by Francois Muscat | Sep 4, 2019 | Content Marketing, Digital Media Marketing
In July, Google announced the launch of its Digital Marketing Transformation programme in South Africa. The tech giant described the programme as a partnership between itself and clients aimed at enabling “business growth through providing customised digital marketing advice, including digital marketing fundamentals, best practices and a focused customised roadmap.”
What will this programme entail? And, how can it help you boost your online marketing strategies from Nascent (the lower end of digital maturity) to Multi-moment (the level at which the top two percent of the world’s digital marketers are operating)?
The programme takes clients through a six-step process, beginning with an assessment of their current online marketing efforts in relation to international best practices. The assessment makes use of the Digital Maturity Benchmark, devised by the Boston Consulting Group. After going through this assessment, your digital marketing work will be benchmarked at one of the following four levels of maturity: Nascent, Emerging, Connect and Multi-moment. If you do not even make it to Nascent, it means that your strategies will need a complete makeover, so as to bring it up to speed when measured against global standards. If your work is Nascent, you will then be helped to devise a strategy to move you up through the next three levels.
If you are sitting among the 2 percent of marketers who are ranked as Multi-moment, meaning that the customer experience you provide moves dynamically and effectively towards desired business outcomes, then you need to just keep doing what you’re doing, while being sure to keep an eye on changing business and marketing trends.
The assessment provides a useful reality check to empower you through data-driven knowledge and self-awareness. The remaining steps of the programme will then help you to develop your marketing strategy to the next level. If you are like 89 percent of the world’s marketers, you will find yourself sitting somewhere between Emerging and Connect, meaning that you need to attend to just one or two key points of transformation to take you into another league.
Looking to create Connect to Multi-moment level digital transformation strategies for your brand? That’s what we live and breathe at WSI. Contact us to discuss your online marketing and allow us to show you how you can make the most of Digital Marketing Transformation.
by Francois Muscat | Aug 28, 2019 | Content Marketing
Attention-grabbing headlines may get people to click through to your website, but if the actual meat of the article is all hyperbole, is thin and does not live up to your headline’s promise, readers will not stay on your site.
Advertising legend David Ogilvy famously said that ‘the consumer is not a moron, she is your wife’. Made in 1955, this statement appears more relevant than ever. In a nutshell, poor content that does not respect the reader does not work.
What Is Quality Content?
Good quality content is any content that aligns your marketing goals with your prospects’ needs. It conveys value and soothes specific pain points keeping people awake at night. Good quality content is targeted and crafted with the goals and aspirations of a clearly defined persona in mind.
An effective content marketing strategy draws a picture of who your ideal customer is. It then maps this persona’s journey as a buyer. The goal is to establish the types of content to serve your prospects at specific stages of their journey towards becoming customers.
Importantly, there is a time to send how-to articles, free ebooks, case studies, webinars or product demo invitations to your prospects. It can’t be at random times. How ever attention-grabbing your headline is, you aren’t going to achieve much with your content if it’s not relevant to the reader.
After mapping your persona’s buyer’s journey against their content needs, go ahead and craft the sort of epic content they can’t resist. Spend enough time making sure the content is well researched, written well and that it is actionable.
Why Click-Bait Content Does Not Work
Sensational headlines that stop people in their tracks worked in 1995 when all it took to make a buck was to just get people on your website.
Guess What?
In 2019, people can now block ads and defend their inboxes against spammy tactics. So a content marketing strategy that prioritises traffic while ignoring ROI will fail each time. Click-bait headlines may work for BuzzFeed. But, try them for your carpet cleaning website, and you may annoy and tune people off your brand for good.
More than that, thin, outdated, and redundant content will not rank for any keywords that matter. Search engines have gotten very smart at recognising good content (and making sure that pointless listicles and other junk content stay on page 11 of the SERPs).
Google is now very picky about what content it shows its users. The search giant now ranks content on topical relevance and how well it meets searcher intent.
So, feverishly building links isn’t going to help your SEO efforts as long as your content quality is poor. To optimise your digital marketing strategy, train your energies on your prospects’ needs, not clicks.
Now and then, click-bait headlines may lead to a few clicks to your website. But, will that traffic convert into email subscription signups, ebook downloads, webinar registrations, video views or sales? The answer is it hardly ever does.
Need help to craft quality content that meets your prospects at their point of need? WSI OMS can help. Contact us today to discuss your needs.
by Francois Muscat | Aug 21, 2019 | Social Media Marketing
According to statistics, social media claims 30% of all the time people spend online. For teens, make that nine hours a day. Which is why social media ad spending is expected to top $32 billion in 2019.
In short, if you want to reach your target prospects, you have to go where they are spending most of their time – which is on social media. But this requires an intentional strategy with clear, achievable and measurable goals. Here is how to set goals for a high-yielding social media marketing strategy:
- Establish a Starting Point
There is a chance you are already on social media? But, that you have until now just been posting randomly without a strategy. To formulate a strategy with clear goals, there is a need to carry out a thorough social media audit.
