Digital marketing moves fast.
No matter if you’re a small biz or big enterprise, it’s difficult to keep up to date with everything going on.
So let’s take a breather, and I’ll try to answer some of the more common digital marketing FAQs.
What is CRO?
Conversion Rate Optimization. It’s basically the practice of using testing to improve a web, landing page, or any other place where you want visitors to take action, in the effort to increase conversions.
CRO is a growing practice, because it involves experimenting, data, user behaviour, and creative thinking to ultimately generate more leads. And doubling your website’s conversion rate has the same impact as doubling it’s traffic – and it’s a lot cheaper to do.
A couple great CRO resources include Unbounce, ConversionXL, and VWO.
What is Influence Marketing?
Influence Marketing (IM) is growing in both importance and investment.
In fact, many marketers plan to increase their spend on IM:
Influence Marketing means engaging those who hold influence over your audience, with the goal of having them help promote your product or service in some way, shape, or form.
What’s important to understand is that influencers are NOT necessarily those who have massive social media followings, but rather those who can directly impact the decision-making of their audience.
There’s lot of Influence Marketing tools to help you find, engage, and manage influencers.
What is SEO in 2016?
It’s difficult to answer this in a single sentence, but I’ll give it a try…
SEO is about raising or maximizing your online profile, while also providing your website visitors with a great user experience.
How do you accomplish these things?
Here’s a (very) non-comprehensive list:
- (Cliche alert) Create unique, interesting, and valuable content
- Create different forms of content (blogs, infographics, video)
- For those who mention you on the web, ask for a link as well
- Use social media, email, guest posts, and forums/commenting to help get your brand out there
- Get reviews and referrals for your product or service
- Ensure your website has clean code and compressed images for fast load times
- More and more people are browsing on mobile phones – make sure your site is mobile-friendly
- Forget one-size-fits-all-websites; use personalization and testing tools for the most relevant user-experience (UX)
What are Marketing Automation Tools, should I use them?
As I’ve written about in the past, marketing automation tools are great for a lot of things: except for automating marketing.
What I mean is that these tools are not marketing panaceas. You first need a marketing team that can help with things like: lead nurturing strategies; email design and email campaigns; landing page design, testing, and optimization; data and analytics; conversion paths, mobile and SMS; and much more.
A marketing automation tool should complement a marketing team, not the other way around.
If you have a team, and have a decent amount of traffic to your website, an automation platform is probably worth considering.
As for which platform to use, I’m pretty neutral – I haven’t come across one that stands out against the rest.
Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…where should I be advertising?
Generally, I recommend to B2B clients that they use Google AdWords (including Bing/Yahoo), LinkedIn sponsored updates, and even Twitter.
For B2C, I recommend AdWords, Facebook, and Twitter.
But whenever in doubt, test, try, and optimize.
All these platforms are becoming more sophisticated in terms of being able to target the right audience (at the right time), but they are also becoming more cluttered and competitive. I’m biased, but my advice is to use a paid search company such as Op Ed Marketing to manage your advertising campaigns
What should I be doing on Social Media?
Whatever you’re doing on social media should align with your business goals.
Use it to:
- deliver a better customer service experience
- share your content (and other people’s content)
- engage with prospects, customers, and influencers
- generate leads
- listening to what people say about your brand, your products, and your competitors
- garnering feedback and surveying people
- launch contests and promotions
- share experiences at events
Most importantly, use social media to create real, actual, professional relationships, which I wrote about here.
When should I hire a Marketing Agency?
I hear it all the time…”do I need a marketing agency”, “when should I hire a marketing agency”, “how much do they cost”?
Again I’m biased, but I’m a firm believer that a marketing agency can benefit most businesses regardless of size.
As for cost, it all depends of course, but a digital agency can often cost no more than a single full-time marketing employee.
However, some of the advantages include:
- Access to an Entire Team
- Multiple skill-sets and range of experiences
- Business Continuity (Agencies won’t quit or leave)
- Know what’s worked for other B2B Businesses
- Efficient Systems and Software often already in-place
- You’re Not Paying for Recruitment, Training, Benefits, Equipment, Taxes, Vacations, Sick Days and other Employee Expenses (while an Agency is a Business Expense)
- The Outsider Advantage of assessing your Brand and Business
- Speed and Scalability to easily increase staff and resources as needed
- A Single Contact for all your Marketing Needs
- Measurable Results and ROI
So consider hiring a digital agency to complement your existing marketing team, or be your marketing team, the costs and benefits can be substantial.
What can I do that my Competitors aren’t doing?
I answered this question in a previous blog, and my answer is probably still the same: testing and conversion rate optimization.
Businesses pay $92 driving traffic to their website for every $1 they invest in conversion.
A website is NEVER done. You need to continually test and experiment with different messaging, imagery, offers, and user experiences to keep moving your conversion needle forward.
And if you’re a B2B business, here’s 3 tips to help get a leg up on your competition.
As well, it never hurts to look into attending digital marketing workshops and conferences or sharpen your skills with online training.
Have any more questions? Ask away
The post CRO? SEO? Influence Marketing? Digital Marketing FAQs and Answers appeared first on Op Ed Marketing.