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DaBrian Marketing Blog: News, Insights, and Digital Marketing

The 5 W’s of Mobile Advertising

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It’s safe to say that the “Mobile Marketing Revolution” is in full swing. To offer a bit of perspective, think about this: Mobile web usage is expected to surpass traditional Desktop Internet browsing by 2015. It’s clear–smartphones and tablets are on the fast-track to ubiquity, and a lot more marketers are starting to catch on and make moves. This week, we’re going to break down Mobile Advertising into its most basic elements.

Here’s the Who, What, When, Where, & Why of Mobile Advertising (your High School English teachers would be so proud!).

Who?

This one is pretty self-explanatory, but there’s nothing wrong with bringing in a little context. In just two years, 40% of American consumers will have a smartphone. That’s a big portion of the market, and that means that advertisers will have to take these devices into account when forming their latest and greatest marketing campaigns. Another thing to consider is the way consumers are using their devices. Now more than ever, mobile devices are becoming the go-to platform for eCommerce, managing finances, performing brand research, and more.

What?

When it comes to mobile advertising, there are many options that marketers will have to consider. Some big ones include mobile-optimized content, mobile-friendly websites, mobile application development, QR Codes, as well as the mobile paid search environment. It’s a lot to wrap one’s head around, and it’ll require research for those marketing teams that are planning to make the mobile transition soon. The numbers don’t lie though–Mobile Ad Spend in the US is projected to reach nearly $4 Billion by the end of this year.

When?

Studies and research have completely agreed on the rise of mobile devices in the future. Consumers are expected to devote more time to using mobile devices, spend more money on mobile apps, and complete more tasks and activities on the small screen. As devices and consumer behavior evolves, marketing teams will have to keep an eye on the trends, capitalize on what they can right now, and prepare for the advances the future will bring.

Where?

Where are these users spending their time? The era of using a smartphone just to check email is over. As these devices have become more sophisticated, average users have become far more comfortable using their smartphones and tablets to complete everyday tasks that were once confined to a Desktop. Shopping, doing research, connecting via Social Media, banking, searching, using brand-specific apps, and playing games–all of these offer big opportunities for a business to gain reach & visibility. Put simply, industry-specific possibilities abound for the mobile arena.

Why?

Time for the most important question of all: Is mobile marketing really worth it? Will it live up to the hype? Time will certainly tell, but the current data is hard to ignore. Mobile devices are fast-becoming the latest communication medium, both from a personal and business perspective. When it comes down to it, successful marketing starts with target audience’s behavior and values, and ends with creating a unique marketing message to match. Mobile devices are poised to be the most effective way to get the word out, and advertisers have begun their plans to explore this new technological frontier.

Have a burning question about your approach to Mobile Advertising? Leave us a comment below!

10 Business System Integrations for Better Marketing

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Everyone wants something for less, but as a business owner, you’re consistently trying to increase sales and improve profit margins. So, the question is: What are the most effective ways of achieving these goals? In my opinion, the integration of business systems or solutions is one of the most under-utilized elements toward achieving these goals. By integrating online business solutions, it allows your business and team to do less manual work while improving efficiencies and overall turnaround time.

Below is my list of top 10 online business solutions that should be integrated to put your business on the path to better sales turnaround time, identifying insights, and improving profit margins:

Web Analytics

Your web analytics solution needs to be implemented onto the entire website accurately. Many times I’ve noticed that prospects or clients have launched websites that do not incorporate tracking into their application, sales, or lead generation processes. In most cases, you should be okay with tracking into these areas as long as you’re not collecting personally-identifiable information. By tracking these areas, you’ll be able to identify opportunities to improve the process as well as your conversion rate (completion).

Search (SEO, PPC, & Onsite)

Search can be used to improve your conversion rate. A few of the easier elements to integrate are SEO, PPC, and Onsite search. An example would be to enable AdWords, Google Analytics, and Google Site Search; however, there are other solutions that have these capabilities as well (Adobe CQ, Search&Promote, and Search Center+). By integrating these solutions, it will give you insights into what keywords or search queries are most critical to the conversion process and cut costs on ineffective keywords.

