The Best Way to Create a Powerful Marketing Funnel

The Best Way to Create a Powerful Marketing Funnel

Daniel Kelly

Daniel Kelly

Web Design & Digital Growth Specialist

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A marketing funnel is the process of converting a visitor into a paying customer and plays a fundamental role in determining the various activities that you need to undertake to attract customers. It begins with the initial stage where someone learns about your business to the purchasing stage, as well as post-purchase follow-ups to increase retention and repeat buying.

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5 Stages of Consumer Behaviour

John Dewey introduced the buying process as early as 1910. According to his theory, consumers go through 5 stages when they are considering a purchase:

  • Problem or need recognition
  • Information search
  • Evaluation of alternatives
  • Purchase
  • Post-purchase behaviour

These stages make up the top of the funnel (TOFU), the middle of the funnel (MOFU), and the bottom of the funnel (BOFU). To give you a better understanding of buyer behaviour and marketing funnel creation, let us look closely at these 5 stages.

Stage 1: Problem or Need Recognition (TOFU)

Awareness is the topmost stage of the marketing funnel. An unrecognized need for a specific product or service won’t make a purchase happen. With the use of marketing campaigns and consumer research, you’ll be able to draw in potential customers into this stage.

Events, advertising, media mentions, trade shows, webinars, direct mail, viral campaigns, social media, and content such as blog posts and infographics are useful tools to establish trust and thought leadership. It is here where lead generation takes place, as information is collected and leads are pulled into a lead management system for nurturing further down the funnel.

Stage 2: Information Search (MOFU)

Once a problem or need is recognized and interest is triggered, your leads will move on to this stage. Here, they learn more about your company, your products, and any helpful information and research you provide. This is an opportunity for you to develop a relationship with the people in your lead database and introduce your positioning. By using emails, targeted content, classes, and newsletters, you will be on your way to nurturing these leads.

The strategies used to gather information may vary based on the size and scope of the purchase. According to Pardot, a software company that offers marketing automation, 70% of buyers turn to Google at least 2-3 times during their search to learn more about potential solutions and relevant businesses for their needs. They also make use of social media and forums to look for recommendations.

This is the best time to position yourself as an industry expert with helpful content. But first, you have to get traffic to your site by creating SEO-friendly content, publishing white papers, and getting backlinks. You need to do some keyword research to figure out what types of content you should be creating and find out which search terms in your niche get high volumes of traffic. Make sure your content matches those queries. Your outreach methods will also get more personalized as leads progress through your funnel, sometimes involving a product demo or a phone call. Then, you wait for the purchase to take place.

Building a series of attention-grabbing content marketing pieces such as blog posts, infographics, and videos that are tied to your website’s landing pages can help engage potential customers which help them learn about your company and its services without a need for a cold call from a salesperson.

When these would-be buyers become interested enough in your products, they can request an online demonstration by filling out the form on your landing pages. These requests are warm leads and can be routed directly to your salespeople, who can then provide a demo and most of the time close the sale.

Stage 3: Evaluation of Alternatives (MOFU)

With the information provided in your article, potential customers will start comparing the options available. The time spent in this stage will vary based on the type of purchase being contemplated, going through a careful and thorough evaluation process. Price points, as well as employment basis for services, will play a major role in decision making. Some may also request free trials, online demonstrations, or training videos when applicable.

Stage 4: Purchase Decision (BOFU)

At this stage, the potential customers have already determined that they have a problem, investigated their options, and made a decision on which one is best for them. Bottom of funnel content, such as case studies content showcasing the success of previous customers with different profiles, verticals, and business sizes can help them feel more confident with this decision. However, there are still factors that may hinder them from moving forward. These include negative feedback from fellow customers and the impact it will create.

Although they don’t make you feel good, complaints and criticisms give you important signals. Whatever decision your potential buyer makes based on negative feedback, make use of these criticisms to make changes, improve, and grow your business.

Stage 5: Post-Purchase Behavior (BOFU)

What happens after the purchase is as important as what happens prior to it. A friendly onboarding process, personal attention, and provision of all the resources they would need will make them feel that they made the right choice.

However, nothing beats a great product that does what it says it would. If your product truly solves a problem, you don’t have to worry about post-purchase behaviour as it will take care of itself. Product satisfaction will result in recommendations and product endorsements. On the other hand, disappointment will result in refunds, negative reviews, and unlikely recommendation from your dissatisfied customer’s social circle.

An FAQ content will also make it easier to get customer support and solicit feedback on the buying process.

AIDA Model: Another Way to Remember Sales Funnel and Content Creation Stages

Another way to remember the stages of the sales funnel and match them to content creation is by using the acronym AIDA. The AIDA model was developed by the American businessman, Elias St. Elmo Lewis, in 1898 and is used in marketing, describing the steps a customer goes through in the process of purchasing a product. It stands for attention, interest, desire, and action.

  • Attention

Research your target audience’s problems and passions then create content that solves their problems and focuses on their passions. Your content should also be easily discovered by your target audience through Google, social media, or another website. This will help boost brand awareness. If your content can grab their attention and deeply engage them, then your target audience will start to become curious about your company and brand.

  • Interest

Help your target audience learn more about your brand, the benefits of your solution, and your potential fit with them by doing the following:

  • Feature your mission statement on your website
  • Explain exactly what you do on your homepage
  • Describe the benefits of your solution on your product pages
  • Offer ungated case studies

Providing instant access to this information will help your target audience visualize a pleasant future with your solution in their lives.

  • Desire

Keep serving your prospects with content that they will enjoy and which will help them think that your product or service will be even better. To generate excitement and help them envision a future with you, make sure they subscribe to your blog, follow you on social media, and download your offers. The more prospects you get to interact with your brand, the more they will trust you. This will compel them to act on that purchase.

  • Action

After you’ve piqued your prospect’s attention and desire with content creation and relationship building, you can generate action from them by placing “request a demo”, “free trial”, and “contact sales” call-to-actions (CTAs) on your homepage, pricing page, and product pages.

