WSI Connect is now a HubSpot Silver Certified Partner

June 18, 2019 // by Luke Middendorf

WSI Connect is very proud to announce that it is now a HubSpot Silver Certified Partner, continuing its expansion of digital marketing services available to clients.

HubSpot developed a world class marketing, sales, and service platform. It revolutionized the marketing industry with its inbound marketing methodology. The HubSpot software platform has many features ranging from lead generation, pipeline management, marketing automation, analytics and customer support and feedback.

In addition, HubSpot has created an Agency Partner Program that provides resources and support to agencies across the globe so they can help their clients grow their businesses. Through this program, the certified agency partners have an increased capacity to transform how their clients win new business, reach new audiences, and serve their customers.

As an agency that provides a variety of digital marketing services, WSI Connect is a natural HubSpot agency partner. Clients of WSI Connect benefit from their expertise in website design, email marketing, social media marketing strategies, online advertising (PPC), search engine optimization, and competitive analysis. WSI Connect leverages these services and the resources of the Global WSI Network to create successful strategic digital marketing campaigns for clients across the U.S.

Reflecting on the benefits of the Agency Partner Program, WSI Connect Managing Director Luke Middendorf said, “We’re excited to deepen our relationship with HubSpot as a Silver Partner. Adding their marketing platform has allowed us to improve our service offerings to existing clients and develop a complete end-to-end marketing, sales, and service solution. We look forward to continuing to build our relationship with HubSpot, supporting our clients’ marketing efforts, and accelerate our growth as a marketing agency.”

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About WSI Connect

WSI Connect is a growth marketing agency that works closely with its clients to develop and implement clear marketing strategies based on their current challenges and goals for growth. With experience across many different verticals such as construction, education, retail, and automotive, WSI Connect has helped many businesses reach new levels of growth.

Understanding Google Analytics: Key Metrics

May 10, 2019 // by WSI Connect

Do you know who people visits your website every day and where they come from?   Wondering who your target audience is in the digital space or what their online behavior might be? Are your advertising programs such as social media marketing or SEO producing the right results?

Access to this data can provide valuable insights to improve your digital marketing campaigns, products and overall customer experience. But how do you access it? The answer is through Google Analytics.

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a web analytics service that provides valuable information about your website traffic and target audience. The service uses machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to provide insights that help businesses formulate their digital marketing campaigns, and reach the right customers.

Whether you have a WordPress, ecommerce or custom website, Google Analytics is one of the most crucial digital marketing tools for businesses today. It analyzes your website’s performance and conversions to help you determine whether your current strategies are working. For your business to thrive, you need to utilize this tool by understanding which metrics to focus on.

Key Google Analytics Reporting Metrics

As an entrepreneur, business owner or marketer, you don’t need to dive into all the technical details of Google Analytics. All you need to understand is the essential metrics your business needs to boost traffic, increase conversions, and enhance the customer experience.

The four essential metrics are:

Audience
Acquisition
Behavior
Conversion

Below is a breakdown of each parameter and how measuring it can make the difference for your business.

1. Audience

Audience, in this case, refers to several factors as it relates to the visitors on your site. Some key metrics:

Location: Visitors from Country, State, City, etc.
Devices: Indicates if visitors use a desktop computers or mobile devices to view your site.
New or Returning Visitors

Monitoring these stats helps identify your audience and uncover areas of opportunity or new markets.

Audience information can help you tweak you personalize your site layout and content, adjust the responsiveness, and help increase returning site users.

Business Application:

Metric: Audience > Mobile > Devices
Majority of visitors view your site from a mobile device versus a tablet or desktop.

Opportunity:
Optimize your site for mobile viewing with larger text and buttons for easy navigation. Ensure it is mobile friendly and responsive.

2. Acquisition

Where does the traffic on your website come from? Organic search (searches on Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) is the largest source of web traffic on most sites today. According to research, Google processes over 3.5 billion searches per day. However, search engine queries aren’t the only source of web traffic.

