Challenges Facing In-House Agencies in 2019

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An increasing amount of companies are bringing back in-house agencies – such as creative and digital – under the impression it will bring speed and deeper knowledge of brand values. But unfortunately for some, the benefits simply aren’t outweighing some of the risks and pitfalls that come with this strategy.

Why Bring it Back

Over the past decade, we are seeing a trend across the advertising and marketing industry where businesses are increasingly taking marketing matters into their own hands. Cost savings and having more control seem to be the biggest reasons why companies have been transitioning back to in-house agencies.

Many companies also believe that it will help integrate their values and beliefs across all platforms, but as some brands have already demonstrated, this may cause more issues than what the savings are worth.

The Unfortunate Challenges

As Pepsi has recently shown with their Kendall Jennar-starring ad, an in-house team may not always hit the mark. A considerable challenge of using an in-house agency is that it completely eliminates outside perspective, creating tunnel vision. Many criticized Pepsi’s ad to be ‘tone-deaf’ and ‘precisely the opposite of the real-world experience’ that was supposedly being portrayed.

Another downside to going in-house is creating a heavy work overload for the studio teams. Commonly those part of the in-house team are working on multiple other projects at the same time. This can make it difficult for them to make last minute or urgent changes.

With putting a heavy workload on the in-house team comes another great challenge, which is the difficulty of managing the many projects and tasks at hand and the pressures that come along with them.Team members can easily get burnt out, resulting in creative slumps or high staff turn-over.

Benefits of Outsourcing

Although creating an in-house agency may seem like the cost effective decision, outsourcing has more benefits in the long-run and for the company as a whole.

One of the greatest benefits of outsourcing is that you’re guaranteed a team of experts with extensive experience in the marketing field. Not only will they have the best experience, but they have the best tools and technology to go along with it. There is an extensive amount of marketing tools out there, and they can help you quickly identify which will be the most beneficial for your company, saving you an endless amount of time and money.

Another benefit that comes along with using an outside source is a fresh perspective. As previously mentioned, when using a team that work in-office they can get stuck using the same tactics or ideas over and over. Group think and tunnel vision can easily occur as well as falling victim to office politics. It’s always beneficial to have an impartial third party that can bring new and different ideas to the table.

Lastly, you completely eliminate the extensive processes of hiring and training. A good marketing partner will have a strong team committed to making the best decisions for your company. You can immediately start tackling strategy and making improvements rather than worrying about assembling a team of your own.

What We Can Do

Onimod Global can function as your own in-house agency with all the tools and expertise of an outside agency. We offer cross-channel digital marketing campaigns driven by machine learning analytics and human intelligence. Experts in SEO, SEM, website development, automation, manage your marketing 24/7, along with so much more. Check out what we have done for others and can do for you.

Pros and Cons of Using a URL Shortener

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Link shorteners are exactly what they sound like: tools that take a too-long URL and condense it into a new, briefer one. But there are some hidden benefits, and the odd drawback of these nifty generators.

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Beware of SEO Robocall Scams

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As a small to medium business owner, chances are good that you’ve been targeted by an SEO Robocall scam. Here’s how to protect yourself and your employees from being tricked.

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Test Your Website Speed And Performance

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The best way to improve your performance is to determine your starting point. Your potential customer does not have the patience to sit around waiting for a slow website to show up on their smartphone or desktop; they want everything immediately. This is why it’s so important to recognize where your site is at currently so you see areas for improvement.

The best way to do that you may ask? Onimod Global’s custom-made digital audit.

 

Our team offers complimentary digital audits for your company to determine what areas of your current digital marketing strategy needs improvement. Our digital audits measure your organic, paid search and social visibility as well as identify any errors or issues with the website. The audit is to give you a solid grasp of what issues your online business may be experiencing.

The digital audit will include the following:

  • SEO Analysis
  • SEM Breakdown
  • Social Media Influence
  • Website Performance
  • Local Business Optimization

All of these areas are crucial to your success in the digital space which is increasing in traffic daily.

