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Digital Marketing – as any marketing strategy – costs money. No ways around it! But this doesn’t needs to cause stress.  If you set your budget correctly from the start, you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches along the way.  Below are some things you need to consider when building a digital marketing budget:

1. Resources: Who’s going to execute the marketing strategy? You? Someone in your department? An agency or outsourced company? You need to have this point clear before starting to estimate your marketing budget. Set a maximum hourly rate you’re willing to pay for this services (let’s say it’s A) and how many hours you’d like people to dedicate to this task (let’s call it B) then just multiply A x B and the result will be your weekly resource allocation budget.
2. Campaigns: Are you going to conduct paid search campaigns? If so, you need to include this in your strategy. Start by understanding the average cost per click in your city, country and industry. This can be as low as $0,01 per click up to even $80 or $100.  You need to be clear on this to allocate a budget that’s actually going to allow you to see results. Once you have it, just multiply the CPC per the amount of clicks you’re expecting on a weekly basis and add that to the amount you had on point one.
3. Others: Do you need graphic design? Copywriters? Any other team member? These “extra” activities may or may not be covered by your social media or digital marketing manager.  If they’re not, you need to include them in budget. Same process as point one.  Estimate a maximum hourly rate and the amount of dedication you need per week. After that, add that number to the ones you got on point one and two!

This is a very basic guideline to start your sample marketing budget.  Of course, there are a lot of other things to consider – e-mail marketing, landing pages, newsletters, etc… but follow the same logic and process and everything will come to life in a few seconds!

Once businesses decide they want to get in the digital world, their main focus is on creating content and reaching more and more people! And that’s a good thing! But there are some steps you need to take before starting to ensure you’re digital marketing strategy is a true success.

The first thing is the audience. They’re the kings and queens of this! And you need to make sure you understand who they are, what they like and where they go online. You don’t want to be distributing content that no one sees right? So make sure you know where, when and what to post.  Always be thinking about your audience.

The second step is content. Yes, you’ve heard it a thousand times, and it’s still the truth: content IS king! So before going in to your brand new fan pages and start posting, you need to develop a good content strategy. What’s your objective? Brand awareness? Sales? Whatever it is, you need to make sure your content aligns to that strategy.  Content marketing is like a party…. no one likes someone that talks about themselves all the time!  So share content other than your own and give your audience really good information!

The final step is your current marketing strategy. You probably already have some marketing and advertising efforts, and it’s important you align this new marketing effort with the previous one. Do you have a great slogan? Then that’s your principal hashtag! Remember: All communication should be integrated in order to achieve success in marketing, and digital marketing should not to be left out!

We all agree, Digital Marketing is an important part of every-single business nowadays. But why? This post explains why your digital marketing efforts are not only important…but also mandatory for business success!

1. Companies that don’t have a digital marketing strategy are totally left out. If you think this whole Internet thing is a fad that will blow over then you’ll start to see business deteriorate (if it hasn’t already). Whether you like it or not customers do look for your offering online.  Having a digital marketing strategy is vital.

2. Customers grab tidbits about you, your business and products through social media and web-based review sites.  social technology applied from world famous websites like Twitter and Facebook, among others, give huge insights into the products you sell or the services you provide.  Even if you aren’t active on social media.  Your digital marketing strategy needs to address social media and what type of persona you want to maintain.

3. Marketing departments can use their digital marketing to stretch the value of their budgets.  Their investments are on story-telling and publication.  A great marketing department pushes out ideas and content that it’s target market wants to hear about!  They sell around their product.  If your a car dealership selling Lexus’ vehicles it makes sense to create content that Lexus drivers, or potential Lexus drivers, would like to read.  As opposed to just throwing special offers at them every 2 minutes on Twitter.

4. Talent wins and competition has never been stiffer.  You’re going to need the best people you can get your hands on in order to win marketing battles over time.  Screening and attracting talent is hard because everyone claims to be an expert on their resume.  However, with transparency being at an all-time high you can use social media, web-based background checks and LinkedIn to get the real story.  The web’s repository of information and content (good and bad) exponentially increases each day.  Chances are information on people you are recruiting will pop up.

Successful marketing is key to your business’s future, yet it is one of the most overlooked tasks!  Companies usually decide they need outsourcing because they don’t have the time or the expertise to get it all done themselves, and that’s perfectly normal.

So, if you’re in the same position, you need to seek marketing support from someone with the time, expertise, and capability to get it done right.  But hiring a pretty-picture agency and running a marketing campaign is expensive! So here’s how you can get one that costs less than an intern.

Consider this: if you want to build your digital marketing team internally and avoid outsourcing, you’ll need to find people with expertise in web development, graphic design, social media, branding, multimedia, SEO, and others. And, believe us, no one can do it all! (If you have a do-it-all person, let me know so I can hire them). You’ll need to find several employees with different skills and take care of them, their office space, benefits, vacation, sick leave, mood swings, and more.

