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Taking Your Marketing Funnel Global

Together Digital — 2019-08-16T16:08:00+01:00

As a B2B company, you offer something unique—whether that’s a product, service or some other niche-demand resource. You’re already well aware of the value of your offering, but the real challenge is recreating the same level of awareness, familiarity, and excitement among your prospects.

At the early stages of your growth cycle, it may be easier to convey your unique selling points through relationship-based selling: there are ample opportunities to network at expos or events, reach out through targeted platforms like LinkedIn, and communicate exactly what your company can do for them.

These types of prospects are often the most fruitful, leading to repeat business and frequent referrals when handled correctly.

As you scale, however, it will become increasingly difficult to sustain this level of one-to-one attention. You’re tapping into a wider—potentially international—market, with prospects that are further away and a sales team that is responsible for efficiently maintaining, scoring and converting a growing pipeline.

The solution?

Let your marketing funnel do the selling for you.

Your marketing funnel is a series of processes that are meant to help guide potential clients, from a point of unawareness through all the necessary stages required to progress them as a prospective lead.

Why then should your sales team have to do all the heavy lifting? As your business scales, you should become more reliant on your marketing funnel as a means to not only attract leads but to educate them as well.

Effective Informational Marketing

According to research by Google,“89% of B2B researchers use the internet during the B2B research process.”.

If you’re not making the most of your digital marketing funnel, you’re probably missing out on an opportunity to get your message across early, depending almost entirely on your sales team to both educate and secure future client deals.

With an effective content strategy, you can mitigate this problem—putting more of an emphasis on education in the middle of the funnel, meaning you have much less selling to do once prospects are at the stage where they have a need or desire for your business offering!

As your business scales, your sales team will need to develop and strategize more around lead scoring and lead nurturing. In this context, the creation and effective syndication of high-quality content can prove even more important.

Quality Content Creation

In your marketing funnel, content is king. Here are some key considerations for creating quality content:

Humanise with video

As you become more global, you lose a certain human element. Your prospects spend less time interacting directly with your sales team and more time communicating by phone or over email.

Video is an effective tool when done correctly—not only is it easy to digest, video can also help visualise hard-to-grasp concepts and, most importantly, can create content with a face, a voice and a name.

Explore localised content

As you move towards global markets, the messaging that has served you well so far in your home market might not quite hit as hard in a different local.

Have you altered your messaging to suit all of your target markets? Each new market might carry with it a number of unknown factors—take the time to split-test your content and adapt to what works best.

Patch known gaps in your messaging

Are there common information shortcomings where your sales team has had to clarify or fill in the gaps? Ideally, now would be the time to address these.

As your marketing funnel takes over the brunt of the work, it becomes increasingly important that you are providing prospects with clear and accurate information. Failure to do so may mean you won’t get the opportunity to remediate it later on.

Avoid preaching to the choir

When creating content, remember that you’re not selling to yourself. Everything that you already know about your offering has to go out the window—what may seem apparent to you may not be quite as clear to a potential prospect.

Your objective when writing content is to help your prospects reach your level of understanding. Make sure you’re providing prospects with correct and accessible information at every step in their journey, from initial awareness all the way through to closing and after-sales support.

Meet prospects at their level

Don’t oversimplify unnecessarily, but don’t make your prospects feel like they need a cypher to understand what you’re saying.

Language is powerful and industry jargon may often help communicate an idea in a concise and precise manner, but when a reader isn’t familiar with a term then you’re likely to confuse, mislead or alienate them.

If you have to use jargon, use it wisely.

Consider everyone involved in the buying process

B2B sales have evolved massively in the last few years. The number of people involved in the B2B sales process has been increasing, meaning you’re no longer selling exclusively to industry experts who would recognise your offering straight away.

There is a key concept here: the Buying Committee.

Long gone is the dynamic where you sell to one contact in an organisation, who then gets to sign off and buy in all on their own…

These days big B2B decisions are made by consensus. A typical Buying Committee might comprise two C level execs and an in house manager. It might comprise a team of anywhere from three to double-digit people.

Targetting the key decision-makers

You need to identify who the overall Buying Committee is, and then how to contact and get each onside so that your products and sales messages have momentum.

Depending on where you ask, you're likely to get a slightly different answer as to which roles are involved, their level of influence in the purchasing process and how you should target their associated buying personas: you may be required to convince any number of employees, from technical buyers all the way up to the c-suite and financial controllers.

Each of these people will have different levels of expertise within your niche, different perspectives and different pain points you need to address:

How does your offering affect ROI?
What do you offer that they can’t simply do in-house?
What advantages do you offer over the alternatives?
What level of onboarding and after-sales support do you offer?
Why should your solution be prioritised over addressing any number of other business issues?

Making your messaging stand out on-site

Creating effective content is only part of the solution. You also need to make sure that it is easy to find both on your site and off. There may be a limit on how long you have your prospect’s captive attention. Make it count.

Perform a User Experience audit

The correct information should never feel like a chore to find. Perform a User Experience (UX) audit to make sure that all information is easy to navigate to and stands out clearly on the page.

Tools like Hotjar can be invaluable for creating heat maps that show exactly where a prospect is interacting with a web page.

Ask yourself: What content is actually being seen and what is regularly being overlooked?

Give the right content at the right time

Structure your site in such a way that it provides all the relevant information when a potential client needs it, without overwhelming them with all the information they don’t need.

The more concisely your USP’s can be conveyed, the easier they are to remember.

Explore formats that allow in-depth information to be accessed quickly, without drastically increasing how far a prospect needs to scroll or how many links they need to click on. For example, a FAQ format with expandable content fields is one such effective solution.

Making your messaging stand out off-site

When your objective is increasing the availability of targeted information for your prospects, each additional required action becomes an additional buffer: including having to navigate back to your site in the first place.

Therefore, activities that will provide your prospects with relevant information off-site, or that ease their journey back to your site should factor into your marketing strategy.

Social strategy

Sometimes prospects will connect with you on social platforms before they make their final buying decision. Have you capitalised on this?

Use company news and regular updates as a means to highlight lesser-known aspects of your offering, push out educational information and supporting articles that target the different people involved in the buying process.

Email marketing

This one should be a no-brainer, but email marketing is one of your most powerful tools for providing prospects with the information they might need.

Take steps to segment your emails lists as much as you reasonably can: in an ideal world, your email communications would contain relevant and highly personalised information pertaining to how familiar the addressee would be with your niche and their involvement with the buying process.

Remarketing campaigns

Google remarketing campaigns are ideal for broadcasting to prospects who have shown a certain level of interest in your website but haven’t filled out a form, subscribed to your newsletter or connected with you on socials.

Remarketing audience segments are incredibly powerful and can be defined based on key website actions, which pages they visited, where they are in the world, amongst other factors.

For example, with remarketing, you can target prospects who have visited your website’s knowledge base but left without visiting certain key pages. You can then follow up with targeted paid ads directing them to come back and visit the page they may have missed.

Finding a digital agency that can do all this...

As you grow your business and reach new and exciting global markets, it can be daunting to make the shift from relationship-based selling and learn to depend on your marketing funnel to do more of the selling for you.

As an agency, we work with clients all over the world, helping them develop marketing strategies designed to scale. We have a full-spec team, capable of providing everything from video content, branding, tech integrations and marketing strategy for long-term growth.

Your marketing funnel isn’t just about creating awareness and putting your offering on your prospects radar—it is an integral member of your sales team (possibly the most important one at an international level).

Make sure you’re giving your marketing funnel the attention it deserves. Get in touch and let one of our strategists talk you through what we can do for you.

Is Your Sales Pipeline Running on Fumes?

Together Digital — 2019-07-19T16:43:00+01:00

Listen, we need to talk about your pipeline. You’re not really getting the bullseye clients that you’d like at the top-end and the traffic to your website has been going down month-on-month. Sometimes you may go weeks without generating a single qualified lead.

When faced with a weak pipeline, most B2B firms will focus on top of funnel activity and ignore the middle of the funnel. Putting more time and resources into attracting visitors to your website may seem like a no-brainer, but if you’re not effectively converting that traffic, you’re essentially losing money.

You may see an increase in conversions, but your conversion rates will most likely plummet. Why? Because you’re applying brute force to a situation that needs a little more finesse.

Don’t settle for a pipeline that only works half the time. You deserve a pipeline that’s perfect. A pipeline that generates a positive return on investment.

If you’re getting confused by our use of the terms pipeline and funnel, we owe you a little clarification:

Pipelines & Funnels: What’s the Difference?

Within business, the terms sales pipelines and funnels are often used interchangeably, but we’re going to make one key distinction here:

When we talk about your funnel, we’re specifically talking about your marketing funnel; the journey that a potential prospect makes, from awareness all the way through to conversion (typically the first point of contact).

When we talk about your pipeline, we’re referring to your sales pipeline; the process of progressing a lead, from the initial point of contact all the way through to the final sale, and more specifically how you facilitate that movement.

Your funnel is essentially one way of feeding fresh qualified leads into your pipeline. It generally won’t be the only method, but if employed correctly, it should be one of the most effective.

At the simplest level, a healthy sales pipeline is entirely dependent on the alignment of your sales and marketing teams.

A healthy pipeline depends on the alignment of sales and marketing.

What does a perfect pipeline look like?

The perfect pipeline is one with constant progression and little to no attrition: qualified leads arrive from your funnel at the top, progressing smoothly until both you and your new client are happy to close the deal.

In an ideal pipeline, your prospects have arrived knowing exactly who you are, what you do and why they want to work with you. Meeting each of these objectives in your funnel means you have less selling to do at the lower end of your pipeline.

On the other hand...

What does an inefficient pipeline look like?

It can often be difficult to admit when your pipeline is performing ineffectively. It might be easy to overlook a dodgy pipeline if you’re still receiving leads from referrals, networking and other offline sources... but this ignores a rather significant issue.

Yes, you may still be receiving some promising leads, but the absence of qualified funnel-fed leads indicates either a loss in investment, lost opportunities, or both.

A 2015 study showed that almost half of B2B executives felt that their company’s pipeline was ineffective.

What are some telltale signs that your funnel is running on fumes?

High traffic, but low conversions: The top of your funnel may appear healthy, but your site’s traffic is either irrelevant or not being passed down the funnel effectively.

Your tracking isn’t up to scratch: You have no idea where website visitors are coming from, or when they’re converting. Without clean data, you’re essentially flying blind.

Your contact forms are being abandoned: You’re almost there, but you’ve fallen short in selling yourself along the way. Are you using remarketing to follow up?

You’re getting the wrong type of leads: The majority of leads coming through your website are wrong for your business. Do you communicate your niche effectively?

How do pipeline processes fail?

Your lead nurturing and follow-up aren’t up to scratch: You’re missing deadlines and come across as disinterested due to delays in follow-up.

Previous clients never generate new referral leads: Satisfied client referrals are invaluable for generating leads. Are you capitalising on this?

You’re expending effort trying to get the wrong leads: Without an effective pipeline strategy, you’re mismanaging resources and pursuing the wrong target customers.

You miss out to the competition even when you have a head start: how many times do you see prospects buy something from a competitor that you initially pitched?

If any of this sounds familiar, then you might be starting to get the sense that something is wrong with how you handle your sales pipeline.

It begs the question: When was the last time you had a pipeline audit?

Are you keeping track of exactly where your leads are coming from?

Auditing your pipeline

Frequent audits are essential in every aspect of your business; how do you know if something is working unless you test it regularly? Auditing your sales pipeline is no different.

This is not an exhaustive list, but if you follow these 8 steps, you should have a strong idea of exactly what your processes need:

Track: Build up a backlog of clean analytic data. This is an essential first step.
Plan: Sketch out how your pipeline is supposed to be working.
Compare: Who is your bullseye client? Do your current leads fit?
Source: Identify where leads come from. How can you expand on this?
Map: Where do prospects drop off along the way? How can you prevent this?
Target: Are you effectively selling to everyone involved in the buying process?
Assess: Identify where you may need to work with an external agency or CRM.
Strategise: Using information from the previous steps, develop a robust pipeline strategy.

If everything goes to plan, you will soon be seeing a healthy increase in the qualified leads that are passing through your pipeline, as well as a diversification in the channels they’re coming from.

Get in touch

At Together Digital, we bring together experts in fields that intersect each of the key stages in your buyer journey—from creating initial awareness at the top of your marketing funnel, all the way through to developing long-term strategies designed to grow your business.

If you’re in a lead-based business and have concerns about your pipeline underperforming, get in touch and see how Together Digital can help.

How to Approach Google Tag Manager In 2019

Together Digital — 2019-04-26T12:05:00+01:00

Everyone involved or even just interested in Digital Marketing has heard about Google’s suite of applications: Google Analytics, Google Ads, Google Data Studio and Google Tag Manager to name a few.

These are all powerful tools in their own right, but today we’re going to focus on just one:

Google Tag Manager

(If you’re already comfortable with the basics of GTM you can skip this next bit)

What is Google Tag Manager?

Simply put, it is a tag management system which allows you to implement tags on your website so you can track how visitors behave. It will code all the tags you need and embed them for you.

It is directly related to Google Analytics and Google Ads so you can extract information through those tags and analyze it directly on those platforms.

But... what is a tag?

A tag is a piece of code on your site that sends a signal every time a specific criterion is met. At the simplest level, this could be every time someone views a page on your site, but that is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to what you can do with tags.

Google Tag Manager is an interface that allows you to manage all of your third-party tags in one place, while also trimming the amount of excess code you’re putting on your site.

(All caught up? Great!)

So, the main goal of Google Tag Manager is to simplify the whole tagging process, but is it really successful in doing so?

Why Should You Use Google Tag Manager?

Let’s take a look at the pros and cons:

Free: Like most of the marketing services offered by Google, Google Tag Manager is provided completely free of charge.

