Marketing Archives Page 7 of 10

Top 10 Productivity Tools for Marketing

The first part of the Tools for Marketers series begins with productivity tools. Productivity is everything for marketing. Any way we can optimize and hack our time for campaigns to achieve the best results is something any marketer strives for. This is why tools for marketers are an imperative part of our daily work for tracking our production.

1. IFTTT

If This Then That is a great way to automate recurring tasks. You setup recipes that connect two of the ever-growing list of apps that triggers a logic for “if this” happens “then that” should happen. For example, you can create a recipe that connects Facebook and Twitter so that whenever you do something specific on Facebook, like share a link, it will also tweet that on Twitter. If you manage a bunch of Facebook pages, IFTTT allows you to choose the specific page you want the actions to trigger for.

There are a lot of other ways you can sync social media platforms, like keeping your social profiles consistent by creating a recipe for when you change a Facebook profile picture to also change it on Twitter.

2. Pocket

Pocket is a plugin and app that you can easily save an online article to read for later on any device you have Pocket on. So when you are in the middle of something but get an e-mail with blog posts that you know you need to read, you can Pocket them for later. But the real power of Pocket is that it is another app that you can integrate into an IFTTT recipe.

You can connect Pocket to social media platforms to share online, but an even better way is to create a recipe that will take your favorite content from Pocket and add it to your Buffer queue.

3. StayFocusd

With the content overload and social media era that we live in, sometimes you can lose your focus online. StayFocusd is a Chrome extension (and they have similar for Firefox users), that you can set to only allow you to be on certain sites that you choose, like social media or shopping sites, for a limited time every day.

If you really need to finish a project that doesn’t require any research or browsing, they also have a nuclear option that really lets you focus on the project at hand for the length of time you set.

4. Toggl

Toggl is a desktop application available for Mac, PC and mobile that allows you to track your time more efficiently as you switch between tasks. They also have a Chrome extension that makes it even more easier for you to track tasks on the go, which also works with dozens of apps and sites like Salesforce, Evernote, Asana, Basecamp, Trello, Google Drive, Wunderlist and many more.

You can assign and track tasks for team members, associate costs to time spent, and get a great overview of how you are spending your time on projects and meetings.

5. Wunderlist

There is a plethora of get-things-done applications out there, but Wunderlist is great for its seamless integration across all of your devices, interacts with other applications like your calendar, and is a great way to brain dump tasks and get them organized and prioritized efficiently.

6. Canva

As humans we are drawn to visuals. As marketers we all need to have the basic capitality of design, whether it’s creating a quick design for a social media post, or it’s adding text overlay to an image.

Canva helps by making it easy to find the right resolution for every image for whatever platform you are creating. You can upload images, choose from their library, or buy a stock image, overlay your text, and load it up for social media.

7. LastPass

Being able to access your accounts across the internet quickly is important so you aren’t wasting time trying to figure out or recover your passwords. This is especially true if you have a lot of client logins on social media sites. LastPass, while it was breached in 2015, is still one of the best password managers available. With different settings and configurations, you can get into your accounts with ease, or setup new logins with their password generator.

8. Evernote

If you’re keeping notes in notepads or textpads, whether in physical form or on your computer, you’re behind the times. Not just a note taker, Evernote helps to organize thoughts, clip ideas from the internet, automatically save and organize e-mail attachments like receipts, and so much more. It works smoothly across all of your devices for when you have that campaign idea on the go that you need to write down, and also integrates with IFTTT recipes and other apps. This video shows how easy it is to use their Evernote Web Clipper.

9. Rapportive

Owned by LinkedIn and with addons for Chrome and Firefox, Rapportive allows you to dig up information on a contact right from Gmail. It will find any mutual LinkedIn connections you have with them, as well as their Twitter, Skype, website, and other contact information so you don’t have to do any digging.

Let’s say you don’t know the person’s email you are trying to reach out to. By putting in different combinations of their email (first initial, last name, full name, first name, last initial, etc.), Rapportive will display their information in the sidebar once you have found the correct email.

10. Voila Norbert

Not knowing someone’s email address that you want to contact can be a daunting research task if it isn’t readily available with a simple Google search. And if the Rapportive trick doesn’t work, or even before you try that method, you should give Voila Norbert a try. All you need to know is the person’s first and last name as well as there domain address. Norbert does the rest and in most cases will bring back their email address. Just run it through mailtester.com first to verify the email is legit.

From automating recurring tasks, forcing your focus on projects, organizing, prioritizing, and tracking tasks to creating images in a breeze, compiling your ideas and finds from the web, and conducting more efficient outreach, these tools can really help you become a more proficient marketer.

We use these (and a lot more) to make sure we are making the most out of our time for ourselves and our clients. So if you feel like your marketing efforts are too daunting, or just need some more digital marketing tips, then sign-up for our weekly emails featuring the latest tips and trending industry news. And if you’re looking for a marketing agency near you, give us a call. Our marketing company has helped small businesses throughout Lancaster, Harrisburg, and York.

Brand Story: A Definitive Guide

Harland David failed at everything he ever attempted.

He failed at school.
He failed as a fireman.
He failed as a lawyer.
He failed at selling life insurance.
He failed at selling tires.
He failed at manufacturing.
He was fired from a dozen jobs.

At age 65, he was left with only a modest savings and $105 a month from Social Security.

But that was the year that he stopped failing. At 65 he began franchising businesses using a special recipe he’d created, and by 73 years old he was able to sell that business for today’s equivalent of $15 million.

$15 million for Harland David Sanders. You know him as Colonel Sanders. His famous recipe, Kentucky Fried Chicken, made him a legend.

Top 5 Digital Marketing Influencers To Follow

If you are just getting started with digital marketing or still striving to learn more you need to be following these marketing influencers online.

