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Creating Advertising Strategies That Work

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Advertising is an integral ingredient in marketing for building a successful business. It’s how you make your business, products, or services known to your target audience. You must devise creative advertising strategies if you want your customers to choose your products or services over the competitors’.

While there are many ways to advertise, your chosen strategy must fit your brand objectives. This post looks at some advertising strategies in marketing and guides you on creating one that works for your business.

Defining an Advertising Strategy

An advertising strategy is an action plan that aims at the following:

Your advertising strategy is part of your comprehensive marketing plan. They must align with your company goals and objectives and can be a mix of digital and traditional marketing channels. These are the two broad categories of advertising strategies. Traditional marketing entails using media like:

  • Television ads
  • Billboards
  • Prints ads
  • Direct mail
  • Street teams

Digital advertising tactics include the following:

  • Social media marketing
  • Email marketing campaigns
  • Content marketing
  • Search engine optimization
  • Pay-per-click advertising
  • Social media marketing
  • Influencer marketing

Steps to Creating Effective Advertising Strategies in Marketing

Having the most effective advertising strategy in marketing takes time to achieve. You must continually fine-tune your approach to determine the advertising methods that best engage your customers.

If you’re starting or want to overhaul your current advertising strategy, here’s a template you can use:

1. Identify Your Target Audience

Your advertising strategy should be about reaching out to the people interested in purchasing your products or services. Consider the specific demographics of this target group, including the following:

  • Their gender
  • Age
  • Attitudes
  • Personal values and attitudes
  • Income levels
  • Occupation.

With this information, you can create a buyer person or a fictional representative of the target customer base that your business wants to reach. The consumer profile of your target audience can give you an abstract idea of what your customers want. You can use this to shape your advertising message.

2. Determine Your Advertising Objectives

Once you identify your target audience, ask yourself why you want to advertise. There could be different goals to achieve through advertising, such as boosting sales, promoting newly launched products, or increasing website traffic. It could also be to create awareness about a product’s benefits.

Having clarity of purpose is a crucial step forward in the direction of creating an effective advertising strategy. Your marketing objectives can also inform your choice of advertising platforms, as different channels have varying outcomes.

3. Create Your Advertising Content

Once you determine what you want to achieve through your advertising strategy, it’s time to create content that helps you achieve this goal. Some factors to help in your content creation strategy are the following:

  • Having an SEO strategy such as voice or video search for local and mobile SEO
  • Keyword research for more insights into what your customers want to see
  • Having a blog or website that you regularly update with relevant, educating, and engaging content
  • Creating attractive landing pages that trigger a sales funnel for your business.

Influencers and content marketing agencies can help you craft relevant content that enables you to put your brand message out there. Forging partnerships with these professionals can help you reach your target audience in ways that automated content advertising strategies cannot.

4. Choose Your Advertising Platforms

In choosing your advertising platforms, consider those most helpful in reaching your target audience. In this digital era, only a tiny percentage of businesses will consider traditional marketing channels as their primary platforms. Digital advertising platforms are more likely to reach a broader audience and have a greater return on investment.

Consider incorporating a mix of advertising channels to test their viability for your business. Online marketing provides an array of advertising strategies, as previously mentioned. However, if you’re new to advertising, you’d rather stick to a few channels first.

Once you accumulate enough analytics and data from the channels, you can determine their effectiveness and consider branching out to other platforms. After testing the results, you can create a vibrant mix of responsive media for an effective advertising strategy.

5. Audit the Results and Keep Improving

Launching an advertising strategy is only the beginning of your business promotion strategy. You must also analyze and refine the various advertising methods you use. A/B testing is one of the approaches you can use. It entails showing different types of ads to similar customers. Then, you can gauge the messages with better click-through rates. Investing more in ad messages with higher click-through rates can yield better returns for your business.

Your marketing team should constantly be on its toes to review marketing campaign metrics. Consequently, it should engage in relevant targeting to reach a broad audience. Assessing and refining advertising strategies is an ongoing process as long as your business operates.

Effective Advertising Strategies in Marketing Are Crucial to Your Business Success

A business without a well-structured advertising strategy in marketing will fail because it lacks a systematic method of reaching its customers. An advertising plan creates brand awareness and tells your customers why they should choose your products or services, not your competitors’.

Creating a strategy that works and withstands the test of time can be complex, but the steps above can help you get started. With time, you can fine-tune the plan to add more steps depending on what works best for your business. You should eventually be able to automate your advertising strategy for marketing and reap from the investment.

Media Mix Marketing

Media Mix Marketing: What Is It and What Are the Benefits?

