Marketing Archives - Page 15 of 53 - Creative Agency Secrets

How To Measure Your Marketing ROI

15 December, 2018/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Sudip Mutt

In every marketing campaign, knowing the Return on Investment or ROI allows entrepreneurs to make decisions that determine their business success. Therefore, it’s fair to say learning how to measure your marketing ROI helps you assess if your business is on the positive side of the equation.

The concept behind ROI is not so simple. However, it is essential for any entrepreneur to learn how to calculate ROI. The last thing you’d want is to spend thousands blindly on marketing your product or service without any certainty if what you get in return compensates for what you spent.

Why is Calculating ROI Important?

The goal of calculating ROI is to check if all the spending goes back in through revenue. Hence, even if it may be a nuisance for some entrepreneurs to deal with numbers, they strive to keep a tab of their ROI because it helps realize their marketing goals. Regardless of business size, entrepreneurs spend thousands and even millions of dollars on promoting one product. This may seem unreasonable, but good entrepreneurs don’t care as long as they get high returns.

While a good ROI helps a business stay afloat, measuring it may not be so simple. This article will help you identify the factors in ROI and ways to measure it.

What is a Good ROI for Digital Marketing?

According to Neilsen, a good ROI for digital marketing is $1.09. This means that for every $1 spent, the company generates $2.09. Capital that’s less than $1 will then give the company a profit of $1.09.

The determining factors for good ROI vary in certain standards. The type of industry is one. You can’t expect to stick to the $1.09 ROI if you’re in real estate or investing.

Factors that affect ROI

Before you can figure out what your business’s ROI is, you need to know what information you need. In any business, it’s integral to keep financial records and keep them organized so it’s easier to go back to. Record-keeping can be done manually using a journal ledger or online software services like QuickBooks. The aim is to keep a comprehensive record of every dollar that goes in and out of your pocket. Some common factors that affect a business’s ROI are:

Time

What you spend at the beginning of the day may not return to you on the same day. It may be a month, or a year after, that you get the return of what you invested today. Thus, businesses use a marketing calendar to cover their yearly marketing activities. This helps them track and reevaluate their marketing campaigns. You should use one for your business, too.

Cost of Producing the Campaign Material

To calculate ROI, you need to determine how much money will it take to produce all the campaign materials for your project. How much did you pay for the graphic designer to develop your landing page? How much did it cost to hire a copywriter? You need to know the exact amount you’ve spent.

Cost of Promoting the Product or Service

Once you have your marketing materials, for example, a landing page, how would you promote it? Will you promote it through Pay-per-click (PPC) or social media advertising, like Facebook ads? All of these constitutes to the financial resources you need to expend, so make sure you keep proper records.

Hopefully, you’ve done your part in recording all the necessary figures in your ledger. After all, the ROI is a number that needs to be continually updated.

The Figures Needed and the Formula

Number of Leads

Whether you do inbound or outbound marketing, knowing the number of leads is essential. How many signups for the free trial did you get? How many prospects gave you their email address? You need to learn how many leads you get each day, week, or month. To track, you can make use of a lead management or tracking software like Zoho.

Number of Converted Leads

Out of every 100 leads, how many are converted to clients? How many made the purchase? Knowing this number is essential so you can calculate the lead-conversion ratio.

Product Average Sales

Another thing is the average cost of your product. If you occasionally alter the price of your products, it’s better to get the average sales. Average sales is the amount each customer spends on buying your product.

Marketing Cost

Identify the cost of creating and promoting your product. This includes wages or payment for services, ad spend, and other things for promoting the product.

When you have all this information, you can calculate the ROI through the following steps:

Multiply the number of leads by the lead-to-customer rate and your product’s average sales price
Then, subtract the amount you spent for ads and other promotional activities
Divide this number again by the cost or ad spend
Multiply by 100 and the final number will be your ROI.

Types of Marketing Campaigns and How to Compute

Often, businesses try different digital marketing strategies to test which one delivers favorable results. In general, marketing is an opportunity to test which campaigns are effective and which aren’t. If one campaign doesn’t give the intended results, it is either modified or taken down. Here, you’ll learn what frequent campaigns businesses implement and samples on how to compute the ROI.

