Digital marketing: Truly the future of marketing

Digital marketing is really important in today’s time not only because it is growing at a very fast pace but also because it is undoubtedly the future of marketing. As it is growing it is of no wonder that soon all other traditional marketing forms will disappear and digital marketing will replace all of them.

There will be some generations who will be unhappy at the loss of paper newspapers, books and old fashioned communication methods, on the other hand the new generations who have grown up with internet and mobile phones are already embracing the brave new world of digital consumption. Technology has really put business in the digital age where the marketing methods are faster, versatile and more practical.

WHEN IS THE RIGHT TIME TO CALL IN A DIGITAL MARKETING AGENCY?

With so many tools available to business owners it’s never been easier to take on the challenge of marketing your brand in the digital age. From free WordPress templates to dedicated marketing software you can do an incredible amount yourself if you have the necessary time and know-how.

So when comes the moment where you need to call in a digital marketing agency to take your online performance to the next level? The answer is different for every business and you’ll have to consider a few important points before you find the right answer – which is what we’re looking at today.

How Much Time Do You Have For DIY Marketing?
Time is money and the toughest thing about marketing a brand is the hours it takes to make the magic happen. A PPC keyword strategy, for example, turns into an entire project when you have to draw your initial list of keywords and negative keywords, before you can write your ad copy, measure results and later tweak your ads to improve performance.
A digital marketing agency has the experts to carry out this workload as quickly as possible, with the knowledge and experience to get results. Sure, you have a range of tools available to do the leg work yourself, but you have to ask how valuable your own time is and weigh this up against the cost of an agency.

Do You Have The Know-How To Make It Profitable?
We touched on it in the last point, but a crucial factor in digital marketing is the knowledge you need to make effective decisions. There are so many variables in this game and it’s easy to get lost in a sea of data with no clue where to go next. Without the necessary know-how you’ll never make DIY marketing time-effective, which touches back on the previous point.
You never stop learning in this game and, while the basics are well documented across the web, you need more than a beginner’s guide to get the edge on your competition. You may be comfortable with getting your own marketing strategy up and running, but you want to make sure you get the foundations spot on and call in an agency when it gets too much to handle alone. The key point is your marketing strategy needs to be profitable and if you can’t do this with the time and knowledge you have available, then it’s time to call in the pros.

Budget Vs ROI
Speaking of profitability, you have to weigh up two crucial factors: your marketing budget and projected ROI. When you put your marketing budget together, don’t underestimate the value of your time or the cost of marketing mistakes. The DIY approach is certainly cheaper on paper, but it could cost you more in the long run and stunt your progress as a business.

As for return on investment, this is difficult to predict unless you know digital marketing inside out and have a solid strategy in place. You may need an agency from day one to put a profitable marketing strategy together and give you a realistic ROI to expect. This will help you calculate a suitable budget to get the results you need, as well as keep you on the right track going forward.

Credits:

https://www.hotclickmarketing.co.uk/when-is-the-right-time-to-call-in-a-digital-marketing-agency/

5 Important And Helping Rules Of Customer Retention...

Estimates vary, but it’s very clear that generating a sale from an existing customer is much easier than doing so with a new one. According to Marketing Metrics the “probability of selling to an existing customer is "60 – 70%. The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5-20%” With that information in tow, it becomes increasingly obvious that as marketers we should be tripling our effort on these existing customers versus our new ones. The problem is retention is so much less sexy than acquisition. How do we attack this reality and address it? At our firm we espouse:

“The 5 Sexy Rules of Customer Retention”

• 1. Recognize customers from their online footprint

This one requires the highest degree of technical aptitude and might actually be the newest of our five. The principle here is that if you have a log-in feature and returning customers come back to your site and are sticky than you win. Customer portals are a strong and deep ways to tie together a customer with a brand and if your customer comes to you without any pushing than you are doing a great job (same thing if they download your app). The more complex and technical way to approach this is to try and utilize data in their application that “recognizes” this customer and can verify their identity through a series of questions. A brand we work with employs this exact technique and the form fill rates for those returning customers dwarfs that of the new users (approx. 61% versus 31%).