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The marketing world is dynamic. New marketing tactics and trends constantly change how businesses market themselves. Consequently, marketers have embraced media mix marketing. Statistics show a 14% growth rate in digital marketing budget spending between 2020 and 2021 across industries. Besides, forecasts show a digital marketing annual growth rate of 9% from 2020 to 2026.

These figures encompass a mix of media marketing strategies available today. Businesses no longer rely on a single media marketing tactic to achieve their objectives. They can leverage a media mix marketing strategy for more versatility and visibility than traditional marketing methods.

What is Media Mix Marketing?

Media mix marketing is a crucial part of business marketing and advertising. It combines all the channels a company can use to achieve its marketing goals and boost the branding message. It entails both online and offline media, such as the following:

  • The business’ website and social media channels
  • Email marketing
  • TV ads
  • Radio ads
  • Newspapers
  • Billboards
  • Direct mail

Leveraging a marketing media mix is a practical and effective way of reaching a wider audience. Besides, a media mix enables a brand to try new things confidently. For example, you may have tried to promote your brand through digital displays and seen results.

However, you may be interested in trying TV ads to test the response while keeping a safety net. Digital advertising isn’t static, so you must evolve your strategy to keep up with the competition.

Benefits of a Media Mix Marketing

One benefit of media mix marketing is enabling you to deliver the right marketing message to your audience. For example, if you want to target a broad market across the country, a media mix of national newspapers, television, and radio may be the right fit.

To reach a specific group of decision-makers, a mix of media marketing might include specialists’ magazines or exhibitions specifically for that target audience. Direct mail or a briefing session could be more effective for a smaller target audience of decision-makers.

Better Returns on Investment (ROI)

A compelling media mix can improve your business ROI while enabling you to test new campaigns. It prevents you from putting all your marketing or advertising budget in one place or relying on one method to reach a broad audience.

You can determine the best-performing method and invest more to balance out the underperforming ones for a better ROI. You can decide whether to optimize or eliminate ineffective marketing methods depending on the outcome.

Creates a Strong Brand Message

When you consistently use a combination of media channels to promote your company, you enhance your chances of creating a consistent brand. Sharing your brand logo, colors, message, and tone across different media platforms makes it easier for people to recognize it.

Better Understanding of Market Trends

As you try to mix different marketing techniques, you gain a better understanding of what other brands are doing in the market. You also learn how different channels affect your business and how trends keep changing with time. Creating new marketing strategies that work best for your brand is easy with this knowledge.

Improved Planning Through Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics provides more insights into what the future of an organization’s marketing efforts looks like. Combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning, you can account for many variables, such as seasonality, industry trends, and the impact of advertising.

The data enables you to predict the effectiveness of campaigns for a clearer view of what to expect from your mixed media marketing strategy. It becomes easier to anticipate customers’ needs and desires for more personalized campaigns.

How to Choose the Best Media Mix?

When choosing a media mix, remember that the goal is to establish suitable communication channels to improve your customer base and sales. That is only achievable by paying attention to the following components of a marketing media mix:

  • People: Carefully consider the audience you want to reach with your messaging through your media mix. Do you want to reinforce a specific message to your existing customers or test a new market segment? Your marketing objectives can largely influence your decision.
  • Product: What do you intend to sell or market through your chosen channels? How effectively can you demonstrate what it offers through your preferred medium to fill a market gap?
  • Place: Place is the location where customers can purchase your product or service. While this may be a physical store, your mix of media marketing may comprise your social media platforms and website as the place where customers can buy.
  • Price: As you mix your media marketing channels, you can quickly determine the price in several ways, including factoring in the cost of the media mix. Remember to include other expenses like labor and distribution.

Ultimately, getting your media mix right requires carefully thinking through the strategies based on your budget, brand, product, audience, unique selling proposition, and in-house skills. Some tips to help you along the way are the following:

  • Consider your primary marketing goals
  • Think through the marketing funnel as different channels are effective at various points of the buyer persona journey.
  • Invest heavily in tracking and analytics to gauge the impact of each marketing channel.
  • Ensure you monitor the same metrics across the various marketing channels.
  • Validate the lessons you pick along the way by optimizing your media mix.
  • Analyze your target audience based on their pain points, location, demographics, and preferences.
  • Harmonize your mixed media marketing channels to boost your ROI.

Getting Started with Your Media Mix Marketing Strategy

With 84% of media planners already leveraging a media mix marketing and getting positive results, there’s no reason you shouldn’t do the same to boost your brand. Determining the best mix may be an uphill task, but not impossible. Analytics tools are available to help you improve and fine-tune the mix. Once you establish how changes in the blend affect the results, you can reallocate your budget to enhance the mix for better marketing performance.

Conclusion:

In today’s fast-paced and highly competitive marketplace, leveraging a well-planned media mix is no longer optional—it’s essential. By combining various media channels strategically, businesses can amplify their reach, enhance message resonance, and build stronger connections with diverse audience segments.

