Basic Digital Marketing

Changing ways of searching for information online has included more consumers using voice search on their smartphones, tablets, and devices like Google Home, Microsoft Cortana, Alexa, Siri, Amazon Echo, and more.

Add to this more consumers are moving to mobile devices instead of browsing the Internet on laptops, desktops, or tablets. A lot of searches get done through voice, such as finding a local restaurant, getting directions, or finding out the weather. By 2020, about half of all Internet searches will be done through voice.

Positioning your brand for long-term success is key to understanding voice search. Unlike written words, voice search is more conversational, natural in tone, and statements made or queries are longer. The future of SEO is voice search which is why we’ve put together this quick guide on elevating brands to where they need to be to ensure they remain successful in tomorrow’s landscape of search engine optimization.

Microdata

Microdata can come in many forms. One such is a sitemap submitted to Google which would include data such as your location, pricing, store hours, and address and phone number. Microdata markups can also be written to communicate various things relating to your business and the products or services offered. Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper is a great tool, in this sense.

For small business owners and entrepreneurs new to using social media as a business tool, it’s common to make mistakes. There’s understandably a lot to learn and using sites like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, or LinkedIn for business can be completely different from how you would use it on your own time. Come on too strong with a hard sell and your leads go running. Approach it too casually and you won’t ever find the leads you want. Here are some quick dos and don’ts of how to approach social media marketing for beginners.

Do set a goal

Before you start on any social media campaign, know your goal. How many leads? What’s your targeted conversion rate? How many social interactions or impressions do you want to have weekly, monthly, or for the full campaign? These answers will help you determine the details of a campaign.

Don’t not have a way to measure success

After you set your goal, install the analytics you need to monitor whether a strategy is working. Without knowing the details of a campaign’s performance, you won’t know when you’ve achieved success or failure. As you measure progress along the way, you may also decide to adjust your campaign according to the results you’re getting.

The dreaded bounce rate. It’s something a lot of sites struggle with, even the best ones. People leaving your page after a short period of time can happen for many reasons. Let’s say your marketing and branding’s strong enough to get a user to click on your site. Now they’re there. How do you get them to buy-in? Well, conversions are a whole other ballgame. Cultivating the lead is one thing. Now you’ve succeeded there, we’ve got to focus on improving those conversions.

The best way to avoid high bounce rates is to focus on improving the quality of your content. Whether it’s a blog or a web page, the look and information on it count for everything in taking care of those bounce rates. Ideally what you want to have happened when someone clicks on a page is for them to start reading and never stop. If you can get a user to read at least halfway through, you have a real opportunity to entice them into buying in. ‘Buying in’ can mean many things. It can be actually buying a product, signing up for a service, subscribing to an email, following social media accounts, etc.

Without quality content, you’ll never be able to get the user to buy-in. This is where your talent in content marketing comes into play. Content is there to provide value. It’s also there to assure prospects that you’re a legitimate brand that knows what it’s talking about and which has a quality product or service to provide.

Every new website that sets sail wants the same thing – results. Ideally without spending a ton of money, you want leads, sign-ups, sales, subscribers, and success. With the right digital marketing agency to execute and a creative approach, you can wow your customers with strategies that go beyond the norm. Here are 11 uncommon ways to fast-track your website to complete success.

Hashtags

Social media’s most powerful digital marketing weapon. Join in on friendly, non-political hashtags and you can get a lot of views from this strategy. By participating and engaging with others, this is one social media marketing campaign that can turn you from just a company looking for customers to having an active, personalized voice.

Photo contests

Hold a campaign encouraging followers on Facebook or Instagram to submit a photo with a specific hashtag, instantly putting them in a draw for a free prize. It’s easy. Photo contests are increasingly becoming the norm, with so many great examples to pluck from for a general template.

When a brand stops taking itself so seriously and starts to have a little fun with their perceived image or rebels against what’s expected of them, it can really resonate with a user base. On Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, brands do this all the time, toying with their corporate voice and showing some personality.

Humor can be a tricky thing though. Some brands try and fail at it with unfunny, offensive posts. Those that get it right however do so because they know their audience and can successfully deliver something that’s funny, quirky, or cute rather than simply being weird or inauthentic. Here are some of the best brands who do funny in social media marketing.

Charmin

Charmin launched a recent campaign under the hashtag #tweetfromtheseat which brought together bathroom humor pins, some pop-culture referencing, and capitalizing on humor to promote branding. For some brands, a similar campaign can be a risk but for products appropriate to the humor, it’s hard not to laugh at hashtags like this that seem so obvious.

