5 Metrics You Should Measure in Every Marketing Campaign

Measuring your marketing campaigns is the best way to determine the success of your efforts. Without accurate measurements, it's easy to be misled by regular market fluctuations or emotions. A few key areas can help you gain important insights into how your campaigns are performing and where they can be improved. Here are five metrics you should use in every marketing campaign, no matter how small it might be.

Where your traffic's coming from

It's important to measure your rate of traffic and know where your visitors are coming from. Identifying how many people click on your ads, follow links from other sites, or find you through search engines will make it easier to identify what aspects of your digital strategy are having the most success and which ones need more work. This data will also give you a better idea about what keywords and offers are the most attractive for customers, so you know which ones need the most attention.

Similarly, with mobile devices representing an ever increasing percentage of the e-commerce market, determining how many of your customers are arriving from mobile devices will help you know how you're doing in reaching this important segment.

Your conversion rate

Once visitors arrive at your site, you should be measuring how many are converting and where they're doing so. Track their engagement with the site, including how many pages they visit before they find themselves on a page that encourages conversion. Knowing which pages and types of offers have the most success with your customers will give you valuable information about how to refine your campaigns to better reach your customers.

Your cost per lead

As you measure your conversion rate, you should also calculate your cost per lead. How much are you spending on average for every lead you acquire through your marketing efforts? Just divide the total cost of each marketing campaign over the course of a particular timeframe by the number of people who converted in that period. Armed with this statistic, you'll be able to see how one marketing campaign compares to another in terms of success.

Your number of return visitors

Page popularity and customer engagement are measured not only by the number of people who find your site, but also by the number of people who return more than once. This will give you insight into the number of people who view you as an authority worth remembering. The more engaged your page visitors are and the more memorable your brand is, the higher your conversion rate will be.

Your cost per customer

You should also carefully monitor the final cost for every customer you gain. This, combined with your other metrics, will let you see how well your campaigns are performing and how many new customers you're pulling in for every dollar you spend. These statistics can be particularly helpful when convincing others in the company to maintain or increase the marketing budget.

Marketing metrics can be valuable tools for improving your campaigns and learning how well they're performing. Metrics take the guesswork out of determining if something was a success. When you pay attention to these five key areas, you'll have a very good idea how your marketing is doing.

PGP Tip: Promotional Tips & Tricks

Promotional Tips & Tricks

Today I am going to share with you a few quick tips and tricks about promoting your business and increasing sales. This is a message you will want to archive and pull out when it’s time to plan your next project.

A recent survey of small business owners conducted by the Hewlett-Packard Company revealed that very few felt confident about their marketing efforts. Almost half (46%) claimed not to have any general marketing expertise; 60% said they could be doing a better job as marketers; and only 18% felt confident about creating their own marketing material.

If this describes you, then take note: we can help. Many of our business customers routinely turn to us for help with developing a promotional campaign, creating a logo and graphic identity, and writing sales-related copy. Because we have worked with so many companies over the years, we have developed sensitivity for what works. Using a series of probing questions, we’ll guide you through the process of determining who your target audience is and how to reach them. For more information or to make an initial appointment for a consultation, contact Dennis Smith at 254-773-7391.

Promotional Tips & Tricks

If you are in business, you have developed areas of expertise that other people are interested in. For example, you know how to differentiate your product or service from your competitors – why what you are offering is superior and worthy of consideration. That becomes the basis for a checklist of what should be considered before making a purchase. And that type of information is valuable to others.

If you have been in business for a while, you may have several areas of expertise that you can share and many options for getting the word out. An informational brochure and a periodic newsletter are two commonly-used and relatively inexpensive methods. Others are writing a column for a local newspaper or sending a postcard as part of a direct mail marketing campaign. A more ambitious method is to hold a seminar or demonstration on an informational topic or offer a presentation as a public speaker for community groups. Writing a blog is a new but increasingly popular method.

For subject matter, use topics that help your target audience with their problems.

Q&A

Q. What is a multi-channel promotion?

A. Multi-channel refers to using more than one promotion method simultaneously for a message on a single topic. Multi-channel can be very effective, especially when the messages in one channel are referenced in the other and are integrated. Use one constant and simple theme that offers a variety of response options.

