1. Set goals

Your strategy should be built based on what it is you’re trying to achieve. If you have ambitious aims you need to invest the right amount of time and effort needed to achieve them. If they are less ambitious then you may be able to allocate a lower budget. You need to know where you’re going to work out how to get there!

2. Know your sales cycle

An inbound campaign aims to fill the top of your sales funnel and to move your leads down through the funnel at the right time, in the right way. Analyze your sales cycles to find out how your content can educate and nurture leads at each individual stage.

3. Use your strengths

Work out what you’re good at and what you aren’t. There’s no sense in investing in things you don’t do well. Play to your strengths to get the most from your campaigns.

4.  Gather your assets

If you’ve been in business for a while, you may have produced guides, brochures and other documents you can use as assets. Create a list of all your available resources to work out how you can use them, squeezing as much value as possible from each piece of content.

5. Find your proposition

Why should people buy from you? If you can’t answer this question your visitors won’t be able to either. This message should be reinforced throughout your website and campaign content.

6. Set KPI’s

I can’t reinforce this point strongly enough. Digital marketing thrives on it’s ability to be measured. Unlike traditional broadcast based campaigns, you can tweak your strategy on an ongoing basis according to what’s working and what isn’t. Here are some handy guides on how to measure your SEO, PPC, blogging, and social media.

7.  Create a content strategy

It’s important to develop a sustainable strategy to produce content on an ongoing basis. You need to be able to commit to it and maintain it, even when you’re being showered with new business. If you can’t sustain it in the long-term then you’ll need to have a plan for outsourcing it, or adding new staff to your roster to make sure you don’t disappoint your (now huge) audience.

8. Create buyer personas

Buyer personas will allow you to segment your target audiences and create strategies to hit each user group. It’s crucial in helping you understand who it is you’re selling to. Here’s a great resource on how to create buyer personas.

The post 8 tips for planning a digital marketing campaign appeared first on CandidSky.

Our designer, Steve, who worked on the site, said:

“We wanted to move away from traditional ticketing websites, which are usually hard to navigate and difficult to use. We made the site as user-friendly as possible to reflect Ticket Text’s needs and vision, and the fact it was completely custom built means it’s really unique”.

We think the site looks great – see for yourself!

Visit the website

The post Ticket Text Launches appeared first on CandidSky.

Fonts on your computer

A lot of the fonts you will be used to seeing are the ones that came with your computer. You may think that because these came with your computer you can just use them on the web. This is partially true; if you tell your website to use a certain font then provided that person already has it on their computer, it will render properly. You may be wondering what a few of the following questions now:

What happens if a user doesn’t have the font on their computer?

The font will, by itself, default to either a specified font in a stack of other fonts or it will default to what ever the browser uses as standard, normally Times New Roman. Compare this to using a font in a Word document then opening that document on another computer and it’s not using the font you used, it’s closely related.

Why doesn’t it show on their computer?

The simple reason is they don’t have it on their computer and if they don’t have it on their computer where is it going to get it from? That leads to the final question.

How do I get that font to show on their computer?

If there is no where for a computer to access a font then you need to make it accessible somehow. There are ways of doing it:

• Getting that person to download that font and install it (no one expects you to do this)
• Put the font on your server
• Use a service that provides the fonts

Licensing

Licensing can be difficult to understand, but all fonts somewhere have a license attached to them, whether its the ones on your computer now or you purchase a new font for a design. Even free fonts come with some form of license. There are generally 2 licenses a desktop and web license. A font that sits on your computer currently you can use that as you wish on your computer, in documents and so on. That is likely only for use on the desktop. A font you purchase as new will generally only be use for desktop too. Though depending where you buy that font from you may see the option to buy for just web or both web and desktop.

Desktop license

This will be how you use a font normally, just install and away you go. Though the conditions of this license might include how many computers you use it on and it tends to get more and more expensive the more computers you need it on. So when you think “I’ll just send the font across to another person”, you could be breaking the agreement in the license. This can be an issue when we are sent fonts by clients – legally we can’t use them unless the license permits it. In addition to this, we can’t just take that font and use it on the web, without a specific web license.

