October 2018 - Operatio Marketing - Your Transparent Digital Marketing Agency

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Quantifying Your Digital Marketing ROI

Digital Marketing needs some clarity. $1,000 for SEO, a 15% management fee for PPC and Social Media Marketing and then $5,000 for a functional website…Sorry, what? For what? English please.

Pricing is one topic in Digital Marketing that has always been questioned. There are various ways in which agencies can price, either offering a higher value or lower price. However, how can you know what real ‘value’ they’re offering? The answer? Follow the money! Will I get more value going with the cheaper agency? Or more expensive agency? What is the true ROI that’s surrounding this project? Does your agency know how to calculate ROI? This will all be answered in this blog!

The first question you should be asking your agency is if they know how to calculate ROI, pause… if within 3 minutes they can’t explain exactly how they are planning on calculating ROI, dump them. For you to understand what a good ROI is relative to industry standards, you have to know what industry standards are. Lucky for you, they’re right below. If you were to invest $1 into the following services, on average, you would see on the following returns:

Email Marketing –$6.75
SEO – $2.75
PPC- $2.25
SMM – $1.30

How do you actually calculate ROI?

Expected ROI = (Sales Value/Offered Cost)

If for example, you hypothesize an email campaign will generate 20 orders at $100/ product and this part of your digital marketing campaign will cost you a total of $250, your ROI would be ($2,000/250) or 8X. Looking back at the industry averages, an email marketing campaign should yield $6.75 for every $1 invested or 6.75X. As a result, you’re getting 1.25X more value than the industry average.

That’s great, but how do you calculate the sales value when the campaign hasn’t even started yet? Well that’s more intuitive and really depends on multiple variables, that’s why no good agency can tell you. If they do promise something, run… The Sales value can depend on:

Quality and competitiveness of the product.
How competitive the industry is altogether
How accurately conversions can be tracked.
The sophistication of the industry is as a whole

Just because an agency can’t tell you the specific ROI to expect, doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have a goal in place. It’s the agencies job is to make sure they analyze the variables and provide you with a ranged ROI so there is a common goal.

Now, when choosing an agency, it doesn’t matter who’s offering the cheaper or more expensive price, it’s about picking the right agency that knows your goals and knows how to achieve them.

23.10.2018 admin-om Business, Digital Marketing, ROI Comments Off

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4 Tips to Leverage Social Media Marketing

2.77 Billion social media users. That’s a big number. That means you have the ability to put your brand in front of over 2.77 Billion people. With that being said, you’d need a bunch of resources to actually reach everyone utilizing these platforms. Below, we have constructed 4 cool tips and tricks to leverage Social Media Marketing.

Live Videos

Over the past few years, more and more consumers and brands are using live videos to communicate. Vimeo recently came out with saying that 82% of consumers prefer watching live videos as opposed to reading a social media post.

It makes a lot of sense why though…

It’s spontaneous and fun, consumers love watching as it lets them get to know the brand more intimately since you’re less polished.
Cheaper! It doesn’t take a lot of money to create live videos. No editing, No production, all that it takes is the simple push of a button to start recording.
Quality over quantity, with live videos you maintain only the most qualified and interested customers in order to specifically target them and increase ROI.

Chatboxes

Customer service is everything! Now how many times have you waited hours just to get a hold of a customer service representative?

Chatboxes can be used by brands in order to communicate with their customers about various
issues/concerns. You don’t have to wait anymore for a response about an issue or concern. This
is only one example of how Chatboxes and artificial intelligence can be used. They can be used for data tracking, sales, marketing, Customer Service etc.

It’s also the cheaper option. No need to pay for customer service reps anymore!

Influencer Marketing

Imagine having someone, who thousands of people listen to, promote your brand. Now, in order to afford Dan Bilzerian or Gary Vaynerchuk to promote your product, you need to have significantly deep pockets.

Now, not all influencers have to be that popular. In comes Micro-Influencers. Micro-Influencers typically have anywhere between 1,000 and 90,000 followers and have some up and coming content! Tackling these Micro-Influencers is incredibly beneficial because their followers are loyal, are brand relevant and most importantly trust what the influencer is saying.

Paid Advertising

No matter how hard you try, there will always be a cap with free. In order to target a specific demographic, a great tool to use is Paid Advertisements. It’s easy to do, easy to set spending limits and just an all-around simple and effect way to generate leads.

You can choose what social media platform you want your advertisements running on and fully control your customer journey.

17.10.2018 admin-om Business, IT Comments Off

Top 3 Ways Sales Have Changed

You walk into a local clothing store, a sales person comes up asking if you need any help and systematically you shut them down with a “No”. You don’t know where the jeans are, yet you still say “No”. The simple answer is that people don’t want to be sold to. Decade after decade sales people have been deemed as annoying, pushy etc. The fact of the matter is, the best sales people in the world are the ones that don’t sell. A sale can be seen as a form of art, yet over the past decade with the increase of companies, the art has systematically changed. In this article, the top three ways of how sales tactics have changed will be explored.

