Category: Marketing

Episode 169: Developing a Cohesive Brand with Mark de Grasse, the New President and General Manager of DigitalMarketer Episode 169: Developing a Cohesive Brand with Mark de Grasse, the New President and General Manager of DigitalMarketer
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Freelancers and agencies fall into the one-time project trap all the time. They work with clients on smaller projects for a few weeks or a month, and then move on to the next client. This puts them in a perpetual sales cycle without a dollar of predictable income.

The outcome leads to a stressed founder and management team, who are all unsure of where their next paycheck will come from.

If this is where your freelance business or agency is right now—there is a solution. It’s called retainer contracts and they’re about to become your new best friend.

What is a Retainer?

A retainer contract is an agreement between client and company that you’ll perform specific services for a set rate each month. For example, your content marketing agency could provide 8 articles per month, distribution, and splintered content for $13,500 a month. 

These contracts can either be on a month-to-month basis or go for an agreed-upon amount of time. For example, 3 months, 6 months, 12 months, or even more.

With retainer contracts, you’ll know how much revenue you’re making from clients each month and (if you’re smart enough to make multi-month contracts) how much you’re making in the near future. For freelancers and agency owners, the predictability you’re seeking comes from these retainer contracts.

But, how can you secure these retainers so you can shift out of perpetual sales mode?

Securing Retainers 101

Retainers are intimidating. If you’ve never asked clients to sign on to a retainer, it’s easy to think they’re going to say no. Of course, they’d rather have their services a la carte—right? Well, that’s actually not the case at all. Clients are happy to sign on to retainers they feel confident in. It helps them solve the problem they’re currently facing (like a struggle with content marketing).

Here are a few tips for securing retainer contracts so you can go into your next contract discussion with confidence.

Only Offer Your Services in Varying Retainer Packages

To get out of the perpetual sales cycle of one-time projects, you can package your services into retainer contracts. Take out all of your one-time project packages and only allow your current and future clients to work with you in retainers. This can feel scary at first and like you’re going to lose out on business, but a few months into only working with retainer clients and you’ll never look back.

Your retainer packages could look like:

Freelance Facebook Marketer: 6 months of Facebook Ads (included: strategy, ad creative, data and analytics, benchmark goals, consulting).

SEO Marketing Agency: 1 year of SEO services (included: 8x SEO articles per month, 4x SEO pillar posts per month, 50x backlinks per month).

Freelance Email Marketer: 6 months of email marketing (included: 2x weekly newsletters, campaign and offer creation, 2x campaigns per month, data and analytics, benchmark goals, consulting).

It feels like a big ask to get clients…

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Content Marketing doesn’t have to be hard, there are so many free resources out there to help you. Here are 6 tips to saving yourself time on content creation this week!

Blog Highlight: https://www.digitalmarketer.com/blog/content-marketing-tips-to-save-time/

WHAT IS DIGITALMARKETER:

DigitalMarketer is the premier online community for digital marketing professionals. It’s a place where you can learn how to market like a pro, connect with industry experts, and get the strategies and tools you need to grow and scale your business to new heights.

https://www.digitalmarketer.com/

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If you sold your business to Amazon for $1 billion—what would your advice to other entrepreneurs be?

Justin Kan, the founder of Amazon acquired Twitch, isn’t afraid to share the reality of entrepreneurship:

You’re always going to feel like you’re drowning—even when you’re succeeding. Which makes being an entrepreneur incredibly confusing.

Are you doing a great job or a terrible job?

This is an entrepreneur’s, like a digital marketing agency founder’s, existential life crisis. The numbers can look great, but does that mean their customers and employees are happy? What happens when you’ve missed the mark on every single metric you set at the beginning of the quarter…but your employees and customers have never talked so positively about you before?

As Justin explains, these are questions you’ll be asking yourself for a very long time as a marketing agency owner. You’ll learn to love them and to challenge yourself in trying to make the hard times a little more enjoyable by leaning into the unknown.

But that’s easier said than done. 

What does that actually look like?

For agency owners, it’s the answers to these 3 questions.

Is your digital marketing agency doing a good job?

