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    Tag: Target Audience

    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. 

    How to market for the travel industry

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    Are you ready to get your digital marketing efforts recognized within the travel industry? If so, you aren’t alone. With spring quickly approaching people are starting to research and book their yearly travel plans. This means that you need to be ready for those searching for cheap travel deals, flights, and hotels. Here are some ideas on how you can win over consumers.

    Monitor search stats

    Leisure travellers go on a couple of trips per year, which means they must do regular research before those vacations can be booked. Each month, search engines such as Google and Bing see millions of searches using keyword varieties pertaining to many types of travel. 

    Here are some that have proven to be most popular:

    • Airline tickets
    • Airline reservations
    • Hotel and motel reservations
    • Vacation packages
    • Car Rentals
    • Cruises

    Since most customers plan ahead when booking a trip, it’s important that you plan your digital marketing strategies well in advance. Whether you manage an airline, a luggage company, or hotel digital marketing, all efforts should be catering to months ahead, while also considering last-minute travellers. 

    Understand the customer journey

    While it would be great if shoppers searched for a travel-related keyword, saw your paid search ad, clicked, and immediately purchased, the reality is that each customer journey is far more complex than that. In fact, one person may have hundreds of interactions with travel brands while researching a single trip. 

    Here are four key moments where you should aim to win over your customers using your chosen digital marketing strategies:

    • The dream stage: This is where those who are thinking about planning a trip find ideas and inspiration on where to go and what to do. While it isn’t easy to capture conversions during the dream stage, you can make an impact that will help them to consider your product or service when it’s the booking stage. 
    • The organizing stage: Once people get past the dream stage, the organization stage is where they’re in deep consideration mode. The destination has been selected and the next steps are choosing a hotel or airline to book, often based on location, cost, and timing. While there’s not much you can do to change the cost and timing as an airline, with hotel digital marketing, you can amp up your creativeness to excite shoppers about your location. 
    • The booking stage: Now that customers have made their decision, they’re ready to make reservations. This would be a great time to upsell your other services. For example, if you operate a hotel, perhaps tour packages, room upgrades, dinner reservations, and/or massage packages would be options to market at this point. 
    • The experience stage: Tied into the booking stage, the experience stage is where you have an opportunity to offer further interactions with your customers. Whether this is a further chance to upsell a service, offering a discount for a later time, or waiting until the service has been performed and asking for a review, the experience should never go overlooked. 

    After two years of limited travel through a global pandemic, people are thinking more and more about how they will be using up their vacation time. By understanding the above key moments you can influence the customer journey and increase your digital marketing conversions.

    Target the right audience

    The demographics of your target audience should be a strong consideration in your digital marketing efforts. Whether your product and/or service caters to families, seniors, or women versus men, things like age and income are also very important. For example, if your hotel wants to promote family travel, we recommend targeting women between the ages of 35 to 49. This is because they’re often the ones doing most of the research and booking. Also, be sure to write your ads or other hotel digital marketing efforts from the perspective of the buyer person to create emotion that will encourage clicks and conversions. 

    Is your business ready to welcome travellers again? Drop a comment below to share your plan with us. 

    3 steps to building successful digital marketing campaigns

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    A successful digital marketing campaign involves the execution of a marketing strategy across a variety of digital channels where a brand’s consumers engage. Dynamic and conversion-focused, digital marketing campaigns are time-consuming and involve efforts where data is exchanged through social media, email marketing, and the process of search engine optimization (SEO). If you’re unfamiliar with launching and managing a digital marketing campaign, stick to the following steps below to ensure that your approach is efficient!  

    Start by defining your goals 

    Every great venture begins with goals in mind, however, eagerness to see results might lead some businesses to launch digital marketing campaigns without planning. Since success can be measured by sales, traffic, and improved conversion rates, depending on the specifics of your business, you must consider what you’re hoping to achieve at that moment and long term. 

