by Marianna Muscat | May 10, 2016 | Digital Media Marketing, SEO
It’s all the buzz, and anyone without one is a loser. But how do you know if the effort you’re putting into your digital marketing is paying off?
Where are the goal posts?
As with all achievements in life, from running a marathon to learning a new language, it’s crucial to have a clear vison of the goals you wish to accomplish. How will you know you’ve succeeded if you haven’t envisioned success.
The main marketing goals for 2016
According to a 2015 study by the Content Marketing Institute, these are the most common marketing goals in order of importance:
88% engagement
88% customer loyalty
87% brand awareness
77% sales
69% lead generation
69% customer evangelism
So how do we measure marketing success?
Research indicates that 33% of B2B marketers and 41% of B2C marketers cite the inability to measure marketing success as a significant challenge.
Four of the most effective methods to measure marketing success include:
- Website traffic
There are a number website analytics software options available. However, for most businesses, Google Analytics is an excellent package because it provides a wealth of information at no cost. And just because it’s free doesn’t mean the information gathered isn’t valuable or comprehensive.
Audience overview shares critical information on the number of visitors, page views, pages per visit, visit duration, and bounce rate. These metrics provide a good summary of how your website is performing overall. To determine whether your inbound marketing program is effective, it is best to compare these numbers month on month to look for trends or changes in visitor behaviour.
Sources provides the details of how people are finding your website, giving internet marketers insight into which direction to grow the campaign.
Landing and exit pages lists where visitors are entering your site and where they’re exiting.
- Search Engine Optimisation
Google Analytics to the fore again! It is one of the best tools for measuring how organic search brings revenue and profit to the business. Universal analysis filters include:
Viewing only organic search traffic
The quality of SEO traffic
Assigning rand values to organic traffic
Identifying slow loading page times
Even creating your own SEO dashboard
- Time spent on site
Measuring time on a website can be hard. Every web analytics tool has issues in this department, Google Analytics included. That is not to imply it is not a good metric. For many types of businesses it can be a critical metric – but rather consult a website analyst who better understands how it is computed so that you can make more informed decisions.
- Inbound links
Quality inbound links are a significant component of web site marketing and search engine optimisation in order to increase traffic and online sales. Central to your SEO strategy is the ability to track links to your web pages. As luck would have it, there are a host of free and paid tools providing a comprehensive look at where your web pages stand.
And, of course, marketing success can be measured with more obvious metrics such as subscriber growth and sales.
Contact us to find out more.
by Marelise da Silva | May 5, 2016 | Online Marketing, PPC, SEO
If inbound marketing is all about creating value for your customers and prospects in order to grow organically into an industry leader and esteemed brand… is paying for advertising not a cheat?
Yes and no
As with so many things in life, there is no definitive answer. Paid advertising a case of not “what”, but “how”.
No one likes to be bombarded with annoying, intrusive ads. However, finding a gem of a product or service through an ad is a treat.
Inbound approach to paid advertising
A service like Google’s AdWords, allows you to “be seen by customers at the very moment that they’re searching on Google for the things you offer.” While Facebook’s Adverts, allows you to select an audience who “are more likely to care about your business.”
Neither of these would work if you didn’t approach your ad creation with an inbound mindset. Because paid advertising leads to something of value to your fans, it is more relevant for the people who see them. That, in turn, increases leads and customers – a real result. When done correctly, paid advertising leads to good content, and is an extremely effective contribution to a well-rounded inbound marketing strategy.
It’s cost-effective too
With the advances in technology which allows service providers to know so much about their users, these digital paid ads are very accurate in targeting the right prospects. So much so, that PPC stands for “pay per click” – in other words, you only pay when they click to visit your website or call.
So whether your marketing goal is to bring in new website visitors, grow online sales, get the phones ringing, or keep customers coming back for more; let us help you generate new leads today.
Contact us today to review your PPC ads, analyse your landing pages, and suggest ways to improve your overall campaign.
by Francois Muscat | May 4, 2016 | Digital Media Marketing, SEO
Competition today is brutal. To win in business, you need to employ the best online practices, including a comprehensive digital marketing strategy to streamline your marketing activities.
To make sure you are prepared, here is a six step checklist:
- Is your website a sight for sore eyes?
Digital marketing promotes organisations through electronic media. An advantage of digital marketing over traditional marketing is that it monitors what is being viewed, how often, and for how long; what content works and what doesn’t; conversions of sales and so forth.
Your website is key for meaningful results. The website design needs to ensure the site is easy to navigate, responsive, trendy and modern.
- Content is still king
According to the CMO Council, 86% of businesses use content marketing nowadays, with
26% of all marketing dollars in the United States are directed toward custom and branded content. It’s a savvy investment too, as content marketing generates three times as many leads as traditional outbound marketing. Yet it costs 62% less to execute.
The majority of people will not care about your advice, no matter how much you feel it may be of value to them. To cut through the endless chatter your prospects are filtering, your message needs to be carefully crafted to appeal to them. Attract attention by combining the right mix of creative ingredients to add flavour – adopt a positive, conversational tone, share your stories and experiences. Consider outsourcing your content creation to provide unique material.
- Do some socialising
Social media is not slowing down! Together with a proper social media marketing strategy, your presence on social networks needs to be branded to reflect who you are.
- Pay up
Paid adverts and PPC are an effective way to launch campaigns, show new images, and are also a widespread way of finding out what appeals to a target audience.
- The devil is in the details
Admin is a bane for many. However, quality administration of your digital marketing campaign will boost its success.
