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Marketing
Blog Left Sidebar Social Media
Why Hire a Social Media Agency?

One of the most significant demands businesses face today is having a social media presence. Being active on social media helps companies connect with their audience and provide them with content they’re interested in. When used correctly, social media marketing can strengthen brands and companies.

Getting started on social media or growing your existing social media presence can be challenging if you don’t know what you’re doing. Which platforms will allow you to reach more audience members? What tools will best help you increase your ROI? Social media agencies can answer these questions and provide valuable advice.

What Is a Social Media Agency? 

A social media agency is an organization that creates and manages social media marketing campaigns and strategies for clients. In the beginning, most advertising and marketing agencies handled television, radio, and print advertisements, but social media agencies were created to help clients leverage emergent social media platforms.

Social media agencies work with clients to align their social media marketing strategies with their overall business goals. They help clients determine the best channels for reaching their target markets. Agencies then write posts, make videos, and create other content that helps clients connect with their audience most effectively on social media platforms.

Agencies also analyze metrics to determine ROI for social marketing campaigns. Impressions and interactions are analyzed to sharpen strategies and improve the effectiveness of social marketing campaigns.

What Does a Social Media Agency Do?

Social media agencies help companies engage with their audience and yield measurable results. There are three primary services agencies can provide to achieve this.

Management

Managing your social media accounts should be taken seriously, as engaging with your audience can impact your business goals. However, it can be overwhelming and time-consuming to keep up with your social media channels. Social media agencies work with you to understand your audience, determine what social media channels are the best fit, and create high-quality content that will appeal to audience members. Additionally, agencies create content calendars to schedule and distribute your content at optimal times.

Paid Advertising

Growing your social media audience and getting in front of the right demographics can be challenging. In recent years, platforms like Facebook have implemented algorithms that make it more difficult to reach your audience organically. You can use paid social media advertising to supplement your organic efforts. Paid ads help you get your message to the right audience by using tools that target specific demographics.

Every social media network has its own tools and ad types that serve different purposes. Social media agencies may recommend specific platforms for your business depending on your audience and KPIs. Whether your KPIs include wanting to increase sales, generate brand awareness, or drive website traffic, social media agencies work with you to develop strategies that produce the results you want.

Reporting

Social media campaigns can’t be effective without proper reporting to measure campaign results. Reporting and measuring are essential to continue optimizing social media ads. When measuring results, social media agencies usually focus on three areas:

  • How effective your ads are for your target audience
  • Generated leads or sales
  • Cost per lead

Metrics like these can help you determine if your social media platform is a good fit, if you are targeting the right audience, and whether or not your ad spend is effective. A social media agency with a solid reporting framework can give your business more informed recommendations and paid social strategies. Agencies work with you to determine what is important for your business and use that to drive their reports and recommendations for social platforms.

Benefits of Hiring a Social Media Agency

Social media agencies provide you with the tools you need for a successful social media presence. Here’s how they can help.

You Can Draw on the Social Media Agency’s Experience

Creating accounts may be easy when starting your business on social media, but it won’t increase your revenue. Having someone to coach you through tools that can be utilized and answer questions you have along the way can help you manage your social media more efficiently. Leveraging someone else’s experience enables you to avoid much of the trial-and-error phase of learning a new skill, especially regarding marketing and technology.

You Can Gain a New Perspective 

Being a leader on social media often involves out-of-the-box ideas. Agencies know what works and what doesn’t on social media channels, which can help you avoid problems that have cost other companies money. When it comes to content ideas and campaign strategies, hiring a social media expert can give you an advantage, as you can access tools to help you schedule posts, track analytics, and more.

Social media agencies also evaluate your previous campaigns, perform audits, and find ways to optimize. They’ll create long-term strategic goals while also looking for opportunities for quick returns, and they will analyze your competitors to know how your company can outperform them on social media.

You’ll Enjoy Access to Necessary Resources

Smaller companies don’t have the budget or resources to hire an entire social media team to create and implement campaigns. Many companies have one or two employees overseeing their social media, and these people usually balance these duties with additional responsibilities.

Social media agencies help businesses quickly scale and free up staff members’ time for other important work. A team of experts will support you in every area, from design and content writing to analysis. Most agencies create a custom plan based on your company’s needs, which means they likely have the right tools.

Data and Analytics Will Help You See Results

A major perk of working with an agency is being able to see analytics as proof of your campaign’s success. Agencies show measurements of the results they provide. Knowing these measurements gives you a better understanding of which campaign strategies work best. Getting rid of the things that don’t work will also get you a higher ROI.

