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Showing posts with label GMB. Show all posts
Showing posts with label GMB. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 09, 2023

Free Online Advertising Tips to Attract Potential Customers

Digital marketing signs and symbols on a computer screen with a stack of books and a tea cup by the computer.
Did I hear you say no ads are really free? Well, somehow yes. You can talk of minimal cost then if that makes you more comfortable. As an online small business owner, your business cannot grow without customers. Even as important it is to attract potential customers, attracting them at minimal cost is even more important. This is where free ads become very important to your business. Attracting the right customers without spending too much money is great for the bottom line in your online business. Fortunately for marketers, there are several ways you can get free advertising for your business without spending a fortune. These here tips will show you how.


 
Most Popular Places Online to Get Free Ads

GMB-Free Business Listings: Do you know you can register your small local business on Google and advertise it for free? Yes, that’s the valuable service Google presently renders to businesses through Google-My-Business, GMB. If you register, the service allows your business to appear in Google Maps and local search results particularly when you optimize for local searches. For best results, you should optimize your GMB-free business listings with accurate and up-to-date information and photos. That helps to increase its visibility and consequently attract more potential customers.

Free Ads on Facebook Messenger: If you want to advertise for free on Facebook Messenger, you can create a Chatbot using the Facebook Messenger API. Chatbot is powered by Artificial Intelligence, AI. So, you can program your Chatbot to offer customer support, provide product recommendations, and even complete transactions directly within the Messenger app. If you leverage this important AI technology well enough, it helps your business to reach more customers where they are already spending their time.



Techniques to take full Advantage of Free Ads Channels

Consistently Create Valuable Content: You can do this by way of various formats, and then publish them as blog posts, videos, or infographics. Such content that can provide value to your target audience and showcase your expertise even if advertised free can get good results.

Get Listed on Popular Directories: You can register your business on popular online directories like Google-My-Business, GMB, Yelp, and YellowPages. Doing so helps to increase visibility for your business in search results.

Collaborate with other Businesses: If you take steps to partner with complementary businesses, particularly businesses in the same niche you are, it can help you to reach wider new audiences and gain more exposure.

Tactically Utilize Email Marketing: You must first be sure you have a credible and reliable email list in place. It is usually a very valuable marketing asset to have. Through this list, you can regularly send out email newsletters, product promotions, discounts, price adjustments, and other important updates about your business.

Leverage Social Media: Yeah, social media is now where nearly everyone is at around the world 24/7. One great market place if you ask me! You can take good advantage of the very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and the likes to promote your business and engage with potential customers mostly for free.

Tuesday, February 08, 2022

Blog Smarter and Make Money Online

A pile of 100 Dollars notes on a table.
Many digital marketers are presently into blogging for the sole purpose of making money online. A huge percentage of them are trying real hard but not many bloggers are actually making good money online. Many of these bloggers keep wondering why this is and exactly what they need to do or do better to start making money too. The real difference between bloggers who are making money and those who aren’t is simply style. With over 600 million blogs active on the internet, less than 10% are really making good money. Now, that sounds a bit depressing but not to worry. You can make money too if you learn to blog smarter than most others. Most bloggers do about the same things with their blogs online, but those bloggers who manage to do these things a bit differently tend to have an edge over others. They tend to work smarter than others that is and they make more money too. Here are a few things you do better than others to enable you blog smarter and earn better.



Setting Up a User-Friendly Website

A user-friendly blog website is usually one of the very basic requirements for smart blogging. The site can also effectively serve as a credible business window in the internet world. If you aim to attract web visitors to your blog, the site must be well designed and friendly enough to welcome them. It is through this site you can deploy the right marketing techniques to advertise your business and attract customers. Through it, you must have the right information readily available to help the website visitors make their buy decisions on your e-commerce store. If your blog website is good enough, it should directly reflect your brand’s character personality and answer queries/questions or concerns visitors or even customers may have as they hit the site.

Deciding Your Business Niche
 
Blogging experts always advise that you must carefully choose the business niche you are passionate about for your blog. Doing so together with the demand for the product/service you are marketing hugely determine how much passive income you can make from your blogging efforts. That is smart blogging. It is why you must carefully decide on a niche you are passionate about to blog in. By doing so, you are more likely to blog with unlimited enthusiasm because of the passion you have for it. If for instance you are passionate about sports, you can settle for sportswear or sports equipment as your niche business. You can blog passionately about sports wears for instance with unlimited enthusiasm. This together with good products sales help you to make good income from blogging about such products.
   
High Quality Value-Filled Content

Smart bloggers don’t just write content for writing sake. Good blog content is always written for a specific purpose and must be full of value. It is the valuable content that helps to drive engagement, leads, customers and sales. Online, if your business consistently puts out quality content through your blog, your brand manages to gain some reputation for providing unique and quality content. That helps to attract more followers and a bigger audience. Your content can serve this purpose well if you optimize everything in the content. What smart bloggers do about that is somehow comprehensive but ranges from the keywords to the length of each blog post, web page or blog articles. Smart bloggers habitually use blog posts that contain a minimum of 300 words to about 2500 words in order to rank well in search engines. Good ranking in search engines translates to good organic traffic.

Optimizing Blogs for Search Engines

Without good traffic, it is virtually impossible to make money from your blog. Organic traffic with is attributable to search engines is about the best quality traffic you can get on your blog. Search Engine Optimization, SEO, makes that possible. With a good SEO on your blog, search engines will rank your content high on their SERPs. That translates to good organic traffic. Many bloggers who are struggling to make money from their blogs either choose to ignore or neglect SEO on their blogs. That is not smart. To make SEO easy to implement even by bloggers, expert marketers recommend the following tools.

•    Google Trends: This tool helps to check the level of interest in a keyword and determine which keywords are becoming more popular is Google Trends.
•    SEMrush: This tool helps to provide information about website traffic, backlinks, keyword positions and ideas for search engine optimized content, among other things.
•    Moz: This tool helps to check the positioning of your website in search results. It is some kind of ranking based on link authority and importance of your website when compared to others. A website’s Moz ranking is determined by the number of backlinks it has, the value of those links, and the authority of the website’s domain. Moz ranking range is usually from 0-100. The nearer the score is to 100, the better the SEO of the website.

Website Marketing

The greatness of a website is in its design and user-friendliness. To blog out of your business website, it must be designed and hosted for that purpose. Professional webmasters are always handy here to give you a good website design you can blog out of. That is one very smart thing to do if you want to blog for money. A good blogging website must be user-friendly and fast loading. It must come with a full complement of social media buttons for easy sharing of your content as well as a Call-To-Action, CTA button. The wider you share your content, the more traffic your blog gets. Widely sharing your content is smart blogging no doubt.

