A 30-Day Master Plan for Marketing Your Brick-and-Mortar Business

Many small business owners today think that owning a brick-and-mortar business excuses them from having to learn and master digital marketing.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, mastering SEO and local optimization for your locally run business will bring a higher ROI than just about any other marketing activity you use.

It’s one of the quickest ways to quickly and simply (notice I did not say easily) get your business in front of thousands of new eyes and earn customers for life. With a few simple steps, you can set yourself on the path to long term digital marketing success.

But how do you start marketing your brick-and-mortar business in the digital world? What steps do you need to take over the next 30, 60, or 90 days to successfully grow your online reach and increase sales like you have never seen before?

I’m glad you asked.

In this article, I’m going to give you a step-by-step and day-by-day plan for marketing your brick-and-mortar business.

Thirty days from now, if you follow the steps I’ve outlined below, you’ll be well on your way to having a successful and profitable local marketing plan in place.

The basics: Days 1-10

The irony of digital marketing is that the simplest steps are often the most important.

Sure, PPC advertising, advanced Facebook campaigns, and AdWords can play a huge role in boosting your sales. But what’s next?

For brick-and-mortar business owners, particularly owners who don’t think they are very “tech savvy,” following these simple steps for the first ten days alone will result in a huge increase in the number of sales they see from their marketing budget.

Step 1: Create a platform

Something I have found with many brick-and-mortar businesses is that the owners think that having a website is an unnecessary luxury.

Nothing could be further from the truth!

Having a place for all your customers and fans to congregate is one of the simplest and most important steps on your path to success.

The first step to mastering local SEO is the simplest one. Give your audience a place to find you!

Notice that almost none of these shops have websites that come up in Google…

For the first 10 days of this master plan, focus on building your website and ensuring it has a great design. After that, focus on 1-2 social media platforms.

That’s it.

Creating presence on a couple of platforms that are easy to navigate and even easier to find is the first key to your marketing success.

Once you develop your website, set up your Facebook page and a Twitter or Instagram account. Then, the real work begins.

And what is that “real work?”

Creating quality content.

Step 2: Start creating high quality content

One of the fallacies many entrepreneurs believe is that simply having a website with some on-page SEO is enough.

But that’s not how Google works, and that’s not how people work either.

If you want to attract new customers and build a loyal fan base, you need to place a premium on creating and curating high quality content.

Look at the bottom of the image above. Ramit has 241 PAGES of content on his blog.

I’ve got 162 pages of blog articles on Quick Sprout.

Content is huge.

But how does this apply to marketing a brick-and-mortar business? Here’s how…

Let’s say you own a coffee shop in Boulder, Colorado.

You take the first 2-3 days and pay to create your website—design it to look great and navigate easily. Then you set up your Facebook page.

Now, it’s time to start populating your website and your social media with killer content.

Continuing with the coffee shop example, the next step would be to start writing articles or filming videos based on your niche.

You could write an article about the best locations for growing coffee or about 3 unconventional brewing methods you can try today, or you could film a video showing people how to do cappuccino art.

The list of things you can do is endless.

By creating this content you will improve your chances of ranking on Google, and you will also start providing free value to customers, which will increase their trust and their desire to give you their business.

Step 3: Increase the number of your email subscribers with a lead magnet

Now that you have a great website and are regularly uploading content and sharing it via social media, it is time to increase your email subscriber list. That’s where the real money is made!

The key to a successful lead magnet is to offer something that a customer would be willing to pay for—but free.

An excellent example of a lead magnet is from Lucky Brand (above).

Back to the coffee shop…

A great marketing method used by many successful brick-and-mortar owners is the free giveaway.

If someone has found your site or is in your store, offering them a free coffee or pastry (which they would normally pay for) in return for access to their email is a win for both parties.

They get something free. You get a direct line to market your company.

Once you have collected the email, you can start sending updates about specials you are running, events you are putting on, and other cool things happening with your business.

Anytime you have a special event or a 2-for-1 deal, people will actually know about it. They will then take advantage of it.

Mastering local SEO: Days 10-25

Many brick-and-mortar business owners make another mistake when delving into the world of SEO. They don’t fully understand the difference between “regular” and “local” SEO.

The biggest difference is that local SEO contains a geographical aspect. This geographical information is crucial in “convincing” Google that you’re a bona fide local company serving local people.

The entry into local SEO may seem a little bit more complicated than normal SEO. Why? Because it’s no longer just about the keywords. There’s an element of mystery.

The result? You may have experienced this yourself. Few businesses execute local SEO efficiently.

However, in my opinion and experience, local SEO is easier. Why? Because there is less competition!

Don’t worry. I’ll remove some of the mystery and help you understand how it works.

Here are some of the essential ways to get started on your path to local SEO mastery.

Step 1: Set up Google Search Console and Analytics

These two tools are absolutely instrumental for successful on-page SEO.

There is a ton of information you will be able to gather about your website from these tools. Using them effectively will allow you to run tests, analyze the results, and make changes as necessary.

Here’s how to set up Google Analytics.

• First, create an Analytics account here.
• Sign in to your new account.
• Select “Admin.”
• Select an account from the “account” column.
• Select a new property from the “property” column.
• Click “Tracking Info” and then “Tracking Code.”
• Copy the ID.
• Insert this number into your website’s code.

Here’s how to set up Search Console:

• Create a Search Console account here.
• Log in to your new account.
• Click “Add a site.”
• Add your website’s URL.
• Copy the ID.
• Add it to your website’s code.

