The Marketing With Ambio Initiative
The #MarketingThatWorks initiative is a signal to our customers and other agencies that we are dedicated to providing high-quality digital marketing services that genuinely help them generate the results they need for their business.
We Believe Marketing Matters
We care deeply about the work we do, and maintaining high standards in an industry that's notorious for poor quality is important to us. We have received some great testimonials from happy customers, so we know we're getting a lot right, but that doesn't mean we can ever be satisfied. We insist on continually reviewing and reappraising our own standards, with quality foremost in our sights.
However, that's not all.
We want to encourage quality across the board, from companies managing their own digital marketing campaigns to agencies working with businesses alike.
You might be asking why is this relevant, but stick with us...
We Care Deeply About User Privacy
We don't engage in misleading marketing practices, or misuse our clients or their customers' personal data as a way of gaining better results. Such marketing practices may achieve some short-term success, but aren't sustainable in the long-term, and do more damage than good to a brand's reputation.
As we enter the 2020's, businesses must focus on how they store, manage and distribute their customers' personal data. Yes, as marketers, data is everything. Still, there is a fine line between gaining data in an ethical manner that puts the customer first, vs an unethical way, without users' consent. We believe 'permission marketing' is the best approach in most instances.
We Aim To Craft The Best User Experience, Every Time
This one is always up for debate - does user experience really matter? Does it really have an impact on results? We believe it does, and there is plenty of data to suggest that it does. However, let's go one step further - what are the things that we think about when determining what contributes to a good user experience?
Brand Does Matter - a Lot
There are too many marketers who don't think brand matters for gaining results. The usual argument is that 'no one cares about a business's logo or colours, so why bother with them?' Those aren't the only things that make a brand, but they are the most commonly mentioned.
Good branding isn't supposed to provoke the conscious thought of 'this is really great branding'. If it's good enough, the user probably won't notice it, but it may make them feel good, and it may make them remember you when they're looking at your competitors.
A good brand makes it easier for a user to engage, and it may hold their attention longer than a brand we might consider to be poor.
This is a point marketers overlook all too often.
Websites Have To Be Fast
Websites are usually where good user experience ends for most brands.
For instance, 46% of people say waiting for pages to load is what they dislike most about browsing the web. It truly is that much of a damper on user experience, and poor user experience hurts a website's results more than anything. And if your website's results are hurting, then chances are you're missing out on leads and sales.
Pages that load within two seconds have an average bounce rate of 9%, while pages that take five seconds to load have a bounce rate of 38%.
People don't have the patience to wait, and this alone could be the difference between someone becoming your customer or your competitor's.
The Responsiveness of Your Website
When someone asks 'Is your website responsive?', they're really asking 'Is your website built for the 2020's?'.
Being slow isn't a great way to kick off a relationship with someone new to your brand, and if your website is also unresponsive to their device, it makes it all much worse!
Almost 60% of all internet traffic comes from mobile devices, which means that if your website isn't optimised for mobile devices in the 2020's you could be losing a serious amount of customers.
On top of that, search engines like Google prioritise responsive websites, so if you're finding yourself struggling in the search rankings, this could be a contributing factor.
Making sure your website is responsive is also crucial. It's similar to what we said about the importance of brand - people might not notice a very responsive website because they expect it to be just that, but they will definitely notice it if the responsiveness is poor.
The reason is that it gets in the user's way and makes life difficult. It makes it hard for them to do what they are there to do, which is ultimately learn more about what you have to offer and possibly buy from you.
Ads Need To Be Compelling - Especially On Social Media
If most of your traffic is coming from your ads, or more specifically, your social media ads, then this is where a good (or bad) user experience starts for most of your website visitors.
The last thing any company wants to be is the lowest common denominator - if your social media ads aren't compelling, informative and useful, then you may be doing yourself an injustice and making it harder for your customers to connect with you.
Everyone is doing the same thing - everyone uses the same ad techniques and competes for the same attention as everyone else.
This lack of diversity creates something called 'ad fatigue' for users, which essentially means users become tired, sick and fed-up seeing the same kind of ads, promising the same thing, over and over and over again.
We have exited the era where it's okay to use the same marketing techniques as everyone else. Your ads have to be different - they have to catch people's attention in the right way, for the right reasons.
Crafting high-quality advertisements that put the consumer first is what businesses have to do to avoid falling into a situation where they are the lowest common denominator.
Personalisation Isn't a Luxury Anymore, It's a Must
For years, Amazon has been doing it - using data science (fuelled by your data) to show you targeted ads that link to the products you're most likely to buy.
