×
  • Leading Digital Marketing Agency
  • 900+ Websites Launched
  • $100M+ Client Revenue Generated








    855.686.4649 ext.707 Get A Proposal

    Category: Marketing Strategies

    Interested in learning about how Google Shopping can grow your business?

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    Are your traffic and leads drying up? Our digital marketing team takes the time to understand what you do and how to make you money, which is why we are happy to manage your Google Shopping ads as part of your online advertising services with us. Google shopping allows vendors an opportunity to reach bottom-funnel customers, giving them an easy way to stand out in search results. For those who have more questions about the advantages of Google Shopping ads, read the information in the article below. 

    How does Google Shopping work for the consumer?

    When a person uses Google Shopping, they can easily browse products from sellers who have chosen to feature their goods on the platform. All offers are ranked based on relevance, the user’s Google activity, and the search terms they choose to use. There will also be some ads peppers in to improve the quality of the search results. However, these offers will have a “sponsored” label underneath, indicating that their spot is based on paying Google rather than the influence of the items displayed. Google will be compensated for any clicks to the ads as well as receiving a commission for each purchase that’s made. 

    Consumers can customize their Google Shopping results by sorting and filtering elements like the price, product category, or brand. This can be viewed under each shopper’s activity section of their Google account. They can also block specific advertisers and opt-out of personalized ads by visiting Google’s Ads Settings page. That way the products displayed on Google Shopping are tailored to each shopper’s experience. 

    When you find a product that you’re interested in on the Google Shopping platform, you’ll then see the item price along with applicable taxes. There is an exception on “Buy on Google” offers, which once clicked upon will take you directly to the seller’s site to make the purchase. Keep in mind that shipping costs vary depending on their final destination, along with shipping method and any applicable information about insurances or warranties. 

    How does Google Shopping work for the vendor?

    Sellers and advertisers who feature products on Google Shopping must comply with all policies to keep their place on this prominent platform. Those that chose to ignore any of the rules may be suspended or have their items removed. To ensure this doesn’t happen, vendors need to provide detailed information about their products and update their listings regularly. 

    To add your products, follow the instructions below:

    1. Log in to your Merchant Center account
    2. Select products from the navigation menu, then click all products
    3. Click the plus button to add the product
    4. Fill out the data fields for each product
    5. If your product has varying colors, sizes, or other attributes, you will want to add these values
    6. Click save

    Why do consumers and vendors alike enjoy the Google Shopping experience? 

    In a world where you can buy products anywhere you go, it’s important to make the experience memorable for the consumer and simplistic for the vendor.

    Google Shopping is a powerful technology that allows consumers to research the products before being pointed towards the vendors who sell them. The best part is that it’s known for its speediness and will instantly provide photos and information, including stores that sell said product, instantly after entering the search. Lastly, the experience is very comprehensive and allows shoppers to find both common and unusual varieties of their search terms. 

    Have you ever purchased a product or sold one using Google Shopping? Drop a comment below to share your experience. 

    4 reasons you need a digital marketing strategy and shouldn’t wing it

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    It’s 2021 and there’s no questioning that digital marketing is becoming a must for growing businesses around the world. Whether it’s through SEO, email marketing, Google Ads, or blogging, crafting a digital marketing strategy is crucial if you hope to compete in your industry. Aside from hiring a full service digital marketing agency, the information below can help you understand the benefits that digital tools possess when combined with a kickass strategy.   

    What is encompassed within digital marketing?

    While the realm of marketing is vast, a full service digital marketing agency utilizes large amounts of technology and digital tools to achieve a wide range of marketing objectives. 

    These tools may include: 

    • Online search engines 
    • Mobile apps
    • Websites
    • Social media pages
    • Email
    • SMS marketing
    • Digital partnerships

    The key to integrating the above digital marketing strategies is to create some business goals with clear benefits that meet your future objectives. This will ensure that each strategy possesses an incentive aimed at growing your business.

