Category: Sales & Marketing

As the coronavirus outbreak continues and the government extends social distancing recommendations, people are spending more time on their phones. And advertisers will likely spend less on mobile advertising.

A March 19-22 survey by InMobi found that 70% of US consumers in areas under lockdown are spending more time on their phones. A good proxy for how much additional time is what happened in China in February. According to App Annie data, the average smartphone user in China spent an additional 30% of their time on their mobile device in February. Italy, which was at the beginning of an incomplete lockdown period at the end of February, saw an 11% increase in daily mobile time spent, while South Korea and Japan—both experiencing outbreaks in February and selective quarantines—saw daily mobile time spent increase 7%. In contrast, the US saw no year-over-year change in February.

The increase in time spent, however, is not easily monetized for app and mobile web publishers. First, much of this increased time is on platforms that aren’t heavily monetized by advertising. In Italy, Facebook has seen traffic increase by 70%, with group calling increasing by 1000%, Facebook Live and Instagram Live up 100% and messaging up 50%. None of those features can be monetized easily.

More importantly many advertisers don’t have the money now to buy the additional impressions, which has depressed CPMs. Adomik, which lets publishers track their ad monetization, released data this week that showed a 17.2% drop in week-over-week ad revenues in the US between March 10 to March 15 and March 17 to March 22. The biggest drops were in direct deal and programmatic guaranteed, with real-time bidding dropping 15%, followed by CPM dropping 14.8% and mobile dropping 13.3%.

Twitter and Facebook are reducing their ad revenue expectations for the rest of the quarter despite having large traffic increases, a pattern being repeated across digital publishers. The New York Times predicted a drop in ad revenues “in the mid-teens.” For the many media companies on the edge of viability, the boon in traffic will only be a cruelly ironic twist to their inability to make enough money to maintain operations. Facebook pledged to spend $100 million to bolster local news outlet, which will help somewhat but not enough to save many publishers.

In February, we released our latest estimates for mobile ad spending, which we expected at the time to grow from $87.3 billion in 2019 to $105.3 billion, a 20.7% increase. Even under the rosiest scenarios, this topline number for 2020 will not be reached because of COVID-19, but it’s still a good baseline to see the ad landscape before the pandemic. The Adomik figures seem ballpark for the drop in revenue—i.e, 10% to 20% over the next few months. Google and Facebook account for the majority of mobile ad spend, and they’re likely to be hit by the steep drop in local business, retail and travel spending. A rapid resolution to the crisis could lead to a decent rebound in spending in Q3 and Q4, but it’s too early to make any clear predictions that far ahead.

There are a few bright spots. Mobile gaming heavily relies on advertising from other games. InMobi’s survey found that 56% of US consumers have increased time playing mobile games. This might be one of the few publishing categories that have benefited from the lockdown rules hurting most of the industry. Subscription video companies have also seen traffic and subscriptions rise and are more immune to advertiser shocks.

Mobile Advertising Declines Due to COVID-19, Despite Increased Time Spent [EMarketer]

Do you know what your customers want? Do you think your customers trust your products? When was the last time you saw a customer tweeting about your product or service? Was it a complaint or compliment?

The answers to all these questions lie in marketing.

How you market your business determines if the enterprise will be successful or not. Marketing is a tool used to create and maintain demand, relevance, reputation, competition and more. Without it, your business is likely to close down due to lack of sales.

So why is marketing important? Check out these 9 reasons why you really do need it.

1. Marketing Is an Effective Way of Engaging Customers

It’s important for your business to engage its customers. Marketing is a tool to keep the conversation going.

Engaging customers is different from pushing your offers. Engaging involves furnishing your customers with relevant information about your products and your business as well. It’s all about creating fresh content.

Tell your customers what they don’t know. Let it be interesting and worth their time.

Social media is one of the best platforms where you can engage your customers. Some organizations use short videos and other humor-laden tricks to engage their customer base.

By engaging your customers, marketing gives them a sense of belonging.

2. Marketing Helps to Build and Maintain the Company’s Reputation

The growth and life span of your business is positively correlated to your business’s reputation. Hence, it’s fair to say your reputation determines your brand equity.

A majority of marketing activities are geared towards building the brand equity of the company.

Your business’s reputation is built when it effectively meets the expectations of its customers. Such a business is considered a responsible member of the community. The customers become proud to be associated with your products.

Marketers use effective communication, branding, PR and CSR strategies to ensure that a business’s reputation is maintained.

