Michael Pendreigh

The Vantage Buzz – December 2019

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Hi,

Happy holidays! Hope Black Friday / Cyber Monday went well. The sales season continues, though, and we continue to busily plan and execute promotions. Let us know if you need any help planning yours.

Additionally, we’ll be closed during the holidays, December 25th, 26th, and January 1st.

Your monthly advantage reading below:

Business:

Clarification on whether Hubspot and Saleforce are competitors and the announcement of the death of the funnel and the birth of the flywheel from the CEO of HubSpot.

Ecommerce:

The new year approaches and you might be considering adding new products to your lineup. If you’re looking for a product launch method, this one sounds intriguing and fast: The 7 Day Product Launch Blitz

And General Intrigue:

New year, new ideas for ensuring humanity’s survival in the face of climate change. This one is very sci-fi movie: A 1,000 Year Space Mission to Save Humanity. 

Michael Pendreigh

The Vantage Buzz – November 2019

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Hi,

It’s coming, it’s almost here, it’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday! We’re busy putting together promotions so we’ll keep this newsletter short and sweet.

Be sure to let us know if you need a last minute campaign setup as the time-frame in which we might be able to do so is quickly disappearing.

Your monthly advantage reading below:

Business:

3 options for dealing with a rising customer churn rate. Highlights how ultimately it is unsustainable, but that there are options for you to find a new course.

Ecommerce:

Why losing money on a sale is not necessarily a bad thing. Counter-intuitive, right?

And General Intrigue:

How to check and improve page loading speeds on WordPress. Ecommerce focused, but applicable to any business running on a WordPress page. Includes plugin tips as well.

The-Digital-Marketing-Portfolio
Michael Pendreigh

The Digital Marketing Portfolio

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To grow an online business you need to get people likely-to-convert on your site. Simple, and you already know as much.

But how do you create a plan for this? By developing a digital marketing portfolio. Like a financial portfolio made up of different assets, your marketing portfolio will be made up of different marketing assets.

This portfolio will consist of all of the online channels you use to guide people to your brand online like social media sites such as Facebook, Instagram, or Pinterest as well as online advertising networks like Google Ads and Bing Ads.

The importance of thinking about all of these channels as a portfolio is the flexibility it will give you to shift budget and resources between what is and isn’t working. 

Like a Financial Portfolio

You wouldn’t keep your money invested in an asset that’s falling on the financial market. Nor would you avoid putting more money in an asset that’s yielding great returns.

Further, by dipping your toes in a variety of networks you’ll maximize exposure as well as the chance you’ll find a placement or network that you can consistently and competitively win profitable traffic from. To be competitive online, you need to be where your best customers are.

Like with a balanced financial portfolio, a balanced digital marketing portfolio helps reduce the riskiness of each investment, while also allowing you to get an idea whether an investment is profitable to continue contributing to.

What’s key is having an initial investment that you’re ready to devote to the portfolio and its initial exploratory phase, as well as a consistent contribution plan, to accommodate any growth opportunities within the portfolio. 

This is the key to building wealth in a financial portfolio, and it’s the key to sustaining growth in a marketing portfolio.

Both resources for original content and the upfront costs of direct advertising need to be factored into any growth plan formula, especially in the attention economy. 

Your marketing investment is the first part of this calculation, but your growth (in traffic as well as sales) and profitability are the second and third.

Measuring your Digital Marketing Portfolio at Both the Whole & Individual

Another benefit of a digital marketing portfolio mindset is the totality of it. You can measure what goes in and what comes out at the overall and granular level. With this kind of perspective you’ll be able to facilitate both growth and profitability as you measure the portfolio as a whole as well each individual component.

To begin building your portfolio we’d suggest you include the major networks Google & Facebook/Instagram as defaults. 

These two networks reach virtually all online traffic and are generally the most sophisticated, meaning you’ll be able to find insights on audiences and placements the fastest for your investment. 

Then, if you have any historical customer analysis, look at where your customers are coming from organically, apart from the major networks, and decide if you’d like to increase your presence on those channels.

What matters is that you keep track of how your overall investment is doing. You’ll also want to track how changes to each marketing asset affect the overall portfolio. 

You must maintain this fundamental mindset when reviewing the portfolio or else you might fall into the trap of becoming over reliant on a single channel. 

Single channel strategies can be extremely profitable in the short term, but are not a long term solution for a brand that hopes to be competitive on the internet and not just on a single network.

Finding and Using Key Performance Metrics

Holistic viewpoints exist when performance indicators can be shared across assets. 

To make analysis easy for you and your team, create shared KPIs across your marketing channels.

Whether its leads, leads to sales rates, new customers, your return on ad spend or another metric, make sure that you have this data flowing from each individual channel to a single report or dashboard where you can see everything.

This dashboard illuminates the final benefit of the marketing portfolio we’ll outline: the concentration of data it frames your mind around. 

A portfolio approach tends to reduce the mental fatigue of sifting through all of your assets, a task you should not have to do every time you want to know how your marketing investment is performing.

Michael Pendreigh

The Vantage Buzz – October 2019

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Hi,

We hope you’re having a happy and perhaps spooky October. We’re currently busy with a plethora of fall and holiday season projects as well as Q4 and next-year analysis.

