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The ins and outs of online marketing strategies and best practices can be quite daunting. However, when you work with someone who adores marketing and the challenges that marketing brings, you too can have fun with them! Passion + Experience and Knowledge = CASH! Let’s have some fun. Managed Media Marketing is simply the combination of Many successful tools and resources all used in conjunction. When managed by the right team or agency, there is no limit to what you can achieve! We see and do it all the time and there are clear patterns of success we’d like to share with you.
This post will simplify the deep-tech behind successful marketing and provide a crash course on what you can expect to find when taking a dive headfirst into the deep end of the pool.
We all want more reach, more sales, more visibility and build a passionate audience but there are many many many ways to achieve success. How can anyone expect to understand all of it? Give us 10 minutes and I promise we can pull back the curtain and explain what you need to know to rock the kasbah.
Ahh… the enigma and downright boredom that is online marketing. The best way to do this will look different from campaign to campaign but there are governing rules, albeit ever-changing, that will make or break your marketing campaign.
It’s very important to note that this information works best when launching a new or rebranded website! There is no better time to spend your whole wad, take big risks and push all your chips in then when also making a big push towards rebranding or branding of a new product or brand. If your company is considering a new website and a big marketing push in tandem, you’re thinking smart.
SO YOU’RE GONNA JUMP INTO THE DEEP END.
If you’ve been pondering how to back over yourself with your own car rather than deal with researching online marketing, look no further. You’re wondering, “What kind of budget should I be spending? What are my competitors spending? Is there a way to see that?” (Yes there is!) “What kind of return would I yield? What else should I be doing while running a PPC campaign to maximize your ROI? How much time and energy would something like this cost me?” Instead ask, do I want to focus on SEO or Marketing, because they are two very different things and often confused. Confusion costs money and loss of direction. While one affects the other, marketing pushes a brand or product while SEO bolsters the brand or product’s visibility and reach.
Side-note * If this is your first time running a marketing campaign through a WordPress Website, you may want to start by taking this free online course with Yoast to give you an idea of how plugins improve your online visibility. A Valuable resource you or someone on your team should know backwards and forwards. If you are unfamiliar with SEO, this is a great start.
Whether you’re selling a widget, an idea, a brand or personality, this article has many of the answers you seek.
THE THREE SIMPLE STEPS TO SENSATIONAL MARKETING
The world isn’t in stores anymore, they’re online. They aren’t reading newspapers or magazines to get their news and lifestyle tips. They don’t trust billboards on the side of the highway and they could care less about a spokesperson’s opinions. Instead, the world responds to engagement. They respond to stimulation, to celebrities, gamification of a product or brand. They respond to facts that make sense to them and they respond to marketing that reflect their own core values. Otherwise, you don’t exist to the world we live in today. There are almost 4 billion people online with us right now, right next to you in cyberspace! Responding and reacting to what they see and can touch on their screen. So where do we start? How do we reach every one of them, not just our friends friends?
Step #1 is to have an engaging and awesome product. All the good SEO and marketing behind a crap product is money throw out the window.
Time and time again I read this over and over; the key to any campaign is to start with an awesome product. No amount of marketing can sell trash, it’s just an uphill battle. So firstly, is your product really best in show or what?
Get your brand in order. Create High Res DSLR product images in a photo studio (remember, a website is only as good as the quality of the images it hosts), prepare proper title tags on your web site, establish a firm and dynamic color palette for your campaign, install Google anaytics HTML into your website… All that good stuff (A good agency will prep and guide you). Get your ducks in that row! Prepare for battle! We’re going all in so prepare and centralize your content with due diligence. Your agency and your future self will both thank you for it.
Step #2 is to hire the most creative and successful marketing team you can afford. Don’t try this at home. Know where your energy is best focused. Just like the Avengers, the best team is one of individual superheros, all using their given superpowers. Know where your energy is best spent and remember it takes money to make money. Once you’re making money though, you’re really making money! This is how fortune 500 pop up everyday, by running well built and well managed campaigns such as the ones we run every day for our clients across the planet.
Your marketing agency should know where your niche of hungry clients are hiding and what they want to hear. They’ll know how they are attracted, how they are retained.
They’ll also know and guide you in how to best split up and allocate your marketing budget on the endless marketing platforms and that exist.
So where are your clients? Welp, they’re online, waiting for you. Let’s take a look shall we?
