Are You Hitting the Right Digital Marketing Targets?

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Target Market|Are You Hitting the Right Digital Marketing Targets?When it comes to digital marketing and growing your brand over the internet, many companies tend to focus on website design–and for good reason. They might also invest in social media marketing strategies such as getting influencers on board or even growing an online brand persona. There are plenty of ways to get your product out there these days, but how do you know if you’re hitting the right targets?

In this post, we’ll be taking a look at a couple of ways to ensure that you’re not wasting your marketing budget by aiming at the wrong targets. We’ll walk you through a couple of simple steps that will help you ensure that your marketing budget is used in the most cost-effective way possible.

Understanding your audience

One of the first things to ask yourself is if you understand your audience or not. A lot of businesses will create an ideal customer profile and try to target them with their products, services and advertisements. However, there’s always a small chance that this ideal customer doesn’t actually exist.

Customer profiles can be used to help you start your business and develop products, but you ultimately need to listen to customer feedback and use real data to determine where you need to take your business. As such, make sure you listen to your audience and determine the type of customer that your products and services actually appeal to instead of trying to chase a fictional customer that might not even exist.

Make use of demographic targeting

Once you understand the type of customer you should be aiming for, it’s time to use targeted marketing to aim your marketing at the right people. Most social media services have some kind of targeted marketing settings where you can choose the demographics who your advertising will appear to. Platforms such as Facebook offer a fantastic number of demographic targeting settings to tweak in order to raise the quality of your leads.

There are also demand-side platforms that can help you save time and money when advertising your products and services. A DSP allows you to quickly set up a campaign with granular demographic targeting that fits your needs, and then the DSP does all the work to figure out how the ads should run. It saves you from having to buy digital ad space from publishers and it offers more predictable pricing.

Find the right platforms and channels to reach your audience

One of the most popular but misunderstood ways to reach your audience is to use social media advertising. By breaking into the right communities, you can go straight to your audience and start improving the quality of your leads. However, it’s important that you try to reach them on the right platforms and channels if you want to get the most out of your budget.

Demographic targeting is great, but you also need to think about the platforms you’re targeting them on. For instance, targeting seniors on a platform such as Twitter might not be as effective as traditional media such as newspapers, magazines and even TV. However, aiming your fashion-oriented products at users on Instagram is far more likely to work given the types of people that use the platform. In short, make sure you’re investing your advertising budget wisely by aiming at the right audiences.

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Target Market|Are You Hitting the Right Digital Marketing Targets?Working on your company’s reputation

Reputation is everything when it comes to today’s business landscape. We live in a connected world where everyone has a say in anything, and that includes your business’s reputation. Annoy one customer and they could spark a chain of boycotting if they have a sizable following on social media. Make one small mistake and your business’s reputation could get dragged through the mud by an angry and ill-informed mob. This is just the world we live in, hence why it’s vital that you need to focus on your company’s reputation if you want to reach your target audience.

Here are a couple of suggestions for improving your reputation to ensure your company reaches the right people:

  • Be transparent when it comes to issues that could cause trouble for your reputation
  • Don’t make promises that you can’t keep and ensure that you stick to them if you’ve made any–there’s nothing worse for a company’s reputation than false promises
  • If you’re facing a problem with your business and your audience, make sure you act quickly instead of letting the problem stew and get progressively worse by staying quiet
  • Always respond to criticism and questions from your audience if possible
  • Be a caring and ethical employer to show that your business can be trusted
  • Work with your audience and its communities to show that you care about their opinions

It can be difficult to maintain a good reputation for your business. However, if you’re an honest and trustworthy company that doesn’t engage in shady dealings, you’ll find that this can be surprisingly easy.

Speak the same language as your audience

Whether it’s jargon, idioms or technical terms, make sure that you’re speaking the same language as your audience. This will greatly improve your chances of reaching out to them on social media and will greatly improve customer relationships.

This can be made much easier if you have a community manager available to assist you. A dedicated role that is focused on communicating with your audience means that you’ll have a much easier time listening to them and understanding them. You can respond to their questions, take on their feedback and create a much better relationship with your audience.

