Nowadays on the internet, memes reign supreme.

New memes are created every day from celebrities’ quotes, politicians’ mistakes, or even idiotic catchphrases from viral videos.

Facebook averages roughly 1.2 billion active users per day, and Twitter has over 300 million active users per month. With the constant usage of these social media sites, new memes spread like wildfire, reaching more people than ever.

The popularity of memes has led many businesses to contemplate whether or not they should partake in meme marketing.

There are both pros and cons to meme marketing. Read on to learn more about them and to see if this type of marketing strategy could be the right fit for you.

What Exactly Is Meme Marketing?

Before we get into the marketing side of things, let’s first clearly define what a “meme” is.

The term “meme” was first coined in 1976 by the famous evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene. Its origin is Greek, and it most simply means “to imitate.”

Since that time, though, the word “meme” has taken on a much larger, more expansive meaning. It essentially describes any type of idea, phrase, image, or other type of media that is shared online between people.

In a way, memes have become the common, universal language of the Internet. That is why so many businesses are interested in using memes to market their products: there is essentially a built-in audience that will recognize the marketing of your brand.

With meme marketing, relatively new businesses can use existing memes to advertise their products and gain customers.

Meanwhile, more well-known and well-established companies can create their own memes and try to make them go viral.

The Pros

There are a lot of clear positives when it comes to using memes in your marketing strategy.

First and foremost, discovering and utilizing the right type of meme makes your brand become more identifiable. Potential customers will notice and appreciate the familiarity of the meme you are using. It’s a way to instantly relate to them.

Using memes can also help businesses connect with a younger audience if they’re struggling with reaching out to them. Memes project a fun, lighthearted image that’s appealing to young adults. Plus, they are instantly shareable on all social media platforms.

While social media has become more widely adopted by people of all ages, young consumers still use it the most out of any age group. Plus, they have used social media for a longer and more consistent period of time than older adults have.

The Cons

With all of those positives, though, come some potential negatives when businesses try implementing memes into their marketing.

The first and most important thing that all businesses can do is know and understand the meme they want to post before they actually post it. Using a meme incorrectly can backfire and damage your brand’s reputation.

Another possible issue could be the timing of your posts.

Some memes have very long life spans that last for years. Other ones burn out in just a couple of weeks or even a few days.

With each meme you use, you are taking a risk.

Some posts could become evergreen marketing if the meme lasts long enough. But others could be huge misfires if you mistime the posting of the meme.

Lastly, be sure that the meme you are using is appropriate.

In the past, other organizations have faced harsh criticism from people who were offended by the meme they chose to use.

Whatever publicity you get from using an inappropriate meme won’t be worth the cost of destroying your reputation with loyal customers.

Do your research. Consult other professionals.

Make sure the meme is the right fit for your business and your customers before you use it.

The Verdict

So what’s the verdict? Should you include memes in your future marketing plan?

Honestly, it could be a different answer for each business.

But, overall, memes have proven to be an effective form of marketing when used responsibly. Plus, memes open your business up to the widest consumer base possible.

Keep yourself informed and updated on the newest trends. Understand that there are major benefits to utilizing memes correctly in your online marketing plan.

But also remember that you are taking a risk each time you jump on the meme bandwagon. Discretion is key. Pick the right ones.

Have you tried this type of marketing before? If so, what was your experience with it like?

Interested in exploring meme marketing or other types of marketing strategies? Contact us so we can help!

The post Should You Use a Meme Marketing Strategy? appeared first on Midas Marketing.

Putting together a digital marketing campaign can help your business, but to maximize its benefit it should be results driven.

By being results driven, your company maintains its focus on what works best and leverages this to improve your business.

But how can you make sure your digital marketing campaign is results driven?

Let’s take a closer look at how to do this!

Set Measurable Goals

One way is by establishing measurable goals for your campaign.

In order to set these goals, you need to give your business an honest assessment of where it is now and where you want it to go.

But how do you do this? By looking at the past and the present to help you look ahead to the future.

Look at the current trends in your industry. What is working for you and your competitors?

