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Breea Cristofoli
In E-Marketing, Marketing,

3 Growth Strategies to Implement for the Spring

Running a business is difficult. Business owners take on so much to ensure they provide customers with innovative products/services backed by unparalleled customer service, lead employees to support growth, manage finances, build, and maintain business relationships, and find new ways for the company to grow and develop. 

Destress this Spring and watch your company grow with Pop Digital Marketing. At Pop, we give you the most innovative, precise, and result-oriented marketing strategies through our years of experience, dedication, and hard work. 

We guarantee results. Here are 3 growth strategies to implement as you make plans for the Spring. 

Increase Your Online Presence 

How often should you be posting on social media? 

Every social post is not going to hit your followers’ feeds, which is why it is important to stay active on all platforms as much as possible. This could be through Facebook stories, Instagram stories, posting a video sometimes, or just interacting with your audience through comments and replies. 

Social media is fast paced by nature, and content becomes obsolete quickly. While you do not want to overwhelm your following with too many posts, we see that a happy medium of 3-4 posts per week is optimal for staying top-of-mind. 

At Pop Digital Marketing, our team of social media experts can diversify your content to maximize engagement and engage with your audience to achieve the highest results. 

Write Blogs That Actually Encourage Clicks 

Do blogs generate leads? 

Blogs are extremely valuable to generate leads, brand awareness, and SEO. A HubSpot study found that 60% of people read a blog at least once a week. Yet, blogging requires a lot of work. It takes time to develop topics, write your content, and format and publish your posts on a regular and consistent basis. 

Blogs increase leads by 67% (Demand Metric). Blogging Improves your visibility. The more valuable pages you publish, the higher your page rank which means when leads type-in a search term that exists on your page(s), the chances of being seen are significantly higher. 

Blogs are a crucial part of content marketing but it’s no easy lift. We have a fantastic team of writers that create and optimize blogs for SEO to yield maximum results for our clients. It is time to have consistent fresh and engaging content on your website that keeps your audience coming back. 

Email to Stay Connected 

How often should you be reaching out to leads? 

Emails are effective in generating sales, enhancing customer or client engagement, acquiring new customers or clients, and creating consumer awareness and loyalty. Return on Investment or ROI for email marketing can be as high as 4400% (Campaign Monitor). 

If you are an e-commerce brand or have more than 10,000 contacts, 10-12 email per month is ideal. However, if you are a smaller business or service-centered company with less than 2,000 contacts, 3-4 emails per month is an ideal frequency. 

Creating an email is more than just a nice graphic and copy. There is so much that goes into email marketing behind the scenes. From developing an effective strategy, creating a lead generation funnel, building your referral lists, segmenting your audience by interest or activity, and creating click-worthy campaigns to collecting and analyzing the performance data. Our team at Pop Digital Marketing has the tools and knowledge to drive results. 

Finally, See the Results You’ve Been Waiting For 

This Spring, it is time to invest in results. When it comes to digital marketing, we do it all. Our team is constantly growing our knowledge base and technical skills to bring our clients the highest level of services available.  

Ready to see results and #GetDisovered? Contact us today to get started. 

Breea Cristofoli
In Advertising, Marketing,

Diversity Marketing: Creating A Strategy That Works

 A recent study conducted by Adobe found that “61% of Americans find diversity in advertising important”. The modern consumer wants to feel seen by brands and diversity marketing is the key to achieving your audiences’ trust and approval. 

Diversity marketing allows your business to approach the market from a variety of angles and widen your reach. Brands often fail because their marketing is too narrow and doesn’t represent ‘real’ people in the present society. The present & future of marketing is now and it is diverse. Consumers are paying attention, are you? 

What Is Diversity Marketing? 

Diversity marketing is a marketing strategy that appeals to multiple groups of consumers. Successful diverse marketing stems from having a deep understanding of various cultures so that you can create effective and authentic content for your target audience. Brands often fail to reach these markets because their strategies are too narrow, only appealing to one or two specific groups.  

