Tag: digital marketing

4 Reasons Remarketing is Essential for Successful Marketeers

Written by Chris Wood on 15/09/2025. Posted in Digital Marketing, Google Ads, Remarketing.

Remarketing is a powerful tool and a great way to complement all of your marketing activities (online and offline). In this blog post we talk you through the main reasons remarketing should be an essential tool in your digital marketing strategy in order to help maximize ROI.

What is remarketing?

Remarketing, or retargeting, helps you to reach a huge percentage of those people who came to your site and left without converting. There’s a number of reasons why people might have left your site. Whilst it could be that they just aren’t interested or bought elsewhere, it may also be that they were busy or distracted, or perhaps just needed some time to think about their purchase.

That’s where remarketing comes in.

Think of your remarketing efforts as a helpful reminder to your site visitors that your product is there waiting for them if they need it; gentle encouragement to finish their purchase, while reinforcing your branding and messaging to that user every time they see your remarketing ads.

1) Save Money with Remarketing

Compared to many other forms of digital marketing, remarketing is very cheap. For small businesses who are bidding on highly competitive keywords for their search ads, remarketing ads are a life saver! They have much lower click costs compared to search ads. If your ads are compelling and engaging, potential customers might just head back to your site and buy from you!

2) Enjoy Higher Conversion Rates

The people you are reaching with your remarketing ads are ‘hot leads’, people who have done their product research and are ready to buy.

Whilst your search ads get people to your site who have expressed an interest in the sorts of products or services you offer, remarketing allows an extra level of sophistication. It allows you to target people, perhaps those not yet purchased or looked at a certain page, therefore elevating your conversion rates.

3) Increase Brand Recognition

An important factor to remember about remarketing is that you only pay when someone clicks on your ads. This means that thousands of people (potential customers!) could view your remarketing ads every month for free!

This is a huge perk of remarketing and one which shouldn’t be undervalued. Even if people don’t choose to click on your ad, your brand name and message is being seen. This can lead to an increase in organic searches from people who have now heard of your brand name – great news for smaller, less established brands.

4) Maximise your ROI

After spending all that money getting people to your website, it just doesn’t make sense to let them disappear.

Remarketing builds on your existing efforts at converting web visitors to leads or sales. It maximizes the value of your current marketing spend and fine tunes it to boost your current ROI.

Remarketing makes sense for any brand which wants to save money, enjoy higher conversion rates, increase brand recognition and maximize ROI! If you need help with any of your remarketing campaigns we’d love to be of assistance. Q Social Media specialises in b2c and ecommerce businesses – based in Exeter, working with clients throughout the UK.

Why You’re Not Seeing Your Own Google Ads

Written by Chris Wood on 01/08/2022. Posted in Digital Marketing, Google Ads.

Are you worried your Google Ads aren’t working because they don’t show up when you do a search for your main keywords on Google? Read on to find out why this isn’t a good way to check whether your ads are working and how it could actually damage your campaign.

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is an auction system with all of the bidding happening in real time. Hence carrying out one search isn’t an accurate way of determining whether your search terms are working – you would need to check over a larger period of time such as a week or month. Other advertisers will be bidding on the same keywords, so a search carried out at different times might have very different results.

The problem is, if you keep searching for your ad and not clicking on it you are inadvertently sending out signals to Google. Google search is very sophisticated and is tailored to the user who is carrying out the search. Therefore if you’ve searched for your ad in the past and not clicked on it (which is the action you would normally want people to take once they’ve searched for your keywords), this is sending information to Google that the ad isn’t relevant to you. You are hence much more likely to see competitor ads, especially if you have clicked on them before!

You could also end up damaging your own campaign if you repeatedly check your ads in this way. By sending messages to Google that your ad isn’t relevant to the search terms you’ve typed in you could actually lower your Quality Score and cause your cost-per-click to go up!

The best action to take if you want to know how your ads are performing is to ask the team responsible for your campaigns to provide a regular report, showing how your campaign is working over a longer period than a single search. If you do want to search regularly to see if your ads are working in real time you should use the ad preview tool within Google Ads. You can set parameters such as location and then see what ads would show at that moment in a real search. Since it’s a search simulator it isn’t actually serving ads so won’t take your search history into account.

We hope you found this blog post useful, for help or advice on Google Ads get in touch.

Introducing our new Digital Marketing Manager at Q Social Media

Written by Chris Wood on 10/06/2021. Posted in Digital Marketing.

Hi, I’m Jessica and I’m really pleased to have joined the team at Q Social Media as a Digital Marketing Manager.