Integrations: As part of the Google Suite, Google Tag Manager can easily integrate with other properties such as Google Analytics and Google Ads.

Ease of Use: Once you get past the learning curve, Google Tag Manager makes it a whole lot easier to add tags to your website.

Accessibility: You don’t have to be a coder to benefit from the majority of Google Tag Manager’s features.

One of the main benefits of Google Tag Manager is a special feature called “Preview mode” which opens a debug console window at the bottom of your website page.

This window will allow you to have a look at detailed information about which tags are firing on your site in real time, making it easier to know when something has gone wrong.

GTM’s Preview Mode in Action

In addition to all of this, Google offers a vast help section which tries to answer all the questions you might have about the service.

Everything has to have cons, so why might GTM put you off?

Well, for one thing, the aphorism ‘easy to learn and difficult to master’ holds true for Google Tag Manager.

As we said earlier, Google Tag Manager is an incredibly powerful tool, but that doesn’t make it any easier to handle. Try to do too much, it becomes easy to get confused due to the technical and somewhat unintuitive nature of the tool.

Spoilt for Choice: It can be easy to get confused by the high degree of configuration options for tags, triggers and variables.

Learning Curve: When you are new to the platform, it can take some time to get used to it. It can be even harder to troubleshoot when something goes wrong.

Lack of Information: Due to gaps in the current literature, it can be difficult to grasp all the opportunities Google Tag Manager is offering.

So what can you do to overcome these issues?

Practice Makes Perfect

There are many aspects of Google Tag Manager that are highly dependent on the specifications of your individual tech stack (form tracking being a particularly notorious example).

The solution that works for someone else may not work for your site, so make sure to rigorously test any changes you make before submitting them to your live website.

Tip: Make regular use of GTM’s built-in Preview and Versioning features to make sure you don’t accidentally break something when testing changes.

Does this mean you should ignore the available literature altogether?

Definitely not! The educational resources provided by Google will help you develop a strong baseline understanding of what you can do with the tool, and more importantly, how to go about doing it.

Google Tag Manager in the Google Academy

Having worked in marketing for a while, you’re most likely already familiar with Google’s Analytics Academy, a training resource provided by the company to help marketers to get to grips with the capabilities of the Google Suite.

What you may not know is that Google has now reintroduced an updated version of its Google Tag Fundamentals course to the Analytics Academy. This course tries to answer four main questions:

What Google Tag Manager is for
How data is collected on a website through Google Tag Manager
How to configure simple Google Tag Manager tags
Which additional tags exist for marketing and remarketing

If you feel lost, then this course is a really good way to get a general understanding of the platform; however, it is limited in the scope of what it teaches you.

This course is a good start if you want to learn the basics, but it will not be enough if your goal is to install a complete tagging system on your website.

What are the course limitations?

The main limitation of this course is that it tries to cover the full breadth of Google Tag Manager in one go: It starts off in a very accessible way but quickly ramps up in complexity with regard to specific use cases that may never be relevant to you.

In fact, a tangible gap exists between getting the Google Tag Manager certification and actually implementing a tagging system from A-to-Z on your own through this platform.

Although the second half of this course is great at providing examples of the full capabilities of what Google Tag Manager can do, we would recommend dipping in and out as the different topics become relevant to you.

Help is on its Way—Ask Us About Our GTM Services

How does Together Digital work with Tag Manager?

Purpose is at the heart of how we approach digital: i.e. what is the purpose of your site and what do you want to achieve with it? How we approach tracking is no different.

We will break down the key conversions for your business goals, and recommend the best course of action to track them.

At Together Digital, we are lucky to have strong marketing and development teams that work very well together. This means it’s easy for us to implement much more complicated tracking code for our clients whenever it’s needed.

Our team can implement your entire tracking system and make sure all your tags are working properly, providing you with valuable insights about how people interact with your site.

(We also have lots of experience integrating CRMs and third-party analytical tools).

If you need more information about the Google suite of tools, or if you are looking for specific help or expertise, feel free to contact our team of Google experts to see what Together Digital can do for you.

Mobile Optimisation | 2019 Checklist

Together Digital — 2019-04-11T12:23:00+01:00

As you probably already know, we have been living in a post-desktop world for a while now (at least, according to Google and other sources). Although it started off slow, mobile search volume has been growing to dominant levels over the past few years.

There has been some confusion amongst our B2B clients over the relevancy of mobile to them; statistically, B2B sites don’t receive as much mobile traffic as B2C. Why the spotlight on mobile then? Two words: Mobile-First (Google’s newest method of indexing sites).

Don’t worry, we’ll explain all about it.

We know that your site’s user experience matters to you. In B2B, every prospective client is important. Whether for desktop or mobile, our aim is simple: To help you in developing an intuition about user design best practices for your business’ website.

We also want to help you to achieve this.

Even if you’re unsure of the technical side of things, we’re here to help you create the confidence to ask the right questions of your agency or in-house web developer, especially around critical web performance issues known to impact conversion.

What is Mobile-First?

It’s easy to look at your own traffic statistics and believe that mobile isn’t that important to you, but that’s no longer the case. Even if mobile visitors make up only a small fraction of your audience, an unoptimised mobile site can now severely impact your SEO on both desktop and mobile.

Google had been promising to switch to a Mobile-First form of indexing in late 2016 and all the signs are that the rollout started in earnest in March of this year.

The quality of your mobile site has played a role in Google organic rankings for some time. However, it is now more important than ever to optimise the mobile experience if you want to remain competitive across all platforms.

This guide will help you do just that:

Mobile users: what's the difference?

Mobile, by its nature, is mobile:

Provided they have a device and an internet signal, a user can access your site no matter what they’re doing or where they are. But this also means that you don’t necessarily have a user’s undivided attention anymore.

Google coined the term micro-moment to describe the way that mobile users browse the web throughout the day. In 2015, they conducted a research study to see how these micro-moments stacked up against desktop sessions. You can read the full study here.

What Google found out was that mobile and desktop traffic behave in very different ways: mobile users are much more focused on immediate gratification and are less likely to waste their time with slow-loading or unintuitive sites.

Some of the 2015 results show:

20% increase in the mobile share of online sessions
29% increase in mobile conversions rates
18% decrease in mobile session length

Mobile users want quick results but are willing to give sites less time than ever before.

It is worthwhile noting that due to the fast-paced nature of our industry, these numbers may be considered stale. In the years since this study was completed, mobile has grown to dominate (moving from ⅓ to ½ of global search volume).

Statistics source

Why should my site prioritise the mobile user experience?

Even though some evidence suggests that B2B users are still strongly tied to desktop browsing, the rise of Google’s mobile-first indexing means that if your B2B site has a poor mobile UX, then your overall online visibility within Google could be affected.

For any B2B business, it is highly important that a balance is struck between both mobile and desktop user experiences:

A poor mobile UX will affect your Google organic rankings
A poor desktop UX will affect your B2B conversions

It isn’t enough to just focus on one or the other. Even if your analytics are telling you that you receive a comparatively low amount of mobile traffic, ignoring the mobile user experience will prevent you from getting the coveted top positions, and probably bar your site from page one for the majority of the competitive terms in your market.

Do I have a mobile-optimized website?

Google has a couple of its own mobile optimization tests, which you can find here and here. These will focus on how quickly your site might load over a 3G connection, and whether Google’s bots consider your site a ‘good mobile site’ (integral in a mobile-first world).

These will only give you information on the technical side of your mobile site. There are other tools which will help you review your mobile UI, such as mobiletest.me.

Does my website load quickly enough?

The relationship between a page’s loading speed and its mobile bounce rate is brutal. In 2016, 53% of mobile users would leave a site that takes longer than three seconds to load—well below the average load speed for mobile sites!

Source

As you know, uncompressed rich media files are generally behind most webpage bloat. Always remember to compress images appropriately and explore external hosting solutions for video.

Most embedded video players, like YouTube and Wistia, have the added benefit of being able to detect a user’s connection speed and adjust accordingly.

Use advanced coding techniques like lazy loading to take advantage of small mobile screens and ensure that visible content always renders first.

Internet speeds are getting faster and mobile 4G is more widely available; however, be careful about using the faster internet standards as a benchmark. Try to create web pages that will work well over a variety of connection speeds.

Read more about optimising your site’s technical performance here.

Is my mobile UI good enough?

Make use of online emulators such as mobiletest.me to make sure that the UI is consistently good no matter what device a user is browsing from. Different mobile devices can render your site in wildly different ways, so testing on various devices is key.

There are a few general rules to follow here, but the best tool available to you is your own eye–if something in your mobile UI looks wrong to you, then it generally is. Here are some tips to follow:

Make sure your page element can adjust to suit the device.
Keep page width consistent and don’t make users need to zoom.
However, give the option to click and zoom on products pages or online image galleries.
Make sure that your website supports both landscape and portrait modes.

Additionally, keep content paragraphs short; a few lines on desktop will fill up the screen on mobile. As a rule, we recommend limiting paragraphs to a maximum of three lines.

Short & snappy: a few lines on desktop will fill up the screen on mobile.

Is it easy to navigate my site?

Make it easy for users to navigate your site, getting from point A to point B with as few clicks as possible. Pay attention to what other popular sites are doing in order to get a sense of user expectations.

Use your logo as a clickable link to your homepage.
Keep subdomains and sister sites consistent to avoid confusion.

Is it easy to search my site?

An effective search bar on your site can be incredibly valuable for two reasons.

Firstly, it can enable users to get where they want to go, and quickly. Secondly, you can access the data from your site search bar in order to improve your site and conversions.

Internal search is not automatically suitable for all sites, and it tends to work especially well with sites whose page numbers rank in the thousands.

Often visitors to your site already know exactly what they want before they arrive. Internal search enables them to find exactly whatever this is without frustration. If you choose to implement one, keep the search bar somewhere where it can be easily found.

Critically, any internal search solution cannot slow down the speed of your site. It also needs to work on all devices and it should be easily integrated into your site’s design.

Internal search does not always need to be a text box. There are other ways to improve internal navigation. Here is an example:

This drop-down menu helps direct a user’s navigation by implementing categorical filters.

Does my site retain visitors?

Mobile visitors are typically harder to retain; keep relevant information and offers at their fingertips in order to prevent them from clicking off.

Many websites benefit from including references to third party resources on their site. For example, an eco-friendly industrial engineering firm’s prospects might benefit from having direct access to government environmental data included on the engineering firm’s website.

As always try to find a good balance, implementing A/B testing to find out if contextual links impact your exit rates or conversions in any way.

Try to find a balance that works for you. Read more in our in-depth bounce rate guide [Here].

Are my calls to action easily seen?

When a mobile user lands on your site, not only do you have a limited amount of time to capture their interest, you also have a highly limited amount of screen real estate to do so.

Your primary call to action should be easily seen and typically above the fold on mobile devices. Crucially, it should not be hidden where a mobile user won’t see it. Not all sites will benefit from having a call to action so soon, but many will: each website and target audience is different.

Keep your business goals in mind and pay attention to your customer flow. Stick with whatever works best for you once you have your analytics data dialled in and providing the insights you need.

Are my interstitial ads creating problems?

The modern mobile equivalent of pop-up ads, interstitials are rich media ads which fill the user’s screen, disrupting their browsing session until they can click out.

It can be tempting to use interstitials on your mobile site, but they can be a sure fire way to increase your bounce rates if used incorrectly.

Remember how we discussed that mobile users have much higher bounce rates earlier? Be aware that putting potential barriers between the user and the content that they’re looking for is not going to make them any more likely to stick around.

If you absolutely must use interstitials then ‘forewarned is forearmed’: make sure that dismissing them is quick and obvious for users and be aware that Google has decided to oppose their use by penalising sites that use them.

Are my forms and signups triggered at appropriate times?

In order to keep mobile bounce rates low, keep pressure and urgency low.

Allow your customer to make themselves familiar with your site, products and content before you ask them to commit through signing up or filling out a form. Doing so prematurely can be irritating and disrupt the customer journey.

If your site incorporates an e-commerce dimension it can be a good idea to let customers buy something without having to go through a lengthy sign-up process:

Allow users to purchase as a guest, offering to register their information afterwards.
Make it easier for registered customers to check out quickly. For example, think of Amazon’s ‘one click purchase’ option.
Additionally, use recognisable and intuitive platforms; at Together Digital we prioritise a clear and intuitive UI (which is why we build ours from scratch!).

Are my forms mobile ready?

Filling out forms isn’t exactly a lot of fun. However, there are certain options that can keep it relatively painless on mobile. You can read more about Google’s advice on mobile device form best practices here, but I’ll summarise a few of the more useful ones:

If your site is not compatible with HTML5, then you are likely to be in need of a new site. Assuming that it is HTML5 compatible, you can designate the appropriate type of keyboard for an input box. For example, mobile devices have different keyboards available for numerical data and email addresses.
Keep things simple: don’t repeat questions and use automation to auto-populate data for registered users, or to fetch potentially repetitive data (such as take shipping address from billing address). Make sure your forms do as much of the work as possible.
Give real-time feedback about form errors to minimise the need for resubmits. Let a user know if they’ve made an error or missed a required entry field before they hit the submit button. When you let them know about the error, highlight the box or boxes in which the error or errors exist and be explicit about what is needed to fix the errors. Give examples for more confusing fields.

Other considerations

Try to make proper use of user location data. Don’t request it immediately or without the context of why you need it. Make sure the user knows what benefit they get from sharing geodata with you.
One of the benefits of the growth of mobile devices is that it is now possible for users to essentially call you directly from their browser. Make sure to implement interactive and simple click-to-call buttons.
Make use of the growth of social media to ensure that your site is integrated. For example, many sites streamline the registration process by allowing users to log in with their social media accounts via applets.

