digital advertising

Drive Web Traffic With Paid Digital Advertising

February 28, 2020 by Justin Miller Leave a Comment

You have a great looking website, but this is not Field Of Dreams. Just because you built it does NOT mean people will come. So, how do you increase traffic to your website? Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Social Media, Email Marketing, Paid Advertising, etc… Where should you start???

Here are a few questions to consider:

Is your website mobile-friendly?
Is your content clear and concise?
Is it easy to achieve the end goal on your website?
Do you have a budget to acquire more traffic?
Do you need web traffic immediately?

While all of the above listed options are valid methods to increase traffic, some take time (SEO), or require an existing audience (Email and Social Media.) However, if you answered “Yes” to all the above questions, then you are ready to run Paid Digital Advertising. Running Paid Ads isn’t quite that simple. What kind of ads – Search, Display, Video or Shopping? Where will these Ads be shown – Search Engines, across the internet, on Social Media? And very possibly the most important how will you reach your desired audience (targeting settings)?

While this blog will never answer all your possible questions about Paid Digital Advertising, let’s at least tackle some of the big ones.

1. Type of Paid Digital Ads

Search Ads – Context based ads that appear above and below Search Results. These ads consist of Headlines, Body Copy, URL and often various Extensions (ie. location, phone numbers and other additional information.)

Display Ads – Image ads that show on various sites above, below, next to, and among a websites content. Since these ads are not the primary reason a person comes to the given website, they need to grab their attention and give them a reason to click.

Video Ads – Often shown before, after or during a desired video similar to a tv commercial. Again, this ad needs to distract a person from their desired video and give them a reason to click.

Shopping Ads – Product focused with the goal for selling typically via an ecommerce site.

2. Placement of Paid Digital Ads

Search Engines – Seems obvious, but Search Ads are shown on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP.)

Display Network – Display Ads can show almost anywhere on the web. There are several Display Networks with the most popular being the Google Display Network (GDN) which boasts to include over 2 million websites,videos and mobile apps. Since videos are included in the Display Network, your video ads will show on this network along with your display ads

Shopping Ads – These ads mostly shown on Search Engine Shopping sections (Google and Bing). However, depending on targeting setting your shopping ads could also be Display ads and therefore be shown across the Display Network.

Social Media Advertising – Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn and several other social media platforms have their own Advertising platform. These ads are often similar to display ads, since they are often shown along the side of the page and are not based upon a search, but rather other targeting settings (geographic, demographic and more.)

3. Target Audience

The success of your Ads ultimate starts with your targeting settings. Even with the greatest Ads (search, display or other) shown to the wrong audience will never succeed, While Search Ads are primarily targeting and shown based on what a user searches, there are several other targeting settings involved. A short list of setting that can (and should) be setup on most, if not all, Paid Digital Advertising campaigns:

Geographic Location
Day Parting/Time of Day
Demographics (Gender, Age, Parental Status, Household Income)
Interest/Topics (for Display Campaigns)
Bidding Strategy
Device Targeting/Bid Adjustments
ReMarketing/Similar Audiences/In-Market Audiences

Following this very oversimplified process to setting up your Paid Digital Advertising will help put you on the path to not only driving web traffic but also growing your business and bottom line. However this is only getting you setup, you will still need to monitor and optimize your Paid Advertising campaigns on a regular basis.

Ready to Start your Paid Digital Advertising? Want Help setting up, monitoring and optimizing your Advertising Campaigns, or just have additional questions – Contact DaBrian Marketing Today.

DaBrian Marketing Has Been Renewed As a Minority Business Enterprise

October 2, 2017 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC is pleased to announce that they have been renewed as a Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) by the National Minority Supplier Development Council.

In order to receive this certification, 51% of the ownership of an enterprise must be operated or controlled by minorities. Regardless of the physical size of the company, minority individuals must be U.S. citizens who are Native American, Hispanic, Black, or Asian.

“We are very excited to be MBE certified with the National Minority Supplier Development Council,” said Daniel B. Laws Jr., President & CEO of DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC. “It’s another certification that helps to differentiate us from other digital marketing agencies, opening doors to new projects. As a minority-owned and operated digital marketing agency, new projects allow us to contribute to community initiatives and increase jobs in downtown Reading, PA.”

Having this certification allows DaBrian Marketing Group to benefit from various activities and become part of an entirely new community with other MBE members. Joint ventures and partnering opportunities allow MBE businesses to grow and further the success of their companies. Opportunity fairs are arranged where minority entrepreneurs can sell their services to hundreds of prospective buyers in a single setting. DaBrian Marketing Group will also have access to customized executive education lessons where leadership tools will be discussed for minority-owned firms. Many other perks come with this certification and the DaBrian Marketing staff is thankful for another opportunity.

