10 Reasons Why Digital Marketing is Important for Your Business!

It’s the year 2015. Of course Digital Marketing is important for your business! It has been phenomenal  in changing business models and challenging age old conventions. The driving force behind this, the customers, mean only one thing: digital marketing is where you should be in. By giving your business the exposure it needs, it also helps you build an online relationship with your target audiences.

Why Digital Marketing?

The key element of social media lies in being ‘being social’. Digital Marketing has a transformative impact on business be it a large-scale business or a small one. Businesses, which adopt social media, are more collaborative and responsive to customers. With the various tools available on social media, can listen to customers, spur innovation, identify new market opportunities and gain credibility. With the help of social media monitoring, one can gain key information on their competitors and make strategic business decisions in order to stay ahead. One of the best benefits of using social media for business is using it to increase website traffic and search ranking.

Here are a few reasons why digital marketing is highly essential for a business.

1. Result Oriented Strategic Digital Marketing

A result oriented digital marketing campaign points your brand in the right direction. You can experiment with different target audiences with a complete 360 degree strategy that combines visibility, leads, engagement and your brand positioning.

Our objective with Dr. Paul’s Multispeciality Clinic was to establish their brand presence & promote their services on all the major social media channels, create visibility about their services and to generate leads for their website. The SEO service helped them fetch 100+ keywords in 6 months and increased their website traffic to 200+. Thanks to the increase in website traffic, the clinic’s online leads were significantly increased and received a good number of leads.

As part of their corporate blog strategy, 20 blog posts/month were posted with the SEO elements integrated in the blog article.

echoVME also won a Best Display Campaign Award for our ad campaigns for Dr Paul’s!

2. Optimize Advertisements Across Different Platforms          

Targeting your audience and website visitors is important. But how do you ensure you convert this audience?By running retargeting advertisements! Your audience will be targeted through third party apps from Facebook when they visit the site which serve as a funnel to your ROI. Later, build a database of this audience to target your future campaigns!echoVME’s retargeting ads:

Ad in Chennaibizz

Ad in Dailythanthi

Ad in Dinakaran

Ad in Indianexpress

 3. Mobile Friendly

The rapid growth rate of the mobile users segment has upped the growth of digital marketing by widening the opportunities and reaching out to customers from various demographics, helping business customize and define their customer reach. The first step towards this is to make your website responsive! A responsive website is one which is flexible and adapts to fit a variety of screens sizes for different devices. Having a responsive website is considered as one of the best web design practices. This way the brand can cater to customers through a variety of channels! With the distinct shift of audience to smartphones and tablets, mobile responsive design is becoming extremely important. This helps to generate more traffic on the website, increase leads and conversions. Our clients Dr. Paul’s,emhealth and Star Weddings, they have responsive websites and we have obtained excellent results so far. The leads count has doubled and also provided their clients with an excellent user experience!

Star Weddings – Mobile Responsive Website

Quick Message Option on the Mobile Responsive Website

Dr. Paul’s – Mobile Responsive Website

Dr. Pauls – Contact Feature on Mobile Responsive Website

 4. Conversion Optimization

Running conversion based campaign and advertisements will benefit your business immediately and in the long run. Investing in SEM and SEO and keyword specific campaigns doubles your results, enabling you to generate and quantify revenues.

5. Survival, Action, Trust & Reputation

For your business to survive, your brand must have a clear cut digital marketing presence. Survival incites action from your customers, which builds automatic trust and relationships, thus creating your reputation online.

The Facebook reviews of our client, Oliva Clinics tripled once we began our digital marketing strategy. Here’s a sneak peek into the ‘Review’ feature on the page:

6. Your Customers are there and so are your competitors!

Where your customers are, you must follow. And what more than a wonderful way to follow them than digital marketing?

7. Content Marketing

Digital marketing is where content reigns king. It provides an opportunity to create a range of content that talks about your brand to educate your customers. The kind of content you create creates the major perception in your target audience’s minds, positioning your brand as well. Content marketing is one of the best ways to improve your leads and drive sales. But always bear in mind while your audience and brand while creating the content, create your content with a purpose.

