Basic Digital Marketing

Facebook can be a pretty mysterious social media platform for new business accounts. It’s regularly undergoing updates and algorithm changes. In the past decade, due to these algorithm changes, it’s gotten increasingly difficult for small businesses to successfully launch non-paid Facebook marketing campaigns.

Even reaching one’s own followers can prove to be a huge challenge. Though it was once promoted as an ‘organic social media platform’, Facebook is anything but these days. If you’re noticing that your posts are barely reaching an audience, you’re not alone. The average Facebook page in 2018 boasts an organic reach of only 2.6 percent.

Buying fake followers to elevate your social media account is something so many influencers and businesses have either done or considered. Considering the consequences though, we’re confident in saying that buying fake followers on social media is just a bad idea. Any business who gets involved in social media marketing does so expecting success. Building the largest platform and maximizing engagement is the dream. Even with high quality content and consistency in posting schedule though, success in social media is not guaranteed. In these moments, it can seem extremely tempting to buy likes, followers, and shares. Here’s why we think you should hold off!

Google, Bing, and similar search engines are used every day. They still account for a sizeable chunk of any digital marketing budget, even in the face of other marketing channels growing exponentially.

The opportunity to generate traffic via search engines is key to business success. By developing content that is high quality and consistent in its messaging, this helps your website in ranking high on search engines. By nabbing a high ranking, this maximizes exposure and allows potential customers to easily find your website. The latest insights into web marketing, trends in search engine optimization, and consumer behaviour all highlight key ranking factors to keep in mind.

For the purposes of this article, we will focus on the biggest search engine in the world, Google. They use hundreds of different ranking factors in their algorithm to determine where a website places.

Video marketing is one of the most effective ways to bring together various marketing channels, such as social media and content marketing, in a bid to derive revenues and increase engagement.

Corporate brands and small businesses alike are engaging with video marketing on sites like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and more. There are a variety of different things that can be done with video marketing and no shortage of opportunities, either. Choose from posting how-to instructionals to promoting new sales, introducing new customers to your brand, an entertainment-based product that relates back to your brand, interviews with management or ambassadors, testimonials, and/or examples from your portfolio. For those that don’t know where to start, consider Instagram where there are more than 1 billion monthly users, Facebook which has more than 2 billion monthly users, and YouTube which boasts 1.8 billion users every month.

New and existing business owners are beaten over the head every day with the advantages of digital marketing. Sometimes though, digital marketing has actually been a bad thing for some businesses. It’s easy for a company to make all kinds of promises about boosting company’s growth and yet, so much more difficult to deliver on these claims. If digital marketing has done you wrong in the past or if you have concerns about hiring a digital marketing agency, keep this list in mind. Browse below for a quick recap of 4 things digital marketing may get wrong about your business.

Tech-savvy under-30 millennials come with a number of stereotypes attached to their name, such as being ‘cheap’, shopping online, and being constantly engaged in their smartphones. This aside, if a brand wishes to market to millennials, it takes looking beyond these myths and digging into the facts of marketing to millennials.

The facts are that millennials are considered to be the generation born between 1981 and 1996. Approximately 50 percent of them have attended or graduated from college or university. They are the first generation to have grown up in and around household computers, the Internet, and technology. In most cases, you may see millennials willing to spend more than previous generations on seemingly casual purchases, outspending other generations significantly. Any brand inexperienced with marketing to millennials can start with these 4 key strategies.

Using apps on your smartphone, tablet, and computer to monitor digital marketing campaigns is a smart idea. Instantly tap into real-time data and see whether a strategy is working or not. If a digital marketing strategy is working, great! If not, you’ll have the insights to change it. Though some apps might claim to automate marketing campaigns, that’s not what we’re trying to do with apps. In large part, digital marketing is not something to be automated. That said, apps can be used to provide better monitoring and to maximize a strategy while it’s working.

App 1 – ‘Seriate’ for the Instagram-specific user

If your digital marketing strategy does not involve Instagram, consider skipping this one. For those that do use Instagram, it’s a highly competitive environment. As one of the most popular social media platforms out there, Instagram is not so easy to use particularly from desktops. ‘Seriate’ is an app that allows an Instagram user to create posts, schedule posts, and make posts across multiple accounts at the same time. The automation capability of Seriate makes it easy to coordinate an Instagram marketing campaign. Sort and repost based on hashtags, geographic location, or set up likes, follows, and direct messages, and automate it all!

eCommerce success in Canada, the US, and internationally is hard to achieve with big players like Amazon already dominating this space and more corporate retail names moving in. If you’re selling eCommerce product in any category, your success depends on you being very, very good at what you do. If you haven’t already, we recommend hiring a digital eCommerce marketing company to ensure you receive the support and guidance you need to succeed.

