Even if you have long-term clients, you can't predict market fluctuations and their impact on your agency. Therefore, to sustain your business and keep it afloat, you need new clients and fresh revenue streams.

But finding qualified leads and the right clients is no cakewalk. You have to build trust for your agency among people unfamiliar with your brand.

In this blog, we discuss how you can get more clients in the short term. We focus on ten proven strategies that have worked wonderfully for several businesses. If used effectively, these can help agency owners stand out and thrive.

1. Get Positive Customer Reviews and Awards

Customer testimonials, reviews, awards, and certifications are indicators of your reputation as a business. Reviews aren't common among web design companies and digital marketing agencies. Therefore, even a few reviews on Google, Yelp, or Clutch will help your company stand out and build trust.

Rewards and certifications are crowd pullers. When you establish yourself as a company that provides high-quality services, businesses line up to work with you. Certifications help win local and state-level projects and avoid relentless bidding on jobs to get new clients.

Similarly, potential clients also look for customer reviews before they call you for a quote. 90% of customers read online reviews before they decide to buy a product. So, getting positive reviews is the best way to generate new clients.

2. Create Unique, Genuine Resources

Offering resources such as instant website builders and report generator software can help agencies with customer acquisition in a big way. By solving your customers' core issues, freeing them from the tedious day-to-day tasks, and enabling them to achieve more, you can easily attract their attention and build more transparent, trusting relationships.

For example, DashClicks allows you to use their white label InstaSites software to serve your clients. With this software, you can build a user-friendly, niche-specific custom website within seconds. It can transform your prospecting process and deliver high value with lightning speed. DashClicks InstaSites offer you the following three benefits:

A. Instant Websites

As a digital marketing agency, your ability to build an InstaSite within a matter of seconds can be a transformational experience. With the DashClicks InstaSites platform, all you need to do is fill out an online form and press the enter button. It will help you form an excellent first impression and increase your chances of winning a contract.

B. Niche-Specific Templates

You can revolutionize your prospecting process by allowing your clients to choose from a wide range of industry-specific templates to create an InstaSite. It will help you to work with multiple niches. For example, different niches such as an agency, business, and services, event, gardening, travel, fitness, legal and non-profit may have varied requirements from their websites. A restaurant might be looking for a different website template than a real estate company. When you offer your clients a wide range of niche-specific website templates, they stay.

C. Bulk Website Builder

DashClicks' single and bulk builders allow you to create hundreds of new websites with a single click, saving you time, effort, and money. With the help of DashClicks bulk InstaSites builder, all you need to do is upload your client information using a CSV file, and the bulk builder will create all the required websites with just one click. To know more about how it works, watch this YouTube video. After completing those websites, you can send them to your prospects for review. You don't need any coding or designing experience to make these sites.

3. Focus on Marketing and SEO

Marketing, blogging, and SEO are the most effective ways of prospecting. They help drive traffic to your website, thereby making people aware of your service quality. Working on various keywords and employing standard optimization techniques can help you discover more business opportunities. When researching keywords, make sure they express buyer intent.

It's also essential to follow the latest trends to create fresh content and tweak old content accordingly. It will increase your visibility on search engines, and users will start acknowledging your website for trending and niche-specific content.

4. Get Involved with the Local Community

Community outreach is one of the best ways of prospecting and business development. Find opportunities to tap into the local community ā attend local events and collaborate with regional organizations to promote your business. If you have the time and resources, try community outreach to find leaders and meet potential customers. This process is long and tedious, but it leads you to loyal customers who will stick around for a long time.

5. Run Paid Ads

According to Google, for every $1 spent on Google Adwords, businesses earn average revenue of $2. So, running paid ads can be the best way to generate new clients. Though most agencies do it, but to succeed, you need to set your budget and have a strong keyword strategy. Apart from running ads on Google, you can also use Facebook and LinkedIn to target specific audiences. Include a compelling offer or guarantee in your ads to increase their conversion rate. To know more about how you can achieve more success through paid ads, click here.

6. Try Custom Emails

Email marketing is still as relevant as ever. Since the open rate of most template-based emails is relatively low, try writing a custom email to your prospects through email management tools. It will boost the chances of conversion, especially if it provides value and gives an offer. You can use the power of personalization to make your emails even more effective.

7. Leverage Offline Events

Offline events are a great way to generate leads. Some events in your niche can be highly engaging and rewarding. For example, the auto industry looks forward to car racing events, car shows, and swap meetings to network, prospect, and get more clients. Try attending tech meetups, startup competitions, seminars, and panel discussions.

Such offline will allow you to reel in the foot traffic, network aggressively, and meet other attendees to create brand awareness and promote your products and services. Face-to-face conversations are often the best way to build long-term relationships without sounding too salesy.

