Marketing - Elm Marketing

Marketing Analytics: What’s the Big Idea?

Measure, measure it again, and then measure it again. When it comes to marketing, this is most definitely one of the golden rules. It’s great to be getting content out there, but if you don’t take the time to observe what is and isn’t working, you’ll never know how to get the most out of it! Marketing analytics is crucial for businesses to make informed decisions and optimise their marketing strategies. Let’s talk about some of the reasons why.

Data-driven Decision Making

In a nutshell, marketing analytics provides businesses with valuable data that can be used to make informed decisions about their marketing strategies. When we can take a good hard look at data gathered on things like customer behavior, their buying patterns, and campaign performance as a whole, it makes it so much easier to choose where you allocate your marketing resources to, and in a way that is going to be the most efficient and effective. As a result, you’re going to get a better return on your investment, rather than throwing valuable marketing dollars away.

Customer insights

Platforms like Google Ads, Meta Business Suite and SEO programmes are such valuable tools when it comes to being able to track performance and see how your target audience is engaging with your content — or not. You can see everything from age demographics to where your visitors are coming from, how long they’re spending there, and where things are going wrong in the sense that they might not complete the customer buyer journey. Once you’ve fine-tuned all of this, it can then be used to develop more targeted marketing campaigns and improve the customer experience altogether.

Competitive advantage

There’s really no doubt about it. Businesses that leverage marketing analytics have a competitive advantage over those that do not. By using data to inform their marketing strategies, they can stay ahead of the competition and respond quickly to changing market conditions. Because let’s face it, the market is always changing, and if we don’t stay in the loop with the ongoings of the world of consumerism, we’re not going to be able to stay ahead of the game and relevant. If you want to be the first port of call for people looking for support from your industry, making the most of the analytics available to us is a must.

Subscribe

Marketing

How To: Content Writing For Newbies

Believe it or not, as humans, we tend to be inclined to use one side of our brain more than the other. Depending on which side you predominantly use, the more likely certain things are going to come more naturally to you. Say you’ve never been any good at maths, or science for that matter. At the same time, you’re great with hands-on work, figuring out how things work and have managed to make a career out of it.

The Basics Of Writing

Just like you might not be any good at maths and science, many people don’t have a whole lot of confidence in their ability to write — especially when it comes to copywriting for their business. Whether you know the basics but don’t know where to start when it comes to social media posts, updating the copy on your website, or have something exciting you want to share through a media release, we want you to go into it feeling prepared and well equipped to take on the task at hand.

Connecting With Your Audience

There’s no doubt about it, we can definitely count on copywriting as a highly transferable skill. When we are able to write clearly, concisely and in a way the average Joe can understand, there’s no limit to how far your message can spread. As a business, how you connect with your audience really is everything. It’s one thing to get your spelling and grammar right, but to write in a way that allows your audience to hear your tone and see your personality in what they are reading, is a whole other story (excuse the pun). Earning trust and building rapport through your copywriting is also a big one.

Market Your Brand

Once you know your buyer persona, your target audience, and the way you want your business to be represented, then you have pretty much all you need to market your brand. As for the communication bit, a few tools and tricks from us will have you feeling like an expert in no time. When you can speak your customers’ language, the strong relationships you’ll build with them will lead to loyal investors, and as a result, a viable business that can thrive long-term.

To learn more about specific types of copywriting and how to master them, get in touch with us about our training sessions or come in for a coffee to discuss how we can do the work for you.

Subscribe

Marketing

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO): Getting Seen By Your Audience

Often abbreviated to SEO, search engine optimisation can sound extremely technical and pretty overwhelming for anyone who hasn’t had a decent dip into the deep end of marketing. So what does it mean? In short, search engine optimisation is the process of improving your website copy or advertising copy to increase your business visibility when searched in engines like Google and Bing. While there is quite a lot to it, there are a few things you can learn about SEO writing that you can utilise in your own copywriting with just a little bit of effort. And for those jobs that might seem too over your head or you’re feeling quite time-poor, we’re here to help.

How does SEO work?

Basically, search engines use these things called bots to trawl the pages of the web and collect information about those pages. They then get put into an index like a giant library and analysed as a whole to determine things like popular keywords being used in searches. This information is then used to help the searcher find what they’re looking for, as well as pages related to that topic. So when someone searches, say, electricians in their area, Google ranks the search results based on the keywords in that search — electrical companies that are based in your location.

