Several business owners make the crucial mistake of focusing their energy on products and services, not recognizing that the key to success is not just from what the business offers. Reaching success is also present in your ability to reach customers and how you can persuade them to invest. In a nutshell, marketing is the essential element to any business’ success.

Before the Internet took the world by storm, marketing, especially to the masses, was challenging and expensive. Although the Internet and its accessibility have changed drastically in the last decade, it does not mean there is no place for traditional marketing strategies alongside Internet marketing.

Allow us to weigh the advantages of these two marketing methods:

Understanding Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing (now referred to as offline marketing) is a broad category involving the promotional strategies used before the Internet. Today, it is still the most recognizable marketing method, which encompasses advertisements we see and hear every day. The majority of traditional marketing strategies fall under one of four categories, including print, broadcast (radio and television), direct mail, and telephone.

Benefits of Traditional Marketing

Even in the digital age, there are great reasons to incorporate old-school marketing strategies, including:

• Reach hard-to-get customers. Believe it or not, 11% of U.S. adults do not use the internet, according to a survey conducted by Pew Research Center. Seniors are the primary age group unlikely to go online, and traditional methods may be the only means to reach this particular group of consumers.

• Woo your clients in person. Internet marketing is convenient in a sense that you rarely have to travel to communicate with a client in person. However, you should not underestimate the effectiveness of traditional face-to-face marketing. Meeting in person allows you to do impressive demonstrations and later read their body language to see if they are genuinely interested in working with you. Furthermore, many customers prefer doing business with people they have met personally.

• Billboards are not a thing of the past. Each week, the average American drivers spend 20 hours traveling over 200 miles. Furthermore, 71% of Americans consciously look at billboard messages while driving, and those who learn about an event or restaurant via traditional ads later pay to visit.

• Hard copy material provides tangible information. Search engine optimization and paid media do great jobs of attracting leads and prospects, but there is still something unique and compelling about a meeting sealed with a business card exchange (which they can refer to at their leisure). This type of traditional marketing makes it incredibly easy to provide information on the go.

Understanding Digital Marketing

Digital marketing, also known as internet marketing, e-marketing, or web marketing, is an all-inclusive term for promoting products and services online.

While the more obvious purpose of internet marketing is to sell goods, services, or advertise your brand over the Internet, your business can build itself by conduct competitor analyses and by learning from your online customers’ feedback and preferences. Online marketing is a very effective way to identify your target market or discover a marketing segment’s wants and needs.

Today, every brick and mortar business can (and should) use the widely available Internet to their advantage and leverage it for marketing purposes.

At PrimeView, we offer a broad selection of digital marketing services, including web design and development, search engine optimization (SEO), social media management, content marketing, pay-per-click advertising, video optimization, email marketing, and reputation management.

Benefits of Digital Marketing

Marketing via the Internet allows your business to reach target audiences more efficiently. Other pros include:

• Measure your marketing success (and failures). Tools like Google Analytics can help you see which methods are bringing prospects, leads, and conversions to your business, including which ones are not. This way, you can alter your marketing practices and focus your efforts on what works.

• Engage and network anytime, anywhere. Social media is a powerful tool that not only allows you to communicate directly with your market, but also share relevant news and information for absolutely free. It is by far the fastest and easiest way to build direct relationships with your clients and prospects. Further, it is an excellent platform for receiving quick feedback on what your target market likes and dislikes.

• Spend less money. Traditional marketing billboards can cost anywhere between $300 to $30,000 per four-week period, which equates to $3,600 to $360,000 per year. Although digital marketing strategy prices may vary depending on which services you integrate into your business, many online marketing tools and methods are free.

Which Type of Marketing Is Best for Your Small Business?

A company can leverage both traditional and digital marketing methods to achieve their goals. It does not have to be one or the other because while one approach might be more effective at drawing leads and analyzing results, it does not mean the other is any less effective. For instance, a television ad might pull in many prospects, but so can the same ad on YouTube for far less money.

The real question should not be what type of marketing is best, but instead, which method offers the best way to reach your audience and convert them into customers. Fact is, there are strategies in both traditional and Internet marketing that will work to your advantage.

Speak with a Professional Marketing Strategist Today

Are you having a hard time figuring out which method – traditional or online – works best for your business? PrimeView, a pioneering digital marketing agency in Phoenix, AZ can help determine which option is the best for your audience. Dial 480-970-4688 to speak with our strategist about improving or rebuilding your company’s marketing strategy. You may also complete our online form to receive a free quote. We look forward to hearing from you.