8. Get Partnerships and Referrals

Partnerships and referrals work best as an acquisition strategy if you get them from agencies and businesses of a different vertical or price range. When marketing and promoting, you may come across many prospects who don't match your ideal buyer persona. However, if you find another business whose buyer persona complements yours, it's a good idea to work with it for mutual benefit.

9. Promote Your Accomplishments

Do an excellent job at customer service and quality, receive a testimonial from a happy customer, get yourself featured in a local or national journal or TV show, or win an award and then promote it aggressively. Talk about it in your marketing messages, social media posts, blog posts, paid ads, tweets, case studies, and everywhere else you can. You could even write articles about your achievements or awards, repurpose this content, use photos of the award ceremony, and develop a case study for broader publicity. It is a fantastic way to spread awareness about your business, build trust, and get more engagement.

10. Use Storytelling to Create Buzz

Storytelling is a great way to engage with your audiences and move them ahead in the sales funnel. You can do it on different platforms through website content, blog posts, paid ads, guest posts, retargeting, YouTube videos, podcasts, and SlideShare presentations.

Putting your point across through a compelling story is a more effective strategy than a monotonous discussion using data points and abstract ideas. We understand stories, learn from them, remember them, and hold on to them in times of crisis. Stories, when told well, can have a profound effect. Therefore, they are the best way to create marketing buzz. To know how to use storytelling to create awareness, click here.

Conclusion

Client acquisition is a never-ending process, so marketers never sit idle. Hopefully, the blueprint shared in this blog will help you to build a sales pipeline. All of these tips are easy to implement, provided you are ready to invest the needed time and effort. Do let us know your views on these strategies in the comments.

Consumer buying behavior has undergone rapid changes in recent years. With so much marketing noise these days, users rarely make a purchase decision immediately after seeing an ad. They evaluate their purchase options several times before deciding.

When they are busy searching online, the various options available to them can be overwhelming. It is why Google terms this stage of a buyer's journey the "Messy Middle."

It's crucial to reconnect with your prospects, especially when they are evaluating their options. Remarketing is the only way to target such customers. Businesses generally use remarketing ads for brand awareness, but you can also use them to send the right marketing messages at the right time. Remarketing ad campaigns can boost your revenue by increasing conversions and ROAS (return on ad spend).

In this blog, we discuss in detail remarketing ads and how to use them effectively to get the most from your paid campaigns.

What is Remarketing?

Businesses are increasing the number of interactions with website visitors to boost sales. Since a user enters the sales funnel the first time they visit the website, it is your responsibility as a marketer to send them the right marketing messages to propel them further into the sales funnel. It increases their awareness of your brand, so the next time they make a purchase, they will consider your brand too.

Remarketing helps businesses achieve various objectives such as promoting awareness, increasing registrations, and driving sales. Initially, you can try both Google and Microsoft platforms for remarketing as both have distinct features. As a market leader, Google is known for its mind-blowing search volume. Meanwhile, Microsoft is known for less competition and affordable prices compared to Google.

Why Are Remarketing Ads so Important?

You can use remarketing ads on both Google and Microsoft to increase the impact of your regular PPC campaigns. Google gives you access to reach more than two million websites and apps through GDN (Google Display Network). Meanwhile, the Microsoft Audience Network allows you to reach users on reputed websites such as Forbes, Yahoo, AOL, and Amazon. You can produce engaging ads, leverage automated bidding, and extract performance reports using remarketing campaigns.

Types of PPC Remarketing Ads

Most remarketing ads target past visitors as they browse different websites on Google Display Network. Since the retargeting feature of PPC ads has a tremendous impact on your conversion rate, you can try several types of ads in this category. Some of them are:

A. Dynamic Remarketing Ads

It is highly customized and, therefore, highly effective. During dynamic remarketing, marketers try to bring users back to complete the buying cycle. They systematically show potential customers ads of specific products that they visited on their website. Highly targeted, these ads get the best results if shown at the right time.

B. Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)

Remarketing lists target the customers that perform follow-up searches after they see a product on a website. RLSA allows you to customize your search ads campaign for your website visitors. It also allows you to customize your bids and ads when these visitors search on Google and partner sites.

C. Video Marketing Ads

YouTube also allows you to remarket to the people who have viewed your videos or visited your YouTube channel. It is also an excellent way to generate leads and increase subscribers.

D. Customer Match Lists

Customer match lists allow advertisers to create paid ads to target prospects on different channels such as Search Network, Gmail, Display Network, and YouTube. They use a visitor's contact informationāphone number, email address, or physical address.

A customer match list is highly result-oriented. With it, you can match around 50.40% of your email list to real users who you can target through your ads. It allows Google Ads and Microsoft advertising to show ads online.

How to Implement Remarketing?

Although remarketing ads are a proven way to drive results, your strategy may vary according to your client's business goals. You can use the following to narrow down your campaign's focus and achieve your client's objectives.

