Digital Marketing

The coronavirus pandemic and quarantine measures to contain it have had a strong impact on different businesses and the world economy. It has already significantly changed entire industries and the behaviors of companies and consumers. In times like these, it’s important to adapt quickly and change your business strategies in line with the new reality hence the need for digital marketing.

Many traditional marketing efforts are no longer effective: customers have stopped listening, or companies are too scared to spend money in such an unstable environment. You need a different approach that lets your clients know that you understand what they are going through. Digital marketing is one of the best instruments that can help not just to keep the business afloat but grow it during the crisis.

Everything goes online

The first shift we see is the rapid growth of online markets. Social isolation is one of the key factors that increased the demand for various online services/products during the pandemic. As a result, there is an influx of new users in the online marketplace. Taking advantage of this trend, it makes sense to review ways of selling products and services for those selling offline and open up new opportunities for their business.

Though, it’s not enough for an offline business to simply move to the Internet: you need to deeply understand what you are doing and why. And an investment in digital marketing can help reach a wide target audience, despite difficult times.

Analyze the behavioral patterns

Another important thing that you should remember is that this crisis will not last forever, and the consumer’s demand will not disappear completely. The demand will change, as well as people’s behavior, priorities, and intentions.

Therefore, the most important thing for a business in a crisis is to constantly analyze the consumer sentiment and predict the behavior of a potential target audience. With digital marketing tools like Google Analytics or HubSpot, you can easily analyze data and identify new behavioral patterns of your customers. That will help you restructure the marketing system so that all this corresponds to the situation and new demand. Remember, it is better to have a plan for different scenarios or at least provide flexibility.

Keep up to date with your marketing metrics.

Now more than ever, it’s more important to keep a close eye on your digital marketing data. Please pay attention to what works and focus on it. If previously successful marketing is currently not producing results, then reduce or stop this type of marketing for a while.

This, of course, should be your daily philosophy. Study the data; explore trends; make changes as needed. Ideally, it would be best if you had daily monitoring and marketing analysis to make conclusions for small periods and, most importantly, to make the right business decisions.

SEO during COVID-19

Some companies might have decided to temporarily suspend their SEO campaigns during the pandemic due to the limited resources. But would it pay off? Is it the most efficient way of optimizing the marketing strategy? The answer is no.

SEO is a long-term game, and what you do today with your SEO campaign will affect the organic search traffic that hits your site even after two months. Yes, budgets are tight right now, but stopping your SEO campaign would be a critical mistake. Customers may no longer find you when they are googling your product or services, and your revenue will decrease. As a result, your business as a whole will suffer from lost leads and lost revenue. So take advantage while your competitors might have stopped their SEO campaigns to dominate the search results.

The main benefits of digital marketing

One of the best things about digital marketing is that it is cheap compared to traditional marketing. For instance, according to WebFX the average cost for digital marketing services for SMEs in 2020 may range from $2500 to $12,000 per month. Digital marketing is more customer-focused and proactive. You can quickly analyze data, tailor your strategy, and personalize content based on the current needs of customers. It is relatively easy to determine the return on investment in digital marketing. You just need to define a specific marketing goal for each campaign and select the appropriate metric to measure. Finally, digital marketing generates more leads and has higher conversion rates, which generates more revenue compared to traditional marketing. For instance, according to a study conducted by Ipos, companies, which use digital marketing, experience 2.8 times better revenue growth expectancy.

Conclusion

Due to the pandemic, the market structure is undergoing significant changes; it has affected almost all business areas, especially the B2C segment. Though it’s important to understand that any crisis is also about opportunities, you just need to see them. The main thing is to act quickly and be agile. While other businesses are giving up, think about what has changed, what tools you can use, and how you can play with them.

This is an adapt-or-die situation: businesses need to make a digital transformation and invest resources in digital marketing. In the online age, marketing requires market leaders to be proactive and use digital tools to monitor customer behavior, predict their needs, communicate with them, and build strong customer relationships.

At Phidev we provide comprehensive digital marketing services, so our clients rely on us. We can help you optimize your marketing strategies so you can minimize your losses from the crisis, increase the customer base, and continue growing your business. Feel free to contact usso that we can start working together to create effective solutions tailored to your business needs and transform your business during this crisis.

Many of us already heard about Pay-Per-Click or PPC, though some people still might not know what exactly that is and how it works. In simple words, PPC is an online marketing model that allows advertisers to place an ad online paying a commission only when the ad is clicked. Essentially, PPC is a way to buy visits to your site, rather than trying to earn visits organically.

Pay-Per-Click is a very popular digital marketing tool actively used by businesses from different industries, and the medical sector is not an exception. For instance, some Internet users might be actively searching for keywords related to healthcare professionals when they want to book an appointment or when they are looking for some medical services. And if you use PPC ads, you may miss a lot of prospective patients. While in contrast, if you use it, you will have more patients and higher sales.

