Ontario Digital Marketing

What is Digital Marketing for Ontario Businesses?

Simply put, digital marketing throughout Ontario is advertising your products through online channels like websites, search engines, social media, email, or mobile apps.

Digital marketing means search engine optimization or paid advertising to most Ontario business owners. Those two services are both used in internet marketing, but neither fully explains what a modern Ontario online marketing program entails.

The latest digital marketing campaigns often use a number of internet marketing strategies, all working together to help you get more visibility and conversions throughout Ontario and the rest of Canada.

For example, the best digital marketing services in Ontario will include tactics to:

• Drive traffic to your digital assets (websites, apps, sales funnels, etc) through SEO, social media marketing, affiliate marketing, or paid advertising.
• Increase revenue for your Ontario business through landing page creation, sales funnel development, and conversion rate optimization.
• Track how visitors interact with your digital assets to figure out improvement areas, retargeting opportunities, or conversion rates.
• Build trust in Ontario by using content marketing, video production, link building, reviews, and social proof.
• Build and nurture relationships through messaging, email, and social media.

Our digital marketing agency is happy to provide Toronto, Gatineau, Hamilton, Kitchener, London, Oshawa, Windsor, St. Catharines, Barrie, Guelph, Kingston, Milton, Brantford, Thunder Bay, Peterborough, Belleville, Welland, North Bay, and Ottawa with professional internet marketing services.

Our Digital Marketing Services for Ontario Small Businesses

We're a team of digital marketing experts who know and understand the latest internet marketing trends for Ontario businesses. We've helped drive traffic and improve conversions across more than 100 business industries in Ontario, and the rest of Canada, so let's work together.

Ontario Small Business SEO Strategies

If you want your website to appear on the first page of search results throughout Ontario for competitive phrases, you have to take a holistic approach to your digital marketing campaign. This means reviewing your technical, on-page, and off-page search engine optimization, since all three aspects of SEO work together, to show value to search engines.

When we take on new digital marketing clients in Ontario, we often find page speed, content quality, and backlink profile issues. Each of these SEO problems can be resolved through technical, on-page, and off-page search optimization. Now let's take a look at each of these Ontario SEO services:

• Technical SEO services for Ontario businesses involve things like page speed, site security, XML sitemaps, site architecture, structured data, and broken links. The way Google reads and navigates your Ontario site, and how visitors interact with it, is affected by these. You'll typically need Ontario web developers to fix technical SEO issues, since they're often related to your website's platform or theme. We have an internal team of web developers skilled in common platforms like WordPress, Joomla, Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce, and Laravel.
• On-Page SEO for Ontario websites includes factors such as content silos, content writing, internal linking, keyword research, competitive analysis, frequently asked questions, page titles, meta tags, images, and videos. Improving these areas of on-page SEO will allow search engines to better understand the value of your content and recognize you as an authority on the subject matter within Ontario or Canada. Also, it will help increase important metrics like "time on site" for your visitors, which shows search engines you gave them something they liked. It's never too late to start creating content for your online marketing campaign in Ontario.
• A big part of Ontario SEO involves your backlink profile which includes the number and quality of backlinks pointing to your website, the naturalness of your anchor text and link velocity, the authority and relevancy of your links, social signals, and a lot more. To help search engines understand that your Ontario website and content is worth mentioning, it's important to build natural backlinks to the homepage and interior pages.

The important takeaway is to understand you can't focus on just one or two areas of search engine optimization in your Ontario digital marketing strategy. If you build an incredibly fast website without useful content or quality backlinks you will likely never see the first page of search results, except in unique circumstances. The same is true for other scenarios where two areas of SEO have been optimized, but one was neglected. Ensure that your Ontario competitors (and national competitors) can't just pass you by completing all the SEO checklist items.

Ontario Small Business Link Building Campaigns

We've discussed off-page SEO briefly, but it's worth mentioning again since Ontario business owners don't usually understand this part.

You'll almost always find large retailers in product-specific search results and long-standing service companies in local Ontario results if you look at the first page of search results for competitive keywords and long-tail phrases. If you further review the exact pages of these search results you will often find the number of backlinks to those pages is far greater than your own relevant pages. That is because search engines use backlinks to determine how authoritative your website and content are on a particular subject.