While a good marketing agency handles all the workload of reaching your specific audience, you should be aware of the basics and how the world of online marketing works. It doesn’t matter if you sell LED light strips, supplements or punk rock music, it’s all marketing using the same platforms. Let’s break it down together ->
UNDERSTANDING SUCCESSFUL MARKETING
STEP #3 is for you to personally learn the marketing basics. We are going to focus below on PPC and Funnel Marketing because it’s fundamental in today’s marketing world. For this course we will be sharing with you an example of a very lucrative campaign that we are currently running right now. Trade secrets revealed:
NOTE *
We’re going to be using the Supplement Industry in this example. Replace supplements with your brand and you’ll get a great idea of how this really works. Here’s how the whole process went:
“Their objective was increase site traffic, sales and customer retention… sound familiar? They achieved this by running multiple data driven campaigns (listed in detail below) in conjunction with data resources (also below) that we manage for them all at once. We have developed a tailored strategy system that seems to be a miracle elixir for our clients. We strongly believe that if you’re going to create a splash with a marketing blitz, make it the best blitz you can afford. There are so many awesome techniques you can do for little or even no cost too!
We’ve developed a system we call FCR.
The platforms you choose are the tools in your tool chest.
As stated, this blog post focuses specifically on PPC and funnel marketing to your prospects because it’s the most popular way to “FCR” or funnel, convert and retain.
FUNNEL THEM to you. Woe them with beautiful creative visual wizardry and you’ve hooked them. Stun them with awe and inspiration.
CONVERT THEM with arcane like inspired actions and responses. Make them respond because they have no choice. They sign up, sign in and green light your brand.
RETAIN THEM and don’t let go. Customer retention starts with the first impression. Marketing is building a foundation between you and your loyal town criers. Account and email capture is paramount in this stage so you can keep them engaged and earn repeat business. For instance, you can help Lutz Media make more content by signing up right here! See how I did that? You should too.
Call or click to chat about your needs. Lutz Multimedia offers an array of marketing solutions. We have been managing marketing campaigns in almost every industry on earth for over 20 years and are currently very excited about the latest practices the new market requires!
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PPC is one of our best selling products. We manage dozens of clients every month who choose Lutz Media to manage their Pay Per Click Campaigns with Google Ads and Yelp. With Google Ads you only pay for clicks on your ad. Some days you might spend less than your daily average, and on others you might spend more. But over the month you won’t pay more than your monthly max. Click Funnels is another great program to run as a plugin in a website when selling something like a live event or book.
The marketing funnel is a time tested approach to creating customers out of prospects and it all starts with marketing. We won’t get deep into it here but it’s certainly worth some extra time when you have it. Here is a great article on funnel marketing to check out later.
Below are some rough stats we procured using Google Smart and AdWords and Search tools that should run for a minimum of exactly 3-6 months. 3-6 months is the mandatory minimum time to see Minimal Viable Product on investment, according to Google, Yelp, Microsoft and basically the entire industry.
SMALL VS. BIG MARKETING BUDGETS
Companies with large budgets are basically guaranteed to win, it’s simple math. The more you spend, the better PPC works. However, not everyone has an unlimited budget. For a more frugal marketing campaign, you will tighten your catchment area and client base reach. Our resources are set up this way. The more money you have to spend on marketing, you essentially widen your reach. Lutz Multimedia employs our unique “MMM” (Managed Media Marketing) campaign model which includes a vast array of complex integrated systems, working together symbiotically. Call us for more details on this later! We’d love to chat with you about this.
MARKETING DURATIONS
As far as how long to run these campaigns, the industry says 3-6 months minimum to see any real impact. Once it’s going, the idea is that you’re making more money than you’re spending on marketing so you should theoretically have no reason to ever turn it off! Our happiest clients have been running managed campaigns with us for years now just like the big boys do.
DISSIPATING RETURNS
Conversely, when you turn them off, the authoritative place you’ve carved out in your industry immediately starts to dissipate within 3-6 months. They call this, “pay to play”. The Google AdWords (now simply called Google Ads) User Interface (UI) and tethered software and techniques are quite algorithmic and take years to master.
Marketing Management companies will often use the Google Search Platform in tandem with an AdWords campaign to have further control over analytics and reach even more people. Just as a stock broker learns the ebbs and flows of the market platforms, it takes many years of research to master these platforms so again, it’s best to hire an agency you can afford than try to go it alone. It’s worth it to maximize your campaign.
OUR CLIENT’S NUMBERS AND STATS:
Here we have a screenshot of an AdWords campaign dashboard that we’re managing for a Supplement client who is spending 1k per month on paid ads for 4 months. Note that these numbers are exponentially greater than the numbers Google quotes as “average”. Their estimate for us was only 600 converted annual users (at a $12k a year, $3 cost per converted customer) based on 126k impressions. Spoiler: Google’s industry median numbers suck. We immediately blew those numbers out of the water with over 300,000 impressions within the first four weeks.
