Category: Uncategorized

Turn Your Clicks Into Customers

Posted on by Andrew

Every time you get a website hit, that’s a potential lead. Aside from the people who accidentally click on your site, all your visitors are at least somewhat interested in your products or services.

So why do you get so much website traffic and so few leads? Because shoppers today go to Google and compare everything about your business with your competitor’s at the click of a button. That means you only have a few seconds to sway them in your direction, or just hope your website was memorable enough that they’ll re-visit it.

We’ve already written some posts on retargeting, but here’s a quick recap: First the user visits your website, and your website places a cookie in their browser. Next, they leave without converting. Then, the cookie in their browser tells the websites they visit to display your ad. Finally, they see the ads, are reminded of your website, and come back and make a purchase.

So what’s so great about retargeting? Well it follows-up with your prospects automatically. As they surf the Internet, your ads appear and remind them of your services. Also, to increase conversions, you can even promote a special deal for people who click on your ad.

As a full-service ad agency in Seattle, we have a retargeting program that delivers return traffic to your website, guaranteed.

Retargeting allows you to cater to website visitors no matter how far into the buying cycle they are. Whether they’re just doing preliminary research, or almost ready to make a purchase, retargeting works in the same way: it reminds them of you.

Let your web traffic bring you results. More than 98% of your website visitors leave and never come back – give them a reason to.

3 Ways to Increase Sales on Valentine’s Day

Posted on by Andrew

So Valentine’s Day is tomorrow, which means millions of couples around the U.S. will be purchasing traditional Valentine’s Day things such as flowers, jewelry, candy, and clothes. So how can you use this to your advantage? The answer is with digital marketing and advertising.

Even if you don’t sell any of the traditional Valentine’s Day gifts, use this holiday as a chance to offer a special promotion, and perhaps even persuade your customers that a new car or hot tub is a better alternative to blowing money on an expensive dinner and diamond bracelet. Sending these kinds of updates through email gives you an easy way to tell all your customers that you’re offering a special.

Follow these three tips to make your Valentine’s email blast successful.

1. Target men

Segment your email list to your male customers. The reason you do this is simple: men spend more than twice as much as women on Valentine’s Day. That means you need to use language targeted to males. Stress the importance of coming up with a gift for their special someone, and highlight the idea of giving a unique gift, depending on what it is that you’re selling.

2. Timing is everything

Depending on how much your product costs, you might want to send the email out a couple of weeks in advance. If your product is a little cheaper, a few days before – or even on – Valentine’s Day will work because it will be fresh in their mind about buying a gift for their significant other.

3. Promote it via social channels

Social Media is a great way to promote your Valentine’s Day offer. Provided that you have a fair amount of followers, sending out timely updates leading up to Valentine’s Day can give your fans and followers a reason to check out your store.

There you have it. Follow these three tips, and you could capitalize on thousands of local Valentine’s Day shoppers. For more tips on local marketing and advertising, check out the rest of our blog or go to our website.

4 Ways you can apply lessons from Superbowl commercials to your business

Posted on by Andrew

For those of you in Antartica last weekend (or non-sports fans), the Superbowl took place last Sunday, and the best football players competed with the best ad agencies for the limelight. You might think Superbowl ads don’t apply to your business because there’s no way you would ever be able to afford one, but all the ads had takeaways that can help with advertising and marketing for any budget.

1. Add a social layer.
If you noticed, almost every ad in the Superbowl had a social media element to it. Some had hashtags associated with them, such as Audi’s vampire commercial’s #SoLongVampires. Others, such as Bud Light’s commercial, encouraged watchers to go to Facebook for more content. While you don’t necessarily have to have a hashtag, promoting your specials on Facebook, or offering extra discounts to users who share your content can help add a social layer to any promotion you do.

Audi’s Vampire Commercial

2. Make it unique.
Every Superbowl commercial has a unique factor to it – usually humor. Do your ad spots say or show anything to separate your business from your competitors? Beware of bad jokes or going overboard, however. Your commercial may go viral for the wrong reasons.

3. Don’t just sell your product.
Not many people want to hear numbers about how your car has 6hp more than the other guys’, or why the hot tub you sell has jets that deliver 26psi more than your competitors’. Instead, focus on the lifestyle aspect of your product. VW’s commercial showed a dog getting in shape so he could chase a New Beetle, and became one of the most watched TV spots because of it’s unique approach.