It can be difficult to hit the right marketing targets especially if you haven’t already defined them yet. Having the right business strategy can greatly improve your chances of targeting the right audience and growing your company. With a limited marketing budget, it’s important that not a single penny goes to waste. With the correct marketing strategies and aiming at the right audiences, it can be much easier than you’d think.

The Dos And Don’ts Of Creating Effective Business Videos

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Business Video|The Dos And Don'ts Of Creating Effective Business VideosCreating valuable and interesting videos is one of the smartest things you can do if you want to get incredible results for your business. Your audience are more likely to watch a video, and far more likely to be entertained by it than by a blog post. A video can get across information in a much shorter amount of time, too, meaning you can spread your message easily and effectively.

If you’re thinking of creating effective videos for your business, read on for some dos and don’ts that will help you.

Do Offer Something Of Value

Don’t just make videos for the sake of making videos. You should offer something of value to the people who will be watching. Could you create a how-to tutorial, or give tips of some kind? Sharing your expertise will go a long way to ensuring people watch your content again and again.

Don’t Make It Boring

Although you’re providing value and trying to help your audience, there’s still no reason that your videos should be boring. Try to make them entertaining. Speak in an engaging way. Use a fun background and demonstrations. Do a little more than sit there and talk in a monotone voice.

Do Edit It Carefully

You will likely need to edit your video when you’re done to ensure it is as streamlined as possible. You may need to edit out moments where you take a long pause or lose your train of thought, for example. It also looks more professional if you don’t see you messing with the camera before/after the video.

Don’t Forget To Show Off Your Brand

Make sure you consider your brand throughout the video, and how you can use this as an opportunity to show people what your brand is all about. What is your brand voice and personality and how can you incorporate this? Think about it carefully and ensure you are consistent across all of your videos.

Do Know Who Your Target Audience Is?

You should know your target audience like the back of your hand. People who watch pharmaceutical videos are likely going to be very different to those who watch home DIY tutorials. They are two very different audiences and should be catered to accordingly. Make sure you create a few personas so you can work out how you’re going to entertain and engage the people watching.

Don’t Post The Same Thing On Every Single Platform

Posting the same thing on every platform can be a mistake. You’ll usually post a very different video on YouTube compared to TikTok for example, although both could be beneficial to your business. Make sure you know the differences between each platform.

Do Pay Attention To Your Video Analytics

Looking at your analytics will give you an idea of what is working for you and what you can perhaps improve on. Looking at these closely will help you to make better content in the future!

How will you make effective business videos? Leave a comment below!

How to Improve Your Website’s SE Ranking

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |SE Ranking|How to Improve Your Website’s SE RankingOnline shopping and businesses are thriving. Everyone is at home and needs items and services that they can buy online. Unfortunately, so too are your competitors. Trying to capture your customer base’s attention is fiercer than ever, with companies trying to offset their in-store income entirely online. To beat them, you need to diversify and focus on efforts that will help your business get to the top – the top of Google, the top of social feeds, and the top of their interest.

Hire an SEO Agency

First things first, if you want to improve where your website is located on a Google search, you will need to hire an SEO agency. There is a lot that needs to be done before you can start building your backlink profile, and all of it will help improve your SE ranking.

Audit Your Website

One of the first things that will need to be done is to improve your on-site SEO, which typically starts with an audit that looks for:

  • Lost or Broken Pages
  • Missing Pages
  • Content
  • Site Speed
  • Site Security
  • User Friendliness
  • Website visitor analytics (for this task, you can use website visitor tracking software)

Keyword Research

Keyword research is then conducted on your behalf to make sure that you know what your customers are searching for and what words they are using. You can then update your content and invest in better PPC campaigns.

Update Content

SEO optimized content is well-written, intended to entice your customers with punchy language and a compelling message. It is also designed to appeal to search algorithms that search through your site. On top of content updates, a new schema will be created to make it easier for these algorithms to understand your site and parse through it faster.

