Online Marketing – Veronica Stenberg

Five business crucial cornerstones for your CRM department

Veronica — Mon, 07 Aug 2017 05:00:53 +0000

These are my five succinct tips for evolving your CRM department and data from “email” to a tool for insight and increased revenue for your brand and business.

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1/ Integrate CRM data with your digital marketing to increase relevance & cut markering costs

Both for re-targeting/markering and finding twins/look-a-likes. This article covers how you can use your CRM data to use your marketing budgets more effectively in more detail.

CRM is short for customer relationship management – and it’s is not email! CRM is relevant for all on and offline channels in some way and using existing customer data helps you be more relevant in markering and communication. Targeting the right customers in the right channels and finding ways to expand your customer base by using the look-a-like method mentioned above helps you be more effective in growing your business.

2/ Use customer life time value to identify the customer segments you should be spending your time and money on

Take note from the B2B business world, who are very skilled at identifying the value of each customer account. Even if you operate in the B2C or B2all business spectrum, calculating and assigning value to each customer based on average order value in relation to average customer life span with your company is key to ensuring you are targeting the right customers in your marketing. Also helpful in identifying if you spend other company resources in an effective and meaningful way.

CLV can also be used as a blueprint for building segmentation models for finding twins/look-a-likes of your most profitable and loyal customers – you want more of these!

3/ Eliminate customer churn

Reduce your attrition rate by identifying specific KPI’s to measure customer engagement and activity over time. For example you can use specific time periods and put automated actions in place using pre-defined actions, designed to initiate engagement or actions. But know where not to automate and when to use real human interaction.

Defining a easy to use model, for your customer engagement can be useful, such as acquisition, engage, validate, and re-engage.

4/ Design moments that matter – use data to help your customers in their path to purchase – and after – delight and be helpful

Use the customer data you have to be more relevant in terms of supplying the right information, at the right moment, to the customer when they are making a decision for a purchase. But it does not stop there. Let’s say you work for an airline company. How can you be of assistance after a purchase – but still there when a customer is having an experience with your company? you can help the customer find the airport, navigate to the right check-in and bagage drop as well as navigating to the taxi area or closest local transport service upon their arrival. The reason behind being helpful is that you take responsibility for the entire open customer journey, not just up to the actual purchase. Beyond that, you can reach out for feedback and the customers opinion of their experience and use the information in their next interaction with your company.

5/ Improve insight to customer service department

Your customer service department is key in supplying that effortless customer experience.

Ensure that if a customer contact your customer service team, that the customer in question, has to supply as little information about themselves as possible to get the assistance they require.

If you have purchase or booking data, even browsing data (for key pages on your website) and preferred way to be contacted – either it be text, email, phone or social media. Use that information to help your customer department to craft a better experience for the customers when they contact your company.

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Image borrowed by: CloudCherry – view the entire infographic over here

The Foundations of Digital Marketing

Veronica — Mon, 15 May 2017 04:30:09 +0000

Either it be a new job or a new client. This is the fool-proof process I put in place to get the initial understanding to build a foundation for digital marketing and communication.

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Look at existing data and set-up

Identify what works
Identify what need to be improved or can actually be removed completely
Find hurdles in the customer journey – and take appropriate measures to adjust these. If you want a head start on what questions to ask the website data – you can get some inspiration over here.

Ensure you have the tracking in place to measure both goals and events

If you don’t have the proper tracking in place, you will never be able to evaluate performance nor highlight the results your work have generated. Always ensure that there is tracking in place and most importantly that it actually works. If there is – great – then there is the next challenge and that is event tracking beyond the last KPI which is often conversion or lead. Identify key pages in the customer journey and make your KPI framework reflect this.

Get insight about the target groups

If you don’t know who your customers are, their interest, driving forces, pain points and so forth. Then is hard to craft compelling and useful content, find the right marketing messages and start building that customer relationship that sets your company apart from all other companies offering the same product. Investing in getting the customer insight you need will pay off.