Written Content Marketing

Articles are a great form of content marketing. Any written content is useful in engaging the readers and keeping them up-to-date with the changes in your business or products. More importantly, written content can be used to condition your leads towards a buying move in the future, so it increases your ROI.

Computing ROI for Written Content Marketing

For example, you hire a project-based writer from a freelancing platform to write an article related to your online course about digital marketing. You paid $500 for the job. Now, this article will direct readers to a landing page where they buy the online course. Using a tracking URL, you can see how many visitors get to the landing page through a click from the article.

If the article gets 100 leads, with 10 people signing up for the online course and $100 average sales, ROI would be $100. Here’s the computation:

If you follow the same steps as mentioned above, then:

[((100x 0.1 x $100) – $500) ÷ $500] x 100 = $100 (ROI)

In conclusion, in every $500 you spend on content, you generate $600 in return, which gives you a profit of $100.

Email Marketing

Believe it or not, email has been a major source of revenue for many businesses. As a matter of fact, with a good campaign, some businesses can generate a massive email conversion rate of 3800%. It means in every $1 spent, businesses get $38 in return. It might seem impossible at first, but many businesses have exceeded this ROI rate for years.

Email marketing is cost-effective. Most times, this campaign doesn’t require graphics or high-quality images that are considered expenditure. Email marketers exploit words to get conversions and increase ROI.

Computing ROI for Email Marketing

You want to use email marketing to promote your online course on digital marketing. For example, an online learning platform is offering a weekly e-newsletter to those who sign up on their website. You pay them $100 to include a link to your course in their weekly e-newsletter that links to a purchasing page.

Again, using a tracking URL, you see it droves 20 visitors to the purchasing page. Of these 20 visitors, 2 enrolled with an average of $100 sales. Here is how to compute ROI.

[((20x 0.1 x $100) – $100) ÷ $100] x 100 = $100

So basically, in $100 you spent for email marketing, you get $200 in revenue, or $100 net profit.

Video Marketing

Video marketing is ideal if you’re selling a product that requires step-by-step instructions for customers to follow. Take, for example, home security systems that need installation instructions. Instead of writing an article for the instructions, using video to educate your potential buyers to eliminate one of the pain points of your product, which is installing it. This makes the decision to buy your product easier.

Computing ROI for Video Marketing

For example, you decided to outsource and spend $1000 in creating your video marketing material. After uploading, it resulted in 10 purchases out of 100 leads, with average sales of $500. The computation would look like this.

[((100x 0.1 x $500) – $1000) ÷ $1000] x 100 = $400

In short, you get $400 net profit in spending $1000 for video marketing.

Calculating ROI might look easy with the examples, but these numbers are just representation. In business, you encounter more numbers to deal with.

Pay-per-click Campaigns

Pay-per-click is exactly what its name implies. You only pay for every click on your ad. If you launch a PPC ad, you need to monitor and manage your campaign constantly. You need to modify your campaign as you go along and get to know your audience better. If you use Google ads, you can use the Google Ads Editor to manage and monitor your campaign.

Computing ROI for Video Marketing

Company XYZ sells mattresses. To get more customers, they use PPC ad, with which they pay $500. Out of 6 clicks, 1 end up buying a mattress that costs $600.

[((6x 0.167 x $600) – $500) ÷ $500] x 100 = $20.24

This return may not be viable, so the business decided to modify their first campaign. They made the copy more compelling and included more details about the product. For this, they spent $300. As a result, 10 new clicks and 3 purchase the product with an average sale of $700.

[((10x 0.3 x $700) – $300) ÷ $300] x 100 = $600

In the end, Company XYZ nets $600 more than the first campaign.

Sponsorship

Usually, businesses use sponsorship when there is no time or enough materials to produce content. Businesses reach out to influencers (people who have a large following in social media) and offer to promote their brand by creating relevant content, usually in exchange for monetary value or giveaways.

Computing ROI for Sponsorship

For example, a famous beauty brand launches a new product—let’s say, a face mask. The business owner connects to some beauty influencers for collaboration in creating content, like a YouTube video, to promote the face mask and add the tracking URL to the description. If the company pays $300 and gets 15 people out of 50 visitors to purchase the product that costs $60 each, what would be the ROI?

