With a new season comes new trends in digital marketing. Fall is when parents think about back to school and Thanksgiving get-togethers, businesses think about their quarter-four goals, and brands start preparing for the holiday shopping season.
Whether you’re a firm owner, realtor, or another type of professional service provider, you don’t want to miss out on these five digital marketing trends for fall.
Plan Campaigns Around Fall Themes
Holidays and events are great for pairing with your upcoming campaigns and promotions. Maybe you’re rolling out a new service offering, providing a veteran’s discount around Remembrance Day, or planning on promoting your highest tier offering. Here are some important events to keep on your radar:
Back to School
Thanksgiving
Remembrance Day
Halloween
Check out this blog on holiday campaign ideas for professional service providers!
Update Your Social Media Pages
Celebrate the change in seasons with your followers. Update your social media graphics, profile pictures, banner images, and logo with a fall theme. You could change your colours to include browns, oranges, yellows, and burgundy. Consider adding a frame around your profile pictures that depict fall imagery.
Updating the creative features of your brand’s social media pages isn’t just for fun. Doing so helps you stand out from your competitors, promote seasonal campaigns, and connect with your followers on an emotional level.
Tease Holiday Shopping
The months leading up to the winter holidays are lucrative for many businesses, especially if you sell a good or service that people want to gift to others. 27 per cent of consumers start holiday shopping at the end of September. Your fall marketing plan could start with teasing the deals consumers might get in the coming weeks and months, followed by full-on promotions of your holiday deals.
Launch a New Referral Program
Since consumers are starting to shop for the holidays in the fall, now is the perfect time to launch a new referral program. You want to incentivize customers to shop with you, and to influence their friends and family to shop with you too.
Perhaps any existing client who brings you a new client can get 10 per cent off your next service, for example. There are lots of rewards you can give in return for customers bringing you more customers.
Assess Your Marketing Goals
The last digital marketing trend for fall may be the most important: evaluating your marketing goals. If you set goals for the last quarter of the year, start the season by assessing how attainable they are. Do you want to double your goal? Do you have a leftover marketing budget to spend this season?
Decide what your final goals for the year will be and create a marketing strategy that will help you achieve them.
Need Help Creating and Executing a Great Marketing Plan?
We can help! Our team of expert digital marketers will create a custom marketing plan for your business and execute it to completion. Contact us today to learn more.
Having a budget for marketing, and specifically, digital ads is incredibly important in today’s market. Digital ads expand your reach, bring in new clients, help establish authority, and so much more.
However, when a business is looking to cut costs, the first place they mistakenly look is at their ad budget. We have seen the power of a highly customized and effectively managed ad strategy, and you don’t want to miss out on the benefits that this can bring.
If you decide to reduce your ad budget, here are three of the things that can happen.
Your Brand Visibility Decreases
One of the biggest challenges faced by every law firm, real estate business, or any other professional service is getting in front of new potential clients. Growing your database is integral to growing your business, so putting yourself where fresh eyes can see you is paramount. Digital ads are one of the most cost-effective ways to do this.
Digital ads allow you to target specific sectors of the population to ensure those people see your advertisement. For example, social ads allow you to set parameters around the physical location, relationship status, education status, profession, and interests of your ad’s viewers. Without a budget for these ads, you lose out on hundreds or even thousands of new potential clients entering your funnel.
You Fall Behind Your Competitors
If you decide to reduce your ad budget, you will be saving money. It’s true. However, your competitors likely won’t be reducing theirs. This means that the gap you leave in the online ad space will be quickly filled by your competitors. Their ads will be in front of your potential clients.
Staying competitive in your market is crucial if you want to generate high-quality leads. Digital ads keep you front of mind for potential clients. Without spending on ads, you miss out on brand exposure.
Your Goals Become Less Achievable
When you create a marketing plan for the year, you likely set some goals you want to achieve. You may want to triple the traffic to your website, increase your database by a certain percentage, or simply increase online sales. No matter what your goal is, online ads are a lucrative stepping stone to achieving it.
Additionally, online ads allow for intricate data monitoring and managing. You get instant feedback on whether an ad was effective or not, and what you can do next time. Whether you’re paying for social ads or Google ads, the ability to track their efficacy is invaluable to your marketing strategy.
Need Help Managing Your Online Ads?
No business owner wants to spend hours each week creating, managing and tracking their online ads. You have a firm or brokerage to run, and that’s where your focus needs to be.
