by DG | Oct 18, 2018 | Digital Marketing, Content Marketing, Branding, Business, Online Marketing
Today’s advertising mediums include more digital channels than ever before. Factors such as faster reach capabilities, lower advertising costs, and global branding opportunities make digital marketing a viable avenue for building awareness. When creating a digital marketing strategy, it’s imperative to plan out each messaging deliverable, communication channel, and content strategy so that you don’t lose yourself in a whirlwind of social media accounts and content deadlines.
Approaching your strategy means taking initial steps to determine what your end goals are and then devising a practical plan to bring them to fruition. Here’s a 4-step process for creating a solid digital marketing strategy.
- Create A Finish Line
Know what your goals are before you embark on your strategy. Create a list of measurable short and long-term goals. For example, are you looking to increase sales? If so, by how much exactly? Are you looking to increase your social media followers? If so, by how many exactly? And on what platforms? Don’t rely on vague goals that can’t be measured.
Put numbers to your goals. For instance, we want to generate 800 leads in one month, Increase sales by $5,000 this month or gain 1000 Twitter Followers in one week. Whatever it is you want to achieve, make it a number and then you can figure out a way to get there. Then you can track and measure your results to see whether you were successful or not in achieving the goal.
If you achieve your goal successfully, great. If not, look at what worked and what didn’t make some adjustments and try again. Try different messaging or images or maybe it was just not enough budget. If you’re tracking everything you should be able to figure out how to improve your results. Expect that there will be some trial and error.
Setting realistic goals gives you accountability and allows you to forecast things such as cost, time, and resource allocation. You don’t want to have to guess what your marketing budget is, and you certainly don’t want to assume which team members can complete certain tasks. Create realistic goals and milestones.
- List Your Mediums
What digital marketing channels do you plan on using to get your message to your audience? Are you planning to focus on one main channel or a combination of three or more? Consider making a list of 10-15 potential marketing channels and then narrow it down to your top five. Next, find out which platforms work best for your target audience based on their demographic and online behaviour and then decide which ones work best for your plans. Laser focus in on your main channel to help you get the initial traction that you need when you first begin your campaigns.
- Plan Out Your Content
Knowing what type of content you’ll create and how often it’ll be delivered is crucial to your digital strategy. Whether it’s article writing, social media posting, or video production, there should always be content that’s being created behind the scenes. Find out which types of content work best for your products and your audience and then create a calendar to keep a steady messaging stream flowing your audience’s way. Content calendars are essential to digital marketing, as they help you avoid the headaches and confusion that can come with last-minute content development.
- Implement, Monitor, and Measure
Once you’ve outlined your digital strategy it’s go-time. Make sure that you have all of the resources you need. Make sure that all of your team members know their deliverables and when they’re due. And most importantly, make sure that you’re monitoring and tracking your progress throughout the entire time. Know what metrics will be used to track each goal, and if you fall short of meeting a goal, use it as a lesson for your next project and campaign. The more you monitor and track your activities, the better insight you’ll have on what types of content your audience responds to best.
Setting up Google Analytics is the most important step to track all your results. There are many online tools out there to help you track all of you digital marketing activities and choosing the right one depends on the depth of your campaign. If you are only using Google ads, then tracking through your Google Analytics and Google Ads control panel are probably sufficient. However if you ad Facebook Ads or any other advertising channel to the mix, there is a lot more to track and you’ll want those reports to be side by side for easy evaluation and comparison. As I mentioned, there are a ton of tools out there price according to their level of capabilities. We have a free tool that is great for tracking your Facebook and Google Ad campaigns. It’s called Advertising Intelligence and you can read more about it on our pricing page.
A well-planned digital marketing strategy will ease the confusion that can come with setting up marketing campaigns. Once you have your content and channels figured out, it’s just a matter of setting up the right goals and metrics.
This sounds simple but it can be overwhelming without some guidance. We would be glad to help you with a Free Marketing Strategy Consultation where we will discuss your goals and we can provide you with solid advise to start building your successful Marketing Strategy!
