Is Paid Digital Marketing in your future?

Digital Ad CampaignIn our 15 years in business we have seen the ebb and flow of digital marketing from "free" organic placement, to Google MAPS and Google text ads. Google is a publicly traded company and "FREE" does not appeal to stock-holders. So the short answer to the above question is: If you want to grow beyond your word-of-mouth strategy and develop a sustainable business growth model, paid digital marketing is in your future. Don't be afraid of it! If you're ready to scale, digital marketing is a controllable marketing resource that you'll wish you had discovered years ago. So - onward!

Digital marketing goes well beyond paid text ads on Google. The fact is: the most expensive forms of advertising on Google and Facebook are often the easiest to access. Google Text Ads and Facebook posts can be huge money pits and often there are better options to consider.

With the right digital marketing strategy, you can dramatically increase the amount of traffic to your website and that traffic can be from a specified audience to a page on your site that speak to that audience (almost never the home page). Call 50Bubbles today and we'll set up a strategy that will get you seeing more traffic and talking to more customers than you ever thought possible. If you've never done digital marketing and even if you show up 1st organically, digital marketing can change your business very quickly. Are you ready? 

Digital Marketing Services - Dayton Ohio

Digital marketing is associated with advertising through internet channels including search engines, websites, social media, email, and mobile apps. 50Bubbles offers a range of digital marketing services including search engine optimization, web design and development, lead generation and digital sales funnels and lead nurturing systems, paid search engine advertising (pay per click), display ads and re-targeting (lead tracking), local search optimization (Google MAPS optimization), Quite often, several of these services are integrated into a single campaign. Read on to discover the nuances of digital marketing services and how they can be integrated into one cohesive internet marketing strategy.

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The Three Essential Elements of Web Design

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We'd like to challenge you with the following question: Do you need to develop a website or do you want to design a digital customer experience? Very few businesses get beyond the standard website solution. Most websites are digital brochures. Beyond that, once created, most businesses will spend very little time adding new content, updating the website and using the website as the truly amazing marketing tool they have at their disposal. We'd like to help you change that.

Basic Website

The term "web design" is tossed around too much in our opinion. Most businesses Googling "web design" are simply looking for a company who can apply their logo and brand to a website application, add a few pages like "about us", "services", "products" and "contact us" and that's it! But honestly, if that is your idea of a website, you're just brushing the surface of possibilities. The website is in our opinion the BEST marketing tool ever invented for a website and at the same same time, the most under utilized.

 

1. Web Design - Graphic Design Considerations

Most website design companies will build a website using a content management solution, the most popular of which is WordPress. To reduce costs, websites can be built on these platforms using pre-designed templates and edited from there. If that's not sufficient, custom graphic design can be used to match the clients branding specifications. For most small businesses, starting with a pre-designed template is usually sufficient. New template designs also include the ability to change colors, styles and basic website features making the pre-designed template path even more appealing. If a business must go through a custom graphic design process, the cost of the website will probably more than double. Before a business heads down that path, it is important to consider the pre-design template options because most businesses don't understand the flexibility of modern website theme designs.

2. Web Design - Developing The Customer Journey

Developing the customer journey is probably the MOST overlooked aspect of web design. The most rudimentary form of this process is to simply setup a site-map. Very often, the creation of a site map is nothing but conventional menu development: Home, About, Products, Service, Blog, Contact. It's OK to start with the site-map but that process rarely considers the customer journey. Moreover, once you have some run-time with the new website, you may discover that what you thought would be the customer journey is not actually what happens.

Part of developing the customer journey is to understand what the prospective customer is doing BEFORE that person lands on your website. How did he get there? Did the visitor come from FaceBook? Google? Advertising? How the visitor finds your site is a necessary beginning to setting up the customer journey through your site. If it's the search engine for example, then keyword research may be necessary before you start writing copy for your site. The fact of the matter is over time you'll have developed many customer journeys through your website.

Perhaps the best question to consider in this process is: "What if...?" Or more specifically "What happens if...?". e.g. What happens if a visitor lands on this page. What happens if a visitor clicks this button? The answers to those questions define the customer journey. The responses to those questions will be your calls to action. If you go through this process, you'll create a website experience - a customer journey. As your website evolves, you'll get to know your client better and better and your website should respond to that knowledge. Your website is never done! (hence the value of a content management solution where you the business owner don't need to really understand how to program.)

3. Website Development

Website development and web design are terms that are often used interchangeably and that's a mistake. The two processes are completely different. Web design is the process of developing the website look and feel and the customer journey (how the website will work). Website development is the process of taking that design specification and making it work so that the physical reality of the website matches what the designer had in mind. Web developers are programmers. They see the world in 1's and 0's.

It is not unusual for businesses to approach a web developer and start building a website. They essentially skip the whole web design process. It's not the job of the web developer to tell you what you don't know (he may not know - or care, either). If you approach a web developer to build a website, that's exactly what you'll get. What you won't get is something that responds to your market and considers the customer journey. There is no marketing or design considerations when building the website.

The problem is that the web developer very often can't market his way out of a paper bag! The business will usually get no search engine optimization, no defined customer journey, limited graphic design consideration and frankly very limited results. You end up with a website that just sits there. This is not to say anything bad about the web developer. The web developer is a necessary part of the process. The problem is that if the business skips the web design and customer journey process, the web site is no more a marketing tool than the menu is to your favorite restaurant. The design and marketing process has been removed from the equation. The result is a static, dysfunctional website that is sitting on a server somewhere with very little value.

So, assuming that your graphic design and your web design considerations are in order, the value of having a good web developer on your team is that persons ability to take your vision of what you want in your website and make it happen. The role of the developer is in the efficient implementation of your web design. Applying clean code and effective programming using current web standards (CSS, HTML5, Javascript etc), it is the job of the web developer to turn the idea into a reality.

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