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Digital Marketing

Social Media Audit: Gain the Competitive Edge You Need

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Using social media in a way that resonates with your audience, builds trust, improves engagement, and drives sales begin with accurate insight

Twitter me this: What do most companies wrestle with when it comes to using social media tools? If you guessed “ROI” (return-on-investment), you earned a red heart (on Twitter, you can “like” a tweet by tapping the red heart icon).

While it’s important to sort out what type of social content you should produce to generate sales or accomplish other strategic goals, there’s an even greater uphill climb for businesses using social media to conquer: defining a holistic digital marketing strategy.

Furthermore, and as noted by the Harvard Business Review, research shows consumers’ so-called “electronic word-of-mouth” referrals or remarks on social networks about businesses and their services can significantly affect a company’s perceived value.

What Is a Social Media Audit?

Whether it’s determining your company’s ROI using social media, figuring out an end-to-end digital marketing strategy, both, or striving to reach other corporate goals, a social media audit is a research-based way to ascertain whether you’re achieving results using the social tools you are, and where you may be falling short.

It can also provide insight into which social channels you need to be on, and which ones to switch off if they’re not producing any tangible results. For example, does your company need to spend time using Snapchat or Pinterest? Are your customers or the bulk of your targeted audience using those platforms? An audit can help you find out.

It can also show you what posts or content you shared resonated the most with your customers, or that generated the greatest amount of engagement.

“To ask, ‘what is the ROI of social media?’ makes as much sense as asking, ‘what’s the ROI of the telephone?”
– SAMUEL SCOTT

Why Vetting Your Social Presence Is Paramount

Some of the primary benefits an audit of your social network presence includes:

  • Competitive intelligence.

    Get the lay of your competitive landscape by analyzing what your primary and secondary competitors are doing on social networks. Take note of both the good and bad because it can help you and your team be more effective with your efforts.
  • Audience analysis. 

    Who is your audience and what social networks are they on? Do you have any social influencers or people who engage with you frequently? And what are your primary objectives for using social networks? A social media audit won’t definitively answer all of these questions – that’s where a social strategy comes in – but it will help you compile the information you need to get there.
  • It’s the foundation for your social marketing strategy.

    To accomplish corporate goals using social media, you must have a thoughtful plan. To establish an in-depth and forward-looking social media marketing plan, you need to review how and what results you’ve achieved to date.
  • It’s integral to measuring your digital marketing performance.

    You need to know where your company is in the social media sphere. An audit can help you shift from a broadcasting mentality to one of engagement. That’s the genesis for building trust with your customers and followers: being helpful and creating value.

Are you ready to aim a magnifying glass on your social media performance? Get in touch. A social media audit can help you identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats you need to understand in order to develop an impactful social marketing strategy.

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Digital Marketing

Social Media Management is About Being Helpful and Creating Value

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Your company’s social strategy needs to be about more than simply chasing click-thrus or likes and growing follower counts

Engaging with existing and prospective customers on social networks effectively, growing those audiences, and racking up followers and ‘likes’ or stars is a matter of providing audiences with useful and engaging content. But the number of followers you have, and the amount of likes and stars you accumulate shouldn’t be your primary goal. Far from it.

Pardon the buzzword, but on social channels, engaging effectively with people requires producing what’s known as “snackable content” (short-form content that is easily and quickly consumed whether on a mobile device or otherwise; like a tweet, short video, or an infographic). At other times, and depending on the subject and social platform, it also means consistently producing long-form and long-tail content of high quality that is either educational, informative, or which provides value to your intended audience in some way. After all, as business strategist and author Dion Hinchcliffe once wrote, “we need to understand that digital engagement is a moving target.” Indeed.

Recognizing and understanding that necessity is crucial to evolving your company into what’s known as a “next-generation enterprise.” Certainly, the ongoing development of various technologies – social tools, analytics, big data, the mobile web, the Internet of Things – and their convergence with digital marketing, as well as the personalization of content, is the key to cultivating and unleashing your business’s digital DNA.

“Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person – a real person you know, or an imagined person – and write to that one.”
– JOHN STEINBECK

Making the Social Transformation

It’s worthwhile to note in its “Building Your Digital DNA” report, professional services consultancy Deloitte recommends companies consider three core factors when looking to enhance their digital maturity levels: leadership, talent management, and organizational design.

Concerning organizational design, the report states, “Culturally open, dynamic, and flexible structures built on mutual trust are the basis for the information economy, and should be a long-term aspiration for many organizations.”

Thus, becoming what’s often referred to in digital marketing circles as a “social business” does not mean creating a company profile on every social network under the sun and blaring out your marketing messages with wild abandon. Furthermore, your social media marketing strategy should not be concocted outside of your overall marketing blueprint. It’s an integral part of that plan, not an afterthought or an outlier.

Cultivating your digital DNA and contending with rapid change requires asking questions about how and what your firm does what it does, why it matters, and to whom. Doing so will not only help you define a thoughtful, well-rounded digital marketing strategy, but it will also spur your employees to think of new innovative ways to do their jobs, and in turn, grow your business.

