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Digital Opportunities Abound for Healthcare Providers in Urgent Care and Telemedicine

August 13, 2019/0 Comments/in Branding, Digital Marketing /by Leverage Marketing

At long last, digital disruption in the healthcare industry is upon us and accelerating at breakneck pace. The trend is driven by the very same drivers witnessed in other verticals: the consumer—specifically, a shift in the consumer’s demands for a retail-like experience and easy access to care. As consumers become more demanding, digital is enabling them to become active participants throughout their healthcare journey, including how they go about selecting their providers.

This “Yelpification” of healthcare means prospective patients are beginning their journey online—on search and review sites—to inform decisions on where to seek care. These trends are much like what we witnessed in the early part of this century in the digital transformations of the residential real estate and consumer travel verticals, which dramatically reshaped the landscape of winners and losers. Today, 70% of US consumers say online ratings sites have influenced their decision to select a physician, per Binary Fountain. Consumer behavior is also changing in their preference for care providers. Between 2008 and 2015, per a 2018 study published in JAMA, visits to retail clinics jumped 214%. These trends bode well for urgent care and telemedicine providers scrambling to fill consumer demand—but is the mere fact of being an urgent care or telemedicine provider sufficient to win? History tells us otherwise, and unfortunately for incumbents, the opportunities in clinical operations have not been overlooked by Silicon Valley.

In the US, digital health funding reached $1.6 billion in Q1 2018, according to Rock Health. Tech startups entering the market are applying the “Silicon Valley” approach, targeting the shortcomings of legacy providers burdened by their business models and unable to adjust quickly to changing consumer behaviors. Seizing digital opportunities has allowed agile, nimble tech startups to successfully disrupt incumbents. This changing landscape presents unique opportunities for incumbents too, but the big winners will be those that leverage digital as a strategic tool to establish themselves at the intersection of where patients meet their providers.

With that in mind, we set about understanding the current digital landscape and uncovered digital trends and insights into how urgent care and telemedicine providers are navigating the online landscape to better position their firms. Overall, we found:

Significant disparities in local providers’ online marketing strategies, suggesting very little in the way of competitive analysis on the part of providers
Even more surprisingly, we found national providers paying very little attention to what other national providers are doing online, with very small overlaps in strategy
Local providers in the past 12 to 24 months have added an emphasis on keyword visibility, while interest in this area among national providers waned during that time period, potentially suggesting more attractive areas for investment of digital resources
Google’s algorithm update in August 2018 dramatically impacted local providers, while national providers were largely able to sidestep the update, suggesting a knowledge gap on the part of local providers
National providers have focused substantial energy and expended significant resources on building backlink portfolios robust in both breadth and quality
In paid search, most advertisers have inconsistent keyword coverage, and many are not running ads optimally
Impression shares in paid search remain low among both national and local providers, suggesting divergent keyword strategies in paid search as well

We see compelling, significant opportunities and strategies for healthcare providers. Our research and observations are indicative of an online marketing effort that is largely oblivious to the importance of comprehensive short-term and long-term strategy development to better position organizations for growth while mitigating risks from online competitors. If your organization is stuck doing for doing’s sake, here’s a checklist of three action items that can help you achieve a course correction:

Stop driving blindly. Assess the competitive online landscape thoroughly. We’re often too busy to take a step back to build a complete 360 view of the competitive landscape. Bring in outside expertise to help if you’re constrained by time or knowledge. Leverage Marketing is extremely well-versed in deep Digital Discovery, and we’ve done hundreds of analyses across dozens of verticals. If you’d like a redacted sample, send us a note from here and we’ll be happy to send one out to you. A view into competitor strategies, strengths, and weaknesses is key to your strategic planning—without it, you’re driving blind.
Look inwards. Assess your own strengths and weaknesses within the online marketplace. How do you compare within the landscape and against major market participants? Why do your customers pick you today? The more realistic your assessment, the more effective your planning will be.
Have a plan. Finally, with this understanding of the competitive landscape and how you are currently positioned, develop plans around mitigating the risks you’ve identified and taking advantage of opportunities for growth. Take a holistic approach that looks at all assets across your organization and how they can be aligned to support your efforts online and offline. Hard as it may be, work to develop a plan that clearly lays out the business case for expending resources against observed opportunities.

This process of digital discovery and planning is difficult and requires time and expertise. Resist the urge to put it off in favor of more immediate challenges. The further you push such planning out, the greater the challenges to overcome. Instead, done right and soon, the benefits of planning are significant to your organization and will serve all your stakeholders well, from your customers to your employees to your investors, for a long time to come.

Amazon Business Has a Bullseye on Your Back: Watch Out, B2B Manufacturers and Distributors

June 24, 2019/0 Comments/in Branding, Digital Marketing /by Leverage Marketing

Amazon Business, launched in 2015, is the B2B marketplace arm of Amazon, providing business customers with the pricing, selection, and convenience of Amazon with additional features and benefits designed for businesses of all sizes.

In its first full year of operation, Amazon Business generated an eye-popping $1 billion in sales. Today, just a few short years later, it’s surpassed $10 billion and continues growing rapidly, with its eyes set squarely on the $1.2 trillion B2B e-commerce opportunity projected by 2021.

We’re only in the early innings of what promises to be a nail-biter, but we’ve already seen over 1 million businesses using Amazon Business—and not all are small businesses, either. In fact, 55 of the Fortune 100 companies, 50% of the biggest U.S. hospital systems, and 40% of the 100 most populous local governments use Amazon Business. It has proven to be of value to businesses big and small in just a few short years.

Currently, over 150,000 businesses sell products on Amazon Business. This rapid growth in sellers is empowering Amazon Business to both build catalog depth and drive prices lower, as Amazon has done successfully in its B2C business.

How Big a Threat Is Amazon Business?

Well, if the history of what Amazon accomplished in B2C is our guide, then “BIG and GETTING BIGGER” is the obvious answer.