We found that in their particular industry of supplements (a good median metric industry), we needed to spend $32.90 a day and about a grand each month to dominate his corner of the market. His business took off and we are enjoying better than expected results today. Here’s a screenshot of his Google Adwords dashboard as this article was written:
We used a host of platforms such as WP Plugins and heavy blogging to create authority and a buzz around the brand at the same time of the campaigns.
Next we tackled Yelp branding. Each marketing platform yields different results for different industries so experience and knowledge reign supreme here. Great agencies know your market better than you do and how best to reach and retain them.
While these Yelp examples worked great for our Supplement Client, they may not be relative to your industry. Just like you’d never run a marketing campaign for a local bakery with Book Bub or Amazon, each platform has its own advantages. A great agency knows when and where to spend.
In such a complex environment, it requires an array of deep-tech skills to manage these analytical dashboards and control panels.
BOLSTERING YOUR CAMPAIGN LIKE A BOSS!
“The most successful campaigns are using multiple resources like Yoast SEO, Monster Insights, Google Search Tools, etc. all at once. The key to success is to push all your chips in. Manipulating multiple platforms to work together at once is a flanking marketing technique that separates the noobs from the pros and is the key to this riddle.”
TITLE TAGS AND IMAGE OPTIMIZATION
Let’s talk about how to set up your web site to support a marketing push properly, this is another ke to marketing success.
A title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page. Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) as the clickable headline for a given result, and are important for usability, SEO, and social sharing.
Making sure title tags and metadata is attached properly makes all the difference. The Google bots that crawl and scrub the web to find you for your customers are constantly looking for this. What’s more your ranking depends on it.
GOOGLE BOTS WANT YOU BAD, IT’S TRUE.
Google wants to find you and love you but their web scrubbing bots can’t see you if your image of a jar of protein is labeled “89202654-73628.jpg” Images should be properly labeled like “Your-Company-12oz-strawberry-smoothie-protien-supplement.jpg” with alt text embedded into the image as well as WP descriptions and even a caption if applicable. Here’s a great article on simple image titling for Optimized website SEO if you’d like to more!
BACKLINKS ARE PURE SEO GOLD
Backlinks are links on a website that, when clicked, take the user to your site off of another site so make sure everyone you know ha your website’s URL listed somewhere that can be clicked on! I often even accept this as part of payment, or discount my invoices if a client can do this for me because it is so incredibly valuable. It can be in the form of an image as well as text but as long as someone with authority has your website link on their site somewhere, Google will see YOU as authoritative.
For instance, if CNN writes an article about supplements and mentions our example companies website URL in the article, as soon as people start clicking that link, Google bots spin on their heels and say, “Who is this that CNN thinks is important?!” Your SEO ranking goes up, your traffic increases and sales increases. This is why backlinks (AKA linkbacks) are SEO gold! Anchor link text is the text that’s used to create the clickable part of a backlink and you can read up on all of this here. A good PR agency can work with you to accomplish these goals in your targeted industry.
CAUTIONARY TALES FROM THE INTERNET CRYPT
THE MOST COMMON MISTAKE
“TO YOU WHO SELLS A WIDGET: YOU’VE BEEN WARNED.” Know that without PPC (pay per click online marketing), you’re just spinning your wheels in the dark. The 1.8 billion online looking for you can’t see you at all. You are running blind because you don’t exist online unless you’re running some kind of paid online media marketing campaign. It’s impossible to sell any tangible widget without reaching your audience where they are and they are online, looking for YOU.
Our broken record statement which we repeat 10 times a day to potential clients has got to be: “If you’re relying on word of mouth you’ll only reach your friends friends friends. That leaves you at about a billion steps away from your potential audience. Managed Media Marketing (MMM) is the bridge.”
Unless CNN or some famous pop star loves your product and is ardently singing haiku’s and ballads from mountaintops, you’re Patrick Swazy. You’re ghost!
WHO MAKES THESE RULES? THE MOB BOSSES OF THE INTERNET.
I like to refer as Google and their ad-pedaling affiliates as the mob, trying to offer you an offer you can’t afford to refuse. Simply put, if you don’t pay Google for their online ad services, Google buries you in a hole in the desert. That’s the short of it. Don’t fear though, they’ve set it up for you to win.
Every month or so they release new requirements that companies either thrive from or are penalized by. It is up to your web admin and marketing agency to stay on top of these changing languages and best practices.
Blog writing is a massive way to increase SEO. Google is constantly looking for the new authority in your industry. Google ads is how Google stays in business and how they’ve made $137 billion dollars to date.
