EworksWSI Cyprus Digital Marketing Blog

Marketing is the act of persuading people to buy a product or service. Often, businesses need to convince customers to buy their product or service instead of a similar one from another company. It goes without saying that marketing is getting harder and harder. Not only is competition fierce, but technology and the digital world are ever-changing. Nailing down a marketing strategy in 2017 is like trying to hit a moving target. Cheryl, our Director of Marketing, recently wrote a post about marketers and their constant search for stakeholder approval. I’ve been part of many pitc...  Read Full Article

We Launched An eBook Marketing Strategy – Here’s How We Did It When the idea for an eBook marketing strategy post popped up in a team meeting, it was discussed, unanimously approved, and quickly put on the content calendar. Once it was deemed I should write it, I began thinking about my intro (or my hook, as the youngsters like to call it). A quote, I thought. Quotes are fun and intriguing. But then I started researching strategy quotes and realized choosing the right quote is sometimes as hard as writing the post! In the end, I settled on a quote from the great Chinese general, mil...  Read Full Article

When a marketing campaign works, celebrating new leads and increasing sales numbers is the natural tendency. Sometimes, vital components of a marketing campaign – like design, email, content, and SEO – get completely overlooked. Each of these core elements requires the skill of an expert marketer. Unfortunately, many of these skills get underrated or misunderstood. Writing is perhaps the most misunderstood skill of the bunch. We all write in some capacity, which causes people who don’t write well to assume it comes naturally to those who do. But answering an email or sending...  Read Full Article

  The title of this post could have been posed as a question, but let’s address the answer straight away: Yes, trust is absolutely an active ingredient of great marketing strategies. In fact, I’d argue that a marketing strategy without a heavy dose of trust is unlikely to ever achieve greatness. This is especially true in Cyprus. The reasons are many, but first, I want to discuss where the idea for this topic came from our recent insightful post about Why Time is Not the Enemy of Marketers that really resonated with a lot of readersme. I’ve been on both sides of the “time...  Read Full Article

Lately, most of WSI’s marketing team attended the HubSpot’s INBOUND conference. WSI organizes as well a yearly Global Convention for the international WSI network, so we are familiar with the benefits of hosting and attending conferences. In particular, the team raved about a talk by renowned speaker and author Simon Sinek. His INBOUND keynote was based on his book, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t. Intrigued by the boost of energy and passion my team received from Sinek’s session, I began looking into his thoughts on business and leadership to see if ...  Read Full Article

Alliance between Red Design and WSI WSI is proud to announce the new strategic alliance between Red Design Consultants in Athens and WSI for High End Digital Marketing services. Through this alliance we will be able to better serve the business community with the most comprehensive and fully integrated marketing strategies and solutions. In the past both traditional marketing and digital marketing companies have always been competing against each other for the marketing budget of the business community. Both Red and WSI see this as an opportunity to bring both aspect...  Read Full Article

WSI Headoffice has movedto larger and more modern premises Effective July 1st, 2017 – the new WSI Head Office address will be: 20 Carlson Court, Suite #100   Etobicoke, Ontario Canada, M9W 7K6 Experience has taught us that successfully building a business comes down to people and the depth of your relationships aka your network. When a crisis hits your business in the future and you need to create the ‘impossible’ on short notice and within budget – your choice will be calling upon us to help you create marketing ‘magic’. With thousands of successful marketi...  Read Full Article

Our friends over at GetResponse just published a post about how to find time for everything, using a Harry Potter analogy that is related to something I wrote earlier: In my recent post on Marketing and the power of belief, I talked about the difficulties of getting stakeholder buy-in for marketing campaigns. My main point was that full belief is the goal of any campaign pitch because without it, the campaign won’t ever achieve its goals. What I realize now is that many marketing campaigns, strategies and tactics fail to get full buy-in due to one common issue: the length of tim...  Read Full Article