A. As far as access to visitor information is concerned, Google advertisers are on top, and they can target most website visitors and app users. Therefore, you can use the "Google ads optimize list" to reach your website visitors, app users, and your audience at other places.

B. You can also use MSFT (Microsoft Corporation) ad targeting options on Microsoft platforms. It will help you experiment with innovative bidding techniques to optimize conversions.

Here are a few intelligent bidding strategies you can use to drive conversions:

A. Enhanced CPC (cost-per-click): It can help you tweak manual bids so you can target interested potential customers.B. Target CPA (cost per action): In such remarketing ads, you need to optimize your bidding to get maximum conversions at the predefined cost per action.C. Target ROAS: It allows you to generate more revenue at a predefined ROAS.

Tip: You need to raise your bid if you want to reach more customers and improve ROI. Consider making a bidding strategy to stay competitive and achieve a high-quality score and improved ad rank. With a better quality score, you have a higher chance of being seen on the Google Display Network.

How to Set Up PPC Remarketing Ad Campaigns?

A. You need to target lookalike audiences or customers with similar characteristics to those on your existing remarketing list.

B. Reconnect with the website visitors who abandoned their shopping carts.

C. If you have a list of customers, use it to upsell or cross-sell your secondary or complementary products. They are more likely to buy. You can also customize your ads for them and create remarketing lists for specific products.

D. To prevent inundating customers with an overwhelming number of ads, limit the number of times your visitors can see your ads.

E. Schedule the ads when your target audience is most likely to see them. You can use Google Analytics for this purpose.

Tips for Creating Effective Remarketing Ads

A. Use custom ads and keep the content relevant to your audience. Maintain visual uniformity, and use strong calls to action (CTAs). You should also test your ad copies frequently through split testing.

B. Use responsive display ads. They adjust to fit any space neatly. It will save you time and improve the user experience across different devices.

C. If you have a remarketing list that is more likely to convert, you can increase bids on it.

Conclusion

Since remarketing ads are created to help you reconnect with users who have already shown interest in your products, you should continue experimenting and tweaking your bidding strategy to improve your ROAS. In trying to connect with your ideal customers, focus on the objectives you want to attain.

If you need expert help with remarketing ads, DashClicks should be your one-stop destination. As a white label PPC agency, we will run your campaigns as per the latest market trends to achieve the best results. To learn more about our remarketing services, click here.

SUMMARY

Let’s get straight to the point… you want to make more money, right?

Chad Kodary, CEO of DashClicks will be pulling back the curtains and showing you the top 10 fastest ways he’s managed to add additional revenue to his agencies bottom-line.

If you’re an entrepreneur that loves scaling your company, making more revenue, and growing internally as an individual at the same time… this is for you!

Schedule a call here to get more information about our DashElite private coaching program:   https://bit.ly/chadpartner

Online marketing includes several strategies such as content marketing, SEO, PPC, social media marketing, email marketing, affiliate marketing, and lead generation. However, most digital marketing agencies and startups are proficient in just one or two streams, making it difficult for them to efficiently handle all the varied activities.

It is why many reputed brands are now choosing white label agencies for their marketing requirements. There are many advantages of outsourcing to a white label agency and reselling their ready-made solutions to your clients after branding them as your own.

Some of the primary benefits include:

• It saves you time, money, and effort. It allows you to cut time and cost incurred in recruiting and maintaining experts and training new hires
• It enables you to create new revenue streams for your agency
• It allows you to focus on your core strengths and business activities by taking care of all else

However, collaborating with a white label company can be tricky if, as a business, you are resistant to change, fear losing control, and are inflexible to new ideas and ways of working. But hiring white label services can do wonders for your business, especially if you are facing the following challenges:

1. You Want to Expand Business Services Across Domain

Because of market uncertainties and unpredictable product life cycles, businesses are advised to grow fast and lean, to scale up or pivot. They need to expand if a new business opportunity arrives. However, most companies cannot capitalize on such opportunities because of many bottlenecks, such as lack of staff, infrastructure, and expertise in a niche field.

For instance, you run a digital marketing agency, and you get a bulk order to develop websites and apps. You can't take on this opportunity if you do not have the trained workforce to provide the requested services. A white label agency can help here. You can outsource web and app development to a white label website design agency proficient in it and provide other services your client requires using in-house teams. This way, you can retain the client and expand the contract's ticket size.

2. You Don't Have the Budget to Hire Additional Workforce

Most startups and small businesses have budget constraints. So, they hire only a few employees to run in-house operations. When such a company wins a series of contracts to provide specialized services, it will struggle to meet the requirements with its small in-house teams.

In such a situation, instead of wasting time, effort, and money on running aggressive recruitment campaigns, the company should hire a white label agency that specializes in the needed field. Investing in hiring bigger teams can be overkill for a startup, especially given the market's fluctuating demand.