CRM Solutions (Salesforce.com)

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions are important for all business types, but not every business integrates their CRM with other solutions. This can lead to inefficiencies as well as negatively impact response times and reduce sales volume. Through CRM solution integration, your business can more easily connect account records, automatically import prospects or leads, and segment prospects into different groups. An example would be the integration of Salesforce.com with email marketing solutions.

Billing & Invoicing Solutions (QuickBooks)

You can manage customer and client accounts without juggling separate databases. By integrating with your billing and invoicing services, you can automatically add new customers to your email marketing audience or estimates with CRM solutions. Going this route significantly limits the possibilities for errors.

Email Marketing Solutions

Email Marketing Solutions’ integration capabilities continue to grow through APIs and login authentications. With some email marketing solutions, you have the ability to integrate web analytics, search, CRMs, billing solutions, and a lot more. This also gives you the ability to implement automatic responses and send notifications directly to your sales team.

Publishing Solutions (Drupal, WordPress, etc)

Many CMS’s (Content Management Systems) allow you to leverage plug-ins that make it easy to add signup forms to your website. If you’re already gathering new subscribers with an online form, there are opportunities to connect it to your email audience in order to easily gather new audience members with the tools you’re already using.

Shopping Carts

By integrating shopping carts with your website or email marketing solution, you can grow your audience right from your shopping cart. With eCommerce plug-ins or applications, your online customers can subscribe to your mailings with a single click during the checkout process. You can also sort your audience using information from their purchase history to send them the most impactful messages.

Events Management

With event management integration, you can better communicate with your event attendees. Connect email marketing solutions to your event management account to gather email subscribers from your events. This integration makes it easier to automatically add new attendees to your email audience and sort your audience by attendee information.

Testing Solution (T&T)

Every business should be testing things like content, landing page variations, email subject lines, etc. With testing solutions, you can evaluate the effectiveness of content, landing pages, ad copy, and more. This integration can be completed between your Content Management System and the testing solutions. It makes it easier to get the right message and design in front of the right customers or prospects.

Project Management

My team uses a project management solution to help organize projects, but I would recommend that marketing professionals as well as business owners consider integrating a project management solution into their processes. No more sending documents, waiting for status updates, or looking for meeting information. Many project management solutions are now cloud-based with applications to integrate with Outlook, QuickBooks, and more. Helping your team to stay on track, stay on budget, invoice accurately, and deliver on your brand promise.

Let me start by saying that this list is not all-inclusive, but it is a start. The truth of the matter is that clients, customers, and prospects demand more from your business. They demand solutions to their problems or ideas for improvements. Your business can deliver more with less if you effectively use online marketing solutions and integrate them to work together. So what’s that mean to your business? It could mean more satisfied customers, better prospecting, improved processes, cohesion among online business solutions, internal solutions, and better information that will increase your likelihood for increased sales and high profit margins. Once upon a time, a business owner or marketing professional would need an army to effectively manage all of these tasks but with applications, plug-ins, and CMS solutions, you can get away with one or two really good people to manage it all.

Have your own integration success story? Let us know in the comments section below!

Top 10 Google Analytics Features to Measure Your Marketing

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With so much industry emphasis on things like Big Data and Attribution Modeling, it can be a bit daunting for newcomers to the world of digital analytics to gain a proper foothold. That’s why we decided to put together a free webinar back in early November covering some of the top features in Google Analytics. Our presentation offered the best ways for you to obtain the insights that drive better marketing and a better user experience on and off your website.

In this webinar, we covered a host of features and functionality in Google Analytics, including:

  1. Multichannel Funnels
  2. Content Experiments
  3. Social Media Reporting
  4. Real-Time Reporting
  5. Custom Reports
  6. Shortcuts
  7. Annotations
  8. Webmaster Tools Integration
  9. Visitor Flow Report
  10. Email Integration

This webinar is now available for free on DaBrian Marketing Group’s YouTube channel, so we decided to share it with you today. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the show! And if you like what you see, or have some suggestions for us, please leave a comment below!