A recent study by Applico on the electrical components segment illustrates the looming threat for B2B enterprises. The study found Amazon Business’ product catalog depth to be far beyond that of top competitors in the industry. In wiring connectors, Amazon Business had 77,764 listings compared to the four largest distributors’ 2,855. Amazon Business also had products listed from 106 of the 120 manufacturers offered by the four largest distributors, and 80% of distributors in the segment were already selling directly on Amazon Business.

Applico also found the largest distributors in the segment to be lagging Amazon Business on price competitiveness. In each instance, the exact same product offered by the four largest distributors was found on Amazon Business marketplace as well, but at a significantly lower price.

Whether you’re a manufacturer or a distributor, this new reality presents significant challenges as well as potential opportunities.

The Impact on Manufacturers and Distributors

For manufacturers, the marketplace for your products is rapidly becoming more transparent and efficient, with B2B buyers able to quickly compare product features, pricing, and customer reviews in a highly efficient and convenient manner. These benefits will be hard for buyers to resist, and in turn, will place pressure on industry margins just as they’ve done previously in the B2C business segment. For manufacturers with well-run, highly efficient businesses and strong product lines, Amazon Business presents a tremendous opportunity to grab market share from lesser competitors and better inform product road maps to drive strong future growth.

In addition, there’s a significant risk to manufacturer business models that have tended to rely on large distributor networks for global distribution of their products. Amazon has proven to be a significant disrupter of distributors, leaving manufacturers scrambling to reinvent their distribution models. In the toy industry, for instance, the recent bankruptcy of Toys R Us has left toy manufacturers struggling to maintain channel diversity as distribution continues to consolidate around fewer and fewer players.

For value-added distributors, is being a niche player with large contracts and value-added services a winning strategy in the face of the coming disruption? While custom pricing on large contracts may be a defensible strategy today, it likely won’t be an advantage for long. Amazon Business will ultimately put margin and pricing pressure on those large contracts, just as it’s doing with smaller orders today. In addition, losing smaller orders today will likely create significant margin pressure on the overall business, as smaller orders tend to have a higher margin.

As its footprint in B2B grows, there’s little question Amazon Business will continue to evolve and add value, as it has with its PRIME program and Fulfillment By Amazon service. It’s certainly not wise to underestimate Amazon’s drive toward progress. B2B businesses have the benefit of and can learn from hindsight. B2C businesses largely played defense in the past two decades and paid the ultimate price. Massive brands like Blockbuster, Circuit City, Sears, and Toys R Us have gone bankrupt, sending shock waves upstream to impacted manufacturers. Best Buy has lost 40% of its market capitalization. The lesson is clear: Repeating these same mistakes can have dire consequences on the viability of long-standing businesses.

Here’s a checklist of 3 action items that get you started in developing short and long term strategies to better position your organization for growth while mitigating risks from online competitors.

Stop driving blindly. Assess the competitive landscape online thoroughly. We’re often too busy to take a step back to build a complete 360 view of the competitive landscape. Not just what Amazon is doing but what all major market participants are doing online. Bring in outside expertise to help if you’re time or knowledge constrained. Here at Leverage Marketing we’re extremely well versed at doing deep Digital Discovery and have done hundreds of them across dozens of verticals. If you’d like a redacted sample, send us a note from here and we’d be happy to send one out to you. Getting a view into competitor strategies, strengths and weaknesses are key inputs into your strategic planning without which you’re driving blind.
Look Inwards. Assess your own strengths and weaknesses within the online marketplace. How do you compare within the landscape and against major market participants? Why do your customers pick you today? The more realistic your assessment the more effective your planning will be.
Have a plan. Finally, with this understanding of the competitive landscape and how you are currently positioned, develop plans around mitigating the risks you’ve identified and taking advantage of opportunities for growth. Take a holistic approach that looks at all assets you have across your organization and how they can be aligned to support your efforts online and offline. For instance, a recent study by Business Intelligence found that traditional B2C retailers continue to miss the opportunity to beat Amazon by taking full advantage of their brick and mortar presence by offering more in-store options like buy online pickup in-store (BOPIS) and convenient in-store returns. Ultimately, you should be able to convincingly assert why your customers will continue to do business with you in the future despite the emergence of online competitors.

This process of digital discovery and planning is difficult and requires time and expertise. Resist the urge to put it off in favor of more immediate challenges. The further you push such planning out, the greater the challenges to overcome. Wait long enough and they become insurmountable. Don’t become the next Blockbuster. Instead, done right and soon, the benefits are significant to your organization and will serve all your stakeholders well from your customers to your employees to your investors for a long time to come.

The Bottom Line

All B2B organizations need to carefully weigh the threats and opportunities Amazon Business presents and carefully develop short- and long-term strategies to position their businesses for long-term success.

The Rise of Bot Marketing

May 23, 2018/0 Comments/in Branding, Ecommerce, Social Media /by Bob Kehoe

Chatbots are taking over marketing. You may have not even noticed that you’re talking with a bot as they’re so seamless. These messenger bots have invaded Facebook messenger, platforms like Kik and WhatsApp, and are present on ecommerce websites across the Internet. Bot marketing saves companies and advertising agencies time and costs on their marketing efforts as they propagate across different marketing segments.

Despite the rapid growth of chatbots, there’s still some concern over their ubiquity. Bot messengers can certainly take over many tasks from humans, but for the moment, they only enhance and supplement traditional digital advertising. Ultimately, human interactions are a necessity for many online sales to occur and chatbots can only take you so far.

However, the future is coming fast, and chatbot marketing technology is constantly evolving. Smart speakers like Amazon’s Echo ecosystem, Apple’s Siri, and Google Voice are all informational chatbots that employ some marketing techniques, including allowing you to order food, call an Uber, and perform other functions. With some key tips, you can utilize existing chatbot technology to improve your marketing strategy and reduce stress on your team.

Customer Service

This is probably where you’ve most frequently seen chatbots. Even today, most businesses force you to wait on the phone and wait for a customer service representative while listening to incessant muzak. Many people are getting more impatient and want to be able to everything online. Whether it’s ordering food, banking, or online shopping, we want to do these tasks with speed.

