Different Types of Online Marketing

/0 Comments/in /by

Different Types of Online Marketing

This guide explains the different types of online marketing and includes resources to expand your knowledge and get started using them!

Inbound and Outbound Marketing

Marketing efforts are often divided into the two categories of “inbound” and “outbound.”

Outbound marketing is the traditional way to market your business and includes print advertising, cold-calling, TV commercials, junk mail, trade show attendance, etc.

Also called “interruption marketing, outbound is all about putting your brand in front of people. It’s kind of like casting a huge net and hoping that you’ll catch the fish you want.

traditional marketing methods

Traditional marketing is like casting a huge net and hoping you’ll bring in the right fish.

Online marketing is mostly concerned with inbound marketing where businesses create websites, content, and social media properties for people to find when they search for your products and services online.

Companies will employ both inbound and outbound marketing techniques together in order to maximize the chances of attracting customers, but no matter what type of marketing you have, it all leads back to your website.

Use inbound and outbound marketing methods at the same time #marketing #yegbiz

Click To Tweet

Are you currently using outbound marketing techniques and wary about inbound marketing strategies? Read through some of the following articles to get an idea of just how effective inbound marketing can be:

Search Engine Optimization

The technical definition of Search Engine Optimization is “the process of improving rankings of a website or web page in the unpaid “organic” search results.” This is very important in online marketing because the goal is to make it easy for your customers to find you.

Imagine how frustrating it can be to get a recommendation from someone and not be able to find the place you’re looking for online. You know it exists, but you just can’t find it no matter what you type into the search bar. Grr!

You want to make it easy for search engines to bring up your business when people type in general search terms.

If you’re the only interior designer in the area, you don’t have to try as hard to get found in organic search, but if you’re one of 30 interior designers, Search Engine Optimization will give your website a boost, making it appear on top of your competition.

The higher a page ranks, the more visible it is, and so it will receive more traffic.
Search Engine Optimization involves Technical SEO, On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, and Local SEO.

Want to know more about SEO? Check out the links below:

Off-Page SEO Resources:

Technical SEO Resources:

Local SEO Resources:

PPC Advertising

Search Engine Optimization of your website is essential to the success of your online marketing efforts because searchers trust organic, unpaid search results over paid ads.

94% of all the clicks in search results go to organic listings – not PPC.

That said, Pay Per Click advertising is a great way to boost traffic in a short amount of time.

By Pay Per Click ads, we’re talking about the sponsored links that appear on top of search results. Price varies, but it’s based on the quality of your website AND ad, so make sure you’re website is top notch before investing in PPC.

These ads work. Some businesses make most of their money because of pay per click ads. Google makes 96% of its billions from Google Adwords and Google Adsense. (More on how Google makes money here.)

Personal results are going to vary depending on your target market, but some companies do very well with PPC advertising.

Interested in Pay Per Click services? Nyche Marketing does campaign audits, recommendations, and campaign management.

For best results, study up on PPC and create high-quality, targeted ads that convert:

Resources from a top authority on paid search, Search Engine Land:

Social Media Marketing

online marketing with social media

Social media is a form of online marketing

The importance of social media varies for each business. Some business owners want nothing to do with it, while others may only have a Facebook page and no website at all!

That’s because social is so versatile. There are literally hundreds of social media sites where you can create a profile, join, a group, make a page, or contribute to forums as a business.

But before you jump onto one of these sites, consider what your goals are:

  • Do you want to use social to promote your brand?
  • Do you want to provide customer service over social media?
  • Would you like to establish yourself as a trusted expert in your field?

Your goals will help you figure out which platforms to be on and what you do on them.

As a type of digital marketing, social media is the one that will help you to grow relationships with your audience. Letting people get to know and trust you is ultimately the best way to make sales and create brand advocates.

Each year, the # of daily #Facebook users INCREASES! It’s still growing! #yegbiz

Click To Tweet

Want to learn more about social media marketing? Click on through the links below:

Content Marketing

Don’t believe them when they tell you people these days don’t read.

On the contrary!

It’s true that people won’t read something if they’re not interested, maybe a word or two of a catchy headline or slogan.

But if people are interested in buying something you’re selling, they’ll. read. every. Word.

That’s where content marketing comes in.

Content marketing is a form of online marketing where businesses produce content for their customers.

It can be videos, podcasts, infographics, white papers, case studies, and most often, blogs that you can use to bring traffic to your website, increase your credibility, showcase your work/products, and convince people that you’re the business they’ve been looking for.

The key to content marketing is not just doing it, but doing it well. Use professional blogging services for best results. 