Why should a healthcare professional use PPC? What are the benefits?

1. You only need to pay for an action – when an Internet user clicks on your ad. Taking into consideration that the average cost per click in Google Ads is between $1 and $2, PPC advertising may considerably reduce your overall marketing costs.

2. PPC is a very handy tool that allows you to track click-through rate, ad position, and the number of leads and measure your return on investment right away. That way you can plan your marketing expenses ahead, optimize costs per click and make ad-hoc adjustments to the digital marketing campaigns.

3.You can tailor your PPC ads to a targeted segment of customers, for example, patients in a certain age group or patients within a specific geographical area, or patients who are looking for specific services. Hence, you can ensure that you focus on the right patients’ niche driving relevant traffic to your medical practice’s website.

4. The better and more specific your digital ad is, the better your ad rank is. Google AdWords always rewards the good performance of the ads, their relevance, and high click rate by charging less fee per click. Therefore, it is very beneficial to create a highly curated ad, as it will help not only to lower costs but also to increase your brand’s online visibility and attract more targeted patients to your website.

5. PPC can significantly increase your profits. According to Google’s economic impact, for every $1 spent on Google ads, a business will get $8 in profit, which means that your ROI is 700%. Of course, to make profits from PPC ads you need to do deep research and select relevant keywords that will drive traffic to your ad, otherwise, you may even end up losing money.

How does the sales funnel work with PPC for healthcare professionals?

First, an Internet user (potential patient) searches for keywords. E.g. medical practice in El Paso, the best healthcare professional in Texas, high-quality medical services, etc. Then Search Engines (Google, Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, etc.) display a search results page with paid adverts placed at the top of the page (The most relevant ads will appear first). After that prospective patients usually click on the ad and/or check reviews about the doctor resulting in booking an appointment with the professional´s clinic. As you can see, tailored PPC ad noticeably fosters the sales process.

It’s also important to take into consideration that there are different Pay-Per-Click advertising strategies for doctors. These are the most popular ones:

Google AdWords for healthcare professionals Websites. This platform is one of the best digital marketing tools for businesses that allows placing PPC ads in Google search. It helps the medical practice to grow an online presence, increase visibility and build an online reputation.

Display advertising for healthcare professionals. Display Advertising includes all the ads that you see online. It’s a useful tool that allows you to get your message out to customers across different Internet platforms (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc.), engage with them, deliver relevance and impact your bottom line.

Bing Ads for hospitals. Bing Ads are search ads on the Microsoft Advertising PPC platform. It is similar to Google Ads with some different features and lower costs. Bing is a less popular search engine with lower traffic, however, there’re still a lot of untapped opportunities to increase the number of patients by using Bing Ads.

Yahoo Gemini Ads for healthcare professionals. Another inexpensive platform for PPC ads with an 11% share of mobile search traffics. Even though it has much less traffic than Google, Yahoo Gemini has some appealing features – it allows a wide scope of geotargeting not only based on geographical location, gender, or age but also based on the interests of the target audience.

So, don’t think what is better – Google Ads, Bing Ads, or Yahoo, instead use all of them to increase reach out to potential patients across different platforms.

It is very challenging to create and optimize Pay-Per-Click campaigns that will generate fast tangible results for your medical practice. And if you want to have a successful PPC campaign, you need to hire a digital marketing professional with strong expertise bringing you real value and return on investment.

The very first website in the world was created by Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist from the European organization for nuclear research (CERN). The author conceived the site as an open space where everyone can search for ideas and share them. This site became the basis for the development of the modern Internet. However, 30 years have passed since then, and during this time, the Internet has undergone significant changes.

Nowadays there are 4.13 billion Internet users and over 1.74 billion various business websites available on the Internet: grocery stores, boutique shops, beauty salons, eye clinics, insurance, pharmacy, coffee shop, bank, accountants, etc. Though, despite the online diversity and digitalization, some companies are still not aware of the importance of having a website for business and marketing purposes. And doctors are not an exception, surprisingly some of them still truly believe that there’s no need and value for them to have a website. Well, let’s find out if this is the case and why a doctor should have a website.

Brand Awareness

First of all, a website is the face of any business, it is what Internet users (potential buyers) see when they first visit your website searching for answers. In fact, it’s their first impression about you as a medical professional and your business, that can significantly increase your brand awareness. Hence, if there’s no website, there’s zero impression about you as a doctor.

Business Reputation

For patients, a website determines a doctor’s reputation, credibility, and professional expertise. Nowadays people are very hesitant. If a doctor doesn’t have an online presence yet, it is considered a very negative signal by its existing and potential patients. It can ruin a reputation putting the business at risk. People don’t trust word of mouth anymore, they search online, do due diligence and if they don’t see your Internet presence, they will find another medical professional who already has it.

