Not sure whether to invest in Google Ads or Facebook Ads? It all comes down to your objectives.
A winning strategy often includes both, but the right mix depends on your goals.
At CIM Marketing Partners, we believe in empowering our clients to maintain full control over their digital assets. We want to emphasize the critical importance of owning your own social media accounts.
In today’s digital landscape, we've encountered situations where businesses faced significant setbacks due to lack of ownership over their online presence. One particularly alarming trend is the occurrence of former employees retaining control over crucial accounts, leaving the businesses they once served in a state of limbo. We've seen instances where ex-employees, whether terminated or having left voluntarily, have held business profiles hostage by refusing to allow access to vital accounts such as Google Business Profiles, websites and social media platforms.
This scenario not only disrupts your business operations, but also poses a serious threat to your brand reputation and customer engagement. Imagine being locked out of your own Google Business Profile, where potential customers are unable to find accurate information about your services or products. Or worse, picture your social media channels falling into the wrong hands, leading to unauthorized posts or even data breaches.
To safeguard your business against potential risks, we recommend taking these proactive measures to secure ownership of your digital assets:
At CIM Marketing Partners, we are committed to supporting you in protecting your digital presence.
In the realm of brand strategy, it's vital to explore innovative avenues for storytelling and engagement. While flashy campaigns and social media ads have their place, one often overlooked tool holds immense potential: the newsletter.
I know what you might be thinking—newsletters in 2024? But bear with me, because here are four compelling reasons why newsletters are a game-changer:
Unlike costly ad campaigns, newsletters offer a simple, budget-friendly way to authentically connect with your audience. By sharing useful newsletter content, you can showcase the genuine essence of your brand without breaking the bank.
Newsletters provide a platform for meaningful storytelling, allowing you to delve into the nuances and context behind your brand. In a world of bite-sized content, this depth can captivate and engage your audience, setting you apart from the competition.
Newsletters serve as a catalyst for building a community of brand advocates. By making it easy for subscribers to share your content, you can organically expand your reach and cultivate a loyal following.
Unlike traditional advertising metrics, newsletters provide tangible data on subscriber engagement. From open rates to click-through rates, these metrics offer invaluable insights into the effectiveness of your branding efforts.
So, where do you begin?
Craft Compelling Content: Start by showcasing the authentic essence of your brand through real stories and experiences. Highlight the people, projects and values that make your company unique.
Cultivate Your Community: Focus on quality over quantity by targeting engaged subscribers who resonate with your brand. Encourage colleagues and current and potential clients to join your mailing list and become part of your brand journey.
Share and Engage: Once you've sent out your newsletter, leverage your existing channels to amplify its reach. Encourage colleagues and clients to share your content, and be consistent in your distribution efforts.
Incorporating newsletters, both printed and digital, into your branding strategy can yield significant marketing dividends, helping you to strategically elevate your brand presence in the marketplace.
At CIM Marketing Partners, we specialize in crafting comprehensive branding strategies tailored to your unique needs. We're here to help you unlock the full potential of newsletters in your branding journey.
It’s that time of year, again. Fall is here, and it’s time to plan and budget for next year. Depending on how you do it, it can be a chore (one you keep pushing off) or it can be transformational, filled with excitement and opportunity.
For more than 20 years, we’ve performed Strategic Marketing Summits® for clients. We even trademarked it. These half-day sessions are designed to create an atmosphere where the past can be glanced, but more importantly, the future can be focused on intentionally and targeted for significant success.
Imagine a planning session wherein you’re not just choosing marketing tactics and assigning how much to spend on each, but you’re aligning specific business goals with right-fit tactics to help you reach and exceed those goals. Proper planning to align all marketing efforts with the best ROI in mind makes the difference between “just budgeting” and masterminding your efforts to build brand awareness, revenue and overall brand value.
If you’d like to learn more, here are a video and several testimonials about our Summits. Our retainer clients are having their annual Summits scheduled for this fall, and we’d welcome the opportunity to schedule one for you. More Summit details can be found here.
We explored our weaknesses and how they could be converted to opportunities for growth. The facilitation by CIM was most valuable – they got information from our team that we didn’t even know we had.
