5 Ways to Effectively Measure Your Ads Campaign Success

In digital marketing campaigns, it is very difficult to judge your marketing campaign success without accurate measurements. Most marketers already know how important and critical measurement is to the success of their marketing campaigns. Because of marketing cost implications and ROI for marketers, it is hugely important for marketers to understand at all times, how effective their campaigns and promotions are. They can only leverage the right metrics to, accurately gauge how successful their digital marketing efforts are. These, here five ways are highly recommended by experienced marketers.

1. Automate Sentiment Analysis

You can manually conduct sentiment analysis or you automate it through a third-party tool. The insights you get from sentiment analysis allow you to know what your customers perceive to be good or bad reasons for these perceptions, as well as causes from a business or customer-service perspective. You can automate AI from third-party tools to help gather sentiments information over a long period of time. Apart from helping to gain valuable insights quickly from large volumes of data, automated sentiment analysis will also minimize error or bias that could easily result from manual analysis. By doing this, brands are able to understand what consumers are saying about the brand over this given period, what perceptions have changed over the same period, and reasons why. Without automation, marketers are saddled with manual analysis of a very huge amount of data from across multiple platforms. This can lead to avoidable errors, misinterpretation and even outright bias because perceptions could be highly subjective to human sentiments.

 
2. Using Emerging Smart Technologies

Emerging technologies are increasingly becoming popular in digital marketing. New smart technologies like Nativex’s XMP are very useful to track creative campaign performance across many different popular social-media platforms including Google. They help to save costs on operations and easily provide an aggregated understanding of which ads work best across social platforms, throughout campaigns and across all various markets. These technologies allow for unprecedented tracking, measurement and customer understanding by providing huge amounts of data to marketers for planning and directing ads campaigns.

3. Combining Qualitative and Quantitative Metrics

You can effectively measure the success of your campaigns if you have a good balance of both qualitative and quantitative metrics. Qualitative metrics help to measure customer sentiments online through third-party social-listening tools while quantitative metrics help to measure tangible commercial outcomes like volume of sales and purchases. A combination of both gives information about how customers perceive your business and how much business they are doing with you. From this information, it is easy to see whether a particular brand is actually driving consumer awareness and engagement as desired and how many customers are being led to your brand’s e-commerce website via a particular piece of ad content. These insights can be subsequently leveraged at the point of engagement and connection between your brand and its consumers to rejig your present campaigns or to design your future campaigns. The significant consequence is that the consumer audiences of your brand will feel heard and seen by the brand. That can help to build some loyalty with them even if they had initial negative misgivings and or perceptions.

4. Studying Brand Nuances

Just as brands differ, so are circumstances surrounding their marketing backgrounds. Every brand must therefore, be understood in tandem with its peculiar circumstances. A brand’s current market context must be peculiar to the brand. For instance, metrics for measuring brand awareness cannot be the same for newly launched brands and a brand that already has mass appeal or a stronger market presence. An adjusted approach has to be taken into consideration when deciding on which measurement metrics to be adopted to measure the success of both brands. Similarly, you cannot use the same parameters for previous campaign measurements for an older brand as against a newer brand in the market. The nuances of both brands if taken into account tend to give more equitable and balanced results to help the marketer measure the success of both brands from the campaigns. That allows brands to have a better understanding of what worked and what did not and to inform the design of future campaigns. All told, it is not only important to look at campaign success in isolation, but also to benchmark it against historical failures as well. Expert marketers know that because of the nuances of both brands, a suitable balance always lies somewhere between these two extremes.

5. Classifying Which Metrics to Measure

In digital marketing, the brand you are marketing largely determines the type of metrics you have to measure. For this reason, different perspectives tend to surround the classification of metrics. Most of these perspectives relate to importance, urgency, and time-frame, that is, short-, mid- or long-term perspectives. In bigger business concerns, different departments and functions tend to prioritize different metrics. That is what they specifically measure for their own departmental use. When metrics are taken over an extended time frame and classified, they add real value to ongoing campaigns and the design of future campaigns. Information from these metrics empowers marketers to be more creative in their content marketing activities and to engage meaningfully with their audiences over an extended time-frame, say for about 6 months or more. From this info, marketers can adequately develop strategic plans that fit perfectly into their immediate, short- mid- and long-term marketing objectives.

