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What marketing channels drive results

I’ve been asked several times over the last month from new and existing clients;

How do we increase our turnover?
Where do we put our marketing dollars?
What marketing channels would work for us?

I honestly feel now more than ever, it is a challenging time to determine what marketing activity will give you the best result and how and why you split your budget into what areas! However there are strategies to help you decide what to spend and where to spend it, more importantly what channels drive your results.

If we’re talking about eCommerce, dive deep into your data, review your traffic channels v’s conversions and add a cost towards each of your traffic channels to determine what channel is giving you the best ROI. Expand into channels that you haven’t tested. Review, analyse and adjust your budgets and marketing accordingly to fine tune and optimise your results, if you do this constantly over a short period of time your results will rapidly improve.

Now, a must do is to create a dashboard so you can track your results! The most important ingredient is ‘make sure’ your website ticks all the boxes or you will not increase your conversions. A quality website with an excellent user experience, a simple and clean layout with a brand purpose in mind, give your products integrity via quality photos and imagery, this will out-perform any budget that you throw at your marketing. So put both strategies together and you will see instant results!

We have helped many of our eCommerce and retail clients drive high growth, give us a call anytime to discuss your growth plans.

Here’s a snap shot, of one of our new clients last year (May – November 2021), you’ll see by the graph below solid gains in both revenue and conversion rates. The growth is due to a strong client partnership and strategic plan focusing on website improvements, and targeted digital marketing.

Contact us anytime to discuss your marketing needs.
Gavin Flannery
0488 977 878
Marketing Blog

Pareto’s principle is the idea that “for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes”.

Originally Pareto had observed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by just 20% of the population. He then noticed that 20% of the pea-pods in his garden contained 80% of the peas.

In Marketing the principle is applied to illustrate that it is often just 20% of the activities you carry out that result in 80% of your income.

You can apply this to your particular business / marketing circumstances in the way that most suits you, some examples are below:

  • Maybe 20% of your “best” clients produce 80% of your income.
  • Perhaps 20% of your “difficult” clients produce 80% of your time consuming challenges.
  • 20% of your top selling products are resulting in 80% of your sales.
  • 80% of your leads come from 20% of your marketing efforts.

Take something that you would like to improve about your business or a particular issue you are having and see if you can apply Pareto’s principle to help you see where changes can be made. For example which are your top products producing the majority of your sales? Are these the same products that you are focussing your marketing efforts on in order to bring in even more sales? Who are your top clients or customers, perhaps it might be worthwhile celebrating the partnership with a small gift of thanks to them in order to foster the relationship.

How can you use Pareto’s 80/20 principle maximise the efforts in your business?

Contact My Robot Monkey Today – Full Service Marketing and Digital Agency www.myrobotmonkey.com.au

Many businesses continue to run with existing marketing strategies that they have had in play for many years. However, retail marketing has changed dramatically in a short period of time. Gone are the days of allocating 90% of your budget to above the line media and the remaining splashed around in PR and Digital, now a more fluid and dynamic approach is needed.

I believe, when building your marketing strategy, you need to ask yourself the following:

  • How successful were your promotions/events over the last few years?
  • What did or didn’t work for your business and why?
  • Are your campaigns positioned to give you the greatest results? Look at the timing of your events and competitors events. Bring into the mix promotional opportunities like Christmas, Mother’s Day, Easter and public holidays.
  • Are you making the most of new product? Review your seasonal product mix; new products and categories are important strategies that require focus. You will want to highlight new releases – Use some of your tight marketing budget to draw attention to these areas.
  • Review your budget and return on investment – What have you been spending funds on? What delivered the best result? You may need to adjust and spend more or less in certain areas (Example: Reducing a 16-page brochure to 12 pages and passing those savings onto an online sales driving campaign).

Answering the above questions will certainly help you gain a positive viewpoint on how you should build your marketing strategy for the next financial year.

Here are a few tips, which may help the process:

  • Break down your annual marketing planner per week, and align your budget accordingly. Track your budget on a weekly basis; adjust accordingly if you’re not achieving business sales targets.
  • When compiling your strategy, determine your expenditure breakdown per event and promotion. What media will work best for each event or promotion? Make sure your content suits your media!
  • Allocate and breakdown the percentage of your total budget wisely; your mix should include allocation of monies towards a variety of campaigns with goals in mind. Goals may include: Driving sales, increasing your brand name in the market, building online sales, acquiring new customers, visual merchandising, loyalty programs and social media. For the best results filter these into the most suitable and relevant media type.
  • Don’t be afraid to try new things. However, always report, analyse and adjust accordingly.

For further information please contact My Robot Monkey, Marketing and Digital Agency.

www.myrobotmonkey.com.au

1. Understand your customer.

Getting to know your customers is the most important stage of the marketing process. The more accurate your information and knowledge, the more effective you will be at promoting your brand, product or service. Use all the information at your disposal to understand customer’s behavior, demographics, and needs. This information should steer your major business decisions and allow you to create an effective marketing plan. 

2. Create your marketing plan.

Develop your strategy in the form of a written marketing plan, as this will ensure all members of your business understand the company direction. The plan is a comprehensive and well-researched document, which covers all essential aspects of taking your products/ services to the customer. When developing the plan, ask yourself the following questions.

  • Where are we now?
  • Where do we want to be?
  • What opportunities exist in the environment?
  • What media channels can I promote within and achieve a strong ROI (return on investment).
  • Make sure you constantly analyse your results and adjust your marketing strategy and plan accordingly.

3. Design your product and service around your customer.

Once you have a marketing plan in place, you need to make sure your product or service is tailored to your customer – from the packaging, the way it is promoted, to the way you display it. Businesses often fall into the trap of making the product they want to sell, rather than designing and presenting things in the way the customer wants.

