How Social Media Impacts ROI:

Social media is the great leveler of our age, the apotheosis of the shift from the one-to-many to the many-to-many models of communication, the subway train that banker and bus-boy alike all ride. In certain ways, it’s also the most complex innovation in digital marketing, so it’s worth remembering that digital ad spend eclipsed traditional advertising budgets in 2019. By 2023, digital will comprise over two-thirds of total ad spend. Point being, social media seems here to stay, and companies should use it to maintain an ongoing conversation with the world—enhancing their brand awareness and extending their customers’ lifetime value.

Yet even though social media may be the preferred advertising art form of the future, it’s still often so unruly, so hard to track and control. Social content can send shock-waves through the internet, conjuring up a tsunami of likes and shares and reposts, but—was it worth the cost? Hard to say. Or, at least, hard to correlate those intangible results to sales figures on a 1:1 basis. So how do you quantify this most qualitative medium? You’re about to find out.

Calculate Your Investment

If you want to determine how your social media marketing impacts your return on investment, you need to keep a record of your investment. Tab up the cost of the platforms that you’re using. (Most are free, but you may be paying for a premium version of a management tool, etc.) Then take note of the money that you spent on paid digital ads and on labor. Correlating a content creator’s salary to the results that come back probably isn’t arithmetically sound, but it’s worth poring over hours billed per project or how much you’re shelling out to freelancers.

The meaning of the numbers that bubble up may depend on how your social media eventually performs. For the moment, though, tally it up and put it aside.

Match Metrics to Goals

As you track how much you’re spending, determine what you want to accomplish with that money. Do you want to improve your SEO, add new email signups, sell more puppy-training sessions through your ecommerce platform? Pinpoint your goals, then calibrate the results with metrics that are commensurate to the value of those goals. 

Let’s say that you want to improve your SEO. Measure whether your bounce rate goes up or down—but not whether your profits go up or down. Conversions and site traffic and lead generation all tie together, but they’re also distinct returns. So choose the yardstick that you want to plunge into the market, and benchmark your current stats so you can compare them with the outcomes. Knowing how you perform now will give you a sense of how realistic your goals are. Imagine that 100 people have signed up to your email list. Adding another 100 this month is—to put it mildly—ambitious. Adding another 10? Doable, and a good goal.

Bear in mind, though, that there is a bewildering array of objectives that you could achieve and KPIs that you could measure. So, we beg of you, don’t try to measure them all. Track a few metrics—and track the right metrics. A savvy social media marketing agency might tell you that views, likes, retweets, and followers are considered “vanity metrics.” Sure, it feels nice when someone gives your post a thumbs up, but it doesn’t necessarily translate into a business result (like a sale or a new customer). Whereas other insights are more illuminating:

  • Bounce rates tell you if you’re maintaining your audience’s attention. 
  • Engagement rates tell you how many people are commenting on your posts. 
  • Converting click attributions tell you which ad a customer clicked on before making a purchase. (More on this stat later.)

Sharpen Your Tools

Since tracking and measuring are integral skills in social media marketing, it should come as no surprise that instruments galore exist to crunch the numbers on how social impacts ROI. Here are just a few of them:

  • Hootsuite built a calculator where you can plug in data like Facebook visits or landing page conversions and match them against your overall investment. 
  • If you want to get precise about those visits and conversions, let Google Analytics give you a panoramic view of all the numbers flowing through your funnels.
  • Building links with UTM parameters helps you understand which sites your visitors came from, which channels routed them in, which part of a promotion they clicked on, and so on. 

The takeaways that these tools provide, in sum, indicate which of your marketing efforts you should work on because they’re underperforming—as well as which ones are over performing, and need some extra rocket fuel poured on them.

Don’t Wait to Iterate

A good digital marketing agency is always measuring the results of a campaign, but they should also measure different versions of that campaign to gauge which one impacts ROI most effectively. So keep A/B testing. Target different audiences. Experiment with a range of tones. Tinker with the copy and the CTAs. Sub out a carousel for a pulldown ad. See what works, but also adopt the mindset that no one thing “works.” The market’s always in flux, so be ready to pivot on strategies as you monitor which aspects of a campaign your audience responds to the best.

Companies that don’t like how their audience is responding—or that panic because their audience isn’t responding at all—sometimes hose out more content as a quick-fix solution. Beware this tactic, because inundating the market can feel spammy. In a word: Slow it down. People prefer digital experiences that feel well-executed and personalized to them rather than torpedoed willy-nilly in their general direction.

Redefine the Return

You know how much money you’ve piped into your social media plan, and now the results are coming back. But what do the numbers mean? A reasonable business leader might assume that one dollar spent on social media should return at least one dollar in revenue. As we’ve indicated, though, your upfront return might not even be money at all.

Strictly speaking, companies don’t need social media. Factories and restaurants and brokerage offices would pump along just fine without a Facebook account. But having social media imparts legitimacy onto your brand. Think about it: If you’re applying to an engineering firm, but they don’t have a LinkedIn page, wouldn’t they seem behind the times to you? (Like, probably-not-much-career-growth-here behind the times?)

Without a social media presence, you also lose opportunities to stake out what distinguishes you from the competition. Look at this Ben & Jerry’s tweet about how Brown v. Board of Education led to the school-to-prison pipeline. The comments that their post garnered range from “This is why you’re my favorite brand of ice cream” to “Bro, you’re ice cream.” Yet Ben & Jerry’s is at least positioning itself front and center in the public forum. Is this positioning performative or genuine? Up for debate. But it seems that the value of engaging with multiple audiences about a complex topic on social media may be cultural cachet and brand visibility rather than a single line-item amount.

Give it Time

Print advertising was all about big, bold declarations—billboards or magazines plastered with headlines that wowed viewers. Digital advertising is less about seizing an audience’s attention and more about serving them bite-sized reminders across the channels they frequent. One of the difficulties with social media is that it’s snackable, and perfectly suited to serve up those reminders, but it moves so quickly that it can put campaigns into hyperdrive, truncating the lifespan of a marketing investment and making its results too intertwined to unthread.

Remember “last click attributions”? That metric can help you see how a post might lead to 100 people clicking into your site and spending $5,000 on your product. All that’s useful to know, but some marketers argue that the insights it provides are somewhat blindered—it doesn’t take into account the other touchpoints that had previously introduced the customer to a brand. After you Googled, “I want the best vacuum cleaner,” Dyson and Shark ads may have popped up on your social platforms. You did your research. You were leaning toward Dyson. Then you saw one last Dyson ad on Facebook and clicked the link and made the purchase.

That single Dyson ad may not have been the superstar in this scenario. Maybe it was just the last reminder in a series of waves and winks—many of which happen through multiple interactions with Dyson’s social media that are hard to alchemize into dollars. So even though social media is fast-paced, give it enough time to mature and glue together all the collateral that contribute to your brand awareness. The return you get on that may be immeasurable.

How to Dominate the Search Engines (SEO and Paid Media):

Fun fact: This month marks the 15th anniversary that the Oxford English Dictionary first listed “Google” as a verb. Google and other search engines have since become so important to the business world that digital marketers encounter this question from our clients all the time: “Can you get us to the top of the first search results page?”

That’s a steep request, but also a pertinent one: Search engines are the starting-point for 93% of web experiences, yet only about 25% of users venture onto the second results page. We all know that search engines are in the business of selling your data to corporations, but we allow them to commoditize us because they route us to the answers that we’re looking for. (If they didn’t, we’d jump over to their competitors.) So to dominate the search engines, keep in mind these marketing strategies that the engines reward—and the ones they penalize.

