Brand bidding is when a company or individual wants to have their ads appear on another website when certain terms are being searched. For example, a soup company bids on the “Campbell’s” brand name. So, when someone searches for Campbell’s products, their company’s ad will also show up as well. There are many reasons as to why bidding on a specific brand is a good idea. Here’s why:
- Bidding on a brand gives you more control over how your company will be portrayed. You have the option of choosing a brand that is closely related to your own product or business concept.
- You can compete better with your competitors and partners. By bidding on a brand, you are giving yourself the option on which website you want to be seen on. It also gives you more exposure to customers who are already searching for the same thing that you’re offering.
- It may cost less money for you to bid on a brand. Usually, in terms of marketing, it is cheaper for traffic to come your way by branded clicks than not. This can also improve your account health overall. The more clicks you have, the better-quality score you will receive.
If you’re in the midst of starting your own small business it can be an absolute dream or a down right nightmare, depending on how you’ve decided to proceed. There are so many different aspects to having your own company that it is virtually impossible to be well versed in every one of those aspects. If you do try and do everything by yourself in order to save some money then you will most definitely fail at some part or another. Also, trying to do everything yourself leaves you without any time for what matters most, yourself and your family. Stress is definitely a part of every business but it should never take over your life.
Sure, there are probably many things that you can take care of yourself, if you have the knowledge and aspiration to do so. A lot of the staff scheduling, order inventory and supply and payroll might be able to be carried out by you. However, leaving the more complex promotional aspects to a digital marketing company or a social media expert is the choice you can probably make!
Social media is is of utmost importance if you want to expand the reach of your business. A social media professional knows what they are doing and can do wonders for your company. Their main focus is your business and how to help it succeed. They can present all sorts of ideas on how to improve your business, depending on what your goal is. Do you want to launch a new product? Get more traffic to your website? Create a real name for yourself? This is what they do best, and will tell you which social media platform will best get you where you want to be.
In the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) world, things are forever changing. It’s a digital world out there and nothing seems to stay the same for long. It is essential to have proper SEO as it lets you stay ahead of your competitors and gain as many leads as possible as well as more traffic to your business website. Here are a few tips to help you stay ahead in the SEO game:
1) First and foremost, you want to check that all your site links have been indexed and crawled by Google. If this is not the case, then your pages will not be visible to visitors or users and they will not gain any page traffic for you. The easy way to do this is to go to the index status under the Google index on the left-hand side of your browser.
2) Secondly, be sure to regularly check your sitemap’s status to ensure all is up to date. A sitemap is to help search engines determine what’s going on with your site and if there are any recent updates to it.
It’s not a secret anymore: SEO is important, and it’s changing. For many marketers, this is good news. As keywords become less important, they have more freedom to create quality content without worrying about being pushed down the search results page. But there are others who are struggling to adjust to the new system, still searching for tactics that will boost their ranking.
It takes time to master and perfect your SEO services, and part of that mastery is learning how to have your team work harmoniously and giving the members of that team chances to advance their careers. The company benefits as much as each individual employee does as a result of implementing relevant SEO strategies. There are many ways in which this can be done, but some are more popular than others.
Creating connections with internal customers is very important in this realm. It makes the website browsing experience more pleasant for the consumer and increases the company’s worth. One part of every website that should be optimized for easier site navigation and an authority boost for the brand is the internal search function, but it can’t rushed or completed in one go. A great deal of data is needed to improve the internal search of a website.
Each sector of your SEO team should have separate roles that all contribute to making your site’s internal search better for the customer. Reviewing recent trends, tweaking site messaging features, and creating doable strategies for special event sales can all lead to a customer-centric internal search algorithm. If your company has partners within its walls, highlight them and get more help with your SEO efforts.
Keywords have long been the focus of SEO and digital marketing. Although it’s important to know which terms users are typing into the search bar, it’s equally important to determine how many of these users are actually willing to buy from you. Just because lots of people search one of your keywords doesn’t mean they’ll all turn into loyal customers. This is a thought that tends not to cross the minds of inexperienced marketers.
It’s easy to plug in a series of often-searched keywords that relate to your business, but to truly benefit, you need to know the motives behind the searches that include those keywords. The users submitting them may not be looking for the products or services you provide; they may even be looking for something in a different industry altogether. Below is a collection of tools you can use to improve at SEO keyword targeting.
