Would my business benefit from digital marketing?
100%. Take a moment to look at the world we live in and your own daily life, notice how connected we all are. Online media is the #1 space where today’s consumers turn to get the information they need to make decisions on a daily basis. Knowing this, there are still business owners in many verticals who are often don’t pay attention to digital marketing. It is an afterthought. Non-participation in digital marketing denies your business access to the majority of consumers and where their focus is aimed throughout the day.
What's the secret behind a successful digital marketing campaign?
Everyone has their own thoughts on what success is. Some think you have to be different, some people think to make it big you must make noticeable splashes and spend a lot of money. While that can definitely help, the real drivers pushing a digital marketing campaign that performs is a strategy and continual optimization. Measure, Report, Adjust…Repeat.
At 961, we monitor all of our client’s campaigns and platforms consistently. Nothing is set it and forget it. The digital landscape is always evolving and ever-changing. We’ve found the campaigns and strategies that perform the best are the ones that are consistently improving.
What is inbound marketing?
Inbound marketing helps your business ‘get found” by the thousands of people each day who are actively in need and searching for the products and services you provide. Rather than shotgunning messages to the general public, and hoping someone out there who may happen to see your message wants your product or needs your service, inbound marketing focuses on making sure you are available to be found easily for users that are likely to be interested in your products and services through social media, blogging and premium content, SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
What is outbound marketing?
Known as the more traditional approaches to attracting customers, this method of marketing includes Print or radio ads, Flyers, TV, Billboards, Newspapers, Door Hangers, Cold Calling / Email Spam, and Signs. While in the past this marketing worked, today’s consumer is bombarded by thousands of mental interruptions from marketing daily. Just by sheer necessity, the human brain has been forced to adapt and become more and more creative in blocking these interruptions so you can simply focus and go on about your day.
What is performance marketing?
Performance marketing focuses on marketing campaigns where you pay for the performance of specific actions such as clicks, leads, or sales. The goal is to achieve measurable conversions and clearly demonstrate a return on the ad dollars spent. Tracking platforms and correct technical setup is necessary to ensure quantifiable results.
Why Should My Company Invest in SEO?
First, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a highly effective marketing tool. The correct and ongoing use of a practical SEO strategy will yield the highest Return on Investment (ROI) over time for many businesses.
Second, The next most important reason to invest in SEO is your competition. Results are not created from a one-time effort. SEO is an ongoing, evolving, ever-changing environment. As long as customers are using search engines as a reliable and direct source of information it is a necessity to stay relevant. This means keeping your SEO efforts fresh and continually active. If you don’t, your business will become invisible and your competition wins.
Local Search Engine Optimization comes into focus when consumers are searching for products, services, or resources near them in real-time. This usually entails the use of mobile devices.
For example, a search for “restaurants” will yield different results than a search for “restaurant near me.” Local search will generally focus on locations and sources of products or services, which is why companies should keep their business citations and listings up to date and optimized. Google My Business, Yelp, Apple Maps, and main directory listings like the White Pages are common examples.
Good Local SEO combines multiple strategies and techniques that work to improve your online visibility using geo modifiers that focus on the area your company operates in.
Monitoring and managing your online reviews is an essential technique to a great local SEO strategy. Consumers trust peer recommendations over advertisements every time and these customer recommendations let your customers market your business for you. While we can’t control what people say (and there will always be negative sentiment out there, you can’t please everyone) we can control our responses to it and ensure there is an effective strategy in place to gather positive commentary for your business to balance the scales and provide increased engagement.
Before launching any marketing campaign it is important that we take time to learn about your business drivers and needs. From there we establish which key performance indicators (KPIs) are most important for growth. A great place to start is by considering the metrics that reflect progress toward building visibility and traffic to your online properties, the conversions that drive your key activities towards a sale or lead generation, marketing costs, and then create a report to track them consistently.
The best way to look at this is in the structure of a well-rounded digital marketing program that includes long, short, and mid-term goals. Paid marketing programs create immediate results that we can begin to see within days and gets you the quick hits you need to keep going. Social Media and digital PR (Public Relations) is an effective mid-term strategy that provides great results, but you have to some build-up to do so they are effective. SEO requires patience. Good search engine optimization takes a minimum of 90 days to begin to see the effects in reporting. But the real benefit will take six months to a year before you realize some of your traffic and conversion objectives. However, this is the money zone where your paid advertising dollars go further, you get better, more qualified leads, and can work now on new audience bases for further reach.
Organic results are based on an algorithm that the search engines create. Specific actions rank websites and their pages higher over time. Paid (or inorganic) search results appear at the top or side of a search engine page based on how much you are willing to pay to be there.
To measure marketing ROI, it is essential to understand your marketing goals and costs. Measurement of the campaigns is key for all digital marketing platforms and initiatives. Each platform has its specific analytics feature, but we constantly verify the data with at least one backup tracking measure to ensure verifiable numbers. We then create custom reports based on our ongoing business discussions that outline how your marketing campaigns and digital efforts are driving the key business drivers essential to your company’s sales and revenue-generating abilities.