3. Marketing Helps to Build a Relationship Between a Business and Its Customers

Businesses need to build a relationship of trust and understanding with their customers. How does marketing establish this relationship?

Marketing research segments should be based on demographics, psychographics, and consumer behavior.

Segmentation helps the business meet the needs of its customers hence gaining their trust. The product team ensures the business delivers what’s promised at the right time. This makes the customers brand loyal.

Loyal customers will have the confidence to buy more products from you. The trust and understanding between the business and its customers make your commercial activities more fruitful.

4. Marketing Is a Communication Channel Used to Inform Customers

Marketing informs your customers about the products or services you’re offering them.

Through marketing, the customers get to know about the value of the products, their usage and additional info that might be helpful to the customers. It creates brand awareness and makes the business stand out.

There’s stiff competition in the market and you need to be a constant voice to convince the customers. Inform your customers of discounts and other competitive tricks you intend to use.

Through communication, marketing helps your business become a market leader. This post explains more about how to gain a competitive advantage.

5. Marketing Helps to Boosts Sales

Marketing utilizes different ways to promote your products or services. Once a product has been advertised, it’s already on the radar and this increases your chances of selling it.

Customers may want to try your products or services and this will trigger a purchase decision.

When customers are happy about your products or services, they become your brand ambassadors without your knowledge. They will spread the word and your sales will start to increase.

Ensure you offer high-quality products and services to complement your marketing efforts.

6. Marketing Aids in Providing Insights About Your Business

Every marketer understands the need for targeting the right audience. However, you must have the right content to share with such an audience. Your marketing strategies can help you establish what business messaging will convince the target audience.

At this point, you have to test different messages and see what works.
Once you have tested different sets of messaging on the target audience, you will find a viable baseline for your marketing efforts.

It acts as a metric and provides the insight needed to make you avoid guesswork.

7. Marketing Helps Your Business to Maintain Relevance

Every marketer understands the need for disrupting a potential consumer’s opinion about other products. But don’t make a mistake of taking this chance for granted.

Most businesses assume that they will always remain the client’s favorite brand because up to now the client has never complained. This is the wrong mindset. You need to find ways to remain at the top of the client’s mind.

Every relationship needs to be maintained. Marketing helps your business to maintain a good relationship with customers by making you remain relevant.

Don’t focus on gaining new customers before addressing the need to retain the present ones.

8. Marketing Creates Revenue Options

During the startup phase, your options are sparse since you’re mostly cash-strapped. This limits your options.

As your marketing strategies generate more customers and revenue opportunities, you’ll begin having options. Having options is comparable to having a nice war chest.

Having options will give you the courage you need to penetrate new markets. You will have the freedom to start letting go of customers who are too demanding to your sanity and well-being.

Without marketing, you will be forced to continue working with clients who you have outgrown and are paying you peanuts.

9. Marketing Helps the Management Team to Make Informed Decisions

Every business is confronted with problems such as to what, when, for whom and how much to produce. A complex and tedious process determine your business’s survival. As a result, businesses heavily rely on marketing mechanisms to make these decisions.

Why should you rely on marketing mechanisms? These mechanisms serve as a reliable link between your business and society. They cultivate people’s mind, educate the public and convince them to buy.

Why Is Marketing Important in Beating Your Business Rivals?

Your competitor is actively marketing their products, doesn’t this tell you why is marketing important? The only way to gain a competitive advantage over your competition is aggressive marketing.

However, you don’t have to be sleazy or negative while marketing against your competitor. Simply conduct research on what your target market is expecting, and then find ways to deliver better products or services.

If you’re offering a product or service that is new to the market, you need to be more aggressive and strategic.

Why Is Marketing Important? 9 Reasons Why You Really Do Need It [Business2Community]

Professional marketers and entrepreneurs alike read Neil Patel’s marketing blog for ideas and tactics, and use the marketing tools like Crazy Egg and Ubersuggest that he helped develop into the category leaders that they are today. Neil was named an Empact100 entrepreneur by the Obama White House, and has been honored by the UN and Forbes, among others.

All of this led to a great deal of excitement in 2016, when Neil founded Neil Patel Digital, together with business partner Mike Kamo.

Now businesses can employ Neil Patel’s marketing services directly. You can find positive Neil Patel Digital reviews  from huge clients like Amazon and Google, but if you’re thinking of hiring Neil’s marketing agency, you probably want to know more about what exactly you’ll get for your money, before you make a commitment.

Having gathered details from reviews published by his customers around the web, we’re here to answer that question.