Here are some examples of multi-channel marketing:

·         Sending an e-mail timed to arrive at the same time as a mailed catalog.

·         Inviting customers and prospects to visit a web site to print a coupon to use in a retail store.

·         Adding a URL or QR code to sales collateral with an invitation to visit the web site, register, and receive something in exchange.

·         Using an ad specialties product as a giveaway for registering online with your company. Advertising this giveaway with a postcard uses a third medium.

At PaperGraphics we can teach you how to make more money through our ManagedMarketing™ program where we can handle all of your printing needs but also teach your staff how to prepare, invite and close the sale with your prospects. In fact, we are the only printer in this market that is certified to do so. 

If your organization or business needs to increase sales we can help. Call us at 254-773-7391 or reply to this message to set up a no obligation consultation where we assess your current situation and offer a plan of attack that works for your budget.

What We Can Learn From Writing Holiday Wish Lists

As the holiday season approaches, children across the country will sit down with paper and crayon in hand to spell out exactly what they hope to get during the upcoming festivities. This year, Frozen-themed toys are likely to top many lists, as are the latest video games, some popular action figures, and other toys that have been flying off the shelves. Many children will compare notes with their friends at school to get ideas about what to ask for and to see what's already on other people's lists.

This sharing of ideas is an example of the psychological phenomenon known as 'the bandwagon effect.' From the activity of writing a Christmas list itself, to the toys that appear on it, children are influenced by what their peers are doing. This principle impacts all of us, no matter how old we are or what the subject matter is. Regardless of how independent we'd like to think we are, the truth is we're all heavily influenced by what our peers are doing.

According to the bandwagon effect, we're all more likely to do something, buy something, or use something if others are doing it. We all desire to be part of a larger group, which leads us to follow others to the latest trends and fads. People become more willing to try new products or services when they find that others are trying those products and are happy with the results.

For marketing, this can be valuable because it means your products and services can grow organically. Learning how to capitalize on this effect will give you the tools you need to make your products seem appealing to the crowd, which will enhance the bandwagon effect and your potential for word-of-mouth advertising.

How to use the bandwagon effect to your advantage

The bandwagon effect is all about convincing people that using your products and services will make them part of an established group of satisfied customers. There are several ways you can leverage this type of advertising.

• Use customer reviews prominently on your website to show your page visitors that others have been pleased with your products.


• Use images of satisfied customers on your website.


• Encourage followers on social media to post pictures and stories of themselves using your products and services and the successes they have had.

You can also use the bandwagon effect to create feelings of belonging among your users. Start by creating spaces for your customers to speak to each other and compare their use of your products and services. Customers can discuss how to grow their own businesses while taking advantage of what your company has to offer. This will encourage people to feel as though they're part of a special group, encouraging more feelings of loyalty. Facebook groups, user forums, and even just the comment threads on your company blog are good places to begin these conversations.

Helping your customers feel as though using your products and services introduces them to a special group can improve brand loyalty and encourage people to continue to use your products. Just like children designing their holiday wish lists, customers enjoy comparing notes with their friends and feeling as though they belong to a particular group. Use the above tips to encourage these types of emotions in your customers, and you should see growth in your brand.

How Much Personality Should You Add to Your Company Blog?

Many businesses struggle with the value of adding personality to their professional blogs. You might have heard that customers like to get to know the people behind the company brand to help build those crucial relationships, but you've also heard that blogs are supposed to be centered around building value for your customers. How are you supposed to reconcile these two seemingly opposing ideas?

Balancing your blog

Your blog should really be doing both. The key is learning to balance the blog. The primary focus of your blog should always be providing value to your visitors. These are the posts that are most likely to bring new visitors to your site, answer their questions, and convince them that you're an authority worth their attention. In general, you want about 75 percent of your blog posts to fall into this category.

