Digital and Social Media Marketing is low cost and has the potential for high ROI.
ocreations has the experience and capabilities to handle all your digital marketing needs.

Q: Does Digital Marketing really create a return on investment?
A: Depends on who does it and how it’s done. Simply putting some posts up on Facebook or throwing your web-banner into the vast space of the internet and hoping for money to boomerang back is not how this works. Turns out that good Digital and Social Media Marketing is the result of carefully planning out the psychological aspect of what we want people to think, feel and say about your company when they interact with your brand online. Simply put: we put a real human behind the digital face.

01 – Define expectations for using Digital marketing

Digital and Social media strategy starts with setting some expectations. We need to ask hard questions like “Will a plumber be able to find good business on LinkedIn?” not likely, but maybe on Facebook. “Will an injury Lawyer be able to find new clients on Instagram?” That might be a stretch, but they may have great success using LinkedIn.

At ocreations we often find that one of the primary reasons a digital marketing campaign fails is simply because the ads did not show up in front of the right people at the right time. This is a core philosophy and demands investigation.

“There are only a few simple real reasons for doing digital marketing in the first place…”

• Generate leads/sales – direct ROI for business
• Brand awareness – let people know you exist
• Grow an audience – best for entertainment
• Engage with a community – great for politics or social movements
• Website traffic – important for news websites with advertisements

When we go to investigate the likelihood of your demographic seeing your digital marketing “at the right time in the right place” we do more than just guess, we pop open the ad tools and demographics data on the social media platform and look to see how many of the people your business needs to reach even exist on that platform, where they are, who they are and what they do.

ocreations knows how to find the right demographic at the right time and on what platform to guide your target audience into a sales funnel and help you set expectations. Take a look at our existing Digital Marketing portfolio for fresh ideas and new concepts to inspire your next campaign.

02 – Set reasonable goals when choosing Social Media Platforms

Each of these social media platforms attract very different audiences, there are intersections but there are also clear lines too.
Knowing what we “want to have happen” is just as important as setting expectations. If a Plumber or a Lawyer decides to target Facebook for digital marketing what is a reasonable thing we can expect from the users? Will they share the digital ad, comment on it, will they troll it, or will they just hit “like” and move on? What is that even worth to you?Ideally in that case we want the customer to take action: we want them to hire you. You might think this is as simple as “let’s just put up the phone number and they will call us!” and you would be right if this was the YellowPages back in 1990, but it’s not, this is the 21st century and ‘this is Multimedia Sparta’.Those rules and examples change drastically for Entertainment websites, News, Blogs, Politics, Social Issues or communities – but none of that applies to a local business.
We think it is therefore “unreasonable” to assume that a goal for a business should be “likes and comments” or even measuring how many times something was “shared” in social media.

It is also equally unreasonable to measure success by the number of “views”. So what if your Digital Marketing agency got you 1 million views, likes and shares – did you get even 1 single job from that?

If you are running for a public office, well, then 1 million views is super important – but not so much if you are selling a local service or operating a restaurant.
The volume of views and shares may work well for politics or news websites or as impressive statistics in a boardroom to get “oohh’s and aahh’s” from Executives – but we are betting that you are not a politician and your product is not “the news” – you just need customers, right?

ocreations therefore take a hard stance on reasonable goals, we consider a real ‘conversion’ to be measured in how many customers actually called, booked and paid you – that is what we call a “reasonable goal” – the number of people who actually hire you VS the number who just look.

03 – Research target audience and define a demographic

Every client we work with believes they know their target audience and demographic perfectly, and many times they do indeed know a lot, but never have we worked with a customer where we did not also find new demographics, associations and target audiences.

Let’s first talk about regional demographics – Pittsburgh Locals, for example, since ocreations is located in Pittsburgh. Every city has local names for people, places and things. In Pittsburgh, one example would be East Carson St. Turns out, if you advertise for the term “East Carson St.” your business will get some traffic, but it will be mostly out-of-towners. Folks here in Pittsburgh would likely type in “South Side”. So here is where that becomes important: if you want to attract business from out of town into Demographic A but you also want local business in Demographic B that means you have 2 different sets of digital marketing creative to build!

In Demographic A, the out-of-towners, they might just want to find “the best cheesesteaks near me” and when they see the digital marketing assets we create, we will show them great looking cheesesteaks of course, with nothing extra… but Demographic B, the local folks? Well in that case we want our digital marketing assets to show one of the Pittsburgh Steelers eating that cheesesteak because we know folks will recognize that local football star immediately.

This is where it gets interesting. We can reasonably assume the people who are out of town perhaps dislike our local football team, so we would not necessarily want to make a big deal about that sports star visiting your restaurant. In fact the idea “they might see one of the Steelers there” might even annoy that visitor. In that case the target audience just wants to see a photo of some tasty food.

The opposite is true for the locals. The idea “they might see one of the Steelers there” is exciting, perhaps a fantasy, but one that might be the difference between which restaurant they choose.

Ocreations knows how to carefully target audiences and define demographics: the whole point of that is to show different demographics different things.

04 – Define metrics – ‘Key Performance Indicators’ (KPI)

TKPI’s, a fancy acronym for ‘Key Performance Indicator’ – which really just means “is it working?” – That’s what every business owner really wants to know: did