Master the Elements

If you want search engines to crawl your site, you need to become proficient in the basics of search engine optimization. Here are just a few tactics to consider:

Plan Out the User Journey

Before you delve into alt tags and meta descriptions and the rest of it, audit your digital identity to gauge how users are interacting with you. Is your bounce rate going up or down? Are you achieving the holy trinity of clicks, likes, and shares? What’s the final conversion that you’re driving your audience toward? Figuring out how your channels connect will help you plan SEO strategies that ladder up to a larger objective, rather than just improving your metrics for the sake of metrics.

Weave in keywords into your digital content, but limit yourself to about one keyword per 100–150 words—and write a few long-tail keywords that contain the entire phrase that someone might be searching for (4–6-word lines like “how to write a cover letter” along with smaller snippets like “resume” and “job application”). Remember, only weave in long-tail phrases if they feel natural. Search bots will lower your SEO score if your long-tail keywords sound like pianos dropped into the middle of sentences that were otherwise flowing along smoothly.

Incorporate Links

Search engines understand that the internet is a hyperlinked database of information and that we’re all clicking through 37 tabs at once to find the answer to our most pressing question right this second. So if you work in links that are specific, sincere, substantial, and succinct, and that connect to relevant content, search engines will consider your site to be “authoritative.” (If that term seems oddly inflated, that’s because it’s a euphemism for sites that aren’t spammy and that don’t annoy the search engines’ product—us.) Avoid linking to content that’s over a year old, and include internal links to improve the visibility of the lesser-known pages of your site.

Don’t Forget Mobile

In 2011, about 35% of Americans owned a cell phone. A decade later, that number has zoomed up to 97%. Worldwide, you’re looking at 5 billion cell phone users, and to top it off, about half of your audience is finding you through their phones. Point being, optimize for mobile. Search engines will filter you into oblivion if you don’t. Besides, a website today that’s riddled with wonky text and misspaced links when it loads on your phone just feels so … 2011.

Never Cry Wolf

Ever heard of “information scent”? That’s a UX concept that holds that internet users are clicking the links and CTAs that give off a palpable whiff of the intel that they’re looking for. But the opposite could occur, too—sites and content can emit a nasty information scent.

Let’s say you’re writing a blog about starting your own business. If your headline is “Learn How to Grow Your Bottom Line 1,000%,” people will click your link, but if you don’t supply a miracle-gro solution to boosting their revenue, you’re going to disappoint them. In the short term, you’ll drive traffic to your site. In the long term, users may call you out for the charlatan that you are, which could result in search engines downgrading you because of misleading content and sneaky redirects.

Act Local

Search engines are a quandary. On one hand, they make the global village even more united and universal. (Every day, people from Nebraska to Nairobi are all Googling, “How do I fix the printer?”) At the same time, they exert the equal and opposite force of localizing the world. People may or may not be thinking globally these days, but they do seem to be buying locally: Searches with the phrase “near me” in them have risen 150% in the last two years, and 28% of online local searches result in a purchase.

Whether you’re a Mom and Pop shop or an international conglomerate, you’re located near someone, so optimize your web presence for local SEO to make it easy for people to find you, digitally and physically. Update your Google local business listing with the pertinent details about your operation (hours, address, phone numbers), and post customer feedback—especially if it’s positive. Search engines will boost your site’s visibility if people rave about you, since you’ve demonstrated your value to their users.

Make Your Content King

To get noticed online, you need to produce something noticeable, like videos or a blog, and push it out on a regular basis, which demonstrates that what you’re saying is timely and current. If people like watching or reading your work enough to linger on your site, search engines will reward you for having a low bounce rate, since that metric tells them that your site is (you guessed it) valuable to their users.

We’ve talked about linking out from your site, but the real goal is to have authoritative sites link to you. Imagine writing a blog about how to harness fusion and National Geographic gives you a shout-out on social media. Search engines will propel your site up their rankings. But you don’t have to solve one of science’s biggest challenges to craft an organic media plan. If you’re an ecommerce entrepreneur, write an article about your market niche on Forbes that links to your site. Upload your videos to YouTube and your music to Spotify. Even guest blogging on less-established domains can drum up the SEO credit that search engines recognize and respect.

Pay to Play

Blogs, videos, backlink hierarchies, designing for mobile—these are all SEO strategies, sometimes termed “owned media” because they appear on channels that companies or users control. (Or that Big Tech lets you think you control.) The other approach you could take is paid media, where you outright pay search engines to rank you higher. One benefit of paid media is that it’s precise: Spend enough, and you can plop your content in front of your target audience, your competition’s target audience, people who are midway down your funnel, and so on.

The main caveat with paid media is that it can feel, well, like you paid for it. Is it really a surprise when Nike serves you an ad about how great Nike is? But when consumers praise Nike on Google Reviews—doesn’t that feel more credible, like humans are recommending a product to each other? Praise like that is called “earned media,” and brands sometimes pay to put that media in front of audiences that their paid media was intended for. Don’t be afraid to pay for ads, just be sure to interweave them with owned and earned media, and keep in mind the old adage about how money can’t buy you likes.

Be Useful to Users

The seven major search engines today are Google, Bing, Baidu, Yahoo!, Yandex, Ask.com, and DuckDuckGo. But let’s not kid ourselves—“Google” has entered the lexicon in a way that “Bing” has not for a reason: Google commands over 70% of the search engine market and 85% of mobile traffic. Google now handles (give or take) two trillion searches each year. Web optimization trends die every season because Google’s webmaster guidelines change all the time, so you’re better served studying their algorithm rather than trying to trick it. Better yet—study what your audience wants. Explain something that users might not know (how to tie a tie, how to interpret case law, how to dominate the search engines) and Google and its brethren are more likely to route them your way rather than to your clickbaity competitors.

Which eCommerce Platform is Right for You (Shopify, Magento, WooCommerce)?

Everyone from freelancers to multibillion-dollar conglomerates are now launching their own ecommerce brands, in part because an online shop can expand your audience from the local foot traffic that a brick and mortar might attract to a worldwide network of retained customers. As a response to the pandemic, a lot of businesses that sold through traditional in-store methods opened ecommerce accounts in 2020 to ship their inventory while all of us were stuck at home. The effect on the market was evident: Analysts expect sales from borderless ecommerce to crest $4.89 trillion this year—a trend that shows no sign of slowing down.

Today you can choose from more than 370 ecommerce platforms out there. For this blog, though, we’re going to focus on three of the biggest names in ecommerce: Shopify, Magento, and WooCommerce. Each platform sometimes positions itself as an all-in-one solution that caters to unfunded entrepreneurs and mega-brands alike, but the truth is they perform better for different business echelons. So which one is right for you? Read on to weigh your options.

Shopify

Out of the three platforms, Shopify tries the hardest to be everything to everyone. Hence the five plans that it offers, which scale from simplest to most complex in this order: Shopify Lite, Basic Shopify, Shopify, Advanced Shopify, and Shopify Plus. Here’s a breakdown of each tier:

  • Shopify Lite: $9/month. Best for a blogger or startup looking to sell products.
  • Basic Shopify: $29/month. For new businesses wading into the market.
  • Shopify: $79/month. For businesses with one retail store.
  • Advanced Shopify: $299/month. For businesses with 2+ retail stores.
  • Shopify Plus: $2,000/month. For big brands like Heinz who want unlimited online stores and a bevy of digital marketing options.

