The Importance of Setting Goals and Tracking Performance in Digital Marketing

The Importance of Setting Goals and Tracking Performance in Digital Marketing

It goes without saying that all successful digital marketing campaigns start with the digital marketing team settling clear goals. Goal inform the details of the marketing campaign plan (how to get to the goal) and illuminate other objectives to reach. However, if a digital marketing team fails to set a goal properly, the campaign is doomed from the start. As such, it is absolutely critical that every digital marketing campaign have clearly defined and achievable goal; that goal is the foundation upon which the rest of the campaign relies.

But setting a goal properly is no easy task. While it may seem simple, specifying the exact objective of a digital marketing campaign is actually one of the hardest parts of planning the campaign. Therefore, it is vital for digital marketing professionals to understand how to form, analyze, and track their goals.

Choose a SMART Goal

Digital marketing campaign goals should be SMART. SMART is an acronym standing for:

Specific means narrow and clearly defined, not vague, and understood fully by all involved. “Improving sales” is too vague, “increasing by 10% the number of blue widgets sold in Florida by the end of the month” is more specific.

Measurable means having an objectively quantifiable or unambiguously qualifiable target to reach. “Selling a lot more blue widgets” is unclear and unmeasurable, since people will have different ideas about what “a lot” entails. “Increasing blue widget sales by 10%” is measurable.

Attainable means being realistic and not excessively ambitious, but still challenging and worth reaching. “Putting a widget in every home in America” is not attainable, “becoming the leading state distributor of widgets” is attainable.

Relevant means being worthwhile, aligning with company or consumer values, and fulfilling needs. “Lobbying Congress to remove environmental regulations” is not relevant, “finding cost-effective green production methods” is.

Timely means having a deadline or end-date that the goal needs to be completed by. “Releasing a new widget” is not timely, “releasing a new widget by Christmas of next year” is, because there is a clear deadline.

SMART goals have been used for decades in the professional and academic world. Until recently, their success was so self-evident that few even bothered to question them. But recent studies have confirmed what many already knew – SMART goals help people work smarter, not harder. In fact, a 2018 study from the National Center for Biotechnology Information, funded by the National Institutes of Health, found that SMART goals can even be helpful in making students smarter. Resident medical students were found to study more after being briefed on SMART goals,

“SMART goals serve as a powerful primer to promote additional self-directed learning,” the study authors wrote in the Western Journal of Emergency Medicine. “This intervention can be readily applied to most simulation debriefing sessions and requires little training to be employed effectively.”

But SMART goals aren’t just for medical students. A number of different digital marketing campaign strategies mesh perfectly with SMART goals, which means that it’s smart to use them for digital marketing teams, too. The examples listed above are just a few of the ways that digital marketers can integrate SMART goals into their campaign plan. To really make SMART goals work well in the digital marketing world, however, KPIs are the place to start.

Getting SMART with KPIs

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) measure success against a specific target. Any objective or numerical goal can function as a KPI. Fortunately, SMART goals usually have key performance indicators built into the first two letters of the acronym. However, it is still important to understand KPIs on a deeper level.. As Forbes puts it:

“Too often owners fail to get an understanding of how their business operates. They fail to log any departmental metrics of their operations throughout the year, and they’re stuck with an idling business wondering where problems lay…KPIs are a pertinent part of measuring the successes and failures of your business.”

Because KPIs are data-driven, they are often tied to financial goals that measure profit margins or revenue. Perhaps the most popular and widely known KPI is net profit: the revenue left from a given period after accounting for all expenses in that same period. For many KPI measurements, net profit is converted to a percentage of revenue called the “net profit margin.”

There are many other KPIs and new ones are invented to measure performance in new situations every day. However, there are some ubiquitous tried and true KPIs that have been used for years across a diverse range of different industries. It is important for digital marketing teams to know what these common KPIs are. Even if these KPIs aren’t useful for a campaign right now, learning about these common KPIs can provide insight for designing or selecting other relevant KPIs (and the more common ones might always come in handy some day in the future). Here are some of the most widespread KPI categories and how they are used:

Customer Metrics. KPIs focused on customers tend to cover customer retention (how many repeat customers a business gets), customer satisfaction (usually based on ratings or reviews from customers) or various measures of productivity/efficiency on a per-customer basis. Some common customer metrics include Customer Lifetime Value, or CLV, which is the total quantity of revenue that a customer gives to a business over the whole lifespan of their relationship with the business, and Customer Acquisition Cost, or CAC, which is the total marketing and sales cost necessary on average to get a new customer. Many businesses also get more perspective by comparing CLV and CAC, which can help determine the efficacy of marketing campaigns that are aimed at acquiring more customers.