If you want to create an effective diverse marketing strategy, you need to go that extra mile to research and truly understand these diverse groups. You should learn about your target audience by asking questions and experimenting. The more effort you put forth helps to ensure that your brand’s diversity marketing strategy is a success.  

3 Steps in Creating a Successful Diversity Marketing Strategy: 

             

1. Learn and Understand your Company’s Diverse Market 

The first thing to do in diverse marketing is to dive deep into your consumer’s minds and learn about these different groups that exist. According to a recent report from Facebook, “most (71%) expect brands to promote diversity and inclusion in their online advertising”. Take the time to understand these groups and learn how they would want to see themselves in media, be spoken to, and discussed. 

2. Add Inclusive Imagery into Your Content 

People want to be able to see themselves in a brand’s advertisements and content. If a brand is only using images portraying one type of person, they are narrowing their audience. According to a report from Heat Test, “69% of brands with representative ads saw an average stock gain of 44% in a seven-quarter period ending last year”. Having a wider, more inclusive representation in your brand’s imagery is a key factor in a successful diverse marketing strategy. 

3. Strategize Ways to Prevent Tokenism 

Tokenism is the practice of only doing a symbolic effort to do a particular thing. This is basically when brands singularly try to appear more inclusive and diverse when they are actually doing this to just make their consumers happy. People are quick to know when a company is not authentic, and doing this can really damage your brand. Make sure you come from a place of sincerity and authenticity; this will ensure your diverse efforts will be a success.  

Successful Diversity Marketing: 

Creating a successful diversity marketing strategy doesn’t just benefit your brand and consumers, it influences the positive change of a more accepting cultural, inclusive, and diverse world. The team at Pop Digital Marketing aims to ensure our marketing strategies are as effective as possible for our clients. The more you understand your diverse audience, the more likely you will achieve success.  

Robyn Ackerman
In Advertising, Marketing, , Tips

How to use ‘Competitive Advantage First Language’ in your Marketing

The guidelines around how to develop effective messaging in your company’s ads have evolved considerably over the past 100 plus years. Fans of the TV show ‘Mad Men’ would be aware of the ad creation process in the 60s, which revolved heavily around storytelling via visual marketing collateral. And while that method is still well used, we now additionally rely on digital space advertising.

In the past, our ads drew on teasers, click-bait, and short descriptions in order to prompt prospects to click through to our product or service. As of the latest research, you have less than two seconds to grab the attention of a potential customer online – two seconds and they’re gone, they’ve already continued scrolling.

This means that the very first words a person sees on your posts, your ads and/or your website need to grab their attention immediately. One effective way to do this is by utilizing a competitive advantage first focused approach.

What is ‘competitive advantage first’ language’ marketing?

The competitive advantage first approach focuses on prioritizing your unique offerings, your differentiators in the very first copy of your ads – preferably at the beginning of the sentence.

If you’re unsure of what makes your company different, you’ll need to take a step back and do some hard research. Poll your current customers about what keeps them coming back, looks at what people are saying about your business in reviews, mentions on social, etc. What is it that comes up as the key defining feature that you want to be known for, and that others consistently refer to?

Why it works?

Very few businesses are entirely unique. There are likely hundreds or thousands of companies that do what you do, so you need to stand out to succeed. Catching the customer’s eye with your competitive advantage can be key to giving them a reason to click through.

Your secret sauce needs to be exactly what the customer needs, thinks he/she needs and/or doesn’t yet know they need yet. You are the answer to the question they’re asking.

Once you can adequately identify your competitive advantage, you can start working on the copy to place on your digital marketing campaigns. Your campaign language should visibly state how your service/product brings value.  If you only have those two initial seconds, it’s vital that the first words people see outline a value.

Remember to try and steer with positive adjectives, and to tailor each campaign to the audience you’re targeting.

