January's Top Questions — Answered!

Happy new year from the Soup team!

We’ve had an array of interesting things happening in the digital marketing area recently, so we’ve answered all the most commonly asked questions by our clients and staff in January as well as a few updates, so you’re aware of changes moving forward.

What’s the difference between Marketing and Sales?

While marketing and sales teams share the same common goals, like increasing brand awareness, converting leads and maximising revenue. Ultimately, both teams have very different functions.?

Marketing works towards a? “one-to-many'' approach to a greater scale of audiences whilst sales works at a more personal “one-to-one” level converting leads. Essentially, the main overarching aim in marketing is to position the brand and nurture a high-quality audience long-term. Whereas the sales team works to fulfill short-term conversion targets.?

Marketing and sales teams use different strategies to engage with current and potential customers and knowing the difference between them and understanding how they work together is key to pushing your business in the long run. We’ve outlined some key differences in the table below for clarity.

What marketing strategies do we recommend for startups?

Often when working with startups their initial focus is understandably directly on their product or service, with hard value metrics front of mind. With all the competing needs that come with rapid initial growth and pressure from investors, the marketing default is likely to be concentrated on brand function.?

In general what we recommend is a more brand persona approach, positioning your offerings in a way that communicates the human elements of your brand. With a greater focus on experience, tone, emotional connections and the broader impacts of your offerings in customers' daily lives.?

For a tech startup, current research regarding branding techniques from Hotwire Australia and The University of Sydney Business School reveals that emotional marketing was sparse and there were consistent design themes across the board.???

With the market competition vying for time and attention it’s key to use disruptive and consumer-centric strategies across all of your brand marketing activities. We offer tailored advice for different industries and free digital marketing audits if you would like a taste of more personalised marketing strategies for your startup.?

How can you leverage social proof in your digital strategy?

Social proof is one of the most powerful psychological effects at play in marketing, it can be used to increase conversion rate, address customer concerns and develop trust in your brand.?

We know that 95% of online shoppers read reviews before making a purchase and 70% of mobile shoppers are more likely to buy something if they can easily access reviews on their devices.?

It's clear that reviews are a crucial aspect of the shopping experience and should be incorporated across all of your channels. Depending on your industry, reviews can be leveraged in specific ways. For instance, retail and e-commerce clients can inject social proof into the customer journey on websites by adding customer reviews to product pages, displaying testimonials on your homepage, using sales notifications when an item is purchased or by displaying a “People who bought this, also bought..” product recommendation selection. For other industries or more specific advice, contact our Website Design specialists.

Creating choice closure after sales is vital for nurturing customer satisfaction and you can support this by incorporating social proof in your post-purchase emails. Signal social proof by referencing past reviews, the number of the same items purchased or by re-affirming their purchased item is a “best seller”. If you haven’t set up Email Marketing campaigns and automations or want to update yours contact our team today.

To address customer concerns we recommend displaying a Customer Questions and Answers section on websites to provide highly detailed product and service information. Select questions from surveys, forms and past feedback to ensure your addressing the right things. A hot tip is to develop Social Media Marketing content and UGC to showcase these questions and answers.?

Should I secure the .au domain name for my business?

Not everyone is aware that last year simpler domain names were launched for Australian businesses, organisations and individuals. Australian websites and email addresses that may be using .com or .com.au or .net.au can apply for the domain name .au creating a new opportunity for signaling locality. Research by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia shared that over half of Australian shoppers want to buy locally sourced or locally produced products.?

This new domain name is short and easily connects consumers to local sites and is a reflection of reliability and security, with a formal licensing process to secure the domain.?

Changing to a .au domain name may have positive impacts on your search engine rankings if you have physical locations and exclusively serve a geographic area in Australia. If you’re unsure of the impact on your business, ask our SEO Management specialists for tailored advice.?

What should I look for in a good agency?

The idea of reviewing and comparing different digital marketing agencies can be daunting.

?Marketing agencies can have a range of different specialties with some offering just SEO, content marketing, and other services. Whereas others may have a range of different channels on offer, it is ideal to keep all of your services under one agency.?

Why do you ask? Because every channel’s learnings can benefit your other channels. Google Search Ads can influence your SEO plan, and Meta performance could benefit your Google Display ads. However, when separating these with multiple agencies, the wins from one channel cannot be leveraged by the other.

Look for an agency that provides the services you’re looking for, shows you that they care for your business and leaves you feeling like you have complete faith and trust in their process.?

At Soup, we offer a full range of digital marketing channels so that you’re able to target different channels at the right time without having to outsource, an experienced and integrated team that works together to reach your objectives the best we can and innovative solutions (we’ve even won an award for that!).

I want to make some marketing changes moving into the new year, what would you suggest?

If you’re planning on taking new digital marketing strategies into the new year, get in touch with Soup Agency specialists today or visit our website to receive a FREE digital audit or strategy session in person or via video chat with no obligations.

Learn more at https://www.soupagency.com.au/.