Process Performance Metrics. These metrics tend to analyze operational performance in an organization. One example is measuring the efficiency of a production process by dividing the total number of defective products by total product output to find out how much waste is in the process. If a significant portion of products a business makes are defective, then waste is losing the company money and that number needs to get cut down. Process performance metrics are useful for this type of analysis, such as Throughput Time which measures how long a particular process takes to run and complete.

Financial Metrics. Metrics focused on the financial performance of a company are also important. One example of this type of KPI is Burn Rate, or the rate that a company is spending money for a given period of time. Financial metrics vary considerably based on the size and type of company, so Burn Rate KPIs (especially short-term ones that cover periods in the week or month range) are most popular among small companies that cannot undertake extensive, large financial analyses but still want to look at how sustainable their expenditures are.

However, digital marketing offers a whole range of its own KPIs that are based on the unique industry they represent. But before choosing KPIs for a digital marketing campaign and learning what KPIs can do to enhance campaign goal setting, it is crucial to understand what KPIs cannot do.

What are the Limits of KPIs?

Digital marketing teams should keep in mind that KPIs are limited in their efficacy, so they shouldn’t be relied on exclusively as the only type of SMART goal that can be set. Some of their limitations are their requirement for non-stop tracking and monitoring (as well as close follow up) to be useful and the fact that they usually need to be measured over a long time to produce meaningful data. Still, their biggest limitation is their effect on workers. Since KPIs are typically numerical and quantitative, they can ignore the qualitative traits that companies need to thrive. For example, a company maximizing the widgets made per month as a KPI can end up making lower quality widgets that break easily or don’t work as intended. KPIs can also force employees to shoot for unrealistic targets, undermining the point of SMART goals and creating unnecessary stress that damages long-term productivity. Workers that are just chasing after a numeric goal are less happy and less fulfilled, which may make them more likely to leave the company for competitors or other fields entirely.

Perhaps worst of all, KPIs have the potential to lead managers to “game the system” to try and appear to meet their performance targets. Although some level of “cooking the books” is an unfortunately widespread practice in many organizations, poorly designed and implemented KPIs can turn minor number tweaking into total falsification, which can spell death for any organization big or small. The importance of getting KPIs right shouldn’t be underestimated; historically it has led to the collapse of entire nations. One classic example is the Soviet Union. After Stalin seized power in the late 1920s, he implemented a series of “Five Year Plans” that were meant to rapidly industrialize the USSR which was still reeling from World War One, the two bloody revolutions and a civil war that followed, and a crushing economic crisis. Five Year Plans, interestingly, made use of KPIs – managers of factories and collective farms were given production targets that had to be supported with measurable data.

During the Five Year Plans, goal success was measured exclusively using these production quotas, and they were the end-all, be-all of the plan. However, the quotas were usually set far too high, and were sometimes impossible to meet. By the 1930s, the pressure to reach production quotas was so high that managers routinely falsified their numbers. As the British National Archives describes it:

“If workers did not achieve their targets, they were punished. Desperate factory managers fiddled the books or committed suicide as the pressure to produce more and more became too great. If the workers succeeded in reaching targets, they might be rewarded with increased wages. But usually their targets were increased as well [leading to] problems with wastage and inefficiency in the plans.”

The lesson here is that the more unrealistic the goal is and the more pressure workers are under to meet it, the more likely they are to fabricate results. As such, when building KPIs into a goal, it is critical to ensure that the goal is reachable and that there are not excessive consequences for failing to meet it. It is almost always better to reward people for meeting KPI goals than to punish them for failing to reach the target. Another important lesson is that significantly raising KPI targets because workers reached the previous target can backfire. The USSR isn’t the only place this this has happened – in the U.S. federal government has this problem too. The “use it or lose it” approach – where agencies risk future budget cuts if they don’t use their entire yearly budget – has led to serious wasteful spending. It is counterproductive to punish people with budget cuts or drastically higher productivity targets. Finally, KPIs should never be the totality of any goal or plan, but rather be used as an objective indicator that helps paint a larger picture. Other methods of goal measurement should be implemented to compensate for the limitations of KPIs.

“Despite having multiple KPIs,” according to Forbes, “every report should tie together into a single flash for the business as a whole. Not every KPI measures the overall performance of the business. They don’t show the totality of a project’s performance.”

What KPIs Work Best for Digital Marketing Campaigns?

