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Take Mini-Marketing Lessons with Google’s New “Primer” APP

Posted on September 25, 2015 at 4:58 pm.

Take Mini-Marketing Lessons with Google’s New “Primer” App 2.0

In 2014, Google launched a new mobile application called Google Primer. This new app offers mini-marketing lessons aimed at helping users get up to speed on Google-specific subject including, search engine marketing, advertising, content marketing, and public relations. The short, interactive lessons are aimed specifically at startups and their busy schedules. According to the app’s website, Primer will teach you valuable marketing skills in 5 minutes or less by offering jargon free lessons to make it easier for those who are new to marketing. The app currently offers lessons in different categories: content marketing, PR and media, and search advertising. Users will also be able to store their progress in their profile.

This app was useful before, but more-so now because Google just re-released it with new content and an updated interface. It is a great place to learn some basics so that you can make more educated decisions regarding your marketing. Whether you are planning on getting better at doing your own marketing or getting help from a professional marketing agency, Google Primer can’t hurt to take a look at!

The Benefits of a Professional Agency

The benefits of hiring a full-service marketing agency are numerous and will give your business access to experts in the many different layers of marketing. With Epic Marketing, you get more than just marketing expertise. With our cutting edge solutions, shared experiences, and access to innovative marketing technology, we can help your business thrive. The marketing field is constantly changing and marketers know how to master the new rules. We help you bridge the gap and provide a team of diverse people with the knowledge and experience. In addition, your company will benefit from an outside perspective. By utilizing a professional agency, you gain flexibility and a second set of eyes. Whether it’s strategizing, copywriting, or designing, you can rely on our skills to find the right marketing approach for your business.

Call Today for a Free Business Consultation

Interested in learning more? Contact us today at 801.657.4383 for a free consultation. Our marketing experts will help your business reach its full potential.

Internet Marketing Jargon: Decoded

Posted on July 16, 2014 at 6:13 pm.

Written by Nick White

You may hear us use some of the following terms about the rapidly growing world of Internet marketing. If “conversion rate” wasn’t your first spoken word, here’s a quick guide to understanding some Internet marketing jargon:

SEO: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (organic) search results. Local search results – an entirely different ballgame – are also important if your business has a physical address. Countless factors affect a site’s search engine rankings, such as site design, load time, over- or under-use of keywords, number external links – the list goes on and on.

Algorithm: PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)). Got it? Ok, neither do I. Google’s algorithm is highly complex – and that’s not even the tip of the iceberg. An algorithm is a mathematical equation that enables search engines to quickly rifle through over 60 trillion web pages and deliver us the best search results possible. As if this isn’t complicated enough, Google makes changes to its algorithm 500-600 times a year. You go, SEO’s.

Analytics: A web marketer’s bread-and-butter, analytics is used to measure, collect, and analyze website data for developing actionable insights that help us make informed marketing decisions. Basically, we get a “behind the scenes” look at who’s visiting your site, when, for how long, etc.

Conversion Rate: A metric to describe the percentage of those who take a desired action. Said desired action depends on one’s individual goals, which could be taking advantage of a free consultation, subscribing to a newsletter or blog, completing a survey or making a purchase. Basically, conversion is the process of turning website visitors into customers.

Content: Content is a piece of information that exists to be digested, engaged with, and shared. Content typically comes in the form of a blog, social media post, advertisement, photo, or website copy. “Content is king” is a (wildly overused) phrase you may hear, describing how good, relevant content is crucial for search engine rankings, conversion, and more.

Keyword: Keywords are single words, or strings of words – called “keyword phrases” – that are strategically selected and incorporated into web content to optimize a page for both search engines and humans. Keywords represent what a page is about and should be integrated through a page’s content in a way that is natural and subtle to avoid “keyword stuffing” – an SEO tactic that Google considers to be a big “no-no.”

Responsive Web Design: This is the practice of developing a website that adapts according to how someone is viewing it. A responsive site will provide an optimal viewing experience across a wide range of devices – laptop, tablet, smartphone, etc. This is crucial, because mobile site visits are quickly surpassing desktop and laptop numbers.

