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    Category: Marketing Strategies

    5 advantages to Amazon selling

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    When it comes to online shopping, it’s no secret that many consumers order off of Amazon. With its convenient delivery methods and free shipping options, it’s a great way to introduce small e-commerce businesses to shoppers worldwide. This very attractive sales channel is an opportunity for vendors everywhere, however, it’s important to see if the advantages of Amazon selling are worth the cost for you. 

    Is Amazon selling right for your business?

    Amazon has brilliantly established itself as the world’s largest online retailer and while this company has a lineup of basic products under its name, most of what it sells is from other retailers. 

    That said, what are the pros of Amazon selling that draw in so many vendors?

    • More sales 
    • Gaining new customers
    • Possibility for international expansion
    • Low marketing costs
    • No stock

    More sales 

    Millions of active customers visit Amazon each month in search of products making it the number one place to shop online.

    By listing your products on Amazon, it’s far easier to gain credibility and trust with the consumer. That’s because of the great policies and customer service set in place. Rather than buying from a company a customer has never heard of, they purchase from that company with Amazon as the middleman. This ensures Amazon’s promise and excellence. 

    Gaining new customers

    As mentioned above, it’s likely that Amazon will help e-commerce businesses increase their sales and with that, build up their customer base. Since most users who utilize Amazon focus on finding the perfect product rather than who sells it, it works as an advantage for businesses who want to gain a wider audience. Plus, once they make their first purchase, they can be retargeted for other products by your company in the future. 

    International expansion

    As a globally trusted selling and buying platform, it makes it easy to branch into different markets. Shipping to over 100 countries worldwide, Amazon selling allows businesses to bridge new markets. 

    Low marketing costs

    Since Amazon already attracts millions of customers to its website daily, you don’t need to spend as much money to access them. Depending on your niche and how crowded the market is you can make significant marketing efforts will little effort or spending. After all, who does want to piggyback on Amazon’s success?

    No stock

    With 175 fulfillment centres around the globe, you can ship your products in bulk to Amazon and they will store your inventory, package it, and ship it when customers order. This allows business owners to not get bogged down with shipping so they can spend more time sorting through other important elements of managing business operations. 

    While Amazon selling is a great way to advertise your products, there are other ways you can utilize the platform to target new customers. Our digital marketing team knows the ins and outs of Amazon selling and would be happy to help you achieve your online sales goals on a budget. 

    Are there any advantages to Amazon selling that we missed? Drop a comment below to share with our readers.

    Reach vs. impressions: What’s the difference?

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    Are you working towards building brand awareness? Have you done what seems like everything possible to grow and influence your audience using a wide variety of digital marketing services and tools? If these explanations resonate with you, it’s critical for you to better understand the difference between reach vs. impressions. Since each metric requires a different strategic approach, accurately measuring these metrics will help you to find areas to increase your efforts without wasting time and money. 

    Reach vs. impressions: What’s the difference? 

    In terms of digital marketing, “reach” refers to the total number of people who see your content, whereas, “impressions” refers to the number of times your content is displayed, no matter if it was clicked or not. This is a metric primarily that’s used in social media marketing and pay-per-click advertising.

    Since every social media follower can’t see all of the posts that you publish organically, if your goal is to increase engagement on a particular platform to ensure content is delivered to your target audience, reach and impressions are great analytics to examine.

    Let’s dig a bit deeper

    There are many similarities between reach and impressions, however, there are some underlying differences as well. Let’s use an example to further your understanding. If your company has 1000 followers on Instagram and you publish a post, if every one of your followers sees that post, you have a reach of 1000 users—along with 1000 impressions. However, if you update your post and all of your followers, once again, see your post, your reach doesn’t change, but you now have 2000 impressions. This is partly why you may notice that your impressions can be higher than your follower count.

    Learning more about engagement

    Building brand awareness is about getting your message to the right people. This can be done by improving your reach and impressions. To ensure that you get the most out of each social platform and ad campaign, you will want to analyze the metrics offered by each network. While it would take many pages to break down the process for each social media platform, for this blog, we will focus on Facebook.

