In the digital age, it can be easy to forget past marketing methods. Navigating through the complex and intricate marketplace, it’s clear that technology plays an increasingly significant role in marketing strategies and campaigns. However, between mobile, digital, and social media channels, traditional marketing still exists. Similar to other aspects of life, digital marketing has irrevocably changed the consumer marketplace, and marketing professionals have been forced to adapt by integrating digital marketing with their traditional marketing tactics.

Advantages of Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing has been around for much longer than digital. Not only is it more trusted by consumers, but they are also more accustomed to it. Your customers reach expands way past online, and so should your advertising. From magazines and newspapers, to radio and TV, there are several effective facets of traditional marketing. In fact, television is still the number one media choice by American consumers. Furthermore, traditional marketing can be extremely beneficial in boosting your bottom line.  While younger generations might look for news and ads online, it’s clear they are not abandoning traditional media altogether.

 

Integrating Traditional & Digital

Although Traditional marketing is not dead, it is facing a great deal of competition from the world of digital marketing. Integrating digital and traditional has been proven to reap more benefits than a one-dimensional approach. As a full-service agency, Epic Marketing has a well-rounded team to create the right package of services for each client. From print, radio and television ads, media placement and creative design to branding and digital marketing, we adapt comprehensive marketing solutions to each scenario for strategic, cost-effective and concrete results.

 

Getting inside the mind of your target market is not only wise, but necessary. Although your products may appeal to a large group, it’s in your best interest to focus on very specific targets. By focusing on a targeted audience, your efforts will provide a higher return on investment, increased conversions, and growth of your online presence.

Define your Target Audience

Clearly defining your target audience can help you overcome obstacles that may be harming your marketing efforts. The information you collect will make it easier to distinguish why customers buy from you.  Here are some tips to help define your target market.
• Understand your existing customers
• Research who your competitors are targeting
• Analyze your product or service
• Select specific demographics to target

Create Customer Profiles

Consider crafting customer profiles to keep up-to-date records about who your customers are and what they are purchasing. To get started, identify the demographic characteristics of your market, including age, location, gender, occupation, etc. To dig a bit deeper, identify psychographic criteria to highlight your target audiences interests, attitudes, behaviors, hobbies, and lifestyle preferences.  Gathering demographic and psychographic criteria will help guide your research and assist in achieving your specific business goals. Once you recognize and understand your customer base, your business’ likelihood of success will increase.

Contact Us Today for a Free Consultation

Do you need help getting inside the mind of your target audience to produce better results? Epic Marketing can help. Contact us today at 801-657-4383 to speak with one of our marketing experts.

Your customer relationships have an immense impact on your company’s profit and bottom line. Establishing and strengthening relationships with your clients or customers tributes to your efforts and investment. There are various ways to measure and balance the instability of customer relationships.

Customer Relationship Dimensions

First, it’s essential to understand how to measure the fragility of your relationships. There are several dimensions related to measuring a relationship, including customer’s satisfaction and attitude. To measure customer satisfaction, you must determine if your product/services are meeting their expectations. Another common aspect used to measure the strength of a relationship is intent. Successfully measuring intent begins with determining how your customer will likely serve your company. Whether they’re a referral or repurchase, intent can reflect frame of mind and approach. Lastly, there’s behavior. Behavior can be measured by how your customers act. Your relationship is considered stronger with satisfied customers who regularly buy your product.

Attributes of a Strong Relationship

The nature of a strong relationship depends on mutual trust, commitment, and the perception of value. Each attribute can be used to measure the strength of customer relationships. Through mutual trust, commitment, and high perception of value, you’ll be able to improve and strengthen your customer relationships.
To be a successful company, it’s imperative to be customer-centric, focusing on all relations between the business and customers. At Epic Marketing, we can help you maintain marketing efforts in order to track and communicate the right dimensions to reduce customer relationship fragility and improve customer satisfaction.  Contact Epic Marketing today at 801-657-4383 to speak with one of our marketing experts.

So you have a business but aren’t sure as to how to go about successfully employing an overall marketing strategy. Don’t fret! The basics of any good marketing campaign are akin to preparing your holiday bird. Find out more below!

1. Market Research: Your Turkey Investigation
No Thanksgiving meal is complete without the much—anticipated turkey. In like fashion, a marketing campaign is without its very essence when devoid of market research. Collecting and organizing data is a crucial first step. You wouldn’t start shopping without first having brainstormed if a traditional turkey is this year’s route or perhaps a turducken is the trendy way to go in 2014. Similarly, any good strategy calls for prior research before making a fowl purchase.

