Are You Ready to Get Into Marketing Automation?

As a marketer or in some cases, the one-man team of your business, your life is bound to be hectic. Answering gazillions of emails, having to tend to customers, and toying on some ideas to generate leads do not cover even a quarter of the things that you need to do in the name of growing your business. Thank God we are already living in the digital age and thus, there are tools and technology that should aid us by making some of these tasks simpler. But then, because everybody knows about these tools already, expectations are heightened anew, especially that of customers who feel that their concerns need to be addressed the millisecond they communicate it to a customer service professional.

Such is the double-edged sword that marketing automation entails. The tools and technology mentioned above are part of marketing automation. For example, a website visitor setting up an account in your website gets to use your website and take advantage of your products of services immediately after successfully setting up that account. No need to visit your office! No need to email (or fax if you are stuck in the 1990s) membership forms! Everything is automatic!

But as mentioned earlier, the extensive use of marketing automation technology has also spoiled all of us in the worst way possible. We get paranoid if we don’t receive a confirmation email of the purchase we finished 10 seconds ago. Were we duped? Did we visit a scam online shopping site? If we keep on hitting the unsubscribe button to an email, we don’t want to receive anymore, why do we still keep on receiving emails from the same company? Has our email been hacked?

As a marketer, you need expert degree knowledge of marketing automation. After all, these tools are available to compliment your current marketing efforts.

The pros of marketing automation

With marketing automation, we save time. tedious tasks we try to avoid as marketers get done efficiently. This is especially true in gathering information on leads. Moreover, with marketing automation, we get to take care of those leads en masse while still making each and every lead feel as though we’ve personalized our customer care efforts.

Marketing automation makes it possible to improve your marketing. You can create several processes that allow you to pinpoint and develop your leads. The software has the capability to enable you to visualize the process sequence and adapt it where necessary to make it more efficient.

(Via: https://www.techfunnel.com/martech/marketing-automation-benefits/)

The forms of marketing automation

Marketing automation comes in many forms. There’s the most common form, email marketing automation which removes routine tasks such as welcoming new customers (hi, thank you for creating an account on our website), purchase confirmation (you’ve bought five flower arrangements charged to your credit card), and re-engagement (hey, we missed you on our website for months, come visit us!) away from your to-do list as a marketer. There’s also social media marketing automation, which marketers can use in a variety of tasks, from scheduling the release of content in their company’s social media assets to giving automatic responses to users engaging with their chatbot after office hours. There’s also advertising automation, which tails (or for lack of a better term, stalks) web users into reminding them of things they have searched on websites by releasing ads of those things in the new websites the stalked user has visited. There’s also mobile marketing automation where customers receive SMS blasts in public places to “inform” them of sales and promotions near them. Finally, there’s CRM automation that is heaven-sent for marketers as if practically does what marketers are supposed to do manually – from scoring leads to sending information of these prospects to the sales team.

A good CRM program will aggregate customer data in one convenient space (often referred to as the dashboard). Marketing team members can quickly access relevant customer data such as email addresses, phone numbers, location and other demographics. They can also see where a specific lead is currently at in the sales funnel, which allows the marketer to send out relevant marketing materials to guide that lead to conversion.

(Via: https://sharpspring.com/blog/types-of-marketing-automation/)

Should small businesses get into marketing automation?

Alas, the question for SME owners. Marketing automation that is done right unfortunately doesn’t come cheap. If you have the budget, go ahead. If you don’t, it is best you save up for it. Do not dabble into those free versions of marketing automation software that might do more harm than good for your business.

A marketing automation software is not only going to house your contacts in an organized fashion, but will also let you move them through the sales pipeline, from lead to customer. With a software like this, the process can be automated– the contact can be moving from stage to stage based on their clicking and opening behavior, you only need to be alerted when they have become a “hot” lead or opportunity so that you can follow up with them.

(Via: https://www.hatchbuck.com/blog/is-marketing-automation-right-for-my-small-business/)

 

For more information on how you can make marketing automation work for you, get in touch with us.

The following article Are You Ready to Get Into Marketing Automation? was initially published on ASGM

from All Systems Go Marketing – Feed https://www.allsystemsgomarketing.com/digital-marketing/are-you-ready-to-get-into-marketing-automation

Local SEO Provider Posts Blog on How Businesses Can Take Their SEO Game Plan to The Next Level

All Systems Go Marketing, a La Mesa, CA-based HVAC digital marketing services provider, has just posted a blog on their website regarding how heating and air service providers can take their SEO game plan to the next level. They know the right way to do this because they have been helping to make HVAC companies the marketing leader in their areas for several years now. They use SEO methods that adapt to the times and when combined with extensive social marketing research it enables them to design impactful digital marketing plans for their HVAC customers.