This is a high level view of what is involved in building a digital marketing strategy. For a more detailed deep-dive, check out this post: Execute a Powerful Marketing Strategy to Grow Your Business
by DG | Oct 19, 2018 | SEO, Digital Marketing, Online Marketing
You should always think local when starting a Search Engine Optimization strategy. It’s much easier to rank for longtail keywords that have less competition. The name of your city or neighbourhood added to those keywords can be an easy win so you can rank quickly. That’s the best strategy to get started so let’s dig into Local SEO.
Key factors
First things first. Be sure to sign up on Google My Business (GMB). This will be the centre of your local strategy for getting rankings on Google. There may be a listing for your business there already so you’ll need to claim it. Do a Google search for your company name and you may see a listing for your business on the right side hand side in the search results. If you have not claimed it already you will see a “Claim this listing” button that will allow you to do so. Once you have access to your listing you will be able to add all kinds of information about your business and this will get him placed on Google maps as well. Be sure to upload lots of pleasing, relevant images for your business. You can great insights about your business listing in there like how many people viewed you listing and took action etc.
Writing Posts on Google My Business
We highly recommend that you create a post on your GMB listing everyday for at least 2 months. I know this sounds like a lot of work but it’s worth it and they only allow 300 words and you can back it off after your see your listing get into the top 3 local results for your keywords. Don’t stop completely though or competitors will eventually catch up. Try to keep posting at least once a week. This of course depends on how competitive your category is so you may need to adjust accordingly.
Add local content to your website
Blogging is the most effective way to help your rankings in search engine results. Write some blog posts that are unique to your local area and align with your local business. Doing some good keyword research prior to writing is articles will go along way. By doing so you can find out what people actually search for when they’re looking for your type of business in your area. For instance if you are a roofing company people might search for “toronto roofing company” (720 searches per month) but there are more searches for “toronto roofers” (1900 searches per month) so you should definitely have the data beforehand so that you can get the most out of your efforts. You can use Google Keyword Planner to get this data. Another new favourite free tool for keyword research is Ubersuggest from SEO expert Neil Patel.
Get listed on directories
Leveraging online directories is an excellent way to improve your online visibility. Claim any listings you can on sites like Yelp and Yellow Pages and other similar ones. Make sure all your profiles have the exact same contact information about your business. This is very important. You’ll also have to monitor these listings as many of them except reviews about your business. You need to stay on top of this and respond to reviews good or bad. Your online reputation is really important so I need to take this seriously.
We have a great tool to help you monitor this – checkout the OCEANONE Reputation Manager. And, if you don’t have the time we also provide a fully managed Reputation Management Service.
Here’s an excellent video on how to respond to reviews…
SEO Best Practices
Finally, be sure that you are using SEO best practices throughout your website. Things like properly formatted URLs and keyword rich descriptive title tags as well as descriptive metadata are important to make sure that Google’s algorithms pick up the best possible information about your page. Of course, make sure that your contact information on the website matches exactly what you added to all those directories you just listed on.
These are just a few things you can do to improve your visibility for local searches but they are the most important. Make sure these on-page improvements are done before taking any other steps. Depending on how competitive your category is, this might be all that you need to do to get the results you want. Start there and see how goes. If it’s not enough to get you in the top three local results there are other strategies. It’s not that complicated but it can be very time consuming.
If you don’t have the time, we can help. We have a Free listing builder app to get you started with getting your listing synced up on Google My Business, Facebook and Twitter. Once you have that set up you can easily add one of our paid packages that make it very easy to get listed on the sites we have discussed here. Learn more about it it out here.
Download our list of “Top 100 Sites To Be Listed On“. Our Listing Distribution add-on lets you build accurate business listings on the four major data aggregators—Factual, Acxiom, Infogroup, and Neustar Localeze. These aggregators are referenced by over 300 websites.
When multiple sources have consistent business data, two outcomes occur:
- Google’s WebCrawler finds the same information in multiple places and adds more confidence to their business data
- Good backlinks are created with more referring sources to the business’ website creating better SEO.
Here’s an excellent video on the importance of have accurate listings online…
Also check out our recent post “Online Reputation Management Tips for Boosting your Local SEO” .
If you already have listing and you have experienced Fake Reviews you’ll want to check out “How to remove “Google reviews when you know they are fake“.
