Email marketing has evolved significantly with the integration of automation, enabling businesses to deliver personalized, timely, and targeted messages at scale. This article explores the latest trends and tools in email marketing automation that can help businesses stay ahead of the competition and maximize the effectiveness of their campaigns.
Personalization at Scale:
Personalization is key to engaging modern consumers. Email automation tools allow businesses to deliver highly personalized content based on customer data, preferences, and behavior. Dynamic content blocks, personalized subject lines, and tailored product recommendations enhance engagement and drive conversions.
Behavioral Trigger Campaigns:
Behavioral triggers are automated responses to specific actions or behaviors taken by subscribers, such as website visits or abandoned carts. By sending targeted messages based on user behavior, businesses can nurture leads and guide them through the sales funnel. Triggered campaigns increase engagement and conversion rates by delivering timely and relevant content.
Drip Campaigns and Automation Workflows:
Drip campaigns are automated sequences of emails sent over time to nurture leads or onboard new subscribers. Automation workflows allow businesses to create complex sequences of emails triggered by user actions or specific criteria. These campaigns streamline communication, segment audiences, and deliver targeted content throughout the customer journey.
AI-Powered Insights and Predictions:
Artificial intelligence (AI) is revolutionizing email marketing by analyzing data to predict customer behavior and preferences. AI-powered tools provide insights into the best times to send emails, segment audiences, and optimize content for maximum engagement. By leveraging AI, businesses can deliver more relevant and personalized messages that resonate with their audience.
Dynamic Content and Personalization Tokens:
Dynamic content adapts to each recipient, displaying different images, text, or offers based on user data. Personalization tokens allow businesses to insert subscriber-specific information, such as names or locations, into emails. Dynamic content and tokens create more personalized experiences, increasing engagement and driving conversions.
Mobile Optimization:
With the majority of emails now opened on mobile devices, it’s crucial to optimize emails for small screens. Automation tools offer features to ensure emails are mobile-friendly, with responsive designs and optimized layouts. Mobile-optimized emails improve user experience and increase open and click-through rates.
Integration with CRM and E-commerce Platforms:
Integrating email automation tools with customer relationship management (CRM) and e-commerce platforms enables seamless data syncing and automation. Businesses can use customer data from these platforms to create targeted campaigns and track user interactions across channels. Integration streamlines workflows and enhances the effectiveness of email marketing efforts.
Testing and Optimization:
A/B testing is essential for optimizing email campaigns. Automation tools allow businesses to test different subject lines, content, and sending times to determine what resonates best with their audience. Continuous testing and optimization ensure that email marketing efforts are always improving and delivering the best possible results.
Conclusion: Email marketing automation is a powerful tool for businesses to engage customers, drive sales, and build relationships. By embracing the latest trends and utilizing advanced automation tools, businesses can create highly personalized, targeted, and effective email campaigns that stay ahead of the competition and deliver real results.
Email marketing remains a cornerstone of digital communication, and as technology evolves, so do the strategies for creating effective and cutting-edge email campaigns. In this guide, we will explore next-generation email marketing strategies that leverage innovative techniques, personalisation, and automation to enhance engagement, build relationships, and drive results.
1. Hyper-Personalisation:
Next-gen email marketing goes beyond simple personalisation by creating highly tailored experiences for individual recipients. Utilise data analytics, behavioral insights, and customer segmentation to deliver personalised content, product recommendations, and offers that resonate with each subscriber.
2. AI-Powered Email Campaigns:
Integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into your email marketing strategy to analyse customer behavior, predict preferences, and automate personalised content recommendations. AI algorithms can optimise send times, subject lines, and content variations for each recipient, leading to improved engagement and conversions.
3. Interactive Content:
Make emails more engaging by incorporating interactive elements such as polls, quizzes, and surveys directly within the email. Interactive content not only captures attention but also encourages subscribers to actively participate, providing valuable data for further personalisation.
4. Behavioral Trigger Campaigns:
Implement automated email campaigns triggered by specific user actions or behaviors. Whether it’s a welcome series, cart abandonment sequence, or re-engagement campaign, leveraging behavioral triggers ensures timely and relevant communication tailored to the recipient’s interactions with your brand.
5. Dynamic Content Blocks:
Enhance email relevance by using dynamic content blocks that change based on user data, preferences, or engagement history. This allows you to create one email template with adaptable sections, ensuring that each subscriber sees content that aligns with their interests.
6. Advanced Segmentation:
Move beyond basic segmentation by utilising advanced segmentation criteria such as predictive analytics, customer lifetime value, or engagement scores. Tailor your messaging to different segments based on their unique characteristics and behaviors to maximise relevance.
7. User-Generated Content (UGC):
Incorporate user-generated content, such as reviews, testimonials, or social media mentions, into your email campaigns. UGC adds authenticity to your messaging and fosters a sense of community, encouraging subscribers to become advocates for your brand.
8. Mobile-First Design:
Given the prevalence of mobile device usage, design your emails with a mobile-first approach. Ensure that your emails are responsive, easy to navigate on smaller screens, and load quickly. Optimise images and content for mobile users to deliver a seamless experience.
9. A/B Testing Automation:
Automate A/B testing to experiment with different elements of your email campaigns, including subject lines, content variations, and calls-to-action. Let automation algorithms analyse the performance data and adjust future campaigns to maximise effectiveness.