Other sources include the following:

Social media (Facebook, Twitter, Quora, etc)
Referrals (visits from another website that links to yours)
Direct traffic (someone types in your URL into the browser or an unidentified source)
Paid search (Google AdWords)

With this information, you’re able to capitalize on sources that generate the most traffic and boost those that receive heavy marketing but generate low traffic.
In the example above, you’ll notice approx. 62% of traffic is arriving from organic search. This is a strong indication that your SEO strategy is working well.

Business Application:

Metric: Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels
Low traffic from organic search

Opportunity:
Optimize your content for search engines by working on a keyword strategy, boosting your site layout, and adding meta descriptions. Reach out to the WSI Team for help with ranking better in search results.

3. Behavior

Behavior reporting refers to what users do when they visit your site. The pages they visit, the average visit duration and the bounce rate (single page visits). What are your most popular pages? How long are users viewing each page? Are users leaving after viewing only one webpage?

Understanding user behavior gives insight into how to improve the customer experience and provide valuable content. If users navigate multiple pages or experience longer sessions, it means they find the site useful and find value in your content.

Understanding the Avg. Time on Page can help determine if users found the information they need.

Business Application:

Metric: Behavior > Site Content > All Pages
Page content with the least amount of pageviews

Opportunity:
Rewrite the content to bring the page more focus and increase overall interest. Create headers with keywords, section content and incorporate bullet points.

4. Conversion

The ultimate goal of any marketing strategy is to provide value to your customers and help them with their needs. Customers who complete certain actions indicates they are searching for additional information could be converted down the pipeline. This conversion typically has a specific call-to-action. It could be to subscribe to your newsletter, download an ebook PDF or buy a product from your e-commerce website.

You can track your conversions thru Google Analytics:

Form conversions, e.g., sign-up forms and contact forms
Products added to cart
Completed purchases or materials downloaded
Articles read or video played

Different businesses have different conversion goals. Google Analytics allows you to track goals specific to your marketing objectives. It ultimately gives insight into how to push leads further down the funnel.

In this example, 745 users completed the goal of scheduling an appointment.
Image Credit: https://www.searchenginejournal.com

Business Application:

Metric: Conversions > Goals > Goal URLs
Noted drop in month over month goal completions for the ebook download

Opportunity:
Increase downloads through urgency or refresh messaging around the value of the ebook.

Ready to Get Started with Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a must-have analytics tool for every business owner, marketer, or entrepreneur who wishes to attain success in the digital space. Let WSI Connect provide insight into your audience, traffic acquisition, conversions, and user behavior. The information will help build a solid marketing strategy that will increase leads and conversions, and boost ROI.

Contact WSI Connect for help with Google Analytics

Web Analytics: Measuring value and growth

December 5, 2013 // by Luke Middendorf

Keep Tabs On Your Digital Campaigns

Due to the vast flow of information and the dawn of Big Data we’re becoming an increasingly analytical society. Whether it’s documenting the fuel efficiency of cars, counting Facebook likes, or managing personal finances, we’re always trying to determine the direct results of our actions and decisions. Did you buy the best performing stock? Do you have the cheapest smartphone plan? How many miles per gallon does your car get?

All of these things require measurement, which isn’t a new concept despite the new tools and tracking methods available today. Businesses have always had budgets, financial reports and fiscal targets. Businesses use employee reviews to determine promotions, demotions and areas of need, as another method of measurement.

So why do so many businesses fail to track and measure their digital marketing campaigns? Some inside the industry might suggest that, “It’s easy, the data is all right there,” but the reality is much tougher than that. Plenty of businesses, especially smaller ones and those in niche markets, are having a hard enough time fully embracing digital marketing tactics. This makes the idea of web analytics overwhelming – after all, if you don’t understand what a set of data is saying, the data itself is useless.

