Tag Archive for: Chicago marketing agency

Marketing Metrics Businesses Should Be Tracking

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Marketing metrics matter because smart marketing is built on the foundations of solid data. That is why any business with a digital marketing strategy should be closely monitoring the following 4 metrics. Let’s hop right in! 

In today’s digital marketing landscape, there are a number of data points to measure. Some of these will help businesses with consumer insights and others with direct response. This can be tricky as trying to measure both consumer behavior as well as whether specific marketing activities have led directly to sales. After all, aren’t you ultimately in the game to book more meetings?

A business is only as good as the data it collects. Data reveals the most critical questions to help a business grow faster. Here’s a look at digital marketing performance indicators, along with best practices on how to evaluate the data they provide.

Traffic Sources

Knowing where your future prospects are coming from is important. Did they visit your website after google searching your company? Or did they find you through social media? There are so many places where your clientele can stem from, and its valuable knowing how they found you.

By having access to these insights, it will help you prioritize and optimize those channels. Once that has been done you can easily make simple improvements to other channels that are underperforming.

Tracking Engagement

When someone visits your website, it’s always best practice to know how long they’re browsing. This metric reveals how interested visitors are in your content and if you are attracting additional visitors.

If you see that visitors are only browsing on your website for a few seconds, it could be an indicator that they either didn’t end up on the site they were looking for or quickly realized they’re disinterested in what you’re offering. On the other hand, if you see that your visitors are on your website for an extended period of time, it can signal that you have content the market is interested in.

Everytime you post on social media, send out an email campaign or put out display ads you should be measuring your engagement rates. A great example of this is seeing how many likes an instagram post gets. At times one post may have more likes than another post. Knowing how your audience engages with your content will help you cater and craft future content for them.

CAC & CLV

CAC stands for customer acquisition cost, CLV stands for customer lifetime value. Both of these are crucial to your marketing metric strategy. With customer acquisition cost, there is a cost associated with every customer. Businesses need to measure how much it costs to acquire customers throughout their buying journey.

With customer lifetime value, you’re measuring how much the average customer will spend on your brand during their lifetime. This metric indicates the total financial value a customer brings. Ultimately, this metric will help you decide where to invest the most.

Brand Equity

Lastly, become an expert on your audience. Know how they view you and your products. Household name brands such as Nike and Coca-Cola are all names you recognize, even if you don’t buy their goods. A great example of this would be referring to the product as the brand name. Most people purchase disinfecting wipes and refer to them as “Clorox Wipes,” whether or not they’re purchasing that specific brand.

Analyzing your brand strength will help you know how strong you are in the market and if customers prefer your brand over competitors. It will also be a relevant factor in whether or not customers are willing to pay more for your products since they find your brand valuable.

Last Thoughts

When it comes to business, every company is different, and as such, will need to rely on their own unique set of KPIs and metrics to track their performance. Even the digital marketing metrics that are relevant to your business will vary greatly, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish.

We hope you have learned a little bit more about the importance of metrics and how beneficial it can be to your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we regognize the unique and individual nature of every client, and work with your business to help develop a custom strategy that is designed to bring you the highest success possible. Digital Decisions driven by Data is our mantra. Advanced analytics and reporting capabilities is what we do best.

Got questions about tracking and measuring your business performance? Contact us here today to start the conversation.

Skills Every Digital Marketing Agency Should Excel in

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A great digital marketing agency should have the ability to learn your brand quickly and be ready to act as your in-house digital experts.  Since the digital industry is so diverse, how do you know if a digital marketing agency is really as great as they claim to be?  

Looking for a new digital marketing agency but have no clue where to begin? Working with a good digital agency that specializes in quality marketing strategies is an obvious starting line. Knowing how to choose a digital marketing agency is essential in your search to find the right agency fit for your brand.

Spending money on digital marketing is a big deal, and you want to find an agency that makes the most of your money and works with your business goals. If you’re tired of being burned by agencies that make big promises but deliver no results, check out our three must-have skills (and top red flags) to watch out for. 

