Inspiration

4. Encourage a call to action/lead generation

Getting customers to do what you want can be like herding cats! They may leave your website half-way through reading an interesting news article, scan your riveting social feed, leave irresistible products in their shopping basket, and not read your beautifully written blog post right until the end! Therefore, effective, and useful CTAs (Call to Actions) are imperative to convert your customers and create leads. As mentioned, CTA stands for call to action, and it’s usually a creative looking button or tab on a website, advertisement, or piece of content, that encourages the reader to do something!

Type of CTA

The type of CTA will depend on the content you are writing and the goal you want to achieve from it. Generally, the amount of information you get from your customer will depend on the value of the CTA to them.

For example, if you’re writing a New Story about a new wrap product, you might want your customers to be able to see their choice, therefore an appropriate CTA could be to download the brochure (a quick and easy click and they’ve got what they want). If the CTA was ‘request a swatch’ for example, this is something more substantial to the company and to the customer, therefore the CTA may include a form to fill in to receive more lead information. If they then follow this CTA, you generate a lead that can be followed up by the sales team as they have taken interest in your content/products.

Other types to convert and engage:

• Watch this video
• Sign Up
• View the range
• Receive your film sample
• Download free bulletins on our website
• Learn more
• Join us

How often and where to place the CTA?

Like a lot of marketing there’s no right or wrong answer. The advice is to keep them varied, relevant, useful and at different points in your content. As mentioned above, unfortunately a lot of content won’t be read until the end, and this is where a lot of businesses put their CTAs. This is correct however they need to be placed throughout to ensure engagement.

• Beginning, middle and end is a good place to start (depending on your content length)- but why not test? AB testing is a resourceful way of finding out what engages your customers best. It can be used across your digital marketing components.
• Don’t go overboard, you don’t want to put them off! Make sure they’re useful, relevant and have that goal in mind.

5. Budget for a paid ad a couple of times a year!

The global pandemic has caused all of us to move online in our private lives- working from home, connecting with friends and family, plus, purchasing habits that have had to change. Instead of going to the shops we now browse and shop a lot more online, rightly or wrongly. More than two billion people use social media everyday and with the average person spending over 90 minutes per day on social media networks, an ad that can catch customers eyes is worth considering. A paid ad can offer reach, engagement, and sales… something all businesses can’t complain about!

On Facebook in particular, posts from friends and family reach the ‘Newsfeed’ first, therefore it can be hard for a business to get the views and engagement they would like from posts. The volume of posts on a feed per day makes it harder and harder for you to connect with your audience and customers. Therefore, a paid ad can guarantee a place on that feed and improve your reach with those you want to interact with. Make it short, ‘snappy’ and useful, with a powerful CTA as we’ve discussed above.

Benefits (you may wish to read in more detail) of paid ads include:

• Improve your audience reach
• There’s an ad for any budget
• Easy to target specific customers (an ad can target a certain number of needs not just all your audience)- use Facebook Insights.
• Boost brand awareness (get your name out there)
• Gather insights into who clicked onto your ad to gain leads and analytics

This all sounds amazing but how much does it cost I hear you thinking!? The truth is it can be as much or as little as you like. It depends on the channel type and duration. Social media ads (what I recommend) can be affordable, whereas a full-page print placement for example, can be a lot more substantial. A social media ad average range is £200-£500, worth it if you take the above benefits into account and use the insights effectively.

Does paid social media interest you? Read this blog by Hubspot for more information.

6. Measure success and adapt!

Simple tools can be used to measure your digital marketing success, predominantly to work out: what works, what has impact, how you get the most engagement and what to leave out next time, therefore adapting according to the analytics.

Where do you get the information from?

This will depend on the type of marketing you have carried out, but I’ll give you an overview!

• Social Media posts can be measured through sentiment value e.g. tags, likes, shares, and mentions. Further analytics can be found within the platforms or Google Analytics is worth a gander e.g. read further details at the bottom of my last social media blog.
• Emails can be measured through the software you use, for us that’s HubSpot. You can check open rates, click through rates (whose clicked on your CTAs!), bounce rates (those that come back to you mean your details for that customer must not be correct, so you could get a member of the sales team to get in touch), and unsubscribe rates (this means they’re sick of you unfortunately so don’t want to get your communications anymore! Don’t worry, we all get them).
• Interactive digital marketing such as videos can be measured through downloads rates and VTR (View through rate.)

It’s worth considering your ROI (Return on Investment) if you start to put a bit more time into your digital marketing, basically, working out if the amount of effort and money spent on your marketing is paying off. KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) will help with this and can be outlined in your plan, these can be as simple or as complex as you want them to be- I would go with the simple option!

Examples:

• Social media traffic and conversion rates
• Landing page conversion rates
• Leads
• Lead to customer ratio
• Customer lifetime value (LTV)

It is important to monitor and evaluate throughout your marketing to find out if goals are being achieved, if the activities set are working and to see if anything can be tweaked or changed to improve success further.

* A final tip to improve your businesses digital reach!

Partner or reach out to local influencers.

We’ve done this recently with a competition ran from our Architextural brand. We wanted to give back to the retail/hospitality community by offering a £5000 makeover using architectural films. In order to gain a bigger traction we reached out to @theflippedpiece (157k followers) and @lookweboughtahouse (21.5k followers) to share the competition on their stories, therefore reaching more of our targeted audience and got our name out there in the industry! It worked a treat.

As mentioned in my previous social media blog, outlining the benefits of social media to a business, tagging within posts and linking with influencers is worth the effort. Think about how many followers you have and then compare that to how many followers your suppliers or industry influencers have? Makes you feel small, right? Well use this information to both of your benefits. Think about all the athletes, actresses and high-profile people out there. Let’s face it, social media makes an impossible task possible when some people manage to interact with these stars, just by tagging them or commenting on something they’ve done.

We have a similar opportunity with our main suppliers; 3M, Avery Dennison and Arlon Graphics- if we tag them in one of our posts or share something we’ve collaborated on, then our post could reach their followers too. Especially if they share it. Simple really.

If this blog has inspired you to get to grips with your digital marketing, why not make some simple changes and additions to your advertising this week?

Further reading can be done through Smart Insights, where you can find guides, blogs and inspiring authors and on HubSpot, articles and templates can be found, such as ‘The 6 Biggest Marketing Lessons’ and ‘5 steps to create an outstanding digital marketing plan’. Finally if you fancy spending a couple of pennies on a book here’s a couple I found useful that were given on my course- ‘Digital Marketing Strategy’ and Digital Marketing For Beginners 2020.

You can browse our website and social channels for inspo (social and Smith/Architextural website’s can be found by scrolling to the bottom) and if we’re doing our job right, you should find them all useful!