Business Growth

Your business can only keep growing if you get more patients. And if a doctor has a website, it means more and more people will visit it and get to know about the doctor, its practice, expertise, and reputation. It’s a very powerful marketing instrument that generates more leads for your business increasing sales and driving business growth.

Everything is online now

Nowadays it is very easy to find a doctor on the Internet, you just need to search for the keywords on Google and it will automatically generate a list of search results for you. But for the customers to be able to find you, you need to be online, you need to have a website. On top of that, you need to have a good website: user-friendly, easy to navigate, and relevant content. Take into consideration that patients usually look for specific information: doctor’s practice, prices, contact information, locations, office hours, reviews, medical news, and online booking. Make sure you have it on your website and that way you’ll make your patients satisfied.

Improve Customer Service

Having a website will also help to increase operational efficiency and customer satisfaction. Do you know that 60% of the patients, that is on hold for more than a minute, usually hang up? Just imagine how many potential clients can a clinic lose just by making them wait on the phone to book an appointment. In comparison, a website is a virtual office that works 24/7. At any time, patients can visit it and get the information they need. They don’t need to wait until the clinic opens to get the answer that they want, with the website they can find everything they need there: book an appointment, find the description of services, prices, etc. This significantly increases the productivity of the staff and essentially improves customer service driving value and customer satisfaction.

Conclusion

A good website is a strong marketing and communications tool that you can use to build and maintain long-lasting engaging relationships with your customers and grow your business. If you already have a website, that’s great, but don’t stop working on it, constantly update it with relevant content, and work on SEO and google ranking. But if you don’t have one yet, you are probably missing out on many potential consumers.

It’s time to digitalize and transform your business. Consider hiring a professional agency that can create and maintain a high-quality website for you with tailored content and SEO strategy. That investment will definitely pay you off.

Why is Search Engine Optimization important for businesses? Well, Did you know that? 167 Billion Searches happen on Google a month. If you are not showing on the first google result for your products and services, you are missing in a vast untapped potential. Search Engines, such as Google, are the new yellow pages. It is where people go to find answers, including people looking for your products and services. 88% of people research before they buy a product or services. And what’s the first place where they research? Google! So, Do you really need SEO for your business website? Yes, you do! Because of this, we decided to create our SEO guide!

What is SEO? S.E.O. stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the work that goes into your website and some other online places to prove search engines, such as Google, that you are the best, more relevant, and most trusted answer. So let’s get started with some basic terms:

Key Terms

Keywords: Your SEO keywords are words and or phrases for which you want to rank in search engine result pages. For example, if you own a spa in El Paso, TX, then one of your keywords might be “spas in El Paso, TX”, or “hot stone massage in El Paso”. A keyword is a phrase someone looking for your product or service might type into Google when looking for a business like yours.

Keyword Competitiveness: It is a term to define how easy or hard it is to rank higher for a specific keyword. Think about it as the “difficulty” level to rank higher for a keyword. Products or services that are in high demand might, such as restaurants, will most likely face higher keyword competitiveness that other business that is not as crowed, such as a Mobile Car Wash.

Looking at the number of results for a specific keyword is an excellent way to get an idea for keyword competitiveness. As a general rule, the fewer results, the lower the competitiveness. We will dive more into this later.

Backlinks: A backlink is a link in someone else’s website pointing to your site. It is also essential that these other pages mention your keywords in their content, where they link to you.

SERP. SERP or “Search Engine Results Page” are the pages Google and or other search engines display the results for a user search.

The job of the Search Engine Optimizer is to convince Google that our website has the most relevant and trusted result for a specific keyword.

First, you need to concentrate on creating great valuable content on your website for your customers and your prospects, but you also need to make sure that search engines can understand your site. Search engines are robots, so you need to make sure your website is well structured using the right HTML syntax, has the right metadata, etc.

Modern website builders might do some of this work, but it is easy to get it wrong. If you know how to do this great! If not, you might need help from an SEO company, such as Phidev, or your marketing agency.

Another thing you need to pay attention to is how fast your website loads, not only from a customer perspective but also from a Google perspective. There is a great tool out there created by Google named PageSpeed Insights. Simple, visit that page and enter your web address. It will then give your website a grade depending on your website performance. PageSpeed Insights looks into many things that might not make sense to the average person. Still, a knowledgable web developer or SEO company will help you figure out the results and the advice on how to improve your website. It is hard to get a score of 90+, but if you are above 50, your site is doing a decent job.

What about Trust?

How does Google know if your website content is trustable? Here is a perfect analogy for that. If you get a call from a 5-year-old saying your neighbor is the next best basketball player in the world? Would you believe it? Now, if you had a call from Michael Jordan, LeBron James, and Larry Bird and told you the same thing? Would you believe them? Most likely, you would because they have something we call “authority.” They are known to be someone who has authority in their field. Search engines work the same way; it is not enough for you to say what you are great at what you do; other trustworthy sources need to say it too. That is where backlinks come it.

What can you do right now?

