5 Things to Keep in Mind while Hiring a Digital Marketing Agency

Once upon a time a brand walked into a digital marketing agency. And realised by 2025, digital ad spending will reach $800 billion!

Evidently, that isn’t a joke, but neither is hiring a digital marketing agency. Because with the rise in digital spending, more brands want a marketing partner who helps in telling their brand story to the right audience, over the right medium, at the right moment to evoke the right response and get the best ROI.

Too overwhelming? Too many metrics to measure? Too …

Worry not, Flora Fountain, the leading social media marketing agency in Ahmedabad and India shares just 5 things that can help you make a better decision while hiring a digital marketing agency.

TOP 5 FACTORS TO CONSIDER BEFORE YOUR HIRE A DIGITAL MARKETING AGENCY

To hire or not to … hire a branding agency, is a question that you must answer after considering the following points:

• Identify your purpose
• Look for an agency with experience and expertise
• Understand the agency’s processes and strategies
• Evaluate the results promised
• Value for money and price play

Let’s dive into the details.

Identify your purpose

Before you venture out to hire a digital marketing agency, introspect and ask yourself:

What end goal am I trying to reach?

• Is it to increase my reach online?
• Or keep the existing audience more engaged through content?
• Do I need help creating content?
• Evaluate the results promised
• Or help enhancing conversions?

What particular service does my brand require?

• What services am I expecting the agency to deliver? (Hint: You want to hire a branding agency for things like brand strategy, identity & logo creation and an eCommerce website development company for things like website development or eCommerce management)
• Will I require one set of services like social media marketing services and then need to expand my scope beyond it? (In such cases you might want to go with a full-service digital marketing agency, which can provide multiple services)

How much am I willing to keep aside as a marketing budget?

• Will I be dedicating a percentage of my sales to marketing?
• Or do I want to invest an initial amount and decide based on the results?

By answering these three questions you will be able to pinpoint WHY you need to hire a digital marketing agency and WHAT services you require from them today or in the future.

LOOK FOR INDUSTRY EXPERIENCE AND EXPERTISE

Once your goal is set, initiate filtering to identify agencies that have an expertise in your particular industry or the services you are looking for.

It is important to make sure the digital agency has relevant expertise and experience. Inquire and research their specialities and previous successes.

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Channelling the Festive Spirit with Digital Marketing

“To Market or Not To Market…Digitally?”

That is the question. With festivals knocking on the door and people cashing in on their bonus there will be an increase in spending across different market segments. But who wants to hustle in traffic, reach the market and only to find out that the desired product is out of stock…NOBODY! And why would anyone, when the same product is just a tap away? Don’t forget, 63% of ‘products purchases’ worldwide begin online. So it’s time! To invest in festive marketing, especially online.

WHAT IS FESTIVE MARKETING

But, what exactly is festive marketing and what is in there for me, you may ask. Hear it from us, the best Digital Marketing Agency in Ahmedabad. When a brand capitalises on the spirit of gifting and spending to amplify its visibility and sales then it’s referred to as festive marketing. Seasonal and event-based marketing also constitute festive marketing.

Remember Surf Excel’s #RangAccheHain advertising campaign on Holi? That campaign was grounded in the thought that a festival is always memorable and special when celebrated with family. This heartwarming campaign didn’t just create engagement for the brand but also brought smiles to the viewer’s faces and conveyed a sense of warmth and affinity with the idea of the product.

From television commercials to digital marketing, occasion-based marketing has always allowed brands to adapt and blend the mediums effectively. Cadbury, another case in point, has often put to use its heritage of being a ‘family brand’ to capitalise on the event and festive-based marketing.

With the Madbury campaign, the brand allowed the consumers to create their own customised Cadbury virtually on a website. The intent was to engage customers and explore their local and unique take on their product. The campaign observed 823 million impressions and 17 million fans were engaged.

WHY SHOULD BRANDS CARE?