For digital marketing campaigns, KPIs are based more on the digital world than the financial or customer service world. While all these areas are of course still important, there are unique circumstances in the digital marketing industry that have led to innovative new ways to measure success. One of those circumstances is social media, and the way individuals can express themselves and tailor the content of their feeds. As such, digital marketing campaign KPIs are as varied and curated as the customers the campaigns are trying to reach. Still, there are some broad goals and KPIs that are often used to measure the success of digital marketing campaigns, such as:

Digital Marketing Return on Investment. Most people who have worked in the business world are familiar with return on investment (ROI), but digital marketing teams face the unique challenge of clients asking “how do we know all this digital marketing stuff even works?” Fortunately, digital marketing return on investment is the answer to that question. Calculating digital marketing ROI is easy as long as the digital marketing team can figure out what new revenue to attribute to their efforts. The equation for calculating this metric is: (Total Revenue From Digital Marketing – Total Digital Marketing Cost) / (Total Digital Marketing Cost)

Conversion Rate. The term conversion refers to users completing a desired action, such as creating an online account, signing up for a free trial, or downloading a file. The importance of conversion lies in the data it generates; every conversion is another entry in a marketing database that helps further analysis. Conversion rate is the percentage of users in a given period of time who complete the action desired and is calculated like this: (Conversions / Total Visitors) x 100%

Cost Per Click (CPC). One of the most common KPIs in digital marketing is CPC, the price paid for each click users make, typically on ads. CPC is useful for measuring the effectiveness of a digital marketing campaign and is commonly used in display campaigns. It illustrates not just whether a campaign is generating clicks, but also whether those clicks are worth the cost of the campaign. It is also useful for comparison between different campaigns. CPC is calculated simply by dividing cost of an ad by total clicks.

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). CPA is the average cost in marketing and sales for every new customer acquired during a campaign. It is a critical digital marketing KPI since it can make or break a campaign; campaigns that fail to acquire customers efficiently will inevitably be abandoned. CPA doesn’t apply in all circumstances, though. It is most useful when the goal of a campaign is acquiring customers that will have high lifetime value, rather than campaigns that aim to facilitate one-time sales. CPA can be calculated in two ways. The first equation is: (Total Ad Cost) / (Total Conversions). The second is: (Marketing Costs + Sales Costs) / (Number of Customers Acquired).

Cost Per Conversion (CPCon). Though similar to CPA, CPCon is a broader metric. While acquisitions refer specifically to gaining a customer, anything can be called a conversion (a sale, a lead, a download, a subscription to a newsletter, etc.) so CPCon takes a bit of a wider view. It varies and is defined by the business model and type of campaign it’s measuring. CPCon is also calculated in two possible ways, first: (Cost) / (Conversions). Note that in this first equation the term “cost” is vague; that is because the costs being used to calculate CPCon will also vary from campaign to campaign. The second equation is: (CPC) / (Conversion Rate).

Cost Per Lead (CPL). Although it can be tempting to look at the raw number of leads to measure success, that isn’t enough to mark the success of a digital marketing campaign. Lead acquisition costs have to be low enough to maintain a good margin and show significant growth. That’s where CPL comes in. It can be calculated as: (Total Campaign Cost) / (Number of Leads)

Revenue Per Lead (RPL). Measuring CPL is good, but it’s important to consider the other side of things and look at the approximate sales value for each new lead. This metric allows digital marketing teams to predict their future sales based on conversion rates and expected traffic. It also helps reveal where the most profitable leads come from so the team can allocate resources effectively and reinvest in those more profitable channels. It can be calculated as: (Total Revenue Attributed to Campaign) / (Number of Leads)

Email Clickthrough Rate (ECTR). In email marketing campaigns, the email clickthrough rate measures the target audience’s engagement. It shows whether an email is actually getting customers to take a desired action and can help the team discover what aspects of an email do and do not work. It can be calculated as: (Number of Clicks) / (Number of Emails Successfully Delivered) x 100%

Email Open Rate (EOR). It is one thing to measure ECTR and know how many people are taking a desired action, but it is important to compare ECTR to EOR. Why? Because some members of the campaign’s target audience will open an email and then not click through. EOR also shows how effective the email subject lines are at grabbing the attention of potential customers. A big difference between ECTR and EOR demonstrates that an email has an eye-catching title, but the content of the email might be failing to get customers to take the desired action. EOR can be calculated as: (Emails Opened) / (Number of Emails Successfully Delivered). However, it is worth noting that tracking of email open rate is achieved through the use of an invisible pixel on the email which, when downloaded in the email client, informs the email service provided that the email has been opened. In June 2021 Apple announced that, with iOS15, the iPhone mail app would no longer support this type of email open tracking in a bid to assure users that Apple valued user privacy. As of this writing, the impact of this change is not yet clear.

Bounce Rate. Of course, not all emails are delivered successfully. Sometimes things go wrong, such as the email list having incorrect or invalid emails. A high Bounce Rate means it is time to clean up the email list and potentially get more email addresses. The Bounce Rate can be calculated as: (Emails Sent – Emails Delivered) / (Total Emails Sent) x 100%

Cost Per Install (CPI). There are few metrics more significant for mobile app owners to measure than CPI. It is a way of measuring the number of paid installs against organic installs. For companies that are trying to extend their existing business into the mobile world, CPI is a critical indicator of where they need to invest to make sure mobile marketing is effective and reaches out to their target customer base. CPI can be calculated as: (Total Ad Cost) / (Total Installs).

