Using a Google AdWords campaign to create traffic, leads and customers is an intelligent move, however it must be done correctly and with some thought. To do otherwise risks not only an abject failure in terms of the campaign but also a considerable waste of your budget.
Before switching on your AdWords campaign, you must establish what goals you want it to achieve. Is it designed to build your brand awareness?
Are you seeking subscribers for an email marketing campaign?
KPIs help you track progress towards your marketing goals, and justify a budget that delivers value for all stakeholders. They identify strengths and weaknesses — basically what’s working and what needs improvement.
You gain data to make informed marketing decisions, and set realistic targets based on past performance.
So, we’re looking at Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for digital marketing. Great analytics tools and selecting the right KPIs can amplify success measurement, and maximize the success of your digital marketing efforts.
What do I mean by (KPIs) in digital marketing? KPIs are quantifiable measures used to evaluate the success of a campaign in meeting objectives for performance. In digital marketing, KPIs help you understand if your marketing efforts are paying off and guide your future strategies.
Are you trying to boost your subscriber list? Well, you’re in the right place. I will share some insights we’ve used at Mandy Gilbert to help businesses in Toronto and beyond. So grab a coffee (Tim Hortons, anyone?) and let’s dive in.
Let’s start with a little incentive. Everyone loves a good freebie, right? We’ve seen this work wonders. Like this one time, a local bakery in Toronto offered a recipe ebook for signing up. It’s about giving people a little something that keeps them wanting more.
Let’s chat about something that’s as important in digital marketing as a good cup of Tim’s is to our mornings – incentives. At Mandy Gilbert, we’re all about getting this right. So, what really makes an incentive tick? Let’s break it down: Canadian style.
Know Your Crowd
First off, it’s all about understanding who you’re talking to. It’s like knowing whether to recommend a Leafs or a Raptors game – you gotta know what your audience loves. Tailor your offers to match their interests. Like this one time, a local café here in Toronto boosted their subscriber list by offering discounts on their killer lattes. Spot on, right?
Unless you are prepared to pay for traffic to your website via PPC advertising, the other main source of online traffic will likely be the organic search traffic from search engines, the primary one being Google.
To rank well on Google so that your website appears in the results when a prospect is searching for the types of goods and services you offer, a significant amount of search engine optimisation (SEO) must have taken place.
SEO is one of those fields within marketing that is almost enigmatic, given that so many people have tried and failed to make it work. One of the problems they encounter is that for SEO to be effective, you need a lot of data and information relating to your website, your competition’s websites, keywords, and many other elements of SEO, and they do not know where to obtain that information.
The answer is SEO software and tools, of which there are many. However, only a select few are tried, tested, and used by most top SEO experts and agencies. Here is a list of the top 10 SEO tools that SEO experts, the Perth SEO company use and recommend;
Many landscapers have websites to help promote their business and the landscaping services which they offer to local residents and businesses. Each of those websites will differ, both in their quality, and their design, and you do not need to be a digital marketing expert to know it is the ones that have been professionally designed with high-quality content that will be more successful.
Part of that will be due to how much those who visit the website become engaged with it, to the extent they may request a call to discuss a landscaping project. The other reason is that better quality websites with great content are identified by Google as being so, and therefore those websites are likely to enjoy higher rankings when someone searches for landscapers in their area.
One of the most successful strategies for gaining the positive outcomes we have just mentioned is to have a blog as part of your website. A blog is the part of a website where content such as articles, videos, images, infographics and audio are all posted by website owners with the view that visitors to the website will enjoy and consume that content.
Many landscaping business owners are unaware of just how many benefits creating a blog on their website can generate which is a pity because there are several as you can see below.
If your kitchen renovation company’s website has a blog then if used correctly it can provide your business with multiple advantages over your competition.
A great blog can improve your branding and generate increased numbers of prospects, and it will also help boost your SEO, which can lead to higher rankings on Google.
As with all matters relating to marketing online, you will only see any of those positive outcomes if your blog is used correctly.
When it comes to marketing your recycling business online, there are two main classifications of traffic, and these are organic traffic which comes from the search engines, and paid traffic which can come from any website where your online paid advertising appears.
As for which specific form of paid advertising you use, the digital marketing professionals have no hesitation in recommending Google Ads.
Using Google Ads has many benefits including increased numbers of leads, the ability to edit and improve your ads, you can see immediate results (often within minutes), and you are in full control of your budget which means you can move your ad’s budget up or down depending on your current marketing strategy.
Unless you have been living on a desert island for the past 20 years, you will be aware of the impact and indeed the influence that social media has had on our lives.
It has many uses, including staying in touch with family, providing the means for giving your personal opinion on just about everything there is to, and most importantly, for any business you are running, marketing.
If your business is not yet using social media in any way, then you are missing out on a huge opportunity.
Not that long ago, almost all of the software and tools that a business would use to make many of its operations quicker and easier had to be downloaded onto a desktop computer or laptop. While it may not have seemed a problem at the time, using software that way presented a few issues.
The first is that the software or tool could only be used on the computer that it was downloaded to. This meant that if a business needed more than one person to be able to use it, it had to buy multiple downloads or purchase a corporate licence, which invariably cost a significant amount.
Another issue was that as the software was loaded only to one computer if an employee’s role meant they went ‘on the road’, any task that relied on the software in question could not be done until they returned to their place of work and logged on to their primary computer.