Social Media Marketing

Sharing your blog content on social media is one very smart blogging strategy. Presently, social media is where over 3 billion people are active 24/7 around the world doing one thing or another. Now, that’s one very huge audience to get your blog content into to attract traffic. Social media is very popular and simple to use. It is highly effective too for content marketing. Social media platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter are about the most popular of these platforms. Sharing your blog content on these platforms helps to give it a very wide exposure. That is good for traffic and smart for blogging. Because of the ease of sharing content on social media, making your content go viral is fairly easy to do. Social media platforms in addition help to provide an easy-to-use two-way communication and inquiry channel making it easy to connect with your readers and to establish business relationships fairly smoothly.

Email Marketing

It is smart blogging to effectively share your blog content by email. But, first you must build your email list. As your blog audience grows, your followers grow too. Your followers list directly complements your email list as vital assets. Your followers automatically get email notifications if and when you post new content. Your email list is one very vital marketing asset you can diligently build over time and segment as well to receive your blog content. That is smart blogging too. Email marketing serves efficiently as a direct communication with your blog readers. Most people because of their busy schedules prefer blog content delivered by email which they can read at their own time and convenience. It is smart blogging to ensure everyone in your email/followers list gets notified every time you make a new blog post.



Diligent Keywords Research

Smart bloggers do not go into real blogging without diligent keywords research. Keywords research is hugely important for SEO because keywords are the real foundation of SEO.  You can take advantage of free online tools for your keywords research. Doing so will help you to discover the right keywords searchers are using online to find your type of business. Once you get the right keywords, you can deliberately use them in your blog content for the benefit of search engines. That is what SEO is all about. Relevant online keyword tools can help you to find the best keywords related to your demographic. If you deploy these keywords in your blog content correctly, it helps your SEO.

Smart bloggers always crave a robust online presence for their blogs. Working out of their blog websites in digital space, bloggers want to be noticed by people who are actively searching for goods and services online. Smart bloggers are aware that a very large percentage of searchers habitually turn to Google for every search query and question. As a very active search engine, Google works with keywords to decide exactly what to serve to people in direct response to their search queries.  When people enter a “keyword or phrase” on the search engine box and hit the search button, Google displays millions of webpages offering similar products/services relating to the keywords or phrases. These keywords and phrases tend to work like connectors, connecting brands to their curious audiences online. Smart bloggers deliberately optimize their blog content to position their blogs for organic traffic. It is the clever placement of these keywords and phrases on their content that helps these bloggers to get this much-needed traffic.

Every search query on Google has an intention. The reason smart bloggers classify search intent into three categories. These are navigational, transformational, and transactional search intent. Bloggers depend on keywords to help them understand user search intent. That is what smart bloggers use to design quality and effective content. Once you understand search intent and how it works, you will find it easier to deploy and display more relevant information to correctly target your audiences. For instance, a searcher with transactional intent will use a brand name or location in the keyword to target a “product categories” page. Such keywords help search engines to direct the searchers towards the right blog content. That helps to save time for searchers by eliminating the hassle of surfing websites aimlessly in search of what blog content they need to read.



Earning Quality Backlinks

Google algorithms take backlinks into consideration when ranking blog content.  Smart bloggers know this and they take maximum advantage of it. For bloggers, links can thus make a considerable difference in the search rankings and SEO of their blog content. Smart bloggers earn backlinks by interacting with high-quality blog platforms and institutions by way of blog commenting and guest blogging. If these links are from reputable, high-authority institutions like universities and research institutions, good blog websites and reputable publications, so much the better. Strong and high quality backlinks do not only increase credibility for your blog content, they also help it to rank high in Google SERPs.

Optimizing for Local Searches

Smart bloggers know that every small business is local. They know that most searchers first search for businesses “near me” on Google when they get online. The reason they usually optimize their blog websites for local searches. Such blogs get to benefit from the huge local search results out there. If you blog for business and your business location is part of your local SEO, major search engines like Google take note. That helps to increase the visibility of your blog particularly to local searchers which is the target audience of the business you blog for. On social media, if you set up your business as a location on Facebook for instance, it can ensure that users tag you on account of that location. That again helps to amplify the visibility of your blog/business.

Smart bloggers carefully place geographically-related keywords as often as possible in the titles, headers, image tags, body, and meta descriptions of their blog websites to increase local visibility. Even when describing the products/services you are blogging about, you must ensure that you are optimizing your location. Make sure your location is in the blog/business listings as in GMB, social media profiles, and your blog website pages. That helps your blog/business visibility in your locality a great deal because more local traffic finds your blog as a result.

Wrapping Up

Blogging for business online is a hugely competitive one because most digital marketers are currently blogging as part of their marketing strategy. These bloggers do most of the foregoing things and much more to project their blogs within the huge competition out there on the internet. However, it is only smart bloggers who get to make good money from their blogs. That comes down to as low as 10% of all bloggers on the internet. Not to worry though. If you blog smart yourself, you too can quietly join that somewhat elite group and make money from blogging. Just get your hands on it and commence smart blogging now. Good luck!

Monday, November 29, 2021

6 Tips to Get Started with Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketer in work station with a computer, pen, notepad and smarthone.
Wanting to do business online? Affiliate marketing is one great idea worthy of your consideration. All you need to get started is just a little extra time to learn the rudiments. You don’t really need any considerable monetary capital outlay or experience. You can start by making it a side hustle at the beginning but it can as well turn to full time income if you gain hands-on experience in the business. With the rise of influencers and social media platforms, affiliate marketing can quickly become one of the largest online income sources for you. Quite simple to get started really! All you need to do as an affiliate marketer is to actively promote offers/products from product merchants and you get paid commissions for your efforts. To get started quick time, just get yourself an internet connection and a social media account and pronto you are in business. You can promote either through your own website/blog or through a full-service affiliate platform or a reputable eCommerce website.



The following tips can help you to get started with a bang and to make the most impact.

1. Market to the Right Audience

The right audience must be deliberately targeted for best results. You can grow a personal blog audience or a social media audience for better targeting. You can segment this this audience through demographics and thereafter promote what fits your demographics best. Because you already have considerable control over the audience you’ve built over time through your content, marketing to the audience becomes fairly easy to do.

2. Take Advantage of Social Media

These days, social media appears to be where everyone is at 24/7. That makes social media a huge market place. First is to have accounts on your preferred social media platforms particularly the very popular ones like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok or Pinterest. Next is to expand your following beyond family and friends with the help of your content which you depend on to help grow your following. You can thereafter engage with other people that have interests similar to yours and your market base grows from there. For better ads targeting, you can segment your audience by way of demographics and you direct your messages with pinpoint accuracy.