Robbie Graham, president, NTC Global Holding Group
We know we are putting our dollars where it gives us the greatest value. The Summit forced us to look down the road in scheduling our marketing program as our company evolves.
Byron Francis, managing partner, Armstrong Teasdale LLP
However you plan and budget for 2022, I implore you to do so strategically so you can realize the best results possible. Don’t dread your planning, but make it purposeful for you and your business.
“If you want to succeed and leave your competitors behind, you need great plans and even greater strategies.”
~Pooja Agnihotri, 17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail: Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure
In our last article, we covered some of the email trends we’re seeing as we work daily in the digital space. With email marketing continuing to grow and remaining, or even increasing, in its effectiveness, capitalizing on this tactic may be important to your diversified marketing approach. Here are four more trends to consider:
Entertaining User Experiences
Entertaining users in email designs are gaining popularity. The use of animated gifs, dynamic & interactive features should evoke a sense of urgency or draw attention to brand incentives. Make sure everything renders perfectly across all browsers and screen readers. Do not overload emails with too much, though, since more means risk of being flagged as spam.
Visuals That are Close to Reality
Plenty of people are still working from home. As for email marketing, it is time to make your email atmosphere cozy and homey. This type of ambiance appeals to potential clients because of the pandemic. It helps to express empathy and let them know that we are all in the same boat. It increases trust and loyalty when the brand positions itself as a company that is always on their side.
People Illustrations
Human illustrations are also gaining popularity because they can take any aesthetics and experience according to your email. Also, the only way to show people without masks and stay in accordance with the rules is to use human illustrations. More and more people are also in favor of illustrations instead of real-life images because it is typically cheaper and easier to make than still-life photos.
Automation
Automation should be integrated throughout the email journey to give the user a sense of control over their inbox all the time. It helps to bring value that could generate into leads. You can personalize through automation or keep in contact with your established audience. Automating emails also saves time and headache, as you don't have to keep track of where every user is on their email journey.
It’s a lot to keep up with! If you’re going to pursue email marketing efforts, we recommend you do so in a strategic manner to make the most impact and secure the best results possible. Please let me know if you’d like guidance or assistance from our digital marketing team.
Quote of the week:
Content builds relationships. Relationships build on trust. Trust drives revenue.
Andrew Davis
The manner in which we conduct business and how we reach out to clients are constantly changing. An ever-increasing number of individuals each year go digital. Fortunately, most everybody can adjust to our evolving world. Email marketing is alive and effective. More and more, companies utilize it to promote their services and products, advocate their brands, and communicate with their target market audience.
At CIM, we focus on clients’ business goals and strategies as the foundation before creating email marketing campaigns. Even if a client’s business activity is focused offline, we can still use online marketing channels like email to attract new business. While email (recipient) lists include current customers and clients or people who have expressed an interest in your business, the goal is to keep expanding your list, creating a bigger “ripple” with each email campaign. Regular, targeted campaigns ensure your company stays “top of mind,” so when the need for your business arises, they know whom to call.
I will be outlining several 2021 email marketing trends in this two-part email series. Here are four that are gaining popularity and geared toward keeping your audience engaged.
Personalization
Personalization is not just a hot new trend, but has become a bare necessity. It's not just enough to have a name in the subject line, but putting a person’s needs first and thinking about their problems is a solid tactic. Segmenting your list and sending relevant content, optimizing send times, and establishing a personal brand connection are several types of personalization that can be utilized to keep your audience engaged.
Customer Appreciation (Empathy) Emails
Even without a pandemic, these emails are enjoying high engagement rates, playing an important role in a company’s success. These types of emails give you the perfect opportunity to praise prospects, provide a helping hand and create an emotional connection. This helps your brand strengthen relationships, build trust, inspire loyalty and increase engagement. Empathy emails come in all shapes and sizes, and provide many opportunities to reach out to your audience.
Mobile Experience
According to Litmus, mobile devices have a higher open rate for emails than desktop or tablets. Even though 56% of people still prefer to make their final purchases on a desktop device, the importance of optimizing a mobile experience is paramount. Mobile optimization can be challenging – inconsistency in how emails display across different devices, the ever evolving mobile device marketplace – makes creating a perfect email design a real challenge. Sticking to simple, responsive designs ensures maximum deliverability of your intended message.