8 Tips To Set Up Effective Email Marketing Campaigns

Some marketers may consider email marketing “old school” but it is still very effective in digital marketing campaigns. It is one of the most popular forms of marketing among marketers because of its relative ease of use and cost effectiveness. If you have ever signed up for any free program online or purchased something online, you must have left your email address on the site as a requirement. By doing so, you just joined someone’s growing email list and email marketing audience. That opens the way for you to receive unsolicited marketing emails until you decide to opt out if you so choose. Among online marketers, the hype always appears to be on influencer/social media marketing, blogging/content marketing and the like, but many always compliment these efforts with email marketing campaigns. The reason is, email marketing works and it is hugely effective to market any brand.

 
These tips can help you to set up an effective email marketing campaign for your business.

1. Clearly Identify Your Audience

Your email marketing campaigns can hardly gain traction if you do not know your audience well enough. It is a waste of time and efforts creating an email campaign if you do not know what your audience wants, how they want it and in what form. You must find out the kind of tone your audience responds well to as well as their status, education and age demographics. It is when you know your audience well enough that you can effectively create your marketing messages and segment the messages well enough to make them sufficiently impactful on your audience. Such are the kinds of messages most needed for your email marketing campaigns.

2. Build an Email List

Email list is a very valuable asset for email marketers. If you have the time and resources, you can build a credible email list yourself. However, building a quality email list takes quite some time. One credible way around that is to tap into the resources of professional email services providers like Mailchimp, Moosend, SalesFlare, Omnisend, Bitrix24 and other online services for same purpose. Some of this software can also help with email scheduling, timing and automation. What really matters however is to be sure your emails are, delivered intact to your targeted audience sometimes in the thousands without too many ending up as junk mails or worse, spam mails.

3. Source Email Campaign Software/Tools

If you choose to start your email marketing campaign through traditional email clients, you will end up with severely limited results. The reason is simple. By using this method, you risk having most of your mails ending up as spam, thereby depriving your recipients the benefits of the messages. One credible way around that is to use the services of online email campaign software that can provide you with all of the tools you need to get the job done effectively. You can use the services of professional email services providers like Mailchimp, Moosend, SalesFlare, Omnisend, Bitrix24 among others. These software come with various tools/packages to enable you choose what is right for your business. Once the results you are getting are good, it means the software is good.

4. Set Achievable Targets

As marketers like to say, you cannot achieve a target you cannot see and you do not have. Without a target, you are simply marketing in the dark. Setting achievable targets is one credible way to set up an effective email marketing campaign. It allows you to know from the outset of the campaigns exactly what you want to achieve, and how you will achieve it. Without set targets, you cannot design your content in a way that will target your customers effectively. Some of such targets include but not limited to the number of new customers attracted to your business over a given period of time, number of leads, volume of sales/revenue and the number of your existing and returning/repeat customers.

5. Market with Quality Content

In digital marketing, content is always king. The better the content, the more the in-bound traffic it attracts. For this reason, before setting up an effective email marketing campaign, you must make sure that your content is educational, informative, entertaining and attractive enough. This is why you must design your emails like a pro. Pay special attention to your branded logos, the right fonts, brand and color themes that make your emails attractive and easy to read. If you are marketing with videos/graphics/photographs, make sure they are of very high quality. Avoid overcrowding your emails with too much text that will not allow the text combine and work effectively with your images for good results.

6. Optimize for Mobile Devices

According to Google reports, over 60% of online searches are now attributable to mobile devices particularly smartphones. What that means is that more and more people are checking their emails on their smartphones. That makes it imperative for you to optimize your email messages for mobile devices. By making sure your email marketing campaign is compatible with mobile devices, you get better results. If you are using the right email marketing campaign software, that’s great. With it, it is a given that most emails will be compatible with mobile devices.

7. Follow-Up Feedback Emails

Effective and result oriented email marketing depends hugely on feedback mails. Never you ignore them. If you do not follow up on your emails, email marketing campaign can hardly be effective. In email marketing, persistence is key. Shooting off just one email is not likely to have enough effect on your customers. A repeated effort tends to get better results but let moderation be your watchword. Do not overdo it.  Overdoing it may infuriate some customers enough for them to unsubscribe from your mailing list. Luring your customers into a mutually beneficial conversation is what your target should be, not annoying and scaring them off. Responding sensibly to the feedback from customers’ emails can guarantee and sustain such beneficial conversations.

