Email Marketing

• In the last 6 months email opened by mobile devices increased 80% worldwide.

• Emails with no subject line were 8% more likely to be opened than those with.

• Average yield for email marketing is $44.25 on the dollar.

• 85% would prefer leaving their email address for an e-book than a tweet.

• 42% of consumers say familiarity with the senders name influences whether or not they will open a promotional email.

Blogs and Content Marketing

• Blogs have 63% more influence over purchasing decisions than the newspaper.

• Companies that blog more than 15 times per month get 5 times the traffic.

• The average length of a top ten page has 2000 words.

• If a post is longer than 1,500 words it will likely have 68.1% more tweets and 22.6% more Facebook likes.

• Posts with 10-18 word titles receive more likes.

• Articles with photographs receive 94% more views.

• Infographics allow companies to grow by 12% on average.

• After increasing the number of pages on their site from 10-15, companies saw an average increase in sales leads of 55%.

• 47% of Americans say that Facebook is the number one influence over their purchases (social media today).

• 78% of CMO’s believe that custom content is the future of marketing.

Video

• Using video on landing pages increases conversions by 86%.

• Videos receive 267% more links than other posts.

• 58% of people will stop watching a video within the first 90 seconds.

• 20% of visitors read text on your page, 80% will watch a video.

• A prospective customer is 144% more likely to buy when there’s a product video featured.

Mobile

• 50% of all searches begin on a mobile device.

• 88% of mobile searches are for local businesses.

• 46% of adults prefer to use their mobile devices to search for items before purchasing them over their desktops or laptops.

• Mobile traffic has a growth rate of 125%, desktop traffic is growing at a rate of 12%.

• By 2018 6.2 million people will have mobile devices.

• 173 million US consumers have a smartphone.

• 81% of smartphone users research products or services on their devices.

• 74% of mobile users make internet searches before making a purchase.

Now that you know that stats, would you like some assistance developing your online presence? If so, give us a call and our talented team of professionals will be happy to assist your business in achieving its goals.

However, this is not the marketing Wild West it once was. New businesses can have a hard time getting started with SEO, and paid search can offer a fast track to search marketing when done correctly.

This all comes back to your digital marketing strategy. Understanding your prospective customers and how they use the web is key to determining whether paid search, organic search or a combination of both is the best approach for your unique and ever-changing situation.

In this post, we are going to look at the pros and cons of both SEO and PPC as a marketing strategy and provide some tips in choosing the right channel for your business. Where both organic and paid are suitable, we will take a look at how to integrate SEO and PPC for improved results from your search marketing efforts.

SEO: Improve your organic traffic

What are the pros and cons of organic traffic from search engines? Let’s begin with the pros:

Awareness. Visibility in search engines for your targeted keywords puts your business in front of potential customers in much the same way as if you were to advertise, and it drives brand awareness.

Branding. Visibility around commercial search terms and informational queries related to your business area can have a positive branding benefit. Your brand can become associated with and trusted by searchers who are asking questions as they conduct the research that will lead to a purchase. You can become an authoritative voice around a given topic.

Credibility and trust. Having your site return in the organic results can influence your perceived credibility with an audience looking for your services. Many users skip ads and trust organic results more highly. Being visible gives your business that all-important stamp of approval. Also having strong review and reputation signals in place will deliver further benefit.

Website traffic. Increasing website traffic provides you with more opportunities to drive awareness of your business and educate a prospect as to why they would buy from you.

Cost per click. Traffic from organic search is free… sort of. Developing that visibility will take time and effort (money), but there is not a direct charge for each impression or click.

Return on investment (ROI). Organic search engine traffic can provide an improved ROI over traditional forms of paid media and certainly improve upon PPC.

Cost. While SEO is neither cheap nor easy, it will generally be more cost-effective than all other marketing tactics for delivering brand awareness and relevant traffic to your website.

Sustainability. Unlike paid search marketing, organic traffic does not dry up the moment you stop paying. As such, efforts to develop organic traffic can sustain a business when marketing spend is cut back.

Improved click-through rate (CTR). A higher percentage of users click on the organic results. While there are exceptions to this rule, you will generate more clicks from a highly placed organic listing than from a highly placed paid ad.

More clicks overall. To maximize visibility and clicks, you will want to have listings in the paid and organic results. Keyword-level experimentation is needed here to see if you are paying for clicks you would get for free or increasing overall clicks and CTR in both paid and organic — but to truly maximize results, strong visibility in paid and organic is needed.

Scope. There are so many new queries every day that to maximize scope, you will need strong organic visibility. You will not want to pay for all kinds of clicks either or advertise every piece of content on your website.