Kara Crinion | Young Leader Winner | Women in IT

Together Digital — 2018-11-23T15:54:00+00:00

Women in IT Awards Ireland

Together Digital is very proud to announce that out of more than 500 overall nominees Kara Crinion, our Technical Director, took home Young Leader of the Year during Wednesday’s awards.

1 of 14 categories in this year's awards, the Young Leader of the Year is described as: someone who progressed rapidly in their role; demonstrating business value and driving innovation through new strategies and technology.

That is Kara Crinion in a nutshell.

Young Leader of the Year | Kara Crinion

Kara Crinion joined Together Digital as a PHP developer in 2015. She quickly moved from developer to project manager: In June 2016, she took over the Technical Lead role within the team, and by January of 2018, she was appointed Chief Technical Officer.

When leaders are sincerely enthusiastic and passionate, it is contagious. Kara has led from the front and her journey to the top of the organisation has the support and respect of all of her colleagues.

Kara constantly explores ways of improving outcomes for clients, whether that is through refining processes or the use of new technology. In this role, she has led her team to a number of key successes. One that she's especially proud of is the successful implementation of an API/decoupled CMS solution into the organisation. A completely customised innovative solution that is going to revolutionise how web development will work in the future.

Thanks to Kara and her team, we are now the first agency in Ireland to offer this specific solution to clients. This technology is groundbreaking because of its high speed and its strong security profile.

A true innovator, her inquisitive nature ensures that she never just settles for the way things have always been done.

We are intensely proud of her.

Kara Crinion says she’s been feeling “Elated” about her win.

“I'm so grateful to my team at Together Digital for nominating me, and for their continued support and encouragement which has propelled my progression over the past 3 years. I'm also thankful to the Women In IT Awards for recognising me for such a prestigious accolade.”

“The event was a fantastic showcase of talented women in the industry, and I feel honoured to be acknowledged as the Young Leader of the Year. Women play an integral role within the IT sector, and I’m excited and hopeful for a future that will include more women in leadership roles.”

We are intensely proud of her.

Women in IT Awards History

Founded with the mission to help rectify the gender imbalance in the IT sector through the promotion of female role models; the first-ever Women in IT Awards took place in London back in January of 2015.

Following on from its initial success, the initiative has since moved on to the global scene: A US version of the event first took place in New York in March, with future events planned for Silicon Valley and Asia in 2019.

This year marked the first time that these awards have ever taken place in Ireland: celebrating how Irish women are driving innovation within the industry and showcasing their achievements in order to challenge gender stereotypes.

This year's event was organised by Information Age, DiversityQ and Bonhill Group plc in association with Amazon Web Services.

Seven Nominations in 2018 for Together Digital and our clients

Together Digital — 2018-11-02T12:16:00+00:00

The Spider Awards have been Ireland’s premier digital innovation awards for over two decades. As the industry has continued to change, they have continued to recognise and celebrate the cutting edge of Irish digital talent.

This year has been our most successful year yet. We have been shortlisted in 7 separate categories.

Watch the video here:

A History of the Spiders

Originally founded in 1996 as the PostGEM Golden Spiders. Ireland’s Spider awards have been known by many different names over the years.

At the time of the Spiders’ inception 22 years ago, PostGem was Ireland’s largest internet provider. Many people today may not know the name, but it’s legacy lives on through the Spiders.

As Ireland’s web industry evolved, the Spiders have evolved alongside it:

1996-1999: PostGEM Golden Spiders
2000-2003: ESAT BT Golden spiders
2004 -2009: Eircom Golden Spiders
2010-2014: Eircom Spiders
2015-2017: Eir Spiders
2018: SpidersX

In 2004, this is what the ‘Golden Spiders’ website looked like:

Source: https://web.archive.org

In 2018, the site and branding reflects the international renown and prestige of the event:

Image credit: https://spidersxtech.com/

The Junior Spiders

In 2009 a Junior Spiders sister competition, which focused on young web creators under the age of 19, was set up.

Image Source: https://web.archive.org

Aiming to encourage innovation among young people, this competition ran from 2009 until 2017. According to the official Junior Spiders website at the time of writing the 2018 incarnation is postponed.

Spider Award Categories

There are currently 15 distinct categories in the Spiders X awards, including Best in Charity and Not-for-Profit (also known as Tech for Good).

Source: Spiders X Tech Website

The categories are presided over by a panel of 15 independent judges, consisting of experts in the fields of technology, online marketing and digital media.

Representing both an Irish and international focus, this panel includes a mixture of academics, managing directors, designers and digital marketers.

Qualifying criteria for the Awards

In order to be eligible to receive a Spider award, it is necessary to evidence both the ability to innovate within the industry and the ability to achieve measurable results.

Entries get evaluated by the judging panel and then the best candidates make a shortlist. The winner of each shortlist is then judged on criteria such as:

Technology
Adaptation & Innovation
Strategy, Growth & Scalability
Design & User Experience

The criteria for each award varies slightly, depending on the specific nuances of that category.

Not only is it necessary to demonstrate an ability to innovate: the shortlisted entries are also judged on their ability to obtain positive feedback and sustainable real-world business results.

The 2018 Awards

The 2018 Awards promises to be one of the most progressive events since the 1996 inauguration, with an evening award ceremony on November 29th in the RDS Concert Hall.

Jess Kelly, Newstalk’s Technology Correspondent and a professional who has attended the awards on a number of prior occasions, is scheduled to be hosting the evening. She follows in the footsteps of Dermot Whelan, Dave Moore (both of Today FM), Panti Bliss, Jennifer McGuire and Bernard O’Shea.

More information about these awards, their history, and the future of technology in Ireland can be found on the official website.

Who are the 2018 Judges?

Brendan Cannon, Canton Communications

Brendan graduated in Business Studies at the Dublin Institute of Technology, subsequently studying and earning a MBA from Trinity College. He has worked globally, currently finding himself at Canton Communications.

Brendan’s LinkedIn profile can be found here.

John Montayne, Senior Lecturer at IADT

John has a wealth of experience spanning more than fourteen years in programming, UX/UI and app design. He has worked collaboratively with many companies and academic leadership groups, including the IADT Governing Body.

John’s LinkedIn profile can be found here.

Aine Molloy, Co-Founder of GirlCrew

Aine is the co-Founder of GirlCrew, an innovative startup dedicated to business development, online marketing and community management for female entrepreneurs. GirlCrew has expanded to over forty countries in four continents. She has been named as a Forbes Top 100 EU Female Founder and is a TEDx speaker.

Aine’s LinkedIn profile can be found here.

Peter Brabazon, Specialisterne Ireland

Peter is an experienced business advisor with a passion for helping startup organizations where education and commercial dynamics meet. He works at Specialisterne, a groundbreaking social organization focused on the provision of training, education and consultancy to an organization where the majority of the employees have learning challenges such as autism.

Peter’s LinkedIn profile can be found here.

Bill Kearney, Vice President at IBM

Bill is the Vice President of IBM Ireland, having been VP for over three years and at IBM for over a decade in total. He is a member of the IBEC Innovation Policy Committee and Vice President of the Fingal Dublin Chamber.

Bill’s LinkedIn profile can be found here.

Claire Halligan, Head of eCommerce Europe, Elavon

Claire is an eCommerce expert, with experience in financial services, FMCG and other verticals. She has impressive expertise in website design and user experience across a range of businesses including Realex Payments and First Data

Claire’s LinkedIn profile can be found here.

Phil Cottier, CEO at CX Collection

Phil is a global advertising expert whose experience traverses the rise of online marketing as an additional inbound channel. He served as European MD for Publicis/Omnicom during which time he developed both national and global powerhouse brands. Having grown Acorn Consulting into one of the most successful marketing startups in 2010, he worked with Epsilon following their acquisition of Acorn in order to integrate the EMEA aspects of the businesses. He now runs a successful brand company.

Phil’s LinkedIn Profile can be found here.

Rob Farrell, Customer Success Trainer at Hubspot

Rob is an experienced examiner, conference speaker, educator, and most recently customer success evangelist at marketing, sales, customer service and CRM experts Hubspot.

Rob’s LinkedIn Profile can be found here.

Krishna De, Digital Transformation Strategist

Krishna is a content marketing, digital marketing and social media expert. Driving brand awareness through online visibility, online reputation management, and formulating action-backed digital marketing plans are her core areas of expertise.

Krishna’s LinkedIn Profile can be found here.

Edel Corrigan, Group Head of Content at Business and Finance Media Group

Edel has demonstrable print and digital marketing expertise across a range of different positions. She is now Group Head of Content as Business and Finance Media Group where she oversees delivery of both offline and online content marketing efforts.

Edel’s LinkedIn Profile can be found here.

Ian Bergin, Brand & Sales Ambassador for BrewDog

Ian proudly describes himself on his LinkedIn profile as a: ‘BrewDog International Beer Anarchist in Ireland’. Indeed, even the url of his LinkedIn profile (‘linkedin.com/in/brewdogian’) reinforces the point! Having co-founded Cogneto.io and operated at senior level in organizations such as CTI, BIONIC and PunkTank, he has now been the architect behind BrewDog, a leading international craft beer brewer.

Ian’s LinkedIn Profile can be found here.

Alan Devlin, CEO at eDot Invest

Alan is one of Dublin’s preeminent digital marketing figures having been at the forefront of Webfactory, the largest digital agency in Ireland, for almost fourteen years. Since then, he has engineered the creation and growth of eDot Invest, which is a dynamic and active venture capital fund.

Alan’s LinkedIn Profile can be found here.

Naoise O Conchubhair, Digital Director at Detail Design Studio

Naoise is an experienced and highly successful Digital Director with a focus on both online and graphic design. Originally developing expertise at Arekibo, he progressed via Creative Inc and his own work to Detail Design Studio, where his current areas of expertise include UX design, print and typographic design.

Naoise’s LinkedIn Profile can be found here.

Noreen D’Arcy, Owner, D'Arcy Marketing & P R

Noreen is one of the leading authorities for branding and PR within Ireland, having set up her own consultancy in 1998. Her company has been recognized on a number of occasions for its success and it has developed into a bilingual (Irish and English) marketing consultancy. As it has grown, Noreen’s team now focuses on targeted PR and communications for clients in the consumer and lifestyle industries.

Noreen’s LinkedIn Profile can be found here.

Philippe Brodeur, CEO and Founder at Overcast

Philippe is a video production and collaboration expert who has over twenty five years’ experience working in video ideation, creation, production, storage and marketing. He has worked within the BBC and TV3, where he founded the TV3.ie website. He now specializes in the design and implementation of world-class video platforms for champion brands including UEFA and the Rugby World Cup.

Philippe’s LinkedIn Profile can be found here.

Together Digital's association with the Spiders

Together Digital has long since had a close relationship with the Spider Awards. We are lucky enough to have won a number of awards for ourselves and for our clients, including the prestigious Large Agency of the Year award in 2014.

From our perspective, much more important is the results we have managed to secure for our clients. In 2017 the Pieta House ‘Darkness Into Light’ campaign won a very prestigious mobile commerce award.

In 2018, we are delighted to announce that our clients have been shortlisted in six out of the thirteen non-agency categories, an unprecedented achievement in the history of the awards.

From not for profit organizations to sports clubs, financial services institutions and tech startups, we are delighted that we have been able to support our clients’ ongoing success.

How to Come Up With Content Marketing Ideas

Together Digital — 2018-09-18T12:07:00+01:00

Why is Content Creation Important?

Content marketing is an important aspect of your B2B digital marketing strategy because it performs various key functions. Producing relevant content establishes your B2B company as a thought leader, and shows prospective clients that you are the experts in your area. Content also plays a crucial role in your SEO (search engine optimisation) strategy. Targeting relevant keywords in your content can help drive traffic to your site.

With many conflicting demands on their plates, B2B companies often grapple with finding the time required to consistently create content. If you do find time to sit down to work on some content for your site, it can be difficult to come up with imaginative ideas on the spot, especially when you’re already under pressure.

The best approach is to block out some time to come up with content ideas. That way, you can create a list to refer to for your future content. When it comes to creating the content, you could even set aside another block of time to create as many content pieces from your ideas list as you can. If you are able to do so, you’ll have developed a bank of content to populate your content calendar, ensuring you have enough content to post regularly for the upcoming period.

We’ve got some ploys that you can use to come up content marketing ideas when the well of inspiration has run dry.

Create Customer-Centric Content

Your content should be valuable. There’s no need to repurpose material that someone else has already created. So when you’re thinking of content ideas, think about your ideal customer.

What would they like to know more about?
What would they need help with?

Maybe you know your clients really well, and you can instantly think of topics that would appeal to them. If you’re struggling, think about your interactions with your customers:

What’s a question that comes up again and again with client?
What information could you provide to deepen their understanding?

Use Keyword Research as Inspiration

Have you completed keyword research as part of your B2B digital marketing strategy? Keywords are an important aspect of your content creation and you’ll want to factor in their inclusion in your finished content. Even before you begin writing the content, you can use your keyword research as topic inspiration.

The keyword research will likely give you a sense of the most searched topics relevant to your business. Of particular interest are search terms that take the form of a question. You could structure your content around answering these questions. This should help your SEO and is also providing a valuable answer to these questions for your readers. You can also use Google’s Keyword Planner to generate new keywords ideas for even more content ideas.

Need Ideas? Google It

Your keyword research will give you some concrete stats on what search terms are most popular in search engines like Google and Bing. A somewhat less scientific, but still useful, approach is to type the beginning of questions into Google and see what phrases Google suggests as search terms.

Google will suggest endings to your questions based on what people are likely to search, so this can provide some great insight into potential content ideas which are based on what people really want to know. To do this:

Clear your cache
Open an incognito window (this ensures that the Google suggestions are skewed by your past Google searches)
Type the beginning of the phrase into the browser bar
Press ‘Enter’ to open up a page of search results
On the search results page, click into the search bar and your suggested search terms will show here.

Another handy tool is Answer the Public. You can enter keywords to be instantly provided with content ideas.

