Information made available by a website or other electronic medium- The Oxford Dictionaries
Defining the word is easy – but actually understanding exactly what it entails and how to include it in your marketing strategy is a whole other level.

What?

Though ‘content’ trends more on Google, the term ‘content marketing’ is steadily rising in popularity. This is because of the trend in inbound marketing which revolves around the creation of content in order to attract readers, followers, and, therefore: buyers.
From 2014 onwards there was a sudden surge in the use of content marketing – leaders in the industry started to realise that digital marketing couldn’t function the way traditional marketing does. You couldn’t simply shout at people in order to sell your product – the internet can’t just be used as an extension to billboards. If you really want to be successful you’ve got to engage your audience.

But how?

Content is whatever is found on your website or social media platforms. It’s anything you produce or create – from images to text to video. Great content inspires and generates interest – great content is shareable. So the main aim for you and your content should be for it to be interesting and shareable so that it creates discussions about and around your brand.
One of the best (but not easiest) ways of doing this is through a blog. These days most websites have a blog which is used as an extension of their brand. That doesn’t mean that everyone with a blog is using it properly. Posting once every blue moon won’t get you anywhere, neither will boring content which doesn’t provide any value.
The first thing you’ve got to do if you’re serious about your content is to come up with a content marketing strategy. Plan out the next three months’ content with an easy to understand schedule with clear deadlines. Don’t be afraid to plan topics in advance, but do allow for some posts which are relevant to things happening at the time.
 
For your blog’s content to be successful it must be actionable, interesting, and engaging. Remember that you’re not talking at your readers… you’re engaging in long term dialogue, and if you work at it you’ll see the same people interacting with your brand over and over again, these are the most loyal people who will take your brand to the next level.

Why should I care?

• It makes your brand more human, it shows who you are, and can be used to establish you as a leader in the field.
• It’s great for your SEO because fresh, frequent content will help you rank higher in search results since it shows you’re more than just an advertising space.
• It directly drives traffic to your website, and can boost overall engagement with your brand.

This is of course just the tip of the ice berg and there are many more reasons as to why content is king. It’s a world of many interconnected layers waiting for you to explore it – so if you haven’t delved into the world of content it’s about time you did.

The post C is for Content appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

1. The beginner’s guide to monitoring the right metrics on Google Analytics

Google Analytics doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere anytime soon – it’s far too useful- so you can be sure that knowing the basics will equip you with the tools you need to figure out future updates and changes.

2. Growth hacking: How to use Twitter to drive traffic to your site

If you need to improve your twitter appeal then this is the perfect post for you. Find out just what you need to do in order to go from zero to hero and really get the most out of your Twitter account.

3. 10 simple growth hacks for your business’ Instagram feed

Instagram can be a great way to interact with your audience – especially if your audience is a slightly younger one. Get people hyped up and inspired with smart and creative posts which will boost your brand’s appeal and drive traffic to your site.

4. FAQ Special – Is your site ready for Google’s biggest update in years?

If you haven’t heard about Google’s Mobilegeddon then perhaps you’ve been living under a rock. We’ll forgive you. Here’s your chance to update yourself on what’s going on in the world of Google and how it’s going to affect you.

5. How to be heard above the noise

From our Office Bloggers series this blog post will give you the boost of inspiration you need to make sure you’re heard above the noise. Find out what it is you need to do to make sure that what you’re saying is useful and impressive.

6. Introduction to Online Advertising – Part 1

This one’s pure gold! We’ve given you a break down of what goes into online advertising, showing you the ins and outs and what different terms mean. Definitely one to be bookmarked for future reference! Check it out.

7. Be Trustworthy: why heart-centred marketing could be your game-changer

With digital marketing becoming more personal and person-focussed it’s important to instil a sense of trust within your brand. If your customers trust you then you’ve got it all. Find out how to be trustworthy and up your game.

8. Independence Day: Why a future-proof WordPress site is the way to go

We build sites to last. We use WordPress for a variety of reasons, but the main one is that it’s future-proof. This makes things simpler for us and the clients. Find out why it’s so important to have a future-proof website and how this could benefit your business.

9. 10 GrowthHacking tips for your next email marketing campaign

E-mail marketing can make or break your campaign. This post provides valuable insight into what you should do to ensure that you’re always on top. Check it out!