Strategic advantage. Visibility in organic search is not quick or easy — which is a good and a bad thing. Once you have established yourself in the organic results, your competitors can’t simply buy their way in (assuming you have done things the right way). This can provide a strategic advantage over the competition if they are relying on paid search.

It is not all sunshine and rainbows, though, and there are certainly cons to SEO. In many cases, organic traffic can be slow to come by, and you may be wildly outgunned. If you are just starting out, and the keywords you are targeting show results dominated by titans like Amazon and eBay, then you may need to rethink your strategy.

You may also need to develop content assets to achieve strong organic visibility. Not all businesses have the in-house resources to tackle content development, and this can pose a problem. Tactics such as safe, sustainable link building can be difficult to master, and often, a strategy is needed, along with expert support.

Organic traffic may also largely come in via informational or pre-purchase research queries. This is valuable traffic, but a more staged approach may be required to nurture those users to a purchase. This is a cornerstone activity in digital marketing; however, it is not always easy, and it is not a good fit for all businesses.

PPC: Laser-targeted visibility

How does paid search differ from organic search? With click-through rates and trust heavily stacked in favor of organic search, why would a business look at paid search? Here are some of the benefits PPC offers:

Position on the page. Paid search dominates above-the-fold content. With typically four ads on desktop and three on mobile, a user will always see the paid search ads, even if they choose to scroll past them.

Improved ads. PPC ads are just that: advertisements. As such, you have far more granular control and more space for delivering your marketing messages. Calls, locations, sitelinks, pricing and bullet points (callouts) are just some of the options for creating ads that dominate the page.

Visual product ads. Where you sell a product, Google provides the option of visual shopping ads (Product Listing Ads, or PLAs) that can help a user see what they will be clicking on. This kind of ad can really improve the click-through rate by offering a feature not available in organic search.

Brand visibility. Running paid search advertisements gets you seen by the right people. Even if they back off and conduct a brand search before clicking to your site, that visibility will pay dividends to your marketing.

Budget. PPC allows for a tight control of budget. Determine how much you are willing to spend per day (ideally with some initial and ideal ideas of returns), and set that fixed limit.

Targeting. PPC provides a laser-targeted way to get in front of potential customers. Ads can be targeted by search keywords, time of day, day of the week, geography, language, device and audiences based on previous visits. Organic traffic, by comparison, is far more scattershot.

Speed. While developing good organic visibility can take time, a PPC campaign can be created in days and ramped up in weeks. There is no faster way to get in front of customers at the very moment they are primed to buy than paid search engine advertising.

Agile. Speed provides agility. Want to test a new product? A new marketing message? You can get rapid feedback on a new product launch (or minimum viable product) by running a short PPC ad campaign.

Marketing intelligence. Where organic largely hides keyword data in the name of privacy, there is no such restriction with paid search. With conversion tracking and a solid integration with analytics software (like Google Analytics), we can determine what keywords convert and at what percentage and cost. This intelligence can be fed directly into organic search (SEO) marketing and can inform all other advertising to improve results across the board.

A/B testing. Easily split-test ads, landing pages, and even call-to-action buttons to determine where the very best results lie. Again, this information can be fed back into all other digital (and traditional) marketing endeavors.

Stability. AdWords does not suffer the same turbulence that the organic results can suffer from. There are changes, but they tend to have a far lower impact and are more easily managed. Careful use of match types and analysis of the search term reports allow for the removal of junk search and an increase in ROI over time.

Cost. Despite what many advertisers believe, a PPC account that’s well set up and managed can be a low-cost way to generate leads for your business. If you are a local business targeting a small geographic area and a small set of keywords, you may find that you can generate more than enough leads without breaking the bank. Additionally, over time, accounts can be further optimized to drive down costs and increase return.

As with organic search, there are many benefits to paid search advertising or PPC. However, there are also some pitfalls for advertisers to be wary of.

PPC can be expensive. It is not always the case, but costs can quickly add up. If you are targeting entire countries or running international campaigns, those costs can spiral.

Paid search advertising is, as the name suggests, paid — so it requires constant investment. Stop paying the piper, and your ads go away and your lead generation dries up. So long as you have a solid acquisition cost, then this should not be a problem, but in contrast to SEO, it can feel like a bad deal. Of course, SEO should be ongoing to keep the opposition at bay, but organic traffic can be a little more robust.

There are various options for search advertising with PPC, and making smart choices here will influence results. If you see product listings dominating the screen for your keywords, then text ads may not perform so well. Likewise, if you run product ads, and only text ads are returned, then these ads may not deliver the goods.

It is not unusual to get into bidding wars with other advertisers, which can drive costs up. As you start to run your ads, often you are taking a bite out of some other advertisers’ digital apple. Doing so can result in some spiraling costs.