Enabling New Business Opportunities

Your social strategy needs to be bold and in-depth. It needs to be about more than simply chasing click-thrus and growing follower counts. Using social media tools effectively for business is not a meaningless popularity contest. It demands less navel-gazing and more listening to what your audience is saying. To put it another way, no one cares about photos of your grinning employees at a conference they’re attending, posted without context. They are more likely to care about what those employees think about or heard from others on any given subject at that event.

If it’s a broader audience you’re after, then you need to put their interests and concerns at the forefront of your social strategy. You need to think of your followers or readers as prized acquaintances that must be respected and intelligently engaged. That may require your company to adapt and quickly to address their concerns or satisfy their demand for knowledge as it relates to your business’s products, services, or industry.

Did you know that the Canada-Ontario Jobs Grant can provide your business with funding to train your team on how to use social media effectively? If you need assistance charting a new course for your organization’s social strategy, let’s chat.

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Branding & Design

5 Ways a Professional Designer Can Make Your Printed Materials Sing

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A combination of digital and traditional marketing materials can build brand loyalty and spur sales. But if your printed collateral falls short of expectations, it can bruise your reputation

Get ahead of the rush to prepare for trade show season and be ready to wow conference attendees and increase your sales leads with professionally designed printed marketing materials.

Taking the helter-skelter approach to your professional printing requirements prior to a major trade show or customer presentation is stressful. More importantly, scrambling at the last moment to have new trade booth banners, brochures, and business cards printed, cut, and delivered on time and on spec can be risky. Why? Because you’re leaving yourself no margin for error and no time to fix any imperfections that crop up. Mistakes made at the print shop in the rush to be ready for your next trade show are expensive, irreversible, and completely avoidable. And what if your last-minute delivery doesn’t arrive on time?

The quality and appearance of your company’s printed matter are mission-critical. Anything less than exemplary is unacceptable and potentially harmful to your firm’s reputation. Design and print go hand-in-hand, but they are not one and the same. There is a great deal of strategy and skill required to ensure the translation between your digital design properties and the printing press are accurate and as you envision them.

“The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.”
– JOHN RUSKIN

A Worthwhile Investment

An experienced, professional designer has the knowledge required to set up any size or type of design for a print shop flawlessly. It is a critical point to bear in mind since mistakes can be costly when they’re made by a printer whose expertise does not include the finer points of graphic design.

Through their work, a knowledgeable and seasoned designer who is familiar with the printing lexicon will ensure your printed materials are neither delayed nor rife with rookie errors. Five important things designers focus on for print-related requirements include:

  1. The difference between RGB and CMYK. RGB (red, green, blue) are primary colours of light. CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and key or black) are the primary colours of ink used in printing. Your computer monitor uses RGB colours. Print shops use CMYK colours. To print digital designs on a four-colour press, the RGB colours must be converted to CMYK, but in doing so, their appearance can change significantly. Hence, colour conversion is a delicate affair best not left to chance.
  2. What the Tristimulus colourimeter reads. In the fascinating world of colourimetry (the science of describing our perception of colour), a Tristimulus colourimeter is a device that measures the quality, intensity, and hue of colours omitted by a computer monitor. It helps designers to calibrate the colour levels on their monitors to accurately match the levels of the printer.
  3. Being mindful of Pantone colour coverage. With more than 1,000 Pantone spot colours available to commercial printers, it is the industry standard spot colour printing system they rely on when mixing inks to produce colours on printed materials. Pantone colours are listed by number, and how they translate into print also depends on whether or not the paper stock is coated or uncoated.
  4. Understanding how to use bleed effectively. In commercial printing, bleed refers to the elements of a design that touch the edge of a page without leaving a white margin. The bleed area is what is trimmed off of printed materials. For designers, knowing what the bleed is helps them determine how digital artwork files need to be set up before they’re sent to the printer.
  5. Triple checking the spelling and kerning. If words are misspelled or the spacing between letters and words is out of whack, changing them digitally is no big deal. Errors of this nature on printed materials, however, is another matter entirely (and a costly one).

Generating Sales with Slick Printed Materials

Professionally designed and produced printed materials – whether for the trade show circuit, a direct mail campaign, or as handouts in your office’s lobby – can reinforce brand loyalty among your existing customers, and help your sales force generate new leads. In fact, producing printed business materials is an important part of complete content campaign strategy.

Moreover, and according to a study conducted by MarketingProfs, three out of four small businesses prefer using both print and online channels as part of their marketing strategies because it tends to produce the best return-on-investment.

Do you have marketing materials that need to be printed for an upcoming trade show? Talk to us before you randomly pick a printer.

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Web Design & Development

What is Web Design?

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Design is the process of collecting ideas, and aesthetically arranging and implementing them, guided by certain principles for a specific purpose. Web design is a similar process of creation, with the intention of presenting the content on electronic web pages, which the end-users can access through the internet with the help of a web browser.

Elements of Web Design

Web design uses many of the same key visual elements as all types of design such as:

Layout: This is the way the graphics, ads and text are arranged. In the web world, a key goal is to help the view find the information they seek at a glance. This includes maintaining the balance, consistency, and integrity of the design.