Stay in the marketing industry long enough, and you see trends come and go. Some prove effective while others tend to hang around a little longer than they really should. Digital marketing’s always evolving and as marketers ourselves, we’re always looking at where the next opportunity is to build something from. These are 5 unfortunate digital marketing myths we’ve found people continue to hang onto to this day even though they have little value.

Fake reviews

If you’re posting fake reviews to help boost your brand’s value, it’s sketchy and eventually, it’s almost a guarantee you’re going to be caught. When these reviews are removed, your brand’s rating will sink and you’ll be flagged. This isn’t growth hacking digital marketing. It’s being manipulative, misleading, and just plain dumb. Over 90% of consumers rely on reviews when buying a product or service. If you want high rated reviews, get them the hard way.

Organic Facebook marketing

As we’ve known for years, organic Facebook marketing’s been on the decline. Facebook, for all intents and purposes, is now a pay-to-play marketing hub. These days, when you post on the platform, only 2-6% of your audience will actually see it. Fortunately, you still have social media marketing on Instagram as well as other high-value platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

Topic clusters are a great way to uncover new headlines for blogs, help SEO, and new content marketing ideas. These clusters of keywords can be a catalyst to helping elevate your site to the top of search engine results pages. Although it can be a long journey to get there, starting in on topic clusters is another SEO strategy that can help your brand.

What are topic clusters?

Topic clusters are a collection of content pieces that live on your website and which have an overarching theme. Topic clusters work to provide insight on what your site is about and the content it features.

In addition to topic clusters, you have what is called pillar content which are pages and articles built from broad keywords with a high search volume. Topic clusters alternatively focus on small search volume keywords. This creates a hierarchy where blogs and content marketing builds around keywords pulled from topic clusters that can then be hyperlinked back to pillar content. Thereby, you get search traffic from highly focused keywords and phrases while helping your overall rankings for pillar content.

Growth hacking isn’t cheating. It’s taking opportunity and flipping it on its head, getting you everything you deserve and elevating a brand, product or service to superstardom.

Growth hacking was originally coined as a term in 2010, advocating for throwing out of the traditional marketing playbook and replacing it with creative, scalable solutions to achieving growth. Growth hacking comes in the form of email marketing, PPC, blogs, and using time and effort rather than money or advertising to get you the results you want. You don’t need all the resources in the world to growth hack. It’s all about being smart, lean, and agile with your marketing – nothing more, nothing less.

Let’s be clear in communicating that this isn’t a cure-all for any and all digital marketing woes. Some fail with growth hacking, just like others succeed. Here are a few examples of campaigns that have done it right however, to learn from.

Beyonce

The music industry is built all around smoke and mirrors, a lot of hype and excitement, and arguably anything but the music product itself. In 2013, Beyonce released an album recorded completely in secret with no notice, no hype, and nothing more than the product. The growth hacking takeaway here is to be bold and make your own headlines at whatever the cost. Already an established brand, Beyonce’s album blew up, shifted more than 828,000 copies in 3 days, brought with it more than 8 million copies sold overall, and was a viral hit.

There’s no sector of brick-and-mortar as competitive as restaurants. Corporate chains v. small family-owned affairs. In cities and towns across Canada, every day, restaurants are opening with the best of intentions while others are closing down shop. What makes a successful restaurant in a city like Toronto? Well, a lot of things. Digital marketing and brand reputation management online are perhaps the two biggest influences, at least in terms of attracting leads.

Unless you’re a regular customer of a restaurant, you’re probably not going to inherently want to try a new place. After all, you could end up disappointed either in the food, the service, the parking, the location, etc. There are a lot of variables. With a place you’ve been getting food at for years, you know exactly what you’re getting. You know what to expect and there shouldn’t be any surprises. For new restaurants, this is the battle they face every day – how to attract customers away from the competition.

From the moment a restaurant opens officially, they are accumulating expenses. Profits are a necessity to keep going and preferably, the sooner, the better. So many small businesses ignore the potential that restaurant digital marketing brings with it.

‘Ephemeral content’ is a term brought into the lexicon by Snapchat and is now perhaps most widely used on Instagram. This type of content can be highly valuable in generating leads and conversions right then and there in the moment. So what is ephemeral content?

