Category: Paid Search
Our resources relating to SEO and SEM.
Review: Bing Ads
Bing Ads is a PPC platform used to create, manage and measure text-based and product ads. Your ads appear on Bing’s search engines under the search terms of your choosing.
Mostly US consumers are active on Bing’s search engine, so the PPC platform is more beneficial for businesses targeting markets in North America. For global reach, use Google AdWords or Yahoo Gemini.
Get started with paid search
Paid search, often referred to as search engine marketing (SEM) or pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, is a digital marketing strategy that drives traffic from search engines to your website.
Searchmetrics changes the [SEO] game
There are countless easily accessible, affordable SEO services available to business owners. However, if you’re unfamiliar with common search engine terminology – possibly one of the most acronym-filled jargon categories in existence – then you might find it difficult to DIY your SEO, or even know what your SEO needs are to begin with.
If you’re doing any SEO for your website then you’ve probably used Google Analytics, and I’d bet that you’ve also tried Google Adwords.
Have you looked into other platforms for SEO purposes? Here’s one you might like to consider.
SEO: Where do you start?
Words:
David Rosam
Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about driving traffic to your website. 61% of internet users worldwide research products online before purchase, so its not surprising that being found online, especially through search engines, is a priority for businesses. The SEO process uses organic (and inorganic) strategies to increase the visibility of your website on search engines.
Deal Sites: Local, mobile and social marketing all in one place
Words:
Joy Lynskey
Over the last few years, marketing executives have highlighted the importance of social, local and mobile marketing. In response, a new type of marketing option evolved that combined the three into one centralized platform. Deal sites offer your business visibility in a complex and busy digital world, while also targeting local consumers.
Read More “Deal Sites: Local, mobile and social marketing all in one place”
Tools & Resources to Improve your Content Strategy
Words:
Kimberly Crossland
Content marketing involves producing and distributing useful information to a core audience with the goal of a profitable exchange in the future. Companies use content marketing as a way to educate, engage, and inform consumers. It functions as a way to express brand identity and to build meaningful relationships with your customers.
Read More “Tools & Resources to Improve your Content Strategy”
The shape of things to come
As the new year looms ever closer, its time to prepare your brand and your marketing strategy for the ways social networks, new technologies and upcoming trends will impact the world of digital marketing in 2015.
We’ve scoured the web to find out what small businesses need to prepare for and how you can leverage the oncoming changes to the online marketplace to your advantage.
1. THINK MOBILE
We’ve seen huge increases in the use of mobile devices when it comes to purchasing products and services online, and the use of social networks.
Beacons, a low-cost piece of wireless hardware, will transform the way brands interact with their customers. Using Bluetooth technology, these devices will allow businesses to send product information, location-based notifications, and information on sales and deals to their customers. Beacon technology will have vast application potential within enterprises, transportation systems, educational institutions, retailers and event organisers.
Our advice:
Integrate SoLoMo strategy into your marketing plan! Check out BrightLocal or hipscan for SoLoMo campaigns.
Some brands will look to creating mobile-only experiences, pursuing independent strategies for multiple devices. These initiatives will require significant time and resources to implement, so for the small business, whether you’re a veterinary clinic, a local restaurant, a retailer or a removalist, you’ll need to consider some simple and cost effective ways to cater to your customers on mobile devices. Here’s some suggestions:
- Provide product information on your website
- Enable online purchases on mobile devices
- Allow your customers to make bookings on your website or through an app
- Ensure your website is responsive.
2. STAY UP-TO-DATE
Social networks are releasing updates and policy changes all the time. One major change, in response to the increased use of mobile devices, is the decision to increase paid advertisements on mobiles. These ads will be highly targeted and give brands the power to choose the optimal reach and frequency. As Facebook explained in a blog post, ‘This allows advertisers to boost awareness while controlling how often someone sees an ad’.
Our advice:
Be aware of what the changes are and how they effect the online marketing strategy you have in place. Where necessary be sure to change your strategy if these changes threaten to decrease its effectiveness.