There were other issues, such as if the software started to act up, no one was sure if it was a problem with the software or the computer it was loaded on. There could also be problems due to the computer not having enough disc space or having a slow CPU causing the software to run slowly. That is a lot of the issues created by something that is supposed to make life easier for a business.
Thankfully, software and tools for many functions, including those relating to a business, have moved on with the growth of what is called ‘cloud-based’ software. The cloud is nothing to do with weather but rather a term that describes software, tools, apps, and file storage running and operating online. This means instead of being downloaded to a single computer, it remains online and thus can be accessed from anywhere and from any device.
Cloud-based software and tools operate in every niche and can help with every task a business could need. As for any digital agency there is a vast array of cloud-based solutions, but to narrow the field down for you, here are 5 of the most popular cloud-based marketing tools available today.
Have you ever bought something because it was recommended by someone else? Was it someone online who had written a glowing review? Perhaps it was a respected figure whose article shed a positive light on the product or service in question. The scenario we have just outlined is what happens on millions of occasions every day online, and such is its impact that it has been given a name, influencer marketing.
Before we go any further, we must clarify that influencer marketing is not the same as movie stars or sports heroes promoting products on TV. That is advertising. Instead, influencer marketing is mostly content-driven. In other words, the content written by influencers is what persuades people to act in a certain way, including purchasing products, but that content is not an out and out advert screaming “Buy This!”.
The question this raises is “Why would a business use influencer marketing instead of simply have a celebrity endorse or advertise their product?” The simple answer is the return on investment from influencer marketing is over 10 times that of traditional advertising. Also, there is fly in the ointment of the modern consumer having barriers up to persuasion when most adverts appear on TV.
So, if a business wants to take advantage of influencer marketing, it first needs to find the influencers creating the content. That is where influencer software becomes a business’s best friend. It is often called an influencer marketplace or influencer network but more commonly it is referred to as an influencer marketing platform. It is what allows a business to research, find, and connect with influencers, and subsequently set up influencer campaigns. Here are our Top 5.
Upfluence
Upfluence is two marketing tools in one. The first component is Reachr which allows companies and brands to find the influencers that will be creating the content. Their database covers over 200 business sectors, and you can search using 50 filters to ensure you find the match most suitable.
Grocery shopping is a necessary evil, and we think, best done online without stepping foot in the supermarket.
Woolies are hoping their new iPhone app will make grocery shopping just a little easier.
The TV ad with Amanda Keller shows Amanda and hubby using their smartphones to scan barcodes from their empty cartons in to make a shopping list – that looks pretty useful. You can also search for product names and add them to your shopping list.
It doesn’t yet allow you to fire up your online shopping account and order everything to be home delivered tomorrow, but hopefully this is a future enhancement. That would make it almost the perfect solution – if it was synchronised to existing online shopping data and allowed you to amend shopping lists, and add new items to your online list from the app.
Customers Have Changed
How customers engage with organisations is vastly different from the fairly recent past and will continue to change in the future. Customers engage with individuals and companies in two way communication through multiple channels, across multiple communities and platforms. Through this engagement they are shaping how companies and brands are perceived. Marketing needs to change to address this change in behaviour and to engage with customers in a personal and consistent way.
Current Situation
Many companies are struggling with internal organisations, processes and systems geared up for product centric, one way, mass marketing which is increasingly irrelevant to today’s customers . It’s safe to say that the companies that succeed in the future will be those that make the shift to one to one marketing and engage customers as individuals.
Today many companies use multiple and uncoordinated databases, processes and campaigns. This leads to uncoordinated activities with multiple, inconsistent customer contacts. As well as often being irrelevant to customers, it is also inefficient, costly and doesn’t provide the greatest return on marketing investments (ROMI). Companies that provide a consistent customer experience, integrated across channels, that is personal and relevant to the customer can improve customer retention and advocacy, as well as achieving greater returns.
In our latest report, eMarketingConnected lifts the lid on the social media habits of Australia’s largest 500 organisations, providing a benchmark for organisations across the country still struggling to come to grips with how to use their social media channels.
Social media might be a hot topic, but this report is the first of its kind in Australia. Comprehensive and broad, the report takes a long, hard look at the realities of social media usage in top Australian businesses. Each organisation studied was analysed against more than 40 points of data, including such metrics as the number of followers, volume and type of updates, engagement levels and what they are using social media for.
Underpinning this research is a timely drive to understand how Australian brands are using social media, which social media platforms they use and what the results have been in terms of consumer engagement.
Surprisingly, despite social media being an important part of integrated marketing for many organisations, less than half of the largest Australian organisations are using each of the social channels studied—Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. In fact, only 12% of the 500 organisations studied use all four of these social networks and 31% are not using social media at all. Of the organisations using the four networks, the most popular with followers are Telstra, Optus, Qantas, Virgin Australia, Myer, Monash University and the University of Sydney.
If you have read any of our other posts and articles relating to online marketing you will have doubtless seen us strongly recommending email as an online marketing channel. For all kinds of businesses, including removalists, email marketing provides one of the simplest, but most effective means of communicating your message to prospects and existing customers.
Given its simplicity, it might seem strange that so many businesses try email marketing but soon give up because they do not see any positive outcomes. They then assume that what they had read about email marketing being so effective, was wrong. The issue that has arisen is not that email marketing does not work, but that how they are using email marketing is incorrect.
In most cases where a business is failing to see any positive outcomes from their email marketing, you can usually identify one of the five most common mistakes made when using email for marketing purposes. To help you avoid these same mistakes we have outlined them below along with advice as to how they can negatively impact any email marketing campaign you implement for your removalists business.