Now, if you solicit outsourced marketing support, you can put all of your needs into the hands of one agency without having to manage the responsibilities and costs of an internal and salaried team.  In the increasingly fast-paced and demanding digital sphere, more companies seek outsourced marketing support. Believe it or not, outsourced marketing support has never been more affordable.  Remember, you are only paying for the resources you need.  Need design help? Great! Use those resources.  Have a great SEO setup already? Then outsource web development! These arrangements pay you on-demand for activity instead of when there is no demand.  A salaried developer gets paid whether you have worked for them or not.  An outsourced arrangement means you pay an agency each month and only leverage the resources you need when you need them.  Why buy an elephant when you can go to the zoo and see it there?

The biggest benefits of outsourcing are time and money. You’ll save a ton of time, ultimately giving you more freedom. You’ll save a ton of money as well.  Plus, most outsourcing contracts come with enforceable non-competes and service-level agreements that guarantee response times at certain levels. It is much easier to enforce a company-to-company non-compete than a company-employee non-compete. People have to work, after all!

So, if you decide to outsource your marketing task, for example, you would get an army of outsourced marketing that costs less than an intern and with levels of expertise that will easily exceed any intern’s skills and for whatever time you need them on.

Another great thing about outsourcing is how easy it is with technology nowadays! Setting up a Skype interview in that free 15-minute meeting is a great way to get to know your team better and ensure they have what it takes to be part of your business!

Don’t think about it anymore! If you want to grow your business, being cost- and time-effective, this is the way to go! Thank you, 21st century! Do you want to go deeper and need help? Set up a no-obligation call with us today to see if outsourcing is right for you and how you stack up against the competition!

Getting customers online can be confusing and leave you with more questions than answers What should I do first? Do I have to pay for ads? Which social media network is right for the new business? Some of these questions are going to be answered in this article! The first thing you need to understand is that Digital Marketing is STILL marketing, so focusing on the audience is key to creating a good strategy.

There are many parts involved in marketing, and the online elements increase in importance with each passing day. Much of what happens online now dictates everything. The importance relays on how you get found, and how you start to exchange value. Without a content platform to build from, a great deal of effort in other stages will be wasted.

So you have your great platform, what’s next? Advertising, the key to successful advertising is  to generate promising leads in exchange for the money you spend. To do so, it helps to offer a message that not only resonates with your target customers, but also showcases the value you can offer them. Everything depends on your target customer.  Pick your web channel wisely. LinkedIn, for instance, is a mainstay among businesses, CEOs and other owners and entrepreneurs, while Facebook remains wildly popular among consumers.

How about Twitter? Twitter is a fast paced social media channel where the conversation never stops. It’s the quickest way to hear what’s going on with your customers or in your industry.  People Tweet  constantly about what they’re doing. Companies are using Twitter to answer questions, give promotions and connect with customers at events, as well as gaining new customers.

Hashtags build collaborative communities, their job is amazing! Hashtags give the opportunity to build relationships and expand our range of influence from communities outside our own. In this evolution of how to do business, everyone wins. But we know sometimes digital marketers mention them as if they are some sort of magic words.  Yeah… we know.  There are many reasons to hate digital marketers!

It’s really not that complicated: the hashtag is the anchor of the social media revolution. A single hashtag connects a conversation across Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook and Google+. From these conversations, a community can quickly be formed and people with common interests are united. The hashtag also serves as a way of indexing the conversation you are in like keywords on a blog post do.

These conversations are also the place where businesses conduct their most powerful market research. Nowadays, even when you can’t physically be at an event, you can still join the conversation, thanks to the hashtag. You can take it one step further and have the conversation live on your website! If your site is a WordPress CMS there are great plugins like Aggregator or Think Twit that allow you automatically display any social media postings with particular hashtags in it.  For the bigger businesses ScribbleLive is a great content marketing optimizer.

Imagine the marketing capabilities as more social media posts get tagged? You really should take advantage of this in your digital marketing campaigns for the following general reasons:

1. They increase the reach of your brand – The messages get to users regardless of if they are your followers or not.   Keep tagging your posts with the same topics and you’ll start to appear on the radar of other people following those hashtags.
2. Develops Authority – Being active in conversations that resonate with your product helps you develop a following.  If you keep sharing useful information in a non-spammy way and tag it appropriately over-time you’ll get more people’s attention.

There are some basic hash tagging rules that we really should follow.  Make sure that the hashtag is actively followed if you are trying to join a conversation.  Otherwise, use a new hashtag if you’re trying to start a new conversation.  Hashtags should generally be short, precise and concise.  Also try to keep it to 1-3 hashtags per post depending on space and the nature of the post.