A Proven Formula

In theory, consumers who learn about your brand will develop certain feelings or emotions about your product or service as they progress through each stage of the model. This is what compels them to act.

Brands use the AIDA model to determine the way they should craft and distribute marketing messages to their target audience at each stage of the buyer’s journey. When applied to your content marketing, you’ll be leveraging a proven formula that can consistently engage, persuade, and convert an audience into customers and just like a typical marketing funnel, each stage will have fewer consumers than the previous one since many will drop off as they move through to the bottom of the funnel.

Some people enter the sales funnel at the top while others enter at subsequent stages. Whichever entry point they take, the process remains the same. They go through a process of discernment and choose to either move to another solution or purchase from you. The action at the end of the funnel—the purchase—concludes the stages of the sales funnel.

Content for Each Stage of Your Marketing Funnel

To create appealing content for every stage of your marketing funnel, you must know how your customers at each stage will find you. This is why it’s important for you to know what kind of information you need to provide them with to help them move from one stage to the next.

  • Cold Traffic or TOFU Content

Cold traffic is made up of people who have not heard of or interacted with your brand before. They click on your ads simply because they are intrigued by what you are promoting. They are not searching for a solution but for information.

Content shared with your warm or hot audiences is not the same content that should be shared with your cold audiences. They need to be specifically top of the funnel and non-promotional so as not to scare them away for good.

The goal of TOFU content is to increase offer awareness, grow your retargeting list, increase engagement, and grow website traffic. The most common types of content for this stage are blog and social media posts, interactive quizzes, videos, podcasts, surveys, infographics, ebooks, and guides. The first two are most used as they are extremely entertaining and engaging, help to grab the cold traffic’s attention and make them want to learn more, and hopefully convert them into customers down the line. A helpful strategy is to establish yourself as a thought leader and industry expert.

  • Warm Traffic or MOFU Content

Warm traffic is made up of people who know about your brand but have not yet made a purchase. They may have read your content, visited your site, followed your social media pages, or signed up for your email list and were interested in your brand enough to engage with you. What you need to do is to keep them interested and nurture them through the sales funnel since they still don’t know enough to make an educated decision on your products.

In this stage, it is essential that you create content that will help them decide to purchase your product. You can share a video or infographic explaining how your product compares to others and why it is better than another product on the market. You can make use of landing pages with lead generation forms for customers requesting online demonstrations, competitor comparison charts, case studies from successful customers, and pop-ups such as “Need help with [that service]?’ link on site relevant to pages the lead is on.

  • Hot Traffic or BOFU Content

Warm traffic is made up of people who already know about you, your brand, products or services, and most likely have bought from you already. Your goal, therefore, is to remind them about your brand or products so they keep buying from you again.

You can create new checkout page content and post-purchase email funnel that you can roll out over time. It will also be helpful to set up PPC ads for this traffic that will send them to sales pages, landing pages, product pages, offer pages, and service pages.

Two Types of Qualifying Leads in Your Sales Funnel

Reality wise, not every prospect will complete all the stages of a sales funnel for reasons that include lack of financial capability or authority to buy. This is where Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) come in.

  1. MQL refers to a prospective customer who has shown a particular level of engagement but is not ready for the buying stage although is more likely to become a customer than other leads.
  2. SQL refers to a prospective customer that has progressed past the engagement stage, has been thoroughly analyzed by both marketing and sales, and has been qualified as a potential customer.

Salespeople qualify leads by looking at interest and fit. Interest refers to how invested the prospect is in moving forward with your company’s type of solution while fit refers to how closely the lead matches your company’s definition of an ideal buyer. This includes factors such as company designation, industry, and budget.

There are four possible primary combinations in qualifying leads:

  • Low interest/low fit – These leads don’t meet your company’s target criteria and are unlikely to make a move soon.
  • High interest/low fit – These MQLs are often people who are searching for a solution, but are unlikely to go with yours.
  • Low interest/high fit – These leads closely resemble your target customer, but may not be a good fit right away. They may still be worth pursuing to create brand awareness that will eventually pay off when the need becomes apparent.
  • High interest/high fit – These MQLs are actively seeking your type of solution and are likely to convert to buyers. Needless to say, they should be prioritized by your sales team.

These parameters are helpful in identifying marketing campaigns and content leading to the newest qualified prospects and ensures that you’re using your salespeople’s time effectively.

Marketing Funnel Metrics You Should Track

Tracking how well your funnel is functioning using a set of metrics can help you improve and optimize. You can work with your SQL and MQL data to see who closes and how they interact with your site, content, channels, and ads. This is the last process of funnel creation that you need to take.

Listed here are some of the different metrics that you can choose to focus on.

  • Sales funnel conversion rate – This metric tracks the number of prospects that enter your funnel at any point and how many convert into customers. As you make changes to your marketing strategy in the future, seeing this number improve will let you know you’re on the right track.
  • Entry sources – Monitor the sources from which people are entering your funnel to get ideas for expanding the reach of your marketing campaigns. These can be from a guest blog post, a social media post, and others.
  • Time in stage – This will help you know if your prospects are getting hung up in one of your stages so you can add more content to your site that answers the questions that are unique to this stage of the funnel.
  • Exits from stage – Track the number of people falling out of a particular stage so you can better address your shortcomings. It could mean that you aren’t answering their questions or you’re asking for commitment too soon. (e.g. don’t ask for a phone number or credit card number when they’re downloading a free e-book). Add more content to give them the information they need to move forward or convert.
  • Content piece engagement rate – Track which calls to action are sending the most converted customers through your funnel so that you can replicate your success. You can upgrade/update that piece of content, send paid traffic to that blog post, promote it via email, and/or create more content pieces like that. You can get the information by tracking engagement rates on each CTA via Google Analytics.
  • Opportunity arrival rate – Track the number of opportunities that are currently in your funnel and see how changes to your marketing strategy impact it.
  • Close rate – Track how many deals you’ve won to get ideas on how to improve the success rate of your marketing funnel. You can check if your content level is a good fit for your ideal customer so you can continue sending your sales team qualified leads.