The certification lasts one year and is renewed yearly to ensure its standards are maintained. Learn more about the Minority Supplier Development Council.

About DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC

Founded in 2008, DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC is a minority-owned and operated full-service digital marketing agency. Focused on providing original and strategic digital marketing solutions for businesses, DaBrian Marketing Group offers a number of essential services, such as include content marketing, social media consulting, web hosting, local SEO, email marketing, digital branding, search engine optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising, web design, web analytics, social media marketing, and more. For more information about DaBrian Marketing Group, located at 500 Penn Street, Suite 201 in Reading, Pennsylvania, visit dabrianmarketing.com or call 610.743.5602.

Google’s Retail & Ecommerce Marketing Event Recap

August 23, 2017 by Justin Miller Leave a Comment

On Wednesday, August 16th, Google provided some great tips, insight, and advice to retailers regarding ecommerce marketing. Kristen Johanson, Head of Industry for Retail at Google and Alex Chen, Product Marketing Manager at Google Shopping, did a great job presenting 3 major problems the shoppers and retailers face online, and steps that retailers can take to remedy these problems.

Problem #1 – Discoverability – Can Consumers Find You?

While having a storefront on the main street helps, in-store foot traffic has been and continues to decline. However, shoppers are not disappearing, rather relocating online. Making your website and overall online presence (local listings, social media, reviews, etc.) that much more important. Today, having a great website isn’t enough, it has to be easily viewed and used on multiple screen sizes especially smaller mobile devices.

Problem #2 – Personalization – Mass Message Is an Easy Way to Fail

Each of your customers’ want/need something, but not all the same thing. While communicating with your client base according to their wants/needs is challenging, it is also a huge opportunity. Present the right offer to the right person at the right time, and watch your sales increase. For instance, imagine your favorite coffee shop texted you a discount coupon for your favorite drink when you are within walking distance of their new location (which you might not have even known about). Are you going to visit the new locations? – most likely.

Problem # 3 – Frictionless – Easy Consumption or Loss of Sale

Being found is step one. Customizing communication with your customers is step two. Step three is ensuring a good user experience. This includes fast load times, fewer clicks to check out, streamlined forms, ease of navigation, and much more. With global competition, sometimes the littlest pain points for a customer could drive them away.

Essentially, consumers are online looking for stores that cannot only provide the products they need/want but also a service that makes purchasing and receiving these products easy. The full Google video can be viewed on YouTube.

If you have any questions or would like to discuss your ecommerce marketing further, you can contact DaBrian Marketing Group, a certified Google Partner.

The Importance Of Optimizing Your Business’ Local Listings

August 21, 2017 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Local listing creation and optimization is an essential part of an effective SEO strategy for local businesses (businesses targeting their local market). For over a decade now, locality and local SEO has continued to grow importance and influence digitally. While many business owners understand this at a basic level, several fail to maximize their efforts.

When it comes to local listings, a lot of businesses take the “set it and forget it” approach. To ensure your business isn’t leaving money on the table, you not only need to be listed on the top platforms, but you need to continuously optimize your account on a regular basis.

Below are performance metrics for some of our clients on two of the top local listing platforms – Google My Business and Yelp.

Yelp

With nearly 150 million annual users and over 100 millions reviews since its inception, Yelp is a very important platform for your businesses to be listed and active on. It allows your business to showcase its products/services, information about the business, and is known for its reviews. Customers can voice their opinions/experiences first hand.

1. If not handled well, this can be a nightmare for a business.
2. If handled well, it can help boost your business past your competitors.

Below are screenshots of one of our client’s Yelp analytics. Prior to us managing their account in August of 2016, our client was simply listed on Yelp. There were only a few images, business information was incomplete, and reviews were left unattended.

Yelp User Views:

11 months prior to optimizing = 172 views – which is 15.63 views per month.
11 months after we optimized = 574 views – 52.18 per month.
A 70% increase of views per month!

Yelp Leads:

11 months prior to optimizing = 25 leads – 2.27 per month.
12 months after optimizing = 79 leads – 6.58 per month.
A 65% increase in leads per month!

Google My Business

Google My Business (GMB) is the most important local listing platform to utilize. Seeing that Google owns the lion’s share of the search engine industry, it’s important for your business to be on their local listing platform. Unlike other local listings, GMB results appear clearly with Google search results in either a widget form (for branded results) or within Google Map listings (for industry-related keywords).

We compared the 5 months prior to us optimizing our client’s account, to the 5 months after. Below are the results.