    Reasons that you need digital marketing

    There are so many ways to improve your customer relations and outreach through the use of digital marketing. Listed below are some benefits:

    1. Measure success: With the use of traditional advertising methods, it can take a long time to analyze the progress your campaign has made, but with the help of digital marketing solutions, you can complete progress reports in a few hours through the use of digital analytics tools that bolster your digital efforts. Leads, conversions, and impressions are just a few of the tools that you can use to measure your companies success and the best part is that you can optimize your strategies as you go.
    2. Levels the playing field: Whether you own a tiny startup or a small, established business, it can be challenging to compete with the big brands. Although promising digital marketing can give your name recognition by adding a little flair to some cost-effective ad campaigns. Using elements such as Google Ads and SEO trends, over time you will generate strong customer relationships and have more visitors flocking to your website. 
    3. Reach a large audience: The internet is a vast network filled with tons of impressionable users, so it doesn’t matter how big your brand is, all that matters is that you use the right digital marketing tools to help you make valuable impressions. Social media marketing is a great way to reach your target demographic and if your level of reach is strong, you can use information collected in your campaigns to target customers outside of your general geographic region. 
    4. Increase revenue: The purpose of any digital marketing strategy is to lead to increased revenue, and with trusted customer relations, your followers will spread the word to their friends and family, helping to generate more online conversions. Even a simple shoutout holds the power to draw more people to visit your site, which offers a greater chance for you to make a sale. 

    Are there other reasons that you feel should be included in our list above? Drop a comment below to share with our readers. 

    What is SMS marketing and how does it work?

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    With the ubiquity of smartphones in recent years, wouldn’t it make more sense to drive engagement through a more direct marketing approach? While email marketing and social media marketing strategies are great for high engagement rates, SMS marketing helps businesses close the gap and is the perfect method for emerging marketings. Continue reading to learn more about this powerful, communicative strategy. 

    What is SMS marketing?

    By definition, SMS marketing means short message service marketing. This technique uses text messages (SMS) to communicate time-sensitive offers, updates, and reminders to customers who have consented to receive these types of messages from your business. While SMS marketing is a great way to enhance your digital marketing strategy, it’s no for everyone, which is why it’s important to analyze how it’s done and emulate if it would work for your target audience before investing the time and money into developing a platform to send out texts. How’s that for proactively developing a relationship with your digital marketing strategy? 

    What are some industry best practices for SMS marketing?

    As consumers become more attached to their phones, text message marketing for small businesses can quickly become the most direct line of contact and effective form of communication. 

    Here are some rules for SMS marketing:

    • Ensure that your contacts have opted in to SMS: Like any type of digital marketing, you need to receive permission from your customers to send them straight to their phones. 
    • Be mindful of the time you’re sending: Unlike email, which is likely only checked by users a couple of times a day, when a text message is received, people tend to open these messages almost immediately. So, when you’re crafting texts, ensure that you’re not disturbing your contacts at odd hours. 
    • Don’t forget to include your company’s name in your message: How awful would it be if your text message generated a lot of interest, but the users couldn’t remember what businesses they’re subscribed to. 
    • Combine text message marketing for small businesses with other elements of your digital marketing strategy: There are a variety of channels to interact with consumers, so be sure they tie together to create a marketing communication system that works to build up these customer connections. In our professional opinion, both SMS marketing and email marketing complement each other quite well!

    What is SMS marketing used for?

    There are two types of messages that you can send with SMS marketing, a campaign message that is linked to coupons or an upcoming event or a transactional message that is triggered by a certain behaviour (order confirmation, shipping notification, etc.). However, text message marketing for small businesses can be used in several ways.

    • Short-term promotions for retail and other e-commerce businesses
    • Urgent updates about events or customer orders
    • Appointment reminders
    • Internal alerts

    Are you ready to start SMS marketing? If you have any further questions about how it works, please drop them in the comments section below. 

    3 SEO insights that Google Analytics offers

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    Are you new to the game and looking to learn a few simple, yet useful insights you can take from Google Analytics to help identify opportunities within your organic search engine optimization (SEO) strategy? There’s a wealth of information right at your fingertips to help identify performance and optimization issues.  Check out these three high-level actionable insights that may help you to improve your organic strategy.

    Utilize/create custom segments

    Using segments helps you to learn more about the users who are visiting your website and how they’re engaging with it. These features allow you to see traffic by channel, visitors who have completed goals, and vast demographic data, including further customized segments created from many facets of user data, such as time spent on site, visits to specific web pages, location of visitors, etc. 

