data driven marketing

Should You Consider A Growth Driven Design Strategy?

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In this day and age, every business understands the importance of having a company website. Even local mom and pop shops have a web presence, whether it’s a basic website or a social media page. However, not everyone realizes that there are different ways to build your website. If your website is the foundation for all of your online marketing efforts, then consider implementing a growth driven design. It is true that when properly implemented, traditional website designs can still be very effective. However, growth driven designs have their own set of unique advantages worth taking a look at.

What Is A Growth Driven Design?

Traditional websites tend to be designed all at once. Meaning, once the website goes live, it’s finished–everything is complete. Growth driven design involves a more incremental process. It’s not completely finished once it launches.

Instead, you continuously work on the website, implementing design elements based on data collected from visitors interacting with your site. This allows you to design your website from top to bottom based on buyer observations which, thereby, improve your web design over time. Additionally, it prevents design elements from growing stale and eliminates the risk of being stuck with poor design choices.

Similar Article: Growth-Driven Web Design – Is It Right For Your Company?

Growth driven design

The Benefits 

The following are a few of the advantages to choosing a growth driven design:

Eliminate the need for massive overhauls – Traditional website designs often require complete redesigns after only a few years. Because a growth driven design requires that your website be regularly updated, major overhauls won’t be needed.

Meet the needs of your users – While traditional website design certainly makes use of some data, a lot of the design elements will no doubt be based on the personal preferences of those in charge of designing the site. Likewise, they may use elements that a competitor has used to great effect. However, your site design will be more effective if it’s tailored to what your users want, not what you want (or what your competitors use). A growth driven design is a user-driven one.

Launch your website quickly – It can take some time to launch a traditional website design. This is because once it’s launched, it’s done. Since a growth driven design requires consistent work on the website, it’s not expected to be finished once launched. This means that you can get it up and running much quicker.

 Support a goal-oriented strategy – Long-term marketing goals require constant work. Being able to consistently improve your website will make it easier to support the goals that you’ve established.

Make better use of your resources – There are certain choices that you may have made with a traditional website design that you’ll just be stuck with until you do a redesign. This ends up being a waste of resources, whereas with a growth driven design, you can change what’s not working.

Shift, pivot, or adjust on the fly – Not only does a growth driven design make it easy to make needed changes on the fly, it also makes it easy to change course should you shift in regards to your business goals or model.

Similar Article: 6 Web Design Principles to Increase Conversions

Implementation

There are three main stages when it comes to implementing a growth driven design. These stages are as follows:

Growth driven designStrategy – Creating a strategy for a growth driven design is not that dissimilar than creating a traditional web design strategy. You’ll need to identify your goals and what you want your website to achieve. You should also perform extensive research so that you can make as many data-backed decisions as possible in the initial stages of your site design.

Launch Pad – During this stage, you’ll launch a site that looks and performs better than what you have but that isn’t finalized. The launch pad is a foundation on which you’ll build your website. Start with creating a wish list that will help achieve your objectives. Narrow that list down to a list of priorities that need to be implemented from the start.

Improvement – The third stage is never-ending–it’s the stage in which your launch pad site goes live, data collection on visitors begins, features are added, and improvements are made based on that data.

One of the big advantages is the ability to continually adjust your website design based on how users are interacting with your site. This prevents your site from growing stale and makes it easier to meet the needs of your audience. While traditional web designs can still be effective, be sure to consider your website design options by looking into growth driven design as well.

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how to tell your brand story

What Is The Brand Development Process?

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Branding is more than just creating a logo and slapping it on a website or the side of a van. Brand is about a consumer’s perception of your company. A positive perception means that a customer has a sense of quality, value and trust in your company. A negative perception means the opposite. Connecting emotional with a brand takes dedication, a brand leader and relentless following the style guides rules and guidelines. That is why you need to understand the brand development process and how to do it successfully.