Let our team of digital ad experts take care of your ad strategy. We’ll ensure the best ROI for your budget and that it leads to growth in your business. Contact us today to learn more.
Most businesses have a slower period of the year when fewer new clients are entering their databases and fewer sales are being made. If you’re in real estate, the spring and summer months may be busier with open houses and new clients wanting to buy or sell. The winter could be slower, but that doesn’t mean you should slow down.
Here, we’ll explore three different ways to make the most of your slow season so that your business continues to grow no matter what quarter you’re in.
Review the Previous Quarter
What worked well last quarter that you want to continue? What was a total flop? Now that you have some extra time, evaluate the effectiveness of your previous marketing strategies. Include your team in these discussions and brainstorm new strategies.
The busy season doesn’t give you much time to sit down and analyze your processes. Perhaps your team needs more detailed SOPs or updated processes altogether. Maybe your physical office is in deep need of organization.
Consider hiring a digital marketing agency to run your online ads. They can analyze what worked well in previous quarters and optimize your strategy to work even better in the next.
Quarterly reviews are useful no matter what industry you’re in. Plan to review your numbers from the previous quarter and your projected numbers for the next.
Prepare for Your Busy Season
Just because fewer people are walking through your doors it doesn’t mean you can take your foot off the pedal. The work you do now will significantly impact the success of your busy quarter. For many businesses, quarter four is their busy period and there are lots of things you can do to prepare for it.
Start by setting new goals for the next quarter and breaking them down into tangible steps. What kind of marketing do you need to start now to see a return next quarter? If you want to increase brand awareness, what kinds of online ads should you be creating? Consistency in marketing is key, so the effort you put in now and continue to put in will pay off later.
The slow season is also an excellent time to build out your team. You have the time to find the right candidates for your positions, vet them thoroughly, and provide in-depth training.
Update Branding
Have you been meaning to revamp your website? Are you curious about making it SEO-friendly? Do you want your branding to extend to your promotional products and social pages?
Creating the right branding for your business is extremely important and requires sufficient time to get it right. Now is the time to schedule team photoshoots, update your marketing videos, and consult branding experts.
Let’s Make Next Quarter Your Best One Yet
Here at SocialEyes Communications, we know how to ensure your digital marketing is always bringing a high ROI no matter what season you’re in. Contact us today to learn more.
To compete in your industry, whether it’s law, real estate, or professional services, you need an online presence. Moreover, you need to actively participate in the online spaces where your clients spend time, effectively advertise your services, and make the most of all the amazing opportunities the internet provides for growing your business.
However, most of these opportunities aren’t free.
That’s why it’s crucial that businesses budget for digital and social media marketing. Here’s everything you need to know about creating your budget.
What Should You Budget For?
Budgets for digital marketing strategies can vary based on what they include. Contrary to what you might think, a marketing strategy consists of more than just throwing money into Facebook ads and hoping you garner some leads. Every aspect of your marketing strategy should be intentional, well thought out, and budgeted for.
Here are some of the costs that might need to be included in your budget:
Website hosting platform
Social media content creation, management, and ads
Google ads
Email campaign software
Branded video content
Staff training for maintaining an online presence
An expert digital marketing agency
You may be asking, “should I really pay an agency to market for me when I could do it myself for free?” Although you might save money by not hiring a team of experts, you’re actually costing yourself much more in the long run. Not only will you need to spend ample time doing market research and understanding different marketing tools and tactics, but you’ll be taking time and energy away from actually running your business and focusing on your clients.
We highly recommend you budget for a professional digital marketing team to save you time and money in the long term.
Decide How Much Your Budget Is
The BDC published an article with general guidelines for helping you decide how much to budget for digital marketing. If you have a B2B business, they recommend spending 2-5% of your revenue on marketing. If you have a B2C business, they recommend spending 5-10% of your revenue.
That article also shared results from a 2019 study that found that small Canadian businesses spent, on average, $30,000 on marketing per year. Companies with 20-49 employees spent, on average, $60,000 per year.
Choose Your Marketing Goals
The amount you allocate to your marketing budget should be driven by your marketing goals. What do you want to accomplish through your marketing? Here are some common marketing goals:
Find X more high-quality leads
Increase website traffic by 20%
Increase brand awareness
Increase customer retention
Increase revenue
An expert marketing agency can help you decide which goals are most important and how to achieve them in the most cost-effective way.
Are You Ready to Invest in a Customized Digital Marketing Strategy?
SocialEyes Communications handles everything from market research and content creation to marketing plan strategizing and execution. We’ll take care of your online marketing so you can focus on your business.