Step 2: Make sure you have the correct NAP data on your site

While this may not seem like a big deal, it is one of the quickest ways to accidentally shoot yourself in the foot with your SEO pursuits.

What’s NAP?

It’s the Name, Address, and Phone number of your business.

If you do not have the EXACT same Name, Address, and Phone Number on your website that you have on your Google My Business account, you will basically ruin all the hard work you have put into mastering local SEO.

Let me give you a few pointers on doing the NAP portion right.

Make sure the phone number listed is your local number (no 1-800 numbers).

Make sure the NAP info is listed as text on the page and not as an image. You need web crawlers to read the information. They won’t be able to do that if it’s in an image.

Include the NAP info in your website footer if possible. This means it will be visible on all pages.

If you’ve had a different name, address, or phone number in the past, find the variations anywhere on the web and correct them. You don’t want to confuse users or web crawlers. NAP consistency is important!

Step 3: Optimize your meta descriptions and title tags

For on-page optimization, this is one of the most important steps you can take.

The first step is to make sure your title tag includes these three things:

1. Your city
2. Your state
3. The keyword you’re trying to rank for

It is easy for this to come across as spammy and artificial, so put some time and effort into this before you hit “Publish.”

For example, these websites are perfectly setup for local SEO success:

If you’re looking for some more inspiration, check out this article for a list of local SEO-optimized title tags.

Next, you want to optimize your meta description.

The meta description is what appears beneath your title tag. It explains a little bit about your company and what you do. The meta description appears in the SERPs to help users understand what they’re about to click on.

I recommend that you include your city, state, keyword, and phone number for maximum efficiency.

A meta description doesn’t technically improve your SEO. It’s designed for users. However, user behavior does influence SEO, so it’s still important to optimize this bit of information.

Step 4: Include your hours of operation and directions

According to one study, Google said that 54% of smartphone users who search for a local business are searching for the hours of operation. And 53% wanted directions.

The simplest thing to do is simply put an “Hours of Operations” or “Business Hours” heading and image next to your maps widget.

This will make life easier for your customers. Plus, it will make Google love you.

Step 5: Leverage the power of social proof

While it doesn’t directly influence your local SEO ranking, including customer testimonials really helps. Adding BBB ratings, integrating Yelp, or citing other highly trusted sources will build customer trust.

In the example below, The Worthwhile Company cited their “Small Business of the Year” award from the local chamber of commerce. Information like this helps local residents to feel a greater degree of trust in the business.

Social proof also decreases your site’s bounce rate, increases the views on your site, and likely increases your opt-ins—all things Google is looking for.

Reaping the rewards and keeping the customers: Day 25-30

By following all the above advice, you will likely see an increase in your SEO ranking and the number of emails you collect within the first 30 days.

Things will move slowly at first.

That’s okay.

These things take time. Slow and steady wins the race.

The final step is to continue producing great content that you can rank on Google. Educate yourself on more advanced local SEO tactics you can start implementing. Most importantly, keep your customers happy.

The more satisfied customers you have, the more people will share your site with others, the more email opt-ins you will receive, and the better your business will be.

All that’s left to do is sit back and reap the rewards of a job well done.

And of course, keep on hustling.

Conclusion

To many entrepreneurs, SEO seems like a black box. And local SEO? It’s even more of a mystery.

Often, it’s viewed as something to be feared, something far too complicated to get involved in, and something that you sure as heck don’t have the required experience to excel at.

My hope, however, is that after reading this article, you’ll realize that SEO is just like any other skill. With a few simple tweaks, you can massively improve your local business’s results for years to come.

So, take this advice, and implement it. You’ll see the results for yourself.

What’s your experience with using digital marketing to drive a brick-and-mortar business? Share your worst mistakes or best tips!

from http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/_QqS_vepQjE/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/146934833454

What can Medium’s Creative Exchange bring to native advertising?

Last week, social publishing company Medium announced the launch of a programme that will allow its writers to partner with brands to create dedicated sponsored content: the Creative Exchange.

The Creative Exchange is by no means Medium’s first foray into native advertising: in the past, it has produced a number of verticals in partnership with different brands, including BMW, Marriott and Samsung. But this is the first time that Medium has opened up native advertising for the wider community to take part in.

In its blog post announcing the new programme, Medium acknowledged that, “One of the things we’ve heard consistently is that our community wants a way to make money from their work on the platform. It takes effort to produce a piece of high-quality content and that effort should be rewarded.”

While this is undoubtedly true, the writers who called for Medium content to be monetised probably wanted the ability to earn money from the independent content they write, rather than to be paid to write sponsored content for a brand.

Still, there are no doubt plenty of others who will welcome the venture. But what can Medium contribute to the field of sponsored content, already crowded with publishers and platforms, that’s particularly new? And what do brands stand to gain?

What can Medium bring to native advertising?

Medium has always been a slightly strange entity, whose exact nature is hard to pin down: it straddles the divide between publisher and network, between social and blogging; giving writers a space for their voice to be heard, but very much on Medium’s terms.

“Medium’s greatest asset is our community of writers and publishers,” the blog post which announced the Creative Exchange began. Clearly this is what Medium intends to be its main selling point as it expands its venture into native advertising: an established network of writers, many with huge followings, and readers who will eagerly consume writing published to the platform regardless of whether it is sponsored or not, as long as it is of the quality and type they have come to expect.

A piece of sponsored content on Medium, with branding clearly marked

Medium’s blog post cites two past pieces of sponsored content as examples of what writing produced by the Creative Exchange is likely to look like. One is sponsored by Guardian, a life insurance company, the other by Upwork, a freelance marketplace.

