Marketing Archives - Page 5 of 7 - DBC Digital

Archive for Marketing – Page 5

Posted by DBC Digital on

June 9, 2016

How to Improve Search Results for Your Business

When businesses work to improve their local search results, they tend to get locked on the idea that most local searchers begin and end with the big three search engines.

Because of this belief, marketers spend most of their time solely focused on paying for and improving their website’s placement in Yahoo, Bing, and of course, Google.

In order to really profit from those buyers who go online to find businesses in their own city or even in their local neighborhood, it’s vital to understand how those buyers are actually searching online. The reality is that the definition of search engines should be expanded to include more than just the big three.

Where Do Local Searches Originate From?

For example, a survey published on Search Engine Land revealed that listings from the major search engines only make up a portion of what most marketers think of as “local search.” Some people may find these survey results surprising:

Only about 36 percent of searches for local businesses began with a major search engine.
An additional 13 percent began with a visit to a niche website on a specific topic about the product, service, or industry they were looking for.
Customer reviews and directories each accounted for another seven percent of searches
Promotions or coupons accounted for another six percent of searches
Additional sites included digital maps, phone apps, and other types of content that mentioned the business.

Which Kinds of Shoppers Rely On Local Search the Least?

The survey did cover a broad range of services and products. Your type of industry may impact results to some degree, but what really stood out was the way that customers and prospective clients searched differently, depending on their familiarity with the type of business they were searching for.

For example, almost half of experienced hotel shoppers said that they tended to visit an industry-specific travel sites for information about local hotels, such as Trip Adviser, Hotels.com, etc.

In other words, casual travelers might start searching on Google or Bing first; but seasoned travelers will already have their favorite resources bookmarked.

Since experienced travelers consume travel services more frequently than casual travelers, it only makes sense for travel-related companies to target these travel-specific sites as much or more than the big three search engines.

In any case, placing a portion of your ad listings on review sites, local industry directories, and a variety of other platforms will serve to increase your visibility. In turn, this increased visibility is likely to help your search rankings on the big search engines.

By understanding how buyers research companies like yours, you can see better results from many different aspects of your digital marketing.

Let DBC Digital Help Your Local Customers Find You

At DBC Digital, our marketing team has helped countless businesses reach out to local shoppers online. Let us help you analyze your current internet presence and expand your reach in the places where your customers are most likely to look for the products or services that you offer. Contact us to discuss your unique company and location.

*Photo credit: Copyright: <a href=’https://www.123rf.com/profile_alexmillos’>alexmillos / 123RF Stock Photo</a>

Tags : local search, search, search engine marketing, sem

DBC Digital Marketing-Using Vanity Metrics

Posted by Greg Sherwood on

May 24, 2016

How to Avoid the Trap of Vanity Social Metrics

Which Social Media Metrics Actually Matter?

Social media marketing usually sits at the very top of the sales funnel. For example, a promoted post or video often acts as a prospect’s initial introduction to your brand or product.

Because these social posts have been crafted to attract an audience, but not necessarily to close a sale, marketers can have trouble selecting which social media metrics will help them see if they are actually reaching their marketing goals.

It’s critical to use the metrics that actually have value and not just “vanity” metrics that only make a marketer feel good.

What are Vanity Metrics?

Most marketers and content producers feel some sense of satisfaction when their social media efforts get a lot of attention. A large number of likes, shares, or follows certainly indicates popularity; however, the number of likes and shares a post receives have proven to be unreliable indicators of effectiveness.

These “feel good” metrics are known as “vanity” metrics because they may help your ego, but not necessarily your bottom line.

Without some additional indicators of how well a social advertisement or post actually helps attract targeted customers, these vanity metrics can cause you to believe your posts are providing more value to your strategy than they actually are.

For example, you probably don’t expect your first video about your loan company to get viewers to rush out and refinance their house or get a new car loan through you.

What Are the Right Social Media Metrics?

So what can that video do? It might help encourage increased visits to your website or get people to fill out a lead form or to download your informative eBook.

These sorts of actions are more likely to draw interested people into your sales funnel than simply clicking a “like” button.

In fact, prospects that actually follow the link to your website are not likely to then return to your social post just to press the “like” button.

How to Find the Right Social Marketing Metrics

If you’re having trouble figuring out which metrics to use, look at your sales funnel.

Attracting a large number of fans to your social page might help increase visibility, but unless your audience is actually taking the actions you want them to take, your marketing efforts aren’t really supporting your business goals.

Most businesses will enjoy better returns from hundreds of targeted views rather than from thousands of views from general social media users.

Kittens or KPI’s?

The takeaway: Your videos of the latest kitten sensation may get your posts a lot of attention, but they probably aren’t helping you sell your products or services (unless you sell videos about kittens).

It’s impossible for you to know how effective your efforts are unless you choose the right measures. These metrics can tell you what you’re doing right and what could use improvement.