    On Facebook, reach falls into three different categories:

    • Organic: The number of unique people who see your content in their news feed.
    • Paid: The number of unique people who see your paid content (ex. Facebook Ad).
    • Viral: The number of unique people who see your post or page mentioned in a story published by a friend. These stories include actions such as liking, sharing, or commenting.

    Similar to reach, Facebook impressions are also split into the same three different categories:

    • Organic: The number of times your content was displayed on someone’s news feed.
    • Paid: The number of times your paid content was displayed.
    • Viral: The number of times content associated with your page was displayed in a story published by a friend.

    A great understanding of building brand awareness must be before engagement, reach, and impressions can drive your target audience to take action. If you’re ready to get your social media marketing and pay-per-click marketing on track, please contact Trek Marketing’s Sales Team to get started.

    What did you find most interesting about the above blog? Drop a comment below to share with our readers.

    Increase web traffic with these 4 strategic services

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    Every online business wants to increase website traffic to drive sales and conversions. After all, an attractive website amplifies brand awareness and revenue. However, it isn’t easy to get noticed in the vast depth of organic search results, which is why we have four digital marketing services to strategically bring quality traffic back to your website. 

    Search engine optimization (SEO) 

    SEO encompasses a wide range of tactics for helping your website rank well in search engine results for relevant keywords and phrases. Since organic searches are most likely to begin via search engines, this digital marketing service has the potential to dramatically increase the quantity and quality of your website traffic by attracting users who’re interested in completing a sale.

    Pay-per-click advertising (PPC)

    PPC advertising drives traffic to your website through the use of paid advertisements. These ads are strategically placed on search engine result pages (SERPs), social media sites, and other websites. While digital marketers are in charge of creating and managing these ads, with PPC advertising, businesses only pay when the ad has been clicked, making this a cost-effective way to increase website traffic. 

    Social media marketing

    Social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are an excellent way to grow your brand, expand your audience, and drive more website traffic. By creating a social media following you offer added opportunities for users to link back to your website, which increases traffic and incentivizes viewers to learn more about what your business has to offer. 

    Content marketing

    Blog post submissions, infographics, videos, and podcasts are all elements that fall under the realm of content marketing. Whether you choose to create and publish content that aligns with the interests of your audience or keep things simple by outsourcing content marketing to a digital marketing agency, it’s important that you be strategic to increase page session times and conversions.

    Did you know that the following content marketing is more likely to drive website traffic?

    • Long-form content (more than 2000 words)
    • Informational pages
    • Product and service pages
    • Guides

    Trek marketing offers all of the above strategic digital marketing services, so perhaps it’s time that you found out more?

    If you had to prioritize, which digital marketing service would you try first to increase your website traffic?

    5 social media content writing tips

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    Social media is an ever-changing aspect of digital marketing and as more people become more technologically savvy, it’s increasingly harder to generate engagement. However, by applying a variety of simple writing tips, you can better your social media content and make it more appealing to the customers you’re targeting. In this post, we will share five content writing tips to assist you with inspiring engagement!

    Spend some time researching

    While spontaneity is part of what makes social media content so fun, if you want your target audience to notice and engage with your social posts, you should spend a bit of time researching what they want to see and what your competition is doing. Although relevance is important, taking some added time to better understand what your audience wants and needs will help you to create a long-standing relationship with them. Start by making a list of challenges that might be prioritized by them and research how you can develop content that will provide them with the perfect solutions. You can also strive to connect with your audience on an emotional level by adding some human interest to your social posts. This means that you can share videos of your team interacting with the products, which helps the audience to envision how they would put your products to the test.  

    Speak their language but develop your voice

    Once you have completed the research phase, the next step is to learn what language your ideal clients use to communicate their needs or challenges. When writing social media content, your posts must resonate with the demographics of your target audience. For example, if your product(s) and/or services cater to retired seniors, it’s best to describe them in more detail and to avoid using slang terms in your writing. However, if your audience is younger, feel free to throw in some hip lingo to better resonate with them. Also, be sure you post on the right social media platform to speak to their needs.