Benefits of Ranking in Google

There is no doubt that Google owns the majority share in the search engine industry. Bing and Yahoo are steadily taking more of that share, and an Apple search engine could do serious damage by having all of their devices default to their own engine. Whatever the case may be in the future, the ranking in Google is currently the most critical for businesses, as the search engine giant owns 70% of the search engine share.

With 3.5 billion search queries per day, your business could garner a lot of website traffic by ranking for keywords related to your business. Given the rise of YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, and more as search engines, just how important is it to rank in Google regarding your SEO?

Ranking on the first page of Google: statistics

Multiple studies have turned out a variety of statistics over the past few years regarding the impact of Google ranking, dealing with factors including:

Branded vs. non-branded searches
Searches without ads or with ads (ads above and/or beside)
Mobile vs. desktop
Long-tail keyword searches

When a user performs a search, about 90% of clicks go towards the organic search results, with the remaining 10% to the pay-per-click ads above or beside the organic results. While PPC campaigns are still important in an integrated marketing strategy, ranking organically lets you own those positions and gain more traffic.

This heat map from Mediative shows how most users look past the advertisements to get to organic search results.

Similarly, the percentage of traffic from the first page of Google is about 91%, while only 4% of users click through to the second page or results, 1% to the third page, and then it drops off into fractions of a percent.

This tells us that if you aren’t ranking on the first two pages on Google, the likelihood of you gaining any organic traffic to your website is less than 1%.

Even if you are ranking on the first page of Google, it is obvious that the top results get a higher click-through rate (CTR) than the others. Click-through rate is the number of users that click through to a certain result compared to the rest of the results on the page.

So when it comes to click-through rate on the first page of organic search results, the biggest benefit for ranking in Google is that the first position typically gets about one-third of all clicks, but with many different factors, the results may vary.

This can be backed up by click-through rates of first page organic results in Google.

Click-through rates of first page results

With an ongoing study on CTR by Advanced Web Ranking, which is one of the best keyword tools available, we are able to see results from testing these factors from hundreds of thousands of keyword searches and websites.

So let’s break down the click-through rates for all the different variations of searches with data from the United States.

Overall CTR for all mobile vs. desktop searches

Mobile has overtaken desktop as the most-used device for searches on Google, so it is important to have a mobile-friendly website to even be considered for a first-page ranking. In this study, 30% of desktop searches click on the first position, while 27% click on the first position on mobile devices. This could be because on a desktop computer, you can see 6 or 7 results on the page and choose to go with the first, whereas with less landscape on mobile, you only see two or three results and give preference to what seems like the best.

CTR for searches with or without ads

When ads are displayed, whether above the organic results or beside them, organic click-through rates take a ten percent hit because users have other options to choose from. This is especially true on mobile where ads are displayed, because they take up the screen before the searcher has to scroll down to organic results.

CTR for branded searches with or without ads

When someone does a brand search, they are specifically looking for a company that they know, trust, have heard of, or have used before. So there is a much higher likelihood that said brand will show up higher in results, which is why it has the highest CTR of 42 percent among these tests. When ads come into play, it allows for competitors, or even the searched brand itself, to pay for ads that display above organic results and potentially steal traffic from their competition.

CTR for unbranded searches with or without ads

An unbranded search is when a user is looking for a product or service, but they do not know which company they want to use, or they are shopping around for the best prices or features. So it makes sense that there is a bit of a drop with unbranded searches when it comes to unbranded searches, especially when ads are involved. At a 22 percent CTR for the first position of unbranded searches with ads, it is the lowest click-through rate for all of the studies done. If you are doing also doing pay-per-click using Google AdWords, unbranded relevant searches would be the keywords to target, as they are stealing a lot of the traffic from the top organic results.

CTR for branded vs. unbranded desktop searches

A big reason you want to build your brand awareness, loyalty, and trust is so that people begin to search your brand name along with your services or keywords. As you can see, when a branded search is done on desktops, it gets 41 percent of the clicks as opposed to just 26 percent for unbranded searches. However, when it comes to the second position and further down, both searches tend to match when it comes to click-through rate.

CTR for branded vs. unbranded mobile searches

On mobile devices, there isn’t as big of a difference between branded and unbranded searches as there is on desktops – but there is still a difference. Oddly enough, unbranded searches have a higher CTR in positions two through five, and then begin to match up with branded searches.

CTR for long-tail keyword searches on desktop

Long-tail phrases, which include at least two keywords, pose much more precise intent. Long-tail keywords are less competitive, which makes them easier to rank, and you should consider putting together a very in-depth long-tail keyword list to use in your website copy and content marketing strategy. When searches are done with four or more keywords, they have a slightly higher CTR on desktop than searches done with fewer keywords. But all of them have around a 30 percent CTR on desktops, which is why you should begin to target and track your long-tail keywords.

CTR for long-tail keyword searches on mobile

When it comes to mobile, long-tail keyword searches tell a slightly different story. While four or more words still get the highest CTR at 32 percent, there is a drastic drop from three keywords to two, and especially to one keyword. One-keyword searches on desktops got a 30 percent CTR, but on mobile they get just a 19 percent CTR.

Calculating your potential traffic

As you can see, there is a huge benefit to ranking on the first page of Google. Your brand awareness will rise, hopefully along with more branded searches, and so will organic traffic to your website.

Let’s say that you ranked for a long-tail keyword that got an estimated 1,000 searches a month. Typically, you would garner about 30 percent of those click-throughs to your website.

1,000 searches a month X .3 CTR = about 300+ more visitors to your website

Now imagine if you started to rank for a combination of different long-tail keywords, or specific buyer keywords for your products and services. You can begin to see how it will add up to a ton of monthly organic traffic to your website, resulting in more leads, sales, and hopefully long-term and loyal customers to your company.