For more information on Marketing, Website Design, Graphic Design, Social Media Marketing or PPC / Google AdWords contact us today!

Firstly what is content marketing?

In its most simplified form content marketing is the writing and/or sharing of relevant pieces of information that you think will be of value and/or interest to your target market (this may be writing, videos, blogs, graphics or anything else that you may use to creatively attract customers).

…Much like this blog post you are reading right now…

When creating your content marketing you want to keep these key questions in mind:

  • Will this topic appeal to my target audience? Ensure that your content is covering information that will be important, interesting and significant to your particular customer.
  • Is it relevant to my purpose? Your content must be relevant and helpful to your business or you are wasting your time.
  • Does your content link in well with search engines? It is important to use relevant, high traffic tags and specific wording so that your work will be picked up well by search engines. You want to drive as much traffic to your site as possible.

The main take home message on content marketing is to create or share something that is of real interest and value to your consumer. People are bombarded all day everyday by masses of different types of marketing telling them what they need and want. Content marketing allows the consumer to take a breath and encourages them to come to you without feeling harassed.

With a quarter of global web searches carried out on mobile devices, having a mobile friendly website is no longer a choice – not doing so is business suicide. Studies show that within 3 years the number of people accessing the Internet via their mobiles will overtake those accessing it via PC.

The reality is, if your website isn’t optimised for mobile you’re losing sales and brand respect.

Levels of Mobile Friendliness:

  1. Completely incompatible: sites that are entirely Flash-based cannot be accessed from a mobile device.
  1. Pinch-&-zoom: these sites work on touch-based devices but users have to “pinch-&-zoom”. When the site comes up nothing can be seen without zooming in. This takes a lot more effort and customers easily lose track of where they are on the site.
  1. Mobile friendly: the page layouts are device appropriate, fonts can be read without zooming in and it’s easy to navigate around the site.

Check-up: Pick up your mobile, and go to your site. Ask yourself the following questions:

  1. Is the content easy to read without zooming in?
  2. Is it easy to navigate around the site?
  3. Are you able to identify and activate the call to action?
  4. Would you want to spend time on the website (if it wasn’t yours)?
  5. Do you think it provides a good user experience?

If you mainly answered “no”, then contact us today to find out how we can help you get your site mobile-friendly.

We posted a blog earlier on “Online stores are changing the way we shop”. To follow on from that, we now explore how trends are changing within the online space. In our previous blog we explained how online shopping and online pre buy research are increasing significantly, leaving some traditional bricks and mortar retailers in the dust. Now we discover the biggest trends to be aware of for optimising your eCommerce business in 2015. Overwhelmingly customers are shopping on the go from mobile phones and are using social media to inform and facilitate these purchases.

  • 1/3 of online purchases are now made from a mobile device.
  • Social media has become a big player in the eCommerce sphere with an overwhelming growth in conversions from social media of 202% in 2014 alone!
  • 24/7 shopping: In traditional retail the store is closed for around 16 hours in every 24. But an online retailer is always open! Customers are responding to this, they shop at work, before they go to sleep at night and on those lazy Sunday afternoons.

So what does this mean for your eCommerce business?

It means that mobile friendly websites are no longer an option but a necessity, it also means that “mobile friendly” may not cut it, it is now time for “mobile optimised”.

If you haven’t already then 2015 is absolutely the year to embrace social media! Social media (SM) has become a serious player and SM marketing is equally, if not more important in some industries than more traditional forms of marketing. Social media platforms are becoming so much more than a place for people to gather and chat online, they are the places where decisions are made and social recommendations count for a lot.

Online stores are changing the way we shop; increasingly people are opting to research and buy the things they want and need online instead of in traditional storefronts. This is resulting in an array of changes, numerous new retailers are opting for online only, and some businesses are creating a mixture where online store and retail outlets work together incorporating practices such as returns and size changing. You can guarantee the number of retailers without an online presence is dropping drastically and some storefronts are disappearing altogether as peoples buying habits change.

The statistics are staggering:

  • More than 80% of people on the Internet have made an online purchase, 50% purchase online regularly.
  • Ecommerce sales have grown by more than 19% a year since 2011, and will be nearing $1.4 trillion by the end of 2015.
  • 81% of consumers go online to research before heading out to make a purchase; this is up 20% on last year.
  • 70% of people search online to find services and information i.e. builders, cleaners, informative websites.

The overwhelming trend is one of movement away from traditional shopping and towards online, on the go, socially informed shopping from a range of different devices.

For further information to assist in improving or creating your online platform, contact My Robot Monkey.

www.myrobotmonkey.com.au

Your customers’ first impression of your business will be determined through your brand; whether it be your business name, your colour palette, logo, website, advertising, social media or any element your customers may have seen or heard.

It is extremely valuable to align and communicate your business values and offering clearly, and to be consistent with all your customer touch points, as this may determine whether you gain or lose that customer from the outset.

In our world today consumers are overwhelmed with choice. Your potential customers are considering which company to engage with or make a purchase. By taking away all the road blocks, clearly communicating your message and being consistent through all forms of your customer touch points, you’re half way there in gaining that sale or engaging a new customer.

At My Robot Monkey we can help you understand how to clearly communicate your valuable message in a busy market!

www.myrobotmonkey.com.au

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In the 21st century, if you don’t have a quality digital presence, you’re not in the game! The world has moved on, your website, logo and design work has to be of a high standard and is your number one priority from a marketing stand point. A great digital presence is extremely important as in most cases the customers first point of call is your website and what they see and experience there will make all the difference.

The great thing about eCommerce is you can analyse everything; customer behaviour, viewed pages, drop off rates and more, in order to understand what is and isn’t working for you. You can then adjust live on the run 24/7 to improve your out come.