Messenger bots make these chores easier—a chatbot can often answer your question in a short period, and a customer service agent doesn’t need to get involved. 24/7 customer service is now possible without paying someone to be there all hours of the day. If your customers do need additional help, chatbots can transfer them to a human.

Personalized Ad Creation

Ad agencies are always looking for ways to create more personalized creatives. Facebook and other messenger bots can greet customers, collect preliminary information, and then use that to generate customized ads. These personalizations can increase conversions and lead to future and repeat sales. It’s important that the bots appear to be as human as possible, or this technique won’t work. A quality chatbot will at least initially appear to be an actual customer service representative, while a bad one can damage your brand image and lower conversion rates.

Analyze Your Customers

Chatbots can do a whole lot more than talk to people. They can analyze consumer data and optimize your sales and marketing strategies with those conclusions. If you’re using chatbot marketing to sell a product, it can track purchasing patterns and monitor your clients’ data, giving you key insights to redevelop strategy.

By utilizing the processing powers of messenger bots, you can save on the costs of hiring an analyst and avoid the possibility of human error.

Customer Feedback and Surveys

If you want to grow your company and evolve your brand, you need genuine feedback from your customers. You can use survey responses to help design future business strategies and improve your customer relations. Bot marketing makes this process much easier than it has been in the past. Forget tired and expensive phone surveys that never get completed.

AI-powered chatbots can adapt conversations based on customer responses and get useful data. Wizu is a chatbot specifically for conversational surveys, helping you improve your customers’ experience and giving you valuable insights. Polly uses Slack for surveys, leveraging the power of the chat app itself to create perceptive questions.

The Future of Chatbots

As chatbot technology grows, their versatility only increases. They are already an asset to marketing firms and businesses as they’re deployed for a myriad of uses. Bots will continue to be a marketing asset in the future, especially when used in voice assistants. You can use chatbots to handle many of your marketing needs to increase productivity, efficiency, and lower costs.

Used in the right fashion, chatbot marketing can revolutionize your business. You can learn more about your customers and increase your conversion rates with minimal cost and effort.

For the latest in chatbot technology, consult the experts at Leverage Marketing. We utilize the latest technology and can help your business grow to its fullest potential.

The 6 Biggest Myths About Buyer Personas

April 12, 2018/0 Comments/in Branding, Content Marketing /by Leverage Marketing

Whether you’re in marketing, sales, product development, or customer service, creating buyer personas can help you deliver what your customers want. However, your buyer personas may not give you the insights you need if you’re going about them the wrong way. There are several pervasive myths that can cause businesses to waste time on poorly-conceived buyer personas:

Buyer personas are entirely fictional.
Buyer personas are only representations of a company’s best customers.
Buyer personas should contain as much information as possible, even if it’s not obviously relevant.
It’s best to have as many buyer persona segments as possible.
Each buyer persona represents a specific person.
Once you create your initial buyer personas, you’re done.

We’ll look at each of these myths in greater depth, but let’s pause for a moment to define the term “buyer persona” for the purposes of this article. Inbound marketing pioneer Hubspot sums the buyer persona up nicely as a “semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” You can use customer interviews and other historical data to create profiles for different segments of your target audience. You can even give them names like C-Suite Cecily and Freelance Freddy if you want (Hubspot is really into this). However, what’s much more important than the names is determining how and why the persona makes certain purchasing decisions. By figuring this out, you’ll get better at developing marketing materials that strike a chord with your audience.

Creating accurate buyer personas is harder than you might think, and there are a lot of misconceptions that can lead both novice and seasoned marketers astray. We’ve debunked six of the most common myths about buyer personas below.

Myth #1: Buyer personas are complete works of fiction.

When creating buyer personas, you shouldn’t be polishing your creative writing skills. Don’t just write personas based on what you think you know about your customers or what your sales team has told you. Look at real customer behavior, from time spent on different pages of your website to survey form fills to purchases. Conduct interviews with a large swath of prospects and customers. Interview team members from different departments within your company (sales, marketing, customer service) as well. These team members interact with customers at different points in the buyer’s journey, and bringing their insights together will give you a clearer picture of the path to purchase your customers take.

Myth #2: Buyer personas should represent your ideal customers only.

According to Hubspot’s definition, buyer personas represent your ideal customers, but we politely disagree on this point. It’s easy to call up a few of your company’s best customers and let the praise wash over you. But that’s not going to give you insights into your typical buyers. It’s okay to reach out to your biggest fans, but you should also interview the people who make infrequent purchases, started as prospects but didn’t close, and even those people who have had a bad customer experience with your company. Figuring out the stumbling blocks that prevent people from making a purchase will help you develop better personas—and that may help you remove those stumbling blocks.

Myth #3: The more information you can cram into your buyer personas, the better.

You don’t need to include irrelevant information just for the sake of making your buyer persona seem like a well-developed character. You probably won’t ever need to know if your target customers ride motorized scooters or regularly eat French toast for breakfast (unless your company is in the motorized scooter or breakfast food industry). Getting too granular can be a waste of your team’s time.

That’s not to say that your buyer personas shouldn’t be specific: they just need to focus on the details that are most relevant to the buyer’s purchasing process. Here are a few things you probably do need to know:

What causes them to invest in your products or services
Concerns they may have when purchasing from you
What selling propositions (e.g. free shipping, high-quality materials) are most important to them
How they expect your products or services to solve a problem for them
Who or what influences them during their decision-making process
How they prefer to shop for your products (e.g. in-store, on their smartphone)

Myth #4: The more segmented personas you have, the better.

It’s easy to get carried away when creating buyer personas. You’ve collected all this data, and you start to convince yourself that maybe there really are 20 different buckets into which you could segment your customers. There’s no right or wrong number of buyer personas, but creating a bunch of microscopically specific personas is going to be confusing and unhelpful. Start with one or two core personas and build out from there as necessary.

Myth #5: A buyer persona represents an individual.