10. Predictive Analytics:
Harness the power of predictive analytics to anticipate customer behaviors, preferences, and future actions. By analysing historical data and patterns, predictive analytics can help you proactively tailor your email content, offers, and recommendations.
11. Social Media Integration:
Integrate social media components into your email campaigns, allowing subscribers to share content or follow your social channels directly from the email. Leverage social proof, such as displaying the number of social media followers or highlighting trending products.
12. Advanced Email Security:
With the increasing sophistication of cyber threats, prioritise advanced email security measures to protect both your brand and your subscribers. Implement authentication protocols, monitor for phishing attempts, and educate subscribers about recognising legitimate emails.
Conclusion: Elevating Email Marketing in the Digital Age
Next-generation email marketing is about leveraging cutting-edge technologies and strategic approaches to create highly personalised, engaging, and effective campaigns. By embracing hyper-personalisation, AI, interactivity, and advanced analytics, brands can build stronger connections with their audience, drive conversions, and stay ahead in the ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing.
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When it comes to B2B marketing or B2B lead generation, the thought of Linkedin would surely come to mind. It is one of the most popular social media platforms used by over 600 million professionals to connect with each other or simply share thoughts regarding the industry they are in.
Not only this, Linked In enables businesses to keep a close eye on their potential prospects, and customers and check out what their competitors are up to. These elements make linked marketing extremely effective for B2B conversions and outreach.
In case you are looking for tips to use linked-in marketing to its full potential in 2022, then you are at the right place. So without further adeue, let’s get started!!
2022 tips to empower your brand with Linkedin marketing
Tip 1) Enhance your network
Growing your network through content marketing is one way to gain new followers. There are other things you can do as well.
You can use a mix of the following methods:
Try Sharing other people’s relevant content if you find them useful for your industry.
Don’t forget to ensure that all your employees are following your business page and engaging with your posts
Tag useful and relevant connections in your content promotions,
Invite your customers and partners to follow your page.
It is also a great idea if you can get recommendations and testimonials from your successful customers. Good social proof or recommendations have their worth in gold when it comes to Linkedin marketing.
Tip 2) Keep experimenting for the best results
Marketing is all about trying different strategies till you come up with one that suits your brand the best. But as a business owner, you cannot stay stagnant, you should keep optimising.
Try out different times of posting and analyse which time of the day gets major action. Check out your competitor’s social pages and see that your business is not missing out on any sort of content.
By thinking out of the box you can even come up with a strategy that even none of your competitors are applying within your market niche.
Tip 3) Make your page optimised for search
It’s about getting the spotlight in front of people that matter to your business. Implement SEO strategies to optimise your social page for searching.
Try to inculcate relevant keywords in your page content and try to work on your business description as best as you can. In case you are wondering which keywords to use? Try brainstorming with your team on the phrases or words that people might use while searching for businesses similar to yours.
After all, what would be the use of having a great profile, if it doesn’t get viewed by relevant viewers?
Tip 4) Always follow data-driven analysis
You need to make sure that all your LinkedIn marketing efforts are heading in the right direction. Nowadays almost all the major social media platforms come with analytical capabilities.
Linkedin analysis can also be divided into 3 parts:
Visitor analytics
Everything you need to know about the people who click on your page, including the number of page views, the ratio of visitors from desktop and mobile, demographic information such as job function, location, industry and company size.
Update analytics
Tracks your engagement metrics for all your LinkedIn example likes, comments, clicks and shares you’ve had within a specified duration.
Follower analytics
This includes all the information you need on your audience.
Final words
Linkedin marketing is truly an excellent option for B2B outreach and conversion if done the right way. However, it’s advised that you seek the support of an experienced digital marketing agency while getting started.
In case you have any questions then please feel free to drop us a line in the comment section and we will get back to you.
The official Google list of algorithm updates will take around 2 weeks to release. And this update is generally being positively welcomed by the online community. While the algorithm is constantly going through changes, however, a core algorithm update tends to be more noticeable.
So let’s dive deeper and find out what the update is all about.
Google core algorithm update
There will be modifications to many parts of the Google algorithm however it’s presumed it will be affecting search results across most languages. The impact of helpful content might become more prominent during a core algorithm update.
With that being said, the helpful content has been an important part of the core algorithm core and is being consistently running so that a new website can be affected by that algorithm component known as the Helpful Content Update (HCU).
As for how to respond to this change The best approach now is to be vigilant of any changes in the search console but don’t react. Search results may bounce around for the next few weeks. Let the search results settle down before trying to make making a definite decision.
We will keep you updated on how the update shapes up, till then stay tuned!!
While some might think that email marketing is not as effective as it used to be, that is not the case. It is about how you implement it for your business. True, the age of outbound and impersonal emails is over, but email marketing with context can make a huge impact.
People check their inbox several times a day and when they see an email that catches their eye, they open it. And that will give your brand a chance to engage with them. When you market your product or service through contextual emails the probability of conversion increase exponentially.
In this article, we are going to be discussing how email marketing can benefit your brand, so without further adieu, let’s get started.
Benefits of Email marketing
1. Easy to Analyse and optimise
Every email that is sent, gives metrics and reports that show open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and conversion rates. These metrics are crucial in understanding which email marketing strategies are working and what needs improvement.
Growth through adaptability is the key to every business’s success.