You’ve realized by now that your agency lives on spreadsheets and reflection. If you’ve read Traction, you’ve already set up your weekly meetings, figured out what your biggest obstacles to success are, and narrowed down your 3-year and 10-year plans. If not, you’ve probably put something like this together on your own. Now, you’re staring at a beautiful sheet of numbers that tell you how your business is doing.

But what do all those numbers mean?

Great revenue doesn’t always mean happy customers. You could have your best quarter in sales, but your clients are feeling left behind and like they can’t ever get a hold of your team. That’s not the work of an agency doing a good job.

Or, your revenue could be on the floor. Yet, you have extra time to help your clients, and they’ve never been happier with your agency.

Part of figuring out if you’re doing a good job (despite feeling like you’re drowning) is to look at the numbers and the words. 

Let’s explain what that looks like with 3 questions you can ask yourself to figure out if your digital marketing agency is doing a good job.

#1: What deliverables did you promise your clients and have you sent all of those over?

First, let’s look at the basics. The foundation of your digital marketing agency is creating deliverables that lead to traffic and conversions for your clients. Your clients can’t get results if they don’t have those deliverables because:

• Your team is behind on final edits and can’t deliver them to clients
• The team isn’t big enough to create the number of deliverables promised
• There’s a bottleneck keeping deliverables from getting created, edited, or sent

What deliverables were promised to your clients—and have they received all of…

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Research shows that for every $1 you spend on email marketing, you can expect an average return of $42. Compare that to paid advertising where the average ROI is $2 for every $1 spent. 

You can see why email is such a crucial part of an effective product launch strategy. 

Email is profitable because it allows you to talk directly to your audience. You don’t have to rely on ever-changing algorithms and hope your message reaches the intended segment. Email gives you a direct, unobstructed means of communication, thus a bigger return.

In this article, we’ll cover what’s needed to grab attention in a stacked inbox. Then, we’ll break down 10 successful product announcement emails, looking at why they work and what you can learn from them.   

Winning the fight for inbox attention

Whether it’s a new product launch, product update, or upcoming event invitation, the aim of a product announcement email is always the same. It should:

1. Get the word out to as many people in your target audience as possible
2. Educate customers on features, benefits, and availability
3. Convince customers to take action

To achieve any of these things, you need to get your email seen. This means winning the battle for inbox attention. With around 320 billion emails sent and received every day, this is no easy feat.

That sheer volume means a product launch email can’t be a one-and-done effort. A single correspondence is too likely to get lost in the shuffle.

To reach, engage and convince your target audience, your best bet is to approach launches as an email campaign. Craft a series of emails that grab attention whether the recipient is an excited fan or only vaguely familiar with your brand.

Creating a product announcement email sequence

With any email sequence, timing is as important as the messaging. For a product announcement, you want to build anticipation ahead of launch and follow up after. 

Your email sequence should look something like this:

1. Teaser email: A heads up that something new is coming soon. You can hint at what it is, but don’t go into too much detail. You only want to build hype and excitement. Scientists have found that anticipation can be even more rewarding than the experience itself, so make sure to utilize it to build interest. Aim to send out your teaser email up to two weeks before launch. 

2. Product announcement email: Tell your audience about the product they’ve been looking forward to. Fill them in on key details (what it is, how it benefits them, launch date, etc). Use images and videos where necessary to show off your product and ramp up the excitement. 

3. Product launch email: Let your audience know that the product is live. Reiterate features and benefits while you’ve got their full attention. 

4. Follow-up email: After the initial excitement has died down and sales have slowed, follow up to remind your audience of your new product and what’s…

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Published an ad but don’t see it getting the reach you expected? Wondering if your Facebook ads are delivering at all?

Keep reading for a list of the top reasons why your Facebook ad campaign isn’t delivering and how you can fix it right away.

What does “not delivering” mean on Facebook ads?

“Not delivering” means that your active ads are not being displayed to your target audience. This can happen to new ads or to existing ads that have been delivering in the past.

To see if this is the case for your campaigns, ad sets or ads, check the Delivery column in Ads Manager.

The status “Not delivering” can appear for a variety of reasons. If an issue prevents the ad from being delivered, the sub-status will read “Update required.”

No matter the reason, don’t fret or ditch the campaign. The reason is, more often than not, something maddeningly simple and straightforward to fix.

10 reasons your Facebook ads are not delivering

Here’s a list of the most common reasons your Facebook ads are active but not delivering — and what you can do to set things right.

