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You are here: Home / Archives for Digital

What Is Digital Marketing?

What Is Digital Marketing?So, to answer a question we often get at SPARKS! – “what exactly is digital marketing?” – here’s a quick-and-dirty summary of the key elements.

Businesses and organizations must rely on some type of marketing in order to grow. Traditional tactics – advertising and trade shows, for example – are stalwarts and an important part of the overall recipe. But a key element that many small businesses overlook is to optimize what is perhaps the easiest gateway to their audience: their digital assets.

Digital marketing refers to the use of online (aka digital) channels, such as search engines, social media, email, mobile apps, and websites, to promote a product or service. It is a broad term that encompasses a wide range of techniques and strategies, all of which are designed to reach and engage with a target audience in a digital environment.

For most organizations, an informative, engaging, mobile/user-friendly website lives at the center of the digital universe. But what about the other spokes in the wheel? Digital marketing can be broken down into several different elements, including:

  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): SEO involves optimizing your website and content to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) like Google and Bing for relevant keywords and phrases.
  • Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC): PPC advertising involves placing ads on search engines or social media platforms, and paying a fee each time a user clicks on one of your ads. These ads can reach a prospect at the most important time of the sales cycle – when they’re searching!
  • Social Media Marketing: Social media marketing involves promoting your brand or product on social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn. But the world does not run on posts alone. Social advertising can be an effective, low-cost method of reaching your targeted influencers, users, and decision makers.
  • Email Marketing: Email marketing involves sending targeted messages to your customer and prospect databases with the goal of driving engagement and sales. We could write articles that delve deeper into the specific strategies, but the most important is to motivate the recipient to take action – visit the website for more info, follow on social media, or make an inquiry.
  • Content Marketing: Content marketing involves creating and sharing valuable, relevant, and engaging content with the aim of attracting and retaining a clearly defined audience. And creating a “clearly defined audience” is critical – know your audience and provide relevant and authoritative content.
  • Analytics: Often overlooked, capturing some type of data is the only way to measure effectiveness and ROI. Free platforms such as Google Analytics, Search Console, and some CRMs are the easiest way to track traffic, user behaviors, referral sources, and measure user interest. This information can guide the strategies and execution of your digital marketing plan.

Is digital marketing a part of your overall marketing strategy? If not, SPARKS! can help inform, guide, and assist you with developing and implementing a plan that’s best for your organization. Let’s connect!

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What Can Google Analytics Do for You? Part 2

This is part 2 of our series on Google Analytics. Click here for part 1.

analytics part two photoNow that you have a basic understanding of what Google Analytics can do for you, it’s important to know what to look for when you’re going over your data. It can be difficult to make sense of all the information that you now have at your fingertips, so consider this a guide to navigating all that Google Analytics has to offer.

User Location

This lets you know where the users who are visiting your site are coming from and gives you a better idea of who you should be targeting. Google Analytics can help you identify where the user is located, so you can better focus your strategy, understand where you should be running ads, and get a better ROI.

Keywords

Keywords are an essential tool to ensure that you’re targeting the correct users and bringing them to your website effectively. They’re also vital for an effective SEO strategy. It’s important to understand the difference between organic keywords and paid keywords. Organic keywords are words that people have typed into Google and found you with, while paid keywords are words that you purposely utilize to increase website traffic.

Pageviews

Pageviews help you get a sense of how many people are visiting your page during a given period of time. To see how many views your page has, just go to Audience > Overview. This allows you to see if your site is gaining momentum, stagnate, or losing visitors.

It’s important to note the difference between pageviews, visits, and unique visitors. Whenever your website is viewed or refreshed, that counts as a “pageview”. A single browsing session is a “visit”, and “unique visitors” are the number of people who have visited your site over a select period of time.

Conversions

 A conversion takes place when a user visits your website and actually follows through with the action that you want them to take. You can program certain events, like form submissions, downloads, or visits to a specific page as conversions. This is a great way to get an idea of how effective your user journey is.

Average Session Duration

Another tool that can help you to build a more enjoyable site journey for the user is the average session duration function. Naturally, if a user spends a lot of time on your site it bodes well for how effective it is. If they’re leaving quickly, you may want to look into what you can do to keep them around.

Look Out for Red Flags

Now that you know a bit more about what tools you should utilize while tracking Google Analytics, it’s time to learn about what red flags you should be on the lookout for. If users are visiting your site and leaving after only viewing one page, that indicates a high bounce rate. It may be time to make sure your site is user friendly and entices visitors to hang around for a while. The more time on your page, the better.

Of course, you need site visitors to have a substantial amount of data to track at all, and that won’t be the case if you don’t have many people visiting your site. Directing people to your page is vital so that you can attract as many potential customers as possible and know that your analytics represent a large sample size. Use all of your marketing assets as calls-to-action to your website.