Website Redesign Process

Website Redesign Tips

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Once you’ve decided to redesign your website so that your business can remain competitive, you’ll want professional website redesign tips to help ensure that your new website design will be effective. Without one, your site is likely going to continue having some of the same problems it currently has. Redesigning your website without a plan is basically like doing temporary repairs and hoping that they will hold up.

Website Redesign Questions to Ask

If you’re looking to figure out what you need to change, you’ll want to start by asking yourself key questions about your current website design. The following questions will help you understand where your current website’s issues lie and how your website can be improved with Website Redesign.

What do you think needs work on your website?

If you’ve identified the need for a website redesign, then you should have some idea of what areas of your current website need work. However, you should still go through your entire site to see if you can pick up on anything that you think needs to be addressed. Pay attention to:

  • How long pages take to load
  • How easy it is to navigate
  • Whether your links are working
  • If visitors are engaging with your content
  • Whether your content is outdated
  • What kind of impression you have of the site’s look

Also Read: How Your Web Page Speed Effects Your SEO and Google Ads Performance

What do visitors think about your website?

Your visitors often have a better perspective on how functional your site is to use than you do. In fact, some of the best website redesign tips you can get are from your visitors. Pay attention to some of the common questions that your visitors are asking concerning your website. You can also look at what your visitors are searching for most in your search bar. For example, if they are searching for your contact information, then your contact page may not be as easy to find as it should be.

Read More Articles: Why Your Website Redesign Would Benefit From An Inbound Marketing Strategy

What is your website’s main goal?

You should have one main goal, whether it’s generating sales, increasing brand authority, converting leads or spreading brand awareness. This goal will help guide you when it comes to making your website design choices and will give you something to benchmark your site’s results against.

What are your competitors’ websites like?

One way to get an idea of what works and what doesn’t is by taking a look at the competition. Spend some time going through one of your competitor’s websites. It’s often easier to judge another website objectively than it is to do so your own. You’re likely to notice that your more successful competitors have the more effective website designs. Take note of some of the things you like about their site as well, such as the layout, features or some of the pages they have that you might not.

How often do you update your website?

You should be updating your website regularly, even if it’s just to post weekly blog content. If you’re not, it could be because your current website is just too difficult to update. Fortunately, there are content management systems (CMS) available that makes it easy for anyone to update a website, whether they are technically proficient or not.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, a successful website redesign requires careful planning and consideration. By taking the time to ask yourself the right website redesign questions, such as those outlined above, you can ensure that your new website meets the needs of your business and your visitors. By investing in a well-designed and user-friendly website, you can set your business up for long-term success.

Looking for additional information on how to rebuild your website? Please click here!

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How Businesses Can Use a Blog To Strengthen Their Online Marketing Efforts

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The history of blogging is an interesting one. For a while, the purpose of a blog was entirely personal. People would use blogs as a sort of online diary that was public to friends and family. However, as online marketing evolved over the years, it became apparent that the blog held immense value as a content marketing tool. Blogging presented the perfect way for businesses to regularly publish new content to attract and build a large audience.

With that in mind, if you’re planning a content marketing strategy, then you should strongly consider setting up a website blog and do blogging.

How Blogging is Beneficial for Business

The following are a few benefits of blogging for business to improve your online marketing efforts:

1. Generate Organic Traffic From Google organic google traffic

One of the main advantages of blogging is that it can help you generate organic traffic from Google. When you publish new content on your blog, Google will index it and include it in its search results. As a result, people searching for information related to your business will be more likely to find your website.

Of course, how your blog content ranks will depend on how effectively you optimize it for SEO (search engine optimization). You’ll need to:

  • Use competitive, relevant keywords throughout each blog post
  • Use internal and external links to improve user engagement
  • Promote your blog via social media and email marketing.

Also Read: 5 Ways To Optimize Your Social Media

2. Drive Social Media Traffic To Your Website

If you have a social media presence for your business, consider promoting new blog content on every channel you’re using. Doing so will encourage more of your followers to click through and read your latest blog post. It can also help your blog posts rank better due to the increased traffic they’ll receive from social media exposure.

It’s also worth mentioning that posting your blog posts on social media improves the post’s chances of being shared by others. Whoever shares your posts on social media will expose them to an entirely new audience, which can help drive new visitors to your site.

3. Establish Brand Authority

One of the primary goals of any content marketing strategy is to establish your brand as an authority in its industry. One of the best ways to do that is by regularly publishing high-quality blog content.

When you publish new, high-quality blog posts regularly, it showcases your expertise on the topic at hand. It also helps to build trust and credibility with your audience. As a result, your blog can help to not only bolster your brand reputation, but to drive conversions.