Utilise the different tools on the market today to help you track these and other metrics. You can opt to use Google Analytics just like most businesses since it provides the most comprehensive, easy-to-implement solution, and more importantly, is free to use. You can always switch if you feel that you need a more advanced sales analytics program or a complete marketing automation program.

Conclusion

Creating a sales and marketing funnel is not a simple undertaking, but it helps drive significant improvements in your efficiency and effectiveness when closing deals. It provides you with a useful model for visualizing the customer journey from initial awareness all the way through conversion. Make sure to take advantage of this useful framework to help you analyze your business and identify areas for improvement.

9 Overlooked Marketing Strategies That Will Save You Money

9 Overlooked Marketing Strategies That Will Save You Money

Daniel Kelly

Daniel Kelly

Web Design & Digital Growth Specialist

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A marketing strategy is a business’s overall game plan to reach prospective consumers and turn them into customers of the products or services it provides. Investing in a marketing strategy takes a lot of money and needs proper planning. To ensure that you’re not throwing money down the drain, consider the following strategies that most entrepreneurs overlook:

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1. Knowing Your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) Rate

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) is a marketing metric that is used to measure the total cost to acquire a single paying customer for a campaign or marketing channel. It is an important measurement for marketing success and a way for businesses to determine if their investment in a certain marketing channel is providing them with a maximum ROI.

Make sure you know your current CPA and test different methods of acquiring customers or users. Using small test budgets and testing different tactics that are large enough to have an accurate sample size will help you find what works for you.

2. Raising Your Conversion Rate

Your conversion rate is the percentage of visitors to your website out of the total number of visitors that complete a desired goal (a conversion). A high conversion rate also indicates a successful marketing and web design. It means people want what you’re offering and are able to get it easily too.

Raise your conversion rate by looking at the quality of traffic you are receiving, your product, or your web design to grow your business.

3. Having An Appropriate Funnel Approach

Top funnel approaches such as PR and influencer marketing are helpful in sending new people to your site. But first, you have to know your conversion rate as well as a product that sells. This approach is also fit for those who have already optimised the bottom of the funnel.

Bottom of the funnel approaches will help increase your renewal rate and bring in repeat customers. Top of the funnel and bottom of the funnel approaches use different strategies so before shelling out money for marketing, make sure you know which approach you have to invest in to hit your goals.

4. Proper Pricing of Long Term Advertisements

Long term marketing methods, such as PR and influencer marketing can’t be priced like short-term advertisements. They have a higher level of engagement than an ad that may or may not have been viewed. They can give you additional value such as shares on social media, discussions, SEO, and increased brand recognition. They are also forever accessible.

You can put a price tag on each piece of media or action, such as a Facebook share being valued at $5, and an organic site visit through the SEO of that content as $10. By calculating total media value rather than looking solely at impressions, you can better determine if your budget will go to good use.

5. Performing A/B Testing

A/B testing is a user experience research methodology consisting of a randomized experiment with two variants, A and B. You can use it to compare two versions of a web page, email, or other marketing assets to figure out the better performing variation which will help you optimize the layout for future initiatives.

You can make slight changes in the page, such as language, colors, and images and see which one yields the best conversion rate. A/B testing is crucial for top of the funnel marketing by providing valuable data that will help you reach your business goals.

6. Retargeting Site Visitors and Email Readers

Retargeting provides you with the opportunity to optimize your mid and bottom-funnel which are customers who are already familiar with your brand. It is a cookie-based technology that uses simple Javascript code to anonymously track your audience all over the Web. The code, or pixel, is obscure to your site visitors and won’t affect your website’s performance. Every time new visitors come to your site, the code drops an anonymous browser cookie. The cookie will let your retargeting provider know when to serve ads as they browse the Web, ensuring that your ads are served to only to people who have previously visited your site.

You can also place retargeting pixels in your email signature to retarget those who open emails from you. When retargeting works well for you, it means that people are interested in your product and that you’ll be able to run successful abandoned shopping cart campaigns too.

7. Blogging

A blog is a marketing tool that can help develop your online presence, attract leads, and engage with your audience. This is especially useful if you are a new business, or an established business launching a new product.

Blogs add value to site visitors, establish trust, and is a good base to have before engaging in other marketing efforts. Make sure you have a couple of blog posts on your site for visitors to access. You need to update them regularly since they are useful in helping drive traffic to your website, convert them into leads, establish authority in your industry, and grow your business. If you still have to find time for it, take the timestamps off so they don’t seem dated.

8. Having A Clear Set of Goals

Make sure you communicate your budget and goals to your vendors since every client is different. This way, you can determine which one will fit you the best and provide you with the results you want. Factors to consider include:

  • anticipated number of site visitors
  • conversion rate
  • social followers or shares
  • event attendees
  • email addresses
  • downloads
  • ads served
  • impressions

You can make a list of primary and secondary goals to help your vendor know which is your top priority so they can better adjust and choose the right strategy to fit your needs.

9. Paying Attention to Social Media During Marketing Campaigns

When engaging in any sort of social campaign, make sure that you have someone ready to answer questions online. If you prefer to answer a specific question offline, make sure to answer them first publicly and ask them to email you.

You should also actively engage when a press release gets picked up and shared on social media. These are opportunities to convert questions and compliments into customers.

Conclusion

An effective marketing strategy helps in developing goods and services with the best profit-making potentials. It is also useful in addressing the areas affected by organizational growth so you can better develop a plan to cater to your customer needs. However, it is also important to consider money-saving strategies so it’ll be a win-win situation for your business.

How to Boost Your Productivity with a Personalized Social Media Content Calendar

How to Boost Your Productivity with a Personalized Social Media Content Calendar

Daniel Kelly

Daniel Kelly

Web Design & Digital Growth Specialist

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Maintaining a social media platform can be stressful at times, especially if you are running multiple ones. You need to keep them updated so your audience will stick around. This is why you should use a social media calendar.

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Why a social media content calendar?

