

Although you may be tempted to target new customers – and you certainly should – it’s equally important to look at your existing customer base. Email marketing and subscriber lists are an inexpensive way to keep in touch. Use these to send personalized messaging to your existing clientele, ensuring they are appreciated. Provide them with the occasional discount or offer to keep them as customers. This is the base from which you can build.

For every minute of the day, there are more than 100 hours of video content uploaded to YouTube. There is no hub of content creation more advanced and growing than YouTube, with billions of users regularly going to the platform to consume. Its’ online community is strong and in an era of increased emphasis on video marketing, YouTube has got the market covered. Unfortunately, for most brands, YouTube goes underutilized.

Any brand building a social media marketing strategy, of course, there are advantages and reasons to consider Facebook and Instagram. There’s opportunities there to advertise and increase leads but these are very populated, busy, and cluttered platforms. They also don’t have the algorithms or advertising support YouTube does. Every website should be investing in a YouTube video marketing strategy and here are just a few reasons why.

eCommerce product pages are secret weapons in SEO, as both a lead generation tool and a conversion method. Getting product pages right are a must. Prospective customers are arriving at your site ready to buy. If you have product pages properly set up alongside a customer-centric sales message, you’ve got a lot to gain. Here are 6 digital strategies to get you to optimized eCommerce product pages.

Video.

The average consumer spends 5.5 hours a day consuming video. Especially with social media marketing abound, video is an ideal way to communicate with your existing and potential audience. In fact, eCommerce sites like Amazon have seen an increase in purchases of 6-30 percent on product pages with video embedded.

Why half of Toronto businesses do not have a digital marketing plan in place is beyond us. Marketing online is seemingly a necessity to survive in today’s marketplace. Although far more businesses than half are engaged with Internet platforms, to fumble one’s way through social media or to have an informal strategy that’s not well defined is not a great idea.

Digital marketing has got so much behind it. You’ll find revenue growth awaiting, a whole new consumer base looking to connect with brands like yours, and so many opportunities to expand your brand and get it in front of qualified leads. To seek success offline is expensive and not altogether feasible for many people. Seemingly, the only reason why a Toronto business would not want to pursue a defined digital marketing strategy would likely be because they don’t necessarily know what to do with it.

Search engine optimization (SEO) strategies are all about delivering to your site organic traffic. How we do that is by getting your website ranked close to the top on the first page of Google.

There are on-page and off-page SEO strategies which can be used to accomplish this, with a variety of SEO tools making an increase in web traffic so much easier to arrive at. Through advanced SEO tools, you get more functionality in your analytics, more insight into the competition, and more power in your link building.

Something else you’ll notice about the SEO tools mentioned is their ability to assist with keyword research. Keywords are still so important to search engine optimization. After all, when a user searches something on Google, they’re using a keyword in their search query. As a brand, you want to ensure you have the right keywords to get you the traffic you want.

To succeed online, it can’t be emphasized enough that strong customer relationships are a necessity. Easy and efficient ways to connect with your target audience exist, thankfully. Cultivating an online community begins with recognizing the social channels available, learning how to interact with customers, and employing strategies to generate discussion. Here are nine ways to build an online community to spur your website towards being the success you know it can be.

Personality.

Humanize your brand by bringing personality to the conversation. Be fun and vibrant. While you don’t want to overshare, be inappropriate, or get too far away from what your brand’s about, personality is important to help let people know there’s someone real behind the computer and not just a corporate robot.

Tech’s been driving society for years now, and business in Toronto has seen many changes in recent decades because of the technology which has come and gone. Smartphones, iPods, social media, digital marketing channels, and how we interact person-to-person has all had an effect on business.

Data.

It’s easier than ever to accumulate data and analytics, which has helped digital marketing agencies in Toronto a great deal. Some data is more important than other data though and so companies are challenged to know which metrics are most important, how to process these analytics, and how to use this information to personalize content to your customer base.

There’s a lot of debate, these days, on what the best social media site is. Truth be told, each brand may have their own personalized answer based on where their audience is and what’s appropriate for them.

Analyzing current social media trends in digital marketing, Instagram is the #1 social media platform in the world right now followed closely by Facebook and Twitter. A huge social media trend that we’ve found is that while Instagram growth rates are the highest of all social media sites, Facebook and Twitter is growth is slowing down rather quickly. Although B2C brands still go to Facebook, waning interest means in 5-10 years’ time, Instagram might be where you want to invest your time.

In 2019, the top 3 social media platforms are Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter based on how marketers are using these sites. Approximately 94 percent of marketers use Facebook for social media marketing while 73 percent use Instagram and 59 percent are using Twitter.

Creating content for social media marketing for most companies is one-size-fits-all. You may be cutting down on the effectiveness of your digital marketing by doing this, however. Each social media platform has its own audience, rules, and trend on content engagement. Not every platform is equal to the next.

Building your social media strategy, approach each platform as if it’s its own unique digital marketing channel. Depending on where your target audience is, some may be more appropriate than others. Also, if your brand is naturally inclined to produce a certain type of content, you may be better suited to sticking to a specific social platform. For example, Twitter is very journalism-heavy and ideal for short text-based messaging while photos and videos are better suited to Instagram. Here are some general rules to social media marketing.