Most digital marketers in Cyprus send a periodical e-digest or newsletter to keep current and prospective customers up to date. And that’s a good move: According to the Nielson Norman group, 90% of consumers would rather receive updates by an email newsletter, while only 10% prefer Facebook. And marketers find them useful as well. The number-one use of email marketing is for newsletters (66%), followed by promotional content (54%), and welcome series emails (42%). Since email newsletters are so commonly used in Cyprus companies and pretty well-received by consumers, thi...  Read Full Article

  “The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow” – Bill Gates – It’s hard to believe that the Microsoft Co-founder made this prediction back in 1999! His analysis has never rung truer. Even a cursory look at the business landscape today makes it obvious that having a strong, visible web presence is absolutely vital to ensuring a steady flow of sales leads to any business. On the Internet, as in the world of business, vying for clicks is as competitive as any marketplace, and your website may need that winning edge in order to overcome the aggress...  Read Full Article

“Most people use statistics the way a drunkard uses a lamppost, more for support than illumination.” – Mark Twain Though Mark Twain wasn’t talking about digital marketing when he said that, he might have predicted something true, especially in current times when almost every good marketer pays close attention to their analytics reports. No matter the industry in Cyprus, knowing how people are interacting with your online properties can give you as a marketer a clear advantage over your competitors. The question though is how many marketers and business owners use their analyt...  Read Full Article

If there’s a trend in my recent posts on the truth about customer loyalty, it’s the running dialogue on what motivates humans to do the things we do. At first, human nature may seem like a heady topic for a humble digital marketing blog. But on second thoughts, marketing is about persuading a group of people (target audience) to do what you want them to do (buy your product/service)! In Neil Gaiman’s novel named American Gods the author develops a relevant concept: the power of belief. In the book, Gaiman’s main character, Shadow Moon, powerfully sums up belief: “It’s what peopl...  Read Full Article

  For those not familiar with marketing automation, this is a method of using software (and tactics) to help businesses nurture their prospects with personalized content over a period of time, thus increasing the chances of turning targeted prospects into loyal customers. Instead of blasting prospects with unwanted sales messages (that they just end up unsubscribing from), they receive relevant information and have a chance to absorb the benefits of a product/service at their speed, creating a mutually beneficial relationship in the process. At best, marketing automation ca...  Read Full Article

  If knowing is half the battle, then the other half is acting on that knowledge. As a digital marketing executive, I’ve come to realize that I work in an extremely tough industry. I see the amount of challenges faced by my team, our agencies and the clients we serve, and am in awe of the sheer amount of problem solving that goes on around me. I absolutely hope that our 30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips, Tricks & Ideas eBook helps you produce a steady stream of new customers on your own. That’s how it was written and designed, and that’s why we sent it out into the world....  Read Full Article

  If you are a business owner in Cyprus struggling to find qualified leads, you are not alone! Many business owners are unable to make time to generate enough leads to keep up with their projected sales. Or maybe your sales force is generating sufficient offline leads, but ones that are unqualified, or that are still in the early stages of the sales funnel and are not ready to make their sales decision yet. In this blog, we will talk about 6 online lead generation best practices specifically for local businesses that can help: 1. Claim your Google+ page While opinions differ on...  Read Full Article

I recently wrote a post on the truth about customer loyalty. That truth, which I stumbled across in an excellent article by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin, is that customers aren’t exhibiting loyal behavior when they buy the same products over and over. People return to a product because the buying process is simple and automatic, and they haven’t encountered a reason not to purchase it. In short, it’s good experiences that keep customers “loyal” and bad ones that push them away. What you say about your product or service matters, but not more than the experience it delivers. O...  Read Full Article

Most marketers are familiar with a traditional sales funnel where leads filter from the top down, encountering various stages of the funnel before converting to customers at the end of the sales process. However, with the increasing impact of social selling and social media, a lead can convert at any stage of the process. As a result, many are beginning to wonder if pay per click (PPC), the more “traditional” of the digital marketing tactics is still an effective method for generating qualified leads for businesses. As a specialist in the 4 pillars of digital marketing – search,...  Read Full Article