Red Bull, Disney Parks, National Geographic, and other big brands make use of a social media content calendar. Having one of your own will make your life easier. How? Let’s find out.

  • Keeps you organized thus saving you a lot of time.
  • Planning your social media content ahead is a surefire way to keep yourself sane. Any writer knows that coming up with great content takes a lot of brainstorming and with a little push from your calendar, you can easily get your creative juices flowing. This also helps you avoid the pitfall of multitasking and getting lost in a sea of to-do lists.
  • A number of social media calendar tools such as Hootsuite’s planning tool can let you schedule posts ahead of time. This means you can basically get the posting done automatically.
  • Makes you post consistently.
  • Consistency in posting your content can help increase your social media accounts’ likes and subscribers. You have to show up in your audience’s feed to keep them engaged and let them know you’re alive and kicking. This will also increase your organic reach and conversions. Make sure you populate your social media content calendar with a range of relevant topics that you can add or remove later on.
  • Minimizes invalid data, typos, and errors.
  • Some of the things that make readers cringe are invalid content, typos, and grammar errors. Planning and preparing your posts ahead will give you more time to check your facts and proofread your text before it goes live. This will save you from a lot of embarrassment and establish your credibility.
  • Gives you more time to find and plan better social strategies.
  • If you’re always running out of time to keep up with your social media content, you won’t be able to move beyond that. While other people are thinking of running an Instagram contest or looking for influencer partners or getting onboard LinkedIn, you’d be stuck cramming for content. Do your social media campaigns a favour and plan ahead.
  • Working along a schedule will also help you track what strategy works using your social media analytics. You can find the right type of content, format, post frequency, and best time of day to post for each social platform. You can experiment and improve along the way.
  • Never miss out relevant events and topics.
  • Once you have your daily topics covered, you will be able to strategically observe global moments relevant to your audience.
  • Gives you more time to create high-quality content.
  • Nowadays, it’s not surprising that there is a whole team of creative talent behind a social media post such as copywriters, designers, video editors, and photographers. They, too, will benefit from a social media content calendar allowing them to come up with their best. This will help push your marketing goals to the next level.

8 steps to creating a social media content calendar

Before filling your social media calendar with details, follow these simple steps to make them more effective:

1. Go through your social networks and content for fine-tuning.

Just like any business, your social platforms need to go through an audit. This can help you develop a clear picture of your current social media efforts, identify areas for improvement, and find opportunities for new strategies. You need to keep the following updated.

  • Profiles and accounts
  • Account security and passwords
  • Work assignee
  • Audience’s demographics and personas
  • Goals and KPIs
  • Areas for improvement

Keeping these updated will give you valuable information that’s unique to your audience, accounts, and brand. You can repeat your strategy for successful posts, campaigns, and tactics which can maximize your ROI.

2. Choose your social media channels

New social media platforms keep popping up on top of Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Find the time to stay on top of new developments and see which new social media platform your audience is getting on. This way, you’ll know if you need Instagram Threads or even TikTok. These will all depend on your audience’s demographics. Once you get the gist, review the best practices for each platform’s business marketing strategies so you’re up-to-date with new insights.

3. Map out data you need to track

As have mentioned earlier, you might have a number of people in your content creation team so this means you need more information output. These might include:

  • The platform including specific formats such as feed post, IGTV, Story, poll, live stream, ads, and shoppable posts
  • Date and time including the time zone
  • The copy
  • Visuals including photos, videos, illustrations, infographics, and gifs
  • Link to assets
  • Link to published post
  • Affiliates including product launch, events, contests, general brand awareness, and customer service
  • Geo-targeting
  • Analytics report

You might also want to add details about your content like one-time or multiple-use, approved or not, posted or not, and organic or paid. If paid, you may also want to add your budget.

4. Establish a workflow

Now, it’s time to get things done. You need to:

  • Plan how often you want to post on each channel.
  • Consider the best time to post per channel by referring to your analytics. Normally, the best time to post on social media is between 9 and 12 a.m. EST, early in the workweek from Monday to Wednesday.
  • Consider what your content ratio will look like. You can use the 80/20 ratio where 80% of your social media posts are informative, educational, and provides entertainment to your audience, while 20% is allotted for the promotion of your business.
  • Assign who needs to approve posts and how communication will work there.
  • Consider the process for brainstorming new content, including assignment and creation.
  • Document everything and keep it in an easy-to-access place in your social media calendar spreadsheet.
  • Keep a guidelines tab that contains useful resources in your calendar.

5. Store your content in a reliable library

A lot of people will vouch that content and visuals should not only be accessible on one’s computer but also on mobile. Keep them orderly so you easily find them. They should be stored in a reliable content repository, media resource database, or digital asset bank as some people call them.

Whether you opt to use Dropbox, Google Drive, your company’s internal network, or made-to-purpose database software, your social media content library should have the following important features:

  • Enough space for large files
  • Accessible from your phone as well as your computer
  • Has privacy features but can be easily shared
  • Provides links to individual files so they’re just a click away once on your calendar

Set it up in a way that you can easily find what you’re looking for.

6. Start crafting your posts

If you want to get more ideas on what your posts should cover, you can consider:

  • Your teammates, which can help build a personal connection with your audience.
  • Video content such as Stories on Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat, IGTV, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram live video, Tik Tok, and In-feed videos on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest.
  • Company news, articles, and blog posts
  • Market data, industry news, and infographics
  • Behind-the-scene stories and product peeks
  • Events, contests, and giveaways
  • Gifs, animations, memes, and quotes
  • Product and customer photos
  • Guest and influencer posts
  • Client feedback and press mentions
  • Polls, surveys, and questions
  • Tips and tricks
  • Twitter conversations
  • Evergreen blog posts

7. Invite your team to review and use their feedback to improve

Ask the people who will be using your social media content calendar every day to check its functionality. Make sure they have the password and know how to find, download, and upload files. Set up a meeting and get their feedback so you can improve on it.