2. Target Market is Your Family’s Tastes
You wouldn’t prepare your turkey with breadcrumbs if there are some severe gluten allergies amongst your Thanksgiving clan. Nor should you try and market to an audience that is not at all interested in your product or service. Consider your potential customers as your family: they’ll have no reservations about telling you that your meal was terrible. With this in mind, target their tastes!

3. Your Turkey is Your Product—Sell It!
If you’ve been tasked with preparing this year’s bird, you had better make sure that you get onboard with making it a hit. Perhaps last year you were demoted to canned yams, so now is the time to really shine and show your mother-in-law that you’ve got the talk of the dining table. In the same way, your company’s product is the lifeblood of its campaign. If you are not convinced that your prepared poultry is the greatest thing since sliced bread, your family won’t be convinced either.

4. Consider the Kitchen’s Competition
If Aunt Ruth’s brown sugar glazed ham is on the menu this year and always is a best-seller, take that into consideration when preparing your own sensational piece. Do you need to ensure that the presentation is nothing short of exquisite? Should the turkey’s entrance be accompanied by epic background music? Whatever you decide, be sure that your marketing campaign, like your turkey, develops unique selling points that set it apart from the competition.

5. Define Your Meal’s Mission Statement
Consider your ultimate goal: is it to feed the masses, outshine your sister-in-law, or wow the crowd? Likewise you need to be clear to your clients—and potential clients—about what your company’s mission statement is and how ultimately your product or service will be a contribution to the “meal.”

6. Monitor the Mmmms!
Pay attention to the amount of smiling faces versus those of disappointment. Use these “reviews” to help better identify areas of future improvement for your turkey preparation as well as identifying what went right. In the same way, analyze the results of your marketing campaign. Survey your customers, track sales, and evaluate your campaign’s results to help better redefine future objectives. In this way, your marketing campaign, and your Thanksgiving feast, will be nothing short of fabulous!

So you’ve decided to hire an advertising agency – excellent choice! Advertising agencies come in all shapes and sizes – from small, locally-based agencies to large, international conglomerates. With thousands of advertising agencies in the United States, how does one choose? We have provided some factors to consider in selecting an agency that is a good fit for your business needs.

Define your intent. The first step in choosing an advertising agency is to clearly define what you are hoping to gain from the partnership. Do you need help developing strategy or driving execution? Do you wish to become the leader of your category? Enter a new geographical territory? Whatever your goal – clearly defined business objectives will help guide you through the process of choosing the right agency.

Conduct initial research. Compile a list of eligible agencies. Do a Google search, ask a non-competitive business owner in your industry or reach out to media outlets for recommendations. Once you have a list of contenders, further narrow the list down by considering:

1. What type of agency are they? Some agencies are full service, while others specialize in a specific function, such as Public Relations. Go back to your intent – what type of services do you really need?

2. Are they currently handling the account of your direct competitor?

3. Where are they located? While many businesses prefer to have face-to-face interaction with their agency, it’s not uncommon for a business to work with an agency in another city or state. If you are comfortable with the majority of your conversations being conducted by phone or email, don’t limit yourself geographically.

Choose fluidity over size. There is much debate about whether it’s best to work with a large or small agency, but what you really want is an agency that is fluid and can adjust to your workload. What are you going to demand of the agency in terms of time – and can they meet your deadlines? If you assigned a large project or group of projects they don’t have the capacity to handle, how would they ensure it was completed by your deadline? Do they have a network of freelancers they can reach out to if needed? It is important to partner with an agency that can adjust to meet the needs of its clients.

Don’t base your decision solely off industry experience. Many businesses think that working with an agency experienced in their industry is a requirement. While industry experience is helpful, choosing an agency that is new to your industry could yield that fresh perspective that you’ve been looking for. Isn’t differentiating yourself from competitors the goal, anyway? Sure, there might be a learning curve, but no agency will ever know as much as you do about your industry, so if you’re going to base your decision on experience, choose the experience that really matters: marketing and communications.

Consider core competencies. Let’s be honest – most agencies do not excel in every discipline. Ask an agency about their core competencies, and consider whether those strengths align with your objectives. You may discover that the agency you’re considering is particularly skilled in print advertisements, but you want to produce a viral video so brilliant that it will trump Evian’s “Baby & Me” – so why not find an agency that is more closely aligned with your goals?

Is there chemistry? The key to long-term success is a good working relationship, so make sure that you like the people and their approach. Also consider professionalism. How do they conduct themselves when interacting with your business – because as your agency, they represent you. You want an agency that will conduct themselves in a professional manner when working on your behalf.