Brand development is a multi-stage process with the ultimate goal of building brand equity in a consumer’s mind. Brand equity is an intangible set of assets that cannot be tracked on a balance sheet. But, the value of that equity is the most valuable asset a company can own. Think about Kraft, Amazon, Apple, Will Ferrell or Servpro. What emotional ties do you have with these brands?

The Brand Development Process

Developing a brand must be part of the larger marketing plan for the company. It is often the biggest challenge but the most critical. You don’t have to invest millions to develop your brand, but making the effort will pay off.

The Brand Development Process Demystified 

Determine what you are branding

You can brand almost anything. The most common things are a person, a company, a product or a service. A critical part of the branding process is determining exactly what you are branding, positioning the brand, what you are promising with your brand, your brand story, and your elements and style. This process can be overwhelming, but with the help of a marketing team, you can make it happen.

Research your target market

Marketing research into your target market is critical for effective brand development. It is a step that many startups overlook because they think they know their audience. The reality is that, professional market research will give you critical insights into who the target is, what they like/dislike, what their challenges are, and how you can help them. As I have been doing this for 30 years, not ONE company has ever properly realized their target audience upon the first meeting.

Compile your brand definition

The next step is developing a clear brand definition. This definition can be in the form of a story or statement that clearly reflects what your brand is all about. Your marketing team will help you define what you are offering, how your target audience will benefit from it, what guarantees you offer, and what your unique selling proposition (USP) is. Remember to ask the question, what can this brand do or stand for that no other brand can say?

 

Learn The StoryBranding Process

 

Create your name, tagline and logo

Giving your company a name, a tagline and a logo is the fun part of brand development. But, it is not something you should do without careful thought. Your marketing team can help you determine what name, tagline and logo will resonate with your audience. Nike’s Just Do It! has become a staple of a strong statement just as “It’s Finger Lickin Good” or “Just like a Good Neighbor, State Farm is there”.

Launch the brand

With all the elements in place, it is time to launch the brand. That means creating your first products, offering your services, or making a name for yourself. It could mean many things to many brands like digital campaigns, radio spots, drip campaigns, demographic targeting, print or even showing up at tradeshows. On the surface that sounds easy, but there are many moving gears that need to align to keep the marketing moving forward. The good news is that with all the prep work you did before, your launch will have a great foundation.

Manage the brand

With good up-front work, your brand launch will be successful, gaining momentum as you provide consistent service and quality. Even with a successful launch, you will still need to manage your brand going forward. That is why you need a dedicated team, always monitoring your company’s reputation, doing continuing research, and updating the brand as the market evolves. This step is one that is most ignored when things are running well, but is most important.

These steps will help you and your marketing experts develop a strong brand. The full brand development process takes time. But, look at it as an investment in the company’s future, one that will pay off with dividends for years to come.

I always tell individuals that if your air conditioner breaks, you hire a professional that does it everyday to find the problem and find a cost efficient way of solving the issue. The same theory can be applied to marketing and developing a brand. Marketing companies do it everyday, know the shortfalls and successes, and will have it launched months or years before you could on your own.

 

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Direct vs Indirect Marketing

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You may not realize it, but all marketing efforts can be categorized in one of two ways — direct marketing or indirect marketing. On the surface, direct vs. indirect marketing is relatively easy to understand.

Difference Between Direct and Indirect Marketing

Direct marketing involves engaging with leads or customers directly. For example, sending a customer an email that contains a promotional offer. Indirect marketing is a strategy in which you put yourself in a position to be found by leads. Consequently, allowing them to engage with you instead of just directly engaging them. For example, writing a post on your website’s blog. Which leads can find through external links or through a search engine, is a form of indirect marketing.

Both direct marketing and indirect marketing can be effective strategies. However, to make sure that you implement them effectively, it’s important that you not only understand what the advantages of using each are, but also what the potential disadvantages are of direct vs indirect marketing.

