Archives for June 2018

Have you ever searched for anything on Google? Of course, you have!

Think about how often you click on one of the first few links that are shown, see what you were looking for, and then move onto something else. Now think about how often you keep going all the way to the sixth or seventh page of search results (if you ever did) and then decide to make a purchase there.

You do NOT want your website to be on one of those high numbered pages when your potential customers are searching Google for the services that you offer!

You have spent many hours making sure that your website looks perfect, the conversion process is streamlined, and all of the information that your customers could ever want is right there waiting for them. So how do you get your awesome website onto that first page of results so that searchers will actually see it?

Become Google-Friendly!

Every website that exists is crawled by Google so that they can check out the content, the structure, and the intent. They take that information and index it so that when someone conducts a search they can offer the most relevant site. SEO ensures that your website is ready for Google to do it’s crawl so that your site will be visible when potential customers are searching. Finally letting the world see your great website and your great business.

For more information, or help setting up your SEO, contact Johnny Murray at johnny@johnnymurray.com

Dacia and Facebook

Dacia is one of Europe’s fastest growing car brands.
The Goal: Their aim was to grow their brand and to generate more leads.
The Result: 60,000 extra cars sold in the last three years. That’s a huge success!

How did they do it?

1. They decided to use social media.
2. They chose Facebook to get their message across.
3. They targeted desktop-using customers and customers who primarily used their smartphones.
4. The tool they used was Facebook’s boosted posts. This allowed them to test the market and find out where their potential customers were and the best time to place an ad in front of them.

The Girl Scouts and Twitter
The Girl Scouts are well-known for making and selling their own cookies to raise funds for the local community.
The Goal: To increase downloads of their mobile app.

The Result: Nearly 20k extra downloads as a direct result of their Twitter campaign!

How did they do it?
1. They decided to use social media.
2. They chose Twitter to do their promotion.
3. They added images to the app to show how delicious and inviting their cookies were.
4. They used the Twitter App Card so customers seeing their Tweet could access the app directly from their Tweet. Simple!

Do you have a set rule for marketing budget allotment?

Or do you just place funds in marketing whatever is left after all of the projected business expenses for the year have been set?

USBA suggests 7% to 8% for small businesses. However, you can shoot for up to 20% if you really want to smash it hard in the marketplace.

A survey from the CMO Council, on the other hand, comes with similar results with 74% percent of marketers allocating 4% to 6% of their annual gross revenue to marketing, while only 2% apportion more than 20%.

The size of your marketing budget will fuel your marketing efforts, and so if you’re in a very competitive industry, and most especially if you’re in the early stages of your business, then you should really have a strong budget.

How do you structure your marketing budget?

Reach out to us and get some advice.

There are many benefits to doing online advertising over the traditional model. One of those is the cost between the two. Traditional advertising, such as billboards or television spots (commercials) can cost quite a bit of money for a single 30-second spot.

Online advertising uses a platform where you are charged by how many times an ad is clicked. This is called Pay-per-click or ‘PPC’ advertising. It’s not nearly as expensive with an average cost per click of 0.60 cents.

With online advertising, you’re getting instant traffic. You could run traditional advertising and online advertising in a race side by side, and you’ll get online customers a lot quicker than traditional.

However, the biggest benefit is that with online advertising is that you can get detailed data on everyone that sees your ads.

You can also split test ads for the same cost, find out who interacted with your ads, where they were from, which ad they liked better, and what converts and what doesn’t. You can then optimize your ads with the data you collected.

Let’s say you ran an ad and 100 people clicked it, but no one bought anything, then you would know there is a problem somewhere and be able to fix it and optimize each ad.

Once you spend money on a television ad, that’s it. No way to optimize it. Having control over your online ads such as when they are shown, and how much money you are spending is crucial for success, while not breaking the bank on ads that aren’t converting.

But running a successful online advertising campaign can be tricky. It takes some knowledge and learning how to setup everything properly to run highly successful campaigns.

There is a lot of competition, and you need every bit of experience you can get on your side.

If you would like to learn more about setting up a successful online advertising campaign, then contact us, and we’ll help you get started today.

johnny@johnnymurray.com

Social media allows so much information to be at our fingertips.

It allows business owners to connect with potential customers in new and exciting ways.

It also gives customers new ways to reach out and share their opinions, and it is inevitable that sometimes those opinions will be negative.

We want to make sure you know just what to do with the inevitable happens so that your customers keep coming back.

The first thing to do when you see a negative review is to take a step back. Never respond in the heat of the moment. Never indulge in an angry flash. Compose yourself and address the review in a cool, calm and collected manner.

Also, work to identify authentic bad reviews from those who are just “trolling” looking to waste your time. If a review is unnecessarily inflammatory, profanity-laden or unintelligible, odds are the reviewer is just targeting you for argument sake. In these situations, the best thing to do is just step back and let it go.

Once you’ve identified true reviews, start by acknowledging the mistake and apologizing. Sometimes a simple sorry is all the reviewer needs to hear. At the end of the day, consumers want to know they matter and that they are not just another number. Demonstrate this with a polite and sincere apology.

Even if it wasn’t your mistake, it doesn’t hurt to say that you feel sorry about the misunderstanding or bad experience.

Next, see if you can make it right. Is there something that can be done to fix it? If not, offer other perks or benefits, such as free shipping or a discount in the future. Also, make sure you’ve identified an accountability process to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Finally, thank the customer for taking time to leave feedback. Feedback gives you the tools you need to improve to become a better business.

