Tag Archive for: Chicago Digital Marketing

Effective Ways to Generate Leads Online

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The goal of any business is to generate leads that offer long-term value. If you’re searching for effective ways to generate leads for your business online, check out these tactics below.

Entrepreneurs, startups and even enterprise organizations are all in business to do one main thing: generate revenue.

Unfortunately, there’s no “magic bullet” that can make your website a magnet for prospective buyers. Instead, you’ll want to use a combination of lead generation ideas and tools to grow relationships with potential buyers.

1. Webinars

Webinars are a great opportunity to inform potential customers about your company, products and services. Be sure to inform your audience on how you can solve their problems. This will likely make them more willing to receive your message.

Webinars are a great way to build relationships with prospects and customers by creating a dialogue between the presenter and attendee. Webinars allow for instant feedback from participants through polls, surveys, or quizzes. This is a great opportunity to gather information about potential leads or customers. Having this feedback at hand is beneficial for follow-up emails and calls. At the end of the day it makes those who participated feel like they matter and were heard during the event itself!

If done correctly, a webinar is an excellent way for companies of any size (especially smaller businesses) to reach out to prospective clients while still keeping things simple enough that they don’t have too many resources tied up in running one at all times!

2. Offer Valuable Content

Your audience wants to learn. By creating unique and insightful content, you’ll in turn create interest and/or trust. These are the first steps in customer loyalty, and you guessed  it – leads.

Users are more likely to engage with your products or services if there is a video that explains how it works and how they can benefit from them. This, in turn, makes it easier to make purchasing decisions. Best practices for video content includes:

1. Use an engaging title that captures the user’s attention

2. Use subtitles and captions throughout the video so that users who are hard of hearing can enjoy and benefit from your content

3. Break up your videos into smaller chunks so that viewers can digest each piece of content individually, instead of having to watch all at once (which may be overwhelming)

4. Include a call-to-action at the end of your video so that viewers know what action they should take next

3. Social Media Competitions

When you’re trying to attract the attention of your ideal customers, a social media competition can be a great way to accomplish this.

Competitions are a great way to capture data from your ideal customers, as they typically only require them to do something simple like share/like/comment on a post or follow your page. This makes it easier for you to reach out and engage with them later.

It’s also important to offer an incentive for entering the competition. You’ll want to make sure that the prize is something easily shareable, such as gift cards or products. This will help increase your overall reach and drive leads directly into your business.

4. Create Outreach Programs

Using the internet to find leads is a great way to reach out and connect with potential customers, but it’s not always the best way. Sometimes the best way to find leads online is to track them down yourself!

There’s nothing wrong with this, as long as you go about it in the right way. If you’re surfing the web and find someone who could benefit from your product or service, you should have an outreach program or plan in place to handle this. When you do find a good lead, make sure that you follow up quickly. Don’t let them slip away—it can be hard enough for people to make time for new things, so don’t make them feel like they have to choose between your product and something else important in their lives.

Use social media channels like Twitter and Facebook to get in touch with potential customers who might be interested in what you have to offer.

How Onimod Global Can Help

Lead generation isn’t a one-and-done task. The more you tweak and test every step of your inbound lead generation process, the more you’ll improve lead quality and increase revenue.

Looking for a way to start marketing your business and generating more leads? Learn how lead generation fits into your inbound marketing strategy, plus easy ways that you can start generating leads for your company with Onimod Global. We can assist you with not only LeadGen strategies, but also a range of digital marketing services such as content creation, paid advertising, social media management, SEO, website development and more. Get started on your next marketing project by contacting us here today.

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Want to keep learning? Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.

Digital Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

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Small businesses should always be looking to find opportunities to stay ahead of the competitive market and reach their potential customers. With the right tools, you can create an effective strategy to have a big return in reach and awareness. 

The internet has become an indispensable tool for almost any consumer making a decision. Whis is why it’s always a good time for business owners to think about the most effective small business marketing ideas. 

Unsure of where to start improving your website or social media pages? Here are 5 quick and effective ways that you can jump start your digital marketing for your SMB.