VW’s Dog Commercial

4. Don’t jab at the competition
Chevy learned that lesson the hard way this year with their Superbowl ad that said Ford drivers didn’t make it through the Mayan apocalypse, but Chevy drivers did. While it generated some buzz, it didn’t do anything to help the brand at all, and Ford released a statement taking offense to the ad as well.

Let us know of any other Superbowl commercials you enjoyed in the comments.

Facebook Ad Impressions Increasing

Posted on by Andrew

Have you tried doing Facebook ads in your latest display advertising campaign? Facebook is getting huge, and they own about a third of the U.S. display ad market. If you want to get the most out of your display campaign, forgetting about Facebook would be a huge oversight.

Continue reading…

Why Hiring a Search Engine Marketer is Like Going to a Mechanic

Posted on by Andrew

Yup, you read that right. At first glance, there might not seem like there’s much similarity between digital advertising and auto repair, but they do have their similarities. For more information on search engine marketing, check out our post on online advertising and the state of search.

First off, both are things you can do yourself. Yup, it’s true. You can do your own car repair the same way you can do your own search marketing. It might take you longer and you might not get the same results, but it’s still possible.

The second reason they are similar is that a lot of people have had bad experiences in the past. Almost everyone you know probably has a story about a shady mechanic, and a lot of people have separate stories about search engine marketers over-promising and under-delivering.

The third reason is that you get what you pay for. There are mechanics out there that will give you a quote for really cheap car repair, but you don’t know exactly what you’re getting. The same is true for search engine marketing agencies. Someone can tell you that you only need to spend $200 per month on search, but don’t tell you what their methods are.

The last reason is that you’re better off hiring a professional. I know I said you can do it yourself, and it’s true. The only thing is that you’re better off hiring someone else. If I asked you to replace the head gasket in your car, the chances are you would have no idea where to start. The same thing would probably happen if I told you to make a search campaign that included dynamic keyword insertion, geo-modifiers, negative keywords, ad rank and quality score. You could spend hours researching how to do all of those things, but the truth is, you’re never done researching. Google, and other search engines, roll out changes constantly, and you need to stay on top of the latest changes in search marketing methods.

At Conversion Logix, we guarantee you’ll see a lift in traffic and will have nothing but good stories to tell your peers and colleagues. We are a full-service digital ad agency in Seattle dedicated to bringing you results.

Get a Better Google Places Rank with Local AdsUpNow

Posted on by Andrew

More than 3 billion searches for local goods or services take place every month. That’s a huge number, and it’s only getting bigger.

We’ve talked on this blog before about Google Places optimization and some of the ways to get your business listing higher in Google. One of the things we mentioned was using business directories to get what are called “citations.”

Citations are mentions of your business name on the Internet. So why is it important to have so many citations? Well search engines think it’s important, that’s why.

Continue reading…

Retargeting: The Ultimate Lift For Website Traffic

Posted on by Andrew

We’ve talked about retargeting before, but for those of you who don’t know what it is, how it works, or how it fits in to your digital marketing strategy, here’s the short version: A user visits your website, a tracking cookie gets placed in their browser, your ads appear to them over the next month as they browse the web, and they are more likely to return to your website and take action.

Retargeting is great in that it follows up with your website customers automatically. 98 percent of your web traffic leaves without doing anything, but with retargeting, you get a much higher return rate. In a study from comScore, sites with retargeting got a 726 percent lift in site visitation after four weeks of ad exposure.

website traffic lift from retargeting

Retargeting also reflects positively on your branded search. Branded search is when someone searches for your business, such as “Moe’s Pizza,” instead of searching a broad category like “Pizza Seattle.” Branded searches are important because it means more and more people know about your business. In the same study, comScore noted that after four weeks of ad exposure, branded search increased 1,046 percent.

retargeting effects on branded search

This means that even if the retargeting ads themselves don’t have a high click-through rate, searchers are still looking for those businesses more often than ones they aren’t retargeted for.

After conducting its study, comScore concluded: “In building the model of branding effectiveness, one strategy clearly outperformed the rest – retargeting. This strategy works well in every scenario and should be considered for both direct response and longer term branding objectives.”

For more information on retargeting, contact us today for a free consultation, or ask a question in the comments.

The Car-buying Mobile Revolution

Posted on by Andrew

Mobile is transforming everything from shopping to searching. According to wireless statistics, wireless users logged 1.15 trillion minutes on mobile devices in the first half of 2011. That’s more than 6 billion minutes of usage every day.