When you consider the past, take a look at what you or your competitors have done that worked and didn’t work.

With those things in mind, set short- and long-term goals for your business.

Ask yourself how your businesses campaign can help it achieve those goals.

Regularly Evaluate Results

Pay close attention to the results of your digital marketing campaign through a reliable metrics measurement tool.

Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google that measures your website’s traffic. But it isn’t just a matter of who is visiting what area of your site.

What are your customers doing when they are on your website. Are they spending more time on certain pages over others? How are certain marketing tactics you are using helping sales of your product or service?

By an in-depth analysis of your results by your business and experienced digital marketing professionals, you can recognize patterns and other trends to help you refine your campaign.

Act on Your Analysis

But an in-depth analysis isn’t enough on its own! You need to take that information and use it to your businesses advantage.

Your data will probably show you things that are working well and others that aren’t.

Knowing what to do with this information is an important part of keeping focusing on  results

A Results Driven Digital Marketing Campaign

A results driven digital marketing campaign is an important tool for your business.

But in order to maintain your focus on being results driven, you have to do a few important things.

Set measurable goals for your business by looking at trends in your industry and what has worked (and not worked) in the past.

Utilize a reliable analytics program, among other things, to see what is working and not working.

But putting this information to use is what matters in a results driven campaign.

Be sure that you refine your message so that it resonates with consumers in the best possible way.

If you are a business owner in the Portland, Oregon area considering taking your digital marketing efforts to the next level, contact us. We want to talk about your business and how we can help you!

The post How to Make Sure Your Digital Marketing Campaign is Results Driven appeared first on Midas Marketing.

There are clearly a ton of digital marketing benefits — if there weren’t, it wouldn’t have taken over traditional marketing last year to become the most popular advertising medium.

Now appears to be the time to start investing in a digital marketing strategy. Companies are consistently spending less of their precious dollars on old advertising methods and more on building a name for themselves online.

In fact, digital marketing is projected to consume 3/4 of industry leader’s marketing budgets by 2021!

So what makes online advertising worth such a huge investment?

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons businesses are making the shift from print, radio, and television to investing in the web — and why you should too.

5 Very Convincing Digital Marketing Benefits

Smart businesses won’t start spending money on something new without making sure it has good value first.

These proven benefits of digital marketing are some of the top reasons why there has been a shift away from traditional ads to the internet.

It’s more cost effective

Simply put, marketing costs are significantly lower for digital marketing than for old school methods.

For example, a Facebook advertisement can generate 5-30 user engagements for as little as $5.00… Whereas a magazine advertisement can run anywhere between $500 and $20,000 depending on the publication.

And you won’t even be able to tell how effective that pricey print ad was, which leads me to the next point.

It gives real time data

Figuring out how effective your advertising is, has never been easier with digital marketing strategies.

Now every time someone clicks, valuable information is collected instantly.

This data can tell you the impact your marketing strategy is having on your target audience — right away.

It can target a specific audience

In the online world, it’s way easier to hone in on your target market. Once you know who they are, you can find out where they hang out on the internet and what their interests are.

This lets you place an ad that will matter to your potential clients and shows up in the right place.

That’s much more effective than mass producing a print ad and hoping the right person reads it!

It will get shared more

When you get a flyer in the mail, where does it end up?

That’s right. The garbage.

Information on the internet has way more potential to get shared and passed on than print. In a world where 68% of people trust online opinions from other consumers, you want to take advantage of word-of-mouth…

Or should I say, word-of-share?

It will convert more clients

The end goal is to turn your target audience into customers.

Some digital marketing strategies were shown to be four times more effective than traditional methods at doing just that!

Winning clients.

Now that’s worth investing in.

Final Thoughts…

After looking into digital marketing benefits, it’s clear why online advertising is the way of the future.

Shifting marketing focus to the web can:

1. Save money
2. Give better insight with real-time data
3. Target a more specific audience
4. Get shared more
5. And convert more potential clients into actual clients

Sounds great, right?

Experience the benefits for yourself. Make the switch to digital marketing today.