Paying companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Instagram and Yelp are the bare minimum to stay relevant in today’s market space and it’s the foundation of a successful marketing campaign. Managing them all at once will make you king Julius Ceaser of the internet but it takes a day in and day out allocation of time and energy. This is why people hire marketing agencies. Do you have 20-30 hours a week to analyze and interpret the incoming data, tweak the keywords, key phrases and ad copy in your campaign in real time? Thank goodness for your marketing agency!
We recommend Google Smart campaign at a very minimum and since 42% of people buy supplements on Amazon, we advertise there too (depending on your product or brand).
“Your agency should provide a weekly summary of your analytics and how to adjust your campaign. This constant real time maintenance and their years of experience is why you pay them.”
KNOWING WHERE NOT TO ADVERTISE IS HALF THE BATTLE.
Personalities and lifestyles do well with Instagram while brick and mortar stores coming offline to online should seriously consider Yelp. While almost everyone can benefit from AdWords, a Google Smart Campaign is different For example, Lutz Multimedia spent a thousand dollars a month with Yelp in 2016 and skyrocketed to the second highest rated marketing agency in NYC in 12 months!
While running Yelp campaigns, we ran a half dozen other platforms which bolstered our Yelp marketing and forced Google bots to spin on their heels. By the end of the year we were the second result that appeared in NYC for web design agency. For us, 15k a year for hundreds of new customers paying on average 7-15k per project was a no-brainer.
Maybe your product is cheaper though and your budget smaller. If that number is quite higher than you were considering fret not. $50 a month with Google will still yield some kind of return and as I always say, something is better than nothing when it comes to marketing. No matter your budget, your catchment area and campaign targets can be tailored to WIN.
What Lutz Multimedia does is take your total budget and split it up between an array of tethered marketing platforms such as Google Ads, Yoast, Yelp and PR to create a dynamic and successful best-in-class marketing campaign. *
INDUSTRIES IS IS ENTERTAINMENT IS PRODUCT IS CHEESE-WHIZ. IT’S ALL A PRODUCT. In the world or commerce you can apply the same metrics across a spectrum of industries. Few industries are outside of these MMM umbrella methods. Let’s use again our example supplement company. First let’s look at Supplements numbers to gauge your companies metrics:
Supplements alone is a $122 BILLION dollar industry and growing exponentially every day. While 76% of American adults take supplements, 92% buy them online. Our “Media Management Marketing” “MMM” is how our example client will interface them and earn their business (and then retain it).
Here’s a simple and easy equation to gauge your current metrics and what you are missing out on:
Add up your annual total sales net from the last calendar year, subtract what you sold online without PPC and managed media marketing.
Call this number “X”.
Take the median annual net profit made by the #1 top grossing competitors in your industry (Y) and subtract your number (X). Simple math. X-Y=Z. The remainder “Z” equates to money you’re leaving on the table next calendar year if you ignore Managed Media Marketing.
IF YOU’RE HAVING TROUBLE WITH BRAND EXPOSURE JUST THINK: TWO THIRDS OF PEOPLE ONLINE RIGHT NOW ARE LOOKING FOR YOUR EXACT PRODUCT. YOU JUST DON’T KNOW HOW TO INTERFACE THEM… YET.
If you’re selling online, at least two thirds of Americans are looking for you right now that you’re not reaching. More than two-thirds of American adults take dietary supplements each year, and according to a new economic impact report by the Council for Responsible Nutrition (CRN), the dietary supplement industry contributes $121.6 billion to the U.S. economy. We need to de-stigmatize the word “competition.” Marketing is not only about beating .Since This is just one of thousands of flourishing industries. With so much fluidity and potential, there’s always enough for everyone to eat. In marketing, there’s always enough for everyone.
The average conversion rate in Google AdWords across all industries is only 3.75 percent for search and 0.77 percent for display. Say what? That’s unacceptable if you crunch the numbers. The typical competitor budget range selling identical supplement products in America is $600-$1300 a month. How much do you want to spend then? Well, that depends on what you want to actually do!
“There are at least a dozen different ways a budget can be allocated.”
Whether it be to get more phone calls, generate leads, focus on retention, focus on funnel marketing or even just create brand awareness… all in hopes to convert impressions into sales, of course. Lutz Media does them all and can best decide where and to whom your marketing budget should go.
At very minimum, your marketing campaign should make you more money than the campaign actually costs. Marketing is not cheap nor is it free although it doesn’t have to break the bank and should be making money so the idea is you never actually see a loss when you spend on marketing, only an increase.
Some people think if they hire a marketing person on staff and leave it at that all their problems go away. But without a marketing budget towards PPC and online media marketing, a marketing employee is a race car driver in a race without a drop of gas.