    Here are some examples of goals for digital marketing campaigns: 

    • Brand awareness: While there are several ways that one can measure brand awareness, word-of-mouth, following, and knowledge of said brand are a great start. Engagement and searches are two ways to message brand awareness as both of these actions signify consumers are on the hunt for your products and/or services. 
    • Social media following: A branch of brand awareness, when a business has a strong social media following, it shows that consumers are interested in your business. While it’s worth tracking followers, we recommend measuring the rate of increase, rather than the raw number. This is because many people unfollow pages as they lose interest, which could be related to the content you’re sharing.  
    • SEO: Search engine optimization (SEO) is a complex business process that relies on many factors to influence where your website appears when consumers are entering queries on search engines. One of these is the number of backlinks your website receives from other reputable sites.

    Know your target market

    While anyone and everyone have an opportunity to purchase from your e-commerce business, shoppers that have a use for or interest in your products and/or services are more likely to complete a transaction. This is why you need to use your resources wisely to ensure these types of customers can find your website. No matter your budget, crafting your marketing materials to appeal to the demographics of your business is an efficient way to build your online presence, versus simply throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks. Begin by establishing who’s currently buying your products and how they reach your marketing and eventually branch out via digital marketing campaigns to the customers you hope to reach. 

    Define your persona

    An extension of the step above, a persona is the detailed description of your ideal customer. This includes knowing their age, possible occupations, wealth and class status, family situation, and other variables that will determine how likely they are to spend money. 

    While your target demographic is broad, your persona is more defined and detailed and often includes more information about their hobbies, interests, and/or personal lives. You might be thinking why is this information important for you to know? Well, it helps you to grow your business safely utilizing the current market but to expand your demographic by knowing more in-depth about the people that you want to be shopping with you. 

    Is there any other dynamic or traditional methods that you’ve used or plan to use to build up your digital marketing campaigns? 

    How does digital marketing increase your e-commerce sales?

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    An effective digital marketing strategy accomplishes many goals — developing a better online ranking, increasing brand awareness, and building a bigger following — but none are as important as increasing your online sales. So, if you’re hoping to drive more customers to your website and achieve a higher conversion rate optimization, you need to understand what you should be doing to help out your business. 

    Understanding conversion rate optimization

    It’s the job of digital marketing professionals to show their worth by breaking down to business owners how conversion rate optimization (CRO) helps to increase traffic and online sales to their e-commerce websites. But first, they must understand what CRO is and how it works to benefit their online sales strategy. 

    It’s considered a conversion when a consumer visits your website and completes a desirable action. This could include purchasing a product or service, filling out an online request form, clicking through to the website to find out more information, or calling your business. Digital marketing professionals monitor these actions using Google Analytics and complete reports for their clients to determine how improvements can be made to improve sales. They use a simple formula: conversions/website visitors multiplied by 100 and expressed as a percentage. For example, if your e-commerce website has 17 conversions from 1,000 visitors to the page, your conversion rate is 1.7%. 

    How can you increase your digital marketing conversions? 

    Since the average consumer spends almost four hours a day using their smartphone, the potential to increase your online conversions is huge when you implement a digital marketing strategy. However, the first step towards a higher conversion optimization rate is to demonstrate a good first impression to your consumers. 

    The way you approach elements like customer service responses, website copy, and social media content gives an impression of the level of service and value your business brings to the table, and it’s always important to inspire confidence when you’re asserting your brand as a leader in your industry. 

    The next thing you can do is create an easy conversion point. This means that once a visitor is convinced to make a purchase, don’t rely on them to have to search high and low to find that conversion point. It’s important to include multiple ways for them to meet those conversion points, meaning that if you send out an e-newsletter, they can click on the product, on a button that says “buy now”, and even if the consumer clicks on the title of the product within the same area. This will make potential customers more likely to take action and create less confusion on how to buy. 

    Another consideration to increase your digital marketing conversions is quite simple, value all your callers, as picking up the phone to answer their questions or concerns may encourage them to carry out their online purchase. Online shoppers are conditioned to look for a telephone contact number rather than email and wait for a response, so if you’re fixated on improving your CRO, put your phone number where it can be easily found and consider measuring your call conversions (how many people call to ask about a sale or purchase) as well! 