3. You Can't Deliver the Quality Your Clients Want

Sometimes, you don't have in-house staff to provide the kind of quality service your client seeks in addition to the existing services you provide. For instance, suppose you offer social media marketing services. In that case, your client may also need you to arrange a copywriter to write their website blogs in sync with their social media branding. It can be highly time-consuming and tedious to hire an expert copywriter. But with the right Recruiting CRM, you can streamline the recruitment process, making it easier to find the perfect copywriter for your team.

Moreover, it may not be a sensible business decision to hire people for this position permanently when copywriting is not one of your primary services. Remote hiring a white label copywriting service can be the best option in this case.

4. You are Failing to Meet Your Business Goals

Startups often struggle with operations and meeting their business goals and revenue targets. In such a situation, it becomes crucial to keep the company afloat. Though they may be good at running their core business operations, most startup owners find it challenging to identify and plug loopholes. A white label agency can assess the underlying issues and bring in the much-needed fresh perspective. It will help you identify areas that need improvement and implement new strategies to put your business back on track.

5. Your Business is Not Growing

It's a major red flag when a company stops growing. During the pandemic, many companies that were either not growing or were operating at a steady pace with a limited number of clients went entirely out of business and had to pause operations.

It happens when there is a slump in demand or during economic downturns. The situation may aggravate if you don't have a sound strategy in place to face it. As your existing clients leave, your revenues plummet. Partnering with a white label marketing agency is the best way to navigate such sticky situations as it allows you to expand operations and build cash reserves. The support of financially strong clients during lean business periods keeps small businesses afloat.

Conclusion

White labeling is a highly cost-effective business practice. It is also the most feasible solution when your business is struggling with fluctuating demand and market uncertainties. It allows you to stay agile and expand business operations without compromising on client satisfaction and service quality. However, you should do thorough research before hiring a white label agency. It should be competent, experienced, accountable, and have a successful track record of delivering quantifiable results.

With more than 3.8 billion people using social networks globally, social media marketing (SMM) has become one of the most powerful, versatile, actionable, and cost-effective strategies to grow and promote your business. It helps you reach your target audience, create a loyal fanbase, build your brand and boost sales and revenue.

Social media marketing may seem overwhelming, but it is a phenomenal opportunity. 97% of marketers use social media, and 78% of salespeople outsell their peers by leveraging it for their business. However, it's crucial to use social media effectively to achieve business goals. According to Social Media Examiner, out of the 97% of marketers who use SMM, about 85% don't know how to use it for best results.

In this blog, we discuss the 15 most significant advantages of using SMM and share how you can leverage these for optimal business growth.

1. Increases Brand Awareness

Consumers buy brands they recognize. Therefore, boosting brand recognition and awareness is every company's fundamental goal. Brand recognition is measured by people's ability to identify a product by looking at its logo design, tagline, or advertisement. Sometimes, consumers may also recognize a brand via an audio cue, such as iPhone or Nokia's signature ringtones. Using social media is the best way to build a brand in the digital age. It gets your brand in front of a massive audience effortlessly and cost-effectively. They can always see and know about your product even if they don't intend to buy it.

Tip: The branding exercise on social media starts with creating your profile, logo, and cover photos. You need to make sure that the visual elements of your brand are well represented.

{ Image Source }

You should know how to place your logo strategically to accentuate your branding. If you look at Pepsi's on Twitter, you'll see it's clutter-free and straightforward. Their logo is visible on the profile picture, and the cover photo has a Pepsi can and their brand color palette. The cover photo connects the logo to the idea of a fresh cold drink for people who love sports.

2. Creates Buzz Around Your Products

Generating conversations and marketing buzz about their brand is every business's ultimate goal. Therefore, if you want people to invest in your products or services, try to encourage discussion around your brand. Social media is the most effective channel to help you create the buzz with minimum or no investment.

Southwest Airlines' marketing strategy relies heavily on social conversations. They use them to reinforce their customer relationships; they accomplish it by being appreciative and attentive towards their customers. When you can stimulate genuine conversations on social media, you receive a great deal of feedback about your products.

{ Image Source }

Tip: Use social media to engage with your audience, especially when they comment on your posts. Make them feel that there is a human face behind your brand that they can interact with. It also makes them feel valued.

Share content that can trigger a conversation. Give shout-outs to your partner companies and other companies in your network. Open-ended questions are also a great way to initiate meaningful conversations.

3. Provides Ready Audience

Monitoring social conversations is extremely important to keep yourself abreast of current market trends and know your audience's wants. The act of monitoring such conversations is called social listening. These conversations primarily highlight consumers' pain points and issues they are struggling with. Smart businesses tweak their marketing strategy based on these insights.

Social listening also helps you know the tone and language your audience uses so you can replicate it in your marketing messages.