10. Simplicity: or how you interact with humans and machines for a winning website

Websites are built to be used by humans, that means that machine and man must interact. This post looks into how to have a website that’s functional but aesthetically pleasing and that will give users the best experience possible.

If these don’t provide you with the information you need to navigate through the digital marketing landscape then why not pop in for a chat? 

The post The recap – Our top ten blog posts you should have read appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

How does bidding work?

Well, there is no simple answer to how exactly how an ad is served up and at what price, however this example might help. We’d set a €2 per click bid for my search advert. If our competitor for that search spot has bid €1.50 per click, our ads will show up with a bid of €1.51 until our budget runs out. Theirs will then show up at €1.50 (or whatever the maximum bid is after ours).
It’s much more complicated than that in reality, because Google will look at hundreds of factors, including the quality of the ads and the relevance of the site before determining how much I’m actually going to have to bid. So the quality of the setup of search advertising is as important as how much you’re ready to spend, because it will determine how much you actually get to spend per click.

CPM

The first method quantifying the cost of advertising online is based on impressions – i.e. the number of times your advert shows up in front of a human person visiting a website. This is usually calculated on a per thousand (CPM = cost per “M”, the roman numeral for 1000).
It makes sense to determine how much you’d like to spend using CPM when your goal is to get in front of as many people as possible. In fact CPM is one of the best ways to buy display advertising.

CPC

If you’re after driving traffic to your website, then what you’re after is how much you’re going to pay every time an ad sends a click your way. This way you can control how much your traffic costs you. But you also need to know how much your traffic is worth to you.

CPC vs CPM

The really interesting stuff starts when you start comparing the two. Later on in the post we’ll be seeing what we can judge our advertising effort on, however let’s assume we’re only after traffic (clicks). I might be paying €0.50 per click and €0.20 per 1000 impressions. So if people click on my advert less than once every 2,500 times it’s served I’m better off buying clicks.
If, on the other hand, I manage to create an advert that’s good enough, and targeted enough, to generate one click per thousand impressions, for example, I’d be much better off buying ads based on impressions.

Slots

This is probably one of the hardest ways to buy online advertising for agencies like ours. It is also the easiest for clients to buy directly, but then leaves clients spending much more than they should.
When you buy a slot you’re effectively buying a banner (or sharing the views of a banner with other advertisers) on a specific site. The problem with this is that you’re committing your ad spend with a specific site at a pre-agreed rate. You usually pay over the odds both when measured on CPC and on CPM, but it could be the only way to get to a particular property, so when a site has enough clout, this is the most money they can make with online advertising.
Some sites have mastered this and earn much more revenue that they would have using traditional methods of advertising. It’s great for them, but savvy advertisers know that readers spend so much time on the internet nowadays that whether you get to them on one site or on another, you’ve still managed to serve them your ad.

How is return on investment (ROI) measured online?

Each campaign should have a goal defined. This determines the way in which we’ll judge whether the campaign we ran was a success or failure.

Reach & frequency

If all I’m after is exposure, then all I should care about is my reach and frequency. The reach of my ad is how many people (or devices) my ad was served to. How many human beings out there saw my advert.
Frequency tells me how many times each of those people saw an advert from my campaign. A successful brand exercise will aim for a pretty high frequency, even though we would try to achieve it over a protracted period if possible. In general, I’d prefer someone to see one of my ads daily for a month than 30 times in a day.
Unless I’m absolutely positive that the people I’m exposing my ad to are in the perfect audience (as we do for some clients of ours), this is a very soft measurement because I have no idea how effective my ad is (unless I use “traditional” methods, see the last point).

Traffic

When I have a site that I’m using to convert my goals, then my aim is to drive traffic to it, and the way I judge my campaign is based on traffic to my site. This is still a “softer” measurement, because if all I measure is traffic, then I can’t know whether the people coming to my site are actually interested in what I have to say or sell.
I could go into more detail based on campaigns, such as how much time people are spending on my site after they come in through an ad or whether they visit multiple pages. This would help me determine the quality of the traffic I’m generating and whether my ad is getting to the right audience.

Cost per Lead (CPL)

Cost per lead is a much better way of calculating how effective my advertising is. A lead is someone who’s interested in my product or service. With B2B advertising it is usually very hard to close sales without the intervention of a sales rep, so we’d measure how many people we’re sending to the sales force.

