Are ROBOCALLS Good Marketing?

Robocalls – Should you consider them?

 

Annoying; aggravating; infuriating however you describe robocalls they have become part of our lives unfortunately.

I was watching John Oliver’s segment on robocalls a few weeks back and it got me thinking (you can view it here).

Just so you know, I am not writing this article from the perspective of we should do this but I am interested in the theatrics of it.

Do robocalls work? Are they all scams? Could they even be considered a marketing technique?

Well, it may surprise you to learn that I was a telemarketer when I was much younger – after coming back from a backpacking trip and needed some quick income (ahh the early 20s – a magical and depressing time; equal parts delightful and sobering when I wasn’t drinking, that is).

I was working for a charitable fund selling lottery tickets, being a charity did soften the blow a bit to whoever answered, but still copped my fair share of verbal assaults from the homeowner. I would put my average fail rate at about 95% which in industry averages is about standard.

It wasn’t a complete robocall because last time I checked I am still human; but there was a computer making all the calls and I and the other 100 people in the room had roughly about 5 seconds in between calls.

Surely, being non-robot must have helped the equation, as I took a quick (and rather unscientific) sample of friends and family and found that no one would respond to a robocall. In fact, as the technology to make the calls advances, so do the devices we use to answer them. Most people automatically screen a call that isn’t in their contacts but our phones more often than not now tell us the country of origin and/or whether it is a suspected spam caller which make it doubly hard to get through.

Most salespeople and marketers alike know that it’s a numbers game at the end of the day and if you throw enough mud at the call wall some will stick hence the preponderance of calls being made.

In the same John Oliver story, it was predicted that 45% of mobile calls in 2019 in the US will be robocalls – a staggering amount and with any numbers game someone is bound to lose and someone is bound to win.

So, is being annoying a viable option?


Stop the presses

I literally just received a spam call as I was writing this – I thought I would have a laugh and answer anyway – it was a tele-survey for the upcoming election – no harm no foul right besides everyone knows who I am voting for…

Make Australia Eat Bananas from r/australia


Now on with the show

When I look at it, there are two ways to being annoying – either being present at an inopportune place and time or doing something that antagonises.

The robocall more often than not does both perfectly, you know they are going to call you when you have just sat down for dinner and they are proffering things you do not want or and more likely still suggesting you will go to jail or worse if action is not taken (I’m pretty sure I paid my tax bill).

The sheer volume, zero human resources, relatively cheap software and calls make it a viable option for many scammers but on the whole, it doesn’t work for a reputable brand as trust and connection are two of the most important facets when making purchasing decisions for punters and companies alike. (These two facets are actually why social media is quite a great economical marketing solution – check out our latest podcast which deals with social).

And the flipside to this is of course, talking to a robot when you make the call yourself – like calling a telco, for example, trying to meander through the often-ambiguous automated questions that will hopefully lead you to the right department but invariably does not.

This causes immense annoyance to the average joe or jane and can lead to lost customers. Companies spend millions trying to figure this out. Recently, a friend called up a car insurance and was greeted by a human and then put into the automate call which softened the blow a lot and increased his happiness with the call.

At the end of the day as you might of guessed it letting a robot do the work in what is traditionally a human to human interaction hasn’t really found traction yet but as technology gets better and the robots get more human-like you can bet your bottom dollar that they will be able to get your bottom dollar.

On a side note, and because you’ve made it this far, annoying isn’t just relegated to the domain of our cyborg overlords some of the most annoying marketing techniques are the ads themselves – enjoy….

Coles Down Down camopaign

 

Sometimes people get so annoyed at the annoying ads they take it upon themselves to rally against them

Chevy Malibu

 

Mentos Nipples

 

There’s also jingles that are just so damn catchy that are annoying I am thinking banana make those bodies sing; banana boat and cottees my dad picks the fruit.
And this absolute gem:

Ashley madison

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3 EPIC Digital Marketing Podcasts that everyone involved in Marketing should listen to!