Direct Marketingdirect vs indirect marketing 2

Direct marketing includes a number of traditional marketing strategies that everyone is familiar with. For example TV commercials are a form of direct marketing. So are billboards, magazine ads, radio ads, and telemarketing. That’s not to say that digital marketing can’t be direct. For example, email marketing and PPC advertising are also forms of direct marketing. You’re essentially trying to find and address a specific audience — and you’re trying to get them to take action right away. The following are some of the advantages to such a strategy:

Advantages

  • You can identify specific audience segments, thereby allowing you to connect with people who are likely interested in your product or service already. For example, if you run a TV commercial, you can choose a time slot on a channel that you know your audience is watching.
  • If you know the audience you’re addressing, then you can personalize your messages, thereby allowing you to nurture leads and build stronger relationships. For example, using the data you have to segment your email list allows you to send more relevant content to your recipients.
  • The data you collect from your direct marketing efforts is more measurable. For example, you can track your email response rate to determine how effective your direct marketing strategy is and to make adjustments accordingly.

While there are plenty of advantages to implementing certain direct marketing techniques, there are some potential drawbacks as well. These can include the following:

Disadvantages

  • If you’re too overzealous, your direct marketing efforts may cross privacy boundaries and may even come off as spam, which will hurt your brand reputation.
  • You have to have an understanding of who your audience is and where you can find them. Otherwise, you may be advertising to people who aren’t interested in your brand, which is a waste of time and money.
  • Your overall reach won’t be as widespread since direct marketing requires you to focus in on a specific audience to be effective.

Learn more about indirect marketing strategies

 

Indirect Marketing

Indirect marketing is essentially marketing in which you’re not trying to sell a specific product or service. For example, content creation in the form of a blog of email newsletter are forms of indirect marketing. A lot of social media marketing is indirect as well. For example, if you’re simply engaging in discussions or posting links to informative articles. The idea behind indirect marketing is that you’re nurturing relationships, building brand authority, and generating brand awareness. The following are some of the advantages of indirect marketing:

Advantages

  • You provide value to your customers without coming off as self-serving, which helps to build your brand reputation and increase brand trust.
  • Indirect marketing is typically much less expensive than direct marketing.
  • Indirect marketing is a long-term strategy, which means that your efforts will continue to have an impact throughout the future. For example, you might write a blog post that someone reads years later.

As beneficial as indirect marketing is, there are a couple of disadvantages when compared to direct marketing. These disadvantages include the following:

Disadvantages

  • Tracking performance is more difficult. This is because you’re not honing in on specific customers — you’re casting a wider net.
  • Indirect marketing efforts may not have an instant impact — it may take some time before they begin drawing in new customers. As such, it can be frustrating not to see an immediate impact on sales.
  • Because it’s a long-term strategy, indirect marketing requires constant attention. Whereas direct marketing tactics can work on their own, indirect marketing functions as a whole. This means that you need to be constantly working at it. There’s basically no end in sight.

You are now well aware of the differences between direct and indirect marketing.

As you can see, when it comes to direct vs indirect marketing, both direct marketing and indirect marketing have their share of advantages and disadvantages. Instead of choosing one over the other, the best course of action is to use a combination of both direct and indirect marketing. This will allow you to see both short-term and long-term results, especially if you’re careful when it comes to avoiding the potential drawbacks that both strategies can present when used improperly.

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Choosing HubSpot CRM As Your CRM Solution

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If any business wishes to collect customer data, monitor customer interactions, and ensure that their marketing and sales teams are properly aligned, it is necessary to have a CRM (customer relation management) platform. However, there are a lot of different CRM software solutions to choose from. For good reason, HubSpot CRM tends to be one of the more popular options. The following six reasons are why you should consider implementing HubSpot CRM into your marketing strategy:

Why To Choose HubSpot CRM As Your CRM Solution?

1. HubSpot is Available For Free

When comparing CRM solutions, you’ll find that most of them cost money. Although many of these solutions have free trials or even free versions, they are often limited in their number of usable or accessible features. HubSpot provides its CRM solution for free. While they do have paid versions available with added features, the free version is absolutely packed with features and almost no limitations. For example, your HubSpot CRM platform will be accessible to unlimited users, and stores upwards of one million contacts.