Tip: Use social listening to know what people are talking about in your industry or niche and build your marketing strategy around it. You can use a social media tool to check the product or brand mentions.

4. Helps You Tell Your Brand's Story

Telling compelling stories can be a game-changer for your brand's image. When you share your brand mission and stories on social media, you can achieve several goals in one go. Compelling brand stories appeal to emotions and communicate enduring values. Craft your brand story to reflect varied elements such as your social media strategy, website copy, and ads. The following tips can help:

• Highlight the advantages: Explain how your product or service can improve your customer’s life. It does not have to be a massive change; even a slight improvement that provides them some relief or adds value to their life will do.
• Infuse emotions: We respond to emotions more strongly than to logic. Therefore, appeal to emotions with your product.
• Connect with your audience: Engage with the people you’re selling your products to.
• Tell the truth: Your audience should believe that your brand story is true, earnest, and worth investing in.

{ Image Source }

Tip: Share stories of your customers; make them your brand's mouthpiece. Ask them to share their reviews. Most of them will be happy to get featured. You can select the positive reviews and share them.

5. Allows You to Gather Data From Audience Research

Social media platforms have built-in analytical tools to gather data about audience behavior. It sounds similar to social listening, but it is different. You should focus on a specific product and the keywords your customers are using to search for it. The insights will help you tweak your marketing strategy and improve your campaigns.

Tip: You can get insights about your posts and ads using metrics such as "reach" and "engagement" on all major social media channels.

6. Allows You to Provide Instant Customer Service

Customer service is the key to a thriving business. Investment in customer service pays off as customer loyalty and increased customer satisfaction. More consumers are using social media to enquire about products and seek instant support.

Instant customer support is already prevalent on Twitter, especially among service sectors such as airlines. People ask time-sensitive questions on Twitter and get instant responses from the companies.

{ Image Source }

Tip: If you use separate teams to handle social media and customer service, ensure that the communication between them is quick, consistent, smooth, and transparent.

7. Helps Build Customer Loyalty

Brand loyalty is every company's premium asset. Social media allows businesses to build customer loyalty for free. In a world where every business is fighting for attention, people interact with the brands they love. Unsurprisingly, more than half of the customers who follow your brand are likely to be loyal to your brand.

Usually, this is how it works. A social media user follows you. Then they start choosing you over your competition. Finally, they begin to advocate your brand online and become your loyal customer, increasing your website traffic.

Tip: Make every effort to keep your loyal customers engaged and happy. It will reward you many times over in ways you can't imagine.

Reward your loyal customers occasionally by announcing special promotional schemes and discounts. However, be mindful of not violating Facebook's promotional content guidelines. You can collaborate with startups and other businesses that might be interested in giving out merchandise (t-shirts, hats, sunglasses, corporate and fashion accessories, office stationery) to promote their brands. You can also give away your products for free on special occasions, festivals, and events.

8. Sends Referral Traffic To Your Website

After search engines, social networks send the most amount of direct referral traffic to your website. Therefore, you should decide the content and frequency of your posts for optimal results. Use a content calendar and follow a fixed schedule for posting. You can use social media tools such as Hootsuite to find the most effective time to post.

Tip: Use URL shorteners like bitly to shorten your links when posting on social media channels. They save space and look aesthetically pleasing.

{ Image Source }

9. Helps You Earn Inbound Links and Improve SEO

Social media has a significant impact on SEO. Google considers social shares, likes, and mentions as a major ranking factor.

Furthermore, a diverse audience views your content on social networks. They can be bloggers, writers, content publishers, or major brands. They can gather ideas from your post, write a new article and link back to you. This way, you earn free inbound links that can improve your rankings against your competition. Both Google and Bing display tweets in their search results. That's why the topics that trend on Twitter also rank on top in Google search.

{ Image Source }

Tip: Use social media post scheduling tools such as Hootsuite or CoSchedule to publish content at the most effective time when your audience is most likely to see it. It will help you earn more backlinks.

10. Social Media is Mostly Free and Cost-Effective

Most social media is available to use free of cost. However, you might need to pay for SMM and promotion. For most businesses, organic promotion is enough.

But for paid advertising, decide on a budget before you start your campaign. Social platforms use AI to take care of your ads' performance and provide you with custom-built, targetable audiences. As a result, you get to target the right audiences and start getting better results with minimum investment.

Tip: People use social media for leisure, and they don't like to see promotional content in their feeds. Advertising on social media is not a bad idea, but you should do it professionally by paying for it to look like an ad. Even if promotional, your posts should engage, inform, and entertain.

11. Establishes Your Brand As An Authority

A significant SMM objective is to help you establish your brand as a topical authority. If you post consistently on social media and receive high engagement, search engines start to perceive you as an authority in your domain or on a specific topic. Soon you may acquire the "go-to" authority status for a given topic and start receiving more traffic on your landing pages. Therefore, when you create content, use sources with a high domain authority score.

