Looking for tips and advice on digital marketing, web development, branding or pretty much anything that helps your business to grow? Then check out the Cloud9 Marketing blog!

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Productivity Apps To Get Things Done

Productivity is personal. Whether you’re looking for a way to take better notes or track your hours at work, it’s time to take advantage of technology to do more in less time. You don’t have to look any further than your computer or smartphone to make simple and easy improvements for both in the office and at home.

Here are five apps that increase productivity in your everyday life:

1. Hive

How we use it: Project management

Why we love it: Hive’s productivity platform is one of the best project management tools on the market. Team members can check their to-do lists, communicate with one another in real-time, collaborate on schedules, share files, and check up on the latest project progress. When synced with Hive’s desktop and web applications, the mobile app provides yet another way to improve work ethic and productivity throughout the day.

Cost: Free to download. Hive Teams begins at $12/month per user.
Hive Solo is free forever for up to 2 users.

Download For: iOs, Android / Desktop

 

2. Todoist

How we use it: A time-management app that’s a great choice for small teams

Why we love it: Todoist is a simple task manager app that allows you to record and group tasks together based on projects. Todoist provides functionality in time management and to-do lists, with an element of project management. Despite its multiple features and uses, the tool remains easy to use. This makes collaborating with teams over multiple projects a breeze, and for us, visual learners; shows deliverables at a glance.

Cost: Free for the basic version (limited projects)
Premium version is $3.99 monthly or $35.99 annually

Download For: iOS, Android, Mac / Windows Desktop

 

3. Google Docs

How we use it: Collaborating on documents

Why we love it: Google Docs is one of the best tools for sharing documents and collaborating in real-time. This online word processor eliminates the need to save and send files back and forth when writing and editing a document. Depending on your settings, projects can be shared inside and outside of your organization. Google Sheets has similar benefits, such as the ability to import CSV into Google Sheets, which lets you keep all of your documents in one online hub.

Cost: Free

Download For: iOS / Android

 

4. Sprout Social

How we use it: Social Scheduling

Why we love it: Sprout Social is a comprehensive tool that lets companies schedule posts and campaigns across all of their social channels. View all the planned posts in a single comprehensive calendar, which is extremely helpful for aligning your campaigns, organizing your social media channels, and seeing the bigger picture. This format allows for easy communication between channels in the inbox, as well as access to post analytics.

Cost: Free 30 day trial.
The professional plan starts at $89 per month for 5 accounts managed by one login. Prices go up from there.

Download For: iOS / Android

 

5. Last Pass

Now it’s time to give your customer a name and a face. This might be strange, but it will help crystalize the idea of the ‘human’ you will later create content and other marketing materials for. Browse through stock images and see if you can find a picture to associate with him. Do not use images of actual people, find AI-generated images of faces for privacy purposes. Try browsing https://generated.photos/ for ideas.

How we use it: Storing and managing passwords

Why we love it: How much time do you waste every day manually signing into various accounts and searching for forgotten passwords? Last Pass is a password management app that stores all of your digital passwords in one place, making it easy to log into all of your various accounts while also keeping your digital information secure. Last Pass uses a browser extension to keep information secure on your computer, and their mobile app is a life-saver for people who are constantly on the move.

Cost: Last Pass has a free plan, but it does not include syncing across all devices.
Premium plans start at $3/month for personal use and $4/month for business teams.

Download for: Browser extension / iOS / Android

 

If productivity and marketing strategies have left you scratching your head, contact us for a free one-hour consultation. We are even more productive in person! Let Cloud 9 take your project to the next level!

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How customer personas help define your target audience

If you can understand your top customers, you will be able to pinpoint their business pains, understand how they communicate and get on the right platforms to attract their attention.
It’s impossible to find out everything about every customer or prospect individually, but you can create a customer persona to represent your customer base.

A customer persona is a detailed description of someone who represents your target audience. This persona represents one fictional customer, not a group of people.

How To Build A Customer Persona

Have a look at who is already buying from you, following you, and interacting with your posts. When painting this picture of your target audience, note the following data points (with examples):

Age: Millennial / 38
Marital Status: Long Term Partner
Gender: Female
Education: BCIT E-Commerce
Children: None
Income: $90,000.00
Occupation: Project Manager
Personality: Ambivert
Home Ownership: Townhouse Owner

 

Start With Demographics

Basic demographics will help create a starting point for your persona. Try and provide as much detail as possible based on your market research.
Where in the world does your social media audience live? This helps you understand which geographic areas to target. Does your target audience include college students? New parents? Parents of teens? Retirees?