8. Start publishing and scheduling future posts

Once you’ve covered everything mentioned above, you can sit down and start publishing your content. If you are pressed for time to manually publish on a daily basis, a calendar with scheduling function will answer to your needs.

Useful social media content calendar apps and tools

If you are not yet familiar with the popular social media content calendar apps and tools that every content writing team uses, here are 3 favourites:

1. Google Sheets

Google’s productivity tools have saved a lot of people from losing their sanity. Use them to create your own personalised calendar or use a template.

2. Trello

Trello allows you to add as many cards and files as you want. You can also personalize your theme, get notifications, set due dates, and create calendar commands among other useful features.

3. Hootsuite Planner

Hootsuite Planner allows you to get your visual overview and all your assets such as copy, visuals, and links in one place. You can also schedule a post or publish directly from the calendar with just a click of a button.

Conclusion

Now that we have laid out the game plan, engage with your followers with a social media content calendar and watch your brand flourish!

Pros and Cons Between Doing Social Media Marketing Yourself

Social Media Marketing

Pros and Cons Between Doing Social Media Marketing Yourself

Social Media Marketing
Daniel Kelly

Daniel Kelly

Web Design & Digital Growth Specialist

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A lot of businesses, brands, and individuals have embraced social media platforms such as Facebook or Instagram so that consumers can notice their product or services online. Social media allows you to reach people locally and as far as internationally. If you are a business owner planning to run your own marketing strategy, it is important to have a good understanding of the characteristics of your target audience so you will be able to personalize your messages and resonate with them appropriately.

Social media platforms can boost your brand’s overall visibility. However, handling your marketing strategy across the different platforms may be overwhelming. Should you hire an agency to do the nitty-gritty work for you? Let’s find out.

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Role Of A Social Media Marketing Agency

In order for companies to have an active digital presence, they need an active social media presence plus a good marketing strategy to reach their business goals. This is why the creative experts at social media agencies have a big role to fulfil. What jobs and responsibilities do they perform on a daily basis?

  • Create a monthly content plan for different clients from different industries
  • Keep up-to-date on the latest industry news and trends
  • Engage with users online, replying to their comments and queries
  • Come up with new post/blog ideas, schedule, and publish them
  • Follow up on emails and calls
  • Find ways to gain higher engagement metrics

How a Social Media Agency Can Benefit You

A social media marketing agency handles a business’ social media publishing activities including the creation of social media content such as blog posts, videos, and events. How can they help business owners like you?

  • Gives you more time to run your business by taking care of the projection and maintenance of your brand value. They are experts when it comes to creating association and fostering trust with your company, product, or service, promoting the positive images of your brand, without compromising brand values.
  • Saves you money by eliminating the need to having your in-house marketing team. Hiring new employees with full-time salaries can cost you a lot more as compared to having a fixed monthly cost with agencies.
  • Saves you time by eliminating the need to have your people trained since agencies already have an extensive set of expertise and experience and know their way around social media. They are also used to working with different kinds of industries.
  • Are always collaborating, generating new ideas, and coming up with specific marketing strategies to achieve your business objective. Every business needs a customized strategy and that’s what they do.

Establishing a partnership with a social media agency will allow you to scale up your specific goals and grow your business.

Pros of DIY Social Media Marketing

DIY social media marketing comes with an increased workload but it works for some small businesses. What benefits can one get with a DIY strategy?

  • Cuts a major cost in your expenses. Doing your own marketing, having a small in-house social marketing team, or outsourcing an employee will save you money.
  • Allows you to learn and come up with everything from scratch. You will get the chance to think of a unique idea and plan an effective strategy. You’ll also get to design creative layouts and write your content, publish posts, communicate with your audience and reply to their comments.
  • Gives you the chance to learn how to analyse your own campaign data and other social media marketing metrics and statistics.
  • Lets you spend more time with your followers thus giving you mandatory time for social activities. Engaging with your audience will build their trust and make them more aware of your business.

Cons of DIY Social Media Marketing

While handling your own social media marketing may sound grand, it does have its downside:

  • You have to do everything all by yourself. Although there are social media marketing tutorials that can teach you how each platform works and what type of content to produce for each of them, you have to hustle double-time to learn the process while still having to focus on your products and services. This will take valuable time away from you and sacrifice both ends.
  • It gives unrealistic expectations. In doing your own social media marketing, you have to set appropriate key performance indicators (KPI) in order to meet your target return on investment (ROI). This entails time, commitment, effort, and interest. Lacking in any of these will lead to less productivity and poor results.
  • It’s costly than you think. Once you learn how to publish posts on social media, you’ll learn that running ad campaigns aren’t free. Social media agencies have the right tools and are knowledgeable on social media expenses which will cost you much less in the long run.

Conclusion

DIY social media marketing may be rewarding but is a very tedious responsibility for business owners. With the time required to run a successful marketing plan, you won’t have much opportunity to focus on the more important stuff, which is ensuring your business is running smoothly and efficiently. So entrust a dedicated social media agency to do the work for you and they’ll constantly bring in newer and more valuable insights to create compelling campaigns and achieve real-driven results for your company.

Your Website and Inbound Marketing: Why They Need Each Other

Your Website and Inbound Marketing: Why They Need Each Other

Daniel Kelly

Daniel Kelly

Web Design & Digital Growth Specialist

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Just like any relationship, your website and inbound marketing need to work together to make your business succeed. To help you reach your goals, inbound marketing must undergo four stages.

  1. Attract – In this stage, you turn strangers into visitors and get to know each other.
  2. Convert – You have to convince them that you’ve got what they’re looking for so they’ll stick around.
  3. Close – Going through your products and information, they give in and become your customers.
  4. Delight – Happy customers turn into promoters. They spread the good word giving you free advertisement.

Sounds easy to achieve, right? Not quite.

Attracting relevant traffic might be easy with the help of keyword-optimised content, social media marketing, and paid social advertising. However, if the rest of your website is not optimised for search or your user experience is poor, don’t expect amazing outcomes.