At DBC Digital, We Measure Our Success by Your Success

At DBC Digital, we want to help you get the word out about the great things that your business does. Then we can help you measure what is working and what needs tweaking. This includes developing a marketing and branding strategy that supports your business goals.

Categories : Marketing, SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING, STRATEGY

Tags : social media measurement, social media metrics

Posted by Greg Sherwood on

May 19, 2016

How to Apply Your Social Media Budget

Does deciding what platforms to use for your social media budget make your palms sweat?

Today’s digital marketers can choose between dozens of established and emerging social networking sites. Many of these sites also offer a variety of different types of advertising.

So Many Options

For example, social sites today offer everything from “sponsored” posts, pay-per-click ads, boosts, video ads, and more.

Naturally, each business will benefit the most from their own unique blend of social platforms and advertising options. But determining the best method to allocate a social marketing budget can put your team in knots.

The Best Ways to Advertise on Social Media

It’s fair to say that most companies can only find the best places and tactics to attract new customers by testing different options.

Analytics are always going to be essential.

Since there are so many social media choices, businesses often don’t know where to start. If you aren’t sure which platforms to try first, you can learn from the experiences of other businesses that are targeting markets similar to yours.

B2B (Business-to-Business) or B2C (Business-to-Consumer)?

To get started, look at the type of audience you are trying to reach.

Are you a Business-to-Consumer brand (where you sell directly to the public) or are you a Business-to-Business brand that sells to other businesses?

Effectiveness Rankings

Recently, Social Media Examiner published an in-depth article about the Content Marketing Institute‘s survey about both types of marketers and their experiences on the effectiveness of advertising on various social networking platforms. While many marketers agreed that some platforms are than others, there was a distinct difference in the rankings based on whether the marketer was B2B or B2C.

Here are the “effectiveness” rankings of social sites and percentages from B2C marketers:

Facebook: 66 percent
YouTube: 53 percent
Twitter: 50 percent

(5. LinkedIn)

No surprise here. Facebook dominates the B2C brand preferences for marketing effectiveness.

In contrast, look at the rankings and percentages from B2B marketers:

LinkedIn: 66 percent
Twitter: 55 percent
YouTube: 51 percent

(5. Facebook)

It might not surprise you that LinkedIn tops the list with B2B marketers and does less well with B2C brands. But it is more interesting to see that Facebook, the largest social networking site on the planet, actually only comes in fifth on the B2B list.

In fact, what’s interesting here is that LinkedIn ranked in Facebook’s fifth position on the B2C list. Marketers are telling us that LinkedIn actually helped them engage with both consumers and businesses, not just other businesses. Of course, if you think about it, business owners and professionals who visit LinkedIn are also consumers.

The Takeaway

The main takeaway is that it’s important to start with a little market research to find where brands similar to yours are spending their budget.

Before becoming overwhelmed with too many choices, start with a marketing strategy using just one platform likely to produce good results for your type of business. Once you’ve optimized your campaigns on the initial site, you can branch out and experiment with others.

Let Us Help You Make Better Choices About Spending Your Social Media Budget

Over the last decade, we’ve helped many different kinds of companies profit from their social media spend. We’ll use our varied experiences with other companies and your own unique business to suggest a marketing strategy that’s crafted with your own objectives and growth goals in mind.

Get in touch with us today for a free consultation with one of our marketing experts to get more value out of your social media expenditures.

Categories : Marketing, SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING, STRATEGY

Tags : social media budget, social media for business, social media spending

Posted by Greg Sherwood on

May 3, 2016

Email List Building: What You Need to Know

Searching for ways to grow and strengthen your business? Many successful business owners credit their success to the quality of their email list.

Both large and small businesses rely on their lists as a honey pot that they can always use as a source of sales and leads.

If you haven’t focused on building a solid email list for your company, or you just wish your own list was more fruitful, consider these list-building basics.

Here are 4 things you need to grow the quality and quantity of your email list.

1. Always Offer Value

Most of us receive a lot of junk emails, so it might be difficult to believe that there are actually emails that recipients look forward to receiving. To keep your subscribers interested in your emails, you’ve got to hold up your end of the bargain by consistently delivering meaningful content.

This “value” can be things like “insider” information, updates on trends that your subscribers can benefit from, discounts, or free offers.

2. Carefully Consider Your Email Provider

Small companies might be relying on Outlook or other in-house email systems to send their group emails. Others may use their website hosting company to send emails.

The problem with this is that unless the email system is designed for bulk sending, you’ll risk being “blacklisted” by your provider and your emails will end up sitting in your recipients’ junk folders.

Also, smaller hosting plans usually have limits on email volumes or are just not robust enough to do you any good.

Choose a third-party email service provider to ensure your emails get through and that they look good when they get there. Some of the most popular email providers include AWeber, MailChimp and Constant Contact.

3. Make it Easy and Attractive to Join Your Email List

These days, it goes without saying that your “join” form has to function well on all sorts of devices, including smart phones, tablets, and desktops.

