Chicago Digital Marketing Company

Why Select Straight North as Your Chicago Internet Marketing Company

Full Range of Internet Marketing Services
For many companies, using a variety of approaches yields the best results. We are highly skilled in SEO, PPC, display advertising and email marketing. For small- and medium-size companies, there is outstanding lead generation potential in all of these services.

Lead Validation & Reporting
We are a top Chicago online marketing agency that tracks, validates and reports sales leads in real time, and displays them to you through an easy-to-use online dashboard. You are able to review leads while they are hot, and also evaluate your campaigns based on actual sales lead data. See our lead validation infographic to learn more.

Full-time, In-house Staff
Our large, in-house staff includes talent in all the areas required to produce high-quality, effective campaigns: strategists, Internet marketing specialists, Web designers, developers, copywriters, outreach specialists, analysts and account managers.

5 Internet Marketing Tips

1. Email Marketing. Are you testing subject lines? If not, your email marketing campaign is likely to flounder. An intriguing subject line is what motivates subscribers to open the email. A vague, uninteresting or spammy subject line results in low open rates, and may lead to unsubscribes or “marked as spam” actions. Effective subject line composition is an art, a specialty within the realm of copywriting. Even so, methodically split testing subject lines is essential, since user behavior is notoriously difficult to predict. Testing like a pro leads to more opens and more new business.
2. Lead Validation. An essential step in every Internet marketing campaign is lead validation — and yet, very few companies take that step. Without validating leads, you will never, ever be able to accurately determine how well your campaigns are performing; not only that, your ability to continuously improve campaigns will be severely limited as well. Lead validation is the process of separating true sales leads from other types of phone and form inquiries such as spam, personal phone calls and sales solicitations. Often, these non-lead inquiries represent a substantial number of conversions. Lumping them all together and calling them leads is very misleading. Beware!
3. On-site Content. All of your website content should be created with the same purpose in mind: to influence visitors to purchase, inquire, and/or form a positive impression of your brand. This is easier said than done. The first step is to understand the needs, concerns and objectives of your target audiences. The second step is to write and present imagery that satisfies their needs, addresses their concerns and meets their objectives. Perhaps the biggest (and most common) way to fail in this effort: creating inward-focused, feature-heavy/benefit-short content. While this approach may satisfy internal audiences, it will leave customers and prospects cold.
4. Reporting. What are the most important items to see on your monthly Internet marketing reports? Generally, you should be sure to monitor traffic and conversions, since those two items are probably the reason you are investing in Internet marketing in the first place. A well set up campaign will be able to identify traffic sources and conversion sources with a high degree of accuracy. When campaigns are well managed, they continuously improve due to ongoing performance testing and tactical and/or strategic refinements. Over time, reports should indicate improvement in traffic totals from campaign-targeted sources, and increased conversions from campaign-targeted sources.
5. Search Engines. We are often asked, “Should we include Bing in our PPC campaign, or limit ourselves to Google?” This is a good question. To be sure, Google should be the primary focus, since it accounts for about two-thirds of all searches. Nevertheless, Bing has a market share of about 20 percent, and can contribute to a campaign. Whether or not to include Bing depends on budget, the scope of the campaign and competitiveness. For instance, in a highly competitive market, high-volume keywords may be cost-prohibitive on Google but within reach on Bing. Bottom line: Only a careful and skillfully conducted analysis can determine which search engines the PPC campaign should incorporate.