Call tracking: An Overview

Are you baffled by the low numbers on your digital advertisements, but your balance sheet says you are actually bringing in more business than ever before? One of the common challenges digital marketers face is that they are unable to pinpoint exactly where each conversion comes from. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, Google Adwords, display ads, social media ads, and even other forms of digital advertising may give you an idea where the conversion is coming from. However, the results can be inconclusive particularly when offline factors are added in the equation. For instance, how many sales did you actually make when someone called your phone number and asked for your services?

All this can change with call tracking.

Defining call tracking

If you want to boost your online ranking and get better SEO traction, you are probably running several advertising campaigns that each target different keywords. Doing so will help you find out what keywords your target audience is searching for, and will, therefore, help you customize your campaigns to respond to this need. You will also determine which ads are not working for you, and you can terminate them easily without investing more money in it.

Why Call Tracking Matters

The same goes for call tracking. It is the act of assigning a specific phone number to a single ad — for example, a different phone number per keyword — which will help you find out exactly where the business is coming from. You would no longer have to ask callers “Hi, where did you hear about us?” since you would know immediately which advertisement led them to call your landline. You would, therefore, have a more concrete, more holistic idea of exactly how profitable each advertisement is for your company.

This works for the simple reason that today’s consumers are heavy mobile users. They search for businesses on the web or on social media, and if they are intrigued by something, they call that number. This often happens even though there is a digital equivalent to a salesperson — that is, customers can put items they want in a cart and just pay when they have completed the transaction. If they want clarification, they are more likely to call a number instead of using the built-in help assistant.

Call Tracking in the Hospitality Industry

If you are still not convinced, take a look at the hospitality industry. While most hotels have online bookings and have competitive prices thanks to websites that can compare their rates, the reality is that most customers would still use the phone to confirm their bookings. If you rely solely on digital advertising to determine where your leads and conversions are coming from, then you would lose the actual figures you should have when you factor in the phone conversions.

How it works

When companies decide to use call tracking to generate leads and get better insight regarding their digital campaigns, they normally tap firms that offer call tracking systems. These systems enable companies to instantly create local or toll-free numbers that they can then associate with each campaign. These numbers are assigned labels, nicknames, and tags so that they can be easily tracked.

The 360-Degree View Process

What happens next gives digital marketers a unique 360 view of the entire conversion. The numbers are assigned to specific advertisements – for example, social media ads, radio ads, and even print ads – and when a caller uses a specific number to inquire, then the number would report to the system. This then gives you a good idea of which ad source works the best. What’s more, you can optimize the system so that your metrics can include call time, so you can determine which phone calls actually led to a sale, and geolocation report, so that you would know where your customers are.

Cost-Effectiveness and Implementation

What makes this even more intriguing is that purchasing multiple numbers is actually very affordable. You also do not need different landlines for each number – all can be routed to a central number, the only difference is that the calls would be coming from different sources.

The benefits of call tracking

Here are some of the more notable benefits of using a call tracking system:

• It saves you money.

How many times have you run an ad for a time, only to find out that it is not earning you anything? With call tracking, you would be able to pinpoint exactly which ad is working and which one is not – thereby giving you the flexibility to cancel the ads that are not working and to focus on the ones that are actually bringing you in money. You don’t have to wait for a long time to be able to say that the ad campaign is effective – you would have real-time data to base your decision on.

• It helps you understand the entire customer journey.

When you rely on digital ads alone, you would have no idea of the customer’s thought process prior to them clicking or engaging with your ad. With call tracking, you would be able to monitor the entire journey. You’ll know what prodded the customer to call your business, the length of wait time, the duration, and other pertinent behavior. For example, if a caller tells you that they called because they wanted more information and they were intrigued by one of your ads, then you would know to customize your succeeding ads the same way.

• Improve your website and SEO performance.

Aside from understanding the entire customer journey and customizing your future ads based on what the customer said was effective, you can also apply these things to your website and therefore improve your SEO performance. You can appropriately set the tone on your social media channels and your website based on what the customer responds to. You can also apply this tone to your website. As a result, your overall messaging would then be a unified front that talks exactly to your customer the way that they understand. Essentially, when you find out what works through the phone calls, you can implement them across the board for a more holistic, more competitive campaign.

Do you want to learn more about Call tracking and how it can help your online marketing campaigns? Give us a call or just send us a quick message!

These days, we can see a lot of websites that make use of the live chat tool because it can aid to the customers’ needs and wants immediately. If you happen to have a business website, and you want more people to engage with it, then a live chat is definitely one of the best tools to have.