Both are well-written and valuable pieces of content which don’t read like advertising or even mention the sponsored brand by name (although they are both clearly marked as sponsored with logos above and below the piece).

Neither of them made me want to buy anything either, but then, the aims of native advertising are usually more subtle than that.

In many ways, Medium is exceedingly well-suited to native advertising, much more than other publishing platforms. For one thing, it’s already heavily branded. Criticisms have been levelled against Medium for taking away creative control from writers who publish to its platform, denying them the ability to choose how their content looks and is offered to readers.

Publishing to Medium offers writers very little leeway, if any, to impose their own style on the content

The design, the layout, the branding is all very much Medium’s; and so users who are happy with this arrangement are unlikely to object to a further level of branding being applied to their content. It seems unlikely that any devoted writers or readers, if they’re content to use Medium as it is, will abruptly draw a line and say no, this amount of branding is a step too far.

So Medium can offer an engaged community of writers and readers among whom there is already a demand for some kind of monetisation, and an openness to sponsored branding. All points in its favour – but what else is Medium offering to brands in the deal?

How will brands benefit?

At the moment, Medium isn’t opening up the Creative Exchange programme too widely to interested writers and publishers; the programme is currently in “closed beta”, and aspiring participants will need to add their details to a waiting list. But Medium is placing no such restriction on brands who want to take part. This makes sense, since Medium has writers in abundance, but the brands are where the real money lies.

Medium’s approach to content publishing, that it simplifies the process by taking care of the unimportant details that no-one wants to concern themselves with (like design) is also the main thrust of its appeal to brands: it offers an all-in-one deal, “including writing, editing, project management, editorial strategy, publication creation, and publication branding.” In its bid, Medium plays up the fact that it can “manage the entire process for you, including publishing approved content from your brand account.”

Medium’s native advertising aims to offer brands the whole package
Image by OpenclipartVectors on Pixabay, available via CC0

This is likely to be an appealing prospect for brands who are new to native advertising or don’t have the time or the resources to micro-manage every aspect of the project. However, as with writers who publish to the Medium platform, there are drawbacks in the form of ownership and control. Medium is coy about the subject of brands owning the content produced via Creative Exchange, saying only that, “We have several different licenses available. We’ll work with you to meet your needs. Contact us for more information.”

There is a lot to be said for publishing to a platform which, as I covered above, comes with an in-built community of readers eager to consume that content. In many respects it puts Medium ahead of native ad providers like Outbrain and Taboola which have to depend on luring readers away from platforms where they are already reading content, with gimmicky headlines and psychological tricks.

Brands are already faced with an overabundance of platforms demanding their content
Image via Wikimedia Commons, available via CC BY-SA 3.0

But there’s a drawback to it, too: brands are already faced with an overabundance of platforms to which they could publish content, each with their own appeal. Medium boasts one engaged community of users, but Facebook has another, as does Twitter, and Google, and Snapchat, and every other contender which is throwing its hat into this expanding ring.

No matter how good the offer is, ultimately brands have to make a choice as to how many channels are worth spreading their presence across. And if they are a brand which already has an established presence on Medium, why pay for what they are already getting for free?

To an extent, Medium’s all-in-one approach does solve that problem, by allowing brands to reach an extra audience without having to expend the time and effort that they would normally need to invest in publishing to a new platform: Medium will take care of all of that. But brands will still have to decide whether the exact audience they want to reach is present within Medium’s walled garden, and if it isn’t, they are likely to take their business elsewhere.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/07/04/what-can-mediums-creative-exchange-bring-to-native-advertising/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/146907261119

Five stats that sum up the rise of ad blocking

Love them or loathe them, ad blockers aren’t going anywhere soon, forcing digital publishers to sit down and have a serious rethink about their marketing strategies.

According to PageFair, which works with publishers to minimise the impact of ad blocking, web users are taking to blocking ads in their hundreds of millions.

To mark the publication of our first Zoom In report, Ad blockers: The lay of the land, we present five stats that we think best tell the story of ad blocking, but first, here’s one for free: according to the UK Association of Online Publishers, 65% of publishers see ad blocking as a threat to the publishing business model.

But is it all doom and gloom? Let’s see what else the stats have to say.

$41.4bn: the estimated global cost of ad blocking this year (PageFair, 2015)

Let’s get the bad news out the way first. Ad blocking is expensive for publishers, who need the ads to pay for the content they’re serving us, (often) absolutely free of charge.

According to PageFair, blocking those revenue-bringing ads will deprive the industry of $41.4bn by the end of this year. Ouch.

100m: number of Adblock Plus active users (Adblock Plus, 2016)

Perhaps the best known of the ad blocking brigade (and the biggest stone in the shoe of German publishing group Axel Springer, which has taken them to court), Cologne-based Adblock Plus was pleased to announce in May that it had more than 100 million active users, which it counts as active installations of its ad blocking platform.

That’s 100 million fewer devices publishers can serve their ads to. Food for thought.

22% of the world’s smartphone users are now using ad blockers (PageFair, 2016)

If the ad blocking battle began on desktop, the war will be in the realm of mobile.

A combination of easier access to ad blocking software on smartphones, and the greater availability of smartphones in emerging markets is driving this – 36% of smartphone users in Asia Pacific are blocking ads.

And apps aren’t beyond the reach of ad blockers anymore, as it’s now also possible to block in-app ads.