Search Engine Optimization should not be ignored! The biggest thing you can do is to put relevant content on your website. Answer the most common questions to your products/services on your website in a separate page. Create pages giving some tips on how to get the most of your products or services, or how to do it themselves. It might seem counter-intuitive to provide information for free, but your experience is another aspect for people to decide to work with you.

A very common question when you meet a new person is “What do you do for a living?”. It’s a question that is part of everyone’s basic repertoire in American networking. When I tell people that I work at a Digital Marketing agency, it is common for them to ask what that means. We all do digital marketing in some way or another, even if we don’t know it so I’ve decided to take some time and write this article to help clarify what Digital Marketing is.

The fancy definition of Digital Marketing:

Digital marketing encompasses all marketing efforts that use the internet therefore, an electronic device. This includes utilizing different marketing channels such as websites, social networks, search engines, online ads, emails, case studies, and event text messages to connect with existing and prospective customers.

Basically, if you are using a device with a screen or a device that utilizes the internet, to try to reach new customers or to keep existing ones, then you are doing digital marketing. Have you ever sent an email to try to convince someone to buy your product or service or to maintain a relationship with an existing customer? Well, then you are a digital marketer!

Digital Marketing Tactics and Examples:

A good digital marketer utilizes free and paid digital marketing at their disposal to accomplish and/or support their business goals. Here are some examples/areas of digital marketing starting with the most obvious.

Social Media:

We are all familiar with social networks such as Facebook. Within digital marketing, we use these networks to help people discover, promote and generate leads for your business. Here are the most common social networks:

Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
Snapchat
Pinterest

Email Marketing::

According to a study from Statista, the daily number of emails sent per day is close to 300 billion! It is safe to assume, that a big chunk of that number is for marketing. We at Phidev, send over 1,000,000 marketing emails a month. Email marketing consists in using emails to communicate with your audience to promote content, events, discounts, products, etc. Some examples of email marketing campaigns include:

Welcoming a new customer
Sending a prospect an email for a meeting/demo
Following emails sent to website visitors who downloaded something or requested more information
Sending holiday promotions for e-commerce websites or loyal subscribers
Sending emails to people who added something to your website cart but did not complete the order.
Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.):

This is the process of making changes to your website (and outside your website) to have it rank higher on search engines, such as Google, for certain search terms, increasing your website traffic and online exposure.

Content Marketing:

This area of digital marketing has a big overlap with Search Engine Optimization. Content marketing consists in creating content to attract new leads or customers. Activities of content marketing include:

Blog and (guest blog) posts
Infographics
Outline brochures or lookbooks
Ebooks and whitepapers

Online Ads / Pay-per-click (P.P.C.)

Pay-per-click is the process of bringing targeted/selected visitors to your website by paying publisher networks to display ads. Depending on the type of campaign you are running, most of the time you only pay when people click on your ad and you actually get a visitor. One of the most common PPC campaigns is using Google Ads (Phidev is a Google Partner) to search your business on top of the search result pages. Other publisher networks include:

Paid Facebook Ads
Promoted Tweets on Twitter
Sponsored Messages on Linked In
Sponsored Instagram Posts
Snapchat Geo-Filters
Spotify Ads

Affiliate Marketing

This is a type of marketing where networks will pay you to promote someone else’s products/services on your website or your social networks. Examples of this include:

Producing videos and hosting video ads through the YouTube Partner Program.
Posting affiliate links on your social network accounts.
Producing stories/posts about specific products/services

Online PR

This is pretty much the digital aspect of the offline counterpart. On online PR, you look for content creators, such as blogs, news websites, etc to talk about your company, product or service

Reporter outreach via social media
Engaging online reviews of your company
Engaging comments on your personal website or blog

Automation

This is somehow the glue that ties it all together. Digital Marketing Automation refers to the process of automating repetitive tasks and moving them from one area to another to save you time. This includes automating:

Email newsletters sequences (Send emails when the recipient takes certain actions or some time has elapsed)
Social media post scheduling
Contact list updating
Lead-nurturing workflows
Campaign tracking and reporting

What Are the Benefits of Digital Marketing?

The goal of digital marketing is to support and accomplish business goals. One of the main benefits of digital marketing is that you can measure results right away. You can measure your return on investment from day one. You can see if your money, time, and efforts are worth the effort or not.

At the same time, you can start gathering useful information that will help you make better decisions. Decisions based on data instead of intuition. Some of the data you can gather include keywords being used to find your website, demographics of your audience, such as age, gender, interests, etc.
You can use this information to prioritize your efforts. For example, if only 10% of your traffic comes from organic search, then you know you probably need to work some more on SEO to increase that number. If most of your leads come from your social media campaign, then you know you should also spend more time there.