The company’s new blog post commenced by saying that every business knows exactly how important SEO is today because of the amount of time that people spend in front of their computers and looking at their smartphones and other gadgets. That’s why businesses have to find ways to use SEO to their advantage so they show up in internet searches before other HVAC customers in their area. All Systems Go Marketing’s goal is to help their heating and air customers show up on the first page of search providers such as Google and even better yet help them show up number one. The company can do this because they have over 20 years of experience in the field designing campaigns from bottom up.

It went on to say that few fields in the computer world change as often as search engine optimization. The blog also mentioned that at one point in time SEO was totally in the hands of content marketers but that has changed drastically. Now successful SEO game plans often fall under the site developer’s duties and the more tech-savvy individuals that they have working for them. This is something that started to come into play in 2017 when such things as machine learning that uses algorithms became more complex. That has resulted in SEO creation becoming more technical in nature than ever before. This means businesses that do not have dedicated digital tech specialists working for them will have trouble coming up with successful SEO campaigns. The article stated that’s where expertise like All Systems Go Marketing provides can prove invaluable for those businesses that want to improve their online search ranking.”

In the newly posted article, it went on to say that at All Systems Go Marketing they start helping formulate an SEO game plan for their clients by doing three steps. The first is designing websites that use a competent user interface such as Google’s reputable ‘Mobile-geddon’. The blog stated that they also do comprehensive analytics of the websites that they create to assess what is working and what needs to be changed. It’s also important for them to fine-tune a client’s social media presence because it does not do any good to have such things as Facebook, Snapchat, and Twitter if people cannot easily find a business on them.

The blog also talked about the reality that very few businesses have the ability to survive if they do not have an impactful SEO strategy. That’s why it’s important for digital marketing companies such as them to also be connected with such well-known SEO services as Big Surf Digital. The importance of this in helping their HVAC clients stay visible and improve their search rankings cannot be emphasized enough. It says this is especially true now that the use of mobile devices has taken over online product and service searching and even the completion of the purchasing process. The newly posted article also talked about the need for website content to be relevant and of high quality but added even this is not good enough unless backed up by an effective SEO game plan. As the blog post wrapped up it talked about how if a company takes their SEO seriously, this can be a major step toward growth and expansion. For those who wish to see this All Systems Go Marketing blog article in its entirety, they can refer to https://www.allsystemsgomarketing.com/hvac-seo/take-your-seo-game-plan-to-the-next-level.

from Press Releases at https://www.pressadvantage.com/story/40184-local-seo-provider-posts-blog-on-how-businesses-can-take-their-seo-game-plan-to-the-next-level

Facebook Ads: A Refresher

We have talked a lot about Facebook and the varied ways the platform has been used by digital marketers over time that it may take you a lifetime if you are trying to consume all the content produced that are related to these topics. Marketing on Facebook is perhaps one of the most discussed and written topics in the field of online (and specifically social media) marketing that everything about it has been analyzed and nitpicked that you might even consider it to be overkill already.

The one thing most people tend to overlook is to analyze Facebook marketing in the current business climate. Yes, we all know that Facebook Ads are the bomb. Yes, we all know that businesses spend a lot on them. But the common theme in discussing Facebook marketing is that a lot of people in the discussion still sound like they are talking in 2016. Reality check: So many things have happened since the platform’s domination.

While it is true that thousands of new users join Facebook every day, millions have also deleted their account due to data privacy and security concerns. The platform’s reputation has taken a hit since it cannot seem to shake off its reputation as a fake news mongering network. Its founder Mark Zuckerberg has been a regular guest to various senate inquiries and congress hearings. Facebook has allegedly been used by the Russians in their involvement in the 2016 elections. Amidst the pandemic this year, several big brands have launched a boycott against the platform, withdrawing millions of their ad budgets unless Facebook adapts more stringent measures on information verification. Yes, we may have to re-discuss the topic of Facebook marketing’s effectiveness in light of all of these.

So, do Facebook Ads still work?