How to get keywords ranking in Google

Without going into too much detail about the entire process that an SEO agency would be able to do, here are some top-level tasks you can do yourself that can help to get your site ranking.

Optimize your website

First and foremost, you want to optimize your website for search engines. This means having a mobile-friendly site with a fast load time and a good user experience. Every page should be optimized with tags and copy, and any issues affecting your website rankings should be addressed.

There are over 200 ranking factors that experts have determined that Google uses. It becomes even more complex, as Google’s Matt Cutts has also stated that some of those ranking factors can have up to 50 different variations.

Therefore, one of the best digital strategies is a content- and data-driven strategy that acquires authoritative links and engages with a social audience.

Your website also needs better copy and a strong customer journey, because without these, users may bounce off of your site and back to the search results where your competition is. If you have a high bounce rate, which is when someone goes to a page and leaves it in under a minute without visiting another page, you should see if your website is making any common website mistakes that are raising your bounce rate.

Keep in mind that the more high-quality content pages you have on your website, the more chances you have to rank. If you have a smaller website with only 10-20 pages, then it will be much harder to steal traffic from your competitors with a larger website presence.

Start producing resourceful content

One easy way to add more relevant pages to your website is to help your visitors find a solution with a resourceful blog. We’ve gone into the benefits of blogging for business before, but essentially, it helps to build your brand and authority, earns trust in your industry, allows you to engage socially by sharing your content across social media networks, and boosts your long-tail rankings which will drive more traffic – all of which will hopefully travel through your funnel to generate conversions.

The best type of blogging is long-form content, which is content that is generally 1,000-3,000 words. The average content length ranking on the first page of organic results is typically at least 2,000-2,500 words, as you can see in this chart.

When you create this long-form content, whether it’s an ultimate guide to a service in your industry or a how-to instructional post that walks someone through a problem, you may begin to attract links in your industry through outreach as well as content and social media promotion. With these authoritative and industry relevant links, you will begin to see those content pieces ranking higher, which will result in more organic traffic.

You can use this strategy by looking to see what content your competition has been developing, and create something far better and more valuable. Then you can research who linked to and mentioned them for their content and reach out to them to also get a link. When you can get the same websites that mention your competitors and some more, you should begin to outrank your competitors online.

Other forms of content other than blogging could be creating eBooks, whitepapers, case studies, influencer interviews, videos, infographics, slideshows, and much more.

When it all comes down to it, the main factors in ranking are optimizing your website and earning links, mentions, and shares from your industry. There are are many specific strategies you can use to try and rank online, but sometimes it’s best to worry about your business and leave the rest to the experts when you want your keywords ranking in Google.

How Infographics Can Benefit a Digital Marketing Strategy

Google and other major search engines continue to redefine their ranking algorithms, making it harder and harder for brands to create high-quality content that receives links and rank organically. Marketers need to continuously find ways to naturally generate authoritative and relevant links for their content and websites.

When link building becomes more about link earning, the focus needs to shift to creating exceptional and helpful or entertaining content. Bloggers and website owners rarely want to link to something that’s not valuable to their own business or blog. Nor do they want to link to your products or services, since such content is promotional in nature and in most cases doesn’t help their audience. One of the best and most popular ways marketers are creating this standout content is with infographics. An infographic is a visual representation of content and data, presented in an appealing, thought-provoking way.

From Visually.

Creating truly helpful and visually appealing content is one of the best ways to increase brand awareness, build your audience, aid in lead generation, and improve conversion rates across the board.

Growing brand awareness

You want your brand in front of your target audience, especially those that don’t know you exist. What’s a good way to do that? Infographics work so well on the web because we live in a world of instant gratification. People are more inclined to share visual pieces of informative content because it’s scannable and appealing—giving searchers a solution in the form of a graphic.

Searchers want instant answers. They’ve become accustomed to search engines returning the information they want in a matter of seconds.

When a brand is new online, or hasn’t been using content marketing or SEO, they’re usually not showing up anywhere close to the top of the search results. This means they’re missing the ability to answer the searcher’s problem, and losing the opportunity to turn them into a valuable lead.

Instead of only focusing resources on creating long-form content, no matter how valuable it may be, new brands should also focus on creating easily digestible content.

Infographics can help your content to stand out from the crowd, especially since there is so much noise out there. Your content, whether it be infographics, videos, blog posts, or anything else, needs to be better than whatever already exists online.

You can see from the Google Trends comparison above that searches for content like “white papers” continue to lose popularity, while searches “infographics” steadily rise in its place.

New brands and online businesses can actively benefit from creating and marketing an infographic. Infographics help turn your message into a visual, digital format that’s ideal for sharing. And when people can easily share your content, they help to expose more and more potential customers to your brand.

Increase in organic search traffic and rankings

When you create infographics that help or entertain those in your industry, influencers, bloggers, writers, and journalists in the same niche will share it with their audiences. By doing so, they mention and link to your site to credit the source.

The more authoritative websites in your industry that link to your site help to increase the overall organic rankings of your website. It shows Google and other search engines that authority sites trust your site by linking and mentioning you, and since Google recognizes those sites as authoritative, it passes along that trust with increased rankings for your site’s related keywords. Because, as mentioned before, Google is all about giving the user the most relevant information as quickly as possible when they search it.

For example, when our infographic on the evolution of arcade games went on Wired and other websites, a lot of their keywords related to arcade games all saw an increase in rankings.

Infographics are easy to post on your website by using an embed code that pastes the image onto you a page and includes a link back to the original source. The best kind of link is a contextual link; that is, one where a writer, blogger, editor, or journalist writes a piece and includes a text link to your source. But the easiest kind of backlink for infographics is the one from the embed code, since all that has to be done is to copy and paste the embed code to the site.

