Big Wins For Arkhi & Gold Coast Businesses

Gold Coast businesses do epic things. And the 2022 Gold Coast Young Entrepreneur Awards is proof. As a GC-founded small business ourselves, we’re so proud to have joined the ranks of finalists and winners who recently celebrated their business growth and success.

Any business that’s managed to thrive despite everything the last few years have thrown at our community deserves a moment in the sun. So, we want to give a huge congrats to a few of our own local heroes:

  • Mannu Kala and Dr Anuj Gupta from Covax Australia, winners of the top Gold Coast Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award
  • Long-term client, Mike Kellet from Macro Mike, winner of the Food & Beverage category
  • eCommerce powerhouse, Tammy Hembrow from Tammy Fit, winner of the Fitness category
  • Joshua Murchie, Mathew Sayed, Craig Gillam and Matthew Shipman from Little Phil, winners of the Sustainability & Social Responsibility category
  • Michael Huxley from Huxley Group, winner of the Arts & Culture category
  • James Gilmour from Gilmour Space, winner of the Technology category

And—yes, we’ve buried the lede—we’re especially proud of our Founder and CEO, Flynn McFarlane who took out the award in the Marketing category!

This award comes after two years of driving inside-out agency change. During this time, our goal was to get real as an agency; for our sake (as hardworking people and professionals) and for the sake of delivering digital growth that actually matters to our clients.

One massive outcome we achieved was to build up our team and make Arkhi a really great place to work. So, if we’re talking about real business growth and success, we have to hand it to every talented person at Arkhi.

We also would be where we are without the support of the teams over at Purple Playground HR, IP Partnership, Shopify Plus, Google, Gorgias, Klaviyo, Meta, Okendo, Tapcart, Recharge, Celigo and Searchspring.

To #teamarkhi, our clients and our local business community: here’s to weathering tough times together, championing each other and facing up to every challenge with ingenuity, honesty and desire to make a real difference.

Sometimes digital growth is strategically simple—we call it leverage. Let’s start talking.

Interested in more?

How To Market On Digital Platforms

With social media taking over the marketing space, it is now a very competitive game to gain awareness, retain attention, and convert people to your brand, product, or service. So how can your business stand out and smash your goals through digital marketing?

The key is having an effective digital marketing mix. Each platform is unique in its offering and its audience, requiring different marketing methods and tactics.

Sometimes digital growth is strategically simple—we call it leverage. Let’s start talking.

This does not mean you should only market on one platform and ignore the rest. It is important to understand each social network has a role to play in converting users. To get the best Return On Ad Spend (ROAS), you need to take advantage of all the different digital streams your customers are in, tailoring content to the platform.

Here is an example:

I am a marketing manager for an eCommerce company selling fun, sustainable swimwear. I am targeting women, aged between 18-30 who are highly motivated, live an active lifestyle, love fashion and share it on their socials. In my social media marketing mix, I’m using:

  • YouTube ads for brand awareness,
  • Pinterest ads to build product awareness with an audience ready to purchase,
  • Google display ads to drive website clicks and traffic, and
  • Facebook ads to build awareness on another touchpoint and retarget previous website visitors

To learn more about the different marketing platforms and how you use them, we have created the ultimate guide, which will aid in your digital marketing mix.

Facebook

With nearly 3 billion monthly users, Facebook is still a goliath in the social media and marketing space. This platform offers small to large businesses a chance to reach customers and gain organic engagement. If you are wanting to stay current in the digital marketing space, its user-friendly and highly scalable Ads Manager should be included in your social media marketing mix.

You can create Facebook ad campaigns in minutes, dedicated to targeting your chosen audience. You can specify age, gender, location, interests as well as audiences who have previously visited your website, purchased from you or are a similar demographic to your current customers (lookalike audiences).

Remember, it’s important to tailor your ads to the app and audience you are targeting. While you might use similar content for ads on Facebook and Instagram, Whatsapp and Messenger will need to reflect the one-on-one interaction you’ll have with your audience.

Google

With Google Ads, you can utilise the world’s largest search engine to launch your marketing campaigns and ads across the internet. The ads types available include:

  • Search: text ads (with potential for an image extension) displayed on relevant search result pages
  • Display: image or video ads that appear across a network of more than two million sites and apps
  • Video: video ads displayed on YouTube and across Google’s network
  • Shopping: image ads with detailed product information
  • App: ads on Google’s largest properties, including Search, Play, and YouTube, as well as mobile sites and apps
  • Local: appearing on Search, Maps, Display, and YouTube to help drive offline metrics, such as store visits or in-store sales
  • Hotel: ads displaying hotel prices and availability on Search, Maps, and Assistant
  • Discovery: one campaign that reaches users across the YouTube Home Feed, Gmail, and Google’s Discover Feed

Google’s marketing platform can promote your business, help sell products or services, raise awareness, and increase traffic to your website.