1. SEO & SEM

Across the board, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most important skills you can have in this field. Knowing how SEO and content optimization work is essential for running a successful campaign. A good marketing agency should have an up-to-date website. If they’re practicing their SEO successfully you can easily find them doing a simple google search. 

Both SEO and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) form your entire digital strategy on a data and content level. At the end of the day, a great website should have all the key elements of an effective inbound marketing strategy:

  • An active blog.
  • Responsive design.
  • Intuitive navigation.
  • Effective conversion strategy with calls to action.

2. A Solid Team

A great agency should have a team that is equipped with versatility and expertise. Building a team that has experts in their respective fields i.e. design, development, SEO, content strategy, social media and brand development, will only make your agency more sought after and stronger as a whole.

Content is perhaps the core of digital marketing. Content marketing will continue to be a crucial part of the game no matter what happens. After you’ve created your all-star team you should then be able to create high quality, SEO-friendly content for various channels. By understanding how to create an effective content strategy you’ll be able to easily engage and convert to various audiences.

Things can be a little challenging when it comes to creating different content formats. From video to social media, emails, web content, blogs, e-books, videos, and white papers, it can be tough to create content that translates to these different formats. Working together as a team is the best way to face the beast that is, content marketing.

3. Tools and How to Utilize Them

Due to the marketing industry being so technology-driven, you need a good grasp on technology as well as be able to learn it quickly. It is immensely beneficial for a marketing agency to have a solid understanding of marketing tools as well as the technical skills that go along with them. For example, a CMS like WordPress – used by a third of websites – can be tweaked to boost SEO. 

Project management tools are important and its always good to ask what platform your desired marketing agency is using.  Nowadays there are many tools you can use to get the job done, for example Google Analytics, Hubspot, Salesforce, the list goes on. The bottom line is, any agency should be comfortable and familiar with all of these tools.

Now that we’ve covered the 3 top things to have as an agency, lets discuss the 3 Red Flags to watch out for.

Red Flag #1 – You Don’t have an Account Manager

A solid agency will pair you with a marketing strategist or account manager who oversees your business’s marketing success.

Something to look out for is talking to a new person every time you call. When you’re looking for an agency, make sure to ask who will handle your account. If it’s one person, that’s great. If they’re running a call center, look elsewhere.

Red Flag #2 – You Can’t Access Your Marketing Data

If the agency refuses to give you access to analytics, you should find an agency that will let you track your marketing success with them. There’s no reason for a digital marketing provider to be dishonest or hoard a business’s data.

The right digital marketing agency will allow you to see your data, and they’ll talk to you about the analytics as they work to improve your marketing performance.

Red Flag #3 – False Promises

If an agency is promising you that your business will be at the top of search results by working with them in a matter of weeks – it’s a bad sign. It’s always important to ask how if they’re promising you things they cant keep. If they’re talking about paid advertising, then rest assured you have nothing to worry about.

Its always best to find an agency that has realistic goals for you to improve your local search results.

Last Thoughts

Digital marketing is fast-paced and demanding. Understanding an agencies top 3 must haves and top 3 red flags to look out for will have you off to the races. At Onimod Global, our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

From SEO to social media, content marketing and strategy, We can help you gain up-to-date and relevant knowledge that will help you become an awesome digital marketer. Got questions about Facebook advertising or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

The Importance of Digital Marketing in 2022

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Digital marketing is more important now than ever. You can utilize digital marketing to target specialized markets, allowing you to reach out to customers who may not have previously considered your company. But this industry is fast-growing, which also means ever changing and evolving. Where do you start if you want to develop a digital marketing strategy? Right here. 

As marketers think about building brands in the coming years post-COVID, how is digital marketing being leveraged to help companies bounce back? More importantly, how should you redefine your strategy for 2022?

According to a CISCO report, 90% of North Americans use the internet, and usage is expected to reach 92% by next year. Customers are now spending more time and resources on owned-media channels such as websites, mobile apps, and customer-service channels. There is also a noticeable increase in customer-conversion rates, with social and digital video channels driving the highest ROIs.

