The post My experience in digital marketing appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

No, we’re not talking about the Aerosmith hit, no matter how good it may have been. We’re talking about being jaded in the aspect of digital marketing. Let’s refresh your memory. Jaded means “bored or lacking enthusiasm, typically after having had too much of something.” Sounds like a familiar feeling?
Being jaded in the digital world has become common. It’s something that any serious digital marketer would take into consideration and plan for. It comes into effect in many ways, here are two of the most important ones to keep in mind.

Ad Blindness

As a society we’ve become almost immune to advertising. We see ads everywhere from the moment we wake up and drive to work, to the moment we get into bed. We’re bombarded with special offers, marketing campaigns, and non stop adverts. Eventually we get so used to these that they become background noise. We automatically tune out and stop paying attention (unless it’s an advert for a product we’re interested in). When it comes to online advertising our eyes have become accustomed to the positioning of ads, such as banners, in particular locations on a website. We filter out these adverts, focussing on the valuable information instead. Of course the ads do work to a certain level, specifically on a subconscious one. However it’s important to constantly update your ad sets and not let them run for too long.

Same tactics, different day

Everything in the digital world works as though it’s on overdrive, and this includes campaign lifetimes. Trends come and go quicker than anything on a Paris runway. Staying at the top of the game is quite the challenge. Consumers become accustomed to the same marketing tactics. They start to see past the charade and learn how the game works. Things in the digital world tend to become overdone. They reach such a high point of virality that eventually they become annoying (like planking, and even the ice bucket challenge) whereas the same competitions become dragging (think ‘like my photo to help me win’).
Thankfully we’re seeing a shift from the short term, high engagement campaigns – the kind of campaigns which don’t last very long but create a peak in engagement. Once these campaigns fizzle out, the brand’s reach goes back to normal until the next big competition comes around. These days the focus is more on having consistency – being relevant throughout in order to have true, genuine engagement and a loyal fan base.
By analysing the top marketing trends and constantly thinking of innovative ways of engaging your audience you’ll automatically improve your chances of remaining relevant. Don’t fall into a marketing rut where you simply copy what your competitors do – dare to be different, and always make it new.

The post J is for Jaded 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.

Why is everybody moving more of their spend online?

The answer is simple, really. The value for money to be had with effective online marketing is stunning when compared to traditional media. No matter what your ultimate promotional goal is, you always get much more mileage from online marketing.

What are the ways I can advertise online?

There are loads of ways to grow your brand and sales efforts online, but in reality, when starting off you have five main ways of buying advertising online.

Banner (or Display) advertising

This is one of the very first forms of online advertising. It started off as the equivalent of print advertising, and it was therefore mainly priced that way. People used to just buy slots around the content of a site. Nowadays it is more common to buy banner advertising based on impressions though.
We usually recommend display advertising for one main goal – when you want to build brand recollection pretty far up in the sales funnel. Banner advertising is a great way of getting people to know and remember your brand.
Don’t try to use banner advertising to drive traffic to your site, though, because you’re usually going to be looking at a very costly exercise.

Video Advertising

A heck of a lot of video is consumed online on a daily basis. You can hijack some of these videos by inserting your video before whatever the audience you’re trying to target was going to watch.
It’s a more expensive medium than simple banner advertising, but gives you the opportunity to get a similar effect as TV advertising. Remember that on Youtube, for example, viewers can skip the ad after about 5 seconds, so you have to make sure that you start telling a compelling story immediately, otherwise viewers will just press “skip”.

Search Advertising

Most people’s buying journeys start with a search nowadays. If you can get your product or service in front of your potential customers at this phase in the buying cycle then you have a much better chance of converting them into customers.
Google understood this first (and best). Look where they are now. This tells you something – search advertising is effective, and companies are willing to pay a lot for spots at the top of search results.
You can’t buy your way to the top of search results organically, but you can buy your way to the top via search engine advertising. And how do you do this? By bidding the highest for the spot in particular. Google (and other search engines) have a “mini auction” every time somebody runs a search. This sees the highest bidder getting the first spot for that particular search result.