Don’t lose sight of the fact that Freelance Freddy isn’t a real person. In fact, Freelance Freddy (or whatever you’ve named your buyer persona) isn’t even supposed to represent a specific person. To paraphrase Hubspot again, your buyer personas come from an amalgamation of data provided by your customers. That means that there will be some variation within each persona (for example, some people who fit the persona might be Content Marketing Managers while others might be Directors of SEO).

Myth #6: Once you create your initial buyer personas, you’re set.

Maybe you and your team decided to create buyer personas as a marketing exercise a year or two ago but filed them away and haven’t looked at them since. If that’s the case, you’re wasting a tool that can be valuable across the sales funnel. Get those personas back out and bring them up to date. And even if you have been using buyer personas consistently, you should make a goal to update them periodically, especially when your business goes through major changes that could affect your personas (e.g. a new product offering, a subscription price increase).

Take the time to get your buyer personas right, and you’ll be able to use them to develop marketing materials that attract qualified visitors, leads, and customers.

Need help developing buyer personas or creating content that speaks to your audience’s needs? Contact Leverage Marketing to learn how we can help you target the right prospects.

How Online Apparel Brands Succeed with Digital Marketing

March 28, 2018/0 Comments/in Branding, Content Marketing, SEO, Social Media /by Leverage Marketing

Of all the consumer goods available online, the apparel category—including clothes, shoes, and accessories—has seen some of the biggest gains.

Revenue for online apparel in the U.S. reached $80.96 billion in 2017 and is projected to grow to over $123 billion by 2022.

Online sales are expected to account for 40% of the apparel and footwear market by the 2030s.

In the past few years, major fashion houses like Louis Vuitton and Gucci have begun shifting marketing dollars from print ads to digital channels in response to the steadily growing popularity of online apparel shopping.

Apparel brands that focus on their ecommerce presence have opportunities for dramatic growth as shoppers move online. But the competition is stiff. Big brick-and-mortar retailers like Macy’s and Kohl’s have been investing significant resources in building their online stores, and Amazon is cutting into the apparel sales of traditional apparel retailers with its low prices and fast shipping.

Niche apparel brands can’t compete with Amazon and other major retailers on price and shipping, so they must carve out a unique selling proposition—and clearly communicate that proposition to their target audience—to succeed online.

How are small- and mid-sized apparel businesses standing out from the competition and connecting with online shoppers? We spoke with three business owners (and Leverage’s own Director of Strategy, Dan Valle), to find out what digital marketing strategies have worked best for them.

Foolies: Developing a Buyer Persona to Grow a Brand

Niche apparel brands can’t succeed in a crowded online space unless they have a clear understanding of who their ideal customers are. This was something that Alex “Nemo” Hanse, owner of the T-shirt company Foolies Limited Clothing, learned as he built his brand. “When I started seven years ago, I thought that my brand was for EVERYONE,” Hanse says. “Incorrect!”

Hanse realized that he needed to focus on a narrower audience, so he began building a profile of his ideal customer, including details like where she works, what her goals in life are, and how his brand would bring value to her. One thing he realized as he developed his buyer persona was that he should be focusing on marketing to women of color. He stresses that this doesn’t mean other women can’t buy his T-shirts. “It just means I know who I need to talk to [in order to] get my message across and help my brand grow.”

Developing customer profiles, or buyer personas, can help brands like Foolies make decisions about where to engage with their audience, what content formats to try, and what messaging to use. While a buyer persona may begin as a semi-fictional representation of an ideal customer, apparel brands should use customer surveys, interviews, and sales data to shape their personas as their company grows.

T.C. Elli’s: Creating Content That Stands Out in the Fashion Industry

Content marketing allows ecommerce apparel companies to differentiate themselves from their competitors, attract more organic website visitors to their site, and convince shoppers to buy from them. However, new ecommerce brands may discover that the data-driven and long-form content that’s dominating other industries isn’t as effective for them.

Tahnee Elliot, CEO and founder of the Texas-based fashion boutique T.C. Elli’s, is quick to make this distinction. “Fashion retailers are competing with top fashion bloggers, magazines, and other influencers in a space that can only be described as crowded,” she says. “Content for fashion brands must provide benefits for the customer, be visually and aesthetically pleasing, and meet the ‘first, better, or different’ principle.” T.C. Elli’s mix of content includes a visually-compelling blog and Instagram posts that highlight ways to wear the brand’s pieces. Elliot says that by regularly producing high-quality content, “we managed to increase traffic both online and in-store, boost organic rankings, and build brand awareness.”

One Tribe Apparel: Finding the Right Collaborators

Influencer marketing—a partnership between brands and consumers with a large or engaged online following—has become a key strategy for many ecommerce apparel businesses. As a visual platform with 500 million daily active users, Instagram is an obvious place for fashion brands to find relevant influencers. But some apparel brands have found success by looking beyond Instagram.

Ryan O’Connor’s company One Tribe Apparel, which sells handmade clothes and accessories from Thailand, has gotten the best results from collaborating with bloggers in the brand’s niche. “I chose bloggers specifically because we can have many points of exposure with them,” O’Connor explains. “Not only do we usually get a product review with a link for SEO value, but we get photos of them in our clothes that are usually shared on their social channels as well.” O’Connor adds that many bloggers also run product giveaways, which allows One Tribe Apparel to grow their audience by requesting that social media users follow their brand accounts to enter the contest.

For O’Connor and his team, working with bloggers has a bigger ripple effect than working with social media influencers alone. “If we work with just an Instagram influencer, we usually get one to three posts from them, whereas with a blogger we get the SEO benefit, social media benefit, and referral traffic from their site.”

Leverage Marketing: Identifying the Best Strategies for the Brand’s Stage

At Leverage Marketing, we recognize that there’s no silver bullet strategy that will work for every apparel brand. Whenever we take on an apparel client, we look at where they are in their brand lifecycle and identify the tactics with the most potential for the stage they’re in. Dan Valle, Director of Strategy at Leverage, points to two specific cases where tailoring our tactics to an apparel brand’s stage led to significant growth.