5 months prior to optimization = 322 total actions* taken by users.
5 months after optimizing = 1986 actions taken – an increase of 33.43%
5 months prior to optimization = 12697 total views.**
5 months after optimizing = 14520 – an increase of 12.56%
5 months prior to optimization = 13191 total searches.***
5 months after optimizing = 15274 – an increase of 13.64%

For GMB, actions are defined as visits to your website, request directions, calls, and online chats.
Total views includes both search views (views within Google Search) and map views (views within Google Maps)
Total searches include both direct searches (branded searches) and discovery searches (industry keyword related searches).

To Wrap Things Up

Local SEO is a (as Donald Trump would say) YUGE digital marketing tactic for small/local businesses. With that being said, having a successful local SEO campaign takes consistent maintenance. Optimize and update your local listings to ensure your business crushes the local market.

Interested in local SEO? Contact DaBrian Marketing today!

By: David McDowell

Using Email Marketing to Grow Your Business

April 3, 2017 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

There are many tactics in the digital marketing realm from PPC, SEO, to social media marketing. The one that’s often overlooked is email marketing which is probably one of your biggest missed opportunities. It has an ROI of 3800%. When you pair email marketing with your Ecommerce store, the results will be outstanding. If you’re not familiar with email marketing, let’s set you in the right direction and explore some of the tactics you can try.

How to Start Email Marketing

As with any marketing initiative, a clear strategy must be written to clearly align the business goals with your email marketing efforts. From there, create the process. Outline key roles, the frequency of each email, best practices for when your company should be sending out these emails, and any other features you’d like to take advantage of. Once you’ve outlined how you’ll be using email, pick the best email marketing platform for your company.

What Can I Send?

There are so many ways to regularly and creatively stay connected with your customers. These emails are critical in order to stay in front of your customers or those interested in your company. You can send an event invitation, a monthly newsletter, or announce a new product. I’m sure you’ve seen many of these in your personal inbox. But, think about which ones grabbed your attention and the ones you actually read. Having an appealing subject line and a unique element to each email is necessary for it to have any effect on your sales.

Set It, But Don’t Forget It

Automation is the simplest way for you to give each customer exactly what they would like to read. It gives you a chance to cross-sell, up-sell, and follow-up with your customers. Here are just a few ways you’d be able to take advantage of it:

Special Coupons – Deals based on a previous purchase.
Abandoned Shopping Carts – Get them to come back to your site and reconsider!
Recent Customer’s Email – Welcome them!
Customer Re-engagement Email – Win back customers you haven’t heard from.
Best Customers Email – Reward those who support you.

Tell Them What They Want To Hear

Segmenting your lists simply means adding extra information to your email list that will help organize and target specific people. This is the best way to truly give your customers what they will actually need or want. Note which category of items they typically buy, their average dollar sale, or where they live. If your business is B2B, note which industry they are in. This way, you will be able to personalize your emails and make them more inclined to engage with your content. Your customers already receive many emails that they immediately delete if it doesn’t pertain to them. Make them read yours!

Email marketing should not be forgotten with all of the ‘cool’, new tactics that are constantly being created. What ways do you see work best for your company? We’d love to hear about them in the comments below!

Want to learn more about Ecommerce? Download our Ecommerce eBook, now.

DaBrian Marketing’s New Year’s Resolution For 2017

January 3, 2017 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

With a new year comes new and exciting opportunities. At DaBrian Marketing, we’re committed to constantly improving our internal efficiencies, as well as your business’ digital marketing efforts. This year we asked members of our team (including the furry ones ?):

What’s your professional New Year’s resolution?

“Get my certification in Quickbooks. Help contribute to the efficiency overall at DaBrian Marketing Group.”

“Simplify and improve the efficiency of meetings to allocate more time to take actions!”

“Learn basic Java Script for PPC Automated Scripting and achieve Bing Partners status for DaBrian Marketing Group”

“Dominate the local market through various Local SEO methods, especially local link building/earning. Improve both our’s and our client’s video marketing efforts. Continue to obtain certifications and accomplishments related to SEO.”

“Earn three or more additional social media/inbound marketing certifications. Stay knowledgeable with the latest trends for social media, email, and video marketing. Find the best possible opportunities for each of our clients and DaBrian Marketing to get the most exposure on their social media platforms. I want to see our efforts go viral!”

“Explore new possible methods and strategies to help further improve our efficiencies as an agency, and the communication amongst clients.”

“Continue to develop my skills in graphic design and web coding.”

“Expand my education in HTML, HTML5, PHP, Javascript and responsive web design as a whole. Help our team become more efficient with client & internal processes. Also, being more involved in blogging and social media.”

“Finally catch my tail.”

“Be a better boy.”

“Expand the reach and visibility of the company & service offering while consistently differentiating us from the competition.”