With offline marketing methods, it is really hard to assign attribution. Was it the flyer or the poster at the coffee shop that brought that new customer in? Was it the billboard on the main highway or was it your radio ad that initiated that call? Digital marketing does not have that problem as every medium and conversion can be attributed to the channel that initiated it. You can identify your customers’ online patterns and behaviors so you can focus on attracting more people like them.

Another benefit is its cost per reach. If you are ready, you can easily start a worldwide campaign within a day. With traditional marketing methods, it would be really hard to do it. Also, the cost to start a digital marketing campaign is minimal compared to that one of the traditional marketing methods.

We hope that after reading this article, you have a clearer idea of what digital marketing is, what its advantages are, and if you are not already doing it, that it has convinced you to start growing your business with Digital Marketing! Please let us know if you have any questions on the comments below.

In this new era of technology, how businesses target their audiences has changed exponentially. The digital world has provided countless channels where you can expose your business to potential costumers. Regardless of what your business does or sells, exposure is everything. Actually, the more eyes you have on your business the more possibility of it expanding and succeeding on a larger scale. With this in mind, Facebook ads might just be the missing piece for your marketing plan.

How Social Media Changed Business Marketing

Nowadays, the majority of people can be reached through digital media. 81% of the US population to be exact. Let’s say that out of that 81%, the average person spends 1.72 hours online on the different social networks. Out of those 1.72 hours, 50 minutes are spent only on Facebook. Imagine having 50 minutes in which you can reach your customer and convince them to engage with your business. Whether this means buying your product/service or simply liking your Facebook page, every engagement counts.

Facebook began as a social networking site where you could find your friends and interact with them online. It opened a world of possibilities. Suddenly you could reach out to family members living far away, or reconnect with old high school friends with just the click of a button. In the same manner, the possibilities of using this platform to market to large audiences became a new prospect for businesses. Consequently, with time, Facebook evolved into one of the most reliable forms of social media and a highly trackable tool for marketers. Through Facebook ads, Facebook has been able to create partnerships with the big data brokers like Epsilon and Datalogix; allowing Facebook to offer a more commercial approach for marketers.

Benefits of Facebooks Ads

If you considering investing in Facebook Ads for your business here are some main benefits for you to consider

Targeting:

Facebook is first and foremost a socializing network with its main purpose being connectivity. This connectivity allows marketers to reach a wider audience. How? Through likes, comments, and shares. For example, you like a Facebook Ad that appeared on your timeline. By liking it, your friends can see that you liked it, and that might drive them to click the ad as well. The same applies to comments and shares of Facebook Ads. They all cause a ripple effect causing your Facebook ad to spread further than just your targeted audience.

However, it is really important to know who your audience is. Mostly because you need to know exactly for whom you’re writing the ad. You have to make them care enough about it to make them engage with it. The first step to define your target audience is to specify: who they are, where they are located, what they like, and how they behave online.

Measurability:

Marketing is highly defined by the numbers. It is crucial for marketers and business owners to be able to see the results of their marketing efforts. Technologic advances now allow for a much easier way of measurement when it comes to marketing online. Facebook Ads have an incredibly easy system that can test ads with great ease. Facebook Ads give you a very detailed review of how your ad is performing across your selected audience. You can easily see how many people liked, commented, or shared your ad. Additionally, you can see how many people it reached organically or through budget allocated to it. From all the data you gather, you can then assess how to better target your future ads.

Affordability:

Now, more than ever before, marketing to millions at a time is not only possible but incredibly affordable. The cost per Facebook ad depends on a variety of factors. Targeting range, quality of the ad, and even the time of the year your ad is published are factors that influence the cost of your ad. Digital marketing is no longer a foreign concept for marketers, in fact, it has become the norm. This means that is your business does not try to reach its audience online, then it is losing an essential percentage of their potential audience. With the low prices set for Facebook ad campaigns, there is really no logical reason why not to take advantage of all the benefits it provides your business.

Decide To Benefit From Experience

The benefits of using Facebook ads to market your business really are countless. However, at the end of the day it all comes down to you and what your main business goal is. Therefore, when you do decide that Facebook ads are the next step for the marketing efforts you have to be informed. It takes much more than simply sponsoring a post, it takes time and dedication, researching the analytics and understanding the metrics. For this particular reason, a professional agency can be instrumental in reaching the right people at the right time. Phidev can help you understand who your audience is and how to reach them on the different social networks. Contact us today and begin expanding your business.

Social media is everywhere! Do you remember a time when social media wasn’t part of your everyday life? We cannot! And it just keeps evolving. The latest way social media has integrated into our lives? Through our favorite brands and businesses. 97% of marketers are currently participating in social media. This means that the majority of brands and businesses have seen the benefits of social media and are taking action. What started as simply social networking sites, have evolved into an innovative digital marketing strategy for businesses.

In 2015 social networks earned an estimated $8.3 billion from advertising. This number is expected to keep increasing. Which means business either get with the times or get lost in a sea of competition. To get the most out of it, you need to know how to engage with your audience and give them what they want. Additionally, in order to accomplish this, you also need to understand why you are doing a social media campaign.