 

Pros

Users subscribing to any of the Shopify plans tend to find that they’re easy to set up—adding in your products, choosing a domain name, managing your operations from a central dashboard. Shopify is also SEO-friendly and compatible with mobile, and it comes with a 24/7 Help Center to assist you with tech questions. Another perk: You get your pick of 70+ customizable templates. Which is a generous amount, but as we’ll find out later on, you can’t customize Shopify to the same extent that you can tinker around with some of its competitors.

Cons

One of the downsides of Shopify is that it uses its own coding language, Liquid, which works in tandem with HTML and CSS. So if you’re not already comfortable with coding, you may want to hire a programmer to help you out. Oh, and depending on your plan, Shopify charges you roughly 2% per transaction, and they make you pay for add-ons and nonstandard features, as well.

Takeaway

Shopify is user-friendly, scalable, and requires relatively little technical knowledge. (Plus, it provides support if you do have questions.) If you’re a business netting under $50 million a year, this may be the right platform for you.

 

Magento

While Shopify offers its users five options, Magento gives you two: Magento Open Source and Magento Commerce. Open Source is the platform’s small business offering, while Commerce is its premier version—the cloud-based option with a subscription fee.

Pros

Magento lets companies set up a unique and customizable storefront with a range of features and a library of over 5,000 extensions. SEO-friendly? Check. Compatible on mobile? Check. Dashboard that gives you a top-level view of live stats? Check again! Magento also makes it easy to glide through the checkout-payment steps.

Cons

But on the topic of payment: They work in fees aplenty for add-ons and web hosting (to name just a few). If you want to upgrade your plan, expect to shell out sums in the four figures. And fair warning to all non-programmers: Magento offers a user forum where developers around the world can compare notes, but no real support for the layman with rudimentary tech questions. Unless you have some background in web dev, the endless customization options of the templates may prove overwhelming.

Takeaway

Magento is a powerful platform best suited for global brands whose tech teams can tweak its features—themes, layouts, plugins, demos, virtual shopping carts—to their products and sales strategies, not the other way around. If you own data warehouses or ship out of 56 locations, this may be the right platform for you.

WooCommerce

About 30% of all online stores use WooCommerce, and for good reason: it’s flexible, SEO-friendly, and easy to integrate into your WordPress site—because WooCommerce only runs on WordPress. Keep that in mind: No WordPress, no WooCommerce. 

Pros

Anyone with a working knowledge of WordPress can navigate WooCommerce with comparative ease, picking up a web host, registering your domain name, installing and activating the plugin, and so on. The Storefront is pretty easy to figure out, too, and it comes with mobile functionality and a dashboard with an overview of sales and orders.

Cons

WooCommerce is self-hosted, so a lot of the maintenance and managing falls back on you. Plus, you gotta pay fees for hosting, themes, a domain, and security features, all of which add up (but, it could be argued, are worth the cost). Like Magento, WooCommerce doesn’t offer much email or phone support. If you have a question, you need to file a ticket, which WooCommerce says it’ll answer within 24 hours.

Takeaway

WooCommerce has fewer tools than Shopify and it’s less customizable than Magento. But it’s generally cheaper than those other platforms, and a good option if you just want to launch a site to get some revenue coming in before you scale up. If you’re a small or medium-sized business that’s not selling that many customized products, this may be the right platform for you.

 

Jacob Tyler’s Approach to Ecommerce in 2021

So which of these ecommerce platforms is right for you? The answer to that is just the first decision you’ll need to make if you want to open your online store. You’ll also need a digital marketing strategy to advertise your brand. That’s where Jacob Tyler comes in. We love working with ecommerce clients—expanding their cyber presence and getting eye-opening results. Give us a call today so we can help you hang out an e-shingle and hit launch.

Why a Good Logo is So Important

First off, let’s define terms: Your logo is not your brand. As we’ve written before, your brand is the reflection of your products and services, your workplace culture and the totality of your values. Your logo, meanwhile, is the imprimatur of your brand. Think of it as your professional coat of arms—the seal that guarantees the quality that you provide to your customers, the emblem perched at the apex of your brand architecture. Need a few more reasons why a logo is so important? Let’s get granular with it.

A Logo Gets You Noticed

Never forget how busy your consumers are. We’re all sending emails on our tablets, jumping on work calls on our laptops, hopping around between twenty apps on our phones. All that shuttling between tabs and devices tends to obliterate our attention spans into fruitflyish units of a few seconds that your digital marketing has to capture an audience’s interest.

Enter your logo, which amounts to a 1,000-words snapshot of your brand. If an ad pops up on your consumers’ screens and they get the vibe that even the logo isn’t for them—it’s too posh, not posh enough, perfectly posh but more (or less) than they wanted to spend—they’re going to keep on clicking on. Rest assured, this is judge-a-book-by-its-cover territory, and the cover of your book needs to scream, “Buy me. Because this experience, my target audience, is tailored to you.”

A Logo Imparts Legitimacy

Since your logo is the summation of your visual identity, a sloppy logo is akin to a restaurant buffet swarming with flies—that first-impressions moment when a customer thinks, ‘Definitely not spending my money here.’ And even a good product without a logo might seem scammy. Microsoft is an established brand, but if someone tries to sell you a Microsoft laptop that doesn’t have the Microsoft logo on it, would you trust it?

If your answer to that is ‘definitely not,’ then you’ve pinpointed the importance of a logo, which rubber-stamps legitimacy onto a brand—and onto all the collateral that your brand produces. Dedicate some time to perfecting your logo design, because it’s gonna live front and center on your website, tucked in the corner of your business cards and peppered throughout your social media feeds. As the North Star of your brand’s aesthetic, your logo ensures the consistency that consumers need in order to be confident that the same company is talking to them across a medley of platforms and campaigns.

A Logo Communicates Your Brand Personality

A good logo should be eye-catching, but it also needs to hint at what your brand does or convey who you are. For that reason, banks or life insurance companies opt for typography that looks sturdy and reliable. Whereas a business that delivers beauty and wellness products might draw from a palette of yellows and greens and pinks—and throw in a few monstera leaves while they’re at it—to send out vibes of optimism, health, joy. 

Position your logo so that it acts as a harbinger of the experience that consumers are about to receive, be it financial advice or a box of hand lotions and jade rollers. At the same time, bear in mind that some of the most famous logos toe the line between functionality and artistry—getting across what a business does in more subtle messaging. In the Gillete logo, the “G” and the “i” look sliced open, as if by a razor. The yellow arrow in the Amazon logo connects the letters “a” and “z,” implying that Amazon sells and ships everything from A–Z. The ultramodern Apple symbol nods to the Biblical story of the fruits of knowledge (with the bite—or byte—in it representing the tasting of that knowledge).

Because a strong logo should err on the side of coherency and precision, making even one of its design features too abstract can befuddle people. Take the Apple logo again. The bite-of-knowledge motif is clever, but Steve Jobs & Co. were allegedly worried that, without that bite, customers would think the fruit was a cherry tomato. Point taken. If you’re on a mission to build the most urbane tech company in the world, the last thing you want is to overhear someone saying, “Does this thing look like a tomato to you?”