Ensure you have a campaign landing page for bought media

It doesn’t matter how much money you invest – or throw away – on bought media if you don’t invest in a landing page that is streamlined, to the point, de-cluttered and easy to convert on.

Make an “open” customer journey

Identify key pages in the customer journey and ensure you have the right content, messaging and also event tracking and KPI’s to follow the customers and work actively and regularly with improving the customer journey and experience in all your digital touchpoints.

These are however just the mechanics and the foundation – on top of this you need to ensure that you have something to say and that your company is using content, the right social media platforms where the target groups are. But once you’ve done this – you have the right foundation for starting the work with the really fun stuff as the creative and marketing

How to calculate potential ROI for a media investment

Veronica — Mon, 13 Feb 2017 05:00:52 +0000

This is my calculation which I use when I want to see if there is a business case behind a media investment for my clients or my own marketing initiatives.

There are so much information available today, and from that you can manually calculate predictions and potentials before you choose to invest in a specific media, channel or campaign. Armed with the right specific, relevant numbers for your business and some industry averages you can create a hypothesis for the potential for an investment if you are unsure, or just want to make a calculation in terms how you should re-distribute your media budgets and what the potential could be.

Marketing today, merges business savviness and analytical skills. There is just a question of time (I guess there already is someone out there who has turned this into a formula, if not, that someone could make some nice bit of cash on a software for this, collecting data from advertisers, merged with some kind of ad score to calculate predictions based on data available).

You need the following numbers:

Average order value for your website
Average conversion rate for your website
Average CTR of ads for the specific media
CPM or CPC price per media
Budget per media
Calculated impressions per media and budget
Estimated clicks per media
Estimated conversions from each media

= estimated revenue per media

NOTE:

This is just a calculation of potential and you use averages and generic numbers for the CTR for example, it’s just to get a clue about the potential and what specific budget can generate.
Your ads and landing pages, entire website and check-out process has a huge impact on if your campaign and marketing activities that your business do, are successful or not.
If applicable, you may want to deduct the VAT from the final calculation.
If applicable, you may want to do a second calculation on this, deducting a percentage, if you have that number, for any return rate you may have on your goods.
If you are doing a campaign for various geographical locations you need the conversion rate and average order value for each country and website store.
Each media needs to be evaluated and calculated separately. Since CTR and similar may vary from both media and country.

A beginners guide to Google AdWords

Veronica — Mon, 30 Jan 2017 07:18:45 +0000

This article will give you an insight into what AdWords is and give you the basic
understanding of how it works. This article is written for a beginner, and only covers the basics with the purpose to explain the fundamentals

AdWords is an clever always-on tool in every successful online marketing strategy to push sales, leads and targeted traffic to your website, offering full transparency in terms of the budget you invest. On top of that it will give you some really valuable insights for your SEO and content work.

What is Google AdWords?

Google AdWords is a text based advertising system visible on the top of and to the right of the organic listings in the Google search engine. Utilising a pay per click payment model – meaning you only pay for a click and not a view of your ad and not views.

How does it work?

You create text ads in relation to a set of keywords. These ads are then showed/served in the Google search engine when users search on the keywords which you are bidding for. You can also add these to be distributed within Googles Network which includes Google Display Network and Youtube.

You can see the process as an auction. There are two locations in the Google search engine layout page where your ads can be visible – at the moment this is in the top of the page and the bottom of the organic listings.

The better you manage to combine your keywords, with your ads and a relevant landing page, and the better the click through rate on them – the better quality score you will get. And thus pay less for the keywords you are bidding on and get a better ranking in the big “competitor que” of ads for the top positions.

So even though you may have a lower bid on a keyword then your competition, you may have a better position then them, on the basis of your quality score in the way you combine your keywords, ads, landing pages and your generated click through rate.

So it’s not all about the money – its about quality and relevance too.

Easy targeting

Your budget is well invested since you can tag specific geographical areas, down to postcodes to make sure you only target people in your business region, as well as setting rules for times and days of the week your campaigns are supposed to be visible.

