Retargeting can be beneficial, as it may be easier to attract a person with awareness of your brand as opposed to a new customer. However, if your retargeting efforts are ultimately unsuccessful, you’ll increase your spending without any benefits. Here are some steps to help you retarget without blowing up your ad budget.  

Consider Email and SMS Campaigns 

Targeted ads are excellent for getting the attention of a new customer, but they might not be necessary with people who’ve already interacted with your brand. In cases where you have contact information for a customer, use email and SMS to re-connect. For example, you can send information on a product a customer started to buy but abandoned during the purchasing process.  

Develop Effective Messaging 

The messaging used to initially attract consumers to your brand isn’t going to be effective the second time around. Instead, develop messaging that addresses potential misgivings about a service or product, which may have played a role in why the person never completed their transaction. Messaging can cover: 

• Discounts, free shipping, and other perks available with purchase 

• Limited time offers to create a sense of urgency 

• Customer reviews and testimonials to show the product or service has merit 

Segment Your Audiences 

Audience segmentation can help you direct your retargeting efforts more effectively. Categories vary based on the needs of your brand, but common segments include cart abandoners, people who’ve engaged with your brand over the last three months, people who’ve watched your videos on social media, and other groups.  

Full Service Marketing, Decades of Experience: SonicSEO 

Our marketing team at SonicSEO can do it all. From social media marketing to PPC ad management, we’ve spent decades helping businesses all over North America get noticed online. Schedule a consultation by calling 505-821-2000 today. You can also contact us to learn more. 

SEO Is a Marathon, Not a Sprint 

There are many factors that dictate when a business will see the effects of its SEO efforts. However, most online brands have a long road ahead when it comes to positive changes.  

At a minimum, it can take three months before results are seen. However, it often takes longer, from six months to a year plus depending on the type of keywords used, competition, and other factors.  

Why Does SEO Take So Long? 

The process of discovering, crawling, and indexing new content by a search engine naturally takes time, and a website won’t see the effects of this process for hours or even weeks. Additionally, businesses must be mindful of how they roll out new content and updates. Search engines may penalize your website if they perceive that these changes are happening too quickly (which calls your reputation into question).  

What Can You Do to Ensure Your SEO Strategy Is Successful? 

Having a strong marketing company in your corner helps, and SonicSEO.com provides clients with the benefits of our knowledge and experience. From web design to app development, we do it all. And when it comes to our SEO services, we use effective strategies that get results as quickly as possible. Call (505) 821-2000 to schedule a consultation or contact us to learn more.  

Understanding the Consumer Buying Process

Most consumers go through a specific process before purchasing a product. This is known as the customer journey, and it involves these steps:

• Recognizing a problem
• Searching for a solution
• Considering alternatives
• Selecting a solution
• Evaluating the solution post-purchase

While most customer buying journeys take the same course, the factors influencing each phase of the journey can vary quite a bit.

What Drives Consumer Behavior?

There are a number of psychological factors that push consumers to make certain decisions:

• Attitudes
• Age
• Socialization
• Perception
• Socioeconomic status
• Culture
• Occupation

Not every marketing campaign has to address every one of these factors to be successful. In order to determine what drives your desired target audience, pay attention to analytics info. This can be information gleaned from past marketing efforts or website/social media analytics. You can also encourage your target audience to share their personal insights through surveys and feedback.

Principles to Apply to Your Marketing Strategy

The following principles can enhance marketing efforts by attracting more consumers and boosting a business’s conversion rate:

• Emotional Marketing – Consumers often respond strongly to emotional appeals. In this case, marketers can focus on one of the primary emotions to induce a consumer to act: happiness, disgust, trust, fear, sadness, surprise, anger, and anticipation.

• Call to Action (CTA) – Calls to action entice consumers to take a specific action. CTAs can prompt a consumer to make a purchase, sign up for an email newsletter, or stop by a physical location.

• Decoy Effect – This strategy entails introducing a third product (the decoy) when a consumer is making a decision between two products. The role of the decoy is to make the target product more attractive and push the consumer to choose it over a competitor.

• Information Gap Theory – Consumers will pursue knowledge to make up any gaps in information when they’re passionate about a subject. Marketers can design content that entices consumers to find information to fill in the gaps, which leads consumers to websites and social media pages.

Marketing That Merges Technical Prowess With User Psychology

You don’t need to have extensive knowledge of psychology to include essential principles in your marketing strategy. By choosing SonicSEO.com, you’ll benefit from our comprehensive SEO and web design knowledge, which incorporate essential marketing principles. Contact us today to learn more.