Social media advertising

Social media advertising works in pretty much the same way as display advertising does, but there’s an added dimension – the social aspect.
Even though the concept is pretty much the same – you’re placing an ad in front of an audience based on their media consumption (as opposed to a specific search), you have two main advantages.
The first advantage is that most social media advertising is native. It is presented in the same format as all other content, so a news feed advert on my news feed in Facebook will look exactly like the photo of my school-friend-I-haven’t-actually-seen-in-10-years’ new chubby baby. This means I’m primed to consume the content because I’m already in “reading mode” when the ad is served to me (unlike banner advertising, which usually lives outside the content on sites).
The second is that it is, yes, you guessed it: social. So if my best friend likes a restaurant and that restaurant runs an advertising campaign on Facebook, it can specify that the advert should only be served to friends of its customers. That way I see an ad in context – so I know that someone I trust has already vetted this restaurant, making it an implicit recommendation.

Retargeting

Retargeting is more complicated to set up and to achieve, but it is gathering quite a bit of momentum in recent years. But what is it?
Simple retargeting works by building up an audience of people who have visited your site and serving them ads that are relevant to your brand. This can be done by advertising platforms which have a large network of advertising partners.
Have you ever searched for a product on a site like Amazon or Booking.com? You are usually followed around with this (or similar ads) for a few weeks. The ads are not simply re-targeted (where I get served an ad simply because I visited a particular website), but programmed to my behaviour.
So booking.com will not just advertise its service in general to me, it will push a hotel in the city I had just searched for. This is an even more complicated system of retargeting, one that re-targets to individuals, not just generic audiences.

Direct deals

Direct deals can be far more flexible. These depend largely on the publisher and can be a combination of all the advertising methods above and more. Some sites sell packages that go beyond regular advertising – including deals for content, sponsoring newsletters, “reviews”, and leads.
Direct deals also allow for a wider take-over of sites. Some sites allow you to take over the site completely, with a re-skin of the site based on the advertiser’s needs. This is a far more immersive experience, and if done well can actually be pretty effective.
Buying directly from sites also allows you to implement advertising technology that would be harder to achieve through a network – such as ads that push a whole site’s content down and start playing a video when a visitor clicks on them.
As we’ll see next week, direct deals are usually more expensive than using a third party medium such as a banner network, however you usually have as close to a guarantee as possible of highly targeted traffic.

What’s next?

This week we’ve seen the different ways in which you can spend your money online. We haven’t really gone into how you buy advertising though. How will you know what to spend, and where to spend it? And more importantly, how will you measure the success (or failure) of your campaigns?

Shameless plug

Most companies don’t really know where to start with online advertising, which is why we’re here to help. We plan out your spending in a way that brings you much more value for money. If you feel you’re missing out on your business’ online potential but don’t really know where to start, then just drop us a line and we’ll help you get much more bang for your buck.

The post Introduction to online advertising – Part 1 appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Aligning the customer buying cycle with SEO

In everything you do, whether it’s SEO, content marketing or any other type of web marketing, make sure that you understand how the customer’s buying cycle fits in. Just to refresh your memory a little bit, the buying cycle is split up into 4 different stages; attention, interest, desire and action. You can use the acronym AIDA to help you remember the sequence. There are other variations that incorporate other stages, such as the loyalty stage at the end of the cycle. Below is a diagram that shows the different stages:

 

The attention stage

This is the initial step that every consumer makes before buying a product or service. Usually at this stage the consumer searches for a product by using a generic keyword such as ‘black car’. The consumer is quite unsure about the different models and prices available. At this stage the consumer is made aware of the different options available.
Keywords that fall under this category are quite high in terms of search engine traffic and since the consumer is not yet ready to buy, it won’t be worth focusing your SEO strategy on these keywords. This is because it is quite difficult to rank for these keywords due to high competition, and if you had to rank for these keywords there’s a very slim chance that you’ll get a return.