3 EPIC Digital Marketing Podcasts that everyone involved in Marketing should listen to!

Staying in the know when it comes to digital marketing is hard. If you are looking for some great marketing podcasts to listen to at work or when you are on the go – look no further we have our top 3:

 

MARKETING OVER COFFEE

Marketing Over Coffee is an awesome podcast to keep up with. Every week, hosts John J. Wall and Christopher S. Penn record the show, which is 20 minutes long and is shared every Friday. This podcast is designed to be casual, conversational, and not “newsy”. They share tips on social media, SEO, search marketing, copywriting, affiliate marketing, and more – and they take listener questions.

https://www.marketingovercoffee.com/

SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING PODCAST

Social Media Examiner’s weekly Social Media Marketing podcast is hosted by Michael Stelzner and other members of the Social Media Examiner team. Each podcast focuses on new social media features and strategies, which provides listeners with helpful tips that they can use to improve their social media results. The Social Media Marketing podcast is 45 minutes long and is shared once weekly, on a Friday.

https://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/shows/

ONLINE MARKETING MADE EASY

Amy Porterfield’s Online Marketing Made Easy was created with small business owners in mind! Most marketing strategies can seem very overwhelming to small businesses first starting out, and it can be difficult to know where to start and how to apply vague strategies like “create an online course.” Sounds much easier said than done! Online Marketing Made Easy breaks down these big strategies into small, manageable step-by-step pieces so that everyone can execute them to get awesome results. Amy shares what will work, and what doesn’t work, in the world of digital marketing.

https://www.amyporterfield.com/amy-porterfield-podcast/

 

There it is – get listening. If you have any favourites let us know here.

 

 

 

 

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Maintaining a tight data cycle

The ins, outs and roundabouts of the Data Cycle

The Data Cycle in marketing is closely linked to campaign cycle and social strategy but it is a bit more refined in scope in that it only focuses on the data and information gleaned.

PREPARE

You are starting a new campaign, it either started with the boss saying

  1. we need more sales or
  2. why aren’t we getting more sales or
  3. we hit our sales targets but let’s do double this month or
  4. we’ve had a good year so far why don’t you take a week off

Wait… What?… OK – just checking if you were paying attention that last one normally doesn’t happen but if it is usual for your boss to say that sort of stuff I can send you my CV or you can make an introduction… you know what, let’s just play by ear, we’ll figure it out, but seriously don’t forget.

So at this stage you have to prepare your marketing strategy whether it’s print or online, social or search yada yada yada. Then we have to make sure we know what success looks like how we measure it and most importantly for the data cycle – how we collect that data.

PRESS PLAY

Now it’s time to start, press the button – if you have ever run a marketing campaign through mailchimp you’ll know that this gif sums up the trepidation nicely.

 

Let’s make some noise.

INTERPRET

You may think the hard work is over – and ideation and creation is important don’t get me wrong but for a numbers geek like me the fun starts right about… now! It’s time to crunch the numbers.

Collect all your data

Look for meaning in the data

Turn it into information for others to understand

REACT

Some think that the reaction part is at the end of the campaign and inputting your learnings in the next campaign but having fast reactions is good. Seriously, your campaigns are like kids you may have set them up for success but you never know what can happen if you aren’t watching.

 

So, it’s wise to schedule in review times during the marketing campaign itself – it can be the key to a successful strategy.

Once you have obtained the information from the interpretation phase it’s time to implement it on the fly. Be it, finding out that one particular social stream is taking a liking to the campaign and putting money behind that or by tweaking your messaging to generate more action. It can save a campaign.

There you have it the data cycle in four* simple steps.

 

*There can be a fifth step and that is storage – store your data in a well collated way can be the key to saving hours looking for a piece of information or being able to aggregate the data so you can see trends emerging. Luckily in this day and age most of us use analytic programs (google, adobe etc.) that keep the history saved and accessible.

 

 

image credits from giphy except A serious man and hero image from unsplash

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What is Marketing Automation?

What is Marketing Automation?

At its most basic, marketing automation is software that self-operates your marketing activities for you. When used correctly, these tools perform tasks in an effective and holistic way that helps convert strangers into customers, improve your bottom line and increase your operation’s efficiency based on their interactions with you online (mostly).

Types of Automation

Some people have a very narrow view of what constitutes marketing automation while others have a the more the merrier point of view.

I like to keep it simple with a list of 5 to be honest most of these have some crossover but they also can stand on their own two feet and perform automated tasks:

 

Email Marketing

Example: User action initiated email or series of emails to educate and nurture your potential customer.

 

Site Automation

Example: Live chat prequalifying/chatbots can save time and harvest data for you.