    Another insightful segment to explore when utilizing Google Analytics for SEO purposes is to create an audience tab. To do this, navigate to Audience > Interests > Overview to find a display that examines the following three interest reports: Affinity categories, in-market segments, and other categories. This will allow you to look at a graph showing what percentage of users are shoppers and of these shoppers, what percentage have an interest in certain products or services. To dive even deeper, you can navigate from there to the Demographics tab under the Audience tab to view the age and gender of your website’s users. 

    Monitor mobile traffic

    Anyone in e-commerce knows the importance of mobile traffic is huge, however, rather than simply monitor mobile traffic to your site, Google Analytics allows users to monitor the engagement of these mobile visitors. 

    Here are some features that you can assess: 

    • Add a mobile segment and you can view the number of mobile conversions at the individual page level. 
    • Monitor your mobile bounce rate so that you can hone in on potential issues on a certain page. This is an incredible benefit SEO opportunity offered through Google Analytics. 
    • Compare both mobile and desktop bounce rate metrics to differentiate between the two types of experiences. 
    • Compare new and returning mobile users to see if there’s any value in the content that translates to a one-time customer or recurring client. 

    Focus on site search

    If there is a search bar on your website there’s an enormous SEO opportunity that Google Analytics can offer you! Aside from learning about what visitors are looking for once they reach your website, you can also gain insight into how many people are searching for the same items. Also, if a large percentage of your search traffic is relying on the search bar, this is a strong indication that your main navigation features on the website are lacking and not providing visitors with a clear idea of the location of what they’re searching for. 

    Another opportunity, especially on the SEO side of things, is to take the terms that are frequently searched for and generate a page with a good amount of information to make sense of that term. If the term is a product or service, use this as an opportunity to create insightful content that will benefit your shoppers and also consider highlighting the product or service prominently on your website to generate more clicks and create easier accessibility.

    What did you find most interesting about SEO and how it works alongside Google Analytics to reveal incredible insights about your business? Drop a comment below to start a conversation.

    2 digital marketing trends to keep an eye on

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    While it seemed like the world was stopping at the beginning of 2020, there has been a lot of e-commerce growth since then, paving the way for a variety of promising digital marketing trends to continue evolving far into the future. Those that shopped online pre-pandemic have continued to support this method of acquiring goods and services and for individuals who preferred the in-person experience, many are now comfortable with e-commerce and have become a huge part of the digital revolution. Needless to say, whether you work for an online marketing agency, run an e-commerce company, or simply enjoy perusing digitally for your shopping needs, it’s clear that many digital marketing trends are progressing and revamping the buying process for consumers everywhere. 

    E-commerce sales are at an all time high

    Many businesses that were digitally equipped throughout the pandemic saw their sales soar to an all-time high, with the rise of smaller chains and startups heavily investing in their digital marketing efforts to grab the attention of online audiences. Those that were brick-and-mortar only also jumped into the digital world in order to survive while they awaited the return of their traditional foot traffic. Needless to say, this influx to the digital marketing ecosystem is a great trend for business owners who are prepared to build their brands a powerful online presence. 

    Prompt shipping methods are necessary 

    Shipping has become a growing digital marketing trend that has reshaped the way that businesses interact with their customers. There was once a time where shoppers would get excited simply having the ability to have purchases shipped directly to their homes. Those days have come and gone! Consumers now see shipping as a service they shouldn’t have to pay for and they also expect a much quicker fulfillment. 

    As a result, many businesses rely on fulfillment centers to manage their inventory and streamline any returns to ensure they’re able to keep up with their competitors. Some also offer curbside pickup and free shipping for the ultimate convenience. While shipping can never truly be free, business owners are able to strategically select local fulfillment centres and increase the selling prices of their products to combat these challenges. 

    What other digital marketing trends have you been experimenting with since 2020? Drop a comment below to share with our readers.

    Why do business owners need to be more cyber vigilant with their marketing strategies?

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    With technology vastly advancing every day, it’s becoming increasingly important to find new ways to protect your business against the threat of cyberattacks. While virtual assets such as customer information and company financials are at risk, your brand’s reputation is another element that requires businesses to be more aware of cyber-vigilance. So, are you ready to learn about how to better secure your online shop? 