    Lastly, if you or the professional digital marketing agency you hire is already doing all of the above to increase your e-commerce sales, considering leveraging digital ads as a way to increase your online conversion rate. Paid ad platforms such as Facebook and Instagram convert well and are worthwhile if you’re hoping to draw in a target audience demographic that spends ample time on these external social platforms. After all, not all digital marketing conversions require you to make changes to your website.

    What did you find most interesting about the above content? Drop a comment below to start a conversation with other readers. 

    Which social media channel will attract your target audience?

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    social media marketing

    It won’t matter how creative, innovative or aspiring your product or service is if it’s not being marketed to the right target audience. Many business owners make the mistake of taking over their own marketing efforts when they first start out. Although they should never feel discouraged to learn and grow in their in-house abilities, working with a professional digital marketing team will allow them to persuade and engage with their customers in a receptive way. After all, instead of simply marketing to anyone and everyone, a team in charge of your social media marketing strategy will start their efforts firstly by breaking down your target audience and curving the appeal towards that demographic. So, if you want to get noticed in your industry, you must first work towards identifying which social media channel will attract the right customers for you.

    Who uses Facebook?

    Facebook still holds onto first place as the most widely used social media platform across the world. With a monthly log in of over 2.23 billion users, 30% of which are aged between 25 through to 34, beginning your social media marketing campaigns on Facebook is always a safe bet. Once you create your business page remember to post regularly, promote your page, engage with your followers and contrive your page layout and content to appeal to your target audience. After all, if you’re hoping for a high level of engagement, your Facebook profile needs to be geared to attract the right shoppers.

    Who uses Twitter?

    The nice thing about Twitter is that the demographics of its users tend to possess a smaller age gap in comparison to the vast age range of Facebook users. With roughly 326 million people engaging on Twitter monthly, 37% of users are between 18 and 25, while 25% of them are 30 and 49-years-old. This means that young adults make up over 60% of the audience on Twitter. So, if your product or service would appeal to this age range, it might be worth setting up a Twitter account and regularly tweeting to the users compelling them to click.

    Who uses Instagram?

    Instagram has quickly made its way to one of the most active social media channels worldwide, especially among young women. This photo-sharing, smart-phone app is plentiful within the millennial generation (1982 – 2004) and allows business owners to get a little creative by sharing enticing visuals, using engaging hashtags and taking advantage of the story feature to promote their business. Considering so many people make purchases based on things they see through their Instagram feed, it’s a great way to exploit social media marketing to get your products or services noticed.

    What are a few tips to help attract your target audience?

    Now that you’ve narrowed down your essential social media platforms you might need a little help reaching out to potential shoppers. The following tips can help you to entice your business’s target audience.

    • Survey your customers to find out what they like
    • Determine your audience size do you know how often to post
    • Find a connection to your audience
    • Reach out to customers through the use of other social media groups
    • Tailor your content to appeal to your audience
    • Balance out your content plan to include something for everyone
    • Use visual quotes for motivation
    • Boost your content with promotional posts
    • Share education content from within your niche

    Which social media channel do you use to target your company’s demographic? Tell us in the comments section below.

     

    What is social media optimization and how can your business benefit from it?

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    social media optimization

    The realm of social media is innovatively thriving faster than ever before with a massive increase in the number of people sharing their lives with the world through socially connected platforms. Businesses are also thriving through these digital platforms by means of increased online engagement. These e-commerce brands are using digital marketing to their advantage by socially connecting themselves to new and existing customers. How are they boosting their company’s online reputation you ask? Well, through social media optimization of course!

    What Is Social Media Optimization?

    When you maximize your online reach through the use of a number of techniques and strategies across multiple social outlets, you’re utilizing social media optimization. Digital marketing companies and business owners use this social media marketing tactic to promote awareness of a brand or service across various social channels. The content is meant to be enticing enough to advertise and attract people to a particular business site. 

    Why Is Social Media Optimization Important?