Similar Article: Using HubSpot Lead Flows to Improve Conversion Rates

2. HubSpot is Packed With Features

For a free CRM, you’ll be surprised at the number of beneficial features you can use. These include a standard dashboard, ticketing, tasks, deals, email scheduling, upwards of five email templates, team email, live chat, conversational bots, external form tracking, pop-up forms, company records, contact management, contact and company insights, and more. 

3. HubSpot is Scalable

As expected,  your business will grow over time. Therefore, whatever CRM solution you implement, you should make sure that it can handle significant increases in customer data. Even HubSpot’s free version is capable of doing this. It is, after all, able to handle upwards of one million contacts. This is enough for even the world’s biggest corporations. Should your business expand to the point where you need added functionality, you’ll probably be at the point where your budget has no problem accommodating one of HubSpot’s paid versions.

4. HubSpot Can Be Easily Integrated

Due to HubSpot CRM being designed to integrate with a wide range of applications,  you should have no issue integrating it with your existing marketing technology stack. Some of the other applications that HubSpot CRM can be integrated with include Dropbox, Gmail, Outlook, MailChimp, WordPress, Salesforce, Facebook, and more.

Similar Article: What Are The Benefits of Using HubSpot Marketing Automation Tools?

5. HubSpot is Extremely Intuitive

Next, HubSpot CRM was designed to be user-friendly. Your team members can easily obtain the data and functionality they need, as a result of the intuitive menus containing only the most useful elements. Additionally, the dashboards make it easy to align your marketing and sales goals, along with establishing who is responsible for what, and identifying the current state of your marketing and sales efforts in real time.

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6. HubSpot Will Improve Conversions

Finally, HubSpot provides tools that allow for tracking leads as they navigate your website. You can monitor what actions they take to determine how ready they are to be engaged. In fact, this makes HubSpot particularly effective for both marketing and sales teams. Your sales personnel will be able to identify the highest quality leads, and use information gathered by your marketing team. Subsequently, this will help them nurture the lead and close the sale (such as what products the lead has viewed the most, for example).

Even if you’re running a smaller to mid-sized company, you will not want to go without a CRM platform for long. Implementing a CRM solution is going to make your marketing and sales efforts much more efficient and, therefore, effective. As far as CRM solutions go, you can’t go wrong with HubSpot CRM. This highly advantageous CRM tool understandably continues to be one of the most popular options on the market.

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers

6 Best Practices For Using Facebook Video Ads

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As you may already know, Facebook Ads can be a very effective advertising platform, especially when you consider its overall cost-effectiveness (it’s a pay-per-click advertising platform, after all) and the ability to target audiences based on a variety of criteria (from demographics to location to interests and more). Facebook Ads has a lot of features that you’ll want to take advantage of, including their Facebook Video Ads feature.

6 Practices For Using Facebook Video Ads

The following are six Facebook Video Ads best practices that you should be sure to implement:

1. Get Your Message Across Immediately

Don’t just assume that your viewers will stick around until the end of your video ads. According to Microsoft, around 19 percent of online viewers lose interest in video content after 10 seconds. Keeping this in mind, it’s a good idea to get to the point as quickly as possible so that your viewers know why they are watching. Try to get your message across in the first ten seconds.

2. Optimize Videos For Lack Of Sound

A lot of people watch videos with their sound off. You want your videos to not only get the message across even if they’re silent, but to engage the viewer to the point that they will turn the sound on. To optimize for the lack of sound, show captions, add text overlay, and be sure to use powerful, moving images.

Video Ad FB

3. Keep Mobile Videos Short

Although some viewers may be more willing to watch a longer video ad on their desktops, this is not so for mobile users. Mobile users are often on the go, which means that they’re not going to have the patience to watch a video that’s minutes long. Try to keep videos under 15 seconds long to help ensure that mobile users actually watch your whole video.