Agencies Do the Research and Planning for You

Because social media agencies have worked with many different kinds of businesses, they know how to make necessary adjustments to your campaign. They have the time and know-how to research ways to maximize your campaign. This means you’ll have more time to be out serving customers instead of spending time analyzing and researching social strategies.

Agencies Help You Save Time

Using a social media agency saves you time if you don’t want to spend your days learning new social media tools. As a business owner, you’re likely a professional in something other than social media, meaning you probably have a lot of different things to take care of in addition to getting your company active online.

Good social media agencies have plans and know what will work to help your business be successful online. Not only will agencies save you time by doing the marketing work for you, but they will also maximize the use of your time because they know what they’re doing and don’t need to spend hours learning new tools or skills or testing new ideas that may or may not work.

Social Media Agencies Know the Right Tools and Trends 

Keeping up with new social media platforms and trends is complicated enough. On top of that, you have to consider all the tools needed to manage each of your accounts and which tools are better than others. Many tools these days are similar with minor differences while others are better for launching your social media campaigns. Social media agencies are designed to keep up with these tools and trends so you don’t have to.

Agencies Can Protect You From Potential Embarrassment

A poor social media campaign could damage your brand and business. You may create a post you think is fine but might be offensive to someone else. This can lead to backlash from your audience members — and bad PR. You may also post something on social media that violates copyrights, gets your accounts suspended, or even results in lawsuits. You can avoid any of these issues with the help of a social media agency. Agencies know what kinds of posts will do best among your audience and what types of content may violate copyright laws.

The Bottom Line

When it comes to branding on social media platforms, hiring an outside agency is the most advantageous way to approach it. Doing so allows businesses like yours to outsource social media marketing duties to professionals while concentrating on what’s most important.

If you’re ready to take your social media marketing to new heights, Cool Ideas Marketing’s experienced marketing team is prepared to launch your business. Contact us today to schedule a social media audit and find out what we can do for you!

by cooladmin
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Digital marketing
Blog Left Sidebar Marketing
What Is Digital Marketing?

What is digital marketing? Digital marketing is advertising by integrating all digital channels and techniques, such as email marketing, social media, search engine optimization (SEO), and other channels to generate leads and turn them into customers. Let’s dive deeper into digital marketing and discuss common marketing strategies of today and how you can use them to improve your communication with digital audiences, regardless of your business type or experience level.

The concept of marketing as we know it came about as during the Industrial Revolution when mass production, transportation infrastructure, high demand, mass media, and increased competition created the need for marketing techniques. Advertising was critical to a business’s survival in a competitive selling landscape even in the mid-1800s! At the time, brands gained exposure through magazine editorials, newspapers, billboards, radio ads, and other forms of traditional media.

When the internet emerged in the 1990s, it opened up a whole new world of possibilities for marketers, giving brands the opportunity to gain global recognition. While web design was still in its infancy, the online trends of the decade like Hotmail chains, pop-up ads, and blogging made it easier for leading companies to target their audiences across the web.

Today, you can use internet for nearly anything from shopping to social networking to online learning and beyond. Approximately 4.57 billion people around the world use the internet for these and other purposes — which, as of April 2020, is 59% of the global population. The convenience of the web has influenced consumer habits to go digital, which is why brands that want to be competitive must establish and/or strengthen their online presence — cue digital marketing.

instagram ad examples

Digital Marketing, Assets, and Channels Defined

Very simply put, digital marketing is any kind of marketing done on the internet. If you’ve ever interacted with a relevant Instagram ad, signed up for commercial email offers, Googled the best plumbers in your city, or read a blog on what kind of boat to buy, you’ve participated in digital marketing before.

There is an entire arsenal of tools at a digital marketer’s disposal. We refer to them as assets, which can be used to help you market your brand effectively online. These assets include (but are not limited to) online reviews, written content, social media pages, company websites, branded assets, videos, images, and so on.

Digital marketing is all about choosing the strategy and assets that will best help you to attract, connect, and engage with your target customers and convince them to buy your product or service from wherever they’re spending their time on the internet. When you turn to a digital marketer for help formulating an online marketing strategy, they will look at your presence across all the digital channels (listed below), identify weaknesses, and determine ways to fill these holes and increase your ROI.