 

Social Automation

Example: Posts curators/sharers or chatbots not only can it save time it can give an answer and provide a nice user experience when your team are away from the desk.

 

CRM Software

Example: Master storer of all lead information that leads to personalisation for each customer interaction.

 

Programmatic Advertising

Example: Automatically display your ads based on data.

Some of the players

As I said above these can be quite intertwined for example your email marketing software being your CRM. There is a plethora of different tools out there to facilitate the various tasks, some of the most popular tools are:

Mailchimp: “Consider us your personal think tank.”

No longer just the worlds biggest email marketing platform they continually add features and they have a forever free plan for the smaller business.

Hubspot: “There’s a better way to grow.”

With a free CRM out of the box Hubspot goes from strength to strength with their inbound marketing and automation software and amazing training.

Marketo: “One Platform, Every Engagement, Any Channel”

Marketo can be expensive and is a true enterprise solution with all the bells and whistles.

Drip: “See your customers in full color.”

A user friendly tool that is a great entry into the automation sphere.

IFTTT: “A world that works for you”

This is for everyone not just marketers a simple computing concept is at the heart of this automation If This, Then That.

Salesforce: “Help your business grow with the world’s #1 CRM.”

Another incredibly powerful enterprise CRM with the mostest. It can build a complete customer journey for you and more.

Is marketing automation the death of the marketer?

You might be thinking with all this set and forget business that people will be losing their jobs to technology. And marketing is no different. These tools can very well take many of the labourious tasks that, as a marketer, can eat up a lot of your time.

This doesn’t mean you will be out of a job however, in fact in many ways this sort of technology can bring great advertising outcomes to ANYONE perhaps the greater the challenge for marketers is to apply their skills and push even harder for the attention of consumers and inspiring action.

But it also means that as a base line, your marketing can be “produced” more effectively and your time will be used by doing what you do best – that’s thinking of new ways to showcase the great work your company does.

The average automation flow still falls down in other areas like the ability to have a meaningful conversation with another human or keeping content fresh although AI is getting crazy good. CHECK THIS OUT

images credit unsplash 1 , 2, 3.

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Digital Marketing: Where do I start?

Digital Marketing: Where do I start?

Launch your digital marketing campaign

Digital Marketing is like launching a rocket into the unknown, so it’s understandable if the very prospect of starting is daunting. And like rocket science it seems very complex, but it doesn’t have to be! Remember one step at a time.

 

Start with your customer

As with most things in your business you want to think about your customer and make your offering as appealing to them as possible. So, who is the audience for your product?  Demographics, likes/dislike etc. Compile all the information you can about them and then use it against them… just kidding… after you have your information the picture should be clearer of how they like to consume content and what sort of content they like. For example, if it is a teen audience you might go down the influencer marketing route on any number of social channels including Instagram.

 

Appraise your resources

Do you have lots of time? Have you allocated a budget for your marketing? A comprehensive marketing strategy will consume one of these (and can consume both but it doesn’t need to).

 

Where should you focus your efforts?

Are you here for a good time not a long time? If you want quick gains then advertising is your best avenue – some great design showcasing your offering to the world, or should I say because you know your customer, showcasing your offering to your highly specified targeted audience, will have you seeing fairly immediate results. Advertising can be anywhere be it ATL (above the line: traditional sources like print media and radio) or across the digital landscape: be it native, search, display networks or social media.

If on the other hand, you want to play the long game you could curate your audience through solid content creation. This would normally align with a blog and lots of great social posts. To get noticed you should have your own voice, you may think everything has already been written but there is always an area or viewpoint that is unique and there are always new developments in every area so there will be lots to canvas. Consistently great content will get shared you can also guest post on other popular avenues that have viewership that you want to target. This content will also help with that dreaded acronym SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).

The wisest option is a little from column A and a little from column B – advertising once it’s finished is finished and you see less and less residual effects but a great content strategy can be fruitful long after the work has been done.

 

(More) Research

Now it’s almost time to put the plan into action, research is the key to start off on the right foot. Research your competitors – what they are doing and what they aren’t doing. What they aren’t doing can help you know what not to do but it can also lead you to a niche area that you could quickly establish yourself as a thought leader in.

 

So the check list is:

  • Know thy customer
  • Know where they are (digitally speaking)
  • Know what strategy is best for you
  • Know what content you will produce
  • Hit the play button

As we said at the top, any new endeavour can be daunting but if you are ready and willing the time to start is now. If you need guidance drop us a line for free consultation.