Understanding measurement by establishing a baseline

In order to adequately track and measure anything, you need to determine a baseline that can be used to compare the results of your tracking and measuring. For example, take your website’s traffic. If you are planning on implementing digital marketing tactics to increase the number of visitors to your website, you would want to know how many visitors your website is receiving prior to implementing your campaigns. If you obtain three months of data that shows you get roughly 50 hits a day on your website, you have then established a baseline of 50 visits. When you implement your digital marketing tactics, you’ll now be able to easily discern whether your campaigns are working by how many more visitors your website is getting. If it’s many more than 50, you know what you’re doing is working; if the difference is negligible, you need to make a tweak.

While the example of website visitors may seem simple, it highlights a critical error that many businesses are making when they delve into digital marketing: they forget to establish a baseline. When used correctly, measurement and the establishment of a baseline number from which you intended to improve is an extremely important (and often overlooked) function of your overall digital marketing plan.

The Digital Marketing and Measurement Model – The Key to Web Analytics

As outlined by Avinash Kaushik in his Digital Marketing and Measurement Model, the key to digital marketing success is the complete structural understanding of the purpose and intent of your campaigns. Once you understand how and why your business should implement certain campaigns, you need to know the exact results of those campaigns in order to understand how well they’re working and whether you should continue forward or make a change.

Here are the five steps you can use as a guideline for your own Digital Marketing and Measurement Model:

Business Objectives: this might seem simple, but you really have to be honest about why your business exists in order to get your Digital Marketing and Measurement Model off to a successful start. Once you know the why, then apply it to whatever campaigns you’re planning on running (website, social, content).
Goals for Objectives: the goals you define here will mark the pathway to completing the business objectives above. These goals will be the ‘how’ you successfully accomplish your ‘why?’
Performance Indicators: performance indicators are metrics (data!) that help you understand how well your goals are working towards accomplishing your objectives.
Targets: much like a baseline, the purpose of setting targets for your campaign is so that you can determine your success (or failure) and act accordingly. If you do not set targets you’ll have no idea what the results of your campaigns mean.
Analysis: decide which objectives, goals and targets are the most valuable to the company and take a close look at the numbers. Are you satisfied with the results? Are the campaigns working? A close analysis of everything you’ve done thus far will help you understand how well your campaigns are working and what you can do to improve performance.

This is just a brief framework from which you can build your own Digital Marketing and Measurement Model. The most important aspect of this model is that one concept builds on the next and the whole thing works cohesively. To function correctly, businesses must truly understand their purposes and honestly define their objectives, goals and targets.

The Aftermath – What You Should Do Next

The actions you take after developing a Digital Marketing and Measurement Model are vital to its success – you can’t just sit back and hope it works. This is a measurement model we’re talking about!

Here are a few things you can do to ensure your model’s continued success:

- Revisit: web analytics never ever involves setting and forgetting. You need to revisit your model – not every day or even every week, but it needs your attention and analysis once in a while.
- Adapt: as with most aspects of the digital world, your ability to adapt will define your level of success. Your Digital Marketing and Measurement Model might need to change year-to-year, so the sooner you understand and embrace the ever-changing nature of the Internet, the better.
- Automate: web analytics is work, but the good news is you can automate some of it to relieve the day-to-day pressure. Take advantage of your analytics provider’s many options and have reports sent to your inbox and set alerts to receive immediate updates when performance indicators reach or drop to certain levels.

The Digital Marketing and Measurement Model is only one aspect of web analytics. For more information or guidance on how to further delve into the world of web analytics contact WSI Connect.

The Power of Mobile Marketing with WSI Connect

November 19, 2013 // by Luke Middendorf

Here are a few tips, trends and important concepts to consider when building your mobile marketing campaigns. Put down your laptop, smartphone or tablet (because chances are extremely good that you’re using at least one of those devices right now) and think about how much the advancements of the last decade have changed our lives. The only thing more astounding than the widespread use of smartphones is the incredible rate at which they have become powerful little computers in our pockets. Anything from answering emails, to trading stocks or watching movies, can be done from a smartphone.

What does this mean for business owners? First and foremost, the drastic technological developments and ever-changing nature of digital marketing provides business with a great opportunity to better connect with their target market. Many of the companies that are now taking advantage of the exceptional growth in the mobile market.