2. Highly Contextual
Email marketing lists can be easily segmented based on demographics, interests, past behaviour, etc which empowers your business to create personalised messaging that users are looking for.
This is an effective marketing strategy that helps your marketing message resonate strongly with your audience.
3. Low Cost & Good ROI
Compared to other marketing channels like pay-per-click, email marketing costs very little. With the right email marketing tool such as a CRM or CDP, you can fully automate all your email marketing campaigns.
However, its advised that you take help from an experienced digital marketer in the begging while setting up your CRM or CDP platforms.
4. Helps in building Relationships, Loyalty & Trust
Customers nowadays are always on the lookout for brands they can relate to. Email marketing is great for building one-on-one relationships with prospects and customers.
By creating well-written and engaging newsletters and emails, that are in context with the interactions that people have had with your brand, the chances of conversion or repetitive business increase greatly.
Summary
Email marketing is still an incredibly viable strategy to reach out to your audience, but you need to ensure your emails are personalised and not spammy.
In case you have any questions or need help with your email marketing campaigns than simply drop us are line and we will try our best to help you out.
A well-written blog can make a powerful impact in boosting all your business’s digital marketing strategies. When we say “Well-written” it’s not just using attractive language (although that is also important).
A good blog should be able to explain and elaborate on the main topic as efficiently as possible for the readers. For instance, when you write a blog about your products or services then your blog should be informative enough for the visitors to understand what your brand is all about.
If done the right way your blog can play a key role in converting your visitors into valuable customers. In this article, we will discuss the number of ways blogging plays a key role in your digital marketing strategies.
Why blogging is essential for your brand
People just don’t want to purchase products or services from your business, they wish to form a connection to which they can relate. In this regard, blogging can help your business to a great extent.
Empowering SEO and SERP
Blogs greatly boost your SEO activities both off-page and on-page. Producing trending and relevant content is a sure shot of coming on top of the competition on the search engine results page.
The Google search engine is a big fan of updated content, new content on your website can help to improve SERP rankings. Using specific keywords about your product or service also helps to boost your search keywords.
You can add some engaging new topics from your team members by getting them to share their experiences at events or write about the latest trends in your brand’s market.
Adding value that helps build relationships
As we mentioned above, customers wish to build a relationship with businesses and that is what you should focus on. Blogs provide an excellent medium to enhance that connection between your brand and the customers. Consumers like to be informed of the updates and appreciate that you are educating them.
Think about what is important to your prospect or customer, how your product or service will benefit them and write on that. The better you are able to resolve your customer, the more chances there are for them to remain loyal to your business.
By focusing on features and answers instead of benefits, and by shifting by blogging to respond to your customers’ wants and needs you are adding and building value for your business.
Boosting Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is a crucial element of digital marketing, blog posting will allow your business to showcase the personal side of your business to your potential prospects and existing customers.
The best branding campaigns are comprised of fantastic storytelling and what other way to directly provide that epic story than blogging? A comprehensive yet entertaining blog is an excellent way to reinforce your brand’s image on the market.
Posting hot content on your website shows your up-to-date knowledge about your product or service. Now there is constant arrival of new content formats and features, but your blog remains the core of an effective digital marketing strategy.
Lastly…
Blogging will always remain a very powerful key component when it comes to executing a successful digital marketing strategy, Building trust with your customer by providing them with helpful content is crucial and important in growing your business.
In case you have any questions or you need our help your jump-starting your blogging journey, then please feel free to book a 30 minutes free session with us and we would be happy to assist you in any way we can.
In today’s cut-throat digital world writing a decent blog is just not enough. You need to do the research, find the right keywords and market it so that it helps you grow your audience and reach out to your customers.
By the time you’re done with all these activities, it’s time for the next blog and the cycle begins again. This rarely leaves you time to do anything else, in fact, most bloggers have to cut some time from their blog prog promotions.
What if we tell you that certain tools can drastically reduce your blogging time? Sounds interesting? Well, it certainly is and we are going to be discussing these blogging tools in this article. So without further adieu let’s get started!
The Todoist tool takes your to-do lists to a new level by allowing you to create multiple tasks so that you could make a list of blog posts, schedule, and collaborate with others.
With the ability to personalise your views that fit with your style it simplifies workflow by connecting your emails, calendars, and files. Not only this Todist can integrate with multiple other apps, including Dropbox and Alexa.
As of now, Todoist has around 187k Google reviews with a 4.7 rating.
When it comes to capturing anything from text, photos or audio notes, Evernote is the finest. With this digital workspace, you can save drafts of your blog posts in the app and then publish them when you’re ready.
Another function that Evernote specialises in is clipping images and screenshots while you surfing the net. Evernote’s a powerful search feature and keyword tags easily find what you need to capture and sync your notes with other devices if you want.
The Flipboard app can be used to collate all kinds of content like news, blogs, videos, photos, social media posts, etc. As of now, there are stories from nearly 30,000 topics on Flipboard.
You can then turn the unified content into personalised stories to share with social media followers or used for your blog. It has an easy-to-use interface that is highly customisable by topic interest, making it great for niche blog promotion.
Agorapulse is an all-in-one digital marketing platform that is used for monitoring, managing, and analysing your social media marketing campaigns. It helps you analyse the impact of your marketing strategies so you can decide on what’s working and what’s not.
You can schedule social media posts in advance so that you don’t miss any opportunities to engage with your followers. Agorapulse specialises in performance tracking to identify your best-performing content and the implementation of analytics to understand which content is getting the best response.