5 Types Of Marketing Videos You Should Think About Using

4. Customize Thumbnail Images

Many Facebook users will turn off autoplay on videos. However, just because some people won’t see your video ads play automatically doesn’t mean that they won’t watch them. You need to spark their interest by choosing a thumbnail image, which is a static image representing your video. Facebook will provide a number of options of still images that it pulls from your video ad. However, you’re not limited to these options–you can also upload a custom thumbnail instead. Make sure the image you use is of high quality and that it’s relevant to your ad.

5. Test Your Video Ads

To make sure your Facebook Video Ads perform to the best of their ability, perform A/B testing. You can create several versions of your video ads through Facebook by changing the creative, the placement, the product set, optimization events, and the audience. Test your ads for three to 14 days to get the most accurate results. Use the results to optimize your video ads so, thereby increasing their chances of performing successfully.

How Facebook Advertising Helps You

6. Analyze Performance

Make sure to analyze your video ads as you run them. The data you collect should help you when it comes to creating future video ads. For example, track which video ads had the highest levels of engagement, what times of the day your audience engaged with your videos, how many viewers visited your landing page after viewing a video ad, which videos were watched from beginning to end, and more.

Considering how effective video marketing is in general, you should be sure to take advantage of Facebook’s Video Ad feature. These are six Facebook Video Ads best practices that you should be sure to take note of before launching a video ad campaign on Facebook.

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Improving User Experience With Good Website Navigation Design

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It’s not a stretch to say that your website is one of — if not the — most important element of your inbound marketing strategy. Without it, there’s very little that you can do. Because of this, it’s essential to make sure that poor web design doesn’t frustrate your visitors. Content quality will not mean as much if visitors have trouble viewing your pages or finding what they’re looking for. This is why you need to make sure you focus on creating a user-friendly website navigation design.

Making Your Website Easy To Navigate

When someone visits your website, no matter how they got there, you’ll want them to spend as much time on it as possible. The more they engage with your site, the easier it becomes to nurture and eventually convert them. As such, you’ll want to make navigation through your website easy. Good website navigation design makes it easy to find links to your site’s main pages, as well as  being able to navigate to those individual pages, conveniently. Awareness Stage

Even if you do have a navigation bar with drop-down menus, it is important to note that most users, today, tend to prefer scrolling.  They’ve become accustomed to scrolling because of the way most social media channels work. Therefore, instead of  visitors clicking through your drop-down menu, a scrollable menu allows them to simply move their mouse over the menu to make it automatically drop-down. This way, they don’t have to click three or four times to get to the page they want to go to. Alternatively, they can just scroll through their options until they find the actual page they want to click on.

It’s a better idea to keep content on one page instead of breaking it up on multiple pages. Even if it’s a long-form piece, forcing the user to click on buttons at the end of each page that says continue to page 2, page 3, etc., is a hassle. Since they have to click to get to the next page, in addition to waiting for that page to load as well. Simply allowing them to scroll through the entire article will make your page more user-friendly.

Growth-Driven Web Design – Is It Right For Your Company? 

Tips for Good Website Navigation Design

The following are a few more examples of how you can create a good website navigation design that will improve your user experience:

Use a responsive design – Your website navigation design may be well thought out for your desktop users, but it may not translate well to mobile devices. This happens due to the fact that most websites use a horizontal design, whereas screens on mobile devices are vertical. By using a responsive design, your navigation menu can be designed to turn into a mobile friendly hamburger-style menu.

Incorporate breadcrumbs – Breadcrumbs allow users to see what links they have followed to get to the page they are on. This makes it easy for them to backtrack to a previous page they were on if they got lost going through your site.

Link logo to your homepage – Make sure that the logo at the top of your page links to your homepage. This makes it easy for visitors to go back to the beginning, without searching for a link to your homepage.

Always display a link to your contact page – Displaying your contact information at the top of your page along with a link to your contact page makes you easier to reach.

Make links easy to click for mobile – Use buttons for CTAs that are easy for people to click on when using mobile devices.