3. Promote Creatively

The Internet is such a huge market place that you must always seek creative ways to get things done if you want good results. Proven and provable authenticity is one of such creative ways. On the Internet, the more authentic you are when you promote products, the better your chances of getting conversions and making sales. Unlike influencers, affiliates have a lot of latitude to choose how they post content to promote their unique affiliate links. Affiliates can for instance do what most other affiliates do but they must do these things more creatively to get better results. 



4. Promote Your Products Multichannel

As an affiliate, you must resolve to explore as many channels as possible to get your messages out. It is fully within your powers to decide what channels to use. Experience and analytics results can help you make these decisions accurately with time. You can decide to promote through Google-My-Business, GMB, social media, emails, newsletters, podcasts, and webinars and so on. If you can spare a little expense for paid online ads, you can create native/display PPC ads to target people outside of your social media and email circles but who have an interest in your niche.

5. Hone in on a Specific Niche

Expert marketers do not advise affiliate marketers to promote any and all types of products. It is best to promote products that sell well and people want to buy. The reason it is better to hone in always on a specific niche of your choice. That helps you to quickly build authenticity. If you have previous certifications, do not fail to use them to help your authenticity. Such certifications come in really handy when partnering with brands/products. If you have a passion for a particular niche, you can look at the content you regularly post and determine what themes are present that will interest your audience. That helps your authenticity a great deal.

6. Target Fringe Products to Market

If you want to be an effective affiliate, always have an eye for fringe products to promote. This is because one of the best ways to easily distinguish yourself from other affiliates is to look for fringe products to market. These are products/brands that are not way too common with too many other affiliates. The reason is to avoid a heavily crowded market where every marketer is in a rat race to survive. Affiliate programs that are already crowded typically don’t usually offer high-paying commissions and you are in affiliate marketing to make money. Isn’t it?

Thursday, August 05, 2021

Digital Marketing Tips to Advertise Your Small Business Online

Advertizing a small business online with a smartphone and a computer.
Small business owners traditionally face very daunting challenges in their marketing campaigns to advertise their small businesses online. That is even with the well-known digital marketing campaign methods like Email marketing, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Blogging and so on most marketers like to use. Many marketers do get by though. You can get by as well if you take these here tips into account when designing and shaping your own digital marketing strategy.



 

Set Up a User-Friendly Website

A user-friendly website is actually one of the very basics of advertising your small business online. It serves as your business window in the internet world. If you aim to get web visitors to your website, the site must be well designed and friendly enough to welcome them. It is through this site you can deploy the right marketing techniques to advertise your business and attract customers. Through it, you must have the right information readily available to help the website visitors make their buy decisions. If your website is good enough, it should directly reflect your brand’s character personality and answer queries/questions or concerns visitors or even customers may have as they hit the site.

Position Your Website for SEO

Online marketers usually worry about how major search engines particularly Google can notice and index their websites. The answer lies in SEO, Search Engine Optimization which is a process of optimizing your online content to enable search engines rank it high in their SERPs. That way, they send more organic traffic to the website for searches of specific keywords the website content is optimized with.
 
Set up an Account on Google My Business, GMB

GMB account is free and easy to set up. Since Google appears to be the first place searchers take to in search of products or services, it is just wise to take the advantage and use it to advertise your small business. A GMB account helps your business to show up in search results when people are looking for your type of products/services online. That makes GMB a perfect and budget-friendly tool to advertise your small business online. 


 

Have a Strong Social Media Presence

Having a strong social media presence can be key to the effective advertising of your small business online. The reason is because of the huge popularity of social media platforms and the ease of sharing information therein. However, you must endeavor to pick only the social media platforms that are right for your type business and you can manage easily without undue stress. This choice is from among the most popular platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and the likes. Because each platform has a different type of audience, for sake of demographics, you must have your social media strategy which is suitable for your type of business. Regularly sharing high quality content on social media helps to advertise your small business at minimal costs.

Optimize for Local Searches

Every small business is local. Most searchers first search for businesses “near me” on Google when they get online. For this reason, if you optimize your website for local searches, it benefits from this huge search results. If your business location is part of your local SEO, search engines like Google take note. That helps to increase the visibility of your small business particularly to local searchers which is your target audience. On social media, if you set up your business as a location on Facebook for instance, it can ensure that users tag you on account of that location. That again helps to amplify the visibility of your business. You can carefully place geographically-related keywords as often as possible in the titles, headers, image tags, body, and meta descriptions of your website to increase your local visibility. Even when describing your products and services, you must ensure that you are optimizing your location. Make sure your location is in your business listings as in GMB, social media profiles, and your website pages. That helps your business visibility in your locality a great deal. 

Saturday, July 17, 2021

Digital Marketing Quick Tips for Small Businesses Start-ups

Virtual digital marketing symbols projected from IPAD screen.
Small business start-ups always face huge marketing challenges. Many learn early enough to take to digital marketing as one great way to take on the challenges. If they take their businesses online early enough, digital marketing can really help them to face their marketing challenges in good stead. Marketing online is the right place to be because most consumers are now resorting to using more online tools to search for local businesses they want to patronize. Small business owners can always take advantage of this marketing reality if they choose to take their products/services online to reach more customers/clients at lower costs. That is where digital marketing can greatly be of help. Find below some quick tips to accelerate this process.

 

Take Your Business Online

Many experienced digital marketers like to say taking your business online is a given. It is not always so particularly for many small business start-ups. Many small businesses still need to be persuaded that internet technology has changed many things in business marketing environment. The smartest thing to do for your small business start-up is to get it online as fast as convenient. To get it done, you may choose to hire the services of professional webmasters at a fee or DIY using Wordpress templates that are quite simple to use, versatile and flexible. Small businesses can easily take advantage of the content management dashboard from WordPress to service their customers well. Having a good website where you can market out of is the first major step in that quest. A good website can serve as your online office and e-commerce shop. It is your business window in the internet world where potential customers first make contact with your small business.

Optimize for Local SEO

Most small businesses are local businesses. It is imperative therefore to optimize your website for local SEO as soon as the site is up and running. In this quest, listing the business on GMB, Google-My-Business is highly recommended. Once your listing is complete on GMB, and the listing is optimized for local SEO, as soon as searchers hit the computer button for “business near me”, Google pops up your business along with others in the same local environment of the searcher. Your business gets good organic traffic as a result. This is exactly why it is very necessary for local businesses to optimize their GMB profile to help them build long term relationships with customers particularly in their local environments.



Enable E-Commerce on Your Website

If you are using WordPress template for your website, you can take advantage of its in-house tools to manage your small business.  WordPress enables business owners to use the WooCommerce plugin to set up their business and start to make transactions almost immediately. If however you decide to use specially designed website by webmasters, they can help you to customize the website for e-commerce functions as well. That allows you to open an e-commerce shop for the products you are selling. That is where you can easily list/display your products for sale. It will in addition be fairly easy for you to track sales, leads, and to build a customer database from this e-commerce shop.

