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ECommerce Marketing in 2020

Expert Tips For How to Improve ECommerce Marketing in 2020

It’s 2020, and the future is here (as well as Coronavirus). While you may have created your Ecommerce website by yourself with Shopify or another out-of-the-box web design tool, you simply can’t go without an Ecommerce marketing agency in our ever-changing online environment. Marketing is part art, part science, and when it comes to marketing your Ecommerce site, it requires a lot of technical knowledge about search engines.

Marketing in 2020 also requires you to be especially aware of the unique opportunities created for online retailers in the wake of the Coronavirus pandemic.

As an Ecommerce marketing agency and Ecommerce marketing experts, we’ve put together this blog post to share our best tips for marketing your website.

Always Run PPC Ads

PPC ads (pay-per-click ads) are a great way to drive traffic to your online retail website. While the most common PPC ads are on Google and YouTube, you can also run campaigns on Bing or on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram and even on mobile devices.

In general, here are a few different types of PPC ads that you can choose from:

  • Paid search ads, which is when you bid on keywords. When someone searches those keywords and you win a bid, your ad is displayed on the search results page.
  • Display ads, which are shown on websites related to the keywords you have bid on, or are part of a remarketing campaign.
  • Product Listing ads, such as Google Shopping ads or Bing Shopping ads, which are perfect for eCommerce sites like yours.

Choosing all the settings for these ads, however, is an extremely technical task. In fact, there are people who spend their entire careers focused on search engine marketing! Trust us, you want to be working with an ecommerce marketing agency like ours for all your PPC ads to achieve the best ROI.

Your Website Must Be Search Engine Optimized (SEO) or It Won’t Be Discovered

In addition to paid traffic, you want your website to be found organically. But your site will never rank on Google if you aren’t deploying the most current SEO trends.

SEO is an entire sector of marketing that is entirely focused on getting web pages to rank highly on search engines like Google. Current things that help web pages rank include:

  • Using quality keywords throughout your webpage copy.
  • Optimizing web elements like title tags, image descriptions, and meta tags.
  • Creating a content marketing campaign that incorporates popular search terms related to your brand or product, such as a blog campaign.

Whether you need our help with web copy, content marketing, or something else, our Ecommerce marketing agency can fulfill all your SEO needs.

Make Sure You Have Social Proof Including Positive Reviews

It used to be that if you wanted to find a new product or service, you’d ask your friends and family. In 2020, that’s all changed. 

New research shows that in 2020, 84% of people trust online reviews from complete strangers just as much as they trust the recommendations of their actual friends and family whom they know in real life. This news is great if you’ve got a 5-star rating on your Google My Business page. This is not-so-great news if your Google My Business is only filled with complaints, or perhaps even worse, has no feedback at all.

In E-commerce marketing, reviews fall under the umbrella of social proof. Social proof encompasses a wide variety of feedback from real users of your products or services that other online retail shoppers use to make a purchasing decision.

The type of social proof that your customers may consider include:

  • Reviews and ratings posted on your website, social media sites, and your Google My Business page.
  • Professional organizations that your business is a member of that you display on your website.
  • Awards you’ve won and mention on your website
  • Big press hits in major publications and websites that you showcase on your website, such as “As Seen in INC.”
  • Recommendations from social media Influencers who are relevant to your brand.

As an Ecommerce marketing agency, we can help you put together a plan to gather more social proof. Our work together may include:

  • Creating an incentive program for customers to leave an honest review of your product or service, and automating the request of these reviews.
  • Submitting your company, products, and services for industry-recognized or consumer awards.
  • Running a public relations campaign to increase media coverage of your Ecommerce website.
  • Working with social media Influencers, such as on Instagram, to give your brand a lift.

Ecommerce Marketing in the Age of Coronavirus

With more people working from home and taking breaks to surf the Internet, or helping their kids do school virtually, there’s never been a better time than now to be running Ecommerce marketing campaigns.

Internet traffic is up in 2020, which means that despite the challenges the economy has undergone this year, the Internet is still ripe with people who may be casually browsing online, but whom you can also quickly convert into customers when you present them with compelling content, messages, and social proof.

As an Ecommerce marketing agency, we’ve been diligently studying pandemic Ecommerce marketing. We know insider tips and tricks to help convert casual browsers who may be taking a break in between Zoom calls into paying customers.

