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DaBrian Marketing Blog: News, Insights, and Digital Marketing

Enhanced AdWords Campaigns – Helpful or Not?

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Some Background

By now, I’m sure you’ve heard of Google’s new enhanced campaigns. These will “simplify” your PPC accounts by allowing you to combine similar Campaigns in to one Campaign without losing any unique settings from the various Campaigns.

Enhanced Campaign Features

From the Campaign view, your account will look simpler (less Campaigns), but at the Ad Group level or deeper (i.e. site links & ad extensions) things could get messy and more complicated. Being able to target different devices and locations at different times and bids is very useful. Having all these settings at the same level can even make them more powerful, but probably not simpler.

The Burning Question

So the question remains–are these enhanced campaigns truly helpful? Will having these various optional settings at one location aid the effectiveness of PPC advertising, or in other words increase Clicks and/or CTRs? Or at least will being able to move easily using these setting in conjunction with one another enable better testing and ultimately improved optimization of PPC Campaigns? Although it may take some time before we discover the answers to these questions, one thing is certain, which is that data collection is invaluable to us as marketers. Google AdWords must make sure that we have a method of easily slicing the data into categories (i.e. mobile devices, specific promotions, geographic locations, etc.) in order for these enhanced campaigns to be helpful and in the long run make our lives simpler.

5 Rapid Fire Social Media Tips

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Along with the exponential popularity of social media, there’s been an equally large amount of misconceptions surrounding the “right” or “surefire” way to be social and reap all its benefits. In light of that, we’ve compiled a quick list of tips that almost any organization can use, whether they’re building a social strategy, looking to improve their efforts, or are still learning how social media works.

Expand your presence (if it makes sense)

A big misconception related to building a presence on social media is that you should focus on one network. Another big one? That you need to be anywhere and everywhere. Both seemingly have their benefits, whether you’ve got limited resources for the former or a small company and big dreams for the latter. The problem here is that not every network is right for your business. The best approach is to experiment, evaluate which networks are really worth it, and move from there. Wash, rinse, repeat as necessary.

Set aside the appropriate amount of time

Think that your entire social media workload can be handed off to an intern who works a few hours a week? Think again! As you learn more about social’s impact on a business, you’ll begin to appreciate the amount of time and work it takes. This is due to the fact that now, more than ever, social media represents the face and personality behind a company. Our last tip will talk about this in greater detail, but just remember: marketing with social media is just as important as any other tactic.

Don't spam!

This tip falls in line with the first one on the list. The assumption that “the more you post from the most places, the better off you’ll be” really shows a lack of knowledge and experience surrounding social media. Understanding that different networks attract different audiences, and that those different audiences have different expectations in terms of post language, content, and frequency, all come into play during a business’s social media strategic planning.

Cater the message to the network

To piggy back off of the previous point, crafting messages that align with the networks you’re sending from should be the last line of defense before social media communications head out the door. This also reinforces the point of getting educated on the subject. Once you do, you’ll find out that Twitter is more useful for quick, frequent updates, while images and videos are better served for Facebook. Little things like that can mean the difference between fostering engagement and your following taking a major nosedive.

Bring in company and employee personality

One final thing to realize about social – your business is one in a sea of many. It’s going to be difficult to set your business apart, and there isn’t going to be an end-all be-all solution. One great way to get started is to add distinct personality to your social media presence. Remember earlier in the post how we mentioned the face behind a company? Audiences are on social to interact with other people, and nothing will make you look like a robotic, faceless corporation more than impersonal messaging or broadcasts focused solely on you.

Have a tip we might’ve missed? Let us know in the comments below!

PPC Just Makes “Cents”

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Pay-Per Click (PPC) advertising is an effective way to market your company that also brings measurable value to you. PPC advertising creates a great amount of exposure and visibility. This makes it an efficient and cost effective way to increase leads, generate sales, and maximize your return on investment. Search engines like Google and Bing allow businesses and individuals to buy listings in their search results. These listings appear along with the natural, non-paid search results. These ads are then sold in an auction. You will be able to control your bid and what you want to pay for a click on the ad. The higher your bid, the better chance you have at ranking number 1 in the sponsored results. But, what exactly can you do to increase sales by using PPC advertising? Let’s take a look at a few basic steps that will help you do just that.