Additionally, the better your reputation is, the more likely other websites will begin linking to your blog. The resulting backlinks can expose your brand to bigger audiences and cement your position as a thought leader within your industry.

4. Educate Your Audience

By publishing how-to guides and other informative pieces on your blog, you can help educate potential leads in the beginning stages of their buyer’s journey. Not only will doing so help build your brand authority, but it will also help nurture your visitors through the buyer’s journey. As a result, you’ll be in a better position to capture leads and convert them into customers.

One of the benefits of having a blog is that it can have a long-term impact on attracting and educating new leads. For instance, someone searching for information about a problem they’re having may stumble on a blog post you published a few years ago that remains relevant. If your post was educational, they might stick around, exploring your blog or your website further.

5. Generate Leads

Besides attracting new visitors to your website, your blog can go a long way towards helping you generate leads. Your blog can nurture potential leads and build trust, two critical steps towards capturing a lead. However, the blog posts themselves can act as a vessel for conversion. By ending each post with a call-to-action and an offer, you can entice visitors to sign up to your email list.

Set Up A Blog to Improve Your Online Marketing Today

If you’re not already taking advantage of all that a blog can do for your online marketing efforts, it’s time to start. Creating high-quality blog content is one of the best ways to improve your website’s SEO, drive social media traffic, establish brand authority, educate your audience, and generate leads. All of which can help improve your online marketing success over the long term.

25 Website Must Haves
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5 Free Graphic Design Tools For Real Estate Agents

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As a real estate agent, you know how important marketing is. After all, marketing is a prominent aspect of selling homes. Competition amongst real estate agents and firms is fierce, which means effective real estate marketing is critical to not only your success but your survival. Graphic design is an important part of a good marketing campaign.

As such, establishing your online presence and creating marketing materials is an essential part of any real estate marketing strategy. While writing content will help you to express your unique value proposition, potential clients will also be looking for visuals that support your brand. After all, human beings are visual creatures and often make decisions based on what they see.

This is where graphic design comes in.

The Importance of Graphic Design For Real Estate

As a real estate agent, you need to stand out from the crowd in order to get noticed. After all, there are plenty of other agents out there vying for the same clients. One way to make sure you stand out is to have an online presence that is professional and eye-catching. As such, good graphic design is essential.

Graphic design can help you build a brand identity, create a website and social media pages, and develop marketing materials that are visually appealing and will help you attract the attention of potential clients. Not to mention, using high-quality visuals can also make your brand appear more trustworthy and credible.

While hiring a professional graphic designer can be costly, there are plenty of great tools out there that you can use to create stunning visuals on your own.

Free Graphic Design Tools For Real Estate Agents

There are countless graphic design tools available that you can use; fortunately, not all of them are expensive. In fact, many of them are free. The following are the five of the best free graphic design tools available:

1. Canva

Canva is a user-friendly graphic design tool that is perfect for beginners. With this tool, you can easily create beautiful visuals without any prior experience or design skills. Canva provides you with everything you need to get started, including templates, images, and fonts. You can even upload your own images to use.

As such, Canva is great for creating blog graphics and eBook covers, preparing real estate presentations, and even for adding text (such as quotes) to your blog posts or social media updates. Plus, it’s extremely easy to use; simply drag and drop your way to a stunning design. Although available for free, there are premium add-ons available for an additional cost.

2. Adobe Photoshop Express

Adobe Photoshop is known as one of the premier graphic design tools; however, it can be quite expensive. Fortunately, they have an Adobe Photoshop Express tool that is available for free.

While it doesn’t offer as many features as the full version of Photoshop, it’s still a powerful tool that can help you create stunning designs. You can use Adobe Photoshop Express to edit photos, create collages, and design logos. You can also upload and enhance your own JPEG, JPG, and JPE files that are 16 megapixels or smaller. Their photo editing feature lets you adjust the brightness and saturation of your images, do touch-ups, and save high-quality versions of the images for free.

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What You Should Know Before Hiring a Package Design Company

3. Free Logo Design

Creating a logo is vital to creating a recognizable brand identity. As its name suggests, Free Logo Design is a tool that you can use to create free logos. This is perfect if you’re just starting out and don’t have the budget to hire a professional logo designer.

To get started, simply enter your business name and industry, and then browse through their library of stock logo icons. Once you find one you like, you can customize it by changing the colors, fonts, and layouts. You can also upload your own images to use. You can download your logo for free in either PNG or JPG format.

4. Piktochart

With Piktochart, you can turn boring data into visually appealing and easy-to-understand visuals. This is a great way to make complex information more digestible for your readers or viewers. Plus, infographics are highly shareable on social media, which means they can help you attract new leads and grow your online presence. Piktochart offers both free and premium plans; however, their free plan still provides you with plenty of features and templates to work with.

