January 2019

While artificial intelligence has not gone the way of Skynet (just yet), 2019 has been noted by many digital marketing consultants and professionals as a game-changing year regarding machine learning.

For digital marketers, this means improved understanding of consumer behavior as well as improved digital marketing campaigns and streamlined implementation. This potentially holds a bevy of benefits for business owners.

Today, we’re taking a look at how automation can help you to perfect your 2019 digital marketing campaigns in a way that will build up fat returns on your investment.

Automation Should Focus on Profitable Growth Over Efficiency

It may be tempting to optimize and use an automated program so that certain business processes can be more efficient. But by doing so, you may be limiting how you see the overall big picture.

Optimizing an automated process that focuses on increasing profits instead can be a better option. In other words, you want to focus on what’s profitable in the long run, not what makes you a quick, easy buck. Many businesses in late 2017 began to adopt this philosophy, resulting in great returns.

For instance, HomeAway, a vacation rental marketplace, really put in the elbow grease in 2017 by using automation. In essence, the company — through automation and machine learning — categorized particular members of their audience that viewed certain pieces of content or ads and set them into groups based on their real-time behaviors.

This gave the company the ability to tailor content and messaging that engaged with potential customers until they were ready to make a decision. This simple act ended up skyrocketing their annual revenue by 115 percent!

Automation Should Help You Find the Right Customer

Many of the industry’s top marketers have designed automated programs that utilize machine learning to allocate funds for finding long-term customers. The goal here is to find customers that provide more sales opportunities over a long period of time and weed out the one-and-doners.

And it has been successful. Finding customers that have a higher customer lifetime value (CLV) isn’t always an easy task, but with automation, lots of possibilities are revealed. For those that need a little refresher, CLV is a prediction that takes into account how much a customer will spend throughout the business-consumer relationship. It is determined through many different calculations that we won’t get into today.

But I can provide you with an example.

Let’s say you own a bakery, and occasionally, you’ll have a customer that will come in to purchase one of your most expensive cakes. Not always, but every now and then. Then, of course, you have your regular; the individual that comes in every day to buy a couple of pastries.

Out of either of these two, which one would you consider to have a higher customer lifetime value?

It’s the regular that provides your bakery with a steady flow of revenue every day.

Using automation to help your marketing efforts target these frequent customers over the rare big spenders should be paramount, as it is these people that sustain your business in the long term.

Automation Should Help Your Business Earn More From Existing Customers

As the old proverb goes, “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” And when it comes to keeping customers engaged and retaining their business, automation has made that process much easier.

The extra revenue that comes in from existing customers can then be allocated to acquiring new customers.

One way that experts increase CLV is to improve on their cross-selling. What these top marketers do is predict what kind of product a customer will buy next and actively market it to them, sometimes through automation. This information can be garnered from similar purchases made previously, social media likes, content viewed, or a variety of other data points that an automated program can pick up regarding past behaviors.

Another technique to improve CLV is through churn reduction. Having an automated program that picks up on at-risk customers — possibly targeting previous customers who haven’t interacted with your brand on social in some time – and then offering them a heck of a deal to earn their business back works great.

With automation, the sky’s the limit to not only making your marketing process more efficient, but to making it more profitable.

Nothing beats a solid investment into hiring an experienced digital marketing consultant. Contact me, Mauricio Piña, today at (956) 566-4998 to learn how automation can improve your digital marketing efforts.

First off, Happy New Year!

Now’s the perfect time to refresh our approach to digital marketing. And the easiest way to devise those strategies is by learning from our past mistakes.

We’re starting off the year with a look at what mistakes we should avoid if we want to run a successful digital marketing campaign in 2019.

Check this out.

4 Digital Marketing Mistakes You Need to Avoid in 2019

1. Creating Content Just Because
Search engine optimization changes all the time, but the one true constant that Google focuses on is factual, meaningful, and valuable content. You can guarantee that won’t be changing anytime soon.