These are only a few of the many buzzwords in the ‘dictionary’ of Internet Marketing.

We want to hear from you! Tweet some jargon you may not understand to @epicmarketing and we’ll give you the 4-1-1.

One Website or Multiple?

Posted on July 13, 2012 at 9:48 pm.

Written by Epic Marketing

Is it better to have one large website or several targeted websites related to individual products or services you offer? Through our experience with clients across the nation in various industries, we have found that many businesses have multiple websites, but often are not maintained or optimized like they should be. As a general rule, it’s almost always more effective to have one authoritative website rather than multiple, small sites. Why? One website is far more productive for your budget and reaching optimal rankings while also creating brand consistency,

Additional websites are typically created as landing pages with keyword-relevant domain names. For example, a business may have a main domain for their brand name (companyname.com) but have other landing page sites for services they offer with a local keyword in the domain (city+serviceoffered.com). Keyword domain names used to be much more of a ranking factor than they are today. Even if your site has a keyword rich domain, your site won’t rank for those keywords unless it’s probably optimized and trusted by search engines. These landing page sites usually have thin content and a limited number of pages–two things search engines don’t like.

Having multiple sites is generally counterproductive for your SEO budget because instead of all of the effort going to helping your main site rank well, it’s divided amongst a variety of small sites that don’t have a lot of potential for ranking well in the first place.

Additionally, having multiple sites doesn’t help to improve your brand consistency, which is an important part of your overall marketing strategy. Multiple sites promote a disjointed brand image and can also detract from your brand credibility, especially if small sites lack design integrity and aren’t maintained.

In short, you will most likely get better results with one great website rather than multiple marginal sites, even if they do have keyword-relevant domains. In the long run, it will save you a lot of time, money, and effort while trying to help your business get the most visibility in search engines. If you have multiple websites but aren’t sure what steps to take next, contact us today to find out what our SEO team can do for you.

The Importance of a Market Analysis

Posted on April 18, 2017 at 9:58 pm.

Written by Nick White

A complete market analysis is a cornerstone of a successful marketing and advertising campaign. All too often companies neglect to perform a thorough market analysis and are left to the bleak alternative of guesswork. Market analysis is a strategic management strategy that provides an analytical approach to answering some of your companies most difficult questions:

Who are our customers?
How competitive is the current market landscape?
How risky is entering this market?
How efficient are our branding efforts?

Most business plans start on a hunch that a product or service could sell or be beneficial to someone. That may have been enough to launch your idea off the ground, but in order to keep your business plans thriving, it’s important you get accurate and concise answers to these questions and to perform a SWOT analysis.

What is market analysis?

A market analysis is a qualitative and quantitative evaluation of the external market and your internal resources. Thorough market analysis adequately assesses opportunity, value, risk, customer purchasing behavior, competition, and economic entry barriers and regulations.

3 Reasons Market Analysis is Important

This strategic management strategy does not tell you exactly how you should run your marketing campaign or position your company’s brand. However, it provides analytical insight that allows you to steer your company and brand around barriers or obstacles that could have impeded or completely halted your company’s progression. So, while there are many, let’s focus on the top 3 reasons market analysis is important.

1. Market Analysis Puts Your Customer First

Not long ago, Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen, shook up the marketing world when he asked, “What job are people hiring your product for?” This simple question opened a door for those selling commodities to differentiate themselves from their competition.

The principle at play in Professor Christensen’s idea can be summed up in just one sentence,

“People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole.” – Theodore Levitt

Once we discover that people are hiring our services or products we realize that our competitors are not always what we think. A morning bagel’s competition might be a fruit smoothie, or an ice cream sundae’s competition could be a pastry. These things are often competitors to the problem of morning hunger or late-night dessert, yet they are not always sold by the business you would generally consider your “competition.”

Market analysis allows you to optimize your service or product for the job your consumer is hiring it to do.