Do you truly know your audience? It’s essential to take note of the interests, opinions, and behaviours the majority of your audience members share. The best way to discover these things is to interact with your followers on social media. Reply to their comments, answer their questions, observe their actions, and reach out to them in any way you can. You will then have a starting point for more accurately determining which keywords they actually use.
Video advertisements were revolutionary when they first came out, effortlessly drawing in consumers and holding their attention. Nowadays, however, they’re more often seen as a nuisance, stuck in front of the free video content the consumer is watching and creating a collective sigh among viewers. So how do companies that rely heavily on marketing reignite the flame of intrigue their audience previously had? The Turner AdLab may be able to help.
Turner AdLab encouraged companies to advertise with specific target audiences and results in mind, but what really made it stand out was its ability to turn video ads into an enjoyable experience. They did this through creating video ads that followed a narrative and were shorter than their predecessors. Unfortunately, the industry couldn’t be turned on its head through the AdLab’s changes alone.
The group continues to find new ways to make advertising and video content a customer-focused initiative, only putting out quality marketing videos when consumers want to see them and can take valuable information from them. To ensure all ads stay this way, the advisory board is composed of individuals who each have a different area of expertise, pairing marketers and ad techs with researchers and media directors.
We humans love new things. We’re constantly looking for entertainment through novel places, activities, people, and objects. It therefore comes as no surprise that marketers put more effort into gaining new customers than holding onto the ones they currently have. Unfortunately, research shows that giving consumers who are already committed to your company a reason to stay is more important than growing your buyer population.
For starters, gaining new customers is five times more costly for any given company than keeping old ones is. Not only that, but it’s also more difficult to sell a product or service to a newcomer than it is to sell one to a brand loyalist. Companies naturally spend less on hiring a marketing company and generate more revenue when they aim to keep the customers they’ve already gained.
Your company, like most, is probably putting the emphasis on obtaining more buyers even though it isn’t the smartest business decision. If you’re ready to shift your focus to maintaining the satisfaction of those who like and support your brand, there are many ways in which your business marketing strategy should change. Let’s take a look at what you can do to keep old-timers around.
In the not-so-distant past, many companies approached marketing with the sole objective of selling their products. They did their best to prove they were the best in their industry, offering bigger and better things than their competitors. For a while, it worked well enough. Consumers actively compared companies and chose the one that provided better value. But the effectiveness of the strategy eventually wore off.
Now, businesses must diversify and create an emotional connection with their audience. Companies explain their origins, personalize experiences, and put the emphasis on being human rather than a money-grabbing corporation concerned only with profit. Better yet, startups can get in on the action, and it’s all thanks to digital marketing.
Although it’s near-revolutionary in terms of increasing return on investment and revenue, digital marketing is very common today and therefore quite competitive. It’s constantly buzzing with activity, and sometimes that steady hum in the background can drown out the sound of businesses who haven’t yet made it big. If you feel like your company has tried every digital marketing strategy in the book and you’re still struggling to keep your head above water, here are a few solid tips for success.
It can be hard to find a unique domain name when so many of them are already taken. Perhaps someone has ownership of the name you want to use and would be willing to sell it to you for a decent amount. This can be a good option, but before you jump right into buying a domain from someone else, you should do some investigating. What exactly should you look for? We’ll tell you everything you need to know!
Collect the information for the Google Search Console account for the domain you’re looking at. This is the best way to evaluate the domain’s quality. Ask admin for access if you can’t get the login information, then enter the account and look at both the Search Traffic and Security Issues sections to identify any problematic manual actions on the domain.
Google Analytics is another great tool for determining the condition of your potential domain. An unusually large wave of traffic or suspicious links could indicate sinister activity. The program can also send you notifications that bring your attention to possible viruses, phishing attempts, and unauthorized changes.
Fake news is taking over the internet, and social media sites have decided to try countering the effects of these illegitimate articles. Facebook, in particular, will soon double down to prevent the widespread sharing of false information. In what many are considering a social media marketing twist, the social media giant will ban any page that is deemed as publishing fake news.