5. Skitch

Skitch is a unique tool that lets you add annotations, shapes, and arrows to your images. This is perfect for highlighting specific features of a property or drawing attention to a particular area in an image. As such, Skitch is useful for highlighting information on images to share on social media and can help make important text jump out at your followers.

Good graphic design is essential to building your real estate business. While these are just a few of the many great free graphic design tools that are available, they should give you a good starting point for creating visuals that will help you market your real estate business effectively.

  Struggling with low website traffic? Get practical tips to boost your online presence and attract new leads.  

Digital Communication Tools to Help Build a Human Brand

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The success of your brand depends on much more than just convincing a potential customer to try your product. In the past, the customer experience has been based solely around the product being offered. These days, you need to look at the big picture. It’s not just about the customer experience in regards to your product. Instead, it’s about the emotional connection that customers are able to form with your brand.

Customers don’t just want a product, they want a relationship with the brand that is selling them that product. You need to focus on fostering an emotional connection with them instead of just trying to build awareness for a certain product. Fortunately, building an emotional connection with your audience is easier than ever before with the number of digital communication tools that are at your disposal.

relationship communication heart shape hands

The Importance Of An Emotional Connection

Customers are more than just transactions or data points. They are human beings with hopes, dreams, and feelings. In a world where their product choices are practically limitless, they will want much more out of a brand. They do not want to engage with a corporation. Customers want to engage with a brand that relates to them on a personal level. Their desire to have a connection with a brand in a world with product options that are virtually limitless is not surprising. A brand that is able to touch their customers emotionally is going to make their customers more engaged.

There are many ways that you can achieve this, like reinforcing the beliefs or perspective of your audience, supporting the goals or perspective of your audience, or challenging your audience to do greater things.

5 Marketing Tactics You Should Be Using in 2019

How Digital Communication Tools Can Help Foster An Emotional Connection

Engaging on an emotional level with your audience is easier than it’s ever been, as long as you make the effort to do so. The following are just a few ways that digital communication tools can help you to connect with your audience emotionally and to build meaningful relationships with them:person looking at digital communication

  • Video content

    When it comes to content, few other forms are able to engage audiences on an emotional level like video content. There are numerous reasons for this. Firstly, people consume visual content much more easily than written content. They also consume visual content much more quickly than written content. Secondly, you can use actors or even real figures that audiences can relate to on a personal level. This will create a sense of empathy and connection. Thirdly, you can emphasize certain emotions much more effectively through video. The color grading, visual style, and cinematography of the video all help set the emotional tone. The sound effects and music used in the video further enhance its emotional impact. They can also be used to create atmospheres that evoke certain feelings. YouTube is the most popular platform for sharing video content.

  • Segmentation

    Segmenting your leads and customers based on the data you’ve collected (via opt-in forms, surveys, and more) will provide you with valuable insight into who your audience is. This will tell you how you can connect with them. Once you have segmented your leads, you can create content that speaks to each group’s needs and interests. Effectively personalizing your content will allow you to catch your audience’s attention. It will also make it easier to drive engagement.

  • Social interaction

    The use of social channels makes it easy to engage with your audience in a personal and direct manner. You can promptly answer their questions, respond to their comments, and address their concerns. Customers appreciate brands that listen and respond to their needs. You’ll have a bigger emotional impact on those who witness the interactions on social media as well. Remember, personal and direct interactions make it easier to build meaningful relationships with your audience.

Building a human brand will help you build long-term relationships with your audience based on real emotional connections. Use digital communication tools available to you, like video content, segmentation, and social interaction, to emphasize emotion in your marketing efforts. Doing so will help your audience relate to you on a more personal level, thereby driving engagement with your brand.

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Why Hiring a Marketing Agency is Right for You

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Success depends on marketing. It doesn’t matter how big or small your business is, you cannot survive or grow unless you market your brand. Marketing does require a lot of time and effort to do effectively. Unfortunately, few businesses have the resources needed to maintain an in-house marketing team. That’s why many of them rely heavily on outsourcing to a professional marketing agency.

Why Hiring a Marketing Agency?

The following are a few reasons why you should strongly consider working with a reputable marketing agency:

1. A Marketing Agency Is Less Expensive

At first glance, the monthly rate of a marketing agency might seem expensive. In fact, many companies make the mistake of thinking it’s an unnecessary expense, especially if they think they can handle their marketing needs on their own. However, when you add up the costs of running a successful in-house marketing team, you’ll realize that it’s much more expensive than outsourcing to a marketing agency.