Content shouldn’t be created just to fill space on your website. That is a surefire way to feel the wrath of Google’s ranking system. Content should contain valuable information that will meet visitor needs in some manner.

Google gauges this by taking into account multiple metrics such as measuring the duration of the visit, as well as if the visitor went to another similar website after viewing your site, just to name a few.

That’s why developing content that answers visitors’ questions is paramount to retaining a high Google ranking on the results page. Be sure to ask yourself questions like:

1. Does my content help build up my brand?
2. Will my content gain – and keep – visitors’ trust?
3. Will it attract potential customers/clients?
4. What format are visitors responding to most: video, blogs, vlogs, live streams, or webinars?
5. What exactly do I know about your target audience?
6. Do I have a strategy developed for sharing the content on a social media platform?

All of these questions are relevant to establishing yourself as a reliable source of information that visitors can trust – and trust earns business.

2. Having Undefined Goals
Having set goals helps you choose what tactics you need to achieve them, allows you to better understand areas of improvement, and offers a clear sight of what obstacles you need to overcome to get there.

And they have to be clearly defined, realistic goals. If your goal was to establish a dominating social media brand, signing up on all social media platforms isn’t necessarily going to get you there. While Facebook and Instagram might earn you some business, Reddit may not particularly cater to your niche. Therefore, it wouldn’t make sense to focus on Reddit if it provides little value to you, regardless if your competition is doing so themselves.

Think about it this way. Would you trust a surgeon that didn’t have a plan if they were about to perform a major surgery on you? I’d hope not. As with many other things in life, you need a plan to get to those streams of revenue that a good digital marketing strategy can unlock.

3. Multiple Profiles, Over-Promoting, and Poor Reply Etiquette
It goes without saying that a brand that has multiple Facebook or Twitter accounts is going to confuse consumers. It’s also a waste of your company’s time and resources.

That’s why it is so important to have a one social media account per social media platform. It ensures that your social media followers know where to go to find out the latest company news, offers, or company-led conversations.

In the end, that’s all social media is all about: being social and communicative.

But there’s a fine line between having a meaningful interaction with a follower and saturating their feed with nothing but promotional content. This can feel a little spammy and nothing encourages brand abandonment quite like spam. Aim for effective and efficient promotion, not the “shooting fish in a barrel” approach.

Lastly, be social on social media. That means having more engagements, interactions, and conversations with your followers. There have been plenty of times where a brand posted engaging content on Facebook that piqued a followers interest, just to lose that opportunity because they refused to reply.

Replying to a follower solidifies their brand loyalty, assists in retaining followers and attracts more consumers to your brand. Refusing to reply is not only a wasted opportunity to grow your brand, but it can also possibly decrease your value as a social media presence.

4. Expecting Instant Results
The world of digital marketing is a fascinating one. Sometimes important decisions come on the fly, but the results can take some time to come to fruition.

That is why you shouldn’t expect instantaneous results. The anticipation in waiting to see if your campaign was successful can be overwhelming, but your patience will be rewarded.

Sure, digital marketing can net you some quick successes — like an increase in your website traffic — but oftentimes, that quick success is only temporary. Then shortly after, you are left wondering what you can do to make another quick buck. In the long run, this isn’t a sustainable digital marketing business model. Work smarter, not harder.

You need to develop long-term content marketing strategies that focus on crafting high-quality content through different methods of distribution. We’re talking through copy, video, social media – the whole works. And the best way to do that is to hire an expert digital marketing consultant.

Hiring an experienced digital marketing consultant like me, Mauricio Piña, is a surefire way to avoid these mistakes in 2019. Don’t hesitate to contact me today at (956) 566-4998 to learn more.

Suffice to say that analytics play a pivotal role in the world of digital marketing. Data helps tremendously when developing your content strategy, social media campaigns, making changes to your website, and essentially all other aspects of your digital marketing strategy.

But understanding analytics can be a challenge if you aren’t familiar with which you should be keeping an eye on. As your friendly digital marketing consultant, I’d like to share with you some basics about web analytics. By better understanding web analytics, you can make valuable improvements to your website – which should ultimately improve your sales and your business.