Be in control of your ad spend

You can easily manage and stay in control of your budget by setting a daily spend cap or budget. The same cap can be applied to any automatic bidding process, for example, you only want to pay a maximum of £1/per click on your keywords, then this is easily set-up and managed within your account. The daily budget you set can be changed whenever and the software also saves your budget to allocate it better.

By using Google AdWords you get full control and insight in your budget and you only pay for clicks – not views (impressions) of your ad. Tying this together with Google Analytics and conversion tracking will enable you to get insight on the ROI of each keyword you choose to invest in.

Why Google AdWords?

There are plenty of reasons to use Google AdWords and your business is never too small or too big to benefit from pay per click ads in Google. The main reasons are obvious: you are visible in the perfect context! Someone searches for your type of service or product in a search engine and you want to be visible when they do so because you are placing yourself in the environment where people are looking for something they want to know more about and where to find it.

You may want to use this as a traffic booster to your website, but at the end of the day you want more sales or leads, then Google AdWords is the perfect tool to capture that and give you the insight you need to refine your activities across your entire digital marketing mix.

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10 reasons to use Google AdWords:

The ads are visible in a customers buying cycle, which is the search context, you can easily customize your ad based on your customer path to purchase.
To attract new customers, leads or increase sales
Your ads reach as broad or specific audience as you desire, from local
to national placements
You do not need a high initial investment to start off with AdWords
It’s easy to change – instant in fact – if something does not work – pause
or delete
You get full control of your budget spend – you set your own limit on
daily spend for the campaigns
You get full insight on which keywords generate sales or leads.
You can test new services, products or marketing messages before investing in them – – you get valuable insights on what your customer is looking for in Google and how you can adjust your messaging to target their desire.
You can easy do split testing on ads or perform experiments for a low
cost and there are plenty of tools to automate the work.
It can be a cost effective way of marketing your company on a small
budget, utilising the right targeting, time of day and high performing key-
words. Comparing to other digital marketing options.

SEO – how to spread content and get backlinks to your website

Veronica — Mon, 23 Jan 2017 06:00:12 +0000

This article is the next step once you have got your most basic SEO groundwork done and focuses on how you can spread the useful content you have now produced and started to publish to get links to your website on specific topics and start to own them.

SEO and content marketing go hand in hand. Some of these channels requires modification of the content, in terms of image cards or similar, its a small adjustment that will have big impact.

But before you head into this remind yourself of your own company purpose and target audience in these channels, so that you don’t just push content, do it in a thoughtful way that aligns with your overarching strategy and of course is both useful and relevant for your target audience and on brand.

Note that this article is written in the beginning of 2017 and from what is relevant now, how these platforms are used now. This is definitely subject to change

So here is 16 ideas on how you can spread the word about the useful content you have now created, on topics you want to own that can help your customers.

Create boards that reflect the customer journey and keyword analysis. Lets say you have a interior design company. Then create boards such as; Bathroom inspiration for small spaces, Design ideas for monochrome kitchen and so forth.

Twitter

Do a search on twitter to find questions relating to the content you have. See if you can find questions that relate to the content you have, that answer their questions. Then respond to the people you find that have the questions with links to your content.

Tweet useful tweets with links to your content in popular hashtags. Do not try and invent your own, use existing ones.

See what is trending and use those hashtags if its relevant to what you have to say. Be creative here, by jumping on a trending topic.

Facebook

Groups – identify a few large groups where you can respond to questions in a useful way and with your response add links to your content to help someone further.

Your company facebook page – how can you post relevant updates with links to your content that is useful for your followers?

Sponsor posts – if you have something that you know is particularly useful and on brand for your business, add a boost on your post. (Don’t forget to add the facebook tracking pixel to evaluate)

Slideshare

This may be mostly applicable to B2B and consultants, however, before it was bought by LinkedIn, this can also be a useful tool to create presentation for yourself, your service, how something works (relating to your business) and add this to your profile and embed on your website.

Tag appropriately.

If you run a business, you should have a LinkedIn company page. Mix in updates with links back to your content, if useful for your followers and inline with your brand.