    This powerful digital marketing tool helps your business by:

    • Building a strong web presence: Your business needs to develop an online identity in order for customers to know and trust your brand. Social media optimization allows you to establish authority within your niche and gives you the visibility you need to find your target audience.
    • Increases your reach: In order for your company to gain new traction in the business world, your business needs to connect with the right people. Social media is an excellent way to build a relationship with customers that are like-minded and enjoy elements that your brand has to offer.
    • Drives traffic: For the most part, social media optimization is cheap, and with the right strategies in place, it will help generate the traffic back to your website. Also, people who are engaging with your social feeds are more likely to head over to your website and make a purchase.

    How can you excel with social media optimization?

    As a business owner, you’re often faced with many other time-consuming tasks that take priority over a social media strategy. That’s why hiring a social media manager is so important. They will take the time to research your audience and develop a campaign that will work for your business by effectively executing your brand’s voice across your social channels. Since not all platforms are equal in terms of their ability to spread the word, a social media manager will study these networks and determine where the customers in your product market are doing their shopping. Not to mention, innovative content has the power to generate a larger audience. If you rely on a professional to contrive intuitive content for your social channels, you can rest assured knowing that your promotion is gaining momentum because of a dedicated marketing team.

    How else can a business benefit from social media optimization? Tell us in the comments section below.

    Starting off the year with a few hotel digital marketing tips

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    digital marketing for hotels

    Digital marketing for hotels is constantly evolving with the times. This ever-changing online landscape requires business owners and their marketing counterparts to constantly tweak their strategies in order to remain edgy and up-to-date within their niche. With an emergence in social media technologies it’s always important to have your eyes on new trends, but it’s even more essential to focus your energy on the marketing tools that will empower you to entice your target audience to click and share. Start by trying out these tips when it comes to developing digital marketing for hotels.

    Optimize your website

    It’s paramount to ensure that all of your content possesses strong SEO (search engine optimization) in order to engage with a far-reaching crowd — this will help your hotel appear organically in the search engines of potential customers. Start out by performing an online audit to ensure that you understand your current online marketing efforts. If you do not know how to do this, a professional digital marketing team can assist you by recommending designs and approaches that will increase your ROI (return on investment).  

    Ask yourself questions. Is your site easy to navigate? Does your copy have clear call-to-actions that assist potential guests through their booking journey? All these of pointers help you to fill your website with clear, concise and advantageous information that makes it not only invaluable to book on, but also a positive experience.

    Understand that hotel digital marketing is competitive

    Once you ensure that your website is up-to-speed in terms of design, development and content then you want to start setting achievable goals for yourself as a business owner. It’s meaningful to understand that you’re in a very competitive industry and although your website now performs great, will it compare to more recognizable hotel booking web pages?

    Know who your competitors are and visit their websites periodically in order to compare how they engage with guests. Use this as an opportunity to see where they may be failing to connect with them and try to find ideas on how you can outperform them in the future. Ask yourself, “how do our digital marketing efforts differ?” and try and adapt your strategy to its fullest potential.

    Use social media marketing

    The power of modern-day social media, especially when it comes to anything travel related, is a huge means for businesses to reach their target audiences. Hotels create a message, that message is shared on various social media channels, consumers receive the message, consumers relate to the message, consumers feel empowered to book and the customer lifecycle repeats itself. Just make sure that your social media interactions are delivered in a way that makes your customers feel valued in order to increase their awareness with your hotel brand.

    Other marketing methods

    Now that you understand the world of digital marketing for hotels, you can try these other tips as a means of promoting your business.

    • Embrace your specialization: What makes your business so special? Maybe it’s the location, the fact that it’s an older building or it is surrounded by breath-taking views?
    • Target your niche: Although you’re running a hotel, maybe there is a niche that you develop on to promote your digital marketing?
    • Reward customer loyalty: Perhaps once your guest has checked out, you can send them an email requesting a quick review of their stay. This gives them an opportunity to provide you with rewarding feedback and maybe, in turn, you can give them a special voucher to use during their next stay.