A Logo Welcomes You into the Club

One of the truisms you often hear in marketing is that your customers need to see themselves in your branding. Which means that your logo should tell your audience, on some level, “You’re in the club.” 

Imagine that you own a gym and your logo is a bodybuilder lifting a ponderous barbell above his head. That logo is going to do wonders to attract lunkish fitness fanatics rather than the just-making-a-change crowd, because an effective logo has its own personality and it talks to the personality of its clientele. The Mercedes-Benz logo is refined, silver, sleek. The Nike logo is on a swift upward-and-onward trajectory. The Coca-Cola logo is energetic and bouncy. The iconography of each of these brands tells you what the brands stand for, but it also fulfills a blank-canvas effect of absorbing meaning that customers pour back into them.

One of the most original recent examples of this in-the-club blank canvas may be Disney. The Disney logo is Walt Disney’s signature written against the backdrop of a fairytale castle, but it’s sometimes abbreviated to the silhouette of Mickey Mouse’s head, which is three black circles resembling a Venn diagram that’s drifting apart. Think about that: Three black circles can stir up memories of watching movies and reading books about adventure and friendship. Those memories, in turn, are powerful enough to sway people to subscribe to Disney+, get married at the Happiest Place on Earth, and become annual passholders who fill closets upon closets with Disney merch—which are stamped all over with three black circles.

That’s the power of a logo.

A Logo Champions Your Individuality

Your logo design should be the crowning symbol of your values and beliefs, the shield or flag that your company rallies behind, the signpost that guides consumers along their journey into your fold. All true—but stay flexible enough to change it. Case in point: Check out Apple’s ye olde logo from 1976, a landscape portrait of Isaac Newton reading under an apple tree (with a William Wordsworth quote decorating the frame, to top it off). Pivoting to the minimalist apple with the bite taken out of it was the right move, because Apple is all about sophistication and simplicity. So be honest about who you are and what you want your logo to say about you. Otherwise, you may end up contriving an image rather than consolidating an identity.

Why Copywriting is Important… And Why You Probably Can’t Do It Yourself

Copywriting is a curious art. Virtually everyone in the ad-business world is literate, so it’s easy to assume that all of us can write with the best of ’em. Ask non-specialists to design a logo or code JavaScript and they may lack the basic skills to even start working. But, writing—we text and email all day, don’t we? Doesn’t that qualify anyone to write ads and websites?

Not really. Don’t get us wrong, there are plenty of great writers out there. Yet even great writers steeped in college lit courses or seasoned in composing long-form stories might never come across the principles of advertising writing that make for excellent print collateral or website design. So if you can afford it, shell out some money for professional copywriting. Here’s why it’s important.

Copywriting Sells

Imagine talking to a car salesman who makes you feel like you’re trapped and withholds information from you. You’re probably not going to buy a new Lexus from this person. Now imagine that the salesman is charming without being pushy and seems knowledgeable rather than hungry. That guy might get you to sign on the dotted line today. The same fundamentals of salesmanship apply to the copy on, say, your website, which amounts to a conversation with your audience that should be enjoyable for them.

The balancing act here is to connect with users as fellow humans while also observing the more technical to-dos of UX/UI copywriting—optimizing keywords, avoiding duplicate content, weaving in external links, and uploading metadata into the CMS. Fusing SEO (search engine optimization) strategies with a relatable voice will help your audience A) find you and B) like you, which tends to amplify your brand awareness and lead to higher conversions.

Copywriting Improves CRO

So far, we’ve talked about SEO, but a related term, CRO (conversion rate optimization), is equally important. SEO is the process of luring an audience to your site. CRO is the process of urging that audience to take a certain action on your site—be it buying your vampire lust novel or signing up for your seminar on how to enter the arbitrage business. 

Smart copy helps inch up your conversion rate percentage, since it fulfills a salesperson-tour guide capacity of establishing trust, clarifying the USPs that separate you from your competitors, using language that caters to distinct user groups, and so on. Your copy, in total, is your brand voice. If people love that brand voice, you’re on your way to retaining a base of customers who purchase from you again and again.

(Good) Copywriting Wards Off Calamity

A strong copywriter should serve as a QC gatekeeper, saving your brand from the marketing equivalent of that gauche-pickup-line moment that can bruise your rep. Companies don’t like to admit how many times their campaigns flop, but they do—all the time. Look at this ad that Mr. Clean ran in 2011. The design appears to depict a mother teaching her daughter (with joyous exuberance) how to do house chores, while the copy reads: “This Mother’s Day, get back to the job that really matters.”

As you can imagine, that ad faced swift backlash. We don’t know who wrote the copy, but our guess is that it was someone with a tin ear whose insensitivity may have cost the client a heap of money. Because competent Head of Copy directors know what effective campaigns look like, they also know what disasters look like. So they earn their paychecks in part by finding the best phrases that bubble up in the first-draft creative stages and cutting everything else. Ergo, they often talk to their teams like this: “Keep working on this tagline. Bury this concept and don’t ever show it to anyone. Wait, this idea might have legs …” 

Copywriting is Always Changing

In our humble opinion, writing a 10,000-word story is sometimes easier than fitting the perfect 10 words onto a billboard for a scrap metal yard client, finishing up a landing page for a patent search startup, and then knocking out a blog for a beards-and-brews shop—on any given Monday. With the long-form story, you can at least sink into the storyline and narrate from a single perspective. Whereas when you’re juggling copy assignments, you’ve got to master the chameleon-style art of shuttling between a range of brand voices and account strategies.

As a copywriter, you know that your billboard headlines can be longer and more ad-like, your landing page copy should fill in the knowledge gaps of the users who read it, and your blogs should be chunked into an information hierarchy. And you know how to write in all these formats in a tone that drives the appropriate result—whether it’s conveying information in an About Us page or sounding CTA-oriented in paid media. 

That even veteran copywriters can struggle with aligning voice, format, and client goals may be the most compelling reason to hire a veteran copywriter: They oversee the sometimes boggling responsibility of making sure that your links are accessible, that you’re leading with benefits-driven language, and that every last H3 subhead helps boost website optimization.

Copywriting Requires Research

The word “copy” is prefixed in front of “writer” for a reason: In practice, copywriting often amounts to winnowing vast reserves of information into a few sharp lines. You’re not exactly copy-pasting what the client has already written, but you are distilling existing content down to its essence. Which means that before they can even write a single line, copywriters spend a lot of their time researching everything from licensing deals to the patient access journey in healthcare to the great chestnut blight of the twentieth century.

So if you need copy written on a bevy of subjects, bear in mind that you really have two jobs in front of you: First, becoming a quasi-expert on a given niche. Second, condensing your newfound expertise into writing that grabs people’s attention and influences their buying habits. Because even if you’re an authority on a certain subject, you may not be an authority on how to convey that subject with a few core insights. Copywriters do all the research about your brand to pinpoint why it matters in a way that nudges your audience further down the marketing funnel.

You Just Can’t Hack It

You’ve probably heard the term “hack writer” before; it derives from “hackney,” or a horse that you could hire for cheap. If you underinvest in copywriters, you may end up with a stable of hacks, rushing out a high volume of words that produce a low caliber of brand. Remember, one daft headline on a site or one typo on a book jacket can torpedo an entire messaging strategy. When you hire a worthy copywriter, you’re not only getting a deep researcher—you’re also teaming up with an editor who reviews the orthography of each piece of content with such rigor that your business always sounds svelte and sophisticated. For that reason alone, leave the writing to the pros.