Car Dealership Mobile App
More and more car dealerships are developing mobile apps

One place mobile is changing the world is in car sales. A recent survey noted that 78 percent of people who are planning to buy a vehicle during the next 12 months will use a mobile device at some point in the purchase process.

If you’re a car dealer and you don’t have a mobile campaign, well, you now have a reason to get one. You can’t alienate such a large percentage of your car shoppers by not having a mobile strategy.

Here are some more stats: 44 percent of mobile car buyers use their phones to compare prices at different dealerships, 32 percent will use them to locate a dealership and 23 percent will use them to contact a dealership.

Those are numbers that you can’t ignore. Mobile is the way of the future, and you need to start adapting your business to the wants of the mobile user.

That means mobile landing pages, mobile ads, mobile SEM, QR codes, SMS campaigns and more. Tailoring to as many different users as possible will ensure none of your customers fall through the cracks.

Call us today and see how we can help you with your mobile strategy.  We’ll get you started on the path to digital marketing success.

Small Businesses Moving Aggressively to Online Marketing

Posted on by Andrew

Digital marketing is continuing to grow compared to traditional forms of advertising among small and medium-sized companies (SMBs).

According to BIA/Kelsey, digital spending for US SMBs is expected to reach $16.6 billion annually by 2016.

That means 70 percent of SMB marketing budgets will be spent on digital. In 2010, SMBs spent 52 percent of their budgets on traditional marketing and advertising, but that number will shrink to 30 percent in 2015.

Digital marketing includes mobile, social, online directories, online display, retargeting, search, and more.

Neal Polachek, president of BIA/Kelsey, said SMBs are using digital practices to engage their customers for longer periods of time.

“With the advent of daily deals to drive customer acquisition, SMBs are now increasingly focused on leveraging technological solutions to engage, grow and retain a higher percentage of their customers,” said Polachek. “As this trend accelerates, these SMBs will turn to outside providers to harness simple tools, which will enable them to maximize the long-term value of each new customer they acquire.”

Marketing Spend by SMBs

Some of the other Key takeaways from the report are as follows:

  • Overall, U.S. SMB spending on media, marketing and business solutions will grow from $22.4 billion in 2010 to $40.2 billion in 2015, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12 percent.
  • SMB spending on traditional advertising will be essentially flat during the forecast period, experiencing a 0.6 percent CAGR, from $11.8 billion in 2010 to $12.1 billion in 2015.
  • SMB spending on digital/online media will grow from $5.4 billion in 2010 to $16.6 billion in 2015 (24.9 percent CAGR).
  • SMBs will also increase spending on performance-based commerce and transaction platforms, from $1.7 billion in 2010 to $4.6 billion in 2015 (21.5 percent CAGR).
  • Spending by SMBs on customer retention business solutions will grow from $3.5 billion in 2010 to $6.9 billion in 2015 (14.6 percent CAGR).

As you can see, digital marketing and advertising are becoming increasingly important. There’s no excuse for why you shouldn’t have your own digital marketing campaign. Contact us today to learn more.

Some Stats about Texting

Posted on by Andrew

OMG! News flash! Texting is huge!

If I told you that you need to start an SMS campaign for your business, would you believe me? You might disagree. You might say “No, texting is just a fad,” or “No one uses texting to stay in contact with their customers.” Well, I hate to break it to you, but you’re mistaken. Texting today is more important than email.

Texting is the most used data service in the world. Yup, that’s right. It’s used more than email, telephone calls and mail. There are more texts sent per year than there are people in the world. Texting is a huge communication medium, and it’s not going away anytime soon.

Not sure what an SMS campaign is? Check out our post on SMS Basics

Since 2009, voice minute usage on cell phones decreased 12 percent, but texting rose 40 percent. Texting is the way your customers interact with each other, so shouldn’t you interact with them in a way that they’re familiar with?

Phone use by gender

A this point you might be thinking “Sure, young people text, but they have no money. I want to market to customers over 35.” Well I have good news; the older generations are the fastest growing segments for sending and receiving text messages. In fact, adults ages 35-55 send and receive on average 1,143 messages per month.

Text Messaging is Increasing

Text campaigns are an easy way to send specials and deals to your customer base, helping you increase your presence and increase mindshare.

At AdsUpNow, we make SMS campaigns easy and rewarding. Contact us today and we’ll get started on a custom-made texting campaign that is sure to connect you with your customers and bring increased revenue to your business.