We do want to reiterate that now’s your last chance to effectively plan Black Friday and other holiday promotions. Let us know if you’d like to work on campaign strategy for these crucial ecommerce dates sooner rather than later!

Your monthly ad-vantage reading below:

Business:

Data-driven sales team decisions sound good to you? Sure does to us. Here’s a thorough write-up on spreading positive sales knowledge efficiently through your team. Further, it shows how non-analytical sales teams fall behind those that measure true drivers of success.

Ecommerce:

We gave you the Google holiday playbook last month. Maybe we should have started with this playbook on why Google Ads work for Ecommerce.

And General Intrigue:

You may get the gist of it, but what the heck is a tracking pixel anyway? May be a useful article to share with anyone you’ve tried to explain it to as well like a boss, friend, partner, precocious child, etc.

Michael Pendreigh

The Vantage Buzz – September 2019

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Hi,

We’ve just released a mini-guide on social media comment etiquette for your brand. Brush up!

We’d also like to forewarn our clients and friends that Steve’s partner, Jordana, is away for work for two weeks this month, enjoying the jewel of the Indian Ocean, Sri Lanka. So, if he’s a bit slower than usual, it’s because he’s experiencing the substantial work that single parenthood involves!

Rest assured, the team is still fully operational, working away on new projects for the rest of the year, including the holiday season.

And here’s your monthly ad-vantage reading:

Business:

4 concise strategies for maintaining and keeping your relationships with your top customers. 

Ecommerce:

We’re getting closer and closer to the infamous holiday marketing season. Are you ready? This playbook from Google might just inspire you to plan some awesome campaigns and kick your storefront into gear.

And General Intrigue:

A how to on giving feedback that encourages change. Looks like it starts off with knowing how someone likes to receive feedback, a preference that could be discovered via a survey given post-employment, or even on a regular basis. But if that’s not feasible or too late for whatever case, there’s a lot more on how to get your feedback across effectively within the article.

Michael Pendreigh

10 Tips for Responding to Comments on Your Brand’s Social Media

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We’ve separated the 10 tips for responding to comments on your brand’s social media into 5 simple do’s and 5 don’ts so that you know both what to do and what not to do.

You may have the best post/ad in the history of Facebook, but if you forget to monitor and reply to comments left on it you risk turning a great post/ad into a ticking social media crisis bomb.

Interacting with your audience through social comments is an effective way to make a connection with your target market.

By providing great customer service through social comments, you not only retain existing customers but also win new ones.

The 5 Do’s of Responding to Comments on Your Brand’s Social Media

1. Do respond in a timely manner

By responding relatively soon you are showing your followers (your potential, past, and current customers) that you care about them and value what they have to say.

Keeping conversations going means keeping the community you’re trying to foster around your brand going.

Even just a like on a comment from your company’s social profile can be enough to show that you’re there and you’re listening and engaging!

2. Do monitor ALL of your comments (the good, the bad, and the ugly)

People can be quite kind, but they can also be unbearably cruel; it’s the internet after all!

The trick is to react calmly and coolly to the cruel and to acknowledge and celebrate the kind.

Using the like method above can be a great way to show kind users you appreciate their thoughts (just don’t mix this up and like negative comments–that can get confusing!)

3. Do respond to ALL of your negative comments. Yes. ALL of them.

Responding to negative comments is important.

Deleting or ignoring negative feedback reflects poorly on your brand.

If you don’t address negative comments on your social media, your followers will start to assume your business is not able to handle criticism, that it’s willing to ignore its customers, and that it might not even be active on the network!

4. Do encourage negative commentators to continue the conversation in private

When you respond to a negative comment, try to encourage the user to transition the conversation to a more private place, like in the direct messages of the social network the negative comment came from or via a support email address.

While you want to show onlookers that you do care about negative opinions, you’ll want to move negative conversations out of the limelight.

5. Do present a professional front

Stay calm and collected.

Monitoring and engaging with your comments will earn your brand a reputation with your followers.

If you consistently respond professionally, you’ll foster a solid reputation.

The 5 Don’ts of Responding to Comments

1. Don’t ignore “small” problems

Unanswered comments will give your business a reputation for bad customer service, and potentially lose you business.

Research from Twitter found that 81% of consumers won’t recommend a company to a friend if they don’t get a reply from them on social media.

2. Don’t lose your cool

The saying “the customer is always right” should always apply in your response to negative social media comments.

If you or whoever’s assigned to currently respond to social comments get frustrated easily, you should introduce another intermediary employee who can better represent your business and your brand voice online.

3. Don’t delete comments.

Deleting comments make it look like your brand doesn’t care, is wrong in the situation, or it has something to hide.

And, more often than not, people notice when their comments get removed and they come back with a vengeance, escalating their comment(s) further.

4. Don’t make the same generic response to every comment

People will catch on if you respond with the same line to EVERY single comment.

Once people start noticing that unhappy comments receive the same message in reply, it will only make your company seem insincere and inauthentic.