$9.50: cost of loading the ads on Boston.com every day for a month (New York Times, 2015)

Many people block ads because they can be annoying. Others may be concerned about the malware they can carry. But another big reason is their loading times, and drain on mobile data – data that we’re paying for.

Last autumn the New York Times set out to discover just how much loading the ads on a range of news websites would cost on the average American mobile data plan over the course of a month.

It found that Boston.com was the most data-hungry, costing just shy of $10 over the 30 days.

20% of people in the UK who have downloaded an ad blocker no longer use it (IAB, 2016)

Let’s end on a sweeter note for publishers. While ad blocker use is increasing rapidly in emerging markets, this stat suggests that the upward trend may start to slow in the UK.

IAB says the primary reason for users abandoning their ad blockers is switching to a new device, but the second most cited reason was a lack of access to content the users wanted – so perhaps the publishers’ strategy of walling off content until the user turns off their ad blocker is working.

Download your free copy of the Zoom In report Ad blocking: The lay of the land, which features exclusive insights from experts in digital media, publishing and technology, as well as the latest stats to bring you a well-rounded, easily digestible analysis of the ad blocking situation as it stands.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/07/04/five-stats-that-sum-up-the-rise-of-ad-blocking/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/146907260324

Surprising Things You Need to Put in Place in Order to Save Thousands of Dollars on Digital Marketing

It wasn’t that long ago when an entrepreneur’s marketing options were limited to flyers, tacky magazine ads, or expensive TV commercials.

However, with the advent of the Internet, the number of marketing options available to both budding and experienced entrepreneurs has become staggering.

Sometimes, when I’m surfing the web—it’s what I do a lot—I find myself thinking, “Wow! So many tactics! So many choices!”

If I were just getting started in digital marketing, I would be in a total freakout mode. Where do I start? Which one should I pick? What do I need to do first?

But it gets worse. Few businesses have the luxury of trying a lot of tactics. Marketing costs money—quite a bit of it, actually. And if you’re just testing out a bunch of tactics, you’ll run out of money before you run out of tactics.

Thankfully, with a little bit of know-how, you can achieve more marketing success than you ever imagined, even on the tightest budget.

How do you go about shaving thousands of dollars off your digital marketing costs without sacrificing the quality and results of your marketing campaigns?

Seems like a tough call, right?

Maybe not as tough as you think.

I’ll show you how.

First, some ground rules

Before I delve into all of the juicy strategies for increasing the success of your digital marketing while saving money, I want to discuss the most important principle of this whole article.

Here it is: less is more

The ultimate goal of all the points I list below is this: eliminate the fluff from your marketing strategy, and focus only on the things that work.

This is why I recommend minimizing your approach and using the 80/20 rule. This rule dictates that

80% of your results come from 20% of your marketing.

You need to understand that this means that you’ll have to give up good marketing opportunities—but only so that you can take advantage of the great ones.

If you are looking to save thousands, you want to put your focus and your money only into the opportunities with the highest yield. That way you can not only save money but also increase your results.

With that in mind, let’s begin.

1. Create a rock-solid strategy

I know that the title of this article promised to teach you “surprising” things you need to put in place for a great marketing strategy. Some of you may be scratching your heads right about now, wondering why I put something so seemingly obvious as a rock-solid strategy as the first point in this article.

Quite simply, I put this first because most people don’t do it!

We live in an era when entrepreneurship has such a low barrier to entry that many first-time business owners and online marketers just throw stuff at the wall to see what sticks.

They don’t ever take the time to develop a proven plan of action with contingencies, review processes, and clearly defined goals.

Sure, it may not be the most exciting part of digital marketing, but it sure is the most important.

Before you even begin to try to save money on your digital marketing, you need to have a clear strategy in place.

Are you wondering how to create a strategy? Here are some questions you should ask yourself:

• How much will I spend? This question is essential since it prevents you from spending money on low yield opportunities.
• What are my goals? Do I want increased traffic, sales, SEO ranking? Everyone wants revenue as the ultimate goal. Back down from this top-level goal, and figure out what KPI-related goals will get you there.
• What competencies do I have that can help me determine which channels to use? Am I good at SEO, copywriting, ad design? Use your existing skill set and resources to determine which marketing channels you’ll be focusing on.

Don’t just ask these questions. Answer them. And write your answers down.

There. Now you have a strategy.

Remember, like the Navy SEALs say,  “The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in battle.”

Or in our case, “The more you plan in marketing, the less you spend on useless garbage and experimentation.”

Trying out new marketing tactics like Kim Kardashian tries on new outfits will only waste time and money.

Get your strategy in place, and the smart tactics will follow.

2. Hire a team of experts for your niche

While it’s common sense to allocate a sizable amount of your budget to hiring experts and consultants with experience in digital marketing, it’s paramount to hire the right experts.

Who are the right experts? People who have experience in your specific niche.

Just because someone is good at digital marketing doesn’t mean they are the best fit for your company.

Remember, you need to find the best options, not just good ones.

How would you like to have the guy in the middle working with you on your music label?

If you run a copywriting firm and are looking to rank higher on Google, what should you do? Hire an SEO expert with a portfolio full of previous clients from copywriting firms for whom they were able to boost rank and quantifiably improve results.

This will ensure you are hiring someone who not only knows the trade but understands how to optimize in your niche as well.

3. Set up a tiered approach to your marketing

It’s easy to get caught up in pursuing all the latest marketing fads and trends. The result, however, is not fun. You spread yourself too thin instead of focusing on one thing and mastering it.

This is why I recommend a “tiered” approach to marketing.

What exactly does this mean?