It’s also important to get as many backlinks as you can in order to generate organic traffic. If you need help with that or any other SEO tasks, checkout our SEO services page.
by DG | Oct 12, 2018 | Digital Marketing, Business
Every business that has a presence online, would naturally want to be able to maintain a decent reputation. No business owner would want their business to generate negative reviews, which is why they always try to keep a keen eye on social media.
Online reputation management is the term that relates to this perusal of your brand’s reputation online. This term, like every other word related to SEO, has been thrown around quite a lot recently. So much so that brand managers now don’t really know to expect from online reputation management. This brings us to the question of what exactly is online reputation management.
Is it a proven method of maintaining your reputation and local SEO online, or is it just a buzzword? Can it really help you with your reputation online?
We answer these questions and many more in the lines below, by taking a look at the nuances involved in online reputation management, and how it can positively boost your Local SEO.
What is Online Reputation Management?
For starters, online reputation management is perhaps one of the best ways to enhance your presence online. At a layman level this practice relates to studying what people are saying about you, and trying to handle their problems. There’s hardly any business out there that doesn’t have issues arising with customers. While you would ideally prefer to have the issue resolved before the customer takes the matter online, that is usually not the case.
Customers share bad experiences online, and these bad experiences act as a deterrent for other potential customers coming your way. However, you can manage these online complaints through your online reputation management system.
When dealing with negative reviews it is important write a response as soon as possible, be polite, courteous and professional. NEVER be defensive. Try to understand their problem and offer to resolve the problem even if you think they are being ridiculous. You will never come out ahead if you try argue with them.
Here we will list down some amazing tips that you can follow to enhance the utility of your online reputation management system and maintain your Local SEO online while at it.
Be Present on all Web Portals
Social media is a must for every brand. It is best for your brand to be up on social media to not only interact with potential customers, but to also listen to their grievances. A company should have a Facebook, Twitter and Google+ account at least. You can further have an Instagram, Snapchat and other social media accounts to reach out to your customers through new channels.
Now, the journey to excellent reputation management online doesn’t stop with the creation of accounts on multiple social media platforms. The real effort lies in regularly regulating and reviewing these accounts. The worst that can happen for your brand is an online review or complaint by a customer that you haven’t addressed.
This negligence on your part would not just turn that one customer away from you, but would also leave a bad impression on others. Thus, the way forward is to review these accounts and all the complaints that come on them.
Local Listings Establish Your Presence
Search engines use complex algorithms to ensure that the information they are giving out is reliable and can be trusted. As part of this, they cross-reference company information from local listings present across the web to generate information related to your phone numbers, map pointers, email addresses, postal addresses and opening and closing times. Based on concrete evidence generated through these methods, a search engine gives out the required information to your customers.
Now, if your information across multiple local listings is not updated, your local SEO campaign will suffer due to this incorrect information. Search engines will direct customers to wrong addresses and might even give old numbers. To cut out the chances of this happening, ensure that all information pertaining to your company on local listings is updated so that search engines can reference the correct source.
Build a Profile of High Quality Local Reviews
User generated content is still content, and pretty successful at it. Individual reviews might not be able to generate the same impact as a blog or a video for that matter, but by building a profile of good reviews across social media and the internet, you can boost your local SEO.
Having potentially good information associated to your brand, from organic third parties, on highly trustworthy review and social media sites, gives your Local SEO the boost it needs. These valuable reviews give search engines quite a lot of contextual information about you, which they can use to rank your company locally.
Social Proof
Believe it or not, but search engines, including Google, tend to rank local companies with better reviews higher than others that have negative reviews or no reviews at all. This is a tried and tested method by these engines to take social proof as a performance of brands.
For example, Google usually takes a look at reviews coming on its own Google My Business platform, and from other partners that their algorithms trust, including Yelp and Facebook. Based on the information from this analysis, Google’s algorithms develop the social standing of a specific organization in its local setting. The social standing includes answers to questions such as, is the company well-liked and popular? Is there sufficient evidence to suggest that the company gives bad experiences and customer services? Then, based on star ratings and reviews, Google takes the ultimate decision of how suitable your brand is for a searcher’s query.