3. REACH YOUR CUSTOMERS THROUGH THEIR PEERS
Customers will be increasingly influenced by their peers’ buying habits in 2015. As many social networks move towards more paid advertising and Facebook starts to limit the number of posts users see from brands, its time to consider alternate ways of reaching your social media followers.
Look for opportunities to indirectly promote your brand through your customers own experiences – think ‘word-of-mouth’ marketing but on the web! Brand ambassadors and influencers will have critical roles in spreading the word about your brand.
Our advice:
Brainstorm ideas as to how you can reach your customers through their peers, think about offering discounts for sharing posts or online activity. Aim to foster meaningful social relationships with your customers.
Additionally, make sure that you’re enabling customers to leave reviews of your services or products on your website or your social media profiles. Reviews provide transparent and honest information on your products.
One survey suggested that 72% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations!
4. THE RIGHT CONTENT
Content marketing has become something of a phenomenon. There is constant discussion on its role in overall marketing strategy, and how brands can use it to build brand image and better engage with customers.
In 2015, what some have coined the ‘second generation’ of content marketing will emerge. Expect to see storytelling play a big role in content marketing.
Many brands will encourage external sources to participate in their content creation. Brands will seek to involve departments and employees outside of marketing, and their customers in the production of their content. Moreover, content marketing will begin to incorporate editorial principles to enhance its effectiveness.
Our advice:
Better planning means better results. Define your content marketing strategy and its objectives. Use your content to tell your brand’s story, develop your brand’s personality, educate your customers, or solve any problems your customer’s might face, but whatever you do, ensure your content strategy is sustainable.
Don’t forget to about tailoring your content to multiple devices. Mobile user experience will be paramount!
5. TIME TO OPTIMIZE
The widespread availability of analytics and all-in-one dashboards for social media management has made it easier for brands to produce and schedule their content, as well as enabling the monitoring of online conversations concerning your brand and products. In 2015 these tools will continue to improve and provide better solutions for business owners. As a small business owner, use them to establish:
- Who your customer is
- Where they are geogrpahically
- Where they spend their time online
- What devices they’re using
- Which social networks they’re using
- How they find the information they’re seeking.
Its time to assess which social networks are working for you and which aren’t!
Don’t waste your time tailoring posts to Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter and Instagram if you’re not seeing results. There will be no point maintaining a Facebook page for your business if most of your engaged customers are on LinkedIn. The ideal social network for your brand will depend on your business – if you’re in the B2B industry chances are you will have the most success on a platform like LinkedIn or Google+.
Our advice:
If you’re yet to track and measure your results on social media we suggest you start sooner rather than later.
Once you’ve got the analytics you need, you’ll have sufficient information to gauge where your customers are and the best way you can reach them. From there, optimize your online marketing strategy accordingly – produce highly targeted content and publish it where your customers are most likely to engage with it.
Don’t forget to align your business goals, like conversions, email acquisition, and retention, with your online marketing initiatives.
Need some guidance on finding the right online marketing strategy for your business? Ampervize can help!
Your guide to website optimization tools
Words:
Sharon Hurley Hall
A website is a must-have tool for any modern business, however, building a website and optimizing that site for your users and for search engines is more pivotal than ever.
From a design perspective, your website should showcase your brand’s image. From a user experience perspective, your site should be attractive and easy to navigate. From a marketing perspective, you need to have clear calls-to-action (CTAs) across all pages.
Website optimization tools are available to make sure that you’re meeting the expectations of your users and the search engines they use. Analytics software that measures the effectiveness of your website and its elements is consequently invaluable to small business.
These applications are designed to track and measure your website traffic and the activity of users on your site. This information will help enable you to make informed decisions about the changes that need to be made to your site to improve its performance.
Analytics programs work by adding a snippet of Javascript and HTML code to your website to log and analyze all visitor interactions. Most analytics programs also allow you to extract the data and create customized reports.