“The 4 D’s of Web Design” to Help Drive Sales

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Web Design is arguably the most important aspect of internet marketing. “A recent study found that 48% of online shoppers viewed a branded website as the most trustworthy source of information.”Although Search Engine Optimization is often referred to as the foundation of it all, without a website the implementation of SEO or any other internet marketing component would be pointless. With that being said, a good web design can help businesses drive sales and increase their overall return on investment. It’s 2013 for God’s sake!!!  That means it’s time to ditch the websites that read like brochures and start creating websites that are going to attract, engage, and convert your target audience. So, what does an exceptional web design look like? Here is what I like to call “The 4 D’s of Design” to help you create the right website to meet your company’s needs and drive sales for your business:

1)    DECISION. The first thing you need to do is decide what your brand, look, and feel should look like. Collaborate with your peers and colleagues and figure out what would be best for your organization. Remember, your website is an extension of your company so make sure it reflects as such.

2)    DEFINITION. It’s also important that you define yourself as an organization. Meaning, make sure your company has a documented and unified mission, vision, and purpose. It is important that your website conveys who you are, what you do, why you do it, and how you can help your target audience.

3)    DIRECTION. The user experience is one of the most important aspects of any good web design. If the user is not comfortable with their experience on the site, then they are most likely going to bounce. Make sure that your visitors are able to navigate through your site and find exactly what they are looking for in a timely matter. The key to a good website is the right combination of fluidity, simplicity, and creativity.

4)    DIFFERENTIATION. There are many organizations out there who believe they have great websites. However, their site isn’t really saying or doing anything that their competitors haven’t already said or done. In order to attract and retain more visitors, it is important that your organization differentiates itself from the competition. What gives you that competitive edge? Understand what sets you apart from your competitors, and then make the most of it.

Once you have a solid website in place, you can then begin to explore additional internet marketing components. The “4 D’s of Design” are by no means all it takes to create a good website. However, by adhering to these four basic steps it will point you in the right direction toward helping your business drive more sales.

If you would like to learn more about how web design can help your business drive sales, please leave us a comment below or call our office at 610-743-5602.

Analytics Christmas Carol: 12 Things To Measure

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This time of the year we’re either busy analyzing the past year’s data for the new year or dreaming of great food, presents, and time with the family over the holiday. In keeping with both of those notions, I’ve decided to take a stab at song-writing with this fun cheesy little version of the “12 Days of Christmas” carol/blog hybrid!

Enjoy (or point and laugh profusely. Either way, you’ll have fun)!

On the 12th Month of Service the Client Wants to Track:

12 PDF downloads

In the case of Google Analytics, tagging downloads on your website with Event Tracking can reduce inflated bounce rates and give you greater insights into how supplemental information and deliverables impact the decision process of prospective customers and ultimately your bottom line.

11 Affiliate link clicks

The same methodologies that are used with tracking downloads can also be applied to links to affiliate websites. Tagging these affiliate links with Outbound Link tagging can help reduce those artificially-inflated bounce rates.

10 billboard adverts

Traditional marketing initiatives need not be segregated from your web analytics data any longer! Through a combination of vanity URLs and unique landing pages, you can easily track the effectiveness of initiatives like billboards and radio ads and uncover the insights to improve these campaigns.

9 PPC campaigns

There’s far more to a pay-per-click campaign than just clicks. Though Google AdWords provides cost data and click analysis, you can get the complete picture by tying Google AdWords and Google Analytics together. You can see how well the landing page content and call-outs are resonating with your paid search visitors, identify disconnects between a display ad and your site, and use these insights to hone in your PPC strategy.

8 Tweets-a-tweetin'

Don’t just throw Twitter and social posts out there and hope something sticks! Tag those links pointing to your site using Google’s URL builder so you can use Google Analytics to determine the effectiveness of those Tweets!

7 QR codes

QR codes have enabled marketers to easily point recipients to their web assets via a hyperlink in barcode form. As an added layer of measurement, you can add tracking parameters to the destination URL of these QR codes. Another great way to bridge the insight gap between traditional and digital!