While you create video campaigns on Google, it’s important to remember YouTube is a significant social media marketing platform in its own right. YouTube is the world’s second-biggest search engine and offers marketers the opportunity to create longer videos that can help drive awareness, engagement, and conversions. Similar to Facebook campaigns, you can select your target demographic based on characteristics, including age, gender, and location. Ads on YouTube include:

  • Skippable In-Stream Video Ads: appearing before or during the video. The viewer has to wait at least 5 seconds before they are allowed to skip the ad.
  • Non-Skippable In-Stream Video Ads: appearing before or during the video with no skip option–ranging from 15 to 30 seconds
  • Bumper Ads: six-second video ads that can’t be skipped and play right before an actual video.
  • Discovery Ads: similar to Google search ads, appearing amongst related search results.
  • Non-Video Ads: a pop-up banner while a video is playing

Pinterest

Pinterest is one of the fastest-growing social media marketing platforms and has the highest average order value for social media shoppers. It’s an image-based platform with users who have intent to purchase. As females make up the majority of users, eCommerce brands with products targeted to women will find more success on this social media app.

Pinterest ads use historical data to promote your content to users who are interested in similar products or those within your set demographics. The most successful and popular type of ad on this platform are Standard Pins, which allows users to save the pin onto their boards and organically grow awareness of your brand. Other ad types include carousel, Video Pins, Shopping Pins, and App Install Pins.

Twitter

For brands wanting to keep their ads short and sweet, Twitter’s marketing platform might be one to add to your social media marketing mix. It can also be a great option for smaller businesses with Twitter’s simple, easy-to-use format and no minimum budget.

Audiences on this platform are wanting content that can be catchy, informative, digested in a second or all the above! Your ads need to reflect this and you can include Facebook and Instagram in your mix for when you are wanting longer-form ads.

Ad types on Twitter include promoting your tweet, account, live stream or trend (a branded hashtag). With your ads, they can be in an image, text, video, moment (similar to a story), and carousel format.

Building your digital marketing mix

Now that you have a basic understanding of the most popular social media and search engine marketing platforms, it is time to think about your digital marketing mix. Which marketing channels best suit your brand, products, or services and goals? How will your choices create an overall strategy where each channel builds on the other? What audiences are on each platform and how will your content reflect that?

While it might seem overwhelming creating and running ads for multiple channels, a digital marketing mix is the best option for achieving and exceeding your digital marketing goals. If you are just starting out, we recommend building your confidence with one marketing platform before adding another.

Want a digital marketing mix to achieve kickass results?

Social media and search engine marketing are some of the best ways to reach customers and increase your conversions. If you are loving the idea of a digital marketing mix and don’t know where to start, that’s where we come in!

As part of our services, Arkhi offers digital strategy, optimisation, monitoring, and content creation. We can use our expert knowledge to bring your goals to fruition. Contact us today!

Interested in more?

Don’t Write For SEO, Write For People

It’s all about keywords, isn’t it?

Keywords, links, title tags, meta descriptions—these are all important but the ultimate thing affecting how your content ranks, is whether or not people want to read it.

So don’t write for SEO, write for the person on the other end. It will improve your content and here’s why.

Sometimes digital growth is strategically simple—we call it leverage. Let’s start talking.

Your content will be more useful

People search to solve a problem and your brand’s goal is to present the solution. If you focus on satisfying your audience, instead of the Google algorithm, you’ll have a much clearer idea on how to provide knowledge and content your readers actually want or need.

Ask yourself who is searching for your brand, product, or service? When and where are they searching? How are they searching and why are they searching? Questions like these will help you understand your customers needs and focus content into something truly useful.

Once you have these insights, you can start thinking about using keyword data to strengthen your content’s searchability.

Your content will rank better

The more useful your content is for readers, the better it will rank. Google wants users to find the best answers to their problems. If your content is high quality and useful, Google is much more likely to prioritise it.

Low-value SEO tactics, such as keyword stuffing, can actually harm your Google ranking. The more painful and difficult your content is to consume, the less people will want to read it, signaling to Google that your content does not solve the searcher’s problem.

Google also actively demotes thin and duplicate content, cloaking (hiding text that only bots will detect) and auto-generated content because these tactics provide a poorer user experience.