Saturday, June 12, 2021

8 Online Marketing Tips to Boost Sales

The key to building wealth sign tagged on a golden key near some dollar notes. Symbolic of boosting sales as one key to building wealth.
Online marketing is hugely competitive. You must know the products you are selling and stay on top of your online marketing activities if you want to boost sales. There are many things you can do ranging from optimizing your website, choosing marketing channels, rebooting your marketing strategies, writing a better blog, getting more industry info and staying on top of the trends and so on if you want to boost sales online. You can also pay more attention to social media marketing, content marketing, email marketing and any other marketing techniques commonly used to effectively market products/services online. Expert marketers advise that you can experiment with different marketing methods/techniques until you come up with the best mix. And, never be afraid to try something new provided it gives you the results you want.



Here are eight things marketers can do to help them boost online sales significantly.
 
1. Make your Website User-Friendly

Your website is your business window on the internet. That is where potential customers first make contact with your business and that is where customers return to for repeat business. It is the first place every prospective buyer gets to before making their buy decisions. To enable your website serve this useful purpose efficiently, it must be well-designed and hosted on the internet. The images, photos, graphics and videos on the site must be such that enables it to be visually engaging, load quickly and interactive enough for the convenience of customers. It must be optimized for search engines and mobile devices.
 
2. Write an Informative Blog

To write an informative blog, you must first figure out your area of expertise in your business niche. That is where you can develop great blog ideas and topics that will be informative enough to showcase your expertise and attract readers. For most marketers, writing a good blog remains one of the best tools to convey value to prospective customers and establish themselves as experts in their business niche. To make your blog content more engaging and shareable, you must optimize it for SEO and incorporate multimedia channels in it. You can in addition promote the blog via your email newsletters.

3. Create Buyer Personas

You need an ideal buyer persona to help you craft your marketing messages. This is because you cannot effectively market to your target audience if you don’t know who they are and where they are. You must take quality time to come up with detailed buyer personas for the people you think would get the most benefits out of your product/service. Exactly who are the people most likely to use your product/service and how you can package the product/service to appeal to them are issues your buyer persona must clearly address. From there, you can deliberately create content specifically tailored to each persona you have created.

4. Jack-up Email Marketing

Email marketing remains one of the best and most cost-effective digital lines of communication with customers and potential customers. Once you have a credible email list in place, you can efficiently use it to market new products, announce promos/discounts, nurture and qualify leads, close sales, collect valuable data and so on. The icing on the cake is that you can automate your emails through some email marketing platforms to make your marketing easier and cheaper for you. Through these email automation platforms, you can host your welcome emails, follow-up emails, and appointment reminders to save you valuable time and money. When you automate your emails, it makes it easy for you to time them appropriately, send a series of emails and maintain regular communication with customers and prospective customers.

5. Brand Yourself Better
 
Your online presence must be consistent to help your branding. For this reason, the branding you use must be cohesive across all platforms and channels. Your business logo, colors, font, aesthetic layout, and other design elements should match across your website, social media channels, and email correspondence. That helps to unify your brand voice making it the same across every platform you are operating from. In addition, your brand must be easily memorable enough to be in the minds of your customers and potential customers. A combination of all these elements will help you to create a brand that is reliable and that people feel they can trust enough to do business with. The real reason you must brand yourself and your business well online.

6. Make your Listings Complete and Active

It is not only recommended you get your business listed, you must make efforts to make the listings active. Keeping your business listing active is critical to ensuring you show up in search results. This is one great way to get more reviews and to engage with more reviewers. If you have not already done so, just get your business listed on GMB, Google-My-Business, Yellow Pages and Bing. Be sure your listing is complete, cohesive and detailed across all sites. Make sure your business hours, contact information like Skype, telephones, office location, business hours, photos, site links, and other relevant business information are detailed on your listings. All these help your business to generate feedback and reviews to enable you engage with customers positively. A good engagement helps your business to build trust, generate more leads and sales.



7. Be Conversant with Industry Terms

Every business has its own language of engagement. You must be conversant with the language of your own industry even if it is industry jargon. If you are conversant with your industry terms and how to use them, it can help you to look more professional in your chosen business. That way, you can build trust with your prospective customers better and faster. However, you must always be sure you really understand a term and its proper context before using it to avoid offending or annoying anyone. The reason you must use these terms sparingly to make sense the way industry experts do.

8. Stay on Top of your Industry Trends
 
A good grasp of industry trends helps business owners to be on top of their marketing game on the internet. For this reason, it is smart to keep close tabs on industry leaders and take note of how they’re marketing themselves. That way, you’ll get to know what they are doing that you can incorporate into your own marketing strategy and what they are not doing that you can drop from yours. Follow/friend your industry leaders on their social media-handles to see what content they regularly share. Identify the major influencers in your business niche and pay attention to what they’re sharing. Regularly curate and share quality content on your social media pages, watch out for what gets the most engagement, then model your new content off of that. Stay on top of the latest industry data to avoid quoting and relying on outdated statistics in your marketing material or social posts. You can do this by checking industry publications and sites regularly for the latest information, statistics and data. Always double-check the source of any statistics/data for credibility and take note of any relevant information that can be of help to your business.

Friday, June 04, 2021

How to Improve your Small Business Online Presence with Listings

A Small Business owner working out of two computers to get online presence for his small business.
You can improve online presence for your small business by listing it on popular directories. Even though there are thousands of online directories out there on the internet, if you create listings for your business on the most popular directories, it helps the business to show up in many more places online. In addition, links to your website from popular directories do serve as valuable citations for your business. Google takes these links into consideration when ranking your site and that helps your online presence a great deal.



Here is what you can do if you want to use listings to improve online presence for your small business.

Get Your Business on the Heavy Hitters

It is always advisable for small business owners to target the most popular directories right from the outset. These are the “heavy hitters.” They tend to dominate the top 10 on the SERPs of most search engines. For this reason, many of the smaller directories out there usually aggregate information from these big directories. The big directories get tens of millions of visits per month and your business can benefit from this huge traffic to improve its online presence. Just try out big hitters like, Google-My-Business, GMB (the star-boy of the lot), Facebook, Yelp and Bing. You may also consider Foursquare if you want to take advantage of being included in thousands of local apps and services.
 
Maintain and Monitor your Listings

Thousands of directories across the web do pull information from one another. That can lead to inconsistencies or inaccuracies over time on your listings. You must take deliberate steps to check this because it spells a very bad omen for your online presence. You know why? Most consumers easily lose trust in local businesses if they find out incorrect or inconsistent information in their listings. And you know why? Every business thrives on trust. As much as practicable, you must make out valuable time to maintain and monitor all your listings from time to me. Alternatively, you can use the services of a listing service provider to help you out.