    That said, the voice of your brand should also be consistent across all marketing activities and social interactions. While that voice should always be professional, it’s an opportunity to influence your company personality and a great way to better your engagements by building trust with prompt responses and customer service. 

    Don’t make your posts too long

    While an older demographic might appreciate the added explaining, people value their time, and if you take too long to get your message across, you risk losing their attention altogether.

    Here are some tips we have for developing short, punchy social media content:

    • Use simple language (slang for when the target audience is younger)
    • Use bullet points often to make your posts easy to scan through
    • Keep it short: two to three sentences is plenty

    Use images and include a call-to-action 

    Have you ever heard the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words”? Images, graphics, and video content help to tell a story when words aren’t possible, and many customers prefer visuals over other forms of social media content. Many platforms even possess “live” video features, which are greatly beneficial for providing a more emotional, human connection to your audience. Whether you jump on live to update about product shipment or simply ask your audience how their day is going, it’s a great way to provide a high level of authenticity, which is often lacking in the high-quality marketing videos of big companies. 

    Moreover, at the end of your social media content posts, consider also prompting your audience with an action that you would like for them to take. For example, you could ask them to comment on their favourite summer activity or even use emojis below to describe their day. Keep in mind that engagement is engagement and it doesn’t always have to be about promoting your business. 

    Do you need help with your social media marketing strategy?

    Trek Marketing offers a social media content writing service where we handle all of the postings for you! Simply connect with one of our team members and let us know your vision for your brand to get started.

    Are there other ways in which you keep your social media content fresh? Drop a comment below to share with our readers.

    Tips to managing a cookieless future

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    Rest assured that we’re referencing third-party cookies being tossed aside and not the popular baked treat. After Google officially announced in 2020 that it was banning website cookies from its web browser Chrome—a platform that the digital advertising industry has used to monetize content—the future of data and analytics has become less clear. To help you ease the transition, listed below are some ways your business can strategically work to conquer a cookieless future.

    What are cookies?

    Known as website cookies, these snippets of code are unique IDs that is assigned to website visitors. Remembering each user, the first-party website cookies collect information to deliver a more personalized experience, whereas the third-party website cookies allow brands to re-engage targeted audiences across domains for digital advertising. 

    Why is Google killing website cookies?

    Following suit with competitors Firefox, Safari, and Apple, Google’s browser has been pressured to step back from the use of website cookies with ongoing concerns surrounding data privacy and regulations. 

    How do businesses and digital advertising companies manage a cookieless future?

    While website cookies helped to underpin audience-based digital ad campaigns to allow businesses to retarget and reach lookalike audiences in the hopes of completing a sale, there are other ways in which brands can contextualize and build their audience segments. 

    Listed below are some cookie-free techniques:

    • Use site lists for alternative targeting: Discover which referral sources account for the top sectors of your incoming traffic and build a whitelist to reach your target audience. Conversely, building a blacklist so your ads don’t appear on the wrong domains. 
    • Leverage the intelligence of your competitors: Cross-browsing behaviours can help to identify the top competitor audiences to convert to your own.
    • Monitor pay flows: Pinpoint channels that drive subscriptions to your competitors by monitoring pay flows. This will help you to allocate the budget between paid channels and search engine optimization (SEO). 
    • Power your pitch: Boost customer acquisition by optimizing your ad sales. You can harness granular traffic information and pitch to clients through ad sellers. 

    Do you have any other tips for business owners and digital marketers when Google gets rid of website cookies? Drop a comment below to share. 

    Performance marketing: What is it and why should you care?

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    Although many tools facilitate how to plan, track, and optimize digital marketing campaigns, measurable actions are best handled by those who know how to understand the data. Not only does this further the insight on how, when, and where to allocate a business’s spend but it allows businesses to be vigilant on what’s most important. Listed below is our summary of performance marketing and why you should care.

    What is performance marketing? 

    Performance marketing is an umbrella term that’s used to describe any online marketing activity that can be tracked and attributed to a specific action and/or result. 

    There are three main types of performance marketing payment models:

    • Percent of sale: The advertiser pays a commission on each sale generated
    • Leads: The advertiser pays a commission on each sale generated
    • New customers: The advertiser pays a fixed amount for each new customer acquired

    There are also situations where performance marketing models become hybrid and encompass many payment types. 