Create True Value

Inbound Marketing, Content Marketing, Influencer Marketing…What does this all mean and why are you endlessly hearing about these? It all comes down to one word—value. Back in the day, value was the product or service you were offering to your customers, simple as that. In the modern day, this has drastically changed. The competitive landscape has allowed for multiple competitors to enter into your industry and thus allow the customers to be in control. You now must leverage rich media, blog posts, videos, webinars, infographics etc. to add additional value for your customers in order for them to choose your company. This all starts with your messaging and ensuring the right customer journey is put into place. Social Media Marketing is a great platform for forming the right initial message.

In god we trust, everyone else brings data

Data has always been there, but the awesome part about new technology is that you get it in real time in order to make data driven decisions on the go. Social Media,Websites, SEO, and PPC all have the ability to provide you with real time analytics. This mixed with a strong team analyzing and acting on various strategies is a dangerous combination for your competitors. Ensuring you have adequate data can allow you to provide the proper messaging that your potential clients can relate to.

Sell when not selling

Awareness, Consideration and Decision. It’s not about driving traffic, it’s about driving the right traffic. In the initial stage of awareness, customers identify that there is a problem. The second step is considering various different solutions for their problem and their problem and the final step is the actual decision. In the awareness stage, you must drive content to your customers that is “soft” and helps them understand the essence of their problem versus in the other two stages where they get closer and closer to your specific value proposition. You want to educate them on the manner and ensure that they are going to search and consider the proper solutions.

Now, how do these three steps all come together in order to generate sales in the new and competitive markets that are in front of us today? The secret sauce is to ensure that you guide your potential customers in a cohesive way, linking all materials along their customers journey in order to ensure that they choose your service or product.

16.10.2018 admin-om Business, Digital Marketing Comments Off

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Top 5 Ways to Increase Your SEO!

SEO has exploded as a means of increasing your site’s visibility in the past ten years. What’s better is that now, you don’t need to be an expert to use it to your advantage. We’ve created a list of five things that you can do to increase your sites SEO!

SEO Tip #1: Content content content

Content is the bread-and-butter of all things SEO. Before you check anything of your list, your website must be filled with well written (readable) and powerful content. In order to write compelling content for your site, you must first understand your audience. Determine who will be reading your sites content and gear the content toward them. Utilize keywords to your advantage and try to incorporate those keywords into your content—but do not overdo it. A keyword density that is too high of a percentage is actually detrimental to your SEO endeavors. To cap things off, you should look for any page on your site to have between 1250-1500 total words—the more the merrier.

SEO Tip #2: Backlinks

Backlinks are, quite literally, pages on the web that link back to your site. They may also be referred to as “inbound links.” A good way to explain the benefit of backlinks is that they show the search engines that they are “vouching” for your site as reputable and as an overall “vote of confidence” that your site has good content worth sharing. When it comes to backlinks, it is quality over quantity. A reputable site that backlinks to yours is a huge boost and can be equated to ten non-reputable site links.

SEO Tip #3: Refine the code

Another huge part of SEO is the refinement and proper utilization of your sites code. Below is a list of things you can do to refine the code:

Ensure that the H1 (title) tags are concise and include relevant keywords.
Two-three keywords in the main title (with a main keyword toward the front).
Only include keywords in H1 and H2 when they are relevant and natural (don’t include it in every H2 subheading).
Utilize modifiers in titles and keywords ( top, best, review, 2018, guide etc.) where relevant.
Optimize images for the crawlers using Alt-text. Ensure that the picture is adequately described in this text so that you can read it and understand what the picture is about without seeing it.

SEO Tip #4: Optimize internal links

Optimizing internal links is like providing a search engine’s algorithm with a set list of directions to navigate your site. There a number of different ways to optimize your sites internal links but firstly you should make sure to link related content together. This helps the crawlers better understand what your site may be about. Another way to optimize your internal links is to create an XML sitemap. This is essentially an outline of your site—via links— that shows the crawler all the important pages on your site. One of the best plugins for sitemaps (and SEO, as a whole) is the Yoast SEO plugin.

SEO Tip #5: Ensure URL’s are accurate and clean

Google’s Artificial Intelligence values the way your URL’s are formed more than most people think. When creating your specific page’s URL, you should keep it between three to five words total, the shorter the better, but they must be relevant. Another thing to keep in mind is utilizing keywords in the URL itself. The keyword used should reflect exactly what the page is about. In simpler terms, Google and other search engines alike need to know what the page is about from the URL itself. Don’t give these algorithms a reason to diminish your SEO off of something seemingly unimportant.