Aiding in lead generation

The best marketers know that right content needs to be presented to their potential customers at exactly the right time for every stage of the customer journey. A potential customer beginning to research a big investment, like adding a swimming pool to their backyard, probably isn’t ready for an eBook detailing different pool designs and features. Instead, presenting them with an infographic about interesting swimming pool facts can be the perfect way to expose them to your brand and move them through the sales funnel.

Interesting Facts & Statistics About Swimming Pools — *From Visually.*

Content like this is at the very top of your funnel and avoids diving right into a sales pitch. When you try to sell a potential customer on your product or service too soon, in most cases, they’re no longer a potential customer (as they weren’t ready to buy yet).

Informative infographics rarely turn potential customers off. They work to give these people entertaining, valuable information while subtly nudging them closer to your brand.

While a good infographic helps to move your potential customer through your sales process, it also works to generate leads in other ways. That customer may have found your infographic so useful that they want to share it with their friends on social media, through email, or maybe even post it on their blog. When your infographic is shared, your brand awareness goes up, and so does your ability to attract new leads to your business.

If your potential customer is finally ready to buy, they’re more likely to go with a company that has helped them with informative and useful content along their journey. Infographics not only help to present information in an appealing way, they also help increase trust with your potential customers. Customers are more likely to buy from a company they trust over someone they’ve never interacted with before.

Improving conversion rate

Now more than ever, gaining the attention of customers online is about earning it. Rather than bombarding potential customers with spam emails, irrelevant offers, and overly “salesy” tactics, you’re allowing them to discover you in their own way.

Infographics aid not only in the discovery of your products and services, but also your ability to convert leads into sales.

Content should be created to fill a need in your industry and/or to entertain, to answer a common problem or concern your customers have in the best way possible. Using an infographic to communicate content is one of the best ways to naturally draw people into your site or blog.

Good content tends to cause a chain reaction: people share your infographic, link to it or embed it on their website, exposing new customers to your brand, gaining links to your site, improving your rankings, leading to more traffic.

“Businesses who market with infographics grow traffic an average of 12% more than those who don’t.”

This chain reaction ultimately leads to increases in traffic to your site from other relevant sites in your industry where your target market is visiting. And, when more people from your target audience are visiting your site, your chances at gaining a conversion are that much better than before.

Few long-form pieces of content have the ability to gain customers’ attention, encourage shares, and increase brand trust as much as infographics. When you take the time to build an infographic with valuable information, you’re filling a void and giving customers exactly what they want. There’s no better way to encourage a conversion and build a strong long-term relationship than that.

For help with defining and creating your overall digital marketing strategy, contact the marketing professionals at EZMarketing today.

Why Your Business Needs a Better Web Presence

When it comes to your business’s web presence, you probably think about how people interact with your website. You may even consider how you show up in Google since they dominate the search engines, but even Google’s search engine market share is declining year after year. In reality, your web presence is so much more than either of these.

Website vs web presence

Your website presence is the one place where your consumers can come to learn information about you and connect with you. This includes your website design and your blog.

Your web presence is the collection of all of the places online where consumers are able to research information about your brand and engage with you. These include social media profiles, review sites, directory listings, microsites, and anywhere else online where your brand is mentioned or profiled.

Importance of search engine presence

As of February of 2016, comScore reports that Google holds 64% of the market and NetMarketShare claims 67% market share when it comes to desktop searches.

comScore

NetMarketShare

It’s always important to have an organic SEO marketing and content marketing strategy so that your content, products, and services are showing up to solve people’s search queries.

When it comes to mobile, more and more people are performing mobile and tablet searches than desktop. This is why it’s more important than ever, and always will be, that your website is mobile-friendly.

Just like you should track Bing and Yahoo along with Google, you should also track mobile rankings for these search engines – which we do for our clients.

In the big picture of the Internet, search engines aren’t everything – there is still something missing.

How social media plays a role in web presence

YouTube, Facebook, Twitter – all of these sites are beginning to account for the decline of Google’s search engine market share. Instead of focusing all of your attention on just your Google search engine rankings, maybe it’s time to see how your business and content is displaying on these search engines.

When it comes to Facebook, you can search right inside the mobile app to find content, never having to leave the app to view the content. This trend will continue, which will hurt website analytics because you are getting visitors from “dark social” that you aren’t able to track on your website.

In terms of displaying ads, you might think that Google is the place to be for mobile ad displays. But you’d be wrong.

According to IHS, Facebook has about 47% ownership of mobile display ad revenue worldwide, while Google comes in at under 24%.

YouTube is considered to be the second biggest search engine there is, with over three billion searches a month and growing.

Created by Mushroom Networks

With YouTube videos showing up on the first page of almost every search result, it’s about time you start creating high quality videos and using them in your marketing strategy.

Future of social media and customer service

A lot of people like to engage with brands through social media, whether they are praising the brand, have a question, or want to make a complaint. Yet about 70% of customer complaints on Twitter are ignored by brands. Because of this, consumers are trying to find a different way to get in touch with businesses.

So, how do brands get more conversational and personal with their customers to handle any questions, comments, and complaints they have quickly and easily?

Social media messaging.

According to a study done by Business Insider, the big four messaging apps (WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, WeChat, and Viber) have taken over the big four social networks (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram) in terms of active users. With the growing popularity of Snapchat, social messaging activity is sure to continue to outpace active users on social networks unless they figure out a way to engage just as quickly, easily, and privately with their consumers.

Not only should you have an active presence on social media sites, but brands need to also be active on these social messaging apps as their customers are clearly favoring them when trying to converse with companies.

Consumers reviewing your business

When performing a Google search about a restaurant, hotel, or other business, you will notice that review sites pop up near the top. Consumers are doing more and more research before buying because of all the content that they can review. Multiple studies have shown that 70-90% of consumers are doing online research before making a buying decision.