5. Don’t be afraid to make comments personal

Have a few standard lines to initiate with, but don’t be afraid to personalize your responses to the unique comment’s content and user. While some companies may want to keep a strict brand tone, social media requires socialization, which requires human interaction. If you keep everything passive and technical, you’ll never make any connections on the platforms.

Mentioning their name and including what they said in your response is a great way to show you’re both paying attention and you care.

Finally, adding a signature from a real person on your team is a great way to add some human personality into your brand persona.

Michael Pendreigh

The Vantage Buzz – August 2019

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Hi,

We’ll jump right into an update from Google: you’re going to need to enable 2-step authentication on the account you use to sign in to Google Ads, so, if you don’t have it set up, you might as well set it up now, before you’re locked out. Here’s a link to do so.

And here’s your monthly ad-vantage reading:

Business:

What’s your business’s key growth metric? This article advocates for using “Lead Velocity Rate” or LVR as your key growth metric as it can make accommodating immediate fluctuations more manageable when you want to focus on the long-term and future sales. Oriented toward SaaS businesses, but could be modified for any business that depends on a consistent flow of leads.

Ecommerce:

An article from Shopify on how to use Shopify to set up a wholesale portal, the benefits of wholesale, and some tips of wholesale pricing.

And General Intrigue:

The so-called savior of the open office floor plan, the office pod, gets a compelling case in this article. Privacy seems to be the major component of their attractiveness as interviewees in the article talk about their ability to both focus more and have more engaged private meetings with clients and leads when using the pods.

Vantage-Search-Marketing-Home-Page
Michael Pendreigh

The Vantage Buzz – July 2019

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Hi,

Happy July! We hope Prime Day went well for all of our fellow Amazonians. Also, an update on the responsive search ad warning we gave last month: they weren’t made the default in July, but they will be at some point in the future. Apparently, there was enough pushback from advertisers to keep Google from making the switch so quickly.

And here’s your monthly ad-vantage reading:

Business:

Do you feel fatigued by a million marketing options pulling you every each way? Here’s a guide on committing to the fundamentals and simplifying what you need to prioritize: How to Focus When You’re Overwhelmed by Marketing Options.

Ecommerce:

We’ve been talking about this one a lot at the office and we tend to agree that customer retention is just as important as new customer acquisition, if not more so, for any modern ecommerce businesses hoping to remain competitive.

And General Intrigue:

It’s big, it’s important, it’s the attention economy we participate in. Nielsen’s broken it down so you know exactly what the attention economy entails and how to start thinking about where you and the business you own or work for fits into it.

Vantage-Buzz-June-2019
Michael Pendreigh

The Vantage Buzz – June 2019

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Hi,

We’ve got an unofficial secret to share with you this month: Google’s default ad type is changing to Responsive Search Ads in July. There’s been no official announcement, so don’t sue us if this isn’t the whole truth, but a little bird told us that this is where Google’s moving for ad types. In light of this, we’ve been busy accommodating the change for all of our clients’ accounts this month.

We did, however, put aside time to share some worthwhile links with you below.

Business:

Is the future of work remote? The CEO of SureSwift Capital, Kevin McArdle, sure thinks so. Here’s the case he lays out. While remote work may not be the perfect solution to some situations, McArdle outlines a lot of benefits from savings to better talent.

Ecommerce:

9 methods for delivering customer appreciation in a meaningful way courtesy of the Shopify blog. There’s a lot of overlap with a customer loyalty program, but some of these can be implemented more easily and on a customer-by-customer basis.

Also: the Prime Day date has been leaked for a second time, so it’s definitely more than likely starting on Monday, July 15th. Is your brand ready?

And General Intrigue:

The most important trends on the internet as reported by the longtime chronicler Mary Meeker have been revealed. From internet use and online shopping to privacy, Meeker dives into it in a 333-page report. Conveniently, Recode has pulled some of the most notable stats as well as a link to the report right here.

Want to talk about your digital campaigns for 2019?

Steve’s Ready to Chat!

Let us know what you’re working on — we might be able to help!

Get in contact with us,

Steve & The Vantage Team

Michael Pendreigh

The Vantage Buzz – May 2019

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Hi,

May’s brought a lot of sun to Vancouver and we’re not complaining. It’s also brought the annual Google marketing live event.

We’ve got links to a couple of the shiny new features revealed by the advertising giant below, but you can register and gain access to the material yourself here.

Business:

ou just might be able to justify getting nothing done. “Niksen,” the Dutch word for idleness or doing nothing, can be adopted as a policy for boosting creativity and problem-solving capacity. So, next time your higher-ups or lower-downs look at you funny for getting nothing done, send them this article from the New York Times.

Ecommerce:

Google’s focus seemed to be e-commerce at the event as it announced a revamped shopping experience, a new discovery campaign format, and gallery ads, which all contribute to providing a wider reach for and more exposure to your products

And General Intrigue:

Ecommerce-y as well, but cool for everyone: soon you’ll be able to take a look at a product’s dimensions from the comfort of your living room with Google augmented reality in search.

Want to talk about your digital marketing campaigns?

Steve’s Ready to Chat! Let us know what you’re working on — we might be able to help!

Get in contact,

Steve & The Vantage Team