1. It Can Save on Costs

First up, it can help you save up on costs. Most businesses would outsource call centers or would invest in plenty of company phones that the customer service representatives use to engage with the customers. With a live chat tool, you can cut costs on phones since you only have to pay for the software. With this, your customer service team can just engage with the customers using their computers.

2. It can Improve Your Customer Service

Of course, one of the main functions of a live chat software is to improve customer service. Your potential customers can just immediately chat with a customer service representative, instead of looking for the customer service email or the hotline on your website. This provides ease as well as convenience to customers who need help right away.

3. It Can Boost Your Sales

Aside from customer service, a live chat tool may also be used to upsell to customers. For example, a first time visitor looks around your website. A live chat option may automatically send an instant message to the visitor offering a certain product or service that the website sells. Add this with some good customer relations messages, and you can help your business boost some sales. For this, you would need to train your customer service representatives also to know how to upsell using the live chat software. Do this with the right customer engagement strategy, and you will get higher conversion rates.

4. It Helps You Gain Feedback Easily

Another thing that a live chat tool does is that it can be the perfect medium where you can get feedback from customers easily. Feedback is crucial to every business because it gives you an idea on what parts or aspects of your business operations have to be improved. While you engage with your customers, you may ask them about their website and shopping experience and what things can still be improved. Doing this would elicit personal connection to your customers, making them feel like their opinion matters. One thing that you must know is that trust and loyalty are related, and they can be achieved through the proper medium and personal connection.

5. It Gives Visitors a Good First Impression on the Website

Aside from its functionality, a live chat software can also act as a marketing tool for the website. A website that has a live chat tool is often viewed as a site that cares deeply for its visitors as it gives them an easier time with their inquiries, complaints, or feedback. Visitors value good service from businesses, and a live chat feature will give an impression that your business goes out of its way to give good service to its customers.

6. It Can Deepen Your Relationship With Your Visitors/Customers

Since you can directly engage with your website’s visitors, you can reach the people at a deeper and more emotional level. You can answer all of their questions comprehensively through the chat system without looking like you sent a robotic reply from a spiel. This would deepen your relationship with your customers because it enables you to talk to them one on one at real time. This will also make your customers feel special, giving them the impression that you always try your best to cater their inquiries and concerns.

7. It Offers Chat Transcripts That Can be Used for Analysis

Another thing that a live chat can do for you is that it offers chat transcripts and chat history that you can use later on for your market analysis and study. With the platform, you’ll be able to look back at the chat messages that your customer service representatives have with your customers or visitors. You can then use the data for your analysis to know what works and what does not.

8. It Allows You to Give 24/7 Service

With a live chat system, you can go 24/7 to enhance and provide the best customer service. The good thing about operating a 24/7 service live chat system is that you can access it from a computer. This makes things so much easier for both the customers and the representatives. The customers can contact the representatives at the comfort of their homes any time of the day. This also allows you to attend to your customers’ needs promptly, thus, boosting your customer engagement.

9. It May Act as an Analytics Tool

Aside from letting you have a medium to engage with your customers or visitors, it can also serve as an analytics tool. The records found in the live chat system will tell you how many customers visited your website, how many used the chat support feature, which messages were responded to by the customer service agents, and which messages were ignored.

10. It Gives You An Edge Over Competition

Lastly, it will give you an edge over all of your other competitors because not all businesses have this feature on their websites. If you have this feature coupled with your personalized welcome messages, then you’ll be able to cater to your customers like no other.

These are some of the ways that a live chat tool can be able to help your business. In a world where technology has taken over, personal touch and face-to-face interactions have become limited. This is specifically true when it comes to sales and customer service since these can be done through email nowadays. Live chat tools enable you to give your customers an easy time accessing information. It also gives them the personalized touch that they are looking for. In fact, it can be a big asset to your business, and can even gain you an upper hand when you are up against your competitors.

Need a chat tool on your website?

Some prospects prefer an immediate response compared to waiting for emails. Don’t miss out on a potential client by installing a live chat tool on your website. Call us at 480-970-4688 today.

Content marketing is all about providing quality information that’s helpful to your target audience and delivering that message in the most effective way. However, written word alone can only go so much, and in today’s digital landscape, it may not be enough to compel users to read until the end and see what you have to say. That being said, how can you improve your content to pique enough user interest, so that you can drive your point across and create an impact?

Quick answer: Present your content with the help of visuals.

Why Visuals Matter

Incorporating visuals in your content marketing strategy is worth considering because 90% of information that the brain receives is visual. More so, it is found that 43% of presentations are more effective when they are accompanied with visual materials.