A comprehensive marketing strategy requires a lot of different skill sets. You’ll need marketing managers, strategists, researchers, analysts, copywriters, social media managers, SEO specialists, web designers, graphic designers, and more. Each one of these specialists costs a significant amount of money to hire full-time. The costs of hiring a marketing agency for a year are often less than hiring just one full-time marketing specialist.

2. Access To High-End Technology

Because a marketing agency is focused solely on marketing, the majority of their investments are going to be in the technology needed to stay on top of the latest tech and trends. As a result, when you work with a marketing agency, you’ll have access to all of the latest marketing tools, many of which can cost an arm and a leg to purchase or subscribe to yourself.

3. Access To An Experienced And Knowledgeable Team

Trying to put together an in-house marketing team can be very difficult in part because you’ll need to know who to hire. If you get stuck with someone who lacks the necessary experience or skills, it can hinder your marketing efforts. A marketing agency makes sure that it hires only the most qualified marketers out there. This means that you can be safe in the knowledge that your team has the experience and skills needed to help implement an effective marketing strategy.

4. Scale Marketing Needs With Ease

Agency

One of the biggest challenges businesses face is attempting to scale their marketing efforts to keep up with their company’s growth. If you find that you suddenly need more personnel to keep up with the demand of your business, you’ll have to go through the hiring process. This process can take a long time. Not to mention that the marketers you hire will have to be onboarded. When working with an agency, you’ll never have to worry about your marketing team falling behind. An agency will be able to scale your needs by simply adjusting your strategy and assigning more of their marketers to your team when needed.

5. Obtain A Fresh Perspective

Even if you have an in-house marketing team, one of the things that can hinder your team is the fact that their perspective of your brand can grow scale. Being able to stand back and look at the overall picture can be difficult sometimes. A marketing agency will be able to do this since they have an outsider perspective. Their experience working on other strategies and campaigns can also bring valuable insight to your team.

Read More: Five Reasons To Hire An Advertising Agency Versus Staffing In-House

6. Compliment Your Existing Personnel

Even if you have in-house marketing personnel, working with a marketing agency can be hugely beneficial. Most smaller to mid-sized businesses won’t have a full-fledged marketing department. This means that the marketing personnel they do have are often forced to wear multiple hats. This can result in them becoming overworked and overwhelmed, thereby hurting their job performance.

By working with a marketing agency, you can ensure that the marketing personnel you do have in-house can focus on their core responsibilities. The marketing agency can provide the personnel needed to fill in the gaps, thereby complementing your existing team.

Having a team of experienced, professional marketers to help promote your business is a must. While you may not be able to afford an in-house team, attempting to leave the marketing strategy up to a handful of individuals at your company is not a good idea — especially if they have multiple job responsibilities. Instead, you should strongly consider outsourcing your marketing efforts to a reputable marketing agency. The benefit of hiring a marketing agency for your business helps to develop, execute, and monitor a marketing strategy that works for you.
30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips

Client-Agency Relationship

Fostering a Better Client-Agency Relationship to Grow Your Business

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There are many benefits to working with a professional marketing agency, no matter how big your business is. A marketing agency can help develop, execute, monitor, and analyze your marketing strategy, thereby assisting in the growth of your company. As a direct result, you’ll also reduce the amount of time, money, and resources you need to throw at your marketing efforts, allowing you to focus on other business-related tasks instead.

However, it’s critical that you build a close working relationship with your agency. You’re entrusting them with your company’s future success, after all. You’ll want to make sure that they’re tailoring your strategy to meet your company’s needs. Keep in mind that a strong relationship is one that both sides work to develop. As such, the following are a few important elements of a successful client-agency relationship that you should be aware of:

1. Clear Expectations for the Client-Agency Relationship

An agency needs to know exactly what you’re expecting from them, both in terms of what services they are providing and what metrics you’re expecting them to achieve. If you don’t lay out your expectations from the get-go, then they won’t know whether they’re on the right track. You should establish milestones and standards. On top of that, make it clear that you expect clear communication and transparency so that if there are any issues, the agency will share them with you and explain their course of action. Otherwise, they may just go at it alone without your input.

Five Reasons To Hire An Advertising Agency Versus Staffing In-House

2. Open Communication

Any relationship, whether in the business world or not, relies on open communication to work. Make yourself available to the agency if they ever have questions or if there are ever any issues. Request the same of them. You’ll want to be able to reach your team leader with ease if there is anything you want to discuss or if you have any questions that need answering. It’s a good idea to have points of contact in place so that both sides know who to reach.

By demonstrating that you expect clear communication, you’ll also make the agency more comfortable in knowing that they can reach out when needed. There are many businesses that will just leave the agency to their own devices and who won’t want to be bothered. Additionally, some agencies may operate in the same way. However, this is a poor way to manage what should be a long-term relationship.