8. Regularly Review and Analyze Performance

Measuring and analyzing results is the only credible way to find out if you are doing well and how well you are meeting your set targets. Therefore, you must spend quality time to analyze your previous email marketing campaigns to ascertain if your efforts are yielding good results as targeted. If you are using the right email-campaign software, they have tools that can help you find out more about who responded to emails and the conversion rates. You get info about how many mails were delivered and how many were acted upon. Critically analyzing this info helps you to properly design and deploy your next campaigns for better results.

Last Line

If you are thinking of effective digital marketing, it is best to think about email marketing because of its ease of use and cost-effectiveness. These tips about can help you plan, deploy, analyze results and re-launch other marketing campaigns to get better results. If you want to rely on email campaign software, use the ones with user-friendly tools that are most effective. Without careful planning and deployment, email marketing may be mere time wasting efforts. Worse still, some emails may indeed hurt and put off some customers from doing business with you. These tips will help you to avoid such pit falls.

8 Effective Software for Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing has been around for quite a while but it is still very popular among digital marketers because of its ease of use and cost effectiveness. The earlier serious drawback of email marketing was having a credible email list but email marketers can now overcome that by tapping into the services of online email marketing services providers via software. Some of these providers render services by way of software/tools that come with a full package of effortlessly delivering emails to your target audience even if in the thousands and providing scheduling and automation services as well. Here are some effective email marketing software/tools you can try on your own. Some of them are highly recommended by expert marketers.

1. Salesflare

Salesflare is an intelligent CRM and email marketing platform, used by thousands of small and medium sized B2B businesses who sell more with less work. It sends automated email sequences, so you can reach out to your leads at scale in a personal way. It automatically fills out your address book and keeps track of all interactions with the leads you're in contact with. In addition, the icing on the cake is, it neatly reminds you when to follow up. 

2. Sender

Sender makes it easy for e-commerce marketers to send automated marketing emails and drive more revenue for a fraction of the price of other email marketing providers, such as Mailchimp or ConstantContact. With 1-click integrations, you can connect your Magento, WooCommerce, WordPress, PrestaShop and other webshops and send transaction emails as well as highly converting newsletters in order to grow your business. Sender is everything you need for effective email marketing within a few clicks.

3. ZeroBounce

ZeroBounce is a great way to protect your sender reputation for email marketing. It detects and removes known abuse and spam trap emails, temporary addresses, invalid, toxic and catch-all domains. It's not only a powerful tool that boosts deliverability, but it also offers data about your subscribers that you can use when segmenting your lists. ZeroBounce is a fast and easy to use email validator, and it includes an API.

4. Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is one of the very few CRM systems that offer email marketing software free of charge. Several things make Bitrix24 quite different from other free email marketing services. First, its customer relationship management software, and this enables you to create any number of static or dynamic segments and craft a unique email campaign for each group of customers or prospects. In addition, if you are thinking about trigger-based emails and email marketing automation, yep, Bitrix24.

5. Omnisend

Omnisend is an all-in-one email marketing automation platform built for growth-focused ecommerce brands. It helps to convert visitors into customers, create personalized emails in minutes, and automate your email marketing. It uses smart segmentation to create hyper-targeted and relevant email messages, earning you more revenue. Omnisend works with all ecommerce platforms including, Shopify, Bigcommerce, Magento, WooCommerce and many more.

6. EngageBay

EngageBay allows you to grow your business with powerful email marketing. You can choose from several ready-made email templates or create your own from a wide array of templates to suit your business needs. You can simply use drag and drop interface to create amazing templates. With EngageBay you can segment and target your subscriber lists, personalize every part of the email and send them in a click. It allows you to design beautiful email templates with rich text formatting. You can track and optimize your campaigns, then analyze your results.

7. EmailOctopus

EmailOctopus is the low-cost email marketing platform offering high deliverability, customized reports and the ability to drip email sequences, import contacts and integrate with forms. With segmentation, users can create highly targeted email campaigns based on the customer data that matters most to their business.