  • Content marketing: Content can include written or visual content, such as blogs, ebooks, website copy, product demos, infographics, video ads, or any other assets that establish authority, provide information to the target audience, and/or generate leads.
  • Social media marketing: Everyone who is anyone these days has some form of social media presence. Social media marketing can be done on all the major platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat, etc.), and you can choose to take the paid route or the free, organic route (which tends to take longer to get results). Both ways help you build brand awareness and yield affordable, qualified leads.
  • Search engine optimization (SEO): A slow but cheap way to help your business appear in the top Google results for a query is search engine optimization. SEO strategies help companies increase the flow of traffic to their websites and attract new business over time through keyword optimization.
  • Pay per click (PPC): If you’ve got the budget and you don’t want to wait to see results on a search engine, you can pay for your ads to appear at the top of Google’s first page. Paid search allows you to test the most effective ad words so you can implement them immediately and drive new business sooner.
  • Marketing automation (MA): MA is a tool that allows a company to target customers automatically across various digital channels. This strategy is one that sales and marketing departments use to automate their campaigns to increase efficiency, generate and nurture leads, and ultimately grow revenue via social media, web, email, and text.

Digital Marketing for B2B Vs B2C 

The assets and channels you focus on in your strategy will depend on your business type (business-to-business, B2B, or business to consumer, B2C), as no single strategy will work for all companies.

For example, B2C companies tend to focus on getting leads through the sales funnel by placing their brand in front of their target customer in an attractive way. As such, businesses like this tend to benefit best from paid and organic social media strategies, as it positions their product or service to be seen by those who weren’t previously aware of it and are likely to buy. The rest takes care of itself.

B2B is a bit more complicated, as B2B products and services usually have higher price points. Their marketing funnels are more intricate and their sales cycles longer, so they would do well to utilize paid search and email marketing to capture the attention of business clients and close the deal faster.

Again, no one solution fits all, so it’s a good idea to work with a qualified digital marketer to help you test a variety of strategies until you land on the most profitable for your business.

How Do I Get Started?

Before you jump headfirst into digital marketing, you need to know your goals, your budget, and your audience.

  • Are you wanting to make sales, generate leads, increase clicks, or see a return?
  • What kind of people fit the persona of your buyers?
  • What do your sales trends tell you about the behavior of your customers?
  • How much does it cost to acquire different lead types?
  • How much do you have to invest in your strategy?

Knowing your general digital marketing goals will guide you as you decide how much to spend and which goals you have the budget to achieve.
If you’re feeling directionless, our enthusiastic marketing strategists are eagerly waiting to help you formulate a plan. Give us a call today and we’ll construct a custom proposal for your long-term business success.

by cooladmin
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Searching Engine Optimizing SEO
Blog Left Sidebar Marketing
15 Questions That Will Define Your Target Audience

Your target audience: They’re the ones who need, want, and eventually purchase your product or service. If you’re in the process of defining your business—or even if you’re looking to redefine your current company—identifying your target audience is a great place to start.

In fact, defining your target audience is one of the most important aspects of your company’s digital marketing strategy. Read on to learn more about the importance of having a target audience, as well as 15 questions that will help you identify it.

Why Define Your Target Audience?

Business is not just about creating a valuable product or service, putting it on the market, and seeing how well it sticks. These three things are useless if the right people know nothing about your company. Defining your target audience can help you broaden the scope of your business strategies, narrow things down, and focus on the right parts of your company.

 It sounds simple, but defining your target audience is probably the most difficult and overlooked aspect of digital marketing strategy. Why? Companies tend to focus most on developing their actual product or service. But in the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t really matter what you’re selling—more so, it matters who you’re selling to.

If your target audience is clearly defined and you know it well, they’ll most likely buy your product or service because they’ll see the value of what you’re offering. If you’ve done your research, your product is something your audience will want, something they’re willing to pay for, and something that will help solve their problems. Plus, as you help solve their problems, you’re building a business relationship—and that’s what successful business is all about.

How Can You Define Your Target Audience? 

Most businesses, especially small businesses, can’t afford to target every single consumer on the planet—and often, it’s not wise to do so. Targeting a niche market is a smart way to identify exactly the type of people who will want to buy your product.

If you’re looking to define your target audience, take a look at this list of target market questions to help you nail it down.