5 Benefits of Social Media For Businesses

Increased brand recognition and brand loyalty
If you are an already well-established brand, chances are you have a very steady ingress of consumers. The real feat is keeping those consumers engaged. Through social media, you can create a lasting relationship and develop real brand loyalty. Having this type of direct access of communication creates a more human perception of your brand/business. This in change gives your consumers more incentive to keep coming back to you for their purchasing decisions. It gives your business legitimacy and credibility.
Quantity and quality of content
Social media is great because it allows you to create the kind of content that you want and as much as you want. Being active on social media acts as a “signal” for search engines, which can result in higher search engine ranking. The higher up your brand/business is, the more exposure you’ll get and the better chances of conversion you’ll have. Therefore, having engaging and constant content can increase the chances of growing a business.
Custom audience
It wasn’t long before social media networks discovered the value of providing their services for marketing purposes. Through a personal brand/business’ account, you can execute entire digital campaigns that can be carefully tracked and adjusted. All through a single click of a button. With this type of digital marketing campaign, you can specify who will receive your campaign, when they’ll receive it, at what time of day, and how many times a day. You can segment campaigns by things like location, company, job title, gender, and age/demographics, interests, behaviors, and connections. This gives businesses a more immediate and successful way to reach their audience.
Direct and immediate customer service
More than half of the population in the world owns a smartphone, which gives your brand/business direct access to your consumer and vice versa. If they have a question, request, concern, or complaint about your brand, services, or products they can utilize one of the different social media platforms to let you know. Most businesses allow consumers to write reviews and send direct messages on the different platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram).
Affordability
One of the most important factors for a business is its budget. Yet, much of the time, businesses prefer to invest in things other than advertising and marketing. This is social media’s greatest advantage, it is incredibly affordable. The posting of content is completely free of charge. The only money you have to invest in these campaigns is when you customize the reach and demographic of your campaign. You can set your post as a sponsored post or boost it to reach a greater audience. However, in order to do this correctly, you have to conduct extensive research to learn about your audience’s behavior online.

How do you go about curating your social media presence?

Realistically speaking, the advantages of using social media for your business far outweigh the disadvantages. A well-structured campaign can grant you access to a whole other section of your audience you had not targeted before. Additionally, it can make your brand/business stand out from the crowd. Professional agencies specializing in digital marketing and social media campaigns have the necessary tools to ensure that your campaign reaches the right people at the right time.

A professional agency can establish your brand/business at the top of search engine results through extensive research and careful analysis of each campaign.

For more information on how a social media campaign can benefit your business contact us at Phidev.

The short and sweet answer is yes. An essential function of every business is to keep expanding by attracting more consumers and retaining their existing client base. As a business owner, you have to be constantly and continuously improving and finding new ways of reaching potential consumers and keeping current consumers engaged. A very effective way to accomplish this is through email marketing.

Technology has evolved at a very fast pace and now you have an array of options where to make your business visible. Seems like social media has taken over. Yet, time and time again, email marketing has proven itself to be highly efficient. So much so that 91% of adults in the US say they like to receive promotional emails from the companies they do business with.

The Importance of Mobile-Friendly Businesses

Email marketing allows you to keep your consumer updated with all your latest news. In today’s day and age, roughly 2 billion people own a smartphone and use it daily. This means your email marketing campaign can reach your consumer directly on their smartphone. This allows businesses to have direct access to the consumer. For example, imagine launching a new product and in a matter of a click in their screen, your consumer can purchase it.

By formatting your email marketing for mobile devices, you create a direct link and communication to your consumer. The ‘proximity’ generates more opportunities to expand and grow your business while creating a lasting relationship with your consumers. By being immediately available to your consumer, you cut some of the time-consuming steps that discourage the consumer from taking action. As a result, this gives your consumer endless opportunities to find your business through the touch of a screen. Whenever and wherever they want.

Additionally, the change of administrations happening this year will impact the economy. Whether for better or worse it is still uncertain. Therefore, businesses have to be smart about how they spend their money, making sure to invest in things they know will generate profit. Advertising and Marketing are essential tools to help a business grow. They allow the customers to be constantly reminded of your business’ existence. With the top-of-mind awareness of your business, you remind your customer of their need for your specific service and make them engaged again.

Hiring a Professional Agency To Help You Maximize Your Email Marketing Strategy

Multiple factors come into play when marketing your business which might discourage business owners from investing in these services. Maybe you don’t have the time to create online campaigns. Or maybe you don’t think there is enough content to create the campaigns. When you hire a professional agency to help you conceptualize and strategize your email marketing campaign, you are investing in a long time service that will only benefit your business. As a result, you have more time to dedicate to your business while you also reach them on the go.

