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    Tag: digital marketing campaigns

    Digital marketing tips for the holiday season

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    The holidays are quickly approaching, and the holiday season means big business for e-commerce companies. While big box stores are bound to get an influx in sales, the holiday season is also a great opportunity for small businesses to shine. Shoppers are always on the hunt for the best deals, the quickest and cheapest shipping, and unique products to give away as gifts. Since November is when people begin to explore and evaluate their options, it’s a great time to focus on your marketing plan. Here are some tips for the holiday season.

    Set SMART goals

    After you take the time to brainstorm some ideas, it’s time for you to set some business goals. Since goal setting is an important part of launching a successful marketing campaign, we recommend that you try using the SMART goals formula—an acronym that offers a framework to develop a path to success.

    What does SMART mean?

    • Specific: Focus on one area or task
    • Measurable: Assign a number or percentage to your task to measure progress
    • Attainable: Can you reasonably achieve your goal?
    • Relevant: Can you benefit from achieving this goal?
    • Time-sensitive: Can you create a deadline and ensure that you hold yourself accountable? 

    When creating goals, it’s important that you focus on one area at a time. For example, if you want to increase traffic this holiday season, you will want to invest in digital marketing services that directly correlate to an influx in traffic. Next, once you pick your goal, make sure it’s something that you can measure. You could say, “I want to increase my traffic by 10% over the holidays” which is something that you can track through Google Analytics. Not only do you want to ensure the said goal is measurable, but it also needs to be attainable. The holiday season has already started and for most people, ends by January 1. Is it attainable for you to increase traffic by 10%? Possibly 5% would be a better benchmark. With a specific, measurable, and attainable goal, you need to test its relevance. Will a 5% increase in traffic have a positive impact on your business? It absolutely will! Finally, you need to make sure that your goal is time-sensitive. Set your deadline. You have at least six weeks onwards to get the job done and keep yourself motivated.

    Be sure to define your target audience

    When speaking with a specific person, we naturally adjust what we say and how we say it. Your marketing should be the same. 

    Here are some questions to ask yourself when marketing to your target audience:

    • How well do you know your customers?
    • What makes them buy specifically from your business?
    • What are your customers thinking when they begin the holiday shopping journey?

    Knowing your audience is an essential part of creating marketing materials that will appeal to them. 

    Don’t forget to tell your story

    Customers join a retailer’s business journey at varied stages, so the holiday season is a great time to reintroduce yourself. 

    Your story could include:

    • How you got started
    • Your brand’s history
    • Customer success stories
    • Advice on products or services

    Hi, we’re Trek Marketing! We hope that all of the above holiday season digital marketing tips allow you to better connect with your audience in a successful and impactful way. 

    Which tip(s) have you added to your radar for the holiday season? Drop a comment below. 

    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. 

    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).

    How to promote your services online as a home contractor

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    With the housing market booming these past few years the need for home improvement projects has skyrocketed, as has digital marketing for small businesses. With homeowners undertaking complete or partial renovations in place of having a holiday, home maintenance services such as HVAC, roofing, electrical, plumbing, and/or landscaping, need to be taking a more aggressive marketing approach to their promotion. After all, these projects need a professional home contractor and the best place for homeowners to search for reputable companies is online. 

    Update your website

    When promoting home contracting services, your website should be where you start first. After all, why rely on word-of-mouth representation when you’re living at the peak of a digital era? While there are potential customers that enjoy visiting a physical brick-and-mortar store to get the feel of a company and ask their face-to-face questions, most prefer websites as a hub for their first glance at a service. So, if you’re a home contractor who’s offering up your tradesmen services, consider creating a website or simply updating the one you have. We recommend going beyond an online portfolio to ensure that your site is equipped with the tools that allow you to promote your specialized skills. Added pages containing your mission statement, a bit about your team and how the company started, and an up-to-date blog with topics surrounding your industry are great ways to add content to your website and instill trust with consumers. Don’t forget to have a reviews page as well highlighted prominently on your website!