Basically, create a list of 3-5 digital marketing mediums where you have a certain amount of strength and expertise or affordable access to people who do.

Next, decide what strongest one is—the one you believe will have the highest ROI based on the data for your industry.

Master that one.

I mean really master it. Don’t be content with a novice status. You’ve got to nail this thing!

Once you master the first medium (I’d say Facebook Ads), you can move on to the next one.

Keep doing this until you have mastery over several forms of digital marketing.

If you take this approach, you’ll be able to understand the best practices for each medium, know how to optimize your investments within each medium for maximum ROI, and automate your marketing systems.

You’ll be amazed at the impact. Not only are you gaining solid ROI, but you’re also building a foundation for future marketing efforts.

For example, let’s say you own a landscaping company in Tennessee. You understand Facebook marketing, AdWords, and have a basic grasp of SEO.

Your approach may look something like this:

• Master Facebook marketing with a budget of $1,500/month and an ROI goal of $2,250 a month.
• Once you hit your ROI goal and have created systems or hired experts that allow you to continue this marketing, move on to AdWords.
• Using the ROI from Facebook, invest into AdWords marketing with a budget of $750 a month and an ROI goal of $1,500.
• Now, you have mastered both mediums. Plus, you’ve been able to boost your ROI within each. You are now spending a total of $2,000/month for digital marketing between the two mediums but netting $5,000/month. You’re already winning. But don’t be content.
• You can now systematize both your Facebook and AdWords marketing based on the mastery in each field. Use a set amount of the profit from the marketing to fund your next step, maybe SEO.
• And on and on it goes until you start dominating each marketing medium.

You see, most people (myself included) dive into a new project and focus on far too many things at once, blowing their budgets and diminishing the potential for their ROI.

By limiting yourself to a single medium at a time, you’ll be able to master each one and save yourself time and money in the long run.

4. Analyze your metrics, and be willing to adjust

If you’re familiar with Murphy’s Law—”anything that can go wrong will go wrong”—you understand the struggle many digital marketers face.

Even if you have a rock-solid strategy, completed an 80/20 analysis of your business, have a team of experts at your disposal, and you are focusing on one medium at a time taking a tiered approach, you can still fail at your digital marketing efforts.

Which makes this point the most important.

Analytics.

And pivoting.

Marketers must know their numbers. Become BFFs with Google Analytics or whatever analytics platform you choose. Know your numbers. Understand them. Interpret them.

The only way you can make smart marketing decisions is with data!

For example, if you have an analysis system in place, you’ll be able to see why your conversion rates significantly increased between the 15th and 22nd of June. Then, you would be able to replicate the process moving forward.

You wouldn’t know any of that if you aren’t tracking your progress and monitoring your analytics!

To be successful in digital marketing and save yourself thousands of dollars, you need an efficient way to analyze your efforts.

This happens through knowing data.

For example, let’s say you have gone against my previous advice and are trying to master Facebook marketing and AdWords at the same time.

After you’ve run a few campaigns and been investing for a couple of months, you decide to take stock of your efforts.

Let’s say you are spending $10 on AdWords a day and are earning back $10.50. That’s a positive ROI. Great!

But when you look at your Facebook marketing, you notice that you are actually losing money on the ad campaign. You’re earning more likes but seem to be hemorrhaging more money.

This presents an interesting conundrum.

On the one hand, logic would say to ditch Facebook marketing and double down on AdWords. However, depending on your niche and your vision for your company, those likes and views may be worth more than the pennies you are earning from AdWords (especially if you earn money from affiliates or sponsorships).

Without a clearly defined goal and an understanding of your ultimate vision for your marketing, you’ll be like a ship in a storm with no anchor, getting tossed around by the waves of emotion and confusion.

That’s why it’s important to know your numbers, analyze your data, and make strategic pivots based on what you discover.

Once you’ve clearly defined your goals and selected a marketing medium to pursue, don’t be afraid to discard other campaigns and move on.

If you are not seeing the results you want after a reasonable amount of time, pivoting is your best option.

5. Build a personal brand

I’ll let you in on a little secret:

People rarely buy from a company; they buy from a brand.

Others have made this point and even written books about it (so maybe not that much of a secret, after all).

It’s true.

A company is about profits, losses, products, management, revenues, and shareholders. How boring is that?

A brand is about excitement, engagement, smiles, experiences, and personality.

You’ll understand this dichotomy if you recall the old Apple ads.

Think about it: there are thousands of companies failing every year. While there could be a great number of reasons for their demise, one of those reasons is poor branding.

People like to buy from people they trust.

I want you to take a look at the branding behind 3 SUPER successful online entrepreneurs.

Here is Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income:

Here is Ramit Sethi of I Will Teach You to be Rich:

And here is, of course, the 4-hour emperor, Tim Ferriss:

Do you notice anything in particular about these blogs…other than the fact that the owners are multi-millionaires?

All of them are about PERSONAL brands. They are focused on the face behind the site, not some ambiguous logo that people can hide behind.

I’m not saying that every business needs to have a figurehead like Ferris or Sethi. What I am saying is that your brand needs personality.

Before you invest a cent into digital marketing, you need to make sure your brand has attitude, emotion, and an authentic feel.

And then, by all means, build your personal brand too—the brand of you.

As an ambassador for your businesses, you can use your personal brand to drive your business.

The better you brand yourself, the less business-focused digital marketing you’ll need to do. People will find you, and they will want to buy from you without needing to be persuaded to do so.

I’ve spent thousands of dollars on courses and seminars I knew very little about. Why? Because I trusted the person selling it and knew their track record as a top performer.