    Performance-based marketing tactics such as paid—where advertisers only pay when a user clicks on an ad—are not performance marketing. While pay-per-click advertising, also known as PPC, campaigns focus on action—the ad click—they don’t always lead to performance-based outcomes such as sales or sign-ups. 

    Why do businesses care about performance marketing?

    Since performance marketing opens up opportunities beyond traditional marketing, it’s important to focus on web destinations and creators across various digital landscapes. With platforms that help to bridge these relationships by offering means of measuring goals and compensation, businesses can achieve desired results through the assistance of performance marketing. 

    Who uses or works with performance marketing tools?

    Since performance marketing is data-driven, it’s best handled by digital marketing professionals. However, many people can utilize its strategy. 

    • Marketers plan and execute performance-based campaigns
    • Publishers track performance and get paid for results
    • Influencers find opportunities, set goals, and measure performance
    • Advertisers find publishers and influencers to work with

    How reliable is performance marketing? 

    While performance marketing is a critical strategy that offers advertisers the insight they need to run campaigns successfully, digital fraud is something that shoppers, 

    business owners, and advertisers need to be aware of this.

    Why does ad fraud happen?

    • Bots simulate real user traffic on the website to generate ad impressions
    • Invalid traffic is generated by humans who click on ads to deplete a competitor’s budget
    • Fake websites are created to inflate impressions
    • Domain spoofing imitates a premium website to sell fake inventory

    Since performance marketing campaigns look at actions rather than metrics, the best way to ensure validity in the actions you pay for is to hire a professional agency to manage your digital marketing services. This ensures that the leads you pay for are real people who have been contacted and are interested in what you’re selling. 

    What did you find most interesting about the above blog? Please leave a comment below to start a conversation.

    Boost your brand’s visibility using PPC

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    While many digital marketing services aim to increase business brand awareness, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a unique technique that stares consumers in the eye. Since awareness is about getting your brand in front of the right people, PPC is kind of like the billboard of the digital world, and the best part is that unless the right shopper sees it and clicks, you don’t pay for that campaign. Plus, you can set a daily budget, so there are no hidden costs to run your next PPC advertising service. Continue reading to learn more about PPC and its connection to brand visibility. 

    What is brand awareness and why is it important?

    Brand awareness is a phrase that’s used to describe how recognizable your business is in the noisy online world. It’s the extent to which customers can recall or reconize your brand under a variety of conditions. As a crucial step in the marketing funnel that will help your business acquire and maintain customers, brand awareness is a huge part of what drives consumer decision. Familiarization differentiates your brand, establishes trust with the customer, and creates a positive association which in turn, will increase your sales and conversions.  

    How does our PPC advertising service work to boost your brand’s visibility?

    PPC works to increase brand awareness by introducing your business within ads that your target market sees. This is the space where you can present an introduction of your brand to your customer base and hopefully creating a lasting impression. Whether it’s click-through rates that are important or physical sales, you can analyze your PPC campaign over time and modify your goals as needed. The best part is you only pay for the people that click on your ad and a daily budget can be set. 

    Tips for growing brand visibility using our PPC advertising service

    There are many creative opportunities that come with growing brand awareness, but the ultimate goal is to build a reputation with your target audience that eventually leads to driven sales. This means that strategic decisions need to be made to keep things moving forward. 

    Here are some examples: 

    • Know who your target market is
    • Understand the habits of your target market
    • Diversify your ads
    • Research and use the right keywords and phrases
    • Add a flair of creativity
    • Include the right information 

    Boosting your brand’s visibility is right at your fingertips with our PPC advertising service!

    Do you have any other questions about how PPC advertising works? Please drop a comment below for a prompt reply.

    How does content work to improve your conversion rate?

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    Those who own an online business are no strangers to writing content, especially if they have yet to collaborate with a professional digital marketing team. Whether writing copy for pages on the website, updating product information, or delving deep into industry news using a creative blogging platform, content marketing is a crucial part of building brand awareness. That said, your brand’s impression heavily depends on increasing conversion rates to your website, and to do that, you must first understand how conversion rates work to improve visibility, traffic, and sales. 