Colour: The choice of colours depends on the purpose and clientele; it could be simple black-and-white to multi-coloured design, conveying the personality of a person or the brand of an organization, using web-safe colours.

Graphics: Graphics can include logos, photos, clipart or icons, all of which enhance the web design. For user friendliness, these need to be placed appropriately, working with the colour and content of the web page, while not making it too congested or slow to load.

Fonts:  The use of various fonts can enhance a website design. Most web browsers can only read a select number of fonts, known as “web-safe fonts”, so your designer will generally work within this widely accepted group.

Content: Content and design can work together to enhance the message of the site through visuals and text. Written text should always be relevant and useful, so as not to confuse the reader and to give them what they want so they will remain on the site. Content should be optimized for search engines and be of a suitable length, incorporating relevant keywords.

Creating User-Friendly Web Design

Besides the basic elements of web design that make a site beautiful and visually compelling, a website must also always consider the end user. User-friendliness can be achieved by paying attention to the following factors.

Navigation: Site architecture, menus and other navigation tools in the web design must be created with consideration of how users browse and search. The goal is to help the user to move around the site with ease, efficiently finding the information they require.

Multimedia: Relevant video and audio stimuli in the design can help users to grasp the information, developing understanding in an easy and quick manner. This can encourage visitors to spend more time on the webpage.

Compatibility: Design the webpage, to perform equally well on different browsers and operating systems, to increase its viewing.

Technology: Advancements in technology give designers the freedom to add movement and innovation, allowing for web design that is always fresh, dynamic and professional.

Interactive: Increase active user participation and involvement, by adding comment boxes and opinion polls in the design. Convert users from visitors to clients with email forms and newsletter sign-ups.

Treefrog’s Toronto web design professionals create excellent User Interface (UI) Design for a satisfying web experience. They use critical planning and analysis for the design and they pay attention to individual client specifications, converting the intricate process into a simple and elegant piece of art.

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Digital Marketing

Influencer Marketing: Putting Your Customers at the Heart of Things

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Taking a more personal, magnified approach to your marketing efforts can yield impressive results

The notion of influencer marketing has gained significant traction in the global marketing community over the last few years and for good reason: in our social media-driven world, influencer or influence marketing is an increasingly important customer acquisition and retention strategy.

What is influencer marketing? It’s a practice that involves focusing your social media outreach efforts on one person or a specific group of people who may be able to influence others to buy your products or services. Ideally, the followers of these influencers may become your most ardent and loyal customers. As you and community influencers help to create advocates, these advocates add their voluntary efforts on social networks to promote your business to your broader marketing strategy. But to encourage people to become your third-party influence marketers, you need to pay close attention to them first.

According to data contained in We Are Social’s “Digital 2016” report, there are more than 2.3 billion daily active social media users. Of that massive worldwide audience, users prefer knowledgeable online influencers instead of traditional advertising tactics. Additionally, and according to data from MDG Advertising, 70% of internet users want to learn about products through content rather than through traditional advertisements.

“Solving the problem means helping the customer to understand why you’re the best person for the job.”
– CHRIS MURRAY

Personalized Messaging Turns Customers into Fans

It’s common knowledge that word-of-mouth referrals from friends and family are typically the major driver of consumers’ purchasing decisions. Data gathered by McKinsey & Company found word-of-mouth referrals from a trusted source is the primary influential factor behind 20% to 50% of all consumer purchasing decisions. And influencer marketing is the evolution of the word-of-mouth methodology through socially targeted messaging or personalization.

In both business-to-business (B2B) business-to-consumer (B2C) industry verticals, customers crave personalized messages from the brands to which they have an intellectual or emotional connection. It’s an excellent way to keep your existing customer base and your business partners engaged, and it should be a cornerstone of your social media marketing efforts.

Targeted personalized messaging boosts brand loyalty, and it can inspire delighted customers to become evangelists or influencers who will speak well of your business on social networks. That, in turn, will help grow your audience, and ultimately increase sales.

Why Influencer Marketing Matters

There are a few ways third-party influencer marketers can help your brand grow its sphere of influence and, over time, its revenues:

  • They have access to a different and possibly a larger audience than your company does
  • High-quality content you share online may not be taken at face value, but if an influencer shares it, it’s more likely you’ll get the click-thrus you desire
  • It will help you build meaningful, long-lasting relationships with your customers

Do you want to learn how your organization can leverage the power of influencer marketing to grow your revenues? Drop us a line.

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Digital Marketing

Why Are SEO Discovery and Audit Services Important?

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Effective SEO isn’t solely about how your website ranks in an organic Google search

Search engine optimization (SEO) is vital to your company’s online presence. The purpose of SEO is to obtain high visibility for your website on Google, Bing, Yahoo! and elsewhere by ensuring it ranks on the first page of the organic searches people perform. In other words, SEO makes it easy for your customers to find you online.