To improve your own web pages, you have to build quality backlinks to your homepage and interior pages using white-hat SEO link building services. For your Ontario digital marketing strategy, you have to see this as a long-term project. Be consistent though! Don't start building backlinks for a few months and then shift your focus to some other SEO tactic for months or years. That lack of consistency is likely to prevent you from ever seeing your website in the first page of Ontario search results. Establish a link-building strategy that will drive quality backlinks to your Ontario website from relevant pages and social accounts. Most of all, you need to keep the backlink profile of your Ontario website natural by not overdoing exact-match phrases, buying numerous backlinks from private block networks (PBNs), or participating in any other black-hat link-building method.

We utilize a number of white-hat link building techniques in our Ontario digital marketing services, including:

• Utilizing the "Skyscraper Technique" to build a bigger, better version of a ranked content article from Ontario competitors.
• Writing in-depth articles to have featured on third-party websites as a guest post, which includes a link back to your Ontario website.
• Reaching out to high-authority websites to suggest content improvements to existing articles that may have become outdated, or didn't cover a specific topic relevant to your Ontario business.
• Responding to HARO requests from news reporters looking for expert opinions and feedback from people in your business industry.
• Adding your website to industry-specific directories by scanning Ontario competitors (or national competitors) to see their most valuable business listings and NAP citations (Name, Address, Phone).

Online Reputation Management Services (ORM) for Ontario Small Businesses

Your online reputation in Ontario and beyond is an important trust factor search engines use to determine rank positions, and your target audience uses it to make purchasing decisions. This is true for all types of purchases and decision-making, ranging from the selection of a local service provider in Ontario, the purchase of a product on an ecommerce store, and even the selection of a physician or attorney for a personal matter. People love reading about the positive experiences, and sometimes even more about negative experiences, that others had with your Ontario brand.

For local service companies in Ontario, we can help you develop a review generation program within your digital marketing to increase the rate at which past customers leave reviews for your business. This often involves collecting reviews on Google My Business, UpCity, Yellow Pages, Angie's List, Yelp, and other online review collection websites.

If you run an ecommerce business, we can help with the collection of product reviews and company reviews. For an ecommerce business, it is important to collect reviews for both the quality of your products and the customer service experience of your Ontario storefront. Online shoppers in Ontario want to know the product they are purchasing is of sufficient quality or utility, but they also need to know you will be there to fulfill the order and answer questions after the sale.

For the reputation of professional service providers, such as Ontario doctors or Ontario attorneys, we can help establish protocols within your online marketing campaign for the collection of testimonials to ensure prospects always see a positive image of you. This includes review generation, reputation monitoring, online reputation repair, survey campaigns, and social media growth for your Ontario website. In some cases, even SEO can be used to help curate the best possible first-page results for your online reputation in and around Ontario.

The risk of ignoring your online reputation is the loss of long-term business, which often isn't noticed until significant damage has been accumulated. Take control of your online reputation today to ensure you always put forth a better image than your local competition.

Content Marketing Strategies for Ontario Small Businesses

Most Ontario businesses use content marketing as a means of attracting, engaging, and retaining a high-interest audience by creating and sharing relevant blog articles, instructional videos, case studies, white papers, and other digital media. This digital marketing approach for Ontario websites helps establish your company as an industry thought leader, while also helping you dominate organic search results and the attention span of your target audience.

When your target customers in and around Ontario begin to identify your brand as the source of valuable advice or guidance you will find it is easier to guide them through your sales funnel. We help Ontario digital marketing clients put together the right content marketing plan for their specific business industry and goals.

It is important to identify your target audience before starting a content marketing plan. This will help you understand the best media format for the content, whether that be informative blog posts, detailed case studies, informal whitepapers, best-in-class listicles, or drip email campaigns. It will also help you determine the best delivery method, which can be from social media, search results, or some other medium.

We often help implement content marketing strategies that involve blog content, infographics, podcasts, videos, email campaigns, whitepapers, case studies, surveys, webinars, checklists, listicles, and lead magnets. We particularly like using the case study method because it is a powerful tool for showing expertise as a Ontario digital marketing service provider. These are all effective ways to market content if you implement them correctly within your Ontario business.

Social Media Advertising Services for Ontario Small Businesses

The use of social media ads in Ontario digital marketing involves paid ads being run on social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Instagram. These social media channels offer a quick and effective method for connecting to your target audience by allowing you to select interests, behaviors, and demographics. However, the downside can be the added cost of setting up the campaigns, creating landing pages, building out sales funnels, and performing conversion rate optimization to ensure the paid ads function as a proper lead generation or sales generation tool for your Ontario company.