    What is a conversion rate?

    A conversion rate is a general term that refers to the recorded percentage of users who have completed a desired action or site goal. The rate is calculated by taking the total number of users who convert—actions and goals come in many shapes and sizes (examples, clicking on an ad or completing a purchase)—dividing it by the overall size of the audience, and converting that figure into a percentage. 

    What is conversion rate optimization? 

    Known as CRO in its short form, conversion rate optimization is the systematic process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who take your desired action or complete your site goal—be that subscribing to a newsletter. CRO also involves understanding how users utilize your website, what actions they take, and what work needs to be done before their complete your actions and goals.

    Search engine optimization and how it works to improve conversion rates

    You could write as much content as you want, but if your copy isn’t following the right search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, potential customers won’t find it on the web. You will simply possess a low-traffic website that has tons of copy. This is because the CRO is closely related to SEO. By writing SEO-friendly content through the use of industry-researched keywords, pages can increase their visibility on popular search engines where customers have the chance to find them and click. There is also an opportunity to improve and generate lead growth by writing bulkier content and answering questions to improve click-through rates, which also assists in improved conversion rates

    What are some ways that you can improve your content to help with conversion rates?

    While content should be written with a clear vision of what needs to be conveyed to the consumer, it can also be crafted to build an emotional connection with the reader. 

    Listed below are actions your business should take to improve your content:

    • Include a call-to-action: Weak or nonexistent call-to-actions (CTAs) give customers zero incentive to engage with your content. Be sure to utilize this part of your copy to offer something truly valuable so that your copy doesn’t become buried over time. 
    • User-friendly development and design: Aside from having a website that functions well and transitions quickly, you should also ensure that it’s mobile-friendly and your information forms are short and sweet. Signups or checkouts that required too many fields or pages often lead to users abandoning before the desired action is complete. 
    • Clear contact page: Customers shouldn’t have to scour your website to find a phone number or email address. 
    • Use high-quality images: Stock images are great when you’re first starting out, but if you want to further establish your brand, we recommend adding photos of the staff, facilities, products, and services to better connect with your customers. 

    What methods have you used in the past to increase your website’s conversion rate? Please share them with our audience in the comments section below.

    5 ways to grow your website traffic through digital marketing

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    Many online businesses struggle to come up with innovative ways to increase traffic to a website. Since it can be challenging to know which methods work well to achieve positive results and which are tired strategies, listed below are some organic and paid options that yield great results when it comes to increasing traffic to a website. 

    Perform keyword research

    Keyword research is a practice that search engine professionals use to find terms that are often entered by users into popular search engines when on the hunt for products, services, or general information. The words related to these queries can then be harnessed and used within web content to target consumers and crawl search engines organically. Aside from using keywords in copy, they can always be used in meta descriptions, the page title, the URL, and headers. 

    Those needing help with keyword strategy should consider hiring an SEO expert to offer valuable insights by performing audits and identifying issues where your website can improve. 

    Create content that’s memorable

    While the posting of regular content is a great habit to get into, you need to make sure that your copy is memorable to cut through the expansive options available already on the internet. Not only does this type of noise help to increase traffic, but it also assists in establishing a better bond with your audience. 

    Keep active on your social feeds

    The use of varied social media platforms is a great way to attract visitors. However, website traffic relies on elements such as:

    • The sharing of posted content via social media platforms
    • The interaction of business to followers through replies and/or reposting of content via tagging
    • The use of relevant hashtags
    • The promotion of new content via links

    Advertise digitally

    Whether you endorse a new product through paid search, social media, or display ads, pay-per-click advertising is an efficient way to increase traffic to your website. While some users may block ads, since you only pay when your ad is clicked on, you can easily stay within a budget and attract the right audience to click and buy. 