Writing this blog has been on my ‘to do’ list since I started at Q Social Media (QSM), as a way to introduce myself to clients. It’s been so busy though that I’ve already been in this role for three months (wow – time has flown by). I actually met Chris 9 years ago when I attended a social media and search engine optimisation course that he was running. I remember really enjoying the course and learning a lot from it, so it’s great to now be working with him all these years later. I’ve gotten to know some lovely clients so far and I’m enjoying working with Chris and Marie and combining our digital marketing skills to deliver the best possible service to QSM’s clients.

What does my role involve?

Online advertising

A big part of my role is creating and managing online adverts for clients, this includes Facebook, Instagram, Google Ads, Bing Ads, Amazon and Twitter. I really enjoy the process of doing keyword research, writing strong copy for adverts, choosing images and setting up the campaigns to get in front of their ideal audiences (or targeting past website visitors). I regularly monitor online adverts and adapt them when needed including adding negative keywords to Google Ads, Bing and Amazon Ads. It’s great to see the results that we get for clients and we use the analytics to make any improvements.

Blogging

I absolutely love writing, especially blog writing. It’s a fantastic way for clients to deliver value to their audience and a really authentic way to help with search engine optimisation (SEO) and to help increase website traffic. I particularly enjoy the challenge of seamlessly adding keywords throughout the blog copy itself, which search engines rank very highly. It’s very rewarding to see the results that blogging is getting for clients so far. A blog that I created a couple of months ago for one client has helped to improve the positions of some important keywords, including one which has just moved up 11 places in Google search results, which is fantastic.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

I combine the work that I do ‘on page’ such as blogging or writing website content together with SEO in the back end of websites, ensuring that I create meta descriptions that stand out in search engine results and that the best keywords are chosen in relation to the content, as well as linking to other relevant websites and back to their own website.

Website content and audits

Quality website content is so important and my role involves writing SEO friendly website content as well as carrying out audits to offer suggestions for improvement. This could include adapting menus, grouping products differently or adding calls to action or more information to a page.

Design

Often clients need design work carried out and it’s a fun part of my role. I create visuals mainly for Google display adverts, either to target people who are browsing similar websites or re-targeting their previous website visitors to entice them to re-visit that particular page.

Reporting

An important aspect of my role is reporting on online advertising, website statistics and any changes in keyword positions, so that the client is kept up to date on the results of our work and of course we can use this to make any changes or to help plan new campaigns.

Why I love digital marketing and why you should too

You have the opportunity to really stand out. It may seem like every brand and company is on social media or that everyone is competing for first page search engine rankings, but it doesn’t mean that everyone’s doing it well. If you provide value to your audience and put your audience first, whether that’s creating meaningful blogs and social media posts, having a website that’s easy to navigate with all the information readily available, or creating great online adverts, you will begin to stand out against your competitors.
You are in control of your advertising. You could spend a lot of money to put an advert in a printed magazine in the hope that it will get in front of the right people (and of course that can work). But if you are looking for an affordable way to reach your target audience, then online advertising is the way to do it. You pick the platform, you choose your audience, you set your budget and that way you have greater chance of getting a good return on ad spend.
You can really get to know your audience and add to the customer experience. Digital marketing is fantastic for understanding your audience, so you can tailor future content to them. I really love that you can make digital marketing part of the customer experience, by interacting with your customers online, asking them questions, providing content that they enjoy, answering customer service quires and just overall showing that you care.
It’s measurable and adaptable. The great thing about digital marketing is that you can measure everything. You can easily see your return on ad spend, understand what drove people to your website, see what content is doing well on social media and it’s all easily adaptable if you ever need to make any changes.
Online content is shareable. This is why it’s crucial to create the best online content that you can, because if you provide value to your audience, whether that’s solving a pain point or creating content that they care about, then they will want to share it with others, and you have the opportunity to get your business in front of even more people.

With all of the above in mind it’s important that what you are putting out online is quality content that makes it as easy as possible for the audience to take action. Please remember that while it is possible to produce quick results with online advertising, great digital marketing is something that takes time to build, and if you put in the time and effort it will become an asset to your business.

If you need help with any aspect of your digital marketing, whether that’s a Google Ads audit with recommendations for improvement, some extra support to complement your own in-house team or full management please contact Q Social Media on 01392 311340 or email marketing@qsocialmedia.co.uk

How to Improve Online Sales Using Social Media

Written by Chris Wood on 10/03/2021. Posted in Digital Marketing, Social Media.