Having a digital marketing strategy in place allows you to reach millions of people cost-effectively. If your business doesn’t have a strategic digital marketing plan aligned with your business plan your business can suffer and you could lose out to competitors who are more digitally savvy.

Reasons To Use Digital Marketing

1. Reach a Specific Audience. 

With media like TV, billboards and radio, you are reaching out to a broad audience, and the chances of targeting a specific group of customers is low. Whereas in digital marketing, you can use the features of a marketing platform to specifically target an audience based on age, interests or behavior. 

Your chances of reaching the right audience are significantly higher, and you can pick and choose these metrics as your needs change. It also allows you to identify subgroups within your clientele. If you have more than one type of product, you can tailor a campaign to this more specific group of customers.

2. Access Metrics of your Digital Marketing Strategy ─ All in One Place.

Digital marketing metrics are the key performance indicators (KPIs) used to measure the success of a business’s marketing efforts online. The goal of using digital marketing metrics is to track and decipher the way consumers interact with your brand online through websites and social media platforms. While there are many benefits of using metrics, the main use of metrics are used to drive improvements and help businesses focus their people and resources on what’s important. Overall, metrics reflect and support the various strategies for all aspects of the organization, including marketing, competition, standards, or customer requirements and expectations. 

Metrics indicate the priorities of the company and provide a window on performance, ethos and ambition. This allows you to determine your return on investment. You know exactly how profitable your digital marketing campaign was, as you can see the results of each aspect of your efforts.

3. Becoming Visible Within the Industry.

Some of the largest corporations have millions of dollars to spend on traditional advertising. If you don’t have that kind of ammunition, digital strategies allow you to outrank big corporations on a smaller budget. 

Here’s what visibility in business can do for you:

  • Helps you get exposure to a larger audience.
  • Build your brand awareness, so that people know who you are and how you help. 
  • Establishes your credibility and expertise.
  • Allows you to reach and sign more ideal clients.
  • Connects you to opportunities you wouldn’t have otherwise. 

Search Engine Optimization

SEO is made up of multiple elements, and knowing what they are and how they work is key to understanding why SEO is so important. In short, SEO is crucial because it makes your website more visible, and that means more traffic and more opportunities to convert prospects into customers. 

It’s also a valuable tool for brand awareness, building relationships with prospects, and positioning yourself as an authoritative and trustworthy expert in your field. More traffic means more potential clients becoming aware of your brand and services.

SEO is composed of three parts:

  • On-page SEO focuses on the content on your website’s pages. You can research keywords that resonate with your buyer persona or keywords that potential clients might ask. The task is to create quality content when answering those questions, so your pages rank higher.
  • Off-page SEO relates to all activity that happens away from your website. It involves external optimization practices that happen away from your site rather than on it. The main technique used for off-page SEO is backlink building since quality backlinks to your site from external sites tell search engines that your site is valuable and high-quality which helps to build authority.
  • Technical SEO is the back end of your website. Things like coding, image compression and cascading style sheets, also known as CSS. These are important aspects of your website that determine how quickly your pages load. Search engines like Google use it as an important ranking factor.

Social Media Marketing

Social media networks are open to all, giving businesses a chance to follow their consumers’ activities or potential buyers. This helps marketers become more informed about their target audience, likes, dislikes, and interests so that they can create a better marketing strategy to attract customers. The opportunities are endless when it comes to social media marketing. A big plus in  using this type of marketing tool is that most of the basic services are free. 

The end goal is to create more traffic and generate leads for your business. The social media channels you can use for this purpose are:

  • Facebook.
  • Twitter.
  • LinkedIn.
  • Instagram.
  • Snapchat.
  • YouTube.
  • TikTok
  • Pinterest

In an increasingly connected world, your approach to marketing must be just as integrated.