What’s your budget? Agency fees can vary dramatically, and some companies cannot afford the agency that they really want to work with. Fees may be a flat rate by project, hourly, or a mix. Do they have minimum billing increments? Do they have a retainer structure? Be sure you fully understand their fee structure so there are no surprises when you get your first bill. You don’t want to choose an agency that your company can’t sustain financially in the long run.

Advertising is an investment. Finding the right agency can be a time consuming process, but the effort is worth it in the long run when you find a partner that helps your business achieve, and even exceed its goals.

Knowing who your target audience is, isn’t always as cut and dry as one may think. Here at Epic we’ve noticed many of our clients had an idea of who they thought their target audience might be, but more times than not they were targeting the wrong audience. It’s probably better to say that some of our clients knew who they wanted to target, but their target audience wasn’t necessarily going to be the best audience to grow their business.

When it comes to marketing your business, it takes time and—yikes—money. If marketing was fast and free, there wouldn’t be professionals who know and specialize in marketing—like us! In order to fully understand who your target audience is, you need to address and identify where you want your business to go. What are the goals for your business? Do you want to bring in more new clients? Do you want to increase your annual revenue? Having solid answers for these questions will allow you to know which audience to target.

For example, if your business goal is to be the top healthy living weight loss clinic, your target audience will be different than if your goal is to double the amount of new patients you see each month. The target audience for weight loss responds differently to marketing than the target audience to drive new patients to your clinic. Clearly defining your business goals will determine the best audience for you to target.

Another approach in analyzing the best target audience is to look at your current client base. Determine who your best clients are, which ones pay the highest case fees, and which ones are the most consistent with their treatments. This audience may not be exactly who you had in mind when thinking about how to market your clinic, but this audience already has a proven track record with your clinic. This may be the best audience to target for your business to grow.

Once you’ve narrowed down the goals you want to accomplish through marketing, and have a good idea of who your target audience is going to be to make that happen, you’re off to a good start. That’s right, this is just the beginning of the marketing process, now comes the task of figuring out how to connect to your target audience. The ultimate goal is to reach them in such a way that they believe in what you’re offering, feel they need it and want to pay for it.

Target audiences are tricky because they identify with and react to different types of marketing and advertising. However, effective targeting of the audience that will help you to meet your business goals will help your business to grow. So in short, first identify where you want your business to be in a month, six months, a year. Second, identify the patients/clients that are most likely going to make this happen. Third, start figuring out what is the best way to reach them so that they’ll do business with you. And finally, keep in mind that if this all seems a little overwhelming to you, we’re here to help.

We recently installed a dartboard in our office for some friendly lunchtime competition. As we brushed up on the rules, many were surprised to note that the bullseye is not the top value location on the board. A bullseye in standard darts is worth 50 points. There are in fact there are 4 other locations that are worth more (triple ring 17-20 – valued at 51-60 points). This knowledge has changed the way that we play the game. We find that we are consistently getting higher scores than when we just were aiming for the bullseye. A small bit of information about the game has allowed us to quickly improve our score, without necessarily getting better at darts.

We find similar situations with many of our clients. They feel like they know their target audience. They have always aimed for the “bullseye”, and paid limited attention to the rest of the board (market), as they figured it was not their best option. However, in some cases our market research has shown that a business could improve their results by simply adjusting their efforts to target a slightly different segment of the market. By making small changes, we might be able to improve your business without altering the game.

Here are a couple questions that can help to determine some key information to improve your sales score. These are just a few of the things that a good marketer should know about your business.

• What is your most profitable service/product?
• What product/service do you sell the most?
• What product/service do you advertise and market the most?
• Who is your most qualified buyer (gender, age, income, marital status, etc.)?
• Why do clients choose to contact you?
• Where do your clients come from?
• What area(s) do you target with your advertising?
• Who is involved in the buying decision (spouses, business partners, etc.)?
• What are the primary buying objections?

Once we know answers to these questions (and many more), we can then help our clients to hone in their game, and make the best decisions with their marketing budget. A major part of that is ensuring that we are aiming and hitting the right target audience – which may be slightly off center from the bullseye.

To Hire Full-Service, Specialist or go In-House?

The hardest questions in life are often deciding between good and good. While we acknowledge that there’s no “one-size-fits-all” answer to this question, we’re going to focus on the benefits of a full-service solution, often considered the best full-service agency approach for many businesses.

In a nutshell, a full-service advertising agency works best when the various elements of a business are leveraged and synergized to help with one another. At Epic Marketing in Utah, we’ve spent the previous 12 years perfecting how we utilize every resource in every relevant department, delivering comprehensive solutions that align with our clients’ business goals. Our agency’s ability to integrate strategic marketing services ensures that every campaign maximizes impact.