8. Moosend

Moosend is a powerful email marketing platform with world-class features, state-of-the-art marketing automation, and an award-winning user interface. You can use it to manage multiple email campaigns and mailing lists, as well as design and send striking, and responsive newsletters created on the built-in campaign editor. It helps you to upgrade your marketing campaigns with intelligent email automation, personalization tags, landing pages, subscription forms, and meaningful campaign reports.

Effective Marketing Campaign Tips For Small Businesses

  

Digital marketing in an increasingly interconnected world is becoming a lot easier and with better results for small businesses if the right marketing strategies are in place. Even with small and very tight marketing budgets peculiar to small businesses, it is possible to create impactful and memorable marketing campaigns to get good results. Many marketing experts do agree on this point and they offer some tips to small business owners seeking to better the lots of their small businesses in digital space.

Here are some tips on what small businesses that want to build effective marketing campaigns should be doing.

1. Segment Your Audience

As many small business marketers very well know, the audience they are marketing to is always very sophisticated and diverse.  That is what makes it hugely imperative for small business owners to work with a comprehensive marketing strategy that includes segmentation. Doing so allows them to target specific ads at specific audiences for utmost impacts at very low cost effects.

2. Leverage Your Free Channels

Marketing online requires the use of multiple channels most of which are free to push messages around the internet. Many small business owners are already using these channels. If you know your way around the internet, you can leverage on these free channels to get your message across to your targeted audience. Free channels like your own social media accounts, blog and email marketing lists are available for you to leverage upon in a cost-effective way to reach your target audience. Many of these channels may be free to use but they are very effective for online marketing, the reason you can leverage them for good results.

3. Be Creative with Your Content

Online marketing requires a lot of creativity to be effective. This is more so with videos, graphics or photo content where quality is of utmost importance. With the use of apps like Prequel or TikTok, you can really get creative with videos, graphics and photo editing. By using these apps effectively, you can easily create highly watchable videos and visually interesting graphics/photos thereby sparing yourself the need to have to hire at considerable costs the services of a professional videographer/photographer.

4. Identify Your Business with a Cause

Be sure what your business stands for is very clear before posting messages about it online. You must identify a particular mission your business can truly claim as its own. With that, you can then identify your business with it as a cause then prepare very clear messaging that drives your objectives forward in tandem with that cause. If you present a haphazard approach to many initiatives instead of identifying with one cause, your results will be hugely limited.

5. Target Your Niche with Social Media Ads

It is a known fact among marketers that small businesses typically serve a niche market. The reason it is easy to target that market with appropriate ads. Using such target messages in the very popular social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, you get very good returns on your investment. For best results, your social media ads must be specific when defining a target because of their own in-house algorithms that enable them to target specific audiences as a matter of course.

6. Develop and Target a Buyer Persona with Ads

For your marketing ads to be more effective, you need to do some diligent research to develop a buyer persona. That done, it becomes easier to channel your messaging to that persona, using the marketing platforms that your buyers interact on the most. That is like taking your message to where your buyers are and can be found. You can deliver such messages with the use of emails, social media accounts and blogs. Doing so enables you to capture easily a small audience that is highly qualified as against dissipating your efforts on a large audience that is unqualified.

7. Use Ads with Multiple Touch Points

If you have listed your business on Google My Business, you can create campaign ads that have multiple touch points by leveraging on it. Google My Business is very popular on Google searches and most people easily turn to it in search of businesses in their localities. Free listing on the platform usually helps to get very good results. This is good for the ads budgets of very many small businesses.

8. Be Consistent To Amplify Your Ads Message

Ads messages when repeated consistently tend to increase remembrance and memorability. That increases their effectiveness. Online tools that help to automate your online messages across several channels are always useful to amplify ads messages online. For this reason, your content needs to be appropriately adapted to any channel or medium you are using to propagate your ads messages online.

9. Deploy Online Metrics to Measure your Efforts

Without accurate metrics, it is very difficult to gauge how well your campaigns are doing. Because measurement is central to the success of your ads campaigns, you must always put metrics in place to make sure what you spend on marketing is converting adequately to sales. That is your ROI which every smart marketer must be interested in. It is a marketing folly to assume your marketing is working. Only metrics measurements give accurate and informed data to help make that decision. If the results you are getting are not commensurate to the marketing efforts you are putting in, with data from your metrics measurements, you can quickly make adjustments for better results.