Trust us, you don’t want to let 2020’s unique Ecommerce marketing opportunities pass you by.

Call Our Ecommerce Marketing Experts for Help with Your Campaigns

If you’re not yet working with an Ecommerce marketing agency, you need to be. 2020 is the most technically advanced year we’ve ever experienced, as well as a high Internet traffic year due to COVID-19 shutdowns. You don’t want to trust your Ecommerce marketing efforts to just anyone, and you definitely don’t want to go it alone without the help of Ecommerce marketing experts like us.

To start and implement an Ecommerce marketing strategy, call our agency to begin a discussion on your website’s unique needs. We can be reached at (214) 295-5845.

Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “ECommerce Marketing in 2020” instead.

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How to Calculate your Google Ads Budget in 2020

Expert Tips on Google Ads

Pay-per-click (PPC) is one of the most effective means of generating qualified leads and maximizing online revenue opportunities. Businesses across the world spent a lot of money on PPC campaigns.

Unlike SEO, PPC generates leads almost immediately. It’s an ideal revenue stream while you are building your online presence. Though, understanding how much you should spend on your Google ads is often tricky. 

There are a lot of factors that go into calculating and adjusting your Google ads budget. Let’s go over the basics of calculating your Google ads budget in 2020. 

Study Your Finances

PPC is an investment. Before you can determine your Google ads budget, you should ideally understand:

  • How much you have available to spend.
  • How much you are comfortable spending.
  • How much you can reasonably afford to spend.

With this said, marketers must work in cohesion with business leaders to gain a deep understanding of organizational finances. Furthermore, here is how each step should go. Marketers should ideally consult with business leaders on the total amount they can spend on a campaign.

Then, marketers should receive guidance from business leaders on how much marketing dollars they are willing to experiment with. Lastly, marketers can decide on their own at what’s reasonable to spend based on their expertise.

Let’s break this down even further. Marketers aren’t normally qualified or allowed to sign off on major investments on their own. Therefore, they should seek the counsel of their senior officials to streamline this process.

Keep in mind that the total amount you have to spend isn’t a budget by any means. If you have any sort of experience with setting up PPC campaigns, you should use this amount in conjunction with your senior officials to decide what you’re willing to spend.

Finally, you can make a decision on your own on a ballpark amount that you want to allocate to your Google ads. These are the most basic steps of setting up your Google ads campaign. 

Setting up your budget is contingent on what you’re trying to achieve. The following section will explain how you can analyze your business goals to make a great decision. 

Know Your PPC Goals

Here’s a question? What are you trying to achieve with your PPC campaign? Oftentimes, marketers take to online guides and videos to learn how they can better optimize their campaigns.

Though, does it make sense to follow the PPC advice of a multi-million dollar company when you have completely different customers and goals? There are a lot of PPC experts online, but you are responsible for understanding how you can adjust your budget based on your goals.

To do this, make sure you answer the following questions:

  • Do I have other marketing initiatives in play or am I focusing solely on PPC?
  • What is my target audience?
  • What is my unique selling proposition (USP)?
  • What keywords are relevant to your business?

Answering these questions and understanding your goals will make you ready to take part in the next phase of calculating your Google ads budget in 2020.

Use Google Keyword Planner to Optimize Your Budget

By now, you should have a great idea of how much you want to spend and your goals for your PPC campaign. Now, it’s time to adjust your budget based on actual data. Before we begin, you should understand one important term: cost-per-click (CPC).

CPC is a rate that Google charges you every time one of your ads is clicked. Now you may be wondering, “I’m paying good money for my PPC ads, so why is Google charging me for when someone clicks on my ads (even if they don’t convert)?”

The answer is simple. High-performance ads can more than makeup losses from a CPC. In fact, if you increase your ad score, your ads will rank higher while maintaining the same CPC.

With that said, Google Keyword Planner is a tool you can use to browse potential keywords you can use as well as the corresponding CPCs. 

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Let’s say that you want to use the keyword, “Google ads budget”. 

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This is a glimpse of what using Google Keyword Planner looks like. Receiving CPCs from this tool will help you take your planned budget and modify it accordingly with real-life data. 

Keep This in Mind

Before you get ready to start your PPC campaign, you should keep this in mind: all campaigns must endure a phase of experimentation. It’s unlikely that you will begin your campaign and produce desirable results immediately.

