Marketing is a simple concept—introducing your business to people that want whatever you’re selling.

The trick is finding those people.

Your website, social media, email and others provide access to millions of potential customers.
There are hundreds of tools to find people interested in your products or services.

However, getting people’s attention can be a challenge.

Your competitors have access to the same marketing channels you do. It is estimated the average American is exposed to 6 to ten thousand marketing messages every single day.

That’s a lot of noise!

Of all the marketing channels available, online video is suited to make connections in a deeply personal way.
With video, you not only show what your business does, but you also signal what your business is like.

According to Forbes, it costs fives times more to attract a new customer than it does to sell the same product or service to a repeat customer.

Partly this is due to fear.
Fear of the unknown.
Fear of being ripped off.
Fear of wasting time or just being a bad fit.

Video provides a perfect ice-breaker. Through video, you can take viewers inside your business and let your glowing personality shine. People like to do business with people they like. Words on a page will never capture the same experience, no matter how skillful the writer is.

Learn More about our Video Production Services

Online video has other benefits. Most videos posted online will show up in search results almost immediately after being published. Embedding videos in related web pages and posts can shorten the time it takes for search engines to index those too.

Also, videos increase the chances your business will be represented in more than one of the top ten organic search results. That’s more visibility and one less competitor on the page with you.

Finally, few businesses engage in online video at all, so you’ll gain a serious competitive advantage.

If you want to launch into online video but aren’t sure how to get started, we’d love to help.

Here we are, at the beginning of 2018. And, with that, we're starting to see the usual flood of predictions for the year. Naturally, as a digital marketing strategist, I couldn't pass on the opportunity to make my own list of 2018 internet marketing predictions. A year ago, I predicted a lot of change will center around human language search due to the popularity of devices like Google Home, Amazon Echo and of course, Siri. It isn't just the availability of devices that's driving this. Technology is making its way into the backgrounds of our daily lives. By now, an entire generation has grown up with the Internet as the backdrop for everything. Today, everything is always on, and everything is listening. Much of what we do as marketers will be in response to technology that's only now starting to become mainstream. While 2017 proved there is a market ready to embrace the new technology, in 2018 we're going to see it take root. By 2019, we're going to experience a complete transformation of how we reach people, but I'll save that for next year.

Here Are My 2018 Internet Marketing Predictions

1. The Google Featured Snippet will be THE hot property in the SERP: If it isn't already, the featured snippet will become the most sought after space in Google's search results. We already know featured snippets receive the majority of clicks, which means SEOs are increasingly competing for that one spot. In other words, the rest of page one has the same status as page 2+ when there is a featured snippet present. I also believe the featured snippet will undergo significant change as the year progresses, but that's a topic for a different day.
2. Web design and content management will be increasingly commoditized: Building a website has become fairly simple, given WordPress and the availability of low-cost (or free) themes that do much of the heavy lifting. Though off-the-shelf solutions run a distant second to custom solutions like ours, they are often "good enough" for meeting short term business goals. This gives marketers an opportunity to focus on other opportunities.
3. Top Internet marketers will need to specialize more than ever: As multi-channel marketing gives way to omni-channel marketing, specialization is a natural progression. Like it or not, marketing is an exercise in data science and predictive analytics. Digital marketing is a team sport. While this may not be good news if you are a freelance web designer, the digital landscape creates new opportunities for your businesses.
4. Marketing automation will become more mainstream: Marketing automation is making its way into tools we've been using for years. Email platforms like MailChimp and MailerLite offer automation. Of course, every decent CRM provides marketing automation tools. The problem is very few business owners and even most marketers have any idea how to create automated marketing campaigns and workflows. Nevertheless, expect automation to find its way into your marketing plans.
5. The death of SEO as we know it: I know, marketers have been predicting the demise of SEO for at least a decade. But, 2017 was a transitional year. With rich cards, featured snippets, the restructuring of the SERP (again) and focus on human language search and mobile SEOs will need to adjust to a completely different set of rules. The future of SEO is understanding the full suite of options made available by Google, and having the technical expertise to take advantage of it. Sadly, Bing and Yahoo don't have enough market share to tip the scale. Like it or not, it's a Google world.

2018 Final Thoughts

Naturally, I could add dozens more 2018 predictions, but in many ways it wouldn't make a difference. The bottom line for business owners and marketers is that building relationships is the key to online success. That's always been true. What's changing is the tools and methodology. If you haven't already, now is the time to embrace it.

Measuring online lead generation: CPA, LTV, ROI, OMG

In a recent post, I told the story of a client that enjoyed $550,000 in new revenue from online lead generation during the first 7 months of 2017. In actuality, the total is significantly higher, since that only includes form fills, and not web-generated phone calls. For the purpose of this discussion, form-fill data works just fine. Let me provide some context and break that down a bit. Prior to the start of our campaign, this company was averaging $5.5M annual revenue. $0.00 of that was generated by attracting new business online. I should mention that our efforts began a few months prior to January 1st., so we had a bit of runway leading up to FY17. Monthly, $550K breaks down to $78,571.43. Annualized, that’s a pace of just over 17.1% year over year. To understand what that means in terms of ROI (return on investment), we’ll need to dig a little deeper. Two key metrics are (1) the number of customers making up that revenue; and (2) how many times each customer will purchase over a lifetime. We know the cost of the contract, so we can calculate the cost per acquisition (CPA), as well as the lifetime value (LTV) for every new customer attracted through SEO. The formula is simple: ROI = LTV - CPA Determining the cost per acquisition is also simple. Just add up all the promotional costs and divide by the number of new customers generated from those efforts. Lifetime value is the amount each of those customers spends. If you are calculating the total return for a given effort, count all of the customers attracted by the campaign. For the above campaign, monthly sales of $78,571.43 represents 3.4 customers. So the average revenue per sale is $23,109.24. Most customers spend that annually and stick around for at least 3 years. Lifetime value (LTV), then, is $23,109.24 X 3, or $69,327.73. Still with me? The entire cost is the amount spent on SEO, which happens to be $5,500 per month. We just divide that by 3.4, the average number of customers acquired through online search in a given month. $5,500 ÷ 3.4 = $1,617.65. Now we can calculate the actual ROI using the formula. ROI = $69,327.73(LTV) - $1,617.65(CPA) ROI = $67,710.08 per month. ($812,520.96 per year) As a side note, that’s a CPA of about 2.4% of revenue. Most industries establish their marketing budgets around 4% to 6%, so 2.4% is very low. Obviously, not every business sells $23,000+ items, but the ratios are the same for every business. It is the relationship between CPA and LTV that determines the success of any marketing effort. It’s what our clients are really interested in, even if they’re not used to thinking in those terms. So, as you put together a plan leading into next year, using hard data in your lead generation planning will keep your forecasts as accurate as possible. Maintaining the relationship between revenue from each generated lead, relative to the cost of acquiring it, will also help you scale your plan.