Clearly, adding more visual elements to your content can help improve your exposure and user engagement. To help you get started, here are seven types of visuals that can be essential to your content marketing efforts.

1. Photos

Articles with images get 94% more views than articles that relied on text alone.

Photos can reinforce your written content and helps break chunks of texts, which makes information more readable. When using photos, remember that it should be related to what you’re talking about. More so, they should be composed and shot well, so that they would be more interesting and pleasing look at.

It’s advisable to capture photos on your own, so that it can incorporate character or traits that are inherent to your brand. If not, you can choose beautiful images from free online sources such as Pixabay, Morguefile, and Flickr.

2. Infographics

Infographics are a good way to present study findings, statistics, and complex information in a way that users can easily grasp and understand. So instead of going through long texts, infographics presents all that essential information at a glance.

There are crucial factors that affect how effective your infographics would be, such as colors, layout, font, and sources. Visual elements should be cohesive and embody what the point is all about. You don’t simply create an icon or element “just for the sake of design”. Every element in your infographic should have a rationale and relation with the data presented.

3. Videos

Each day, there are 4 billion video views on YouTube. That’s a lot of potential audience that you can tap.

Just like infographics, videos provide a smart and entertaining way of presenting content in a short period of time. Because it allows for movement, videos can invoke more impact through motion graphics, visual effects, and musical scoring.

Videos can be used to communicate different types of information such as how-tos, demonstrations, testimonials, facts, and statistics.

4. Quote Cards

Content marketing is not restrictive to your niche alone. In order to reach more people, you need to sometimes appeal to their emotions, and quote cards can do the trick.

Quote cards, as the name suggests, are illustrations or images that contains a quote. They can be easily shared in social media, because typically, these sayings invoke a universal truth—making it easy to relate to.

In creating quote cards, use your company’s color scheme and font, so that it will be cohesive with your branding. In addition, you can also choose sayings that somehow reflect your values as a brand or service provider.

5. Screenshots

Screenshots provide a good way to validate content. For instance, if your information claims that a particular marketing strategy works well on Facebook, providing a screenshot showing the technique being implemented along with the level of engagement it generated (number of likes or comments) will drive your point across. Just the same, if you’re offering a tool, may it be an app or software, a screenshot can be the best visualization tool to illustrate a particular feature and why it’s valuable.

6. Data Visualizations

Data like statistics and research findings adds more credibility to your content, but reading them in textual form make them hard to grasp. If you have such information within your article, you can turn them to visualizations like charts and graphs so that people can easily understand why those figures are important.

7. Tips and How-To’s

Internet users can’t resist helpful content. So, if you have step by step guides, hacks, or tips, you can break down that information into images to make it more appealing to your audience. Again, the trick is to provide clear images, so that users can easily follow your tips or instructions for a recipe, hairstyle, or a DIY activity.

Content marketing is not boxed within the realm of the written word. Play up the ways you deliver content and try spicing it up with stunning visuals to boost engagement and reach more people.

RELATED ARTICLE: 17 Secrets to Keep Your Content Fresh and Engaging

The Web: Data at the Speed of Want

The worldwide web (www) offers a lot of interesting things to everyone—the novice and the experts, the seekers and the providers, even those from the system within Google itself. It has developed from the very first computer, which is a programmable calculator, created by German engineer Konrad Zuse and completed in 1941, that yields exact and single response to a single query, to having the SERPs (short for “Search Engine Result Pages”) by 2004 where a great number of yields per individual search is provided, to a more complex, intricate, yet interconnected world were ranking matters most. Now, companions within the network involves more than just the pages within a page, a website or a network of websites, but a truncated and systematic conglomeration of systems, including the hummingbird, which allows internet user experience more satisfying by providing related information based on several factors at a speed of want.

The Web: The World beyond Boundaries

A whole new world- this is what the web presents every time one steps into its threshold and immerse in the ever growing environment that supersedes every known boundaries, such as time and space.

A very interesting, engaging, and creative description of what Google, one of the best representations of the web, is provided for us in a piece by Laurie Berkner, and it goes like this:

On a spring day you can find your way

To a little flower garden where the Googlehead plays

You know they’re there by the clothes they wear

And their Googlehead faces and their Googlehead hair.

“Cause they’re the Googleheads

They shake their doodleheads

They’re the goo-ga-goo-ga-goo-gah Googleheads.