The post Digital Marketing Benefits: 5 Great Reasons to Invest in Online Marketing appeared first on Midas Marketing.

How to Build High Converting Websites

Let’s put things straight right away: every business aspires for a high converting website but only a few are able to reach their goal. With more than a billion websites trying to attract 3.8 billion Internet users, the challenge is pretty steep. So how do you create that inspiring website that attracts tons of traffic and helps you drive in sales and revenue? While it may seem an uphill task given the competition you are up against, it isn’t insurmountable if you get the fundamentals right. Once you start getting traffic, it’s time to nail the essentials behind a high converting website.

• Killer Design – Ever heard of the phrase “first impression is the last impression?” It aptly applies to web designing. An average user would spend less than 3 seconds on a website before switching over to another, so you need to catch their attention within this short time span. The design should be unique and aesthetically pleasing in order to immediately strike a chord with the visitor. Stress on a mobile friendly design as majority of your users would visit on their smartphone and tablets. Make use of motivating graphics and images to vibrantly convey your message effectively.

• Optimize The Website – Search Engine Optimization is one of the essential ingredients of a high converting website. It acts as a hook for users who are browsing for information on products and services similar to yours. Working with SEO strategists to research on high potential keywords and then following up with a good SEO strategy can drive in tons of traffic to your website. If you are a local business, local SEO plays a key role in bringing in qualified traffic to the landing pages and helps you rise up in the SERP rankings. A well-optimized strategy is especially an important piece of the puzzle for B2B websites.

• Captivating Content – Often ignored, content is vital both for engaging your users as well as the search engines. The content should be crisp and should deliver your message to the audience. Use humor and anecdotes to make the content conversational as this will help in speaking to the right emotions in the mind of the users. Content should immediately convey the value proposition that your products or services would offer them. Publishing regular blogs also allows you to interact with your target users and also ensures better engagement with the search engine crawlers.

Make sure you pair strong imagery with your content. If you are a massage therapist, consider using the serenity that water evokes to drive home content about the calming benefits of massage.

• Call To Actions – Call to actions have helped businesses increase their online revenue and other forms of conversion by as much as 150%. Once your design and content have inspired the right desire in the minds of the audience you need to guide them towards their next set of actions. The last thing you want to do is make it difficult for someone once they are ready to buy from you!

• Analytics – Paying attention to data is often the cornerstone tool that high converting websites use very well. Google Analytics can show you visitor behavior flow, exit pages, entrance pages, time spent on each page, and so much more. Other applications like heat maps can even measure where a user’s mouse hovers on the screen. Make sure that analytics are a very considered element of your website strategy.

High Converting Websites Grow Businesses!

High converting websites have used these techniques for years to stay ahead of their rivals.

If you are interested in partnering us to build one for your company, get started here!

The post The Process of Building High Converting Websites appeared first on Midas Marketing.

6 Ways to Turn Social Media Followers to Buyers

Taking a personable approach to social media marketing is a very effective way to build a large and loyal following. However, there’s more to business than just being liked. Unless you’re giving your online audience great value and a clear, undeniable reason to convert, it won’t do much for your bottom line. To ensure your followers show their support with their wallets also, here are six best practices for converting fans to customers.

1. Take trending topics and relate them back to your business.

As a company owner and/or decision maker, part of your job is to identify the problems your customers have, even if they aren’t consciously aware of them. After all, you’re the industry expert and this means that you have the trusted ability to determine how your services or products can impact and improve lives. Use major search engines to find out what topics are trending on the web and then find one that you can relate back to your business. For instance, if you service and install HVAC systems and web users are in a frenzy over the latest report on indoor mold growth, generate a few blog posts on this subject and then offer a modest discount on HVAC system servicing and filter replacements. Not only will this be a timely and well-received value-add to your fans, but it will also give them a relevant reason to consider your offer and take action.

2. Create a sense of urgency.

This is the oldest marketing tactic in the book, but it has, does and will continue to work. Generate social media posts to let people know that you have a high-value offer that will only last for a limited amount of time. Make sure to include a link back to the appropriate sales page and provide all the information that they need for taking advantage of the related promotion. In addition to fostering rapid and positive purchasing decisions, creating buyer urgency is also a great way to offload products that are collecting dust on warehouse shelves or nearing their expiration dates.