“One of our clients was an already-established brand with a good amount of brand awareness and a substantial set of current and past customers,” Valle says. “With their target audiences, most audience members had heard of the brand and had a positive affinity for it. We saw an opportunity to expand into new audiences while continuing to build lifetime value for current and past customers.” Leverage began pursuing newly targeted, non-branded search terms to reach new audiences and grow the brand’s customer base. At the same time, we prioritized email marketing to cross-sell and alert past and current customers about new products, leading to an increase in repeat purchasers.

Leverage also worked with an apparel brand that was in the introduction stage of their brand lifecycle and had a modest budget. “We committed to improving this client’s brand awareness through influencer marketing and content marketing,” Valle explains. Leverage also began building out search engine-optimized onsite content to work towards the longer-term goal of helping the client rank for keywords with a high volume of monthly searches.

Valle recommends that every apparel brand looking to grow takes stock of their current audience and stage in the brand lifecycle. “With this knowledge, you can make better decisions about the tactics that have the most potential now and in the near future,” he says.

Using Digital Marketing to Make an Impact in Online Apparel

As an apparel company, you don’t need the marketing budget of a Macy’s or a Nordstrom’s to succeed online. What you do need is the ability to identify your audience, tailor your content to them, and provide value that they can’t find elsewhere. Taking a customer-first approach will help you win over online shoppers and keep them coming back to your ecommerce store.

Not sure where to start? Leverage Marketing can help you target your ideal customers, develop campaigns to stand out from competitors, and measure your results. Contact us to learn about our full suite of digital marketing services for ecommerce apparel brands.

SEO and Branding: The Team Your Business Really Needs

March 21, 2018/0 Comments/in Branding, SEO /by Bob Kehoe

If you’re someone who wants the best for their site, you are probably always on the lookout for the right digital marketing mix to drive results. There are a lot of options you can invest in – with SEO, PPC, content marketing, social media, and more all vying for space in your business plan, where should you put your money?

No two businesses are the same, so no advice is truly “one size fits all”, but there are big two marketing focuses that work in sync to form the base of your digital marketing strategy: SEO and branding.

SEO and branding can’t work very effectively without each other; without good branding, your SEO strategy won’t really stick and grow over the long term, and without SEO, your awesome branding efforts won’t be found on the web.

While many business owners often struggle to see the real value in brand building and SEO efforts, the two are much more related and foundational than you think.

Name Recognition

When you search on Google for something, what drives you to click on any particular blue link? Do you always just click on the first result you see?

You probably don’t choose that link every single time. Sometimes, you’re looking for something specific and that first link gets you what you need, but what about if it’s not an area you’re familiar with, or something you’re just beginning to shop around for? You’re either going to click the link that looks:

Familiar, or
Most relevant to what you need.

Organic (non-advertising/paid) link click-through rate isn’t nearly as concentrated on the top ranking link as you think it is; while research suggests that the top link does generally drive a ~20% click-through rate, links #2-5 range from 9-13% click-throughs, which isn’t a whole lot lower. This is why SEO and branding can be so linked – a familiar brand name gives you a better chance of driving clicks even if you aren’t #1.

This is also why having strong brand awareness is so vital to your SEO strategy. As we’ve mentioned before, having an excellent click-through rate on search results pages is a factor in helping your links gain better ranking positions. And having a brand name that is somewhat familiar or at least present and legitimate is a good way to invite people to click onto your site, in that you’re promising a good experience and that your site isn’t, say, some random link that will download malware onto the visitor’s computer.

Authority

Another reason you want your branding and SEO to be strong? Featured snippets. Search engines are becoming increasingly full of rich features such as knowledge boxes, Q&A panels, and even direct answer boxes. Grabbing that valuable search page real estate is one of the fastest ways to establish your brand as an “authority” on your topic – and using SEO to optimize for snippets can help you do that.

Even if your content isn’t taking a whole lot of rich feature spaces, creating informative, search engine optimized, and customer-focused content on highly relevant topics can help establish your brand as a top authority in your industry and build brand awareness through SEO. Both humans and search engines will look at your thorough library of informational resources and say, “Hey, they look like they know what they’re doing over there…”

Link Building

When your brand is trusted, your site will be, too. That’s why developing a recognized and trusted brand presence is so key to link building, which is one of the cornerstone tactics within SEO.

If you’re not familiar with the concept of link building, think of it as a way of earning endorsements for your site. If another site links back to you, search engines tend to see that as a confirmation of your site’s usefulness, safety, and relevancy of your site. Once your site has collected a few relevant and trustworthy links from other sites, search engines will be more likely to serve it up to visitors in search results because it has been “endorsed” by other sites.

From a branding perspective, building great links is a LOT more difficult without a strong brand image. Think about it like this – if you’re looking for a source to cite in your blog post, would you rather link to Forbes.com, or some generic website you just stumbled upon? Assuming the info you’re citing is the same from both sites, you’re probably going to decide that the Forbes article is a better citation for your blog post. If your readers are wondering where you got your information, they’re going to trust you, the blog writer, a lot more if you’re citing widely known and trusted brands such as Forbes, rather than something they’ve never heard of.

Searches for Brands = Easy Wins

Maybe this is a given, but it’s worth pointing out: people who know exactly what they’re looking for are more likely to find it. In other words, if someone types your brand name into Google, they are probably looking specifically for your site, your brand, and your offerings. They know what they want already. By intertwining your SEO and branding strategies, you can grow your brand recognition, and, over time, begin driving valuable brand searches that turn into faster conversions than those among visitors who are just shopping around.

This is a difficult concept to prove because platforms like Google Analytics do not supply keyword-level info that can be directly connected to conversions, but the pure authority of branded searches is hard to ignore. If your brand is strong enough, people may not even bother searching for general keywords, and will just search your brand name instead. For example, look at the search volumes around three of the most common car windshield repair keywords on the books.

Now, look at the search volume around the brand name of one of the biggest national players in this industry.