An oft-misunderstood online marketing tactic, SEO is an increasingly vast and complex methodology, and it’s one of many crucial elements comprising a holistic digital marketing strategy. Search engines rank websites based on multiple factors; no one digital marketing method alone will rocket your website to the top of Google’s list and keep it there indefinitely, and that includes SEO.

The effectiveness of SEO is reliant on many other components and services including:

Done well, SEO can improve your search engine rankings, thereby increasing your website’s organic traffic, and in turn, helping you score new customers, earn more revenue, and realize a high return on your SEO investment. But understand SEO isn’t only about your site’s ranking. One of your webpages may be ranking well for a keyword you’ve identified as relevant to your business, but if visitors to that webpage aren’t finding what they need quickly upon arrival, they’ll “bounce” or go elsewhere. Thus, user engagement is a major factor in Google’s determination of the value of any website. If large volumes of visitors are leaving your website rapidly, it will hurt your overall SEO ranking in the long run.

Research from multiple sources has quantified the value SEO provides for companies in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) industry verticals. For instance, when conducting online procurement research an estimated 89% of B2B professionals start with a generic search. From a B2C perspective, about 72% of consumers who perform an organic search for a specific product or service visited a store or business within 8 kilometres of their location, and four out of five consumers use a search engine to find businesses in their vicinity.

However, like all things within the realm of business, there is no magic wand to wave that will produce instantaneous results. SEO involves research and analysis. Among the first steps to improving your site’s SEO ranking requires what’s known as an SEO discovery and audit session. It helps to determine which of your webpages are ranking as per targeted keywords, which ones aren’t, and what needs to be done to improve overall performance.

“Discovery consists of looking at the same thing as everyone else and thinking something different.”
– ALBERT SZENT-GYÖRGYI DE NAGYRÁPOLT

Learning about Your Business and Customers

Before an in-depth site audit is performed to gauge the health of your website’s current SEO ranking and how it can be improved, a pre-audit discovery session is required. An integral part of an effective SEO strategy, the purpose of a discovery session is straightforward: it sets the stage for an organized, useful, and strategic audit.

There are five things an SEO discovery session should include:

  • A comprehensive client interview. We need to learn about your business and industry and your products and services. We need to know who your existing, and prospective customers are, the lexicon you and they use, how and where they connect with you online, and what’s driving online conversions or sales today.
  • Determining what your goals are. A goal without a plan is but a wish. Setting realistic, executable goals serves two important functions: it clarifies what it is you want to achieve with your website, and how compiled data should be measured.
  • Access to real-time analytics. Assuming your company uses Google Analytics to track how online traffic arrives at your site, how long visitors dwell on your webpages, and whether they buy or bounce. The more historical data you can provide, the better it is during the audit phase and for plotting your future. If your business uses or has used Google AdWords, the data it can provide helps paint a more complete picture of your website’s performance to date.
  • What keywords you think are best and why. Forget about your current SEO ranking for the time being. In the discovery session, we need to have a clear understanding of the keywords you think are relevant to your business, and why you think your customers would use those keywords to search for your products and services.
  • The quality of your site’s current content. How often do you refresh your website’s content? What is the quality of the content on your site? Your content needs to be well-written, impactful, and it should accurately and succinctly articulate what benefits your business and products provide. If it’s rife with spelling errors, poor grammar, and rambling, incoherent jargon, it will severely diminish your SEO ranking.

Auditing Your Website

With the discovery session complete, we conduct a thorough SEO audit of all of your web properties, and subsequently, provide you with the details of that review and our strategic recommendations that are tailored to your company’s needs.

Our SEO audits and assessments typically include:

  • Competitive intelligence on your competitors
  • Keyword analysis and recommended targeted keywords
  • Reconfiguring your Google Analytics and AdWords to reap more insightful data
  • Local search optimization for Google My Business and other directories
  • Gauging your site’s mobile responsiveness and how mobile search impacts your SEO
  • The usefulness of your inbound links versus your competitors’
  • Recommendations about your site as a whole to improve engagement and increase visitor conversions

An in-depth SEO audit and discovery session takes the guesswork out of what resonates with your existing and potential customers, and it helps to determine a path forward based on data and your business’s strategic goals. It also lays the foundation for building your ongoing marketing plan to ensure you’ve got inspiring and effective content and messaging, a high-quality, responsive web presence, and above all, a compelling reason for the world to land on your pages first and foremost.

Do you have questions about SEO and its effectiveness in conjunction with other digital marketing methodologies? Talk to us. Whether your company is big or small, a startup or a recognized brand, we have the expertise and the experience to optimize your site and boost your website traffic.

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Digital Marketing, Web Application Development, Web Design & Development

Choosing the Right Small Business E-Commerce Solution

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Should you integrate an out-of-the-box hosted platform with your website? Or is a customized on-premise solution a better option?

Your website is a contemporary extension of your business but with more important details about you, your employees, and how your products and services help solve your customers’ problems. In a hyperconnected world fuelled by e-commerce, the onus is on business owners and leaders to determine what the best e-commerce solution is to build into their sites.

Whether your company focuses on the business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B) market (or both), the questions you need to answer are the same: Should you pick a hosted, out-of-the-box software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution? Or go for a more customizable on-premise platform?