SPARKS! has you covered! For more information about how we can make Google Analytics work for you, please contact SPARKS! Marketing Communications at 866-500-888 or visit https://www.onsparks.com/.

Check back soon for part 3 of our series on how Google Analytics can help take your website to the next level.

What Can Google Analytics Do for You? Part 1

google analytics post oneIt seems like analytics become a bigger part of how people make decisions every day. Their use has never been more present in sports, so why should business be any different?

Companies are realizing that in order to optimize their outreach efforts, they need to be able to use reliable data that tells them how to best allocate their capital. That’s where Google Analytics comes in. But before the service can be used to your advantage, you have to understand exactly what it is and how it functions.

So, What is It?

Simply put, Google Analytics is a web analytics service that helps you track and report website traffic. This information gives you a better understanding of how visitors find and interact with your website. It can also help you manage your digital marketing decisions. It’s also free, so it won’t take up all of your budget. Google Analytics can help your website boost its performance better than any other online tool out there.

Sounds Great, How Does it Work?

Good question. Essentially, Google Analytics uses a tracking code to collect data about who’s coming to your website, where they’re coming from, how long they’re staying, what they’re looking at, and more. Setting up Google Analytics on your site is easy, and something that we can help you with.

Google Analytics uses a cookie placed in the user’s browser to track their visit to your website. This interaction is recorded, and a staggering amount of information can be gathered from it. You don’t just learn surface level information about the user, you know exactly where they accessed your site from and what device they used to get there. Once they’re there, you can track the journey they take through your site, including what pages they went to and how long they were on each one. It’s vital information that will help you better understand what users want from you.

Google Analytics allows you to compare data from previous periods, such as comparing how many visitors you had in April of 2019 versus how many you had in the same month of 2018.  It also shows you what specific channels users reached you through, whether that be organic search (SEO), paid search (PPC), or social media. Want to know how many users are actually following through with what you want them to do on your site and creating a conversion? Google Analytics has you covered.

Seems Pretty Important, Huh?

Absolutely. If your business isn’t taking advantage of all that Google Analytics has to offer, you’re not only passing up an opportunity to learn more about potential customers and clients, you’re also letting your competition get ahead. Being able to use this information to your advantage maximizes the performance of your website and provides the strongest ROI. Discover how effective your online strategies are and whether or not you provide a satisfying user experience so you can build on what’s working or correct what isn’t.

What’s the Catch?

There is no catch. Google Analytics is free, but if you want to take things up a notch there is a Google Analytics 360 option. This option is recommended for larger corporations or companies that feel like they’re reaching the limit of what they can do with the standard Google Analytics service.

There’s no such thing as the perfect platform. Google Analytics relies on JavaScript code and cookies to track information. Unfortunately, not all browsers are compatible with JavaScript, and cookies can be blocked by web browsers and ad blockers.

SPARKS! has you covered! For more information about how we can make Google Analytics work for you, please contact SPARKS! Marketing Communications at 866-500-8088 or visit https://www.onsparks.com/.

Check back soon for part 2 of our series on how Google Analytics can help take your website to the next level.

WordPress Will Usher in the Era of “Happy Publishing” in 2019

It’s been many years since WordPress was simply a site used for blogging, and in 2019 the software language of the company will finally reflect that reality.

With the introduction of WordPress 5.1, the word “publishing” will replace any mention of blogging throughout the platform. The language will be updated in wp-config-sample.php this year. So long, “happy blogging”. Hello, “happy publishing”!

Once upon a time, blogging was the central function of all WordPress sites, but the software’s capabilities have expanded dramatically, and the platform is more dynamic than ever. “WordPress is no longer a simple blogging platform,” wrote Gutenberg and WordPress core contributor Gary Pendergast. “It’s now a comprehensive publishing solution.”

WordPress is a popular and heavily relied upon open-source content management system due in part to its versatility and ability to serve multiple functions. Although it can still be used for something as simple as publishing blog content, it also allows users to perform functions like set up an affiliate shop, create real estate listings, and fundraise. Even better, these functions are accessible to people regardless of whether or not they know how to code because of the software’s user-friendly setup.

That’s not all that WordPress has in store for 2019, though. WordPress core contributor Matt Mullenweg laid out the platform’s priorities for the new year. Allowing users to opt-in to automatic plugin and theme updates, upgrading the widgets-editing areas, creating a block for navigation menus, and making it possible for themes to visually register content areas are all upgrades that WordPress expects to make within the next 12 months.

By changing the website’s language, WordPress is simply making clear what was already true a long time ago. There’s no shortage of functions that the platform can be used for, and its capabilities expand so far beyond simply blogging. Without WordPress, 32% of the web would cease to exist, and as its uses continue to grow and expand, so does the vernacular we use to talk about them.

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iPhone users targeted in phone AND data theft campaign

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When is an iPhone theft not just an iPhone theft? When the user's Apple ID and more, goes with it.
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224 Schilling Circle, Suite 240
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