SEO and Marketing

So why is it crucial for marketing? With the increasing reliance on search engines for answers to our questions, people search trillions of things every year. With all that information going into the index, consumers are more likely to be directed to your pages when your website copy has used SEO and is filled with commonly searched keywords. Depending on a few other factors, like the location someone is surfing the internet from, the better your SEO is, the more likely you’re going to rank highly on Google and be that person’s first or even second click. So of course, the ideal outcome of that is that they like what they see on your site and choose to make a purchase.

Keywords

If you’re wanting to determine what the best keywords for your content are, there are plenty of online platforms to help you do just that. There are a few free ones available, but if you’re really committed to improving your SEO yourself, programmes like Semrush and Moz offer monthly and yearly paid subscriptions. These programmes do everything from analysing your website and other content in order to make keyword suggestions, to site audits and competitor analysis. And if you’d rather leave it up to the professionals, that’s what we’re here for. To ensure you’re getting the most out of your SEO, our packages start at $2,000 per month — it might seem like a lot, but trust us, anything cheaper won’t get you the results you’re looking for.

Are you ready for us to lend you a hand? Contact us here.

Subscribe

Marketing

How to Hook Your Audience: Blogs & Articles

The art of writing is a bit of a niggly one. If we could describe it simply, you’re either really good at it or it’s just not your thing. That’s not to say you don’t know what you want to communicate, it just means it’s a little harder for people who are more hands-on or technical to put their ideas down on paper. In marketing, copywriting is one of the best tools to have when it comes to gaining interest in your product or service from your target audience, keeping them there, and then convincing them that investing in what you have to offer is worthwhile. Whether you’re a start up business or a seasoned entrepreneur, if you don’t have the right messaging in your marketing, your voice is going to fall on deaf ears.

Copywriting

This is tricky, because so much of business marketing relies on good copy. From the information you write on your website landing page to your social media posts, blogs, email newsletters, brochures and so on, writing is one of those things you’ve just gotta get right. Fortunately, marketing agencies like us exist for that exact reason. We get that running a business is a huge amount of work (trust us, we’ve been there), and finding the time to either teach yourself how to write for marketing or even just conjure something up when it’s needed, is often at the bottom of your list of priorities.

The good news is, we’re here to help. There is no doubt in our minds that you are good at what you do. Whether you’re a clothing designer, an accountant or an all-round handyman, if you’re a business owner, you’re going to know your stuff. We want you to focus on that, so we can focus on how to help you grow your business and get that return on your investment from your marketing efforts.

Writing for Marketing

If you need an ad campaign written, a personal profile for a magazine feature, or a story about your journey as a business, we can do all the writing for you. Our process might involve re-doing something you’ve written and making it more enticing and SEO friendly, or it could be that we start from scratch by talking to you about what it is you’re wanting to say and communicating that for you. Whatever you want written in order to increase your brand awareness and convert that to sales, leave it with us.

Articles & Blogs

There’s no doubt about it, articles and blogs are not only a great way to give your customers a more in-depth look inside your brand, but they’re also a game changer for SEO. When you have the right keywords scattered throughout your website, you’re going to gain way more traction on your products and services because it drives traffic right there. Tell us what you want to write about, and we’ll do the rest for you.

Social Media

Posting consistently on your social media platforms is one of the best methods to get your target audience to turn their attention to you, engage with what you have to say, and give you a bit of control over the algorithm. Knowing how to write social media copy and how to carry out those marketing techniques is a bit of a fine art, and it’s something we’re more than happy to help you with.

Websites

Having a website and something for customers to Google search is a super important one. If your website doesn’t have the right keywords on it, the copy isn’t informative and it doesn’t show your uniqueness as a brand, it’s not going to be effective. We help to boost your website’s SEO and appeal through writing team bios, eye-catching landing page copy and can work with you to tell your story in the most impactful way.

Advertising

Whether it’s an ad campaign, an event poster or a brochure, your advertising needs to make a statement. A huge part of that is the messaging that’s on those marketing materials. We work with you to come up with the best way to communicate your story through words, so you can promote your business on every piece of collateral you have.

Subscribe

Marketing

Any Successful Business Needs a Strategy

We are no strangers to the feeling of having a billion business ideas running through our minds on a regular basis. While it’s mostly fantastic to have an overly creative mind, it can also leave you feeling a bit scattered and lacking direction at times. When you’re just throwing those ideas out there and seeing what sticks, you’re likely going to be left wondering why none of your advertising is working. That’s why we are so adamant about every business needing a solid marketing strategy in order to get results. You simply just can’t start marketing effectively without knowing where you stand as a business.