1. Your ad post is not available

Problem: The post associated with your ad is not available

The Facebook post associated with your ad may have been removed, or you may no longer have permission to view it. Or, you may be using a post that can’t be promoted in an ad.

Your ad might contain an offer/event that has ended/expired, or the product you’re trying to promote couldn’t be found because the product ID is missing or the product set is empty (out of stock or deleted).

Also, Shared posts can’t be boosted by anyone except the owner of the original post.

Fix: Choose a different post or adjust permissions

Depending on the exact reason, you can either:

• Get permission from the page Admin or Editor.
• Choose a different Page post.
• Create a new offer and ad in a different ad set.
• Review your catalog to see if the product you wish to promote is available.

Once you’ve made the necessary changes, manually toggle the ad set back to active, and the “Update required” sub-status should now be gone.

2. Your spending limit has been reached

Problem: You set a spending limit and forgot about it

Another simple problem that’s easy to forget (but also easy to fix!) is going over your account’s spending limit. Your account spending limit is the overall spending limit you set for the entire ad account. Once the limit is reached, Facebook will stop showing your ads.

Fix: Change, remove, or reset your limit

In Ads Manager, navigate to the Billing & Payment Methods section in Settings.

You will find…

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Brand is the perception of your company in the eyes of the world. It’s shorthand for who and what you are. 

Getting branding right gives people a reason to love you, which they’ll reward with loyalty. Getting it wrong, however, can create an impression you may never be able to change.

In this article, you’ll learn what’s required to create a branding campaign that strikes the right chord. We’ll look at the importance of strategy and cover the key ingredients a campaign needs to increase brand awareness. We’ll also give you creative fuel by breaking down how Lemonade has used branding to disrupt the market.

Branding strategy is more than a series of gimmicks

When we start in business one of the first things we’re encouraged to do is nail the branding: come up with a memorable brand name, a good logo, and a striking visual brand identity. These elements are important in making you recognizable. 

If you were to show a group of people the Apple logo, most would associate it with Apple the tech company and not a Red Delicious. The same goes for all of the major tech and consumer companies in the world: Facebook, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Nike, etc. 

If people see your name or logo and instantly know who you are, you’ve done a great job of creating the tangible aspects of your brand. 

But it’s what people feel when they see your brand that matters. 

Reading the company names we just mentioned probably triggered feelings and associations in you. These feelings are called brand associations; the stronger the brand association, the more likely a consumer will buy from you.

As companies, we don’t directly control these feelings. They’re intangible and personal to each individual. But we can indirectly influence them. In fact, everything we do influences how people feel, for better or worse.

This is where a good brand strategy comes in. It’s also why campaigns can’t ever be led by gimmicks. 

“Today’s audiences can smell a gimmick. Sometimes, they uncover the baloney within the first line of your ad content. They are more aware of marketing gimmicks than ever before. And, these potential customers no longer tolerate false promises and astounding claims. Instead, consumers want transparency and honesty from brands.”

– Steve Olenski [via Forbes]

Brand strategy helps influence how people perceive your brand. It maps out where you’re headed and helps you work out what (and what not) to do. It carries you into every campaign knowing the message you need to get across and how to say it. 

“A good definition of brand strategy is the considered intent for the positive role a company wants to play in the lives of the people it serves and the communities around it.”

– Neil Parker, Chief Strategy Officer at Co: Collective [via Branding Mag]

It also gives your brand the robust foundations to handle scrutiny and bounce back if ever you…

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Episode 169: Developing a Cohesive Brand with Mark de Grasse, the New President and General Manager of DigitalMarketer Episode 169: Developing a Cohesive Brand with Mark de Grasse, the New President and General Manager of DigitalMarketer
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With more than 2 billion monthly active users and more than a billion hours of content consumed every day, the right Youtube strategy can increase brand awareness, engagement, and conversions. 

But, cutting through the noise can be a challenge. 

Strategically leveraging YouTube’s robust analytics can help you make data-backed decisions and improve performance.

In this post, we’ll tell you how to use YouTube analytics to grow your brand and generate more video content views.

Why YouTube analytics is critical for measuring content and paid ad performance

YouTube generated $19.77 billion in ad revenue in 2020. Ahead of both Instagram and Facebook, it has the highest ROI for video content. Done right, YouTube ads are a profitable endeavor.