[((50x 0.3 x $70) – $300) ÷ $300] x 100 = $250

The company gains $550, with $250 net profit from spending $300 for sponsorship.

Final Thoughts

Learning how to calculate your marketing ROI enables you to assess if your business is in the right direction and how profitable it is becoming. This is essential because ROI is a long-term goal for every business. Monitoring your ROI gives you insights whether the different strategies you have in place are delivering the results you desire for your business.

Who starts first – marketing or sales?

15 November, 2018/0 Comments/in B2B, Marketing, Sales /by Rebecca Caroe

I wrote this email to a client today. I have been working with them to set up and activate the things which will move them towards sales. And I answer the Chicken and Egg question too…. read on

I think you have made significant progress in understanding three things which are essential to a successful new business development process.

Deep focus on the target prospect companies and how to find individuals and make contact with them

Validation that there is a flow through activities from awareness, interest, desire, action (AIDA)…. e.g.XYZ is moving down that funnel well. Also you have closed off the funnel for ABC and won’t waste time with him – he got returned to a ‘holding pattern’ in the newsletter mailing list.

Recognition that we need to get to know more new people and to find ways of becoming relevant to them – from personal chat / email to newsletter subscription to face to face meeting.

My guidance is being acted upon and you are seeing results which will bear fruit. Also it’s forcing you to challenge presumptions and to run little experiments to see what the market responds to. These both change over time and so I have learned never to guess. But you knew that, didn’t you?

New Business is a Process

Creating a set-up that delivers a stream of leads for your business is how successful sales and marketing combine in a B2B organisation. The underlying principles are the same for every firm yet the implementation and the diligent persistence of action is frequently what sets apart the successful from the rest.

Who starts first? Marketing or Sales for new business success.

Can I help you?

If you’d like an appraisal of your current situation and recommendations for improvement which you can implement yourself, get in touch.

What we will do is

Review your recent new business success (or otherwise)
Assess the process
Research the possible bottle-necks, gaps and successful elements
Guide towards an improved method

Chicken or Egg; which comes first?

So to answer the question – it depends. No, that’s not a cop-out.

Marketing comes first when the firm already has revenues and is looking to grow average size of sale, launch new products or new markets.

Sales comes first when the firm has a product and is not yet profitable enough to invest in intensive marketing or isn’t converting enquiries to revenue.

Keyword Search Simplified – 3 Ways You Can Find the Right Keywords to Siphon Traffic From

14 November, 2018/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Sudip Mutt

Whether in content marketing or a Google AdWords campaign, the role of keywords cannot be underestimated. It’s one of those things some people are quick to ignore, but which could very well spell the end for business.

To that end, you need to be working overtime to find the right keywords for your campaigns. Unfortunately, this isn’t always as easy as it sounds. Most of the top keywords are extremely competitive. On AdWords, those competitive keywords can be very expensive.

As a shrewd business person, you may want to preserve your budget by avoiding these overly costly keywords at least until you have a winning formula. On the flip side, cheap keywords rarely return a profit. That’s why other marketers ignore them in the first place. Paying for them would be akin to throwing your money down the drains.

This leaves you with only one option, to find potential keywords that haven’t become too competitive yet. The following are three ways to unearth these unknown high-performing keywords;

1. Invest in Keyword Search Tools

Keyword search tools are software programs specially designed to help marketers find the right keywords for their campaigns. You’re required to enter the parameters of your search, including your target audience, geographic location, and type of business, and then the tool looks up and returns the most relevant keywords for your business.

It doesn’t end there; some keyword search tools are now built in such a way that you can consistently monitor high performing keywords in your industry. This would allow you to keep your ads and content relevant throughout. Some of the best keyword search tools out there include; Soolve, KWFinder, and WordTracker Scout.

2. Learn From Your Competitors

There are several approaches you can use here. But one of the easiest and most effective methods is manual checking. The first step is to identify the products or services of focus. For instance, you can choose to check one of the products in their video blogs. After picking the product, go to Google and search that product or service (we recommend that you use Chrome for your search).