See the articles below for more info on content marketing and how you can use it for your business.

Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation is when businesses use a software system to capture and track data about leads (potential customers), automate manual marketing activities (such as follow-up), and generate in-depth reports to track your marketing and advertising efforts.

Nurture, encourage, and track leads easily with #marketingautomation #yegbiz

Click To Tweet

Email Marketing

What types of Online Marketing is Right for Your Business?

When deciding on which types of online marketing are right for your business, ask yourself, “What are my goals?”

Then go with the online marketing method that will help you accomplish your goals:

SEO will bring you long-term traffic increases from search engines.
PPC will bring instant traffic and boost your visibility in search engines, as long as you keep paying for it.
Social Media Marketing for building relationships with your target market
Content Marketing for long-term, steady traffic from search engines, shares on social media. Will help build customers’ trust in your business.

Does your website need optimization? Are you ready to start doing some online marketing?

Get in touch with expert digital marketers at Nyche Marketing: 587-409-3000

Marketing Math: How to Determine ROI of your Marketing Efforts

/0 Comments/in /by

Nobody starts a business with hopes of just breaking even.

You want your business to be profitable and lead to expansion and success – right?

You don’t want to just live comfortably, you want to live the dream!

How does Marketing Help?

Marketing helps people (strangers, friends & family) get to know your business. You want people to know who you are and what you’re selling in order to

  1. Make prospecting easier and more efficient
  2. Get new leads and sales opportunities (from existing leads or new leads)
  3. Qualify leads for your sales team to close
  4. Make more money!

How do you know if your Marketing is Working?

Marketing should be an investment, NOT an expense. The goal is to get a return on investment or ROI for every marketing dollar invested.

The idea of investing dollars into marketing is to get back more money than you invested (whether in the short term or the long term).

As a business owner, you want to know that your marketing investment is paying off. You do this by evaluating your current situation (i.e. capturing a baseline), setting SMART goals for future objectives, identifying your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s to make sure your marketing is on the right track) and reviewing your marketing campaigns and their results.

Setting SMART Goals

The first step in planning your marketing efforts is to set SMART business goals. SMART stands for: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-bound goals.

When it comes to the marketing and sales area of your business, you want to be able to say, “I put $10,000 into marketing my business this year and I made $20,000 in sales/revenue because of it.” Essentially in this simple scenario, you will have doubled your investment.

Figure Out Your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Key Performance Indicators are the metrics (aka numbers) you identify and watch that tell you how your marketing efforts are doing.

When you’re setting your marketing goals, you need to figure out what things you need to keep track of to ensure that you’re investing wisely. Your KPIs aren’t going to be exactly the same as another business, but they might be similar. The idea is to ensure that your KPI’s are trending upward and if they fall, to be able to react quickly and make a measured decision to pivot or regroup as needed.

Here are a few KPI’s that are important to most businesses when reviewing your marketing campaigns:

  • Number of leads coming in
  • How many leads it takes to generate a sale
  • How many touch points does it take to get a lead, to get a sale
  • Number and dollar value of sales made
  • Cost of each lead gained
  • Cost to acquire a new customer
  • How many transactions a customer has with you / How often they buy
  • How much each customer is spending with you
  • Lifetime value of a customer

… and there are many many more – click here to watch a video from Brian Tracy on the numbers a business should keep track of.

Does some of these metrics and numbers sound like Greek to you? Click here for The 16 Marketing KPI’s You Should Be Measuring.

Bottom Line Metrics vs Vanity Metrics

When you’re figuring out which metrics to watch as a KPI, you need to distinguish the Vanity Metrics from the Bottom Line Metrics.

Bottom Line Metrics are things like sales made, revenue from each sale, profit per sale, number of phone calls, or emails showing up in your inbox.

Keep track of these numbers and then tie them back to which marketing campaign (or effort) lead to those sales, phone calls, or emails, etc.

Want to get an idea of how to calculate your profits? Try out this Profit Calculator from ActionCOACH.

Metrics that you shouldn’t place too much value on are Vanity Metrics:

These are the things that make you feel good, but they don’t help you reach your business goals.

As Caleb Wojcik from Fizzle.com, “The number of your visitors, subscribers, and followers are often meaningless.” There is a fuzzier line between these metrics and the end result of a sale…

However, the idea is to make sure all of these metrics are trending up. If they should fall for some reason, you definitely want to keep an eye out for that.

Read more about Bottom Line and Vanity Metrics here.

Which Metrics Really Matter when Determining Return On Investment (ROI)?