If you have an online shop, the question of how to improve your online sales is never far from your thoughts. As well as working out how to reach your target audience, strengthen your USP and improve your sales funnel, there’s the problem of cart abandonment. World shopping cart abandonment rates for retailers in March 2020 were 88.05% .

If your cart abandonment could be improved by even 5% it could make a big difference to your sales. Social media is an invaluable tool for online retailers. Below we’ve included our tips on how to use it to help improve your online sales.

Plan Your Social Media Content

Your brand is probably already using social media, but are you planning your content? Make sure you are using social media to raise awareness of your brand and products. Don’t just taking the hard sell approach.

Plan your posts carefully, particularly in the lead up to key seasonal sales periods. Highlight your popular products: mention their key features, benefits and endorsements. To avoid disappointment don’t forget to keep your customers well informed across all of your social media platforms regarding the last postage days for last minute orders.

To find out more, check out our social media content ideas for businesses here.

How to Improve Online Sales Using Social Media

Build Trust on Social Media

As well as raising awareness of your brand and products, use social media to build trust. If you want people to hand over credit card information on your website, your brand must feel authentic and trustworthy. People will often head over to social media to see what people are saying about your brand before buying. Make sure your social media accounts are linked to your website. You also need to build in a strategy for customer engagement and loyalty. Peer to peer reviews are becoming the main source of brand advocacy, so ensure you are doing everything you can to encourage good reviews and feedback. This will help to build trust with your target market.

Optimise Social Media Advertising

Social Media advertising is a great way to reach beyond your existing audience and increase web visitors and sales. You can do detailed targeting on both Twitter and Facebook/Instagram. For example, narrowing down your audience by location, age, interests and job titles. If you already run ad campaigns it is worth reviewing the setup of your Ad campaigns to avoid wasting money. Optimise your settings to pay by Ad clicks rather than Ad views and ensure the set-up matches your target audience. Location targeting should be set up correctly to concentrate your efforts where your products sell best, particularly if you have a limited budget.

Use Remarketing to Bring Back Potential Customers

To reach out to people who visited your site and left before completing a target activity (e.g. completing a purchase or filling out a contact form), it’s possible to target them using remarketing ads. These are image based ads which can be set up on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. They work by appearing to customers who have visited your website as they browse the web. Since you only pay each time someone clicks on your ad they’re a great way to remind people of your business whilst they are still in the decision making process. Facebook also has a big advantage over Google when it comes to remarketing, since there is no minimum audience required before your ads kick in.

For High-Level Targeting Try Dynamic Ads

Even more targeted than remarketing are dynamic ads. If someone abandons their cart mid sale whilst logged into Facebook, it’s possible to target them with an ad showing the exact product they were looking at, reminding them to finish their purchase. You can even offer a discount code or free shipping to tempt them back. This is a highly effective way of increasing conversion rates and bringing back customers. Maybe they left your site to compare product shipping times or prices with another provider and then forgot who you were!

Promote Flash Sales

If you have a glut of products at the end of a season or line, a flash sale is a great way to shift them quickly. Social media is the ideal way to quickly share your sale. Create a Facebook offer and share using audience targeting. Base this on location and interests or behaviours (e.g. people who have interacted with your Facebook page recently).

We hope you found these tips on how to use social media to improve your online sales helpful. We specialise in helping online retailers increase their revenue, so get in touch to find out how we can help.

What You Can Do to Prepare Your Website Post Lockdown

Written by Chris Wood on 27/05/2020. Posted in Digital Marketing, Social Media.

If your business activities are quieter or on pause due to coronavirus, now might be a good time to take stock of your website and digital marketing activities ready for when you’re fully operational. Here are some tips to help you review, update and optimise your current marketing channels.

Improve Organic Reach with Keyword Analysis and SEO

Make your web pages more visible to search engines and help them appear higher up in the organic search results by improving your SEO. Alongside well planned website text, getting meta title & descriptions right is important in getting those all important click-throughs to your website.

Firstly, carry out some keyword analysis. Use Google’s keyword planner to find out which keywords are most relevant to your business and which are searched for the most. You can then use this information to review and update your website content (making sure copy is still readable and flows well) and the meta data fields and alt text on your site. It might be that the keyword analysis has informed you that there could be new pages to introduce too.

For example, if you’re a fitness coach, analysis on keyword planner would show that as well as ‘fitness coach’ the keywords ‘fitness trainer’ and ‘workout coach’ would also be worth including on your website and in meta data. If you need to flex your offering to take account of changing customer behaviour due to coronavirus, you might also decide that the keyword ‘virtual fitness coach’ and similar are worth including if you have the capacity to offer virtual sessions.