These blogging tools will help you in simplifying most of your blogging activities and help you save time. We will keep updating you when we come across other tools that you can use. Till then keep reading our blogs and drop us a line in case you have any questions.
Google released quite a few updates and features in the year 2020 for over 1 billion users. Most of these updates are directed toward improving the user experience, security and privacy. In case you missed out on some of Google’s key announcements, here’s a quick summary for you.
Key highlights from Google in 2022
Android 13
Google wants to take the OEM customisation experience to the next level in Android 13. The users will be able to customise the looks of the UI with ready-made colour variants that can be applied throughout the OS and reflected in wallpapers and themes.
As for multilingual users, the Android 13 will give a variety of options to select different languages for different apps through phone settings.
Security and privacy update
With the transformation to remote work and using devices outside of security, office networks have become more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. To enable users to navigate online in a more secure manner Google is launching Account Safety Status for apps.
If an account is not fully secure, a yellow alert icon will appear on the profile pic and recommend actions that the users can take to secure the app.
Latest pixel devices
As many of us expected, Google has announced a new mid-range smartphone Pixel 6A. It will be using Google’s Tensor chip and have a 6.1-inch OLED screen with a blazing 60Hz refresh rate.
It also supports 5G and is equipped with dual cameras. Not only Google has also given a sneak into the design of Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro smartphones.
Expanding search experience
Google has announced that it is growing the scope of what users can do with the latest multi-search feature launched to help users search with images. Users can now search by taking a picture or screenshot of local businesses, retailers, and other goods and adding “near me” while exploring.
Google is also putting together another feature called “scene exploration,” which will allow users to pan the camera in multi-search so that they can get more information on multiple objects in a scene.
We hope you found our summation of Google’s latest updates helpful and in case you have any questions, simply drop us a line and we’d love to help you out.
Here’s QL Tech’s comprehensive guide to digital marketing, irrespective of your size or budget.
Whether you own and run a business, or work in the marketing department, you can’t escape digital marketing. It is the buzzword and covers a vast set of opportunities – as well as its own, unique terminology.
In this article, we’ll cover all digital marketing comprehensively, with detailed explanations. After reading through, you’ll know what your options are, and how best to leverage them effectively.
What is Digital Marketing
Digital marketing covers all the activities that involve reaching out to people via the internet. Its foundation is content (information), which is used to attract people to get acquainted with, and buy your products or services.
Speaking of content, remember, that even a well written (and free!) Google My Business listing counts. However, as you get savvier, you’ll want to ramp it up to increase eyeballs and revenue.
There are multiple methods and channels you can use to put your message across. Some are free. Others cost money.
But, the internet is vast and diverse. It accommodates everyone, offering several smart ways to do it, irrespective of your size, or budget.
Why Digital Marketing is Hot (And Will Continue to Be)
Advertising online is the in thing. Any other reasons to join the bandwagon?
Yes, lots!
Reason #1: Digital Marketing Works, Because it’s Targeted and Relevant
Let’s explain that further. Targeted means you can show your message specifically to the people you choose to. Relevant, as you can show different messages to different audiences.
Billboards and TV ads are displayed to everyone watching it. Some may like it. Others might not even relate to it.
Reason #2: When You Market on the Internet, Costs are Way Lower
A billboard costs between $2,300 to $100,000 per month. A sought-after TV spot during the grand finals will cost even more. And that’s not counting the production costs.
On the other hand, you can advertise (with plain text) on Google search pages with a budget of a hundred.
You can also pass on your message for free, with a good content marketing strategy – we’ll be expanding on this later.
Reason #3: With Online Marketing, You Only Pay for What You Get
While there are multiple billing methods on the internet, nearly all involve paying only when a user takes an action. It might be a view or a click – you choose.
Reason #4: The Internet Opens Up a Larger Audience
89% of Australians are on the internet. You have more chance of connecting with them on the internet, than anywhere else.
Reason #5: You Can Change Your Marketing Strategy by the Minute
Once you’ve made an offline marketing campaign, you’re more or less stuck with it, irrespective of the performance. With digital marketing, you can alter your strategy in seconds. You can change your audience, messaging and even the amount you’re willing to pay.
Reason #6: Your ROI is Measurable
It’s really hard to measure how much of your sales were due to a TV, print, or billboard ad. With digital marketing, you know which ad or piece of content resulted in a conversion. This allows you to fine-tune your messaging to a T.
Reason #7 You Can Beat Rivals With Deeper Pockets
The Internet makes the David vs Goliath story an everyday reality. You don’t need to shell out big bucks to fight for limited space on a newspaper. If you play it smart, betting on the right keywords and messaging, you can beat the competition at their game.
How Digital Marketing Works
Effective internet marketing is built on 3 key foundations (ranked in the order of importance):
Audience
While content is king, your audience is your God. They decide what will work, and what won’t.
That’s why it’s critical to understand who your prospects are, their likes and dislikes. You need to know where they hang out on the net. Their lingo. And their online habits.
Content
Once you get to know your audience, you can then create content tailored to them. You speak their language. You address their pain points. You like the things they like. And your pet peeves are the same.
Understanding the Buyer’s Journey
In broad terms, there are 3 stages of the buyer’s journey online.