Web license

If you purchase fonts for web and not desktop, then you’re only allowed to use them on the web in reality. The main difference is you will likely be provided with a few different formats. This is because some browsers only accept a certain format (which is a completely different topic, just one to be aware of). A key thing to remember here is if you have a font but can’t find the license or know where to find a license. Don’t use it on the web.

What do we recommend?

We recommend using a font service. they remove the various complications such as licensing, filetypes and browser support, so you only have to think about the cost and terms of the license (which is usually down to page views). You’re also likely to not get access to the fonts on your desktop. This isn’t a deal breaker for us because of the way fonts render across the variety of devices out there.

Font services

There are many out there, our preference personally is Typekit due to it’s reliability, quality and cost.

The post Understanding Fonts appeared first on CandidSky.

Rivermead are a global property service, specialising in property in Egypt, Cyprus and Turkey. Based in Oldham, Rivermead guide buyers throughout the entire process, providing contact with properties and developers throughout their specialised areas. They also offer a reward system, membership cards and furniture packages.

We’ve been working with Rivermead for several years, and have a really close working relationship with them. We launched their new site last November, and we’re delighted to say that they were just awarded the AIPP Award for Most User Friendly Website.

The AIPP – or Association of International Property Professionals – are an organisation dedicated to promoting high standards of professionalism in the international property industry. The awards have 10 lucrative categories and a tough judging panel, so it’s a real honour to receive one.

View the website

The post Rivermead Global Properties Win AIPP Award appeared first on CandidSky.

I’ve already written a few blog posts on the topic (which you can see here), so hopefully you already have a fairly good idea of why content is vital in the modern business landscape. Content can fit into any campaign and can work for any business, and I think this really underpins just why I’m so passionate about it – it spans the whole breadth of marketing.

Content itself is also a huge category – it can include sales copy, blogs, press releases, newsletters, white papers and more. It’s a really malleable area and can be personalised, whatever the context or purpose. I wrote about this here, and we’ll also be producing an ebook that goes into greater detail so you can fully understand the depth and value of content.

Prior to starting at CandidSky, I worked in a digital agency (Snapshot Media, Leeds) and in an academic publishing house (Equinox, Sheffield). I also work as a freelance copywriter and write for a number of online and print publications.

If you have any questions about content or any of the blogs I’ve already written, then feel free to leave a comment, contact me on the CandidSky Facebook or tweet me @CandidSky.

The post Emily joins the CandidSky team appeared first on CandidSky.

Outbound

Broadly speaking, outbound marketing can be described as pushing marketing messages to consumers using ‘broadcast mediums’. It’s considered to be the traditional way of marketing because it was popularised by mediums such as direct mail, TV and radio. This has been taken online in the form of paid advertising (affiliate schemes) and paid search.

For the duration of an outbound marketing campaign, every click or impression has a cost. When the budget runs out or the campaign ends, the marketing stops and so does the benefit you get from it.

Some examples of outbound marketing:

• Paid search (Paid traffic from search engines)
• Emailing bought lists
• Affiliate ads (paid traffic from other sites)
• Retargeting (keeping track of people who visit your site and displaying ads to them on other sites)
• Any form of broadcast advertising

The benefits of outbound marketing are that it can be spun up quickly and if done correctly can leverage lots of leads in a short space of time.

However, because you’re often interrupting what a consumer is doing at that moment in time, outbound marketing methods can be seen to be ‘salesy’, ‘spammy’, distracting or simply annoying. Paid search advertising is an exception to this, as it’s designed to be relevant to the term the user has searched for, and can therefore, potentially, add value. Although it is an outbound method, it shares some of the characteristics of inbound.

Inbound

Conversely, inbound marketing can be defined as any type of marketing which generates an organic source of traffic without needing to be paid for. Effectively, you are pulling customers into your world by offering them relevant and valuable content, engaging with them creatively, or responding to a demand.