On the first page of results, click the first item on the list. Once you’re on the desired page, click Cmd + Alt + u to view the page source. Here you’ll find the code for that page. Now, check the whole page for non-branded keywords, focusing on titles and headlines. You’ll learn all the keywords they use to rank so well on search engines.

3. Use Google to Rig the Game

Finally, you can also use Google to find the right keywords for your digital campaign. Since you probably already know about auto-complete and related searches, we’d advise that you shift attention to three other useful sources for unique, often unknown keywords; Google product taxonomy, Google sets, and Google Trends.

Google Taxonomy is used as part of the mechanisms for Google Shopping for categorization of products. Google Sets can be found via the “Google Sets” category found in Google Spreadsheets. Lastly, Google Trends is a special website created by Google to help users learn what people are searching at different places in the world.

Get Started Today

While not a complete list, these three sources should help you find unique, yet inexpensive keywords for your marketing campaign.

My SaaS has 7% conversion rate, how to improve?

13 November, 2018/0 Comments/in B2B, Marketing, Sales /by Rebecca Caroe

My eCommerce SaaS has a conversion rate of 7% (2 new subscribers a day). I only get 1200 page hits a month though. How can I get more traffic?

The service is called Trendosaur. It helps online retailers make money by showing them the most profitable products to sell. My subscribers love the service. I’ve been running it for just over a year. The landing page is converting really well, but now it’s time to scale up the traffic numbers. Finding it really hard to get more than 40-50 page hits a day. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I know you should not rely solely on inbound traffic. That’s a fool’s errand in today’s crowded market.

Other marketers will suggest SEO, Content Marketing, Lead Funnels, Keyword search terms, LinkedIn Content, SEM, Social adverts, remarketing. All good ideas and definitely part of the marketing mix needed – but they miss one fundamental comprehension of how modern marketing works.

Inbound and Outbound is the key strategy

When you take a product to market you need both awareness and targeted prospective buyers.

The joy of inbound is that if someone is looking, with good SEO, Keywords and Content Marketing you can appear in search results. But for B2B markets, rarely is someone looking and the search volumes are so small, so niche that these volumes won’t deliver you the customer buyers in any great size or at scale.

I recommend 2 things

Outbound Selling. Research a list of retailers who could use you and approach them direct. Direct sales is very powerful – it draws attention to you and then your content marketing / SEO will serve to bring them back to your site.
Sponsor a retailers podcast like Ecommerce Fuel with a landing page / special sign up deal.

I used both of these to grow Rowperfect.co.uk/shop such that we now have a paid Christmas promotion page based on that list which is a great case study for this method.

Case Study: Multi Language Website

12 November, 2018/0 Comments/in B2C, Marketing, Marketing ideas /by Rebecca Caroe

New challenges are what we thrive on and so the opportunity to work with a client on migrating them to a Multi Language and Multi Currency website was exciting.

Specifying the Minimum

WordPress Multi Language plugin logo

Key to getting a great outcome was the first step of the site adjustment – what was the minimum viable site which would work?

The site has three main parts – a membership area, an online shop and a blog. We decided to start with the blog and shop.

Creative Agency Secrets used our Sub-Contracted Services to find a great developer for the job. It was important that they had already used the plugin we selected – WordPress Multi Language (WPML).

The most visited pages were prioritised for translation and the migration plan included adding shop products in descending order of popularity.

Integrations with MailChimp were also planned and a range of marcoms tactics to publicise to the existing user base.

Currency choices

Stage two was to add multi-currency to the site. Since German was the language we added, it was clear the Euro currency was needed. Finding a good plugin wasn’t hard – but customising the display to suit the site made usability better.

The default install is below – the user has to notice that the flag doesn’t match their country and then click the down arrow to find alternatives. This was clumsy and not very obvious since nothing actually mentioned that this related to payment choices.

Drop down currency choice

Our improvements were made with two changes – firstly displaying the currencies side by side in a grey bar and secondly by adding a label “Change Currency”.

label to improve currency selection visibility

Change Currency label

Lastly we recommended the client pay for the fully functioned version and add many more currencies – we selected these based on the countries where website visitors come from.

Full multi currency list

Unexpected outcomes and challenges

Here’s our list of things which we found challenging and which should help you shortcut your own learning.