It will build your brand

Clickbait titles may improve short-term results, but it likely won’t build your brand. Tactics alone just don’t cut it anymore. In our digital world, you need to connect with your customers—with people—now more than ever before to stand out and rise above the noise.

Providing quality content that focuses on a real customer need, that’s useful and meaningful, will help people connect—to open their hearts and their wallets.

What’s next?

Good, old-fashioned writing, unique ideas, and focused problem solving will help you create the best content. Once these basics are nailed, you can start to strategise with keywords and tactics to drive even more people toward your epic content and product or service.

Don’t have time to do it all yourself?

The team at Stead Lane can help you create engaging, useful, and high ranking content to drive people to your website and increase sales. Let’s chat.

Interested in more?

How Do We Trust The Numbers?

With changes in attribution models and numbers not adding up across platforms, how do we know what’s really working?

Creating reports and analysing performance has become tricky when you rely on what ad platforms tell you. If you’re advertising across multiple platforms like Facebook, Google, Pinterest, and TikTok, every platform will skew the data to try and claim a result where they can. It can take a lot of analysing – trying to understand where a purchase came from and which platform is really giving you the best results – but all the analysis in the world won’t always give you a clear answer.

Sometimes digital growth is strategically simple—we call it leverage. Let’s start talking.

But does it really matter?

The way I look at it, every platform is contributing to the end result. Every time someone comes in contact with your brand, whether they realise it or not, they’re one step closer to trusting you and believing in your story. So if Google Ads are where you’re seeing a big chunk of purchases and the best return on investment, do you put all your digital advertising budget into Google?

Probably not.

Because people have to know about your brand to have the thought to even Google you. Or they at least have to be looking for what you offer. They need to be actively looking for the answer to a problem.

Being across multiple platforms and being present across various touchpoints, means that you’re building awareness of your brand and your product. Each piece of content you push should be purposeful and specific to the platform that it’s on.

While seeing results is obviously important and you don’t want to be pushing content on certain platforms and getting nothing in return — it’s important to understand what success looks like across platforms and for your business. Increasing total revenue might be your overarching goal, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be your goal on every platform.

With ad platforms becoming more expensive and attribution models changing, it’s difficult to directly compare results year on year and understand if performance is really changing or the reporting you’re receiving is changing. So, focusing on producing good content and looking at the overall results can help paint a better picture of your performance.

For an eCommerce business, looking at your overall digital ad spend and your overall revenue and how that has changed over time can be a good way of looking at how your business is performing.

The sum of all digital marketing costs (ad spend + email marketing costs + influencer costs + agency fees) is divided by total revenue.

This will then give you the % of your revenue that you’re spending — looking at this over time will give you a good understanding of how your digital marketing is performing.

Of course, you look at particular metrics and data within each platform, and monitor how specific ads and audiences are performing — but looking at things from a more holistic perspective can end up being more useful.

It’s so important to understand what the purpose of being on certain platforms is for your business, and what success looks like at each stage of the funnel.

If your digital advertising reports aren’t quite adding up and a more holistic approach to your digital ad spend interests you, get in touch with us.

Written By Lillian Price.

Interested in more?

How To Market On Digital Platforms

With social media taking over the marketing space, gaining awareness, retaining attention, and converting people is a competitive space. So how does your business stand out and meet your goals through social media marketing?The key is having an effective digital marketing mix. Each platform is unique in its offering and its audience, requiring different marketing methods and tactics.

Are you ready for Black Friday Cyber Monday?

Black Friday Cyber Monday (BCFM) 2022 isn’t until November, but don’t let that lull you into a false sense of security. Now is the time to get your business BFCM-ready.

BCFM is one of the biggest shopping weekends of the year. With in-person shopping at risk and travel out of the picture, people have money to spend and they’ll be taking it online. They may already be adding items to their wish lists.

We’ve put together a marketing and technical checklist so your products and promotions are top-of-mind, and your business can deliver a seamless digital experience for the biggest eCommerce BFCM ever.

Sometimes digital growth is strategically simple—we call it leverage. Let’s start talking.

Get your website ready for BFCM

During the busiest time of year, you have to make sure your website is set up for a seamless user experience from browse to purchase—and that it can be done at scale.

Optimise your website

If your website cannot handle the surge in traffic, your customers will go to your competitor’s site. A case study by Skilled found that:

  • 79% of customers who are dissatisfied with website performance are less likely to buy again

  • 64% of smartphone users expect a website to load in four seconds or less

  • 47% of online shoppers expect webpages to load in two seconds or less

Luckily, those with Shopify websites are able to handle massive influxes of traffic and over 10,000 transactions per minute. You can improve your site’s performance and page speeds even further with Shopify’s list of 13 ways to optimise your website.