Addressing bad PR is easier when you have our marketing team on your side. Contact us today to learn more about our services.

When it comes to remarketing, some businesses have no idea what it means, or the benefits that it can bring by getting visitors (who left your website empty-handed) back to your website and purchasing what they were looking for.

It is important for a business to take every advantage that there is to convert a potential customer or client into a happy and satisfied customer. But this isn’t the only benefit of remarketing.

In fact, you can get some pretty interesting data by showing different ads to a customer who leaves your website and goes to another website.

This type of remarketing can serve to the visitor a reminder that they are looking for a certain product or service, and if they are moving around the web looking for this product or service from someone else, there is a good chance they might see your ad and return to convert. For example, you could show a different ad group to visitors that leave your website with a discount if they return to get what they were looking for. This strategy works so well that you are likely to see a 2-3 times increase in click-through-rates for these ad groups.

It might sound like a complicated process, but if you are already using Google AdWords, then you can take advantage of Google Ad Retargeting. These ads will be shown on other websites through the Google Content Network which are amazingly effective.

The benefits of a solid remarketing campaign strategy, and having Google Retargeting setup correctly are huge. The benefits range from having your ads in front of people when they are finally ready to buy, a much larger scale reach as these ads are shown on over 2 million websites, and much more efficient pricing, easier ad creation, and so on.

And there are many different ways to remarket with Google Adwords besides this. There is video remarketing, remarketing for mobile applications, having remarketing lists for search ads, and email-list remarketing which works by uploading your list of email addresses you have collected from your visitors.

When anyone on this list are signed into YouTube, Google Search, or Gmail, they will see your ads.

If ad targeting or remarketing is something you haven’t been doing, then don’t wait a minute longer to get started.

If you need some help and expert advice on creating effective and successful ad retargeting campaigns, then shoot me an email to get started today!

johnny@johnnymurray.com
Johnny Murray

Are your competitors way ahead of you when it comes to getting leads? Ever wondered how they do that? How come their website ranks so high? Why do you keep seeing their ads at the top of the page? It’s frustrating, isn’t it?

There is something that you can do about it.

Interested?

What if I told you that you can find out what their keyword strategy is and simply adapting their techniques for your business?

Just think, you can then add their effective keywords to your existing keywords without doing any exhausting, time-consuming research. Easy!

It’s easy if you know where to look. Click on these links to start immediately:

https://www.spyfu.com/
https://semrush.com
https://keywordspy.com
http://keywordeye.co.uk

Contact us to learn more: johnny@johnnymurray.com

Make your business visible online, and you will get a larger share of customers.

Operating a small and local business doesn’t mean you cannot increase your customers and scale.

Get a Website. Don’t you have a website yet? Where have you been all this time? From plumbers to dentists, the local handyman to big engineering firms – they have websites. Your website will be your 24/7 storefront.

Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. You are increasingly using your mobile phone when searching for a product or service, right?

Get some Traffic with SEO. Many of your potential customers probably do not know that your business exists. However, when they go to Google searching for a product or service they need, which you offer, and finds you because you’re doing SEO — then bingo!

Make sure that your SEO is well-planned with a comprehensive blueprint to ensure ROI.

Get on Social Media. Many more of your potential customers may find you in social media. When a recent customer following you in social media likes or shares an article, a photo, or a video you posted, then that post will be visible to their friends – who might as well try out your product or service.

Become active on at least 4 social media channels. Your potential customers are actively using more than one.

Capture and Nurture. Capture your leads through an opt-in form on your website and nurture them through email marketing.

Be on top of mind all the time to your potential customers by constantly communicating with them through email. Once they need something you offer, boom, you got a customer.

There you have it. 4 simple steps.

Follow me, and we’ll guide you along the way. Contact Johnny Murray at johnny@johnnymurray.com.

Keyword Research allows you to gain intelligence on the actual queries of your potential customers are using and how big the monthly search volume is for those terms. Through this research, it is easy to determine the keywords for your SEO campaign.

More than 80% of buyers research online before making a big purchase. If you have no idea what search terms they are using, then you don’t know what keywords to optimize for.

Keyword Research is a crucial process for any successful SEO campaign. Connect with us to learn more.

Digital marketing generally means getting the word out online about your brand and getting customers to see why they should buy from your business.

But in today’s hyperconnected world, your customers can also shape the reputation of your business online in (nearly) real time. This is very important as 77% of consumers read online reviews before making a decision.

While talking about how good your products and services are is of course useful and necessary, what your customers say about your company can also be used as a marketing tool. This is called Reputation Marketing. What makes this strategy different from other types is that it puts the “voice of the customer” as the central focus.

What your customers say about your business is not something you can control, buy, or make them do, but you can use the positive reviews they do leave to shape the narrative of your business’ reputation.

It’s amazing how many business owners are keen on running all sorts of online marketing campaigns, yet they don’t take the time to have their customers write a comprehensive review about their products.

Can you imagine how many of your “would-be customers” end up buying from your competitors, all because they couldn’t find any reviews about your product or service?

It’s essential for potential customers to know that others have used your business and had a good experience doing so, giving your business a reputation of trustworthiness.

Reputation marketing today is a must.

How do you get these positive reviews for your business and strengthen your reputation? There are many ways and we’d be glad to help.

Reach out to us at johnny@johnnymurray.com.
Johnny Murray
ICU Marketing Associates