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What is Marketing Automation?

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Marketing Automation is the hottest phrase in marketing.

In a nutshell, it is a process of leveraging digital technology to facilitate online discovery of a product or service, acquire a qualified sales lead, and nurture that lead closer and closer to a buying decision — with little or no human intervention until the optimum moment of contact and/or close.

Marketing Automation is also synonymous with a wide variety of software programs that marketers use to facilitate this inbound marketing process.

But software by itself is not worth a hill of beans without a solid strategy designed specifically for your particular business and prospective customer.

So let’s go back to the start…

If you or someone in your organization has identified the need for marketing automation, then there is likely an understanding that two things have changed for the business.

1. The traditional methods of sales are not working. It’s getting harder to sell!
2. Most prospects would rather cut off their ear than listener to a sales pitch.

Consumers want to discover your product either through search or through a social recommendation. In fact, 82% of B2B buyers start with an internet search.

Your team, perhaps with guidance from your digital marketing agency, will help you determine the strategy and marketing automation tools required to design and execute an entire program, to attract visitors to your business, pre-qualify leads and nurture them with specifically crafted content and offers to lead them through the various stages of your deal funnel.

Only at this stage is it a wise to employ a marketing automation software program to carry out the program devised above. If you pour money into a SAAS (software-as-a-solution) without a plan, you will be wasting your precious marketing dollars. Arguably the true value is in the plan, not the software. In fact, the best digital marketing agencies will provide a robust agency-grade marketing automation software program at little or no cost when you work with them to create, measure, and refine a plan to reach specific goals.

The agency will also train your marketers to properly drive the system on an ongoing basis. Of critical importance is the need to assess performance of every campaign every 30 days. Your agency will be able to crunch the data, make adjustments based on the results, and help you make better business decisions as a result.

Most importantly, you will be generating more, highly qualified leads, meaning that the sales department will spend more precious time closing than warming up cold prospects. Companies that use inbound marketing automation campaigns routinely close 15-30% more business with a properly coordinated strategy and execution.

Momentum Marketing offers comprehensive Inbound Marketing strategy and service coupled with our powerful agency-grade Momentum Marketing Automation software – all for less than a monthly subscription alone for other leading SAAS solutions.

Invest your precious marketing into inbound marketing strategy and training that will drive your business and your team forward. (And get the software for free.)

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Making Money with Social Media

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Many social media marketers talk incessantly about things like “depth of engagement,” “catering to the audience,” and “the importance of a Like.” They can talk about Likes until they’re blue in the face. But what’s the value of a Like to the brand? The answer: It depends on what you plan to do with it.

You can make money with social media. But first you must be prepared to break-up with engagement and fall out of love a little bit with the Like.

At Momentum, we always set out to convey to our clients the importance of a path that provides them with measurable return.

The important questions involving social media are: How do you attract the prospect? How do you convert the prospect to a sale? How do you measure the effectiveness of the process? What does it cost?

In some cases, a brand may only be in it for the Likes. More likely they’ll see an opportunity to drives sales, stimulate trial, or sell event tickets.

In the case of a client of ours in the financial services industry, the initial goal was to accrue Likes as a means of enhancing the credibility of the brand. After a short time with Momentum, we succeeded in helping the client realize a much more lucrative path of leveraging social media to generate leads for its financial services.

We worked with BBC Kids Television to create a strategy of gaining Likes in order to put the daily program schedule in front of new moms and encourage them to subscribe to the channel – clear calls-to-action with measurable results.

We worked with the Vancouver Giants hockey team to create a Facebook advertising campaign to sell $99 White Spot Family Game Paks. The data that Momentum generated in the first few days of the campaign ended up also illuminating the need for an improved, streamlined ticketing process.

Getting beyond engagement for engagement’s sake. That’s performance defined… and the key to making money with Social Media.

Find Out More About Making Money With Social Media

How do you convert the prospect to a sale?

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Halloween Marketing Statistics And Trends

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The Future of Marketing

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The future of marketing is technology. It’s a future that is materializing before our very eyes, driven by a new breed of marketers. They are individuals who leverage highly targetable and measurable technologies to reach buyers wherever they are via whatever platforms they’re using.