We may have already enumerated some changes that happened through the years with Facebook, but perhaps the single-most-important event that happened to the platform that ultimately affected users is its shift from organic to paid posts. Facebook’s algorithm made it more difficult for businesses to reach their entire audience from its organic posts alone, as the platform decided to favor posts from businesses only if they are paid. In fact, a report claimed that only 6.4% of a page’s total followers will see an organic post of a business page, which leaves serious marketers who want to maximize the platform to go for paid Facebook ads.  As to the effectiveness of Facebook ads, consumers have become okay with it, as long as it doesn’t interrupt their usual experience of seeing updates from their friends, family, and social contacts. This must be better compared to YouTube users who constantly complain about how the ads disrupt their experience of watching videos.

Consumers have become more informed and savvy about the way they use the Facebook platform. And consumers have grown tired of the advertising that interrupts their Facebook experience.

(Via: https://mrgavinbell.com/facebook-ads-in-2020/)

The one ingredient of a successful Facebook Ad

If you are invested in Facebook marketing, you need to realize one thing: the platform is most successful if used as a tool to increase brand awareness. Facebook is now primarily a platform to roll out ads, not really anything else. So, while it is true that there is also engagement and relationship building between brands and customers, the most effective area of Facebook is its ability to let everyone using it knows about the existence of your business. Know that, set your expectations, and work around that fact for an effective strategy.

As businesses shift to online, dig into the holiday season and adapt to the new normals of the coronavirus pandemic, it becomes even more important to find ways to make your brand stand out. If you’ve started establishing an online presence throughout COVID-19, you’ll also want to think about how to create strong brand awareness both online and offline.

(Via: https://www.facebook.com/business/news/five-tips-to-increase-brand-awareness/#)

Know your options and limitations

Another factor you have to master to be effective with advertising on Facebook is the various ad formats and their limitations. Knowing how big and how many characters you can put in an ad would allow you to maximize the platform, lest you run the risk of ads that get chopped because you used a photo that’s too big or text that has been cut because you passed the character limit.

If you don’t keep all the above points in mind, then you are vulnerable to having your ad cropped at the wrong places. Not only would it make you look like a brand that has no clue what it is doing, but you also will not be able to get any sales if your ad looks shoddy.

(Via: https://surveysparrow.com/blog/facebook-ad-size-specification-guide/)

 

Talk to us if you want to reconsider some Facebook ad tactics you want to be implemented on your business’ marketing efforts.

The blog article Facebook Ads: A Refresher was initially seen on All Systems Go Marketing Blog

from All Systems Go Marketing – Feed https://www.allsystemsgomarketing.com/uncategorized/facebook-ads-a-refresher

All Systems Go Marketing Offers Insight Into Other Content Marketing Platforms

La Mesa, CA-based All Systems Go Marketing recently published a new blog post titled ‘More Platforms For Your Consideration.’ The blog post talks about some of the most effective social media platforms when it comes to content marketing and offers tips that might help make one’s content marketing efforts more effective. Brands that make use of social media to market themselves have seen huge spikes in their user base. Some platforms, however, have become oversaturated with businesses — and others are very underutilized by brands looking to reach out to customers.

The internet is one of the most powerful marketing tools available to any business, be it big or small. With some creativity and a good marketing strategy, the internet can become one of the best ways to reach out to potential customers and win their patronage.

Review sites are one platform that businesses sometimes underestimate when attempting to market themselves online. “Online reviews have become omnipresent,” the blog post says. “They’re no longer just on review sites like Yelp, Tripadvisor or G2 Crowd. They’re available and visible on Google search, or even social media networks like Facebook. If you’re new to the online business world, online reviews may seem daunting and difficult to control. You may be tempted to brush them off as something that’s ‘nice to have’ or ‘just there.’ The bad news is that customers are relying heavily on them to make buying decisions. Believe it or not, 90% of American consumers are reported to read reviews before making a purchase.”

They are consistently great for businesses looking to rise to the top of relevant search results, especially local business searches. Case studies, technical papers and other similar pieces of content can be shared on these sites, especially if they are B2 review sites. Visitors to these sites are usually prospects, and businesses can take advantage of this to establish themselves as authorities in a field and generate leads.

Another potentially useful marketing platform which many businesses often fail to utilize correctly is the company intranet. The blog post states, “Your workforce is a medium that’s right under your use, willing and ready to be of service to the success of your business (for the most part). That is why company intranets are channels that you should use to share and repurpose content such as articles and blog posts that have previously been published in your other social media and online assets. You can turn your employees into effective influencers and evangelists of your brand. They can even be more excited to spread the word if they or someone they know in the organization is mentioned in the content.”