Google Image Search

Ensure that your images are appropriately named as per your selected keywords to increase visibility in Google.

Instagram

Can you use the photos from your content in a useful way, that also reflects your brand and business on instagram in an engaging way? or perhaps use quotes from content? use popular and relevant hashtags when posting.
Here a list on the 1500 most popular hashtags right now.

Youtube

Videos should be added to a Youtube channel for your company. This is the second largest search engine in the world where “how to” searches rule. Therefore your videos should be named accordingly as well as your playlists. The selected keywords from your keyword analysis should be used here to.

Google +

Groups – identify groups that you can join and again, answer questions.

Create a business page and profile – post content and tag it appropriately.

Issuu

If you have publications of some sort, you can either upload these here directly on to issuu or you can upload previews with links to your website.

Gawker sites

These sites are only if you have really professional photos. There is suite of sites to submit to:
craftgawker
dwellinggawker
foodgawker
stylegawker
weddinggawker

However, there are a multitude of these sites to submit photos and links to, the best way is to google to find these and set up profiles and start to submit your photos and links.

Specific forums

If there are any specific and large forums for your specific niche, identify them and become active in answering questions with links to any relevant and useful content in each answer.

Once you have enough content on your website. You can start to incorporate this to any newsletter you may have. Make it useful and relevant. Perhaps you own a travel business. Why not include a summer holiday checklist for someone who has booked a holiday trip with you during summer. Or you are a food blogger – why not start the new year to collect your most healthy recipes and email out a selection with tantalizing images and links to your website?

Collaborations

Is there any complimentary brands you can team up with. Can you swap content for newsletters? or write guest post or articles for each others websites? how can you team up and work togeheter?

Online PR

To ge featured on websites for magazines or life style magazines use prnewswire.com or similar to your country or if there are any industry specific PR distribution platforms and sites relevant for your business.

Niche social platforms

If you google your topic you may find even more social media platforms to join that are not known to everyone but still have a huge amount of activity and users passionate about a specific topic or lifestyle choice. Find one of these and you have plenty of opportunities to find your niche target audience and be both relevant and helpful to them.

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To structure your work – you can add (or make) a distribution plan to your content calendar (or plan).

Insights – if you need additional insights (and relevant traffic to convert of course) run an AdWords campaign. It will give you an insight on your quality score for specific keywords (i.e find more things to fix on your website), new keywords ideas etc.

Don’t have time?
Invest 6 months in spreading across all platforms, then evaluate the top performing platforms and collaborations, then focus on them and cut out the other ones from your plan. You can also automate some of the posting using tools such as Hootsuite and similar. However you can never automate a authentic response, dialoge or connection.

A Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Veronica — Mon, 16 Jan 2017 05:05:45 +0000

“Google now processes over 40,000 search queries every second on average, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.”

– Source = Google (!)

Who this article is written for:

This article covers the very basics of search engine optimization and is written for beginners, who already have a website that they need to optimize for their visitors and in doing so search.

This article will focus on anything you can do with your own website, or ask a website administrator and/or developer to help you out with on a very basic level.

What is search engine optimization?

Search engine optimization is a way to improve your website so that you will rank higher in the organic listings for Google, Yahoo or whatever search engine is important to you and your target audience, market and/or business.

The improvements you do, are all centered around a set or a specific keywords and/or phrases. The better you optimize your website for the chosen keywords and phrases, the higher up in the organic results listings for searches relevant to that, your website will appear. Thus you will gain more visitors to convert to customers or leads.

So how does it work?

There are five main parts of improving your website for search engines, they are as follows:

Technical – how the code is structured, how your URL’s are generated, server load and response time, along with meta descriptions and CSS and so forth

Mobile – that you have an adaptive/responsive design or a mobile version of your website, load time and user friendliness

Structure of your website – how you have create your pages and organize them, categories tags etc

Content – such as where you place keywords in your copy, alt tags on images, how you name images, downloads, inbound links on text etc

Amplification of content – link building, many times referred to as off page “optimization”. Which means what sites link to yours, what keywords they use in the link text and what page they link to. As well as social media counts. To simplify – see it as online PR.