 

Photo by Bill Jelen on Unsplash

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3 Golden Rules of Web Design

3 Golden Rules of Web Design

When you boil it down most jobs are fairly simple… Once you know what you are doing. As is the case with Web Design and Development

Users Come First. 

The 21st century version of the customer is always right – The user experience (UX) is tantamount for the success of your website. Think about your user – what will they want from your website? This means make it easy for them, whether it is
– making sure that it is responsive for different screen sizes
– make the information easy to find and easy to understand
– make it fast – a speedy website is essential if you want people to continue to use your website.
– Make it familiar – we are creatures of habit and use icons to save time so a gear/cog usually means settings or a trolley would be your shopping cart. Don’t assume that your user will intuitively know a new icon. If you want to create iconography make sure it’s easily understood and have a key or “hoverover” in an easy to find place.

You Come Second.

Your aim, in having a website in the first place, is to get the user to do something – so make sure it drives them to that goal. Plot out the user journey you want anyone to take from whatever page they land on. On a publisher’s website, whose livelihood is from ad revenue then their goal might be for a user to consume as many pages as possible thus serving as many ads as possible – To help this along they will have suggested articles with catchy titles. In Wikipedia’s case they are not trying to serve you ads, rather they deliver information, so they have a very simple interface with the bare facts so you get what you want as quick as possible but they also know a user might want more information on a term they come across, so they have their cross linking game down pat – Wikipedia provides a great resource for the world’s enjoyment and education and they do it time and time again – which is why they don’t need ads or subscriptions the product is so good, they can live of donations of people that appreciate it. If you have a blog but you want to drive leads for your contracting business make sure you have strong call to actions on your blog posts that lead a user to make an enquiry or take up an offer.

Engage!

Once you have covered the basics of UX and User Journey it’s engagement time – make sure the website speaks to your brand – engage them by showing off your uniqueness – whether it is adding some flair to the designs – creating some videos that show you at your best or copy that screams “we are the that you’ve been looking for”.

Finally,

Remember the internet is a free global market place. Standing out is not simple and simply being there isn’t good enough. So, spend time making sure you have a plan that encompasses the above and don’t forget websites are a living embodiment of your brand, so make sure your plan goes beyond today and includes both a clear mechanism for measuring performance and the flexibility to evolve with your audience.

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Not getting enough traffic?

WHY AM I NOT GETTING ENOUGH TRAFFIC TO MY WEBSITE?

We all want a constant stream of people viewing our site.

 

A constant stream is good but what we really want is a constant stream of high quality users, the kind that are interested in our offering and enquiring. Or better yet, converting then and there.

 

How do you go about building organic traffic to your website?

 

Let’s start with the stuff that is easy to fix.

I say easy because it’s stuff that most people can test and can go to you, or your local web development company, to fix.

 

Speed – I feel the need, the need for…

 

The speed of your website is paramount to rising up the rankings on search engines. If your site is slow, people will leave. Basically, we know that people are impatient, because if they clicked on your link from an organic search, they know that there are 4 million other results to read simply by hitting the back button. If your website is taking longer than 4 seconds (many suggest quicker, but us Aussies are a docile bunch comparatively) the user can get frustrated. Pingdom has done a great job of researching the correlation between the likelihood of a user bouncing as time goes by.

 

Things you can probably do in house:

  1. Optimise your images – If you have 2000px wide image in a 300px wide box you need to resize. It is just a waste and will not look any better.
  2. Redirects – If your landing page has a redirect, a browser has to execute that before it can start loading. If it then has to redirect to a mobile page such as m.domain.com (more on mobile sites later) well then it will have to execute that one as well.

 

Things that you might need help with are:

  1. Enable compression, optimising css, removing renderblocking JS and leveraging caching.
  2. Learn more about page speed with google here and test your speed with pingdom.

 

Mobile – Being mobile is the new agile

I mentioned mobile above, but it still bears repeating that if your website is not responsive yet, make it so. We know that mobile accounts for well over 50% of all searches, and search engines like to send their searchers to websites with a good experience for the operating system that is being searched on.