First comes the awareness stage, when your audience becomes aware that they have a problem, and wonder what the solution could be. You know the answer – you! But, don’t shout it out just yet. Address their problem, and let them in on all the possible solutions, including any you don’t own.
Second, comes the consideration stage, when your prospects are weighing the solutions very seriously. This is the time to give your products or services centerstage, expressing why you’re the best option.
Finally, there’s the decision stage. Your prospects have made up their minds. All they require is a nudge into your shopping cart. Time for a discount maybe?
What are the Elements of Digital Marketing?
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Content Marketing
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Social Media Marketing
Email Marketing
Retargeting & Remarketing
Pay Per Click (PPC) & its Variations
Affiliate Marketing
Marketing Automation
Sponsored Content & Native Advertising
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is the process of optimising your website and content towards search engine queries.
Unless you’re a well-known brand or name, a search engine is the most likely place to be discovered. After all, nearly half of product searches start on Google.
Optimizing your content for search engines is important because users may use different terms to the ones you think they do.
Lets’s say you own a shoe store. You’re wondering which of your products should take centre stage and build your content around. Should you focus on sneakers, trainers, runners or running shoes?
You think about it a lot, and decide that you’ll focus on the word ‘sports shoes’. After all, more people will search for a generic term, right? If you look up the Google search data, here are the results.
As you can see, the word ‘sports shoes’ is not so popular among Australians on Google.
Here’s another insight you can get from search data.
If a person searched for just runners, they might be referring to carpets! So it’s a term you must use carefully.
The key to SEO is to do keyword analysis on Google Adwords, and find the terms related to your product that people search for. You can then build your site content around these terms.
While at it, also create content related to your main keywords. When you’ve covered the topic completely, Google will consider you to be an expert in that realm, and direct more traffic your way.
SEO falls into 3 categories:
On-page SEO
It refers to all the content optimization efforts done on your site, like in the example above. It includes keyword research, and then adding keywords in your content (not stuffing them), especially in the headlines and subheads.
You must also add keywords in your metatags and meta descriptions – they let the search engine bots know what your site is about. Meta descriptions also appear on the search results page, just under your page’s title. Do note though, Google might decide to take other content from the page if it feels that’s more relevant to the search query.
Off-page SEO
There’s another factor besides the quality and authoritativeness of the content on your site, that Google uses to rank you for a certain keyword. It’s the number of backlinks you have.
Backlinks are the links pointing to your site from an external source. And it’s very important to have as many of them as possible.
Consider it to be like a good reputation. You wouldn’t give too much importance to a person himself claiming to be very good. On the other hand, if many other people told you he was really very good, you’d definitely take notice.
At the same time, if a lot of shady characters recommended the guy, you’d be downright sceptical. Therefore, your backlinks must be from good sources.
2 factors determine the quality of your backlinks.
Relevant Anchor Text
Anchor text is the words within which your link is embedded. So, if you want to rank high on Google search results for shoes, it helps if the links to your site come attached to the word shoes or related terms.
It also helps if the links are from pages with relevant content. Plus, links pointing to your homepage are not as beneficial as those pointing to a page hosting the content you’re optimizing for.
Domain Authority
DA is a term that gives you an idea about the quality of a website. It ranges from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the more of a ranking boost you’ll get.
A DA score above 70 is very good, but it’s not easy to get a link from such sites.
DA between 70 to 20 is good, and that’s where you should aim to get links from.
A score below 20 is like a shady reputation. Give it a miss.
Remember, that you can’t trick Google with shortcuts like placing links in comments, or using sites that are built solely for generating backlinks. Tactics you can use are guest blogging, republishing (modified) content, and creating classy infographics.
The bottom line is to simply create awesome and original content that others will want to link back to.
Technical SEO
SEO also has a more technical aspect related to your website, and how it is structured. You need to ensure that all of your pages are accessible to Google’s search engine bot, as it crawls the internet looking to find new pages and categorise them. A good web designer will help with this.
2. Content Marketing
Content is the #1 way to stand out from the competition on the net.
But, creating good content is not enough. You also have to put it out there, calling attention to it.
Content marketing is the process of generating quality content and distributing it across multiple channels across the net.
As you can see, there are two steps to it. First, create useful information that your audience is searching for. Next, share it across multiple channels and fora to bring visitors to your site.
Both the traffic generated, as well as the engagement that your content earns (such as likes and shares will make Google sit up and take notice.
You can only put so much content on your main pages. So to achieve the critical mass required for success, you need to diversify into multiple content types. Some of them are:
Blogs
Having a blog, and posting articles regularly is key. The first step is to figure out the broad topics that you want to cover and write a bunch of articles around each. Answer the questions your audience have on their mind. Address their pain points. Offer solutions and advice. But, don’t hard sell all the time.
Whitepapers, Guides & Ebooks
Such long forms of content serve multiple aims.
They establish you as an expert. They also give your audience something to take home and keep with them.
And the best part is, that you’re giving all this helpful advice for free. Well, kind of! Before giving away your pdfs, you can ask for their email in return. That way, you can build a database of customers – a very important part of digital marketing.
The data you collect can be loaded onto a customer data platform or CRM, and you can send across emails, newsletters, exclusive offers, and more.
The one drawback of giving access to your best information only after filling a form is that Google can’t crawl it. It means that the content in your pdf won’t help your search engine results page (SERP) rankings as Google doesn’t know you have it.
Therefore, put most of that information on the page, with a button that leads to the form.