How to Optimize Your Web Copy to Drive Conversions

“Print is dead.” “Don’t quit your day job.” “Yeah, because the money’s in writing.” As a writer, you hear it all your life: You’re doomed. High school counselors, your uncle’s friend in the red sweater-vest at the Christmas party a few years back, even your doctor — everybody around you feels the need to let you know that anyone who writes for a living will end up penniless, curled up in a gutter.

The thing is, they’re not wrong (even if they are exaggerating). Writing is not so much a field as a precarious skill that you enter the job market with at your own peril. At the same time, people need to communicate, and that’s when you hire a writer. Blogs, websites, landing pages, retargeting ads, and other tactics in your digital marketing strategy — we copywriters probably handled the language for all that. But if we didn’t, and you’re wondering how to optimize web copy to drive conversions, here are some tips the writers at Jacob Tyler have written for you.

Stay on Point

The term “writer” got batted around a lot in the paragraphs above, so let’s define terms: Slinging digital marketing copy is often way different than crafting an essay or plotting a novel. Print tends to afford writers more space than digital layouts, which are usually functional or parceled out between web pages. Remember, readers on your site might be clicking between 15 tabs at the same time, and they’re likely to only scan 20% of your page’s content, anyway. 

So keep your sentences pithy. Guide your audience to the most relevant info with headers and bold type and bullet points, since people may only be on your site to get an answer (“Should I hire this company for my kitchen remodel? When does this place even open?”). And be consistent. You don’t want to strike a lofty third-person tone on the landing page only to switch to the earnest first-person in the “About Us” section. Maintain the same voice throughout your web copy so users don’t feel like they’ve somehow jumped between those 15 tabs unbeknownst to them.

But What’s the Point?

Let’s return to one of the phrases above: “People may only be on your site to get an answer.” That idea is more pertinent than it may appear. Novels, essays, scripts all give authors the breadth to move characters through countries and centuries, picking up on themes later on that they foreshadowed at the outset — and letting the reader (or viewer) sink into an argument or a narrative. Not so with digital copywriting, which needs to be punchy because it drives toward a CTA. Copywriters, with each page you compose, ask yourself: “What is this accomplishing?”

Are you nudging users to book a resort, enroll in theology school, become a member of a credit union? Craft your content so that it’s smart and fresh, yes, but don’t leave your reader floundering in a sea of pretty descriptions. Effective UX copywriting compels prospective clients to journey further down the funnel, so you should A) have a CTA, and B) make your CTA compelling — and then run A/B testing to make sure it really is driving people to book a resort or enroll in theology school or become a member of a credit union. (Which it is, if you’re wondering. Those are our accounts, and our director of business development would love to tell you all about them.)

Mean What You Say

Even though web copy may be the newest medium in the history of writing, the old verities of how to compose a good sentence still apply to the art of digital marketing: Go heavy on verbs and nouns, light on adjectives and adverbs. Know your grammar, and if you break it, be able to defend it. Read what you’ve written out loud and let your ear guide the phrasing. Be specific — but don’t get prosy with detail. And assume the reader is smarter than you are.

Since web copy does generally hinge on a CTA, copywriters can sometimes trick themselves into taking the attitude that they’re tricking consumers down the funnel. But people know when they’re being talked down to; they sense it if you don’t believe in what you’re saying or selling. So find a way to enter into the copy emotionally. If your client is a nature preserve, conjure up memories of fog raveling fir trees. If your client is a bank, think back to that feeling of security that a customer service rep at your mortgage company gave you when you called about maybe, hopefully waiving late fees. Adopt whatever mindset you need to write with passion, because if you don’t care about the subject at hand, why should your audience? 

Know Your Audience

On that note: Never forget who your target audience is. Imagine you’re a business that makes high-end baby products. Your target audience might be Andy, a thirty-ish accountant who’s about to have his first child. Inhabit Andy’s perspective. This guy is overjoyed, scared, nervous, and impatient all at once for this baby to arrive. He can’t wait — so he’s buying as many baby products as he can to feel like he’s prepared, but baby strollers confuse him (Do they fold up? Can you fit them in a car? Do you really need the accessories they come with?), and he’s willing to pay more for the right one because he doesn’t want to let his wife down.

Talk to Andy. Soothe his worries. Strip out your buzzwords and address him as “you,” as if writer and reader are just having a beer and talking about how baby strollers work. Try out a headline like “Baby Strollers Made Simple.” Then get into some body copy that addresses Andy’s concerns dead-on: “We know what you’re thinking — which baby stroller should I pick? We’ve got some answers.” 

Hear that sigh of relief? That’s the sweet sound of a conversion.

Mix It Up

The best web copy is minimal web copy. We’ve said it before: Be succinct. But also be willing to yield space to developers and designers who optimize conversions with their own skill-sets. A page of copy stamped onto whitespace will look HTML-y to users — like they landed on a blog from the dial-up days, or like you put zero seduction into guiding them through your digital marketing strategy. Nest the copy in a color palette that makes your sentences pop. Break it into modules alongside photos that illustrate what you’re describing. Nail that brand headline for a CBB client, but be cool with a programmer animating it so that it emerges out of a cloud of smoke. Think past the copywriting to visualize how your words — thrilling as they are — complement the talents of the other artists working alongside you. And remember to proofread your site with the rigor of a technician. No matter how svelte that CBD brand line is, it’ll look dazed and confused if even one word is misspelled.

Web copy, a memoir, a brochure for a museum — you can make any piece of copy excellent if you trust in it as an art form that moves people. What does that have to do with conversions? Well, it’s not by accident that Google penalizes websites that stuff the text with keywords. Think about that: Even search engines recognize that writing that talks to an audience like humans is more valuable than jargon that assumes consumers are psychographic profiles. Use keywords and meta descriptions, absolutely, but remember this above all else: Write with soul and sincerity, and people will listen to you.

How to Increase Your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

You know how the best time to get a job is when you have a job? Well, the best time to get new business is when you already have business. You can grow your bottom line in two ways: Acquiring new clients, or retaining the clients you already have and increasing their customer lifetime value (or CLV), which is the amount of revenue that you’ll earn off a consumer in the period that they’re using your service or product. Calculating this metric can get complex, but a simple scenario might run like this:

Imagine that you’re a paper-shredding service that cleans out veritable garbage cans full of old documents for a law firm that pays you $100 a month. You’ve been working with said law firm for a year now. Ergo, this customer’s lifetime value is $1,200. If you continue working with them, their CLV only goes up. Some studies have even found that a 5% uptick in retention can increase profits up to 95%, which is one reason that boosting your CLV is a more effective strategy in turning on the spigot of revenue than always being on the hunt for new business. So here are a few tips on how to extend your portfolio’s CLV.

Perfect the Process of Client and Customer Onboarding

Your employees need to be onboarded to understand the parameters of their roles, where to access the server, how everyone takes the fish-in-the-microwave policy seriously no matter where you go. The same process of providing clarification applies to your clients, as well. Even in the top-of-the-funnel stages, take the opportunity to wow your prospective customers with tutorials, leave-behinds, how-to videos, and walkthrough guides that communicate what you do and why your product is worth their money.

