Strategy

Unlike many agencies or media groups, prior to recommending specific initiatives, we complete a detailed review of your category and competition and provide a marketing and communication strategy for your business. By doing so, we are able to provide the best plans that have the highest likelihood of achieving an acceptable ROI on service fees plus your advertising investment.

Growing Your Business.
Maximizing Your Return On Investment.

Key Components of
Successful Digital Marketing

Website

Most business owners know they need a website to support their business. At a minimum, a website will tell visitors what type of business it is and provide basic contact information. What many businesses don’t realize is that when a website is set up correctly, it can be a powerful source for gaining new customers and significantly impact the growth of their business.

Social Media Platforms

Social media can feel like a necessary evil for businesses who want to focus on their customers, but spend a lot of time keeping up with their various social media accounts. The good news is, you don’t have to be on every social media platform. Business owners should consider where their prospective customers are and create a communication plan to gain their attention and engage with them.

Paid Online Advertising

Every time you surf the web, you run into ads – in your Google search results, on Google Maps, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more. Each ad you see is part of a larger online advertising strategy that reaches potential customers across multiple platforms and sends them a consistent clear and specific message – allowing businesses to reach the people who need their products or services with compelling messaging.

Content Marketing

Considering that content marketing has proven to generate over three times as many leads as traditional promotion marketing, costs less, and has six times the conversion rate, this marketing tool needs to be considered with other tactics.

Content marketing is the ongoing creation of content – web pages, blogs, webinars, etc. – that is created with the goal of persuading prospects to become prospects. To be successful with the development of content, marketers must identify their goal (for example brand awareness, trial, upsell, etc.) and how and when to best reach their audience (the discovery path). Then, a plan needs to be completed for what content needs to include, the format in which it needs to be shown in (video, blog post, etc.) and the digital platform where it needs to be placed.

Reputation Management

Family and friend referrals along with other word of mouth advertising are universally recognized as an extremely effective way to gain new customers. Capturing those testimonials online extends the reach of those influential endorsements. Considering that 93% of consumers will read online reviews before making a purchase, reputation management plays a critical role in the growth and health of your business.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Next time you search for something on Google, pay attention to how far you scroll before you click. Chances are you don’t go past the top few results. The first three organic search results get as much as 50 to 70% of clicks. The number one organic result gets the majority of attention and clicks, and between 20 to 40%.  Your website, social media pages, and business profiles all need to be optimized in order for Google to recognize them in relevant searches.

Email Marketing

Despite the popularity of social media, email is still the most valuable method for reaching and building relationships with your target audience. Email marketing allows you to create a  personalized message to current and prospective customers and measure almost every element of your campaign to include what recipients find most engaging. As a result, you can pinpoint specific messages and remain top-of-mind among important customers.

High Quality Visuals & Video

High-quality photography is critical to capturing the attention of your target audience, engaging with them, and building brand recall. Studies have shown that posts with visuals receive 94% more page visits and engagements than those without. Other research has noted that 60% of consumers who use online search prefer to contact a business whose listing includes an image. It’s been shown, as well, that people who hear information are only likely to remember 10% of that information 3 days later — compared to remembering 65% after being shown a relevant image. While a good visual can grab a person’s attention, a bad one can cause them to dismiss your content completely.

Video marketing is an important part of any digital marketing strategy as it allows for greater reach, engagement, conversions, and increased website traffic. For example, 92% of online users watch videos every week. Including a video on a landing page can increase conversions by 80 to 85%, and including a video in an email has been shown to increase click-through rates by 200–300%.

Strategy and Evaluation

Digital marketing strategies are never stagnant. With methodical analysis and review, they evolve over time to incorporate new insights, industry trends, and the changing needs of your business. There are elements of your marketing strategy that are monitored on a daily basis. Others require more time to optimize results and gain data that will provide insights and indicate next steps.

Working with Digital Smart Marketing

The Set Up

The primary goals of our initial meeting are to learn about your business and objectives, as well as to address any questions and concerns you may have. We’ll paint a picture for what it would look like to work together and what to expect from our digital marketing services.

Following our initial meeting, we will complete an in-depth study of the industry and your market, key players, and competition. We will then use these learnings to craft a marketing strategy specifically for your business.

Once our research is synthesized, we will meet with you to review marketing and communication strategies with specific action steps designed to meet your business objectives. This provides you the opportunity to assess whether our proposal can meet the needs for your business. Adjustments will be made as needed until we arrive at a plan that you are confident will be effective and worth your investment.

With the approved plan, our team outlines the logistical steps needed to set things in place. This includes a period of gathering necessary digital assets and information, which can require some time on your part to collect needed resources. We will provide detailed checklists and instructions and assist in any way we can to make this a smooth process.

Once assets and access to your digital platforms are in place, your involvement will include review and approval for digital initiatives agreed to in our strategy. Our team will build each element of the digital plan, along with placing the appropriate tracking mechanisms needed for key measurements, evaluation, and reporting.

Our Ongoing Commitment to Your Success

While certain digital campaign aspects are reviewed monthly, there are crucial elements that should be monitored daily. The most obvious are ad spend and performance. We want to ensure that digital marketing campaigns remain within your budget and that key performance metrics are in line with historical trends and expectations. Fluctuations can indicate an issue that needs to be addressed immediately, or an opportunity that requires quick action.

While the initial market research and strategies lay a strong foundation for key marketing initiatives, competition and industry-specific trends are always changing. Subsequently, it is important to continually research and evaluate changing market conditions to maximize the effectiveness of all digital marketing efforts. Between monitoring authoritative sources and staying current with what’s happening in your business, our goal is to maintain best practices and  new approaches to meet your goals.

When we initially set up a digital marketing campaign, we create a visual map of how various components work together. By revisiting this map each month, side by side with performance metrics, we are able to identify areas in which each campaign is successful and others that can be optimized to increase performance.

Every month, we gather data from all of our active initiatives and evaluate their performance. Our goal is for our marketing efforts to consistently exceed industry averages and optimize your return on investment. In addition, we identify new opportunities each month that we believe will strengthen our marketing and communication strategies. A written report is provided, and we meet you to review our findings and learn more about your business performance and how we can best serve you.