PEOPLE LOOK FORWARD TO SPENDING ON SPECIAL OCCASIONS

As per a survey by LocalCircles, Indian consumers have the propensity to make big-ticket purchases during festivals. Because for people it’s a season of consuming, they look forward to spending. Whether it’s Dushhera or Diwali, Raksha Bandhan or Christmas, celebrating has always meant gifting and giving.

It’s imbibed in our culture to spend and give when we are happy, to welcome novel things home. Thus, the festive season opens an enormous amount of opportunities for brands and local companies to drive engagement and conversions. Moreover, extensive lockdowns have altered consumer habits in a significant manner. So, now your brother won’t leave his office early to look for gifts during Raksha Bandhan. He will probably go through a wide range of offers online and give you the most amazing gift you deserve.

So you might want to make the best of the festive season and will be looking for a proficient and reliable Digital Marketing Agency, if yes then Flora Fountain is at your aid. Call us!

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Tap Into Your Loyal Customer Base & Boost Sales with Remarketing In Digital Marketing

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No, we haven’t pivoted into selling coffee from being a creative advertising agency in Ahmedabad or digital agency! But, we’re sure that the above text did remind you of having something familiar, either as a text message, email or a push notification on the phone. This is an example of a brand trying to lure back its existing customers to keep shopping with them regularly. This is the brand remarketing itself to stay relevant, maintain a loyal customer base and keep the sales going. The example here is of a prominent Indian coffee brand pitching one of its popular summer brews as soon as the weather started getting hotter.

BUT, WHAT IS REMARKETING?

Remarketing is a type of marketing activity that focuses on consumers who have previously shown interest in the brand. This interest could be in the form of a visit to the brand’s website, following it on social media, or clicking on any of their ads online.

The idea behind remarketing is to reach out to the most receptive audience, the one that already has an interest in the brand. Remarketing is basically rekindling such an audience’s interest and drawing them back. The chances of conversions are always higher when remarketing to this loyal audience.

REMARKETING VS RETARGETING

Remarketing is sometimes considered as retargeting. Yes, they do sound eerily similar, but there is a slight difference.

Retargeting is usually done to serve ads across various platforms, such as social media and Google Ad Network, to potential customers based on their past interaction on digital mediums with the brand.

Remarketing is reaching out to users and website visitors through messages and mails making a sales pitch, with the help of the contact information shared by them while subscribing or making a purchase earlier.

However, over the years, remarketing has become an umbrella term, of which retargeting is a part alongside the many other marketing activities which engage existing customers and previous website visitors.

SO…HOW DOES REMARKETING WORK?

Let us understand this using an example of a remarketing activity that Flora Fountain performed in its role as creative advertising agency in Ahmedabad for one of our ecommerce clients.

Sujith visited the www.falguni.shop ecommerce website of Falguni Gruh Udhyog, a famous farsan and snack store in Ahmedabad. He purchased some delicious Gujarati snacks and chose to get them delivered to his friend living in New Delhi. Now, for the purchase to be completed, Sujith had to create a profile on the website by providing his email ID and contact number. In the next step, he had to provide his friend’s information, like her name, address, email ID and contact number for the delivery to be done.

A week later, both of them receive an email that looked something like the one below:

While Sujith ignored the email, it piqued his friend’s interest and later that day, she ended up visiting the website and ordering the Theplas and some more Gujarati snacks.

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Upselling & Cross-Selling To Increase Sales on Your Ecommerce Website

Indians spend close to 6 hours every day on the internet. And 50% of the overall online traffic is on online shopping websites looking for products and services. While this trend has gotten a lot of small businesses to start selling online too, many still lack the marketing strategy to capitalize on this trend. And to stand out amongst the multitudes selling online.