Here are some examples:

• Organic search (SEO)
• Content marketing (blogs, infographics, video, online PR)
• Social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Ning, forums, Q&A sessions, boards)
• Email marketing
• Premium offers (enticing sales offers and promotions)
• Link building (direct links from external sites)
• Podcasts
• Word of mouth

These methods are sometimes referred to as ‘earned media’ because the cost is in the effort it takes to plan, research, produce and distribute content. It can take quite a bit of time and effort before the actions leverage any return, not to mention the effort in building up an audience and industry relationships.

The benefits of inbound are that once you have built a level of authority and expertise, content you produce can carry on working for you long after original publication. Think of it like a bank account. Once you’ve deposited your time and effort, it continues to  pay dividends in traffic, links and leads.

Inbound marketing is all about permission. It lets buyers choose when and where they are going to interact with your brand. For instance, they may subscribe to your blog or email newsletter, like you on Facebook or listen to a podcast. This is beneficial in a number of ways. If someone is already searching for a service, they’re already engaged and interested, and therefore far more likely to respond to your business. This means you’re not wasting your money and time targeting consumers who’d never use your services – only those who would.

Retention Marketing (honourable mention)

There are also some methods that technically fall into another category known as retention marketing. This is where existing leads become known and can be interacted with directly in order to pull them back into marketing sources.

• Transactional emails (Event driven emails)
• Email marketing to existing customers
• Customer service
• Social media

Conclusion

Different types of campaigns require different approaches to digital marketing.  We believe that a healthy balance of inbound, outbound and retention marketing can produce the best results. Outbound marketing certainly has its place – testing or kick starting a campaign’s traffic – but ultimately the real value to digital marketing is creating authentic, relevant value to customers. This is where inbound marketing comes in. Not only will inbound continue to generate leads far after your outbound budget has run out, but the quality of the leads tends to be much higher, as well at a lower cost, than outbound marketing.

The post Inbound and Outbound Marketing Explained appeared first on CandidSky.

Many people have raced to Twitter to express their disappointment at the unexpected outage – even Google employees, with Mike Dudas tweeting this morning “Happens far too often”

Backup business files

It’s clear that these days more and more people are reliant on cloud based services to hold important information, particularly on a business level. But you need to make sure you are backing up your data in a secure and reliable way so at times like this you are not affected too badly.

One simple way to back up Google Drive is to download the desktop version, which syncs all files to a single computer. This, however, can be problematic if you have 100GB + in files as it can slow down your computer or make it a bit sluggish.

There are third party providers such as Spanning out there who will mirror what you have on Google Drive and back it up for you but this option is not for everyone.

In saying all this Google Drive will be back online in the next hour or so and in the grand scheme of things it presents far less issues having files stored in the cloud than remotely. Even other cloud based services such as Dropbox have had similar outages so it isn’t unheard of.

Sticking with Google Drive

Here at CandidSky we’ve been using Google Drive for about 7 months now after previously using Dropbox. We find that Google Drive offers a better package for us as a digital marketing agency as most of our work and collaboration is done via shared online documents and spreadsheets.

Today we’ve hit one or two small hiccups with it being down but as we back up our files and have procedures in place for this kind of thing we are able to carry on. So long as this isn’t a regular occurrence in the coming months I’m pretty sure we will stick with Google Drive.

The post Google Drive experiences major outage, halting productivity appeared first on CandidSky.

What is white space?

White space isn’t necessarily space that’s white – it’s empty (or negative) space between elements on a page. It allows those elements to get the focus they need and can generally make or break a design.

Let’s use amazon as an example. There is an awful lot of stuff on here, it’s a very busy website and not the greatest example to promote white space. I’m going there, as I feel it demonstrates my point for making something stand out in a crowd.

This is the top part of the amazon homepage, of all the page as it stands. You’ll notice that the area with the Kindle is the only part that has a larger amount of white space around it. Why is this? Let’s take a look at an alternative version of this page.

Although the differences aren’t huge, we can see that, having reduced the amount of negative space, it takes the focus away from the primary product amazon is trying to sell.