As a result, your Instagram strategy must be carefully created to ensure success. Here are a few key principles of developing an effective marketing campaign.

Determine the Goal of the Campaign

Every good marketing strategy should have a solid plan in place, and all great plans begin with a goal. Some businesses want to boost their profits through social media, while others are mainly focused on growing their user base. You might also be in search of an outlet to promote new products or discounts. Take some time to consider your top priority for Instagram to help hone your marketing strategy.

Decide How Often to Post

Most businesses utilize content calendars to plan out their posts over a certain period of time. Monthly content calendars are quite common, but they can comprise any time period that feels appropriate to you. They also allow you to precisely plan your posting schedule, which has a big impact on success.

Posting too much will turn off followers while posting too little may drive them away from your page. In general, one post per day works for a lot of businesses, but you can increase or decrease post frequency according to your needs.

Create Compelling Captions

In addition to sharing interesting photos and videos, you must also create engaging captions to accompany them. Keep in mind that much of the caption will be hidden until expanded, so you must make that first sentence count. You also want to get readers thinking, which can be achieved by asking compelling questions. Finally, adding value in the form of educating or informing the reader also makes a big impact.

Don’t Forget Your Hashtags

Hashtags help your profile appear in more searches, so they’re another integral component of effective marketing. The best strategy for selecting good hashtags is to use a combination of terms. Super popular hashtags show up in searches but are highly competitive. As a result, they should be combined with niche hashtags that are associated with your business or industry.

Many businesses see great results when they use 15 to 20 relevant hashtags. You can definitely use more, but keep in mind that only 30 of your hashtags will actually appear in user searches. Any hashtags used beyond that will not be linked to your business in searches.

In addition to Instagram, SonicSEO.com is also familiar with many other social media platforms. We’ll develop a solid marketing strategy for each channel, while also ensuring that branding is consistent throughout. Feel free to contact us today to discuss your Instagram goals.

Even small businesses can learn important lessons from some of the most successful social media advertisers in the corporate world. Here are a few techniques to apply to your own campaign.

Emphasize the Trustworthiness of Your Brand

One would expect a world famous fast food establishment to only present only the best images of their products. A recent campaign from a popular chain instead emphasized their all-natural ingredients by showing their burgers covered in mold, which is a far cry from other chains and their seemingly indestructible menu items.

While showing unappetizing food flies in the face of every conceivable social media rule for restaurants, it’s an innovative and eye-catching way to show that your offerings are made using fresh, wholesome ingredients. It also builds trust with consumers because it’s a genuine gesture that is unconcerned with appearances.

Don’t Be Shy About Acknowledging the Competition

While there is definitely an art to friendly bantering between brands on social media, ignoring your competition or pretending they don’t exist is not the way to go. Your followers will be thinking about your competitors when making a purchasing decision, so using social media to make the case for your brand can help influence their choice.

You don’t necessarily need to tag other brands or direct posts towards them, but you can make comparisons between your products to establish what you have to offer consumers. And if you are close with direct competitors, a friendly back and forth can benefit both your brands.  

Know When to Be Casual

Social media is the place for businesses to present a more personal side to their brands. Establishing a relationship with your customers means interacting with them in a way you would with a friend or family member.

Social media is the right place for light-hearted jokes, memes, and other forms of personalized engagement. While posts must be easily understood by your followers, there is less of an emphasis on strict grammar and language conventions.

SonicSEO.com also recognizes the importance of creative, innovative social media campaigns for our clients. We can help you choose the best platforms, develop effective messaging, and create a posting schedule for maximum engagement. Let’s discuss your social media marketing needs today.

Even if you’re fully onboard with the benefits of video marketing, you may not be sure which platform is best for you. While YouTube is considered the leading site for videos online, Vimeo is definitely a contender. This guide explains the pros and cons of each so you can make an informed decision to benefit your business.

YouTube

When it comes to users, there really is no beating YouTube. With 73% of American adults using the site regularly, it’s likely that your target audience already visits YouTube on a frequent basis. This increases the viral potential of videos, which in turn amplifies your marketing efforts exponentially. The platform is also quite accommodating to mobile users, with the majority of videos watched on the site are viewed from a mobile phone.

As a thriving search engine, falling just behind Google in terms of size, YouTube is also amenable to common SEO tactics. When promoting your videos, you can use hashtags, keywords, and optimized titles to ensure your content gets in front of the right viewers. It’s also easier to monitor analytics info on YouTube as compared to Vimeo, which is essential for marketers.  