As a digital agency in Ahmedabad, focusing as an ecommerce website development company in Ahmedabad, Flora Fountain, always suggests its clients to start upselling and cross-selling online as a part of their digital sales strategy. In short, this means building features on ecommerce websites that encourage customers to add more products to their cart during or even post checkout. But, what is the difference between upselling and cross-selling? And how can they be used more effectively to increase the size of each transaction and retain customers? Read on…

Upselling and cross-selling are commonly confused, but there is a key difference. While upselling focuses on increasing order value, cross-selling involves making a recommendation adjacent to the original product. So an upsell is more of an upgrade, whereas a cross-sell is a whole other purchase.

Wait, wait… Let’s try it with a more relatable example. When a hungry customer orders a burger at a McDonald’s, the guy on the other side of the counter says, “Would you like some fries to go with it?”

That’s a cross-selling pitch. Now, if the counter guy had said, “You can make this a Big Mac for just X rupees/dollars”. That is an upselling pitch. With the world going digital (yes, we’re not going to stop saying it!), brands can implement the same sales strategy on their websites too… Here’s how!

SHOP THE LOOK

This technique works well for fashion and lifestyle brands. When a visitor selects a product, say a shirt or a kurta, then the display page will show a small module right below the description, where a high definition picture of a model wearing the said shirt/kurta, along with a jacket, trousers, shoes and sunglasses. Now, this technique should be used when all the products in question are available on the website.

Brands like FabIndia, Ray Ethnic and major ecommerce players like Amazon and Myntra use this method of cross selling heavily to increase the cart value of the visitors on their page. Plus, the customers benefit from this, as they get their desired outfit ready to pick and delivered to them for a flat rate of shipping.

USE SIDE-BY-SIDE COMPARISONS

This is a great method of upselling, mostly used by brands that sell electronics and electrical products, where upgrades matter a lot. Let’s take an example of a mobile phone purchase here. When a customer selects a mobile phone model by Samsung, with specific features involving storage, processor speed, camera quality, etc, he/she is shown a module with a slider consisting of similar mobile phones from the same and different brands, but a slightly upgraded version with an increased price.

Since the placement of these products are such that the viewer can immediately compare the look and feel, and the features of the phone with the price difference, there are high chances of him/her picking the upgraded model as they won’t mind shelling out a few extra bucks for a better model.

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The Ultimate Guide to LAUNCH A Product on Social Media

Remember the last time you scrolled through your Instagram feed and thought “Hey, how did they know I was looking for this sneaker/hoodie/blender/fill in the blanks?” More and more people are discovering new products and services online through social media, over traditional methods of discovery like TV ads, newspaper ads, hoardings and billboards. And this is even more true after the pandemic, with an increasing population comfortable spending time and money online.

So it is imperative, when a brand has a new product ready for launch, to create a big buzz online. Brands have to get people curious about the product and the idea behind it. However, with over 3.6 billion people active on various social media platforms, spending an average of 2.5 hours every day scrolling and messaging, there are chances of a brand’s messaging getting lost in the din and noise made by almost everybody online.

So here’s the ultimate cheat sheet (or guide, if you will) created by India’s top social media marketing agency, Flora Fountain, to make some noise, stand out and attract the right eyeballs for a new product or brand launch online.

1. FIRST THING FIRST, IDENTIFY THE AUDIENCE

The first thing a brand must do before planning a new product or starting any form of marketing activity for its launch, is to understand “WHAT DOES THE MARKET WANT?” and “WHERE DO WE FIND THIS AUDIENCE”

It starts with market research, where the ideal customer is identified based on various demographic points like age, gender, interests, income, region, etc. It can start from something as simple as a Google search of a product similar to the one about to be launched by the brand. Simply going through the kind of people that the competition brands are addressing through their content, images, and the reviews on their shopping platforms can give a rough idea about the ideal customer.

If the product is targeted towards young people in their 20s who love following trends, then Instagram is the place to find them (well, isn’t everyone on Instagram now!). If the product is more service-based, priced higher and is targeted at a somewhat older audience, Facebook can be the place to target such an audience. If the target is business communities, or art lovers, or musicians, there is a platform for these too. But it all starts with knowing who the product, service, brand or idea is meant for: the OG TG.