Pricing

Given that Neil is such a rockstar marketer, it’s not surprising that he charges rockstar prices. But the agency’s clients insist that his pricing is also very fair and balanced. There are flexible payment plans, and you can choose between a monthly or annual contact, depending on what works best for your cashflow situation.

Furthermore, the price you’ll pay is tailored specifically to your needs and is fully transparent. You won’t be forced into paying for a huge package if you don’t need or want it. Instead, you’ll receive a customized pricing proposal that lays out exactly which services are included in your contract.

It’s important to know that working with Neil Patel Digital means signing up for at least one year, so it’s not for the commitment-phobic. The long contract time is so that the NP Digital team can create and implement a long-term marketing strategy instead of short-term fixes.

Services

Neil Patel Digital follows Neil’s own marketing approach, which is to take a holistic view of the entire process. As a result, you’ll find that his team specializes in a whole set of interconnected marketing services:

• Social media marketing. This includes a targeted strategy for the biggies, like Facebook and Instagram, as well as niche platforms where you can establish a powerful brand reputation.
• SEO. This is one of Neil Patel’s biggest strengths, and it’s reflected in the priorities of his team at NP Digital. SEO and content marketing services are combined, since they feed off each other.
• PPC. Another key element to marketing campaigns at NP Digital. You’ll get assistance in developing paid ad campaigns that cover social media, apps, and search engine ads, to beat ad-blockers and audience apathy.
• Strategy and funnel development. Expect expert analysis of your existing funnels, advice for maximizing complex business and marketing channels, and guidance on identifying new paths for conversion.
• Email marketing and lead capture. Although this is provided by Hello Bar, another of Neil’s companies, the level of professionalism and results are still high. You’ll enjoy expert support to grow your email list with valuable new contacts.

You can request assistance with just one of these areas, but it’s best to take the complete marketing package so that the NP Digital team can harmonize every aspect of your marketing efforts.

You’ll really be getting a single marketing strategy that has several elements to it, since it’s inevitable that your PPC ads also impact on your SEO tactics, your social media and your email content overlap, and that SEO, PPC, social, and email campaigns are all involved in your marketing and sales funnels.

Underpinning all these marketing tactics is content marketing. Your marketers at NP Digital follow Neil’s own precepts by beginning with your content, which is the foundation for all your digital marketing campaigns. If your content is not quite all it could be, the dedicated NP Digital professionals work with you to strengthen and improve it, so that you can use it to drive down costs for PPC, boost your SEO rankings, and employ it as a reliable springboard for overarching marketing strategy.

Workflows and Processes

The proposal generation and onboarding processes at NP Digital are exemplary. You won’t get any hard sell here. Instead, the strategy work begins before you even sign up or commit to paying a penny.

The team starts by giving all your marketing efforts a thorough overhaul, ripping apart your email campaigns and social media posts, finding weaknesses in your SEO choices, and spotting missed opportunities for PPC. Prepare yourself to face up to every mistake you ever made in your content marketing, because you’ll be assessed by an unforgiving judge.

However, it’s all for a good cause. Neil Patel Digital’s team identifies everything that could be improved, and they send you a detailed list, complete with recommendations for changes and projections for estimated traffic lift, conversion lift and ROI once those changes are implemented.

You’ll get a full description of how they will increase SERP rankings, monthly traffic, and your overall revenue.

You’ll only get a pricing proposal and a contract after this process is complete. The model does make it hard to get a quick price quote, but it also enables you to feel confident about the service you’re about to pay for and helps ensure that NP Digital has properly understood your company’s needs. If you’re not happy with their assessment of your marketing requirements, you can ask them to think again, or simply walk away without any charge.

Once you’ve signed the contract and begun payments, the real work begins. At Neil Patel Digital, the focus is on long-term results, which means that it takes around six months of improving content, fine-tuning SEO keywords, redeveloping funnels, and refining PPC ad elements before clients see a significant uptick in traffic and conversions.

Neil Patel Digital Delivers Long-Term Results

Wrapping up on this review of Neil Patel Digital,  it’s clear that with the company’s holistic marketing approach, your money doesn’t just bring you marketing advice and guidance. All the marketing elements impact on each other to boost revenue and profits for the long term.

It takes time to finish improving each piece of the puzzle, but once SEO, PPC, email, social, and content are all working together as part of a well-thought-out marketing strategy, they have an impact which is greater than the sum of their parts.

Most everyone has a vague idea of what SEO is. But if you’re going to try to use it to succeed as an entrepreneur, you need to genuinely understand what the term means, how the concept works, and how you can leverage it in order to help your business prosper.