Personalizing all of that collateral to the needs of your user personas can help your sales team ace this vital first-impressions moment and ward off the scourge of customer churn. Plus, open communication helps people on both sides of the contract. Research indicates that 8 out of 10 consumers will pay more for a better customer experience, while businesses that know their customers’ motivations and interests can craft digital marketing messages tailored to them, develop precise upselling and cross-selling tactics, and — what often follows — deliver higher ecommerce conversions and a stronger ROI. Which makes sense: Customers who feel courted from the outset are more likely to seek your services for the long-term.

Stay in Touch with Your Customers

All that presale work you’ve done to charm your clients may not result in a sale unless you stay in touch with them. Keep in mind, though, the follow-up is a fine art: You want to pique people’s interest, but you don’t want to bug them. A careful email marketing strategy may be your solution, since it’s one of the most effective ways to maintain your customers’ attention — so long as those emails are worth the read. 

So communicate the benefits of your product or service in a way that doesn’t feel like a one-size-fits-all promotion. Let people know you’re here to help. Send them a birthday hello. You’ve already segmented off your user personas, now be prepared for those personas to change. And when they do, the tone of your messaging should change right along with them — that is, if you want to maintain a relationship with them for the long term.

Switch to an Annual Billing Cycle

One of the foundational questions that any business must ask itself is how to price their services. An equally weighty question is how to bill those services. Those questions overlap, but they’re not exactly the same. Let’s go back to those attorneys who paid you $1,200 for a year of paper-shredding. Whether they fork over the whole amount upfront or $100 on the first of every month hardly matters, right? Wrong. A lump sum of cash allows businesses to forecast revenue, reinvest in operations, and do away with those awkward check-ins meant to chivvy customers across the renewal deadline.

With that said, few of us enjoy handing over a bullfrog of bills to anyone. So incentivize the switch to a yearly payment with a discount — 10–20% off, or a few months of free usage — and talk up the perks of a subscription model (instant access to new product features, multi-tiered offerings tailored to what the customer wants). Annual billing may seem like a lot to ask for, but if you establish a fee structure with a longer lifespan that benefits both merchant and client, you’re almost automatically extending your portfolio’s CLV.

Embrace Upselling and Cross-Selling Tactics

Upselling is the strategy of bumping up the price of a service or a product — a barista asking if you’d like an extra pump of caramel in your latte for $0.30 more, for instance. Cross-selling is offering services or products that complement something that a customer has already bought. Let’s say that you order a hanging planter off Amazon for your newborn’s nursery. Once you’ve filled up your virtual shopping cart, Amazon will cross-sell you with other items related to your purchase. (Wait a minute now, don’t you want a self-watering midcentury bamboo stand to go along with that hanging planter?)

Bundling products, or offering temporary upgrades and free shipping, also help boost revenue. And those tactics can be as beneficial for the company as they are for the customer, since sometimes you need someone to say “Do you need a bike lock?” when you buy a new bike. Just keep your recommendations to a tasteful minimum. Asking customers if they need a new bike lock is one thing. Pressuring them to buy tires and a helmet and a cycling bodysuit may overwhelm them — and cause them to abandon the transaction altogether.

Up Your Prices

Ever hear the old saw about the accountant who audits a business’ books and tells the owner, “I suggest you double your prices”? The owner says, “I can’t do that — I’d lose half my clients.” To which the accountant says: “Then I insist you double your prices.” 

We’re not (necessarily) suggesting that you double your prices, but you do need to give yourself a raise as your company matures. Businesses, like professionals, tend to undersell themselves when they start out. As your operations scale up, however — offering new product options, adding more sophisticated clients, shoring up your clients’ bottom lines — you should reexamine how much you’re charging.

Now, a few things: You gotta earn your raise. (Don’t make your services more expensive if those services aren’t adding value for your consumers.) And let’s say you’ve got an old customer who took a chance on you when you had nada in your portfolio. Maybe don’t stun them with a gargantuan fee hike. Instead, build your pricing models to be flexible: Give them a downgraded service plan at their current price with the option of upgrading for a higher fee. Karma doesn’t always factor into business, but when tinkering around with your prices, you should also keep in mind the old saw about burning bridges.

Listen and Learn

The key to nurturing lasting customer relationships may be to view yourself as a partner to your clients rather than a salesperson who’s got to close a deal, because the least glamorous aspect of a digital marketing strategy may be its most vital part: Listening to your audience. 

Send out surveys to gauge their responses on how to improve your business. Compile the good feedback with the bad, and sift through it for recurring issues. Granted, this means that you’ll be paddling against streams of criticism for the rest of your career. But what you’ll learn from that criticism will help you solve your customers’ problems, which will likely improve their satisfaction, and which, in turn, tends to do wonders for your profitability in the long-term.

Why Branding Matters

What’s In a Brand?

Companies are the sum of their products and services, but they’re also made up of the tesserae of insights and perspectives of the employees who work for them and the audience who buys from them. Those tesserae, taken together, form the mosaic that is your brand — the reflection of your workplace culture and the totality of your values, a beacon of familiarity for consumers who know you and a handshake extending to consumers who don’t. To put it mildly: Branding matters. Here are just a few reasons why.

Branding Tells Your Story

The word “unique” gets overused a lot in these everyone’s-a-winner days, but each person on the planet really is unique from the other 7.8 billion humans we live among. The same goes for your company. Imagine that you’re a coffee roastery. Even if your dark roast has the same lovely arrangement of smoky-chocolate-marshmallow notes as your competitors’ dark roasts, ask yourself: What is it about your coffee company that’s different from Peet’s or Starbucks or Juan Valdez? 

Maybe you had a revelation that you wanted to open your own roastery the moment you took a sip of vintage Colombian coffee in a cobbled plaza in the La Calera hills east of Bogotá. Maybe part of your revenue siphons off into a fund that helps prevent the acidification of coral reefs. Whatever is unique — and true — about your brand will feel likeable to someone who shares your values. That “someone” is your customer base, and one of your first orders of business is to communicate your you-ness to them with a brand design and a number of quick-hitting descriptors that they can absorb in seconds and then somehow work up a hankering for a cup of dark roast.

Branding Establishes Trust

‘Wait a minute,’ you might be thinking. ‘Isn’t branding just a ploy for companies to buddy-buddy up to their consumers, when all those companies really want is to make a buck off us?’ Here’s our answer to that: It can be. But we’d recommend that companies drill into their values and establish trust with their audience rather than regard them as floating dollars to be netted. If a business talks about itself in a way that feels inauthentic, people are going to sniff out its phoniness. So figure out who you are and what you stand for, and hire a brand agency to mold tactics and campaigns that position your brand in a way that people will relate to it.

Let’s say you’re that roastery again. First things first: You’ll get people to trust you if you brew a high-quality cup of coffee every time. But you have to deliver on other articles of faith, as well. If you support Fair Trade to raise the standard of living for coffee farmers in equatorial latitudes, don’t limit your own employees to 29 hours and pay them starvation wages. Live up to your principles in every aspect of your operations and your audience will trust you. Which means you’ve got a shot at establishing brand loyalty with them, so that they’re buying into you as much as they’re buying from you.

Branding Keeps Things Bold

A funny thing often happens on the way to the formation of a brand identity: Companies know they need to say something that’ll help them stand out, so in the final hours before launch, they decide it’s best to say something that’ll help them blend in. Why? Because real is risky.