It gets quite complicated quite quickly, but let's be clear. You don't need to personalise your marketing campaigns to the same extent as Amazon, but the effectiveness of mass marketing campaigns is beginning to diminish.
For example, 71% of consumers feel frustrated when a shopping experience is impersonal. Think about that for a second, because if your marketing campaign's messaging and positioning aren't granular, personal and specific, you could be 'frustrating' up to 70% of your audience.
By being personalised, you're promoting a good user experience because users will feel good if they see content curated for them and only them.
What Can You Do about It?
The above are essential to us when we think about good user experience in the 2020's, and we believe that many brands could be losing customers due to not considering these points.
To learn more about how to implement this knowledge for your business, we recommend looking at some of our services or checking out Ambio Academy for in-depth tutorials on how to improve your online presence.
Leading With A Quality-First Approach, For Everyone's Benefit
As businesses, we are responsible for ensuring all our customers have a positive digital experience when engaging with our brands. However, some are more responsible than others.
Unfortunately, there has been an unfortunate rise in companies using unethical marketing practices. No industry sector is entirely free of opportunists or sharp practise, but we need to address it - it's the elephant in the room no one wants to discuss.
While there is nothing we can do to prevent this, we do our absolute best to inspire better quality across the board, leading by example. By raising the bar, we expose the amateur and half-hearted, making our marketplace a smarter, cleaner, happier and more trustworthy atmosphere for all involved.
These values - of decency, quality, honesty - are simple and, if shared across the sector, help create an air of professionalism which benefits everyone.
So how are we doing this? What products and services do we have to offer to inspire the change we seek to make?
Our Products And Services, And Why They Exist
We have a range of products and services that exist to help different businesses in different ways. These all drive towards Ambio Media's overall goal of making marketing services more accessible to the people and companies that need it. Below gives a brief overview of our services and who they exist to serve.
Ambio Media's Core Services
For starters, our core services of website design, search engine optimisation, online advertising, social media marketing, email marketing and conversational marketing exist for the companies that want to outsource all of their marketing campaigns altogether.
Ambio Academy
Next, we have Ambio Academy, an online education platform where we provide digital marketing courses. We cover a wide range of subjects from website development to search engine optimisation, social media advertising, search advertising, email marketing, conversational marketing and much more.
Ambio White
Ambio White is subsidiary of Ambio Media's core services where agencies can white label the implementation of their services with us, allowing them to focus more on getting more clients and serving more businesses instead of worrying about how they will generate the results they promised.
We debated the launch of this service because in most cases, it doesn't make sense to help your competitors. Still, by assisting other agencies to offer better services, we help more businesses improve their online presence. By helping other agencies, we get the chance to help more businesses, which is ultimately what we are here to do.
Ambio Marketplace
Ambio Marketplace is an online store for anyone in need of copywriting, graphic design, photography or videography services. It is an affordable alternative to Ambio Media's core services.
The platform is for busy business owners who don't have the time and resources to do this kind of work themselves, but who also don't have the budget to pay an agency like Ambio Media to take it all off their hands.
Ambio Sensus
Ambio Sensus is an up and coming online CRM being developed under Ambio Media. We're creating Ambio Sensus for two reasons:
1. We are dissatisfied with the CRM's currently on the market.
2. We think we can build a better platform.
The overall goal here is to serve our customers better and we believe building a proprietary CRM contributes to that goal.
This platform's expected launch is 2022.
Ambio Local
Ambio Local is another affordable alternative to our core services (which is still in development) to help local businesses with their lead generation.
If 2020 did one thing, it sent a shockwave through the local business market. Ambio Local will help local businesses generate more leads by deepening their connection with the community they exist to serve.
The truth is that it's becoming more difficult for local companies to gain traction on social media platforms unless they are running targeted ads. The same can be said for search engines like Google if you don't know how to organically rank for keywords in your local community.
This up and coming platform aims to provide local businesses with a dependable and affordable lead generation solution.
A Focus On Better
We price our services openly and honestly. But so much of what we are doing here carries no price-tag - we offer reliable, practical advice in good faith on all aspects of digital marketing. Check out Ambio Academy and our blog, two resources intended to help you succeed with your digital marketing efforts.
If we all focus on doing better work, that's all that matters - raising the bar together improves everyone's overall digital experiences.
Honest companies attract and keep decent customers who stay faithful in the long-term because there is trust and respect both ways.
Focusing on better is a win-win for everyone, and that's what we all need to be striving towards.