10. Optimize Your Business for Local Searches

Many small businesses tend to get a very high patronage from local customers. That is what makes optimizing your business for local searches a very smart thing to do if you are running a small business of your own. Doing so is a way of telling your local target market that you are there for them. Google search results do show that many customers are always looking for businesses near their current locations. For this reason, it is just not enough to simply optimize your business for search engines, the business must be optimized for local searches as well. That helps more people searching locally to be able to find you when they need what you are offering.

11. Leverage SMS Automation

For most small business owners, repeat business means good business. Staying in touch with customers is one great way to guarantee repeat business. How do you do this? One very effective way is to leverage SMS automation to keep a constant dialogue going with your customers. Building personal one-on-one relationships with customers helps many small businesses to grow very rapidly. Leveraging SMS automation to keep their businesses top of mind for customers is one great way to build these relationships.  

12. Optimize Your Content Marketing Strategy

For online marketing purposes, it is not just enough to have a good content. The content must be well-optimized for search purposes because consumers now spend more time online searching for their needs. Content optimization has thus become a good marketing strategy. Consumer behavior now tends towards seeking out more information while looking for ways to be educated, entertained and inspired. Redirecting more of your marketing efforts to content marketing helps your brand to connect better with consumers in places they spend most of their time online.

13. Deploy a Robust Customer Loyalty Program

Nearly everyone I know craves recognition and appreciation. Customers are no exceptions. The existing customer base of many small businesses is their most valuable asset. They can leverage on that asset to get repeat business if they have a robust customer loyalty program in place. This program can take the form of discounts for repeat business or even outright gifts. Marketing experience shows that it is by far easier and cheaper to service a returning customer than it is to source a new customer. With satisfied repeat customers, you can quickly build up brand loyalty. With it, you can easily reach a wider audience through referral programs capable of helping your business to grow exponentially.

14. Market Your Satisfied Customers

By the time your business builds up a good customer base, you can leverage on it to get more and more customers. Many people always want to know what customers are saying about your business. Explore ways to get your satisfied customers in front of your target audience. Get what your customers are saying about your business on social media and such other channels where your target audience is. Their testimonies can get you more and more customers when many consumers chance on such comments online.

How to Revamp Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Are you an online marketer? Is the traffic inflow to your website dwindling? Are you experiencing any drop in leads and sales? If your answer is yes to any of these three questions, all you need is to re-energize and revamp your marketing strategy. First place to look is the internet and the growing trends in it. The internet is one great phenomenon that dominates consumer shopping behavior. If you can shape your digital marketing strategies to take full advantage of the internet, you can easily revamp such strategies. Digital marketing is a gateway of the future for online marketers. If you want to join the train of successful digital marketers, developing and implementing a robust strategy for your marketing campaigns is the way to go. If you already have an ongoing marketing campaign, but it isn’t performing as expected, there is a good chance the strategies you are using are flawed.



To solidify your plans and revamp your strategies in your digital marketing efforts, follow these tips.

Make Research a Priority

Every digital marketer needs a lot of research to help maintain a correct marketing course and to be able to make sales. Granted, research may involve some tedious and grueling process, but, it is very vital for the success of your marketing campaign efforts. It helps marketers to predict marketing trends which they greatly need to save time and money, stay one step ahead competitors and assist marketers to avoid some of the most common pitfalls of digital marketing. Every digital marketer needs to devote some time to data-backed research. Even if your gut-feelings have been helpful in the past, it is best to always back up your strategies with good research. Good research helps you to know your target audience and your competitors better. With that knowledge, you can easily revamp your marketing strategies for better results.

Diversify Your Communications

On the internet, a virtual community enjoys a very wide world of its own. That world is of immense depth and diversity. To make any impact in such environment, it helps to diversify your communication efforts and presence in the virtual communities. The best way to go is to have multiple outlets of your brand using all feasible communication channels effective in the virtual world. For introduction to new brands and promotion of older brands, many consumers now rely hugely on many social media channels for information. You can easily open accounts and run your marketing campaigns on many social media platforms. So, by diversifying your communications, you can strengthen your digital marketing strategy and solidify your online presence.