Podcasts are another heavily underutilized platform, according to the blog article. Despite being incredibly popular, they have not yet begun to be widely used for digital marketing or content sharing. This may be due to the fact that not a lot of podcast channels have a lot of credibility or depth despite having a large following, which means listeners are not usually inclined to take anything said in a podcast very seriously. Businesses can, however, take advantage of the fact that podcast listeners tend to be highly engaged and loyal to ensure that they become engaging and loyal customers.

All Systems Go’s blog post also recommends content curation, another effective but underutilized method of content marketing. There is a great deal of pressure to ensure that any articles or other content a business puts out is of the highest quality. This all but guarantees that all content featured is valuable and also creates an opportunity to form relationships influencers and leaders whose involvement can further grow the brand.

There are multiple other ways in which one can grow their brand, and one can read all about them in the blog post. All Systems Go is an Local SEO and online marketing agency that focuses primarily on helping small-to-medium sized businesses grow. The company’s goal is to provide accountable, high ROI digital marketing services that help businesses get clients and deals.

“Our techniques are based upon 20 years of digital marketing experience,” the agency says. “We have seen it all during our multi-decade relationship with Google, and we focus on a fundamentally sound, results oriented and — most importantly — safe approach to Digital Marketing.”

Find out more about All Systems Go through their website. Clients may reach out to the agency’s representatives for further details as well.

from Press Releases at https://www.pressadvantage.com/story/39560-all-systems-go-marketing-offers-insight-into-other-content-marketing-platforms

Ready to Market in Real Time?

You have tried your hand in social media marketing, above the line marketing, below the line marketing, account-based marketing, partnerships and collaborations, and now you’re asking if you’ve exhausted all methods or if you’ve only scratched the surface. Truth be told, the field of digital marketing alone is so diverse that there are many ways of adapting so many strategies into your own campaigns. Of course, you have to remember that trying to be a Jack (or Jill) of implementing all these marketing strategies may end you up as a master of none. With that, depending on your workforce bandwidth and budget, be more discerning of which strategy or tactic you should employ for your business.

Having said that, here is another marketing strategy to consider – real-time marketing. Simply put, it is marketing that involves rolling out marketing tactics in real, or near real-time in reaction to current events or happenings in your geographical area or field of business. So, instead of executing a marketing plan that you or your team has worked on for months, your company reacts to something that has happened in your market recently, whether it’s in politics, arts, culture, or a local human-interest story by making it an integral component of your marketing efforts. Of course, there is still planning involved in real-time marketing, although the timelines set for this is much quicker. This means teams (or whoever) executing real-time marketing has to act with agility and a sense of urgency. If not, the “moment” of the event or phenomenon you (or your business is) are reacting to may already have passed, thus making your marketing move stale.

Getting real-time marketing information of your website visitors so that you will know what exact service or product you can highlight to him or her also counts as real-time marketing. That said, these efforts require a lot of resources to profile your visitors ASAP and creative and quick-witted minds that know how to turn recent events into marketing gold fast before your competition does. So, the question is, does your company have these resources ready?

The key is knowing your visitor

A key ingredient of a successful real-time marketing effort is having sufficient knowledge about your visitors. If you know their backgrounds, why they visited your site, what it exactly they are looking for, and how they are looking for it, then you have the ways of providing them with relevant marketing information that will further entice them into action, may it be to sign up for an account with your shopping site or immediately purchase your offerings.

First-party, real-time data is what sets RTM apart from older personalization marketing models. This comes from numerous sources, like tracking a user’s cursor location, or the time they spend with certain products on your app. Or visitors might be greeted on a fashion retail site by a bot asking ‘What are you shopping for today?’ The same way a human clerk in a brick and mortar store would.

(Via: https://insights.revtrax.com/the-power-of-real-time-marketing)

Can your small business hop on the bandwagon as well?

As mentioned above, there may be a need for huge resources if you want to implement real-time marketing, particularly in software that tracks customer behavior and profiles them. Of course, the dividends pay off as these companies roll out more effective messaging that their followers gobble up and share, which further raises the profile of these companies and allows them to extend their audiences even further. What smaller companies can do to also even just savor a tiny portion of the benefits would be to engage with the posts of the larger companies to call the attention of the larger companies’ audience and possibly lure them to having a look at your business.