Obviously, not every person searching for any of those keywords is looking to buy auto glass. But a lot of them are. That’s 246,000 people who (probably) know who Safelite is, what they do, and how to find them. That’s why they’re more targeted, conversion-friendly searches than the more general, volatile to change, and less often searched terms such as “auto glass”.

Searching “auto glass repair” is proof positive of the company’s SEO efforts as well – Safelite has secured 3 out of the 10 organic (non-paid) search results on the first page in our area. SEO for brand awareness AND organic search domination? Now that’s authority!

How to Tell When Branding and SEO are Making an Impact

Sure, SEO and branding are a superhero team that can help your business take off. But how do you know if your SEO and brand building efforts are really working and driving meaningful actions such as leads and sales?

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to decipher the exact impact of SEO and brand marketing. As with traditional marketing, measuring every buyer’s true journey from start to finish can be difficult when tracing every interaction is nearly impossible. How many places, digital and physical, did a customer see and interact with your brand before converting? Even the customer may not know.

However, we can see how often people are looking for things that are unique to your brand. (How many times your site has appeared when someone has searched for your brand name, for instance.)

To do this, you’ll need to have your site connected to Google Search Console. This service allows you to monitor several technical aspects of your site, but most importantly in this case, it helps you see what searches your site is appearing for.

Once your site ownership is verified in Google Search Console, navigate to the Performance report.

Once you’re there, you can see roughly how many Clicks and Impressions your site gets from the organic search result pages. “Clicks” refers to someone clicking on one of your site’s pages via an organic search result, and “Impressions” refers to the number of times a link from your site appeared for a query made by a searcher – AKA, how many times your brand name and website was seen.

To see approximately how often your brand name has been searched for, you can perform a search.

Make a new Query filter that contains your brand name, or part of your brand name. You can also add additional filters to capture common brand misspellings or represent common searches that only include part of your brand name (i.e., if your brand is “Freedom Investments”, set a filter that only includes “Freedom”.)

Now, you can see how many impressions and clicks that searches for your brand name have generated over time. Play around with the date function to see results as far as 16 months into the past.

As an example, look at one of Leverage Marketing’s clients who needed both SEO and brand building to help create a searchable presence and a stronger brand presence. Upon becoming a Leverage client near the end of 2016, Google Search Console showed us an average of about 50 branded query impressions per day. We can translate this to mean that their brand name was getting searched and seen about 50 times a day.

After a website redesign, dedicated onsite and technical SEO work, and a concentrated effort to create the brand image and voice that this client was missing, we’ve seen branded query impressions per day climb to over double what they were before pursuing SEO and branding. The impact of our campaign has helped their brand gain twice as many searches as it did before. That’s the power of branding!

Ready to set a solid SEO and branding foundation for your site but not sure where to start? Get in touch with the Leverage team – we’re experts at curating your brand image and SEO strategy to drive results on your site.

3 Ways To Use Emotional Marketing To Reach People

January 3, 2018/0 Comments/in Branding, Content Marketing /by Bob Kehoe

While you might not immediately think of emotions when you think of marketing to your customers, they are an integral part of relating to your clientele and establishing a genuine brand connection. According to Shayna Smilovitz from Instapage, “Emotional branding then is creating an emotional connection to one company that separates it from the rest, creating brand loyalty over time.” By playing on different kinds of emotions, you can humanize your brand and show customers how your products and services solve their essential problems.

You can establish genuine trust with customers by making them feel like they’re an important part of your brand and creating content that gives your readers something to discuss. Fifty percent of every buying decision is driven by emotion, so creating effective emotional advertising is the most effective means of gaining and retaining customers.

But how do you craft this emotional connection effectively? Do you use branding, ads, or stories to facilitate the relationship? We’ll explain how to use storytelling to engage with your audience, review several different approaches to emotional marketing, and show how utilizing this strategy can benefit you in the long run.

Using Storytelling to Connect with Customers

Ultimately, whether you’re writing the great American novel or crafting retail content, you’re trying to tell a compelling story. Emotional advertising is about developing a story that speaks to your audience by entertaining them. Even if you’re just writing a “how-to” guide or a recipe, you can make it fun and exciting, adding storytelling elements into it. Customers respond more readily when you use emotional marketing that appeals to the senses directly.

When writing or creating emotional ads, you’ll need to consider your audience. What are their wants and needs? Understanding their desires and aspirations will help you create relatable content.

When telling your story, it’s essential to use the tone of your audience. Write in the vernacular that your target customer is familiar with, with authentic words and powerful verbiage, to craft copy that directly speaks to your customers.

Different Approaches to Emotional Marketing

An excellent emotional branding campaign successfully transforms a casual customer into a brand advocate. According to the Disney Institute, emotionally engaged customers are:

At least three times more likely to recommend your product
Three times more likely to re-purchase
Less likely to shop around
Much less price sensitive

These statistics show why it’s integral to create a campaign that stimulates your customers’ emotions.

There’s more than one way to make an emotional connection with your customers. Hubspot has identified six core emotions that encourage sharing, engagement, and purchase including happiness, sadness, fright, surprise, anger, and disgust. By playing on these feelings, you can create personalized advertising suited to your customers’ needs. Emotional advertising is about understanding how to utilize these core emotions, evoke a response in your readers, and have that lead to action. That act can be a purchase, sharing, or engagement, depending on your goals.

Your Customers’ Deeper Desires

Emotional marketing can also tap into certain desires of your customers, utilizing deeper feelings than the core six emotions. Developing an ad or campaign that utilizes these approaches (detailed in Entrepreneur), can be more powerful and lasting. They include:

Inspiration: Creates pride, like a human interest story
Aspirational: Taps into audience’s dreams, like a lofty goal, lifestyle, or experience
Expressing love: Reaches into personal and raw emotions
Milestone Connection: Celebrates a brand anniversary or important life events
Local angle: Connects to people’s passion and pride for where they live

This way of approaching emotional marketing helps create meaningful connections with your customers in a way that feels reliable and honest. If you don’t manage this authenticity, your advertising can fall flat and damage your relationship with customers. It’s essential to determine which strategy will work best for your business. The key to emotional advertising is understanding your audience and telling an authentic, believable story that will stick with them.