Make the Investment
Finally, you need to make a sufficient investment to get the best out of your online reputation management plan. Reputation development often requires investment both in the form of time and money. You will obviously need dedicated members to monitor your reputation online and generate results based on that.
Other than that, there is also the need for investment in catering to customer grievances. A simple apology doesn’t make the cut anymore. You would need something along the lines of a giveaway to win their trust again, and use that complaint as a means to leverage your reputation online.
Proactive reputation management might take some time and effort while setting up, but it is a worthy investment that will definitely pay off in the long run.
BONUS TIP – Make it easier for people to leave a Google review.
Here are steps to make it easier for people to leave a Google review about your business :
- Search for your company by name in Google.
- Click on the button “Write a review”.
- A Google review box has pops up, click away for the popup window and copy the URL from the address bar.
- Shorten the URL. The URL will be very long. Use a URL shortener like bit.ly to get a nice sort URL that you can share with people.
Here an example of ours – Click To Review: https://bit.ly/2PhcT7b
We hope these tips will be helpful. If you don’t have the time to deal with all this we do have Reputation Management Services to take care of it for you. It will help with your Local SEO efforts.
Also check our article about dealing with Fake Reviews. as well as Neil Patel’s Definitive Guide to Online Reputation Management.
by DG | Oct 8, 2018 | Branding, Digital Marketing
Fake reviews are an unfortunate reality that many businesses have to deal with.
It’s so easy for people to create a new anonymous account and leave a review that is positive or negative. The worst part is that it doesn’t matter if they are a customer or not, they are free to leave a review and say whatever they like. So what do you do when you want to remove Google reviews?
Before we go further I’ll just say that when dealing with negative reviews that are real it is important write a response as soon as possible, be polite, courteous and professional. DO NOT ever be defensive. Try to understand their problem and offer to resolve the problem.
The rest of this post is about dealing with reviews that you know are fake. I get asked about this often so let’s get to it…
Google Policies
Google has a huge list of policies around this topic but they do not do a very good job of catching policy violations. There is hope however! If you can track these fake reviews and make a case as to why the review is violating Google’s policy guidelines you can get them removed. To do so you can contact them through Facebook, Twitter or on the Google My Business forum.
When you are logged in to GMB find the review that you believe is a fake. You will see three dots stacked on top of one another, click those. Then you will see the option to “flag as inappropriate.” Fill out the form and that’s it. You can also expedite the process by calling GMB support. You will find their support number within your GMB account.
Why won’t Google remove that fake review?
If you can’t show that the reviewer has made a policy violation, they won’t remove the review. The most difficult reviews to get rid of are the ones with 1 star and no comments. Google’s response will likely be that it didn’t violate the guidelines — since there’s no text in the review. Personally I think that reviews without comments should not be accepted by Google – call me crazy – I guess it’s it too much to ask!
If the review is completely off-topic and complaining about a service you don’t even offer then you will most certainly be able to get it removed by Google.
What do you when Google won’t remove that fake review.
The huge problem with fake negative reviews is that Google doesn’t know your customers. Therefore, telling them that the person leaving a review is not an actual customer is not a strong enough case to get that review removed. If the reviewer is anonymous it’s very difficult to prove their identity.
Another problem is that they might not have been a customer. They are eligible to leave a review even if they just called you and you didn’t return their voicemail. Maybe you have a store and they couldn’t find parking… Oh yeah, it’s hard to make everyone happy.
Most small businesses bend over back wars to keep customers satisfied and you just know when you have an unhappy customer so when there’s a fake review, you can just smell it. It seems out of place and it seems to come out of nowhere.
Like I said, sometimes Google just won’t remove it, then what, should you just leave it sitting there?
Absolutely not, there are some strategies to deal with it. Encouraging your satisfied customers is of course one of the ways to help bring up your rating average. However that fake review is still festering and annoying you to no end.
What’s the best way to deal with a fake negative review that Google won’t remove?
Challenge that Faker! Be polite by writing a response something like: “We are quite certain that [username] is not a customer of ours. In fact we are so certain that we would like to offer a 100% refund if you send us the receipt from the gmail account you used to write this review.”
Give them a few days to respond. If they don’t respond to that, then you know it’s a fake review and you should update your review response.