Populate Every Listing Field with Accurate Information

You must be very meticulous about this for obvious reasons. Just like social media feeds and search engine results pages, listing results are determined by algorithms. This means that the quality and consistency of your listing matters a great deal for you to get noticed. All vital information about your business must be listed accurately in the correct boxes or spaces provided. Vital information like your website, business niche/category, hours of business, business address, and contact info and so on are hugely important in your listings. As much as possible, make sure the information you provide is identical across all the listing sites you are using.
 
Make your Review Strategy Proactive

Strategically, reviews have perhaps the most powerful influence over how high you show up in directory results. That is in addition to the fact that they are one of the top ranking factors for Google local search. These are hugely important factors for your online presence. For this reason, there is a need for you to have a proactive strategy in place to keep a steady stream of reviews coming in. The more reviews you get, the higher your business is ranked by search engines and the stronger your online presence becomes. Constantly monitoring your reviews is very crucial because of how important the reviews are for your online presence.

Monday, May 31, 2021

7 Free Tools for Online Presence Management of Your Business

Small business branding work station with a computer, smartphone, Tablet and black cup of beverage.
If you market online, you must the concerned about the online presence management of your business. With so many online channels out there, building and maintaining your online presence is a very huge undertaking. It is always worthwhile though because the returns from the efforts can be very big. That is why it is worth undertaking. Doing it physically is usually very daunting. So, you need online tools and some form of automation to help you out with the online presence management of your business. Below are some free tools which are popular with marketers you can try out yourself to help you with the online presence management of your business. 

 

1. WordStream Tool

This is an effective GMB, Google-My-Business grader tool you can rely on. WordStream’s free GMB grader helps you to identify what is missing in your profile and exactly what you need to do to improve it. The better your profile is on GMB, the more visible it is and the more clicks it gets. WordStream Tool helps to make your profile look better on GMB.

2. Google and Facebook Ads Graders Tool

Marketers effectively use this free tool to perform a thorough audit of their ads accounts. The tool usually provides a detailed report on optimizations which can be undertaken to increase the visibility of the ads. That way, you can prevent wasted spend, and get more conversions in the process.

3. LOCALiQ Tool
 
This is a very effective digital marketing health check tool. To use LOCALiQ’s free presence checker, just enter your business name and address and get a report showing which of your business listings are complete, which ones are missing information, and which ones are missing entirely. You can then supply the missing/incomplete information to make your ads more captivating.

4. Google Search Tool

Anytime you Google your business-name yourself, you can easily see what shows up on the SERPs of Google. It is Google search tool that gets out this report. You will see exactly what others see when they search your business name on this tool. If what you see is not satisfactory for your marketing efforts, you can do some tweaking on your listings until you are satisfied with the search results.



5. Google’s Page Speed Insights Tool

If you plug your website into the Page Speed Insights tool of Google, you’ll get a score for both mobile and desktop devices as well as recommendations to improve page speed. You can do some tweaking thereafter until you are satisfied with the results.

6. Google Alerts Tool

You can get periodic reports free of cost from Google alerts depending on the information you want Google to alert you on periodically. These reports could be daily, weekly or monthly depending on your choice. You can set up these alerts to enable Google notify you when new results for any topic of your choice about your business shows up in Google Search. This is one very useful tool you can effectively use to stay on top of trends in your business niche and even to spy on your competition.

7. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test Tool

Google now reports that that over 60% of search results is at times attributable to mobile devices. So, marketers must now optimize their websites to be mobile-friendly to take advantage of this huge search data. For your own website, you can simply Google “mobile friendly test” and enter your website into the search result. The report will show you how mobile-friendly your website is.

Friday, April 30, 2021

Digital Marketing Tips for Marketing a Local Business Online

Digital Marketing work station having a BRANDING sign projected from the computer screen on the table and a smartphone, Tablet and a mug of beverage on the computer table.
If you run a local business, one of the best ways to grow it is by investing in digital marketing. With digital marketing, you can easily connect with prospective customers and customers, get good traffic, leads and make sales. This is because digital marketing leverages internet technology to reach a diverse audience of people that are also on the internet to do business and make connections. The influence of social media and the rising trend of web searches enable you to build a strong online presence for your business. Yes indeed, but thanks to internet technology and digital marketing that it enables. If correctly deployed, digital marketing can help your local business to connect with customers online and effectively promote your brand to them.


 
To market your local business successfully online, you must give it a strong online presence which these here tips can help you with.

Make a Digital Marketing Plan

To market successfully online, you must have an effective digital marketing plan right from the outset. Decide early on exactly what you want to achieve with your marketing efforts. You must have clear objectives, goals and strategies to incorporate into your digital marketing plan. You may decide on such goals/objectives as increased traffic, increased leads, customers, sales and a strong brand. Next is to decide on which digital marketing plans that can best help you achieve your goals/objectives. After SWOT testing your digital marketing plan using analytics to be sure it will deliver on your expectations, you’re good to go.

Launch a User-Friendly Business Website

Your business website is the most important window your business has on the internet. That is where you first make contact with online surfers looking to do business. If your business website is both user and mobile friendly enough, it helps you to do good business online. It is through your website prospective customers get to have firsthand opportunity to learn more about your business. If they like what they see and are satisfied with their experience on your website, they will engage more with you. You can help your website to be user-friendly by making sure it is well designed, secure, loads fast and has relevant information about what your business is offering to customers through clear, concise, aesthetically appealing and persuasive content. For organic traffic purposes, be sure you use good SEO to help its search engine rankings. You can also optimize your website for mobile devices to make it mobile-friendly since Google now attributes a high percentage of searches to mobile devices.  

Invest in Quality Content Creation

In digital marketing, content is king. This content must be of high quality, informative, educational and even entertaining. If you regularly craft high quality and creative content and post it on either your website or social media platforms, it will help you to attract customers and build your brand online. If you have the skills, you can create your content yourself. If not, contracting your content creation activities to professionals is the next best option. Irrespective of whosoever writes the content, what is important is to make sure it is relevant to your business niche and provides very useful information to your customers. It is advisable to experiment with different kinds of content and see which one works best for your objectives before deciding on it. If you decide, you can commence pushing the content through infographics, videos, how-to guides, and blog posts with your objectives firmly in the picture.

Create a Google Listing

Google-My-Business, GMB listing with the tools it offers is very helpful to local businesses. The listing allows you to enter your business name, location, the products/services you market, contact address, day time phone number, and other relevant business details. It can be fully optimized for local searches. That is what allows searchers looking for businesses “near me” to hit on your website and hopefully make beneficial contacts with your business. If you have Google listing, when a prospective customer searches for a product/service that your business offers, the name of your business will pop up alongside others. That helps prospective customers to easily reach you.