Ephemeral content is any visual content – so it needs to be either an image or video – that is available only for a certain period of time. For example, on Instagram and Snapchat, you can communicate in photos or videos that are viewed once and then they disappear. Especially on Instagram, brands have used ephemeral content marketing to share product demonstrations, jokes, live streams, and more.

Part of the attraction to this method of content marketing on social media is that it encourages creativity. Users can enjoy the content and then, it’s gone, ideally replaced with something new. So it’s also encouraging posts and for any platform, the more posts, the more engagement. Nobody wants to be on a network nobody’s on. So for a platform like Snapchat, it opens on a camera screen encouraging the user to post. Then, their posts are set on a time limit. This is all to create an atmosphere of ongoing posts, comments, and consumption.

The social media age we live in spins on the access of one platform above the rest – Facebook. Comprising of the widest array of demographics from all over the world, Facebook has virtually every audience you can think of waiting to be tapped into by willing brands and marketers. Interested in growing your Facebook followers? Shape your Facebook marketing campaign to achieve your goal with these exclusive tips.

Be personal

If you’re funny, quirky, passionate, or disruptive, be that way on Facebook. When you act like yourself, you’re taking on a voice unique to you. Although it may not appeal to everyone, your unique voice will resonate with a percentage of Facebook users.

Converse

If you want a social media marketing campaign that produces user engagement, engage yourself. Answer comments and questions. Answer DMs. Build relationships. Comment on other businesses’ posts. Be active in creating conversation on Facebook using your branded account.

Every business relies on its marketing. Healthy, strong digital marketing produces leads, turns this into sales, recruits and retains customers, and builds a long-term brand. For small businesses with limited resources however, prioritizing how you spend your time and effort on marketing’s key. Here are 14 digital marketing essentials that are crucial to keeping you in the game.

Powerful content

Content should have impact. Don’t waste anyone’s time. Write blogs, pages, and social media posts that have value. Include photos, videos, graphics, or animations when/if appropriate. The more powerful the story is, the more likely you can move a prospect to become a follower or customer.

Influencer marketing

Influencers have built-in audiences ready to consume their content. Partnering with relevant influencers gets your brand’s name out there, instantly making new fans.

Video marketing trends show video only getting bigger, as Internet speeds get faster and consumers’ appetite for visual content continues to grow. The most important trends happening around video marketing seem pretty basic right now however they are worth knowing. In a decades’ time, platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Snapchat, and others may be entirely video-centric. Here’s what’s going on around video currently.

Affordable

Video is cheaper and more affordable than most people think. On a smartphone, one can produce a high-quality video that can be edited down into something meaningful to share.

Video email

Within the next decade, it’s likely video responses to customer service inquiries may be sent via email as the next generation of personalized digital marketing. Testing has already shown us this makes the customer feel more valued and is a more effective method of communication.

You need it and you need it bad. Without it, you won’t get far. You’ll be punishing yourself by failing to follow through with it. If there’s one thing you invest your time and money in this year in digital marketing, make it content marketing. Here’s why.

More than 70 percent of consumers would rather learn about a company, brand, product, or service through an article rather than an ad. Content marketing is the act of writing and distributing high-quality blogs and articles that support your website. Under the right guidance, content marketing can help drive leads, conversions, SEO rankings, social media followers, subscribers to an email campaign, and more. Companies who use blogs regularly receive on average 55% more visitors to their website and 97% more backlinks.

These numbers aren’t the only areas that content marketing breeds success. There are roughly 600 million devices out there with some form of ad-blocking software installed. This means the advertisements you worked so hard to craft aren’t even being seen. With content marketing, you’re using articles to cut through this barrier to messaging. Articles aren’t ads and they aren’t sales. Articles in a campaign have some value to them that can keep on giving and giving for weeks, months, and sometimes even years.

AI bots exist all over social media, helping brands spread their message through automated means. These bots have not only helped brands promote but they have also allowed for better customer service, improved brand-customer interactions, and less necessity for human intervention.

Social media bots are still a controversial subject. Some see them as meaningless spam. Then, others couldn’t do without them. Bots are accounts that are automated and controlled by coding. Social media bots are essentially algorithms that use AI to automate responses, carry conversations, and build relationships. You make the code, set up the account, and let it run.

In social media marketing, bots are used to answer or send direct messaging, to help humans locate information online, like posts on your behalf, and/or can follow users on your behalf. They can be used to help grow audiences and have done so effectively in the past decade, on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and elsewhere.