 

Psychographics Add Personal Detail

Next, psychographic data, such as interests and hobbies add more personal details to help form a better understanding of your customer prospects.
What does your target audience like to do? What TV shows do they watch? What other businesses do they interact with? What are the personal and business challenges they face in a day?

 

Understand Spending Behaviors

Finally, defining the users spending power and patterns allows us to understand purchasing behavior and estimated retail spending.
How much money does your target audience have to spend? How do they approach purchases in your price category? Do they have specific financial concerns or preferences you need to address? Do they purchase on the spot or take time to research before a purchase?

Put A Face To The Name

Now it’s time to give your customer a name and a face. This might be strange, but it will help crystalize the idea of the ‘human’ you will later create content and other marketing materials for. Browse through stock images and see if you can find a picture to associate with him. Do not use images of actual people, find AI-generated images of faces for privacy purposes. Try browsing https://generated.photos/ for ideas.

 

 

Paint A Picture With All The Parts

It’s time to gather all the data in one place and breath some life into this person. Create a short bio or “life story” for your customer persona. Explain how they have come to need your help. Many businesses have more than one customer segment they want to reach. Create a different customer persona for each of these segments.

The better you understand your target market, the more you’ll be able to focus ads and reach people who are most likely to convert into customers. This customer research will help you create resonating content, messaging, and ads. The next time you need to ask the question, “What does my customer want?”, ask your persona. Going through this process will give you valuable insights into how to create content that resonates with your target audience.

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The benefits of Geo-targeting
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The Benefits of Geo-Targeting

Geo-targeting is where you reach an audience in a specific location of benefit to your business. In today’s society, it is a great tool for reaching a more qualified audience and getting more value from your budget. Here are the reasons why you should be geo-targeting and the best way to go about it.

Spend your money in the right places

You can literally target people within a specific radius of your business. If you own a clothing store, by targeting the people within a 20-mile radius of your store, for example, you are more likely to generate in-store sales. Google Ads allows you to add a location extension to your ads so people searching can get directions right to your store.

Best and Worst areas

Google Analytics gives you the data to monitor which are the best and worst performing location areas. You can use this data to target your budget in the places that will result in the best return on investment. You may find out you have an audience in an area that you previously would not have considered. As well as finding the best places, you can also choose to exclude areas that you think won’t result in conversions. If your physical location is in Whistler, then using ad budget showing ads to people in Toronto may not be the best move.

Greater overall engagement

If you target people in the right location, your ads will have better overall engagement as they will be more relevant to your audience. By geo-targeting Facebook ads, you can showcase your service or product to someone in their area as they are browsing social media. You can target the area around your actual physical address and promote a sale or offer that is happening at the time. Stand out from your competitors by showing people in the area why they should shop at your store rather than elsewhere in real-time.

Build Loyalty

Having a business in the community can be something you can really use to your advantage. You can post about the community which will make your audience more likely to engage with your business, show testimonials and highlight local things you are proud of. Creating an emotional connection to a local audience will mean good results for your business.

Geo-targeting has multiple benefits and allows you to reach an audience who will be more invested in your brand. At Cloud9 Marketing, our specialists can help you target the audience you want to reach. Contact us for more information.

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Google-analytics
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Why You Should Be Using Analytics

Google Analytics is a very valuable tool for business owners. More than just numbers, here are some ways you can enhance your campaigns by using analytics.

Get to know your web visitors

Enhance user experience by understanding who is visiting your website. By monitoring who your customers are, you can adapt your site to match their needs. If you find that most of your web visitors are visiting on mobile devices, then you can make sure your site is more mobile friendly, so these visitors are more likely to convert. You can also view reports for age and interest categories, a useful tool as you can use this data to adapt your site to make the content more relevant to these users.

Understand your best content

Viewing metrics such as bounce rate which shows how many people left your site after viewing only one page, page sessions and seeing which individual pages have been popular can really benefit the overall usability of your site. If you are finding that certain pages are less popular, you can adjust the content so they mirror the more popular pages and therefore generate a better response. Understanding how your content works will really help to improve site engagement.

Helps with SEO

Google Analytics can help you to understand where your audience is coming from. You can link your account to Google Search Console which will show you what your audience is searching to get to your site. This data will allow you to adapt your content to include these terms.

To Check you are achieving goals

Goals are something that every business owner wants to establish in order to know they are making progress. Without data, you cannot tell if you meeting those goals. You can set goals directly in Google Analytics and measure how you are performing against them. It is also possible to track conversions so you can see how many newsletter signups you have as well as the results from your e-commerce store. If you have linked your Analytics account to your Google AdWords account, you can directly measure the return on investment you are getting from your ads by comparing your ad spend to your conversions.