Conclusion

Saving money with digital marketing is more straightforward than many “gurus” would want you to believe.

To have a bigger marketing impact you don’t need a bigger budget.

What does it take instead?

It takes discipline.

It takes discipline to pick a single marketing medium at a time and stick to it.

It takes discipline to invest all your money into your personal brand and continue doing so even when you aren’t seeing an immediate ROI.

It takes discipline to develop a strategy, hire the experts to execute it, and then trust them to do their jobs even when results aren’t coming as fast as you want.

Like most things in life, mastering digital marketing on a budget is simple but not easy.

If it were easy, everybody would do it.

Tactics are tempting, but it’s the rock-solid strategy—driven by experts, strategically structured, backed by data, and built upon a personal brand—that will get you places!

How have you learned to save money while also improving and expanding your marketing reach?

from http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Quicksprout/~3/cX3lx6WbbmE/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/146796759239

How to create insights from consumers’ click histories

Without any action behind it, data is just a bunch of numbers. Clickstream data is particularly valuable, providing insights about what consumers are doing.

Data alone does not lead to insights. Analyzed data backed by a hypothesis and placed in the right context, on the other hand, does.

Clickstream information is a particularly good set of data for marketers to examine if they want to understand their customers better and connect with them based on their actions.

The many benefits of clickstream data

With clickstream data, you can examine not only how customers are interacting with your brand, but also what they are doing before and after they arrive at your site.

Clickstream information is based on consumers’ actual click and browsing behaviors, with records of click-throughs and URLs visited collected in the order they occurred, giving marketers important, industrywide insight into online behavior, the customer journey through the funnel, and user experiences.

Rather than providing simple numbers of visits or sales, clickstream information reflects consumer behavior based on their activity and identifies areas companies could improve where the competition might be doing it better.

The insights garnered from clickstream data may not always match your hypothesis, but they are always useful if you ask the right questions.

Don’t collect data just because numbers are nice to fall back on. Instead, focus on collecting information like click history that is directly tied to your business objectives and key performance indicators.

Identify what you want to learn, and focus your collection and analysis on that specific data subset.

Make the most of your clickstream data

Creating actionable insights out of your data is essential to portraying a full and accurate picture of the customer journey. Maximize the effectiveness of your clickstream analysis by employing these three tactics:

1. Have a hypothesis

This is a minimum requirement for a data project to be efficient and lead to insights. Without a hypothesis, you’re just wasting time. The more specific you are in your data requests, the easier it is for your data team to pinpoint exactly what they need to pull, analyze, and provide.

You don’t have to be sure of the outcome, and the data may prove you wrong, but that’s OK. Just be sure your data team enters a project focused and that they reach a conclusion.

Let’s say you run a display campaign to drive awareness and clicks to your own site for a product. If you sell that product through third-party distributors, like Amazon or Target, your hypothesis might be that your display campaign is influencing purchase behavior and conversions on these third-party sites. Without clickstream data, it’s very hard to connect those two pieces and prove or disprove this hypothesis.

2. Tie your analysis to KPIs

Your analysis might reveal plenty of information about how consumers reach and interact with your brand or with your competition, but not all information yields actionable insights. You might find that consumers searching your website tend to search three times. That’s interesting, but you don’t gain real insights from it without understanding how their search activity affects their subsequent behavior or how it differs from consumer search activity on competitors’ sites.

Structuring your hypothesis and analysis around KPIs diminishes the risk of reaching insights that are not actionable. If your leading KPI is, say, trial subscriptions, look into the trial conversion flow of your competitors, and reverse engineer their customer journey through the funnel to detect conversion and abandonment trends at each step.

If the vast majority of consumers bounce during step three of five on your site (but not on your competitors’ sites), test out consolidation steps to improve the user experience and increase conversions.

3. Identify your output goals

Without a clear goal for what you intend to do with clickstream data, you cannot transform it into actionable insights. Are you studying customer journeys to optimize conversions or user experience? Are you looking for details about PR or case studies to grow brand awareness and generate leads?

Answering these questions and setting intentions for your data will help you in many ways, from filtering data requests from the get-go to guiding your thought process when focusing your data request and analysis.

By analyzing customers’ online actions – clicks, purchases on other sites, and their browsing history — with specific output goals, you reveal a world of insight into how they interact with your brand’s web properties, your competition, and how they react to your offering.

Don’t collect clickstream data just for the sake of collecting it. Understand what you want to investigate and how you can benefit from it. Make sure it’s relevant to your company, and then analyze clickstream data to better understand your customers’ actions and optimize their experience.

Marketers need to go beyond just the numbers and patterns that data provides if they want to successfully understand and connect with consumers. Focusing on customer actions will lead to a better understanding of your audience and what resonates with them, increasing the success of your marketing efforts and, ultimately, creating a better business.

This is an abridged version of an article published earlier this week on our sister site ClickZ.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/07/01/how-to-create-insights-from-consumers-click-histories/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/146772966049

How to use images to bring real world credibility to your digital presence

We all know the importance of imagery, especially on mobile. However, the focus on icons and the fear of oversized pages has caused many designers to forget the power of pictures.

The right emotive photograph of the right proportions that loads rapidly is a fantastic way to bring your offline identity in a homogenous digital world.

In the physical world, many people love (or love the idea of) shopping in independent shops – music shops, fashion, books, surf shops, bicycles, delicatessens etc. – eating in independent restaurants and/or staying in independent hotels. There’s some joy in their individuality, expertise, quirkiness, familiarity. However, this differentiation often fails to translate into the digital world.