3. Contribute to a worthy cause.

Believe it or not, consumer buying decisions can still be driven by a desire to do something good for others. When researching trending topics, also look for a cause that you believe in and address it in your social media posts. Also, make sure to tell your customers that you’ll be donating a portion of your sales to the specified cause. Actions like these create more buyer urgency, give people the chance to contribute to causes they want to support and generate goodwill and good word-of-mouth advertising for your business.

Be creative and relevant with the causes your support. For example, a computer repair company might donate a percentage of profits to solar-powered computers in developing countries.

4. Take it to the press.

Do you have a new product, a new service or even a new address? Write up a professional press release or source one from a trusted team of content writers and then publish a link back to any media outlets that issue this release. This is marketing on top of marketing and it is guaranteed to make people take more interest in your business. Media outlets are considered information authorities and if they perceive your business as being worthy of discussion, consumers will consider it worthy of their cash.

5. Solve problems for free.

You don’t have spend money on promos and giveaways in order to win trust for your business. You’re an informed, experienced expert in your field and this means that you have valuable information to share. Helping people troubleshoot common problems online without collecting cash will allow you to establish a reputation for trustworthiness with your audience. When it comes to choosing a supplier or service provider, most people heavily consider the companies that they trust.

6. Make it fun to buy from you.

Gamification has been one of the top marketing buzzwords as of late. Making a game of you marketing campaigns is guaranteed to be effective. Why? Online consumers love playing games, especially on social networking sites. The enjoy competition and they like having the opportunity to win something. Gamification allows you to give things away without having to give something to everyone, which is the surest way to control your online marketing costs. Tell your fans and followers that people who purchase now will be entered into a drawing for a chance to win a special prize or give them daily puzzles to solve for product or service discounts. Additionally and somewhat surprisingly, the ability to win something is often far more appealing than being given something for free.

Use These Tips to Turn Social Media Followers to Buyers

Ultimately, when it comes to building a robust customer base through social media marketing, it’s not enough to just attract large numbers of followers and fans. You have to give your readership a reason to engage and adequate incentive for converting. Fortunately, there are countless ways that you can do this without coming off as being entirely sales-oriented. The leading strategy, when the dust settles, is to commit yourself to always giving your followers excellent value. If you consistently give your fans and followers something worthwhile, they’ll keep coming back and your profits are sure to soar. Lastly, if you are wondering if your social media marketing is converting well enough to return positive value to your business, here’s a dedicated post on that very topic of measuring social media ROI.

The post How to Convert Your Social Media Followers to Buyers appeared first on Midas Marketing.

How to Measure Social Media ROI

Social media marketing is a great tool that helps businesses of all sizes promote their brand and engage directly with customers and fans. Over the years, many businesses have definitely recognized the need to remain socially engaged but many of them do not know how to measure social media ROI (return on investment) for their marketing campaigns using the e-commerce/goals functionality of Google Analytics. Google Analytics is necessity for anyone who wants their marketing efforts on social media platforms to translate into improved sales and profits.

Here is a simple method that you can employ to track your social media results with the help of the free Google Analytics program:

Step #1: Decide the goals of your social media campaign

Identifying the goals you want to track should be your first step towards measuring the ROI from your social media campaigns. For example, one of your goals may be converting 5 percent of all the Internet users visiting your website from the social media platforms into customers.  Once you know what you want to measure, such as sales in this example, the next step is to set up goal tracking in Google Analytics.

• Log into your account’s admin area
• Click on profile of site for which you are creating goals
• Select Goals tab
• Click on + Goal link in one of the goal sets to pull up the screen that enables you to choose one of the four goals you want to track using Google Analytics
• If the sales funnel on your website ends up on a predetermined thank you’ page, then choose the goal option ‘URL Destination.’ Also fill out the fields that show up when you choose this option. If you are employing a complicated e-commerce system, then you must choose the goal option ‘Event’ and also follow the instructions on ‘Conversion Overview’ in Google Help in order to properly set up the goals.