It may seem counterintuitive to do so but brands who want to sell more would benefit from communicating the opposite in their messaging. Authoritative advertising isn’t how it’s done anymore. Consumers don’t want to be ‘sold to’. They want an interaction, to know the brand they’re supporting, and an experience. They want an identity that they connect with. Short-term sales pitches – wrong approach! Creating conversation is where to invest your time, money, and attention.

A conversation between a brand and a consumer doesn’t focus on sales. It focuses on sharing information and education, having fun, and creating meaning. Consumers better understand a brand’s mission through two-way conversation. Social media marketing is built off conversation. Authentic, less sales oriented digital marketing can spur major sales for brands who do it right. Static advertising is boring and its purpose is transparent. It treats the customer like a number. Unfortunately, this only ends badly for the brand who chooses to go this way.

Think about what happens when you make a social media post on a product or service you’re selling. If all the message is is, ‘Please buy my product!’ there’s not a whole lot for a user to say. What about if you ask a question? When you leave it open-ended, this is one way to involve a consumer in a conversation. Alternatively, what if you posted a how-to blog post or an instructional video on how to use a certain product without ever directly selling it to the user watching – this could work.

Do you want your content to go viral? There’s no sure formula that will guarantee a viral post. Daily, there’s more than 4 million hours of content uploaded to YouTube and almost 700 million tweets made on Twitter. That’s a lot of content trying to get attention. We live in an age where consumers experience an onslaught of content from the moment they wake. How do you cut through all this noise and actually get your content marketing viral – here’s your answer.

There’s nothing more important than your headline, like it or not. A bad headline and no one’s going to click it. One estimate suggests 80 cents of your marketing dollar is spent after you’ve written the headline. Developing a clickable headline can take time to find. Let’s say you’ve written the greatest article of all-time. It won’t count for anything without a headline. Instead of writing your content first and then the headline, do the opposite. Writing to a headline, your content is more likely to be effective.

When in doubt, look to the people who are doing it best. Buzzfeed is probably best at getting content to go viral. They’re essentially a hub of viral content, pulling from stories from all over the Internet. The average Buzzfeed writer generates 25 headlines per article, slowly wittling this down to the right headline for the article. You don’t need to go this far with headline writing but the expectation is always going to be for a high-impact headline. Don’t be afraid to do some A/B testing in your digital marketing to find the right headline for you.

Customers come to your online store, have a browse, and leave without buying. This is a part of the game. This is browsing. Customers in checkout, with products in their baskets and ready to buy, leaving in great numbers is a much bigger problem. Have you ever seen people drop their baskets in a store while they’re waiting in the line to be checked out and they just leave – it’s alarming to see and on an eCommerce site, it’s equally worrisome.

According to estimates from 2017, up to 77% of shopping carts in eCommerce are abandoned before the customer pays. What this tells us is that eCommerce marketing is a lot better at cultivating leads and getting them to the website but may not necessarily product a sale. So we ask, how can you prevent shopping cart abandonment? Here’s a little bit more insight into why shoppers abandon carts and the dynamics of surviving in the eCommerce space.

Audio-visuals are videos, webinars, live streams, and similar forms of content. More marketers are tapping into audio-visuals because they’re finding this is the type of content consumers appreciate the most. It’s what gets the most engagement, attention, and love. Combine a high-impact audio-visual with images – a la GIFs, infographics, data visualizations, or photos – and you’ve got the perfect B2C digital marketing strategy ready to unload results!

Out there, a lot of content’s competing for the same eyes. Quality stands out. High quality, customized audio-visuals can be a big hit with audiences. They don’t require anyone to read or make any effort other than to sit and watch. For this reason, YouTube continues to build as a platform, live streaming is growing in a big way, video streaming channels are expanding, and there’s no shortage of ways to connect to an audience through visual means.

 Multicultural digital marketing isn’t discussed as nearly as often as it should. According a recent report, marketers are underspending on multicultural media in a big way. This has left a major opportunity open for brands willing to take this angle and chase this demographic.

‘Multicultural’ consumers make up roughly 40 percent of Canada’s population. Spending on multicultural ads in North America last year totaled $25.9 billion. In that, $17.94 billion was for Hispanics, $7.2 billion aimed at black communities, and $722 million directed at Asian populations. Spending on these populations is set to continue to rise roughly 4.5% year over year in 2019 and 2020. These populations are not only growing but they’re underserved in many ways by contemporary marketing standards. Here’s what we mean.