This is particularly the case in retail. Too often websites are simply a list of products, often the same or similar products as can be found on plenty of other retailers… sometimes at a better price, with little (bar a logo) to express the retailer’s unique selling proposition (USP) that is so evident offline.

A perfect picture is worth a thousand words

On the high street consumers are attracted into stores, restaurants, bars by what they see. The façade, name, logo, and any call-to-action, e.g. 50% off all helps gain attention, but mostly it is what we see inside.

This is why all shops and many other establishments have big windows. Sometimes it’s just a showcase window display, but often the window provides the opportunity to gaze into the soul and grasp the identity of the place.

It is this unique identity that most websites lack online and really lack on mobile.

Take a look at the mobile site of Daunt Books below. That photograph of the flagship London store tells you more about this retailer than any “about” section, review or product catalogue.

It’s there: front and center, whatever the device. You don’t need to ever have visited the real store to know this isn’t Amazon, Walmart, Tesco or Barnes & Noble.

Daunt Books is not a perfect mobile experience, but it is considerably better than many independent retailers (plenty of chains also) and, with those images, it is certainly one of the most elegant.

If you’ve got it, should you flaunt it?

So while we’re shopping in London, let’s visit the iconic department store Liberty. The image below shows the different experiences that greet the visitor to the physical store and to the mobile site. To find a picture of the store on the mobile site you need to look in the location tab.

Then let’s skip across the channel to Paris, to compare the gorgeous interior of Galeries Lafayette, pictured below, with its digital presence.

As you visit more sites of the world’s iconic department stores, it quickly becomes clear that they have all taken the decision to focus solely on product, with a utilitarian (though ironically not always user friendly) mobile web presence.

Try this: put your finger over the logo on any site (web or mobile), would you recognize the site? Is there anything that gives a hint of retailer’s real world physical presence, heritage or brand? Is there anything that demands: when I’m in New York, I’m going straight to this store?

Try Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale’s, or any other of New York’s temples to shopping.

Does this matter?

It seems surprising, when you have an iconic physical presence not to capitalize on it online, just to remind the customer of the heritage. But these department stores have strong brands, perhaps they feel the logo (with the look and feel of the site) is all that is required to give customers a sense of place, belonging and loyalty.

And of course, you can be sure that every retailer has conducted methodical tests to see what works best with mobile customers. Right?

But what about smaller stores, that aren’t such well-known brands?

Pick a list, any list.

Here’s the test.

Everybody loves a “best of” list. Best hotels in Singapore. Best restaurants in Berlin. The best surf shops in the world. Best coffee, boutique, pubs… whatever your poison.

All best of lists have a tried and tested format.

• Name of store/outlet/place
• Photo of store
• Description of store
• Name of store
• Photo of store
• Etc…

For example, take a look at: America’s 15 Greatest Independent Record Stores  according to Gear Patrol. This was chosen purely at random for this test.

Record stores are great example because they look fantastic in photos, even if you are not a big fan. If you are a fan… you can almost smell the vinyl. But all sorts of outlets look great in a good photograph, inside or storefront: skateboards mountain bikes, shoes, garden nurseries, bars, restaurant, hotels… That’s why we love the tried-and-tested list format.

The question is: when you tap through to this outlet that looked so great in the physical world, do you get a mobile (or PC) experience as compelling that image? Because, let’s face it, no normal person is going to physically visit 15 record stores from San Francisco to Brooklyn; but plenty of people might indulge in a little m-commerce.

The image below shows a screenshot of our record store list on the left (a tablet view, much reduced), with screenshots from various examples, good and bad, mobile friendly and not, from the sites to which the list linked (the screenshots are taken on a Samsung S6, but iPhone 6 looks similar using Mobilizer, which is a freemium tool).

How to research

Conduct tests repeatedly on all best of lists you can find. You can use directory services such as Yelp or TripAdvisor, but these are less fun or interesting than random curated lists.

The test:

• Pick lists related to, and unrelated to, your business.
• Try best in the world and by country, city – not just your own.
• Conduct it on a mobile devices – ideally more than one type of device.
• Don’t just do it on WIFI, do it at the bus stop, on the train, in the pub.
• Rate each sites on immediate impact. Does it grab your attention and draw you in? Why?
• Did the images make the site slow to load? Enough time to make you bored?
• Do images justify the real estate they take up on the screen?
• Then conduct a more thorough investigation.
• Then back up your findings with user testing.

Mobile as a brochure for your real world experience

Arguably it is even more important to capture the essence of your physical presence, if mobile (and digital) is a vehicle to drive and/or pay for visits to your business in the real world.

If you are in the any of the following kinds of businesses, it’s not just a very good idea, it is, arguably, an imperative to use powerful, compelling imagery:

• Hotels, restaurants, bars and clubs.
• Museums and galleries.
• Entertainment e.g. sports centers, bowling, ice skating.
• Shopping centers.
• Locations – countries, cities, neighborhoods, parks, beaches.

Not only do customers need to know what they are committing to/purchasing, i.e. is it their sort of place, people, good time; but also what the place actually looks like, so they can find it.

The following image shows four mobile experiences for the first five featured on Top 10 Museums and Galleries according to National Geographic. Two of the five, Le Louvre, Paris, France; and The Acropolis Museum, Athens, Greece (not pictured) lacked a mobile-friendly presence.

The homepages of The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. USA; State Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia; and The British Museum, London, England all suggest quite different approaches to mobile – including use of imagery.

