Direct Placement Blog

  Why You Want a Google Premier Partner on Your Team It’s no secret that Google reigns supreme among the search engines, having over 90% of the market share. It’s the first place many searches for products and services start, meaning that it’s vital for your business to have visibility on the platform. There’s a lot that goes into running successful campaigns on Google Ads and the competition can be intense. That’s why you want a Google Premier Partner on your team. Agencies who have achieved this status can do more for your online presence, regardless of the industry you’re in. Google Partners Google wants you to see results from advertising on their platform so you keep paying for more ads. Because of this they have set up a partner program to help you find trusted agencies that meet Google’s criteria for performance, spend and certifications. Premier Partner status is the highest-level partnership an agency can attain, it is only given to a small fraction of partnered...

  Content Strategy: Buying Cycles So now that you’ve come up with your buyer personas that represent the different segments of your ideal customer base, it’s time to come up with a content strategy that targets prospects and leads at different parts of the buying process. Relevancy is the name of the game here and people are asking different questions at each stage of the funnel. This means that an effective marketing campaign will address people according to where they are in the process. You will want to come up with a different strategy tailored to each persona. Your funnel will look different based on your industry and your specific business, however, a general funnel has the following stages; awareness, consideration, purchase. The Awareness Stage This stage is all about building awareness for your brand. At this point you’re interacting with a cold audience that has never heard of your company. It’s important to note t...

  Content Strategy: Creating Buyer Personas Creating content regularly has become essential for businesses to compete in the age of the internet. With the immense amount of competition for people’s attention online, it is no longer enough to just make one size fits all content. Today your business content needs to really connect with people, to show that you understand them, in order to be an effective lead generator or an effective part of your marketing funnel. One of the best ways to know exactly what kind of content can achieve this is to create buyer personas to represent each segment of your customer base. Buyer personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers. It is vitally important that they be based on research and data, not on intuition. Buyer personas give you a better understanding of your current and future customers and prospects. This way you can tailor your content, products and services to appeal to them in a meaningful way, which will lead to mo...

  The 4 Pillars of Market Research That Will Make or Break Your Business Businesses don’t operate in a vacuum. There are a number of factors, some under our control and some that aren’t, that interact to determine how we fare in the open market. Conducting market research gives you insight into these factors, which can give you direction when it comes to making educated decisions related to growth and development. Many businesses rely solely on analytics to determine how they are doing and how to move forward. Analytics are crucial to understanding how your business is performing and how to make moves to encourage growth, however, they provide an incomplete picture. Analytics provide the “what” and market research provides the “why.” So, what kinds of insights that we can gather from conducting market research? What we are aiming to do is understand our ideal customer, market, competition and competitive ranking. These are the 4 pillars. Let’s take a look at each one of these...

Digital Marketing for Real Estate Agents Being a real estate agent is highly competitive and most end up calling it quits within 5 years. The profession is saturated with over 2 million agents nationwide. With so many agents competing for buyer/ seller’s attention, effective marketing is the key to making it or breaking it. Over the last 2 decades there has been a shift in the way people buy/ sell homes. People now generally start on the internet. 3-5% conversion rate is considered good, which means that if you have 20 leads, maybe 1 will convert, if you are good. Lead generation is tricky due to the highly competitive nature of the industry. Let’s discuss some of the more common ways that realtors find leads. Zillow Zillow has become the leading online platform in real estate for sellers, buyers and agents. They have the largest database of homes with over 110 million properties and offer pre-qualified financing, informational ...

  Increase Value for Both You and Your Customers by Upselling and Cross Selling Upselling and Cross selling are great ways to maximize your revenue while building stronger relationships with your clients and customers. You may hear the term upsell used interchangeably with cross sell, and though they are technically slightly different, I think this is fine as long as what is being conveyed is understood. Technically speaking, upselling is encouraging customers to purchase a service or product that is comparable, but more expensive, to the one they are intending to buy. Essentially a higher-end or more comprehensive version of the same product or service. Cross selling is encouraging add-ons or complementary products or services along with the intended purchase. Both of these practices can increase the value of each client or customer and, if done correctly, build trust. You also have the benefit of making more sales without having invested in lead generation for those sales since...