Account managers at Onimod Global work with a wide variety of clients every day, and there is not a single industry we don’t feel confident in creating a marketing strategy for. Not quite convinced? Check out the dozens of case studies on our site by clicking here!

 

Ready for your brand’s custom-digital audit?

Simply visit our digital audit page, and enter your information for a complimentary digital audit. We cannot wait to work with you!

4 Tips To Success For Your Brand’s SEO Strategy

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As the online environment becomes increasingly competitive for businesses and brands, SEO is more important now than ever. Just how important is it? According to Marketing Land, over one-third of U.S. consumers started their online purchases with Google or another search tool in 2018. Paid search can only take you so far, we find that success lies in organic search results. Before you can take your SEO to the next level, you need to know where you are now and what to do next. Check out these 4 tips from Onimod Global that will give your brand the biggest competitive advantage in organic search results and make your SEO strategy a success.

 

Crawlability

The first step is making your site visible to search engine crawlers. A crawler is a program that visits Web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. In order to show your site crawlers your site structure for better indexing, you may need to update and expand your sitemap or build one from scratch. Updating your site’s robot.txt file with instructions will tell crawlers which pages you want indexed and which you don’t. After this step is complete, submit it to Google and other search engines so they can re-crawl your site as soon as possible.

 

Content Optimization 

After you resolve your engine crawler issues, the next thing you’ll want to focus on is content optimization and leveraging your existing assets. Doing this will improve ranking with specific keywords you want your brand to be associated with. There are a variety of tools to develop a list of keywords, the best one being Google Keyword Planner which develops a list of target keywords based on volume and ROI. From there, you can use this list to enhance meta tags and content you add to your site. This tip is very important in improving your SEO so your brand is shown to the right audience at the right time.

 

Build Links and Engagement

This tip is an offsite strategy, and the more complete content-optimization process is, the more SEO benefits you’ll see from your link-building and influencer efforts. We recommend researching link building and reviewing Google’s link-building ethics and best practices before you begin. Marketing Land also shares that a 10 to 15 percent response rate is good for link-building campaigns — so don’t get discouraged by what may seem a small response to your outreach efforts.

Influencer marketing is a strategy that is taking off and getting bigger every year. In order for this to be successful, you have to know your product and audience. From there, you can identify the social media user that has built a specific following specific to your industry or product. It is also important to recognize that large social influencers may not get you the best ROI, and it may be better to go the micro-influencer route. These are people who may only have tens of thousands of followers, but they’ve earned a high level of trust and authority within that group you are targeting.

 

Content Creation 

Your content is by far one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle to success for your brand. If your company is mature in its SEO program, you can focus on content creation at a whole new level. By this we mean your content should go beyond answering the basic questions of your products or services to answering questions that relate to what you sell. For example, if you are a company that sells bar shelves B2B, you can create content on how to effectively sell liquor in certain seasons by the lighting in your club.

It’s important to recognize these tips go in order and allow your brand to build level by level. Establish a solid foundation with crawlability and optimize your existing content — before you know it you’ll be creating unique content and your brand will see significant growth in your organic search traffic.

 

How Onimod Global Can Help

Are you on the hunt for someone to help you create an SEO strategy and increase your organic search traffic? We have you covered at Onimod Global! We would love to help you and your company succeed, request a quote or contact us here. We can’t wait to here from you!

 

2018 Digital Marketing: Our Top 5 Trends

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The new year has officially arrived, and we bid farewell to 2018. As 2019 arrives, we have noticed a dramatic shift in the industry regarding social media, SEO, and a variety of other spaces within the digital marketing landscape. So many digital marketing trends have revolutionized the industry which will carry over to 2019. Which methods and platforms are most popular among marketers that will transition us into 2019? Take a look at some of the most notable digital marketing trends in 2018:

 

  1. Artificial Intelligence

    At the top of several lists is artificial intelligence and all of the doors it has opened for digital marketing. AI helps in a variety of ways: analyzing consumer behavior and search patterns, utilizing data from social media platforms and blog posts to help with customer’s discovery process, and much more! A great example of AI is chatbots frequently used in customer service. Gartner shares that 25% of customers will use this chatbot technology by 2020, which is a huge jump from the less than 2% in 2017.