Essentially, a marketing strategy is a comprehensive, in-depth plan that acts as a blueprint for the marketing objectives you want to achieve, including who your ideal customers are and how you’re going to reach them. Not only does it give you something to consistently refer to, but it also keeps you accountable. Once you’ve done your marketing research, which we discussed in our blogs on content marketing and knowing your target audience, the strategy will help you to concentrate your efforts and resources on the best possible opportunities to generate profit.

Start your marketing strategy by outlining your business’s purpose, vision, and what makes it stand out from the competition. Then it’s about setting out who your customers are and why they would be likely to engage with your product or service. The strategy will outline how you plan to reach your target audience, what sort of content you’re going to produce and the communication methods that are going to be most effective. It could also include things like your buyer persona, where the brand is positioned with the market, a timeline for implementing those steps, and a multi-channel activity plan such as advertising the business across social media, a website, and so on.

Here are just a few reasons why we believe a marketing strategy is a no-brainer.

Talk Directly to Your Target Audience

Gone are the days of marketing that is thrown out into the abyss in the hopes everyone will think they need what you’re selling in their lives — you’ve actually got to connect with your audience. People want to know how your product or service will solve their problem, and that they can trust your brand. In order to know how to do this, you need to have an understanding of what’s happening in the world and in the marketplace, which should all be included in your marketing strategy.

Don’t Waste Your Marketing Dollars

It can be tempting at times to put a few dollars on a marketing campaign, whether it’s on Google Ads or social media, and just “see how it goes’’. But in reality, this approach very rarely works and instead, will have you wasting a lot of money unnecessarily. Getting your brand front and centre stage is all about consistency and strategic spending. Having a marketing strategy that lays out your budget, how and on what you are going to spend your money, and then being able to monitor it is what will benefit your business short and long-term.

Keep Your Content Relevant

Without a plan in place, it’s easy for businesses to get off track and lose their target audience. When you’re able to refer back to who your audience is, check if your content is in line with your brand, as well as if it’s what people are looking for, it makes the marketing process a whole lot smoother.

Measure Your Success

When we set marketing objectives from day one, it prevents us from wandering aimlessly and hoping good things will just happen. Unfortunately, like any other form of success, marketing success isn’t done on a whim and it most certainly doesn’t happen overnight. Setting goals, as well as expectations for your return on investment (ROI), gives you something to look back on and reassess what is and isn’t working.

And as always, if you’re still feeling a little lost when it comes to your marketing strategy, it’s what we do best. So, don’t hesitate — reach out and let us help your business grow.

Read enough? Contact us here.

Subscribe

Marketing

Why Is Data So Important in Marketing?

Okay, so not everyone is a genius when it comes to numbers and reporting. Some are more inclined to be good at writing and reading, others are more hands on and need to be practical to achieve success. Whatever your skills are, there’s no denying that data is a vital component of any activity.

In order to be able to see what is and isn’t working, especially when it comes to marketing, is an absolute must. Data is important for every business’s marketing because of the simple fact that it provides insights and information that help marketers make better decisions and create more effective campaigns.

Target Audiences

One of the biggest drawcards for marketers when it comes to data is the ability it gives us to understand a business’s target audience. After all, if you don’t know your target audience, you can’t even begin to start thinking about how you’re going to sell your product or service. When we are able to collect data about your key customers, we can then gain insights into your demographic, their behaviours, interests, and preferences. Until you know how your target audience ticks, you can’t expect your marketing to deliver the return on investment you may be hoping for. Once you have all of this information on hand, it can be used to create more targeted and relevant marketing campaigns that resonate with that target audience, and in turn, encourage them to invest in what you have to offer.

Measuring performance

While nailing your target audience is a great first step, the work doesn’t end there. In order to ensure that you are getting the best out of your marketing, you need to be able to measure, measure it again, and then keep measuring as trends change as well as the constantly evolving sphere of digital marketing. Through tools like Meta Business Suite and Google Ads, we’re able to get access to data that has been created through tracking a form of marketing’s performance, whatever that may be. This can be the tracking of anything from marketing campaigns to social media polls — from metrics such as website traffic, click-through rates, conversion rates, and customer engagement. By analyzing this data, marketers can identify what’s working and what’s not, and make adjustments accordingly.

Personalisation

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again, people don’t want to be sold to, they want to be spoken to. Our newsfeeds, tv screens and everyday life is so consumed by marketing that it constantly feels like we’re being forced to invest in something we are made to feel like we need in order to “fit the mould”. It can be overwhelming, and with so much messaging, we can’t avoid it. But what we can do as businesses is show people that there is so much more to the brand than just making a sale. When we can personalise our product or service, build trust with that target audience, and solve a problem they’re facing, it has more meaning. By collecting data about customers’ past purchases, preferences, and behavior, marketers can create personalised marketing messages that are more likely to resonate with them and help them with what they’re looking for.

