by Francois Muscat | Aug 28, 2017 | Digital Media Marketing, Social Media Marketing
The key to a successful digital marketing campaign is planning. One of the most important aspects of planning is the creation of buyer personas. Buyer personas are sometimes referred to as ‘customer avatars’. They are based on personal profiles that represent your customers. They are used to help develop a digital marketing campaign that targets specific customer groups within your overall market base.
Buyer Personas help maximise return on digital marketing spend
The creation of buyer personas helps you to maximise:
- The return on your digital marketing spend;
- Develop your online business model; and
- Develop your marketing model.
But, it must be done right. You cannot gloss over this step in your initial planning without significant risk – this is where in-depth and insightful market research comes into play.
In-depth market research will help you create valuable buyer personas
Remember when people came to your door with questionnaires and samples of products? Market research predates the internet. But the internet has made market research substantially easier and more useful:
- You can canvas your potential customers more easily;
- You can canvas your potential customers in infinitely greater numbers;
- You are now able to obtain far more in-depth information…and the more in-depth the better;
- Some things can be asked outright and others can be deduced;
- You can learn far more about your potential customers through unprecedented access;
- You can utilise online data and your demographics’ interaction with social media through tools such as Facebook’s Audience Insights.
Create a market research template
- Identify: Demographics
- Direct Ask: Hobbies and Interests
- Direct Ask / Deduce: Goals and Challenges
- Direct Ask / Deduce: Values and Fears
Create primary and secondary buyer personas
With that information, you can create: Primary Pete, Secondary Sue, Sheila and Sandra. Even third-level avatars can be created to represent the outer rim of your customer base: those you may never have reached with a one-size-fits-all campaign. Once that is done effectively, they will be at the boardroom table helping you design and develop your multi-channel digital marketing campaign. They will be advising on and influencing your social media marketing, your content marketing and SEO (search engine optimisation). Even your website design and link building campaigns: all crucial arms of successful digital marketing and solid and sustainable, long-term online business growth.
Contact us today for more information on how the creation of highly researched and carefully designed buyer personas will help you engage your customers, make the most of your digital marketing campaign and take your online business or business arm to the next level.
by Francois Muscat | Aug 25, 2017 | Digital Media Marketing
Digital marketing expert, Francois Muscat, will be speaking at South Africa’s premier secretaries conference and training event for administrative professionals. The conference, which is being held on 6 – 7 September 2017 at the Wanderers Club in Johannesburg, aims to provide secretaries, PA’s, office managers, project administrators, executive assistants, training and HR administrators and administrative professionals with exceptional learning opportunities.
“I’m excited to be presenting at this conference. Some of the topics that I will be discussing include social media marketing, social media management and online reputation management.” says Francois.
Francois says that administrative professionals have an important role to play when it comes to the digital profile of the organisations they work for: “Training and HR administrators, for example, can use LinkedIn to find the potential candidates and trainers that they need. Executive assistants who must manage the online presence of company directors can employ smart listening tools to find opportunities for their bosses to exploit. I look forward to sharing some insights on using these platforms to create connections and help them boost their skills.”
Francois is the owner of internet marketing company WSI OMS. He regularly travels the globe to do presentations on topics about digital marketing. He is passionate about social selling. He excels at creating action plans for professionals to take advantage of the internet to help them enhance their business practices.
by Francois Muscat | Aug 11, 2017 | Digital Media Marketing
Digital marketing expert, Francois Muscat, will be speaking at South Africa’s premier secretaries conference and training event for administrative professionals. The conference, which is being held on 6 – 7 September 2017 at the Wanderers Club in Johannesburg, aims to provide secretaries, PA’s, office managers, project administrators, executive assistants, training and HR administrators and administrative professionals with exceptional learning opportunities.
“I’m excited to be presenting at this conference. Some of the topics that I will be discussing include social media marketing, social media management and online reputation management,” says Francois.
Francois says that administrative professionals have an important role to play when it comes to the digital profile of the organisations they work for: “Training and HR administrators, for example, can use LinkedIn to find the potential candidates and trainers that they need. Executive assistants who manage the online presence of company directors can employ smart listening tools to find opportunities for their bosses to exploit. I look forward to sharing some insights on using these platforms to create connections and help them boost their skills.”
Francois is the owner of internet marketing company WSI OMS. He regularly travels the globe to do presentations on topics about digital marketing. He is passionate about social selling. He excels at creating action plans for professionals to take advantage of the internet to enhance their business practices.
by Marelise da Silva | Jul 20, 2017 | Digital Media Marketing
Social Media marketing is central to any digital marketing effort, and so it follows that growing your Facebook network and increasing the number of people who follow you on Twitter is essential to the success of your digital marketing campaign. Do this and all the other digital marketing techniques and platforms you use in your campaign will offer up ROI the way daisies pop up in the Karoo after it rains.
Following are just some of the things you can do to grow your social media networks.
Increase your Facebook reach
- Inspire people to share your content by making it fun, interesting and engaging. Ideal methods for this include images, text in meme format, videos, giveaways and competitions. (PS – announce competition winners too – it helps build trust.)
- If you can do ‘seriously cute’ or ‘seriously funny’ – do it. Those kinds of posts get millions of views. Few people share serious or important stuff. You don’t need to have kittens and babies headbanging to Metallica in their car seats, but if it makes you go ‘aaaw’ or laugh out loud, it will get shared – a lot.