Do You Need to Redesign Your Website

When designing your website, make sure that you carefully consider your website navigation design. Easy to use and clear navigation will help to improve your user experience, thereby making it easier to keep visitors engaged and on your website.

25 Website Must Haves For Driving Traffic, Leads & Sales

Why TV Advertising Remains Effective

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Over the past decade, there has been the perception that inbound marketing tactics, such as publishing blog content and expanding brand recognition by maintaining a strong social media presence, has eclipsed many outbound marketing tactics; however, this isn’t altogether true. Businesses are still having a lot of success with outbound marketing, especially TV advertising. The following are a few reasons why television ads can still play an effective part of your marketing campaign.

People Still Watch TV

While it’s true that many people (especially younger people) are spending more of their time watching streaming services, that doesn’t mean that there’s no audience to reach via TV advertising. Plenty of people still watch TV even though viewership has declined over the past decade. In fact, according to a UK study done last year, people still watch an average of 3 hours and 49 minutes of TV a day.

People Watch Live TV

While streaming services are attempting to build up their content libraries, there is one area in which they still lag behind TV, and that’s in the realm of live TV–specifically, sports. Live sports games broadcast on TV are still an enormous draw and an excellent way to reach certain audiences. Just take for example the Super Bowl, which allows a 30-second ad to reach roughly 100 million viewers. There’s something immediate and social about live TV that few streaming services have managed to replicate.

How To Transition From Traditional Advertising to Inbound Marketing

TV Can Benefit Inbound Marketing Strategies

The use of TV advertising can actually compliment your inbound activities. For example, you can use hashtags in your ads or display website addresses to encourage viewers to seek out more information online — something that’s easy for viewers to do since they often watch TV with their smartphones or tablets on hand.

Why Inbound Marketing Solutions Are Integral To Your Success

TV Will Never Die, It Will Evolve

Abandoning television advertising simply because you think it’s on the way out is not a good idea. Viewership may be trending down slightly and streaming channels may still be figuring out ways to eclipse their TV counterparts (for example, Amazon recently begun streaming NFL games), but that doesn’t mean TV is dying. An industry as big as TV doesn’t just go away–it evolves.

One of the reasons why streaming services are so popular is because they provide more customizability to their viewers. Viewers get to choose what they want to watch from the content that lives on each streaming platform instead of being forced to watch whatever’s programmed at certain times. TV has been resisting change for some time, but it won’t be long that the way TV works evolves; for example, once channels become available piecemeal (which seems inevitable) instead of grouped in packages, people will have much more control over what they’re paying for. This will also benefit advertisers since you’ll be able to more effectively target your demographics.

These are just a few reasons that you should still be investing in TV advertising as it remains and will most likely always remain an effective marketing technique.

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Marketing Trends

What Experiential Marketing Companies Can Gain By Blending Experiential Marketing With Digital Works

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Experiential marketing is becoming a popular tactic among companies who realize that audiences connect with brands more successfully if they are able to participate or engage directly with the brand. A great example of experiential marketing is Samsung’s efforts at the 2012 Olympics to introduce consumers to their new Galaxy S3. They set up booths throughout London where they allowed consumers to play with the phone or to have pictures of themselves taken with the phone that were then turned into personalized badges.

While experiential marketing is a very effective tactic in itself, experiential marketing companies should be sure to incorporate digital marketing to help increase the impact that it can have. The following are a few ways that experiential marketing companies can use digital technology to improve their experiential marketing efforts.

Promote Your Events

Using experiential marketing to engage your audience isn’t going to be very effective if you don’t have much of an audience in the first place. You should use digital marketing to promote whatever events you’re holding. For example, if your company is putting up booths in multiple locations during a specific event (such as the Samsung example during the London Olympics), then you’ll want to not only promote when you’re doing it, but the exact locations and times that you will be there.

You can do this by promoting the event on social media where it will get the most exposure. Make it possible to RSVP to the event so that you can track the number of attendants that you’re expecting. You could even promote the event, but not reveal the time and place unless someone RSVPs to create a more exclusive feeling. You can also use your email list to notify people of your event and what they can expect there.