How Analytics Can Help with Website Optimization
Analytics, in all their glorious forms, are used by business owners, web developers, search engine and web optimization professionals, and marketers. They use these analytics because there is no substitute for hard data that maps the behavior of the user they are trying to reach. Before you can optimize a website, you need to know who the user is, why or how they got there and how they behave.
If your users are spending only a short time on your site it suggests that you’re not engaging them in the way that you need to be.
Analytics will provide indispensable insight into your users’ demographics and their experience on your site. Find out:
- Where they are geographically
- How long they spent on your site
- What device they accessed your site on
- What they looked at
- How they found your site (e.g. social media, search engines)
- Whether they shared, liked or commented on your content via social networks
This information can be used to improve your product, improve the ways you interact with your customers or better the user’s experience on your website, the possibilities are extensive.
Types of Analytics Programs
There are dozens of analytics programs available. One of the best, which is also free, is Google Analytics. The most recent release, Universal Analytics, allows you to track how visitors interact with your web content, not just on your site, but across a range of devices and locations. Other analytics programs with both free and paid subscriptions include Clicky Analytics, GoSquared, Piwik and Woopra. Most of these present the data in easy-to-understand tables, bar graphs and pie charts. While the free versions work well for small sites with a few visitors, paid versions of the software offer the ability to add team members, more reporting depth, and the option to track bigger sites that get more traffic and may also offer additional integrations.
One analytics program that offers something a bit different is Crazy Egg. This affordable analytics program provides heatmap analytics, tracking clicks to show which are the hottest and coolest areas of your site. This provides a visual representation of how effective your website is and where you might need to optimize.
Other premium analytics programs such as Hubspot and Kissmetrics integrate analytics data with marketing data to help you see how successful your website is in meeting your business and marketing goals.
One important feature of all analytics programs is the ability to set up and measure goals and campaigns by adding new parameters to the analytics code. For example, you might track how many people sign up for your email newsletter, by putting landing on the “thank you” page as a goal within your analytics software. For a campaign, you might add an identifying tag to any content you post externally, so you can track how this fairs in bringing people back to your site.
Measuring and Testing Website Optimization
Analytics can be used to test how well people respond to widgets, podcasts, videos, slideshows and customer reviews – all the elements you might add to further optimize your website. For example, if you create a free download for people who sign up for your email list, you can measure its effectiveness.
You can even measure the effectiveness of the signup form itself via a split testing campaign. Split testing (A/B testing and multivariate testing) allows you to show site visitors variations of your content to see which one is most effective. You can split test whole pages or individual elements such as headlines and sub-headings, CTAs, buttons, ads and more.
Split testing is part of Google Analytics (via Google Content Experiments) and is available in many of the analytics tools listed above, such as Kissmetrics. There are also several mid-priced and premium split testing tools such as Optimizely and Visual Website Optimizer.
Is my website mobile-friendly?
There is growing concern around web optimization on mobile devices as the number of consumers using mobile devices to make purchases and engage with their favorite brands continues to increase. Analytics can show you how many of your customers are accessing your website from mobile devices, as well as which devices and platforms your customers are using. This functionality is offered in WordPress plugins and themes as well as in stand-alone premium software like Duda Mobile or GoMobi. Then you can return to your analytics reports to measure conversions on the mobile version of your website.
How do I use analytics to generate leads?
Lead generation is an important function of your website. Some premium tools such as Power My Analytics and Visual Visitor let you integrate cost and sales data, merchant tools, call tracking and lead analysis with analytics software to help you gain more information about your leads and win more business. Instapage and Unbounce can help you customize landing pages to increase conversions and provide analytics on the results.
Analytics in Action
There are many studies that show how companies have used analytics and split testing tools to measure the effectiveness of their websites in general, and more specifically, their CTAs. Here are a few examples:
- VMWare boosted clickthroughs on a CTA by 956% simply by changing its position (source: Marketing Experiments)
- Quicksprout showed how changing the button copy, as well as its size, color and location led to conversion improvements.