In Constant Motion – Mobile Marketing

The Third Screen Evolution  - The first and second screens were the television and computer, respectively. TV and the Internet changed the face of marketing from the dawn of their inceptions, and it seems natural to expect that the mobile device –the third screen – would have the same effect. Here are just a few of the shifts in behavior that the third screen is eliciting:

According to Google, 44% of consumers use their smartphones while shopping, often holding a product in one hand while searching for reviews or price comparisons on their phone with the other hand.
Instead of eyeballing newspapers and magazines while waiting in checkout lines, Google says that 59% of us are now using this waiting period to browse the Internet on their smartphones.
Google also found that 48% of us actually use our third screens while eating, often taking pictures of our meals and sharing them via social networks like Facebook and Pinterest.

It might not be immediately obvious how these changes in behavior directly affect your business, but it should be abundantly clear that consumers are using their smartphones for more than just making calls and texting friends. And if you can submit to the notion that the third screen is not only here to stay, but is also the chosen device of the younger generation (your customers of tomorrow), then you’ve taken the first step towards understanding the potential of mobile marketing.

Mobile Marketing Techniques – Engage On The Go

The key to mobile marketing success, in most cases, involves incorporating small adjustments to your campaigns. By now, the majority of companies are active on social media and they understand that there is a large percentage of consumers on mobile, so your main goal should be to mobilize all your campaigns to ensure they are as effective as possible.

Here are key areas where you can leverage mobile engagement:

Social media: an important element within your social strategies is finding the best way to communicate to the different third screen devices. With smartphone users, keep your messages short and ensure they are easily shareable via mobile. Tablet users are more likely to engage with content, so messaging can be media rich, more visual (video is especially effective) and longer form.
Text messaging: most people are very comfortable with text messaging since they do it so frequently. This presents an interesting opportunity for businesses to engage with customers in a way that’s convenient to them. Just be sure to use an opt-in approach.
Local: for businesses that depend on local customers, knowing the location of your prospects a tremendously valuable piece of information. If you offer products and services, you can tap into this and use mobile to offer specific coupons or discounts when consumers are at or near your physical location.

Your Website Is Still Important – Make it Responsive

The main goal of any digital marketing strategy is to use multiple techniques (one of which is mobile marketing) to get your potential customers to take a specific action. And the majority of the time, this action will take place on your website, which means it’s extremely important that it remains consistent with your campaigns. Enter responsive web design, a mobile-friendly web construction technique that allows your customers to experience your brand across all devices.

Here are a few reasons why responsive design might be right for your business:

Location, time and device: these are three vital areas not only to mobile marketing, but digital marketing as a whole. Responsive design caters to all of them by allowing you to present your brand experience to customers on the go, no matter what their device.
Consistency: you don’t want your hard work to go to waste, so don’t send customers to an unfriendly website that they have to pinch and zoom to even read. Let responsive design keeps your web presence consistent across all devices.
Human behavior: did you know that a large percentage of Internet searches start on one device and get finished on another? This is key to the understanding that we move between devices depending on location and time of day (there are those vital components again!). Responsive design helps you adapt to changing human behaviors.

These are just a few guidelines for getting started with mobile marketing and keeping pace with your always-on-the-go customers. Contact WSI Connect for further information or a consultation on how to begin implementing effective mobile marketing strategies.

Email Marketing: An Underrated Tactic

November 9, 2013 // by Luke Middendorf

Unlock the Power of Permission-Based Outreach through Email Marketing

Amidst the furious growth of the technology that we use in our everyday lives, a common complaint is that all the gadgetry is decreasing the amount of face-to-face human contact (and thus ruining, or places less importance on, personal relationships). But what about the parents who can now video-chat with their sons and daughters who have moved across the country – or even across the ocean – to attend school? Or how about our ability to keep in regular contact with friends and family who live in different parts of the word? It’s also now much easier to find and get in touch with old friends through email and social networks.