If you’re here because you’re not convinced of the advantages of a full-service solution then I’d like you to imagine the following statements as true or false questions:

•Your social media marketing strategy can be leveraged to boost your search engine optimization and PPC campaigns.
•Your print and direct mail campaigns can work in tandem to enhance your website development or email marketing efforts.
•Your web analytics can reveal in deeper granularity who your target audience is and which campaigns should target which audience, enhancing customer lifetime value.

Even if you think just one of these statements is false, wouldn’t you like your Utah advertising agency to believe they’re true and apply that industry knowledge to your benefit?

Experts Who Advocate For Full-Service Ad Agencies

Gerald Vinci, Owner of Vinci Designs LLC –

“[Agencies] do not diversify their service offerings enough to meet the needs of their customers. This is a problem for most agencies who remain extremely one-dimensional…If we offer only the bare essentials they are forced to hire multiple vendors to complete the project and no customer wants to add more work and frustration to their plate.

Gina Rodriguez, Digital Marketing Specialist at Keenability –

“[A full-service agency] benefits the client in the long term since they are able to have fewer account managers and people to email…Not only does it make it easier for the client, but also for the agency — especially if the agency manages the website as the SEO team, social media manager and content writer all need to work in sync with one another to be successful.”

Mark Mulhern, President of Digital Marketing at iCrossing (east region) –

“In the beginning, digital was new and separate and a different set of skills that needed to be addressed by specialists,” he said. “But now fast forward to 2017 and…everything is happening…in the digital funnel and there is real value in a client having one partner who understands every phase of that.”

Advertising By the Numbers

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According to Statista, The US has, by a long shot, the largest advertising market in the world. In 2015, approximately 190 billion U.S. dollars were spent on advertising in the United States. This figure is more than double the amount spent on advertising in China.

It’s projected that by 2018 the United States will collectively be investing approximately $220,000,000,000 into media-based advertising, including paid advertising like Google Ads. This is a near 40% increase since 2011.

To every advertiser’s misfortune, this massive increase in advertising spend comes bearing gifts:

1. An increasingly saturated market
2. A more competitive digital marketing landscape  

These two misfortunes work together to make your advertising campaigns more difficult, so shouldn’t you have every medium, campaign, and individual working together as well? That’s where cost-effective marketing services can make a difference.

What You Won’t Find Elsewhere

Whether you’re an enterprise level business, or a brick and mortar store, perhaps one of the many local businesses we serve, we’ve got a collection of definitive conclusions as to why full-service is almost always the right solution for your business. Here are just a few, backed by our marketing expertise.

1. No One’s Playing Favorites

“If the only tool that you have is a hammer, the solution to every problem is banging on a nail.”
–  Mike Teasdale, Planning Director of Harvest

There’s one thing every agency has in common: they want to retain your business. With this objective in mind, a full-service agency has the capacity to be impartial towards services and partisan toward results. They’re interested in providing you with creative solution that works so they can retain you as a client, often through marketing research to identify the best path forward.

Because full-service agencies aren’t pigeonholed in just SEO or just public relations they can diagnose the best solution(s) to cure your advertising or marketing ills, enhancing on your brand identity.

2. Go on a Date Before You Agree to a Relationship

With a full-service agency, you can utilize one service or all of them. You have the option to try digital marketing services before deciding if you want social media management, or web development before you pull the trigger on media buying. Our focus on continuous improvement ensures that every service evolves with industry trends.

Specialty services put a lot of bearing on their sales or growth teams to structure their contracts over the course of 6 months or a year. The commitment you might already be unsure of comes with even bigger dollar signs.

Here, our clients are billed month to month and pay for marketing services on a needs basis. This is the kind of autonomy that keeps our clients coming back for second and third dates. They stay with us because they want to, not because we’ve forced them, and they see results like increased organic traffic and lead generation.

3. Marketing Monogamy

This is where your personal preference will determine which solution is right for you. With every agency, every 3rd party product or service, there also comes a new relationship. Deciding what services you need and how you’d like to manage them will determine which model will be right for you.

FULL-SERVICE ad agency MODEL

SPECIALTY OPTION

The full-service model is meant to reduce and optimize:

•Cost: Full-service agencies almost always have flexible pricing models that principle their costs around “The more you bundle, the more you save.” making them cost-effective marketing services.

•Talk Time: With a full-service agency you are empowered to be as involved as much or as little as you’d like. Because you’re managing one relationship as opposed to several, you have more time to devote to your full-service agency or other projects on your to-do list.

