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July 17, 2014

Analyze Your Inbound Marketing with These Tools

If If you aren’t using data to analyze your inbound marketing campaigns, you aren’t taking advantage of marketing on the Internet. Plenty of campaigns bear similarities to traditional forms of marketing–display networks are akin to billboards, video advertising has parallels with TV commercials, and so on. But billboards and TV commercials can’t touch what makes their online counterparts so incredibly valuable.

That’s right, it’s data. Everything is trackable online, from the clicks a consumer makes online to the user profiles of those online consumers, even to the length of time those consumers spend on a single web page–everything can be documented in data. These troves of information can offer incredible insights to marketers when they are properly analyzed.

To do that, you need an analytics solution. Many are available online, and some of the best ones come at a low-cost, or even for free. You need at least one of these solutions to help guide your strategy going forward, as you make small strategy shifts that optimize each campaign. Here’s an overview of the best options.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the obvious go-to for most businesses. It’s simple to use, offers in-depth data, and is geared toward small business owners. Even if you do struggle to understand the platform, there are a number of tutorials that walk you through the basic processes you will need to know in order to maximize the value of Google Analytics.

And there’s incredible value: not just because it’s a great data tool, but also because it’s free when you integrate it with Google AdWords. If you’re doing paid search campaigns, AdWords is a no-brainer, even before you through in Google Analytics for free.

2. Moz Analytics

If you’re focused on analytics for search marketing purposes, Moz Analytics is a great solution. It specializes in using data to improve SEO performance for various campaigns, and it offers a wide range of data to help you track your results. Moz Analytics also accommodates social media marketing and content marketing efforts, too, but if your primary focus is search marketing, this could be the right tool for you.

Moz Analytics costs $99 per month, which isn’t cheap for small businesses. But if you make an earnest effort to use the data when improving your campaigns, it’s a great option.

3. KISSmetrics

The great thing about KISSmetrics: its platform is beautiful. Users can navigate the solution easily, and it offers great data analysis that offers some insights and perspectives you won’t find with other solutions.

The biggest barrier for most businesses is going to be the cost. KISSmetrics packages start at $150 per month and go up. Additionally, the data isn’t comprehensive when it comes to traffic analysis, so you will probably need to complement KISSmetrics with another analytics tool that gives great Web traffic insights.

4. Clicky

Straddling the line between free and subscription-based, Clicky has a lot to offer small businesses. It has comprehensive analytics tools that rival what Google Analytics has to offer, and there’s no delay in receiving that data–results can be monitored in real-time.

The biggest challenge of Clicky is that it isn’t the easiest platform to use. If you’re averse to technology already, it may be more of a headache than it’s worth. But keep in mind that Clicky is completely free until you surpass 3,000 page views. In other words, you get some time to get the hang of things–and to start driving traffic to your website–before you’re asked to put money down.

If you’re ready to start analyzing data and building your digital strategy, contact DBC Digital today.

Categories : SEO, STRATEGY, WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT

Posted by DBC Digital on

June 19, 2014

Overcoming Cart Abandonment: Four Ways to Seal the Deal

When shoppers in physical stores put something in their shopping cart, it’s usually there to stay. The customer has committed to the idea of buying an item, and most of the time they will bring that item through to the checkout.

When those shoppers are at their computers, though, those traditional shopping habits go out the window. Items placed in a shopping cart offer no guarantee of a sale. Consumers place items in a virtual cart while they continue shopping for various reasons: to make sure they don’t lose track of the item, or to “hold it” while they consider whether they want to make the purchase. All too often, retailers see shoppers abandon their site and their filled shopping cart, turning an apparent conversion into a lost opportunity.

The only retail sales floor is littered with such abandoned carts. As much as this is a fact of life in the e-retail world, there are things businesses can do to minimize the occurrence rate of shopping cart abandonments. Successfully strategy can even bring some customers back to their once-abandoned carts, where they go on to complete the conversion. Here are four great strategies businesses should consider to cut down on shopping cart abandonments.