Review all your apps

The apps available in the Shopify ecosystem are certainly one of its strong points. However, if you are planning to have more than 5,000 users on the site at once we suggest you check to make sure the apps you have can handle that amount of traffic.

Some apps are more robust than others. It’s also important to make sure they are compatible with each other.

If you’re expecting more than 10,000 users, then you should really be on Shopify Plus which will allow you to use Shopify Scripts for complex bundles and discounting rules. Check out how it helped Muscle Nation.

Shopify Scripts allow you to have multiple discounting rules running at the same time—all fully automated.

Automate where possible

Shopify apps

For Shopify Plus merchants, you can utilise the power of Shopify Flow to automate tasks to allow you to handle the volume.

Shipping

Using a product like StarShipIT will help you automate a lot of your shipping and fulfilment process, which essentially allows you to get more orders in the hands of your customers faster.

Customer Service

You likely have a kickass customer service system in place already. However, during BFCM you’ll be handling 20-50 times your normal volume of requests. It’s not just the number of visitors, it’s also the sheer amount of questions they’ll have for you.

We highly recommend looking at an automated customer service product like Gorgias, so you can manage all your customer communication on one platform, and automate up to 20% of commonly asked questions for increased productivity.

Brands spend a lot of money to ensure customers land on their site or purchase a product. Once you’ve captured these customers, it is vital for brands to provide the best possible customer experience. On average, 80% of online shoppers are more likely to purchase a product if they receive a personalised customer service response.

Once you’ve ensured all things are tight on the technical side of things, you’ll want to make sure you get the right people to your website.

Get your marketing BFCM-ready

Promotional messages flood everyone’s inbox and social channels during BFCM, and in the lead up. According to a Shopify survey, 82% of merchants are planning to market their BFCM promotions through Facebook and Instagram.

Finding ways to make your brand stand out on these platforms is crucial. Here are some tips for getting the most traffic and conversions, and the best return on ad spend.

Make creative that stands out

Create killer organic and paid content. This is important all year round, but even more so during the biggest online shopping event of the year. Your ads will be competing more than ever.

Create ads that are visually striking and, more importantly, memorable. Think about what will resonate with your audience and communicate in a creative way, making sure your message is simple and clear.

Be as ‘on brand’ as ever

During BFCM, it’s more important than ever to keep your brand messaging and language consistent across every platform. Promotions bring new customers, and having a strong brand with a strong voice (link to brand blog) can be the difference between a one-off purchase and a loyal customer.

Consider creating a brand guide, if you haven’t already, so when it’s time to launch your brand further into the world during BFCM, your messaging remains consistent across all your touchpoints: website, socials, emails, paid ads and even packaging.

You can use a brand guide to audit your existing language or as a reference point when creating new content. This is especially important when you have multiple people, or an external agency, writing for your brand.

Use retargeting audiences for an efficient ad spend

During BFCM, you’ll be paying top dollar to get people to your website. Using retargeting audiences means you know your ads are getting in front of those who are already interested, engaged and thinking about your brand and products. This will likely lead to more conversions and your money will be spent efficiently.

At a minimum, make sure your website visitors, add to cart and social engagement audiences are set up and ready to go. However, for an even greater competitive edge, you can segment your audiences further.

Depending on your business and what type of sale you’re running, you might want to send a number of emails or Facebook ads based on what each customer has previously shown interest in. This will likely increase conversions and ROAS, because you know you’re sending your ads to the right people.

Make sure your Facebook pixel is set up correctly

By setting the data-sharing level to Maximum within Facebook settings in Shopify, you will enable the Conversions API as well as the Facebook pixel, meaning you’ll have the best possible remarketing available for your Facebook ads.

Do this today so when it’s time to advertise your special BFCM promotions, you’re ready.

Tease your promotions early

With most businesses now partaking in BFCM, it’s a good idea to tease your promotions in the weeks leading up to it. Customers will be planning where to spend their cash ahead of time, and making sure your brand stays top of mind is really important to ensure strong results.

If you have their email, they have already shown interest in your brand so getting in front of your database is the easiest—and sometimes the cheapest—way to capture an already engaged audience.

Set up email flows

You’ll likely have an influx of new users. Ensure their experience is great from the start by having all your basics set up, like welcome emails, abandoned cart and abandonment emails. Using a platform like Klaviyo makes this setup nice and easy and allows you to be really specific with your messaging, depending on what actions a user has taken.

If a sale is only running for a few days, outlining the limited time left within an email should help to bring that user back to complete their purchase.