Whichever way you choose to go, the solution should be a unified, user-friendly platform that is scalable and which integrates an online store with accounting, point-of-sale, inventory and subscription management tools, and other finance-related functions.

There are, of course, a number of elements you will need to consider, including:

  • If taxes are based on the location of the shipping warehouse or the shipment’s destination
  • Are shipping charges determined by a package’s weight, size, or destination? Or do you charge a flat fee?
  • Inventory control and management
  • Do you need to connect point-of-sale systems from bricks-and-mortar locations?
  • Cross-border customs clearance
  • Fluctuating currency exchange rates
  • Product discounts or seasonal specials
  • Overall reporting and metrics

“Here is a simple but powerful rule: Always give people more than they expect to get.”
– NELSON BOSWELL

Which E-Commerce Platform Is Best for Your Business?

When it comes to picking an e-commerce solution, the good news is there are options aplenty.

For most small businesses on tight budgets, Shopify has emerged as one of the most popular. Treefrog has integrated Shopify’s and other platforms with many of our clients’ sites, but we also provide custom-built e-commerce solutions.

Although Treefrog can integrate your site with any e-commerce platform you want, most of our clients that have selected a hosted solution have chosen one of the following platforms:

  • Shopify. Possibly the most popular and widely used e-commerce and shopping cart platform used by small- and medium-sized businesses today, this Canadian company’s solution features a broad range of options. It is easy to set up, has an intuitive user interface, add-on apps, 24/7 support, and its API integrates seamlessly with enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and other software.
  • Volusion. This platform features a comprehensive set of shopping tools, round-the-clock support, a user-friendly interface, extensive security features, and a mobile-responsive storefront. Volusion integrates seamlessly with Amazon and eBay, and through its social store builder tool, you can list your products on Facebook. It’s scalable, but the basic version sets a limit on the number of monthly transactions by restricting bandwidth, meaning service charges may apply if you exceed it.
  • Bigcommerce. This feature-rich solution includes many customizable templates, is easy to use and has an intuitive user interface, 24/7 support, no transaction fees, and has smooth integration with several e-newsletter services and Alibaba. It too is mobile-responsive and provides in-depth metrics and reporting.
  • Magento CE. An open source e-commerce platform that is available in four variations, the Magento Community Edition is an out-of-the-box solution that you must host on your server, or with its partnering company, Zoey. It includes bundled features including smooth integration with Google Analytics, in-depth sales reporting, and many third-party integration options but it is not PCI-compliant. Existing small business users provide community-based support.

Additional Things to Consider for Your Website

Once you’ve determined which e-commerce solution suits your business best, and taking a 360-degree view of your company and its online presence, there are other considerations to weigh:

  • A payment gateway. If you’re going to establish an online e-commerce platform, you will also need a payment gateway to facilitate online credit and debit card transactions. A payment gateway is an e-commerce enabler. It’s vital, and it provides a secure link between your site and the banking system. In essence, it provides a merchant-centric, single, automated portal to manage online financial transactions cost-effectively, quickly, and easily. It also makes it easy and flexible for your customers to buy from you online.
  • Readable, compelling content. If “content is king” then context must be queen. The importance of producing content online regularly cannot be denied, but to be regarded as a thought leader in your industry, your content needs to be persuasive, well-written, and it must provide value to your intended audience, or they will pay it no mind.
  • Search engine optimization (SEO). A widely used methodology to drive website traffic organically through the use of high-quality content, SEO maximizes your site’s content to rank well in search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo!.
  • High-quality images and design. There is no shortage of cheap, do-it-yourself (DIY) website builders available online promising anyone can create a professional-looking site in mere minutes for free or for only a few bucks. Lest we forget, you most often get what you pay for in this world. A well-designed website with high-quality images lends credibility to your business. A less-than-stellar online presence will hurt your business, not help it.
  • Using social media tools. More than 2 billion people use social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn on a daily basis. Since sales success requires cultivating relationships, your website should incorporate the use of social media tools, and social media marketing should be a part of your overall marketing efforts. Social tools will also help drive traffic to your website.

Do you have questions about e-commerce platforms and which one is best for your business?  Let’s talk. We can help you determine whether or not you need a custom-built solution or an off-the-shelf platform. Our expert programming team have experience customizing and integrating several e-commerce solutions with our clients’ websites.

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Digital Marketing

5 Steps to Creating Knockout Content Campaigns

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An effective content campaign can help your company reach new audiences and generate more sales leads. Learn how to build focused, impactful content campaigns that will resonate with your customers

It’s common knowledge that content marketing is what drives traffic to websites, improves a site’s search engine optimization (SEO) rankings, and generates sales leads. But how do you use content effectively to do that? And what’s the difference between content marketing and a content campaign?

Content marketing encompasses many types of content including blogs, email broadcasts, social media posts, pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements, podcasts and videos, e-newsletters, and more. Its purpose is straightforward: to create and share content for free that is informative and entertaining, and helps your firm build trust with readers so they will become your customers.