6 Customer segments

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: If you’re not segmenting your web analytics data, you’re probably not doing it right. Customer behavior from your campaigns to your website can vary greatly depending on what segment they fit into. Slicing and dicing your data accordingly will help optimize your customer’s experience and improve marketing to those individuals.

5 KPIs!

You can’t measure without a unit of measurement to go by! That’s just a fact of life. When it comes to measuring your marketing, establishing solid KPIs that align with your business goals and objectives is crucial. You want to ensure that these KPIs are meaningful to the decision makers and speak to the success of your campaigns.

4 Vanity numbers

Similar to how vanity URLs and QR codes can be used with traditional marketing, there’s also opportunities to use vanity phone numbers that are integrated with call tracking platforms. This provides another great layer of measurement and yet another opportunity to bridge that digital and traditional gap!

3 Email blasts

Most email marketing platforms allow for varying levels of integration with Web Analytics tools. Platforms like MyEmma offer automatic tagging for links pointing to your web assets. This extends your analytical visibility beyond just open rates and allows you to see whether or not the subject lines, messages, and call-outs are really resonating with your audiences.

2 Subdomains

Perhaps your organization’s site stretches across several subdomains (or even across multiple domains entirely). This is often the case with websites that incorporate a blog, online application system, or 3rd party shopping cart. Seamless deployment of web analytics tracking through the use of cross-domain methods will shine light into problem areas of conversion funnels and other valuable tidbits.

And a CVAR in a tracking cookie!

Google Analytics allows for the use of CVARs, or Custom Variables, which allow you to set specific variables within the tracking cookie. These CVARs can be set when a user performs a specific action on your site, comes from a certain traffic source, or fits other specific criteria.

And there you have it, folks: My half-blog-half-Christmas Carol masterpiece! Hopefully you found it festive AND informative! On behalf of everyone at DaBrian Marketing Group, I’d like to wish you all a very Happy Holiday!

Content Marketing Resolutions for 2013

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As 2012 continues to wind down and we look forward to what 2013 will bring, a great opportunity presents itself to evaluate our content efforts throughout this year, make improvements, and get a jump on January 1. In the spirit of the holiday season and the New Year, we’ve gathered up a list of some Content Marketing “New Year’s resolutions” to make sure your business is ready to hit the ground running when the ball drops.

Revamp an Existing Content Strategy

Even if you’ve got a content marketing strategy in play, it’s always a good idea to take a step back and seek out areas that performed well vs. those that could use improvement. And this doesn’t just mean your digital content assets. If you’ve spent a big chunk of time optimizing digital content, social media profiles, etc., what does that mean for your tried and tested physical marketing materials, like flyers and brochures? Have these been updated as well, carrying over the same cohesive brand message, look, and feel?

This is just one example to consider when evaluating content as a whole. If you’d like more tips in this area, our team recently wrote an exhaustive white paper on the subject (and did we mention it’s free to download?).

Subscribe to a New Marketing Source / Blog

We all know the value of the Internet when it comes to gathering the latest trends, tactics, and updates from a marketing perspective. With that being said, branching out and finding a new resource can offer up better insights and give your marketing teams more fodder to drive their future actions toward innovation. There are a bunch of resources, blogs, and discussion groups out there that report on what’s “hot” among different audiences.

If your company would rather keep up with industry-specific trends, taking that route also has great advantages. Keeping up and interacting via LinkedIn groups is a great way to find and participate in industry-wide discussions as well as hear different opinions and viewpoints.

Evaluate your Brand and Content as a Tag Team

Nothing in digital marketing operates in isolation. Everything is interconnected, and different campaigns always influence and affect each other. From a content-based standpoint, one of the most direct relationships is between your content and your brand.

For 2013, it may be time to re-evaluate this relationship; does your content reinforce your brand promise and “mission statement“? Is there a solid “brand language” established for all company communications? Do these elements work together across all media and materials? Taking all of these concerns into consideration is a big step toward highlighting what makes your business stand out and carrying those differentiating factors over to the way you market and advertise.

What’s your marketing resolution for 2013? Leave us a comment below!