Shorten the Checkout Process

How many times are consumers asked to click through to another step in the shopping process? The more clicks, the more opportunities they have to reconsider their purchase. If you go beyond two or three checkout steps, it’s also possible that consumers have become fatigued by the task of checking out online.

Checkouts should be as simple as possible. You don’t want to do anything to discourage consumers from making a purchase, and you don’t want to give them extra time to develop buyer’s remorse. Whenever possible, condense checkout steps–even if that means combining two pages into one. Only ask for the most relevant information from customers. Simpler is always faster, and that will reduce your cart abandonment rates.

Allow Purchases From Guest Accounts

Some shopping sites only allow purchases from users who have registered an account. While it seems smart to have consumers register, it can backfire in terms of sales. Some shoppers simply don’t want to sign up with a new retailer and invite even more email into their inbox. It’s great to have a sign-in option, but always give shoppers the option to continue with the purchase as a guest.

Maximize Available Payment Options

This one’s a no-brainer: if you only have one or two purchasing options, you’re going to lose sales opportunities. You’ll want to make sure you’re set up to take credit card payments from as many credit card providers as possible. Alternative options, including PayPal and mobile wallet payment options, will also be great–especially if you’re dealing with overseas sales. The bottom-line is, more options to purchase means you’ll turn away fewer consumers.

Bring Lost Conversions Back Through Retargeting

Sometimes it’s inevitable that a consumer will abandon their virtual cart. Fortunately, digital ad technology makes it easy to retarget those consumers through display ads. With this ad strategy in place, you can present multiple different retargeted ads to try and entice the customer back to your website. Other retargeting strategies are also available. If the abandoned cart was left under someone’s account, for example, you can use that person’s registration info–i.e., their email address–to send them retargeting content. This direct appeal to their purchasing interests could ultimately persuade them to return to your website and finish what they started. If you need help improving your website to reduce shopping cart abandonment rates, contact DBC Digital and get started on the path to higher sales.

Categories : INTERNET MARKETING, STRATEGY

Posted by DBC Digital on

June 12, 2014

Running the Best Inbound Marketing Campaigns

By now, you probably understand the basic reasons why inbound marketing works for so many businesses around the world. That’s a great first step, but how do you start actually running inbound campaigns?

And, perhaps more importantly, what types of strategies are best? Inbound encompasses a broad range of different campaign types, but some are more foundational than others.

If you’re new to inbound, you will likely want to start with the most basic strategies that have been proven to work.

Here are some common inbound campaign types that will carry your business a long way toward its online goals:

Build a Useful Business Website

No matter how many new digital campaign channels are developed online, websites continue to be a centerpiece. The reasoning is simple: a business website can serve as a home base to all of your other digital properties and campaigns. Websites also help establish credibility for a business. And, for customers trying to connect with a business, they can be extremely valuable, offering basic contact information, store locations and hours, contact forms, emails, and even links to other properties, including social media accounts where consumers can go connect. Websites are relatively inexpensive to set up, and even a simple setup will offer great value to your business, helping inbound customers figure out how to connect with you.

Start a Company Blog

With a website in place, it’s easy to get started producing your own content. Regular blog posts serve a number of valuable purposes. For one, they help demonstrate your expertise to customers–relevant content will make it clear that you know what you’re doing, and that your business can be of service to prospective clients. Blogs also serve technological purposes.

Each post can be indexed by Google, making it able to appear in online search results. You can further optimize each page to maximize its visibility on Google and other search engines. Greater visibility will inevitably mean more traffic to your company’s website. Over time, this will equal more opportunities to make a sale.

Send Emails to Subscribing Customers

Email remains a highly effective way of driving traffic to your website, and encouraging sales from past and new customers. Email lists can be developed many different ways: by having online consumers opt-in when they register an account; by offering a newsletter sign-up box on your website; and even by posting a sign-up sheet near the cash register in your physical store.

