Internet Marketing

In general, when we talk about Internet Marketing, we’re often examining individual services. Almost always, it’s a combination of SEO, SEM or PPC, website and blog content, social media, email marketing and sometimes video. We offer other digital marketing services, and depending on the business and goals, the mix can change a lot–especially over time.

Most agencies list their marketing services in some kind of menu format, and base their fees on how long things take. It’s a basic fee for service model where you, the customer, choose what you want and tally up the list. It’s simple, but it sucks. Here’s why.

You own the company. You should care about one thing.

When you pay for marketing, your promotional dollars need to multiply. For every dollar you invest in marketing, you should expect that dollar, plus some additional dollars, back in profit. Usually, there’s a ramp up period for web design, establishing campaigns, setting up accounts, running tests, etc., but business is a for-profit endeavor. You can’t just pour money in.

Here’s a simple formula: dollars in, is less than, dollars out

How we get there, how long it takes and the actual ROI are tricky to forecast without data. In fact that is a major difference between OCG Creative and other digital agencies. We measure everything. More than that, we have analytical tools our competitors can’t get, aren’t aware of or don’t use.

Marketing is math

Marketing is a behavioral science. Science is probability and statistics. Statistics is math.

Hypothesize. Test. Measure. Evaluate. Adjust.

Apply that to every active marketing channel (SEO, Social Media, etc.). It’s not just a challenge. It’s the digital landscape. Regardless of your industry, the top competitors online are almost always the best at utilizing data in their marketing efforts.

As dehumanizing as the math seems, consumer behavior is always going to be influenced, if not driven, by what they see hear and feel. In other words, we need to understand what motivates individual consumers to take action. Design, written copy, visual elements, color, layout and usability are critically important to the goal of generating more dollars than you spend.

In actual practice, we learn everything we can about your theoretical best customers so we can profile them based on what we believe to be their preferences. An assumption might be that your customers prefer to be well-educated and compare several competitors before committing to a purchase.

However, we never want to commit your marketing budget to an assumption. In an active campaign, we’ll restate assumptions in testable terms (hypothesis), test, evaluate and make changes until your marketing dollars multiply.

Internet marketing and design

All that math and testing may seem impersonal, but it only tells us whether something we test performs better than whatever we test it against. It’s a history lesson. We take great care to design and publish web pages, posts and individual elements that are as close to perfect as possible. This is true for social media, email marketing, directories, video and even offline media.

Design is critically important. Design quality shapes first impressions and strengthens the emotional connection individuals make with your company.

Our approach is to do everything possible to understand your target consumers and craft our initial designs around our understanding of those groups. Most of the time, early designs perform well because our research is thorough and our findings turn out to be accurate. After that, data sampling, testing and refinements are the rule.

Digital marketing has to be flexible.

Our approach Internet marketing is to start with obvious, major items, like websites, SEO fundamentals, email and social media accounts, and even Google My Business. We will always set the stage by ensuring your entire online footprint is complete and accurately represents your business.

Since everything touches and influences everything else, it doesn’t make sense to limit marketing efforts to only social media, or only SEO. Even in cases where we are specifically brought in to manage one aspect of your digital marketing strategy, we’ll track the performance of the entire digital marketing ecosystem and help you plan based on what we learn. We also frequently stretch into other areas even if it isn’t part of our contract.

In other words, the best way to reach your marketing goals is to do whatever needs to be done. By remaining flexible, we can put resources where we need to. For example, if your search engine rankings are strong and trading upward, but social media performance shows opportunity, we’ll make the shift while continuing to monitor rankings.

By prioritizing opportunities over lists of services, we universally achieve the best outcomes. Remember the formula: dollars in, is less than, dollars out