Differentiate Your Customers

Think about your customers - are there different groups you could focus on? Perhaps you serve 3 or 4 different sectors.

What makes the sectors you serve different from one another?
What makes them the same?
What unique questions would one sector have that wouldn’t be relevant to the others?

If you can split out different categories of customer you serve, thinking about the unique challenges for each customer type can allow content ideas to spring up naturally.

If In Doubt, Ask

You are already thinking about what your customers would like to know so that you can fill in the gaps for them. It might seem crazy, but sometimes if you want to know something, you should just ask!

If you communicate with your audience via social media, this is a casual forum where you can put the question straight to your audience: ‘What would you like to know about?’ This shows that you are interested in their needs and that you will follow through on this by providing the information they want. Just make sure that you don’t do this too frequently. Part of knowing your audience, is understanding their needs without needing to ask them all the time.

Improve on Past Content Creation

If you’re having trouble getting the creative juices flowing, take a look at content you created in the past. Can you expand on this in any way? Perhaps you did a blog post on a particular topic, and you mentioned a related topic in it. It would be nice to address the related topic in a standalone blog post of its own - you can even link the two blogs together, making it even more useful for readers. This has the happy side benefit of creating internal links on your website as well.

Maybe some content your created previously has become outdated due to changes in your industry. Could you produce an updated version for this year? This is good in that it provides new content for your site, but also it ensures that the content your produced previously continues to be valuable.

Check Out the Competition

As part of your research, you should take a look at what similar companies are doing, and what they’re producing in the way of content. This certainly isn’t where you should get your content ideas. It’s more about submerging yourself in the industry and thinking about the types of questions that can be answered by content, rather than looking for help with which specific questions to address.

What you might find is that when looking at competitors, you notice a topic that no-one has really thought to cover yet. If anything jumps out at you as a key topic that your competitors seem to be glossing over, this could be an indication that there’s an opportunity for you to plug that gap.

Set Aside Time to Brainstorm Content Ideas

Sometimes, a really amazing ideas present itself to you. It’s a magical thing when inspiration strikes. Sadly, this doesn’t tend to happen when you’re busy with a million other responsibilities. If you wait for inspiration to strike, you’ll be waiting.

Take half an hour out of your other activities and try to come up with a list of content ideas. If you’re drawing a blank, try some of these tactics:

Step away from the laptop - grab a whiteboard and try ‘stream of consciousness’ style ideas
Draw a spider diagram of topics that are relevant to your industry
Race yourself. Take some lined paper and give yourself only 10 mins to come up with as many content ideas as possible.

With this type of brainstorming approach, don’t worry about the quality of your ideas for now. This is all about getting ideas down on a page - you can edit and refine them later.

Keep Your Ear to the Social Media Ground

You likely follow similar companies and relevant industry-related social media accounts. Have you seen anything recently on LinkedIn that could spark a content idea? Or, you could look up related hashtags on Twitter to see what conversations people are having around your topics of interest.

By staying in touch with industry developments and conversations, you’re much better placed to generate useful content ideas.

Create a Folder for Content Ideas

Open up a folder for adding in future content ideas. This means if you ever do get struck by inspiration, you have a safe place to keep your idea until you can implement it.

You might also find that once you start thinking about producing content in this way, the creative cogs will start turning in the background all by themselves - and those Eureka moments may happen more frequently all on their own!

B2B Buyer Personas: 5 Tips for success

Together Digital — 2018-09-10T09:35:00+01:00

When B2B companies envision their target audience, it's natural for them to think first of the companies and industries they want to do business with. That’s a great way to start the process of defining your audience, but to add more depth to your understanding of your customers, you need to build audience personas.

What is a B2B Buyer Persona?

A persona is a fictitious character who represents an archetype of who you understand your customers to be. You assign attributes to the persona and create an identity that can inform decisions in your business strategy. If you are devising personas for your B2B company, there are some key differences to how you would approach this compared with B2C organisations. This is because the ‘buying’ process for B2B is very different from how B2C buying decisions are made.

One important similarity between B2B and B2C personas is that they must be based on people. This is particularly helpful for B2B companies, as personas help you drill down past the organisation level of your business customers to the individuals who make up that business. Who is the ideal decision-maker you are hoping will get to know your product or service? Who else is involved in the buying process in your target company? This should be Step One in your persona building exercise.

Buyer personas for B2B companies may have the same basic format as those for B2C, but the addition of some invaluable details can really narrow your targeting.

Follow these tips to create your B2B personas:

1. Build More Than 1 Persona

B2B purchase decisions rarely are made by a single person inside a business. You might need to reach multiple people in the company and address a variety of concerns and challenges during your pitch and communication process.

Decisions will often be made by a group of professionals, each of whom will think about your offering from the perspective of their own role in the organization, and in light of their skills and expertise. It's important to build a persona for each type of ‘customer’ represented in the buying process, in order to deliver tailored and targeted content throughout their different phases of decision-making.

2. Understanding the Person Behind the Persona

Make a list of traits that could impact the decision-making process of someone in your industry. At this stage, only include those traits which may affect the buying process. Some examples might be:

What is their role in the company?
How many years of experience do they have?
What is their educational background?
What type of content do they consume?
When do they consume content?
What social platforms do they use?

3. Demographics for Your Buyer Persona

Once you’ve considered the details of an individual’s work life (role, years of experience, etc) that would impact the decision-making process, it’s time to consider demographics. This can help you develop a more tangible sense of your customer. For B2C companies, demographics are a key aspect of devising marketing strategies. Factors like ‘age’ and ‘gender’ of customers would be considered extremely relevant and would be analysed in depth.

Perhaps demographic factors like age and gender are less impactful on the decision-making process for B2B products and services. However, when building a picture of a persona it can be helpful to flesh out their identity by assigning certain demographic features. You might consider:

Their age
Their gender
Their family status
Where they live
What they do in their free time

Once you’ve assigned demographic traits to your personas, you can give the personas names and faces to truly personify them! Ultimately, your personas are there to help you visualise your ideal clients so that you can tailor your marketing activity accordingly. Giving them names and faces makes it a lot easier to think of them as if they are real people.

4. What Motivates Your Buyer Persona?

B2B purchases are not driven by impulse, and price is not always the deciding factor. Your target, the ideal client, is usually looking for a solution to ease a business pain. They may even be additionally motivated by the desire to gain visibility and recognition within their organisation.

Business pains come in all different shapes and sizes. Getting to know what type of problem your company is able to solve for your clients is crucial. If you understand what motivates your personas to choose your solution, you will be able to tailor content and campaigns to help them down the buying funnel.

5. Challenges for Your Buyer Persona

So your product or service solves a business pain for your client, hopefully making things better and easier for them. They’ll likely be delighted with the improvement, but it’s good to acknowledge that sometimes introducing new solutions impacts on existing processes within the company.

This can present a challenge for your buyer during the purchase decision. Your decision-maker may encounter various internal queries and objections during the process. They can be up against internal bureaucracy, industry regulations or even out-of-date misconceptions or long-used practices that your product challenges. Anticipating these difficulties will help you to address them throughout your communications and marketing strategy.

Using Your Buyer Personas

Building buyer personas is a great way to build a strong relationship with your target audience. Personas enable you to produce catered content and offer tailored educational pieces that assist your ideal clients through the decision-making process. They can even inform your future business strategy or new products or services that may serve your target audience.

When you have created a list of named personas, you can add these details in a column to your content calendar. This ensures that when you’re creating a particular piece of content, you are keeping the relevant persona in mind at all times.

If you need help designing buyer personas for your business, contact our strategy team to see how we can help.

Understanding Google Ad Grants for Irish Charities

Together Digital — 2018-08-23T11:50:00+01:00

Google Ad Grants is a scheme run by Google that can be of great benefit to charities and nonprofits who would like to run Google Ads.

What are Google Ads?

If you’re trying to drive traffic to your website, there are lots of steps you can take to help your site show up in Google’s search results. Besides the search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques available to improve the organic ranking of your site in Google, it’s advantageous to use Google Ads, which is an example of pay-per-click marketing. By buying paid ad space on Google Search, your website will then show up above the organic, unpaid search results. We’ve discussed some of the key elements of successful Google ads previously.

What are Google Ad Grants?

Google Ad Grants help nonprofits reach a wider audience with their message. Part of the Google for Nonprofits program, Ad Grants offers free advertising to eligible registered charities and nonprofits. It amounts to up to $10,000 available in free Google ad clicks per month for your organisation. With this free boost from Google advertising, you can raise awareness of your organisation and hopefully increase donations for your cause.

Why should charities and nonprofits use Google Ads?

If you are a charity or nonprofit, this is a fantastic opportunity to avail of. The potential for promoting your cause is far-reaching, and Google ads could have a powerful impact on your ability to reach your digital marketing objectives.

For the best chance at success, craft compelling ads and choose the right keywords to bid on. Make use of ad extensions to increase the relevance of the ads to those who view them. These extensions include phone numbers, sitelinks and callouts which add to the richness of your ads with extra information about your organisation. It’s also crucial that once users click through to your website, the landing page they arrive on has a frictionless interface to facilitate people finding out more about your organisation and indeed making donations with ease.

As with regular Google Search ads, you can gain insights into the performance of your ads via both Google Ads and Google Analytics, it’s advisable to link your Analytics to your Google Ad Grant. It’s possible to track what visitors do on your site having clicked on an ad; that way you can see which are the best performing keywords

The capability for detailed tracking and reporting on the success of Google Search ads enables you to continually monitor the impact of the ads. It’s so important that future marketing decisions are informed by actual evidence from past activity, and so reporting on your metrics is key in making sure that you are getting the most out of your Google Ad Grants. By tweaking and optimising your ads based on these reports, you can continue to hone your ads for the best results.

Anything else I should know?

Google Ad Grants offers a fantastic $10,000 in free Google ads. However this is only available for Google Search and not Google Display or YouTube Video ads.

Previously, Google Ad Grants had also set a cap on the cost-per-click (CPC) value of the keywords targeted in the ads, with a max of $2. This decision impacted the ads by not having them show up for higher value keywords. As of 1st January 2018, this CPC cap has been removed and a number of new rules have been introduced. Among other things, the rules require that:

Your organization operate ‘exclusively for charitable purposes’.
Geo-targeting must be used to ensure that your ads appear in the right locations.
Certain new keywords are now forbidden from use in your ads - this crackdown impacts use of single word keywords, with some exceptions, unless they are your own branded keywords. You also must avoid generic keywords which Google have explained with examples like ‘today’s news’ and ‘things to do’.

Additionally, to maintain your eligibility for Ad Grants, you must achieve a 5% CTR (click-through rate) on your ads each month.

Do I qualify for Google Ad Grants?

To qualify for Google Ad Grants, you need to meet the following criteria:

Be registered with Google for Nonprofits
Be a registered charity
Agree to Google’s requirements regarding non-discrimination and use of donations

You also need to ensure that your website meets certain criteria. For example, you must:

Own the website to which the ad leads. The only exceptions to this are some third-party donation websites if approved by Google.
Make your mission very clear and unambiguous on your website.
Have a current, updated website with a significant amount of content.
Maintain a quality standard for your website with no broken links.

Certain types of organisations do not qualify, such as governmental organisations, hospitals, and academic or educational institutions, among others.

If you do meet the criteria and qualify for Google Ad Grants, you will also need to follow Google Ads and Ad Grants policies to maintain your eligibility status and to continue to avail of the program.

How can I get set up with Google Ad Grants?

If your organisation is non-profit and you’d like to apply for a Google Ad Grant, get in touch with our team who can advise on all the requirements and get you ready to rock.

Here at Together Digital, we offer a range of digital marketing services. Feel free to contact us with any questions you may have.

Find Your B2B Brand Voice

Together Digital — 2018-08-16T15:11:00+01:00

When we think of iconic brands, many of them are in the B2C space; Coca Cola, Nike, L’Oreal. And yet strong branding is critical for B2B companies to communicate clearly your identity and what your approach to business is.

Importance of Brand Identity for B2B

Branding for B2B companies tells your customers a great deal about your organisation:

Who you are
What your ethos and values are
What your personality is
What you hope to contribute
Where you sit amongst competitors.

If you clearly define your brand internally, you create a consistent identity for your company externally. Any marketing messages can then convey this identity to the world. A distinct brand identity also simplifies processes for your staff, as everyone is in alignment on how to present the company.

What Do We Mean By Brand Voice?

Sometimes conversations around ‘branding’ reduce it to visual elements like the company logo and typeface and while these are absolutely key components, branding also goes beyond this. It’s all to do with how you present your company to the world, and many ingredients are involved:

Image: what type of experience do people associate with your brand?
Positioning: where does your company sit in the market?
Differentiators: what sets you apart from similar companies?
Colour: what palette is used and is this consistent?
Personality: what is the personality of your brand?

Your brand voice is another fundamental part of branding - it’s as significant as visual elements like your logo and brand colour palette in creating your identity. With so many new ways to communicate with your customers 24/7, brand voice is arguably more important than ever.

A well-defined brand voice ensures that your messaging works twice as hard for you, with all aspects of your communications reinforcing important ideas about who you are as a company. It’s a voice that is recognisable as belonging to your organisation, and which fits with your company’s personality.

As with visual branding, consistency is key in building brand trust through your brand voice. By finding and defining your brand voice, you can ensure consistency in your communications, allowing your brand voice to become familiar to customers.

How to Find Your B2B Brand Voice

When finding your brand voice there are various questions you can ask yourself:

Do you currently have a brand voice for your business, or are you inconsistent in your approach?
If you do have a B2B brand voice, how would you define it at the moment?
Is your current brand voice accurately representing what you are about as a company?

Think about the ethos of your company and how the tone and writing style of your communications could emphasise these principles. Ask yourself:

Who is the intended audience of your communications?
How do your customers speak?
How would you best communicate with your customer personas?