Consumers are researching on sites like Yelp, Angie’s List, Foursquare, Amazon, and Google Business for reviews before determining where they should give you their money.

When you have a good presence on all of these sites and you’re getting good reviews from the most loyal brand evangelists, sometimes your customers still need to be gently nudged or asked to leave a review.

Your web presence on review sites is a big part of reputation management, which we recently discussed here.

https://www.ezmarketing.com/blog/things-to-know-reputation-management/

Content is ranking higher than products and services

Organic search results have changed and will continue to change, so we must adapt. Fewer products and services are showing up, with more articles and blog posts taking their place. Years ago, an SEO marketing mindset would want to rank their product pages for search terms like best smartwatch, affordable car, best headphones, and more. What’s showing up now aren’t products – it’s articles and blog posts that provide helpful content to the user in their research phase (after you get passed the paid search results, of course).

Notice that Apple does not rank at the top for “best smartwatch” (but it does show up as the top paid result).

If you are searching for a restaurant or hotel, Google returns maps, reviews, and travel sites. You have to get to the second or third page until you find a site owned by the restaurant or hotel.

Are you getting your business listed on these review sites? Your competition is, and so should you.

Claiming listings and niche directories

Whether you’ve moved business locations or your directory listings have never been in sync, having a consistent Name, Address and Phone Number (also known as NAP) is very important for your online business. If you have inconsistencies, even just spelling out “West” versus “W.” in some cases, can mean you won’t be showing up in map results that Google is pulling from directory listing sites.

There are many benefits of claiming your directory listings, so it’s extremely important to have a consistent NAP across all of your listings. It’s also important to be listed in listings relevant to your industry and niche as well.

If you are a local business then you need to have a presence on Yelp, Foursquare, and Thumbtack.

For lawyers, you need to be on FindLaw, Avvo, and Lawyers.com. When you look at just about any city search for lawyers, they are on the first page.

Finally, if you sell eCommerce products, look into selling on Etsy, Amazon, and eBay. The chances of beating out competitors for buyer keywords is slim without having to pay for it.

Your brand or your competition

So do you want consumers to search for your products and services and find you among your competitors? Or do you want consumers to search for your brand and your products and services because they’ve done their research on your company – and you provided what they needed with a strong web presence? Need help? Talk with our website design company in Lancaster. We can help with SEO marketing, email marketing, as well as website design.

Is Your Content Marketing Strategy Working?

One of the core functions of great content marketing is to have a documented strategy that, when executed, offers solutions to your targets’ problems. When they’re presented with a conversion trigger, they’ll be much likelier to take an action. If none of the people who view your content take the next step in the customer journey, you may need to look into changing your content marketing strategy.

A documented marketing strategy is the driving force behind getting your content marketing to produce results that meet your company’s goals. Without market research, tracking, and documented goals, you are just performing tactics haphazardly without really knowing what is working.

Constantly create valuable, resourceful, and entertaining content to make your website visitors, email subscribers, customers, and followers more informed and committed to your brand. You should do this to gain their trust, which leads them through the customer journey of eventually converting, making a sale, and becoming a loyal long-term customer.

This is why content marketing has to be performed consistently across different platforms, including paid, earned, owned, and shared media – also known as the PESO marketing model.

Source: Pear Analytics

Content marketing, defined by Content Marketing Institute, is “a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

In the business-to-business world, 88% of B2B marketers claim to be using content marketing as a tactic. In business-to-consumer industries, 76% of B2C marketers claim they are using content marketing.

But only a fraction of those businesses actually think that their content marketing is achieving results that they want. Of the 88% of B2Bs who are involved in content marketing, 30% of marketers said it was effective or very effective, with only 6% of those claiming it to be very effective.

When it comes to B2C, 38% of respondents doing content marketing said it was effective or very effective, with 10% of those saying it was very effective.

What does this mean?

Across the board, over 60% of marketers aren’t seeing results from their content marketing efforts. A big reason for this is that they don’t do the research, know their target audiences, set goals, and track everything along the way in a documented marketing strategy.

Do you have a content marketing strategy?

A documented content marketing strategy is often the defining factor in whether content marketing succeeds or fails. In fact, without a documented strategy, you’ll only ever succeed by accident. Your strategy provides everything from data-driven research through to tactical execution, along with the analytics that show whether you’ve met your marketing goals.

So how many marketers in B2C and B2B have a documented content marketing strategy?

Only 32% of B2B marketers have a documented marketing strategy, while 48% have a marketing strategy that is not documented.

In B2C, 37% of marketers have a documented strategy, while 44% don’t document their strategy.

Strategies keep your brand’s messaging consistent across all platforms, and tracking everything lets you know that what you’re doing is leading toward your goals. If your strategy is unrefined or nonexistent, there’s no way to ensure cohesive content marketing efforts.

Having a documented marketing strategy is the key to keeping everyone in your organization focused, so each employee knows exactly how their role plays out in an ongoing, collaborative effort. Some vague abstraction of a strategy that exists solely in the minds of one or two people on the content marketing team won’t serve the team as a whole.

EZMarketing’s brand strategist, Brandon Peach, had this to say about content marketing strategy:

“A content marketing strategy helps to tell the story of your business. It’s essential that a content marketing strategy be documented, since it’s been demonstrated year after year that content marketers who do so feel more effective, and can justify spending more on their content budget.”

Documentation is the proof that shows whether or not a marketing strategy is working, and if it is, companies are more willing to leverage a higher budget to continue evolving and optimizing their strategy.

Are you actively updating your content marketing strategy?

A strategy isn’t a once-and-done task. It’s something that needs revised and updated as the scope of your industry or business goals change. Strategy has to accommodate trends in the metrics you’ve measured, or the behavior of your target audience.

Your strategy should always be at the forefront of your mind and actions. It’s only natural for it to change according to key performance indicators (KPIs), the metrics important to your business, and when what you’re doing isn’t as effective as it could be.