- Hubspot recorded a 211% improvement in clicks by changing the words on a CTA widget.
The Future of Analytics
These are just three examples of how using analytics can help you measure the effectiveness of website improvements. Analytics software is likely to become more important. Google has already made it possible to gain more universal insight into how your customers use your website and content. According to Cognesia, in the future, analytics will focus more on individual users, will track even more media types, and will be able to make complex interactions more understandable. That means more breadth and depth, providing additional opportunities for website optimization to increase both revenue and customer satisfaction.
Find the right online marketing strategy for your business
Words:
Jess Hodkinson
‘Like’, ‘follow’ and ‘share’ are words that have become part of our everyday vocabulary. It would seem that every company you can think of, from the local dog groomer to transnational corporations like Coca-Cola, want you to pledge your allegiance to their brand on social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.
As consumers across the globe spend more and more time online, the need to develop an online marketing strategy fit for your business, and your customers, becomes more pressing. Unfortunately, setting up a Facebook page for your business may not result in instant online marketing success.
This overview of online marketing strategy is aimed at helping you understand what a successful strategy might look like for your business.
Online marketing allows companies to promote and sell their products and their brand over digital platforms. Traditionally, online marketing strategy could be overlooked, however, the increased use of mobile phones and huge reach of online social networks have changed the marketing game – brands can now reach customers all over the globe.
What a good online marketing strategy should do:
- Identify the brand’s target audience
- Consider which online marketing tools are most likely to attract their target audience
- Utilise data to evaluate how successful the strategy has been.
Many strategies are simple and cost effective to implement; there is ample opportunity for new brands to develop a customer base quickly. So, before you embark on an online marketing strategy, carefully consider the time commitment and costs associated with it. Depending on the complexity of your strategy, you may be capable of executing it yourself, or you may want to enlist the help of a professional.
The vast range of options can be daunting and there is often there a reluctance by those who feel they are ‘technophobes’ to embrace the world of digital marketing when developing their overall marketing strategy. Luckily there are a number of companies out there that can help you to get the ball rolling and often a small outlay can yield significant returns:
Many companies will already have an online marketing strategy in place and need support in a specific area or maybe have identified that they only need to implement a particular type of strategy, for instance a social media plan.
Main St Hub is doing great work with companies who want to improve their social media approach. Working with 200 Fifth in Brooklyn, Main St Hub were able to develop a social media strategy that included interacting with customer reviews, promoting events and building customer relationships. The outcomes delivered numerous benefits over a five-month period:
- 10x the monthly traffic to their Yelp profiles and 14x the customer interactions
- Exposure to over 197,000 potential customers on Facebook
- Over 1,000 new visitors and check-ins on Foursquare.
Video marketing
The pace of development in the world of online marketing is frightening. Brands are always pushing the boundaries to find new customers or promote to existing customers in new ways. Commentary on the future of online marketing indicates that video marketing might be the next big thing. It is predicted that, by 2017, video will account for 69% of all internet traffic, so it stands to reason that moving forwards brands should strongly consider how they can incorporate video marketing in their overall online marketing campaign.
To get started with a video marketing campaign you don’t need to have a huge budget or the directorial talents of Steven Spielberg. Vine is a great example of a free, easy-to-use platform that huge brands have utilised to create effective video marketing campaigns. To get your creative juices flowing check out this example of a great video marketing campaign from Dunkin’ Donuts:
The campaign aired the Vine video prior to live broadcast NFL games on ESPN but also encouraged sharing of the campaign using #dunkinreplay. According to Dunkin’ Donuts the shares on Twitter delivered as many impressions for the brand as a comparable TV slot – and at significantly less cost.
The possibilities with online marketing are endless. Fresh ways to find new and existing customers and build relationships with them. With good planning and an understanding of the options available devising and delivering a great online marketing strategy can help your company realise its full potential.
For more from Jess Hodkinson, check out her blog Online PR Pixie.
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