Performing A/B split tests, trying different keywords, and various ad formats are essential to understanding the precise techniques that can be used to drive increased revenue. Once you’ve found out what works, you can increase your spending and do whatever you want to improve your results.

So, What’s Next?

You shouldn’t rush to spend your entire monthly budget when starting your campaign. Otherwise, you could waste your time, money, and other valuable resources. Understand that losses in your campaign will happen.

Though, hiring an experienced PPC agency will help you avoid the learning curve and rookie mistakes that are sure to come if you aren’t sure how to navigate your campaign. The quicker you realize what works, the better.

The best way to calculate what you’re going to spend on Google ads is by hiring a PPC agency to provide you with a quote.

Give Us a Call Today!

There are a lot of PPC calculators available online. However, many of these tools only provide preliminary information that won’t help you as you move forward throughout your campaign.

Instead, you should contact Agency Partner Interactive to provide a quote for your business. We specialize in creating high-performance Google ads on behalf of our clients. 

We can lead you on selecting the right budget based on your goals and available resources. Therefore, if you want to learn more about our services, give us a call at (214) 295-5845 or click here to receive a free quote. 

Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “How to Calculate your Google Ads Budget in 2020instead.

Using the power of Artificial Intelligence, we turned this blog into a video for you. Check it out below!

 

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How to Determine How Much to Spend on PPC Advertising

Expert Tips For Setting a Pay Per Click Ad Budget

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is the lifeline of many businesses across the world. In fact, more than seven million advertisers invested 10 billion in PPC ads in just 2017, according to Social Media Today

Also, PPC advertising remains one of the major generators of one-page conversions. Like any marketing strategy, you must be cognizant of how you are spending your PPC budget.

You can’t mindlessly throw away dollars to an unrefined campaign, and you don’t want to limit the potential of your campaign by not investing in it properly. With that said, knowing how much you should spend on PPC advertising is essential.

This guide will explain key methods for determining the budget for your campaign commensurate the results you’re looking for.

Things to Consider Before Determining Your PPC Budget

Striking a balance between quality and quantity is important for any PPC campaign. However, you can’t do this without first defining the results you need and understanding the characteristics of your target audience. 

Ideally, you’ll need to recognize certain qualities about your target audience, which include:

  • Buying cycle
  • Visitor frequency
  • Geographic location
  • Target cost per lead (CPL)
  • Lead quality

These are all qualities you must understand about your intended lead. If you’re not yet sure what this lead looks like, you can start by asking the following questions:

  • What can I afford to spend?
  • How do I “value” a lead?
  • What is my website’s conversion rate?
  • How many leads do I need from my PPC campaign?

Let’s take a closer look at the information you’ll need to be aware of before determining your PPC budget.

How Much Do You Need to Spend to Get Started with PPC?

Once you know the answer to the questions above, you can perform some basic mathematical calculations to help you define your overall budget. Take a look at this image to further understand how this math will work.

How-to-Determine-How-Much-to-Spend-on-PPC-Advertising.
Let’s say that you need at least 250 leads per month from your PPC campaign and you have a conversion rate (close rate) of 15%. This means you’ll need 1667 conversions every month to convert 250 leads every month.
If your CPL is $25, you can expect to spend $1,388 every month or $41,666.67 annually to achieve this goal. 

Is There Anything That Affects How You Value Leads?

All leads aren’t created equal. Some leads will enter your funnel fully ready to do business with you. These are called qualified leads. On the contrary, others will need to be nurtured.

The value of leads will depend strongly on the following factors:

  • Geography: Are your leads valued more or less based on where they live? Are you willing to spend more money on leads from specific areas?
  • Bounce rate: How are your leads interacting with your website? What’s the average bounce rate for your website and what do your web users do after they click on your website?
  • Precedence: What have past qualified leads shown you?

Controlling the quality of leads that are derived from your PPC campaign is simple. You can utilize negative keywords to stop using search terms that don’t bring in qualified leads

You can also manipulate the placement of your ads and adjust them based on the time of day they appear. Doing this will ensure that you are putting your budget to great use. 

For example, if you analyze the performance of your ads during all days of the week, you may see that your CPL on Saturdays is higher than other days of the week, especially for international traffic. 