By adding white space instead of cluttering up areas with content that may not bring any value you can use it to bring focus to the areas you want people to view most.

Another example

Apple is a great example of using white space effectively. They are all about showcasing their products, and they keep it simple in many ways.

Huge image, minimal copy and lots of white space. It is all about the product. Not their logo, not who they are, not their latest offers or blog posts. This allows you to focus on the product and not be bombarded with huge amounts of information immediately that you see on a lot of home pages.

The image above, for example, shows the exact same information in the original. Immediately the product Apple want you to focus on is competing with 4 other areas. It’s likely people will ignore the iPhone and focus on the other 4 areas as much as they would focus on the iPhone first. In the original everyone has to focus on the iPhone, which is the most important thing on this page at the time.

White space isn’t a waste of space! It’s a way to put emphasis on the most important things on a page, and is something which should be incorporated in to design to help guide users through the journey you’ve laid out in front of them.

The post Why White Space is Important appeared first on CandidSky.

This is the third of a 4-part series on how to measure your online marketing efforts. We’ll post up links to the latest articles as we release them.

1.  How to measure your SEO
2.  How to measure your PPC
3.  How to measure your blogging
4.  How to measure your social media marketing

How to measure your blogging

Measuring your business blog is the best possible way to assess and improve its performance. Its worth noting at this point that what you call your  blog may vary depending on your vertical and target audience, so just to be clear, we’re referring to any area of your site where you are regularly publishing content for your audience. This might be in the form of a ‘Press’ or ‘News’ section, or a more informal ‘Blog’.

What you measure should be decided by what it is your blog is trying to achieve. There are an awful lot of people (and businesses) who blog ‘for the sake of it’ or because they have been told they should to improve their online exposure, but if it’s something you’re investing time (or money) in, you need to know what it’s doing for you and how well it’s doing it.

If the main goal of your blog is to generate leads, you need to understand how many leads it’s generating at the moment and which articles or tactics are working best to achieve this goal. Your aim is to identify the key factors which make (or could make) your blog successful, so that you can incorporate them in to your upcoming posts and improve your blogs performance.

We’re going to be looking at

• Blog traffic & referral sources
• Individual post views
• Visitor-to-lead conversion rate
• Call-to-action (CTA) performance
• Blog generated leads

Blog traffic & referral sources

“How many visitors your blog is receiving, and where that traffic comes from (organic search, referrals, direct traffic, social media etc.)”

Being able to identify where your traffic comes from and in what volume will reveal valuable information as to how effective you are at promoting your blog content in certain channels. If 80% of your traffic is coming from social media and only 5% is coming from search engines, it would suggest that you’re doing a great job of writing and sharing your content on social platforms, but a poor job of optimising it for search engines. If a large chunk of your traffic is coming direct to your website it would suggest that you’ve got some dedicated followers coming back for more.

You can draw actionable conclusions by studying your traffic sources carefully, telling you what you’re doing well and where there’s room for improvement.

Individual post views/shares/likes

“How many views each individual blog post receives”

You can use this data to identify trends in articles which are more popular with your audience. Over a period of time you can identify patterns in the data and tailor your content to fit the themes that your audience are already engaging with. This isn’t limited to the actual body of the post; it may be that articles with actionable page titles are getting more clicks, or that ones with certain types of featured images are enticing more people. We recommend that you analyze each article that works well and make a list of the lessons you’ve learned from it. Over time you can incorporate the successful tags in to  you approach to blogging.

Visitor-to-lead conversion rate

“The rate at which your blog converts visitors in to leads”

If you’re blogging as a business and you aim for your content to help generate leads for you to action, you need to know how many leads you’re generating and how effective you are at converting visits to leads. You should aim to maintain the highest conversion rate possible, so that as you gain new traffic you receive a proportional increase in leads being generated.

If you see your conversion rates increasing it means you’re doing a good job of converting  people.

Call-to-action performance

“How well your individual calls-to-action convert blog visitors in to leads.”