We always make sure to write content with our brand and audience in mind. As one of our brands, Urban Tree, which is one of the best real estate brands in Chennai, our content usually revolves around property and Chennai everything Chennai related. Every blog post we publish has a message behind it apart form the marketing and promotion. We make sure to communicate specific messages along with the brand’s mission statement. Eg: The recent Facebook post on ‘Hilarious Hollywood Scenarios’ is all about relating famous Hollywood movie and television shows to situations which our Chennaites face on a regular basis using a lot of word play in the content. Another example would be one of Urban Tree’s blog post 10 Reasons Why You Should Invest in Porur  which reaped a good SEO status, helped increase their website traffic as well. Our client blogs and posts always have interestingly designed creatives or GIF’s. Creating image rich content will have your audiences looking for longer! We also ensure that our content is keyword friendly.

Blog post for Urban Tree with 10 creative reasons to invest in their Porur property!

Hilarious Hollywood Scenarios – Facebook post with unique content for Urban Tree!

 8. Converse, Listen & Engage

Bridging the gap between customer interaction, digital marketing allows you to not just talk but converse, listen and engage your potential customers and target audience.The most vital and essential aspects of Social Media marketing is the ability to converse, listen and engage with your present and potential customers. Our formula for listening, conversing and engaging on social media platforms involves usage of right keywords, hashtags and looking for users based on demographics if required by a brand.

Apollo White Dental being a National brand requires us to tweet to people all around the country. One of our other brands, Star Weddings, which is totally Chennai based requires us to engage with people residing in Chennai. Before listening and gaining right conversations for Star Weddings, we always determine what to search for and take advantage of the ‘Advanced Search’ option on Twitter by looking up Chennai and Wedding related keywords which are #Weddings #Chennai #Festival #Shopping #Photography and so on. In order to achieve the business goals of a brand on Social Media, it is highly important to carry out activities and create content for audience engagement. This also helps to keep the existing audience interested. For one of our brands Oliva, which is a clinic for skin and hair care we make create engagement posts every week concentrating on different themes, which leads to a lot of interaction thereby increasing the fan base.

Listening on Apollo White Dental’s Twitter Page

Conversing with Twitter users in Chennai for Star Weddings

Audience Engagement Post on Facebook for Oliva

9. Exclusive Revenue Generating Model

With your brand’s positioning and creative campaigning strategy, the conversation leads to a revenue generating model.

10. Behavioural Targeting

Behavioural targeting helps you in identifying what your customers are looking for, customizing and narrowing your audience’s interest to befit your targeting at the same time offering a customized approach to the customer.Content is analysed and broken down to behaviours breaking it into dimensions on a broader perspective. This of course, is possible only in digital marketing!

With Facebook’s impressive ad targeting capabilities, it is always essential to have a target group for your advertisement campaigns on Facebook, either target your customers behaviour wise, by their demographic capabilities, customize your audience i.e. if you have a customer data base (list of their emails and telephone numbers) etc. Recently we had run a Like Advertisement Campaign for one of our brands on Facebook, Oliva, which is a multi specialty hair and skin care clinic located in Bangalore and Hyderabad! The set of advertisements were targeted to iPhone users between the age group 18-65 in Bangalore and Hyderabad, which helped us generate about 1100 likes in a span of 3 weeks increasing the fan base 18,088 approximately!

Basic Demographic Targeting

Why Blogging is a Good Career Option

So today we are going to talk about blogging. Now many of you may already be part time bloggers so you know what we are talking about when we say that it is a good career option. To those of you that don’t know what blogging is or don’t know what it means to blog then let’s do a quick summary of it.

Blogging basically means that you get your opinion out by writing about it. Suppose a new movie has come out and you have watched it. Now you have an opinion about it and want to share it with the world. You write an article, post it on the internet and there you go, you’ve just become a blogger.

Now that we all know what blogging is about, it’s time we start to take a look at why it is a good career option. No we’re not going to write long paragraphs detailing the reasons why it’s a good move, instead we’re going to simply give it to you in a nice and stylish point by point format so you get your answers.

Why blogging is a good career option:

• You are able to express your opinions and thoughts. As this is an online portal for you to talk about what you think on a particular subject. This will often spark healthy debate from people that are also interested in the same subject as you are.
• You are able to market and promote products. Pro bloggers these days are paid top dollar to advertise, talk about or even mention a particular product. You can also do the same thing about a product that you have or one that you are trying to sell.
• You are able to help others. Think of it like this, there’s a movie or game out there that looks great in the trailers but is incredibly dull when you actually play or watch it. So you as a blogger take to your online platform and talk about it. This then informs other people that this movie or game is not something they want to get and so you save them from making a mistake.
• By blogging you are reaching out to the community that likes to read. Eventually you will meet like-minded people that have similar interests, share the same thoughts and opinions that you do. It can become a good way for you to make new friends and increase your reach by blogging.
• A blog is a truly great way to try out things that you would not have tried to do earlier on with the benefit of honest internet users telling you where you’re right and where you’re wrong. You can fully express your creative side online in any way from eye catching drawings to wonderful and simple short stories.
• Finally and most important of all, making money is a really big reason why to become a blogger. Sure a lot of people may say they’re in it for creativity and such but that’s not true. Blogging is a career and everyone knows that a career means making money online. Blog regularly and passionately then in time you will also start making money as the traffic increases.