After creating a digital marketing plan and selecting the main KPI metrics that will measure its success, it is time to choose what tool to measure them with.

Choosing Analytics Tools

There are a number of different platforms to manage digital and social media analytics. They fall into three categories: web & SEO tools, social media tools, and email marketing tools.

Web & SEO Analytics Tools

Search Engine Optimization and web analysis is difficult and complex, but fortunately there is an abundance of different tools to help assess the success of efforts in these areas. Here are some of the biggest ones:

Google Analytics. By far the most popular, Google Analytics runs on a freemium model provided directly by Google to help digital marketing teams track various metrics about traffic and other web performance measures. The basic version is free, but the premium version (Google Analytics 360) has a number of additional features that many find well worth the cost.

Google Search Console. This program, which is a part of Google Analytics, offers in-depth SEO reports when linked to a Google Analytics account. The service is completely free to use and does much of the SEO-based analysis that Google Analytics doesn’t offer.

HubSpot. For those looking for inbound marketing and automation, HubSpot can be used to track website traffic, social media channels, landing pages, inbound marketing, calls to action, and more. HubSpot is especially geared toward B2B companies.

Moz. One of the more comprehensive platform for web analytics, Moz offers a broad range of tools for virtually everything a digital marketing team would need to do, including: keyword analysis, SEO competition, SERP features, search volume data, and more.

ClickMeter. As a single virtual platform, ClickMeter aims to be a one-stop shop for businesses seeking to analyze and optimize their marketing links and conversion rates. If Moz is a toolbox, ClickMeter is a comprehensive multi-tool.

SimilarWeb. SimilarWeb is a platform that allows businesses to compare their website to competitors around the world, discover what sources drive traffic to any website (search inquiries, social media, referrals, etc.), and analyze target customer base interests. SimilarWeb has the unique advantage of allowing digital marketing teams to see the organic and paid keywords – even the “Google not-provided” ones – of any website.

Crazy Egg. With a number of unique tools such as Heat Map, Scroll Map, Overlay, and Confetti, Crazy Egg allows heatmap tracking of website usage. Crazy Egg is notable for its visualization features, making it easier to understand the data without getting buried in numbers. Crazy Egg also offers A/B Testing and other editing tools that are designed to help businesses build and modify content features for success.

Ahrefs. Unlike its competitors, Ahrefs is made for maximum ease of use and minimal navigation. A paid SEO software suite, it has various tools for rank tracking, link building, keyword analysis, competitor analysis, and website audits. For many businesses, the biggest draw for Ahrefs is that it is designed specifically to learn why competitors rank highly. Getting that inside information can give companies an edge by showing them what they have to do in order to outrank the competition.

Social Media Marketing Analytics Tools

Social media marketing can seem deceptively simple, but a deeper look reveals that there is much more than meets the eye. There are a handful of good programs to help dig in and gather metrics so help you engage social media users better.

Facebook Business Manager – Facebook Business Manager is your control console for paid Facebook and Instagram marketing campaigns. In Business Manager you’ll build you creatives, add your copy and calls-to-action, set campaign targeting, and set the goals for the campaign. You’ll be able to track progress to goal and see engagement with your paid Facebook promotions.

AdEspresso. Hootsuite’s latest social media management suite, AdEspresso offers a wide range of helpful tools that provide real-time social media performance metrics. Some of the analytics it includes are: engagement, clicks, follow/unfollow statistics, mentions, and the performance of the social media team in responding to visitor messages and comments.

Socialbakers Social Media Analytics. A completely free collection of cutting edge social media analytics tools, Socialbakers is designed to measure social media performance against competitors. It is built on the idea of multi-channel publishing, social media listening, and analyzing competing companies’ social media accounts to learn from them.

Buffer. It can be exhausting to try and keep up with all the different social media accounts that a modern business can have, but Buffer helps by providing a platform to manage them all in one place. Buffer helps social media and digital marketing teams schedule content and publish it automatically, get analytics insights for all social media accounts, and understand how to improve performance. It also has the unique bonus feature of creating reports for managers and clients with pre-designed templates.

Email Marketing Analytics

Email marketing is like Pong: easy to learn, but hard to master. Email marketing analytics fall into several basic categories:

Email service providers (ESPs) – ESPs are the tools you use to design and send out your email marketing. They range from simple, easy to use tools like MailChimp and Constant Contact, up to more sophisticated ESPs like Salesforce and Marketo. ESP analytics generally cover open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate and bounce rate. ESP analytics will also include details on which links or buttons were clicked and some insight into deliverability.