Now let’s look at hotels:

The following image shows the four results randomly chosen from Top 10 good-value hotels in Singapore according to The Guardian.

The images are iPhone 6 screenshots using Mobilizer. While all sites appeared to be mobile-friendly, Mobilizer found some of the sites slow to load and other sites on the Guardian list impossible to load. This may indicate some usability issues, which may or may not be caused by the images used.

Is your picture worth its weight/wait in gold?

A quick test of the four museum sites highlighted above using the excellent WebPagetest revealed that the best performer over a mobile network (at the time of the test) was the homepage of The Smithsonian. Looking at the images you might guess that, but the other results were less predictable.

• The Smithsonian had a mobile load time of 2.3 seconds.
• British Museum: 4.1 seconds.
• The Louvre: 5.8 seconds.
• State Hermitage: 13.3 seconds.

With the exception of Smithsonian, the WebPagetest results suggested that one of the issues was images and suggested compressing the images should improve performance for all three.

Images will always come at a small cost when it comes to performance on a mobile network. It is essential to test your site to check that images are not causing unnecessary delay to page load. Consumers are becoming increasingly intolerant of slow mobile sites, so you must take measures to identify and reduce performance lag.

It is absolutely imperative that you test. Read this guide to testing the mobile-friendliness and performance of your site.

The following tools will help expose any issues, including image problems:

• Site Speed Data tool in Google Analytics.
• SEMRush
• Google Mobile Usability Report.
• https://mobile1st.com/
• Google Mobile-friendly test.
• Bing Mobile Friendliness Tool.
• Google PageSpeed Insights.
• http://www.webpagetest.org

It is absolutely imperative that you also user test to establish if your imagery works with the users and if it justifies any latency in page performance. Read this guide to how to user test.

Among other measures, you should:

• Use onsite and remote user testing.
• A/B testing.
• Heatmaps, such as Clicktale.

Read the full report: DNA of a Great M-Commerce Site Part 1: Planning 

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/07/01/how-to-use-images-to-bring-real-world-credibility-to-your-digital-presence/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/146772965639

Five most interesting search marketing news stories of the week

Look, I’ll level with you, I’ve pretty much just spent the week staring open mouthed at the internet while one more UK political crisis collapses into the next. You probably have too.

It may not have affected your work, but you’ve probably felt less of a need to bingewatch anything particularly dramatic on Netflix.

So basically this is all the latest search-related news that you may have missed over the last week, and frankly nobody would have blamed you if you had. Heck, Google could have announced a new line of sentient killer robots built suspiciously like Arnold Schwarzenneger and nobody would have noticed.

Well hey, let’s see what happens…

Facebook tightens its News Feed algorithm again, publishers feel the pinch

In what is the equivalent of a bank manager shouting at “lousy freeloaders” and emptying a bag of broken glass onto the ground to stop them from sleeping in the doorway, Facebook has strengthened its News Feed algorithm in order to show users fewer posts from publisher pages.

But, as this Buzzfeed article puts it so eloquently, it has been a public vote – and one against seeing more news.

Sure you can argue that Facebook is merely doing this to generate ad revenue from branded pages, but ultimately if its 1.65 billion users aren’t engaging directly with published news content, then it’s not doing Facebook any favours to keep it at the top of News Feeds.

Well that’s depressing. Don’t worry, there’s a 50 Cent Gif in a minute to cheer you up.

Google’s Keyword Planner tool became even more inaccurate

As Chris Lake reported this week, the numbers in Google Keyword Planner have always been somewhat vague, as they’re often rounded up and end with at least one zero.

Sadly these numbers will become even less precise in the very near future as Google has begun combining related terms, pooling them all together and reporting one larger number instead.

“You longer can you separate the data for keyword variants, such as plurals, acronyms, words with space, and words with punctuation. As such it would be easy to get a false impression of search volumes, unless you’re aware of the change”

The most common backlinks are natural

In Glen Allsop’s recent analysis of 1,000 search results, he discovered which kinds of links are most valuable for high rankings.

Natural (or earned) links top the chart of most common backlinks:

The research also found that the volume of backlinks does not correlate with ranking, but the variety of linking domains and longer word counts do help.

Check out the complete research here: State of Link Building 2016.

Google’s local 3-pack may now include paid listings

As reported in SEJ this week, Google’s organic listings may begin showing ads for certain localised searches.

Here’s the crappy photo I took of the presentation showing the 3-pack with 1 ad. #SMX #SMXLocal pic.twitter.com/LwCnc2WHPl

— Joy Hawkins (@JoyanneHawkins) June 21, 2016

As SEJ lead news reporter Matt Southern suggests:

“The ramifications of this change mean that any business can become featured in the local pack just by paying their way to get there. That’s good news for advertisers, but could spell bad news for local businesses who have worked hard to earn a spot in the 3-pack.”

Goodbye crappy lyric sites, Google has taken over

If you’re a regular searcher of song lyrics, they will now be served directly on Google SERPs thanks to a multi-year deal between Google and Toronto-based lyric licensing company LyricFind.

It has already begun…

Although Google horning in on anybody’s racket is normally something to be wary of, this is actually quite a good development, as lyrics websites are pretty awful and awash with horrible advertising.

Sadly it doesn’t have the lyrics to 2 Unlimited’s ‘No Limits’ yet, but that’s probably understandable.

from https://searchenginewatch.com/2016/07/01/five-most-interesting-search-marketing-news-stories-of-the-week-3/

source http://kateninablog.tumblr.com/post/146772964904