Hire a Digital Marketing Expert

As most digital marketers very well know, digital marketing is a science. Every move requires careful planning and execution to ensure that the strategy is foolproof. No matter how experienced you are in digital marketing, at times, you may not have all the answers to many online challenges. For instance, if SEO or Search Engine algorithms are not your specialties, it is where expert services become imperative. Hiring the services of digital experts is the easiest way to spot and fix digital problems. You may be required to pay some fees for the expert/professional services but that is always a great investment to make in your online business. Investing in digital marketing somehow helps to empower businesses and ensures their financial security, with good returns to boot.

5 Easy and Creative Marketing Campaign Strategies

Taking a creative approach to your marketing campaigns is one great way to increase your online presence and improve traffic to your website. Even if it involves spending a little money on creative approaches to your digital marketing campaigns, getting good traffic from such efforts somehow enhances your business revenue. Once in a while, a good marketer needs to spruce up the marketing content of his business. If this need arises, the first thing to do is to work on your marketing campaign strategies in a creative way.



You may choose to try these here 5 creative marketing campaign strategies if you want to give your business some boost.

1. Routinely Create Fresh and Engaging Content

In online marketing, content is always king. The more and better the content you produce to enhance your marketing efforts, the better for your business. Online audiences respond better to engaging and current content which provides them real value. This is exactly where blog posts come in very handy. Your blog may be the first place customers hit when they have questions about products or solutions like the ones you provide. If your blog posts are engaging, relevant to your product, and remain up-to-date, they tend to encourage more visitors who are initially attracted through a search query to explore your website further. Engaging readers longer on your website content can lead to conversion and eventual customer. A creative content marketing strategy results in more engagement from your content readers. This leads to more and better conversions, leads and sales.

2. Use Video Marketing

What video marketing entails is to creatively use videos to promote and market your products. Videos tend to have a unique way of helping to increase engagement on your website particularly when they are used to demonstrate the use of products or to suggest uses. They practically tell a convincing story which can help your brand to resonate effectively with its target audience. Thus, videos can become very powerful outreach tools when they are produced in a conversational, measurable and actionable way especially personalized to the consumer.

3. Generously Use Enticing Giveaways

Generally, most people love the prospect of getting something for nothing no matter how token the object is. Giving something related to your brand away as a token gift is one creative way to market a brand or to attract customers. This is why many businesses use branded products like ballpoint pens, calendars, branded mugs, tea sets, stress balls, customized dress socks and neck ties, face towels, handkerchiefs, key holders, notepads etc etc, during such events as product launches, trade shows and product promos.

4. Design and Use Graphics for Branding

Images and graphics if well designed and deployed always have a very unique ability to arrest customer attention. They help to provide a seamless website experience for your website visitors. That somehow enhances the overall customer satisfaction for those website visitors. Images/graphics convey to your target audience at a quick glance what your business is all about and represent a brand that has something of value to offer them. When creatively used, images/graphics eloquently tell the story of your brand to visitors. The reason they’re very effective marketing tools. With good images/graphics on display, a visitor’s experience on your website actually starts even before they click to access the homepage. Therefore, for your online digital marketing strategies to actually work to effectively inspire visitors to click through to your website, the graphic design used in your ads must prioritize creative marketing strategies that match the target customers in terms of culture, lifestyle, and messaging. That enhances their real effectiveness.

5. Promote on Social Media

These days, nearly everyone is on social media for one reason or another. When used creatively, the popularity of social media can be deployed to provide a huge advantage for your promotional efforts.  Social media is an excellent platform to showcase authenticity in a very graphic way. With the ease to share updates of content and photographs regularly, social media manages to keep the attention and engagement of your reading audience for prolonged periods. It easily promotes customer interaction by allowing customer comments on your posts and photographs. This tends to amplify messaging to reach new markets which are likely to share important characteristics with your initial contacts. By responding to these comments, the brand not only further fuels sharing but also makes contacts feel valued. That is good for trust building, leads and conversions. If social media is used creatively, it allows for improved market performance without having the audience feeling as if they’re being sold an item or service.