Predictive analytics

With the constantly evolving, fast-paced nature of marketing, we need to be able to keep ahead of the trend. While you may have aced a product or service based on what people are wanting at the time, six months or even a few weeks down the track that need could be the complete opposite. In order to stay relevant and keep your finger on the pulse, we need to be able to predict what’s next. Staying ahead of the game is a must. By analyzing large datasets, marketers can use predictive analytics to forecast future trends and behaviors. This can help them anticipate customer needs and preferences, and create marketing campaigns that are definitely more likely to be successful.

These are just a handful of the reasons why data plays such a critical role in the world of marketing. While we could probably go on forever, this is a really good base to start with and something every business should have a solid understanding of. Not sure where to start with your data research? We’re here to help. Just ask!

Subscribe

Marketing

The Role of Backlinks: Building an Effective SEO Strategy

Backlinks are one of the most important measures of success for any SEO strategy. These powerful links from other websites not only help to generate more traffic and leads to your website, but also contribute to search engine rankings. Let’s talk about why backlinks are essential for SEO, how they work and how you can build a successful link profile.

What is a Backlink?

A backlink is an incoming link from another website to your own. By establishing these links, search engines are able to analyse the relevance and authority of a page. When a website has a high number of quality backlinks, it shows that the content is valuable and can be trusted as reliable, leading to higher rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs).

How Do Backlinks Improve SEO?

Backlinks play a key role in SEO, as they help search engines determine the quality and relevance of a website’s content. The more inbound links a webpage has, the higher its authority will be. Moreover, these links act as signals to tell search engine algorithms that other websites value this content and deem it worthy of being recommended to users. The result is improved visibility for the page on SERPs, allowing them to attract more visitors organically from search engines.

Types of Backlinks

There are many types of backlinks that you can use to boost your SEO efforts. “DoFollow” and “NoFollow” links, for example, can help improve a website’s search engine rankings in different ways. DoFollow links pass on “link juice” from one web page to another and in turn, can be used as a direct ranking signal for SERPs. On the other hand, there are those links that you can insert and not have it pointing back to you. A large number of NoFollow links demonstrate to search engines that your content is of great value and relevant to the discussion at hand — even if it doesn’t really adhere to their link building policies.

Strategies for Building Quality Backlinks

When it comes to backlinks, not all are created equal. Quality is more important than quantity, so focus on creating valuable content and relationships with other webmasters that can result in backlink opportunities. To ensure you’re building quality backlinks, ensure you’re building them from the right sources. Use social media platforms and forums for gaining visibility, as these are great starting points when looking for users who are likely to link to your content. Make sure your content is keyword-rich and contains valuable information in order for people to be interested in linking to it — this will help boost your rankings naturally.

The Benefits of Developing a Quality Backlink Strategy

A well-thought-out backlink strategy can bring a range of benefits to your website, including increased visibility and improved search engine rankings. Quality backlinks will help establish you as an authority in your industry which in turn will lead to more organic traffic and conversions for your business. Additionally, by spreading the link authority around multiple sources, you’ll benefit from a stronger presence across the web and additional referral sources for continual growth.

Subscribe

Marketing

How to Get Seen & Heard: Google Ads & Paid Advertising

If you’re new to the world of digital marketing, Google Ads may sound like a whole lot of gibberish to you. And while it is a little on the complex side as a marketing tool, it is incredibly powerful in boosting your brand presence, brand awareness, and in turn, your business sales. If you’re curious about how it all works and either want to explore its marketing benefits yourself, or want to understand it so you can trust a marketing agency like us to do it for you — you’ve come to the right place. Read on!

What is Google Ads?

Considering how enormously popular Google.com is, you almost certainly will have come past Google Ads in your lifetime. And if you haven’t, we’ll have to assume you’ve been living on some sort of desert island. Google ads is a paid advertising platform where you, the business owner, pay per click on your ad (PPC) or pay per impression your ad has. It’s one of the most effective ways to drive traffic to your business and increase your brand visibility, which is why it’s so highly rated by its users. It encourages people to go to your website, contact you, and in many cases, can increase your in-store visits.

Search Ads: What are they?

Let’s break these terms down. Google search ads are used to target people that are already looking for a solution to their problem. They use keywords and a bidding strategy, a bit like an auction, where they compete to show above and below organic (not-paid-for links) content on Google search. The aim is to get your ad in amongst the first three results that come up when someone searches similar keywords to what you’ve included in your ad on Google. Search ads have three main components — a headline, display URL, and description text. Ad extensions can also be included to provide users with additional information. How often search ads appear, how they rank and the cost per click all depend on the bid amount and the quality score of the ad.