At this point, you should ask yourself, “are the leads I’m bringing in over the weekend worth the increased cost? Should I dial back my budget just a bit? This is where bid adjustments come into play.

Changing the schedule of your ads can help you save money overall, but it’s not the only way. Finding other growth opportunities is vital to saving more money and nailing down your PPC budget.

How to Find Growth Opportunities?

Will increasing your budget result in more leads? How can you define the marginal gain for every cent you are spending? Ultimately, it can be challenging to see how changes in your budget can influence your entire campaign.

Though, Google does offer some tools that can assist marketers in this task. If you’ve used Google Adwords for your campaign, then you’ve likely seen the “limited by budget” notification in your account.

If you have, then Google provides a helpful resource that will inform you just how much more leads you would receive if you increase your budget. Just take a look at this snapshot.

ppc-budget
This shows that Google can estimate the growth of your campaign based on your daily budget. For this user, increasing their daily budget will lead to more daily clicks. The user also has an option to set a different budget and see custom metrics for how that will impact the potential of their campaign.

Is There Anything to Consider Before Setting My Budget?

There are various scenarios that can affect your PPC budget, which include:

      • Search vs. the Display Network
      • Keyword Considerations
      • Search Engine (Google vs. Bing)
      • Device (desktop/tablet vs mobile)

To set the right budget, you’ll need to do some experimentation. Little changes can significantly impact your budget. Therefore, once you understand the growth opportunities for your campaign, you can move forward in increasing or decreasing your budget.

Over time, you can figure out if your budget is efficiently leading to the results you’re after. Finally, you can deliberate with your marketing team to optimize your campaign to reach your objectives.

This is the basis of creating a successful campaign and spending the correct amount of money to do so. 

Improve Your PPC Campaign Today!

As you can see, defining an accurate budget for your campaign takes a lot of knowledge and effort. If this is something you don’t have, then contact Agency Partner Interactive today to learn more about our PPC services. 

Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “How to Determine How Much to Spend on PPC Advertisinginstead.

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2020 Marketing Trends For Dallas Businesses

Tips From Professional Digital Marketers

Every year, Marketing Strategies fundamentals fluctuate. This makes it important for businesses to adapt to changing policies surrounding their marketing initiatives. Particularly, putting marketing trends into focus can benefit your business in the following ways:

  • You can receive insights on what’s working and what’s not.
  • You can save time and money on more efficient techniques.
  • You can streamline your marketing operations and achieve faster results.

As you can see, following current marketing trends is a big deal. Needless to say, 2020 has brought on an entirely new crop of marketing trends you should be aware of. Let’s take a look at some 2020 marketing trends for Dallas businesses in particular.

Customer Experience is Becoming Paramount

In 2020, it’s not enough to simply have stellar products and services. According to a study from Walker, consumers are leaning towards brands that provide an excellent customer experience.

This makes sense because there are probably hundreds of businesses that provide the same offerings as you. Consumers want to know how you’ll make their purchasing experience different, or they’ll move on to your competitor.

Moving forward, try to create an authentic and helpful customer experience to generate quality leads and keep customers coming back for more. 

Digital Real Estate Will Become Scarce

By 2022, CMO predicts that nearly 87% of Marketing Budgets will be Spent on Digital Marketing. This will inevitably make digital real estate hard to come by. As if SEO wasn’t already a competitive process, this year’s digital playing field will become more saturated.

To combat this, it’s important to invest in Advanced SEO Techniques, such as using schema markup to create rich snippets online and diversifying your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads on both Bing and Google. 

Whatever it takes, you should try to accumulate as much digital real estate as you can before the competition gets hectic.

Hyper-Personalized Advertising is Thriving

Here’s an interesting statistic – 78% of internet users stated that hyper-personalized Content Makes them more inclined to do Business with a Brand. In addition, 63% of those users said that they now expect brands to use their purchase history to create more relevant content for them.

All of this means that solicitation and cold-calling are officially dead. Consumers only want to work with businesses that are providing the most relevant content to their purchase.

For example, an Online Retailer selling video game consoles will find real success if they provide content promoting popular video games to a person who has already purchased a console.

Consumers value magnetic Content, so you should get started crafting a new Content Marketing Strategy for your business.