Using a multi-channel sales approach is often what works best for start-up eCommerce brands. Tap into as many possible relevant streams as you can to advertise product. Ensure the online shopping experience is strong and seamless, and that no matter how a visitor gets to your site, that they find everything they’re looking for and more. Don’t make promises you can’t keep and be clear about shipping info, delivery time, and any customer service-related contact info.

Digital marketing has made some pretty sizeable shifts on a near annual basis. For example, in the last few years alone, mobile has become the largest spending category of digital marketing, more than half of people are now using voice search regularly, social media marketing has become the go-to strategy for business-to-consumer marketing, and LinkedIn has established itself as the top marketing channel for business-to-business marketing. As consumer behaviour changes so must the digital marketing strategies we use.

Should you hire an SEO expert for your business – this is an important question. SEO is a highly competitive marketing category. After all, consumers are so much more likely to click on the first or second Google search result than those further down the page. The competition is strong for those placements. According to some estimates, the first search result gets as much as 47 percent of all clicks and the first three results total get up to 60 percent of total clicks.

When entrepreneurs and small business start with SEO, a lot of them make an attempt of it on their own. Despite this, it takes years of experience and experimenting to get one’s SEO skills just right. As algorithms change annually, expertise is not easily won. Even with the tremendous amount of SEO courses and tools out there, expertise is not necessarily going to come. For this reason, there comes a point where most small business owners acknowledge that they might need an SEO marketing expert to help them get the results for their business that they can’t get for themselves.

 Word-of-mouth has always been a very persuasive marketing technique. Throughout the years as marketing trends have come and gone, a recommendation from someone we trust is still tremendously influential.

Today, social media and communication tech via the Internet has meant more connection between human beings. In response, this has given rise to YouTubers, bloggers, and influencers – categories of people that never existed prior. By partnering with relevant influencers in these areas and others, there’s the potential to tap into word-of-mouth marketing in a very contemporary way.

 As organic traffic algorithms have changed drastically in the past decade, it’s harder than ever to get social media content in front of the people you want. Though paid social media marketing is one option, if there are organic opportunities to monetize, these can be equally fruitful. As sites like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube continue to change the way they monetize and spread marketing messages, it’s up to us to ultimately adapt.

If one believes social media is about creating momentum in conversation, one of the best places we suggest starting is on Facebook. Bringing together the best features of Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Twitter, and more platforms, Facebook is a great place to post video, photos, graphics, and text. By putting together a high quality Facebook post that can then be transferred and shared across other social media platforms, this provides a good hub to work from.

 Long-term social media marketing strategies focus on consistent effort equating to growth. Though content and consistency seems like a simple formula for social media success, it can still take time and effort to see real results.

For an experienced social media marketing agency like Unlimited Exposure, we’ve helped social media accounts grow and establish large followings over time. Through releasing of high quality content consistently across a schedule, this forms the basis for the social media marketing strategies we use to generate results.

 Social media marketing can have a number of goals. Creating consistent momentum and generating leads through creative, engaging content is at the heart of this category of marketing. The luckiest may be able to tap into a viral post while the unluckiest struggle to find ways to lift dead social media posts. Needless to say, even the best of social media marketers sometimes can’t get their strategies off the ground and make mistakes.

Insisting every post is promotional

While every post is going to promote your brand, if the content of each post is purely promotional, that’s a huge turn off. Remember, social media is all about creating connection in shares and conversation. Sometimes, this means posting neutral, non-promotional posts, which could be news, tips, or how-to’s. Balance promotional posts with neutral posts. In the end, you’ll win over more customers and create more engagement.

 For those with a digital marketing plan that does not already have some form of live event plan included, evidence shows you might want to re-consider. Live events is a great advertising method to establish sense of urgency in consumers to buy.

Any business can throw a live event and it doesn’t need to be a massive extravaganza either. It can be something as simple as a 24-hour eCommerce sale. Research shows this can heavily boost your digital marketing and better connect your brand with consumers.

The amount of data one can procure from Google Analytics is extremely helpful in determining whether a content marketing strategy is working or not. Needless to say, if you’re looking to improve your content marketing efforts, programs like Google Analytics is precisely where you want to look. There are many ways to get quality data from these programs that allow you to understand how users are engaging with one’s marketing.

Though organic search on social media is less ineffective than perhaps ever before, organic search across Google and other search engines is still a strong way to generate traffic. Getting a top search engine ranking is key to this however it’s something not easily accomplishable.

 Augmented intelligence (AI) is going to elevate brands to heights they’ve never seen before. Though many brands have not tapped into AI yet, there are some amazing opportunities just around the corner. Here are some marketing challenges that we’ve seen a lot of brands eventually run into that we believe could be resolved using AI.

Customers who are not supporting your business in all the ways they can be.

Sometimes customers are not made aware of the different ways they can support your business. Augmented intelligence may be able to help in improving digital content response rates by determining the best keywords and areas to place ads. AI can be leveraged in this way by acknowledging and analyzing the way ads are being placed, their performance, and how they are being seen. Though most brands don’t have the opportunity to work AI like this quite yet, we hope to see the technology continue to develop in the next few years.