Say you’re currently in a slump and you want to ramp up your online marketing efforts to bring in more leads and sales.

Before you invest, you need to figure out where you stand.

In terms of just digital marketing, once you know how your website, social properties, and online advertising campaigns are currently performing, you can set goals for your future online marketing efforts.

Most businesses have a website and social properties like Facebook and LinkedIn pages. If you’re really savvy, you might even have SEO and PPC campaigns.

Set Realistic Marketing Goals

If your current website traffic is 300 unique visitors per month and your website brings in 3 leads each month, you are currently getting a 1% website visitor-to-lead conversion rate.

Tactical goals could be to (increase) double your traffic and to increase your visitor-to-lead conversion rate by 100% over the next 6 months.

Using the SMART goal acronym:

1. Double Traffic to Website 2. Double Lead Conversion rate
Specific Current: 300 Future goal: 600 Current: 1% Future goal: 2%
Measurable Yes – 600 Yes – 2%
Attainable This will depend on search volume and competition online for traffic and budget to achieve this growth This is attainable as industry averages range from 1-5% or better if really dialed in
Realistic Again will depend on search volumes and existing competition and marketing budget to execute task Yes
Time-bound 6 months 6 months

So the two goals above are SMART – given that there is enough demand out in cyberspace to be able to double the traffic and you have the resources (time, money and expertise) to be able to.

Imaging increasing your traffic by 100% to 600 visitors a month – ostensibly with the same 1% visitor-to-lead conversion rate you would now be getting 6 leads every month.

Now if you also worked on increasing the conversion rate from 1% and doubling it to 2%. That same 600 websites visitors would turn into 12 leads a month!

If you’re a home building company, these 9 extra leads could mean 9 contracts for new houses, which could bring in hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars!

An unrealistic goal would be a 100% increase in leads in 1 month. Website traffic will increase when you have done great SEO, and SEO takes time to work.

With time, you could see large increases, but it’s unrealistic to think traffic will skyrocket immediately. Having monthly KPI’s and metrics that you are gauging progress against is crucial.

The key is to set yourself realistic (but challenging) goals. If there are dozens and dozens of competitors out there, it’s unrealistic to have your goal be to show up on the first page of Google’s search results. Your goals should be based on making improvements to your current status.

Here are a bunch of metrics to keep track of regarding your marketing campaigns – note each of these should be captured for every type of marketing you do and for every channel your business is promoted on (e.g. social, organic search, paid search, tv, radio, newspaper, in-person networking events, direct mail etc etc)

  • # of calls received
  • # of emails received
  • # of social media messages received
  • Total number of Lead received
  • Cost per Lead
  • # of sales generated
  • Cost per sale
  • Customer acquisition cost
  • Revenue generated
  • Conversion rates
  • ROI

Marketing Math – Summary

How did you get leads? How many sales, and from which leads? Which marketing effort brings in the most profitable lead? How many repeat sales and How many referral sales. One lead can bring in ten other customers. Are you keeping track of them?

Have SMART goals and metrics and KPIs to be able to track your goals against to make the most out of your marketing dollars.

RenovationFind: a Marketing tool for Home Contractors

/0 Comments/in /by

What is RenovationFind?

RenovationFind exists to bring home owners and contractors together. They have an active, current database of local homeowners who are actively searching for contractors. Homeowners who have ideas to do some renovations, but they don’t know who to hire and where to get their supplies from.

RenovationFind bring homeowners who are ready to hire the best of the best a list of top local contractors, which helps make finding the right contractor for the job easier.

How did RenovationFind Come to Life?

When the massive flooding happened in Calgary in 2013, Keith Riley and his wife Vivian heard about a lot of shady dealings where home and business owners were taken advantage of by contractors (read about how contractors overcharged Calgarians after the flood). It wasn’t easy for people to tell which companies were honest and which were just out there to take advantage of people.

But it’s not just Calgary that has bad apples, you’ll find bad contractors just about anywhere. RenovationFind is trying to rectify that. They launched three years ago in Alberta, and they’ve been growing ever since.

Who uses RenovationFind?

Thousands of homeowners search for contractors using Google and often land on the RenovationFind.com website. Over 10,000 homeowners have joined and as a member, they have access to the database of contractors profiled from over 22 Canadian cities.

 

Members are primarily homeowners who are actively looking for home services – products and contractors. People who join can be assured that they will find a reputable contractor. They aren’t looking for the cheapest company they can find, they want companies they can trust.

Members can

  • Check out the description of the contractor,
  • Look through the contractor website and social media accounts,
  • See their RenovationFind rating, and
  • Look through pictures of each company’s work to give them an idea of what to expect.

