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DaBrian Marketing Blog: News, Insights, and Digital Marketing

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!

Bidding is More than Just How You Pay

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CPA or CPC? Which is best for your Pay per Click (PPC) Advertising Campaigns? To answer that, first let’s look at how these two strategies differ from each other.

CPA – Cost per Acquisition (Conversions): You set a target CPA and Google will automatically adjust your CPC bid to keep you relatively close to your target. From my experience, Google has been getting CPA just under the target CPA.

CPC – Cost per Click: This is the more common bidding strategy and allows you to manually or automatically (enhanced) set maximum CPC bids per keyword.

The Case for CPA

Obviously, the first requirement for using CPA is the necessity of Conversion tracking (which should be a priority anyway). But assuming you are tracking Conversions, is CPA your best option? From personal experience, a good campaign for CPA bidding is one that is well established and in a stable market. While implementing CPA strategic bidding, we witnessed a decrease in CPA, which increased profit margins.

The Turning Point

However, once there were changes within the market, such as new advertisers and increased competitors’ bids, the overall performance of campaigns using CPA dropped. Despite using some automatic tools to maintain average position, Google’s CPA bidding style was not able to remain competitive. The Campaign began decreasing in Clicks and Conversions. As a result of the decrease in Conversions, the CPA strategy automatically lowered the max CPC causing the ads positioning to drop, which further impacted the Conversion Rate. The CPA bidding strategy began a steep drop in performance.

The Case for CPC

Once the bidding strategy was changed back to manual CPC, the Campaign regained its positioning in the market, and the Clicks and Conversions increased back to normal levels as well. Although this required an increase in CPC, we were able to maintain the overall CPA at a very close level to the original target CPA.

Conclusions

The end result was no relative change to the calculated CPA, but an increase in overall Conversions. The conclusion is this: Google’s automatic CPA bidding strategy is great to use once your PPC campaign is up and running, but be sure to keep a close eye on it. Increased competition in your market could send your PPC spiraling downward quickly.

Have you had more luck with CPA or CPC bidding strategies? Leave us a comment and let us know!

Sizing Up Tag Management For Your Organization

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What is Tag Management?

Tag management is a way to add, edit, and remove tags from your website. The most common forms of tags (small piece of code) are for web analytics, search engine marketing, ad serving, and testing; however, there are many other types. These tags are usually in the form of JavaScript. Tag management systems provide you with flexibility to combine these tags into a single tag and control the deployment of the tag from a console, not directly on the website.

Do I need Tag Management?

In my opinion, it depends on the type of website (content management systems or “hard coded” websites), your marketing tactics, website performance, security policy, and business strategies. If you are not proactively looking to measure all marketing initiatives, then you’re not ready for tag management and you need to start measuring. If you have more than 1 million pageviews to your website and 3 different types of JavaScript or tags on the website, then you might want to consider tag management. In addition, if you have specific needs such as poor load-times, industry security issues, or to make a strategic decision to empower your marketing team, I would recommend looking into a tag management system.

Types of Tags supported by Tag Management Solutions

How it works: Common Approaches of Tag Management

There is a variety of implementation methodologies, but most vendors use client-side tag implementation. A few use server-side tag management and a combination of client-side & server-side tag management. Both options use JavaScript tags; however, the main difference refers to where most tags are fired, either at the browser or server level.

Why Tag Management?

Most tag management solutions have partners with prebuilt common tags to implement quickly and save you time. There are often workflow and user administration features to manage users and processes to manage quality assurance as well as approvals to launch tags. The uses of simplified user interfaces make it easy for everyone to use the tool. There are also reports to see if the tags are working effectively. Many vendors give you additional features for auditing, conversion analysis, and attribution modeling.

Recommendations for Tag Management by Business type

  1. For small businesses that need tag management, I would recommend Google Tag Manager. It’s free and it should provide you with the basic necessities of tag management with align with your marketing tactics.

  2. For mid-sized businesses with multiple tags, 1-10 million pageviews, and a need for tag templates, I would recommend QuBit. It has native reporting with API features and about 50 tag templates for ease of use. It’s fairly priced and has options for self-service or hosted management.

  3.  For enterprise businesses with multiple tags, mobile devices, security issues and more, I would recommend Ensighten. It has hybrid deployment options with additional modules such as mobile or privacy. It’s more expensive but worth the security features. There’s a one-time flat implementation fee plus the cost of pageviews.

Action Items to move forward with Tag Management

  • Take inventory of your tags and future tagging opportunities.

  • Review tag management solutions that meet your business’s needs.

  • Do your research on possible vendors & demo the solutions.

  • Select a solution for your business.

  • Find two tag management champions: Business side & IT.

How Implementing SEO Can Help Drive Sales

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What is Search Engine Optimization? Believe it or not, there are still business owners who have no clue what SEO is. Or maybe they have an awareness, but they are either too scared or not interested enough to see the benefits in it. Well, today I’m going talk about how vital implementing SEO is for your business and how it can help drive sales.