UTM codes – Putting UTM codes on your email CTAs (calls to action) allows you to track how well each CTA does in driving traffic to your site. Using Google’s UTM code builder is the easiest way to generate logical UTM codes. You’ll track UTM codes in your site’s Google Analytics dashboard.

Email deliverability – Deliverability has to do with whether or not your outbound email marketing is being received and, if so, in what tab. If you have a Gmail account you know it has three tabs: Primary, Social and Promotion. Of course, every email marketer would like their outbound email offers to land in recipients’ Primary tabs, but can be difficult to achieve. Use Google Postmaster to monitor your IP and mailing domain reputation for recipients’ Gmail accounts. To assess deliverability across all email clients you can use a tool like Glockapps which will send test emails and measure whether they are delivered or blocked in Yahoo, Gmail, AOL, and more.

Email rendering – Every email client will read your email code slightly differently. This means that your email will look different depending on whether it is received by Gmail, Outlook, AOL, Yahoo, or others. And your email will also look different on an iPhone, Android phone, laptop, desktop, or tablet. Tool like Litmus and Email on Acid will test your email designs across all email clients and viewport sizes to give you clear metrics on how it will look.

Making Digital Marketing Campaigns Work

Often, the reason that digital marketing campaigns don’t succeed is not that they lack quality, creativity, or skilled team members. The actual reason that many campaigns fail is that they do not set the right goals and track the campaign’s performance.

LNP Media Group is a leading Lancaster digital agency with the staff to do all of your digital campaign management in-house. We work with businesses across the Harrisburg-Lebanon-Lancaster-York area as well as businesses up and down in the east coast. During a marketing planning and strategy session we’ll set SMART goals for your campaigns to ensure their success. And, following campaign deployment, we’ll continue to be your partner in mid-campaign optimization and post-campaign analysis. Contact us today for a free consultation.

3 Tips To Boost Back-To-School Sales

3 Tips To Boost Back-To-School Sales

An integral component of a well-rounded back-to-school marketing plan involves reaching your target audience at the right time, repeatedly, through various ad channels. As can be expected, notebooks and backpacks are still commonplace for any back-to-school list, but an independent study by Deloitte indicated clothing and accessories account for 55% or more of back-to-school purchases. Students and their parents are also stocking up on things like beauty services, sports accessories, and plants. Whether or not your business offers the typical back-to school items, your business can benefit from shoppers’ need to get ready for the new school season. So how do businesses capitalize on this opportunity?

Right Time, Right Place

Businesses need to consider how back-to-school audiences shop and where they’ll intercept your messages:

  • A study by the News Media Alliance found that eight in ten adults with children not only used the newspaper, they also took some action as a result of an ad in a print newspaper in the past month.
  • This highlights the fact that if your messages reach your target audience, you have the ability to directly influence the actions of buyers. Leverage your various marketing channels to create motivation for back-to-school shoppers to buy your products.

Appeal to Emotions

Consumerism begins and ends with emotion and back to school-shoppers, like the rest of us, are emotional spenders. Emotions create an opportunity for you to draw in your ideal market and drive revenue. Tapping into a buyer’s mindset is what will enable you to successfully market your products to this crowd:

  • As a business owner, think about the products you sell and why they appeal to your customers. Are your products fulfilling a basic need or do they fall into the category of non-essential wants?
  • Your mission is to connect the dots for buyers by illustrating how your products will fulfill their needs.
  • A salon owner, for instance, can appeal to anyone looking to start the new school year with a fresh, new haircut. A technology retailer can feature the latest tablet covers that allow students to personalize their tech.

Be an Early Bird

Businesses that attract shoppers early earn a greater portion of back to school sales:

  • According to a survey by Deloitte, consumers who began their back-to-school shopping in August spent an average of $458 on back-to-school items.
  • If you plan ahead, executing your marketing strategy at the right time will help you increase your profits without doing extra work.

Ready to begin your back-to-school advertising campaign? Our marketing experts are happy to help you develop a well-rounded plan from start to finish. We love working with local business owners to create customized plans that suit their needs. Contact us today to get started!

How to Target the Right Audience on Facebook

How to Target the Right Audience on Facebook

By Tiffany  Anderson   

If you don’t already know the value of Facebook advertising, it’s OK. The good news is that it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down in the near future. In fact, the ad manager platform frequently launches new updates intended to create a better user experience.

Businesses can now promote content with a few simple clicks but if you don’t understand the targeting opportunities beyond what boosted posts have to offer, you could be wasting money. We’ve collected a few stats from Facebook’s ad manager to give you a preview of the targeting potential in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

Facebook users in Lancaster County Pennsylvania

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Our infographic illustrates just a few of the 200+ targeting options businesses can use to increase their local reach. January reports showed that nearly 70% of the county’s population 18 years and older are active on Facebook. Before you assume this isn’t the right advertising tool for your business, the ad manager allows us to check the potential reach before spending any money. You may be pleasantly surprised by the numbers!