• 2. Reward them with stuff

Give them a hat. Or an umbrella. Whatever you want to give them is great. People love free stuff. A non-scientific study of this subject points out that 100% of people love free things. On a serious note, a timed reminder of your services can be an incredibly valuable tool for any business. Obviously there can be a great degree of cost here and your boss might ask why we are spending money on a customer we already have, but the point is you need to do this. Just one lifelong customer can come from the nice pen on their desk or the calendar in the office.

• 3. Reduce friction when possible

From cart abandon rates to lost passwords there are people and industries dedicated this exact pressure point in the customer experience. We all want to be able to complete our task quickly. If we forgot the username and password it is just one more thing we have to do before we finish our task. If our credit card number isn’t validating on a form, we are going to grow impatient. The point is you need to test and re-test your fill rates. Try different names on your form fields to see if you can get folks through quicker. A service like Optimizely is a great one for this kind of testing (this isn’t a plug—it is simply an awesome product).

• 4. VIP treatment via email

Email is the delicate third rail of customer retention. We want to stay in front of our customers but we also don’t want to piss them off. How do you deal with this? With kid gloves. Be sure to test with minimal saturation in the beginning. Monitor those spam complaints and do not bombard these valuable customers.

• 5. Don’t be dumb

Don’t do dumb things. Don’t sell lists of your most valuable customers. Don’t remarket unrelated products to them. No, your valuable customers don’t want to hear from you about unrelated products that have nothing to do with your core competencies.

Just be smart with your returning customers. They are your more valuable commodity (aside from your staff). Be good to them. Nurture them. Treat them like friends—after all, they are!

credits:

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/2015-05-10/5-sexy-rules-customer-retention?hootPostID=3a825880872eff16932d8a49400bf368

Digital Marketing: It's Beyond Website Designing....

As everyone is moving from traditional advertising methods towards digital marketing, the market gets increasingly competitive and vast. Its is not confined to your local area anymore. To make your business stand out from the crowd it is more crucial to look into various means of digital media which is not only confined to website designing but also build strategy to put potential customers first and  monitor competitors to make you excel in the world.

How to Publish Content that Caters to Natural Consumption Behavior

How to maximize content marketing cost by understanding, and catering to, the various ways that people read. In other words, break down your readership and place the things that they each care most about where they will naturally find it.

For nearly as long as newspapers and magazines have been entertaining and informing the masses, publishers have known that they need to appeal to essentially three kinds of readers: Skimmers, Readers, and Examiners.

• Skimmers glance at headlines and captions – they fly right through it
• Readers dig a little deeper and read subheads, introductions and summaries, captions & pull-quotes, and charts & graphs – they take more time than skimmers
• Examiners read every word in the body copy – take the most time of all

Publishers appeal to these varying behaviors by breaking up their articles into digestible little bits and pieces so that each type of reader gets a little something from a single publication.

In short, Skimmers get a glimpse of what is happening, Readers know a bit more, and Examiners know everything. Everyone is happy.

VALUABLE LESSONS FOR MARKETERS

This same framework can be used when publishing longer B2B marketing documents such as white papers, case studies, business cases, entire websites, and more.

But first, a little background…

As marketers, we first identified three roles in an organization that typically evaluate our services. Here is our target audience: CMO at the top, VP/Director of Marketing in the middle, and Marketing Managers/Art Directors/and others at the bottom (no offense, those are just the labels we use).

Then we profiled what those people care most about (as it applies to the services we offer) and applied relevant keywords to each. For instance, we feel:

• CMOs care most about building their brand, engaging customers, empowering the sales force, and getting ROI from their investments so they can increase market share (and more) and impress the CEO and the Board.
• VPs and Directors care most about aligning the right message with the right audience, assuring their teams are productive, delivering great leads to the sales head, and looking good to the CMO.
• Marketing Managers, Art Directors and others care most about delivering the right thing, delivering it on time, and impressing their VP or Director boss.