B2B companies have the edge over B2C when it comes to knowing their customers. Your customer personas are likely more specific, so settling on an appropriate brand voice can often be more straightforward.

Once you’ve contemplated your current brand voice and how your customers communicate, the next step is to assign your company a personality.

Showing Personality Through Brand Voice

Think about your company as if it were a person; what personality would it have? If you are bringing something innovative to your industry, your brand voice could be young, exciting and animated. If you are a long-established company and your customers value your reliability, your brand voice could be stable and traditional.

What makes your company valuable to its customers? Whatever the answer to this question is, that characteristic can be highlighted by your brand voice. When drilling down into your company personality, consider the following questions:

What is the character of our company?
What matters to us as a company?
What three words most succinctly describe our company?
Which attributes do we currently embody and which do we aspire to have?

It’s helpful to create a bank of words that express your brand personality, as this then feeds your brand voice. Your word bank could include words like ‘formal’ or ‘relaxed’, ‘cutting-edge’ or ‘historic’, ‘quirky’ or ‘traditional’.

Once you’ve developed and agreed on a bank of descriptor words, this is a useful reference resource to maintain consistency in your communications going forward.

The Difference Between Voice and Tone

We’ve been talking a lot about ‘brand voice’, and this is closely related to ‘tone’. The difference between ‘voice’ and ‘tone’ is that your brand voice is a constant. Once you have defined it, your brand voice should be used consistently across communications so that customers are familiar with it and can trust that this will remain steady.

Tone, on the other hand, can vary across platforms and circumstances. How you handle different messages will depend on the situation, and so your tone can fluctuate as necessary. However, tone is always underpinned by your unchanging brand voice.

Tone is what allows the flexibility for you to communicate in the most appropriate way given the circumstance. One application of this is that you can tailor your tone to the platform your message is going out on. To give an example from social media, LinkedIn is typically more formal and professional than other social platforms, so your tone can reflect this; in contrast, Twitter is more conversational.

Achieving Balance with Your Brand Voice

Discovering your brand voice makes communicating with your customers a smoother experience for you, but more importantly it gives an impression of an organisation that can be trusted to be consistent.

In the B2B space, you’re always going to want to maintain a certain level of professionalism, but no matter the industry remember that you are fundamentally communicating with people, not businesses, at the end of the day. Depending on your company and industry, this can sometimes leave wiggle room for levity and humour in your communications when appropriate.

Some things should apply to every brand voice - you need to be authentic and unique. Unique in that your voice should align with what makes your business stand out, what you bring to the table that no-one else does. And of course, it’s essential to be authentic. The best way to develop your true brand voice and personality is to let what makes you different naturally shine through.

How to Create Your B2B Content Calendar

Together Digital — 2018-08-02T12:42:00+01:00

What is a Content Calendar?

Businesses these days are realising the importance of incorporating content marketing into their B2B strategy and are producing more and more content. Whether you’re already producing a lot of content, or it’s something you want to tentatively dip a toe in, a content calendar helps you structure your content creation and plan exactly what you’re going to do.

Seeing all your content at a glance is particularly helpful if you have multiple people involved in the content creation process. A centralised content calendar means anyone can check in on the status of upcoming pieces, and it’s even helpful for team members not involved in producing content to have sight of what’s coming up.

Why Use a Content Calendar?

A content calendar has a number of positive benefits for your B2B digital marketing strategy. Once you get in the habit of using one, you’ll wonder how you got by before! We’ve got 6 reasons why using a content calendar is a great idea for your business.

1: Know Where You Are

On a practical level, it’s a big relief to have a content calendar to refer to. Knowing what you’re going to post, and when, takes the stress out of your content marketing strategy.

2: Improve Content Quality

Do you need to do extra research for this content piece, or will another team member need to feed in with some expertise on the topic? Planning content in this way means you can gather all the resources you need ahead of time.

3: Reinforce Your B2B Marketing Strategy

If you’re currently coming up with content ideas on the fly, you might not be hitting your objective of what the content would ideally achieve. A content calendar gives you the confidence that your content is feeding directly into the rest of your business strategy.

4: Brainstorm Content Ideas as a Team

If everyone can see the planned content, it’s easy for other team members to jump in with suggestions and ideas of their own, making sure all areas of the business are represented.

5: Be Prepared for Important Dates

Maybe there’s a particular event coming up that your business could link to nicely with some content? You can prepare content to fit in with industry events and important dates, rather than scrambling to produce something timely when the mood strikes.

6: No More Scary Deadlines

By working to a content calendar, you can ensure that you always have a bank of content at the ready. You’ll be a lot less stressed if content deadlines don’t creep up out of nowhere and surprise you.

How to Make Your B2B Content Calendar

Hopefully you’re seeing the many benefits of creating a content calendar. So where do you begin?

There are endless options available for housing your content calendar and some people like to use an actual calendar application. The main thing is that a content calendar should simplify your processes, not add a new layer of complication.

The humble spreadsheet may seem like a lo-fi option, but it can be very effective as a content calendar and it’s a format everyone is already familiar with. Our recommended headings for your spreadsheet layout are:

Type of content: is this a blog post, case study, news bulletin…?
Date to post: when does this content need to go out?
Title of the piece: ideally this will be optimised for SEO.
Channel: where will this content appear?
Author: who will be writing this content?
Written: has the text been finished?
Approved: is this approved to publish?
Published: has the piece been published yet?

How Much Content to Produce?

Now that you have the infrastructure, your content calendar will be looking good. You just have to populate it - easy, right?!

Think about how often you want to put new content out. You’ll need to be realistic about the resources available to you and what you can manage. It’s tempting to go in all guns blazing and plan 3 blogs every week for the coming quarter, but is it more realistic to plan one a week or one a fortnight? This will depend on your business structure and the other priorities at play. The beauty of a content calendar is that you now know how much content you’re committing to produce.

Populating Your Content Calendar

When it comes to choosing the content itself, a great place to start is thinking about upcoming dates and what content would be appropriate to share. Maybe the end of a calendar year calls for a round up of changes in your industry in the year gone by; other key dates could be when industry-specific events are taking place, or when you’re launching a new product or service. Once you’ve blocked out the content that you’ll definitely want to do for specific dates, you can look at what’s remaining.

It can seem easy to fill in content ideas themed around special dates or events. When you come to generating ideas for the remaining blank days, you might find your ideas run a little dry. Your content should always stem from your overarching digital marketing strategy, so if you are ever struggling with topic ideas, think back to your customers and what information would be valuable to them.

It’s also great to draw on different areas of expertise in the business to address a broad variety of topics, so the author of each content piece can vary. With a content calendar that your whole team can access, it can even be used to assign topics to different team members.

Social Media Content Calendar

You content calendar can also include the social media posts associated with sharing your content. With lots of options to schedule social media posts in advance, you can even have a bank of posts ready to go.

It’s great to be prepared and that’s what a content calendar is all about; just remember that it also pays to be agile and responsive. If something crops up that wasn’t in the original content calendar, there’s no law to say that you can’t create some content around it.

Putting a shape on your content marketing allows you to see it in the big picture of your digital marketing strategy. If you need advice on your digital marketing strategy, contact our team to discuss how we can help.

Insights from Ignite 2018: B2B Marketing Conference

Together Digital — 2018-07-26T16:51:00+01:00

We were excited to attend Ignite 2018 recently, a massive B2B marketing conference in London. With so many speakers presenting that day, it was a great opportunity to add more fuel to our ideas about B2B marketing strategy.

Challenging Ideas about B2B Marketing

We think a lot about what makes B2B marketing distinct from B2C. Paul Cash from Rooster Punk suggested that B2B needs to take the lead from B2C marketing and make their customers feel something. As this isn’t an approach B2B marketers always take, Paul stressed that there’s lots of scope out there to take advantage of this.

Heidi Taylor spoke to us about ‘The Three Fallacies of B2B Marketing’. One of the fallacies she presented was that marketing has changed drastically in recent years. Heidi argued that although the technology available to us has changed, the fundamental principles of marketing have not. This is helpful to bear in mind if you are getting bogged down in the seemingly overwhelming options available to you to market your business.

On the data side, John Warner from Click Consult explained how to add automation to your monthly analytics reports, and Adam Greener and Jon Clarke then reminded us to ‘humanise the data’, as the only value we can take from predictive data comes from human insights.

Who are the Influencers in B2B Marketing?

Tim Williams from Onalytica talked about how to incorporate influencer marketing into a B2B strategy. Often when we think of ‘influencers’, we think of young social media stars promoting B2C brands on Instagram. Tim highlighted the fact that 92% of us trust people over brands, so it’s easy to see why influencer marketing is an effective tool when done right.

Tim reframed the concept of ‘influencers’ for the B2B world, suggesting that companies should engage with experts in their area to develop a relationship with an equal value proposition for both parties. Influencers in the B2B space could fall into the categories ‘Industry Expert’, ‘Academic’, ‘Business Leader’ or ‘Decision Maker’, to name a few.

Tim noted that the 3 R’s of influencer marketing are the key ideas that lead to its success implementation; relevance, resonance and reach.

Relevance: is the influencer in alignment with your brand and message?
Resonance: does the influencer’s audience engage with their content?
Reach: how large is the influencer’s following?

The Psychology of B2B Marketing

One of the most impactful talks of the day came from keynote speaker Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy. He too raised the question of what differentiates B2C and B2B Marketing. His conclusion was that while they are different, buying decisions made regarding B2B products or services only ‘appear to be rational’. B2B buyers are still human, so Rory suggested that these decisions are actually made on instinct and we then reverse-engineer a rational justification for them - an interesting suggestion!

Rory irreverently described marketing as ‘the science of knowing what economists are wrong about’. He suggested that human behaviour doesn’t occur in a reproducible way like the laws of physics. Rather, it’s more complex, varying depending on the context and therefore much more difficult to predict.

By delving into the psychology behind our decisions, Rory uncovered a fascinating new way of looking at buyer decisions, which can then inform marketing strategy. Here are some of the incredible examples he shared:

Pitch your product right: A product needs to be priced so that it’s either ‘a bargain or a treat’. There are people who shop in both high-end fashion stores and ultra-cheap bargain shops; but they get a different feeling of excitement from each because of how the experience is presented to them.
Think about how a service feels: Uber doesn’t feel like a transaction because money doesn’t change hands. Uber certainly didn’t invent the concept of a ‘taxi’, but the psychology around the experience of getting a taxi has been turned upside-down, and that is the innovation.
Turn a negative into a positive: When getting off a plane, having to get a bus to the airport is often seen as a nuisance... Until it’s framed as a way to bypass a long walk in the airport and arrive straight at passport control. You can market the same experience in a positive way, simply by pointing out a different attribute.
Position your offering in the right bracket: Individual home-use coffee pods could be considered very expensive when compared with a lower-cost jar of coffee. However, the customer’s frame of reference for this item is more likely an expensive takeaway coffee, and so the pod begins to look like the cheap option!

As a way of understanding what motivates us as buyers, Rory presented David Rock’s SCARF model:

Status
Certainty
Autonomy
Relatedness
Fairness

One big difference that Rory raised between B2C and B2B Marketing is the motivation. He suggested that B2C buyers are hoping to avoid the regret associated with buying the ‘wrong’ thing. In contrast, B2B buyers are hoping to avoid the blame associated with making a poor decision.

Having taken us on a journey through the human psyche and its irrational ways, Rory appealed for B2B marketers to have courage to test those ideas that don’t make sense. ‘A good marketer has a fear of the obvious,’ he said, inviting us to take creative risks in the knowledge that those ideas which don’t make conventional sense can be incredibly successful.

Content Marketing for B2B

Nick Mason of Turtl advised us how to ‘fight against disposable content’ and had some great tips for improving the quality of your content.

With teams under pressure to produce, disposable content is ‘churned out’, without regard for its value or longevity. Nick called for a focus on quality content over quantity, noting that thoughtfully written, well-produced content is truly valued by its readers. He identified the following main issues with content:

Uninspiring design, often in flat PDFs that require readers to ‘pinch’ the screen to zoom in and read.
Lack of measurement or analytics.
Thinking that ‘if you write it, they will read it’; this is not true.
The cost and complexity associated with producing content.

Nick offered these solutions for tackling disposable content:

Design for humans: Consider the layout and production value of your content. The quality of the presentation of ideas has a real impact on how credible, trustworthy and interesting content is perceived to be.
Find out what content people want, and make that: Nick offered the example of Netflix, who have commissioned shows based on the past behaviour of viewers. This is key, as your content should serve the needs of your customers.
Streamline content processes: Focus on higher quality content and more efficient content creation.

Companies may be producing more and more content today but, as readers, we struggle to consume this quantity. Nick’s suggestion to improve the quality of content has these happy benefits:

Premium content is a joy to read; and people come back for more.
Your readers will be more engaged.
You enjoy a better ROI for your content creation.
You can derive long-lasting value from your content.

Julie Wisdom of Alias discussed drawing on account-based marketing to inform content marketing strategy. Applying the principles of ABM (account-based marketing) to CM (content marketing) results in ABX - Account-based Experience.

The focus should be to put the client at the centre of everything and to address their needs and interests at every stage of the buying journey. Julie’s key points were:

Insight: think carefully about how your customers make decisions.
Perspective: get your different teams together to consider the customer experience.
Conversations: offer your customers real value in your communications. People want to hear from you, but only if you have something fresh to contribute.

Also in the content space was a talk by Jo Duncan from Lean Content. Jo had us put away our phones and laptops to create a really interactive workshop atmosphere, and she directed us to answer questions relating to content marketing strategy with the person sat next to us.

Fundamental questions like:

What is your message?
Who is your audience?
What is your channel?

Jo’s ‘lean’ approach to content marketing recommended 80% ‘thinking’ versus 20% ‘doing’. By spending more time strategising and answering the types of questions we discussed in pairs, Jo says we can create better, more effective content.