So there you go. A number of reasons why blogging is a good choice for a career move. Now all you have to do is get started on that blog and who knows, maybe you might be the next big thing.

Search Engine Optimization SEO Experts Job Roles & Responsibilities

Interested to know about roles and responsibilities of  SEO experts or SEO Team Lead? Probably you do, because you are reading this article after looking this article title. Hope I am right!

If your website is not listed on the first page of major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing then you are more likely to be ignored by your potential customer. These days increasing brand awareness and improving sales all depends upon search visibility and hits you receive. If you often wonder “whymy website is not performing or not visible”, then probably you need professional help. With search engines becoming increasingly sophisticated, a reliable Search Engine Optimization Expert can do multiple tasks to improve your website’s ranking!

Who is an SEO Expert?                  

An SEO expert has a thorough understanding of online research methods that can be beneficial to clients. Right from latest marketing trends to online venues, techniques and tools that will improve client’s online presence are all managed by the SEO expert. However, many people believe SEO is a one time task wherein optimizing done once and you can focus on other areas of website. That is not true, SEO is an ongoing job which requires concentrated efforts and resource for achieving success. So if you lack of time or expertise then hiring a reliable SEO expert can be a wise choice.

Here are Top 25 Roles and Responsibilities of an SEO Expert:

1. An SEO experts know all the two levels of optimization – on-page optimization and Off-page optimization.
2. An SEO expert is responsible for analyzing client’s goal and designing marketing plan that works best.
3. Works within the budget allotted by client for marketing campaign and other purchase.
4. It is SEO expert’s responsibility to protect the personal information provided by the client.
5. Decides on best domain name, Titles, Headings and sub-headings.
6. Using effective search engine keywords in relevant places within website should be taken care of by the SEO Expert.
7. Making changes in design, content and links as per requirements.
8. Using strategies that increase in-bound traffic.
9. Trying to achieve position in the first page of popular search engines.
10. Being up-to-date with the latest SEO news and methods such as Google’s Algorithm.
11. Should take part in online forums and SEO communities to interact with SEO leader.
12. To add blog pages if required and submit articles to directories for getting back-links, also try new methods that can prove beneficial.
13. Thoroughly monitor website performance and take necessary steps to improve traffic.
14. Technical issues such as 404 Error, Duplicate Content, problems related to XML and HTML sitemap, broken links etc should be rectified.
15. Should develop user and mobile friendly website to increase Click Through Rates (CTR) and improve search engine rankings.
16. Write catchy outline and unique content to grab viewer’s attention. Place them properly throughout the website and remove outdated ones.
17. Must work well with Content Management System such as Blogger and WordPress and simple coding like CSS, HTML, etc.
18. Periodic stats and analytical data given to client on website’s performance.
19. Use of Social Media and networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, YouTube etc in marketing plan.
20. To draw the customer’s attention, an SEO Specialist/Expert and team lead should also create online ad campaigns, and press releases if demanded by client.
21. To use digital marketing channels and techniques to increase brand awareness.
22. Monitor Social Media performance and take corrective measures to improve like creating Fan Pages etc.
23. Client should be protected against any malware or website security issues.
24. Monthly review of the work done on website and progress till date should be given via personal meeting with client.
25. Most importantly he should be able to generate traffic, turn them into leads and convert those leads into sales.

Start-up or Bootstrapped! Why you need to hire a digital marketing agency?

The question in the mind of a lot of young (age/experience) entrepreneurs these days is “Should I focus on selling my product/services or market it or do both?”

Surely you can’t do both simultaneously, it’s not that it’s impossible, I mean you have just started up; so, your main focus should be on closing all your sales loop in the earlier stages to survive in the present start up scenario. Moreover, with everything online these days, your business/brand cannot afford to not be on social media.