Display Ads: How they’re different from search ads

As for display ads, they’re used to target people that have attributes, values and characteristics similar to your existing customers or your target audience. These are different to search ads in the sense that search ads are only visible to people who are already searching for your product or service, while display ads are paid placements that can appear in various places. In fact, millions of different sites. Think of times when you have seen an ad pop up on your Facebook or Instagram feed, or even when you’re reading an article on your daily news — those are display ads.

The two main things to consider when it comes to deciding whether or not to run search ads or display ads is the difference in cost per click and their conversion to sales rate — these can vary quite significantly. If you’re looking to boost your brand visibility, get people to engage with your marketing and then turn that into a return on investment, we can help!

Are you ready for us to lend you a hand? Contact us here.

Subscribe

Marketing

Social Media Advertising: Go Where Your Audience Is

It’s the golden rule — social media advertising really is all about being where your audience hangs out. From Facebook to Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and everywhere in between, there are so many platforms nowadays to promote your brand on, it just depends on who your demographics are. For example, if you’re trying to reach the younger generation, you’re more likely to have success if you’re using Instagram to market your products or services. This is based on the fact that it’s been proven to be more popular with that particular age range, and the same goes for other platforms and the types of people who use them most. So why is it a good place to advertise you might ask? For starters, social media has over 4 billion users. Finding a way to share your message with those kinds of numbers is going to be pretty tricky to do elsewhere, let’s talk more about the power of social media advertising.

Brand Awareness

If you haven’t delved into the world of social media advertising yet, you could be missing out on a whole lot of opportunities to reach more people, increase the amount of conversions you’re making and build your relationships with your customers so they want to keep investing in your brand. One of the best parts of social media advertising is that it works to increase brand awareness — a necessity for any business. Put aside the idea of getting sales and new page likes and think about simply getting your brand out there. Even if people might scroll past your ad and not fully engage with it, they’ve seen your logo, your brand colours, and the imagery you’ve used to grab attention. The more they see this, the more they are going to associate these factors with your brand and be more likely to look into it the next time they go to scroll past.

Build Audience Trust

Believe it or not, social media advertising is more than just about making instant sales. When you get your brand into the places where people most commonly spend their time, it opens up doors for building stronger relationships with your target audience, which in turn, can lead to more sales. When your customers trust your business, they feel a deeper sense of connection to it and their loyalty can grow with time. To ensure you’re marketing is reaching people on social media, you can also try your hand at remarketing, where you target your ads towards people who have shown some form of interest but haven’t gone through the whole process to end with a sale being made. It also helps to build that connection with your customers so they feel they haven’t gone unnoticed or been forgotten about.

Increase leads and conversion rates

Unlike a lot of marketing platforms, it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg to advertise through social media. Because of this, it’s even easier to increase the number of leads you receive and up the conversion rates. You can use lead generation ads on sites like Facebook to do things like encourage people to sign up for your event, gather customer information and feedback for future marketing, and even add to your email newsletter recipients list ahead of a big announcement. As for conversions, most social media platforms allow you to create detailed audience-targeting metrics so you can get a better handle on exactly who you want to be reaching and how to do it better.

Retargeting people through your marketing also gives potential customers a bit of a push in the right direction — all of which is possible thanks to the advances in social media technology. We do have to remind you, the best way to catapult your business into the social media spotlight is to create content your audience wants to see. When you make content engaging and then shareable, you’re more likely to drive more traffic to your website and get that sale across the line.

While social media advertising is relatively straightforward for business owners to navigate, it can be a bit of a struggle for some people to get their heads around. The other thing is that it can be time consuming when you’ve got so much else on your plate. If you’re wanting to learn how to utilise these tools or need someone to do it for you, you know where to find us.

Are you ready for us to lend you a hand? Contact us here.

Subscribe

Marketing

How to Hook Your Audience: Blogs & Articles

The art of writing is a bit of a niggly one. If we could describe it simply, you’re either really good at it or it’s just not your thing. That’s not to say you don’t know what you want to communicate, it just means it’s a little harder for people who are more hands-on or technical to put their ideas down on paper. In marketing, copywriting is one of the best tools to have when it comes to gaining interest in your product or service from your target audience, keeping them there, and then convincing them that investing in what you have to offer is worthwhile. Whether you’re a start up business or a seasoned entrepreneur, if you don’t have the right messaging in your marketing, your voice is going to fall on deaf ears.