Most social media sites have analytics tools from which you can pull data to measure both your historical and current performance. The audit will expose your least and best performing social channels, holes that need plugging, wins to build on and insights on what is achievable as well as what a feasible time frame will be.
The audit you have just done, and a bit of competitor analysis, should show you what marketing opportunities there are on social media. Importantly, it will help you spell out what your immediate and long term goals should be. These could be to:
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- Increase engagement on your target social channels,
- Drive traffic to your website,
- Increase brand awareness,
- Generate new leads, or
- To boost SEO.
- Know the Right Metrics to Track
Goals must have timed targets. For example, to generate 100 leads per month. But to meet your targets you need a set of metrics to track and guide you. For your search engine optimisation strategy, these will likely be backlinks, SERPs rankings growth and traffic to your site.
Social media metrics you can track include mentions, likes or shares/pins/retweets per post or per given time period. Remembering, too, that some are vanity metrics that aren’t worth tracking.
You can look at this as breaking your goals down to shorter-term objectives and key results (OKRs). Use these to flag parts of your strategy to tweak for better results as well as to highlight high-performing posts and assets that you may boost to maximise benefit.
- Establish a Measuring and Reporting Framework
Tracking specific metrics to keep your social media goals in focus is important. But so is clearly spelling out how to measure each campaign’s effectiveness, when to report progress and which tools to use. Weekly is a good frequency to measure and note campaign progress, with a strategy meeting at the end of the month.
Ready to streamline your social media marketing efforts with a clear strategy that brings results? Then contact our SMM experts, WSI OMS, today for expert guidance.
by Francois Muscat | Aug 16, 2019 | Social Media Marketing
With the sheer volume of material you need to post to social media on a daily, weekly and monthly basis, it can become quite an ungainly task to manage. Thankfully there are many excellent tools and apps available that can make the task much easier. Here are our five favourites:
Hootsuite
It’s become the standard scheduling tool out there and it’s easy to see why. It’s user friendly, it works across platforms, it’s scalable – enabling you to add accounts and account managers as you need to, and, with its excellent training platform, it’s easy to learn.
IFTTT
“If this then that” is an extremely useful social media management tool that not only helps you schedule your posts, it also automates the process with its trigger-action processes, which can be set up to instantly perform an action in response to a trigger you perform. Say you post a blog, this then triggers the app to perform an action such as create a Facebook post. This means that you don’t even have to create the post or tweet, you simply upload the blog and the app does the rest.
Sprout Social
This is rapidly becoming a favourite among online content creators. You can schedule posts in advance, make use of the feedback tools to check the success of your campaigns and monitor your mentions on social media.
SocialFlow
This takes content scheduling up a notch. Social Flow analyses the behaviour of social media users and then predicts the optimum time for each of your posts to be published. This can really help you make the most of your social media platforms by ensuring that you hit exactly the right target market at the perfect time.
Iconosquare
This one’s specifically for Instagram users. The apps ever-expanding and improving analytical tools help you make the most of the platform. Plus, of course, you can still schedule your posts and manage multiple accounts.
Contact WSI to assist you in creating a great, easily-manageable social media strategy.
by Francois Muscat | Aug 15, 2019 | Online Marketing
Much of the talk in the world of online marketing is about drawing readers to your site. But that’s only the first part of the process. Your focus should really be on making sure that, once readers come to your site, they become paying customers.
The principles that drive conversions in online business are not much different to those in brick and mortar retail spaces. It’s all about your product, how you package it, your prices, your service and the environment. If a customer walks into a well laid out and designed shop, is met by competent and helpful staff, and finds good value for money, he/she is likely to make a purchase. In the online space, the same principles apply. Consider these five important actions to convert site visits to sales.
Make your USP unmissable from the first click
You can’t give visitors time to look around the site, not find what they need and move on – because they will in less than half a minute. From the moment they enter your site, if it is not already apparent from the social media post or email they clicked through from, your USP must be obvious and unmissable. Spell it out. Be classy and clever but never subtle.
Engage your visitors
Don’t just offer information passively – invite readers to interact with you and your product. Offer a tester of your product and ask for feedback. Keep them thinking about the product and engaging with it.
Avoid clutter and give your clients breathing space
Cut down on the text and make good use of white space. Offer only the essential information and allow your customers the space to make their decisions.
Add value
Everyone loves a bargain. You don’t have a live salesperson on your website to upsell and/ or haggle with your clients, so you have to let the website itself do that work for you. In addition to your central USP, offer add-ins, complementary products and packages deals. Always put a time limit on those to encourage the purchase.
Maintain a relationship after the sale
From a “thank you” mail to follow-up offers, continued post-sale communication with your customers are always a good idea (unless they say otherwise, of course). Show your appreciation and they will likely return the favour.
Contact WSI to assist you in creating a sale-closing website and marketing strategy.