One minute an event could be trending and the next it’s already on a downward spiral. Your company will need to be on high alert if it wants to successfully execute real-time marketing. This can include setting up Google alerts or other news alert platforms on specific topics your business may want to cover. This will help your brand be the first informed on new situations and happenings.

(Via: https://martech.zone/real-time-marketing-in-the-covid-era/)

Don’t get carried away!

Of course, since real-time marketing involves immediate reactions, you might fall into the tendency of responding to information right away without giving substantial thought to your reaction. Reactionary is good, but in a lot of cases, being too quick diminishes the careful thought you put in your actions, so careless ensue, which in some cases, merits customer dissatisfaction. Remember that while speedy is a desired characteristic of RTM, efficiency, which is reacting properly in a set timeframe) is better.

He cited the example of a customer complaining about something on social media. Things could fester if you take too long to respond. However, a quick response that isn’t thoughtful could “stoke the flame,” he said. “Finding the balance that allows a thoughtful and quick response could squash the issue while strengthening brand perception,” he said.

(Via: https://www.cmswire.com/digital-marketing/6-challenges-with-real-time-marketing/)

If you want to grab more customers for your company, check out this page.

The blog post Ready to Market in Real Time? is republished from ASGM Blog

from All Systems Go Marketing – Feed https://www.allsystemsgomarketing.com/social-media/ready-to-market-in-real-time

Local SEO Expert Explains Basics Of Search Engine Optimization

All Systems Go Marketing, based in La Mesa, California, is taking the initiative to educate their clients and community on the basics of search engine optimization. The company has published a new blog post on their website titled ‘Back to Basics With SEO’s Ingredients’.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an aspect of online marketing that all businesses should know how to use to their benefit. To quote the post, “After all, if your digital assets do not perform well on SEO and cannot be seen on the first page of search engine results, then your business will most likely not succeed. On the other hand, if your business comes out on top of search engine results, web users would most likely trust and engage with your business.” The important fact to know is that SEO is not particularly difficult to implement. The post goes on to explain that, “What’s great is that there are a wide array of tools that can help your business at getting better in SEO, and in turn, make your venture grow.” For example, Google’s Search Console, SEMrush, FatRank and Keywords Everywhere are tools designed to improve performance in the factors that shape SEO.

The post takes a look at what these factors are. One point is to research what keywords work. The algorithms of Google and other search engines are responsible for ranking web pages based on a number of factors, one of which are keywords. The post explains that, “Of course, the most popular keywords are already ‘owned’ by the world’s most famous and biggest businesses, for the most part, because their brands are already keywords that web searchers actually use when they look for them on the internet.”

Thus, if one’s company is a small business that is just starting with local SEO, it is advisable to not assume that the company’s brand is being searched for by web users on a large scale. The post advises one to try using, “keywords that are at least relevant to your business. Those words that rank higher when you run them through tools like FatRank will obviously benefit your business if you include them in your pages’ content.” This is why it is crucial to research which keywords related to the business are most likely to be searched on Google.

The post also asserts that, “Creating a DSA campaign is a cinch.” Technically, one may add DSAs to a search campaign that is set to all features, but All Systems Go recommends creating standalone DSA campaigns. All one needs to do is set up dynamic ad targets, which are based on the site content. This is further explained in the post, which states that, “AdWords will use this data to identify a list of product categories. If a site is well-indexed, there are typically plenty of categories to choose from.” This will allow a company to create their own brand based on a URL, page title or page content.

The post advises the reader to, “Provide valuable content that users can’t see anywhere else.” A business becomes more valuable if one can provide not just goods and services, but content related to them. Content may be in the form of product descriptions, written articles, blog posts, videos or photographs. This wide variety of possibilities means that one cannot have the excuse of running out of content. Content is key because it is what search engines examine in order to assign a ranking. If one’s web pages provide good content, search engines will most likely rank the site high when a user looks for something that is related to the business in question. To quote the post, “That’s already one huge foot in the door of a potential customer.”

All Systems Go Marketing also points out that it is important to, “Build authority and relationships with links,” which is explained in detail in the blog post. The post also goes on to elaborate on how, “Rich Snippet Search Results are now a thing,” which, though relatively new, can be used by small businesses to great advantage. For example, if one searches for a business, Google snippets will show information about the business, including details such as the address and operating hours.

To learn more about the basics of SEO or the services offered by the company, one may visit the company website. One may also call or email the team for further inquiries.

from Press Releases at https://www.pressadvantage.com/story/39559-local-seo-expert-explains-basics-of-search-engine-optimization