Choosing High Quality, Relevant Keywords

Choosing the right keywords is vital to your PPC campaigns. If you don’t have relevant keywords that are going to resonate with your target audience, then your ad rank, quality score, and your overall PPC campaign will be affected. It is important to develop an extensive keyword list. Keyword research is what is going to enable you to define the keywords used by your target audience to find your products or services. This also allows you to cover numerous possibilities without utilizing the “broad match” function, which is likely to prove more expensive due to the poor audience targeting of this method. Negative keywords are also important to ensure you are not paying for traffic which is of no value to you. Negative keywords are the keywords you specify that shouldn’t be included in the search engine results pages which show your ad. Using multiple match types is also beneficial to a successful PPC campaign. Google AdWords offers “Broad Match”, “Phrase Match”, and exact match for the keywords selected for your ads. Using the proper match type is critical to achieving the targeted traffic you are looking for. Although broad match may deliver high traffic volumes, this choice should be avoided in favor of “phrase match” and “exact match,” which are more precise and will bring more targeted traffic to your website.

Create Relevant Ad Copy with a Clear Call-To-Action

Most PPC advertising platforms require that you write a couple short descriptive phrases about your product or service. It is extremely important that you make sure your grammar, spelling, and overall language is correct and appropriate for your audience. You must also verify that your language adheres to the rules enforced by the Pay per Click service. Get specific! Entice the reader and tell them why they should click on your ad. The better your ad copy, the better your quality score will be. The better your quality score, the less you will pay per click and the higher your ad rank will be. The higher your ad rank, the better chance you will generate more conversions and increase sales.

Improve Landing Page Experience

The landing page associated with your keyword advertisement is just as important as your advertisement itself. The web page associated with your keyword advertisement has to be 100% relevant to the ads offered if you are going to obtain reasonable conversion rates. In general, the typical business web page is often too generic to offer high relevancy to the specific ad. Also, general web pages often have too many distractions to achieve reasonable success at converting PPC advertisements. The objective of the landing page, ideally, is to convert the visitor on the page. However, at times in the sales process, additional information is required. If this is the case, developing a multiple page sales funnel to obtain the desired conversion should be considered. A well constructed and relevant landing page is often the deciding factor as to whether or not a user converts.

Summing It Up

In summary, PPC advertising is an efficient and cost effective way to monitor performance and stay ahead of the competition. It will also help you gain greater exposure and visibility to generate leads and increase sales. Adhering to the three basic steps listed above will put you that much closer to developing and maintaining a successful PPC campaign. Thus, it will help you to drive more traffic, generate more conversions, and increase sales.

If you would like to learn more about how PPC Advertising can help your business drive sales, please comment below or call us at 610-743-5602.

DaBrian Marketing Group Selected by Green Giant Lawn & Tree Care for Website Redesign

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Green Giant Lawn, Tree & Pest Control, a Fleetwood, PA-based Company that provides residential and commercial lawn, tree, & pest control services throughout southeastern Pennsylvania, has chosen DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC, an Internet Marketing company that specializes in Search Engine Marketing & Analytics, to design its new website.

Locally-owned and operated since 1982, Green Giant prides itself on providing effective Lawn Care, Tree Care, & Pest Control services in a family- and environmentally-friendly manner. The new website works to reinforce Green Giant’s commitment to their customers, their industry expertise, as well as their long-standing focus on making life easier for every client.

“We were able to provide a solution to Green Giant Lawn Care’s website challenges and improve the backend functionality,” said Daniel Laws, principal owner of DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC. “The beauty of these solutions is that clients have access to make changes as well as with the support of our team. This new design provides a small sample of our web design capabilities and demonstrates the evolution of our service offerings.”

DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC designed and developed the Green Giant Lawn & Tree Care website using the WordPress CMS platform, greatly improving the site’s user experience, better reinforcing the Green Giant brand, and opening new doors for content customization and more effective marketing.

“Our old website was outdated and not nearly as user friendly as we wanted,” said Daniel Rothermel, owner of Green Giant Lawn & Tree Care. “We choose DaBrian primarily because they committed to providing a site that will be very user friendly and informative while also providing industry leading Search Engine Optimization.”

Green Giant’s new website can be found at GreenGiantLawnCare.com and GreenGiantPestControl.com.