It’s Free

You don’t have to pay anything to use this service. Collect all kind of data which will make your business more profitable and it’s totally free to use.

Want to monitor your Google Analytics data but don’t know how? Fear not, here at Cloud9 we have experts who can help you analyze data and meet your goals. Contact us for more info.

 

 

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Social Media Influencers
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What is Influencer Marketing (and does it really matter)?

Influencer marketing, a spin-off from celebrity endorsement, is on the rise. More and more companies are realizing its power and seeing a massive return on investment. Here’s our guide to why it’s effective and the best way to go about using influencers.

What is it?

An influencer is someone, usually with a high social media following, who has the ability to influence the purchasing decisions of others. They have a following in a particular niche and actively engage with their audience. You can use different types of influencers depending on your business needs and budget. Micro Influencers have between 2,000 and 100,000 followers but can produce significate results.

Measure

While the amount of followers plays a large part in how much influence someone will have, engagement is something that shouldn’t be ignored. Someone with 20,000 followers is likely to get more engagement than someone with 200 followers, but the idea is to be able to reach real people. Followers have to be earned not purchased, and, while bots and unqualified followers will have an impact on initial social media credibility, it is important to measure engagement. High engagement levels mean maximum results.

Get the right influencers for your product or service

There are thousands of influencers out there so how do you know which one is right for you? You need to look at how aligned a bloggers content is with your messaging. Even though they may have thousands of followers, and high engagement levels, if they are not relevant to your business, then the results will be less desirable. You want to choose an influencer who can naturally incorporate your brand into their own style. Working with an influencer who is passionate about your product or service will reflect in their posts. Find someone who you feel fits in with your brand voice.

Where can you find them

There are many sites to find influencers: Upluence, AspireIQ and Hypr are just a few. Make sure you look at metrics. These sites will show you a break down of their analytics so you can get an indication of how much of a return on investment you will receive.

The gift that keeps on giving

The beauty of influencer marketing is that it doesn’t stop with that post. Unlike other forms of marketing, posts about your product can come up months after the post. You will get the most results at the time of posting but it is not uncommon to see a second ‘spike’ especially if it is connected to an event.

Here at Cloud9 Marketing, we can help you with all your social media needs. Contact us for help on how you can use an influencer to promote your brand.

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e-commerce advice from Michele Romanow
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E-commerce advice from Michele Romanow

Looking for e-commerce advice? Check out this 4-part video series by Michele Romanow from CBC’s Dragons Den. She shares every you should know about running an online business. Originally posted on the Canada Post website.

 

 

 

 

 

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What Is A Customer Journey Map In Digital Marketing?

In order to gain and retain loyal customers, you have to create a seamless online experience that leaves users with a lasting positive impression of your brand. Every single touchpoint with your company plays a role in converting your customer, so each one must be faultless.

A customer journey map is a visual representation of every experience your customers have with you. It shows you the route your customers take when navigating your website, and allows you to record every touchpoint. Developing a customer journey map can optimize your digital marketing strategy, as you can understand and address your buyer’s feelings, motivations and questions.

Here’s a breakdown of what customer journey mapping is, how it can help reveal gaps or issues within your strategy, and how to get started planning your own map.

What is a customer journey map?

The purpose of a customer journey map is very simple: it helps you understand the route your customers take when buying and using your products and services. It serves to tell the story of your customer’s experience, from their initial engagement with your brand, into hopefully a long-term relationship.

By charting and organizing your customer’s touchpoints with your brand, you’ll gain a holistic view of the process they go through when using your services.

Why do I need it?

A customer journey map is a powerful tool that allows you to clearly understand your audience’s needs. Here’s why it’s so effective.

It gives you clarity

Firstly, it gives you a complete overview of where and when customers are interacting with your business. You can understand the context of your users, and gain a clear picture of their needs, hesitations and potential concerns. From there, you can tailor your online experience and work towards establishing a long-term relationship with customers, based on consistency and trust.

You can address gaps and issues

While you can reward yourself for all the fantastically positive touchpoints you have created, you will also be able to see where you are currently lacking content and losing customers. This works in your favour, so fear not! Understanding where you need to invest time and money means you can immediately develop priorities to address these. You can then take steps to improve certain aspects of your customer’s experience.

Great! How can I create my own?

Now you’re fully aware of the benefits of a customer journey map, you’re probably wondering how to get started? As you can imagine, mapping out the customer experience takes some time, but it’s definitely worth the effort.