But you can also accumulate significant exposure and revenue through an organic YouTube strategy. Best practice is to start with organic, understand what techniques work for your content, then boost with paid. 

In both respects, you need to understand if your content and paid media efforts are performing. There are four key reporting areas within YouTube Analytics: 

• Overview
• Reach
• Engagement 
• Audience 

As with most platforms, there are metrics that matter, and vanity metrics. Similar to app store optimization (ASO), it’s easy to fall into the trap of chasing shallow wins. 

For ASO, this happens when you prioritize downloads over long-term value. Given that most users abandon apps within 30 days post-installation, high downloads don’t lead to high audience retention, satisfaction, or revenue. Time-to-value is much more important.

With YouTube, for organic, average view duration (AVD) and click-through rate (CTR) should be prioritized over YouTube search optimization, descriptions, tags, and other vanity metrics. YouTube elevates videos (and channels) that prove meaningful engagement, which is exactly what AVD and CTR do. 

By elevate, we mean high AVD and CTR can get you into YouTube’s recommendation engine. 70% of the time, content users consume is recommended by YouTube’s AI and algorithm, so you want to be on this ride. 

Why does YouTube elevate AVD and CTR? Both metrics represent high engagement. 

AVD is total watch time divided by total video plays, meaning viewers watch for longer, and sometimes even replay. And a high CTR represents that your hook and thumbnail resonate with your audience enough to click and view.  

Understanding which videos resonate and engage allows you to replicate success and optimize those that fall flat.

Once you do master your organic marketing strategy, you can bring YouTube ads into the game. With the right targeting and content, paid ads can expand your reach and revenue.

As with any marketing play, make sure to align your ads with the stages of the funnel. Choose an ad format and campaign that aligns with your end goals (e.g. are you looking to generate traffic or leads?).  

The three most critical metrics for monitoring ad performance, especially regarding ROI, are View rate, CTR, and Earnings per view. These tell you how many people actually…

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After 5 years of marketing agency experience in B2B, I started creating on Youtube 2 years ago when I went on maternity leave. I wanted to understand how video marketing and Youtube works so I could walk the talk when it came to selling video content to clients. 

Turns out I enjoy being a content creator more than providing services to clients. 

I’ve learned a lot of things from doing Youtube – some of them changed how I view and approach certain things as a marketer.

Here are 5 marketing lessons after 2 consistent years of creating content on Youtube:

Importance of building a community and engaging with people

I’ve created some of my most popular videos because I’ve listened to my audience and had 1:1 conversations with them. Engaging with people on a personal level takes much more time than traditional communication methods of randomly selecting people from your audience or through social listening (which is what most businesses do), but so worth the effort.

It’s rare for a brand to reply to every email and message they receive on social media for every content they put out. Reason is simple: The value is not easy to see, the impact can’t be attributed or attached to a marketing goal and companies can’t (or don’t) invest in having a team member focus on this.

But brand efforts usually perform better when they’re not attached to monetary goals and obsessed over to hit some numbers. 

The value you can create is a loyal fan base and promoters of your brand. Those who talk about you in the online or offline space with their friends and network. And that is priceless!

Value of direct feedback loops and qualitative input vs metrics and data

Analytics dashboards give you lots of numbers to analyze and optimize. But numbers are limited in telling you stories and sentiments. 

I began taking advantage of surveys, polls, Q&A’s, DM’s, comments in Youtube and even emails to keep the feedback loop open and consistently keep updated with what my audience is enjoying, what they’re interested in, what they don’t like, what they’re doing with their lives, etc. There is SO MUCH feedback opportunity and input if you’re willing to invest your time into those channels. 

Humanizing marketing and putting a face to brands is a game changer

Traditionally, a marketer’s job is to communicate a brand’s message using digital platforms. Obviously in a way that is engaging, relevant and timely to their audience.

We normally don’t put a face on that communication or have 1:1 conversations and get to know them. 

Now I know certain names in my audience. I know where they’re from. I don’t only talk with them about marketing or career but also about the weather in their country or a holiday tradition. It brought the relationship building back into the picture and I know that this isn’t something possible to continue at an extensive scale. But I’d still say it’s…

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