Takeaways for Your B2B Marketing Strategy

Overall it was a very useful day at Ignite 2018. It was helpful to think about many ways in which we need to approach B2B marketing differently to B2C, but also to stay open-minded about the places where there can be overlap.

The common message regarding content marketing from both Nick Mason and Jo Duncan’s talks was that focusing on the quality of content will help you see the biggest return on your investment.

Rory Sutherland’s keynote was an education in the impact of human psychology on how effective our B2B marketing will be, and a stirring call for more creativity and fearlessness.

If you’d like help with your B2B marketing strategy, get in touch with our team.

What’s the best CMS to use?

Together Digital — 2018-06-01T09:51:00+01:00

What is a CMS?

A CMS, or Content Management System, is a software that serves as an interface for storing data about a website and publishing the pages to the web. A content management system enables the relevant people on your team to collaboratively make updates to the content on your website, in an easy-to-use interface without any knowledge of coding.

How does a Traditional CMS work?

A traditional CMS consists of two main elements:

a content management application (CMA)
a content delivery application (CDA)

The content management application (CMA) is the interface that enables users to easily add, edit or delete content on the website without assistance from a web developer. A WYSIWYG format (What You See Is What You Get) makes it straightforward for users to make their changes without technical expertise.

The content delivery application (CDA) works in the back-end, compiling any content changes and publishing them to the site for visitors to see.

In this way, selected people in different parts of the business are able to use the content management system to make updates to the website as necessary, which is very helpful for any organisation which is regularly adding or changing content.

The New Solution: What is a Headless CMS?

In the last few years, a new solution has come on the scene, known as Headless CMS. Lots of companies are making the move to this new type of content management system, for example Smashing Magazine. As far as the user is concerned, it looks like other content management systems you may have used in the past to update content on your website.

The key difference between a headless CMS and a traditional CMS is that a headless CMS is only concerned with storing the data. Users can make content edits as before and the headless CMS will store all of these, but it is not responsible for displaying or outputting the pages.

The ‘headless’ part of the name refers to the fact that the CMS is not interested in the ‘head’ or the front end of the website and how this is displayed. When people refer to this as a ‘decoupled CMS’, it’s because the two elements of the CMS (front end and back end) have been separated.

Decoupled CMS: How does it work?

With a headless or decoupled CMS, it does not contain both a content management application and a content delivery application like a traditional CMS. Instead the headless CMS works alongside a Static Site Generator. The Static Site Generator downloads the content and outputs the pages to be visible on the site; this is the ‘head’ part referred to in the ‘headless CMS’.

In this way, a traditional CMS is replaced by two separate pieces of software that are specialised in their purposes. As a result, there are various advantages to using a headless CMS.

Headless CMS Advantage 1: Speed

More than ever, keeping your site speed high is crucial. A page from a Static Site Generator loads faster than one loaded from a traditional CMS. This is because the pages are stored as physical files on a server, rather than a database request being created every time a user visits a page. The outcome is a much improved site speed.

Besides the obvious improvement in user experience that comes with increased site speed, this is also an SEO (search engine optimisation) concern, as site speed is a critical ranking factor for Google. Even with high quality, pixel-dense imagery, a headless CMS provides faster download speeds than a traditional CMS.

Headless CMS Advantage 2: Safety

A traditional CMS is very safe. When we build sites on a traditional CMS, we keep backups of the whole site, ensuring that your website is safe and reliable. The new headless CMS solution is even more secure, because the front end and the back end are handled separately and held in different places, and we still have backups of the content as with a traditional CMS.

Our headless CMS solution also has two factor authentication. Anyone who makes updates to the website will need to know the CMS password and have access to the relevant email inbox or mobile phone.

Headless CMS Advantage 3: Uptime

Any business needs to feel confident that its website is reliable and will experience the absolute minimum downtime. A site set up with a traditional CMS will have several software packages running on it: PHP, MySQL, Apache and so on. These software packages will need constant upgrading and patching to keep them in tip top shape.

With a headless CMS and Static Site Generator, your risk of downtime decreases. This is because a Static Site doesn’t need any of these software packages to run. With your site less reliant on these various software packages, you reduce your risk that you’ll run into issues with one or more of them.

Another cause of potential downtime is high peaks of traffic that your site is unprepared for. Because the front end and back end are separate with a headless CMS, the website does not require powerful hosting. It does not matter how many people try to access your site, it cannot cause the server to crash.

Headless CMS Advantage 4: Portability

If for any reason your want to move your site to a new CMS in the future, this is much easier to accomplish with a decoupled CMS. As the front end and back end are separated with a headless CMS, your content can be easily migrated to a new CMS. All that’s required is a script and some small adjustments to the Static Site Generator.

This means you’re flexible. You can respond to the changing tech environment if you choose. Say in 5 years’ time, a new CMS software becomes available, with great features that you want to avail of. If your site is on a traditional CMS, you would need to recreate the whole website to migrate to that new solution.

With a headless CMS, your content is not stored in a database, making it easy to transition to a new CMS down the line.

Headless CMS Advantage 5: Perfect for Websites and Web Apps

A headless CMS is the perfect solution for a business that requires both a website and a web application. Managing data for each of these properties is very straightforward if they both run on a headless CMS.

A user can make change to data on the website and see these changes reflected on the app as well. This reduces the labour involved in making updates, simplifying the process for your staff, and also ensures consistency across the platforms.

Have Questions about Headless CMS?

There are lots of benefits to transitioning to this new technology. Get in touch with our team to discuss building a website on a headless CMS.

Inspiring Stories from Darkness Into Light 2018

Together Digital — 2018-05-22T11:49:00+01:00

One of the highlights of 2017 for us was getting to work on Darkness Into Light with Pieta House. That’s why we were thrilled to work with Pieta House again on the 2018 campaign.

Darkness Into Light is a truly unique experience, as people come together in locations around the globe to raise money and awareness in hopes of creating a world without self harm and suicide. Pieta House is there for people in their times of greatest need, and their flagship event Darkness Into Light is a critical part of their annual fundraising.

Last year, we revolutionised the digital platform for Darkness Into Light to increase fundraiser participation and maximise online donations. We were delighted to win an eir Spider for Best mCommerce Campaign as a result. For Darkness Into Light 2018, we updated the designs for the website to create a fresh appearance for this year’s event. We also linked the website to an online merchandise store and added a social media engagement wall to make the site even more interactive.

The CEO of Pieta House, Brian Higgins, has a special 'thank you' message for anyone who was involved in Darkness Into Light 2018:

Darkness Into Light is an incredibly moving experience for all involved. TV3 are presenting a show that captures the essence of this event, and which tells the poignant stories of what inspires people to get involved. Tune in to TV3 on Wednesday 23rd May at 9pm for a taste of this awe-inspiring event.

ifac and Big Week on the Farm

Together Digital — 2018-04-12T12:45:00+01:00

The big news in Ireland this week is Big Week on the Farm, RTÉ’s award-winning show about all the happenings of a Waterford farm. ifac are sponsors of Big Week on the Farm 2018, and the show itself centres on dairy farmer Gillian O’Sullivan, a client of ifac.

We were thrilled to work with ifac on their new website to showcase their recent brand refresh. With ifac surpassing 40 years in business, it’s a time of reflection but also a time to consider the next 40 years and what is to come. Their new digital platform was built with the future in mind, as ifac move into the next chapter.

ifac work closely within the farming community, offering a range of services such as Audit & Assurance, Book-keeping, Corporate Finance, Taxation and Specialist Advisory services. The specialist insight and expertise possessed by the team at ifac is what enables their clients to thrive.

Finalists for 2018 Digital Media Awards

Together Digital — 2018-01-23T14:22:00+00:00

So the finalists for the 2018 Digital Media Awards have been announced, and we’re delighted to learn that we’re included in 3 categories!

For our work on the digital platform for Darkness Into Light, we’re nominated for:

Best Strategy
Best Website
Best Collaborative Campaign

It’s fantastic to be recognised across multiple categories, for different aspects of the project.

Best Strategy

Any successful digital project depends on a strong underlying strategy, so it’s crucial to put a lot of emphasis on the strategy phase. Identifying clear objectives brings focus to the project and ensures everyone involved knows what the measures of success are.

This category in the Digital Media Awards highlights organisations who are driving success through digital, and we felt that a strong website could certainly deliver measurable results for Darkness Into Light.

In our strategy phase, we established a number of key objectives.

Gather the contact details of participants to allow improved communication
Encourage participants to fundraise in addition to paying the event entry fee
Promote team participation in the event - this included teams based across multiple countries
Maintain or grow event participation levels
Create a site that can handle web traffic from many locations, as well as spikes in activity at key moments.

These were in alignment with Pieta House’s overall objectives, and thoughtful design enabled these aims to be realised.

Best Website

86% of Pieta House’s income comes from individual fundraising efforts, and Darkness Into Light is Pieta House’s biggest annual fundraising and awareness event. It began in 2009 with 400 people coming together in Dublin’s Phoenix Park and has spread internationally across 4 continents, representing over 100,000 participants.

With such rapid growth, it’s essential that Darkness Into Light has a strong digital platform to support the volumes of people engaging with the event online. In 2017, we overhauled their digital platform to ensure that it adequately supports this momentous event.

To do so, we made user experience a priority. The Darkness Into Light site has clear, unambiguous calls to action, as well as a focus on being user-friendly.

Some actions taken to deliver on key objectives were:

‘Register’ widgets were placed in key locations to encourage sign-ups
Mapping functionality allowed users to find their local event easily
Site content was created to best convey Darkness Into Light’s impactful message
Teamwork was encouraged with fundraising league tables and rewards
We built a custom integration with Everyday Hero API to increase online donations
A scalable hosting solution was created to handle web traffic
We provided graphics to make social media sharing easy for participants.

Best Collaborative Campaign

We love working together with our clients so it’s really great to be a finalist for Best Collaborative Campaign. This category celebrates teamwork and collaboration between organisations, all while retaining a focus on return on investment.

Darkness Into Light itself is all about collaboration and bringing people together for a common goal. By working with Pieta House on this project, we were able to create a platform to foster this teamwork amongst the participants of the event.

This annual event is a beacon for all those whose lives have been touched by suicide. Collaboration in the community is at the heart of Darkness Into Light, and the website needed to co-ordinate and unite the community towards one common goal.

It’s great to know that our partnership with Darkness Into Light was effective in delivering an appropriate digital solution for such a unique event.

2018 Digital Media Awards

We’re delighted with the success of the new digital platform for Darkness Into Light, reflected in the number of donation pages created, the increase in registered participants, the surge in online donation revenue, and many other KPIs.

Darkness Into Light is having a tangible positive impact on people’s lives, and so we’re really thrilled it’s been recognised as a finalist for the Digital Media Awards.

Together with Illuminate Learning

Together Digital — 2018-01-08T13:59:00+00:00

Reconnaissance Group, an Irish-owned risk management company with operations in Ireland, the U.S. and Haiti, had been developing a new training solution for a number of years. This year, Reconnaissance Group were able to officially launch Illuminate Learning. It’s an online tool designed to meet the needs of their clients, which allows them roll out training to their global teams via engaging animations.

Reconnaissance Group approached Together Digital early in 2017, with an aim to not only have a platform where existing clients could find out more about their services, but also a tool that could be used to market to a wider audience. Our team was able to create a modern, brochure-style website which incorporated new branding with a login portal linked to their existing learning management system.

Since launching the site in November 2017, Reconnaissance Group have already seen great results in terms of traffic and leads.

Check out the new Illuminate Learning website. Here’s what Kirsten Savage, Marketing Manager at Reconnaissance Group, had to say about working with Together Digital!

Merry Christmas to You!

Together Digital — 2017-12-21T15:42:00+00:00

Wishing you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Thank you to all our clients for working with us in 2017. It’s been a fantastic year, and we’re looking forward to what 2018 will bring.

We’re feeling pretty festive at Together Digital, as you can see...!

Together Digital and Darkness Into Light Win eir Spider Award

Together Digital — 2017-12-04T11:58:00+00:00

There’s a buzz of celebration in the office, as last Thursday we took home an eir Spider for our work on Darkness Into Light!

We worked on the digital platform for Pieta House’s annual flagship event. The new platform for their 2017 event resulted in a enormous 185% increase in online donations.

We’re delighted to win the award for Best mCommerce Campaign. Darkness Into Light is such an important event and we’re happy to see its digital platform recognised at the 2017 eir Spiders.

A massive congratulations goes to Pieta House. The phenomenon of Darkness Into Light brings people together around the world, and the donations raised enable Pieta House to give people hope when they need it most. Brian Higgins, CEO of Pieta House, spoke to us about the impact of the new digital platform.

Darkness Into Light Shortlisted for 3 eir Spiders

Together Digital — 2017-11-17T13:27:00+00:00

At Together Digital, we are delighted to see one of our clients, Darkness Into Light, shortlisted for three eir Spider awards in the recent eir Spiders shortlist announcement.

Darkness Into Light is an annual, global event run by Pieta House, and the website we created with them ahead of their 2017 event has been shortlisted in the following categories:

Best in Charity and Not-for-Profit
Best in User Experience
Best mCommerce Campaign

About Darkness Into Light

Darkness Into Light is the flagship fundraising event for Pieta House, an organisation which assists people in their most difficult times of need. Pieta House provides free counselling and support to people experiencing suicidal ideation, people engaging in self-harm, and people who have been bereaved by suicide.

The charity gives hope to people when they need it most, and their Darkness Into Light event completely embodies this. At 150 venues worldwide, more than 100,000 people rise before dawn to walk together into the sunrise. It’s an awe-inspiring and emotional experience, with people uniting around the world for this symbolic event. And while it poignantly represents a journey towards hope, the event also raises crucial funds to enable Pieta House to continue offering free and critical support to those who need their help.