Don’t get us wrong, there are plenty of cautionary tales out there about how taking risks in the ad world can flop. (Burger King’s “Women belong in the kitchen” tweet, which was phrased ironically to attract attention to their support for a scholarship that helps aspiring female chefs — but which people didn’t find all that appetizing — is only a recent example of cringeworthy chutzpah.) By “risky,” though, we mean embarking on a campaign that’s perhaps even edgier than coming up with a head-swiveling statement: Being yourself.

If you did have a cup of coffee in Bogotá that was so rich and deep that it transported you into visions of opening up your own cafe, tell that story. The last thing you want to do when talking about yourself is to adopt the tone of a corporate comms manual, because no one wants to read that stuff, anyway. Be sensitive to others, yes, but be you. Authenticity and honesty will probably always seem bold, and so long as you mix those two fine traits in with empathy, your branding will feel more genuine and enduring than anyone else’s blanding.

Branding Brings Value

Price is perspective. If you’ve ever given your work away for free, you may have noticed — with horror — that your clients tend to undervalue the thing they’re not paying for. We often trick ourselves into assuming that something’s worth more if it’s more expensive, and the same psychological acrobatics are at play with branding. 

The world’s most influential brands are pricetagged in the billions, and even a logo can cost hundreds of millions of dollars anymore. All of that valuation imparts legitimacy, legitimacy imparts familiarity, and familiarity is the quintessence of a successful brand, since consumers generally feel more at ease parking their money with people or products they know and trust.

Think about it: If a guy on the street handed you a latte, you might pour it out on the curb. (You don’t know this dude, and the fact that he’s giving away this thing gratis seems suspect.) Whereas if you pass by a Starbucks, the store’s aura of legitimacy assures you that paying five or six dollars for a latte is worth it, because that latte’s been approved through a certain global vetting process. The quality of the latte is important, for sure, but the guy on the street’s latte may be even tastier. What’s the difference? The legitimacy of the branding, which often commands a higher price-point on the market than the quality of the product alone.

Branding Focuses the Company Culture

Books need outlines, buildings need blueprints, and businesses need brands, because they don’t just drum up familiarity in customers — they also help center the employees who uphold those brands. If done right, your brand story and positioning statement should be the end-product of a lot of time spent thinking about your workplace’s vision and why it matters. What does any of this have to do with your employees? Well, if your brand standards faithfully represent your culture, you’re more likely to attract talented folks who thrive in that culture. 

Branding that unites people with a purpose boosts morale, which may lead to employee advocacy, the power of which cannot be overstated. Companies that build excellent reputations often enjoy the perks of positive word-of-mouth. (When someone endorses you — which amounts to a free promotion — someone else is more likely to buy from you.) Glowing reviews, from customers and workers alike, can drive business referrals and increase your revenue. And it all starts with committing to a brand that everyone can rally behind.

Branding Provides Clarity

For people running a business, it’s tempting to sprint forward every day — taking meetings, putting out fires, patching cracks in the bottom line. But whenever you can, slow down and reassess your company’s identity. Branding may seem ephemeral, a feel-goody exercise that’ll end up on some poster about values in the lobby. Yet this process of introspection can help you foresee trends, map your growth patterns, pinpoint solutions to recurring problems, and better communicate your expertise to your clients. Stenciling forth the uniqueness of your brand may serve to guide you forward amid the gales of business cycles and market forces for years to come.

Multi-Channel Advertising and the Consumer Funnel

Enter the Funnel

The world population currently stands at 7.8 billion people — and nearly 630,000 publicly traded companies are vying for their attention every day. So how can your business create messages that cut through the din and turn potential leads into loyal customers? You lure them into the consumer funnel.

Ask a group of advertisers, and they’ll each sketch a different version of the funnel, since it isn’t a sanctioned diagram so much as a representation of the sales cycle that can change according to the marketing strategy applied to any given account. But the classic B2C funnel resembles an inverted pyramid that proceeds top-to-bottom in this order: “Awareness, Interest, Desire, Action.” To really understand the funnel, let’s take a test-run of it ourselves, tumbling from its broadest echelon down to its narrowest point, and touching on the best tactics associated with each stage as we go.

Awareness

When people embark on what’s known as the “customer journey,” they’re often just searching for information about a business or a product. For that reason, the topmost level of the funnel is usually referred to as the “awareness stage.” Consider this the cast-the-net-wide step, in which marketers will advise you to dedicate time to consumer research so you know who your audience is, where to find them, how to appeal to them, and which top-of-the-funnel tactics — such as blogs, webinars, infographics, SEO content, or social media posts, to name a few — you want to push out for the sake of lead generation (that is, stoking interest in people, or gauging how interested they are in continuing on this customer journey with you).

Let’s say your target audience is people who want to sink some money into their house. When they’re at the top of the funnel, they’re probably just Googling, “How much does a home reno cost?” rather than scoping out pictures of herringbone backsplash tile on Pinterest. The ad that a savvy digital marketer should serve them at this juncture needs to communicate that, hi, we’re a construction company, and we can give you an honest quote whenever you need it. ‘How convenient,’ your future clients think, as they click further down the funnel … 

Interest

So now you’ve waved your arms around enough that people are taking notice of you. Leads have been generated. Attention has been captured. Next you’ll need to teach the consumers who you lured in your direction about your company or the services you offer. The “interest” phase is where all the leads that you’ve attracted suss out into only the most “qualified leads,” which you should view as prospective customers. That net you cast in the last step has turned into a lasso, and you’re switching from social posts and webinars to blogs and email campaigns tailored to your qualified leads’ interests.

Desire

Even further down the slide we go into the “desire” phase. Before now, you and your qualified leads have been orbiting each other. But the time for coyness has passed and the terms are clear: You want them, they’re considering buying from you, but they’re still reading reviews and comparing products. Nudge them onward with case studies and customer testimonials, and if you’re an online retailer, build in functionality that lets them drop what they want in a virtual shopping cart — anything that’ll push the customer out of their will-I-won’t-I hesitations and into making a purchase.

Action

If all goes well, we will arrive at the terminus of this customer journey once someone makes a purchase, be it a crib from West Elm or the agreement to hire you to do a home renovation. The immediate goal is a sale, true, but the larger objective of a digital marketing strategy is to fatten up that inverted pyramid so that it better resembles a cylinder or an hourglass: Again, the top echelon is the widest, and it tapers to the “action” (sometimes called the “conversion”) phase. Ideally, however, it enlarges once more after that, swelling into a base of retained customers who buy from you again and again, and who advocate for your brand with glowing reviews left on your site. The tactics at this stage? Try referral programs or re-engagement email campaigns to personalize the relationship and encourage repeat purchases.

The (Omni)Channels

The funnel can be flipped upside-down, turned into a figure-eight, swapped around depending on whether it depicts a B2B or B2C play, and so on. Yet despite all the rungs you can layer into it, the premise remains pretty intuitive: Snag your audience’s attention, whet their curiosity, and convert them into a loyal purveyor of your shop. What distinguishes an old-school marketing strategy from a digital marketing strategy, however, is that today the funnel is piped through with a web of channels — so many that the current lingo for our field is “omnichannel” or “multi-channel” advertising.

Those channels might be TV, radio, computers, cell phones, or some combination of all of the above. People are paying attention to different channels at different times throughout the day, so catching their attention becomes more complex if they’re on multiple devices at once. Which means digital marketers need to place their ads on an array of channels to grab consumers’ attention in a way that still encourages the use of multiple devices.