1. Research Competitors and Differentiate Yourself

Competitor research is important because as a small business, you’ll want to be able to offer additional value in the market. One way to do this is by using Google Search Ads. Doing a search and seeing the results that pop up is a great way to start. For example, if you’re a plumbing company and you see the terms “No Call Out Charge”, “Fully Qualified Plumbers” and “1-Hr Response” for your results, they’re likely to be great selling points for other businesses looking to compete with these results.

How can you differentiate your company from other plumbers in the area who provide similar services? Most times, if you don’t have anything that differentiates your company from others, you can invent one. You can do this by giving your products, services, and reputation more attention and detail.

2. Get Your Website Basics Right

Users are increasingly demanding in terms of the experience they expect from a website. They want a fast loading website as a minimum requirement. As a local business, you may not have the budget of larger firms, but you can at least get the basics right.

Here’s a couple things you can do to fix this problem. You can start by test your website’s mobile speed with Google’s free tool and see how you could decrease bounce rates. If this doesn’t provide clarity you can move onto the following options:

1. Compressing Text and Images: Decreasing or converting your image sizing and scales can help dramatically, as well as removing any video content that isn’t critical to your site’s content.

2. Website Design: Over-designing web pages by adding loads of banners, images, icons, and other additions can lead to slower loading times.

3. Mobile Optimization: Last but not least, making your site mobile friendly is probably the most important thing you should do for your website. A majority of consumers now access the internet via mobile browser. So make sure your website is designed so that it is responsive per device and screen size.

3. Improve Google My Business Listing and Customer Reviews

When a customer searches for your products or services, your online reputation could be the deciding factor. Luckily, Google My Business gives you control over how people perceive your business.

Some of the common mistakes to avoid include:

  • Duplicate listings
  • Setting up unnecessary new listings after a change of address
  • Business name misuse e.g. adding unnecessary promotional messages

Customer reviews are not a new concept, but you might be surprised at how often they are overlooked. 30% of consumers said that reviews were a key factor in judging local businesses, so make sure this as a top priority in your digital marketing strategy.

4. Create Interesting Blog Content

In highly competitive industries, a content strategy is necessary to drive search results. When working with smaller businesses, it’s likely that they will not rank on the first page of Google for a broad term related to their product or service. Blog content plays a big role in creating and converting leads to customers. You can easily increase your organic traffic for local businesses through researching blog content that you can create in house. Here are a couple tips to amp up your blogs:

  • Putting the audience first
  • Making sure it’s SEO friendly
  • Correct tone of voice
  • Showing readers they can trust you

Final Thoughts

As a small business owner, you can use digital marketing to reduce barriers-to-entry in your industry by increasing the reach of your business through the Internet. But you need a plan to get there. A strong content marketing strategy and experimenting with different topics, measuring the results, and tracking your progress all help you develop an effective coverall content marketing strategy.

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 skills. 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.

How To Improve Your Ad Campaigns

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Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is a valuable method to earning the coveted top spot on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs). However, without a solid strategy, you will soon see underwhelming campaign results and ad spend issues.

Here are a few red flags to watch out for and some extra tips to help boost underperforming SEM campaigns:

Clicks are Few to None

If your SEM campaigns keywords aren’t relevant to a user’s search intent and where they are in their buyer’s journey, Google’s less likely to show your ads. Keyword research can help you target relevant keywords that satisfy Google and your users so they engage more with your ads.

Start your keyword research by using a keyword tool. If you use Google for your marketing needs, you can utilize Google Keywords. You can use the tool to discover new keywords, research keywords, and creating an advertising plan to share with your marketing team. The tool “cleans” your keywords by removing unnecessary characters and duplicates, groups keywords by campaigns, and more.

Poor Performance Tracking

If you want to measure the success of your SEM strategy, tracking your keywords’ positions can help you do that. If a competitor starts targeting or ranking for the same keywords as you, tracking their positions can alert you. Tracking relevant campaign KPIs helps you understand the following:

  • Keyword performance: Successful ad campaigns hinge on finding the right keywords. If the target keywords you’re using aren’t driving relevant traffic, you can quickly change them.
  • Media and content types your audience resonates with: By A/B testing campaigns with different media and content types, you gain insight into which media types drive engagement and help boost conversions.
  • Audience behavior: You can analyze audience behavior and tell which parts of your ad campaign your target audience is not engaging with.
  • Channel attribution: This enables you to focus more resources on these channels. Google Attribution is an excellent tool that can help.