Examples of Competitive Advantage First Language Ads:

Monday.com

This ad is a prime example of presenting its value to a select audience. Their Competitive Advantage? They’ve done research on their audience and know the demographics they are targeting respond to adjectives like “new generation”.  They lead with that claim.

Additionally, Monday.com claims to be the project management tool for Mac users.  Visually, they fill in their logo with the Mac brand colors to connect the two even further.

Allbirds.com

Allbirds successfully uses competitive advantage first language in this ad.  Look how they structure the ad copy under the video. Machine Washable is the biggest value and they placed that at the beginning of the sentence.  Normally it would be phrased, “When life gets dirty, you need machine washable shoes”.  But Allbirds took the value and restructured the sentence to grab the readers attention.

You can see how, by defining your key traits, you can boost your ad responsiveness. If there’s a key element you serve, it makes sense to highlight that in your copy – and with so little time to stop the scroll, you need to do so quickly.

 Need help with identifying your company’s Competitive Advantage? Let Pop Digital Marketing help you Get Discovered.

Robyn Ackerman
In Blog, Marketing, Webinar

5 Key Reasons Your Company Should Host Webinars:

For years, webinars have been used as a source of educational training.  What you may not know is that no matter what industry your company is in, or what you sell you can absolutely and should undoubtedly be utilizing webinars as a part of your digital marketing strategy.

Below are the top 5 benefits of hosting a webinar:

Webinars Position You As Thought Leaders

  • When marketing and hosting webinars you are showing the world that you are an expert in that subject.
  • Your potential customers will now have this opportunity to learn from you and see with little commitment how much you can provide for them.
  • As a thought leader, you build trust with your audience.  When consumers are searching for information online and see your webinar positioned high on search engines and on multiple platforms, the consumer is more likely to “trust” what you are offering.

Webinars Increase Online Traffic And Brand Awareness

  • Just by hosting a webinar, you now have a reason to market your company.  This will in turn improve your brand awareness.
  • If your event pages are optimized correctly and you have a strong marketing strategy, a webinar has the potential to increase your online traffic.
  • It builds a “relationship” with your customers when they watch your webinars, as they will feel more connected to you and your brand.

Webinars are a great lead generation tool

  • In order for anyone to join or watch your webinars, they will have to give their contact information.  This provides you with the opportunity to collect emails, interests, business information and anything else you may need.
  • You will now have a great list of interested customers in that specific subject to which you can create a lead generation campaign around.
  • You can create a post-webinar survey to narrow this list even more based on answers and questions.

Webinars can be re-purposed for years

  • Recorded webinars can be placed on your site as a download.
  • You can generate revenue from the webinars by selling them on your site.
  • You can use the slides and/or questions asked from the webinar to create popular blogs.
  • Upload the presentation to Slideshare for ultimate exposure.

Webinars are convenient and affordable

  • With webinars, you are not limited to one location. You can reach anybody anywhere.
  • People do not have to leave their office of home to participate.
  • You have complete control over participation.  You choose who can see attendees, who can ask questions and even how it is moderated on your end!
  • Can be watched from PC, MAC and smart devices
  • Can be run with 1 person or 500 people attending.
  • Compared to the cost of renting a conference room, printing materials, providing refreshments and other live event expenses, a webinar is extremely cost efficient.

If you are looking for help with your webinar strategy, contact us here: Webinar Strategy Contact Form

Robyn Ackerman
In Blog, , How to, Marketing,

Why your Company Needs a Weekly Tip on Social Media | 4 How-To Guided Steps

One of the first pieces of advice I give to new clients looking to increase engagement on Social Media is to create a monthly content strategy plan.  Part of that plan involves creating a weekly tip to offer followers and fans.

The benefits of providing a weekly tip for followers include:

  • Content Manager HiringPositioning your business or brand as a thought leader.
  • Opening up dialogue for customers who may have questions about that topic.
  • Building trust with your followers and showing your expertise.
  • Learning what subjects your customers find popular through shares and likes and then turning them into blogs or e-books.
  • Increasing visibility on that subject with search engines (as they crawl and show public status updates with keywords relevant to search terms).
  • Keeping followers and fans coming back to your company page in anticipation for that weeks tip.  This will in turn increase your post updates showing up in their feed.