Here’s an example: Imagine that you’re a “Real Housewives of New York City” fanatic. (Or, at least, someone you live with has it on literally all the time.) TV producers realize that when you’re watching that show, you’re probably also scrolling on your phone or your tablet, so they float out overlays of hashtags (#rhony, anyone?) during an episode to get you to post about it. Then, at the end of a season, when Andy Cohen hosts a “reunion” among the housewives, he reads out a lot of those posts. Sure, he’s stoking tempers and digging into old wounds (and making bingeable TV in the process). But he’s also reinforcing the feedback loop between social and TV channels — asking reality stars how they react to criticism from their audience about their outrageous behavior, even though their audience tuned in just to see that outrageous behavior in the first place. 

And that is merely one dimension of Bravo’s media plan: Encourage viewers to comment on the show, poke more antics out of the housewives with those comments, and keep driving the meta-cycle that blurs the line between audience and actor.

Building Customer Value

All the channels connect. Run a hashtag campaign on Bravo, and someone might post about it on Twitter. Advertise on YouTube, and someone might search for your product on Google. Once you transpose the channels — which are like on-ramps weaving through the funnel — the picture of an inverted pyramid piped with a cluster of extensions can appear dizzyingly 3D. Tempting as it is to assume that this framework will always entice your customers, this is not necessarily a if-you-build-it-they-will-come situation. Customers click around faster than any marketing team can concoct a media plan, which means your analytics need to track them and your strategy needs to adapt to their interests, not the other way around. 

So link up all your channels, but before you hose your audience with content, pinpoint the essential service that you’re giving them: An online selection of tropical plants? A newsletter of haiku and short stories? A minute-by-minute update of stocks that they should invest in? Never forget, their loyalty depends on the value you provide them, which means you need to identify your user personas and hone in on the overlap between what you’re selling and what they’re looking for. Whenever possible, make the consumer journey enjoyable rather than results-obsessed, and you may find that customers are more likely to re-enter the funnel at their next opportunity.

Advertising Trends for 2021

We can all breathe a collective sigh of relief: 2020 is over. About the best thing that can be said for 2020 is that she found her paramour, Satan. That spot, from Match.com, resonated with people because it did seem like a nightmare year and the Dark Lord was taking selfies in front of dumpster-fires while the rest of us huddled in our apartments. The upheavals of 2020 changed digital advertising — and not just in the sense that creative agencies worldwide were all working on the same cliche-of-the-century campaign: “in these uncertain times.”

No, 2020 pushed marketers to find new audiences in virtual channels. Companies reckoned with their intensifying proximity to politics. Consumer habits lurched within an economy that kept start-stopping in response to COVID safety measures. And through the smoldering haze of Lucifer and Lady Apocalypse’s love persisted innovations in digital marketing years in the making, contributing to the forecast that Jacob Tyler is calling here and now for the trends in advertising that lie ahead in 2021.

Thinking Virtual

Advertisers find audiences in their preferred channels, and our preferred channels are now more virtual than ever, since 2020 was the year that reality became virtual reality. Consumers will continue to quarantine through 2021, so they’ll want to go to virtual trade shows and virtual annual events, join online communities and download live streaming services. Yes, we’re all pushing through Zoom fatigue and hoping unmasked human interaction resumes on the sunny side of this century. But already it seems as if the days of the webinar — where the authorities on a subject present to their viewers — are numbered. 

In its stead, we’ll see remote events and digital gatherings where hundreds or even thousands of people (or their beaming avatars) meet, network, and Q&A with the experts. The communications ecosystem has been reshaped, and we are interacting from around a globe that seems to have shrunk and also gotten much larger all at once.

Taking a Stand

As you may have noticed, the political climate of the US is (to put it mildly) charged. Similar dynamics are roiling other countries, as well, and since many brands are global, businesses have discovered that their response to polemics worldwide impacts their bottom line. Oatly, HSBC, L’Oreal, Soul Cycle, Jo Malone — these are all brands that, in 2020, consumers #cancelled. That doesn’t mean they’re out of business, but it does mean their business is effectively off-limits to many once-prospective clients because of a bevy of different factors. (According to one study, for instance, 29% of consumers are willing to switch brands if those brands don’t show enough diversity.)

Debate the merits of the cancel all you wish, but the underlying reasons for it trace back to issues once thought more or less outside the bailiwick of advertising: political association, accusations of racism, ties to unsavory businesses. Perhaps never before has PR been such a tightrope act, so it’s no wonder some brands are steering away from controversy altogether. Other brands, however, are embracing the polarization with their own “blanding backlash.” Staking a position amid all the lightning-rod issues, they’re paddling against what sometimes feels like a societal drift toward homogeneity and sameness.

What will prove to be the best crisis comms playbook for the near future? Only 2021 will tell.

Optimizing for People

Even before COVID, isolation was a hallmark feature of 21st century life — partly a result of the sensation a lot of us have that we’re beetling through mazes of automated inauthenticity. As a consequence, what many consumers crave when they interact with a brand is to feel like a human is somewhere on the other side of the digital marketing strategy.

Beyond just embracing the trend toward creating content that sounds relatable, brands will also seek out conversations with followers in 2021, responding to comments on their social channels and adopting a many-to-many model of communication (rather than assuming We the Business are addressing you the consumer). Remember: Isolation. People want to feel courted and listened to. And to that end, we’ll see brands infuse their content with a spirit of cultural inclusivity. The hitch? Because of how siloed consumer segments are today, brands may have to pick which culture(s) they speak to. But that’s a challenge they’ll likely learn to be even savvier about as this year unfolds.

Personalizing the Data Economy

With all that said about people just being people, today’s iteration of the Bernbach-Ogilvy schism in advertising has become a battle waged between those who think you should talk to your audience like humans, and those who think you should talk to your audience like humans … through data insights and algorithm-based feeds. 

Here’s the case for the machine learning camp: Sure, personalized content is neighborly and all, but responding to every single comment on a brand’s social media is exhausting, and well nigh impossible. Isn’t it better to at least reach people with email campaigns rather than (metaphorical) notes handwritten on stationery? 

Think of an ad for a grill served to your phone right after you’ve texted your partner, “Let’s get a grill this summer.” That may feel invasive to some, but it’ll come across as time-saving to others. And the smarter the AI, the more interactive the content, engaging customers with polls and contests and giveaways. Don’t think of data marketing as a self-checkout kiosk — rather, it’s a series of tools that tailor campaigns to customers based on their preferences. 

Or so the argument goes.

Going Green

“Sustainability” transcends simple trendiness because its entire premise is future-oriented, and we’re living through the effects of climate change every day. We did mention firebrand issues, didn’t we? Well, environmentalism is one of the fieriest, with swaths of California and Australia erupting into flames, back-to-back US administrations hopping in and out of the Paris Agreement, and businesses shifting their operations and messaging to address the threats of global warming. With studies showing that 81% of consumers believe companies should do their part in helping the environment, eco-friendly brands will seem even friendlier this year, especially as we navigate the perils of a world where we’ve all but trapped ourselves inside our own carbon emissions.

Forecasting trends in digital advertising is an uncertain science, at best, but it’s also not the same as placing bets or guessing at predictions. Rather, it’s an effort to analyze markets, listen to what customers are saying, and shape tools for businesses that need to anticipate how consumer behavior will pattern itself in coming years. No one can peer into the future — much less know when Satan will find his soulmate — but with some attention to the forces reinventing our culture, you can act on (rather than react to) the changes within your industry.