 

How to Use Digital Marketing to Position Your Business

The internet remains very deep, wide and very complex. It is this complexity digital marketing explores to get promotional messages out to customers and potential customers. The real reason smart marketers habitually dedicate quality time, efforts and energy on digital marketing to get good results. Marketers not doing so are in critical error which inevitably costs their businesses very dearly on the long run. Such marketers may no doubt understand the importance of digital marketing. The snag however is that many of them don’t really know how to implement it for their specific situations as may be related to their own specific types of businesses.

If you want to succeed as a marketer and to position your business very well in the digital world, there are two things you must first focus on. First you must decide on your brand image and secondly you must know the audience you are targeting with your marketing campaigns. Once you decide on these, it is then possible to send out effective campaign messages that help to get some action from your audience. These efforts help to position your brand/business for good results even in the complexity of the digital marketing world. 

 

Here is how it works:

Project Your Brand Image

Everything about your business revolves around your brand image. A brand image is simply a very fancy way your business wants others to see it. It is an all-encompassing picture involving your reputation and what you stand for. Exactly how you want others to see you, think about you and remember you anytime they think of a product/service.
For this reason, every single information, advertisement or marketing campaign on social media posts, emails, handbills, flyers, billboards, TV ads, etc. etc, must as of necessity reflect and project the brand image you decided for your business right from the outset.

For a brand image to be effective, it must’ve been shaped from the following:

Why must someone remember or buy my product?
What do people feel when they buy the product?
What is unique about the product?
Who are the target customers?
Why these customers and not others?
How will they react when they buy the product?
Will they be satisfied with the product?
What feelings come to people’s minds when they think about the product?
How generally do others perceive the product?

If you design a brand with these concerns in mind, it is bound to make impact and help your business to grow in our complex digital world. These are some of the concerns that helped shape the business outlook of popular brands like Microsoft, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Hp, Dell and many others.

Define Your Ideal Customer

You cannot successfully do any business without first defining who your customers/clients are. Because these are persons you must target, your first order of business is to decide on who your ideal customer/client is. You really need this because of the fierceness of the competition characteristic of the digital world. Knowing who you want to sell your products/services to is the first step to selling any product/service. You risk failure to sell products if you think of your customers in broad and nonspecific terms particularly in a highly competitive marketing place like the digital environment. Once you can successfully identify who your target audience is, it is easier to align it with your brand image. Everything else flows from there to give your business a very formidable foundation. Building your marketing strategy on a formidable foundation can be great for your marketing campaigns, leads, sales and business growth. Knowing who your customer is appears to be the most important step to growing your business by way of digital marketing. This is because without a clear target audience to market to, you may be marketing in vain. Marketing in vain can in no way help your business to grow.  To avoid that scenario, you must always endeavour to decide on a target audience first, and then you create a brand image to appeal to that particular audience. That is the surest way to make sales and grow your business in digital marketing environment.

Common Mistakes to Avoid With Global Affiliates

Affiliate marketing has become a very powerful means of generating revenue in our fast-paced digital world. Because of the very characteristics of the Internet, affiliate marketing cuts across regional and geographical barriers and it appears to be a real rage of the moment. Companies are now looking to partner with affiliates no matter where they are in the world. These companies need local and international affiliates to effectively power their activities in many aspects of their business.  Such activities range from helping to raise their brand awareness in new territories to managing brand reputations in new and existing overseas markets. Expanding affiliate activities globally may have many advantages but there are drawbacks as well. These drawbacks are actually avoidable mistakes which you can take deliberate steps to avoid.


 
If you are keen on having an effective international affiliate marketing program, here are some common mistakes to avoid:

Marketing with a Language Barrier

Worldwide, language remains the medium of doing business. You cannot effectively do business with anyone if you are unable to communicate in a language you both understand. That makes it imperative for brands to be able to deliver their marketing campaigns in the local languages of the people they’re targeting. No being able to do so makes language a barrier to your marketing efforts and that is a marketing mistake you can do well to avoid. Making sure your website and its contents are easily translated with the help of Google tools into appropriate languages is one great way to avoid language barriers in international marketing campaigns.

Not Being Locally Well-Informed

Brand messages are most effective when they are in concert with local opportunities. Every good marketer must know with concise records what exactly the local trends are where campaigns are being targeted. That way, they can easily take advantage of great shopping dates/periods like Thanksgiving Days, Singles Days, Black Fridays, Double Digit Days and suchlike days worldwide where shoppers expect premiums and discounts.