From now on, Facebook pages that are caught consistently posting fabricated news content will be banned from the social networking site altogether. This plays into the recently created rule that requires the blocking of ads that have been deemed false by multiple fact-checkers. These two new policies are expected to combat the misinformation crisis the digital world is currently facing.
The new guidelines created specifically to curb fake news are also being put into place to eliminate the profits the illegitimate sources are gaining from the content’s circulation. Typically, these sources use ads to promote their content, but if they’re spotted collecting followers through these ads to give provide them with ongoing false information, they will be banned from using Facebook ads until they prove they are regularly producing truthful content.
Key performance indicators are an essential part of tracking your marketing progress. However, picking out the most important ones and measuring them accurately can sometimes be tricky. Which key performance indicators should you be keeping an eye on, and how do you quantify their effectiveness?
The first most important key performance indicator is customer lifetime value. Although it doesn’t seem like something you should consider when you’re focusing on conversion rates, it’s crucial to have a good understanding of it to improve the means through which you advertise and how your budget is split up. Come up with an average transaction value for a cross-section of your customers, then calculate the average purchase frequency over a period of time - usually one year. Once you’ve determined how long any given customer remains a customer, you can calculate your customer lifetime value.
If you’re looking to extend the duration of time each person buys from you, develop a loyalty system that gives them incentive to come back to you repeatedly. One way to do this is through personalized marketing emails that you can automate to send at specific times or when specific actions are completed. Products that come included with signups or purchases can also help stretch the customer lifespan of your buyers.
Although it may seem intimidating to some, bootstrapping your own company is a good option as long as you play by the rules. You always have the final say when you create something from the ground up. Get the business you want with the money you have by following our list of steps below.
Be realistic about your budget. You may be spending more than you think you are, which is why it’s so important to record every single thing you buy. Up your budget by a quarter of its initial number; you’ll likely be closer to this new spending roof by the end of the month.
If you’re overspending, look for effective ways to cut costs without cutting corners. This applies to life outside your business as well. Cut your leisure activities budget in half, get a more cost-efficient phone plan, or find a way to lower your vehicle loans. There are many ways to save a bit of cash in each category every month.
Protect yourself by making your business a C corporation. Some entrepreneurs forgo this option in favour of an LLC label, but it’s much safer for new startups to become C corporations. You and your company will be taxed individually rather than as one group, which means the large amount of taxes that your company eventually racks up won’t affect you.
Every business needs to use SEO to some degree, but it’s especially important for small businesses. Skirting around SEO, or steering clear of learning about it altogether, can hinder your company’s growth more than you think, especially if it’s newer and smaller than others. We’ll help you get started by showing you exactly how to use SEO to your advantage.
Search engine optimization, when done correctly, will provide visibility for your company’s digital content across different online platforms. This typically involves the use of various strategies to rank higher in search engine results. Altering your website’s layout, taking advantage of content marketing, link building effectively, and advertising your business on social media can all put you closer to the top of the results page.
Although it isn’t common, businesses should keep SEO strategies in mind while building their websites. Larger businesses can afford to professionally market themselves right off the bat, but smaller ones should invest in affordable SEO practices.
One of the most important skills for any employee to have is the ability to effectively recruit. Workers who have grown accustomed to being in leadership roles or managerial positions often find recruitment to be an easy task, but the same can’t be said for the majority of the employees at any given company. They may want to recruit and simply lack the knowledge to do so correctly, which can pose problems down the road.
Although company leaders should be able to rely on their employees as their main brand ambassadors, they first need to be taught what being a brand ambassador entails. If they go in blindly, they could end up making near-fatal mistakes. Set your employees up for success by following our the three easy steps below.
Put them at ease. Due to the high costs in money, time, and energy, hiring bad workers is something a company can’t afford and something employees don’t want to be held responsible for. Many employees who want to make referrals simply don’t for fear that their referral will fail. You can avoid bad hires and obtain good referrals by training your employees to be good recruitment officers.
If you’re part of a large company, you know that meeting all of the requirements in an approved way can be tricky. You often need verification from marketing and legal groups, on top of getting around many other obstacles. Simplify the process by putting a few things into place.
Create a genuine connection with your company’s decision makers so they can give the go-ahead for your company’s marketing strategies and activities quickly and easily. Make yourself an honest, likeable component of the team, and once you’ve gained their trust, start offering your ideas while still maintaining a casual relationship.