  1. When you came up with your idea for your business, product, or service, who did you think it would help? Answering this question will help you get back to your roots of why you created your business or product in the first place.
  2. Does this audience currently purchase products similar to yours, or from businesses similar to yours? Current purchasing patterns can give you an idea of how your target audience will engage with your product or company.
  3. Why specifically did you choose to create your business, product, or service? Some motivations can be as simple as seeing a need and bridging the gap. Other motivations can be as complex as having a personal connection with a product or service, or even with the audience to which your company appeals.
  4. What problems are you attempting to solve with your business, product, or service? Every target audience has a problem, and every product, business, or service seeks to remedy that problem. Identifying the problem can help determine the messaging of your digital marketing strategy.
  5. What are your target audience’s demographics? (Age, gender, income level, education level, marital status, occupation, etc.) These core elements are fairly basic, but determine the most important aspects of your strategy.
  6. Where does your target audience live? This is similar to identifying target demographics, but can be relevant if you have a brick-and-mortar store or a product or service especially valuable to people in a specific geographic area.
  7. How do you currently determine who buys your product or service? Your current determinations might be sufficient, but there could be some room for improvement or further development.
  8. What specific things do your buyers have in common? Every person is different, but their motivations for buying your product or using your service are usually quite similar.
  9. What are your marketing psychographics? (Personality, attitudes, values, interests/hobbies, lifestyles, behaviors, etc.) These elements determine how your target audience reacts to your marketing methods, and the types of campaigns that might interest them.
  10. How does your target audience engage socially online? There’s no point in spending marketing dollars on platforms that don’t appeal to your audience. You target market’s current social habits can determine where you devote ad spend, and how much you allocate.
  11. How do you determine if there are enough people that fit your target market? If there is a need for your product or service, chances are there are enough people in your target market. Before you launch a new company or product, be sure to do adequate research beforehand to ensure you don’t run into any problems.
  12. What drives your target audience to make buying decisions? Ideally, your marketing strategy will ensure your product or service enters into your audience’s decisions.
  13. How can you best reach your target audience? There’s a very fine line between annoying your target audience and appealing to them in a way they’ll appreciate. Gaining a better picture of what your audience likes will help ensure success.
  14. Where is your target audience “hanging out” online? A younger audience will be more likely to hang out on Instagram, while an older audience will be more likely to hang out on Facebook. You can also identify if there are fan sites or forums centered around products or services similar to yours.
  15. How does your target audience engage with other brands? Brands similar to yours might have strong social media presences, influencing how consumers purchase from them. If your target audience is actively engaging with your competitors on these platforms, you might want to try a similar approach.

Each of these questions deserves some serious thought on your part. Once you’ve answered each one, you’re closer to defining your target audience and creating a successful business strategy.

You’ve Defined Your Target Audience—Now What?

After you’ve thoroughly answered these 15 questions, your next step should be creating an effective strategy to target your market through PPC and SEO campaigns. These methods can help put your product or service in front of the right set of eyes, leading to more sales and a better bottom line.

At Cool Ideas Marketing, we pride ourselves on helping our clients identify their target audiences and develop comprehensive digital marketing strategies. No matter the size of your company or the industry you’re in, we can help you get your product or service in front of the right market.

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Marketing-funnel
Blog Left Sidebar Marketing
Stages of a SUCCESSFUL Marketing Funnel

Research estimates that 80% of new leads will never result in sales, and companies that excel at lead nurturing will generate 50% more revenue with 33% less cost. How well are you nurturing your leads?

When we think about lead nurturing, the first things that come to mind are to be friendly to your leads and answer their questions. However, implementing a campaign that makes people want to convert takes much more thought and creativity. How can you connect and engage with consumers and convince them you’re the solution to their problems? That’s where the marketing funnel can help.

What Is the Marketing Funnel?

The marketing funnel is a model that shows you how to appeal to consumers as they travel through the customer journey. It includes several stages designed to build brand awareness, engage with audiences, and ultimately lead to customer conversions. As consumers enter each step of the marketing funnel, marketers try to capture as many leads as possible to create a loyal customer base.

Marketing Funnel Stages

Successful marketing strategies cater to all funnel stages to reach users. Understanding each stage of the funnel helps you create individual touchpoints and appropriately interact with your audience wherever they are in the customer journey. Below are the marketing funnel stages and each stage’s goals.

Awareness

Awareness is the first and most crucial stage of the marketing funnel since it’s where customers first get to know your brand. The awareness stage encourages interaction and engagement. In this stage, leads are drawn in for further nurturing in the rest of the funnel.

The critical question during this stage is how will you attract your audience? How do you get your content out to them? You can build brand awareness through content like blog posts, social media posts, and infographics. Webinars, special events, and advertising can also attract the right audience.