Here are the best Facebook targeting strategies every ad manager should take advantage of.

Custom Audiences

If you have a list of customer emails, upload them to your audience profile. This presents an opportunity to nurture your audience, develop brand loyalty, promote order frequency, and increase the lifetime customer value.

Lookalike Audiences

Who better to target than the friends of your current customers? You can create a “lookalike” audience from a custom audience, conversion tracking pixel, or business page followers. How does it work? First, Facebook scans the active accounts of the source to identify similar qualities based on demographics, interests, and behaviors. Then, those qualities are matched with the friends of the users from the source and curated into a new lookalike audience list.

Location Targeting

This is one targeting option that is pretty easy to overlook. Besides having the option to target locations by country, state, address, and mile radius; there is one selection advertisers should think twice about before starting their campaign. It’s that little drop down box beside the Locations field where “everyone in this location” is preselected. Depending on your business and/or offer, this may not be the most efficient way to spend. When you look at the drop down options (everyone in, living in, recently in, and traveling in this location), you may find at least one of the three groups that make up the default selection does not apply to your target audience.

A home cleaning business, for example, wouldn’t benefit by targeting people who do not live within their service area. A local attraction, however, would see value in targeting people who live in the area and are traveling near their location. In this instance, an advertiser can create different ads that are unique to residents and visitors.

Detailed/Layered Targeting

This is level audience targeting is not available in boosted posts so pay close attention because it can help save you money! There are so many scenarios where this hypertargeting tool comes in handy but let’s pretend we are marketing a new fast and fresh meal option to working moms with small children.

It’s not enough to simply add those selections in one layer because you won’t be targeting the right audience. Without narrowing your selections, you will be targeting all working moms no matter what age their children are and all moms with small children who may or may not be working.  Detailed targeting allows us to exclude or narrow selections to further define your most desired audiences.

Purchase Behaviors

Facebook’s partnerships with big data companies offer advertisers with a whole new set of targeting options based on the buying habits of users. From DIYers, coupon users, fashionistas and consumers of just about any type of product you can think of, there is bound to be a selection relevant to your offer.

Life Events

Some businesses, like jewelers, can benefit greatly from Facebook’s life events selections. Life events is a collection of user data that helps advertisers target people in new relationships, who are newly engaged, have an anniversary coming up, started a new job, and more. This feature gives us the unique ability to capture and convert customers at opportune times.

With the amount of information Facebook collects on their users, to say they know more about you than your best friend wouldn’t be totally far-fetched for some. As scary as it may sound, they are committed to transparency and respecting user privacy. Advertisers will never gain access to personally identifiable information of their target audience unless it is willingly submitted by an individual in response to a call-to-action campaign.

Are you ready to explore the opportunities Facebook has in store for you? Create customized ads for niche audiences, build better connections, and measure campaign effectiveness. For help getting started, contact us!

LNP Media Group is committed to delivering exceptional experiences to our audiences, our customers, our vendors and our employees throughout Lancaster County and Central Pennsylvania. We provide value to our marketing and advertising partners by building effective and innovative solutions and by delivering exemplary customer experiences.
LNP Media Group is a division of Steinman Communications, one of the largest and most experienced communications companies in the Mid-Atlantic. Steinman Communications is an innovative, multi-channel communications company that delivers high-quality news, information and entertainment to diverse audiences.
Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing

The Power of Social Media

We don’t need to sell you on the importance of social media. With more people on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and X (formerly known as Twitter) than ever before, social media marketing has rapidly become one of the most effective tools for targeted digital marketing. Social platforms have the unique advantage of collecting interests, job titles, and demographic data on users through their social profiles and their engagement with content within the platform. The digital experts at LNP Media Group have designed hundreds of successful social media campaigns for a wide variety of use cases and are ready to take your business’s social media marketing to the next level.

Still on the fence?

Not sure if a social media campaign is right for your business? Check out our case studies to see what we’ve done for our clients through social media. Want to talk to a member of our team for more information? Contact us and we’ll answer any questions you have and work with you to develop the right campaign for your needs.

What you Receive

Transparent Reports

We’ll measure the performance of your social media ad campaigns by tracking all clicks, views, shares, and conversions. We also use proven ad optimization techniques and A/B testing to improve your return on investment (ROI) so that you get the most out of your campaign. Using tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and Facebook’s Business Manager, we’ll accurately track your campaign metrics and provide you with a detailed report upon your campaign’s completion.

Advanced Audience Targeting

Using Facebook’s targeting capabilities, our team can identify consumers most likely to make purchases from your business. Your Facebook and Instagram ads will be presented to this targeted audience. We use demographics, interests, hobbies, location, behaviors, and more to identify the individuals most likely to convert.