Your business or firm may have a website and social media pages, but another aspect of digital marketing you don’t want to skip out on is email marketing. This lucrative tactic can skyrocket your client retention rate, garner new clients, and ensure no opportunity to upsell is missed.
There are two common types of email marketing, newsletter campaigns and email automation campaigns, and here we will explore both.
What Are Newsletter Campaigns?
Newsletters are individual emails that you can schedule to go out to your email list every week, month, or other specific time frames. They might include news about the business or industry, topics that the client cares about, tips or guides, announcements, and reminders.
For example, a tax filing company might send out a monthly newsletter with tips for their business owner clientele to manage their taxes throughout the year.
The goal of a newsletter campaign is to build rapport with your following. They aren’t intended for direct selling or aggressive promoting. Newsletters allow your recipients to see the human side of your brand, learn about what you do, and be reminded of how you can help them.
What Are Email Automation Campaigns?
Email automation campaigns are emails that are sent out when triggered by a customer’s behaviour on your website. These are usually existing clients or customers whose email addresses are already in your email marketing software.
An example would be when a customer adds items from your online store to their cart and then closes the window without purchasing. This action could trigger an automated email that tells the customer that they left without purchasing what was in their cart, serving to remind them to come back and complete the transaction.
Another example would be an automated email that goes out to a recent client providing them with a discount code for their next purchase.
Email automation campaigns are an effective way to re-market to previous customers. Since these automations come from email marketing software, you can track how many emails are sent based on different triggers which give you more information about your customers and how they like to shop.
Which Email Marketing Tactic is Right for My Business?
Both newsletters and email automation campaigns are effective methods of digital marketing. However, they serve different purposes. If you are looking to support the sales cycle, improve customer retention, and increase sales, then an email automation campaign is an excellent choice. If you want to increase customer loyalty, strengthen your connection with customers, and increase brand awareness, a monthly newsletter would be a better option.
To maximize the ROI you can see from email marketing, you might consider using both campaign strategies in your marketing plan to reap the benefits of each.
Interested in Using Email Marketing to Grow Your Business?
We can help! Whether you need an email newsletter campaign or an automated email campaign, SocialEyes Communications has the expertise and experience to ensure your emails get opened and acted on. Contact us today to learn more.
A big part of what makes digital marketing so crucial to growing your firm or business is running engaging, enticing, and effective social media ads. It’s not enough to simply post to your Instagram feed or do the occasional Facebook Live. If you really want to utilize all social media has to offer your business, incorporating ads is mandatory.
Here, we’ll explore how to ensure your ads are successful and why hiring a professional to run them for you is the best option.
The Importance of Running Ads
It’s difficult to compete with other firms or businesses these days online without having an expert ad strategy. A highly customized and targeted ad strategy not only funnels leads to your website, but it can also get your brand in front of consumers you wouldn’t otherwise interact with.
How to Run Ads Successfully
Some business owners incorrectly assume they can throw some money at Facebook ads, and they will reach the right people with the right message. While there is an aspect of testing in a good ad strategy, your ads should always be intentional and well-thought-out.
Doing market research and consumer research is incredibly important before you spend money on ads. You must have a goal associated with your ad, and a target that, once hit, signifies that your strategy was effective and can be repeated.
To know when an ad is successful, it must be monitored. Understanding the data associated with ads can be helpful, such as knowing the click-thru-rate. Without knowing this information, you won’t know when your budget needs to be increased or reallocated to be more successful.
Should You Outsource Your Ads?
As you can see, running effective ads that bring a high return on investment requires a lot of work and expertise. While you can certainly take the time to learn how to run ads, do you really want to?
You spend your days managing your people, nurturing leads, connecting with past and present clients, and planning your next steps. Your time is taken working on your business. If you don’t want to spend your free hours doing social media ad implementation, you’re in luck.
A digital marketing agency can run your social media ad campaigns. We can conduct all necessary research on your business and your clients’ ad preferences. From there, we can craft a customed and highly detailed plan of attack for your ads. We will follow and track the ads from creation to expiry, noting what works well and what doesn’t, informing what strategy you should follow next.
Not to mention the fact that social media marketing agencies pride themselves on staying apprised of all platform changes and updates. If there’s an update that will impact your marketing strategy, an agency will ensure your plan adapts seamlessly.
How We Can Help
SocialEyes Communications comprises of a team of experienced social media ad managers. We have the expertise to ensure your investment in social ads is returned in spades.