The strategy that’s never updated is the one that can’t compete.

Do you have content marketing goals?

Consider why you use content marketing by asking yourself: “What do I want to accomplish?” You may have a strategy in place, but does it accomplish the goals you wanted to address in the first place?

A content marketing strategy should be born from the objectives put in place by the content marketing team. The chart below highlights common goals for B2B content marketers.

Your goals will define the specifics of your strategy. If your goal is lead generation and sales, then you might want to create more eBooks, case studies, and whitepapers in your content strategy to help generate more leads and sales.

In B2C, organizational goals are slightly different, with sales also being a top priority in all industries.

In B2C, if you want to focus on customer retention, then work on better customer service, and providing unique, relevant, and valuable content through email and social media to your subscribers and followers.

Objectives keep a marketing strategy goal-oriented and your content marketing results-driven.

Are you promoting your content?

Promoting content is one of the two key parts of content marketing: creation and promotion.

While your content marketing team may be churning out great content, if the process ends there then content marketing simply isn’t working hard enough for you. In fact, it’s probably not doing anything at all, because you haven’t taken the next step, which is promoting that content.

Most experts say you should spend just as much time, if not more, promoting your content as you do creating it.

What are some ways to promote your content?

Social media promotions, email marketing, influencer marketing, and industry outreach are all great ways to promote your content.

Writing a new post for your blog or publishing a cutting-edge eBook to your website isn’t enough. If your website has a strong following, then your current audience may find it – but your target audience who isn’t aware of your brand probably won’t. If your competition is creating helpful content, they will be found before you will be.

You can promote your content through paid content promotion services like Outbrain, or targeting specific audiences in Facebook or Twitter to get the word out. Also, reaching out to industry publications, bloggers, journalists, and writers to let them know about your content and how it may be helpful for their audience. Figuring out the sites to place your content where your target audience visits takes a bit of work. But Rand Fishkin from Moz explains how to discover the sites your audience visits in this extremely helpful whiteboard video.

Marketers who spend more time promoting their content on the right platforms and websites will see more success than businesses who spend more time creating and not enough time promoting.

Are you spending enough on content marketing?

As we’ve said above, too few companies think that their content marketing is actually effective. Those same companies may not be spending enough money or time on their content marketing either, which can be a contributing factor to their lack of confidence (and results).

If you’re spending a minimal amount on content marketing, then it’s difficult to expect it to do everything it’s supposed to do as effectively as you need it to. Content marketing is about ROI, and if you’re not investing enough, you won’t be seeing those huge returns.

So what percentage of marketing budgets are being spent on content marketing?

For B2B, the average is about 28% of marketing budgets that are being spent on content marketing. The marketers that found content marketing to be the most effective were allocating 46% of their total marketing budget on content marketing.

Are you spending almost half of your marketing budget on content marketing? Those that see the best results are.

In B2C, 32% of marketing budgets are being spent on content marketing. The most effective marketers say that about 38% of their marketing budget is being spent on content marketing.

So what are you allocating from your whole marketing budget on content marketing?

It’s been shown that companies with strategic content marketing generate a higher percentage of leads than companies who don’t.

Ask yourself: “Is my content marketing working for me?”

Here’s the bottom line. If your content marketing isn’t working for you, it could be any number of things—from a nonexistent strategy, lack of promotion, a stifled budget, or unclear objectives and goals.

If you’re still wondering about where your content marketing stands, contact EZMarketing and we’ll do more than just develop content for you—we’ll help you create the strategy that gets results. Our Lancaster digital marketing agency offers content marketing a core internet marketing service.

How Offline Branding Supports Your Online Marketing

Offline branding, as well as traditional marketing materials and channels, continue to demonstrate their value to businesses large and small. Companies may have adopted larger digital marketing strategies, but print, TV, and radio still hold sway when it comes to capturing interest in a company’s brand.

When integrated into your overall marketing strategy, offline branding enhances the scope of your reach and can guide leads into the sales funnel. The real benefit to offline branding efforts is being seen by part of your target audience, a segment that might have potentially missed your digital marketing campaigns up until that point.

How to bridge the gap between offline and online marketing

They key to successful marketing is using offline and online branding strategies to complement one another so that you cover potential weak spots in any given ad campaign.

Offline branding can be essential in guiding your prospects through the customer journey, from the real world to the digital. A billboard could lead someone to a website where they make a purchase.

That’s what successful offline branding looks like.

While that’s a good example of successful offline branding, it’s important to understand that your offline marketing materials should pave the way for a customer’s online exploration. A prospect should be able to take something away from your TV commercial or print ad that will lead them to your website or online store.

There’s also the chance that your end game won’t lead them to a website. Maybe you’re drawing them to a physical location, or encouraging them to make a phone call. Wherever you want your offline branding to take leads, it has to share the same direction and messaging as the rest of your collateral.

Offline and online may be two different worlds but your brand should possess a single, united voice. Inconsistencies between the two could confuse or alienate potential customers.

When offline branding succeeds

Trade shows, community events, and conventions provide companies with unique offline branding opportunities that allow businesses to meet with peers or customers in person, letting others put a face and personality to the corporation.

Gaining contacts or becoming part of an organization can lead to directory listings, or becoming a member and having your business mentioned through a link on the group’s website. In terms of ROI, this association and endorsement is great for the amount of time or money it takes to attend shows or run booths.

Car and truck wraps are another example of offline branding that can be optimized for your digital marketing campaigns. Including keywords you’ve optimized for online use along with your URL creates an intrinsic connection between offline and online. This sense of cohesion in your marketing tactics is what leads to conversions.

When offline branding fails

Offline channels still play a fundamental role in marketing. Media such as TV, radio, and print ads continue to drive online searches. However, they’re not always optimized to capitalize on the content you’ve published online. Someone might try Googling a phrase they heard in one of your commercials and wind up with any result but the website they wanted to find.