Are you interested in developing an emotional advertising strategy? The Leverage Marketing team specializes in creating campaigns that build lasting relationships between brands and their customers. Contact us today to learn what we can do for your company.

6 Online Branding Strategies Your New Business Can Use Now

December 20, 2017/0 Comments/in Branding, Content Marketing, Social Media /by Leverage Marketing

When you’ve been busy getting your business off the ground, marketing may not be your biggest priority. However, it’s never too early to start branding your business, and the sooner you adopt online branding strategies, the better.

Branding your business online will help you connect with your potential customers in the digital spaces where they spend time. A good branding strategy should give your audience a strong sense of what your company is all about and why they should choose you over a similar competitor. A well-developed brand will stick with consumers. Even if they’re not ready to buy from you right now, they’ll remember you when they need your products or services.

Let’s look at some of the online branding strategies you can start implementing now, even if your budget and resources are limited.

Expand Your About Us Page

Take a look at the About Us page on your website. Does it read like a laundry list of basic facts (e.g., founder’s name, year launched, location)? Is it a short paragraph that you told yourself would serve as a placeholder until you came up with something better? If so, it’s time to invest more energy in the content on this page.

The About page is your chance to introduce customers to your brand and show them what you stand for. This page needs to answer the questions:

Why does this business exist?

What does this business do better than anybody else?

Not everyone who lands on your site will visit your About page, but those who do will gain a better sense of what drives and defines your brand. And the act of developing content for your About page will help you and your team come up with the language that best describes your business, which you’ll continue to use in both offline and online branding strategies.

Document Your Buyer Personas

Before you can get rolling with your website branding strategies, you need to understand who you’re trying to reach. 74 percent of online consumers say they get frustrated when a website’s content is irrelevant to them, so it’s important to tailor your brand content to the right buyers.

You may already have an idea about the kind of person who will love your product or service, but do you have documented buyer personas? A buyer persona is a representation of your target audience based on market research and historical data. If you’re a new business, you may not have a lot of customer data to base your personas on. That’s okay: you can start with broad personas and add details as you learn more about your audience. For example, a company that sells beard grooming products might identify two primary audiences:

Men with beards
Women buying gifts for their bearded partners

As their business takes off, the beard care company can begin collecting demographic information from sources like Google Analytics, customer surveys, and interviews.

Once you learn more about (and document) your target buyers’ interests, pain points, and buying process, you’ll be better prepared to connect with them through your brand messaging.

Create a Brand Style Guide

No matter what branding strategies you use in your online marketing, your brand voice and visual style need to be consistent. Consistency helps your audience quickly recognize and identify with your brand, while inconsistency can confuse your audience and cause them to see your business as unprofessional. Your new business should take the time to create a brand style guide that includes:

Your brand’s mission/goals
Your brand story (e., the reason you exist)
Adjectives to describe the brand, as well as adjectives to describe what the brand is not
A description of your audience (e., your buyer personas)
Notes about language to avoid
Your brand color palette
Your brand typography (e., the fonts you’ll use)
Approved versions of your logo and descriptions of when to use each one
Best practices for visual content

Is that a lot of detail? Yes, but it’s worth it. Having a brand style guide that you can share with your employees and freelancers will keep everyone aligned with your brand voice. And that kind of consistency pays off: you’re three to four times more likely to enjoy brand visibility when you consistently present your brand, leading to an average revenue increase of 23 percent.

Develop a Customer Reward Plan

Branding your business online isn’t just about attracting new customers—it’s about building brand loyalty.

One great way to improve your customer retention is to reward customers for every purchase. For example, you could:

include a personalized thank-you note whenever you ship an online purchase
send customers a discount code after they buy something or subscribe to your newsletter
let customers earn store credit every time they make a purchase.

Adopting a reward plan will help you become known as a company that truly cares about its customers. Additionally, if your company offers a type of reward plan that none of your competitors have, you can use it as a unique selling proposition. For example, the shoe company TOMS markets the fact that they donate a pair of shoes to a child in need every time a customer makes a purchase.

Encourage and Share User-Generated Content

One of the main goals of branding is to engage with potential customers so that they’ll choose to buy from your business. And one of the beauties of online branding is that you can directly connect with your audience on the digital platforms where they’re already spending their time.

Once you start building an audience online, encourage your followers to share brand content on your website and social media. User-generated content, which can be anything from product reviews to unboxing videos, builds your brand’s authenticity and provides social proof. When potential customers see real people using and enjoying your product, their confidence in your brand will increase.

So, how do you get your online followers to create and share content with your brand? Give them an incentive. For example, you could run a photo contest with a gift card prize or pledge to donate $1 to a charity every time followers post an Instagram photo using your branded hashtag.

Build an Influencer Network

A discussion of online branding strategies wouldn’t be complete without mentioning influencer marketing. Influencer marketing involves working with someone who has a dedicated base of online followers so that their followers can get to know your brand. This might include writing a branded guest post on an influencer’s blog, having an influencer share a photo of your product on Instagram, or teaming up with an influencer to host a webinar, just to name a few examples.

As a new business, you might not feel like you have the clout to work with an influential blogger or social media personality, but influencer marketing campaigns can work for companies of all sizes, as long as you’re willing to invest some time and effort.

The first step you’ll need to take is to identify online influencers who closely align with your brand and your customers’ interests. You can do this manually by performing Google searches for blogs that are relevant to your industry, or you can streamline the process by using an influencer database tool like Buzzsumo or Upfluence.

Once you’ve identified influencers you’d like to partner with, you’ll need to take the time to build a professional relationship. Subscribe to the influencer’s newsletter, comment on their blog, share their content on social media, and familiarize yourself with their brand. Influencers will be much more open to working with your brand if you’ve done your research and shown an interest in their content than if you abruptly ask them for a favor.