A website created for your user’s needs and optimised for search can make a huge impact on your inbound results. Focus on optimisation so that users can find it easily. Consider these following areas:

  • Budget for your website
  • Control over the website changes
  • A Content Management System (CMS) in line with SEO
  • An understanding of the content you want to offer in your website
  • Your branding and user journey

Don’t know where to start? Here is a list of essentials that will help make your inbound and content marketing successful.

Your Website: To DIY or Not

Basic

Your website needs basic necessities to function well with your content marketing effort. These are:

  • Insights - Your website is not about you. It’s about what your customers need to hear from you to make informed decisions. This is why you need an understanding of your customers’ buying habits, keywords, and preferences so you can apply these on your website.
  • A Flexible CMS - Your content management system (CMS) should let you easily publish content directly to the Web as well as agile and responsive enough to let you update your content, add links, and tinker with the design yourself. This way, you can optimise it accordingly.
  • A strong brand - Your brand is who you are. Make sure your clients can identify with it.
  • Responsive design - A helpful user experience across all your devices will make your prospects and customers go back for more.
  • A strategically beautiful design - This helps catch your prospects’ attention, get your message across, and help them act.
  • Strong product or service pages - Give your customers strong visuals that are descriptive and compelling.

Intermediate

If you’ve gone past the basics, you can move up the scale and apply these strategies to get more traffic to your site:

  • Optimise your web pages - Make sure your web pages are SEO-friendly, answer your prospects’ questions, and are regularly updated.
  • Use a strong Call-To-Action (CTA) - A call to action helps convert your viewers to leads as well as get them to provide their details so make sure your blogs have one. Make them brief and use strong verbs such as “Sign up”, “Learn more”, or “Get started”.
  • Create landing pages that capture leads - A landing page is very useful because it is where your website visitors land when they first reach your site. Make sure it attracts and engages the right audience and convinces them to respond to your call-to-action.

Advanced

Now, you’re ready to level up. What do you need when you’ve reached this stage?

  • Case studies - As previously discussed, your website is not about you but your clients so talk about them and the results they’ve reaped.
  • Content that solves visitors’ problems - A great way to go about this is to talk to your prospects about their pain points and their challenges.
  • A blog and a resource section - Attract your personas with high-quality, valuable, and educational content. This is a must if you want to keep your customers.
  • Personalised web content and experiences - Different people from anywhere in the world are looking at your web pages 24/7—at least that’s what you’re hoping for. This is where automation comes in. You need to adapt your web pages to whoever is looking at it. Use automation tools that will allow you to do this.
  • Implement a lead nurturing workflow - A lead nurturing workflow leads to higher conversion rates and increased engagement with your contacts using automated touches. It helps you close more educated and qualified customers faster so make use of it!

Conclusion

A well-planned and properly executed inbound marketing helps you earn the attention of your customers. It also makes your company easy to be found and draws customers into your business. Do it correctly and your prospects will surely find their way to your website and make your business soar.

How to Use WordPress and HubSpot Together for Your Business’ Success

How to Use WordPress and HubSpot Together for Your Business’ Success

Daniel Kelly

Daniel Kelly

Web Design & Digital Growth Specialist

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Like two sides of a coin, HubSpot and WPEngine are very different but work purposely for the same goal. With their recent official tie-up, users can now enjoy easy access to HubSpot’s plugin and tools on certain templates. So, how do you make use of them as complementary platforms?

If you are already using WordPress as your content management system (CMS) and WPEngine as your hosting provider, adding HubSpot into the mix will help you reap benefits. How?

  • Embedding HubSpot forms can help you in capturing leads and adding them to segmented lists.
  • Implementing automated email marketing can help you engage with leads after they have submitted a form.
  • Adding live chat or chatbots can help you in scoring leads and closing deals. They also provide faster and more specific answers to your customers’ questions.
  • Helps in tracking visitors and conversion rates so you can update or refine content thereby improving your site’s performance.

The good thing about this is that you can level up your marketing, sales, and customer service/support capabilities on the same WordPress dashboard you’re using.

Your Website: To DIY or Not

Why you need WPEngine apart from your existing HubSpot CMS and CRM.

Activities that require you to run server-side code such as upvoting, commenting, or creating new posts require a fully custom database which is not possible to do on HubSpot because of some restrictions. What HubSpot can offer you is its HubDb which only works like an Excel spreadsheet.

Another benefit you can get from building a site on WordPress with WPEngine as the hosting provider is the security it provides. In addition, it will allow your users to create their individual accounts. So if your marketing website is built on HubSpot, don’t hesitate to build your customer forum on WordPress under a subdomain.

WPEngine also has a staging environment and the backup system. In this staging environment, you can play with a copy of your live site and make new changes and features that won’t affect the live one. Once you’re good to go, just click a button and the staging site is copied to the live one. It doesn’t stop there. If you want to revert back to the previous version, you can easily do that, thanks to WPEngine’s automatic backup feature.

If you’re already a HubSpot user, make use of WPEngine to create something more complicated while allowing HubSpot to capture leads. Make use of their partnership and make your business soar higher!

Useful Tips To Help You Get More Leads with PPC Campaigns

Useful Tips To Help You Get More Leads with PPC Campaigns

Daniel Kelly

Daniel Kelly

Web Design & Digital Growth Specialist

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Are you attempting to improve your existing pay-per-click (PPC) campaign or start from scratch? eCommerce and services sites need to have PPC ads in place. Once people who are searching for your services or products on Google click your ads, they are taken straight to your page earning you more traffic. You can follow these tips and master the art of PPC.

Your Website: To DIY or Not

Beginning Stages

Aside from SEO, PPC ads are a great way to increase your visibility thus generating more leads. People using Google usually have a product or service already in mind. This is why you have to carefully consider your positioning and market share. Here’s how you can start:

1. Make Your Copy Matter

The content you use in your PPC ads is in control of your business so make sure they are of high quality and relevance! You should place great importance on the keywords you want to rank for as well as on the extra information or extensions you want to share such site links and promotional and location extensions. A good copywriter can help you create thoughtful and well-written content which in turn generate better leads.