Last Thoughts

In this day and age where just about everyone is connected to the internet, it is crucial for any business to have a strong online presence. As we continue to move forward within the digital age, younger generations are likely to be centered on using the internet to access different services. Having a strong digital marketing strategy is a must if you want to succeed in the increasingly competitive industries across the globe.

Could your digital marketing strategy use a boost? Onimod Global is your Chicago-based, in-house marketing team, your partner experts for specific marketing verticals or some nice balance in between. We excel in customer service and will teach you the most relevant and up-to-date digital marketing trends. From social media to SEO and paid search, you will have the tools to ensure your business succeeds online.  

Have questions about creating your online presence and need help strategizing? Contact us here today.

Google Ads brings image extensions to desktop

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New search engine update coming your way in just a few weeks. The new Google update will be bringing image extensions to desktop devices before the end of 2021. In addition, advertisers that are already using image extensions for mobile devices will automatically show those extensions on desktop. Google Ads will begin to roll out image extensions to desktop devices in the coming weeks, the company announced last week. This update will not only be added to static images, but also apply to all dynamic image extensions.

Why marketers should care.

It really depends, however image extensions can be extremely helpful in making your ads more visually appealing, which might encourage visitors to click on them. Before the end of 2021 and available the start of 2022, image extensions will also be available on desktop which will enable you to show any images that are relevant to users whether they’re at home or on the go.

If you’re already running image extensions on mobile, they’ll automatically show on desktop devices as this update rolls out, so make sure to monitor performance so that you can assess whether this is something that’s worthwhile for your brand.

Prior to this update, the images attached to ads would only show on mobile devices. For advertisers that are already using image extensions, their ads will automatically show these images on desktop devices as this update rolls out.

Desktop device performance can be broken out by segmenting your data by “Device.”

Dynamic image extensions are also expanding. 

This update also brings dynamic image extensions, which automatically select the most relevant image from your ad’s landing page, to desktop devices. In addition, these are also now available for all languages.

Google has also added a free, searchable library of stock images to help advertisers source visuals. To access the library, select “stock images” when you’re asked to choose an image for your image extension. Stock images can be cropped to a square or landscape format from directly within Google Ads before adding it to your image extension.

Final thoughts

In addition to Google Ads updates, general SEA and other digital marketing tips, we will continue to share case studies and the latest digital marketing news and tips to help you drive your business. Our goal is to ensure we help improve your marketing and drive success.

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, general social media advertising, and digital marketing. Got questions about how to optimize your search engine advertising or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

Google To End Expanded Text Ads in 2022

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You heard it here first, Google is officially set to sunset their expanding text ads, or ETAs, in July of 2022. According to an announcement from Sylvanus Bent, Product Manager, Google Ads, advertisers will no longer be able to create new ETAs or edit existing ETAs in Google Ads beginning in July 2022. “Your existing expanded text ads will continue to serve alongside responsive search ads, and you’ll still see reports on their performance going forward. Additionally, you’ll be able to pause and resume your expanded text ads or remove them if needed. You’ll also still be able to create and edit call ads and Dynamic Search Ads,” said Bent.

 

What to do in the meantime?

We know this news is coming pretty far in advance. What we recommend for now is to use ETA info for RSAs in the transition, which is also recommended by product managers at Google Ads. “To prepare for this change, we recommend that you have at least one responsive search ad in every ad group in your Search campaigns by June 30, 2022,” Bent suggested. Google’s announcement also has already included ways that advertisers can repurpose their ETA content for RSAs. Recommendations from Google’s team include the following:

  • Look through your ads and evaluate their success based on incremental impressions, clicks, and conversions your ad groups and campaigns receive
  • Repurpose high-performing content from your expanded text ads and focus on Ad strength
  • Pin headlines or descriptions to specific positions in your responsive search ads

This new Google update will mainly affect anyone in highly regulated fields.These are currently the industries that benefit from ETAs and will be the most impacted starting next year. 