When your aim is to generate leads, each and every one of your blog posts should contain a call-to-action which leads to a contact form (or product page). This is the main way a blog can generate leads for your business. You should try using different calls-to-action to find out which work best for your industry and audience.

Blog generated leads

“Leads generated which can be attributed to your blog”

After all, this is your goal. Whilst conversion rates are a decent indicator of leads, the actual number of leads being generated scales with the traffic you’re receiving. If you’re serious about generating leads on your blog, you should set yourself a monthly goal and commit to it. If you don’t hit your goals you can dig in to analytics and find out what needs to be improved for better performance; perhaps you need to increase search traffic, promote your content more on social media, or tweak your content strategy.

Any questions?

All of the above metrics can be taken using Google Analytics. If you have any questions on how to use Analytics to measure and improve your blogging, ask them in the comments here…

The post Marketing Analytics: How to measure your blogging appeared first on CandidSky.

This is the second of a 4-part series on how to measure your online marketing efforts. We’ll post up links to the latest articles as we release them.

1.  How to measure your SEO
2.  How to measure your PPC
3.  How to measure your blogging
4.  How to measure your social media marketing

How to measure your PPC

Measuring your paid search performance demands a completely different set of metrics to organic SEO. The biggest difference is that every time someone clicks your link from a search engine results page (SERP), you’re paying for it. It’s important to understand how much you’re paying per visitor, and what kind of profit paid advertising is generating for you. For the most part it’s a numbers game.

You’re going to need to understand 5 key metrics for paid search:

• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Average cost per click (CPC)
• Conversion rate
• Cost per acquisition (CPA)
• Return on ad spend (ROAS)

Click-through rate (CTR)

“The percentage of people who saw your advert and that clicked a link.”

Click-through rates vary massively depending on the keyword in question and the industry it relates to. Improving your CTR won’t make your campaign more profitable, as you’ll be paying for the extra clicks you get, but it will increase the number of visitors clicking your ads rather than your competitors. You can increase your CTR by testing different advert headlines, and using ad extensions such as reviews or ratings. The positioning of your ad in the SERP will also impact CTR, so you want to make sure that your ads are appearing at the top of the page for your most important keywords.

Average cost per click (CPC)

“How much you’re paying for a click on a given search advert”

How much you should be paying per click will vary depending on a number of factors, most importantly the eventual conversion rate for each keyword. The placement of your ad in the SERP will depend for a large part on how much you’re paying. Keywords which have a high conversion rate will be worth more, so you’ll generally need to pay a higher CPC to appear at the top of the page. However, having a good quality score will allow you to appear higher on the page without having to pay as much per click, so it’s worth taking note of factors which can affect a quality score. 

Conversion Rate

“The percentage of people who arrived on your site via a paid search ad who then completed the desired action (such are requesting contact or making a purchase)”

As with organic SEO, conversion rates are one of the most important metrics to track. They will determine the profitablity of your entire campaign. Low conversion rates mean your paying for visitors who aren’t buying anything!

Conversion rates are also a good indicator as to how well your PPC landing pages are performing, If the landing page content is highly relevant to the original PPC advert you should expect a higher conversion rate as you’re providing exactly what the searcher is looking for. There are also other factors to take in to account, such as the competitiveness and attractiveness of your offer.

Cost per acquisition (CPA)

“How much you are spending on PPC advertising to generate each conversion”

CPA is the result of all the factors I’ve already mentioned. It’s the top-level reporting that, as a business owner or PPC manager, you need to be keeping an eye on; the cost of generating a lead through paid search. If your average sale value is particularly low you need to monitor this regularly to ensure that your campaigns are profitable.

Improving your conversion rates whilst maintaining the same budget will make each conversion cheaper, as will lowering your CPC.

Return on ad spend (ROAS)

“ROAS measures the overall return on your PPC advertising investment, calculated by dividing your total PPC spend by the revenue generated from PPC conversions”

ROAS is how you determine whether or not your PPC strategy is working for you. Conversions generated through paid search are only valuable if the revenue you generate offsets the amount you’re spending to generate sales or leads.Any Questions?

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