RenovationFind does’t hand pick a contractor for a member. They recommend being thorough and getting at least three quotes.

Here’s an example of a member’s experience using RenovationFind:

While at a trade show, a customer spoke about how he renovated a whole floor in his condo using contractors he found on RenovationFind. He used a handyman for the repainting, a flooring company, and bought a new closet. It ended up being a great service for him all around. There were so many moving parts, but all the contractors managed themselves professionally.

How does RenovationFind assess trades and contractors?

They do a series of background checks:

  • legal,
  • credit,
  • complaints,
  • insurance,
  • WCB,
  • BBB,
  • and others

They give contractors third party accreditation and let homeowners know they’ve passed these background checks. It’s an ongoing process and if things change, their RenovationFind Rating will change.

The ratings are A, A+, and A-. Companies can display them on their websites or in their advertising. Shoppers look for a third party seal of approval when they’re researching who to go with. Here’s a breakdown of the ratings.

Homeowners look for 3rd party accreditation when deciding where to buy #yegbiz #yeghomes

Click To Tweet

What are the Levels of Membership for Contractors?

There are three tiers of profiles for you as a contractor: Basic, Premium, and Platinum.

A Basic Profile includes:

  • A profile on RenovationFind
  • Promoted as top rated, most trusted in their category
  • Internal brand campaign, banner ads on RenovationFind
  • Two homeowner memberships to give out
  • Analytics to see how many people are clicking on your website link and the phone number in your profile

You can check out examples of profiles here.

Premium membership includes all the things you get with Basic PLUS:

  • External online marketing campaign with retargeting via AdWords
  • Your business will be featured on RenovationFind’s social media properties
  • Blog articles on the RenovationFind blog written by or for you
  • You can also have your blog shared on other company’s blogs

Check out the RenovationFind blog!

The Platinum membership includes everything in the Basic and Premium packages PLUS:

  • email campaigns
  • print and digital marketing
  • a profile on the RenovationFind mobile phone app
  • can participate in trade shows and represent themselves at the RenovationFind booth and gain major exposure (the RenovationFind booth usually attracts thousands of homeowners at each trade show)
  • Unlimited homeowner memberships to give away

Here’s an example of how a Platinum member used their free memberships to close deals:

Tile and Stone Source International are a platinum member, so they have unlimited homeowner memberships to give away. They use it as a way to help close deals so that homeowners can use RenovationFind to find other products or services they need. Membership also gives homeowners access to discounts from other companies on RenovationFind, so that’s an added bonus too.

How Does RenovationFind Differ From its Competitors?

It is not a review-based website!

Contractors don’t have to deal with damaging or fake reviews. The service does monitor complaints, but they don’t make them public.

They find your potential customers ahead of time.

The fact that they have homeowners as members and are not just a directory of listings is a big differentiator. You don’t see that with any competitors’ business models.

Currently they have over 25,000 homeowner members in Western Canada alone.

They are present at local tradeshows

RenovationFind ensures they have a presence at some of the biggest home and garden trade shows (such as the Edmonton Home and Garden Show) and allow Platinum contractor members to work the booth with them.

They frequently communicate with their members by email and they call contractors on a quarterly basis.

Currently they send out monthly emails to homeowner members in Edmonton and Calgary. These emails include discounts and promotions from contractors.

They are across Canada:

There are 22 locations listed on RenovationFind. They get online traffic from all 22 cities and they’re adding more cities all the time.

What is RenovationFind’s Number One Tip For Contractors to Generate More Leads?

The number one tip is to use their tools! Contact a sales rep and figure out all of the ways you can squeeze the most out of your RenovationFind profile. Sales reps will call you quarterly and they encourage all contractors to reach out to the potential homeowners via emails, blogging opportunities, and banner ads to help you get leads and sales.

RenovationFind gives its contractors great marketing tools. Pro tip: Use them! #yegbiz

Click To Tweet

What are RenovationFind’s Plans for the Future?

Global domination 🙂 and there are a few things they want to do along the way, like move into different markets.

They also want to tailor and tweak what they currently offer to make sure it stays win-win.

Another thing they’re working on is improving communication between contractors using a newsletter. It can be hard to make partnerships with other contractors unless you’re actively networking. Some people don’t like networking, so they want to make it easier to connect with other contractors.

How To Learn More about RenovationFind?

They can fill out their online contact form, send an email to garrett@renovationfind.com, or give them a call at 1-800-576-8998.

You can also check them out online on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and Pinterest.