Beginners’ Guide to Evergreen Content
Highly effective content marketing strategies use search-optimized content that retains its value and relevance long after it has been published.
5 Ways to Know Your Digital Marketing is Really Working
At the end of the month, your biggest question about any marketing campaign is whether or not it’s making a positive difference for your business. In the years before Facebook, Snapchat, YouTube, and Google, marketers had a difficult time measuring the ROI of their campaigns in digital marketing, lacking much of the insight from current analytics. Now modern, measurable marketing is the difference between stagnant sales and steady growth.
But even with streaming data, today’s marketers have trouble determining which metrics indicate some measure of success and where (or how) to access them. This is where we can help. Here are some of the best ways you can measure if your marketing is really working.
Set SMART Goals
Every marketing initiative needs to begin with concrete expectations. Specific, measurable, actionable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals are critical to achieving results.
Not sure what a digital marketing SMART goal looks like? Take a look at these two examples:
Generic Example: I want to generate a larger email list.
SMART Example: Increase subscribers by 10,000, decrease churn rate by 20%, increase conversion rate by 10%, and as a result, attract 50,000 subscribers over a six-month campaign.
Generic Example: I want more website visitors, leads, and sales.
SMART Example: Spend $25,000 on optimizing the website’s SEO for six months with an expected 30% growth in traffic.
Framing your goals in this quantifiable way increases your chances of achieving results that will actually make a difference in your business.
Conversions: Online sales and Online-to-store sales
Perhaps the simplest conversion for gauging success equates to dollars and cents. Tracking online sales is easy if you use Google Analytics. After installing a snippet of code on your website, you’ll have access to data and actions that details which campaigns are driving the most online sales.
Number of online transactions: Monitoring transactions helps to track AOV and how customers interact with your online store.
Average order value (AOV): Total sales / number of transactions helps you understand and even influence trends.
Deep sales data: Sales totals generated by channel (e.g. search, social media, email, direct, referrals, radio, promo code) help prioritize campaigns.
Sales conversion rates: Sales / sessions reveals how much traffic is required to generate your target sales.
For local customers who are likely to visit and make in-person purchases, you can collect information from prospective customers on your website, such as an email address, that can later be compared with data collected at the cash register.
Leads: Submission forms
Most websites have forms that customers complete to request services, schedule appointments or access more information as in this video consult form:
Leads are considered conversions in and of themselves: When someone visits your website and takes the time to fill out a form, they’ve converted from visitors into leads. Therefore, your marketing campaign success can be measured by the number of form submissions generated. Analytics data reveals which campaigns utilize your various lead generation forms the most.
Inbound Traffic KPIs: Onsite traffic metrics
The focus of a portion of your marketing efforts should be to convince potential and existing customers to engage with your brand, with the end goal of purchasing your products or services. Therefore, various on-site key performance indicators should be measured on a monthly basis:
Sessions: Which of your campaigns is putting the most eyes on your website? A single session (e.g. page views, events, social interactions, transactions) within a given timeframe helps to understand traffic trends over time.
Pages/Session: Site visits are important, but they don’t indicate whether people are engaged. The unofficial industry standard is 2 pages per session.
Bounce rate: People hitting their “back” button upon landing on your site may indicate a serious problem, but an average of 26% to 40% is considered “healthy.”
Avg. Session Duration: Folks who spend more time browsing are more likely to eventually buy. The industry standard for a good average duration is 2 to 3 minutes.
Organic Traffic Metrics
Since a significant amount of inbound traffic comes from the Google SERP, you should be tracking Google Search Console metrics on a monthly basis:
Average CTR: The percentage of clicks resulting from a search impression is healthy at an average of 2%. Use it to gauge how well your title tags and meta description tags drive searches on Google to your site.
Avg. Position: The average ranking of your site’s URLs for Google search queries can help to better understand traffic and engagement.
Having the confidence to adjust or turn off campaigns that aren’t working, and bolstering those that are, is reliant on a results-based strategy. Knowing how you’ll measure a campaign’s success before you launch it means your business will find predictable and confident growth.
Digital marketing is a major investment of time, money, and energy. We can create and track the SMART goals that will drive steady growth and ROI for your business. Contact RLC Media here to get started!