Back end is duplicated now in each language – but you have to select each page or post individually for translation
Creating new landing pages for each language means that the URL needs to also change, making the site structure more complex
The tags and categories can be translated, listed for the translation team to work on or left untranslated
Categories lists (created alphabetically in English) are listed differently in other languages
The media library is common to both – but labels, naming and searching is in each language
Publicity tools like OneSignal work across the whole site and were sending out updates in both languages. Customers noticed and told us they didn’t like this.
Mail Chimp allows editing of database field labels e.g. “Subscribe here” but we found that a lot more work was needed to update all the messaging with subscription confirmation emails, unsubscribe messages etc.

Overall we found that we needed to create “rules” for the teams using the site – marketing, translation, web and merchandising so that it was clear where and how we expected any product, image or article to display and be included in the taxonomy. Many of these rules could not be anticipated and so necessitated detailed checking of each others’ work to identify mis-matches.

cleaneze, carpet cleaning, Auckland carpets

Daylight savings promotion ideas

29 October, 2018/0 Comments/in B2C, Marketing, Marketing ideas /by Rebecca Caroe

Twice a year you get a chance to run a promotion themed around the biannual clock changes in spring and autumn (fall). We call it daylight savings or “summer time” but either way, the clocks advance or retreat an hour.

Here are 5 themes for promotions you can run in your marketing

Daylight Savings promotion for clean carpets

5 Daylight Savings Promotions

A reminder – some products change over time and so using this clock change as a reminder can help your customers. Toothbrushes need changing each season; Carpets get cleaned twice a year – a campaign we did for Cleaneze carpet cleaning.

Something to do – A new activity which reflects the new season we move into. Start a sport in Springtime. Or new clothes for winter.

Stopping doing something – This is great for diet products or changing habits – if you swim in the ocean in summer, you could move to pool swimming in winter.

A change of routine – working with children and particularly small babies is challenging getting them to sleep. Promotions for Sleep remedies, child care advice and behaviour coaching.

Modern clocks are often automatically set to change – but how about all your old manual clocks – could you offer a service to show how to change the clock on your car dashboard?

Meanwhile, what could you customer be doing with the time saved? Send her a stress ball, a gel eye mask to relax with, a new book or magazine voucher or a coupon for a free coffee and a muffin.

B2B Event Marketing, webinars for business, event marketing

B2B Event Marketing tips

10 October, 2018/0 Comments/in B2B, Public Speaking /by Rebecca Caroe

I got a call this week and asked to advise an event which is for business to business audience how I could help them double their attendees in the last 4-5 weeks before the event happens.

This is my advice.

Last-minute event marketing

Set up a tripwire webinar to drive interest / registration details
Find people with mailing lists and agree a joint venture collaboration with them to promote
Run a competition to win a free ticket (combine with webinar)
Telesales follow up to all webinar attendees (and non-attendees). Best to use GoToWebinar as it tells you who attends.
I do not think affiliate marketing would work in New Zealand for B2B events. But offering a second ticket free if one person buys can add headcount.
I do not think radio advertising will work because which station(s) do all your target audience listen to? But podcasting could. Find business podcasters in your niche.

Digital Marketing Strategies You Need to Try

9 October, 2018/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Sudip Mutt

Digital marketing is now a fully-fledged, accessible, gigantic industry – dabbled in by most companies across the world. From humble beginnings, it’s taken some twists and turns on its way to ubiquity – and now, it’s something that’s developing and changing in ever-increasing spirals of complexity and competition. In order to stay ahead of the curve, able to benefit from the latest techniques and trends, you need to be a party to the information that matters. It’s that information that is shared for you below – to help inform your future digital marketing strategies.

Programmatic Marketing

There is little doubt that the new kid on the digital marketing block is likely also to be the most-used form of digital marketing in the future. Programmatic marketing may not have been around for all that long, but it’s quickly gained plaudits for its ease, lack of expense, and the fact that it can target groups of web users based on the digital footprint that they’ve left behind in the form of data, transactions and prolific social media use. Look into guides for programmatic marketing tips that’ll help your business secure a fulfilled and bright future.