Unfortunately, a simple marketing pitch isn’t good enough - you need evidence that those ideas will benefit all parties involved. Email your decision makers accurate articles or reports that support your suggestion or marketing strategy pitch. Be ready to counter any objections they may have to your plan. When they see the value in your proposal, they’ll make a decision faster and with more knowledge of the situation.
To achieve SEO with your content, you have to do more than just produce great content - you also have to follow Google’s rules. The way the company determines the quality of the content it receives is ever-changing, but two factors that are always relevant are the internet habits of device users and the people, not machines, that ensure the ranking rules are being followed. Human review and appeal are an important part of SEO. Having said that, we’ll go over the technical side of SEO first.
Every good marketer knows that using keywords is mandatory to achieve ideal SEO. With this in mind, you should choose keywords relevant to your business, but not broad enough to generate a great deal of competition. Go for keywords that are specific to your industry and often searched by members of your target audience. If you select keywords simply due to their high search frequency, you may not be reaching the right people. Dropping keywords into your article headlines is a great way of ensuring that those articles will be seen by many.
Brand loyalty can be hard to come by now that millions of advertisements can reach anyone, anywhere, anytime. Recent studies have shown results that favour this notion, discovering that 79% of the millennials surveyed considered the quality of the product over the brand name associated with it when making a purchase.
Other studies have contradicted this information, finding that 77% of the consumers surveyed use the same brand countless times, and 37% of that group labeled themselves as brand loyalists based on the fact that they’d stick to their typical brand even when offered a similar, better product. Assuming the second findings are more accurate, there are a few things about brand loyalists that businesses and every advertising agency should know to better understand them.
Reeling in customers starts with presenting your product as a novelty. It may not be the first of its kind, but perhaps it has a unique feature or design that your competitors’ products don’t have. If neither of these things is applicable to your product, find an atypical way to advertise it and create novelty that way. This novelty, when repeated, will be stored in the consumer’s memory, and their mind will begin to equate happiness and quality with your brand.
Now that so much of the world has gone virtual, it’s easy for just about anyone with access to wifi to make a bit of extra cash. Sneaky scams aside, there are many ways you can add to your salary through the services offered by the internet.
Blogging is a great way to make money online. Buying a domain name and a service package from a blog building site doesn’t cost much, and you can start blogging as soon as you’ve purchased the necessary equipment. If you choose the blog route, you’ll want to write about interesting topics to draw in as many people as possible. After your blog has gained a significant amount of traffic, monetize it through sponsors, advertisers, or affiliate commissions. Depending on your blog’s content, it may benefit more from one monetization option than another.
If you know a lot about a certain topic but don’t like the idea of blogging, try putting together books, videos, or items that people can purchase to learn more about that topic. You can do this alongside blogging, as well, promoting your materials on your business website and in your articles. Putting in the effort and properly advertising these products is sure to bring in some cash. Autoresponders can make the process easier, collecting the email addresses of interested customers and sending them a series of marketing emails.
When SEO first came into play, the focus was on coding and practically nothing else. With the change in consumer habits and search engine functions, however, SEO has gained a much more human element. This means that while the logical, hands-on parts of the practice are still important, navigating the likes, dislikes, thoughts, and feelings of your audience is just as significant. It’s possible to find a happy medium, and we’ll show you how.
Technical SEO teams typically work on similar tasks as but separate from IT teams, helping to understand and clarify the needs of each content marketer, web developer, and link creator they deal with. The SEO team then puts its plans into action, making the data fetching, categorization, and ranking much easier. When SEO and IT teams collaborate, time is saved, issues are avoided, and cohesion is achieved.
Once your development teams are working together, separate on-page SEO and off-page SEO. On-page elements include internal links, website structure, coding errors, loading speed, page content, and mobile adaptability. In contrast, off-page elements include social networking, inbound links, influencer content, and guest articles.
There are few people who know Instagram better than the ones who use it the most: 21st century teenagers. Having grown up with the internet and alongside the boom in social media, they’ve figured out how to swiftly navigate the photo-based platform in record time. So how do they do it, and how can your business benefit from the social media strategies of teens? You’re about to find out.