Coming up with a social media strategy is time consuming, which you cannot afford.  Hiring an in-house marketing team isn’t a good idea – time consuming and very expensive. But outsourcing it to a digital marketing agency will prove to be a smart move – they are affordable, flexible and deliver exactly what is expected out of them.

Still not convinced? Let me list out some key reasons for why you should hire a digital marketing agency:-

Go Frugal!

The cost involved in hiring a digital marketing agency is relatively less when compared to hiring an in-house marketing team. In the case of hiring an in-house marketing team, you will have to pay each and every expert of the team separately, according to his/her area of expertise. Whereas, if you hire an external digital marketing agency, you have access to a team of professionals for the price of a single hire from the in-house marketing team.

They can help you pick your niche:

Most of the businesses nowadays are losing the race in social media because they have been story-telling to the wrong target audience. The main objective of going digital is to make sales and for that to happen you should reach people who are in need of your products/services. Digital marketing agencies handle clients across multiple vertices, so this is something that they can help you with. They make sure that your products/services reach to people/businesses that are in need of it.

Collective minds, creative story telling:

Your in-house marketing team will at some point of time run out of ideas; this will eventually result in in-effective story-telling which in-turn will bore your online community. Whereas the marketing team in a digital marketing agency have a frequent brainstorming session and come up with fresh set of ideas to engage your online community.

Hiring is Tiring!

If you think hiring an in-house marketing team is a frugal approach, well think again – Hiring an effective marketing team isn’t an overnight possibility. Being a start-up entrepreneur, do you think you can afford to spend your crucial time on conducting interviews and negotiating CTC? No right? But Remember, you have a lot of calls to make and sales loop to close. So, avoid this tiresome process and hire a digital marketing agency to handle your marketing requirements. Focus more time on running your business.

Stay Stress-free!

From staying up to date with the latest industry trends to specialized training, marketing is a passion driven industry and requires huge time commitment. If you don’t have what it takes to keep up with the online world, the easy way is to hire a digital marketing agency to handle your marketing requirements.

Risk-free!

If you are not convinced with a marketing agency you can always move on to another. It’s not like you have to wait until the contract expires to break-up with them. Digital Marketing agencies choose their clients wisely and so should you choose your agency.

They align your goals with theirs

Have a number in mind that you would like to reach?

Some numbers are pretty easy to reach whereas some require time and patience. All you have to do is, share your visions and goals with the head of the agency who is a visionary in this industry. He and his agency will help you reach your number goals.

Work with multiple agencies.

It’s not like “We 2 ours 1”. You can work with multiple agencies for multiple objectives. Have one agency handle your social media, while the other handles your SEM,SEO or vice-versa. Or if you choose to, you can outsource everything to one agency.

You are always in charge.

Want to see some ROI after working for a month with an agency?

They will always keep you posted with weekly reports and plans. Moreover at the end of every month they will send you a report containing a list of activities carried over the past month and a detailed plan of action for the upcoming month. Only after your approval they will go ahead with it.

It’s better to leave certain things in the hands of the experts.

Becoming well-versed in all aspects of digital marketing, social media, web design, SEM, SEO, etc., isn’t an overnight triumph. “If it was that easy, anyone can do it”. Digital marketing is an on-going process that requires a high level of passion, commitment, skills and training, which seems to be the credo of digital marketing agencies.

Few start-ups we work with,

Lokaa Developer:

Competing directly with Casa Grande, being extraordinary is their mantra. They strive to not only surpass but elevate expectations and delight those who want to experience nothing but the finest, everywhere they go and at the beautiful abode they come home to. Their vision is to become India’s most sought-after real estate developer, by setting superlative standards of excellence in quality and design.

Signed up with us in the early 2016, we handle 360 degree Digital Marketing Services for them – An integrated marketing approach that combines Social Media Marketing, Search Engine Marketing & Search Engine Optimization (corporate blogging). Our ROI focussed approach leaves them no other option than to continue to partner with us.

Do check out their on-going project: M One

Ivory Niche:

Ivory Niche is positioned as an Expert in the Home Products division and embodies a stylish riposte to bedroom products and accessories which have been handpicked from across India, to ensure highest quality, up to date designs and innovative ideas. E-Shopping at Ivory Niche is personal, social and fun focused on building concierge-style services and to satisfy every customer query.

Signed up with us very recently, there objective was to gain as much leads as possible for their online business. Achieving number goals is something we are so good in and in the case of Ivory Niche we always keep their sales guys busy by giving them leads every day.