Email Marketing

Contrast the newest form of marketing with one of the stalwarts of the industry, the emailed marketing campaign. You may find that the humble email – sent to your subscriber list, however large or small – is not mentioned in the marketing literature, but truth be told it’s still seen with great fondness and admiration within the digital marketing sphere. MailChimp and other providers of neat email marketing services have helped rejuvenate the method in recent years, showing that emails still have a place in winning back customers who’ve already traded with you once before. Try out a campaign to see what your ratios and click-through are.

Website Marketing

Some marketing techniques don’t even require you to leave the comfort of your website. To use these efficiently, you need to deal with some of the professionals in the web marketing space, like those found at digivante.com. Here, you’ll discover, alongside long-time specialists in making your website a fit-for-purpose click-and-sale machine, how to make your site burst with features and services that attract increased custom to your site and to your business. Simply learn from the digital marketing executives you partner from, and you’ll find that your site converts visitors to customers more readily.

Data Analysis

Data, in truth, has always been a big part of how digital marketing has developed – but it’s now, in the age of mass data banks that are able to be analyzed through complex suites of software- that we are moving to ‘Digital Marketing 2.0’. As well as programmatic marketing campaigns, we’re now looking at a new range of marketing techniques developed alongside the data that companies find so valuable. You’ll be able to identify the places at which your customers find out about your company – and maximize your investment of marketing in these spaces – in order to build a marketing strategy that’s sound, secure and long-lasting.

These marketing tips will help you get up-to-date and savvy with the latest in the world of digital marketing in a complex and competitive space.

Image: https://unsplash.com/photos/W7K3LJHcsu8

The Best E-Commerce Platforms

8 October, 2018/0 Comments/in Marketing /by Sudip Mutt

E-commerce is rapidly becoming one of the fundamental components of a monetized internet, and it is important to understand that it is an area that is constantly in a state of flux. Your traction in the e-commerce world depends a lot on the kinds of technology you are equipped with. Choosing the right e-commerce platform is thus imperative to your success. The biggest challenge for new starters lies in the reality that there is not one ‘correct’ platform. Every business is unique and therefore has unique requirements. Nonetheless, here you can find some of the leading platforms for e-commerce in 2018.

Big Cartel

Big Cartel is currently one of the most popular e-commerce platforms. Although Big Cartel is an established brand within the e-commerce platform market with an efficient 24-hour support team, this is a very basic option – branded as being suitable for “artists and makers.” The platform limits a business to 300 products and only five images per product. This platform is only perfect for a very basic e-commerce store. Choosing the right platform for your company is crucial because out of 12 million active sites, only 650,000 e-commerce sites make more than $1000 a year.

Magento

Magneto, the e-commerce platform owned by Adobe, is an open-source e-commerce website, which means that the source code of the product can be modified and customized. This is actively encouraged by the company – which is naturally an enviable option for eager web developers. Magento’s scalability and reliability have made it one of the most popular e-commerce platforms available and boast high-end clients such as Coca-Cola and Paul Smith. This platform, however, is not for the faint-hearted and it is not suitable if the e-commerce company cannot comprehend complex code.

Shopify

This Canadian-based e-commerce solution was established in 2004 and has been recognized as one of the most innovative e-commerce platforms due to the emphasis the company places on keeping up with relevant trends and technologies. Mobile payment is the biggest e-commerce trend in 2018, and it promises to rapidly transform the current digital marketplace. Shopify has its own coding language which can cause problems for some entrepreneurs, however, there are professionals such as those at www.blackbeltcommerce.com who can assist in navigating this platform and their unique ‘liquid’ code, as well as offer theme customization and digital marketing services.

YoKart

This platform was designed with startups and small businesses in mind. YoKart specializes as a solution to multi-vendor stores including Amazon and eBay and the smaller host of stores on the internet today. The newest version of this platform is also multilingual and multi-currency, which is extremely important in the current global climate that exists both ‘on’ and offline.

Choosing the best e-commerce platform may seem confusing at first. There is only a few dollars discrepancy between the average monthly cost of the different services, which means it’s hard to pick between them. It is worth researching each platform thoroughly to avoid wasting time and money on a service which cannot satisfy your company’s needs.