Multi-Media Planning for Ad Campaigns

Media should be considered an integral part of your advertising campaigns. You can use different media types in the same campaign to create a seamless customer experience. Using a combination of websites, text messages, and YouTube videos may help you achieve this goal.

If your ad campaign assets aren’t in sync across all platforms, your customer will become confused and your engagement and conversion rates will suffer. With the right tools, multi-media planning will be significantly easier. Ad campaigns are optimized to offer customers a positive CX as they move across different platforms on your buyer journey.

Last Thoughts

While the business world is increasingly competitive, you can still outperform your competitors and drive enough revenue-generating traffic to your business. By planning ahead and strategizing your ad campaigns, you can stay ahead of the curve and create a robust ad campaign strategy.

At Onimod Global, our talented digital team has unbeatable experience and expertise when it comes to all things SEO, expanding your social presence and digital marketing. Got questions about how to develop a digital marketing strategy for 2022 or want to learn more about us? Contact us here today.

How to Measure Social Media ROI

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As one of the top digital marketing channels for businesses, social media is a critical component in your company’s success. Here’s how to engage your network, drive collaboration, stay up-to-date, and share best practices.

Every business should be able to calculate their social media return on investment. By tracking ROI, it shows the monetary value of your social media campaigns. You can double down by using marketing methods that work and avoid ones that dont. Social media is a crucial part to anyone’s marketing strategy if your goal is to drive brand awareness.

Here’s how you can measure your social media ROI and improve your content.

What is Social Media ROI?

When you’re looking to increase your social media ROI, it’s important to know how to calculate the value of your activities.

The calculation is simple: (return – investment made) / investment made X 100 = social media ROI.

If your ROI value is more than 0 percent, it means you’re making money from your campaigns. If it is anything below that, then you are losing money.

ROI calculation depends on your goals and objectives as an organization. Different organizations will have different objectives. There are many social media goals you can choose from. It all depends on your core objective, which could be:

  • New followers
  • Click-through rates
  • Conversions
  • Completed lead generation forms

Metrics Used to Measure Social Media ROI

Your social media strategy is the backbone of your business. Without it, you’re just flailing around in the dark, hoping that things work out.

And they won’t. It’s time to get a plan in place.

  • Engagement – This metric is measured by the level of people interacting with your content and brand. A recent study shows that over one third of executives that create content are using engagement as a way to measure their contents performance. Clicks, likes, shares and brand mentions are all part of tracking engagement for you social media channels.
  • Reach- This metric is measured on views and interactions with your company on social media. Reach can be harder to measure than engagement because it only factors how many people saw your post.
  • Leads – This metric is generated by social media, and it’s important to know which channels provide the most leads and what content drives those leads. The best way to achieve ROI with leads is by linking your campaigns to your activity.
  • Conversions – This metric uses UTM parameters on the links within your posts so you can track clicks by each campaign and platform.

When you have all four of these metrics implemented correctly, it will drive ROI to your business.

Best Way to Track ROI

Once you have your plan laid out and you know which targets you are hitting it is time to set up a system for tracking your ROI. There are so many different types of platforms on the market that do a variety of things for you. The simplest way to do this is by using Google Analytics and setting up goals and event tracking.

Google Analytics is a simple tool to use and their help page provides their users with a step-by-step guide on how to use their program. Most importantly, Onimod Global is a Google partner. Google Partners are online marketing companies, trusted and recognized for exceling with Google’s products.

As more customers use social media to browse, connect and purchase, marketers need to know how social media continuously evolves. No matter what your ROI percentage is, there is always room for improvement. Some last key things to remember are:

  • Understand your audience – make sure you know who is interacting with you and how you can provide them with content that will engage them.
  • Think outside the box – quality not quantity, take time to create interesting and engaging content for your audience.
  • Test and Optimize – fine tune your organic social posts by using new imagery, keywords and headlines.

Last Thoughts

At Onimod Global, our goal is to help you align your content marketing efforts to real business results. Our data-driven content strategies make it easy to understand your audience’s needs, where your competition is winning, and areas where you have an opportunity to lead your industry.