TAKE A LOOK AT HOW WE INITIATED A REBRAND THAT RESULTED IN 6.5X WEB CONVERSIONS.

2. Market Analysis Forces Companies to Look Inward

Starting your own company or managing one is often accompanied by a dose of egoism. It’s difficult to look at your product or service offering from a truly objective perspective because of how much you have invested. Market analysis forces companies to look inward and ask, “Why would consumers come to us?”

Critically acclaimed author Simon Sinek prompts business owners to think differently in regards to how they sell. He says, “People don’t buy what you do; people buy why you do it.”

He asks us to compare the following sales pitches:

“We make great computers. They’re beautifully designed, simple to use and user-friendly. Want to buy one?”

Versus:

“Everything we do, we believe in challenging the status quo. We believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use and user-friendly. We just happen to make great computers. Want to buy one?”

This principle is especially important when your product or service is tied to the consumer’s self-actualizing vision of themselves. This benchmarking principle is more apparent in the apparel business than any other. Take the members of the surf culture around the North Shore of Hawaii, for example. Do you think they care how breathable the fabric of their t-shirt is? Or the thread-count of their hoodie? No. Their predominant want is to identify with a brand that helps them feel like their best self.

Market analysis forces companies to consider how their product makes their consumer feel and to what degree that feeling is driving the purchase decision.

TAKE A LOOK AT HOW WE TURNED AN INTERNATIONAL LAW FIRM’S BRAND FROM COMMONPLACE TO CONTEMPORARY

3. Market Analysis Helps Determine Your Unique Sales Proposition

Though they are not always semantically agreed upon, there are five ways a company can differentiate their product or service in order to make it appealing to customers. Market analysis enables you to determine which of these methods of differentiation would be the most effective way to enter the market through strategic control.

Brand- Companies differentiate themselves by brand by standing for something or associating their brand with a cause.
Ex: TOMS’ slogan is, “One for One.” Their initiative to give shoes to the impoverished and shoeless is built heavily into their branding strategy. This branding strategy seeks to resonate with empathetic people who can turn a common purchase into one that helps others.
Product- Companies differentiate themselves by product by positioning themselves as the highest quality product on the market.
Ex: BMW’s slogan is, “The Ultimate Driving Machine.” Their branding and marketing goals set out to position themselves as the best car someone can own in the minds of their consumers.
Service- Companies with organizational structure differentiate themselves by service by offering a one-of-a-kind experience for their customer; this is typically done by showing exceptional customer service.
Ex: Nordstrom’s mission statement begins with, “To provide outstanding service every day one customer at a time.” Nordstrom’s has been accredited for having an extremely lenient return policy, swift response time to customer inquiry via email and even social media. Their brand is built around treating their customers with care and they are therefore retained.
Price- Companies differentiate themselves by price by positioning themselves as the most affordable or even the most expensive.
Ex: Wal-Mart’s slogan is, “Save money. Live better.” After Wal-Mart introduced their price matching program, they successfully branded themselves as the most affordable grocer by doing just that, literally being the most affordable.
Audience- Companies differentiate themselves by audience by branding their product or services to specifically aid or benefit a certain group or type of person.
Ex: Whole Foods’ brand is reflected in their motto, “Whole Foods, Whole People, Whole Planet.” Because their branding stands for healthy living, it often resonates with healthy people. Because of this people are often willing to pay more for the shopping experience.

Take a look at these two e-commerce Cheerio’s offers. Can you guess which one is from Wal- Mart and which is from Whole Foods?

Using market analysis to determine your entry point and your unique selling proposition is crucial for creating a sustainable business model.

Marketing analysis is the first step to making data-driven decisions in your business plan. Get in touch with our marketing team to see how we can assist you with finding your brand voice and your audience.

Marketing Psychology 101: How to Get Inside the Mind of Your Target Market

Some of Our Recent Work

What Makes a Good Ad?

Posted on February 16, 2017 at 10:12 pm.