In general, content marketing is designed to draw people to your website and entice them into your sales funnel. It’s the most critical ingredient in the commercial digital marketing stew. According to a 2015 poll of marketers conducted by Smart Insights, 29.6% ranked content marketing ahead of all other marketing techniques in importance, including marketing automation (12.8%), mobile marketing (11%), social media marketing (8.9%), and PPC marketing (3%).

A content campaign is a long-term, focused effort to drive awareness of your company and its services, or to change an impression people have of your company with content you have created that centres on a single topic.

Your content campaigns are not sales pitches. They contain targeted, relevant, useful information that is designed to educate or answer your readers’ questions. They address specific issues that your desired audience cares about while positioning your company as a thought leader in your industry. For example, a heating, ventilation, and air conditioning company may launch a content campaign each autumn explaining to homeowners how they should winter-proof their homes to help reduce their energy bills.

How to Build an Impactful Content Campaign

At one time, some companies would produce irrelevant, forgettable content stuffed with keywords as a means of spiking their SEO rankings. Thankfully, that methodology has fallen by the wayside. Now, search engines determine their rankings based on both keywords and valuable content.

There are five steps you need to take to develop a useful and impactful content campaign:

Be credible. Building trust demands credibility. That is to say, readers (or consumers) are more inclined to trust a company that consistently provides positive, personal experiences, quality products, useful information, and which responds to problems when they arise quickly and transparently.

Serve your audience with knowledge. Understanding quality, relevant content is the glue that holds your company’s sales funnel together, give your audience what they value: answers to questions they may have. Do it well, and you’re more likely to increase your sales in the short- and long-term.

Use keywords strategically. Using a select number of keywords is useful but don’t rely on them solely. From an SEO point of view, it’s important to use them to help people find your content, but keywords alone won’t help you create fantastic content that will resonate with people. It’s also critical to understand that SEO techniques are useless without meaningful content. Content is the foundation on which SEO sits.

Tap into your team’s creativity. Brainstorm with your colleagues and come up with interesting topics for content campaigns that will capture both your existing customers’ and desired prospects’ attention. Sometimes, you can discover terrific topic ideas simply by scouting Twitter hashtags relevant to your business or targeted audience.

Define what your goals are. What is the objective of your content campaign? Is it simply to give sales a boost? Then ponder how a content campaign can achieve that since using content to make a blatant sales pitch rarely works. Is it to increase email subscribers? Now flip the question and ask yourself, “how will someone who reads your content benefit from it? What matters to your targeted audience?”

Measuring the Results

After you’ve published your content and run the campaign, analyze the results to see what worked and what didn’t. Make changes where required, then begin anew. Bear in mind that determining a return-on-investment (ROI) on your content campaigns is not a straightforward calculation, and don’t lose sight of the big picture: you’re playing the long game with content. It’s a brand-builder, it inspires trust, and it helps position your company as an industry leader.

When measuring results to determine the ROI, you first need to know:

  • How valuable each new visitor to your website is and the length of time they spend at your site
  • How valuable is improving your visibility on Google
  • What the worth is of new visitors to specific product pages on your company’s site
  • The level of importance to place on the growing number of your social followers

Are you looking for a digital marketing partner to help you grow your company’s sphere of influence, and in turn, its revenues? We can help. Tell us what you want to achieve and let’s get started positioning your business as an authority in your industry.

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Branding & Design, Digital Marketing, Web Design & Development

4 Reasons Your Email Unsubscribe Numbers Are on the Rise

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Are you taking a ‘megaphone’ approach to your email marketing campaigns in an effort to reach as many people as possible? The key to keeping your customers engaged comes down to sending targeted messages at precisely the right time

It’s the winter and a weeklong cold spell has you shivering. Snow and ice are everywhere. As an icy wind freezes your face while you stand outside waiting for a bus to arrive, you feel your mobile phone vibrate in your pocket. You peel off one of your gloves to check your messages only to find you’ve received an email about ice cream, frosty milkshakes, and frozen desserts.

You wouldn’t think a company would send such an ill-timed and poorly targeted marketing message, but it happens more often than not, and it typically prompts the recipient to hit the “unsubscribe” link in fine print at the bottom of that email.

Irrelevant messaging is a significant driver of unsubscribe rates, and importantly, it’s an annoyance to your customers. According to IBM Silverpop’s annual global report on email marketing dubbed, “2015 Email Marketing Metrics Benchmark Study”, Canadian brands posted markedly lower email opening rates compared to companies in the U.S., U.K., the Asia-Pacific region, Europe, the Mideast, and Africa. It could be because of many reasons including consumers are quick to delete emails that don’t resonate with them immediately.

In addition to the content of marketing communications, the format of marketing emails may also be a factor. A study by Litmus found nearly half of emails are now opened on either a smartphone or tablet. That’s a dramatic increase from 2011 when only 8% of emails were opened on a mobile device. In light of this finding, marketers would be wise to adopt a mobile-friendly approach to the content and design of their emails, and they should reduce the number of calls-to-action to one or two per email.