The majority of teenagers on Instagram and social media use the abbreviations LB, CB, and FB, as well as the word First when responding to a post from a popular online personality. These strange little codes stand for like back, comment back, follow back, and like my latest post, respectively. Surprisingly, employing this strategy can help your company’s account gain followers. This is because Instagram recommends relevant content to its users instead of recent content for a more personalized experience. You’ll naturally collect more likes, comments, and followers this way.
When done correctly, email marketing is one of the most effective marketing strategies available to businesses today. Automated email marketing follows the principles of email marketing, but sends emails at specific times that are predetermined by your company. There are many things you need to know before you start, so let’s go over the ins and outs of automated email marketing.
Automated email marketing doesn’t include the confirmation emails sent to customers when they place an order. This is because most of the time, those emails aren’t trying to sell anything; they’re simply laying out information that the customer already knows. Emails intended for marketing, on the other hand, give customers new information and attempt to draw them in enough to make a purchase.
We’ll first look at trigger emails, which are sent when a member of your target audience completes a certain action. Trigger emails cover those sent when a customer leaves a full online shopping cart, purchases a product, passes an important date, or is close to ending a free trial period. This type of automated email marketing is ideal for companies that have many active customers.
To push your company up to the first Google search results page, you’ll need links. While many businesses focus on the quantity of those links, it’s quality that truly determines how you’ll rank. Use our simple tricks to give your company more online exposure.
When it comes to search engine ranking, look for pre-compiled blog lists that relate to your industry. This makes choosing the best ones much easier and hunting down individual links unnecessary. Click on an article with a list of 20 to 50 blogs so you have a good amount of selection. When you find a few sources that are relevant to your business, reach out with an email offering an appealing deal or special offer.
If you want to be more sure you’ve chosen a good blog, use Ahrefs to evaluate the site based on its domain and page authority. It’s best to create a master list or spreadsheet to store the data you find and compare your sources. When you eventually reach out to other bloggers, make sure you’re not being demanding. Allow for some back and forth communication before you ask for a favour, and consider offering something free or discounted in exchange for an honest review.
If your target audience is smaller and more refined than those of other businesses, you may be struggling to gain results from regular online marketing strategies. You’re in luck, however - there are several ways to successfully advertise your products to your very specific audience.
Start in the Google search engine to discover what your customers are typing into the search bar. Narrow down the information and create Facebook ads that will directly target and attract potential buyers. These ads need to be shown repeatedly to your customers over a decent period of time to press the product into their subconscious, predisposing them to buy your product when they need something like it.
You can also opt for the Google ads or Google AdWords approach, in which you use relevant keywords in your ads to have them appear far up on the search results page and lead your audience members to a contest or giveaway your company is hosting. The more specific the keywords are, the less it will cost your company to run the ads.
No businesses struggle to keep their cash the way startups do. Most companies cost around $30,000 just to get up and running, and thousands more for rent, salaries, materials, and advertising. The last of this list seems unnecessary, but not doing it could cost your business more money in the long run. You’ll want to focus on it without spending much, so here’s a handful of cheap and useful marketing strategies for your budding company.
Give referrals a try. Create a campaign that allows your current customers to refer a friend who might be interested in trying your product and receive a reward for doing so. Setting up a campaign like this comes at little to no cost, and the referred individuals that come your way are more willing to trust you having been told about your company by someone they like and respect.
Press releases can work as well. You’ll have your company mentioned in popular media this way, extending your reach far beyond your previous boundaries. If you take the time to find the journalists yourself, it can be a completely free option. For an alternate approach, content marketing is promising for most. This strategy includes text, photos, videos, and podcasts, all of which can up your site traffic and be used alongside other methods.
In the waning age of simple print advertisements, companies are forced to focus on what 21st century consumers have come to enjoy: content marketing. Nowadays, it’s important to come across genuinely in your marketing, putting thought into the composition of each advertisement and promotion you create. This is made more difficult with the growing popularity of social media platforms and the staggering rate at which they’re used. There’s no need to stress, however - there are many tools available that make content marketing easier.
Defining and integrating your goals into all the marketing campaigns you run can prove challenging, but this challenge can be overcome with an all-inclusive strategy manual. Content marketing manuals help your company maintain consistency throughout your marketing campaign, adhering to your overarching message. Many websites offer both digital and print manuals that can be purchased or downloaded by those who need it.