5 Storytelling Techniques You Should Use

Create Real-Time Content

Creating content during the event can be helpful for a number of reasons. First of all, it gives audiences who weren’t able to attend a chance to see the effort you’ve put into creating an experience. While they won’t have the full experience of attending, they’ll get a general idea of what it was like and will be able to learn about whatever your event was about. For example, you could live stream parts of the event.

Besides providing more exposure for your event this way, it can also help convince audience members who didn’t attend to show up to your next event (or if your event is being held over multiple days, it could convince people to show up at the next scheduled event).

Encourage User-Generated Content

Use the content that your audience creates at the event to promote it. This can be especially effective for demonstrations of new products. Simply have a hashtag available that everyone can use to tag the content they create, such as pictures or videos recorded on their phones. There are other ways to encourage users to create content as well. For example, one food company had a professional photographer at their event to teach audience members techniques for taking pictures of food. They would then post the pictures they took on Instagram using the official hashtag that the company created.

Experiential marketing is a fantastic way to engage consumers, but you should be sure to leverage digital technology to get the most out of your experiential marketing efforts. These are a number of ways that experiential marketing companies can use digital technology to help increase the overall impact of their experiential marketing efforts.

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Inside Adwords: Exploring The Differences Between Smart Display Campaigns & Custom Intent Campaigns

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The use of PPC (pay per click) advertising can be beneficial for countless reasons. Not only are PPC ads a great way to bring in more traffic, they are incredibly cost-effective and are particularly useful for trying out new keywords or copy. It’s why Google AdWords continues to be popular with advertisers. Let’s take a closer look inside AdWords to discover some of their newer PPC options, including their smart display ads and their custom intent ads.

Inside AdWords’ Smart Display Ads

Smart display ads are ads that are automated by Google. This helps to make creating display ads much easier since all you’ll need to do is submit your creative assets (such as images, headlines, subheaders, and copy) along with your cost-per-acquisition (CPA) goal and Google will determine what the best possible combination of these elements are in order to meet your CPA. Google will also automatically find placements for your ad.

There are a number of advantages to creating your ads this way. For example, benefits include:

  • The ability to test out different ad elements for other ad campaigns.
  • Test ads that haven’t been working to see if any elements are salvageable.
  • Find new placements.
  • Spend less time optimizing and managing your own ads.

However, it’s worth noting that there are a few drawbacks. Namely, you’re giving up a lot of control over your ad. For example, you can’t bid down, you can’t exclude placements, and you don’t have control over the devices your ads are placed on.

How Your Web Page Speed Effects Your SEO and Adwords Performance

Even though you do give up some control, what makes smart display ads worth using is the fact that Google will automatically test out different elements of your ad to find the best possible combination.

Inside Adwords’ Custom Intent Campaigns

The custom intent audiences option now offered by Google AdWords provides a more accurate way to target consumers who are looking to make a purchase right now. It’s the equivalent of being able to walk up to a customer who is browsing items inside of a physical store and engaging with them. Using custom intent audiences, you’ll have a much better chance of closing a sale since the audiences your ad will be targeting will be looking to buy something that’s similar to your product or service.

For example, if you’re marketing an airline service and want to target customers who are going on vacation, you could set your customer intent to target people who are looking to go on vacation in Hawaii. Not only can you target potential customers searching for flights to Hawaii on Google using keywords like Hawaii vacation or flights to Hawaii, but you can also reach them on YouTube while they are watching Hawaii travel videos.

Adwords’ Custom Intent Makes Finding Your Audience A Breeze

Using the custom intent audience feature is easy. When creating a display ad, simply select “target” and choose “intent.” You can then choose either ‘DIY” which allows you to combine links and topics in order to pursue customers who are most likely looking to buy what you are selling, or you can choose “Auto-generated,” which leaves the work to Google’s machine learning technology in order to create audiences that are exclusive to the data of your brand based on inference.