    Bots can affect your marketing strategy

    A bot is a software program that operates on the internet and performs repetitive tasks. While most bot traffic is good, some bots have a negative impact on a website or application and will maliciously attack to collect data. So, if you’ve got a killer marketing strategy, you need to be cyber vigilant to ensure that you’re protected. While Google Analytics can do some of the work for you, this program will miss things that the human eye can catch, which is why it’s always a good idea to have a professional take a look at your digital marketing efforts to ensure good cybersecurity. 

    You want to protect your customer’s information

    While you may not examine your customer’s information daily, its collection is essential to the operation of your business, especially if you have loads of recurring orders. That being said, customer-associated data is very precious and should be stored in a protected order management system to track visitor movements and protect names, addresses, and credit card numbers in the event of a data breach. 

    Since digital marketing is a data-led game, it’s important to carry out security checks to ensure any risks or vulnerabilities within your chosen software are removed. We also recommend that you change your passwords often and keep employee access only to those that require it. 

    Avoid plagiarism of content

    It’s challenging to share content in the online world without the risk of competitors copying your style. While the first step is being aware that plagiarism tends to happen, the next is ensuring that your content creation remains focused on building informative copy that’s written in-house or by a trusted third-party digital marketing company that will write original copy geared towards your brand. 

    If you think you’re a victim, use an online plagiarism checker and once found, contact the offender to have them remove the copy. If they refuse, the next step is to contact their web hosting service with the proof. 

    Remove the risk of brand damage

    Another reason that business owners focus on digital marketing cybersecurity is to ensure their brand’s competence isn’t destroyed due to aggressive or obscene messaging. Many consumers are fixated on a company based on this relationship and if emails or social posts go live with other motives in mind, it can be very challenging to apologize and make a comeback. 

    Are you ready to reduce any threats to your businesses’ security? 

    Have you ever been a victim of a cybersecurity breach? Please share your story in the comments section below with our other readers.

    How to use cross channel insights in digital marketing

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    Competition can make or break an online business and if you’re at a crossroads where you feel it’s time to take on a new approach when it comes to strategizing your digital campaigns, cross channel marketing might be just the breakthrough your business needs to better serve your customers! A business needs to move beyond usual resources to find insights that allow them to grow, especially when looking to gain efficiency channel-to-channel. 

    Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO)

    While both of these digital marketing services are good to focus on when you want to increase the sales and conversion rates of your business, one focuses on targeting a niche audience through paid search results while the other utilizes keywords and builds up the organic traffic to the website over time. That being said, cross channel marketing comes into play when the above two services work in conjunction with each other and use the power of high-converting target keywords to focus on building clicks through organic search results. Cross channel marketing also looks at longer-tail variations of targeted keywords and considers the intent of the user who’s searching. 

    While paid search is a low funnel approach that often sees high intent-based users that are ready to immediately purchase, organic search is more likely to draw in information-seeking users that may peruse your website and shop at a later time. With this in mind, both services have the potential to increase the behavior metrics of your website such as time on site, pages per visit, and the bounce rate when working alongside each other. 

    Google My Business and paid search/social

    If your business has the funds to expand your cross channel marketing efforts, there are also some other ways to refine and target your audience! Aside from researching your potential customers interests, geographies, affinities, you can also utilize Google My Business (GMB) data from users that request directions to your brick and mortar location. 

    While it’s always a great idea to nurture your existing customers, GMS insights provide excellent opportunities to expand on paid searches and open new opportunities for modified social targeting. 

    Polling and content marketing

    While polls are not a new concept, in the world of digital marketing, they’re a great way to see what gets your social audience excited! Businesses are able to utilize polls to learn more about their customers and the type of content that they enjoy seeing, topics that interest them, and issues that may worry them. Aside from gaining valuable insights, this type of cross channel marketing also allows you to draw on social engagement to determine a new perspective on where you should invest your time and resources. 

    Are there any other ways that you use cross channel marketing for your online business? Drop a comment below to share with our readers. 