2. Hit Your Target

Optimise your ads to reach your particular personas based on age, gender, previous searches, interests, household income, and location as well as devices such as desktop, mobile, tablet, smart TV and time schedule. Carefully tailoring your ads to people who will respond favourably will also bring you better ROI.

Existing Ad Campaigns

If you already have existing ads and feel that you’re not getting the results you want, try some of these options and see what kind of impact they bring. They would help you get more leads without having to shell out more money.

1. Expand your keywords

Expand your keyword list before creating new ads by mining SEO data and looking into unused keyword verticals. You can also mine the search query data generated in your existing campaigns.

2. Improve your quality score

Bring your ads to a higher rung by revisiting your target keywords and increasing your bid with match keyword phrases. You may also opt to target branded keywords. With this, you may get to enjoy Google’s generosity and be rewarded with a high-quality score with a lower CPC (cost per click) and a higher position among other ads.

3. Consider using new platforms

There is no doubt about Google when it comes to PPC ads but other search engines such as Bing, Yahoo, and Bai Du may also help in generating qualified leads and in reaching out to better audiences. Different platforms like LinkedIn, Adbrite, and Advertising.com may also help you reach your target market if you base it on data research.

4. Take note of your mobile ads

Optimise your ads for mobile to keep up with the changing times. A lot of people are using mobile for their searches and if you’re aiming to have ads that drive direct phone calls, make sure you offer a click to call feature. When working on mobile ads, consider the following:

  • Mobile screens are tiny so make sure your ads are short, clearly written, concise, and impactful.
  • Segment your mobile campaigns from your PPC campaigns to see how well they are performing with the data coming through.
  • Use mobile-responsive landing pages to ensure that the UX is completely optimised to suit your audience and their behaviours, which can lead to a conversion.

5. Pay attention to your remarketing

Make sure you revisit your remarketing ads regularly and optimise them once you receive more data on their performance. Direct these ads to target individuals who have already shown interest in your services. Your remarketing ads will then help channel them through the funnel towards your desired goal and capture them as a lead.

Conclusion

Getting your PPC campaign right may be hard to master but if you consider these tips, you are well on your way to attaining more leads.

5 Inbound Marketing Strategies You Should Have

5 Inbound Marketing Strategies You Should Have

Daniel Kelly

Daniel Kelly

Web Design & Digital Growth Specialist

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What is inbound marketing? Inbound marketing is a very useful tool that can help you draw customers to your products and services. It comes in the form of social media marketing, content marketing, search engine optimization, and branding. However, blasting customers and prospects with messages hoping that they’ll buy from you is not a good idea. You need to engage and provide them with valuable content which will help them better understand their challenges and pain points.

With the use of relevant content that answers prospects’ questions and helps them understand the potential solutions to their problems, inbound marketing can help you attract your target market. This experience helps when they’re ready to avail of the solution that they need from you.

These five inbound marketing strategies can help you attract and engage with your prospects.

Your Website: To DIY or Not

1. Social Media

When it comes to facilitating the creation and sharing of information, interests, and ideas, nothing beats social media. The virtual communities and networks do only aim to automate posts to drive people to a brand but also to create an impactful experience for the audience on the platform they are already using. This is why when utilizing social media, you should be authentic and align your content with your brand.

A good example of this would be creating an infographic that summarizes information in a way that is easy to understand. When you provide value to your audience, you can increase your social media engagement and organically attract people to your content.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Search engine optimization is a must-have tool in inbound marketing since it helps increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. It makes it easy for the people you want to find your website navigate there organically. This is why there’s a great deal of value in having a website that is designed for lead generation.

SEO and inbound marketing work together, revolving around the creation of valuable content for your prospects. Your SEO strategy should be centered around your buyer personas and before crafting content, you should conduct proactive keyword research to understand what your personas are searching for. This can simplify your task and as you continue observing SEO best practices, it will drive high rankings and make it easy for your prospects to find your content.

3. Email Marketing

The goal of email marketing is to send valuable and relevant emails to your prospects. It provides you with an opportunity to choose who you want to talk to and how you want to go about reaching them. To develop a stellar email campaign, you need to gain a better understanding of the type of content and messaging your prospects are likely to engage with.

Keep in mind that CTA’s may work for some personas while newsletters may be attractive for others. A downward trend in your open and click-through rates in your emails means that you should reevaluate who you’re sending them to. You should also ensure you are providing value to your contacts otherwise, you won’t be able to drive successful conversions.

4. Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing gives you the opportunity to provide a personalized approach to doing business online. By providing an automated conversation with your website visitors, it will move your buyers through marketing and sales funnels.

Conversational marketing techniques apply seamlessly to an inbound marketing strategy. However, it can only be successful when supported by relevant content. Chatbots are engineered to be engaging and are a good form of communication tactics. They can also help you drive your lead generation as long as you provide your prospects with something they’ll gain value from.

5. Partner Marketing

In partner marketing, two or more brands collaborate using a variety of marketing programs to achieve their business objectives. It can help boost awareness and scale business by growing the network through link building. Customers are also more likely to react positively when two or more companies collaborate on new, valuable content together. This is a great way to build authentic relationships while organically attracting high-fit leads.

To develop your partner marketing strategy, make sure you establish mutual goals, co-host events, create co-branded content, ensure careful reporting, and set partnership tiers. These best practices can help your customers find the authenticity and credibility they are looking for.

Conclusion

Take advantage of multiple strategies at once so you can diversify your risk and allow your marketing efforts to be successful even if one tactic doesn’t seem to work. This can help you leverage your content. Make sure you also evaluate their performance constantly to find out which one is the most effective and which one needs more push.

Why You Should Use Content Pillar Strategy

Why You Should Use Content Pillar Strategy

Daniel Kelly

Daniel Kelly

Web Design & Digital Growth Specialist

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Behind every successful marketing campaign lies irresistible content that resonates with the right people. This is why a killer content marketing strategy is crucial if you want to rake in revenues. How do you make content marketing work? Two words. Content pillars.