As your list grows, you can continue connecting with consumers on a bi-weekly or monthly basis, keeping them in-the-know on promotions, new products and services, and other aspects of your business. Just be sure not to overwhelm consumers with too-frequent email–that could force unsubscribes and damage your brand’s reputation.

Get Active on Social Media

Social media has become a great, multi-platform campaign strategy that increases the value of many other inbound strategies. For example, you can promote your blog content through your social profiles, thereby increasing the value of both. Meanwhile, connections forged through social media can be retained for the future, allowing you to keep reaching out to a dedicated consumer base.

Social media is also used by many companies to establish brand trust and strengthen a company’s visibility–all of which are critical to cultivating a strong, loyal consumer base. And as social media followings grow, so do the opportunities to drive sales and popularity among all kinds of consumers–both existing customers and new ones.

If you’re ready to start implementing these inbound strategies for your business, contact DBC Digital to start developing your digital campaigns today.

Categories : INTERNET MARKETING, MESSAGING AND DESIGN, STRATEGY

Posted by DBC Digital on

April 29, 2014

Tracking and Understanding Customer Conversion

Where outside vendors are concerned, businesses want to know what they’re paying for. This is an unending problem for marketers, who can’t reliably offer an expected return-on-investment. Marketing returns are never guaranteed, and in the digital realm, their value can be even more challenging to illustrate to managers and owners who aren’t particularly tech-savvy.

Given these challenges, AdWords’ new conversion tracking features are a major win for all parties, and a potential revolution for digital marketing. If AdWords can make its new system work–Google is still testing the technology–marketers could soon be able to identify in-store business purchases that were inspired by digital marketing campaigns.

This would allow companies to see exactly how their digital presence is driving in-store business. That’s a huge opportunity for companies that rely heavily on brick-and-mortar sales and don’t yet see the value of digital marketing–think plumbers, laundromats, restaurants and so on. Meanwhile, marketers would better understand the value of a conversion and be able to set pricing accordingly–and with some better assurances of the potential returns.

Enter the Third Party

The way AdWords is hoping to track conversions from the screen to the store is by utilizing the data of third parties. Many third-party companies specializing in retail and consumer data have access to mountains of information covering tens of millions of consumers. Those companies can use the various data gathered to build profiles of individual consumers based on various identifying information they use online.

Those third parties can then make the identifying information anonymous and assign a number to that character. Then, when a customer uses a credit card, email address, phone number or other identifying information online, AdWords can hand that information over to the third party, and they can determine whether the transaction was the result of any digital marketing influence.

If the third party finds a match, AdWords can mark that down as an in-store conversion for digital efforts.

Gaining a Clearer Conversion Picture

The benefits of these insights cannot be overstated. While steering clear of any privacy concerns related to consumer information, AdWords will be able to introduce a different metric within its current conversion tracking tools. Users can then distinguish between these different types of conversions to see what kinds of conversions are being initiated, and where. Users can already distinguish a transaction conversion from other types of conversions, such as whitepaper downloads. But soon, they might also be able to distinguish between a digital transaction and an in-store transaction.

Google has taken small steps toward such services by developing a click-to-call feature, which makes it easy to track online searches that lead consumers to call a store and possibly make a conversion. But that current feature would pale in comparison to the much broader tracking capabilities of the new system.

For Businesses, The Benefit of Digital Becomes Clearer

The problem with tracking conversions is that they aren’t always immediate. Consumers may visit a website, do product research elsewhere, hem and haw and mull over their options before finally making a purchase days or weeks later. These delayed purchases are tough to track–and impossible, if they end up occurring in a physical store.

Businesses would benefit greatly if they were able to follow these drawn-out consumer paths to purchase all the way from the computer to the transaction. Any kind of business could have the potential benefits clearly illustrated, and because digital marketing would be utilized to drive in-store business, there would be no type of company or industry that could honestly say digital marketing doesn’t serve their interests.