2. PLAN OUT THE ONLINE CONTENT CALENDAR

Having a launch timeline is very important for the brand to chart out every move, every post on the various digital platforms it is active on. While it may sound like a task as easy as taking a picture and posting it on Instagram, Facebook or Pinterest with a caption stating check out our newly launched collection, it is way more than that…

Think about it, the product pictures needs to be clicked, they have to be named (if not done), banners and creatives for website pages and posts are to be made, captions as per the platform (hashtag heavy for Instagram, long yet linked for Facebook and short and sweet for Pinterest) are to be written, promotional email drafts have to be created, SEO work is to be done, special social media promotional content for boosts are to be made… Phew!

Yeah, that’s right… All that, apart from the regular, in-store or outdoor marketing campaigns. Here’s a look at how Ray Ethnic, an Ahmedabad-based ethnic fashion brand recently planned their product launch. Simple, minimalistic & to the point.

Plan out every piece of content that will go online, from the teaser to the launch to the product showcase. Yes, it takes time, but then actual work becomes a piece of cake.

3. START CREATING A BUZZ

Social media is such a powerful tool, it is scalable, cost effective, provides great creative freedom to experiment, and the best part: The people are there, online!

And one of the best ways to get started with the promotions is by generating curiosity among the people online, on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and even LinkedIn (if the brand has an audience there).

Start with Coming Soon posts like these:

Give the viewers a sneak peek on how the product is going to look like, what it is for, why it is unique, etc. This is kind of teasing the customer, by showing parts or some element of the product as a preview and why they should look forward to it.

Next, you can create countdown posts that usually say, ‘2 Days to Go’, ‘1 Day to Go’, etc. These kinds of promotional content create a sense of anticipation among the followers and the customers and they stay tuned with the brand page on social media.

And finally, post the launch, a giveaway or a contest can be run through specially created posts to boost up the engagement on the page. Wondering why? Because when the page gets maximum engagement, the posts are visible on the Explore and Suggestion sections of non-following people online who may have similar tastes in the product.

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Here’s How to Retain SEO Ranking Even after a Website Redesign

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) Rankings are sensitive and are prone to changing every time there is a change in the design or content of the website without planning for SEO. During a website redesign or redevelopment, there is a high risk of the website losing its organic traffic, rankings and sales.

While there are plenty of blogs and conversation online revolving around how to make a website rank higher up on the search engine results pages (SERP), very few talk specifically about maintaining those rankings, even in the event of a redesign on the website. So, let’s talk about retaining a website’s rankings on the SERP after a redesign on the site and look at some of the tips shared by the SEO experts at Flora Fountain, a digital agency offering SEO Services in Ahmedabad.

SAVE THE ORIGINAL WEBSITE’S DATA FIRST

One of the ways to ensure website’s rankings don’t suffer heavily is by maintaining a similarity in the flow of content and design of the old site. Because search engines rank those pages or websites higher that are easy to navigate. It is important to save the old or current website’s data, i.e. a list of all the pages, its URLs, important pieces of content, keywords and the sitemap for future reference. It helps the developers and designers to ensure the user experience doesn’t get disturbed on the redesigned website.

DON’T MAKE CHANGES ON THE LIVE SITE

This is an important point to remember. While making changes or during the redesigning process, the website must be disabled. The updated version should be made live only after testing. But disabling a website means the business will lose many customers and visitors who might be trying to access the site. It is advised to do it on a different domain. Experts providing top SEO services in India suggest that all the changes and updates should be made in a different domain or a staging site, and once all the changes provide satisfactory results in testing, only then the new site be swapped with the old one live on the internet.

USE 301 REDIRECTS

When there is a change in the URLs, make sure to have 301 Redirects for them. The 301 Redirects notifies the search engines that the content has been shifted to a new location and takes the visitors to the new web page from the old one.

A broken link can damage the ranking of the website, which will eventually lead to losing organic traffic to the website. This happens because the search engine assigns the existing ranking to the new page only after it knows that both the pages have the same content in them.

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