Vimeo

Founded in 2004, Vimeo is used by approximately 80 million people all over the world. While it has a thriving community of engaged users, it’s not as congested as YouTube. This means it might be easier to rank high in searches because there’s less competition. Vimeo also goes easy on the ads, which is a common complaint among YouTube viewers. Vimeo users can pay to get rid of ads, or they can use the free service where ads are presented beneath the video. A lot of viewers consider this a welcomed alternative to YouTube ads, which stop videos or require the user to scroll through until the ad is over.

Vimeo also rates higher when it comes to customization. The player itself can be customized, unlike YouTube. That means you can style your business’s player to match your unique branding colors, which ensures marketing consistency. You also have more options when it comes to privacy. While you only get a public and private option with YouTube, Vimeo has a lot more privacy settings. You can even password protect certain videos, which is not possible with YouTube.

Let’s Talk About Your Video Marketing Campaign

Making good digital marketing decisions is difficult without the right assistance.  Our team at SonicSEO.com is always happy to discuss your current campaign and make recommendations on digital content, SEO, app development, and many other topics. Call 888-437-3737 today for more information on video marketing.  

Luxury Brand Marketing: It’s All about the Feels

To effectively market your luxury brand, you first need to understand a little basic human psychology.

Back in the 1940s, Abraham Maslow formulated his theory of human needs—the short version: needs are hierarchal. Basic human needs, like the need for food, water and physical safety, must be fulfilled before an individual can focus on higher-level needs, like belonging, autonomy, cognitive challenge and aesthetics.

Luxury products and services are not necessary to fulfill basic human needs. Rather, consumers only begin to look for luxury brands when their physiological needs are satisfied. That means luxury goods are sought to fulfill higher-level needs, which are largely emotional and social in nature. So, to market luxury brands, your messaging needs to target consumers’ feelings and higher-order needs—their need to fit in and their need to be perceived in a certain way, for example.

Luxury marketing, then, is less about trumpeting the benefits or features of your product or service. It’s about creating an experience. Luxury marketing uses storytelling and visualization to help consumers vividly imagine how much better their lives would be, how differently they would feel if they were to choose your luxury product or service.

Tips to Improve Your Luxury Marketing

So, how do you create an experience to execute effective luxury marketing? You create content that targets consumers’ feelings. Strategies for effective online implementation include:

• Matching page content and keywords with user intent

A disconnect between what an online viewer is searching for and where they land is almost certainly going to result in a bounce—a viewer leaving the page to look at other results or refine their search altogether. You can help prevent bouncing by creating content consistent with user intent, which is implied by the user’s choice of keyword terms.

Apart from searches for a specific website or web page (e.g. a search for “Chanel” or “Louis Vuitton”), there are two categories of user intent:

1. Informational—a user is looking for information about a brand, product or service. Users who are researching potential purchases perform informational searches, so keyword terms may include phrases like “designer shoe reviews” and “best destinations for luxury vacations.”
2. Transactional—a user is looking for where/how to execute a purchase. Common keywords used for transactional searches include “buy…” or “order online…”

Matching page content with user intent means that your luxury brand website must have content developed for users at every stage of the buying process.

• Use active, viewer-oriented language

Your content should help each user visualize themselves with your product or enjoying your service. To achieve this, you need to use active, “you”-centered language.

For example, say you’re selling time at a luxury resort villa. Your messaging should sound more like this:

NOT this:

See the difference?

• Use high quality images

Prospective buyers can better visualize themselves enjoying your luxury product or service when they can see the actual product or result themselves. High-resolution images on your website provide a visual experience that can tease the other senses, driving viewers to complete the sale so that they can also enjoy their luxury purchase with all their senses.

• Creating a sense of urgency through time limits or product shortages

Luxury purchases are emotionally driven decisions. Often, the only way that these decisions happen is when people are not given time enough to more rationally, logically consider the purchase. You can create the sense of “no time” by showing viewers the limited product quantity available or limited time to complete the purchase.

When you effectively market your luxury items, your marketing does double duty. Not only does it increase sales and leads, it can improve search engine performance, which contributes to even more sales and leads potential.

One key to remember to make your online content work best toward your SEO goals: apply the same content principles to your meta descriptions. Meta descriptions—the snippets viewers see below links in organic search results—do not themselves impact your ranking. However, they can compel (or discourage) clicks on your link, and click-through rate does affect your ranking. So, when your meta description appeals to your viewers’ emotions through vivid, active, “you”-oriented language consistent with their search intent, they are more likely to visit your site, follow your sales path…and by doing so, make it more likely that others will follow.

Think your luxury brand might need some marketing help? Contact the SEO and digital marketing professionals at SonicSEO.com to schedule a free consultation.