Tip: You can use Moz's domain authority score to find the most authoritative resources for your content by downloading Moz's free toolbar. A domain authority score of more than 60 is considered good.

12. Allows You to Retarget Your Audience

SMM is incomplete without retargeting, a handy feature of paid advertising on social media. Given that only 2% of customers purchase something during their first visit to your website, you should have a solid plan to target the remaining 98% using a sales funnel. The most popular method to target this audience is to run retargeting ads.

When a visitor comes to your site, the website places cookies on its browser. When they leave without buying and revisit the social media site, the retargeting service starts displaying the ad in their feed. It acts as a gentle reminder and is usually successful in driving conversion.

13. Gives Visibility To Your Cause

Social media allows you to share your stories with the potential for them to go viral. You can use stories to promote your cause, run a campaign, or support your branding efforts. A story that targets emotions and is inspired by other viral stories has a high chance of going viral. You might have seen various viral stories. They use a good plot and emotions ā€” struggle, conflict, heartbreak, or heroic courage ā€” to achieve something big. Such videos have an underlying message that leaves a lasting impression.

Tip: An SMM campaign's objective should be to reach the right people, even if they are few. You should try to make a lasting impression, but don't do something desperate or forced to make your post go viral. Good content goes viral if created with enthusiasm, is well-planned, uses effective storytelling, and is promoted heavily.

14. Drives Conversions

Apart from sending traffic to your website, social media also helps in driving conversions. You can take the following steps to boost conversions through social posts and ads:

1. Add strong calls to action (CTAs)
2. Create engaging landing pages for your ads to prevent customers from bouncing off
3. Announce contests and giveaways frequently
4. Use social ads but don’t post promotional content in organic space

15. Promotes Your Content

Social media is currently the biggest platform to market content. Each month approximately 409 million people view more than 20 billion pages of content globally. You can use both free and paid tactics to promote your content on various social platforms. You can also use content repurposing to increase its impact.

You must take into consideration the following when promoting a post:

1. Its headline
2. It should have a catchy image
3. The time of posting

Use your creativity when writing a message for your posts. The content should be original and appealing. Use storytelling to prevent promotional content from looking like an ad.

Tip: Use this Lightroom Instagram Presets collection to spruce up your images for Instagram and quickly achieve the desired effect.

Conclusion

Much like with other digital marketing strategies, success through SMM largely depends on learning, experimenting, and updating your strategy from time to time. Its benefits and rewards almost always outweigh the time, cost, and effort it demands. Within a few weeks of implementing effective SMM, you will likely see an increase in traffic, conversion rate, brand loyalty, and improved SEO. Furthermore, since it is highly cost-effective, you have nothing to lose. Your competitors are already there on different social platforms leveraging SMM's benefits. You should use it too and make it your own.

Though Google Analytics (GA) can be a nightmare for a novice, if you perform website audits and implement effective technical SEO, it can be the most reliable and effective tool.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics provides an in-depth assessment of a website or app's performance. Its ability to accurately analyze vast incoming traffic data makes it indispensable for marketers who mean business. Google Analytics (GA) integrates with Google's various marketing and advertising platforms, such as Google search console and Google ads.

There are several other tools with similar features. But since GA offers actionable in-depth reports and insights, it is most suitable for a data-driven marketing environment. This blog is an introductory guide to using GA. We discuss the essentials ā setting up your GA account, the various GA dimensions, metrics, GA audience, segments, and reports, and how to navigate through it all.

Is Google Analytics Free?

Google Analytics offers a free version with most of the features a small or medium-sized business might need. However, if you have a large enterprise, you should opt for the premium version ā Analytics 360. It has many advanced features such as attribution modeling, advanced funnel reporting, and roll-up reporting. But it has a high subscription fee. Analytics 360 starts at $150,000 annually.

How to Set Up Google Analytics?

Like other Google products, to set up GA, you need to create a Google account. You then need to register for Analytics. Usually, it has three layers.

• Organization: Bigger businesses run many accounts under an umbrella account known as an “organization.” For example, Microsoft can run many GA accounts, but the organization will remain the same, i.e., Microsoft. It’s optional to choose.
• Account(s): Various users can access GA using their accounts. You can assign up to 50 properties, i.e., websites or apps, to one account.
• Views: There can be two views per property — one with no configuration, the other with a filter to exclude any traffic from your own company, bots, and spam.

Here's how you can set up your Google Analytics account:

1. Create a Google account: Go to google.com/analytics and click on Sign in to Analytics

Begin with creating or signing into your current GA account.

2. Add the website's name and enter additional relevant information in setting up your property field

Create and name your property and enter additional relevant information such as industry, timezone, etc. You can also choose an account to link this property to.