    As always, if you need help in the field of digital marketing for hotels, remember to reach out to an agency that will help you keep on top of the latest hotel trends and campaigns.

    How do you keep on top of your digital marketing? Tell us in the comments section below.

    Why do you need a social media strategy?

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    social media strategy

    The decisions you make regarding your e-commerce business have the ability to steer your company in a successful direction. In order to start defining your brand online, you need to make use of an effective social media strategy, an essential building block that will allow you achieve your target goals. Whether this detailed plan of action is focused on understanding your customers, creating innovative sales content or generating a presence within your niche, a concise social media plan will help you to stand out from your competitors. Here are a few reasons why a social media strategy is an effective way to manage your brands online reputation.

    Many purchases are influenced by social media

    There was a time when businesses only used social media to spread brand awareness, but that era of engagement has involved into something new and more marketable. Currently, more companies than ever before have invested in major social platforms in order to lure potential customers to their products and services.

    For example, e-commerce businesses use Facebook to create ads, manage a posting schedule and keep an eye on their analytics. Not to mention, social media users often rely on their social feeds to provide them with recommendations based on their search history. The perfect way for them to find their way to you.

    Lack of strategy gives your competition an advantage

    Now that you understand how frequently a social media strategy is used and how effective it can be on influencing purchases, it seems silly to not have one. After all, without the appropriate framework, you’re basically handing your competitors your business.

    Investing in your social presence by planning, prioritizing and executing active content will allow you to better communicate with your audience and will provide you with some steady insight into how you can set more appropriate business objectives.

    Everyone is on social media

    Now, this is probably the most valid reason of all… many people are already on social media. Your friends, colleagues, family and future customers are already probably active on at least one social media account, so, what do you have to lose? Why not strategically connect with your audience through means of social media?

    If you’re not incredibly tech savvy or you don’t understand how to work your way around the popular social media networks, speak with a representative from Trek Marketing and find out how to get started.

    Are there any other reasons as to why an e-commerce business should lay out a social media strategy? Tell us in the comments section below.

    How do you build a successful brand?

    Posted on by Alex Wilks

    brand awareness

    Creating brand awareness is one of the most important things you can do as an e-commerce business owner. Familiarity and accountability generate devoted customers and establish a relationship that will grow through proper marketing, word-of-mouth and organically as your company expands. Naturally, brand building is so much more than a fancy website, an eye pleasing logo and an assortment of advertising, it is about establishing a target audience and focusing on their needs.

    The first steps of brand building

    First and foremost, you need to determine who your target audience is. Although you want anyone and everyone to buy your products or services, selecting a more narrow-focused audience will allow you to target how you will reach them, tailor your messages and accommodate what they need. The key part is to be as specific as possible. For example, college students who enjoy the outdoors. You’ve narrowed your demographic to include educated people, between the ages of 18 to roughly 30, that enjoy spending time surrounded by nature. This will allow you to cater your marketing approach to appeal to them and perhaps even other consumers along the way.

    Create a mission statement

    When you’re aiming to create brand awareness, you’ll have to craft a clear statement that expresses what your company is passionate about. Once you establish your target audience, you will be able to form a message that intrigues them. For example, the brand Nike has a clear, distinct message to their demographic, “Our Mission is to Bring Inspiration and Innovation to Every Athlete* in the World”, with a footnote indicating, “*If You Have a Body, You are an Athlete.” Those are some pretty smart choice of words when it comes to brand building.

    Research, research, research

    It’s naive to think that your brand is the only unique one, especially in a world of endless competition. However, dedicated time to research what is already being done is really worthwhile. Study how your competitors have effectively built their brand and identify how you can use the same processes within your own company

    Hire professional help

    A quality marketing team or professional graphic designer will be your saving grace when it comes to building brand awareness. They will work with you to reach your target audience by resonating your message through social media, newsletters and blog posts, all while creating an innovative logo and an attractive website design.

    Do you have any other tips to help e-commerce businesses build their brand awareness? Let us know in the comments section below.