  2. Personalize Your Marketing

    Contents, emails, products, and more! Personalizing was an extremely popular trend in 2018 and will continue to make your company stand out in 2019. With the mounds of data we have going into the new year, the process of personalization with your marketing will be easier than ever. Data such as purchase history, links clicked, and consumer behavior all aid custom content. In fact, 96% of marketers believe that personalization advances customer relationships.

  3. Video Marketing

    Single Grain shares some significant numbers that display the importance of incorporating video marketing into your 2019 marketing strategy:–  70% of consumers say that they have shared a brand’s video
    – 72% of businesses say video has improved their conversation rate
    – 52% of consumers say that watching product videos makes them more confident in online purchase decisions

    This goes far beyond YouTube. Your business can create this type of content on Facebook Live, share on Twitter, Instagram, or even LinkedIn. Live video specifically is gaining lots of popularity and will definitely put you one step ahead of competition in 2o19.

  4. Social Messaging Apps11 Digital Marketing Trends3
    This shows exactly how important it is to make your business available across social platforms. Similar to chatbots, your customer service team being available on these popular social messaging platforms will help increase customer loyalty by adding value to their experience with your business. Being easily accessible will only increase your success in 2019.
  5. Micro-Moments

    As termed by Google, micro-moments are a brand new consumer behavior. On average, people spend 3 hours and 35 minutes a day on their smartphones. This means that is more important than ever to have a clear and concise message to your consumer at the right time in the right place. More so, this must happen in a matter of seconds, or your potential consumer will lose interest. People prepare for every instance big or small; no one has time for surprises anymore. A great example of this is a restaurant having their menu, vegan options, wait-time, and other common queries all available when requested on a search engine.

More From Onimod Global

We’d like to thank you for being a part of 2018 journey and look forward to assisting you in 2019 with your digital marketing needs. We would love to work with you and help you optimize your digital marketing strategy.

To contact our experts or request a quote, please click here. We can’t wait to hear from you, Happy New Year!

Organic SEO For Plumbers

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SEO, or search engine optimization, is crucial to the success of any business in any industry. SEO refers to non-paid marketing techniques with the goal of increasing your search engine visibility and ranking high on the first page of search results for specific keywords. The plumbing industry can benefit from SEO in a variety of ways. Experts at Onimod Global are professionals in this space plus more, check out our case studies on a variety of industries!

The plumbing industry needs SEO work for a variety of reasons:

  • Cost Efficiency. This is the foundation of any marketing plan, it gives you the most value without costing any money.
  • Visibility. Competition in this area can be tough, as we know from working with several clients in this industry. With a good SEO strategy, your visibility will increase over a long period of time.
  • Sustainability. Organic search will last for over a long period of time, and it can establish your company as one that will constantly ranking on Google SERPs (search engine results pages).

 

Importance of Local SEO for Plumbing

The major purpose of the internet presence is to attract plenty of customers who will require your plumbing services. For the industry of plumbing, SEO is a very important element in terms of building up revenue and business growth. Since most plumbing operations are in specific areas, a strategy that is very efficient is to include keywords that will target local business in your area.

For example, if you had a plumbing company in Chicago, several blog posts and pages on your site should include phrases about being a plumbing company located in Chicago. Through that, customer lead generation is easy and fast.

 

More From Onimod Global

We would love to work with you and help you optimize your digital marketing strategy for your plumbing company. To contact our experts or request a quote, please click here. We can’t wait to hear from you!

How To Create Loyal Customers With Social Media Transparency

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Customer loyalty is a priority and goal for all companies in existence. How to create those loyal customers is much easier than you may think, and it all has to do with transparency. According to the social media company, Sprout Social, 86% of surveyed U.S. consumers think it is more important than ever for businesses to be transparent.