Offline collateral featuring brand mentions should be optimized for your website and landing pages. If you’re using keywords or phrases in your offline branding that don’t appear on your website then people won’t know how to find you online or learn more about your business.

When people have search queries, something online has to answer those—like a landing page specifically for an offline marketing campaign. Likewise, your digital marketing should be capitalizing on any printed materials and ads.

Checklist for optimizing offline branding

To ensure your digital marketing is benefiting from your offline efforts, follow this helpful checklist.

Spell out your URL. On the radio, on billboards, it doesn’t matter—spell it out so people can easily remember and write it down.
Words included on any printed material (ads, billboards, car wraps) should be keywords already optimized for content on your website. Don’t introduce any new terminology that wouldn’t point towards your site in a search.
Optimize websites for ads run on the TV or radio. Anything someone might have heard or seen in one of your ads should be useful in a search to find you and your content.
Take control of your video content. If you’ve aired commercials, make sure you’re the first to upload them to sites like YouTube and remember to embed the video on your website as well.

To ensure both your digital and offline marketing are coordinated, make sure that they share enough similarities, like keywords. Using keywords linked to your online content is the most efficient way to lead your customers from an offline piece of branding back to your website. Prospects will be left confused, frustrated, and with a sense of disconnect if one piece of marketing doesn’t lead to the other.

Learn how to coordinate your offline branding strategies with your online marketing tactics. If your customers see a print ad or TV commercial, you’re starting a conversation with them—one you should be able to finish online. Collaborate with the professionals who know how to coordinate your digital marketing efforts with intelligent, results-driven offline branding.

Our Lancaster marketing company works with clients on traditional and digital marketing campaigns. Give us a call to get started.

5 Things to Know About Reputation Management

Reputation management is about framing public perception of a company in a positive light. It involves shaping public opinion by influencing online information about that business, such as social media posts, search engine results, and user reviews. How the public perceives your business, goods, or services is your reputation, and managing that reputation is essential when user reviews and ratings are so influential in the minds of today’s consumer.

Your company’s reputation is always on the line, and protecting it is a full-time job. Managing your reputation starts with learning to prevent the negative comments and complaints from being lodged in the first place. Consider these user review statistics:

4 out of 5 prospects will be influenced to change their mind on a purchase based on reviews—good or bad
80% of consumers consider reviews to be on par with personal referrals in terms of trust
90% of all review searches end on the first page

The customer can be a company’s worst nightmare or the brand’s biggest advocate. With the rise in review sites and their increasing availability, they’re being used to praise or condemn companies on a daily basis. A reputation manager’s job is to proactively preserve your reputation by responding quickly and implementing preventive measures that minimize the amount of damaging comments and reviews you might receive.

To understand why this role is essential for businesses, here are five need-to-know facts about reputation management.

1. You can’t do it all by yourself

It takes an immense amount of work and attention to detail to manage a company’s reputation. There are social media accounts to keep up with and customer review sites like Yelp, Angie’s List, and Google Reviews to monitor. Not only that, but customers expect you to respond to their problems via tweet and Facebook post right away or their level of frustration multiplies. That’s a lot of demand per customer, not to mention it calls for someone willing to be unbiased, apologetic, and restrained in his or her responses.

Many companies have made the mistake of writing hasty replies to negative reviews, only to further damage their reputation in the eyes of customers. Respond quickly with the facts, but remember that your comment is going to be read by everyone, not just the reviewer.

2. Reputation management is about more than handling the negative…

It’s also about accentuating the positive.

A reputation manager will spend most of his or her time addressing complaints and reviews on social media, but they’re much more than simple damage control. Protecting your reputation first requires you to build it. Regular upkeep of social media accounts and ensuring your information is positive and telling of what your business does is necessary. It’s imperative that customers have quick, easy access to your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter pages; and that they know how to contact you in the event that they have a complaint, review, or compliment.

Keeping your reputation intact also necessitates regular updates to your social media platforms or blog. This continuous wave of content will allow an individual to direct your audience’s attention to your successes, rather than your failures, as may be the case with inactive social profiles. Content generation is key to burying any bad reviews and making your company seem like it’s keeping on top of providing a better service and experience.

3. You can encourage customers to leave honest reviews…

Just direct them to do so.

Nearly 80% of the tweets on customer service on any given week are negative in tone. By letting all of your customers know how and where they can give you feedback, you may be prompting satisfied customers to leave good reviews when they may not have otherwise done so.

If a client is happy with a product or service they may simply move on, glad to repeat the transaction in the future; but the same may be true of unhappy customers who may not leave any comment at all. Instead, they share their bad experience offline.

“A dissatisfied customer will tell between 9-15 people about their experience. Around 13% of dissatisfied customers tell more than 20 people,” according to the White House Office of Consumer Affairs.

Having negative reviews won’t instantly destroy your reputation. It’s how you handle those reviews that dictates how customers see you.

4. A few negative reviews won’t hurt you…

But how you handle them might.

While they say it takes 12 positive reviews to undo one complaint, your reputation manager should be well versed in dealing with poor customer experiences quickly and sympathetically.

Respond to these negative experiences promptly.

Tell the customer how you’ve taken measures to prevent their problem in the future, and have the confidence to invite them back once you’ve solved the issue.

Obsessing over or attacking the customers who leave negative reviews will only exacerbate the problem and your reputation.

5. Your reputation is built on what you’ve done…

Not what you are going to do

It would be easy for a business owner to sit down and rave about all of the changes they have in the pipeline, but promising change is not nearly as powerful as demonstrating it. Your reputation will be built upon your actions, not your intentions; and going overboard with future plans will do nothing to alleviate the problems your customers have today. To manage your reputation effectively, you have to focus on what you’re doing now.

