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Watch this brief but informative webinar and see if your website is fine-tuned to deliver abundant sales volume. Today, it is vital that your company communicate with a strong digital presence, informative content and convenient user experience.
You'll learn how to:
Yes, you can.
If your current perception of Facebook is a bunch of photos of food photos, you are behind the times. Today’s Facebook has evolved from a relatively youthful space to a space involving people with significant buying power. While plenty of “fluff” continues to be on Facebook, you can socially relate to your prospect where they spend abundant time. It’s critical from a messaging standpoint that you have a clear objective of goals for social media.
These could include the following:
Facebook is a viable and cost-effective channel for placing your industrial products and services in front of your audience with specificity, accuracy, and relevance. Even now, no other social media platform has Facebook’s reach. In 2018, Facebook’s daily active users (DAUs) averaged 1.52 billion, an increase of 9 percent over 2017. The largest group of Facebook users is also the largest group of purchase decision makers, most of whom make their purchases, both small and large, online.
Key reasons to implement a Facebook marketing and advertising program include the following:
The very nature of Facebook’s registration allows users to provide significant personal data such as job title, workplace, age, gender, and location, all of which can all be leveraged for product placement. Specificity in targeting and low customer acquisition cost are what make Facebook a platform not to be overlooked by industrial marketers.
Facebook ads are interactive, with Messenger capabilities enabling users to easily communicate with manufacturers and distributors to discuss pricing, availability, product specifications, and more. This method of direct selling and interaction is a much different approach than focusing on search ranking performance or search engine optimization (SEO). With Facebook, marketers can target a demographic that might not know that it is interested in a product, thus subtly creating demand for a brand or product.
For for over a decade, X-Factor Web Marketing has narrated the stories of numerous industrial companies on Facebook to build brand awareness and ultimately convert users and their buying behaviors into measurable sales. Via Facebook Messenger, our customers commonly quote machinery and industrial goods exceeding $80k in value. Telling engaging stories about your brand using Facebook advertising will remain a lucrative selling channel for the foreseeable future. Contact us if you need help building your Facebook advertising campaign.
It is easy to assume Google dominates search, and rightly so. In 2018, Google Search made up more than 90% of all worldwide searches. Looking at those figures, why would any business invest in advertising in Bing Ads? Below are a few compelling reasons why advertising on Bing should be part of your inbound marketing strategy to maximize your business’s online visibility.
Look at these stats from Microsoft in 2018 for all industries searched:
Ignoring Bing in the US is tantamount to ignoring 34% of the search market. It’s important you do your homework on your target users’ search behavior and determine whether you would gain more reach using Bing for paid search. X-Factor Web Marketing can help you determine if your business is right for advertising on Bing. We can also help you design a paid search program for both Bing Ads and Google Adwords that will provide measurable results.
Your website is the core of your marketing program. It is working for you 24/7. Is it working as effectively as it can be? Do you know who your online competitors are? Is your competition outranking your website on major search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Bing?
An online competitive analysis is essential for businesses today. Just as you would evaluate your competitors if you had a storefront, you must now review other websites that sell the same product or service as you do. Your online competitors are not the same as your traditional storefront competitors. Your online competitors are the companies whose websites are ranking higher than yours on search engines for keywords related to your industry.
An online competitive analysis aims to provide you with detailed information on how your competitors are using the Internet to promote their products and services, which strategiesthey are employing and which tactics they are using to attract web traffic. For example, which keywords are your competitors targeting? Is their website optimized for search engines? Do they have more external links pointing to their website than you do? Do they have a social media presence? When you know what your online competitors’ strengths and weaknesses are, you will be better able to structure your marketing program to get more leads and sales directly from your website and outrank your competition.
Did your web developer add Google Analytics to your website? Great! That’s the first step in measuring your website’s success. Now, do you know how to actually read all of those great reports?
It can be a bit overwhelming. Here are a few things to look for when reviewing the data:
Dashboard View:
Site Usage
Visitors Overview
Map Overlay
Traffic Sources Overview
Content Overview
Need more help? X-Factor can study your Google Analytics reports on a monthly basis, provide pro-active suggestions, and will make changes as necessary to improve your website position and performance based on these results.
What is marketing? Marketing is everything that leads up to the sale of a product. Many people confuse advertising or public relations with marketing when in fact, they fall under the marketing umbrella.
“Push,” or traditional marketing, is what we think of as interruptive advertising: TV ads, radio spots, billboards, direct mail, email, etc. They “push” the message at you to attract your attention, compel you to engage emotionally with the message and, ultimately, result in purchasing intent.
This pushing technique worked very well when television was new and there were only three major networks to view. Procter & Gamble, Mattel and other companies enjoyed great success by employing traditional “push” advertising. Today, a variety of media daily inundate us with about 3,000 advertising messages. To succeed with a “push” campaign, you need a product or service with a narrow niche, and you need a lot of money to make your message heard.
“Pull” marketing involves attracting the market to a website, engaging visitors with content written specifically for the market, and inviting them to act on an offer. It may be a low-risk offer such as a free white paper on a topic or access to a free interest calculator. The idea behind “pull” marketing is accepting that the browser is completely in charge of the purchasing decision. The method works best if you pave a path for your ideal prospect in a process that would look like this:
Some combination of “push” and “pull” techniques usually works best. In either case, market research on consumer attitudes and buying trends can remove much of the guesswork. Whether it’s “push” or “pull” – keep on marketing!
Websites are now the core of any company’s marketing program. It’s the 24-hour storefront that never closes. It’s a resource of information enabling the showcasing of products pictorially, in video and in text. This is changing the face of marketing, which use to be a “push” message that utilized persuasion to educate prospects. With the web, the control has shifted to the consumer’s hands; they need a product, they research it on the web and then make the inquiry if interested. Attaching Google Analytics or some other web metrics to your site can provide a wealth of marketing intelligence that is often overlooked. Want to know how prospects arrive on your site? Which products they view most frequently? Which pages hold the most interest? Which geographic regions are hitting your website most frequently? It’s all in analytics. And best of all, you can segment time by day, month or year and even do comparisons to past months or years. The consumer has control, but you can develop a better strategy to attract them with heightened attention to your analytics.
Google Analytics has a feature on its dashboard called a “Bounce Rate.” This is one of the key metrics in web analysis. Essentially, it is the percentage of times that someone “bounces” almost immediately when they find your site. A bounce rate of over 40% is cause for concern. It may mean that your site doesn’t captivate the audience quickly, causing them to look elsewhere for services. To improve your bounce rate, make certain you are appealing to the right prospect with relevant keywords and content. Another way to quickly engage the prospect is free resources in the form of white papers or other useful tools that will help the browser. Blogs can actually hurt a bounce rate. If your blog has regular readership over time, it may mean that browser’s show up to read the blog and then immediately depart. This act alone could adversely affect your bounce rate. Check your analytics over 12 months, make the appropriate changes to your site and begin to assess it on a monthly basis to test improvement.