Over the years the percent of online consumption has steadily increased. As a survey showed, around 51% of shoppers made their purchases online. Therefore, by making your content directly available for your consumers you are increasing your chances of raising awareness and attracting new consumers. Ultimately, the only way your business grows is by being visible and by having old and new consumers who are engaged with your message. There is no logical reason why you shouldn’t try email marketing to help your business grow.

According to research conducted by Google, “89% of visits to advertiser’s sites from ad clicks would not have occurred without ad campaigns.” This means that investing in online ad campaigns (Search Engine Marketing) does, in fact, pay off. It is something that pays in the short-term and the long-term.

SEO takes time to place your website on the first page of your selected keywords, in the meantime, an effective way to get in front of potential customers is through Search Engine Marketing.

What is SEM?

Search Engine Marketing (or SEM) is a fancy name for online advertisement, among other things. Some people consider SEO to be part of SEM but not everybody agrees. Here at Phidev, we like to think of them as separate, while SEM encompasses a similar process to SEO. The main difference between the two is that Search Engine Optimization is organic – which means that page views happen naturally (without you having to pay for clicks) and SEM is paid search results to bring people to a specific section of your website.

Most SEMs efforts are done in the “campaigns”, this means, you have a budget and you want to promote a specific product or service within your website. So you do your keyword research and with data in hand, you begin by creating a campaign.

When managing an online (SEM) campaign there are countless of factors that contribute to your campaign’s success and consequent business growth. Either if you are doing this by yourself or decide to hire an agency, you will find out that there are a lot of terms you will need to get familiar with to better understand what is going on with your campaign in order to improve your results.

Here is a quick and dirty list of terms you will need to know when you start doing SEM.

Advertising Strategies

Once you decided you want to go ahead start advertising online (and you should), the next step is to define what advertising strategy you will use. For the most part, there are three different strategies.

Pay-Per-Click or PPC

There are different strategies used to run campaigns online, one of them is, Pay-per-click or PPC. This means that you will be paying everything someone clicks on your ad to take them into your website. For example, imagine you are running a restaurant and you have selected “Best Tacos” as a keyword. Then, you will run a PPC campaign this keyword. This means, your ads will show when someone types “Best Tacos” in Google. Your ad might show, but you will only be charged when someone actually clicks on your ad.

Cost-Per-Mille (Thousand) or CPM

Depending on the objective or your campaign, PPC might not be the right strategy for you. Another, advertising strategy available for you is Cost-per-mille or CPM, in which, instead of paying every time someone clicks on your ad, you decide you want to pay per impression instead. This might help you get a lot more eyeballs into your ad but might not necessarily bring traffic or convert your visitors.

Cost-Per-Acquisition or CPA

Another strategy for your SEM campaign is Cost-per-acquisition or CPA. In this strategy, you decide you want to pay only when someone makes a predefined action once they are on your website. Let’s say you are only willing to pay when someone makes a reservation to your restaurant by submitting a form. Someone will see and click on your ad, visit your website, but you will only pay once the visitor fills and submits your reservation form. This strategy is directly related to sales, and most people might think it is the best strategy since you are basically paying per performance. However, depending on your business objectives it might not be the right strategy for you.

Components of Search Engine Marketing

Once you have selected your strategy there are many other things you will need to know in order to successfully run a marketing campaign online.

Cost-Per-Click or CPC

When you are running a PPC campaign, another term you will need to know is Cost-Per-Click or CPC which is the amount you are paying per click or visitor into your site. So, in a PPC campaign, your ad can be displayed to a hundred people, but if only one of them clicks on it, you will only pay for that click.

The cost-per-click depends on a lot of factors, but mostly on how many other people want the keyword for that ad.

Landing Page

A landing page is the section of your website you want people to visit right after they click on your ad. A lot of people, especially when they are starting into SEM, make the mistake of setting their homepage as their landing page. You want your landing page to be as relevant to the ad as possible, for example, if you are advertising “tacos” then send your visitors, to the taco section of your site.

Geo Targeting

Geo-Targeting means you want to display your ads to people in a specific geographical area. If you are advertising snowboards, you will want to geotarget your ads to cities or regions that have snow and/or skiing areas/resorts.

Device Targeting

With many different devices available, with device targeting, you decide in which device your ad should be displayed, whether on your mobile, personal tablet, or desktop. For example, if you are advertising an Android app, you wanna make sure only people on Android phones get your ad, as you don’t want to waste your hard-earned ad dollars on people on iPhones as they won’t be able to install your app.

Audience Targeting

This refers to targeting a specific group of people who share similar interests and therefore will have similar purchasing habits. Going back to the snowboard example, you might only display your ads to people who have expressed an interest in extreme sports and/or snow boots.

Ad Scheduling

Defines what days your ad will be displayed and at what times of the day. Depending on your audience’s online searching and purchasing habits you can determine the best time to show your ads. This might also make sense if you are running a campaign that invites the visitor to call you for a specific reason. You want to make sure your ad displays only when your business is open and someone will be available to pick up the phone.

