I have been watching You, a popular Netflix series in which the 2nd season was just released. Within this new season there is a young 15-year-old character named Ellie. Ellie’s character is smart, trendy, and when it comes to her social media, on point. In the Netflix series, there is a scene where Ellie gives the main character, Joe, some tips about his social media posts. And, what she tells him in this scene, made me stop and think a minute. “Don't hashtag, they're thirsty,” she said. What? Did this mean what I thought it did? Were hashtags a thing of the past? Were they uncool now and not relevant in the social media world? I had to explore.
Ever since e-mail became popularized in the 1990s, it changed the way the world communicated. Businesses, organizations, and long-distance friends quickly adopted e-mail as a new way to share information and keep in touch. Today, more than half of the world’s population uses email, and that number is expected to increase up to more than 4.3 billion by 2023. According to Pew Research, 92% of adults in the United States use email, and 61% of users check and send email daily. That’s a lot of people, and also a lot of potential customers/clients. How can businesses tap into this medium and effectively use it? By understanding why email marketing is effective.
The website has always been the foundation of a business’s online presence, right? A good website allows a company to tell the world a story about its capabilities and demonstrates the reasons to take an action over the many other options that exist. That being said, as the internet continues to change, so do the multitude of platforms in which today’s society consumes information to make informed decisions. It seems as though every day a new application appears with the intention of making things easier to find the best deal or business with incredible reviews and ratings. The reality is with so many stimuli puling for our attention, how does a business even get a customer to visit their website in the first place?
Something I hear from most of my clients and prospective clients is, “How will I know this is working?”, or something close to that. As business owners and marketers, you want to execute on marketing campaigns that accomplish the goals set forth. But how do you do that?
If your goal is to get more applications, increase website traffic or increase online sales, you probably want to know if your campaign is contributing to these goals. This attribution can be a real struggle for some business, and it doesn’t have to be. Here are 5 ways can you measure success of your campaigns:
The consumer’s path to purchase has totally changed over the years, giving the consumer more control than ever. Long gone are the days when the company controlled when and where their message could be found and what they wanted people to know about their brand. With access at an all-time high, the consumer can find what they want to know about any business in a matter of seconds across devices and channels and make up their mind as to whether they are worth their time and money or not.
Marketers and advertisers are in the business of influencing. The hope of each campaign is to convey a message that is so relevant, timely, and/or resonating that it will influence a potential consumer to act. Sometimes, before they even need it. However, a key component to influencing a consumer is in the consumer experience. The advertisement or concept could be brilliant, but if there are multiple road blocks at any point during the consumer journey, the effects are null.
The various ways in which marketers communicate with consumers continues to grow, but with that growth can come confusion and frustration. Several years ago the consumer path to purchase was linear, but with more marketing channels developing each day, competing for their attention and getting a consumer to convert can be more difficult. No two consumer journeys are exactly the same and people are moving through this path on their own terms. The consumer path to purchase is now non-linear with their actions overlapping and repeating until they reach their final purchase decision. Several marketing platforms, channels and trends have impacted this change, including these three:
One of the greatest benefits of the modern age of marketing is the amount of data available. More than ever before, businesses and marketers have a plethora of information available to them about what is moving the needle with consumers and what leads to new sales or conversions. As wonderful as having all this information, one of the biggest challenges I face with businesses when reviewing campaigns is how to best distill all the data into what matters most to them. Sometimes there can be almost too much information available that it is easy to get lost in a sea of data. This can be a problem regardless of the size of your business, which is why I was happy to see a recent article from Google discussing how their marketing team has overcome these issues.
Understanding not only where your marketing dollars are going, but the impact they’re having on your bottom line is perhaps the most important piece of any marketing puzzle. The good news, it’s easier than ever to track these results and your return on investment!
Why this matters…
Understanding if each element of your marketing campaign is doing its job is going to allow for a more cohesive, powerful strategy. Having this type of insight into your campaign will allow for you to make necessary (and otherwise difficult!) decisions like…. transitioning dollars to a more effective tactic, increasing budget where there is an opportunity for additional growth, or supplementing what’s already working with a new marketing vehicle.
Tracking your results…
Today I wanted to talk about a very popular topic over the last year or so, Video. I have been talking a lot about video advertising with my clients, prospects, and colleagues over the last 12-14 months and there is one common topic that comes up, how do we use video to generate leads?
Traditionally video has been used as a solution for branding and awareness advertising. It used to be a 15-second pre-roll video that turned into a 30-second pre-, mid- and post-roll video and the introduction of YouTube’s TrueView solution. Video has blown up over the last year, year and a half. According to Mary Lister on wordstream.com, “YouTube has over a billion users, almost one-third of total internet users.” That is a staggering amount of users for a platform that only deals in one medium, video. Another staggering stat, according to Lister “more than 500 million hours of video are watched on YouTube each day.” Let that sink in. 500 MILLION. That is the equivalent of 57,077.63 years.
With such a large amount of users and an even larger amount of time spent on the YouTube platform, the king of video, it makes sense for just about every vertical to have some sort of content on YouTube. Whether it is short clips of the owner of the business, or the staff wishing the clients or customers Happy Holidays, you need to have some sort of content on YouTube.
As far as utilizing Video advertising as a Lead Generation Solution, here are a few tips.