Videos
Everyone loves visual content. You’re probably watching more videos than you’re reading articles. Videos are a good way to provide value for your audience’s time.
Did you know that Youtube is the most visited site after Google? On average, an Australian user spends 18 minutes on it, visiting 10 pages every day. That’s even more time than spent on the search engine.
Besides, 82% of all consumer traffic on the net will be directed towards videos by 2022. And here’s the best stat – your video has a 50 times higher chance of appearing on the 1st page of Google, as compared to text content on the same topic.
3. Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
While SEO and content marketing are free, SEM is when you pay to be placed on the first pages of Google. Your ad appears when a user types in your keyword in the search box – this is called paid search. The ad also appears above the usual search results – also known as organic search.
This is especially useful when you’re starting, or you need a quick burst of sales volumes.
What you need to do, is first identify the keywords that you think will drive traffic and/or sales. Google Adwords indicates the volume and competitiveness of each keyword. The ideal one to pick has high search volumes and low competition.
That way, you can get your message across to a large number of people, without paying as much.
Once you’ve picked your keyword, you’ve got to place a bid for it. That’s what you’ll pay if a user clicks on your ad. There are 2 ways to bid:
Manual Bidding
You manually set how much you’re willing to bid for each keyword.
Automated bidding
You set an average daily budget per click. Google then automatically places a bid, to maximize your clicks within your budget over a month.
So, do you have to outbid everyone else for your ad to be seen? No. Google decides which ad appears based on this formula:
Ad Rank = CPC Bid x Quality Score
What is the Quality Score in Google Ads?
Google measures your quality score based on 3 factors:
Expected Click Through Rate (CTR)
How likely is it that your ad will be clicked on for a certain query?
Ad Relevance
Does your ad content match the user’s intent?
Landing Page
Are the landing pages (where the click takes users) relevant and useful to those who’ve clicked?
The gist of it is, that your ad content and landing pages must closely match the user’s keywords and intent. How your ad performs over time ultimately determines the quality score.
By fine-tuning your content, you can get your ad to appear higher, despite bidding lower than your competition.
Another big advantage of SEM is that you can show your ad to very specific audiences. You can define who sees your ads based on demographics and current location. You can also create different content to be shown to different audiences, even if they type in the same thing.
You can also be picky about the keyword variations your ads appear for. You can choose:
Broad Match
Your ad appears if your keyword matches with the intent of the query
Phrase Match
Your ad is displayed if the keyword phrase is included in the query.
Exact Match
Your shows up only if the exact keyword or a close variation is typed in.
Negative Keywords
You can also choose to not show your ads if a certain word appears along with the query. For example, if you’re targeting the word ‘runners’ for your shoe store. You can ensure your ad does not appear if the word ‘carpet’ and related terms appear.
The wider your net, the more impressions your ad will receive, but it will also increase your costs.
Social Media Marketing (SMM)
Social Media Marketing is simply promoting your content on social media. There are 2 ways to do it.
One is to create highly engaging as well as share-worthy content and promote it among your social communities. This is absolutely free. You can also take part in social discussions, and converse with influencers to spread your message.
Besides, networks like Instagram allow users to follow the hashtags of their choice. When they do, they are shown posts containing the hashtag, even from people they don’t follow.
So, add relevant hashtags that your audience is likely to be interested in.`
The other way to market on social media is to pay for your ad or content to be shown. This is great to connect with new audiences.
Here’s proof. 60% of Instagram users in a survey have followed a new brand after seeing an ad.
Social media is also a great place to sell. More than 33% of the respondents in the same survey have made a purchase after seeing an ad on Instagram.
Some of the top social sites are:
LinkedIn
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
Pinterest
The most common mistake marketers make when on social media, is taking a one-size-fits-all approach.
Each channel is different, and the same audience does things differently on each. You should do the same too.
Tailor your messaging to mimic your audience’s actions. Use the appropriate content format. And focus on building a community of believers.
Paid social media marketing works very similarly to PPC. Each channel has its version of the quality score. And all allow you to target specific audiences.
But, there’s one additional variable when it comes to user targeting on social media – audience behaviour.
You can, for example, show your sports shoe ads to people who follow a certain athlete, are part of a fitness community, or, liked/shared a post related to sports in the recent past.
This allows you to show your ad to more precise buyer personas, allowing for more clicks and conversions.
Email Marketing
An email is perhaps the one means of communication that you’re sure will reach your prospect. But the drawback is that every other marketer knows this, and inboxes are flooded with emails – most of them unwelcome.
So how do you stand out among the clutter?
Here’s the step by step way to being welcome in your audience’s inbox.
Create a Database of Customers
Offer every visitor to your site something in return for their email id. It could be an eBook download. A discount code. Or a newsletter they’d love to read.
You can do the same across social media channels too.
Segment Your Database
Segment your users according to their personas, tastes, and stage in the buyer’s journey.
Send Personalised Emails
Send emails that are in tune with each user segment’s needs. Also, refer to each person by name. If your database is huge, an email or marketing automation tool can help you achieve this without a sweat.
Avoid Spammy Content
There are certain words email service providers use to classify mail as unwanted and send them to the spam folder. Words like FREE, offer and discount are red flags.
Allow Easy Unsubscribing
Make it easy for a user to stop receiving emails. Otherwise, you might end up in the spam folder, and that’s always a black mark against your email id.