4 tips to sharing tips on Social Media: 

  1. Pick a day of the week when your audience is likely online.  You can see when they are online through Facebook insights, or timing + (which measures your google + fan activity).
  2. Create an editorial calendar 6 months out (which is only 24 tips).  Create a spreadsheet and include the month, date and time you plan on posting the tips.  Add fields for topic, subject and content developer (if you have multiple experts in your company that will be contributing).  Then add the field where the actual tip content belongs.  The tip itself should be 2-3 sentences at most.
  3. Hashtag your tip name. Prior to launching your tip strategy come up with a clever name that you can place at the beginning of each tip post.  Examples are “Monday Marketing Tip” or “Tuesday Tips With Jon” or “Fridays Health Tips”.  Keep it brand and industry appropriate and make sure it is relevant to what your customers would expect to see from you.  Then Hashtag it so people can eventually search for and see all the previous tips by clicking on the hashtag. Example: #SocialMediaWeeklyTip.

    Post by Pop Digital Marketing.

     

  4. Create a visual of the tip.  Hubspot launched a very successful 30 day blogging tip in which each day they provided a visual of a tip dealing with blogging.  When you post a picture on any Social Media platform you increase the likelihood of the post getting shared and liked.  You can also share the tip picture on Instagram and Pinterest!

For advice on launching or re-launching your company’s social media strategy, contact us here.

Robyn Ackerman
In , How to, Marketing, , Uncategorized

5 Reasons why your Facebook Posts Create Awkward Silences

It goes like this: You think you’ve created something that will go viral.  You post it and wait….and wait…..and wait.  30 minutes go by and there is still no comment, “like” or share at all.

Here are 5 reasons why your Facebook posts may not get the reaction (or any reaction) your were hoping for:Awkward Facebook Posts

  1. You ask yes or no questions.  You have to give people the opportunity to express themselves.  If you are asking a question with an obvious answer or one that doesn’t require much thought, you won’t generate much response.   Ask open ended questions, and give your followers the chance to share their full thoughts!
  2. You are posting yesterday’s news. It’s nice to share the viral video that everyone is talking about.  Guess what though: if everyone has already seen it, they will scroll over your post.  Of course, it doesn’t hurt to share, but it’s even better to be one of the first pages releasing it!  Tip: when you first wake up, peruse your industry news and post on your page the top story/video/picture.  Be the thought LEADER… not follower.
  3. You post the same things over and over again.  So many pages do this.  They love to promote a specific E-Book, product or service and they keep posting about it.  Think about meeting someone and, after that first time, every time you see them they tell the same story.  You will start avoiding them.  That is exactly what will happen to your page posts.  People will hide them, ignore them and because of the Facebook algorithm, they will eventually stop seeing your posts altogether on their feed.
  4. You are boring.  Post something funny, exciting, provocative, scary, visual or even confrontational.  Switch up your tone every once in a while.  Some of the most interactive posts are the ones that drive emotion (good and bad) from followers.
  5. You are self absorbed.  The best way to get people to share your post is if it’s about them.  Not you or your business.  Don’t just concentrate on your services, concentrate on your followers.  Follow the 20/80 rule.  80% of your posts should be industry or client related and 20% should focus on your business.

Click here to talk with our experts on how you can take your facebook marketing to the next level!

Robyn Ackerman
In Blog, , How to, Marketing,

Word of Mouth Marketing; Then and Now

word of mouth marketing

It was only a few years ago when the term “Word of Mouth” was interpreted literally: Person A heard about Product or Service directly from Person B’s mouth.  Through the past few years, it has taken on a completely new meaning as communication on a whole between people has drastically changed.