Since CMOs have so much on their minds, they likely will simply skim a long document that they’ve come across – in our case, a paper that discusses how to maximize visual assets that we published several months ago. In our white paper they see things that align with their goals in places like headlines and captions. Happy with what they’ve seen, the CMO passes it along to a subordinate for further investigation.

So the VP or Director gets their hands on it and they dig a little deeper and read things that they care about in places like introductory paragraphs, sidebars, pull-quotes, etc. So, in a single document, in addition to the things that the CMO is interested in, the VP or Director also finds things that interest them. It looks interesting but they too are too busy to read every word so they pass the document along to one of their subordinates to confirm that we truly can deliver what we say. And alas, the Marketing Managerexamines all the nitty gritty details about working with us. They are convinced that we are a great company to work with and back up the org chart we go. And, naturally, this works the same way had the VP or Director found it first or if the Marketing Manager came across it first.

To illustrate how it works, below is our white paper on how we develop marketing content that incorporates the psychology of sharing and memorability to maximize exposure. To show how our three audience-level publishing structure works, we’ve shrunk down the first couple of pages to make room to annotate it.

Each person gets exactly what we want him or her to know about us because the things that interest them are in places where they are most likely to find them. One document for many people, each getting just what they want, and they’re all headed to the same conclusion: Interplay gets it.

Here’s how to do this in your own documents:

1. Write down everything your audience gets from your solution. Not what it does, but how it improves your customers’ lives, bottom line, productivity, and more. Short phrases work best.
2. Break apart your audience into three hierarchical groups. You might already have such groups profiled and saved as personas for your inbound marketing efforts.
3. Apply each of the topics in step 1 into each of the three groups in step 2.
4. Shrink each topic for the top-level audience into a few keywords, leave short phrases as is for the mid-level audience, and expand on phrases into longer descriptions for the lower-level audience. You shouldn’t have more than about 5 for each group. Save these as persona-based keywords.
5. As an added benefit, you now have a bunch of SEO keywords and phrases, some of which might be new. In fact, grab your current SEO keyword list and see if the exercise has revealed additional phrases that you can add to it.
6. Add the top words and phrases from your SEO list beneath the phrases you saved in step 4.
7. Write the document or web page (or re-write an existing one) with the phrases from step 4 in their rightful places and also sprinkle the most applicable SEO terms throughout those same sections. Of course, the headlines and captions might get a bit crowded so you might need to just focus on the most important or applicable ones.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

By strategically placing topics that matter to various segments of your target market, you can attract all of them with a single document. As that document gets passed around, they each can gain something from it, and find those things easily because they are in places that match their natural consumption habits.

By serving all of layers of a target customer in one document, companies can reduce publishing costs.

Credits:

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/2015-05-10/how-publish-content-caters-natural-consumption-behavior?hootPostID=013cc72f0e31fc6f1e43353cae345956

The Greatest Advantage Of The Specialist Shop Is The Low Cost Of Winning The Work.....

Depending on the type of consultancy you are thinking about creating, there is a very good chance that you will find yourself working with other agencies and consultancies as your clients.

Indeed, if you plan on being a specialist shop, you may always find yourself working with agencies as clients.

Working with agencies has many advantages, to be sure. There can also be some challenges. But for all but a select few consultancies, other agencies will be a significant component of your work for a long period of time.

This is, on the face of it, not necessarily an obvious notion. Many people, when starting a services shop, envision themselves working primarily -- or exclusively -- with brands.

Early on in your career, it’s worthwhile to develop a plan and a point of view when it comes to working with agencies. Do you want to work primarily for agencies? Now? Forever? What is your ultimate goal?