Email Marketing is Also Becoming More Personalized

In previous years, segmentation was a creative way to personalize correspondence to your Target Audience. In 2020, it’s not enough to segment your email list. You’ll now need to put in more effort to make your emails hyper-personal.

For example, you’ll need to view the purchasing history of past customers, see definite consumer patterns, and understand if people are responding to your emails. Putting a watchful eye on all of these metrics, while using hyper-personalized messaging is a great way to expand your reach in 2020.

Hi-Tech is Evolving into Mainstream

A few years ago, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and virtual reality (VR) was only able to be used by billion-dollar companies. Nowadays, small and medium-sized businesses can affordably hire developers to produce this technology for them.

AI-enhanced Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is one example of how any business can leverage hi-tech to improve their online positioning and drive more qualified leads. Even VR is becoming a driving force in marketing. 

Companies like the New York Times, CNN, and Facebook are all using VR to create interactive content that will drive their Content Marketing Objectives.

E-Commerce Advertising is Becoming More Creative

At any time, 84% of Americans are Currently Shopping. This presents both challenges and opportunities for advertisers. If you want to compete with Google and Amazon, you’ll need to get creative in advertising your products.

One great way of doing so is by using Pinterest. You can try creating captivating photos of your products in action. When your prospects see them and click on your pictures, they’ll be directed to your website where they can shop.

Develop Your New Marketing Strategy Today

2020 is already underway, and it’s never been a better time to devise a new marketing strategy. If you are unsure of how you’ll configure a marketing strategy for your business, then you’ve come to the right place.
Give us a call at (214) 295-5845 or Contact Agency Partner Interactive Today for more information.

Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “2020 Marketing Trends For Dallas Businesses” instead.

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How To Use Pay-Per-Click To Get More Phone Calls

Tips From Professional Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketers

Let’s say that you recently set up a Pay-Per-Click Campaign that was mildly successful. You’re noticing that your ads are garnering clicks, but one thing is irritating you.

That is – your ads are getting clicks but no one is buying anything. PPC Ads aren’t cheap, and your campaign could be hemorrhaging money by the day if your conversions and clicks aren’t matching up.

To capitalize on hot leads while their interest levels are still high, you should Optimize your PPC Campaign to get more calls instead of clicks. 

Here’s how you can do this.

Utilize Call Extensions

When you perform an online search, you’ll probably run into a few ads that have a call extension – that is a blue, formatted phone call link on the top of the ad.

Call extensions can increase your Click-through Rate (CTR) significantly. Why? It makes it easier for potential customers to contact you.

With call extensions, a lead won’t have to fill out a form or navigate through your landing page just to find your office number. They’ll simply call you on the spot if they’re interested or want to learn more about your business.

Call extensions may become increasingly important to implement. This is because consumers are constantly being bombarded with commercial emails, which makes it less likely that they’ll answer your email if you take the traditional route of linking your ads to your website.

Make Your Phone a Click-to-Call 

When your ad appears on a search engine, your phone number will be automatically formatted to be dialed once it is clicked on a mobile device.

On your landing page, you should also format your phone number in your call-to-action to do the same. This makes it easier for consumers to contact you instead of writing down or remembering your phone number.

Eliminating friction by making your phone number simpler to dial is key because humans value simplicity. It doesn’t take much effort to format your phone number in this way, and it can tremendously impact your bottom line in a positive way.

Make Calling your Intended Call-to-Action 

Landing pages will often have a clear call-to-action to either dial a phone number or visit a web page. Sometimes, this doesn’t happen in ads, and it can throw off its effectiveness.

In your ads, you should make it clear that you want your audience to call you. You can post your phone number in your ad while your copy says to visit your website.

Something this subtle can confuse your audience. For example, let’s say that you’re a Personal Injury Attorney & your PPC Ad Copy simply says “Get your maximum Compensation! Call us Today for a Free Consultation!”
How is someone supposed to follow through with this call-to-action? Make your call-to-action clear that you intend on your leads to dial your phone number.

Do you want to improve the performance of your PPC Ads to generate more phone calls and sales opportunities? Our experts have a proven track record of developing high-performance PPC Campaigns.

Contact Agency Partner Interactive Today to speak to a member of our sales team.

Not big on reading? That’s okay. Watch “How To Use Pay-Per-Click To Get More Phone Calls?” instead.

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