The interest and desire stages

The consumer is now searching for keywords such as “black car reviews” or “compare black cars”. At these stages the consumer is still not ready to buy, however he might be susceptible to marketing messages related to the benefits of a particular model. By now, he has gathered enough information and has a clear picture on what he really wants to buy. It is important to include some of these keywords in your SEO campaign so that when the consumer is looking for different alternatives, your product will be one of the available options. However it is important to understand that it will take more time to rank for these keywords since a lot of your competitors might also target them.

The action stage

The last stage of the buying cycle is when the consumer is ready to take an action and is finally interested to make the actual purchase.  The consumer is now searching for keywords that are specific, such as “Ford Fiesta 2012 model” or “mini cooper 2013”. You definitely have to include these types of keywords since there is a better chance that you will get a return. This is because at this stage your website visitors already know what they want to purchase. So now it’s a question of whether your product is better than your competitor’s, and whether it is at the right price that the consumer is willing to pay for.

Keyword Research

If you want to get a return out of SEO, you need to make sure that you’re focusing on highly targeted keywords. What I mean by this is that you need to focus on keywords that will attract customers that are at the final stages of the buying cycle discussed above. In terms of potential traffic, it will be much lower than if you had to target generic keywords and you might think that it won’t be worth all the effort. However, since we’re interested in increasing our sales figures by using SEO, our best bet would be to attract customers that are ready to buy.
You will find these types of keywords by using tools such as the Google Keyword Planner. This is a tool that you can find in your Google Adwords account. If you don’t have one yet, you can go here to create one for yourself. As soon as you log into your account you will see something like the screenshot below:

 
Now go to Tools and click on Keyword Planner as shown below:

When you’re in the Keyword Planner section choose “Search for new keyword and ad group ideas,” it is found under “What would you like to do?” Now start entering some keywords related to your product. Let’s say that we sell Ford Fiesta cars, the form will look something like this:

For this purpose leave the other fields empty. Your next step would be to choose the countries and languages that you’d like to target; all found under ‘Targeting’. When you’re ready with the form click on ‘Get Ideas’. Now choose the ‘Keyword Ideas’ so that the tool will give you a list of keywords with the average monthly search traffic next to each one of them. In other words, this is the number of times that visitors have searched for that particular keyword in Google. As you can see from the list, the more specific the keyword is, the less traffic it generates. Now the question would be, which keywords should you choose? The next section will explain how you will find those keywords that will give you a bigger return.

Finding the Right Keywords for your SEO Campaign

The most common method of choosing keywords for your SEO campaign is by selecting those keywords from the list that you’ve managed to compile in the keyword research phase. Usually you’d choose those keywords that are highly specific to your product.
However there’s a much better way to do it. You can allocate a small budget, not more than $1000, and spend it on Google Adwords. The idea here would be to choose a couple of highly targeted keywords that you’ve found in the research phase and test them on a PPC (pay per click) campaign. Run the campaign for a couple of months let’s say 2 to 3 months. Then spot those keywords that converted, and use them in your SEO campaign. With this method, you’ll save a lot of money on SEO because you will only focus on keywords that are going to get you the money.

Conclusion

As a CMO, make sure that you share your ideas and intentions with your web marketing agency. You have to show them that you know all about the whole process of how SEO works, and that you’re not only interested in getting traffic, you also want to get a return out of it. I’m mentioning this because a lot of agencies out there will simply focus on getting you ranked highly in Google for particular keywords, and that’s it. They will tell you that they are going to get you massive traffic, and of course you’d think that traffic implies money. Although this might sound good to you, it will never get you the desired return. This is mainly because the visitors that you’re attracting are either not interested enough, or not ready to buy your products yet!

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