Display Advertising
Display ads are visual ads that appear on websites. To put up a display ad, you can get in touch with a site popular among your audience directly, or link up with a display ad network.
The top display ad networks are:
Google Display Network (Adsense)
Facebook Audience Network Ads
Yahoo! Network
Apple Advertising
Taboola
Airpush
Each of these networks has its own advantages, and it’s up to you to pick the right one. Facebook Audience Network Ads, for example, uses the humungous user data the social network has, as well as its other in-house channels like Instagram and Whatsapp.
Apple Advertising gives access to the apps in the Apple app store. Taboola lets you display ads on its vast network of affiliate sites.
There are hundreds of display networks. Many focus on niche categories and geographical locations. So, find the sites your audience frequent, and create the appropriate messaging for each site you’re advertising on.
In addition to PPC, there are 2 more ways to decide the terms on which you’ll pay.
Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM)
You pay every time 1,000 users view your ad.
Cost Per Acquisition (CPA)
You pay only when a predetermined conversion occurs.
7. Retargeting & Remarketing
Retargeting is simply sending a relevant message to users who’ve already interacted with your site before.
They may have visited a few pages without taking any real action. They may have loaded an item onto a shopping cart, but haven’t returned since. Or, they could have visited a CTA page, without filling in the form and pressing the button.
In the first case, wouldn’t it be great if you could offer a guide related to the pages the prospect was browsing? For the second, a discount on that very product might turn the tide in your favour. And in the last case, offering that CTA page goodie without having to fill the entire form (only keying the email id) – might be a nice display of empathy.
All of the above actions are possible, and it’s put into action by the humble cookie.
When a visitor visits your site, you can allow the browser to place a cookie on his or her computer. When another site is visited by the same user, you can display the appropriate ad. For this to happen, you’d have to tap into a display network, and give them a collection of display ads. The network will then display the ad.
This form of retargeting is also known as offsite retargeting.
With the help of the cookie, you can also perform actions on your site. Like an on-page popup displaying a discount, or maybe offering to take the visitor back to the page they were last on. This is an example of onsite retargeting.
Remarketing is essentially the same thing, except that you use cookie information to send highly contextual emails.
In addition, display networks also allow you to use a visitor’s email id to identify and send them the right ad. In this case, the line between retargeting and remarketing blur, to mean the same thing.
8. Marketing Automation
As you’re probably wondering, how is it possible to retarget visitors? After all, everything occurs in milliseconds.
The visitor visits your site. Then leaves to visit another site. Between the time your prospect clicks on that site, and the page loads, the decision on which ad to display is made. And when the page content appears, your message is there too.
All of this is possible with marketing automation. It connects all the key players in your online marketing efforts – website, customer database, email engine and marketing systems – as well as your sales and marketing teams.
The perfect marketing automation system helps you identify and segment your audience, create the right content, and automatically perform the appropriate actions based on what your audience is doing – in real-time
Here are some examples.
Email Automation
You can retarget site visitors, send thank you emails on a purchase, and send the appropriate newsletter to the right audience segment. All, without moving a muscle.
Nurturing Leads into Customers
You can send the apt information at the appropriate time to your prospects, to nudge them along in the buyer’s journey. The information can be sent via multiple channels – free as well as paid – and coordinated across your marketing, sales and service teams.
Programmatic Advertising
Targeting the right audience at the right time with the right messaging – automatically, is called programmatic advertising. All of this happens in real-time.
Measuring ROI
There are multiple ways to measure ROI. You might want to calculate your returns based on conversions, sales, or simply brand engagement. With an automated system in place, you can check all of these factors on the go. With such information at your fingertips, you can focus on your marketing strategy, recalibrating it by the minute.
Attribution Modelling
When it comes to online marketing, conversion usually happens over multiple touchpoints. A customer may have read a blog, then viewed a video, and finally clicked on a display ad with a discount before buying.
So, which of these touchpoints do you give credit to?
There are various attribution models. Some give credit to the first touchpoint(s), and others to the last (few). There are also attribution models that distribute the credit to different touchpoints in a weighted manner.
An automated digital marketing system can automatically attribute your successes to the touchpoints you choose. Over time, you can decipher which of your assets are giving you the most returns.
Marketing automation allows you to let the system handle all the mundane, repetitive tasks, allowing you to focus on the strategic decisions that’ll grow your business.
9. Affiliate Advertising
You can display ads from other brands on your site, to earn additional revenue. To do so, you’ll have to join an affiliate network. After you join, you can open up spaces on your webpage for advertisers on the network.
There are many compensation methods, including:
Revenue sharing/commissions/pay per sale (PPS)
Cost per action/acquisition (CPA)
Cost per click (CPC)
Cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
Getting a commission on a sale is the most popular way to get paid as a member of an affiliate network. So, ensure that your audience, the content of the display page, and the ad messaging are aligned, for best results.
10. Sponsored Content & Native Advertising
As you know, ads are sales-y and viewers know you’re making a pitch. To overcome this hitch, there are forms of advertising that are not so obvious.
Sponsored Content
Sponsored content may be in the form of an advertorial, where a website or online publication publishes an article that conveys information about your brand and/or products. Influencer marketing is also a form of sponsored content, where you pay social media stars in cash or kind to promote your products.
Native Advertising
Native advertising is creating promotional content for a site in a format and tone that looks exactly like the other material on the site. A good example is this article on the dreariness of filing tax returns on The Onion by H&R Block, a tax payment firm.