3. Transparency

An agency needs to understand what you’re looking to achieve with your marketing, both in terms of short-term and long-term goals. It also helps to understand what your business goals are so that your marketing strategy can reflect that. If you withhold information such as this, itfostering a better client-agency relationship will be more difficult for the agency to tailor your strategy to your specific needs. In fact, monitoring and evaluating marketing performance will become much more difficult as a result.

4. Honest Feedback in the Client-Agency Relationship

Establish from the outset that you expect the agency to provide feedback when needed. This way, if you’re not providing the information that your marketing team needs or you’re not getting back to them quickly enough, they will actually let you know. As a result of straightforward feedback, you can not only strengthen your relationship over time, you can keep it from deteriorating (which will only hurt your marketing efforts). The same goes for your side: if the agency’s marketing efforts are not meeting expectations, you need to let them know. You may even want to consider implementing a mutual evaluation at specific dates.

5. True Partnership

Don’t think of an agency as a service provider. Instead, think of them as a partner. After all, their success relies on your success. If you go into the relationship with the idea that you’re partners, you’ll be much more likely to find yourself on the same page as the agency you’re working with. By treating the relationship as a partnership, the agency will have greater success meeting your company’s specific needs.

These are the factors that contribute to a strong relationship between a business and a marketing agency. It’s important that if you outsource your marketing to an agency that they make an effort to develop a trusting relationship with you; however, remember that a good relationship depends on both sides. As such, you need to meet them halfway for the partnership to be a fruitful one. Here at Stevens & Tate, we pride ourselves in not just the work we do, but the relationships that we build with all of our clients.

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Hubspot vs Mailchimp

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There are hundreds of different tools available for every aspect of online marketing. Such tools can be used to automate basic tasks, provide aesthetic options, analyze performance, and much more. However, choosing the right tool can be difficult, especially when it comes to email marketing. For instance, two of the main email marketing tools currently on the market include HubSpot and Mailchimp. Both have a stellar reputation for user-friendly interfaces, customization options, and automation features. But how do you choose between HubSpot vs. Mailchimp? The following is a breakdown between HubSpot vs. Mailchimp:

What Is HubSpot?

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HubSpot is essentially an all-in-one marketing platform. As such, email marketing is just one of its components. The HubSpot ecosystem also includes inbound marketing, analytics, CRM, and sales tools. Using their email marketing service, you will be able to segment your email lists and use a variety of automation features to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of your email campaigns. Although HubSpot’s most basic plan starts at $45/month, they do offer free tools, including email marketing tools.

What Is Mailchimp?

Unlike HubSpot, Mailchimp’s primary focus is on email marketing. They have built a reputation as one of the premier email marketing services on the market. Like HubSpot, MailChimp does have a free service that includes their marketing CRM, form and landing pages, website builder, and creative assistant. However, access to additional email marketing features, such as custom branding, A/B testing, and more, requires a paid plan (plans start at $9.99/month).

What Are The Differences Between HubSpot vs. Mailchimp?

As email marketing tools with a large set of customization capabilities and automation features, HubSpot and Mailchimp may seem very similar. The following is a closer look at some of the differences between the two, which should help guide you in making your decision:

  • Price – Although both HubSpot and Mailchimp offer free plans, you’ll likely want to pay for access to more email marketing features. Mailchimp is going to be cheaper at every tier. HubSpot’s plans range from $45 to $3,200/month, while Mailchimp’s plans range from $9.99 to $299/month. Of course, you’ll be getting a more comprehensive marketing suite for the price if you go with HubSpot.
  • CRM – Both HubSpot and Mailchimp offer list segmentation tools, as well as pop-up and embedded forms. However, HubSpot also offers standalone and collected forms. On the other hand, HubSpot only allows up to 60,000 contacts compared to Mailchimp’s 100,000 contact limit (although 60,000 is arguably more than enough).
  • Email Building Features – Both tools offer drag-and-drop features along with customizable templates and A/B testing. HubSpot does have a design manager that makes its tool particularly user-friendly for building your emails.
  • Automation Capabilities – Automation is essential to any successful email marketing campaign. Mailchimp’s automation features include data-based and behavior-based automation, welcome messages, product recommendation, and retargeting emails, as well as in-depth multi-step automation (such as pre-built journeys). HubSpot offers most of these features in addition to complex branching logic, follow-up campaigns, multi-channel automation, score leading, workflow templates, and more. However, access to these features on HubSpot requires their professional plan.
  • Analytics – Mailchimp includes a dashboard with real-time performance and analytics. Additional features include ROI tracking, a click map, advanced audience insights, and more. HubSpot has arguably more comprehensive email analytics capabilities, including up to ten reporting dashboards and custom reports for their starter plan. Higher tiered plans include more dashboards and report options. HubSpot’s data analytics are more detailed as well.
  • Landing pages – Landing pages are essential to building your email list. Not to mention that they are also needed for your emails to convert. HubSpot has an easy-to-use landing page builder that allows you to choose from various customizable templates. However, this feature is not available in their free plan. On the other hand, Mailchimp doesn’t have a landing page builder at all. Instead, it offers integrations with other third-party tools that you can use to build your email landing pages.

