Digital Marketing Mondays

We are a data-driven agency. As such, we believe that all data, good and bad, must be reported on. More importantly, we believe that reporting needs to be actionable (as we discussed in episode 33). In our experience, too many agencies serve their clients fluff reports where all graphs are up and to the right. While it is important and satisfying to measure what has gone well, it is often more effective to identify areas of poor performance. This allows your agency to tell a complete story of your marketing initiatives and adjust your strategy as needed, keeping what is working while improving areas where the campaigns struggle. Canned reports and hand-selecting positive results provide little actionable insight. Digging deeper reveals opportunities to better reach your goals. It is these opportunities that help drive continuous improvement.

In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss the likelihood that you're missing opportunities to improve the performance of your ads and organic rankings, especially when everything seems too good in the reports you are getting from your agency. They also go over what you need to do to ensure you are getting the insights you need from your data.

With the pending recession of 2022 right around the corner, now is the time to think about your marketing campaigns and where your money is going. Many companies run fluff campaigns that produce nothing quantifiable; it is essential to actively collect data that is accurate & current to combat waste. This data will be the foundation on which you can make decisions going forward. It's a great time to review your data, determine which campaigns are unnecessary, and decide whether it makes sense to end them or make changes. This is not to say, however, that you should stop marketing and hold onto your money. Doing so will guarantee you have no new traffic through paid campaigns, and this fear response may very well squeeze the cash flow out of your business. One of the biggest benefits our clients get by working with our agency is that we've been around for over two decades. This will not be the first recession that we navigate for ourselves and for our clients. We've found that with fewer people are advertising, the cost per click is likely to drop. What many people see as an issue can also be viewed as a huge opportunity with the right perspective and experience.

In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss the upcoming recession, its effects on digital marketing, and what you should consider for your ad campaigns moving forward.

In advertising days of yore, marketing and sales teams didn't play well together, data wasn't actionable, and the systems to store customers' data were hardly more efficient than an address book. Over time, the simple databases used to collect and retain prospect and client data evolved into what we know today as customer relationship management (CRM) systems. As CRM systems matured, the relationships between data did as well. Features that enabled leads to be associated with companies, lists, opportunities, and more became standard across all reputable CRMs. Clever marketers saw an opportunity to benefit the bottom line by further leveraging this data. This gave birth to marketing automation platforms.

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All digital marketers agree that data collection is critical to measuring the success of any marketing effort. Data from your ad campaigns, SEO efforts, and traffic from your website visitors will help you better understand what's going on. If this is where you stop, you are missing a big opportunity to use your data to make impactful improvements. The purpose of collecting data should be to tell a story about the results of your efforts. This story should be used to make your data actionable. Reports are too often littered with an overwhelming number of metrics that show performance but do little in terms of helping discover areas for improvement. Focusing on the key metrics that are able to indicate what is going well and what can be improved will not only simplify your reporting but will enable you to make continuous improvements to your campaigns. 

In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays Hans and Devin discuss how to make your data actionable and why that will benefit both the marketer and client.

These days, everyone is trying to collect as much data as possible. User privacy efforts have shaken the marketing world, and the dust surrounding the impacts this will have on regulations for data collection has yet to settle. While it's clear that more data than ever is being collected, many companies do not quite understand how to use that data. Reporting on high-level metrics is useful, but many are missing the opportunity to reveal insights through actionable reporting. Before taking action, it is important to verify your data, compare it internally against various periods, measure it against globally accepted benchmarks, and understand the context of the data in your organization. Once you understand the story around your data, you can proceed to create a strategy to improve performance. Making changes to how you target, which platforms you are advertising with, testing ad copies, and improving landing pages for better conversion, if done properly, can help any campaign.

In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss the best ways to utilize your organization's data to effectively make changes and continuously improve your ad campaign's performance.

Bidding on your competitor's brand keywords can have benefits, though it can also create turmoil. One of the issues that could arise is that, if they notice, competitors could retaliate by bidding on your brand's keywords. This poses an interesting question, should you bid on your own brand's keywords? The challenge in answering this question is that not all situations are the same. Deciding if this strategy is right for you requires some analysis of your ad budget, competitors' campaigns, and your goals to weigh the potential value that could be gained.

In this week’s Digital Marketing Monday, Hans and Devin continue the discussion about bidding on brand keywords. Understanding when bidding on your own brand keywords can make a positive impact and when it would be a complete waste of your campaign's budget will help you decide if this strategy is right for your organization.

Most of our clients at Market Vantage offer products or services that are considered 'highly considered purchases'. This creates the need for prospecting and advertising that is different than for companies that thrive on impulse purchases. When marketing a product or service that is carefully thought about, a carefully crafted buyer's journey and detailed buyer personas are necessary for success. The goal is not to just interrupt the flow and get content in front of a potential buyer, but rather to create content for each persona at each part of their buyer's journey. You may notice fewer clicks and impressions, but you will see an increase in MQLs, SQLs, opportunities, and sales as our methods are more effective and focused.

In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss the right way to market highly considered purchases and dive into the tools and methods you'll need to get the end results you are hoping to achieve. 

Bidding on competitor brand keywords sounds like a great way to steal market share. On the surface it's a no-brainer, but if you dig deeper you'll find things aren't so simple. The intention of a search query has a big impact on which result will be relevant to a searcher. Are they simply trying to log into a bank account and using voice search to pull up their bank's website on Google, or are they researching which bank to open an account with? Another potential of sponsoring your competition's brand is that they might retaliate and begin targeting your brand. In additional to all of this, Google Ads has a metric called quality score that directly affects your cost per click. If you target less relevant keywords, the costs for your campaign will likely increase as a result of a lower quality score.

In this week’s Digital Marketing Monday, Hans and Devin debate when, if ever, it is appropriate to target your competitor's brand keywords in your paid marketing campaigns. The results might surprise you and change how you plan keywords on your next paid campaign.

PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX - everything Elon Musk touches turns to gold. At this point, it's not news that Elon Musk will, at least temporarily, take the reins at Twitter after his nearly hostile takeover of the company. However, it's worth examining the future of Twitter as an ads platform now that arguably the world's most successful CEO could shortly be performing a massive overhaul of the company. By taking Twitter private, he will not only assume a leadership role but he will have absolute authority to make any change he deems necessary. He has already announced the planned removal of all bots on the platform and intends to implement more advanced user verification. These changes alone will have a massive impact of ad performance. In the past, Twitter has not been as effective at targeting an audience as Facebook or Google, but we think it is safe to assume this will not be the case for long.

In this week's Digital Marketing Monday, Hans and Devin discuss the potential future of Twitter as an ads platform along with several things you can do now to get ready for the inevitable business model changes to come.

In recent years, organic traffic has become secondary to paid traffic as Google's business model continuously shifts towards a pay to play model to maximize their revenue. Does this mean organic results have gone by the wayside? Absolutely not. Organic search rankings are especially critical for people in the early stages of researching a topic or product that interests them. If your company ranks well, it creates the opportunity to become viewed as a trusted source. Conversions become much easier once your brand has established itself as a trusted authority in your industry. Google has released several updates that weighs a website's performance when ranking potential results. The Mobile First Indexing and Core Web Vitals updates introduced the need for performant mobile sites with a heavy focus on usability and speed. A poorly performing website is bound to create many lost opportunities.

In this week's Digital Marketing Mondays, Hans and Devin discuss easy to execute but often overlooked site optimizations to help you improve your site's performance which in turn will have a positive impact on your SEO efforts.

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