•Reporting: At Epic Marketing, we consolidate everything you need to know about all your key services into one report. After approximately 12 years (144 months of reporting) we’ve left behind the vanity metrics and focus on reporting KPIs that matter to your business, driving brand building.

As a Full-Service Advertising Agency in Utah, We Handle:

• Research/Analysis (Market Research) 
• Strategy (Strategic Marketing Services)
• Media Placement/Buying
• Creative (creative solutions)
• TV
• Video Production & Editing
• Print
• Mailers
• Billboards
• Radio
• Online Marketing (Online marketing efforts)
• Direct Mail
• Pay Per Click
• Search Engine Optimization
• Graphic Design
• Website Development
• Social Media
• Campaign Development
• Campaign Tracking Tools
• Brand Identity
• Production/Printing
• Public Relations
• Script Writing
• Copywriting
• Content Marketing

We can effectively run any or all of these categories. We do so with our complete in-house team. This allows for consistent messaging, plus it’s less stressful, much easier and economical for business owners. Our Influence marking strategies can even amplify your reach.

We help our clients plan, build, and maintain every aspect of their marketing efforts and we can handle all of your advertising needs. We stand out from other ad agencies by functioning as an extension of our client’s staff, acting as their marketing arm at a fraction of the cost of a full-time marketing specialist or hiring a team of other agencies. With our industry knowledge, we deliver results that align with your vision.

See how we can help you reach your advertising and marketing goals.

Throughout our years of experience working with hundreds of businesses in a variety of different of industries, we’ve found that some practices or businesses have a harder time attracting new customers or patients than others. As we’re worked with different clients, we’ve seen a trend in some key factors that can hurt advertising results. But unfortunately, these factors are often overlooked. Being aware of these factors can help you better plan for and gauge your marketing success:

1. Competition: While competition can be good in many ways, it can also have a negative effect on your advertising if competition is high for you industry in certain areas or mediums. Even if your ads are professionally crafted with a great message, they may not get as much of a response if your competitor’s ads are run in the same place (newspaper, TV, etc) on the same day.

2. Reputation: Sometimes a great ad can’t always fix a bad reputation. Reputation management and repair isn’t easy to do, but the fact is that until it is repaired, your ads will produce far less results compared to a business with an established and credible reputation. If a negative reputation is detracting from the success of your ads, it’s worthwhile to look into making efforts to repair it over time.

3. Geographic Differences: Cities, counties and states across the country can have widely different population densities and demographics. It’s not surprising to note that business or practices that have a higher density of potential customers or patients within a 60-mile radius of the location generally see better ROI with their advertisements. It’s important that businesses don’t follow a “one size fits all” approach for geographic targeting, as it can vary greatly depending on the population density around your location.

4. Economy: A more unpredictable factor, the state of the economy can have a big impact on the success of your advertising results. Unfortunately, consumer confidence in the economy can shift even on a weekly basis. Consumers are constantly prioritizing their spending habits, wants, and needs, and that can affect how responsive they are to your advertisements. This, of course, varies by industry as well. Businesses—such as medical practices—that offer more of a “need” than a want typically seem to see less of an effect with economic shifts.

5. Seasonality: Each calendar year brings with it a variety of holidays and special events that can also vary with geographic regions. It’s important to be aware of how seasons and holidays affect your advertising so you can get the most return on your marketing dollars. For example, some businesses or industries based on the nature of their product or service should advertise heavily over holidays. Others, however, should go light on marketing efforts over holidays like Christmas and summer vacation because the response is not as successful.

6. Acts of God: While it may seem a little unconventional, extreme weather and natural disasters can have a huge impact on any sort of advertising that runs on the same day. Extreme snowstorms, floods, earthquakes, tornado warnings, or really anything that heavily disrupts the day-to-day flow of your local area can hurt your advertising results. While you can’t necessarily prevent these things from happening, recognizing that they were likely the cause of a somewhat unsuccessful ad will make your future marketing efforts a lot better off.

Running a business or practice of your own can be difficult as you’re expected to wear several different hats to get the job done—this includes marketing and advertising. It’s something that our clients who are business owners keep a very close eye on because it’s expensive, and as such, they have a lot riding on that investment every month. Poor marketing decisions—particularly ignoring these six factors above—can result in wasted money that could eventually cost you your business.

Epic Marketing works with businesses and practices across the country to help them see a greater return on their marketing and advertising dollars. If your marketing could use some improvement, contact us today to speak with one of our experienced account executives and find out how we can take your business to the next level.