What’s a review worth? How many do we need?
Clients often ask these questions, especially when they’re trying to motivate staff. Read More
As a Toronto marketing company in the trenches of the digital marketing revolution, we’ve witnessed the rise of video marketing as a key tool in your marketing toolbox. In fact, partly because of algorithm changes, views of branded video content have increased:
- 258% on Facebook and
- 99% on YouTube as of June 2017
And, when deployed on your site, videos have been shown to increase conversion by 20% and average order value by 19%.
Sounds great but given that there’s 100 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute, how do create video content that will get found and be successful for your business? Here’s a hint; the most important part of the video production happens before the shoot. It’s all about the pre-production!
Here’s a 20 step checklist to successful video marketing pre-production:
1. What Are Your Goals For The Video?
Define how you are going to measure success, for example:
Simple Brand Awareness (Views and Reach)
Leads
Actual Purchase of Product or Service. Different goals will have different video marketing strategies.
2. Who Is Your Audience?
Define the buyer persona (Demographic, Hobbies/Interests, Read More
While The Marketing Garage specializes in Digital Marketing and Branding, we are also big movie fans. While filling out our annual Oscar ballots we decided to create our own category. Here are the nominees for Best Film Marketing Campaign as decided by a Toronto marketing company.
This category is not simply “which film made most money” though that is a factor. We will examine how far a movie was able to stretch a budget, the uniqueness of the marketing campaign, and overall quality of the marketing and ROI.
A national healthcare provider with 100+ locations approached the Marketing Garage to improve their organic Google rankings and local maps rankings. Although they were the leader in their category, they felt that they were underrepresented in search engines and were ranking poorly for a variety of valuable keywords.
What Is Sponsored InMail?
Sponsored InMail on LinkedIn is the paid counterpart to regular InMail. It allows you to engage with your target audience by sending personalized, private messages right to their LinkedIn inboxes. You can reach people based on location, the company they work at, job industry, job title, skills, education, and more.
As a Toronto marketing company, we’ve seen this tool outperform others, including traditional email marketing, mainly due to the fact that these messages seem so personal and are delivered in an uncluttered, professional environment.
But how do you make sure you’re getting the most out of your Sponsored InMail? Below, we outline 9 best practices to incorporate into your campaign to get real results.
Looking for a new year’s resolution for your digital marketing? How about ‘no more stock photos!’?
This is a handy post for those trying to convince others in the company not to use stock photos AND for those who know deep inside they shouldn’t use stock but don’t have any good alternatives. Accordingly here’s 5 great reasons you shouldn’t use stock photos and 7 easy things to do instead.
Top 5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Use Stock Photos In Digital Marketing
1. Stock photos lower conversion.
There’s no shortage of digital marketing tests that show that real photography converts better:
- A debt company sees a 35% increase in online sign-ups with a picture of the founder vs. the top-performing stock photo.
- A 3 fold increase in ad click-through occurred when user-generated photos wearing the product were used instead of stock or with stock.
- A moving company that replaced THAT generic shot of happy people moving (who’s happy when they’re moving?) with a photo of their team or their truck (a truck!) and saw 45% more quotes from their digital marketing.
2. Stock photos lack authenticity.
High-performing digital marketing is all about reducing FUD (Fear, Uncertainty & Doubt) for those making a purchase decision online and increasing Read More
So, you’ve written an email and created a kickass email list. Now comes the part marketing companies agree is the most important. The email subject line. The one line that could make or break your entire email. The first line your contacts will see that will influence their decision to open it. Did you know? 35% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone! So how do you write a good one?
Here’s a 7 step checklist to help you write an email subject line that people will want to open.
What Is UX?
Simply put, UX is User eXperience. But what does that mean and why is it so important? User Experience is a very broad term. It can cover everything from content to how that content is laid out. Are you answering the common questions? Is your content what the user is looking for? Is your content a wall of text or is there some images that add to the context of your text? These are the types of questions that you need to ask yourself when crafting content.
Many of these problems are a result of poor conversion practices and can be improved by conversion rate optimization.
As a Toronto marketing company, it feels like every day we see a new headline about the death of Facebook, Twitter, or other social sites. Unsurprisingly, our clients frequently ask us about where the teens are going these days. Instead of just giving you the stats, we thought we would go a step further and get an actual teenagers opinion. Here’s our intern Lauren’s opinion about the 7 most popular social media sites and apps.
We all know that social media is popular and we all use it, but why? That is, in fact, the real question, why has our world become so revolved around social media and the trends that come with it? My research said that as of 2017 the average person has eight different social media accounts. More than half of the world is using social media on a daily basis. When something is trending we all think that we should download that app and make an account to be like everyone else but are these apps really as popular as you think?
Devising the right marketing strategy can be overwhelming. With so many different offline and digital marketing options available, businesses and even marketing companies themselves are often left to wonder whether their marketing efforts are really worth it.
In 2018, Google Adwords accounted for the largest portion of digital ad spend in the US with 38.6%, so it’s no wonder that it’s usually one of the first places advertisers look. Google Adwords campaigns, especially Google Search, can be very effective when used and optimized strategically. However, as a digital marketing agency, we frequently come across poorly optimized campaigns that are wasting significant portions of their budget.