    Why email marketing should be the cornerstone of your digital strategy

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    In today’s growing digital world, everyone relies on a variety of channels as a means of communication, education, entertainment, and shopping. However, depending on your target demographic, the amount of time spent online varies, giving even more opportunities for marketers to reach their audiences through digital strategies. That being said, a business can only invest in tactful strategies that keep revenue coming in, and since some digital marketing efforts take time before they start to make money, many rely on email marketing as a crucial cornerstone in their digital strategy. Let’s break it down.

    What is email marketing? 

    Email marketing is the act of sending a mass message to a group or list of contacts through email. While most emails are sent to incentivize potential and current customers to make a quick purchase, some include business updates, industry announcements, and inventory restocks. While many business owners successfully formulate and send their own e-newsletters, most utilize professional email marketing services to help them create click-worthy content that attracts their target audience.  

    What are the advantages of email marketing? 

    While every digital marketing tactic has its own advantages, if we had to pick one that brings the most business value, it would be email marketing. Why? Well, email marketing offers an unbeatable return-on-investment (ROI) when compared to other types of marketing channels. That being said, while email marketing gives consumers less opportunity for engagement, it does offer business owners the opportunity to connect and grow with their audience, while tweaking their approach based on clicks and views. 

    Why you should sign up for email marketing services

    You wouldn’t attempt to repair your vehicle’s engine without the right set of knowledge and skills to put everything back together in working order, would you? The same rule applies to your company’s email marketing. As a top contributor to the success of your business’s digital strategy, here are some reasons why email marketing is worth the investment.

    • Email offers great return-on-investment
    • Email allows business owners to incorporate other marketing techniques (ex. social platforms)
    • Email allows you to connect with larger audiences all at once
    • Emails possess a longer lifespan than most social posts
    • Email is a great way to tailor content to new and existing customers

    Are you ready to launch ongoing email campaigns and start collecting valuable customer data? Drop a comment below to share with other readers.

    How do newsfeed algorithms work on popular social platforms?

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    People everywhere rely on social channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to keep them connected with their loved ones as well as admired connections like celebrities and organizations. However, each time you log onto these networks it isn’t impossible for you to see every single update from all your connections, which is why today’s social channels have gravitated towards an algorithm-based feed to better the experience for each user. 

    What is a social media algorithm?

    A social media algorithm is a compilation of rules and data that work together to decide what a user will see on their chosen platform. Each social media website utilizes a unique, ever-changing algorithm for every person’s account, which means that no two people will possess the same updates, news, and posts on their feeds. 

    How does Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm work? 

    Facebook is the largest social media platform to date, studying user’s behaviours to ensure that the content shown is what that person is most interested in. But, how does Facebook know what its users like? Well, the Like button works as the epicentre of Facebook’s user experience, allowing each user to personalize it based on who and what they enjoy most. The Like button also works as a form of positive reinforcement, allowing users to click like on content that’s shared by friends and family. Over time, all of this data governs how each newsfeed operates. 

    How does Twitter’s Timeline algorithm work?

    Below is a breakdown of the data that determines the social media algorithm:

    • Relevancy score: There are hundreds of variables that an algorithm takes into account when it picks each user’s posts. Things like the user’s history of likes, clicks, comments, shares, hides, or marked spam are all stored and used to predict future content. More specifically, the algorithm predicts outcomes by giving content a relevancy score, which sorts your social media content and places it on your feed for optimal engagement. 
    • Prioritizes friends: Did you know that you can boost the posts that you want to see more of on your account? The people you interact with most often on Facebook are given priority over other Facebook users, which means that you won’t be concerned about missing important updates from the friends and family members that you care for the most. This is done by categorizing a person or page by clicking “see post” and unfollowing the people or pages that you don’t want to see as often. 

    Your Twitter Timeline consists of a stream of tweets from the users you follow. If you’re very active on Twitter and have a lot of celebrities and friends that you care about, then your algorithm can be organized based on two approaches: “Show Me The Best Tweets First”, “Best Tweets” or the “While You Were Away” feature.