The effect of advancements in personal communication methods and devices is merely a matter of perspective. Sure, the way email is sometimes favored over a face-to-face conversation to save the 10 minutes it’d take to walk to a different floor of the office is an example of depersonalization. But using Google hangouts to hold a meeting with people from London, New York and Los Angeles offices adds a level of personalization that was previously impossible.

Technology and communication both play a huge role in marketing, but the truth is, up until a decade ago, most marketing messages consisted of companies speaking at consumers about their products and services. It was disruptive, pushy, and impersonal in every way. So despite appearances and arguments to the contrary, tactics like social media and email marketing, coupled with the new notion of engaging with customers, are actually shifting marketing in a much more personal direction.

The age of the inbox and the effectiveness of email marketing

Most businesses depend on two critical aspects to thrive: lead generation and customer retention. Without customers, your business can’t operate, but nor can you survive if you don’t keep your current customers happy and willing to give you recurring revenue and referrals. Fortunately, email marketing can help with both your lead generation and customer retention efforts, which is why it’s an effective tactic for businesses of all industries.

If you’re convinced, you’re probably wondering how and where to start with email marketing. Since you can’t engage with anybody until you have a list of contacts, you need to start by building up an email database!

Here are five ways you can begin to generate a list of email contacts:

Ask for it: ask and you shall receive! You won’t be able to engage without any email addresses, but you’d be surprised by how easily people will give theirs up if you just ask for it. Whether in a physical store or on a website, people are accustomed to being asked for their email address, so don’t worry about scaring anybody away.
Remind them to subscribe: sometimes people need a little extra encouragement, so don’t be shy to put buttons calling for users to subscribe to your communications everywhere you can. On your homepage, in your blog posts, on social media feeds, in your email signature and even on your contact us page. The more you ask, the better chance they’ll convert.
Provide incentive: if you’re having trouble generating a list of email addresses, consider adding some incentive for those who give you their information. Offering promotions, discounts, or valuable information via a whitepaper or webinar in exchange for email addresses will be more successful.
Run a contest: similarly to providing incentive, you could also run a contest and raffle off a product, service, or just a popular item like an iPad. All you need to do is have people submit ballots that include their email address – if your prize is good enough, you’re sure to generate a decent list of contacts.
Friend referral: once you do start sending out communications, a great way to grow your database is to get subscribers to ‘Forward to a Friend.’ Put a ‘Forward to a Friend’ link in all of your newsletters and drive subscribers to a page where they can type in their friends’ information and you’ll instantly add to your list of contacts!

Tips for More Effective Email Campaigns

How to Increase Conversions

In the end, email campaigns are judged on the results they achieve – so in other words, on conversions. The kind of responses and the rate at which your defined goals are completed will ultimately determine the success of your email marketing strategy.

Here are a few tips and trick for increasing your email marketing conversions:

Stay relevant and interesting: the thing about email marketing is that since people get so many emails, only the best get read. Think about your inbox – do you read every email you get? Probably not. This doesn’t mean that email marketing isn’t effective – not everybody has to open your emails for them to be successful – but it does mean that you have to be both creative and strategic with your campaigns. Stay current, relevant and interesting.
Include product recommendations and reviews: if you’re properly maintaining your consumer database, then you’ll have information on what your customers are most interested in. Use this information to your advantage by basing your communications around certain products and personalize the experience for the reader so they’re more likely to take action.
Offer a guarantee policy: unfortunately, many people are still wary of purchasing products online, so ease their mind with a worry-free money back guarantee. This leaves them with no qualms about buying your products and services through an email.
Include freebies: the loyalty and trust of your online customers is critical for the success of your future campaigns. Consider rewarding your faithful subscribers with a free product or sample every once in a while, just to let them know you appreciate their business. It’ll go a long way.

These are only some of the many strategies and techniques for running effective email marketing campaigns and ensuring great return on investment. Contact WSI Connect for more information or guidance on how to unlock the power of email marketing.