 There are some amazing opportunities for eCommerce in social media. As platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter have continued to evolve, this has meant a growing body of users. When it comes to eCommerce, taking any advantage you have is integral to ensuring you’re able to succeed against competitors.

1 – Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing partners companies with social media influencers, in the hopes that these influencers add credibility and profit to the eCommerce platforms they partner with. Select an influencer with some relation to your brand or target audience, with a follower count of minimal 10,000 or more, and who are regularly engaging with their fans. Throughout 2018, influencer marketing has continued to rise as a recommended form of social media promotion.

 Every year it seems like there’s a new key ranking factor driving where websites rank on Google. A few years ago, it was mobile usability and last year, it was the craze surrounding ‘HTTPS’ sites. In 2018, mobile responsiveness and loading speed are among the top factors, and who knows what it will be next year.

So when it comes to driving search engine rankings today and in the future, knowing what key search engine optimization (SEO) strategies to use is central to accomplishing the task at-hand. Here are a few strategies you may want to keep in mind!

Knowing the users’ Search Intent to drive Organic Traffic

If you want to increase your traffic, consider reshaping your SEO strategies and accompanying content to align with the intent of the searcher. After all, if you know what people want from you, you can work to deliver it. To get this information, you’ll have to delve into Google Analytics.

 Knowing how to execute a web design and marketing strategy is a science and an art onto itself. It takes skill, patience, and energy to ensure that it’s being done correctly. By knowing where others have gone wrong, thankfully, much time and effort can be saved. Instead of losing money on the same mistakes numerous others have made, take a quick read through our list. These are the top six mistakes that your website’s marketing might be making and how to avoid them.

1 – A lack of clear marketing objectives

The big thing with marketing is that you need to know the result you’re chasing. Identify where existing web marketing strategies might be falling short and know what you want to accomplish. For some, that might mean increasing site visits while for others, it could mean increasing leads and/or increasing sales revenues. By knowing the goals you’re chasing, you can actively ensure strategies are steering everything in the right direction.

 Website design is a great opportunity to express your brand, what it stands for, and to embed consumer behaviour-based strategies. Sometimes, you may end up with a website design that you’re not happy with and/or that’s not performing up to standard. For those that already have a website or are in the process of developing their first, there are some strong questions you want to ask yourself. So any time you’re designing a new website or re-designing an existing one, it’s important to set some objectives for what you want to accomplish.

Identifying Basic, Background Information

Ask yourself to identify background information prior to jumping in. Identify the target audience, the purpose of your website, what your company’s core values are, what makes you different from the competition, why consumers should choose you over the competition, if you have any visual colors or typography you want to use, if there are other marketing materials that your website will need to match, and if there are any designs related or unrelated that you enjoy.

 Virtual reality and marketing might not seem like the most obvious partnership. That said, what the past year has shown us is that this is technological advancement that has caught on with consumers like wildfire. As virtual reality growth continues to further, and more come to accept it as a means of consuming media and content, this marks a real opportunity for marketers to connect with consumers in a new arena.

As each year passes, augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality apps get more inexpensive to create. They provide the customer with something immersive to have fun with and get people excited about a product, service, event, or brand. By 2020, it’s estimated the VR market will be worth up to $40 billion. Last year, in 2017, it was already valued at $6 billion. For websites, brands, and companies on the cutting edge, learning how to attract customers with it is going to be key.

 Professional, results-driven video marketing is challenging however when done effectively, it’s a real audience-builder. Capitalizing on existing video marketing trends, there are numerous ways to ensure your campaign is a success.

While we recognize every small business is on a budget, video costs add up quickly and that’s why we’ve put together this list. Here are seven ways to create a successful video marketing campaign for social media sharing.

 Search engine optimization (SEO) is great for building organic traffic however it’s not the only piece of the puzzle when it comes to building a successful website. Consistent, long-term online traffic seemingly built from SEO is oftentimes in part related to, yes, the SEO but also to what is supporting its efforts. No website should stop investing in SEO strategies. That said, it may be possible to heighten the success of your SEO efforts by using techniques such as these.

 Digital marketing strategies may not always produce the results you desperately want them to. Eventually, every company hits a brick wall with their digital marketing. Numbers begin to either stagnate or fall and the way forward might not be clear. At a time like this, hiring a digital marketing agency might be the best thing for you.

Digital marketing companies are tasked with the responsibility of producing results. When your marketing isn’t working for you anymore, a digital marketing company can provide a fresh, objective approach. Perhaps the marketing strategies you are using are outdated or maybe there’s been a change in the marketplace that has caused something that once worked to not work as well. Nevertheless, a successful digital marketing agency should be on the cutting edge of what works and they’ll be able to provide some insight into how you may be able to fix your exposure.