Content pillars use a strategy that provides meaningful pieces of content that your target audience⁠—and Google⁠— will love, focusing on a specific topic or theme instead of keywords. This can include eBooks, reports, and guides.

Your Website: To DIY or Not

Why content pillars?

Using content pillars can help you narrow down content ideas and focus on the creation instead. Here is a rundown of why you should consider the strategy:

  1. Content pillars make navigating your content easier – This goes for both humans and search engines. The internet is flooded with content and information which makes it difficult for users to find what they need. By using content pillars, you can talk about your topic in a streamlined and easy to navigate way, helping users find the one they are looking for. Links in your pillar page can point them to other relevant content otherwise known as clusters.

    Making things this easy for people can help you build a loyal following and most possibly convert them to customers. You also help search engines find what they need to index and rank your site. Google favors fresh and relevant content so if you keep adding and updating your pillar posts with more cluster content, you’ll surely rank higher.

  2. Content pillars can raise rankings for linked pages – Pillar pages help Google quickly determine what your content is about. If you don’t confuse Google’s algorithm, then it’ll rank you higher in search results.

    So focus on a key topic, write cluster posts, link to relevant pages, and update regularly. Then wait for the magic to work.

  3. Content pillars help you focus your content on your customer’s needs – Knowing what your customers are looking for can help you create killer content that produces results. Make sure every piece is focused on your target audience and pique their interest to help them stay on your site longer.

    Let’s say a buyer is looking for information on how to keep her skin moisturized. So, after reading your article about this, she moves on to another related topic about day and night skincare routines, then to sun damage prevention, and so on. When she’s finally ready to buy skin-care related products, she will surely remember your brand!

Creating your content pillars

The first step in using the content pillar strategy is to understand your target audience and identify your buyer personas. You need to create different content pillars for each buyer persona that you have and give them what they want. The important things to remember in doing so are:

Growth-Driven Design has its benefits:

  • Identify the type of content your buyers are looking for.
  • Address their pain points through content.
  • Identify the keywords they are searching for.
  • Research on which content performed well historically.

The second step is to set up social listening. Go through what your target audience is talking about on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn. You can set up search streams to help you monitor conversations that mention your products, brand, services, and even competitors. Take note of the topics that are mentioned, the articles that are shared, and the posts get the most attention. Use this information and back it up with keyword research for your content creation. You can use Google Adwords to search for your keywords.

The last step is to watch your competitors. See what types of pillar content they are using and what type of pieces are getting hits. You can use Buzzsumo to know what’s working for them and then use the popular topics as references for your content.

Planning your content pillars

Plan your content pillars by collecting the ideas and topics and separating them into distinct groups that will become your pillars. They don’t have to be too specific. The main category with subcategories that sprout from questions, ideas, and conversations will do the trick.

Writing your pillar page

Create your pillar page using your content ideas which will also act as the foundation where you will build your topic cluster. Four things to keep in mind:

  1. Your pillar page should only give an overview of the broad topic, letting the cluster pages expound on the smaller details. You can answer questions but make sure to give the related blogs work to do.
  2. Your content should be long-form, made up of at least 3,000 words.
  3. Don’t forget to use hyperlinks to link to cluster posts as well as to other sections within the page.
  4. Start with a killer introduction. Tell your audience something that will make them stay and read on.

Conclusion

Create an easily navigable content structure that will allow your readers to quickly head down to the section that interests them. You should also engage them by scattering related resources that answer questions throughout the page, provide a strong call to action, and consider having a comments section. These will help drive revenue from your digital channel.

Your Brand Story, It Matters

Your Brand Story, It Matters

Daniel Kelly

Daniel Kelly

Web Design & Digital Growth Specialist

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Are you creating a new brand or revitalizing your existing one? Keep in mind that a smart business needs to speak and connect with its market and good branding is an important tool for this communication. Not only will your brand story help you reach larger and new audiences but it will also set you apart from your competitors.

Your Website: To DIY or Not

Brand development is more than just an eye-catching logo and a website

Branding is how to you speak to your customers. It is about creating a story, lifestyle, and experience around your product or service for your customers and audience. To be effective, it needs to highlight your business’ principles, values, and mission and strengthen your promise.

Look at one of Australia’s most enduring Agricultural brands

Change is constant and no business can standstill. The surviving ones will always be those that have adapted to the changing market place. A good example is RM Williams which had taken stock and remained current in order to adapt to the new global retail landscape. They were traditionally known for their classic riding boot and has now evolved to include green and blue leathers and even biker boots.

An essential part of this evolution was preserving the substance of the brand which is based on authenticity, honesty, and craftsmanship. To communicate this in a modern way, they worked on their packaging, creative work, and product development.

By preserving the true, proud Aussie essence of the brand through storytelling and video content, they were able to take the product online and grow. Their boots, accessories, and clothing can be seen in the paddock as well as the boardroom all over the world.

Empower yourself with brand clarity

The most important thing is to know who you are and why you get out of bed each day. Identify your company’s personality and tone of voice. How do you go about speaking to your customers? These factors can guide everyone working in your business and unite them to your brand’s cause. Employees are more likely to feel that same pride and work in the same direction to achieve the goals you have set when they understand your mission and reason for being. It can also help you make decisions and keep you on track.

Why you should consider rebranding

Like most businesses, your company may have grown or evolved beyond its original mission. Are you looking to reach a new audience and broaden your appeal? By rebranding, you will also be able to reposition your brand, look at your strategy, and see how this is communicated.

There may be some parts of your brand story worth keeping. You can easily determine which ones are irrelevant, and which needs to be tweaked. It all depends on how it is presented as media and digital channels evolve. You can always ask your web developer to help you make wise decisions.

Tell your brand’s story using impactful visual communication

Once you have decided on which strategy will work for you, your web developer can easily work with you to ensure that your logo, colour scheme, images, written and video content are consistent. You should also make sure that you do what your brand says it will. Customers value honesty and integrity and by delivering on your promises, your brand is going to stay around for a long time.