When Email Open Rates Slide and Unsubscribes Spike

Though your email open rates data shouldn’t be used as a sole indicator of a marketing campaign’s success or failure, it is a useful metric to measure. Your email subscribers are valuable. Reducing email list churn is dependent upon understanding why existing and prospective customers unsubscribe from your communications.

After spending the effort (and money) to get your customers to opt-in or subscribe to your marketing emails and to keep them engaged, it is disheartening and frustrating to see unsubscribe levels increase. Outside of irrelevant messaging, there are four primary reasons why people are unsubscribing from your email lists:

  • You’re emailing them too often. When was the last time you heard someone complain they don’t receive enough email? Determining what the right frequency is to send your subscribers an email is multifaceted, but it comes down to the size of your list, the quality of your email content, and the unknowable: how receptive your subscribers truly are to reading your emails.
  • Your emails aren’t smartphone-friendly. Email remains the most effective and affordable digital marketing tool at your disposal to reach your customers, but are you crafting and designing your marketing emails for mobile device readers? With an estimated 68% of all emails in 2015 opened on a mobile device (tablets comprise about 16% of that total) versus on a desktop, it’s wise to assume your emails will be read on a smartphone.
  • All you do is try to sell to them. Are you hitting people over the head with an unending stream of “buy this!” type of content? It’s good to make your customers aware of current and upcoming promotions, but if all you’re doing with your email marketing content is pushing your recipients to purchase something, they’ll start to tune you out.
  • Your content is repetitive and uninteresting. If your email content triggers déjà vu in your audience, or it’s merely uninspiring drivel that serves no real purpose, all you’re succeeding at is inviting people to hit the unsubscribe button.

“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him (or her) and sells itself.”
– PETER DRUCKER

Zeroing in on Targeted Messaging

Not all of your marketing communications will be relevant to all of your customers, so choose smartly, and don’t lose sight of your marketing campaign objectives. Keep these key points in mind before you hit the “send” button:

  • Define your target audience. Knowing who to market to and why will dictate the success of your email campaigns. You need to understand who has a need for your product or service, who is most likely to purchase it, and what’s most appealing about it to them.
  • Be specific. Your brand is at the heart of your messaging, so narrow down what it is you’re trying to tell your audience and clearly state it. Are you trying to get them to purchase something new? Are you attempting to provide advice? Or are you wanting to draw attention to something your company has done for the betterment of the local community? Avoid emailing mixed messages; they only lead to confusion (and the virtual trash bin).
  • Tailor your messages per channel. Don’t clone your marketing messages. In other words, whatever messaging you use in an email, shouldn’t be the same messaging you have on your website, use on your social media channels, or have printed on brochures. Particularly now in the age of mobile computing, you need to strategize how best to reach your targeted audiences via varying avenues or mediums and customize your content accordingly.
  • Timing is everything. Use your customer data to determine the best time of day to send your marketing emails. If you do, in all likelihood you’ll see a high number of emails opened, and the links within it clicked. Moreover, you won’t annoy your recipients by sending them an email in the winter about ice cream.
  • Get permission first. The most important point to remember is to make sure you have every recipient’s permission orally or in writing (electronic consent is acceptable) before you send them any marketing-related email. Moreover, take steps to protect your customers’ privacy. You should also make it simple for anyone to unsubscribe from or opt-out of your emails. Nobody likes to be spammed. And lest we forget, Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) expressly forbids companies and marketers from engaging in such shady practices. CASL applies to all forms of commercial electronic messaging, not only email.

One last noteworthy point on the subject of CASL: According to the Canadian Marketing Association, July 1, 2016, marks CASL’s two-year anniversary, and it’s the deadline for two-year implied consent agreements to expire. That means you need to ensure you have permission for all of your electronic messages (emails, texts, etc.) from your list of recipients unless you have an existing business relationship with them. It’s also important to be mindful that as of July 1, 2017, Canadian citizens will have the legal right to sue organizations for CASL violations.

Want to learn how to create more sales leads via email marketing? Let’s talk. We can help you create meaningful content for your subscribers, develop a strategy for cultivating an effective email list, and analyze the performance of your campaigns.

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Branding & Design, Digital Marketing

Tips for Writing Impactful Content

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Your content needs to be thought-provoking, meaningful, and it must resonate with your target audience

The power of online publishing is such that every company is a media company nowadays, but is your company producing engaging and informative content?

According to data from the Nielsen Norman Group, you have less than one minute to entice a visitor to your website to stick around and explore. That’s not a lot of time to inspire rapt attention. If your site’s content doesn’t affect or appeal to its intended audience instantly and in an intellectual or emotional way, they’ll quickly lose interest, and you will lose business.

There are theories as to why and how cringeworthy content resides on so many business websites. It could be because of the oft-repeated “content is king” cliché that’s bandied about with wild abandon by marketing cheerleaders induces people to produce content for content’s sake. (Don’t do this) Or it’s possible business owners and decision-makers don’t want to pay a professional writer to help them. Regardless, if brands want to be successful publishers and use content to create relationships and up sales leads, they need to produce clear but compelling content consistently, and ensure it’s optimized for social media sharing.