A sincere apology for a poor customer experience
Prompt replies to customer questions and complaints
Improving the quality of a service or product as a result of a customer complaint

If you’ve done any of the above then that’s something you can point to as a positive highlight. It demonstrates your company’s ability to listen to a customer’s problem and solve it. Even if your customers have had a few bad experiences in the past, knowing that you work as hard to keep your current clients as you do to secure new ones says a great deal about your business.

When you consider that it costs roughly six times more to acquire a new customer than retain an existing one (Bain & Company), you’ll start to understand the value of keeping clients happy. Building your authority with a reputation manager will help you grow your client list and turn your current customers into loyal brand warriors.

If you’re looking for a marketing agency near you in Lancaster or nearby York and Harrisburg markets, make sure you give us a call. We’d love to help.

The Value of eBooks, Whitepapers, and Case Studies

Content is no longer the pawn of SEO experts and their optimization tactics. The likes of eBooks, whitepapers, and case studies have become powerful lead-generation tools for marketers and businesses everywhere. A solid whitepaper will effectively drive high-value leads by educating and engaging them. And a great whitepaper will become a powerful viral teaching tool once others begin to share it.

The three different kinds of collateral (eBooks, whitepapers, and case studies) can be used as part of an opt-in offer, as an incentive to lure in new subscribers, or in the case of case studies, illustrate how something was accomplished. Take a closer look at each one to understand the value and impact they can have on you, your business, and your industry.

EBooks

What can help your marketing efforts without seeming like a marketing tool?

An eBook.

These digital books allow you to reshape your content and direct its tone, increasing its overall value and demonstrating the worth of your business, service, or product—but in a very non-marketing way.

Not only are eBooks subtle on the sell, they also boast two very important benefits:

Short production time
Fast deployment

Their value comes from how easy they are to implement into current campaigns, and the minimal time and monetary expense associated with their production. EBooks can be turned out relatively quickly with the right content and be put to use almost instantly, giving marketers the opportunity to reinforce a campaign or promotion with the smallest expenditure of resources.

Besides being cost-effective, eBooks are an efficient way to reuse and repurpose larger pieces of content. For example, a collection of quality blog posts on the same topic could be turned into an eBook. This allows you to deliver your expertise to a targeted audience. From a technological standpoint, eBooks are all about convenience.

Companies can track URLs placed in eBooks to determine ROI of marketing costs, while providing an almost immediate call-to-action that readers can follow. Prospects won’t have to remember URLs when they can consult an eBook filled with offers, coupons, and checklists. Further, they can be tied to your brand, making eBooks a valuable brand image enhancer.

Whitepapers

Some might say that the value or relevance of whitepapers has diminished, but they would be wrong. More and more businesses are using whitepapers to engage their industries, by either teaching with them or learning something new. In Q2 2015, 78% of the content leveraged for lead generation were whitepapers.

As the goal of a whitepaper is to educate, they often do so in a thorough, accessible manner that provides only the most relevant of information to the reader. They’re also extremely influential in helping decision makers in evaluating purchases. For example, a whitepaper outlining the top five best tablets could be useful in weighing the pros and cons of each device and helping you reach an informed buying decision.

Because of their educational potential, whitepapers are also used to generate leads. They can outline the steps of the decision making process, highlight key benefits, and explain subject matter in an easy-to-digest fashion that speaks to your ideal customer. Their ability to drive top-of-the-funnel leads is what has made whitepapers so consistently popular among businesses.

Like eBooks, whitepapers are easy to deploy. Prospects can be directed to download links, or you can share the whitepaper content piecemeal as social media posts. Sharing segments of your latest whitepaper on Facebook or Twitter is useful for smaller businesses who need help populating their social media pages. Posts will engage their followers while driving focus back to the business’s website or a download link to the larger whitepaper.

Case studies

The purpose of a case study is straightforward: to prove what you’ve done through visuals, facts, and figures on how a given product or service has worked for a customer. Case studies also build trust with potential and future customers. This allows businesses to show, rather than tell, how their service or product can benefit prospects. Case studies act as clear narratives that move from problem to strategy to solution.

Case studies help build relationships through proven results. When you can hand or email a client a piece of collateral that shows them what you offer and how it has helped solve the problems of your clients, they gain a better understanding of how their relationship with your business will play out. They’re given an impression of what they can expect. And matching expectations with results is a powerful thing in marketing.

The specificity of case studies is another reason why they work so well. Not only do they address very specific subject matter, but they can also illustrate the problem, strategy, and solution process in a “how X helped Y do Z” way. This makes the content of the case study much more appealing and searchable to prospects who may be having the same problem.

Case studies can be printed pieces or accessed through a link on your website, such as a gallery page filled with case studies, or a news piece written about a recent success you or one of your clients have had. If testimonials are powerful, then case studies are exponentially more beneficial to share with customers and prospective clients.

A case study can illustrate, through hard numeric data, the benefit of your product or service. Not only that, but case studies can be used to demonstrate your business’s ability to solve very specific problems, further highlighting your given expertise.

True value of eBooks, whitepapers, and case studies

EBooks are a subtle marketing tool capable of providing marketers with actionable deliverables that are both convenient and inexpensive to produce. With whitepapers, the value comes from how powerful their ability to engage is, and how valuable they become to others as educational tools. Finally, case studies provide specific, in-depth content that contributes to better relationships between businesses and prospects.

The one thing these pieces of collateral share is their ability to engage prospects in meaningful ways. Ultimately, their value comes from the amount of control businesses have over the content, allowing them to target their ideal customer in effective new ways.

If you’re struggling to find a better way to start a dialogue with your customers, talk to the experts who know marketing collateral. We can help find the right combination of eBooks, whitepapers, and case studies to grab your customers’ attention—and keep it.