DIGITAL MARKETING IN FAR NORTH QUEENSLAND
The world spends over to 700 billion dollars on online marketing per year
With numbers like that, it should come as no surprise that the most successful advertising campaigns follow formulas that have taken a phenomenal amount of time, research, and money to create. In the world of advertising, nothing is left to chance.
To make things even more interesting, the advertising and copy-writing methods that work best for PPC (price per click search engine marketing) for instance, will not be very effective on other formats such as social media or websites.
When people use search engines, they are typically looking for an answer or a service, as such, an effective PPC should convey the answer to their search immediately. You have at most 4 seconds to get your message across and ensure the user clicks on your add, rather than somewhere else.
Social media is a completely different kettle of virtual fish. Users are not actively searching for an answer and instead are more receptive to special offers, contests and being engaged through mediums such as surveys and entertaining content.
Email is different yet again. Every time that you send out an email or newsletter, you risk your customers unsubscribing unless you offer them consistently helpful, engaging or valuable content.
Being successful in any of these areas requires a lot of research and a comprehensive understanding of your customers. This means delving through data and testing the alternatives to further refine your advertising. You should never go forth blindly in to the world of advertising, as you may risk alienating your audience, coming across as out of touch and losing the interest of your customer base.
How does online marketing work?
There are a lot of nuances when it comes to online advertising and it takes considerable practice and research to get the best results, especially in competitive niches.
Outside of direct marketing, it is also important to increase the effectiveness of your webpages and split testing all of your online content – this means presenting one version of your advertisements or webpages to a percentage of your visitors, and another version to the others and seeing which version has a higher conversion rate. This process is known creatively as conversion rate optimisation, and its a very big deal if you are looking to maximise the potential of your entire online presence.
Once you have the data and know which version works best, you start again, and on and on and on it goes until you rule the world-I mean the internet-I mean until you have the highest conversion rate possible (which is never).
Understanding your customers is where all good marketing begins
Great marketing, requires large amounts of delicious, delicious data. But you have to be able to collect that data. Not all analytic software is created equal, and some of the biggest suites can costs hundreds of thousands of dollars a year just to license. If you have the budget for that, then, by all means, I can highly recommend a few packages, but for those of us who aren’t quite there yet, there are a number of options available to help businesses collect data and apply marketing strategies such as re-marketing and targeted marketing to your customer resource base.
At the very least, you will be wanting you collect:
- Email Addresses
- Contact and personal information
- Demographical information
- Interests and internet habits
From there you can go further to start looking at fine-tuning your campaigns. Marketing campaigns can be as simple or as sophisticated as a business requires, depending on their budget. Whether that means manually coding and sending out a newsletter every fortnight, or spending big money on advanced CRM (customer relationship management) packages to automate most of the process, I’m here to help make your digital marketing dreams a reality.