Be Active on Social Media

These days, social media because of its peculiarities appears to have some of the best digital marketing services online. The reason it is advisable to have active social media pages for your business particularly on the most popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and others. On social media, local business owners can easily interact with prospective customers since they are able to identify the platforms that they like to use. If social media is effectively used, you can better promote your business and grow your brand to generate more interest in the products/services you are rendering.

Market with Locally Targeted Ads

You get better results from digital ads when you are specific about the locality you are targeting. What you need to target are relevant factors that make it clearer for prospective customers to reach your business. Factors like street addresses, city names, county names, boroughs, district names, regions and countries. That helps to increase your reach and enable you to target more relevant customers. By having a compelling Call-to-Action, CTA in your ads, it helps to enhance the process for prospective customers to engage with you.
 
Win Customers with Offers and Discounts

Including offers and discounts in your digital marketing messages is a very effective way to win new customers. Many people will always be interested in buying your products if they discover that you have some really enticing offers or discounts. You can make these offers alongside your normal marketing info through your website, your social media platforms and even via emails and newsletters. If you notice products that are lagging in sales, you can specifically target such products with good offers and discounts to boost sales.

Evaluate Your Marketing Strategies with Analytics

It is with accurate evaluation of your marketing strategies that you can effectively determine if you are getting good value for every ads dollar you are spending. To accurately measure the Return On Investment, ROI in your business, you need good analytics tools. If you connect your website to Google Analytics, you can constantly check the reports from your marketing activities on social media pages and multi-channel ads campaigns. These tools help you to analyze and understand the impact of your marketing strategies, and which brings the best returns on your investment. With this information, you can plan accordingly and make necessary adjustments on your ads. Significantly, you can rely on the insights from analytics data to help you take vital decisions to rejig or repurpose your digital marketing strategies.


 
Engage with Your Customers

If you market online and you value customer reviews, comments, and complaints, you must explore all ways to constantly engage with your customers. It is the insights from such customer reviews, comments, and complaints that can help you to get a very clear picture of your business from the perspectives of your customers. It is through these perspectives you can get to know what you are doing great and what you need to improve upon. By doing so, you build customer trust and reliance and your business benefits immensely. When customers trust you, they are likely to stay loyal to you and you win more new customers in the bargain. It therefore makes good business sense to constantly engage with your customers, by sending them regular emails about the latest deals, price adjustments, promos, special offers, and giveaways, all great for customer loyalty and retention.  

Have Multiple Contacts on Your Website

Aside the landing page, the “About Us” page appears to be the next most important page on your business website. That is where your website visitors can get to know more about your business and to make contact with you because in online business, it is hugely important to make it easy for customers and prospective customers to easily reach you 24/7. For this reason, you must make sure you have multiple contacts on your website and even in all your social media platforms. Make it easy for your website visitors to have easy access to your email address, day time telephone numbers, and your handles across all the social media platforms where you have accounts. With these multiple contacts, customers and prospective customers can freely choose any contact method that they are comfortable with to reach out to you.

Wednesday, April 28, 2021

How to Improve Your Online Reputation with Content Marketing

Digital marketing design and graphics on a brown table with eye glasses, potted plant and a red mug of coffee.
For many small business owners, online reputation matters a lot. If your online reputation is good, you stand a good chance of doing better business with prospective customers and customers. For this reason, managing your online reputation is hugely essential to your business success. Then what to do? You must explore all ways to market across multi-channel using content marketing. These here tips from experienced marketers can help improve your online reputation.



Sell Digital Products and Courses Online

As a digital marketer, you do not necessarily have to create free content all the time. In addition to free content, you create and sell good content as well. If you have the skills, you can create and sell digital products and online courses. Such content which is largely informative and educational can be sold to improve your revenue stream.

Use Social Media Tools to Streamline Your Marketing

Social media marketing is one great way to sell content on the internet. There are very many social platforms with peculiar tools that help the marketing process and many of these tools are free. Some of the platforms have in-house analytics tools which marketers depend on for great insights into their marketing activities. If you want to market through the various platforms, it can be quite time consuming. Therefore, you can take advantage of special online tools to help manage your platforms to save time and other resources.

Manage Reviews with New GMB Tools

As most marketers very well know, online reviews can always make a great difference in the online reputation of their businesses. If you want to quickly build a great reputation for your business online, just sign up on Google-My-Business, GMB, and take advantage of its tools. With continuous release of new options/tools for businesses, GMB has become one of the most important online platforms businesses can depend on to build their online reputation through reviews.

Be Dominant in Local Search Results

If you optimize your website for local searches it will help with your search results. A huge number of potential customers now habitually search Google for businesses “near me” in their search activities. “Near me” searches usually turn up local businesses. For many local businesses therefore, online search is often where new customers first interact with their brands. Therefore, your ability to get found through local searches can make a major impact on your reputation and the bottom line of your business.
 
Improve Your Live-streams

Video content marketing is hugely important to digital marketers because of the great results it gets when compared to other types of content. It is even better still if the video is live. So, live-streaming videos can be incredibly powerful ways to reach an audience real time. The results are great for your business reputation, lead generation and sales.

Market Differently with Testimonials, Reviews, and Recommendations

Testimonials, reviews and recommendations tend to help your marketing business in many different ways. They are very important because they serve as very sincere, genuine and useful insights that come directly from your customers. As such, they can provide valuable social proof to potential new buyers. But because they represent different types of feedback in content and context, it is helpful to marketers if they really understand and appreciate these differences. If they do and they market with them differently, it can greatly help to improve on their online reputation in addition to many other ancillary marketing benefits.

 

Build an Effective Instagram Presence

Instagram is becoming one social media platform that is quite business-friendly because you can open a business account on Instagram. This is why it is now one of the top social media platforms for today’s businesses. Instagram will not only help you to build an effective presence by having your content on its Feed and Stories, it will also help you to better and more effectively communicate with your customers.

Use the Best WordPress Plugins for Podcasting

Marketers who market with podcasts usually need multiple ways to share content. For these marketers, plugins are indispensable in their marketing activities. That is why many usually seek out and use web-hosts like WordPress to have access to the best plugins. WordPress provides many free and hugely versatile plugins to help the marketing activities of the websites they host. If your website is hosted by WordPress, you’ll find their plugins as very valuable assets for your podcasts.

