It’s now the month of love. While most of you are making floral delivery plans, securing dinner reservations, picking up chocolates, cards and more for your significant other, don’t forget to show your online marketing initiatives some love too.
Ensuring that your digital marketing campaigns are in tune with the season is best practice for optimal performance. Starting that wave early is one of the most optimal strategies we recommend to all our clients. Why wait until the last minute to start running your Valentine’s Day ads and romantically decorated landing pages? By that time you’re too late. Advertisers must understand that the early bird gets the worm. Shoppers are now making seasonal and special occasion purchase decisions much earlier than they used to. If you are not there when the consumer is ready to buy then that’s a missed opportunity for you, but a grand score for your competitors.
How to Romance Google’s Pandas & Penguins
We talk a lot about paid search campaigns, but you organic search campaigns need love too. I’m sure you’re tired of those pretty little pandas and penguins attempting to stifle your online success. So show them some love too. Dress up your keyword research for this time period and show those creatures that you are in tune with your audience’s search habits. Do you sell bean bag chairs? Why not give the pandas somewhere to cuddle for Valentine’s Day? Google’s Pandas and Penguins are looking for timely information, things that are happening right now, as they are always on the move. Updating your site frequently ensures that the spiders will come back to crawl more often. In the world of Google the spiders are the ones who bring your information back to the penguins and pandas so keep that in mind and cater to them too by making things easy for them to index.
For the Love of SEO, Practice Safe Link Building!
Link building is similar to dating. If you date the wrong person you get burned. However if you find the right partner, the relationship can last a lifetime. When looking for a link partner we advise partnering with bloggers, Web masters, vendors and the like that are in your vertical/industry to obtain quality backlinks to your Website. For example, if you sale flowers engage botanist or flower fanatics bloggers with a free flower delivery to their offices. This should score you a post on their blog about your product or services. If not, you should at least get a mention on their Facebook page. Targeting links from topical, relevant and authoritative sites and blogs where your information would be valuable to the audience is not only a link building best practice but a very safe way to practice link building.
The Heart of PPC
Just as your heart pumps blood throughout your body, your keywords and adgroups are the heart of your PPC campaigns. Your budget is the brains. You can have the highest budget known to man, but if your adgroups are not tightly configured around your keywords and products, it may be time to get out the defibrillator, as you will blow through your budget in a heartbeat and not have any sales or conversions to show for it. We recommend that each adgroup is relevant to a particular product and all keywords for that adgroup are just as relevant.
When running display ads ensure that you are finding sites that would be most relevant for your campaigns, allowing you to connect with your customers when and where it matters. You can do this in a number of different ways. One way of connecting with potential customers is content targeting or contextual targeting, which uses keywords to automatically match your ad to the content of a Webpage.
Another way of ensuring that you are reaching your target audience is to use placement targeting to choose ad placements, from entire Websites to ad positions on specific Webpages. Finding niche audiences with a combination of placement and contextual targeting is showing both your customers and your stakeholders some love.
The Bare Essentials of Social Media…and We mean Bare
Seems like everyone is on “Instagram straight flexin” (Hip-Hop has made its way to social media) and willing to bare it all for the world to see. So why not show off your products to the world? We all know that images are the next big social media to do, so why not be there with the cool kids and do ‘em.
Seriously, what better way to promote your brand then having a stream of images of your products and/or services to showcase to your audience? Just be careful what type of photos you use. Your followers will not want to see generic stock photos, boring store images or text-heavy images. So put your creative hat on and personalize your photos. For example, if you own a bakery shop take pictures of your employees having fun during a normal shift. Does Tammy always put more icing on the cakes than what’s needed? Did Marcus fall asleep on break and have his face painted with icing? Chances are, you’ll get people’s attention and they will likely share with their social networks. Make it funny and it’s almost a guarantee. Humorous media gets shared more than any other kind of media out there.
What type of promotions can you try? How about free stuff ? As humans we all love to win something that’s free. There’s nothing more enticing to a person then the possibility of scoring something for free from their favorite store. These types of promotions are fun, generate buzz, attract new customers and increases interactivity with your brand.
With all this love in the air don’t let your opportunity to convert all these love struck searchers into customers slip by. By romancing all your marketing campaign types year ’round, you can continue to see returns on your investments no matter what season it is.
We’re here year ’round as well. Ask about our Full Service Digital Marketing today.