We recommend you start out by listing all online touchpoints your company has with customers. Keep it simple, and note what message your customer is receiving at each encounter, and what platform they receive this on. Once you’ve synchronized your messages throughout your customer’s journey, you can put together your map.

Below is an example of a customer journey map from Forrester Research. However, if you fancy something a little more visual, there are many tools such as Microsoft Visio and Glizzy that turn your data into flow charts and diagrams.

 

We understand that customer journey mapping is a complex process! At the end of the day, each and every map is produced differently, depending on your own, personal preferences. If you need help connecting with your customer and improving touchpoints online, as a full-service marketing agency here at Cloud9 Marketing, we would be happy to help. To arrange a strategy consultancy that focuses on your consumer’s journey, you can find us here – we look forward to hearing from you!

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Identifying Your Online Target Audience

Can you identify your exact online target audience? If no immediate image or prototype pops into your head, you may need to re-evaluate your marketing strategy.

You could have the most visually appealing website to ever exist, but it will fail to make an impact if it’s not reaching the right audience. To make sure your hard work pays off, you’ll need to find out who your customers are and where they hang out online. By identifying your primary audience’s needs, you can increase your online conversations, optimize your social media marketing, and boost organic traffic.

Why identifying your target audience matters

If you know exactly what your customers want, you can optimize your site to maximise the likeliness of them coming across it in their online searches.

The same goes for what your customers don’t want- by understanding their state of mind you can structure and prioritise content on your site, and leave out what you know won’t interest them. Here are a few ways to identify your target audience.

Educated assumptions are a good place to start…

But they definitely wont deliver entirely effective results. If you have no paying customers yet, trust your instincts and make educated guesses. In an online world, location becomes irrelevant, so stick to making assumptions about your target audience’s lifestyle and needs.

The best way to identify your audience is to talk to them

While your own estimations are a good start, unfortunately you’re not psychic. Once you have a sketch of your target audience, put it to the test in the real world. Meet people and businesses that fit your customer profile, and converse and interact with them. Once you learn about the market you are operating in, it will be easy to tweak your previous assumptions and change course if necessary.

It’s also worth surveying some of your most recent customers on what they used your site for, and how your business has changed their life. Keep your questions short and neutral, but in-depth enough that you can gather some solid demographical data.

Do your online research

There are many web analytics services on the Internet, but Google Analytics is the biggest and the best. It tracks and reports website traffic to provide you with insightful data right at your fingertips. Use it to unearth near limitless data about your target audience’s demographic and psychographic profiles, and gain a better understanding of what they find important and interesting.

The custom reports it produces are also highly useful, allowing you to see which traffic sources convert the best so you can invest more time, money and effort into high performing traffic senders.

Target Audience on Google Analytics

Connect with your customers

Once you’ve identified your target audience, you need to make them stick around. Learn about them, understand them, and represent them on your site. You can try using social media listening tools, or manual monitoring, to learn your audience’s common dialect and understand their social media conversations.

Then, it’s time to take the plunge and dabble in your own online networking. Connecting with your target demographic and having a strong social media presence will help build trust and loyalty between your customers and your brand. Done right, your social media marketing will also provide proof that you are a well-connected, conscientious company that is worth following and supporting.

Blogging is also a great way to increase your following and maximise online conversations, as you’ll produce valuable optimized content that establishes your expertise to your audience.

If you need any help identifying and securing your target audience, here at Cloud9 we’d be more than happy to arrange a strategy consultancy. We focus our marketing plans around digital marketing strategies that are proven to gain customers. You can book an appointment here.

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SSL Certificates Are Simply a Must for 2018

If you have a website, you’ve probably heard of SSL certificates, but are you actually aware of what they are and why they are important?

If not, keep reading…

SSL is an acronym for secure sockets layer. SSL certificates are the backbone of website security, and are vital for any business with an online presence, especially in 2018. SSL certificates allow someone’s browser to bridge a secure connection to your server, ensuring that the information is securely transferred.

You can tell if a website is SSL secure by looking at the URL structure. If a website’s URL starts out with “http,” it is not SSL secure. If it starts with “https,” then it is secure. Some browsers will also display a small lock icon to indicate you are browsing a secure website.

Here are a few reasons why all of this is important.

1. Stops Information Theft

When information is submitted on a website, it usually goes through a channel of computers before it reaches the intended party. So the chances of that information being stolen along the way are higher if SSL is not applied. SSL encrypts the information so that it’s readable only to the party it is intended for. It does this by adding random characters to the submitted information, which can only be accessed with an encryption key. The information is useless to anyone who doesn’t have that key.