Setting up goals can be a bit intimidating, but we are happy to help if you need it. For most work we do at Midas, we insist that Google Analytics is installed and goals are established or else measuring website performance starts to become a guessing game, kind of like if customers turned invisible as soon as they walked in your store. If we run a campaign, we want to be able to measure social media ROI to know what worked and what didn’t.

Step #2: Measure social media traffic conversions

As soon as you set up your goals and activate the system, data (in regards to the number of sales happening on your website) will be generated; however, feeding in your conversion goal alone is not sufficient for obtaining meaningful information about the ROI of your social media campaigns because this feature takes into account sales from all sources.  In order to segregate the conversions from social media and those from other sources, you need to create an Advanced Traffic Segment in your Google Analytics account. This can be done as follows:

• Navigate to the screen ‘Traffic Sources Overview’ from your reporting dashboard
• Click on ‘Advanced Segments’ button which you can see immediately under the main header of the page
• Click on the button ‘+ New Custom Segment’ button which shows up on the lower right-hand side corner of the segmentation menu
• On the new screen that pops up, add ‘OR’ statements using the ‘Source’ metric in order to specify the users who come from specific social media sources.  A custom segment can be created for each social media platform from which your website receives traffic. Ensure that mobile and desktop domains as well as all URL shortening services (as an example, Twitter’s ‘t.co’) are also used. You should not group all social media domains into a single custom segment ‘Social Media Traffic.’ This diminishes the value of the data you generate.

Taking the time to set up your Google Analytics goals properly turns black and white website data into full color.

Step #3: On the basis of data generated, make adjustments to your social media marketing strategy

After creating the custom social segments, you can come back to the reporting dashboard ‘Goals Overview’ in the ‘Conversions’ menu in order to apply the custom filters that you have created using the ‘Advanced Segments’ button. This will help you to clearly know how many of the visitors to your website from the social media platforms have turned into paying customers.
The ROI from your social media marketing campaigns can now be worked out by comparing the number of sales that has been contributed by this source with the time, effort and money involved in running the campaign. It is important to measure the ROI for each social media platform because it is commonly seen that when some platforms provide a positive ROI, other don’t, and calculating this can help you allocate your future marketing dollars accordingly.

Conclusion: How to Measure Social Media ROI

We hear many complaints about the mystery of social media marketing. Truthfully, many people just don’t want to put in the work to deeply analyze everything that’s happening. If you take these steps, measuring your social media ROI is actually easier than offline ROI in many ways. Invest in setting up your systems and you’ll be able to measure social media ROI and build your business with proper clarity and strategy.

The post How to Measure Social Media ROI appeared first on Midas Marketing.

How to Promote a New Website: Getting Started

You may have already read our guide on driving traffic to your website, but what if your website is brand new? Modern businesses are driven by technology and a website plays a pivotal role in your digital marketing efforts. While every business craves website hits, very few know the secret formula for success. Small businesses and start-ups with their small marketing budget often struggle to attract potential customers to their website. How do you create awareness? How do you turn your website into the most potent marketing tool? If you have just launched or are still building, here are some of the things you need to consider when driving traffic to a new website.

• Know Your Audience – There are close to 3.2 billion active Internet users around the world. While your site is accessible to all, you need to know whom you want to target. Whether you are engaging a professional agency for your marketing campaign or plan to adopt the DIY route, you need to know your audience and there should be no ambiguity here. You can identify your customers based on their age, sex, location, social habits, spending prowess, and so much more. Knowing your buyer persona is crucial to the success of any business. Intimately understanding your target market is a must in order to design a campaign to attract the right kind of visitors as you begin driving traffic to a new website.

• Quality Over Quantity – Many businesses see lots of traffic to their website without being able to monetize it. If you aren’t a news or publishing website, you should aim for quality rather than quantity. For instance if you sell used cars in New York, attracting a user who is looking for similar services in Europe wouldn’t add value to your marketing efforts. Qualified traffic increases your conversion rate and helps you increase your sales and profits. To do this, don’t be afraid to be specific and clear about what your business offers and how it stands out from the competition. This will help you carve out your space online and start building traffic through long-tail keyword searches.