How CTAs Convert Blog Readers to Leads
Pairing strong calls-to-action on your business blog is one of the most effective and affordable ways to pair traffic and lead generation.
5 Super-Effective Ways to Nurture Prospects with PPC
AdWords and Facebook paid advertising are effective in reaching and nurturing highly-targeted prospects who become consumers.
Let’s face it, most of the time people just aren’t ready to convert. The time it takes to close business lasts anywhere from minutes to months, and competitors have ample time to sway prospects from your sale. That is, unless you do something called nurture.
The catch-all term applies to any system or strategy that moves potential customers down a business’s conversion funnel. And while email is an invaluable channel for engaging prospects, the Gmail promotions tab is where nurture often languishes.
That’s why Adwords’ paid search and Facebook paid social provide consistent brand awareness and greater value without giving customers the feeling they’re being stalked around the internet.
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Use AdWords Tracking Codes and Facebook Pixels
Nurture is the current that draws the stream of consumers to your doorstep.
But if your website exists without the ability to track actions to and on its landing pages, nurture is rendered nearly impossible. There are three primary forms of tracking codes that differ across AdWords, Facebook, and Google Analytics.
AdWords Tracking Code
The tags you can generate in AdWords effectively track your conversions. Simply define the parameters for your conversion and finally paste the code onto your landing page between the <body></body> tags of the page you’d like to track.
The Facebook Pixel
Put the pixel around your website and optimize for different types of on-site actions.
In order to avoid overlapping data, distinguish the parameters of a conversion: revenue, email address, or other.
Google Analytics UA Code
Most people track organic metrics using an Analytics code on their site. It provides essential nurture data, informing consumer actions to, on, and from your site.
Without tracking site-related data, it’s difficult to evaluate the success on each channel that a business uses to eventually nurture consumers.
2. Keywords Research
The primary advantage to paid search and social is the ability to reach hyper-targeted audiences as opposed to the unmeasurable ears and eyeballs of a radio or TV spot. And a great place to start is Google’s Keyword Planner, which allows you to research and prioritize new keywords for your AdWords account.
While broad keywords may be a waste of your time if you’re a smaller business, consider search intent: what do the search queries you’re bidding on say about the prospect’s ultimate goal?
Facebook works similarly in that you can leverage their targeting options to zoom in on local demographics and view how many potential customers in the area fit your targeting goals. With both PPC strategies, the nurture funnel for your business initiates prospects much closer to conversion.
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Connect Messaging Between Platforms
If a potential customer sees a text ad, their next steps may include clicking and then downloading an ebook or whitepaper.
Your Facebook messaging should overlap this nurturing effort by serving an ad to the very same users that downloaded the white paper. This ad should address the problem suggested in the text ad and offer a research-based solution.
It’s essential that effective advertising acknowledges that channels are interdependent; they are more effective when they create a flow of information that educates and moves the consumer towards a purchase.
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Utilize Ad Copy IF Functions
The digital advertising gold standard is an ad capable of adapting on the fly to fulfill the individual search query and sales funnel stage of a prospect.
According to Google, “IF functions allow you to insert a specific message in your text ads when a condition is met, and a default text when it does not.” In other words, if you generally have difficulty converting mobile users, make the ad more appealing to consumers viewing on their phones.
With IF functions, you can primarily target cart abandoners with hyper-targeted messaging using “limited,” “exclusive,” or time-sensitive offer with greater discounts. Prospects not quite so far along in the sales funnel will merely see the standard sale.
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Meet Better Prospects with Lookalike and Similar Audiences
Facebook’s Lookalike Audiences and AdWords’ Similar Audiences leverage current customer data to locate new high-quality prospects.
Through targeting or bid adjustment, you can reach audiences similar to your existing remarketing lists in AdWords. And on Facebook, you can create multiple Lookalikes based on their level of similarity to your original audience.
All new prospects are not created equal and can be dropped into your nurture funnel accordingly based on the comparative data.
Still Struggling to Convert Prospects into Customers?
The question is no longer whether a particular channel is worth the investment. You need to be able to reach prospective customers wherever they exist. Fill your nurture funnel and earn new leads with RLC Media’s optimization strategies and expertise. We can help.