Creative, Consistent Content

We develop and execute social media campaigns that align with your brand and keep your messaging consistent. We will creatively engage potential customers based on your goals and send them to your website, social media page, or a customized landing page. Our campaigns will ask them to fill out a form, sign up to receive your email newsletters, enter a contest, take a quiz/poll, or engage with your business in a variety of other ways.

Landing Pages

Our custom landing pages are designed to enhance conversion-driven campaigns. Landing pages may include forms to capture leads and user data. Your email or retargeting ads can click through to a coordinated landing page that will feature a clear call-to-action and engaging content to drive conversions. We offer custom landing page design for any type of digital marketing campaign.

A custom landing page can aid any digital marketing campaign

Results Matter

You want to be sure that you’re investing with a company that is knowledgeable and has a history of success. Our results speak for themselves; our clients love their experience with LNP Media Group. Check out our case studies for more examples of our clients’ successes.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I do my own social media marketing?

Social media marketing has rapidly developed from simple posts to complex campaigns designed to reach specific target markets. You can’t rely on just creating organic social media posts because they only reach about 6% of your fans. And, boosting a post has only limited targeting options. True social media marketing requires knowledge and expertise in digital design, Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Facebook Business Manager, and audience development. We have the expertise to create a cohesive social media campaign that will reach tens of thousands of people in your exact target market.

Will social media marketing work for my type of business?

If your customers use the internet, we think so! A portion of nearly every business’s customer base uses social media. By advertising on these platforms you can target people whose interests most closely align with your business.

Which platforms should I use?

There is no one-size-fits-all solution to this question. Choosing the right social media platform for your business depends on your goals, your target audience, and on the products and services you offer. If you’re not sure which platform to choose, contact our team to discuss your goals and get advice on which platform will best suit your marketing needs

How much should I spend on social media marketing?
Social media is a “pay to play” platform. This means that the more money you spend, the more your ads will be displayed to users. By starting out with a smaller amount, we can assess the impact your ad spend is having and adjust from there. Once we help you identify what works best, we can optimize the amount you’re spending to get the most impact for your money.

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The Secrets to Getting More People into Your Restaurant

The Secrets to Getting More People into Your Restaurant

Good Food Starts with High-Volume Marketing

You have great food. Your restaurant looks good. And you finally got the back of the house into working order. All you’re missing are the crowds of hungry patrons. While Lancaster County is famous for having more than its fair share of outstanding eating options, not all restaurants are experiencing the same levels of success.

With so many great options available for diners, Lancaster restaurants need more than word of mouth to keep momentum going. In this super-competitive marketplace, smart advertising can make the difference between busy kitchens and layoffs.

Start with Awareness MarketingEvery Thursday over 40,000 households turn to Entertainment Lancaster to plan their weekends.

You need to reach large numbers of people without paying a fortune. LNP Media Group offers a variety of media options developed especially for restaurants. In addition to vibrant newspaper options and the area’s most visited website, LNP Media also publishes several specialty publications that can also increase awareness. Each Thursday L
NP publishes Entertainment Lancaster, also know as EL, which is the area’s most comprehensive guide to weekend activities, destinations and events. Fly After 5 targets people in Lancaster County looking for exciting nightlife options, including restaurants, festivals and drinks. LNP Media Group also offers Spanish-language ads in LaVoz, the county’s only Spanish-language newspaper. There are so many ways to reach the patrons you’re looking for. We can help you make smart choices that make sense for your business and your bottom line. Contact us to find out more.

IFly Magazinenvest in Photography

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but for restaurant owners, it may actually be worth more. Today’s restaurant patrons not only look at photos of food online, they may be posting some of their own! Make sure you supplement their amateur photos with a professional shots of your own. Lancaster County has dozens of young photographers who are both eager to work and affordable. Once you upgrade your food photography, your ads will work better, your social media will get more attention and the perceptions of your restaurant and its food will skyrocket.

If you’re not ready for a website, spend some time with your Facebook page.

Many restaurants skip the website, and honestly, in today’s digital universe, that’s okay. But it’s not okay to treat a Facebook page like a website. You can’t set it and forget it, or update it twice a year. Facebook pages require regular content. We recommend creating new posts daily. You should be promoting new menu items, changes in hours, talk about how you handle food allergies, features shots of guests and employees, and generally create a daily conversation. Facebook pages that look and feel like abandoned property reflect poorly on your establishment.