Monday, April 26, 2021

How to Develop a Good Content Marketing Strategy for a Service Business

A white notepad and pen with content letterring on a computer keyboard, a white mug of creamy beverage and a computer mouse on a work table.
Many service businesses have since discovered that content marketing on the internet is one of the most powerful lead generation tools they can depend on to grow their businesses. This is because through the internet they can publish thought-provoking content, market their services, follow up with clients/customers, get leads and make sales. Service businesses are hugely dependent on good content to market their businesses online across multi-channel. To do this successfully, they rely on their content marketing strategy to reach the right audience at the right time with their marketing messages. A good content marketing strategy can assist service businesses to reach more customers through high-quality, informative, valuable, relevant, and engaging content.



These here tips can help you to create an effective, customer-attracting content plan to get more leads and customers to grow your service business.

What’s Your Primary Marketing Objective?

If you run a service business, this question must be answered right from the outset of your marketing strategy. Exactly what do you want to achieve with your content marketing efforts? That is, your primary marketing objective? Content usually serves a variety of purposes for marketers. Some of these purposes include, improving SEO, getting more leads, attracting more backlinks, attracting more website visitors, increasing engagement on social media, growing your email list and so on. Before creating content, these factors must come into play to decide on a primary marketing objective since different types of content usually work to generate different results.

Tap Ideas from Your Audience

What keeps a service business in business is its client/customer base. That is the main audience it serves. Without this audience you cannot remain in the business. So, what is good for your audience is what is good for your business. For this reason, sourcing ideas and suggestions from your audience is good marketing. You can find out from your audience what topics they’re interested in and what questions they have about the services you offer even if by way of email questionnaire, social media posts or through anonymous surveys. From the information you gather from these efforts, you can turn some of the questions/topics into blog posts. Better still, you can create a Frequently Asked Questions, FAQ page on your website from this information.

Create a Content Marketing Schedule

This is one effective way to plan and distribute your content. In matters of content marketing, quality comes first but consistency tends to make the real difference. If you have a credible content marketing strategy in place, it is made more effective when you are writing, publishing, posting, distributing and marketing your content on a regular and reliable schedule. You can engage project management tools like Asana and Monday.com to help you stay on schedule, organize your content details, and ensure that you’re distributing your content regularly across multi-channel.

Diligently Research Keywords for SEO

You cannot have a good SEO for your service business if you do not have searchable keywords to use in your content. That makes it imperative for you to thoroughly research keywords, using online keyword research tools like SEMRush.com or Ahrefs.com to find keywords to use on your web pages or in your blog posts. It involves identifying keywords your target audience is searching for to find the type of service your business is rendering. SEO is a bit technical in implementation. You can hire the services of professional webmasters to help you with SEO on your website if you are unable to do it yourself.

Spy on Your Competition

It is smart digital marketing to always keep an eye on what your competition is doing. By doing so, you can get to find out what they are doing better than you and how they are doing it. It is ok to spy on their content strategies to see what keywords they are targeting and what content they’re posting on social media and even in other web channels. You can use keyword research tools like SEMRush or Ahrefs to search for your competitors’ domain names and see what keywords they are ranking for. This can be a credible and effective way to find keywords you should be targeting on your own site. What your competition is posting on their blogs or social media channels, can give you some very helpful insights on the type of content you can create to increase engagement, boost your brand authority, and even attract more leads and customers to your own website.

Create Linkable Assets

There are many types of linkable assets content marketers like to create and use. These range from research findings to eBooks to guest articles to industry leaders’ interviews to webinars and so on. A linkable asset is a type of content that works to attract backlinks to your website. If such links are from high-quality and reputable sites, they can help to improve your own website’s SEO. An improved SEO helps to increase your website’s rankings, increase traffic and draw in more website visitors. If you are smart enough to share content that services many purposes, you can have just one SEO-friendly blog post that generates traffic, attracts backlinks, boosts engagement on social media, and converts your blog readers into leads/customers. Now, that’s great!



Have Content Distribution Plan

After planning your topics, writing your content, and publishing it, the next thing is to be sure it is widely distributed. That calls for a content distribution plan. The plan allows you to explore all viable ways to widely distribute your content multi-channel to reach as many eyes as possible. You may choose to distribute your content manually if you have the time and the patience. On the alternative, you can use content distribution tools like Buffer or Hootsuite to share your content on social media sites like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and some other web channels like email, Google ads, Blogs, GMB and the likes.

Generate Leads

If you have leads generation as one of your content marketing objectives, you must give your readers ample opportunities to make contact with you. Make sure your website has a CTA feature to invite/direct your visitors to take desired steps. Include contact forms and be sure they are easily noticeable on the service pages of your website. Offer value, by way of downloadable eBooks or infographics on your website posts in exchange for users to provide their email addresses. Have an easily noticeable “contact me” feature on your website to include email address, telephone, chat bot, office address for physical visits. It helps to make it easy for prospects to easily make contact with you. When a contact is made, that is some kind of lead when qualified.
 
Maintain Contact with Prospects

It is just not enough to have leads, the leads must be nurtured. A lead is of no use without a diligent follow up. The contacts information you generate in your business must be used to keep communications open with prospects. Either by regular emails or even occasional telephone calls, if you maintain contact with your prospects, you can turn them to customers. With online Customer Relationship Management, CRM tools, you can keep your lead information organized, check follow-up status, send customers business information, and much more. These tools are great to help you follow up with every lead to be sure you are not missing out on any new customer opportunities.

Final Thoughts

From the foregoing, you can easily deduce that with good writing skills, the right planning, tools, and great scheduling/distribution, you can create amazing content that helps to grow your service business. The more content you create, the more beneficial experience you’ll have, the more your skills will improve and the better you’ll become at using content to turn prospective visitors into new leads/customers.

Thursday, April 22, 2021

Effective Tips for Marketing a Local Business Online

Online marketer in a work station with a computer, a white mug of coffee and some cookies.
Every small business appears local as many small business owners are discovering. Google now presents the facts as nearly 50% of all searches on Google are looking for local information. People habitually search for businesses “near me” when they take to Google to purchase a product or hire a service. If you run a small business yourself, how well are you prepared for local searches? No doubt you are aware that a critical aspect of digital marketing is how well you share information about your business with both consumers and search engines particularly Google. If you share your business information well with Google, it will help you to promote your business to online searchers. That translates to the much needed organic traffic back to your business. These here tips are effective to help you market your local business online.



Make Sure Your Website is Secure

A secure website confers quality in the eyes of search engines. If your website isn't secure, all data therein is insecure and hugely vulnerable. It is easy to know a secure website with a locked padlock and an "s" sign on the left side of the URL, web address of the page when it opens. When searchers hit your site and they don’t see these signs, because of security concerns, they may not be willing to do business with the site. In addition, Google does not prioritize unsecured websites in search results. That means if your website is insecure, it will hurt your SEO. Be sure you are marketing out of a secure website if you want good results. To secure your website, the best option for you is to reach out to your website hosting providers for the service. Some hosting providers like Wix for instance do make website security part of their hosting services through their all-in-one solutions.