Cost per acquisition (CPA)

The ultimate method of measuring the effectiveness of a campaign is by calculating the cost per acquisition (and subsequently the direct Return on Investment when you have the revenue generated from a sale).

Traditional methods

Finally you have to keep in mind that online advertising can also be measured with more traditional methods – i.e. offline measures.
We recently ran a campaign for a client of ours that has no way of selling online. It was a year-long campaign which tried to take their brand of paint from being the one painters chose to also be the one home-owners chose.
There was no way to track how effective the campaign was online, but the company had a record year in terms of sales. Since it was the only thing that changed that year, it was pretty easy to attribute the success to the campaign we ran for them.
You can also use other methods such as brand recall and first of mind mentions when tracking how effective an online branding exercise has been, but it’s really hard to specifically pinpoint which medium is working more if you’re running a campaign both online and offline. Having said that, this is no harder than measuring the effectiveness of traditional media.

Shameless plug

If you’ve managed to read through this post and last week’s you’re probably pretty confused. You can probably also understand why it’s important to have an agency that really understands online marketing. There’s much more to online advertising than simply ordering a page on a magazine. The potential for reward is much greater too, but it’s also much easier to make a mess of it all.
Drop us a line if you’re confused. We’ll be happy to help you out, and as always, the coffee’s on us!

The post Introduction to online advertising – Part 2 appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

1. Set up

It’s extremely easy to set everything up and get started. Simply sign into your Google account and head over to Analytics. What you’ll need to do is go to the Admin panel and click “Add account”. From there on in you just fill in some very basic information about your website to receive your Tracking ID. After that you’re ready to install your HTML tracking code into the source code of your website. This code is essentially how Google Analytics taps into and captures your website’s usage statistics.
Now that you’re all set up, here are the most important metrics simplified and explained.

2. Users & Sessions

Find these metrics through Audience > Overview.

The explanation

The visitor count is something you will keep a close eye on because it helps you see if you’re increasing traffic to your website. As Google defines it, ‘The Users metric shows how many unique users viewed or interacted with your content within a specific date range.’ On the other hand, one single session can contain multiple pageviews, events, social interactions, and ecommerce transactions.

The interpretation

The fewer uniques you see as compared with your total visitation (sessions), the more loyal your audience is. So, if the number of visitations is a lot higher than the number of uniques it means that your users are visiting more pages, interacting more, and there’s more chance that they will decide to choose your services or make a purchase from your website.
While you want to build a loyal following, getting new people to your website is the way to grow your presence. Make sure you get maximum exposure to attract more uniques, by focusing on the right keywords, getting active on social media, and promoting your content.

3. Bounce Rate and Average Visit Duration

Find these metrics through Audience > Overview.

The explanation

These are actually two metrics, but they’re related. Bounce rate is the percentage of users who leave immediately after seeing one page. Average visit duration is the the amount of time spent on the site. A low bounce rate and high visit duration tells you that people find your website useful and valuable.

The interpretation

The reality is not everyone is going to like your content. The bounce rate is essentially the percentage of people who leave your website from the same page they entered without any interaction with the page. For a visitor to be measured in the Bounce Rate they must have come to your website, only looked at the one page, and then left your website immediately.
Ideally you want to keep this percentage low. If you think the bounce rate is high, take a look at the average time spent, exit pages, and where visitors are clicking (see In-Page Analytics below).
According to Neil Patel, these are the benchmark averages for bounce rates:
If you would like to lower your bounce rate and increase the time users spend on you website, you have to make sure that you enhance the quality of your content, have strong opening paragraphs and make sure that users don’t have to wait too long for your website to load.

4. Browser & OS

Find these metrics through Audience > Technology > Browser & OS (for cross browser usability).
Every website should look good on every type of browser, operating system and different screen sizes. If you monitor these metrics well, you can make various changes on how your website appears online. The ‘Browser & OS’ is a very useful metric that will give you an indication of what is the most popular browser that users are using to access your site. This is great for cross-browser usability, because by knowing the most popular browser with your users, you can make sure that your website looks great on that particular browser.

5. Mobile

Find these metrics through Audience > Mobile > Overview (for responsive websites – decisions).
It is also crucial to know how many visitors are accessing your site through mobile devices. As time goes by, you are going to experience a rise in visitors that access your website through mobile devices, so you’d better prepare to optimise your site to a responsive one if it still isn’t.