- People also love ‘aaahah’ moments, so if you can do ‘clever’ or ‘enlightening’, do that too. Try to keep it original though.
- Don’t post five times a day. If you spam people’s feeds they will un-follow you, and that’s damage you might never undo.
- Use plugins on your website that allow people to Like and Share your content – where they found it and without having to visit Facebook to paste a URL.
Get more followers on Twitter
- Tweet regularly and often. Because they are short and can be read in microseconds, Tweets aren’t as invasive as constant Facebook Page updates that fill up your news feed to the exclusion of other posts.
- Make your tweets more visible outside of your community of followers by referencing popular topics through hashtags.
- Follow ‘Influencers’ (famous people or people and businesses with large followings) and re-tweet their tweets – with @mentions (signifying your re-tweet).
- Start conversations…and then keep them going.
- Make sure your tweets are meaningful and will inspire other to re-tweet them and ‘co-opt’ more followers.
In both cases, you can learn a lot by ‘winging it’, but you also risk losing followers in the process. A best practice for all attempts to grow networks and get more followers is to design a campaign and have a strategy from the start. A next best practice is to implement your strategy with constant attention to Facebook, Twitter and Google Analytics metrics and be ready to adjust your posts and tweets accordingly.
If that sound like a lot of work, it’s because it is – if you tried to do it on your own.
Contact us at WSI OMS to devise and manage a digital marketing campaign incorporating social media content and strategies. We’ll grow your networks and your customer base while you get on with running your business.
by Marianna Muscat | Jul 4, 2017 | Digital Media Marketing
One of the most important metrics tracked in Analytics is Bounce Rates. Bounce rates measure the % of site visitors who view the page they have landed on and then click off the site. It is an algorithmic indication that they did not find what they were looking for when they searched for, or clicked on, ‘xyz’.
While there will always be a certain bounce rate, high bounce rates can be very damaging to your website’s performance in Google search – and devastating to your digital marketing campaign.
Reasons for high bounce rates
- A website visitor didn’t find what they were looking for
- They don’t think they’ll find what they are looking for if they browse further through the website
- They don’t like the website:
- the way it looks,
- displays, and/or
- content
- They don’t trust the website
- They can’t or don’t want to try and browse the site because:
- it doesn’t display properly,
- there are too many pop-up ads,
- ads obscure the content,
- menus don’t work properly, etc.
- There’s nothing wrong with the website, but you are getting hits from the wrong market
- You used the wrong PPC keywords or landing page
- There’s nothing wrong with the website, but it’s not the one they heard about
A high bounce rate can indicate one or several problems. It is usually measured at between 50 and 70% of site visitors bouncing off immediately, after reading only one page or browsing to only one other page, then leaving the site.
There could be myriad reasons why site visitors ‘bounce’. Some of these can be measured through Analytics, and /or they can be deduced quickly and accurately at the outset or during the process of SEO and the online marketing campaign along with on-going Analytics.
Why Analytics and bounce rates matter so much
To Google it doesn’t matter what is making your site visitors bounce off your website in such high numbers. What matters is that they are bouncing. That indicates that by returning your website or web page on a search for ‘xyz’, Google isn’t fulfilling its mandate (to serve the needs of its customers) to the best of its ability. That means that it shouldn’t bring up your website or your web page in response to that search: either not at all or not positioned as high in search results. Ouch.
Low bounce rates = high quality; high bounce rates = low quality.
So, while the reason site visitors are ‘bouncing off’ doesn’t matter all that much to Google beyond it being an indicator of low quality, it should matter to you – a great deal! It certainly matters to us…
Contact us at WSI OMS to set up Analytics on your site as part of an SEO and digital marketing package. We will track your bounce rates amongst other data while evaluating your website’s content, structure, mobile functionality and your PPC keywords. We can lower your bounce rate and elevate the ROI from your online marketing campaign.
by Marianna Muscat | Jun 27, 2017 | Digital Media Marketing
When most of us think of influential people within the digital marketing realm, we think of Jeff Bullas, Sam Hurley and Larry Kim… But what about Mari Smith? Jennifer Cisney? And Michelle Killebrew? All of these women have done some amazing things, received incredible awards and obtained immense success over the years. We take a closer look below.
Mari Smith is better known as the Queen of Facebook and specialises in Facebook training for small businesses. She is a respected digital marketing speaker, consultant and author and is best known for her 1.5 million followers on her combined social networks.
Jennifer Cisney is a content marketing and social media marketing expert and has been for almost 20 years. She is the Chief Blogger & Social Media Manager at Kodak Alaris. Her talents don’t end there though. She also has a keen eye for design and photography, two skills which have helped her achieve success on the behalf of many a client in the past!
As Group Vice President of US Marketing at Fisher Investments, Michelle Killebrew has done some incredible things throughout her digital marketing career. She is best known for being able to deliver a superior brand experience and has worked at several high-tech companies over the years. She has won a multitude of awards including the Innovators 40 Under 40 award and the 2014 Killer Content Award, to name but a few.
Here at WSI OMS, we do more than simply admire the industry’s most successful digital marketers… we put our own spin on it! For assistance with all aspects of digital marketing, from social media marketing to website design and everything in between, be sure to get in touch with us today!