    In terms of digital marketing for small businesses, there’s a lot an agency can do for your website. A professional content writer and/or search engine optimization (SEO) expert can work together to ensure your website’s copy is engaging, click-worthy, and gaining traction and traffic with a variety of other services like email marketing and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, which link back to your website. 

    Boost your online presence and traffic

    Although simply having a website is better than nothing, as a home contractor that is competing in a heavily saturated market, you need ways for your potential clients to pick you out of the vast competition. To stand out in your industry, digital marketing services like SEO and PPC campaign must come into play. While an SEO campaign optimizes your website by producing relevant content and important links, a PPC campaign allows you to display ads on search engines. Together these types of campaigns allow you to rank, and with every successful click comes an opportunity to get noticed and gain business. Ultimately, if coordinated professional, both digital marketing strategies will help to increase your online visibility and website traffic.  

    Employ email marketing and social media marketing

    Ask an e-commerce business and they will tell you that both email marketing and social media marketing have proven to be effective and beneficial to their businesses. That said, as a home contractor, you likely already have lists of past and current clients. As such, you can use them to create a list that can then be selected wherever you want to offer promotions, describe new services offered, or simply wish them a healthy and happy New Year! On the other hand, an up-to-date social media platform also has its perks. We recommend managing a Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn account and utilizing them for business all while showcasing the more edgy side of your company. Post ongoing or finished projects, highlight members of your team, and network with potential clients all with your smartphone in hand. 

    The key to promoting your tradesman services is through digital marketing for small businesses. Consider the marketing strategies recommended above or contact a member of our sales team to look at other means for boosting your profits.

    What type of home contracting business do you own and/or operate? Let’s compare in the comments section below. 

    Have you considered AI as part of your brand’s digital marketing strategy?

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    Digital marketing has vastly grown in popularity as e-commerce business owners expand their hunt for the best methods and channels to distribute their products and services to the online masses. That said, with such an expansion, artificial intelligence (AI) has made leaps to help marketing professionals perform their jobs more efficiently than they could just a few years ago. Needless to say, since AI can be used in several ways, it’s important to determine which processes hold more value for your marketing campaigns before you invest in any type of AI-related experience. Continue reading to find new ways that you could be using AI in marketing. 

    AI predictive features add personalization 

    AI is a great resource for data collection—instead of manually sorting through each customer interaction, businesses use AI programs to compile the information into easy-to-read reports. So, why can’t businesses owners and marketing professionals alike use it to make smarter decisions for their campaigns?

    Think about times where you’ve shopped a website that was set up to offer personalization. Elements suggesting that you may also like other products is an AI customization that makes each visit unique to the consumer based on their search history and previous purchases. This not only improves the customer experience but also ensures that what’s displayed is more likely to fit the needs of the shopper, resulting in more sales, engagement, and site traffic.

    AI improves content creation

    Much of digital marketing involves creating consistent, fresh content to post on a website, making category pages and blogs an essential part of any marketing strategy. Depending on the industry, consumers may even rely on content (reviews, testimonials, etc.) to reassure their decision to make a purchase. While there’s no arguing that content is key, brainstorming topics ideas is both challenging and time-consuming. 

    With the power of AI, marketing professionals can analyze consumer behaviour on these pages through a machine learning system that provides feedback to improve future content. For example, elements such as time spent on page providers writers with some insight into how far the reader is delving into the content and where they can place photos and/or videos to increase this engagement. 

    The use of chatbots and natural language processing (NLP)

    Natural language processing (NLP) is a form of machine learning that understands, analyzes, compiles, and creates human speech. Many businesses utilize this type of AI in marketing, whether it be as a chatbot technology or as an aid when writing emails and/or blogs. 

    We’re living in a world where chatbots understand a consumer’s basic request and can respond to them based on the specific keywords or phrases provided. These AI tools make it possible for businesses to provide 24/7 service, answering questions for customers around the clock and providing long-tail sentences for those who may not be savvy with their words. 

    Trek Marketing works in partnership with Numinix Web Development using AI practices to make our client’s businesses thrive. Want to find out more? 

    Do you use AI in any of your marketing strategies? Drop a comment below to tell us more.