For us, agencies were a means to an end. My partner Benjamin said more than once, “Working with agencies allows us to work on a larger stage with larger brands. One day we will be able to do this on our own. But for now, they are necessary.”

This was our plan: to work with agencies for as long as it took to grow our business, establish our reputation, and hone our craft. Over time, we would wean ourselves off of them.

Other shops I know work exclusively with other agencies and love it. They love not having to deal with clients. They love working on projects they wouldn’t get otherwise. They love the ease of repeat work. This is totally okay. Develop a plan.

The Advantages of Working With Other Agencies

Low Cost of Winning Work

Perhaps the greatest advantage for the specialist shop that is working with other agencies is the low cost of winning the work. If, for example, you are a UX or a digital product consultancy, winning work directly from clients can be a time-consuming process. In many cases, the client is almost completely uneducated about your offering, the challenges in the marketplace, or the very basics of developing, say, an iOS app (these specific examples will, of course, eventually be dated, but the concept will remain).

If this particular client has a lead agency, however, that agency can bear a lot of the heavy lifting on that sale, teaching the client and establishing the strategic need. This is a bunch of work you will not have to do.

Low project acquisition costs are also reinforced by the fact that you only have to maintain good relationships with a few key agencies, and they can then bring multiple projects to you. It’s only so often that a brand needs a new website, or iOS app, or even a print ad. The agency, by contrast, often needs these things, as their whole raison d’être is to get their clients up to speed on the latest brand and marketing techniques.

Less Pitching

One more low-acquisition-cost benefit: often with agency work, you don’t have to pitch to win the job. That is the agency’s problem. At least, you don’t have to pitch in the traditional sense, with a giant presentation, a dog and pony show, comped boards, and so on.

Early in our company’s history, we were chasing a large job with Goodby and Saturn. I went all out on the pitch. Comps, detailed wireframes, a massive strategy document, all totaling some 60 pages in proposal form. The producer at Goodby said, “This is great, but I really just need a one-pager with your price and timing.” I sent it. Boom. Done. I never had to send anything OTHER than simple pricing and timing to Goodby for years, at least, until the jobs got more daring, more complex, and higher budget.

Being able to win jobs by just sending in pricing and timing, and maybe a paragraph of thinking is glorious. Wonderful. Advertising nirvana. Agencies -- good agencies -- can provide this.

Work With People Who Know What They’re Doing (Relatively Speaking)

Another concrete luxury of working with agencies as clients is that they have a robust account service corps. They are responsible for maintaining the relationship with the client. You are not. This is great. I cannot overemphasize how wonderful it is not to have to deal with angry clients. This is not to say you won’t have to maintain your relationship with the agency, but by and large, this is a far less difficult undertaking.

Agency people are busy. They want problem solvers; they want you to get things done.

By working with agencies, you can keep your relationships with your clients -- the agencies -- lightweight. One or two people should be able to maintain your relationship with five to 10 agencies. By contrast, maintaining relationships with five to 10 brand clients, directly, can require a minimum of ten and up to thirty or forty people.

Remember: in the beginning at a high-growth services company, your goal is to bring in as many quality billings as quickly and cheaply as possible. Doing this without having to hire a robust account staff serves both of these goals.

Work With More Sophisticated Clients Faster

We are referring specifically to the sophistication of the work and the quality of the brand.

Now, far be it from me to claim that agencies have a handle on the outermost realms of digital marketing, but I can say working for GM, Pepsi, Nike, or a car company will get your shop noticed faster than a bunch of work for local bars and restaurants, even if they are really, really cool.

Some people may understand this work comes through another agency, and some of them may count that against you, but they are few and far between. By and large, your work will be noticed more, and your opportunities to do better work are expanded if you work for higher quality brands.

Credits:

http://blog.hubspot.com/agency/growth-partnering-agencies?utm_campaign=Agency%20Post%20Social%20Media&utm_content=15051412&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter

Happy Mothers Day To All Of You!!!!!!