Conversion Rate

This one is really important and if you are working with an agency, something you will want to pay attention month-to-month.

Placement

Refers to the place on the website where your ad is going to be located. It can be either on the header part of the web page or aligned to the right, you decide what works best.

Re-marketing

Also, know as cyber-stalking, Remarketing is a tactic that is highly underutilized. Re-marketing refers to displaying ads only to people who have visited your website. It can be even more specific and you can display ads only to people who made a specific action within your site, for example, placing something into their shopping cart on your website but that did not finish the checkout process. This is a hot lead that you want to close.

So, now what?

The availability to track all this information allows you to use the best methods of advertising to optimize your business. It is a matter of utilizing all of the tools available to you in order to achieve your business goals.

The online marketing world is a highly populated one, which only means that it is a very competitive one as well. In such a competitive environment, it is your job to make your business stand out from the crowd. It is a matter of advertising your business in the right place, at the right time, with the right strategies and tactics.

Want to learn more about search engine marketing and how it can help your business grow? Request a Free Consultation to see how we can help.

If you own any kind of business, a website becomes an extension of that business. Through your website, you provide your clients with a strong professional online destination, where they can explore what your business has to offer them. Many will agree that not having a business website is representative of a missed opportunity, and having a bad website can actually be detrimental to your business.

Regardless of the type of business you own, having a website is a vital part of your business because it gives it a certain level of credibility. Nowadays, if your business does not have a website, it is not relevant. According to BIA/Kelsey and ConStat 97% of consumers look online before buying a product or service. With this in mind, the main question is: “Should I hire an agency to do my website or should I do it myself?”

When creating a website there are 5 main things to consider:

Time

Ask yourself, do you have the time to invest in creating your website? One of the first mistakes you can make is underestimating the process of creating a professional website. Consider the fact that creating, setting up, and populating a website can take a substantial amount of time out of your day to day business. From choosing a layout style, setting up a domain and linking it to the appropriate hosting provider, to constantly maintaining it afterward, your website needs constant care and attention.

Design Skills

Most people fail to realize how important content is. This may include but is not limited to, logo design, copy structure, and custom graphics creation. The “look” of your website reflects your business’ brand and communicates the type of business you are. Your logo alone represents a big part of your business’ image, it is what people will remember most. Using the right design programs to develop your logo and graphics has a real and direct impact on your business.

Writing Skills

Poorly written copy can have a negative impact on your business. In addition to what you communicate with the look of your website, you also have to ensure the information you provide your customer is understandable. The copy for your website has to describe your website’s purpose in a way that it keeps your clients interested.

Money

The key concern many business owners face is, “How much money am I willing to invest in a business’ website?” The idea of hiring a company to create a professional website for your business may seem a little bit daunting at first. But think of it this way, you are making a long-term investment that will directly and positively impact your business’ success. Pricing your website design and development can be subjective depending on the functionality of the website and what resources you decide to use. On average a professional website can be priced anywhere from a few hundred dollars up to a few thousand.

Technical Knowledge

Sure, you might opt for a drag and drop template; however, depending on the type of business you own and how it operates, you need to think ahead on the type of functionality you want your website to have. The more you require of your website, the more elaborate your website structure becomes. Hiring a professional team/company to help you create your business’ website can be the best option for you and your business. There is an invaluable merit to the vast knowledge and experience a professional website developer can provide to you.

In Conclusion

All in all, hiring a professional team to design and create your business’ website is the smartest and most practical decision you’ll make for your business. A team of professionals can provide you with the best techniques and latest formatting tools to make your website reflect the best of your business. By having a grade-A, professional looking and functioning website, you are ensuring your business’ stability and success for the future.

Ready to grow your business digitally? Contact us and together we’ll create a professional website that will do just that!

Mobile internet usage is projected to overtake desktop internet usage by 2014— two short years away. If your website is not currently optimized to load fast and look good on a mobile device then you may be missing a part of the action. With people constantly researching businesses and options from their mobile devices to make purchase decisions, having a mobile friendly website is a must!

What is a Mobile-Friendly Website?

It’s a website that has been optimized for mobile devices. This optimization makes sure that your website fits on a mobile device screen, it loads fast, its text is legible, and most importantly, that it is usable from a mobile device.

Why is a Mobile-Friendly Website Important?

As mobile traffic continues to increase, your website will be visited by more mobile devices. There have been several studies showing that people will only wait 5 seconds for a website to load on their mobile device before they try a different option. There have also been studies showing that 73% of mobile searches turn into a purchase decision the same day. Do you really want potential customers to go away because your website did not load fast enough?

Most people will also look for another website when they have trouble navigating the site from their smartphone or when the content of your website does not show correctly. This is highly frustrating and it can be easily fixed with a mobile-friendly website.

Mobile is changing the way we do things; make sure your website is doing the same!