Advertise on Facebook and Instagram

A few years ago, Facebook purchased Instagram. Now you can place ads on both platforms that are geographically targeted. You can also refine your ad delivery by specifying people of a certain age, gender or interest. Want to promote new gluten-free menu items? Facebook and Instagram can send ads only to people concerned about gluten allergies. Have a pricey menu? Just send ads to higher income groups in Lancaster County. You may be surprised by the ease and cost of these new media. LNP Media Group’s experiences social media experts can help make the most of your campaigns by creating and placings ads, creating special promotional landing pages and even creating and monitoring content.

You Have Dozens of Marketing Options

LNP Media Group offers a variety of print and online publications. We offer a wide range of digital marketing tools and social media content and advertising opportunities. If you haven’t talked to an LNP Media Group representative lately, you may be surprised at how flexible and affordable our offerings can be. Contact us today and let’s get reacquainted.

LNP Media Group is committed to delivering exceptional experiences to our audiences, our customers, our vendors and our employees throughout Lancaster County and Central Pennsylvania. We provide value to our marketing and advertising partners by building effective and innovative solutions and by delivering exemplary customer experiences.
LNP Media Group is a division of Steinman Communications, one of the largest and most experienced communications companies in the Mid-Atlantic. Steinman Communications is an innovative, multi-channel communications company that delivers high quality news, information and entertainment to diverse audiences.

 

 

Marketing Tips for Home and Holiday Retailers

Marketing Tips for Home and Holiday Retailers

Fourth Quarter is Just Around the Corner. Are You Ready?

For businesses in the home and holiday markets, July is truly the calm before the storm. While home décor and holiday sales are traditionally very slow in July and August, September heralds the return of the hordes of eager shoppers. They’re ready to outfit their home for the cold weather and make this the best holiday season ever.  

It’s no secret that fourth quarter can make or break a home fashion or holiday business. It makes sense to start planning your fourth quarter marketing strategies early. We can help.

The Goal is Top-of-Mind Awareness

When you think of phones, which brands come to mind? When you’re considering a new vehicle, which brands do you look at first? The brands that popped into your head have top-of-mind awareness with you. They are the brands you think of first when you think of that category.

Top-of-mind awareness is one of the most powerful marketing goal. Think of your best customers today. They come to your store often. They don’t complain (much) about price. They’re loyal. You have already achieved top-of-mind awareness with those people. Wouldn’t it be great if you could create the same kind of awareness with hundreds, even thousands, of new customers? This Fall your business goals should go beyond creating awareness. You want to create top-of-mind awareness.

Here in Lancaster County LNP Media Group offers a variety of ways to create top-of-mind awareness. We all know newspaper offers a highly visual medium. But did you know that LNP readers tend to be 40+ homeowners with families and above average income? For many home and holiday marketers, that’s the sweet spot.Lancaster County Consumer Advertising

That’s why, every Fall, LNP Media Group creates special Fall home sections developed to engage homeowners looking for ways to make this season the best one ever. Contact us to discover all the ways these special advertising opportunities can help your home and holiday business.

Combine the Reach of Print with the Laser-Focus of Digital

Nothing beats LNP for creating brand awareness, but if you want to combine your awareness campaign with super-targeted digital ads, we’ve got some great tools to help drive traffic into your door at the right time. LNP Media Group offers geo-fencing, a relatively new technology that pushes your ads out to customers’ mobile devices when they’re close to your store. That means they’re g
oing to be reminded of your business when they’re already in the neighborhood.

We also help businesses create special promotional landing pages, social and internet ads and help push those ads out to the targeted audiences that are most likely to purchase your goods. Be sure to contact us so our team can explain all the exciting digital options to your business.

Promotional Marketing

Even the most loyal customer needs an occasional push to get them to shop at your business. Break through shopping apathy with exciting promotions and sales. While nothing moves people to action like super low prices, if you want to maintain margins, you may want to consider fun, thematic promotions that pique curiosity and encourage foot traffic. It requires your business to think creatively and get a little less predictable. Have a sale on everything orange. Run a scratch and win promotion. Unveil new merchandise at an invitation-only event.

And then promote it creatively with things like digital landing pages, social media ads and geo-fenced mobile ads. Fourth quarter is a time to make big, bold moves, so be creative and try moving outside of your comfort zone.

We’re Ready to Rock the Fourth Quarter

LNP Media Group is continually growing and adding new, exciting technologies to our suite of marketing and media products. If you have talked to us lately, fourth quarter is the time to get reacquainted. Give us a call and we’ll help you make this your best fourth quarter ever.

LNP Media Group is committed to delivering exceptional experiences to our audiences, our customers, our vendors and our employees throughout Lancaster County and Central Pennsylvania. We provide value to our marketing and advertising partners by building effective and innovative solutions and by delivering exemplary customer experiences.
LNP Media Group is a division of Steinman Communications, one of the largest and most experienced communications companies in the Mid-Atlantic. Steinman Communications is an innovative, multi-channel communications company that delivers high quality news, information and entertainment to diverse audiences.