This article will focus on anything you can do with your own website, or ask a website administrator and/or developer to help you out with on a very basic level.

The basic principles for improving your website for search engines is actually quite simple, see your website pages as a newspaper page, you have an appropriate titles with keywords and follow up with an intro text, usually slightly bolder to entice the reader and then your body text contains your keywords, strategically placed where this makes sense.

Your basic, beginners SEO strategy overview;

Selected keywords (from a keyword analysis with user intent and volume)

Content

Page optimization

Link building

Social media and other relevant external websites

Press releases and external link building activities

Time and patience

Can I do this by myself?

Yes you can perform some of the work yourself, based on what is important to rank high on for your business and the competition of course. There are plenty of basic improvements you can do yourself when it comes to search engine optimization and your website. A lot of the work (or should be if not!) is simple “best practice” when it comes to website management.

To establish what keywords that you want to rank high on – do a keyword analysis – I would recommend that you let an SEO agency do this, or freelance consultant, since this is tedious work and a experienced person does this much quicker.

From the keyword analysis you select keywords to rank high on, based on the search volume (in most cases, there is a waste of time to target to rank high for keywords that have low search volume).

When selecting keywords to work with, you should also take in consideration your customer journey to purchase and select a few keywords from each phase. (intent)

I use see, think, do and care since this is an easy model to apply and work with.

In this model I’ve used high waisted jeans as an example for on how the potential customer can use a search engine to find those perfect black, high waisted pair of jeans. And thus illustrate how you should think in terms of picking your keywords, optimizing and creating content for your website.

How to do a keyword analysis and evaluation yourself:

If you rather do a keyword analysis and evaluation yourself, these are the tools to use to perform one.

Google Keyword Planner – evaluate the search volume and competition, amount of searches on a local and global scale

Google Analytics – review existing keywords generating traffic

Google Search Console – submit a sitemap and gain insight on when your website is crawled etc (as well an enabler for you to be able to view some keywords and phrases that generate traffic to your website today)

Google Insight for Search – review trends and search volume in your country

Use your keywords

Create a document of your keywords/phrases mapped against your customer search journey/path to purchase, and make sure this is included in your marketing strategy.

Geographical location – if your company only supplies a service within a specific geographical region, make sure you consider including geographical location/s

The SEO checklist

Once you have your keywords, follow this checklist of simple changes you can perform yourself to use as a guide to your SEO empowerment and improvements. To search engine optimize your website pages add your keywords where appropriate:

(download the SEO checklist here)

Page Code

Meta description
Meta keyword

Structure

Navigation structure
URL to page
Page title and name

Page copy

Headings and titles (H1, H2 etc)
Intro text
Body text
Body text with highlighted words
Or in bullets

Page content

Link within your website on keywords (vote on your own website)
Copy, videos, images – alt text, file names and descriptions
Links
Links to key pages on your website

Social media

Pinterest – how your boards, images and content are named
Youtube – how you playlist are named, videos, description etc
Google+ – business profile, place and communities, if relevant
Twitter – use to spread the word about your content, in a useful way of course
Other relevant platforms and forums (yelp, tripadvisor etc )

Your pages

For each page make sure vital keywords are present in:

Page titles, name etc
Meta description
Meta keywords
URLs generated – should reflect your keywords in them (where relevant and logical)
Content (copy, images, videos, alt text, descriptions etc)
New content

Code

CSS files should be placed externally and linked in
JavaScript files should be placed externally and linked in
Image mapping code, should preferably be placed in the bottom of the HTML code structure if possible
Cookies – try to use an alternative solution or don’t use cookies on content pages (depending on your requirements that is)
Get Google Tag Manager

Url’s

Dynamic URL’s with parameters in them, use a URL re-write tool for this make sure the URL’s that are generated follow a neat structure like for example: domain.com/category/product_name.htm