Many businesses, primarily small-medium sized ones were built on and sustained by customer recommendations and through the “old word of mouth method”.  As technology expands, our communication skills among people, customers, families and friends has adapted as well.  Many schools have lessened curriculum on cursive writing, and increased curricula surrounding computer skills and even teaching coding and social media.  People now share life history, pictures, and personal stories through social media, texts and emails.  When someone is looking for a suggestion of a doctor, service or product, they crowd-source online.

So how do we utilize this relatively new way of communication and still hold on to our word of mouth marketing strategy?

5 Ways to Increase your Word of Mouth Online Marketing Success:

  1. Generate likes on your products, services and pages.  Make sure your website is optimized with social media buttons.  While in the past, people verbally told their friends they liked something, now people are share their preferences through “likes” and clicks.  When one person “likes” a website, Facebook business page, LinkedIn update etc. all of their followers are potentially exposed to seeing that “like”.  Just as with the traditional word of mouth, this new way is powerful in that people “trust” what their friends share and like online.
  2. Solicit Positive Reviews.  Set up your company YELP, Google Maps, Facebook and LinkedIn pages and encourage your happy customers to write a short review about why they come to you.  These reviews are magnificent in that they are always available (24/7!) and can be found by just about anyone looking for information on your company.
  3. Watch your “company” with Google Alerts.  Strategically outline important Brand and Industry keywords and sign up for notifications whenever those keywords are mentioned online.  Then, JOIN THE CONVERSATION.  If someone is searching in an online group for a product or service you sell, Google Alerts will let you know so you may answer them in that group in real time.
  4. Become the thought leader in your industry.  The more you position yourself as the expert, the higher the likelihood people will recommend you to others for that service.  If you are blogging all the time about a specific subject, you will be seen as the professional, even if that reader has never used you before.  When people read your blogs, watch your videos, see your tweets and posts about industry related services or products, they begin to respect and TRUST your knowledge.  They then feel comfortable recommending you to others as that expert!
  5. Find influential people in your target industry.  This one takes a bit more research work, but there are always tweeters, bloggers and facebookers who love to write about YOUR product and industry.  They have tons followers who already trust them, and they can become a very strong ally when it comes to recommending your services.  Find them, befriend them and join forces to create an equally beneficial partnership!
Robyn Ackerman
In Blog, How to, Marketing, SEO

URL Best Practices

A question that comes up often as companies rebrand or delve more into digital marketing is: should a URL have a branded name, company name or be keyword targeted?  Below we take a look at each aspect and the best practices of choosing URLs.

What is a URL?

A URL, aka Uniform Resource Locator is what most people refer to as the “web address”.  The URL is a string of characters that help browsers identify the website file location.  Typically, the URL is located in the top of the browser in the ‘address bar’.

Should my URL be SEO friendly?

url best practices

Yes.  Ideally, everything dealing with your site should be SEO friendly.  However, there are different ways of achieving optimization.  So while, having a URL with keywords can be helpful in specific situations, you must keep in mind that in order to rank well and receive a high quality score with the search engines, a URL of your entire site should exemplify what a visitor will see on the website.  Therefore, the main URL of your site should be more in line with your company name or brand as opposed to just the keywords.

Why choose your company name as your URL:

Often, searchers want to click on a trustworthy link.  That means the link should have your name in it to increase clickthrough rates.  Then make sure you have a killer meta description that outlines the keywords the web searcher may be looking for.  For instance, if someone is searching for “coffee shop in Chicago”, and a search result comes with the two choices of “www.BestChicagoCoffeeEver.com” or “www.TheBrewCrew.com(as the actual company name)”, the clickthrough rate will be higher on the branded company name URL.  Please note that if designing keyword URL’s, the rank of the URL may also be lower if the URL sounds to “gimmicky”.  Another reason to have your company name as the URL is because you want to be easily found by customers searching for you.  If your company is called “Bob’s Fences”, but your URL is www.Californiayardexperts.com you may lose visitors due to them not knowing how to find you or which link goes to your website.

How can you optimize URL’s?

Feel free to leave a comment with your URL experiences and what has worked for you!

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