By leveraging the data sources of social media platforms, advertisers are able to hyper-target their audiences to deliver personalized content based on demographics, behaviors, interests, and other factors. While this is an enormous opportunity for most established Ontario companies, it can be an expensive method for businesses that aren't ready to take full advantage of social media advertising.

We help Ontario small businesses and large corporations build out the necessary sales funnels and lead generation tools to make the most of their social media ads. We also recommend putting in place plans for conversion optimization and retargeting within these Ontario digital marketing services, both of which will help improve the return on ad spend you see within your campaigns. Let's not forget to mention the freshness of your ad creatives. When running a social media marketing campaign, you have to be mindful of ad decay and ad fatigue to prevent your campaigns from becoming stagnant and suffering from degraded performance.

Search Engine Marketing Services for Ontario Small Businesses

The use of Ontario search engine marketing in digital marketing involves paid ads being run on search engines like Google and Bing. You will find that Google Ads and Bing Ads offer a quick and effective method for connecting your Ontario business to an engaged audience that is actively looking for your products or services. The downside is the cost of setting up an effective and scalable paid advertising campaign, which often involves the creation of landing pages or sales funnels that are optimized for conversion opportunities.

We help businesses of all sizes build out the necessary landing pages and funnels to generate leads and grow revenue, which makes paid advertising a cost-effective Ontario digital marketing strategy. For any search engine marketing campaign in Ontario, we recommend creating a plan for retargeting and conversion rate optimization to improve your return on investment.

Sales Funnel Development for Ontario Small Businesses

A sales funnel, or purchase funnel, is the visual representation of your customer's journey with your Ontario company. The illustration of a sales funnel, which is often referred to as a marketing funnel or revenue funnel, looks just like a physical funnel you'd use to pour a liquid into a container. The top of the funnel is always larger because it illustrates the large number of potential customers that might interact with your Ontario business. The funnel narrows at the bottom to represent the various exit points within the sales process. Naturally, the bottom of the funnel is the smallest part because it represents the number of people who actually converted through the generation of a lead or the sale of a product.

The development of a sales funnel for your Ontario business is more difficult than the explanation of its concepts. For example, some of the most successful sales funnels produce millions of dollars of value each day for their Ontario businesses. To develop a sales funnel that produces value for your Ontario business, you have to put thought into the goal of the sales funnel and the type of sales funnel you want to implement.

There are numerous types of sales funnels, including self-liquidating funnels, automated webinar funnels, lead magnet funnels, premium client funnels, free plus shipping funnels, affiliate sales funnels, and dozens of others to consider. When you work with one of our digital marketing specialists, you will have an experienced digital marketer to bounce ideas off to help you determine the best type of revenue funnel for your business. Alternatively, if you don't have an interest in being involved in the process, we can research more about your business and industry to determine the best funnels to explore and test within your Ontario digital marketing campaign.

Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) for Ontario Small Businesses

There is almost no reason to neglect conversion rate optimization within Ontario digital marketing services. This is a critical aspect of any type of online marketing in Ontario since it directly impacts the ability of the marketing service to provide value for the small business or large corporation paying for the marketing service.

Boosting conversion rates can have a huge impact on your bottom line. Before you pursue a CRO strategy, it is important to understand what it is, how it works, and how to evaluate the service. This is a time-intensive process that involves plenty of iterative research and testing. What makes it most difficult is the CRO strategies that work for one Ontario business might not work for a different Ontario business, even when both are in the same industry.

The most common CRO strategies include reducing form fields on contact forms, testing different call-to-action phrases, creating attractive headlines, implementing a sense of urgency, fixing mobile website issues, improving page speed, adding exit-intent popups, defining value for the visitor, and adding trust and social proof signals.

True conversion rate optimization for Ontario websites can become much more complex. To really dive into CRO, we have to fully understand your business offer, your competitors, the strengths and weaknesses of your value proposition, how visitors are currently interacting with your digital assets, your online reputation in Ontario, and many other factors.

Email Marketing Services for Ontario Small Businesses

You can use email marketing within a digital strategy to increase brand awareness, generate website traffic, drive sales and revenue, bring awareness to your social media profiles, engage past customers, and gain valuable information about your target audience.

We help our Ontario digital marketing clients use Mail Chimp, Campaign Monitor, and Constant Contact for their email marketing campaigns. These are robust email marketing tools to create subscriber lists, segment your audience, and even develop email marketing drip campaigns.

The most important part of email marketing is developing a plan to increase your subscribers. We help Ontario email marketing clients build and nurture their email marketing lists by implementing email collection opportunities within lead magnets, exit-intent popups, checkout processes, squeeze pages, referral programs, affiliate programs, and numerous other methods.