Update your response with something like: “After waiting 1 week for a reply to our 100% refund offer we never got a response. Sadly, it is likely from one of our competitors engaging in the writing of fake reviews for their own gain.”
If by some miracle you are wrong and the review was real, they may send you a receipt. If their reasoning for the complaint is legitimate, then you might want to refund them and in return ask them to delete the review. It’s probably worth it for your business and you have learned something. You might also be able to settle it by fixing the problem that they have complained about.
USEFUL TIP – Make it easier for people to leave a Google review.
To make it easier for people to leave a positive Google review about your business, follow there steps:
- Search for your company by name in Google.
- Click on the button “Write a review”.
- A Google review box has pops up, click away for the popup window and copy the URL from the address bar (see image below).
- The URL will be very long. Use a URL shortener like bit.ly to get a nice short URL that you can share with people.
Here an example of ours – Click to review: https://bit.ly/2PhcT7b
We hope these tips will be helpful. We have a Reputation Management App to help you get control of your reviews. If you don’t have the time to deal with all this, we do have Reputation Management Services to take care of it for you.
Beyond Google
We have focused entirely on getting reviews on your Google My Business page in this post but you should of course not ignore other review sites, Google should be your prime focus though. There are many other review sites that you can benefit from like Yelp, Yahoo Local, Trip Advisor, Trust Link, Trust Pilot etc.
The more you list on, the more you will help build trust for your business, and boosting your local search rankings at the same time.
Have you experienced fake reviews? If have, we would love to hear about it, please leave a comment.
by DG | Nov 12, 2021 | Content Marketing, Digital Marketing, Online Marketing, SEO
Updated: Nov, 12, 2021
You are likely well aware of the concept of content marketing by now. It’s a tactic that helps you engage and attract customers and prospects by delivering quality content that provides value for everyone who visits your site. And the strategy has a lot of staying power.
Here are just a few areas in which content marketing can help you.
Driving Conversion
A great benefit of content marketing is that it helps your company drive more conversions over time. Research shows that companies that create consistent marketing content experience conversion rates almost six times higher than their competitors.
Increasing Traffic and Brand Awareness
Publishing consistent blog posts that engage audiences will help you bring in more traffic to your site over time. According to HubSpot, companies that published more than 16 blog posts per month got almost three and a half times more traffic than those that only published fewer than four posts.
It also helps educate people about your brand and raises the level of brand awareness that is otherwise not there when you don’t publish blog posts outlining what your company does or sells.
Check out our Pro Blogging Packages
Building trust and Fostering Relationships
You can build real relationships with your customers through content driven marketing. It allows customers to really absorb your philosophy and thinking patterns and associate themselves with your values. This allows them to take a peek in to the way that your company does business. It’s a lot more personal and less presumptuous than an advertisement.
Building Credibility and Expertise
Well written and polished content automatically comes across as professional and authoritative. It allows people to see your company as an expert or an authority on the subject of your business. It also allows you to be seen as a major player in the industry.
Cost Effectiveness and SEO Visibility
According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing costs 62% less than outbound marketing even though it generates three times as many leads. It also helps your company and topics trend better in search engines, specifically Google. Allowing your content to trend well allows for greater visibility.
Targeting Specific Audiences
It’s important to know exactly who you’re selling to when you’re selling a product or a service. For this reason, content driven marketing is useful to get your message across to your target demographic. It sounds extremely cold and calculating, but it’s useful without a doubt.
Engaging Content Makes a Personal Connection
As outlined above, it’s more engaging and personal than an advertisement. The written word, when written well has a much better connection with your readers and customers than an ad ever can, hence, the emphasis on content driven marketing.
Can bring you Unexpected Customers
It’s incredible that content marketing can bring you customers from so many different places that are not your target demographic. You can use trends and current hot topics to market your products or services to people that won’t normally look twice in your direction.
Do you need great content for your website? As on of the top small business branding agencies, we have great writers standing by that can produce excellent, affordable content on any topic. Check out our packages.
It’s also important to get as many backlinks as you can in order to generate organic traffic. If you need help with that or any other SEO tasks, checkout our SEO services page.