If you are a nanny, but are showing up in the search engines for all searches related to “childcare,” you may want to build your content strategy around the term “nanny” specifically so you don’t get untargeted leads looking for day care service.

• Target Organic Search – Most of your target audience may not be aware of your brand name. In such circumstances, the only real way to attract them to your website without paid advertising is via organic search. You need to identify the generic keywords and key phrases used by your audience and optimize your site around these. Target keywords which have high search volume and yet are low in competition as this increases your chances of success manifold. Search online for “keyword tools” and “traffic estimators” and you’ll be on your way.

• Be Creative – Considering the numbers of live websites, you are up against odds. To take down the competition, you should be creative with your marketing campaign. It all starts with designing a website that captures the immediate attention of its visitors. From the design to the color scheme, focus on exclusivity and pick a style that conveys your message convincingly. The content should be crisp and conversational to build authentic interest in your brand.

• Start with a Bang – If you have a following already, consider offering a sale or promotion of some sort for the first 3 months after your website launches. This will lead your existing tribe to your website and will engage them on a digital level also.

Keeping these things in mind will have you well on your way to promoting your new website. Contact us to learn how we can help!

The post How to Promote a New Website: 5 Winning Strategies appeared first on Midas Marketing.

How to Get Your Website Noticed

Generating leads and sales from a website is a challenge that troubles all businesses, right from start-ups to large companies. With every company creating its online footprint, you need to fight high odds to succeed. What you need is an organized strategy with a multi-fold approach, as there is no simple formula for success. Here are a few tips that would help you attract quality traffic to and finally answer the question, “How to get customers on my website?”

• It Starts with the Website! – You can’t sell a poor product or service, and similarly you can attract traffic to a bad website. If your existing website isn’t yielding results, get it redesigned from a professional agency or freelancer. The design should be eye-catching and the site should be mobile-friendly to improve your odds. Also, make sure the web pages have a short load time as this is essential for a modern website.

• On-Page SEO – On-page SEO is the most potent way of attracting traffic to your website. But again, the strategies and techniques behind on-site SEO undergo changes regularly with algorithmic updates of major search engines. Bringing in help or training your marketing director with the best practices in SEO is crucial. Long tail keywords account for the majority of searches and are also low on competition, so ranking well for these longer searches will bring you targeted, high converting traffic. If you’re wondering how to get your website noticed by Google, this is a key place to start.

• Create a Blog – Blog marketing has proven to be a highly rewarding technique as it allows you to post unique content on a regular basis, which is great for SEO. Blogs also serve as a big incentive for your regular visitors to check your website on a periodic basis. Also, reply to the comments on your blog as this shows you are present and engaged with your customer’s questions, concerns and praise.

A real estate agent might keep a blog running to keep their clientele aware of market trends, which could lead to buying and selling opportunities.

• Link Building – Link building isn’t dead as some people think. It still holds great potential and can complement other strategies that you would use to get your website noticed. Apart from external links, you should also focus on the internal linking of your website.

• Go Social – Social Media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are big mines of traffic that you can use them to your advantage. Users spend hours of their leisure time on the social media daily, and here you would be able to engage with the audience and interact with them actively. Beyond just tweeting and posting, there are strategies you can implement to monitor the ROI on your social media marketing.

• Email Marketing – While critics have written an early obituary for email marketing, it can still be a brilliant marketing medium if you take a strategic approach. Email marketing allows you to engage with your existing customers and keep them in the know of your latest offerings. It has also weathered the storm of all the social media ups and downs, and remains a consistent communication platform if done right.

Summary: How to Get Your Website Noticed

These few tips would go a long way in increasing traffic to your website and creating new opportunities for your business.

Best of luck on your implementation, and if you need help, don’t hesitate to contact us!

The post How to Get Your Website Noticed: Website Marketing 101 appeared first on Midas Marketing.