Enrich Your “About Us” Page

A good and well worded “About Us” page on your website is the first opportunity your business has to build trust with online searchers. Aside the landing page, it is the second most popular page of many business websites. It is a digital marketing fact that about eighty-five percent of consumers only buy from businesses they trust. These consumers often use the “About Us” page of a website to get and learn vital and essential information about any business when they hit the website. If you skillfully use this page to share your business values, experience, what you stand for and even your bragging rights, you can easily create a connection with people as they frantically evaluate which businesses to patronize.

Make Location Prominent on Your Website  
 
Never shy away from telling Google the location of your business and how local it is. That means your business location must be a prominent part of your website if you want your business to benefit from Google’s very popular local search results. Be sure to have your location in your website footer and also include it on your “Contact Us” page. If you have multiple locations, you can add a "locations" link to your main website navigation. Google as a major search engine has very sophisticated algorithms. It often uses a searcher's current location when providing search results. That makes provision of accurate location information on your website very crucial for SEO purposes. Your business location is not only important for your customers and potential customers, it is also important for your websites, social channels, and search engines that send online searchers to your business. The more specific your business location is the better for your SEO. The reason you must make sure it clearly identifies the street, the neighborhood, the town, the precinct, the county and even the region.

Create a GMB, Google My Business Account

For Google search engine, accuracy and consistency matter a lot. To present your business in that light, it is advisable to create a GMB account on Google. With a GMB account, you have the benefit of free listing for your business.  That allows you to promote your business on Google search and Maps. That is how online searchers particularly local searchers manage to get a first impression of your business. With a GMB account, you can easily modify your hours of operation, add contact information, and provide quick post-style updates where necessary. For best results, make sure your GMB account is always accurate, up-to-date and provides the most important information you want your customers and potential customers to see.

Add a CTA Button to Your Navigation

Anyone who hits on your website must have intentions. It is your duty to make them take some actions you prefer in relation to your business. That is where call-to-action, CTA button is hugely important. You can make it easy for your website visitors to take some action by placing a prominent CTA button in your navigation or main menu. The CTA is a compelling way to direct your website visitors to see “specials”, “shop” or “buy” products or to simply provide “directions” to some goodies on your website. The button text should be preferably one word that is easy to comprehend.



Make Your Employees Front-line Marketers

Your employees can be the real face of your business if they are well trained. Most employees are usually local people and the way and manner they interact with others in and outside your business promises can make them good marketers for your business. If you train them well, your employees can act as marketing channels to help consumers follow you on social media, explain your loyalty program, or promote an upcoming/special sales program. It is your employees who routinely communicate and even interact in persons with your customers. So, if your employees are likable to your customers, the business they promote for you is almost certainly likable to the customers. Good employee training helps that process a great deal. Great employees never miss any opportunity to tell others great things about your business. Making them front line marketers is therefore good for your local business.

Build a Customers’ Contacts Base

Effective communication usually leads to effective business. To make communication effective, every local business must build a credible and reliable contacts data base. This data base should include street contact addresses for possible home deliveries, email and phone numbers for making quick contacts and passing on urgent marketing info. Make sure that you have the proper consent of your website visitors before adding their personal contact info to your data base. In some climes, to be able to market by email or phone, you must obtain an individual's informed consent to receive communications from you. A simple sign-up form on your website can make visitors to voluntarily leave their contact info with you in exchange for some value, such as eBook, Newsletter or some token gift. A voluntary sign-up is enough consent but with an opt-out option if they no longer want to hear from you.

Wednesday, April 14, 2021

10 Digital Marketing Tips to Redefine Your Marketing Strategies

Brown table top digital marketing work station with a computer and a hand held pen on a computer mouse.
No matter how effective your digital marketing strategies are, they can go off course once in a while. This is as a result of the nuances of the internet and even the marketing strategies. Every digital marketer wants results, so, it is imperative to redefine and redirect their marketing strategies often enough for increased results. This at times necessitates their having to alter their ad campaigns and messaging channels. What really matters is good marketing results and what marketers do to get these results varies from marketer to marketer. That is where their individual marketing strategies come to the fore.

If you are an ambitious marketer, these 10 tips are very handy to redefine your existing marketing strategy for better results.



1. Utilize Live Features on Social Media: Yes, marketing on social media is a very good idea. If you are on social media, you can take the advantage of the real-time updates on the platforms to get connected with your audience.

2. Shift in Media Consumption Behavior: Marketing with video content is becoming very important to marketers because audiences are viewing more video content via streaming services. Video content helps to reach a larger audience with better messaging and consequently better results. However, mobile and in-transit channels are seeing reduced audience sizes. This calls for a marketing shift.

3. Pay Special Attention to Your Local Listings: Yes because every business now appears local. Consumers now habitually search online for businesses “near me.”  For new reviews or questions, local listings make it possible for quick responses and faster business connections.

4. Regularly Review Your Paid Media Campaigns: This is hugely important because if your media campaigns do not align with the changes in your business strategies, you get very poor results. It is smart marketing therefore to always align your paid media campaigns with any changes in your business strategies or objectives and messaging. You can always review your text, image, audio and video ads as the situation demands to get better results. That allows you to update what is necessary, pause or completely remove ads that are no longer getting the expected results.



5. Reposition Landing Pages: Make sure your landing pages have a lead capture feature and call-to-action, CTA features. For best results, be sure your lead capture and CTA features are properly aligned with your current prospect or customer journey.

6. Utilize Google My Business Posts Feature: Every business benefits from trending and current information. GMB posts feature regularly features current information and updates with the public. Your business can benefit from this.

7. Ensure Your Customer Support Info is Current: This is important to avoid sending consumers on a wild goose chase. Pay special attention to all support services of your business, like phone support and live chat staff support. These support services must at all times have all the current information about your business. Even if you are you are using Artificial Intelligence, AI chatbots, they must be fully programmed with the current information.

8. Regularly Review Your Website Activities: Your website is your business window on the internet. That is where potential customers first make contact with your business and it is where customers return to do business with you. So, you must ensure your website is user-friendly and it does well what it is meant to do. You can always review how visitors are searching for your site, how they get to it, what they do in it, how long they stay in it and how they generally interact with your website.  

9. Obey Community Rules of Various Marketing Platforms: These rules as related to language and visuals in ads vary from platform to platform. You risk sanctions including outright ban if you contravene any of these rules.
 
10. Review Your Geographic Targeting Settings: This is necessary from time to time depending on the restrictions on your business and the general global outlook and proposed expansions. Anytime you have ads campaigns with broader geographic targeting, when there are restrictions such as the current global pandemic restrictions, you must take steps to reduce your geographic targeting in tandem with your business restrictions.