The future of digital marketing is quickly evolving and creating new ways for businesses to thrive. If you’re ready to leverage these opportunities for your own business, contact DBC Digital to start today.

Greg Sherwood is CEO of DBC Digital, a marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado. With over 30 years of marketing experience with traditional and inbound (internet) marketing, Greg helps mid-sized businesses get a better return on their marketing dollars.

You can reach Greg at (303) 357-5757 or at dbc@dbcdigital.com

Categories : MESSAGING AND DESIGN, STRATEGY

Posted by DBC Digital on

March 12, 2014

Is it Time to Invest in Apps?

Static Internet properties may have been of high value several years ago, but they’ve quickly fallen out of fashion. Google updates to its search algorithm, and even the evolving ways in which consumers use the Internet, have rapidly eroded the value of Internet pages built to live forever while producing an ever-running trickle of online traffic. Today’s online properties need to be relevant to modern-day Internet consumers, and new technology is changing those consumer habits faster than many businesses might expect.

For years, content has been lifted up as the undisputed king of digital marketing. Its relatively low cost, high-value lifespan, and organic traffic generation potential has enabled its use as the foundation of many digital marketing strategies. And while it’s still an extremely valuable and indispensable component of successful digital strategy, mobile apps are quickly gaining clout as a valuable marketing tool and as a means of increasing customer engagement. Even so, mobile apps aren’t right for every business.

For Search Visibility, Content is Still King

Despite the recent buzz about the importance of developing mobile apps, businesses shouldn’t overreact: Content remains an essential component of effective digital marketing. One key reason for small and medium-sized businesses is the cost: developing an app isn’t cheap, and the sheer cost can exceed the marketing budgets of some companies. Even if a mobile app might be within your budgetary limits, content marketing still provides plenty of bang-for-your-buck that needs to be considered when putting together a marketing strategy.

Online content helps drive up search engine optimization scores, and it provides a shareable item that can be distributed online through social platforms, thereby presenting the opportunity for free, organic distribution of your content and, through that, your brand. Businesses shouldn’t consider apps as a replacement to written content, but for some organizations it might be a useful complementary piece.

With Mobile Consumers, the Change is More Urgent

No one is going to say that a dentist needs his own app to sell himself to digital consumers. But any business that depends on mobile devices as a revenue stream should at least look into the benefits of developing a mobile app. Recent research shows that consumers spend 80 percent of their tablet and smartphone screen time using mobile apps, greatly reducing the reach and influence of a mobile browser.

Consumers are generally spending more time online, regardless of the platform they use, and that’s a good thing for content marketing as well as for mobile apps. But while the average user’s daily web browsing time increased by just 10 minutes over the past year, mobile app usage almost doubled from 43 minutes to 82.

Experts are starting to understand the reason for this gravitation toward mobile apps. Functionality and convenience may play a small role, but the greater influence comes from the unique experience provided by an app.

Apps and the Power of Creation

Mobile web browsers offer access to the whole Internet, but the experience is limited: websites are constrained to the limitations of the browser, both in terms of technology and the space. Mobile web browsers offer a one-size-fits-all approach that doesn’t always encourage the best user experience possible.

That’s exactly where mobile apps flex their power. With a mobile app, developers and businesses can work together to create a seamless, intelligent user experience that mixes media with ease to create a new digital experience. Consumers respond well to these innovative experiences and use mobile apps to seek them out. The quality and aesthetic of a mobile app, in contrast with a website, can dramatically increase the extent of a company’s engagement with users, and, by extension, their brand’s relationship with its consumer base.

The more a company depends on mobile consumerism to pad its bottom-line, the more valuable a mobile app may be. But before you pull the trigger on mobile app development, make sure you have the best information and a concrete plan for your future. Contact DBC Digital today and see how we can prime your business for the digital future.

Categories : BLOGGING, MESSAGING AND DESIGN, SEO, STRATEGY

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