Three Ways to Minimize Costs With Digital Marketing
The key to minimizing your online advertising costs is to target your ads to as specific an audience as possible. That way, you display your ad to the people most likely to take the desired action, driving down advertising costs, and pushing up conversion rates and ROI.
Besides the targeting techniques mentioned in the article so far, here are 3 more:
Ad Scheduling
You specify the time periods when your ads are displayed, picking the times your audience is most likely to be online.
Device Targeting
You choose the device on which your ad is displayed, like picking mobiles for queries with ‘near me’ in it. That’s when your prospect is most likely to buy.
Geotargeting
You aim at users within a target radius, ideally when they’re close to your store.
Conclusion
Digital marketing is the holy grail of marketing today, and leveraging it effectively is critical to win customers and make friends in the digital age. The advantage of internet marketing is that small players can punch above their weight, and quick, agile marketers can outfox the heavyweights.
As you transform your business into an online marketing machine, remember to keep your audience at the centre of all your efforts. Focus primarily on your customers, not the competition. Create content that they’ll love. And spread it across the channels they frequent, in their everyday language.
Remember, as the world moves online, a well-thought digital marketing strategy will give your business the immunity to survive the pandemic and its crippling effects.
At QL Tech, we’ve been aiding businesses in their digital transformation efforts with market analysis, process & marketing automation, customer database platforms, and digital marketing. Get in touch, and we’ll help you get ahead too.
Anyone who’s ever been involved with email marketing is aware of the term “Buyers persona” and why it must be inculcated in the marketing strategies. For those of you who are still unfamiliar with the term, need not worry. As we are going to explain and show you how to make the best use of the Buyers persona to boost your email marketing efforts.
Its sales & marketing 101 that in order to sell your product or service, you have to know your customers to the fullest. And creating a buyers persona helps you out with just that. It is a fictional representation of your ideal customer based on real info. Such as their online behaviour, demographics and even educated speculations on customer’s goals and challenges.
Just keep in mind that the buyer’s personas are not about the customers that you could bring. But more about the customer you really wish to attract. This thought process will give you a clearer idea while creating them.
Now, why are Buyer personas so crucial in email marketing? Let’s find out…
What Makes Buyer Personas So Crucial in Email Marketing?
Let’s face it, as of today the world of email marketing has turned into a battlefield. An average person receives a legion of emails offering countless offering N number of offers & deals on a daily basis. Most of these get deleted without a second thought.
So now the question is how can you make sure that the emails that your brand sends don’t meet the same fate?
People like to take their business to brands they can trust and speak their language. As we mentioned before the buyer persona are created based on the needs, goals and challenges of your ideal customer. With the help of such information, you can create powerful emails that will have the highest probability of touching base with customers and achieve your business objectives.
Buyers personas are pivotal to creating highly targeted email marketing campaigns which get more opens, clicks, and engagement. Targeted emails more optimized towards lead generation and result in increased conversions.
Now that we have made abundantly clear how important buyers personas are in email marketing, lets’ go into some of its applications.
Segmenting Your Email Lists
The best feature of the buyer’s persona is that it provides a great source to customise your email lists in a personalized manner.
Utilising data such as demographics (age and gender) segment your email lists is a good start. but this will only give you a one-dimensional client profile. By crawling inside your prospect’s head and figuring out their thought process while making their buying decisions, you can refine the segmentation quite a bit.
The segmentation list allows you to send more engaging and contextual content pertaining to needs, based on:
Personas: The buyer personas does the receiver align with?
Engagement level: Based on emails opened, website pages visited, products bought or resources downloaded.
Status: Whether an existing customer, prospect, or a curious passer-by?
These segmented lists can be created in the automated email marketing tool like Infusionsoft and targeted emails will be automatically sent once the segment criteria are met by the user, prospect, or client.
Making an Offer One Cannot Refuse
By taking the customer’s goals and challenges into consideration. You can present customized offers that have the highest probability of meeting the objective of the email.
Just make sure that you do not make the offer in your first email. Send and a couple of nurture emails, providing helpful information regarding your product or services.
Let’s take an example of one of our clients, Brain Wellness Spa who help people with their mental and emotional health challenges. As per their buyer persona, one of the major challenges is people’s apprehension regarding the therapy.
Therefore based on the user action on the website, we designed targeted email sequences. By providing useful information along with free audios to gently nurturing the prospects. With the idea of opting for the client’s services. And making an offer for a free consultation at the end of the sequence greatly enhances the chances of conversion.
Create Actionable Content
Content is the message that your brand wants to share with the World. By tailoring your email content starting from the subject line to the body and CTA. You can boost the open and click-through rates by several folds.
Consider the buyer’s biggest concerns and challenges, and then write copy that will address them all.
Also, consider verbiage used in your mail as you cannot market to a Millennial as you would to a Baby Boomer. So take into consideration aspects like age and education. Would the reader relate with complex words or a simpler approach would get the job done? All of these elements will help your email marketing efforts resonate more with the readers.
Few Last Words…
We hope you found out take on buyer persona helpful and if you require any assistance, then please contact us. Our experts would be delighted to assist you.
Don’t forget that as your business grows and changes over time, then so would your brand’s buyer persona. Therefore it is necessary for you to review the persona from time to time and implement the changes in your email marketing.