There are some visitors, however, who read your blog because they've gotten to know your company. They already know they can trust your judgment, so they turn to you for regular industry updates or when they're looking for information. These are the visitors who will likely be most interested in learning more about your company on a personal level. Since you want to develop content for your visitors on every stage of their journey, you also need to develop some content for this type of reader. Set aside about 15 to 20 percent of your content as more self promotional. These posts can include case studies, product information, and ideas about how to maximize your company's products and services. Then reserve about 5 percent to 10 percent of your posts for more personal information.

What to include in your personal posts

Your personal posts can include a variety of different types of information that will give your potential customers insight into your company and the people who work there. Here are some ideas about the kinds of things to include in this section:

• posts about company gatherings (such as your holiday party), including some pictures of the celebration


• employee spotlights, where you highlight the employee of the month and give a fun interview that helps the reader relate to this person on an individual level


• announcements about new hires


• video walk-through tours of your offices and production facilities, so visitors can see 'where the magic happens'

Including occasional posts like these on your company blog will help customers place a face with the name. When they receive an email from your company or a response to an inquiry, they'll no longer be dealing with an anonymous person, but an individual they feel as though they know.

The hidden benefit of personal blog posts

As an added bonus, speaking about your employees and highlighting their accomplishments can help make your workers feel more appreciated. They'll feel as though their work is noticed and valued by everyone at the organization. This helps create a happier workplace and can help reduce employee turnover. When your employees are happy, they project that happiness to your customers, which helps improve customer satisfaction.

Personal blog posts can be a fantastic asset for your organization. They can help build customer relationships and make your employees happy. Using them wisely can help grow your company and improve your marketing. If you're ready to begin a new marketing campaign, let us know! We'll be happy to help you get started.

How to Fix Your Call To Action

Your call to action, or CTA, is easily one of the most important parts of your website. It's where you find new leads and convince your audience you offer something worth exploring. Whether your CTA invites people to sign up for a newsletter or download your latest ebook, all CTAs are not created the same. Here are a few things you need to keep in mind when developing this critical part of the website.

The words

The words on your CTA are critical. Most people will be skimming it, so it's important to make your offer's potential value obvious to everyone who sees it. Use precise, clear language that explains what customers are going to receive. Bullet points are fantastic because they're particularly easy to skim and tell the audience exactly what they're going to receive.

The words you use in your CTA should also line up with the text around it. For example, if you offer home cleaning services and are offering a free download on the safest cleaners to use around children, your CTA will probably best fit at the end of blog posts and articles that discuss the dangers of certain cleaners or how to safely secure cleaners away from children. Try to create a tangible link between the content and the CTA. This will help ensure your offer reaches those who are most likely to be interested in what you have to say.

The appearance

While what you say is certainly important, so is the overall appearance of your CTA. Choose contrasting colors to help the CTA pop from the page and attract viewers' attention. A CTA that just blends in at the bottom of a blog post will be overlooked and have a poor conversion rate. Similarly, make sure the CTA is big and bold, so no one can miss it. Don't hide the CTA in the corner, using the same font size as the rest of the page. It will be too easy to ignore.

In the same way, use images and other visuals to help consumers get a concrete look at what they'll be receiving. If that's an ebook, for example, use a picture of an actual book with the title of your ebook printed on the front. Using images helps people develop a strong association with the product you're offering and makes it look more appealing.

The importance of testing

When planning your campaign, develop more than one CTA, then test them to see which one resonates more with customers. You might be surprised how much difference a particular word choice or color can make on your conversion rates. Run basic A/B tests on the CTA, and get concrete answers about which offer is getting more conversions.

An A/B test is simple. Say you have one CTA and then develop an alternate page. The A/B test will randomly show some visitors the original and some the alternate page. It will then track how many people convert from each page. You can use this information to see which has a higher conversion rate, so you get the best page on your site.

Developing an efficient CTA will bring you leads and potential customers. Take the time to follow the steps above, and create a CTA that will maximize your potential.

Finding Your Crowd... On Social Media

Imagine you just moved to a new area. It's a small city with a bustling population. The local college attracts many young adults to the city, especially on the weekends, while local businesses ensure the professional crowd is also well represented.