Top 5 Financial Services Marketing Tips

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We do a lot of work with banks and credit unions because of previous relationship within these markets. The financial services marketing landscape has really changed over the past decade and it’s about to get a mobile face lift and whole lot more in 2013. Below are my top five recommendations for bank & credit union marketers:

Go Mobile

Invest in mobile banking and measure the effectiveness of mobile to generate leads as well as increase sales. According to a report by Adology, Mobile banking is having the biggest impact on routine banking activities: 64% of mobile banking users in the U.S. say that the future ability to use their smartphones or tablets to check account balances would be highly valued. This move has the potential to increase liability and risk for financial services institutions, so make sure it delivers value to your customers.

Incorporate Measurement

Measure all of your marketing campaigns and implement tag management solutions. With all of the marketing tactics that financial services use as well as third party application processing, tag management will help to simplify tagging and limit data collection challenges. Tag management boils down to this–one tag on your site for numerous solutions, such as affiliates, third party application, media buys, etc.

Test, Test, Test!

Test your marketing tactics, PLEASE! The cost of many tests can be justified and can help improve your institution’s online sales process. If you’re not testing, you might as well dump a portion of you marketing budget into the trash and set it on fire.

Tag Management for Financial Services Marketing

The best place to test is within the conversion process. Invest the time, money, and resources into conversion optimization. It will require you to bring your partners (third party vendors) to the table for discussions. Tag management solutions can also streamline required vulnerability testing within the application process.

Predictive Modeling for Applications & Quotes

Now that measuring all of your marketing tactics is on the agenda, you should consider attribution and predictive modeling. Attribution modeling will help you give credit to marketing tactics that most impact the conversion process, and predictive modeling will help you to forecast future sales and revenue.

Have your own financial services marketing tips to add? Let us hear them in the comments below!

Create Analytics Reports For ALL Key Players

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So your organization has decided to delve into the world of digital analytics. You’ve done your research, talked to countless analytics professionals and consultants, and performed the song and dance to gain the support of the decision makers for measuring your campaigns. At this point you may be thinking that you are ready to hit the ground running, throwing analytics tracking tags every which way and setting up eye-catching dashboards and graphs. This is looking like a sure-fire thing, right?

Not So Fast!

Before you deploy your analytics tracking solution, let alone begin reporting, you’ll want to get a little more strategic. The beautiful thing about web analytics solutions is that they can be wielded to gather insights that will benefit virtually any department or role in an organization. It is important to understand, however, that even though these solutions can be very flexible and adaptable; this entirely depends on the measurement plan and reporting strategy that’s in place from the start. Laying a solid foundation in measurement is paramount to the success of all involved parties.

Regardless of what industry an organization is in, there are often multiple individuals with unique responsibilities when it comes to marketing and advertising. From marketing managers to copywriters to brand managers, the list can go on and on. Each one of these roles has their own set of responsibilities. With those responsibilities come unique challenges, which very well could be alleviated through increased visibility into marketing, website, and brand performance.

This is why it is a good idea to get these individuals into a room together during the early stages of measurement planning and laying out reports. These reporting capabilities may be great for your own purposes, but these benefits can extend well beyond that. Share the wealth!

Get The Wheels Turning

Now that you’ve rallied all of the right people together, it’s time to figure out what you will be reporting on and how you will be measuring it. I read a very interesting little blog recently that did a really great job of driving the point home that success with analytics comes from asking the right questions. Truer words have never been spoken. When meeting with your marketing, branding, and advertising personnel, be sure to get down to basics: Ask them what they think is a successful action a prospective customer can take in a campaign or on the site. Ask them what they deem as a valuable Key Performance Indicator. Their responses may not be ideal, but they will at least give you a direction to take when deciding what to measure, where to deploy tracking, and what to report on. This high-level feedback will also give you something to base those shiny visuals on when it comes time to develop graphs and performance dashboards.

One of the most important things to keep in mind during this entire process is that analytics reports can be extremely organic. Measurement models and reports can easily be altered to suit changing needs, campaigns, and marketing strategies over time. It might be a good idea to revisit this whole process quarterly or at least bi-annually to ensure that all of those data needs are still being met for ALL players. The key is to stay light on your analytical feet so you can anticipate and adapt accordingly.

What kinds of analytical challenges have you come up against in your organization? Leave us a comment and share your experience!