Written by Nick White

What is it that makes a good ad? Is it the pictures/video? Is it what is written or said? Is it the creative elements that cause you to feel something after you have been exposed to it?

We believe that a good ad is one that is written and designed to emotionally connect with its target audience. Once connected, your ad’s rhetoric strongly persuades its consumer to want the product or service. The individual recognizes a need for it and feels a sense of urgency until the purchase is made.

Nonetheless, this is all easier said than done. When you’re competing for ad space in 2017 there’s little vacancy for mediocrity. Anything short of disruptive or highly targeted ends up falling short. Here are some ad related statistics that will acquaint you with the advertising industry of today–

-In 2015, digital ad blocking grew globally by 41%.

-Approximately 90% of TV viewers report, “always skipping” ads on DVR.

–Adobe reports that only 8% of people pay attention to online ads, 16% for radio ads and 14% for billboards. Ads in apps and games bottomed-out at 5%.

There are a wide range of ad styles and each are appropriate depending on the product or service that is being offered. With that in mind, here are some things that, if done correctly, will improve the quality and response to your next ad:

Compelling Hi-Res Visuals

After experimenting with the effectiveness of online imagery, Dan Zarrella of Hubspot, reported that, “[A] 37% increase in engagement [was] experienced when Facebook posts include[d] photographs.”

Visuals are one of the first things people look at when viewing an advertisement. In advertising, the old adage, “a picture is worth a thousand words” really fits. For example, you can probably think of some advertisements you’ve seen that are mainly just an image with little text. The ad visual should complement the ad headline, copy, and overall message.

Take a look at how we optimized images and responsiveness for a client website to increase web form conversions by 550%.

Effective Headline

Without question, digital advertisers are in the business of capturing attention. Though you may have put hours, weeks or even months into prepping the content that’s behind the click, your headline is what must compel them to do so.

In regards to the average Google searcher, Forbes reports, “it now takes people on average about eight or nine seconds to find the result they want.”

Moz also reports, “80% of readers never make it past the headline.”

We naturally search the internet with impulsiveness and impatience. When it comes to search engines, we’re anxious to get from A to B as fast as possible. We reserve our consciousness and focus for our destination and not the journey. So it would make sense that we ought to create headlines that cater to our naturally click-happy audience.

Because headlines are implicitly the first thing your viewer pays attention to, your headline should be attention-grabbing but should also encompass the overall message in a short sentence. Headlines can be thought-provoking, strictly informative, humorous, etc., but effective headlines have one thing in common: they all leave their reader wanting more.

Well-written Copy

If your headline and visuals have been effective enough to keep viewers reading, well-written copy will be the next aspect of your ad that will compel viewers to take action. If Moz’s report about 80% of users never making it past the headline is true, that means, if we read between the lines, 20% of users do make it past the headline.

So what now? Ad copy should be creative, concise and easy to read but also have compelling and relevant content. Avoid using jargon or excessive information that doesn’t contribute directly to the overall message of the advertisement.

Calls the Viewer to Action

Without a strong call to action, your advertisement probably won’t get the results you’re expecting it to. A call to action is defined as something in the ad that gives them an incentive to call or contact you now. Your ad’s call to action should be well thought out and defined. Make sure that your contact information is clearly visible and not surrounded by clutter. Though you may feel it’s important that your visitors become informed, have a positive branding experience with your company or visit a high number of pages, remember you ultimately created your ad so people can convert.

See how we helped a new york city client achieve 386 unique first-time callers in a single month.

Here are some key factors to consider when crafting your CTA-

– More than 90% of visitors who read your headline also read your CTA copy.

– Making CTAs look like buttons created a 45% boost in clicks for Create Debate.

– Emails with a single call-to-action increased clicks 371% and sales 1617%.

Overall, great advertisements connect to their audience and provide memorable, informative, and compelling content that get viewers respond to the call to action. Need help creating great ads? Contact Epic Marketing to find out how we can successfully boost your digital marketing campaign with great ads.