Various

Have you created a sitemap?
Have you submitted your website to Google through Google Search Console?
Get a developer to help you out with any errors and warnings found by Search Console upon indexing your site
Load time and other server side tasks

Links

Do you have a link building strategy for external websites?
Make sure your keywords are included in the link text
Make sure you are using the right pages of your website to build links to (that you link to a specific or specific pages (with the keywords in them))
Internal links, within your website, linking to other pages, the same rules for keywords in the link text apply for these

This is a lot of information in one article – so you can download a search engine optimization checklist over here

Tools:

Google Keyword Planner – you need an AdWords account for this (free anyways)
Website Grader – for a quick assessment of your website SEO friendliness
Majestic SEO – a quick and free backlink assessment
Google Analytics – review existing keywords generating traffic
Google Search Console – submit a sitemap and gain insight on when your website is crawled etc (as well an enabler for you to be able to view some keywords and phrases that generate traffic to your website today)
Google Trends – review trends and search volume in your country
A Thesaurus – thesaurus.com
Your competitions source code if you are curious to see what words they are using
traffictravis.com – PC only software which you can download and install, in the free version you can get a list of page errors to fix after initial set-up and you can see your current ranking for your particular keywords

A quick way to find out if and what from your website is indexed

Go to Google.com (or whatever suffix is relevant for you)

Type in site:yourdomainname.com

In my case:

site:veronicastenberg.com

gave me on the 7/01/2017 – 132 page results

or use your Google Search Console, if you have this for your domain – to find out if and what is indexed in more detail (listed)

For further reading

Twitter & Google: http://searchengineland.com/signals-twitter-google-care-219202

11 tips before getting started with Digital Marketing

Veronica — Mon, 09 Jan 2017 05:38:23 +0000

If you are new to digital marketing and want 11 swift tips before you get started. Here is a list with short and general advice relevant for someone just starting out in the field of digital marketing.

1/ Don’t be afraid of failure – that’s also a lesson learned on your way towards discovering what works and what doesn’t – for your business.

2/ You will learn new things everyday – however empower yourself with the basic
and essential information on each topic. Then add to it as you go along. You don’t need
to know everything on day one, just the basics – and buy the services from skilled people
who can help you.

3/ Test and measure everything – digital means instant and measurable results – if
something don’t work or generate the desired results after a valid amount of time – just stop it. Each activity should have a primary KPI and thats how you knwo if it’s working or not.

4/ Identify non-competitive complimentary brands to exchange services and work
with if you are on a shoestring budget.

5/ Don’t forget that your website is key – you can drive traffic to it – but you need to
ensure it’s strong enough to convert. Google Website Optimizer is free – use it and make
more money by optimizing your website content and design.

6/ Apply a goal to each activity, don’t just be on twitter for being on twitter – use it for
something. Make sure everything you do or invest either time or money in has a purpose and thought behind it.

7/ Be conscious about the value you can give to your customers, either it be through free
shipping, advice, content etc. Modern marketing is all about adding value
to other people’s lives.

8/ Increasing traffic and likes have no value in itself. It is what you DO with the
traffic on your website or the fans that matters. Connect, capture and convert. Apply goal tracking on your website with Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager.

9/ Do you need to convince upper management about getting decent online marketing budget? or a budget at all? then do your research and this template to create a an digital marketing strategy for your business and propose
a three month trial with evaluation of your plan. Back this up with research about your
target audience online and perhaps some useful statistics on the industry average ROI from
each channel you want to invest in. Show the potential and the transparency in terms of
invested budget. Digital marketing done right will enable you to evaluate each penny spent.

10/ Do you have a disaster you don’t want to deal with or have been putting
off for a long time? Hire someone temporarily to deal with it, i.e. to sort though your
customer database and divide up the information in a way which enables you to use this as
segmented database for newsletter campaigns or similar tasks.

11/ Unsure about what or how to improve your website to make it convert, hire
a freelancer to sort it out or use Website Optimiser. Your website is key since this is where you drive traffic and it should convert, as well as working for you in terms of SEO and aiding your customer through their path to purchase.