3. Add a view to the propertyĀ

Go to the property, create a view from the menu, name it, select the typeāweb or app, and fill in other necessary information. A property can have up to 25 views.

4. Add your tracking code to your website's <head> section

When creating a property, you need a unique ID and a global site tag to track and collect data. You can paste your global site tag on each webpage you want to "track." Place it right after the opening <head> tag. You'll also have to disclose what type of website it is, i.e., dynamic or static. It will help you to set up the data collection accordingly. For more information on how to install the Google Analytics tracking code, click here.

5. Verify if the analytics code is working on your website

Open the website to check real-time reports. It will show at least one visitor ā that's you; it means your code is working.

Do you need to add the Google Analytics tracking code to every page?

You don't need to add the code to every page of your website. If the website is big, all you need to do is insert the tag to every page template in the header module, and it will apply to all the pages. If you have two-page types, insert the code into two separate header modules, and it will apply to the rest of the pages.

Google Analytics Dimensions and Metrics

To understand and use GA efficiently, you need to be familiar with its dimensions and metrics. Dimensions are standard variables such as browser, location, landing page, device, and customer type. Meanwhile, metrics are quantitative variables such as sessions, page views, conversions, bounce rate, and session duration. The GA reporting format has dimensions as rows and metrics as columns.

Custom Dimensions and Metrics

You can create custom dimensions and metrics using Analytics data and non-Analytics data. You can know more about user behavior and the relationship between engagement and metrics such as pages per session and conversions by creating the following three dimensions:

• Advocate: User who shared your content on social (stage 1 in the sales funnel)
• Subscriber: User who subscribed to your newsletter (stage 2 in the sales funnel)
• Customer: User who paid for premium access (stage 3 in the sales funnel)

What's a Google Analytics Audience?

An audience is a group of people with a common element such as region or age group. Google Analytics provides a few built-in audiences and insights on them based on available visitor data. GA also gives the option to create custom audiences. For example, if your target consumer group is female millennials living in Florida, you can easily make a custom audience that includes female visitors from Florida aged between 23 and 35.

Now you need to create a new audience segment. You can use its data for your reports.

What's an Audience Segment in Google Analytics?

When your data is divided into small chunks, each set is called a segment. You can create segments based on different factors such as users, sessions, and hits.

• Users: Someone who has purchased from your site or has signed up for a program or service.
• Sessions: It includes categorization based on the task performed on a website—for example, all sessions when the user viewed a product page.
• Hits: This segment reveals all the website “hits” of a specific event. For example, you can determine all the “hits” of an instant purchase or an addition to the shopping cart.

Like “audiences,” Google Analytics also allows you to fetch data using various “segments,” which can sometimes be highly granular. It means that you can further split the data according to even more specific variables. A report can use a maximum of four segments at a time.

What are the Different Types of Reports in Google Analytics?

Reporting can be a bit overwhelming in Google Analytics as there are numerous options to choose from. Here are the eight major and very important types of reports and their variations that Google Analytics can generate for you:

1. Google Analytics Real-Time Report

It gives you real-time insights into the website's traffic data. It helps you determine the number of visitors and the particular pages they're visiting. This report also tells you the origin of the traffic as well as location data.

However, real-time reports offer little value for strategy-building. But you can use them to track how much traffic you're getting from a new social media or blog post and gauge the success of a sales event.

2. Google Analytics Audience Report

It carries much more weight than a real-time report. It's essential to review it a few times every week to assess your website's performance accurately.

You’ll be able to find “Audiences” below “Overview.” There are also expandable menus for various metrics such as “Behavior,” “Interests,” and “Demographics.” The best way to learn is to explore each of them and see how they can help you assess the traffic.

3. Google Analytics Active Users Report

“Active users” aren’t the users who are currently on your website. It refers to users who visited your website the previous day and remained active for some time.

You can use this report to analyze data in various ways to make informed business decisions. For example, if your traffic includes more one-day users than repeat visitors, you might be struggling with retention. When visitors don't come back to your site or app ā this report can help you find out why.

4. Customer Lifetime Value Report

As a marketer, you are probably familiar with the concept of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) and how it's calculated.

The CLV report tells you how much value each customer is bringing to your business. You can also evaluate the lifetime value of customers acquired from paid advertising compared to those attracted through organic search. You can use this information to decide which revenue channels deserve more attention. It's important to note that the lifetime value is measured only for 90 days.

5. Google Analytics Cohort Report

Cohort analysis is popularly seen as “the single most powerful report in GA.” It groups customers by a common characteristic, such as acquisition date — the day someone first visited your website.

You can find the cohort type, which by default is the acquisition date in GA, in the left-hand column. It is further split by cohort size into the day, week, or month.