As a Chicago-based, in-house marketing team, we are 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 skills.

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

How To Choose Content Marketing Topics

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When choosing content topics, most digital marketers try to write about things they believe is relevant to their audience. While relevance is important, alone it’s not enough. Furthermore, some seemingly relevant content topics may not be a good fit for your brand. 

Effective content marketing grows only when you understand the competition at stake when trying to get the audience’s attention. One of the biggest questions you can ask yourself is, how do you determine topics that are a good fit but also have a positive impact on ROI?

Here are a couple tips on how to choose your content marketing topics effectively.

Find the content topic that your audience is most interested in

If you have two related topics in mind, write about the one that gets more average engagements on social media. While this may sound simple, its often times overlooked. A common problem most people run into is quickly sorting content or blog ideas to find the best topic out there. Evaluating topics with alongside of your social data can be a significantly easier step for analyzing content.

For example, if you’re writing about nutrition or fitness, you might want to critique different diets. In this search for the terms “Paleo” and “Vegan,” it’s easy to see that content about vegan eating is more popular.

“Vegan” has a much higher average level of engagement. So, writing about it can give me a competitive edge, making it easier to get my audience interested in my content, and extending its reach with more social shares. This search took less than a minute, making the Content Analyzer an efficient choice for maximum ROI.

Find topics with less competition

Just as it can be wise to opt for long-tail keywords with lower competition instead of core keywords with tons of competition, using content marketing topics that meet your business goals AND are less competitive is a great option for maximum impact.

Another option would be to pursue different types of content based on how saturated or competitive the content landscape is. If you are writing about a topic with high competition, here are a few tips:

  • Create higher production value content such as videos, courses, ebooks, or original research
  • Consider paid distribution, such as advertising on social media
  • Collaborate with influencers to increase the distribution power behind the content
  • Make sure you have a promotion plan in place that extends beyond the initial post-publication phase

Can the message be shared across multiple mediums?  

Social networks are where conversations take place on different topics. In most content areas, the conversation will gravitate toward one network over another. By comparing the performance of different topics through various networks, you can develop content that will appeal to target audiences on specific networks.

Content marketing takes a good balance of storytelling, educating, convincing and should include a call-to-action. Once you’ve landed on a strong topic, it’s equally important to ensure you’re able to create multi-purpose content out of it. You want to choose topics that you’re an expert on, but you don’t want it to be too niche. This may cause a shortage of material and of those actually interested in reading it. Not only that, but it might also be difficult to share that content across multiple mediums and platforms.

For example, mobile app development content performs better on Facebook and low code performs better on Twitter. If you want your content to reach people on Twitter, it would be a good idea to frame the piece around low code. You want to find the sweet spot between broad and niche. Ideally, you will find content pieces that can be featured in a number of ways. For example how-to content could be created as:

  • A YouTube video
  • An infographic
  • A blog post

You want to be able to then share these pieces of content across social platforms. Having flexible content ensures that all members of your audience will be able to find something they best relate to and be able to find it in multiple places. This also creates less work for you, as you can successfully reuse and share topics.

Final Thoughts 

Mapping out and choosing the right topics for content marketing takes strategic planning. Learning what content performs best among your audience takes time and experimenting. Continually measure and track your strategy and make changes when necessary. Choosing the right topics is essential to developing and driving an effective coverall content marketing strategy.

More From Onimod Global

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. If you’re looking for assistance with your content marketing or any other areas of digital marketing, contact us today!

4 Ways to Boost Your WordPress SEO

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Yes WordPress is SEO-friendly, but simply launching a WordPress website isn’t enough to rank at the top of the search engines.

WordPress has been around since 2003, and has certainly come a long way to help define itself as a powerful marketing tool. Over a third of all websites are using WordPress, simply for its publishing platform and well-designed SEO.

However, if you want your site to rank higher than your competitors’ sites, you still need to do some work yourself. Here’s a couple ways Onimod Global can help you improve your WordPress site’s SEO.

Carry Out Keyword Research

Without keyword research, you are not going to know which search terms you should be optimizing your site’s content for. Keyword research should come at the start of any SEO project and be used to plan your site content and on-page optimization.