Image borrowed from: sbmarketingtools.com

How to measure brand awareness

Veronica — Mon, 02 Jan 2017 06:38:19 +0000

To know how your brand is doing in terms of getting more or less know. Or the initiative you are working on, there are a few quick ways to find out without involving an agency or undergoing a big research project.

View these methods as a preview of if your brand are increasing or decreasing in awareness. A first step in an investigation that will give you an indication in terms of what to do next.

Google Trends

Google Trends is an excellent research tool to get an indication how brand awarness initatives have performed. Match this with events, PR work, product launches and exlplore the effect these have had on search volume relating to your brand and vertical.

Let’s use Elegantly Vegan as an example:

As you can see there are a few spikes in this graph in terms of search volume. (For you who don’t know Elegantly Vegan is my side project where I write about vegan food and lifestyle). These spikes in search volume has do do with press coverage. Every time a magazine, newspaper or a larger website has written about Elegantly Vegan – the search volume goes up. Since there is a specific correlation and its easy for me to remember, the conclusion here is that, there is low awareness of Elegantly Vegan since the blog is not that well known.

Compare this to the topic vegan recipes you can see what the potential and what can be achieved with a little bit (well a lot) more work.

If you view the page you can also see related topics that are rising and more detailed infomation which also heps you in establishing an understanding on how your brand are doing in terms of awarness. (Vegan recipes as an example)

Google Analytics & Google Search Console

If you haven’t already, you need to enable Search Console to get an indication of what keywords people are using to land on your website. Can you see a rise in branded keywords and queries? if so, this is an indication that you are increasing in awareness.

Google AdWords and/or other paid search

The same logic applies to your paid search, does the branded keywords and queries increase in performance? then you are on to something.

Followers in social channels

If followers are increasing and mentions are increasing, you are gaining. If not, you need to work on your brand awareness initiatives.

In terms of mentions – are they positive or negative?

Useful tools

Google Alerts – get notified when your brand or a topic related to a bradn is mentioned online (indexed as search result) to keep on top of what is written and said about you.

Mention – monitor your brand, competitors and industry on teh web and in social channels.

Trackur – if you want insight, but a free trial first, use this.

Klout – “scorecard” to measure influence

Image credit – aka borrowed from: pingler.com

How to grow your email marketing database

Veronica — Mon, 12 Dec 2016 05:22:51 +0000

Once you got your email marketing activities in place, you want more subscribers, and by more I mean relevant subscribers. There is plenty of easy and fun ways for you to increase your database. Here are a few suggestions:

Value for your subscribers – identify what type of information you could share withyour subscribers that would be of value for them. An online fashion boutique might offer styling tips. A marketing consultant might want to share free marketing tips & trix and worksheets. From your business perspective, what can you give which is of value to others?

Competitions – create competitions on your website where you collect user details and also ask them if they want to opt in to your list.

Download for email – create a workbook, or something that you can offer your target audience as a download, in return for their email and details. Once you have that, I would suggest that you add another opt-in layer on top of that, where you ask your potential subscribers, if they like to hear from you (could be in the download link email, or such)

Facebook – create an ad campaign on Facebook for people to sign-up to your newsletter. Use compelling image to enhance the ad. You can also ad an campaign page/tab for it on your Facebook page.

Twitter – create an ad for sign-up, or spread a link to each newsletter after you send itout, on twitter, to gain more subscribers.

Team up with other complementary brands and companies – create competitions or special promotions in each others newsletters, or offer advice. Whatever is relevant to both you and the subscribers, and swap of space in each others newsletters.

Forward to a friend – important functionality which even free email marketing software companies provide.

Share – your newsletter can be tweeted or shared in other ways spread in social media and as long as you have helpful, relevant content, you will attract new subscribers. Check with your ESP which possibilities you have available to you

Get testimonials from subscribers and use this on your website at the sign-up or as an incentive to get more subscribers. Communicate the value of your newsletter.

Create content for your newsletters – that are relevant and makes people want to receive them and share with their friends. Again, try to think of what you can give to others of value.