What Are Analytics

Analytics is the system by which you collect and analyze data. This information is collected from your website, as well as through other channels like your social media profiles and includes information involving site visitor activity, SEO performance, and other key areas.

Generally, data is collected everytime a user visits your website or social media profile(s), tracking them from when they first enter until they leave. This individual data is recorded into a larger databank where you can begin to see bigger trends, like which website pages are attracting the most visitors and which pages have the highest bounce rate.

Ultimately, the more you know about your site visitors and customers, the easier it is to figure out how to draw them in and get them to spend more.

Key Analytics to Monitor

The truth is that there is a ton of information that you can draw from your analytics but the secret is to set goals beforehand and use the data to measure how far or close you are to reaching them. It’s important to recognize that your digital marketing campaign doesn’t always have to be about conversions and sales, you can also focus on:

• Building strong customer relationships by providing meaningful information.
• Building your company up as an expert in your industry.
• Building up and promoting higher value services.
• Attracting a newer, more lucrative client demographic.

In terms of basic data metrics, you should be keeping an eye on, you’ll want to take note of the following key analytics:

• Visits – This is the number of visitors that come to your site within a given time frame (which you can dictate). The same visitor can be counted as multiple visits. For example, 1 visitor coming to your site 10 times within a month will count as 10 visits.
• Unique Visitors – This data focuses on the number of unique individuals that visit your site within a given time frame. Visitors are only counted once, regardless of how many times they visit your site.
• Page Views – This metric measures the website pages that are viewed by visitors. You can determine the average page view per visitor using this “formula” (Page views ÷ Visits = Page views per visit).
• Time-on-Site –  This is the average amount of time that users stay on your site during a visit.
• Bounce Rate – The bounce rate is the measurement of how quickly a website visitor enters and leaves your site. The lower the bounce rate, the better.
• Top Pages – Knowing which pages are receiving the most love can prove to be vital as it helps to show you what your audience responds to and prefers. You can use this info to make adjustments to the rest of your content.
• Conversion Rate – Your conversion rate is essentially the goal that you have set for your visitors. You can calculate this number by dividing the number of unique visitors you get and the number of those that “convert”, which can include:
  • Making a purchase
  • Submitting an email to join your mailing list
  • Sharing on social media
  • Liking your page

Common Traffic Sources

A key component to effectively understanding your website traffic is knowing where your traffic is coming from. By effectively knowing where your visitors are coming from, you can spend more resources on these components. For instance, are your site visitors finding you on Google? Then you’ll want to place emphasis on your SEO strategy to ensure they are able to find you organically via this (and other) search engine.

In terms of traffic sources, the most common ones are:

• Organic – Traffic that comes via search engines.
• Direct – Traffic that comes from someone typing in your URL in their address bar or through a bookmark.
• Referral – Traffic that comes from another website to yours.
• Paid Search – Traffic that comes from search engines that have a search ad of your business.
• Social – Website traffic that comes from social media networks (i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.)

Again, knowing where your traffic is coming from can help you to improve your overall marketing strategy. A qualified digital marketing consultant can help to break down the numbers and conversion rate by traffic source to uncover which works best for you and how you can continue to optimize this source.

Improving Your Conversion Rate

Alongside using this data to make meaningful adjustments to your overall digital marketing strategy, make sure to also:

• Include plenty of calls-to-action throughout your website and make sure they are in areas where they can be easily found.
• Make the checkout process as seamless and quick as possible. A convoluted checkout process can lead to plenty of abandoned carts.
• Headlines and sliders should grab visitors’ attention and include CTAs.
• Experiment with A/B testing on ads and landing pages to see what type of copy and images customers prefer.

Keep in mind that web analytics are not the end all of your digital marketing plans, but should, nonetheless, play an important role in your overall strategy. Use these data points as the tools that they are and make 2019 a record year.

Need help figuring out all your web analytics data?

Reach out to the digital marketing expert, Mauricio Piña, today at (956) 566-4998.