Dark Mode
Litmus stats also show that 36% of Apple iPhone users read their emails in dark mode. People spending more time on their mobile phones can bring some discomfort to their eyes. Dark mode reduces eye strain in low-light conditions, especially for people who read their emails right before going to sleep (know anyone?). Accommodating dark themes in your email campaigns is recommended and appreciated by your audience.
While the global pandemic has disrupted and changed our lifestyle, email proved to be a core way of communicating. I’ll be sharing four more trends in my next email. In the meantime, if you would like to discuss your email marketing needs, please contact me.
Quote of the week:
Personalization – it is not about first/last name. It’s about relevant content.
Dan Jak
PPC stands for pay-per-click, a form of advertising that allows you to target consumers and generate potential leads. While there are quite a few platforms that perform PPC, we will focus on the Google Ads platform today. There are four distinct ad channels on Google’s platform: Search, Display, Video and Shopping. We will be focusing on search marketing PPC in this email.
The PPC marketing model charges you every time your ad is clicked. It is an extremely powerful tool to drive traffic to your website while consumers are searching for keywords or browsing sites related to your business or service.
Monitor keyword pricing for the first-page position on Google so that you are bidding competitively.
Constantly review the search terms report to filter out negative keywords that you do not want your ad to rank for — you don’t want to pay for irrelevant clicks.
Refresh your ads with new content — headlines, descriptions, ad extensions, etc.
Utilize the audience targeting strategy to increase your ads' relevance.
CIM Marketing Partners is proud to be certified in Google Ads. We won’t sugarcoat it, PPC is a big lift and ongoing management is required. It isn’t a “set it and forget it” system. If you have thought about PPC, we would be happy to discuss any opportunities to run PPC campaigns for your business. We enjoy strategizing alongside businesses in order to develop the most effective PPC campaigns possible to get you the greatest return on your marketing investment.
Quote of the week:
Nobody counts the number of ads you run; they just remember the impression you make.
Bill Bernbach
There’s a wonderful book from the late 1990s, Who Moved My Cheese? Cheese is used as a metaphor for something related to our livelihoods – our jobs, our relationships, our industries, for example. It tells an interesting story of dealing with change, how change can be embraced or shunned. In the end, change is generally unavoidable. Lesson learned? Expect change and adapt, or one day you’ll find yourself (or your company) left in the dust.
A Marketing 101 course covers a lot of ground, running through theory and strategy, research, analytics, marketing platforms, and dozens of tactics to consider for a given company to use. As marketers in the day-to-day for our clients every day, we know that what works today will change. Yellow Pages, anyone? That was the top tactic, consuming a large chunk of a diversified marketing budget, for some of our clients in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Why? It’s the tactic that caused their phones to ring and brought in 50+% of their business.
One key lesson from a Marketing 101 course withstands the test of time, and simply does not change: A business succeeds only when it has something to sell that people want or need, and are willing and able to buy. You can have the greatest employees in the business, the best website, the lowest prices, the greatest value, the highest ratings, and reviews, and the happiest customers…but if you don’t have a product or service people need and want to purchase, your business won’t be viable for long.
So, while you’re keeping an eye on the many, many facets of running your business (operations, marketing, sales, HR, etc.), never lose sight of what you’re offering, and make sure you continue to align your offerings with what consumers demand, or will be demanding as time goes on. Take the time for ongoing reviews of where you are, and where you need to be, so you won’t wake up one day to find that your “cheese” has been moved.
Who Moved My Cheese?: An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life
by Spencer Johnson, M.D.
Quote of the week:
Every success story is a tale of constant adaption, revision, and change.
Richard Branson
In late June, Google announced that it would begin providing domain name registration services. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it will impact the big players like GoDaddy, Network Solutions and 1&1, to name a few. How so?
You can read more about the features of Google Domains by visiting https://domains.google.com/about/features.html#resource-records.
Google Domains is currently in beta (by invite only) and not being made available to the masses just yet. Stay tuned; I am sure this will create a buzz in the online community very soon.