They’re marketing technologists. Our marketing agency has them in spades and their influence can be felt on virtually every campaign we mount for our clients.

Marketing Technologists are passionate about staying up-to-the-minute on rapidly evolving platforms, whether it’s Google, Facebook, or digital outlets. They’re also problem solvers who are keen to apply best-of-breed techniques – whether old (like totally 2012) or new – to achieve the campaign goals.

They question status quo and they break through tech barriers as necessary to create a conversion path and generate measurable return on investment for their clients.

The marketing technologist is also a geek about testing multiple conversion paths and refining those paths based on results to deliver the desired efficiency.



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And lastly but not finally, the marketing technologist studies the industry in which they’re working and applies the correct tools for that vertical.

In the case of our client Budget Brake & Muffler, our MTs employed Google Local to help the auto service provider facilitate online discovery and harness the power of consumer generated content (reviews) in a way that the Yellow Pages never could.

When challenged by the client’s desire to distribute content to their brokers and consumers, our MTs created an embedded player for Prudential Real Estate to deliver weekly podcasts that have resulted in over 1 million plays (2015 is the Year of the Podcast!).

Marketing technologists have essentially become the backbone of the digital marketing agency and regardless of the challenges or opportunities they are presented with, they’ll chart a highly customized digital strategy that will deliver results for your brand.

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Let’s customize a digital strategy that will deliver results for your brand.

Why Tourism & Travel Should Pay for Facebook Advertising

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With gas prices on the decline and the American dollar travelling further than ever (especially in Canada) the tourism and travel season is shaping up to be a great one.

If you couple this with the ultra low cost of Facebook advertising at the moment, virtually every tourism and travel oriented business can reach their exact target market.

You should be paying for Facebook advertising. Here’s why…

The free ride for brands on Facebook is over.

As the social giant transforms into a media company and not simply another social platform, the hard reality is coming to light with regard to organic (unpaid) posting placement, specifically posting to brand pages, and the depth of which users will now see brand posts.

The organic reach of posts is in serious decline. (Organic reach being how often the post will be seen without the assistance of Facebook’s algorithm or via paid placement.) Although no one can provide definitive numbers in terms of the current reach of unpaid posting, the majority of online sources report numbers as low as 6% and declining. This is no accident.

Facebook derives all of its current revenue from paid placement. This is their model and this is how the platform will further shape itself into being the most powerful ad spend any organization can harness today. The reach of Facebook’s advertising model is far more powerful than any other platform currently available on the marketplace. It’s a fact. Advertisers have never had the power to harness deep seeded demographic information at the scale now provided by Facebook – all with a very limited ad spend. The type of data now available to the advertiser, within the platform, not only drives granular campaigns but also provides statistical information that allows reactive changes in strategy based on those metrics. This data illuminates the most effective conversion paths allowing marketers to quickly abandon those paths that are not showing returns.




At present, the cost to the advertiser is the lowest it has been in the history of the platform. The average cost per 1000 people (CPM) reached can be as low as $0.25. This type of cost is well below all other platforms, both digital and traditional. With a minimum spend of $1.00 per day there is essentially no excuse to not be paying for advertising on a platform that will provide, at the very least, brand exposure, at a scale that most businesses would have only hoped to achieve just 3 years ago. Many organizations will find themselves wrapped up in the ROI debate. But in all seriousness, 30 dollars a month for simple brand exposure is unheard of. Wrapping your brand into a well conceived and well tracked campaign will provide effective lead generation, deep seeded brand awareness, and put your organization far ahead of your competitors. All with very minimal financial commitment.

If you are still spending the lions share of your advertising budget in television, radio, and print, the following infographic should be all the impetus you need to carve out a healthy portion from traditional to digital, for Facebook, today.

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It was a wild and free ride. But it’s time to pay the piper his paltry sum. And do it while its still the best kept secret in marketing. Your digital marketing agency will help your local business or large-scale organization design the correct Facebook strategies and campaigns for your brand.

Thinking About Facebook Advertising?

Let’s chat about the most cost effective advertising available online today.