When creating your new audience, you’ll name the audience, enter any keywords or URLs that are related to your target audience, and then create it. Based on the custom audience you’ve created, you’ll be provided with useful information like estimated reach, associated keywords, and potential audiences according to phrase.

Although the custom intent audience feature can be extremely useful in reaching customers who are looking to buy immediately, it’s worth noting that this feature is only valuable as a short-term strategy. If you’re looking to nurture leads over the long-term, using this feature is not the best option.

Choosing Between Smart Display Ads and Custom Intent Audiences

When looking inside AdWords to determine what the best PPC option is for you, you need to figure out exactly what you’re goal is. If you’re trying to boost sales short term, then using the custom intent audience feature can be quite valuable. When it comes to smart display ads, there’s much more that you can use them for, whether it’s attracting more long-term leads, finding new places to reach your target audience, or identifying what elements of your ads are the most effective to help with future ad campaigns.

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How To Transition From Traditional Advertising to Inbound Marketing

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If your brand has been focusing on solely traditional advertising methods, then it’s time that you consider inbound marketing. Although traditional advertising, such as TV or radio commercials, print ads and billboards can all be successful strategies when properly utilized, they are short-term strategies.

Purely focusing on these advertising methods also means that you are missing out on an enormous online audience. It also means that all of your marketing budget is going into a short-term strategy. By also implementing an inbound marketing strategy, you’ll set your brand up for more long-term marketing success while increasing your brand exposure to a bigger audience. Of course, transitioning from traditional advertising to inbound marketing is going to require some work.

The following are the steps you’ll need to take to incorporate inbound marketing into your overall advertising strategy:

1. Understand The Advantages Of Inbound Marketing

If you don’t understand how inbound marketing differs from traditional marketing, then you’re going to end up applying the same type of strategy. Namely, your online presence will focus on promoting products and services. Posting online advertisements isn’t going to cut it. Online audiences differ greatly from those that you are targeting with traditional marketing efforts.

The idea of inbound marketing is to provide consumers with something valuable along with the information that they need to educate themselves about your brand, products, or services. By doing this, you’ll position yourself to be found by potential customers instead of having to find them. Inbound marketing also allows you to engage directly with your audience. This makes knowing what they want and need more important. They not only have a choice as to what content they consume, they can actually respond to your marketing efforts as well.

2. Use Your Available Data

Any data about your business and its customers should be carefully analyzed to help guide your inbound marketing strategy. This is because inbound marketing is all about optimizing your advertising efforts based on the data you have available. In fact, you should continue adjusting your strategies based on the new data that you’ll be collecting.

For example, you should use the information on your existing and past customers to expand your audience and create a buyer persona. By creating more in-depth buyer personas using customer online behavior data, you ensure that your content will be relevant to your specific audience. Your buyer personas should inform everything you produce and post online.

Five Inbound Marketing Resources Every Marketer Should Know About

3. Establish A Plan

Inbound marketing is so broad–it incorporates a wide range of strategies, including your website optimization, social media marketing, content marketing, SEO, email marketing, and more. You’ll need to have clear short-term and long-term goals so that you can judge the performance of your efforts.

For example, one of your long-term goals may be to increase brand awareness. By setting this goal, it will inform the marketing strategies you implement (such as being active on social media or using PPC ads) and will also allow you to judge your strategies based on that goal (such as page visits over time, conversions over time, number of social shares, etc.).

4. Repurpose Offline Content

Many of your traditional advertising efforts can be repurposed online. For example, the newsletters that you may have been sending out can be turned into email newsletters instead. Your copywriting team can transition from writing copy for print ads and commercials to writing blog content for your website. You can even use your research reports and white papers to create infographics and eBooks.

Once you’ve decided to transition from traditional advertising to inbound marketing, you’ll want to follow these steps in order to get started. Doing so will help establish a foundation for your inbound marketing efforts to build on.

Why Your Website Redesign Would Benefit From An Inbound Marketing Strategy

Inbound marketing will help you grow your business by attracting website visitors, converting them into leads and closing leads into customers