With identity theft on the rise, information security is more important than ever. SSL ensures you keep everyone’s information safe, which builds confidence in people who are visiting your site.

2. Provides a Sense of Security to People Visiting Your Website

With identity theft on the rise, information security is more important than ever. SSL ensures you keep everyone’s information safe, which builds confidence in people who are visiting your site.

3. A Necessity for Online Payments

An SSL certificate is a requirement for any website that accepts payments with an encryption of at least 128-bit. So, if you have an ecommerce site, you have to have an SSL certificate installed if you plan on taking credit card payments.

4. It’s Mandatory in 2018

To ensure safer browsing in 2018, Google flagged any website that doesn’t have SSL certification by the end of 2017. It’s important to note that this change will affect all websites and not just ecommerce sites. So, if you’re a restaurant owner, lawyer, dentist, realtor or consultant, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that this change doesn’t apply to you. It does.

Now that January 1st has passed, when people try to access a website without a SSL certification, a ‘Not Secure’ message will appear, which will more often times than not prompt them to leave.

Maintaining an online presence can be tough, so don’t make it any harder for yourself than it already is. If you don’t already have an SSL certificate on your website, NOW is the time to do so. If you would like to speak with a Cloud9 hosting specialist about making your website secure, contact us today.

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digital marketing ipad
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Hashtag 101- How to Use #Hashtags Like a Pro

How to use Hashtags

There is a lot of confusion surrounding hashtags. They seemed to pop up out of no where and now have over run the social media space. Hashtags done properly can be immensely powerful marketing tools but when used carelessly can be extremely annoying and possibly detrimental to your online reputation. We could sit here and bore you with the history of the hashtag, and how they’ve evolved in the digital space over the years but we will leave that to PaultheTrombonist in his hilarious video History of the Hashtag # while we enlighten you on how to apply hashtags in each of your social channels like a Pro.

What the #eck is the purpose of a hashtag?

Love them or hate them, hashtags are here to stay. There are many examples out there of hashtags done well (and probably even more of hashtags gone bad) but overall they serve three main purposes:

  1. To filter and categorize information
  2. To connect with people and unite messages
  3. To add to a brand

Here at Cloud9 Marketing, we represent a lot of businesses in the tourism industry here in beautiful Whistler, B.C. We obviously want people across social media platforms who are interested in travelling and visiting places like Whistler to view our posts. Because of this, we always ensure to append #Whistler to our posts. Other common hashtags we use are #ski #snowboard #adventure (you get it).  By doing this people interested in these topics can simply click on one of the above hashtags and all of our beautiful and engaging photos and posts will appear. If you went on Twitter or Instagram right now and typed in a hashtag that interested you (like #winewednesday for example), you will see thousands of posts all displaying the hashtag and theme.

If you run a business and want to connect with potential fans and followers, hashtags are an excellent way to do so. Say you have an online dog treat business and want to get more people following you on social media and ultimately order dog treats on your website. Conducting initial research on popular hashtags used in your industry on sites such as Tagboard will give you a good idea which tags will be popular with your target market. By consistently appending these hashtags to your posts you will get more likes, comments, shares and retweets simply by people interested in and following those hashtags.

Hashtags are also great tools for branding. If you have a promotion you are running or want to communicate your slogan or brand strengths in your posts, appending them as hashtags is a great way to communicate the message to your fans and followers. Take Coca Cola for example, their recent Share a Coke campaign has penetrated the social realm and the hashtag #ShareACoke has been appended to all of their relevant posts. The more your social community notices branded hashtags the more likely they are to engage with them.

Are they for all social channels?

Hashtags were born on Twitter, and are still important additions to any post on this channel although generally only one or two can be included due to the character limitations. Instagram is also the perfect platform for hashtags and relevant and trending hashtags are sure to increase engagement of your posts. Instagram has a maximum of 30 hashtags per post but it’s recommended to insert 5-10 relevant, trending and catchy tags. Unlike Twitter and Instagram, where hashtags unite the entire community of users, Facebook hashtags generally only unite current friends and followers, or large brands who don’t have their setting set to private. For that reason, individuals don’t use hashtags as much on Facebook as brands do however if you’re going to use them, it is suggested to keep them minimal, 1-2 shows the most engagement.

Hopefully now we’ve demystified the hashtag and you are ready to put them to use in your own social media strategy. Still confused or need help with your online marketing- we are here to help! Contact Cloud9 Marketing today and find out how we can assist you.

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