You can use our Keyword Overview tool to identify the keywords you should be using and optimizing for. Whether you are starting to optimize your site from scratch or are creating new content, knowing the keywords you are trying to rank the page for is essential.

Craft Unique Optimized Title Tags & Meta Descriptions

Your page’s title tag tells users and search engines what your page is about and is commonly regarded as being an important ranking factor. It is what feeds the clickable page title you see on Google search results.

Yoast automatically sets your page’s title tag using your page heading. What’s nice about Yoast is that you also have the ability to overwrite this and improve it in order to work in variations of keywords that you might not include in your page’s heading. Here are a couple things you can do to optimize your title tags and Meta descriptions:

  • You can either use snippet variables, add custom text as your title tag, or use a mix of both.
  • Meta descriptions indirectly impact your site’s organic performance due to Click-through- rate. It is worth spending time to write enticing descriptions. 

Use Internal Linking

You need to use internal linking within your content to help establish topical relevance between different pages on your site, to pass authority earned from external links, and to help users efficiently navigate.

Adding in internal links to other pages in WordPress is really simple. All you need to do is highlight the text which you want to link (this will be your link’s anchor text) and click the ‘link’ button on the toolbar, which will then allow you to either paste a URL or search for pages within your site.

Mark Up Your Pages with Schema

Schema markup can help to enhance your SEO efforts by adding context to your content and data. It helps Google to understand your content, present it in different and useful ways, which enhances a searcher’s experience.

By adding context to your pages, you are making it more likely that you not only rank higher but also get clicks when your page receives impressions. Since Yoast 11.0, a full structured data graph is built for every post or page on your site, but there are instances where you will want to mark up specific blocks within WordPress.  

Last Thoughts

WordPress is one of the most SEO-friendly CMS’ out there, and that is one of the reasons why it is so popular. It is user-friendly and easy to implement a whole host of SEO tactics using just a small number of fantastic plugins. By following the steps above, you are putting yourself in a great position to outrank your competitors.

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 skills. 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.

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.

Why Digital Marketing is Crucial for Small Businesses

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Effective Digital Marketing is paramount in helping small businesses learn the online habits of customers – which in turn they can better target their ideal customers. Here, we have listed the benefits of digital marketing strategies for small businesses to help them market their products or services with the right digital media planning. 

When small businesses get started, their main focus is how to attract customers to shop at their store and how to get them to utilize your services. Most small businesses may rely on traditional forms of advertising, such as print ads and mailers. Small business owners have a tendency to believe, if they offer a good product or service, it’s only a matter of time until new customers find their way to them.

While this strategy may bring in some business, there is an easier route to take. Small businesses should consider the marketplace of prospects that are available online. Small businesses, no matter how new to market, should never overlook the opportunity that digital channels can bring. This is a way to generate leads and convert interest into customers. Here’s a look at the benefits of digital marketing and the ways online platforms can be used to help grow your business.

Online Marketing & Its Benefits

With endless opportunities, digital marketing can seem intimidating if you’ve never used it for a business before. There are many different social media platforms and marketing terms that may make it seem like a bigger project than it is. It’s easy for small businesses to believe they don’t have the time or money to compete online. As a result, many take things slowly and stick with one or two forms of traditional advertising, assuming that their business will evolve as time passes.

The marketplace is competitive and while word of mouth and customer recommendations can help drive traffic, customers will struggle to find your business unless you show up in the places they spend time. Delaying building a presence online is not an effective approach. The best way to ensure success is to promote your business is to use target marketing to attract customers that are interested in your specific service and/or product. 

You can find an excess of potential customers online. It’s a larger group than you’ll ever be able to attract only locally. Using digital marketing techniques, you can reach a global audience in a way that’s cost-effective, scalable and measurable. Some of the benefits of using Digital Marketing tactics include:

  • Target the right audience at the right time – personalization is simpler with digital marketing.
  • Get to know your audience and drive engagement to create brand loyalty. Get some inspiration by creating a customer loyalty strategy. 
  • Track and monitor responses to your marketing efforts easily and instantly (i.e.) any social media platform which are typically free of cost. 
  • The ability to reach out to anyone and anywhere as there are no geographical boundaries with digital.