Being new to the area, you want to find a place to go for dinner where you can meet some locals and start to get to know your new neighbors. Friday afternoon, you head into the first restaurant. It's bustling with activity and has great music, but at a volume so loud you can barely hear yourself think. You look around and realize that the crowd is mostly college kids. Surely, some of them are great people, but this isn't really the crowd you're looking to get to know. You might make a connection or two, but it will likely be significantly harder to form meaningful relationships.

So, you head out to the second restaurant. As you walk in, hardly anyone looks up. Most people seem to already be finishing their dinner, and the average age in the place seems to be older than your father. Sure, there are probably some fantastic people here, too, but again, this really isn't the crowd you're looking for.

You try the next place. You see some people in your age range, but it seems to be a much more family-oriented scene. Most people in the restaurant have young children seated with them. While you love your nieces and nephews, you don't have children yourself yet, so you wonder how well you'd fit in. You decide to wander on.

Finally, you head into the fourth place. You look around and breathe a sigh of relief. This establishment is filled with other professionals in your age range. This will be a great place for you to start to meet people in your new town and hopefully form some meaningful connections that can help you both socially and professionally.

So what does all of this have to do with marketing your company?

As the restaurants in our story demonstrate, different places tend to cater to different crowds. They aren't all interchangeable. The same is true of social media. If you want to increase your odds of connecting with your audience, you have to know what types of social media they like and where they will be found. To accomplish this, you need to know the following:

A precise definition of your audience

Before planning a social strategy, you need to know who you're trying to reach. This isn't just a general idea of "people who need XYZ." Instead, you need a more precise profile, including age, education, position, challenges, responsibilities, and what your prospects are looking for.

Who uses each social media platform

B2B companies tend to put a considerable amount of effort into LinkedIn, because this is the platform for networking professionals and those who are thinking about business. Facebook is dominated by people in a variety of age ranges looking to joke around and chat with friends. Twitter is a continuous conversation. Google+ has the biggest asset for local businesses looking to boost their SEO and odds of being found by local patrons.

Take these two sources of information and combine them to make a social media marketing plan that will help grow your company in ways you never thought possible. When you're ready to begin a new marketing campaign, contact us. We're here to help you get started and find success.

Ten Things You Need To Know About Typography

Ten Things You Need To Know About Typography

Typography- both the design of letters and characters and the process of arranging type- is a central component of any graphic design project and is integral to communication. Good typography reinforces the meaning of the text; puts the reader at ease; allows the reader to devote less energy to the mechanics of reading; and causes the reader to pay more attention to the message.

Typeface or font?

The terms typeface and font are used interchangeably today. However, in the days of metal type, there was a distinction. Font meant an alphabet (i.e., the upper and lower case letters, numerals, punctuation marks and symbols) in a single size, weight and style, while typeface  meant a family of fonts in various sizes, weights and styles.

• Size is the height of the alphabet and is measured in points (print) or ems (web).
• Weight, such as medium, bold, light or black, is the thickness of the alphabet relative to its height.
• Style is the slant of the letters. Upright letters are known as roman; slanted is called italics or oblique.

When type was set by hand, all the letters and characters representing one font were separately stored in the drawer of a job case. Then technology replaced metal type, and changes in size, weight and style were evoked by simple keyboard commands. The distinction between a typeface and font subsequently blurred to what it is today.

Typography as design: type classification

Type classification is a system for grouping fonts by shared visual characteristics (stroke variation, serifs and bracketing, x-height and stress). Typography for print uses these main classifications: Roman, Blackletter and Gaelic. The Roman classification- which predominates today- is further divided into serif, sans serif, script and ornamental.

• Serif typefaces have finishing strokes and stems on individual characters. Serif typefaces you may be familiar with include Times, Garamond, Palatio, Bodoni, Bookman.
• Sans serif typefaces lack finishing strokes and are relatively modern. Helvetica, Univers, Futura, Avant Garde, Gill Sans are all sans serif typefaces.
• Script typefaces mimic calligraphy or hand lettering and are either formal or casual. Formal script examples are Snell Roundhand and Old English; casual script includes Brush Script and Mistral.
• Ornamental typefaces (also known as display or novelty type) have limited use as headlines or for decorative purposes.