6. Traffic Sources

Find these metrics through Acquisition > Overview.
Find these metrics through Acquisition > All Traffic.
The ‘All Traffic’ report details how many people visited your site and where that they came from. Traffic sources can be divided into 5 channels as explained below:

Direct –  Typed your URL in the browser.

Social – Visits that came through social media platforms.

Paid Search – Visits that are tracked through pre-defined campaigns.

Referral – Clicked on a link from another website that linked back to you.

Organic Search – Found your website using a search engine (i.e.Google).

Another handy feature here is that it helps track where your content is online. You’ll also notice social networks on your list of referrers which is great for analysing which social network brings in the most visitors. Your business needs an effective keyword strategy and its goal should be to show up on the first search page for specific keywords associated with your business. This goal is important because usually users never scroll beyond the first page of search results.

7. Keywords

Find these metrics through Acquisition > Keywords (Paid & Organic).
The Keywords (Paid & Organic) report shows what keywords visitors used to find your website. This report will help you measure the success of your search engine optimisation campaign. You want to make sure that the keywords that appear in this report are the ones you want to be associated with you and your content.

8. Popular pages

Find these metrics through Behaviour > Site Content > All pages.
Here is where you evaluate which content is the most popular on your website. Take a look and see which pages get the most views and how long people are staying on the page. After a while of publishing content you’ll notice patterns and see which posts perform better.
Remember it’s about publishing content your audience wants to read, so if a particular style of writing appears to getting more views, stick to that style.

9. Landing & Exit Pages

Find this metric through Content > Site Content > Landing Pages.
Find this metric through Content > Site Content > Exit Pages.
We’ve looked at how people are finding your site, but this report tells us the exact pages visitors are landing on. Knowing how visitors are entering your site is key for creating a successful sales funnel. Are your top landing pages optimised to convert leads? Do they have calls to action? They should because having an engaging CTA on a popular landing page will improve your website’s lead generation metrics.
It’s very useful to get to know what is sending your visitors away. The Exit Page report will show us what pages visitors are leaving the site from. Take a close look at your top ten pages and make sure they’re the pages you want people to be leaving your site from. For example you want users to exit from thank you pages, so that you will know that they subscribed. On the other hand, you don’t want users to exit from your homepage, because that simply means that users weren’t interested to continue viewing other pages.

10. In-Page Analytics

Find these metrics through Behaviour > In-Page Analytics.
You can also use In-Page Analytics to see how users really interact with web pages. To make analysis easier, Google Analytics includes a variety of charts to display information just as you want to see it. Here you’ll be presented with a map that lets you view where your visitors are clicking. This feature helps find out how your visitors are interacting with your website.
For instance, if you’ve got a button nobody is clicking on, you might want to change the design or consider a different value proposition and call to action. Another benefit is to find out how many people scroll below the fold and read the content at the bottom.
There you have it!
Keep in mind that the online marketing for your business is a moving target. You will never reach a point where your website is finished. To keep your focus on an ever-improving bottom line, you must change what isn’t working and enhance what is. Knowledge is power, after all, so stay informed by checking in regularly on some of the most important numbers concerning your business.

The post The beginner's guide to monitoring the right metrics on Google Analytics appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Monthly Revenue

One of the most important metrics to measure is your monthly revenue. This can be calculated by multiplying the price of your products or services by the quantity you’ve sold over a particular month.

This is a very important metric to calculate as it allows you to assess the performance of your business month after month. By calculating your monthly revenue you can analyse trends such as dips in revenue during a particular period, prompting you to dig deeper to find out exactly what’s causing that drop. On the other hand, you could also spot a welcome increase in revenue, which should lead you to find out what caused it and, more importantly, how to make it happen again.
By working hard to replicate positive results you’ll be laying the groundwork for a sustainable business – one that draws in more revenue each month. You would also need to plan your revenue forecasts around this figure. This guide will help you out in preparing your forecasts with the help of a few additional bits of information, such as costs and profit margins.

Churn

If your business gets repeat customers, you should know who they are by calculating repeat custom. This metric goes both ways – you will also need to calculate the churn, meaning the number of customers that stop buying your product. This figure will give you valuable insight into whether or not your clients are satisfied with your product.
If clients are dropping out after making the first purchase, for instance, it could indicate that something’s not quite right with your product. At this stage you should focus your efforts on improving your product rather than try to attract new customers.

How? Ask!