Also, make sure to test your email’s appearance on mobile devices because that’s where the majority of your prospects and customers are likely to open them.

Most successful email campaigns also offer something of value to get the visitor to take an action, such as signing up for a newsletter. This could be a discount coupon, a free eBook, or something else that’s relevant to their business.

You’ll have to balance the cost of whatever you offer against the value of a new subscriber, but a targeted offer will definitely increase your success rate.

You might also consider using other parts of your marketing platform to collect leads. For example, you can collect leads with Twitter Cards, Facebook, and YouTube videos. (More on this in another post.)

4. Invest in Your List

You have to drive traffic to your lead forms to grow subscribers. Make sure to test your forms and your offers for a period of time to see how they convert.

Don’t be afraid to tweak them after a couple of weeks. See if you can improve your conversions by regularly making small adjustments to your forms.

To get ideas on what works, check out some of your larger competitors to see how they are positioning their lead forms and take a cue from them if appropriate.

To increase your website traffic and see how your forms are performing, you can temporarily buy extra visitor traffic by using Pay-per-click ads or Facebook ads.

As you fine tune your offers and your forms, you should be able to reduce your cost per lead.

You can always continue buying traffic to grow your list faster or you can rely on organic traffic from your social media and search engines. It takes longer to grow your visitor count this way but it is more affordable for limited budgets.

Let Us Help You Grow Your List and Profit From It

At DBC Digital, we’ve developed email campaigns with amazing conversion rates. Learn more about how we can help you develop a profitable email marketing campaign and then use it in a way that your customers will actually love.

Call one of our marketing consultants at (303) 357-5757 or toll free at (877) 432-2322 — whether you use our services or not, the consultation is FREE!

Categories : EMAIL CAMPAIGNS, Marketing

Tags : conversions, email marketing

Posted by Greg Sherwood on

April 26, 2016

Crowd Cultures: Branding in the Social Media Age

In the beginning, the dawn of the social media age was heralded as the start of a new era. There was a lot of hype about the ease of creating branded content for marketers and forging direct connections with their customers.

Some companies even invested millions of dollars in this concept, but it hasn’t always paid off. In this age of direct and two-way communication, why is it so difficult for brands to get established on social sites? Maybe a better question is why do some companies, and even some individuals, make it look so easy?

Is Branded Content Actually a New Concept?

Actually, the idea of branded content comes from TV commercials. Older readers might remember the Oscar Mayer ads, “My bologna has a first name….” and Alka-Seltzer ads, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing…”

Those memorable commercials were like mini movies and tended to stick in people’s minds. For younger readers, here’s the video of the Oscar Mayer ad from the 1970s.

It’s not that those ads weren’t great for their times. They were brilliant, but they also faced limited competition. There weren’t many TV channels, and consumers didn’t have access to the almost-unlimited content choices they have today.

Also, there was no way to opt out of these ads. Today’s media has evolved and become more challenging for brands to get noticed.

Understanding the Rise of Crowd Cultures

A good way to understand how some companies can rise above these challenges is to understand the rise of “crowd cultures” on the Internet. According to Harvard Business Review, “Branding in the Age of Social Media,” social media has found a way to bind together diverse cultures that were formerly very isolated.

Marketers that understand how this happened can leverage this for their own benefit.

They call these groups crowd cultures. A more familiar term might be subcultures, but these are subcultures that exist only online. The reason many companies fail to thrive on social media is they don’t understand that crowd cultures can be a significant source of a new audiences.

Examples of Good Branding in the Social Media Age

Think about those YouTube contributors who have gained massive fame by playing video games (see “PewDiePie” with 40 million subscribers) or filming silly pet (or human) tricks. These amateur videos very often attract more views and create higher engagement than professional content from large companies.

That doesn’t mean that brand marketers need to stop creating videos about silly pet tricks or video games, but it does mean that marketers need to learn more about crowd cultures that can support their brand.

Chipotle, before the food scare, is a great example of a brand that connected with existing crowd cultures that were made up of members who were dissatisfied with typical casual and fast food. Chipolte offered fresh and healthy ingredients and the possibility of a vegan burrito. They addressed a problem that was common to the crowd cultures they were targeting. This set a good example for other brands because the number of crowd cultures on the Internet is practically unlimited.

Consider who your audience is (or should be) and what is most valuable to them. More than likely, there is a crowd culture that you can appeal to.

Focus your content and branding to this group in order to gain a foothold with this audience.

Let Us Help You Connect With Your Crowd Cultures

During the past decade, DBC Digital has been helping brands connect with the right targets online. Contact us right away to begin getting the good news about your brand distributed to the right targets.

Categories : BRANDING, Marketing, SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

Tags : content, crowd cultures, social media

2899 S Santa Fe Drive, Unit 2
Englewood, CO 80110

(303) 357-5757

orders@plumbmarketing.com