All digital marketers know that pay per click advertising is a great tool to enhance site traffic and increase online leads. Its effectiveness can be attributed to the 3 common characteristics that all great marketing campaigns have – it’s targeted, predictable (to a certain extent) and measurable. The challenge arises when clients or marketing managers spend a considerable budget on pay per click advertising but do not see corresponding returns. If your digital advertising spend is not bringing you the results you want, it may be time to take a good, hard look at your current s...  Read Full Article

I thought I did, but then I read something that made me realize I don’t know the truth about customer loyalty. Or I don’t have a mindful understanding of it, even though my subconscious does (and yours does surely too); which is funny, because the truth about customer loyalty has a lot to do with the subconscious. Let me explain. The “something” I read is an article by A.G. Lafley and Roger L. Martin called Customer Loyalty Is Overrated . The following excerpt is the culprit of my aha! moment on the truth about customer loyalty: Research into the workings of the human brain ...  Read Full Article

  So, if you have been following me on blogs and LinkedIn, it’s likely you’ve learned a little bit about Paid Search Advertising and how it all works. If not, you can refer to the articles PPC effectiveness: Highly effective PPC tactics are most commonly used and Paid Search: How Does It Work?. Both articles will give you great insight into the fundamentals of Paid Search. But when should you actually use paid advertising? As a digital marketing consultant, I get this question a lot, and in order to answer it effectively, we must run through why using paid search is so impo...  Read Full Article

Are you a business owner challenged with finding enough qualified leads for your business? Don’t worry, you are not alone! This is one of the top questions we get on a regular basis. It’s the classic catch-22; you have a million things to do to support your business and it would be great to solve the ongoing issue of finding enough people who want to buy your product or service on a regular basis. This blog article will explain the various paid search advertising tactics that a company can use to start generating leads quicker for their business. ...  Read Full Article

I have a friend who, for lack of a better way to describe it, often resists technology. For at least five years, he refused to get a smartphone. Instead, he lagged well behind the societal curve by clinging to his flip-phone. Don’t get me wrong, flip-phones were great and played an important role in the evolution of the cell phone. But there’s something fascinating about shunning a better and more efficient technology.Given how movies like Her and shows like Black Mirror depict the dangerous impact technology has on our society – or that most of us spend more time than we’d like w...  Read Full Article

  Over the last six years, content’s relationship with the marketing world has been a wild ride. Content was all the rage during the honeymoon stage. There were late nights, long conversations and no matter what, everything turned out rosy. The content itself didn’t matter – as long as you had more of it than your competitors, you were winning the content marketing battle. As content became mainstream and more companies joined the scramble to publish as often as they could, distribution – and even more frequent content – were the next big tenets of content marketing. But hey, t...  Read Full Article

Using Video with Marketing Automation Marketing Automation Facts In 2015 only an estimated 0.1% of all US SMBs had invested in Marketing Automation. Top performing SMBs report improvements in lead quality, sales effectiveness and lead pipeline growth within 6 months after an investment in a Marketing Automation tool. But how do they achieve this? One innovative way is to integrate video marketing into marketing automation. Generate, nurture and qualify new Leads through Video Marketing automation has been around for years, and video has been around even longer. But using the...  Read Full Article

  Valentine’s Day is just around the corner. Love is in the air – or maybe that’s just store-bought chocolate. Either way, February is all about relationships. And when it comes to picking a marketing automation platform, it’s important to choose the right fit for your business, particularly if you work for an agency. But how do you go about finding the “Prince (or Princess) Charming” of marketing automation solutions? Here are the top ten considerations for agencies when choosing a platform. 1. Key featuresDon’t pay more for features you aren’t going to use. Know what you rea...  Read Full Article