    Below is a breakdown of the data that determines the social media algorithm:

    • Show Me The Best Tweets First: This feature ranks your content based on relevancy rather than listing tweets chronologically. Based on what you’ve liked or engaged with recently, Twitter will put the tweets that it thinks you will find most interesting at the top of your timeline.
    • Best Tweets: This feature requires the user to opt-in and select content from specific users to indicate these will be the best tweets. Then, the user can refresh the timeline to have any of these tweets added to the top of their feeds.
    • While You Were Away: This feature has been added to allow users the flexibility to be away from checking their feeds without FOMO (fear of missing out). It’s completely determined by user engagement and can be turned off for users that don’t check with Twitter feeds often.

    How does Instagram’s feed algorithm work?

    This quickly evolving platform is becoming a hot spot for digital marketing, which means that it’s important for small businesses to understand how the social media algorithm works for this channel. 

    Using machine learning to aggregate six key factors, Instagram determines the content that’s the most relevant to the user.

    • Interest: This is based on prediction data that measures the type of content of posts you engage with most often. 
    • Frequency: This is measured by how often you use the app to determine what posts you want to see when you open the app again. 
    • Following: The more accounts you follow, the less likely you’ll be to see everyone appear in your news feed. 
    • Recency: How recently was the post published? This impacts if it will appear in your newsfeed. 
    • Relationship: Who shared the post and what connection do you have to them or their content? This can easily be influenced by tagged photos, engagements, or direct messages. 
    • Usage: The time you spend on Instagram also has a great effect on the content that you see on your feed.

    Do you need someone to help you to manage your company’s social media networks? Trek Marketing offers a social media marketing management service for businesses that want to outsource their social content and have a team member available to answer customer questions and comments. 

    Which of the above three social networks do you spend the most time on? Drop a comment below to share.

    How to use Google Adwords for your business

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    There are a lot of expenses that come with e-commerce operations and since most small business owners don’t have access to endless marketing resources, it’s important to select the best advertising methods to start generating revenue. So, since it can take months to increase your organic search ranking through the use of search engine optimization (SEO), we recommend investing in pay-per-click advertising campaigns like Google Adwords to get yourself started. 

    What is Google Adwords?

    Google Adwords is a pay-per-click online advertising platform developed by Google where advertisers can bid to display brief ads, service offerings, product listings, or videos to web users. These ads can be placed in the results of search engines (ex. Google Search, Bing Search) as well as non-search websites, mobile apps, and videos. Google Adwords also works as a keyword tool, allowing users to target specific words or phrases they’re hoping to target to get their ads highly ranked on various search results pages. 

    How does it work?

    It all starts with a query. When a user searches for something on Google, it will look at the Adwords advertisers pool and determine whether there will be an auction for those terms. If one or more advertising is bidding on keywords that Google deems are relevant to the search, it will trigger an auction. This is where the advertisers will identify which keywords they want to bid on, how much they’re willing to spend, and create groupings using these keywords that can pair with their ads. Google then does the work by entering the keyword from that advertiser’s account, along with their maximum bid. 

    If you’re wondering how Google determines which ads are shown where, once an advertiser has entered into an auction, Google will look at two key factors to determine ad rank: maximum bid and quality score. The maximum bid is the set price the advertiser specifies for that keyword, whereas the quality score is a metric that determines how useful the ad is to the user (max bid x quality score = ad rank > position). 

    The auction is run billions of times each month. This allows results that users find relevant to their searches and advertisers to connect with potential customers for cheap.

    What are the top advantages of using Google Adwords?

    Google Adwords is a powerful keyword tool when it comes to advertising your business online. Listed below are a few advantages that you can enjoy on this paid marketing platform.

    • Targeting is more precise: This ensures that each ad is only displayed to users that are more likely to become potential customers. With the ability to filter audiences based on geographic location, age, gender, and more. There’s even a feature that allows the targeted audience to see the ad on specified devices or at certain times. 
    • You only pay for results: With Google Adwords, businesses only pay for the clicks their ads get, rather than the impressions. This advertising model only costs money when the targeted user takes action. 
    • Performance can be easily tracked: Whether you want to track the number of users that view and click your ad, those taking action, or those spending money, Google Adwords is the perfect tool to increase profitability. 

    Do you need help setting up and managing your Google Adwords account? Once you determine your budget, it’s time to speak with one of Trek Marketing’s Client Success Managers. 

    What do you think is the most advantageous part of using Google Adwords for your business? Drop a comment below to share with our readers.