 

Customers are much more willing to show loyalty to companies that are consistent with being clear in communication, open, and honest. For example, an 89 percent of U.S. customers are willing to give a transparent brand a second chance after a bad experience, and 85 percent are willing to stick with them through a crisis. These astonishing numbers prove that transparency is key to business success.

 

Gaining Trust and Sales From Transparency

Customer loyalty will come with your ability to communicate the message of transparency in the most effective manner. Customers that also purchase from you only on occasion poses an opportunity to convert them into being a loyal customer.

Typically, organic brands are very transparent because that information in their ingredient lists is crucial to their brand message. If you take a look at Horizon, the organic milk brand, you can locate any of their organic farms on their website as well as seeing their manufacturing processes, stories about the farmers and shipment processes. This is all given directly on their website with 100% transparency, making them an elite brand that does millions of dollars in sales each year.

 

The Role Of Social Media

In this same report, 81 percent of the group consumers say that businesses must be transparent on social media. This is more than they expect out of politicians (79 percent), friends and family (66 percent) and even themselves (71 percent). This adds a significant amount of pressure to a brand’s plate making sure they are proactive with mistakes and responding to customers at all times.

 

Here is an example of the makeup brand rising in popularity daily, Morphe, disclosing a mistake in production via Twitter to all 526,000 of their followers. It is statements like this, in addition to publicly addressing customer concerns, that consumers expect from businesses.

 

As relationships are continuously built through social media channels between brands and consumers, people want business to be more open and honest than ever, especially in public settings. Marketing teams that accept this expectation and do their best to treat transparency as a mandatory business practice are the most likely to retain customers and increase sales in doing so. Long-term, transparency is a differentiating factor that will motivate consumers to stick with your brand through a difficult times and to remain loyal over time.

 

More From Onimod Global

We would love to work with you and help you optimize your social media strategy for any event your company is hosting. To contact our experts or request a quote, please click here. We can’t wait to hear from you!

 

Effective Small Business SEO Strategies

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Starting up your own business is a challenge in itself, and one of the most challenging parts is generating any leads for your services. How your business ranks online is the key to helping with that challenge, and it is critical to success. In fact, search engine rank is the number one source of traffic by most websites all over the globe. If creating traffic is a goal of yours, it is essential for you to spend time on small business SEO strategies. Not sure if you’re convinced? Here are a few facts on the first page of search engines according to a study from AOL’s search engine logs:

  • The first ten results (page one ) received 89.71% of all click-through traffic
  • The next 10 results (normally listed on the second page of results) received 4.37%
  • All other pages of results received less than 1% of total search traffic clicks

Last but not least, research has shown in several studies that 93% of all buying decisions will start with an online search.

Paid search, email marketing and social media promotions will also send traffic to your site. However, all of those things cumulatively are not bigger than your organic results.

The digital marketing experts at Onimod Global have some tips for you so that your small business can have the most effective SEO strategy.

 

Thorough Audit Of Your Site

How can you fix something if you don’t know it’s broken? An audit is a crucial first step to success with your SEO, and will very clearly point out the spots on your site that have room for improvement. Start by searching your own company and specific keywords into a search engine that you want your company to rank for. If you’re not on the first page or in the top 10 search results, that’s a good sign for an improvement opportunity.

If you don’t know how to do this on your own, fear not! Experts at Onimod Global, who are also a trusted Google partner, will audit your site at no cost. You can reach out to us by clicking here.

 

Long-Tail Keywords

As a brand new business, it will be challenging to rank high on search engines with single word keywords.

To make it easier to understand, we can use the example of selling homemade jewelry. The chances that your pages will rank in the top tier of Google’s first page results are slim to none.

Why is this?

Simply put, the competition is brutally challenging. There is no need to stress out about being the top organic listing for competitive keywords as a start-up company in a competitive field with a small marketing budget. Long-tail keywords like “where to buy handmade jewelry”, or “cheap homemade jewelry in Chicago”, distinguish your business from others. They will also give you the opportunity to rank high with more rare keywords.