Not Being Able to Seize Seasonal Opportunities

Worldwide, as the seasons vary, so are sales/marketing trends. Your website flexibility plays a big role in helping your business to seize local opportunities for business around the world. If your website is not flexible enough for different customers and doesn’t target them with content and products that are relevant to their local needs and location, it can greatly impede the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns.

Not Dealing in Local Currency

Money is a means of payment and an effective medium of exchange. If you are not offering your affiliate campaigns in the local currency of your target market, it can be a potential barrier which deters international customers. All costs, taxes, fees and duties associated with your marketing campaigns must be in the local currencies of your target audience and convertibility issues handled by the sellers.

Underestimating Your Brand Popularity

With the internet, it has become fairly easily for brands to get known around the world. This is a very vital marketing asset which you cannot afford to underestimate or ignore. Your key partners or affiliates around the world may very well know already what they expect from you and you cannot afford to disappoint. That is why it is vital that your affiliate program presents your brand to new audiences in the right way in order to build trust and strong working relationships. Presenting anything less than what they expect based on the impression they already have may lead to dampening their marketing enthusiasm.


 
Not Working with the Right Technology Provider

Since worldwide affiliate marketing campaigns rely hugely on the use of technology, your technology provider must be up to the game. That way, it can be in a good position to be able to give you very valuable insights about local opportunities worldwide. Therefore, if you want to give your campaign programs the best head start, you should opt for a provider that has extensive operations in the countries you’re hoping to move into and market to. Such technology providers are always best placed to deploy their valuable knowledge of each market’s unique characteristics and trends into a strategy that works for your brand. That is some very helpful knowledge brands can always leverage on for good results.

Ignoring Cultural Differences

You cannot be a good marketer if you are culturally insensitive. Worldwide, culture is one very vital aspect of peoples way of life which if not carefully handled can backfire with very disastrous marketing results. What you are marketing and the way you are marketing it can be very culturally sensitive in most parts of the world. You can therefore not afford to undermine the culture of a people if you want to market to them successfully. 

How to Get the Most Out of Your Marketing Efforts

Putting your business out there to get customers is almost always a very challenging undertaking. You need real marketing skills and resources to get the job done. Sadly, small businesses do not always have the benefit of big budgets for advertising. As such, they must explore ways to balance creativity and efficiency to make their marketing efforts effective. These here tips can be of help to you if you want to get the most out of your marketing efforts.

Create Your Own Productivity Strategy

 

You can always be a step ahead your competitors if you can create your own inimitable productivity strategy. This is because productivity isn’t a one-size-fits-all thing. What works for one business isn’t necessarily going to work for another. So, you have to create your own productivity strategy which works exclusively for your business.

Turn Your Customers into Advocates

 

Finding customers is one skill, turning them into advocates for your business is another. Your marketing efforts can always go a lot further if you’re able to get customers and followers to do some of the work for you. Satisfied customers are willing and highly effective tools in these efforts. 

Use Data/Statistics to Influence Reluctant Buyers

 

What really counts in most marketing efforts is what easily convinces by way of verifiable data and statistics. When you’re trying to convince potential buyers to do business with you, you can create complicated marketing campaigns using correct data/statistics to back up your claims. 

Sharpen and Hone Your Writing Skills

 

Today, most business owners are using content marketing by way of blogging to get their businesses noticed. If you use a blog for your business, it’s in your best interest to make that blog reach as many potential customers as possible. That is straightforward enough. If however you want your blog or any other form of written content marketing to be effective, you need to constantly work on improving your writing skills to get out your message simply and without ambiguity. That requires some good writing skills.

Build a High Performance Content Marketing Team

 

Efficient and effective marketing is usually done by well-trained and dedicated content marketing teams. Your content marketing team can actually make or break your marketing campaigns. That is the reason why the team must be very good. Somehow, if you can build a high performance content marketing team, it can easily take your business to the next level with team efforts.

Constantly Improve the Motivation of Your Workforce

 

All businesses revolve around people and for people. What they do and or neglect to do readily impact the fortunes of any business. Significantly, your employees can have a major impact on the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns and other areas of your business’s operations. Keeping them well motivated readily guarantees that effectiveness. Somehow, if you can keep your workforce sufficiently motivated, they help improve your chances of being successful.