Offsite Link Building

Once on-site is optimized, it will be time to move offsite. White hat link building today looks like guest posts, where quality content in your niche will be added to other blogs and websites in your industry. It helps improve your organic reach and your SE ranking.

What You Can Do to Further Your SEO Campaign

SEO agencies can help improve the searchability and user appeal of your website, social media, and backlink profile. While they are working hard there, you will want to invest in:

PPC Marketing

PPC marketing will help you see results immediately, and you already have everything ready to go with your SEO efforts:

  1. A great site
  2. Keyword research

It is essential to know which keywords to invest in, however. Keywords can usually be organized based on buyer steps. At the very beginning of the buying process, customers are still researching what they want and are looking for. These keywords are often valued, and typically more expensive. If your goal is to gain a level of authority, then they are worthwhile to pay for, but if you want to boost sales, then paying for niche keywords or specific keywords should be your focus. As a bonus, these keywords are often cheaper.

Social Media Marketing

Finally, there is social media. You can pay for social media ads, but if you want to grow your business and customer loyalty, you will want to focus on good old engagement with the hope that users organically share and talk about your business on their own channels. This takes time, so start now and don’t cut corners – you need to be a real person when interacting with your customers.

3 Back End Web Design Mistakes That Are Ruining Your Business Site

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Back End Web Design|3 Back End Web Design Mistakes That Are Ruining Your Business SiteWhen designing a business website, it is important that you get all of the front end aspects right. Things like navigation and the overall aesthetic, for example, are incredibly important because they impact the way that users view your business and a poorly designed website will not convert. However, it is important that you don’t neglect all of the back end web design elements as well. Even though these may not seem as important, mistakes with the background design of the website can cause you some serious problems. These are some of the biggest back end web design mistakes that you need to avoid.

Poor Hosting

Hosting your site in the right place is absolutely vital, and if you do not have enough server space to accommodate the number of visitors that your site gets, it will run incredibly slowly. Poor hosting services also increase the chance of errors and site crashes, which lose you money as well. There is nothing more frustrating than a slow website or a site that keeps crashing, and potential customers won’t stick around and wait for pages to load, they will just give up and go elsewhere. It’s vital that you find a reliable hosting service for your website so you can be sure that it is always running smoothly.

Lack of On Page Optimization

When Google is trying to rank websites and decide who gets the number one spot, it takes a lot of different factors into account. If you are going to consistently rank well you need an on page optimization strategy in place. Things like titles and keywords in your content are important, but you also need to manage a lot of back end things like meta tags, URL structure, and meta descriptions. If you are unsure about how to manage these things, you should call in a company like Integrity Marketing to help you develop a strategy. Carefully crafted content will help to rank fairly well, but if you want to hit the top spot, you need to consider all of the back end elements of on page optimization as well.

Not Optimizing For Mobile

Over 50 percent of all web traffic comes from mobile devices and that figure is only going to get larger in the coming years. When people are searching for a business, they are more likely to take out their phone than they are to open a laptop, which is why optimizing for mobile is so important. If you only design a single version of your site and it is optimized for a computer or laptop, it will not run well on a mobile device. Users will soon become frustrated and give up, so you need to create a specific mobile version of the website as well. When you are choosing a web designer, make sure that you find one that has good experience creating mobile websites. You could also consider developing your own app if you want to improve the experience for mobile users even more.

These common back end mistakes can seriously impact the effectiveness of your website, so it is important that you avoid them.

Marketing Success: 7 Marketing Dos and Don’ts for Start Ups

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StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |marketing success |Marketing Success: 7 Marketing Dos and Don'ts for Start UpsNine out of ten startups will fail. Having a strong marketing strategy can make or break the successful launch of a business.

Does your startup have the marketing blueprint it needs to make it in 2020? Follow these seven keys to marketing success and avoid mistakes.

Do: Position Your Startup Correctly

A little bit of planning goes a long way for your startup. Positioning your business at the beginning is important for getting started on the right foot. It doesn’t have to be difficult.