Use an editorial calendar to distribute content on brand channels such as social media, website blogs, and guides.
Monitor engagement, feedback, trending topics, and customer reaction to consistently creating relevant, timely content that appeals to your audience.
- Search Engine Optimisation
Do not panic that Google and co. are routinely tweaking algorithms to reshuffle websites. Using the honest marketing strategies above, combined with fine-tuning from our digital marketing consultants will ensure that you are on-track when it comes to SEO.
The bottom line
Contact us to optimise your digital marketing strategy by:
- doing more with less.
- centralising your marketing activities.
- delivering effective results.
- making sense of you marketing metrics.
by Francois Muscat | May 2, 2016 | PPC, SEO
Search Engine Optimisation continues to evolve and change. Google’s search algorithms reward relevance, great content and engaging pages, but there are still a lot of myths about shortcuts that can be taken to bypass Google’s systems. Here are some of the top SEO myths:
Keyword stuffing is the way to rank well
If anything, keyword stuffing will hurt your SEO efforts. A paragraph that reads as follows: “XYZ Company is a cheap electrician in Gauteng and if you need the best cheap electrician in Gauteng than you should contact our cheap electrician before it’s too late” doesn’t read well and Google will definitely classify this as ‘keyword stuffing’.
Meta tags are very important
In the past, a well-optimised meta tag would help your SEO efforts. While it’s not a bad idea to optimise your website’s meta tags, this isn’t the be all and end all of SEO anymore. There are many different types of tags that are crucial for quality SEO, including description tags, alt tags and title tags. The meta tag is only one of the factors that Google takes into consideration, so make sure you’re not neglecting the other vital tags.
A Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaign will boost your search results
A common myth is that paid search advertising will increase your organic search results. PPC offers many benefits, including instant results and being able to accurately manage your advertising spend, but investing in a PPC strategy isn’t a short cut to good SEO results.
WSI OMS offers SEO strategies that work. To find out more, contact us today.
by Francois Muscat | Feb 24, 2016 | Content Marketing, E-mail Marketing, SEO
Building up an email sales list is hard work – no one wants another subscription or sign-up clogging up their inbox. The folk out there are getting pretty picky about who can have their email details, with spam emails and phishing attempts on the rise. So how can you get more subscribers? Well, one way that’s tried and tested, is to incentivise, or plainly speaking, bribe.
“Sign up for my blog updates and get my eBook for free” … “Subscribe now and you’ll receive a 10% discount on your first order” …
These all work, but are common, so you need to find a way to incentivise that’s really going to catch and keep new readers. It has to something genuinely tempting, that your reader simply must have. So here are some suggestions:
- Cheat sheet: a highly practical reference guide that outlines and shares valuable data and shortcuts. It offers time and effort saving and does not need to be complicated. Often quite visual, to be user-friendly.
- Handy template: a framework for success based on what has already been effective for others. Select a template that is going to solve a problem or achieve a goal of your audience.
- All-in-one toolkit: this gives your readers a number of tools in a single download, at the same time showing them your depth of knowledge. Videos, checklists and worksheets can be bundled together to provide maximum usefulness.
- Blueprint: a concrete plan that breaks down a major process into small and digestible pieces. Whether in pdf or eBook format, this framework will allow your reader to achieve a specific task. It’s more intensive than a cheat sheet or template, but less bulky than the toolkit.
- Case study: a success story about a person in your niche, one of your readers or a customer. This is great if you like storytelling, as you get to focus on emotions and characters, rather than facts and figures.
- Video course: for readers who prefer visuals or more interaction, a video tutorial could cover one topic in depth, or several topics. You could also create a series, as long as the content is useful and meaningful.
- A manifesto: this is a public declaration of your beliefs and principles. It could be presented as a written statement, or could include typography and graphics. If you publish it as a pdf, your readers can download it and keep it for inspiration.
- Graphic giveaway: if you specialise in graphic or web design, you could use a fantastic freebie in exchange for sign-up. This could be a business card template, a desktop wallpaper, greeting card or poster.
It may sound labour intensive, but giving big means getting big, so it’s worth putting some effort. Showing potential subscribers that you value the relationship by sharing your ideas or skills will earn their time, attention and trust. For more on email marketing, contact us today.
by Francois Muscat | Jan 25, 2016 | Link-building, SEO
Link building is both an art and a science. Getting other websites to link to your online web properties isn’t always easy and with Google’s algorithms that are always being tweaked and improved, it’s important to stay up to date with what works and what doesn’t. Here are a few things to keep in mind:
Don’t be spammy
Google doesn’t count unnatural links, in other words links you paid for or sourced from a link farm. The goal is to produce value adding content that people want to link to ‘naturally’ (in other words, on their own accord), so instead of focusing on sourcing unnatural links, focus on producing great content that people want to share or refer to in their own content.
Engage guest bloggers
Guest posting is one of the best ways to maximise your link building strategy. This involves getting someone from within your business (perhaps a product developer or senior executive who will have a few thoughts on where the industry is heading, for example) to write a blog post and post it on an industry website, news website or other related website. You can then link back to your own website and you will be able to benefit from the other website’s audience.
Use in-content links
Many sites use ‘sitewide’ links (in other words, links which appear in the footers of website content or on the side of each page) as part of their link building strategy. While this is a good SEO practice, it doesn’t really maximise your strategy. Focus on using in-content links to create a better internal linking strategy instead of relying on sitewide links.
Need help with your digital marketing or link building strategy? Then contact WSI OMS today.