Brian Higgins, CEO of Pieta House, spoke to us about the impact their new digital platform had on the success of the event.

A great project to work on

Our team loved working on this and we are so pleased that the project and the event itself have being recognised by the Eir Spiders judging panel.

You can read the case study of the project for more detail.

About the eir Spiders Awards

The 21st eir Spiders Awards Ceremony will be held at the Mansion House in Dublin on the 30th November. The Awards recognise excellence in websites and digital technology in Ireland, and are judged by a team of digital experts from across industries.

Together Digital Shortlisted for Agency of the Year 2017 at eir Spiders

Together Digital — 2017-11-17T12:35:00+00:00

We were absolutely thrilled to learn that we have been shortlisted for an eir Spider Award for Agency of the Year 2017!

2017 was a big year for us. We completely rebranded to become Together Digital, which included launching a whole new digital platform for ourselves, and also created a new site for our video offering.

Making the move to becoming Together Digital has been a really exciting one. We’ve taken on some fantastic new clients, and maintained ongoing digital partnerships with long-standing clients, many of whom also enjoyed a stellar year:

Movidius, a great Irish tech story, completed its $400m sale to Intel
Digital Marketing Institute sold a majority stake in their business for over $25m
Vanderbilt Industries bedded in their acquisition of the ACT security solutions business cementing their market leader position in their sector
Dublin GAA secured an historic three-in-a-row All Ireland’s (can’t claim too much credit for this one!)
RBK, one of Ireland’s leading accountancy firms, expanded and rebranded.

One of the favourite projects we did this year was for Darkness into Light, the flagship annual event for Pieta House, who were shortlisted for three eir Spider awards.

We’re very happy to be attending the 2017 eir Spiders awards ceremony in the Mansion House on 30th November, as it promises to be a great night featuring the best in digital technology in Ireland.

Getting the Most from your Pay Per Click Campaigns

Together Digital — 2017-11-09T10:40:00+00:00

At the recent 3XE Digital Conference in Croke Park, we heard lots of great speakers discuss their thoughts on the latest developments in digital marketing. One talk we really wanted to share was that by Kirk Williams, Founder and CEO at ZATO PPC Marketing. Kirk spoke about pay per click marketing, also known as PPC, and gave some great ideas on how to stretch your PPC budget to make the most of your campaigns. These were his top tips:

Set up a great campaign structure from the beginning

Kirk emphasises the importance of setting up a great campaign structure right from the get-go. Your campaign structure refers to the arrangement of your different PPC campaigns within your PPC account. The campaign structure enables you to organise the components of your PPC campaigns in a defined hierarchy.

Your PPC account has multiple campaigns
Each campaign may consist of multiple ad groups
Each ad group could focus on multiple keywords

Thinking carefully about your campaign structure is a process that takes time, but it’s well worth it. When doing pay per click marketing, you will be considering different keywords that people may be using as search terms. A deliberate and thorough approach to your campaign structure enables you to examine how best to target these keywords, and to ultimately create more focused and relevant ad campaigns.

If you have a strong campaign structure set up at the start, you can continue to keep tweaking and optimising the campaign as time goes by; but your well thought-out campaign structure will stand to you, and likely save you money in the long run.

Have different campaigns for different match types

Kirk recommended creating individual campaigns for different match types. There are four match types - Broad Match, Broad Match Modifier, Phrase Match, and Exact Match. By assigning a match type to your keywords, you dictate what varieties of your keywords will cause your ads to appear. For example, Exact Match indicates that your campaign will only appear if the user searches for your exact keyword, without any changes or additional phrases included.

You can choose highly targeted keywords and create campaigns tailored for these using only Exact Match. At Together Digital, we’ve tried this in the past and we found that this greatly increased click-through rate on these campaigns. And as budget is controlled at campaign level, it ensures you are getting strong exposure for these very relevant key terms. Doing this can result in an increased conversion rate with a lower cost to you - this is a great tip for anyone, but particularly those working with smaller budgets.

Don’t wait to build your remarketing list

Once your campaign is set up and ready to go, Kirk suggests building your remarketing lists right away. Remarketing is when you can target ads at people who have already visited your site, and so they are likely to be interested in your business already.

Your website records cookies showing which users have visited your site, and you can then target ads at those previous visitors. You may have experienced this as a user. An example would be if you looked up a particular hotel, and then saw ads for that hotel appear at a later date. Remarketing is a great way to remind people about your product or service if they are already interested in it.

You can apply different ‘rules’ to your remarketing list. For example, you might indicate that members on the list should have visited a specific URL on your site to qualify for inclusion on the list. You can then create different ads for your different rules, enabling you to be as targeted as possible, which is always the best approach to digital marketing.

Create separate remarketing campaigns

Kirk also discussed creating separate remarketing campaigns, rather than including your remarketing lists in your regular search campaigns. This way, you can customise specific search ads for people who previously visited your website.

Search engines may suggest that you keep both regular and remarketing search campaigns grouped together. However, Kirk prefers to separate them into different campaigns for budget control reasons, so this may be something you wish to experiment with.

Start advertising on Bing now

Another tip he shared was to get involved with advertising on Bing immediately. Bing isn’t currently as big in Ireland as it is in US, but it’s still a very important search engine. We’ve already talked about Why You Should be Advertising on Bing, so it was great to hear this suggestion reiterated.

The process to set up adwords campaigns for Bing will not take very long if you’re already advertising elsewhere, and it’s definitely a worthwhile exercise. You can get lower cost-per-clicks (CPCs) and cost per conversion if you avail of Bing advertising, as not as many businesses are competing in this area at the moment. In this way, you can get some quick wins for quite a low input of time resources.

Always report on your PPC activity

Kirk’s last piece of advice was something that should always be part of marketing activity - reporting. Reporting on your PPC activity is how we learn what works and - also very important - what doesn’t. By choosing some main KPIs to focus on, you can benchmark your activity and develop a strategy for future PPC marketing.

If you’re not sure how to approach PPC marketing, feel free to get in touch with our team who are experienced in developing PPC campaigns.

3XE Digital Conference Highlights

Together Digital — 2017-10-27T09:53:00+01:00

3XE Digital Conference took place in our neck of the woods, so we didn’t have far to go for a day of interesting speakers and digital marketing in Croke Park.

We were delighted to see that our digital marketing services are following the latest guidance from the industry. It was a packed day, so we’ve condensed it into some key takeaways to share with you.

By 2020, a massive 50% of all search will be by voice search

Barry Adams, Founder & CEO of Polemic Digital, shared this amazing prediction from comScore. We had a feeling things were going this way, but it was great to hear confirmation on this.

The best way to capitalise on voice search is to implement structured data and schema on your website. Structured data helps search engines understand your website. This is something we have been encouraging clients to do on our latest websites, as we have found it’s increasingly important for local search optimisation.

Barry also touched on how structured data can also improve how your search results appear, and impact how much real estate they get.

We’ve certainly noticed an increase in click-through rate on certain search results by implementing structured data. An example of this is introducing Google’s ratings schema, as we did with Seapoint Clinic.

“SEO & PPC need to hug it out, why all the fighting?” - Trevor Koen

Trevor Koen from Imperic Media spoke about search engine optimisation and pay per click marketing. SEO and PPC operate in the same environment, so Trevor warned against allowing them to end up in silos.

It’s really important to ensure that your time investment for PPC & SEO is not being duplicated. By sharing information and learnings between both activities, your resources are streamlined and you can develop repeatable goals.

Trevor gave excellent tips on identifying search opportunities by looking at the key components of:

domain authority
keyword difficulty level
keyword volumes.

By combining these elements, strategies can be put in place for short, medium and long term goals for your SEO strategy. You can then fill in the organic search gaps with PPC marketing.

50% of all web traffic in Ireland goes to 68 websites

Not every link is worth the same. Backlinks do still matter with 80% of the backlinks you get affecting your ranking.

Lisa Myers from Verve Search spoke about how a small number of key websites, such as RTE.ie, The Journal.ie, The Guardian and The Times receive the majority of Ireland’s web traffic.

As such, it’s crucial to generate backlinks by creating unique and valuable content.

Lisa’s top tips for success were:

Find an idea that nearly worked and improve on it
Be willing to invest in building formats that can be used again
Don’t be afraid to come up with bad ideas: “You have to be willing to come up with bad ideas in order to come up with great ideas!”

3XE Digital had some fantastic contributors from a variety of digital marketing companies in Dublin and beyond. We always like to keep up to speed with the latest market data and trends, and were pleased to confirm that we already adhere to best practice with search marketing strategies. We’re excited to take what we heard at the conference to inspire ideas for our digital marketing strategy!

If you have any questions on these topics, don't hesitate to get in touch.

Questions Your Web Designer Should Ask You

Together Digital — 2017-10-20T11:53:00+01:00

Before kicking off a web design project, your designer should ask some key questions. Clarifying these points in advance will result in a strategic approach to your new design.

What is your motivation?

Why now? What’s driving the decision to create a new website? You likely have some key reasons that have led you to this project. Perhaps you have an existing website that needs modernisation to deliver on your business strategy. Maybe you’re aware that your digital profile isn’t helping you meet your goals, and that you’re missing opportunities as a result.

A strong digital presence is crucial for any organisation today. If your website isn’t cutting the mustard, the impact can be enormous.

Interrogating the motivating factors for designing a new website:

brings clarity to the project
defines what you hope the outcome to be
enables your web designer to envision what will have the greatest impact for you.

What are your KPIs?

Each organisation is unique and will measure success differently. A well-designed website does more than look professional – it leads to tangible results.

Great web design goes far beyond just the appearance of your site. It’s critical that you understand the user journey, making the site as intuitive and helpful for your users as possible. Good design ultimately leads to more conversions, and less people leaving your site in the middle of the process. If your web designer understands what outcomes you need to see from your site, they can incorporate this into the strategy from the beginning and put it at the forefront of the web design.

Who is supplying the content?

Have you thought about where the content is coming from for your site?
Will you be providing copy for the site or enlisting the help of a content specialist?
What images will you need for the site?

This is the material that will populate your web designer’s creation. Without having the content supplied right away, your web designer will need some information on what's being included to understand how best to layout the site. Your site is the digital ‘shop window’ for your business, so don’t make content an after-thought.

If you’d like help on any of these areas, you can get in touch to discuss your digital strategy.

What does technical SEO entail?

Together Digital — 2017-10-12T12:24:00+01:00

We know a lot about on-page and off-page SEO factors that affect your rankings when it comes to search engines such as Google, Bing etc. These include inbound links, keywords, content and much more… but what does technical SEO consider when ranking your website?

Website Speed

This element is probably in the top 5 items that affect your site’s ranking. No one likes a slow website! It’s as simple as that. In 2016, Google pointed out that their aim is for a website to load in 0.5 seconds. Google tend to be ambitious when it comes to their expectations, so ideally your site shouldn’t take longer than 2 seconds to load. If it does, we have a problem. Here are a few things to look at when it comes to your site’s speed:

Keep your templates and designs simple. Anything “extra” is guaranteed to slow down your site.
Make sure your images are optimised correctly.
Limit the number of redirects. The more redirects you have on a single page, the longer the load time; make sure that a user is only redirected once.

Mobile Friendliness

This is equally as important as website speed. It’s no secret that Google already prefers mobile-friendly websites, and they recently announced that from 2018 they will start indexing mobile sites first. Read Google's statement here.

So if your site is not mobile-friendly, it’s time to optimise it now!

Site Architecture

A clear site architecture is important, not only for search engine rankings but also for your users. So it’s crucial you do it right from the start! There are a few things to consider when it comes to this:

HTTPS - This is the secure protocol to use when it comes to your website. We recently wrote a blog about HTTPS if you'd like to know more about it. Not only does it help to boost your search rankings, it also makes your site more secure which, since this October, has been a crucial factor for Google. Sites that aren’t HTTPS will be marked as unsafe by Google.
URL Structure - Your site URLs should be clear, descriptive and, for best SEO practices, include a keyword. Keyword inclusion in the page URL will strengthen the relevancy of the page and give that extra boost to your rankings.
Internal Links - You should link the content internally on your site. Also, make sure to categorise your website’s subject matter.This way you’ll ensure that the users can browse between sections and older content can be easily accessed.

Structured Data

Structured data is a standardised format for providing information about a web page and its content. It is a more efficient way for Google and other search engines to crawl sites and identify the content on the page more precisely, and to augment Search Engine Result Pages with additional search features.

It allows web crawlers to identify company information such as the name, address and phone number, along with other information such as articles, events, products, recipes, reviews, etc. Structured data is constantly being developed and improved, with new features regularly cropping up in our SERPs. An example can be seen below, where the film review website Rotten Tomatoes uses structured data to show searchers a brief overview of information relating to a film, such as review score, film runtime, release date and rating.

The advantage of using structured data is to make your website’s presence on SERPs more attractive to searchers and to increase clickthroughs to your site, ultimately increasing conversions.

In terms of what’s involved in implementing structured data, your web developers would code and markup your website using the code suggested by search engines such as Google. The Google Developer website provides a comprehensive gallery of what’s available and a relatively easy-to-follow implementation guide for each feature on their developer website.

We hope you’ve learnt all you need to know about technical SEO features but if you’re still unsure or are looking to implement some of these technical SEO features on your website, why not get in touch with Together Digital today and one of our highly-trained experts can advise you on best practices.

Brand New Together Video Website Launched

Together Digital — 2017-09-20T12:13:00+01:00

And it’s live! The team here at Together Digital are delighted to announce we’ve launched a brand new website for video.... Together Video!

Content strategy and video in particular have in recent years played a much bigger part in the digital strategies that we create with our clients.

Since launching our video business in 2012, we have continually evolved our offering in line with our overall thinking on digital strategy. The next stage in this evolution sees us today launching our brand new video website. We hope you like it.