Write down the problem you are trying to solve and how your company or product can solve it. Include who the product is for and why there is a need for the product. List all the benefits of the product and how your product or company is different from competitors.

Describe your product or company in simplistic terms and avoid buzzwords or jargon. The positioning statement should be easy to read and explain the idea behind your product or company.

The positioning statement is an internal document. No one outside the startup will see it. Proper planning can lead to the top positioning of your product or company in the minds of your ideal consumers.

Don’t: Forget About Your Competitors

Now that you have your positioning statement laid out, you should be able to easily identify your competitors. It may have been good advice in the past to focus solely on your own company or product, but these days startups can’t afford to forget about their competition.

Keeping an eye on your competition will help you react to market changes before they do. At the very least it will help your startup respond more quickly.

If you can’t think of any direct competitors at this time, keep an eye on companies or products with overlapping features or companies who are vying for the same target customer. Do they have an app? Are they offering delivery? What keywords are they using? There is no need to obsess over these details but keep them in mind.

Startups can also learn from their competitor’s mistakes. Perhaps a competitor grew too quickly or put out too many variations of the product before the market was ready. By watching the competition a startup can learn valuable information about the market and avoid costly marketing mistakes.

Do: Use Social Media for Marketing Success

Social media is one of the best tools a startup can use for marketing on a budget. Social media has a lot of different uses than just advertising your company or products.

Social media can help your startup with market research. Take a look at your competitor’s mentions or what people are saying about existing products and companies. Social media allows you to get inside your potential customer’s heads and read the thoughts they put online.

Social media can be a great platform to help you craft your startup’s voice. Is your startup’s voice laid back, funny, or informational? Experiment with different tones until you find the one that works for your startup and then stick with it.

Don’t: Assume You Know Everything

A big marketing mistake lots of startups make is assuming they know everything about the market and what their customers want. Instead, startups should approach the customer and markets with a curious mind.

  • When was the last time you had a conversation with customers?
  • Have you ever conducted a focus group?
  • Do you give customers a chance to provide feedback through surveys?

Reading product reviews online and listening to customer feedback is a great opportunity for startups to hear directly from their customers. Take advantage of these feedback tools and keep an open mind about the feedback you receive.

Do: Use Email Marketing

Email marketing is a cost-effective strategy to include in your marketing work. People who sign up for your startup’s email marketing list are already highly engaged with your company and product. This means that it should be easy to make a sale or a repeat sale.

Setting up an email list for your startup should be a priority. Invite people you know to sign up for your email marketing list who may be interested in your company or product. Then ask your friends to share the emails with their friends.

Email marketing can help startups drive revenue through consistent interaction. Email your customers to let them know about sales or discounts and when new products launch. You can also send newsletters with educational information or testimonials from previous customers.

Don’t: Forget About Mobile

72.6% of all internet users will access the internet via their smartphones by 2025. That’s almost three-quarters of all internet users! Startups in today’s world must realize the importance of marketing on mobile and making their websites mobile-friendly.

Perhaps during your customer research, you have learned that your targeted customers like to use a certain app to keep organized or listen to a particular sports podcast. Mobile marketing can help you easily reach these customers.

With more and more people accessing webpages on their smartphone, it’s a good idea to optimize your webpage for mobile.

  • Can the website font be easily read without squinting?
  • Are the buttons large enough to tap?
  • Is your website easy to navigate on a mobile device?

Accessing the internet on a mobile device versus a desktop computer is only going to get more popular. By fixing these issues now, your website can achieve top positioning in search engines.

Do: Invest in a Blog

Dedicate a page on your website to a blog for your business. A blog can help your SEO and is indispensable in marketing because it is a platform that you own.

The last thing you want to do is build your entire marketing strategy on social media platforms who are constantly changing their algorithms.

Consistent blogging can also help your startup gain visibility. Think of it as your own social media platform of sorts. Blogging will help connect to your fans and support your business in many ways as it grows.

Marketing Success Is Within Your Reach

We all make mistakes, but not having a solid marketing plan could cost your startup.
Share these seven takeaways with your fellow entrepreneurs and set your startup for marketing success.