The main goals of the awareness stage include

  • Finding your target audience
  • Learning more about their goals
  • Discovering their pain points
  • Getting your brand in front of them

Interest and Research

After becoming aware of your brand, people move on to the interest and research stage. In this stage, they spend time researching and learning more about the company, its products or services, and any other helpful information the company shares. Companies now have the opportunity to develop a relationship with their new audience through classes, emails, and newsletters.

People want to learn more about your brand during the interest stage. They want to know how your products or services can benefit them. The interest stage should focus on building trust with your leads.

The main goals of the interest and research stage include

  • Interacting with your target audience
  • Offering solutions to their pain points
  • Gaining their trust

Consideration

During the consideration stage, leads are now seen as potential customers. Leads that reach this stage are interested in your brand and ready to choose you over competitors. At this stage, keeping the relationship going and guiding them to make a purchase is essential. Producing targeted content and having meaningful interactions can help you nurture the relationship. This is also an excellent time to offer free trials and case studies.

As part of this stage, it’s crucial to clearly demonstrate the differences between your brand and competing brands. What makes you stand out from the competition? How can your offerings better suit the needs of your potential customers? Automated emails offering more information about products and offers can encourage potential customers to purchase from your company.

The main goals of the consideration stage include

  • Continuing to build trust
  • Proving your brand’s value
  • Convincing your potential customers to make a purchase

Purchase

The purchase stage is where prospects make their buying decision and become customers. During this stage, the most crucial goal is positioning your brand at the top of prospects’ minds. Demonstrate how you can solve prospects’ needs and how to choose the right products or services to meet those needs.

By this point, prospects have learned a great deal about your brand and feel confident in making a purchase. Make the purchase process as straightforward as possible. Ensure they know how to complete a purchase on your website or who to contact about a consultation. Include clear calls to action to direct people where they need to go to complete their purchase.

The main goals of the purchase stage include

  • Simplifying the purchase process
  • Making customers feel confident in their purchase
  • Offering product or service support

Benefits of the Marketing Funnel

Companies that spend time nurturing their lead relationships have a better chance of converting those leads into actual customers. The marketing funnel helps companies shift their strategies throughout the customer journey to target the right audiences and appropriately nurture their leads. Other benefits of the funnel include

  • Focus on the buyer persona. The marketing funnel helps you stay focused on the needs of your prospects and how your products, services, and content can relate to them.
  • Simplify the customer journey. The marketing funnel helps you quickly see the entire customer journey to find the right tools and techniques for every stage.
  • Better planning. By mapping out the whole customer journey, you can find any gaps in the system and fix them before they become a problem.
  • Easier tracking. The marketing funnel helps you measure where you’re losing customers to help you adjust your strategy.

The Customer Experience Funnel

It’s common for brands to flip the funnel after a purchase is made. This flip, commonly known as the customer experience funnel, defines the process for turning customers into brand advocates. Creating brand advocates can refuel the marketing funnel through awareness and referral. The stages of the customer experience funnel are outlined below.

Repeat Purchase

Once a customer has made a purchase, the next step is to convince them to return. Continue to nurture customer relationships through interactions and follow-ups after the purchase to prove to them why it’s worth returning.

Customer Loyalty

Customers develop a preference for a company during the customer loyalty stage and begin to identify with the brand. Building a personal connection is essential during this stage. The best way to build this connection is to develop a brand community, regularly engage with customers, and provide any needed support.

Referral

Customers loyal to a brand are more likely to refer them to others. They may suggest your brand or products when asked for recommendations or share the word of your business with friends and family.

Promoting

Loyal customers have the potential to become brand advocates. They may write positive reviews about your brand or products or share your products on social media, which can generate more leads.

A recommendation from an outside source unaffiliated with the brand can influence prospects. To better support advocates, companies can build their communities, ask advocates to take part in case studies, and engage with them on social media.

The main goals of the customer experience funnel are to increase the number of purchases and encourage more awareness and referrals to fuel a new marketing funnel.

Conclusion

When people are ready to make a purchase, they’re more likely to choose a company they’re more familiar with. The more people know about your brand, the more likely they will convert into customers. Therefore, understanding your brand and how it fits into a marketing funnel is essential for success.

If you’re struggling to determine how to cater to consumers throughout the marketing funnel, Cool Ideas Marketing can help. We launch brands to their highest potential by walking them through specific marketing strategies and creating content that appeals to their audience. Visit our website to learn more about how we can help you navigate through every marketing funnel stage.

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