Strategically, PPC is relatively easy to copy. If a competitor notices you are running ads, they can run ads. Your messaging can be imitated. Your entire funnel can be easily evaluated by competitors. This is the digital marketing landscape, and you have to accept that to some extent.

Successful PPC needs skilled management and optimization — from monitoring bids, Quality Scores, positions and click-through rates. Some of this can be done with scripts, but if you are too busy to do this properly, ensure you have an expert on hand to take care of keeping your account in tip-top shape.

SEO or PPC?

It’s just not possible to answer this question without taking the unique situation of a given business into consideration.

A hyper-local business with little competition and a requirement for just a few leads per week could likely develop good visibility in the local and organic search results with a little spend or some DIY SEO.

A new e-commerce store that is competing with a page of results from Amazon, eBay and other major department stores and online retailers is likely going to struggle in organic search (in the short term, at least).

Do you need leads now? Are you looking at the long game? Do you have much in the way of website authority? What is the competition like in organic search? What is the cost per click in paid search?

A clear digital marketing strategy and clear short- and long-term goals are essential in making an SEO or PPC decision here.

SEO and PPC

In an ideal world, we would look at both SEO and PPC. They both have pros and cons and work best when supporting each other synergistically. Where you can get SEO and PPC working together, you will often be able to drive results that are greater than their component parts.

The benefits of running SEO and PPC together include:

• Keyword and conversion data from PPC can be fed into organic search (SEO).
• The total volume of traffic can be increased by targeting clicks in paid and organic for high-performing keywords.
• High-cost keywords, high-volume or low-converting (yet still important) keywords can be moved from PPC to organic search.
• A/B testing of ad copy and landing pages can be fed into your organic listing and landing pages.
• Remarketing allows you to stay in front of visitors after an initial touch via organic search and customize messaging around their engagement with your site.
• Test your keyword strategy in PPC before committing to long-term SEO strategies.
• Target users at all stages of the customer journey from research to comparison to purchase with commercial keywords.
• Increase confidence and awareness by having both strong organic and paid visibility.

In our experience with hundreds of businesses, an integrated search strategy that looks at both SEO and PPC is the optimal approach. Results are improved in each channel by utilizing both paid and organic. This will not be right for every business, but for high-growth, aggressive marketing, you will want to develop a holistic search engine strategy rather than look at SEO or PPC in isolation.

Thus it is always better to choose few digital marketing best practices rather than doing it all. Few of the marketing trends that stay on the top of the list in 2018 Marketing Strategy are as below:

1.    Marketing Automation:

This is an innovative solution to save time and resources by doing automation of repetitive tasks. But there needs to be an expertise available to utilize it otherwise, it can be an expensive venture. Under this concept, the website, social media and email campaigns are integrated with other lead generation initiative. There is always requirement in the company to generate leads for sales to increase revenue. Marketing automation helps in this by using number of marketing channels and automates the tasks.

2.    Mobile Marketing:

Google has already stated mobile as an important ranking factor. Thus the mobile friendly website and applications have gain significance in recent years. Every year, Google search has been made extensively and half of it is done using mobile. With the help of expanded text ads, Adwords are gaining importance and is about to become first advertising platform on mobile.

Everything done on a website, from content creation to display ads, it is necessary to incorporate mobile standards. You can always consider working with a digital marketing agency if you are low in resources as the digital marketing company can really help in boosting the sales of your products and services with the help of latest digital marketing campaigns.

3. Website Security

Earlier this month, Yahoo suffered a security breach that affected more than one billion of its user accounts. A security breach of this size should serve as a reminder of just how critical it is to ensure that your website is secure in 2018. We provide our clients with server-level monitoring for maximum security.

As scammers become more adept at stealing sensitive information, phishing scams are also on the rise  The Anthem medical data breach of 2015 was one of the largest data breaches in American history, and it caused by a phishing scam that targeted Anthem employees. Today’s scammers will go to great lengths to separate you from your money or access your customer data. In our blog post, Lessons Learned From Scamming a Scammer, you can see just how far scammers are willing to go to get what they want.

In 2015, Google announced that it uses HTTPS encryption and SSL certificates as a ranking factor. This means that websites with HTTPS or SSL certificate will be given priority in Google search engine rankings over websites that don’t. Many online shoppers won’t even buy from websites that don’t have SSL certificates, because they’re afraid of having their credit card information stolen. If you haven’t already done so, your company should definitely make the switch to HTTPS in 2017.

We offer SSL certificates, website security audits, employee training about the dangers of phishing scams and other common threats to your website security.