Whether you’re writing for a corporate website, a blog, company e-newsletter, an advertisement, or emails to your customers, on the web, and especially in a world that’s increasingly dialled in via a mobile device, you have mere seconds to make that connection with your readers.

In general, there appears to be four content- or writing-related errors many brands make online:

  • Their content is poorly written and full of grammatical or spelling errors
  • The language used is sheer flimflam or gibberish, and it’s not the language their customers use
  • It offers no new perspectives or fails to recommend a solution to readers’ problems
  • It’s a standalone piece of work that’s not part of an overall content marketing strategy

Ergo if you’re scratching your head wondering why your website and marketing efforts aren’t bringing home the bacon, it could be because your content lacks sizzle, or it completely misses the mark.

“Words can be like X-Rays if you use them properly – they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”
– ALDOUS HUXLEY

There are many good reasons that you should consider hiring a professional writer to help you and your team consistently produce quality blogs, marketing materials, and website copy. These may include:

  • Writing isn’t your forte. Writing is hard work and writing well doesn’t come naturally or easily to a lot of people. There’s no shame in that. But if you forgo investing in a professional writer to help concisely articulate what it is you do, and the value your company provides to your customers and potential customers, you’re essentially handicapping your business. Nothing scorns the prospect of new business and potentially damages your company’s reputation than a website rife with bad or unnecessary copy.
  • You’re busy running your business. Undoubtedly, managing or running a business swallows up most of your waking hours. As a decision-maker or business leader, do you have the time to write website copy, advertising copy, blogs, social media content, case studies, white papers, and press releases? Chances are you don’t.
  • You lack objectivity. In other words, you’re the DNA your business needs to survive, but you’re so close to the heart of it, and so knowledgeable, you simply can’t write effectively about it to your target audience. Sometimes, we need a friend or colleague to point out to us that which we cannot readily identify. When it comes to writing content about your firm or industry, the same truth applies. It could be that something your company does which might seem trivial or unimportant to you may be what dazzles and delights your customers.
  • Your approach to marketing is flawed. You need to know who your target audience is, what they care about and the issues they need to solve, and how your products and services can help them overcome their challenges and reach their goals. But are all of your marketing efforts in-synch? Are your marketing campaigns tied to achievable goals? Are you speaking the language of your customers and leveraging search engine optimization (SEO) best practices in order to ensure your website ranks high in organic searches? Your marketing messages (in whatever form) need to be as smooth as silk and should feature a takeaway or call-to-action that matters to your audience. In general, it’s critical to understand that writing or producing content is but one important part of a holistic marketing strategy.

The Quality of Your Content Impacts Your Site’s Performance

Professional wordsmiths hang on every word they write. They agonize over every sentence and they analyze and assess how those words read, sound, and flow from one paragraph to the next. They rely on keyword analysis and recommended SEO best practices when choosing words to craft a sentence. It can be time-consuming, but it’s a wholly valuable and worthwhile exercise.

A well-designed website with high-quality images and photos and intuitive navigation is important. But don’t let these things overshadow your site’s readability. Content and messaging that’s clear, simple, and bold will increase the number of visitors to your website. It builds trust, positions you as a thought leader, and in turn, leads to conversions whereby prospective customers will have conversations with you about how your services can help them. To quote Mark Twain, “use the right word, not its second cousin.” Indeed.

But it isn’t solely a matter of choosing the right words. It’s also important to ably express what your business is all about, and what challenges you help your customers overcome. Doing so across all of your digital marketing channels will help your business stand out from others in online search rankings, and swell your social media follower count.

Consider these six do’s and don’ts when thinking about drafting content for your website:

  1. Do use a dictionary, the spellcheck feature in your word processing software, and have one or two people proofread your content before posting it live online to ensure there are no spelling and grammar errors. Read your content aloud to catch errors. If it doesn’t sound right, it probably isn’t.
  2. Do write with authority and write for your audience. No one knows your company and its products and services better than you. Let your knowledge and confidence show.
  3. Do produce fresh content regularly. It works wonders for your website SEO rankings by keeping your brand front and centre, establishing you and your team as industry thought leaders, and it will keep people coming back to your site to read more.
  4. Don’t use fanciful, flowery words to promise everything under the sun and then underperform. It’s the opposite you need to shoot for. Under-promise and then exceed your customers’ expectations.
  5. Don’t use meaningless strings of keyword-stuffed jargon. Use plain language to get your message across sensibly and clearly articulate to your customers the value of your firm’s products and services.
  6. Don’t write excessively long marketing content, especially online. On one hand, it’s important to share your breadth of knowledge and expertise with useful, in-depth information. On the other hand, mobile computing and the Internet is changing how we consume the written word so dispense with unnecessary verbiage. You need to find the right balance between producing quality content efficiently without shortchanging your readers by being too vague.

We hope you’ve found this list of ideas for injecting content marketing into your business helpful.

Not sure where to start? Have writer blocks when it comes to content marketing? Get in touch with us. Our experienced team knows how to make your marketing materials sing.

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