Email Marketing isn’t Dead, Your Approach Is

Email marketing is still one of the best lead generators in the digital marketing space. It generates a sky-high ROI of $42 for every dollar spent. But this ROI doesn’t come automatically. Let’s dive into some best practices for email marketing:

Use your customer and prospect data to create personalized messages for your subscribers. Customizing your emails with relevant information is a powerful way to get more engagement and sales from your leads. Most CRM platforms have AI features that take the guesswork out of creating personalized emails.

It’s not always about short-term conversions. Delivering a regular cadence of email newsletters to your past and present customers builds strong relationships. This improves brand loyalty and retention. If your customers value and enjoy your newsletter, they’ll begin to look for it around the time you normally send it!

Use exciting subject lines to drive higher open rates. Use urgency, intrigue, humor, teasers, and questions. ALWAYS provide value and avoid spam-flagging tactics like multiple exclamation points, too many ALL CAPS or certain trigger-happy sales words. Follow the same guidelines in your content. Think value over length or beauty. Some of the best performing emails we’ve seen are short, text only, and direct. If you don’t provide valuable information, recipients are likely to unsubscribe or mark you as spam. Ouch.

Leverage Paid Social Media Ads

Gaining organic reach on most social media platforms is an uphill challenge. Paid social is a game changer for most businesses when the right techniques are used. Make sure you study your audience enough to know where they gather online and the types of content they engage with the most. Leverage this consumer data to create social ads that grab their attention within the first three seconds while positioning your product/service as a solution to their problem. Ads can build your fan base, drive website traffic or generate leads. The best long-term strategies take a balanced approach.

Optimize SEO for Voice Search 

There’s no denying the growing use of voice recognition in the devices that surround us. Optimizing your content for searches with ears rather than eyes requires some reworking of your content. Create content that answers common questions your customers ask. Answer The Public is a great place to quickly find out what your target group is searching for online. Google Ads can evaluate the performance of human language keywords and find new ones.

Content Creation 

Content is king, but not all that glitters is gold. Demand for interactive content is growing in today’s digital landscape. Interacting with your audience is becoming more important with the latest social media updates: Instagram story quizzes, LinkedIn polls, and a host of other interactive features are becoming the norm. Using these interactive features not only creates an engaging and entertaining experience for your audience, it also makes it easy to capture their information and begin a dialogue.

These are just a few of the digital marketing tactics you can use to generate more leads and not blow your budget. By using a mix of these tactics, you can reach your target audience and convert them into leads. 

At AdEdge Digital Marketing, we specialize in helping businesses generate more leads and sales through digital marketing. We understand the ins and outs of all the different digital marketing tactics and can help you create a campaign that achieves your specific goals. Contact us today to learn how we can help you grow your business without breaking the bank. Got a question? Need a hand? Give us a shout!

The post Best Digital Marketing Tactics to Generate More Leads and Not Blow the Budget Doing It appeared first on AdEdge Online Marketing.

Finding a reputable Digital Marketing agency for your SMB is like stepping into the Wild West. Any cowboy can hang up a sign and say he’s open for business. Unfortunately for you, like the Wild West, there’s no governing body for Digital Marketing agencies or how they manage accounts. Sifting through the dust to find a diamond in the rough is not an ideal use of your time.
So how do you know if you’re working with an experienced, reputable Digital Marketing agency and not some cowboy operation that’s just looking to make a quick buck?

1. Vague Campaign Data

We created a successful Digital Marketing campaign with no data…said no reputable marketing agency ever. Strategy follows numbers and not the other way around. Without a proper understanding of how your marketing dollars are performing, you cannot gauge your campaign’s effectiveness and make necessary adjustments.

A reputable Digital Marketing agency will be more than happy to share this data with you. If your agency is not forthcoming with this information, or worse, if they are trying to hide it from you, this is a red flag.

2. Minimal Communication

Good communication is critical in any relationship, and this is especially true when it comes to working with a Digital Marketing agency. How often do they contact you? What kind of updates or reports do you receive? How much input do you have into the campaign?

An agency that is ripping you off will likely be very secretive and frequently avoid communication. You should expect regular communication from your agency, whether it is through emails, phone calls, or face-to-face meetings. It’s their duty to keep you in the loop and share details about the ongoing work they are doing for you.

3. Failing to Follow Industry Best Practices

Digital Marketing best practices change faster than a Cowboy fan’s hopes at making it to the play-offs. Following industry trends, algorithms, and changes will help you remain at the top of your game and gain a competitive edge over your competitors.

You don’t want your agency using out-of-date tactics that may cause more harm than good. A reputable Digital Marketing agency will stay updated on the latest tactics to help you achieve your marketing goals.

4. Over Promise Under Deliver

I see it all of the time, an agency will promise a client the moon and the stars only to end up getting peanuts. Always do your homework and look at an agency’s credentials such as:

• Qualifications and certifications
• Awards
• Positive reviews, testimonials, and references
• Case Studies and white papers
• Portfolio

Any reputable agency would be happy to provide this information if it’s not already listed on their website.

5. “Set it and forget it” …and other agency money savers that could cost you

Certain money-hungry agencies will stop at nothing to improve their bottom line. While this can come in the form of over-charging, it more often comes in the form of cutting expenses – at your cost. Here are three ways an agency can rip you off by not investing appropriately in your effort.