 

Keep Track Of Data

Google has just launched brand new platforms that allow you to keep track of data and simplifies multiple Google products into one space. Catering specifically to small businesses, Google is currently launching Smart Campaigns. These are designed for small business to save you time, offer simplicity, and allow you to focus on results that matter to the small business. These campaigns can be set up in just minutes and are three times better at getting your ad in from of the right audience.

Google has also just launched instant reporting, so you can build your own custom reports in seconds that used to take minutes or even hours. This product uses automatic pivot tables to measure the device against the creative to see what’s performing well, and this will allow you to make changes to any creative based on real-time data.

 

Focus On Content

Content, above all else, is key to your success. It’s important to make sure the quality of content you’re producing, especially as a new business, is top-notch and something people would spend time viewing. If your pages are keyword rich but provide zero useful information to your customers, your content has the potential to be deemed as spam and Google will dish out penalties.

 

More From Onimod Global

We would love to work with you and help you optimize your digital marketing strategy. To contact our experts or request a quote, please click here. We can’t wait to hear from you!

How to Develop the Most Effective Keyword Strategy

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The development of keyword strategies has changed drastically over time. Back in the day (AKA 5 to 10 years ago), a common goal among search marketers was to obtain as many keywords as possible. The number of keywords in your account was something to respect about a marketer in that time and today that has remarkably changed. Instead of focusing on the quantity of keywords, the emphasis is centered now on the quality of what keywords you want to target. The experts here at Onimod Global have a few do’s and don’ts you can implement into your keyword strategy.

Do: Identify themes.

Identifying themes for specific pages is crucial. There is only so much room to expand on any existing keywords you have before it just becomes irrelevant to your site and won’t create any relevant traffic or visibility. An example that Search Engine Land suggests is instead of attempting to search for every possible, insanely-specific description of a shirt like “pink polka dotted yellow shirt”, look for other opportunities to branch out. For example, look into different types of shirts such as “sweaters”, “tees”, “blouses”, and so on.

Don’t: Keyword Stuffing.

This is exactly as it sounds, stuffing a bunch of the keyword you’re attempting to rank for in a particular page on your site. Don’t get us wrong; it’s essential to have those keywords on the pages you want to rank for that specific keyword. The key is to find that right amount of using that keyword where you’re still delivering high-quality content. Not only is this pretty unethical, but it also can look like spam and will be treated as such by Google or other search engines.

Do: Utilize meta descriptions.

A meta description is merely a short paragraph that appears on SERP (search engine results page). These can increase your click-through rate if you optimize your keyword in this location. The meta description has virtually nothing to do with ranking in web searches; however, it is helpful with click-through rate which will increase your ranking in the long run.

Don’t: Get caught up in your professional terminology.

This is extremely easy to do, and it can hurt your page ranking on SERP. This is because you can often forget to account for ways that a consumer without your technical knowledge might seek out your product or service. When deciding on keywords you want to target, remember to think like a consumer. For any of you that focus mostly on B2C sales, this is significantly important. An opportunity to take advantage of would be to do market research in focus groups to discover what consumers are wanting or needing your services would search.

Do: Monitor the impact of new keywords.

When adding new keywords, you want to make sure they are adding value to your account. A straightforward way to track this is to label new keywords as they are attached, this way you can quickly give a performance review, whether that be good or bad. Additionally, make sure that a keyword you have added is contributing positively while not taking away from existing keywords. If this is the case, make sure the performance of the account overall is increasing in strength.

Don’t: Duplicate keywords.

Duplicating keywords is another factor in keyword strategy that is a common mistake, but easily avoidable. Broad match keywords don’t rely on which order the terms are in, so keywords that would be considered duplicates are just words rearranged in a search. For example, “charcoal suit jacket” and “suit jacket charcoal” would be viewed as a duplicate and would also compete for the same search. The main thing here is you don’t want to be competing against yourself and spend more on clicks than necessary.

Contact Us

For more information regarding digital marketing expertise, trends and insights, visit the Onimod Global Website. We provide weekly news updates on the latest in the world of digital marketing. Enjoy!