 

Good design is good

57% of people won’t recommend a business or brand with a poorly designed mobile site. Ouch! Imagine your shirt not being pressed being the reason you missed out on a new client. A bad user experience can quite easily cause lack of interest in your website. People won’t link to, and share, bad content.

 

Design is not just limited to the overall look of your site, it’s your individual pages as well. If you have a new page or blog entry, make sure it’s not just a mountain of text; make it easily consumable, some simple suggestions are headlines, bullet points…

hang on

  • headlines
  • bullet points (yay)
  • imagery (appropriate imagery)
  • videos
  • a readable font (size, colour and style)
  • provide a CTA and sharing options

 

 

SEO – ESOteric or essential

SEO might seem like a bit of voodoo, but there are tried and true methods that can help boost your rankings, and in turn boost your traffic. SEO will help by making it easier for the engines to crawl your website, read your images, etc. but a good strategy will also help your website offsite by making sure there are no bad inbound links and create good high quality inbound links.

 

Keywords: this can be considered part of your SEO strategy or your content strategy, but once you have discovered who you are writing for (ideal customer/s) and what they are searching for, you will then have a pretty clear idea of what your keywords should be. Also spend some time on how you will use these in longtail search.

 

Influence the influencers

Speaking of inbound links, ask your favourite industry influencers to share your content. If it’s good, they will want to share it because it looks good on them to share good work. Ask nicely and engage them with why you think your content would work for their audience. No is the worst thing they can say.

 

You’re still reading? I haven’t scared you off yet? Well… the above was the easy part, and the ugly truth for why you might not be getting any traffic, is that your content is bad. There I said it… it had to be said…

 

Content is king

The more people like your article, the more they will want to share the article and things will just snowball from there. It’s hard… it takes time… and if you are not dedicated to the process, it’s pointless. Quality over quantity always!

 

Practice makes perfect – you won’t hit it out of the park on your first attempt, but then again you don’t have to publish your first attempt. Or you can publish it and learn from mistakes.

 

Writing copy that opens your brand up to new audiences and creating copy that will turn your leads into clients, isn’t something you can do half-heartedly. It’s a skill, and like any skill, it takes dedication to learn.

 

So what have we learned

The easy part – making your content as accessible to your targets as possible

The hard part – making your content creative, convincing, informative, entertaining, compelling.

Photo by Cris Ovalle on Unsplash

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Why Doesn’t My Mailchimp Click Equal My Google Analytics?

WHY DON’T MY MAILCHIMP CLICKS EQUAL MY GOOGLE ANALYTICS?

The above question, or variations thereof, come up often when talking with clients (and family and friends that want to bend your ear at a get together).

On a side note, I feel for the doctor oft cornered at a party with requests like, “could you just have a look at this mole?” Working in digital marketing, I am more and more finding myself answering questions from IT to Print: ‘I think I have a virus on my computer…’ to ‘how wide should my letterbox drop go?’

But enough about my dazzling social life – back to the job at hand.

Why do I have more clicks and less sessions on my analytics?

It comes down to a fairly mundane answer.

First of all, we make sure that the figures we are talking about are correct. Every once in a while you get a zero from analytics only to find out that a client’s landing page didn’t have the Google Analytics (GA) tracking code on it.

Then, if we are indeed trying to compare apples to apples, it’s usually due to a combination of factors.

But the main contributors are:

  • Click and close: A user may click on the link and then close the page before the page has loaded, which means the GA tracking code didn’t have a chance to register a hit on Analytics. This can happen because the user accidentally clicked the link, your server is slow, they have slow internet and gave up, or they just simply changed their minds. Also, it’s a good idea to have your GA code near the top of your page so it can load quickly and thus track that click… even if it is a bounce.
  • Multiple clicks: A user may click the link multiple times in succession. Like with ad servers, your mail distributor will track all the clicks instantly but GA will only record a session every 30 minutes. So, if a user went to read an article on their computer, changed to another page and then went back to the email to click on the link again to finish reading the article, Mailchimp will have registered two clicks and Google only one.
  • Road blocks: Many people wittingly or unwittingly might be throttling your analytics via use of a browser setting like switching off javascript (js) or having a technology or add-on for their browser that actively blocks GA.

So unfortunately, like with many systems, it’s not perfect, and your numbers will not often marry up 100%. But there should be some consistent differences which will let you extrapolate findings to see what’s working and what isn’t in your emails or other marketing endeavours.

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