4.    Quality Content:

Anything posted on social media has to be a part of a thoughtful marketing plan. There will be a larger appetite for quality content in 2017 as social media also only favors relevant content. The customers are always looking for a unique, fresh approach to their problem and thus a customized experience is to be created to speak to the audience.

The realistic goals can be established and documented through an effective digital marketing plan. Internet now consumes more content and less advertising.

5. Paid Search Advertising

As the effectiveness of paid search advertising continues to grow, more companies are realizing that it’s something they need to do to stay competitive. Popular paid search advertising networks like Google AdWords, Facebook Ads and LinkedIn Ads offer advanced audience targeting features that allow companies to target their customers like never before. This prevents your ad dollars from being wasted on irrelevant audiences and helps to ensure that your ads are in front of the right prospect at the right moment.

We can set up your paid search ad campaigns to only target users who meet your specific demographic and geographic customer data, or campaigns that only remarket/retarget your ads to people who have visited or made a purchase from your website. Using paid search advertising to target in-market segments of prospective customers who are actively researching and comparing your products or services to your competitors is an efficient and cost-effective digital marketing strategy.

However, with advanced targeting capabilities comes increased complexity. Many companies do what they can to limit their ad spend and reach their customers, but paid search ad campaign are the most effective when they’re being managed and optimized by ad experts. Paid search ad specialists know how to research your competitors and;are able to tell you whether or not your competitors are doing paid search advertising and how much they are spending. They can even tell you which keywords your competitors are advertising for and which ads they are running so you can maximize the effectiveness of your paid search ad campaigns and increase your return on investment.

As a Google Partner that is also AdWords certified, we can optimize your paid search campaigns in accordance with Google best practices and setup or manage Bing, Google, Facebook and LinkedIn ad campaigns to achieve your marketing objectives and increase your ROI.

The year 2017 will be arriving soon and new digital marketing 2017 trends are also emerging. These trends relate to the digital consumer with developments relating to marketing practices and habits of users on social networks.

These are the Top 5 digital marketing 2017 trends:

1. Social networks are competing with Search engines to research information

To research information about a brand, product, service, users still think that the search engines is best. But first, put some emphasis on social networks for this approach. This is the case for the age group of 16-34 years, with more than 1/3 preferred social network against search engines.  The Social network is becoming equally important to research information.

2. The digital transformation is for 2017?

We talk a lot, but in fact, this digital marketing 2017 transformation, how to realize?  But the reality seems less simple: according to a recent study by Capgemini, only 7% of companies can be considered “expert digital”, namely that “have invested in new technologies, changed their organization in depth, and are the only ones able to adapt quickly to the latest trends.”  Every company which offers digital marketing services should be 100% updated on the latest trends.

3. Video Trend (Marketing)

This digital marketing trend, you cannot escape: the video is “new image”. The influence of the video in use has increased steadily since 2011. The numbers are huge: 8 billion videos are viewed every day on Facebook, 7 billion on Snapchat (x 3 from May to November 2015). The consumption trend is the short format, even very short, “about 34% of the holders of a Smartphone regularly watch videos”. Web companies indeed offer apps offering more short videos: Beyond streaming proposed by Meerkat and Periscope Twitter, Instagram launched Boomerang and micro-video 3 seconds (against 6 seconds to Vine Twitter in 2012).

4. Mobile

Another big digital marketing 2017 trend: The numbers are impressive: From 2015 to 2016, Facebook realize that 78% of its advertising revenue is from mobile. Over 50% of the 100 billion searches on Google are via mobile. And now, 51% of time spent on the Internet is mobile. This is the first time in so many years that mobile is # 1.

4. Images and Videos: guarantees interactions

Social networks, videos, and images allow very high engagement rate with the largest average user than other formats. Social networks are very important for online presence: Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and Instagram obviously well before Snapchat, are networks that have experienced the highest growth in terms of unique Users. Instagram realizes an average engagement rate of 4.21% (Study e-marketer) and on Twitter, 150% of tweets with an image receive 150% more retweets (Forrester).

5. Facebook is stronger than ever.

The benefit of Snapchat including Facebook yet appears stronger than ever: Economically, the group includes big social network like Instagram and WhatsApp. Facebook Messenger instant messaging service has over 800 million users (over 200 million in 1 year). So Facebook marketing cannot be underestimated in anyways in 2017.

These were the Top 5 digital marketing trends that cannot be ignored anyways. We at Pointer IT Solutions are evolving and changing with the new trends like some of them mentioned in this blog. We have an expert team who can handle digital marketing service like SEO, SMM, SMO and SEM very well and by our experience, we think digital marketing will keep evolving according to the trends and at ISDMMT will keep updating our knowledge according to the latest trends.