You could get all the answers you need by speaking to both your existing and past clients and asking questions along the lines of:

“We really miss you! Is there something that we can do to get you back?”

“Would you suggest our product to your friends and relatives? If yes, why would you do so?”

You could even go a step further and ask for feedback before the client walks out on you, just like Starbucks did in coffee shops across the world:

If you don’t happen to have coffee shops in every corner of the globe, you can still get in touch with your clients to ask questions and get feedback by sending them a short email questionnaire, for instance. Online tools like Surveymonkey or Surveygizmo make this quick and simple.
You also have another option that’s closer to home – you can get customer feedback through your site itself! Check out Olark or Qualaroo – these tools make it easy for you to ask questions to your website visitors as soon as they go to specific web page or behave in a certain way.
Most importantly: If you really want to lower your churn you need to better understand your customers. Forget about what you think about your company and start thinking about it from your customers’ perspective. What do they want from you? Which problems are they trying to solve? Does your product address these problems? Find out, and modify your product accordingly.
Keep in mind that this is not a one-off exercise, but a process that should be implemented in an on-going manner. It’s crucial if you’re looking to build a sustainable business in the long run.

Lifetime Value

The client lifetime value (LTV) applies for businesses that either sell a subscription based service or get repeat customers. It is the projected revenue that you will get from each customer for his lifetime. There is a simple way in which you can work this out. Take the average revenue per sale and then multiply it by the number of repeat transactions and average retention time. The diagram below will make this easier to wrap your head around:

So let’s say that you get a total number of 2000 repeat customers per year for your online store that spend on average $200 for every transaction that they will make. The average number of transactions per year is 3 whilst the retention rate is 2 years. To work out their LTV you need to do the following:

In this case the LTV would be $1200. So in other words each customer is getting you $1200 before he stops buying from your site.
LTVs vary according to the type of traffic that you are attracting to your site. For example you can compare different LTVs for the different clients that you get from online marketing campaigns and then focus on those that have a higher LTV. You can also compare the different LTVs based on geography – which regions have the highest LTVs? Once you find that out you can start focusing your strategy on attracting more clients from those regions.

Conversion Rate

This metric will help you to measure the success rate of your website. In order to improve your website you need to know how many sales or leads you’re generating from your current web traffic. If for example you want to work out the sales conversion rate for your website you will use the equation below:

This will give you the percentage of unique visitors that are making a purchase from your website. In order to improve your conversion rate you will have to analyse every step that each visitor is making before purchasing your products.
A lot of CMOs are discouraged when they calculate their conversion rate because the real situation would be that from, say, 100,000 unique visitors they can only convert something below 2% into sales. However, keep in mind that not all of your visitors are ready to buy and most of them are still at the beginning of the buying cycle.
You should look at it this way: if you improve your conversion rate by just 1% you will increase your sales by 50%. So rather than discouraging yourself, focus on continuously improving your conversion rate by optimising your website. These tips will help you to convert more sales from your website.

Cost per Acquisition

This metric is one of the most important ones that is ignored by a lot of businesses, unfortunately. The cost per acquisition is the price that you have to pay to acquire a new customer. This means that it measures the cost of advertising to convert a visitor into a customer.
You need to know exactly how much a customer is costing you when using different advertising channels, such as PPC (pay per click) advertising. This will give you a clear indication on whether you should continue to invest in advertising or else use other means to generate business that will cost you less money.
So let’s say you have an option of choosing whether to continue running PPC ads or invest in SEO – what you would need to do is to calculate how much it is costing you to acquire a new customer through these channels. With PPC, this is quite easy to calculate since all you need to do is to divide the total cost of your PPC account by the number of sales that you’ve generated for that particular month.
On the other hand, to calculate the CPA from SEO you need to calculate the monthly service fees of your web-marketing agency and any additional costs that you might incur when running an SEO campaign and divide them by the number of transactions generated from SEO for a particular month. The latter can be easily obtained by logging into your Google analytics account and finding the total number of transactions generated by organic traffic. Find this under the Acquisitions > Keywords tab as shown below:
 

And there you have it!

The metrics above should keep you focused on increasing your sales. Do not see them as separate data sets – they all tie in to the same goal. It is important that you share this data with your team members so that they will be able to visualise the bigger picture.
After all, the more they know about the business, the better it is for them to come up with ideas on how to improve the process of acquiring new customers!

The post The top 5 metrics to consider before making business decisions appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.