Web typography uses a slightly different classification system: serif, sans serif, monospaced, cursive, fantasy and script.

Typography as arranging type: design choices

Arranging type means selecting a font, point size, line length and spacing for each line and for the page as a whole that conveys the meaning of the words.

Fonts

The choice of fonts is dictated by the page's purpose, the amount of text, the intended audience, and characteristics of the font itself. Because there is more body copy than anything else, it has the biggest influence on the overall appearance of the page.

• For a printed page with a lot of text, use a serif font for the body copy as most books, newspapers and magazines do. On a web page, use either a serif or sans serif font. (Today's improved screen resolution displays serif fonts well).
• Limit the total number of fonts to three or less. For a single-page or short document, use only one or two fonts. Use only one script or ornamental font, regardless of the number of pages, and use it sparingly.
• Except for acronyms and abbreviations, avoid using all capital letters for text. In printed documents, using all caps slows down reading speed; on the web, all caps is synonymous with shouting.
• Never use all caps in a script font- the letters won't connect as they would in handwriting or calligraphy and the words will be very difficult to read.

For contrast, pair a serif font for body copy with a sans serif for headlines. For a variety, vary the size and weight of the type rather than changing fonts. For emphasis, use bold or italic type.

Point Size

Point size is the size of the letters. For print, use 10-12 point type for body copy; on the web, use 15-25 pixels. Be prepared  to make adjustments as some identical point sizes may appear larger or smaller depending on the font.

Headings help organize the page by defining sections of body copy and defining a hierarchy. Headings can be set in a larger point size than body copy, with a different weight, or set off with space above and below.

Line Length

Line length is the horizontal width of the text block. For best results, set the line length to average 45-90 characters per line or to about 2 1/2 times the alphabet length of the font you are using. (To determine alphabet length, type the alphabet twice, then a third time up to the letter m; measure. The width in picas is usually the best line length for that font.) If you follow this rule, you may have to create columns on the page.

Spacing

Spacing- between letters, words, lines, columns and on the margins of the page - creates negative space, the space that surrounds an object. Negative space defines the boundaries of positive space and helps balance the page.

Leading (rhymes with heading) is the vertical distance between lines, measured baseline to baseline. It should be 120-145% of the point size though it can be adjusted to bring lines closer together or spread them farther apart. In CSS, leading is called line-height.

Adjusting the space between two letters is called kerning and is used to remove gaps around letters whose forms angle outward or frame an open space (W,Y,V,T,L). Kerning can be controlled by creating a table of kerning pairs that specifies spaces between different letter combinations.

Tracking, letter spacing or character spacing refers to adjusting space between all the letters in a word. It is used to make lines of type more even, to remove hyphenation or widows and orphans from paragraphs or to increase the space between the letters of a word set in all caps.

White space is the part of a page that is empty of text, photos or graphic elements. If a page looks crowded, it probably needs more white space. Many readers associate white space with an upscale or sophisticated look. Page margins, line length and column width all affect white space.

Alignment

Alignment refers to how the text is displayed on the page. The choices are left, right, centered or justified and should remain consistent throughout the document.

Left alignment (also called left justified or flush left) begins each line at the left margin. This produces a straight margin on the left and a ragged edge margin on the right. This is this most commonly used alignment.

Right alignment (also called right justified or flush right) aligns the beginning of each line of text along the right margin, producing a straight right margin and ragged edge margin on the left. Right alignment is used sparingly as it is difficult to read in large blocks of text.

Centered alignment has equal amounts of space on the right and left margin of each line, making ragged edge margins on both sides. Centered alignment is often used for document titles and headings.

Justified alignment combines left and right aligned text, resulting in a straight margin on both sides. This is accomplished by adjusting the space between words and characters so the text fills the entire line. It is popular in newspapers and magazines and increasingly,on the web.

Typography is about the details

Whether in print or on the web, the goal of good typography is the same: to convey the meaning of the text and thereby to enhance the reader's comprehension and learning's. In typography, small changes can make a big difference.