Lead Generation Strategies for Ontario Small Businesses

For local service providers in Ontario, the most important part of an inbound marketing program is lead generation. Not everything can be sold on the internet. For a lot of products and services, a phone conversation or in-person conversation is needed to close the sale. For these types of business industries, Ontario lead generation tactics are going to be critical.

There are many types of lead generation strategies to consider, all of which have been tried and implemented by our digital marketing team at some point in the past. The most common lead gen strategies include the creation of helpful content, retargeting past website visitors, nurturing past contacts with email marketing, engaging visitors with live chat, developing free tools for visitors to use, creating referral programs and affiliate programs, creating video content that can be shared online, setting up free webinars for visitors to attend, and offering helpful downloadable content in a lead magnet.

For most digital marketing campaigns where lead generation is a primary goal, our team will develop and implement one or more lead gen strategies in your digital assets to test what works best for your Ontario small business.

Video Marketing for Ontario Small Businesses

As a full-service digital marketing firm for Ontario, we have our own in-house video production and video marketing department. This has been extremely helpful for content marketing strategies that required creative video assets. More importantly, we've used our video production department for the creation of video ads on YouTube and video marketing within Facebook Ads campaigns. There are many great applications for video production within your Ontario digital marketing strategy. You can use videos to demonstrate unique products, teach new concepts, and improve visitor duration. You can also implement videos within Ontario digital advertising campaigns to bring life to paid campaigns.

Why You Should Invest in Digital Marketing for Your Ontario Website

If you run a business in Ontario that sells products or services, you're going to need marketing to increase sales. You might be thinking about Ontario digital marketing services over other, more traditional, marketing strategies. Here are a few reasons why your Ontario business should embrace digital marketing:

• Digital marketing can often be more affordable than other forms of marketing, because it can be started with a small budget and scaled up as it succeeds.
• With the use of valuable reporting tools like Google Analytics, you can get better insights into how many visitors interacted with your brand, how long your marketing efforts kept their attention, and if you were able to bring them back to your website in the days, weeks, or months after their first interaction.
• Everyone in Ontario is constantly on their phones, tablets, and desktop computers. Why not choose a marketing format and medium that is able to follow your target audience anywhere they travel in Ontario, and beyond?
• Ontario digital advertising has way more flexibility than print marketing, billboard ads, TV ads, or radio commercials, which can't be updated as easily.
• In Ontario, online marketing is one of the best ways to engage users. We wish you the best of luck getting people to comment, like, and share your Ontario non-digital ads!

How to Develop Ontario Digital Marketing Programs

To start a digital marketing campaign for your Ontario business, you need a plan with measurable goals. Your team needs to know what the business's ultimate goal is so you don't spend time on things that won't help.

Identifying a target audience is easy once you have a clear set of business objectives. Knowing who you're targeting in Ontario or beyond is important. This helps you tailor your Ontario digital marketing efforts to platforms your audience engages in and that you use messaging that resonates with your target audience.

Now that you understand your business goals and your target customer, you can make an informed decision regarding the needs and search intent of your Ontario audience. This will help ensure you focus on the right keywords for your Ontario digital marketing and you align your content marketing strategies with the needs of your audience.

Search engine optimization should be your first priority if you plan to incorporate it into your Ontario digital strategy. In digital marketing, search engine optimization moves the slowest. Improvements to your website structure, content quality, and backlinks can take weeks or months for search engines to notice and affect your rankings.

You should consider paid advertising for your Ontario business. However, rather than sending paid traffic to your homepage, product page, or service page, you should consider the creation of a landing page or sales funnel. Most paid advertising campaigns in Ontario that have high bounce rates and low conversion rates make the mistake of sending traffic to a page that isn't optimized to convert a cold audience. The best Ontario lead generation strategies employ the use of splash pages and sales funnels to lead people to the desired marketing outcome.

As soon as your Ontario website gets traffic, you should think about how to keep in touch with those visitors. Some people won't convert on the first visit to your website, landing page, or sales funnel. Consider building an email list, sending SMS alerts for new offers, or setting up tracking pixels to retarget Ontario website visitors.

When you have all of these Ontario digital marketing strategies in place, you can start testing and optimizing. This involves constantly measuring the success of your campaigns, looking for areas of improvement, and even trying new ideas that you read about in case studies or white papers. Your Ontario digital marketing campaign should always be focused on conversion rate optimization.