SEO “The Foundation”

When it comes to Internet Marketing, SEO is the foundation. Without optimizing and having the most relevant content on your site, it might be difficult to drive the most traffic and get the most engagement from your current and potential customers. Implementing SEO techniques will help get your business’s website to the top of the search engine rankings and reduce your costs per lead or acquisition by establishing relevant content and quality links.

Link Building is “King”

Speaking of links….links can point to information on the same webpage or another webpage. Link building is your business’s effort to create links that point to your page or pages. And in the world of SEO, Link building is “King.” Without an effective link building strategy that is consistent with your company’s on-page optimization, SEO cannot be accomplished.

Optimize for Opportunities

Optimizing your website’s content will provide your company the best opportunity to gain more traffic and ultimately drive conversions. It would also be greatly beneficial to optimize based on customer segments and seasonality as well. For example, an insurance company would focus on their recreational vehicle insurance during the warmer months of the year. This practice will help to keep your site’s content even more relevant and thus more likely to be highly-ranked in the search results.

So, how can implementing SEO help drive sales? As I mentioned earlier, by implementing SEO and optimizing your website’s content, you’ll be able to create more relevancy and improve your overall search rankings. The higher you are ranked in the search results, the more likely you are to generate more overall site traffic. Ultimately, the more site traffic that you generate translates to a greater chance that a user is going to convert and buy your product or service.

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

Not Segmenting Your Data? Turn in Your Gun & Badge

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"Market segmentation is a natural result of the vast differences among people."

– Donald Norman (author of “The Design of Everyday Things” – excellent read! I’ll never look at doors the same way again.)

Donald nailed it when it comes to customer segments. Your customers are all unique. They all have their own interests and motivations for looking at your product and service offerings. You (hopefully) use your analytics data to gain insights for improving marketing initiatives. So why wouldn’t you arrange your data in a manner that captures these differences in motivation and behavior? Analysis of all-encompassing data can yield some interesting sticking points, however it can just as easily mislead you with regards to customer behavior.

What Can Be Done to Avoid This?

As marketing professionals and analysts, it is our duty to get to the information that leads to more effective campaigns. So if you haven’t considered segmenting your data, here are four steps to take to get it done in your web analytics tools.

  1. Look at your high-level offerings. Before jumping into the creation of segments in your solution, it is a good idea to take a few steps back. First look at your organization from a high level. What are the core service and product offerings of your organization? How do your target audience and customer demographics align with these service offerings? This information will give you the foundation on which to base your analytics customer segments. If you already have this figured out, great! Move on to the next step.

  2. Identify touch-points with your customer segments. Now that you know who your customer segments are, it’s time to determine how your analytics solution will identify them. For this, you’ll want to identify how they are discovering your brand. In the case of web analytics, are customers in a particular segment arriving via search engines (organic or paid)? If so, what search phrases did they use? What landing pages did they use? Use the trending you see with these questions to create the rules for each segment.

  3. Create your segments! You’ve identified your segments and how you can find them in your analytics data. Now it’s time to set up these rules in your solution. In the case of Google Analytics, set up the proper Include rules using Regular Expressions for related search phrases and landing pages.

  4. Make sure the segments actually work! At this point you may have put some significant time and effort into creating these customer segments. Don’t let all of that hard work go to waste. Make sure it separates and organizes your data properly. Test them with different date ranges to ensure the results are somewhat consistent and make sense.

As modern day analysts and marketers, most of us do our best not to think in silos. This mentality should translate over when it comes to data analysis. Though some questions may warrant looking at high-level, all-encompassing data, the best insights will come from segmentation. Adapting these tips to your own process should help you discover hidden gems for converting more customers.

Have some other helpful tips for segmentation of data? Feel free to leave a comment and share the wealth! Also be sure to follow us on Twitter (link to the right) to stay up to date on the latest tips for better analysis.

Marketing Election 2012

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If you voted in the Presidential election yesterday and are still in the voting spirit, you’re in luck! We’ve created our own election where the fundamental marketing belief systems are going head-to-head. No debates and no political attack-ads, and at the end, you’ll get to cast your vote! But first, let’s take a look at the candidates.

Digital Marketing Party

As technology continues to thrive and building relationships with customers holds more marketing clout than ever before, it seems as though digital marketing is building a strong presence to lower costs, increase reach & visibility, and drive sales. Compared to its traditional competitor, the Digital Marketing party touts that it’s more forward-thinking and more in tune with modern audiences.

The Digital Marketing Party’s high-level platform items break down like this:

  • Cost-Effective & Cutting-Edge

  • Removes Geographic Barriers (potential for international markets)

  • Focused on Forming Relationships with Target Audiences

  • Affords Adaptability and Flexibility

Traditional Marketing Party

On the more conventional side of things, some businesses are perfectly satisfied with their current initiatives (phone calls, billboards, TV and radio ads, etc.), and adhere to the “ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. The traditional party argues that digital marketing is still new and constantly changing. This party believes that it will take time to see what, if anything from the digital marketers will be able to truly stand the test of time.

The Traditional Marketing Party’s high-level platform items are as follows:

  • Time-Tested, Reliable, and Consistent

  • Some Audiences are Better Reached through Traditional Means

  • Traditional Campaigns can Form Relationships as well

  • Takes the Business to the People (more direct)