Defining SEO

SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it refers to practices designed to improve a site’s position in search engine results pages (SERPs). The goal of SEO is to improve the visibility and traffic of a site. In essence, this optimization is much like holding a search engine’s hand in order to help it understand a website. 

Black and White Hat SEO

Now, as you might suspect, this can lead to both good and bad SEO. Your SEO practices must be centered around improving your audience’s experience. If you focus solely on short-term gains in the SERPs, you’ll inevitably find yourself engaging in ethically questionable practices.

Bad or “black hat” SEO involves the owner of a website deliberately misleading search engines by stuffing their site’s content with SEO tactics, even if it doesn’t accurately reflect the content of the site itself. This satisfies the needs of the search engine but doesn’t actually provide quality content for the audience — in essence, “lying” in order to get traffic.

Good or “white hat” SEO, on the other hand, utilizes sustainable, honest techniques in order to optimize a site’s content while simultaneously making the content itself focused on the audience, not merely on gaming search engines.

Types of SEO

In addition to white and black hat techniques, there are two kinds of SEO that you want to use in order to fully optimize your site. 

The first is on-page SEO. This involves the content actually housed on your site. On-page SEO involves optimizing everything, from keywords and links within the content itself to meta tags and titles, image alt text, URLs, and even the code on the back end.

Off-page is the other kind of SEO you’ll want to consider. As the name suggests, this consists of any and all online SEO activities that you do off of your website. This can include things like guest posts, sharing infographics, working with influencers, and utilizing social media.

How to Use SEO to Build Your New Business

Now, if you’re starting to feel like a deer in the headlights, that’s understandable. SEO can feel very overwhelming at first. However, there’s no need to panic nor to throw in the towel. When broken down into manageable steps, optimizing your business’s online presence can actually be quite an achievable task, and it can yield tremendous benefits. Here are a few ways to go about using SEO in order to make your business shine and bring in traffic from across the web:

Create Genuine, Authoritative Content

First and foremost, always remember to put the customer first. One of the best on-page ways to increase your new business’s SEO is to create authoritative content that is aimed at the customer. In other words, if you start a company blog, make sure that you use it to write articles that provide real information and answer key questions for customers within your niche.

As you create content, start looking into keywords, including long-tail keyword phrases that are specific to your industry, expertise, and location. There are many different free keyword tools out there, like Google AdWords, Keyword Planner, or Keyword In. Look for one that you feel comfortable using, then search for keywords and phrases to include in your content. As you come up with a list of terms that people are searching for, add them to your content in natural places where they don’t disrupt the flow of information.

In addition, make sure to include links within your text that both point to other parts of your sites (known as internal linking) and outside quality sources (known as external linking). Governmental and educational sites are excellent quality external links. When you add a link to your text, also make sure that the words you hyperlink are applicable to the information being linked to!

Heading Off-Page

In addition to the on-site content, make sure to look for opportunities to share your business in other places. As previously mentioned, this can be done by using social media to personally connect with customers. It can also provide an avenue to promote your materials as well. Simply take the time to interact with customers as well as those interested in your niche and join in the conversation.

In addition, you can look for opportunities to connect with other authorities within your niche (known as influencers) who you can collaborate with. Providing quality guest posts for other blogs that include a link or two pointing back to your site can also help drive traffic.

Hiring a Professional

If want to use SEO but you can’t find the time to do so, you can always hire a professional to help. If you do that, though, make sure to set up a system of analytics in order to track their effectiveness. Remember, you’re not running a charity. If your business is new, chances are you don’t have a lot of capital to throw around. If that’s the case, you want to make sure that you’re investing your SEO dollars wisely. Make sure that you have a tool like Google Analytics tracking your data behind the scenes in order to see where your customers are coming from, how long they’re spending on your site, who is making purchases, and so on.

Using SEO to Succeed

In many ways, SEO is the lifeblood of the internet these days. While you always want your content to genuinely meet the needs of your customers, it’s good SEO that will ensure that the content reaches those customers in the first place. 

The beauty of good SEO, though, is it doesn’t require a massive budget or an extremely specialized skill set. While SEO experts can take the concept of optimization to very detailed levels, it’s certainly possible for startups and fledgling companies to also throw their “white hats” into the ring as well. If you focus on creating quality, on-page SEO content and leveraging your off-page SEO endeavors to the best of your ability, chances are you’ll notice your online momentum beginning to build in no time.