Get to Know Your Target Audience

One of the great things about digital marketing is that it allows you to engage with new customers. You can get to know them and their pain points, and in turn, provide them with a solution. Social media and blog posts are a great way to start a conversation. It’s important to make note of any comments or responses to your posts, it’s another great way to strengthen your strategy. Using digital marketing helps you stop wondering who your customers are so you can personalize communications and refine targeting. 

By doing this, you will build a relationship with your customers. You become more than a business, you become a reliable partner. Remember, people are also more likely to buy from businesses that they have already bought from and had a good experience with. When someone is interested in your business, whether it’s in your niche or they are curious about your brand, the first thing they will do is research online and see what they can find out about you. 

With today’s digital age, customers expect to find a business website or social media page easily. They also might be looking for reviews so they can learn what other people are saying about your company and whether it is a good place to do business. For local businesses, 87% of consumers read online reviews – a growth of 6% from 2019 to 2020.

So if a potential new customer can’t find you online, they may conclude that your business doesn’t appear to be legitimate. There is a very good chance that a lot of these prospects may decide not to take your business seriously and they will quickly take their business elsewhere.

Do More While Spending Less

Small businesses and start-ups are always trying to achieve as much as possible through their marketing on a budget. Advertising online can stretch your budget further and will allow you to refine your target audience. Social media is particularly good for this as it enables you to set a daily budget for a discrete audience that has an interest in your brand or ethos. Most importantly, it allows your business to exclude the people that would never buy from you – saving you time and money!

The key with advertising on social media is to select the platform that will work best for you and your brand. Don’t pick TikTok just because it’s trending or advertise on LinkedIn when you’re not trying to generate B2B interest. Research social channels, see which social media platform matches what you’re looking for and run some simple tests to see what messaging and content works. 

Last Thoughts

Ultimately, you are the one steering your business to success. Where do you want to go and what does success look like for you? Are you looking to develop a website that can generate leads? Or maybe you want to set up a Facebook campaign to see the results. The first step to achieving these goals is to develop an understanding of digital marketing and how it can have a positive impact on your business.

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 skills. 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.

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. 

Why You Should Invest in Video Ad Marketing

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Investing in video ads can help drive brand awareness, more engagement, foster a greater audience connection and ultimately boost sales. If you’ve yet to commit to a solid video marketing strategy, here are 3 reasons to consider. 

Better Engagement

Movement and sound are two elements of an ad that easily catch user attention. They also help convey efficient, effective messaging, both which lead to higher engagement. This format is additionally effective in delivering your narrative to the target audience with a tailored message that’s easy to consume. Video ads that capture the interest of users and follow through with a CTA are more likely to succeed with keeping audiences interested. 

Additionally, research has found that the average user remembers 95% of a message when watched, compared to 10% when read. Meaning potential customers are more likely to recollect your brand’s message through video content, rather than a static image or text ad. 

More Shareable

Video content is quick, concise and makes it very easy to tell stories that are easy to consume by users. Video ads offer brands the perfect opportunity to express themselves and tell consumers why they can be trusted and why their products or services are worth purchasing. All of these elements also make videos much more sherable. As seen on Twitter, where 700 videos are shared by users every minute. Posting more shareable content helps increase your brand reach, generate more awareness and put yourself in front of more customer prospects. 

Higher Click-Through Rate

Along with being more engaging, videos also get a much higher-click through rate. According to a Smaato study, the average CTR of video ads via mobile is 7.5 times higher than standard display ads. One particular brand even found that video ads generated 47% higher CTR on Facebook than text ads. 

Final Thoughts

Though video ads can be more time consuming and costly to create, their ability to effectively narrate your story allows you to engage more prospects, gain higher reach and generate more ad clicks. 

At Onimod Global, we’re experts in all things digital marketing, including SEO, SEM, social media, web dev, graphic design, branding and more. If you’re looking to get started on building a video marketing strategy, we can help. Contact us today. 

More from Onimod Global

Onimod Global releases the latest digital marketing news and essential marketing tips every Tuesday and Thursday! To catch up on the top digital marketing news and trends, click here. To find out more about who we are and what we do, click here.