 

Why this Extended Text Ads news is relevant 

This new update from Google is the latest move in order to make a big push in the automation through their ad products. In the announcement from Google, their team explains, “15% of search queries every day are new searches we’ve never seen before” and therefore “Automation is key to keeping pace with these trends.” While RSAs are in use by many advertisers, we also understand the control over ads that ETAs provide as well as other capabilities. The future phase-out of ETAs means advertisers are moving even further away from direct control over their accounts and having to work with the Google Ads machine learning and AI.

Before the full phase-out is complete, our experts recommend testing your ETA ad pieces in RSAs and figure out what works best so you’re not cut off completely from new ad creation when Google Ads stops allowing new ETAs. 

 

More from Onimod Global

As this is news almost a year in advance, the story is evolving and our experts at Onimod Global will keep you up to date on the latest information regarding expanding text ads and any other Google Ads updates to come. At Onimod Global, our experts have endless expertise when it comes to the latest news on Google updates. We’re here to discover what is the right and relevant information to make your ads successful. Got questions about ETAs, Google Ads, or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today. 

Top 5 Must Use Digital Marketing Tools

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Fortunately in 2021, there are thousands of tools to utilize for your digital marketing efforts. Unfortunately, this oversaturated market has made it overwhelming for many to choose the right platforms for their marketing needs. 

With Americans spending over 11 hours daily on their electronic devices, there’s not much space left for traditional marketing. And while digital marketing tools help you execute a proper marketing strategy, they don’t do the work for you, and some work better than others – depending on your marketing goals.

With such a large selection of digital marketing tool available, it is important to know how each one will benefit you to help drive results. We’ve compiled a list of the all-around best tools that everyone can use and benefit from.

SEMRush 

When it comes to SEO, SEMRush is one of the most effective tools out there. This platform provides:

  • Keyword performance research 
  • Position tracking 
  • Backlink identification 
  • Technical SEO auditing abilities

SEMRush also just rolled out a few new features that include marketing, advertising and social media tools. If you’re looking for a comprehensive, all-in-one tool, this platform is the way to go. There are both free and paid subscriptions offered. But with a free account, your data pulling abilities are limited. You also won’t get access to all the additional tools they offer. 

Google Analytics

If you’re in the digital marketing space, you should be taking advantage of Google Analytics. This tool delivers vast amounts of insight on your campaign performance and how users engage with your website. It’s extremely beneficial when running A/B tests, keyword performance research and more. One of the best parts is Google Analytics is free to use. They also provide great educational tools to help increase your understanding in Google Analytics Academy. 

HubSpot 

HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing and sales software that assists you in attracting, engaging and nurturing your customers at every step of the sales journey. This CRM comes with a wide variety of tools that allow you to: 

  • Host web and landing pages 
  • Create blogs and email sequences
  • Track interactions with leads and customers
  • Analyze campaign success and user behavior

Canva

Canva allows users to create graphic designs and content simply and economically. It’s great because it helps you make professional graphics, even if you have no design experience. With the premium version you get access to over 50,000 templates, stock images, video, backgrounds, clip art and more. It’s the perfect solution for someone who doesn’t have the time to use InDesign or Photoshop, but still get high-quality designs to use for your business. 

Sprout Social

While there are endless social media management tools online that all provide similar features, the best overall is Sprout Social. It’s simple to use but also provides many tools to make publishing content and analyzing data easy. They offer dashboards let allow you to manage your pages all in one place, reports to help you manage your user engagement and ROI and scheduling tools. They currently support all platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Sprout has three different tier levels for their plans, but they’re fairly reasonable. 

Final Thoughts

When there’s so many tools out there, it’s important to know how each will benefit you and drive results. If you’re not using them correctly, or missing a few key ones you’re likely wasting time, effort and energy better put into other aspects of perfecting your marketing. That’s why sometimes, your best tool is a marketing partner. Someone who knows which tools are the best for your business, will help improve your marketing and drive success. 

At Onimod Global, we have endless experience and expertise when it comes to digital marketing tools. Meaning it’s simple for use to identify which are right for you. Got questions about marketing tools or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.