Some brands are noticeably marketed towards a specific racial, ethnic, or cultural background. Many products and brands enjoy consumers of all backgrounds. There’s nothing wrong with this however some brands clearly benefit from marketing towards a specific culture. For example, Asian grocery stores exist from the Pacific to the Atlantic and in these stores, products are marketed directly to Asian populations. There are different music organizations and brands in sports which market specifically to those of an urban background. If/when there’s a chance to reach a specific cultural demographic, take it!

Influencer marketing is a big digital marketing trend that brands and marketers like to hook to, exploiting it for what they think is going to be massive ROI. They’re not entirely wrong on the expectation of ROI as study after study demonstrates how powerful influencer marketing is. In a sense, it’s a combination of a celebrity endorsement with casual word-of-mouth marketing. It works.

Unfortunately, this has also brought about the rise of fake influencers who will take your money and offer nothing in return. In fact, more than $1.3 billion in 2019 will be lost by brands investing into fake influences. Needless to say, influencer marketing fraud is something that’s running rampant in the world of social media marketing. Here’s a little more about where these fake influencers are coming from, how to spot them, and what to do to ensure your money’s spent well.

How influencer marketing works

Influencer marketing is centered around influencer. This is someone with a social media account and who is popular. They likely have a lot of followers, likes, shares, and are considered influential in their category of the market. These accounts are typically run by individuals. Sites such as Instagram and Twitter are swamped with influencers. You become an influencer once you begin accepting offers to promote other peoples’ products. So as a brand, if you jump to influencer marketing, you will pay a popular social account to post about your product or branding in order to show you to an audience you may not otherwise be able to access.

Want success on social media? Have you not even created your first social account yet? Achieving success takes time. Everyone’s been in your shoes, staring down at social media sans account. Whether you’re a corporate brand or are promoting yourself, here’s how a Toronto social media marketing expert would build social media from unknown to full-on success.

Create and keep updated your accounts

Create accounts on the platforms you want to focus on and ensure all information is accurate, updated, and filled in. This will help you establish credibility and transparency to anyone you communicate with.

Identify your expertise

Be open on your social media accounts about what type of products, services, or subjects specialized in. Let consumers know from the get go who you are and what kind of content they can expect from you.

Email is an often overlooked marketing medium to communicate with customers and generate strong ROI. Despite the perception that email’s not as much a priority as social media or other marketing channels, email’s directly responsible for billions of dollars’ worth of sales every year. Crafting a successful campaign relies on boosting key metrics – open rate, click-through rate, conversion rates, and more.

Push email subscriber sign-up

For email to work, you need subscribers. Provide a sign-up box on your website and encourage sign-ups whenever appropriate. After a customer’s signed up, send them a confirmation and provide some insight on how often they can expect marketing messages from you. By setting expectation, you ensure you maximize the chance of an open, click-through, and sale.

Creating followers, fans, and buyers of a brand sits front and center with digital marketing campaigns. To arrive there, real and non-incentivized customer reviews can play a role. These testimonials, when used right, legitimize and promote your brand.

There are many brands out there relying on customer reviews – including retail, restaurants, and hospitality. In this era of eCommerce, online shopping, tech, and software companies are also relying on customer reviews to generate buyers. What business isn’t in the business of acquiring customers? Boost your brand reputation, get your momentum on the upswing, and spur your existing customer reviews to generate more revenues.

Own your corner of the marketplace online. Take any advantage you can get. One of social media’s most underdeveloped digital marketing opportunities is live streaming. Facebook live streaming, Twitter’s Periscope app, and Instagram all have platforms. Simple, inexpensive, and engagement-friendly broadcasts can get you that edge over the competition you want.

Live streaming isn’t going anywhere. It’s only going to grow in the years to come. Currently, over 20% of the videos posted to Facebook are live streamed. For brands looking to compete, digital strategies for live streaming is not limited to anyone. You can set up a page today and begin streaming, gaining potentially 1,000s of watches. The average live video on Facebook gets viewed for 3 seconds which doesn’t say a lot about quality of the video but what it does communicate is that there’s plenty of curious eyes and ears interested in having a look.

There are plenty of ideas for how to do a live stream on social media, ranging from doing a live tutorial or how-to video to doing a Q&A. The great thing about Facebook is you will also have a video stored there indefinitely long after the live stream is done, allowing followers who missed it see what you did. That could mean bigger numbers for your next live stream, if you promote it right. Plan your live stream around answering the questions, ‘Why do people follow us on social media?’ and ‘What value are they receiving from these live stream videos?’