Yet, it’s more than just search

Google is more than just the search engine. Even though being that alone wouldn’t be too bad as it allows us to retrieve responses or data from the web to almost any question asked, as quickly as blinking our eyes. Today, Google consists of a great number of services (google.com/sitemap.html) like Gmail, Google Maps, Drive, Hangouts, Talk, Labs, Picasa, Catalogs, Answers, and so on. Others are more obscure, like Google Base, Google Page Creator, Google Writely or Google X, and even Google experts can have a hard time keeping track.

The Web and Google Analytics

One of these services is Google Analytics. What is Google Analytics? It is a web stats analysis application. Data is generated by including snippets of JavaScript in your website which allows it to collects data about your visitors, including his or her geographic location, using cookies. Google Analytics takes these data and analyses it, creating graphs and reports about your visitors’ trends.

Many users understanding of analytics software has not changed since the introduction of Analytics over a decade ago. However, a lot has changed since Google first launched the program in 2005. So even if you are familiar with its basic functions, working with it can sometimes pose a number of difficulties.

“GA (Google Analytics) is the eyes on your digital ecosystem and on your customer,” reveals Caleb Whitmore, founder and principle consultant at Seattle-based Analytics Pros. “GA is a platform that lets you restore some of that gap that’s grown between businesses and their customers in the digital age. It measures all of those digital interactions in an aggregate, anonymized way, but in a way that still can paint a very real picture of who your customer is and what they need or want from you, and how you can better serve them.”

Google and Analytics in 2016

Like any other Google features, GA faced a number of trying times. As such, Google tried to add desired user features to repair issues with classic Google Analytics (GA) until the various patches as well as fixes could no longer keep up with the demand. To address this concern, it released what is now known as the Universal Analytics (UA), which is an improved version of its original analysis software. By April 2014, UA exited beta testing phase and recognized as the “new and improved” version of GA.

After the UA launch, Google announced that it would be officially retiring GA as of April 2016 and replacing it with UA. To quote the Google, “Universal Analytics is the new operating standard for Google Analytics. All accounts will soon be required to use Universal Analytics.”

Modifications to the existing GA are as follows:

1. Custom Dimensions and Metrics replaced Standard reports. GA provides an audience overview and indicates visits (unique visits, page views, bounces), traffic sources (referral, direct and campaign traffic), content (site content, speed) as well as conversion information in its standard reports area. These are all useful information, but does not address the requirements of all users.

With the UA custom dimensions and metrics for a number of properties (i.e., websites) may now be generated. Each property has 20 available indices for both custom dimensions as well as custom metrics. These allows UA dependents to define what is needed to be measured and how.

2. URLs are replaced by content categories. In GA, the standard page report provides page lists of URLs followed by page views, average time on page, bounce rate, and so on. This “top down” view makes it challenging to determine which specific elements were influencing user behaviour during each page visit.

With UA, however, user behavior can be defined through individually created content categories like page types, product groups, as well as site sections, not just URLs. Such information is more usable as well as understandable.

3. Enhanced Ecommerce replaced Ecommerce. This feature on UA provides a detailed picture of what buyers (and potential buyers) are doing on a website. Though this information could also be obtained through GA, it required significant setup and offline analysis.

With Enhanced E-commerce, a business owner of UA specialist can now evaluate individual product performance reports (by SKU, category, etc.) and learn how many times a product was viewed, added to the shopping cart, taken to checkout, abandoned during checkout, and so on. Moreover, with the UA installed, businesses can now focus on the buyer journey and analyse how many buyers viewed a specific product, added that product to their shopping carts, how many buyers went to checkout and purchased, etc.

Significant changes are happening with Google and analytics in 2016, thus it is also vital that you refresh your knowledge to everything related to it. Perhaps it is also a great time to update your objectives to keep up with the trends. Change is good and if we can keep up with it, we benefit most and will be able to keep our businesses running and en sync with the changing time.

One question we often encounter with our customers who’ve had their accounts for a while now, would be how to add other users to their Google Analytics Account? How can I grant them Access to our Google Analytics Account? It’s actually pretty easy.

Step 1. Login to your account

Step 2. Once logged in, look to the top right part and click on the tab that says admin

Step 3. It will show you a dashboard similar to the image below. Use the menus – which you can see on top of the columns, to select account, property or view you want.  To add someone at the account level, click user management under that column.  Same goes for Property or View Profile column. If you want someone to view all websites under a certain account then click account. If you want them to see just a certain website only, click property or view.

Step 4. Once you click user management, just add the email address of the user you want to grant access to, check if you want the user to just be able to read & analyze, collaborate, edit or manage user. You may opt to check or leave unchecked the box that says Notify this user by email. Click Add and you’re done. They should be able to gain access to the Google Analytics account using the email you just added. Told you it was easy.