Tip: If your website has a lot of pages and you’re not sure where to start, you could check in Analytics for your most visited pages. Head to Behaviour – Site Content – Landing Pages and then All Pages.

Promote key products with Google Ads

If you’re not currently running Google Ads it might be worth considering setting up a campaign to promote your key products or services and increase web visitors and customers. Make sure you pay attention to locations, ad text, keywords and negative keywords. If you’re an ecommerce business not yet on Google Shopping that would be worth considering as well – great for online retailers. If you need help get in touch.

If you’re running Google Ads already, review & update your Ad text and negative keywords and check your settings, keywords, bids and search queries. This will help you get the best ROI for your ad spend.

Tip: It could be worth introducing new Google Ads campaigns which focus on your most searched for products and services, which could have changed due to coronavirus.

If you would like a Google Ads audit to see whether you could get a better return, or if your business could get a boost from some paid Google advertising, we’re here to help. We offer Google Ads Audits to give you expert help on how to improve your campaigns. Many campaigns we see aren’t optimised to their full potential and we’ve helped many clients save money and improve their reach and sales.

Review Social Media Ads

Social media ads are useful to businesses in a number of ways. Unlike Google Ads, which appear in the search engine if someone searches for keywords relating to the ad, social media ads show to people who may potentially be interested in your product or service.

For example, an accountant may have Google Ads running which appear when someone in their target area searches for ‘accountant’. They may then complement these ads and increase exposure for their business by setting up Facebook Ads which appear to people in their local area who are small business owners who might be interested in an accountant.

If you already have social media ads set up, now could be a good time to review and update them. Make sure images, ad text, landing pages and location targeting is reviewed to make sure it’s relevant to the current situation and customer needs.

Review your email marketing strategy

Do you regularly send out email marketing updates to your followers? Although people now communicate frequently on social media, email marketing still remains a very effective way of keeping in touch with customers, increasing website visits and making sales. The chances are, your customer needs have changed dramatically due to coronavirus and you might need to flex your offering accordingly. Think about your likely customer needs and desires over the coming months and develop an email marketing strategy accordingly.

We hope you’ve found these tips useful. For help with any aspect of digital marketing or SEO, get in touch.

Super-Target your Facebook Ads with Custom Audiences

Written by Chris Wood on 23/03/2020. Posted in Digital Marketing, Facebook Ads, Social Media. No Comments on Super-Target your Facebook Ads with Custom Audiences

Have you used Facebook’s custom audiences to get the most out of your Facebook advertising spend? Read on to find out what they are, when to use them and how effective they are.

What are Custom Audiences?

A Custom Audience is an audience that lets you show ads to people who may already interact with your business. Maybe they’ve reacted to your Facebook Page posts, purchased products on your website, downloaded your app, visited your shop or interacted with you on Instagram.

When to Use Custom Audiences?

Using custom audiences helps you to be more targeted in your advertising and get the best return on investment for your advertising spend.

It’s worth considering custom audiences when you want to target people who have already shown an interest in your business or product and you want to reach them with the product they have already shown an interest in (remarketing) or with a new or similar offering. Here’s a few examples:

1) Website Visitors: If you want to reach website visitors people who have visited a specific website page with an advert reminding them what you offer, you can use a custom audience to set up a remarketing campaign. Since these people have already shown they have an interest in your services by visiting your website, they should be more receptive to your advert. You can even target people who have spent a longer time on specific pages, making your audience even more targeted, especially useful if you have a high volume of visitors.

If you have a new product launch it would be worthwhile targeting people who have recently browsed similar product pages on your website, or interacted with your Facebook Page rather than an audience based on demographic and interests information alone.

2) Customer lists: If you have an email marketing list you could upload your customer list and target people who have bought from you in the past. This is especially useful if you don’t have an online shop from which to track purchases using the Facebook Pixel. Note though that this will only work if Facebook can match the email address in your database with a user’s Facebook email. You also need to make sure you collected the correct permissions from people when they signed up to your marketing list.

3) Lookalike Audience: You can also use your Custom Audiences to create another type of audience called a Lookalike Audience. This audience is made up of people who are likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to your best existing customers.

How Effective are Custom Audiences?

Custom audiences can be a very effective type of advertising campaign and typically attract a higher conversion rate than an audience which is set up using demographics and interests only. They often run alongside, or after, a series of more general awareness raising campaigns. The awareness raising campaign might generate the website numbers or Facebook activity and the custom audience ads then use these results to target people who have interacted with your business or product.