    Send out newsletters

    Email marketing is one of the most effective means of increasing web traffic…especially if your company is hosting a sale or launching a new product. Here are a few practices that work well for those sending regular emails: 

    • Be sure to include enticing information in the subject line and body of your emails
    • Insert links and buttons to allow shoppers to click easily
    • Mobile-friendliness is essential 
    • Add touches of personalization
    • Take the time to ensure that your email is visually appealing and well-designed
    • Test each email before it’s sent

    Which of the above methods do you plan to use to increase traffic to a website? Drop a comment below to let us know. 

    Marketing analytics and why they matter

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    In every aspect of digital marketing, measurement can be a challenge. How does one know which campaigns and efforts are creating opportunities and generating the most sales? Aside from remembering to provide attribution to campaigns, you must also take the time to revisit those touchpoints and review the valuable data offer through marketing analytics tools. Not only do these tools take the guesswork out of allocating your marketing budget but they also enable you to be more proactive with your future strategies, and here’s how!

    What is marketing analytics?

    Marketing analytics is an umbrella term that’s used to describe the processes and technologies that measure a company’s activities through various sources of marketing mediums. 

    Marketing data includes some of the following:

    • Web analytics: This includes elements like website visits, traffic patterns, referral sources, and bounce rates.
    • Social media interactions: This includes elements like social engagements, follows, profile views, shares, and direct messaging (DMs).
    • E-commerce purchases and transactions: This includes online sales, leads, and signups. 
    • Paid ad campaign metrics: This includes ad views, clicks, click-through rates (CTR), cost per mille (CPM), cost per click (CPC), conversions, conversion rate, cost per lead (CPL), and overall performance. 
    • Customer data: This includes elements like feedback, behaviour, and purchase history. 

    Marketing analytics tools, software, and technologies are used to gather data and provide business owners and marketing professionals with content and visualizations that help them to better understand which tactics are working well and how to best optimize the budget. 

    What are the three types of marketing analytics models?

    Planning, managing, and optimizing marketing campaigns can be done using three models that assist in providing insight to better plan and allocate the budget. 

    • Descriptive: Descriptive models use historical data from previous campaigns to display what happened, which provides hindsight into which future actions might work better for the businesses’ marketing strategy. 
    • Predictive: Predictive models provide further insights than descriptive models, using past campaigns to predict customer behaviours. This approach is beneficial for providing more target marketing campaigns. 
    • Prescriptive: Prescriptive models use data from various touchpoints by weighing the impact of each interactive for the purpose of influencing more efficient customer behaviour. This model is highly targeted and will often focus on current trends. 

    Why do you need to care about marketing analytics?

    Whether you’re a digital marketing professional who’s working alongside clients or a business professional who’s looking to better understand their industry, marketing analytics works to surface insights and influence customer interactions. 

    Listed below are some of the many advantages of marketing analytics:

    • It provides tangible data around paid marketing initiatives
    • It informs how marketing campaigns over time and in real-time
    • It connects marketing campaigns to traffic and other metrics that impact customer behaviours
    • It influences future marketing and content strategies
    • It helps you to better spend advertising dollars on effective marketing channels
    • It provides valuable data on current and prospective customers

    What marketing analytics tools are trending right now?

    In a world where digital reach is vast, there are a variety of ways that marketers and business owners alike get the data that they need to plan, analyze, optimize and execute digital marketing campaigns—with access to so many free and budget-friendly marketing analytics tools!

    • Web analytics: Google Analytics, Adobe Analytics, and MixPanel
    • Campaign analytics: Semrush, Cyfe, and Klipfolio
    • Social analytics: Hootesuite and SproutSocial
    • Social listening: Brandwatcg and Falcon.io.
    • Customer journey analytics: Sprinklr, Thunderhead, and Pointillist 
    • Sales intelligence tools: HubSpot, Salesforce, and ActiveCampaign
    • Company financial data

    And so much more, since most marketers and businesses utilize an abundance of tools and platforms in conjunction with one another. 

    Do you need assistance in getting your marketing analytics in check? Trek Marketing believes that analytics hold the key to e-commerce success and we’re happy to teach you how to better understand them and/or utilize them ourselves to help your business thrive.

    What is your current e-commerce goal? Drop it below for advice on which marketing analytics tools can be used to help you achieve your vision(s).