Collecting points – ensure that your collecting points for names and emails where appropriate.

Add information about your newsletter in other emails you send out.

Create visual promo-boxes/areas on your website for your newsletter, where the visitor can sign-up or click through a page about the newsletter and get more information. Where you set expectations through displaying an an example of the newsletter, a review from subscribers, talk about frequency and the purpose.

Photograph by: www.adrianapalanca.com

How to start working with data to increase sales

Veronica — Mon, 21 Nov 2016 05:27:08 +0000

A cornerstone in your marketing activities is to work with the data you have. You don’t need to be a senior web analyst or a data scientist to do this. Today a Marketing Manager or CMO need to have the knowledge about key metrics and the competence to harness the power of data to transform it into ROI action for the business they market and work for.

Larger companies have already started working with more advanced techniques, such as Machine Learning, predictive analysis and so forth and every company, no matter how large or small, will have to improve the way and also increase the understanding of data, to be part of the future. Being data driven is now a competitive advantage and in the very near future it will be standard procedure for being able to stay within the competition for a customers attention or will to purchase.

Here is a simple framework that anyone can master that will help you start working with data, to turn it into insight and action. Without being complicated.

1/ Start small and use what you got
You probably have a website analytics software and perhaps a customer database of some sort. Establish what you have and then how you can use this for insight for simple improvements.

2/ Focus and ask questions
Remove the clutter of information by creating questions that are relevant to get the answers to. Such as:

What issues can you find on key pages such as decision and conversion process
Can you A/B test or test a new solution?
What patterns can you see?
Is there a trend?
Can you identify 3-5 tasks to test or changes to make?
(for more inspiration for questions, read this beginners guide to web analytics for businesses)
Can you segment the data you have?
Can you use the data in another platform? (for example CRM data to find look-a-likes on Facebook)
Can you ask your customer service department for insights and then cross-check with the data?

3/ Set aside 2 hours/week for this
Make this part of your routine and non negotiable. Rather spend 2 hours/week on this then emails. What activity will grant the most successful outcome for your work?

4/ Implement small changes and actions
Each week, identify 3-5 or even just one thing to change on your website, in your communication etc. And then make that change.

5/ Do this for 3 months
then compare before and after in terms of sales, customer satisfaction and other key metrics.

THE END GOAL: delight your customers/visitor/subscribers

Online Marketing – Veronica Stenberg

Five business crucial cornerstones for your CRM department

1/ Integrate CRM data with your digital marketing to increase relevance & cut markering costs

2/ Use customer life time value to identify the customer segments you should be spending your time and money on

3/ Eliminate customer churn

4/ Design moments that matter – use data to help your customers in their path to purchase – and after – delight and be helpful

5/ Improve insight to customer service department

The Foundations of Digital Marketing

Look at existing data and set-up

Ensure you have the tracking in place to measure both goals and events

Get insight about the target groups

Ensure you have a campaign landing page for bought media

Make an “open” customer journey

How to calculate potential ROI for a media investment

NOTE:

A beginners guide to Google AdWords

What is Google AdWords?

How does it work?

Easy targeting

Be in control of your ad spend

Why Google AdWords?

10 reasons to use Google AdWords:

SEO – how to spread content and get backlinks to your website

Pinterest

Twitter

Facebook

Slideshare

LinkedIn

Google Image Search

Instagram

Youtube

Google +

Issuu

Gawker sites

Specific forums

Newsletter

Collaborations

Online PR

Niche social platforms

A Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimization

Who this article is written for:

What is search engine optimization?

So how does it work?

Your basic, beginners SEO strategy overview;

Can I do this by myself?

How to do a keyword analysis and evaluation yourself:

Use your keywords

The SEO checklist

Tools:

A quick way to find out if and what from your website is indexed

For further reading

11 tips before getting started with Digital Marketing

How to measure brand awareness

Google Trends

Google Analytics & Google Search Console

Google AdWords and/or other paid search

Followers in social channels

Useful tools

How to grow your email marketing database

How to start working with data to increase sales