If you haven’t yet experimented with Custom Audiences it’s worth giving this powerful tool a go. Some Custom Audiences require inserting the Facebook Pixel Code on your website, but simply linking to Facebook activity just requires set up through the Audiences section of Ad Manager.

For expert help with Facebook and digital marketing campaigns get in touch.

How your Business can Adapt to Social Media Trends in 2020

Written by Chris Wood on 03/01/2020. Posted in Digital Marketing, Social Media. No Comments on How your Business can Adapt to Social Media Trends in 2020

It’s the start of a new year and a great time to re-evaluate your current marketing strategy. To help you in your planning, in this blog post we cover some of the main social media trends for 2020 and suggest how your business can adapt to them. Social media changes fast, so to make sure your business thrives in 2020 you need to stay ahead of the game!

1. Strike a balance between public and private engagement

Private messaging is on the rise and more and more people are shifting their time and focus to private channels such as Messenger and Whatsapp. Instagram has launched Threads, a camera-first messaging app, and LinkedIn is rolling out its new Teamates feature.

However, this doesn’t mean that the future is purely private social, so hang onto your Facebook page! The rise of private behaviors like messaging has not diminished the importance of public social media feeds, which remain a critical space for brand discovery and customer acquisition.

The key for brands is creating a seamless experience across both worlds, while balancing automation and human connection to build deeper customer relationships at scale. When it comes to private channels you can automate the easy stuff, taking advantage of messaging bots, but make sure you don’t lose the human touch.

2. Employers take centre stage in a divided world

Pessimism among consumers is growing with the rise of populism, divisive politics, and global mistrust of traditional institutions. As our world becomes increasingly divided, employees are looking to their organisations to make things right.

Progressive organisations should take advantage of this new role, building strong internal cultures, amplifying their company purpose with employee and customer advocacy, and putting to work the inextricable link between employee and customer experience.

Don’t underestimate the strength of employee advocates – they can help amplify bold sentiments and goodwill from your organisation. Try creating staff ambassadors on social media, and develop a positive social media culture within your organisation.

3. TikTok shakes up the status quo

Have you heard of TikTok? This social media app had explosive growth last year and is shaking up the social media landscape. Users share short, addictive video clips, reshaping how music is both made and marketed.

The question is, as with all new social media platforms, will it last? Whilst the platform may or may not last, it is certainly bringing valuable insight into the future of social culture, content, and collaboration. In response, Instagram has released Reels, allowing Instagram users to set 15-second video clips to music, share them as Stories, and potentially see them go viral on the new Top Reels section of the Explore tab.

It is only really worth investing time and resources into TikTok as a brand if you are aiming at the youth market. Aside from that, it’s worth noting the trend of short, authentic, raw and fun video as you develop your social media strategy for 2020.

4. Social marketing and performance marketing collide

Brand building has long been the primary use case for businesses on social media, but with the continuing decline of organic reach and increasing demand for return on investment, there’s been a rise in social performance marketing (using social ads to achieve a specific conversion such as a sale, lead, or click). Social marketers must expand the scope of their skill sets to fulfill the dual brand requirements of community building and performance marketing.

Successful organisations need to balance both driving short-term conversions and creating long-term strategies to build brand equity, customer happiness, and differentiation. Take a full funnel approach when it comes to social advertising campaigns – remember that ads aren’t just for performance marketing, they can also be just as effective for brand awareness. Don’t try to do too much with one ad either – use smart, targeted ads to move customers along the purchase path.

5. The social proof gap closes

ROI and measurement will continue to be persistent challenges this year despite attribution models now being built into social ad platforms. Successful organisations need to unite social data with other data for a holistic view (e.g. with Google Analytics data and CRM data) and don’t just look at social data in isolation.

They also need to have an integrated customer engagement approach between social media and other digital and traditional channels leads (e.g integrating a social ad strategy with email marketing, PR activities and advocacy programs).

Smart organisations should invest in both skills and tools to understand social ROI. Simply owning clever software won’t help your organisation understand the value of social media, you need to either have the skills internally to integrate and analyse the data that is meaningful to you, or to work with a skilled partner company.

We hope you found this blog post on social media trends useful. For help with social media and digital marketing campaigns for your business in 2020 get in touch.

Much of the information and stats in this blog post is based on Hootsuite’s recent live webinars on social media trends in 2020 and Hootsuite’s blog on social media trends.

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