The first row contains information about all the customers in that cohort. The rows below show the activity on that day, week, or month. The cohort report will tell you how many campaign goals have been achieved during a specific date range. It also includes additional details such as the customer acquisition date and goal completion date.

6. Google Analytics Acquisition Report

It provides traffic analysis by source. It can be direct, organic, referral, social, email, and paid search.

Go to “All Traffic” on the left column, click on “Channels,” and select a category to see the projections associated with that source.

If you want to see the report in graphics format, click on “Treemaps” under “All Traffic.”

GA also informs you which channel is sending you more referral traffic, so you can tweak your strategy and focus your marketing efforts accordingly. Apart from the traffic source, GA also tells you which landing pages on your website are receiving referral traffic.

7. Google Analytics Behavior Report

The behavior reports given by Google Analytics are immensely useful for marketers. They reveal what actions your visitors take when visiting your website, including the pages they visit. You can obtain these reports from the menu on your Google Analytics dashboard's left sidebar, where you will find various sections and tools.

Site Content

This report helps you audit and update your website content based on the performance of web pages, blog posts, and landing pages.

All Pages

It gives you a page-wise report on the traffic and insights about traffic fluctuations, if any, over a specific period. You can get it by going to Site Content > All Pages. It will also allow you to compare page views between different URLs. If you add a Page Title, you will see each page's name alongside its URL.

Content Drilldown

This report shows your site's structure at the subdomain and subfolder levels. If you have a highly complex website, this report can be tremendously helpful.

Landing Pages

Landing pages report tells you how a visitor first interacted with your website. It informs you of the sources (direct, organic, paid, social) that got visitors to the landing pages. You can add "source" as a secondary dimension. It displays the web pages as seen on smartphones and tablets to help you manage the traffic from portable devices.

Exit Pages Report

It shows the last page a visitor saw before leaving your site.

In addition to these reports, there are several others too:

• Site speed report: It gives information about how quickly your site loads. It also includes a site speed page timings report, which provides a URL’s average page-loading time.

• Site search report: It provides critical information about every website view, including usage, sessions, and search terms used. You can use it for keyword research.

• Events report: It provides information about user interactions with content. To get this report, you need to add a code to your website that tracks the actions you’re interested in.

8. Google Analytics Conversion Reports

Every website has one or more objectives for the visitors. For example, an eCommerce site owner may want its visitors to sign up for its newsletter, create a user account, and/or complete the purchase.

Media companies want visitors to spend as much time on their site as possible to maximize ad revenue. Similarly, B2B websites wish visitors to download educational material such as eBooks or reports or sign up for a webinar. With GA, you can measure all these objectives and do much more.

These goals are called conversions. There are four major types of goal-oriented metrics:

• Destination: You can use it when the goal is to reach a specific page, such as a product page or a thank you page.
• Event: It’s when the goal is to watch a video or share a piece of content on social media.
• Duration: This one is when the goal is to stretch a user’s session beyond a preset period.
• Pages per session: You can use it when the goal is to make a user visit specific pages per session.

Once you've decided on the goals, follow these tips to create, edit and share them:

Overview

If you want to assess your overall goal-wise performance, go to “Overview” and get a report. To drive maximum value from it, you should compare date ranges and/or look at segment-wise goal completions.

Goal URLs Report

You must know where a goal was achieved. For example, if there are newsletter subscription opt-ins on three different pages, the goal URLs report will tell you the visitor signed up for the subscription on which page.

Funnel Visualization Report

It allows you to see sequential goals to help you visualize your sales funnel.

In a sales funnel, a customer journey has various stages and corresponding goals.

The first goal: Visitor visited the product listing page

The “goal before checkout”: Visitor added a product to the shopping cart

The “previous goal” just before the purchase: Visitor clicked “checkout”

The last goal (can be): Visitor arrived at the order confirmation page

Try to determine why visitors are leaving at various stages to increase the conversion rate. For instance, if most users leave the session during checkout, you can alter the process to let them check out as a guest without creating an account. You can also take other measures to lower the shopping cart abandonment rate.

Goal Flow

It provides you with the sessions that led to the final goal. However, in Goal Flow, it doesn't matter if the user completed a particular goal. It shares loopbacks and includes sessions when a user moves back to a previous page or refreshes the current page. It helps evaluate various segments to compare conversion rates.

Smart Goals

This report is for marketers who use Google Ads but don't measure conversions. AI and machine learning help identify the "best" sessions or those with the highest probability of generating conversions. Google then uses them to make Smart Goals. You can use Smart Goals in Google Ads to optimize your advertising performance.

Conclusion

Google Analytics is a valuable and multi-feature tool that any business can use to get actionable data. If used smartly, it can substantially boost your website's performance.Ā  There is a lot of information in this article, and you can always come back to learn sophisticated techniques for deeper insights. We wish you good luck on your journey with Google's complex and potent analytical weapon ā Google Analytics.