Also Read: 5 Ways to Revamp Your Email Marketing Strategy and Increase ROI

Both HubSpot and Mailchimp are excellent options when it comes to email marketing tools. However, when taking into account the differences between HubSpot vs. Mailchimp, we believe that HubSpot does edge Mailchimp in terms of its quality and capabilities. On top of that, HubSpot has an entire ecosystem of marketing tools and platforms, making it easier to integrate all of your marketing capabilities and to run your efforts from a single hub. As such, you should strongly consider HubSpot for your email marketing needs.

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Marketing Blog tips to Supplement your Digital Strategy

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Ask any business, big or small, and they’ll tell you how important digital marketing is to their overall marketing strategy. When it comes to digital marketing strategies, most prioritize social media, SEO, and email marketing. While these strategies can be very effective, it’s critical that you don’t dismiss the importance of maintaining a digital marketing blog. For many businesses, their blog isn’t nearly as big of a priority as other digital marketing elements. However, a digital marketing blog has an enormous impact on the overall success of your digital marketing efforts. In fact, a successful blog can have a huge impact on how effective your SEO and social media strategies are.

Why Maintaining a Blog Is So Important

The following are some of the reasons why you should maintain a blog on your website:

  • Keep new content organized – Digital marketing requires regular content generation to be effective. A blog allows you to publish and organize all of your content in one place, making it easy for leads to find information that they’re looking for. Leads will also know where to go to find new content, keeping leads engaged.
  • Educate and nurture your leads – A regularly updated blog allows you to continually educate new leads and to nurture them through the buyer’s journey. The more informed your leads are, the more prepared they will be to make a purchasing decision in the near future.
  • Generate website traffic – Having a blog makes it easier to improve your website’s SEO. When you routinely publish relevant, highly optimized content on your blog, you’ll end up boosting web traffic. As a result, you’ll bring in more new potential leads.
  • Build brand authority – A blog full of high-quality content will help position your brand as an authority within your industry. The more you build your authority, the more brand trust you’ll create. It will also help you build your audience on social media as followers will be more likely to share your blog content with others.

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Tips For Maintaining A Successful Blog on the Website

Now that you have a better understanding of why a blog is so vital to your overall digital marketing strategy, the following are a few tips to help you build and maintain a successful blog:

  1. Know who your audience is – If you don’t know who your target audience is, then you won’t be able to create and publish content that’s relevant. Two of the main goals of a content strategy are to build authority and attract new leads. Neither will occur without an understanding of who your audience is. Develop your buyer personas so that you know who your blog is for.
  2. Perform content research – Once you know who your audience is, you can figure out what kind of information they’re looking for. Do research on trending topics that are relevant to your audience. You should also look at the blogs of various competitors to see what type of content they’re publishing.
  3. Publish new blog content regularly – To maintain your audience, you need to publish new content on a regular basis. This means posting new content to your blog on the same days of the week, at the same times. Doing so ensures that your audience knows exactly when to visit your blog for new content, thereby helping keep your brand at the top of mind. Digital Marketing Blog
  4. Monitor the performance of your blog – Use analytics tools to track how your blog posts are doing. You can learn a lot about your blog content this way. For instance, what types of content get the most views, engagement, click-throughs, and conversions. This data is invaluable when it comes to adjusting your content strategy for success.

Keep Your Blog in the Front of Your Audiences Eyes

  1. Publish different types of content.– Make sure you vary the type of content you post so that you keep things fresh. In addition to written content, create and post infographics, SlideShares, and videos
  2. Keep your content interesting – It’s okay to post promotional content to your blog once in a while (such as a product announcement or a sale announcement), but it’s better to stick to educational content so that your blog doesn’t feel like a giant advertisement. However, this doesn’t mean your content should be purely informative. Your content should also be entertaining to keep your audience’s interest.
  3. Optimize your blog for SEO – Proper optimization through the use of high-quality internal and external links and relevant keywords will improve your chances of ranking. By ranking well, you’ll attract more traffic through Google and other search engines.
  4. Promote your blog – Don’t rely solely on SEO to attract an audience. Promote new blog content by posting links in your email newsletters and on social media. You can even use PPC ads to promote specific blog posts you want to showcase.

Building and maintaining a blog is essential to a successful digital marketing strategy. Be sure to use these eight tips to maintain a successful digital marketing blog on your website.

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