Need help implementing any of the online branding strategies above? The Leverage Marketing team specializes in building brands through digital channels, and we’d love to hear from you. Contact us to learn more about what we can do for your brand.

Enhance Your Ecommerce Marketing Strategy with Leverage Learning

August 16, 2017/0 Comments/in Branding, Content Marketing, PPC, SEO, Social Media, Web Design /by Leverage Marketing

95% of Americans make an online purchase at least once a year, and 80% have made at least one online purchase in the past month. And, as the Washington Post recently put it, about a third of consumers now buy something online at least as often as they take out the trash (once a week). As online shopping becomes increasingly popular, it may seem like there’s never been a better time to own an ecommerce business.

However, growth-focused ecommerce businesses still face plenty of challenges, especially when it comes to attracting shoppers (who may be inclined to start their search on Amazon) and converting those shoppers into paying customers.

Build Your Ecommerce Marketing Knowledge

At Leverage Marketing, we want to help online businesses address these challenges with actionable ecommerce marketing ideas. We’ve been doing this for years with our digital marketing services, and now we’re taking what we’ve learned and sharing it in a free educational email series called Leverage Learning: Ecommerce.

The goal of Leverage Learning: Ecommerce is to help online business owners find digital marketing ideas to reach more customers and increase sales. The series is broken into 11 lessons on the following subjects:

Branding
Search Engine Optimization
UX Web Design
Content Marketing
Influencer Marketing
Facebook and Instagram Marketing
Paid Search Advertising
Email Marketing
Online Customer Service
Mobile Marketing
Measuring Success in Google Analytics

When you subscribe, you’ll receive a new email lesson twice a week until you’ve received the full series. The emails offer best practices for ecommerce marketing, quick tips that business owners can implement right away, and recommendations for free or low-cost tools to streamline marketing efforts.

If you’re ready to use digital marketing to drive sales for your ecommerce business, you can subscribe to our Leverage Learning: Ecommerce series by clicking here.

And if you enjoy this series, stay tuned: we’ll be releasing our Leverage Learning: Content Marketing series next!

As always, we’d love for you to contact us if you have any questions about our Leverage Learning series or the digital marketing services we offer!

How to Master Online Customer Service

July 7, 2017/0 Comments/in Branding, Social Media /by Bob Kehoe

As sales increasingly move online, it’s more vital than ever for your company to have stellar online customer service. Your web presence, including social media, online chat, and even forums, is your customers’ gateway into your brand. At Leverage Marketing, we know how necessary online customer support is, and have the online customer service tips you need for success. These brands go above and beyond when interacting with their clients, creating an accessible and fun web reputation.

Even just a decade or two ago, people would use BBB (the Better Business Bureau) and services like Angie’s List to find the best business for the job. Today, we use Facebook, Twitter, review sites like Yelp, and Google searches to find the best company. A brand with the best online customer service stands out and encourages using them time and time again.

Here are some of our tips for online customer service:

Why is Customer Service Important?

You might be asking why customer service is important in the digital age. After all, we interact face-to-face less than ever before. Customer service is important because it can be a critical step on the way to purchase or as a way to resolve an issue with an order. First impressions are important, and you want to make sure to get it right. Well-educated customer service representatives can help potential customers problem-solve and avoid negative reactions to your company. Most importantly, online customer support provides an easy and convenient way for your customers to interact with you. It goes both ways—you learn from current and potential clients, and they can have their questions and concerns addressed.

How Should My Company Engage with Our Customers?

In today’s constantly-on environment, it’s important to have multiple avenues of customer service for your clients to engage with you. While the basics are important—phone, email, and web chat– going beyond those are essential for creating the best online customer service. Being accessible to your customers and engaging with them helps make your company feel relatable. Determine which social media networks are useful for communicating your brand message, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and even Pinterest. Twitter and Facebook are most commonly used for complaints (and positive reviews), so responding to customer comments can be a key part of your engagement strategy.

Social media is a key part of developing your brand voice: you can decide to be snarky, always positive, or have a specific sense of humor. Wendy’s Twitter account has been making waves with their hilarious and often mean @replies, which can work for some brands, but not for all. Developing your brand identity through social media is key because it’s often your customers’ first look into your product or service. Help make potential clients feel comfortable engaging by responding to comments, using emojis and GIFs to create a casual atmosphere.

Companies Known for Great Customer Service

Here at Leverage, we know about the best online customer service. We work with companies every day that utilize our online customer support tips to help their clients and develop better relationships with their customer base. These are some outstanding examples of companies with great customer service:

JetBlue- While it’s certainly not the largest U.S. airline, JetBlue knows how to engage with its customers. Their customer service team realizes the importance of interacting not only with satisfied flyers but also with those who had bad experiences. They’re extremely active on Twitter, responding to @mentions as well as brand mentions. JetBlue’s commitment to customers is evident in its Customer Bill of Rights: “JetBlue Airways is dedicated to bringing humanity back to air travel. We strive to make every part of your experience a

s simple and as pleasant as possible.” With many forms of support, including phone, email, an online knowledge base, text updates, and a smartphone app, JetBlue has customer service covered. From in-person to online customer service, JetBlue takes care of its customers, leading to people using the airline again and again.

Zappos- Although Amazon now owns them, Zappos disrupted an industry (shoes) and has some of the best online customer service out there. They offer fast, free shipping and free returns for a year. Zappos puts their customers first—their company motto is that they’re a “service company that happens to sell shoes. And handbags. And more….” This attitude has helped Zappos succeed in a big way. The company puts its representatives through its School of WOW to inspire its leaders and teach them the best customer service philosophy. Most importantly, for an all-online company, Zappos puts its customers first. Whether a customer calls in, chats, or uses social media, Zappos is right there to help them whatever their concern.

How Can My Company Master Online Customer Support?

To become a company known for great customer service, you need to start with a customer-first philosophy. Leverage Marketing offers web design services and social media management services that support your customer service efforts. Contact us today to develop a strategy and get the tips you need for success.