If you’re looking for further material to aid you with email & SMS preparations for BFCM, we recommend taking this 30 minute Klaviyo course on BFCM prep!

Are you BFCM-ready?

If you start planning for BFCM now, you’re much less likely to run into problems. However, it can still happen. Having a plan and a team of experts behind you will give you even more peace of mind.

Shopify offers 24/7 support and can partner you with a Shopify Plus partner, like Stead Lane, when you can’t do it all yourself.

Arkhi can help you with ad content, marketing strategies, website optimisation and Shopify/Shopify Plus migration, so you can deliver an unmatched digital experience for what will likely be the biggest Black Friday Cyber Monday for eCommerce ever. Let’s chat!

Interested in more?

Australian eCommerce Revenue & Traffic Trends During the COVID-19 Crisis

Covid-19 is having a devastating effect on small, medium and large businesses. Not only is the situation tragic for individuals but causing immense pressure across many business sectors as we all navigate through this. Whilst none of us can control the macro environment, we can review and implement various tactical initiatives during this time. To help companies do this, we’ve compiled the data for our diverse portfolio to provide insights that will hopefully be helpful to eCommerce businesses and those who work with eCommerce brands.

Instantly Improve Your Copy With These Writing Tips

Don’t lose your powerful message in confusing, jargon-filled copy. One of the best tips for writing is to simply write clearly.

George Orwell said, “Good prose should be like a window pane.” Before being clever and interesting, be clear. Writing copy is about inciting action. If your message is entertaining, great! But if the call to action isn’t clear, you simply won’t see results.

Here are some writing tips that will instantly improve your copy:

Sometimes digital growth is strategically simple—we call it leverage. Let’s start talking.

Keep it simple

Don’t use a complicated word when a simple one will do. It’s tempting to whip out a thesaurus to find rare and big words to impress your readers. But the easier your writing is to read, the more energy they’ll have to think about your idea, brand, product or service.

George Orwell’s example illustrates this perfectly:

“Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”

This monstrosity could be simplified to:

If you look carefully, you’ll see that success is more about luck than talent.

Write for scanners, not readers

We don’t tend to read anymore, we scan—especially in the digital space. Breaking text into small snack sized paragraphs makes it easier for people to scan and consume your content.

Headings and subheadings also help with this. Imagine if this article had no paragraphs and headings.

Your headings may also be the only text someone reads. So make them meaningful and specific. Will they get your message from your headlines?

Write how you speak

The more formally you write, the faster you may lose your reader, especially when it comes to copy. Copywriting is about connection and engaging in a conversation. So be human, keep it simple and avoid jargon when possible.

As David Ogilvy said, “Write the way you talk. Naturally. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs. Never use jargon words like reconceptualise, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are the hallmarks of a pretentious ass.”

Use active voice

Active voice puts the subject first, which helps the reader imagine themselves taking the action—it’s no surprise this is great for copywriting. It also uses less words and creates a faster moving sentence. It’s a simple adjustment that will make your writing more engaging.

Active and passive sentences look like this:

Passive: Object+verb+subject
Active: Subject+verb+object

Passive: eCommerce is dominated by your brand.
Active: Your brand dominates eCommerce

Sometimes the difference is subtle, but when it comes to writing, small changes can make a big impact.

Eliminate fluff

If you can cut out a word, always do.

Very, rather, actually, really, that—get rid of these filler words. These pad out your sentences without adding value.

Most filler words are adverbs and adjectives. According to Stephen King, “The road to hell is paved with adverbs”.

Rather than padding your sentences with words that describe verbs and nouns, choose your words more wisely. Use one good word, instead of 2-3 mediocre ones.

Here are two sentences:

The light came into the room abruptly.
The light chain sawed into the room.

Which do you prefer?

Edit

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” – Mark Twain.

Writing is rewriting. There is no getting around this. Writing effective copy takes time and usually many drafts.

Go back and read your writing. Use this as a checklist. Ask yourself: is this as simple as it can be and will my audience know what to do?

How does your writing hold up?

“Good writing is not a natural gift, you have to learn to write well.” – David Ogilvy

It takes time and patience. And chances are you may not have time if your head deep in building your kickass business.

Our copywriters at Arkhi know a thing or two. We write clear engaging content across platforms for all kinds of brands. Let’s chat!

Interested in more?

How To Market On Digital Platforms

With social media taking over the marketing space, gaining awareness, retaining attention, and converting people is a competitive space. So how does your business stand out and meet your goals through social media marketing?The key is having an effective digital marketing mix. Each platform is unique in its offering and its audience, requiring different marketing methods and tactics.