• Set it and forget it. All is good at kickoff but after that, the changes and proactive communications go silent. The agency is basically running your campaign on auto-pilot which leaves your performance flat or worse.
• Automation. Lots of agencies looking to save a buck on personnel turn to automated optimization tools. A.I. may be good at making mathematical decisions but nothing replaces a skilled digital marketer who understands the all-important creative and human side of marketing. A machine can’t come up with new ideas, give subjective feedback or ask, “why?”
• Newbie account managers. We hear it all the time, my account manager kept changing or didn’t really know what he/she was doing. Account turnover means unhappy managers and usually new, underpaid managers that skip out to find the next best thing.

An excellent digital marketing agency will offer highly educated, experienced account managers who love what they do and who work hard to optimize your campaign on an ongoing basis. They enjoy their work and what they do, and take pride in delivering continued improvements in your account performance over time.

Looking out for these common red flags will save you time and money. At AdEdge Digital Marketing, you can count on us to create outstanding digital marketing campaigns that generate results through outstanding people, thoughtful campaign development, continuous analysis and performance optimization. Contact us if you’d like to chat.

The post 5 Signs Your Digital Marketing Agency is Ripping You Off appeared first on AdEdge Online Marketing.

As your business continues to expand, you may discover that you need to use both tactics for different objectives. Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing  come with a unique set of strengths and weaknesses. However, with a solid understanding of how to leverage these tactics to grow your business, you’ll be able to make an informed decision on how to incorporate each into your overall marketing plan to produce a high return on your investment. 

How does each tactic work? Which one is better? Let’s explore… 

What is Search Engine Marketing?

Seems like a dumb question but as Google continues to evolve so does all that is impacted by Search Engine Marketing (SEM). In business marketing terms, it’s about optimizing your exposure in all areas of the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) of Google, Bing, etc., anytime someone in your market area searches for your business or any of the products or services you sell.  In other words, how well is your business represented in the search engines when a ready prospect is searching for the things that you sell? The goal of SEM is to improve your exposure in the SERPS and to drive good, prospective customers and clients to your website where they will learn about your company, your products or services and hopefully, will convert to a lead or sale. 

Why is SEM so important? Well, just think about how many search queries are inputted into Google on a daily basis: 3.5 billion, according to one study. It’s evident the importance of making sure your business not only shows up in relevant search results, but appears on the first page through an effective SEM strategy.

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing (SMM) involves using apps such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and many others to build your brand and create an engaging community that likes and purchases from your business.

SMM involves a more intentional approach to social media platforms than simply uploading the occasional post to your business account. Marketing experts know that the best results from social media advertising spring out of bespoke solutions, carefully tailored to each audience segment, as well as the unique attributes of each network.

What’s the difference between SEM and SMM?

SEM and SMM can both be very valuable tools to grow your business. However, they accomplish this objective in different ways. 

1. Focus

In general, the focus of search engine marketing is to generate clicks and, subsequently, traffic to your website. Whether you stick with organic SEO (i.e producing content that will climb Google’s unpaid “natural” rankings) or dive into the world of Google Ads Pay-Per-Click (PPC), the main objective is to get the highest number of qualified visitors to your website, convert them into leads, and ultimately, sales.

In contrast, social media marketing may have a number of different objectives apart from funneling traffic to your website. For instance, you may want to leverage SMM for increased engagement, or enhanced brand credibility. And in many cases, companies use social media accounts to foster customer loyalty to their business, rather than to directly drive sales.

2. Content

There’s a world of difference between content that performs well in an SEM context, versus what works for SMM.

For search engine marketing, you’ll typically have either paid ads with clear and  concise copy or organic content that will show up as top results.  Studies show that the optimal word count for organic SEO falls somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 words. Of course, successful posts may be much shorter or much longer, depending on a wide variety of factors that come into play, such as relevance, domain authority,  and content structure to name a few. 

On the other hand, social media is typically not the medium for longform pieces of content. In fact, a 2021 survey found that 85% of marketers rank short-form video lasting no more than 15 seconds  as the most effective type of social media content. 

3. Cadence

How often should you post content for search engine marketing? SEO-driven content may only be published a few times per month, depending on the size of the business and what’s being sold. In fact, email newsletters have grown more personalized overtime with companies choosing to showcase specific content to different audiences. 

On the other hand, the effectiveness of social media marketing is contingent on staying on top of the changing algorithm patterns on the various social media apps to achieve maximum growth and brand recognition on social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and many others. 

Which method is better?

That’s the million dollar question. And maybe you already saw this coming, but the answer is, it depends. It depends on your industry, budget, goals, sales cycle, etc. Neither one is inherently “better” than the other. A digital marketing strategy that combines both approaches will work much better than either one alone. In many cases, you could sum up the synergy between SEM and SMM this way:

Social media marketing increases brand awareness of and engagement with your brand, while search engine marketing increases both engagement and the likelihood that consumers will select your brand when they are ready to make a decision.

Building a powerful online presence that increases your bottom line is no easy feat. Instead of wasting time and money with trial and error, connect with an AdEdge Digital Marketing expert today for a free Digital Marketing Health Checkup.

The post Search Engine Marketing Vs. Social Media Marketing: The Final Match appeared first on AdEdge Online Marketing.