Our objectives for the new website are as follows:

Showcase the great work we are doing for clients
Highlight our ‘agency thinking’ on how to maximise the value of video content
Sell the benefits of video as a tool to drive website conversions
Outline the process of creating a video content strategy

Why not pop over to www.togethervideo.ie for the full lowdown.

And if you’re interested in getting started with your video marketing strategy, or you just fancy chatting about video options for your business, email info@togethervideo.ie or call 01 681 4440.

Together with Seapoint Clinic

Together Digital — 2017-09-14T10:35:00+01:00

Together Digital recently had the pleasure of working closely with Seapoint Clinic, one of Ireland's leading dental practices based in Blackrock, Co. Dublin. Seapoint Clinic felt that their existing website did not fully reflect the standard of work they do and the modern dentistry techniques in use in their practice, and didn’t have much of an impact by way of converting potential patients who visited the site into customers.

After a number of workshops and consultations focusing on Seapoint Clinic as a business, their practice and how they sell their services we were able to recommend and provide them with the ideal strategy to dominate the Irish dentistry market. We completely transformed their online presence with a fresh new web design and helped make improvements to their digital marketing strategy. All in all leading to increased traffic, higher conversion rates and happier clients.

You can see all the work we did on their website here : SeapointClinic.ie

Check out our video testimonial below with Dr. Thomas Linehan, Co-owner and Dentist, talking about his experience with Together Digital.

SEO vs PPC : What’s the Difference?

Together Digital — 2017-09-04T12:42:00+01:00

We often get clients who confuse Adwords Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) search results. It’s an easy thing to confuse, both of these belong to Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and if implemented together they can dramatically increase leads for your business.

Firstly, what’s the difference? Well let us demonstrate :

The top result is a Pay Per Click ad that we are running through Google AdWords. The second result is generated organically by Google. Now, both of these results are shown when someone searches for Together Digital. You might be wondering why?

Google Adwords Pay Per Click

Before you read any further, if PPC is unclear to you it might be a good idea for you to watch our motion graphic about what PPC Advertising is here.

When it comes to where you appear on the search result page for pay per click advertising this depends on how much you’re willing to pay - cost per click. With that being said, here are some other factors that determine your position on Google’s paid search:

How popular is the keyword you’re targeting
How much money are your competitors putting behind the said keyword
How many competitors do you have

However, you only pay when someone clicks on your ad and not when it’s being viewed on the search page.

Search Engine Optimisation

To get good organic rankings (not on a PPC model) you need to optimise your website and your content. Ranking positions depend on how well your site is optimised for search engines. It combines technical, on-page and off-page factors. These are just some of the factors that Google takes into consideration when it comes to ranking sites.

Site speed
Responsive design (website, tablet and mobile friendly design)
How often the site is being updated
Quality of content, having good on-page optimisation (titles, descriptions, heading tags etc)
Is the content relevant and useful for your audience?
Having a good UX design and experience
Video content
Links, CTR, and time spent on site

Let’s Focus on the Content and Keyword Elements Only

Our site is going to appear on top of the organic search result page because “Together Digital” is in our URL, meta data, used consistently within the content and we are relevant for that term.

However, we will have different ranking results when a user searches for “digital marketing agency” or ‘web development Dublin.’ Ranking for those will depend on whether we are relevant for that term, have lots of useful quality and relevant content, and how well we have optimised our metadata.

How to Best Use PPC and Organic Keywords Efficiently

So now that we’ve established the difference between organic and paid traffic, how do you know what keywords to use for each channel?

Organic Keywords

Pick around 10 keywords that you have the most chance of ranking for, keeping in mind how relevant it is to your core offering, the amount of content you can write about it, how competitive it is, and whether it has a high chance of converting.These keywords should form the backbone of the content that you add to your website through text blog posts, video blogs, news articles or service pages. As you’re creating this content you’ll have to ensure to add these keywords in your meta data.

PPC Keywords

PPC keywords can be used very effectively for:

Keywords you find it hard to rank for organically e.g. too many competitors, not enough content
Terms related to specific products and services outside of your core offering
Competitor names (Your business listing shows when people search for a similar competitor)
‘Own the page’ - when you want to appear in the PPC panel as well as the organic listing
Driving specific traffic to a landing page (sign up demo page)
Offer based campaigns - Free, discounted,
Words that you don’t want your website to rank for organically e.g. ‘cheap’

When it comes to creating your PPC campaigns, use the terms you want to bid on. Make sure to include them in your ad copy, ad group, landing page, metadata and URL of the landing page for best results.

We hope that it’s become a little clearer for you as to what the difference between SEO and PPC is. If you want us to carry out a simple SEO audit on your website absolutely FREE fill in the form below!

How Google Shopping Can Supercharge Your Sales

Together Digital — 2017-08-31T10:19:00+01:00

Google Shopping launched in Ireland in December 2016, after having established itself previously as a successful integrated ecommerce promotion platform in other regions around the world. It has become an invaluable tool for anyone involved in selling products online, and helps drive sales in a more engaging medium than ever before. In this post we’ll give you the rundown of everything you need to know about Google Shopping.

What is Google Shopping?

By using your powers of deductive reasoning we’re sure you may have figured out that Google Shopping has something to do with Google and Shopping. But what exactly is the platform?

Google Shopping was formed from the marriage of two separate Google services, AdWords and Merchant Centre. The Merchant Centre platform manages your inventory, product information and pricing, and images of your product. This allows Google to maintain an up-to-date database of what you have to offer.

On the other side of things the AdWords platform manages the bidding and placement of your products on the Google Shopping platform. The bidding process and some of the inner workings differ slightly from Search and Display Advertising, as instead of bidding and competing with keywords for search terms, you bid on products themselves. The platform automatically associates search terms with certain products, which makes our lives as advertisers a lot more simplified.

Who it is and isn’t for

First of all it is important to establish if Google Shopping is for your business. Typically shopping suits most businesses engaged in ecommerce, however Google does have a number of restricted and prohibited product categories that will not be permitted on their platform.

Businesses selling clothes, sports gear or stationery need not worry about any of their products being turned away from Google Shopping. However the likes of tickets, vehicles, property, services and currency to name a few, are all unsupported products in Google Shopping and can result in your account being suspended if added.

Additionally counterfeit goods, explosives, dangerous and illegal goods, offensive content amongst a few other categories are also prohibited from being displayed by Google Shopping

Setting it Up

In order to use these services you must first log in to the platform using your Google Account to set up and verify your website. Once you have set up the account and added some basic information about your business and the locales in which it operates you can start adding your inventory.

There are two methods of adding inventory to Google Shopping. The quick and easy method is to allow the Merchant Centre to crawl your site and automatically retrieve data about your product inventory. It is important to note that unless your content and product information is correctly marked up in the Schema.org Structured Data format, the Google crawler will not be able to properly retrieve the necessary product data. This method of adding your inventory is the easiest and helps keep Google’s records up to date with the latest information from your ecommerce site.

Alternatively, you can export a CSV file that is stored in your Google Drive and manually add your product information in the accepted format that Google requires. The Merchant Centre will have access to this file and will regularly access it and update the latest product information. In addition to adding products to this Google formatted sheet, you can also upload an exported file from your in-house POS or ecommerce systems directly to the Merchant Centre, and make changes using formatting and rules to ensure the data is compatible with the platform.

It is important to ensure that the information given to Google matches the information on your website, as any disparities in data such as prices being different can result in a suspension from Google.

How it Works

Once you have imported your inventory to the Merchant Centre you can start advertising your products to would-be customers. When people are searching for certain terms or specific products they may be served with the Google Shopping Widget which displays an image of the product you’ve provided, along with the title, price and name of the merchant. These Shopping ads appear alongside search results and can gain the attention of a customer who is towards the end of the sales funnel when it comes to making a purchase.

Google Shopping is a form of Pay Per Click advertising, and you only get charged for the ad if someone clicks on your advertisement. The bidding structure used in Google Shopping is similar to that AdWords Search and Display ads. We cannot simply set the prices and let it run automatically. We need to make adjustments based on competition, business goals, seasons, and ad performance. If you see that you are getting a lot of conversions you can make changes to your budgets and bids in order to improve sales and conversions.

Again similar to Search and Display, you can also target potential customers who are geographically close to your physical shop and use Google Shopping to help drive business into your store. Google has included a feature called Local Inventory Ads which combine ad extensions such as maps, phone numbers and addresses to the ads to encourage physical visits.

Benefits for Businesses and Retailers

The main benefit to using Google Shopping ads is that they are served to people that are searching for products with a high intent to purchase, in a more detailed format to traditional search ads. By adding an image, a price and some product information alongside search results you are giving your potential customer a lot of information to inform their purchasing decision. Recent data shows that Shopping Ads perform twice to three times better than standard text ads when used correctly, and are a lot easier to manage when working with large product inventories.

Benefits for Irish Sellers

One of the key benefits for Irish sellers engaged in ecommerce is that currently there are few retailers using Google Shopping to sell their products, however there are a large number of Irish consumers constantly searching for goods. There is a huge opportunity in the market to gain competitive edge and to drive more online sales. Irish people engaged in ecommerce spend on average €3,143 per year online according to Ecommerce Europe, which represents a huge opportunity for Irish SME’s and retailers to augment their sales through these new tools and platforms available to us.

Are you looking at driving more quality leads and turbocharging your Digital Marketing strategy? Then why not get in touch with our experienced team of strategists today and get on track towards blowing your sales out of the water.

Wireframes 101 - What they are and Why we use them

Together Digital — 2017-08-24T12:35:00+01:00

When a client approaches us to deliver a brand new and innovative digital solution, whether it is a whole website redesign to a web application to aid business processes, one of the most important strategy elements we work upon and develop for our clients are wireframe prototypes.

Wireframes are, in a nutshell, a low fidelity visual mockup of the views and processes that we envisage during the strategy phases of a project that we can use to show the client and collectively make changes upon.

We identify certain processes and user journeys in the strategy phase of a project and we use wireframes to visualise these views. These are the pages the user will encounter as they move through a website. These visual representations give us the perfect basis to work collectively with a client to ensure their customers needs are met. Having these wireframes also allows us to conduct paper prototyping before venturing into the design phase.

They give both us and our clients a rough idea of the direction a project will take and how it will look and behave. Wireframes are NOT however, project designs, plans and blueprints, and differ greatly from concept designs

When are wireframes not used

Typically wireframes can be used for a wide variety of projects and applications, however wireframes typically aren’t used for high end product brochure websites. The reason being is that there is a high focus on the design and presentation of the brochure website, so the actual visual design takes a lot more prominence over how the information is laid out on the page.

Their Role in Design and Why are they Used ?

Wireframing before creating a concept design with colours, logos and imagery allows us to focus on user behaviour and information architecture while not getting distracted by smaller details such as fonts and colours.

If the web design process begins with a well thought out and structured wireframe, it saves a lot of time and energy changing layouts further down the line, and it also means that your designers can make more informed and accurate decisions over the final concept design of the website when the time comes.

Wireframing also allows us to put a lot of consideration towards the flow of the website and how the content of the website is interacted with. Wireframes typically just consist of layouts and snippets of content, which can be lost in a high level design as our judgement can be clouded by the other design elements in place. Essentially wireframes allow us to see the wood from the trees when it comes to our web sites.

Advantages of Wireframing

One of the main advantages of using a wireframe in the strategy phase of a website is that making changes to the wireframes becomes a quicker and more efficient process. As there are considerably fewer detailed design elements in the wireframe to be changed, things can be changed and added quickly and easily, and brand new layouts can be created based on other templates.

Another advantage of using wireframes for the initial design stages of a site is that when it comes to content creation it helps us to envisage exactly what content goes where, what content is the most important, and how much content should be included. All of this helps us at a later stage to create content that is both suitable for the setting, fits in well with the design and is optimised.

When it comes to communicating and proposing ideas and concepts to clients, showing them rather than telling them reigns supreme. Another advantage of using wireframes is that it is a great aid in communication, both internally and externally. Wireframes and prototypes can be shared amongst teams and the logic behind it can be quickly and easily interpreted, which is important when we have such a large team of people working on a project. It also allows the client to play an active part in the web design process and allows them to also communicate ideas in a similar fashion, after all wireframing isn’t just for designers and strategists.

Low-fidelity and High-fidelity wireframes

Wireframes can be produced in two distinct flavours, low-fidelity and high-fidelity.

Low-fidelity wireframes are essentially used at the very beginning of the design process and are typically the rough sketches and designs we produce on paper and on whiteboards in strategy meetings. They are the bare foundations of a design and can be rapidly created and changed, based on what we think would be the best way to structure a site or a project. Once we have the structure and layout defined in a low-fidelity format we can move onto the high-fidelity wireframe.

High-fidelity wireframes are a lot more polished and refined versions of their low-fidelity counterparts. They are typically created using one of the various graphic design tools we have available and be easily exported as an image that can be shared with clients. Their higher level of detail and layouts make them the perfect foundation to base a high level design and to create a technical specification from.

Creating a Prototype using Wireframes

Some of our clients might require a prototype in order to get buy in from the key stakeholders. This is where we can take wireframes a step further. Using the collaborative tool we present our wireframes in we can create a simple click through demo that demonstrates a user journey. Wireframes give us the added value of allowing us to do these demo’s when requested without having the significant cost / time requirement of building this in code.

Efficiency

As mentioned previously in the advantages of using wireframes, efficiency is one of the defining features of using wireframes in the strategic and creative processes. There is a lot to be gained in using wireframes over creating concept designs. The low level of detail in a wireframe helps to focus our attention and allows us to refine the user interaction (UI) and the user journey. Then, once the concept design is presented to a client they can then focus on the design elements and transitions, happy that their users needs are taken care of.

If you would like to discuss your own website strategy or would like our help with a web project why not get in touch with one of our digital strategists today?