8 Ways to Use Web Design Techniques to Boost Sales Online

As part of current feasible digital marketing strategies, most marketers deliberately aim to maximize ROI by leveraging web design techniques to convert website visitors into customers. Most adopt user-centric design techniques to get the best results. These design techniques are usually helpful to improve online presence, attract more customers and help boost sales. Here are some of such techniques.

1. Persuasive Content Creation

In this age and time, compelling content is a must in the realm of digital marketing. This content must not only be factual, it must be well-crafted to attract and hold the attention of readers. It helps if the content has SEO-optimized headlines and product descriptions to attract real attention online. If it is crafted to instill urgency, it can captivate potential customers, nudging them towards such positive action as to make a purchase. If compelling content becomes part of your overall web design, your website benefits from good organic traffic.

2. Understand Customer Behavior

Whether online shop or brick-and-mortar shop, everyone sets up a shop with a view to making sales. You can best do this if you fully understand customer behavior since the shop is set up for customers. As part of your website design therefore, you must carefully analyze user interactions to simplify navigation. This is some form of personalization which helps to improve the efficiency of your website since the design aligns with the website’s interface with user behavior.

3. Personalize User Experience

As most digital marketers very well know, customizing content to meet target audiences’ specific interests and needs is a great marketing technique. It usually enhances the relevance and impact of the overall marketing efforts of the marketer. Personalizing user experience through web design can dramatically increase conversion rates because users feel directly addressed and valued. Therefore, websites that excel in personalizing user experience are great marketing tools largely because of their innovative approaches to engagement and conversion.

4. Enhance Visual Appeal

Most human beings are visual in perception. So, if you want to enhance the appeal of your website design, pay special attention to the visuals and colors. Both are very critical to the success of a website. For this reason, you can significantly impact branding and user perception by investing in high-quality visuals and employing effective color matching techniques. Such communication techniques/tools can evoke user experiences and influence their decision-making processes. This is why, websites that master this balance of aesthetics and color combination techniques can leverage their design innovation and their effectiveness in capturing and maintaining user interest.

5. Optimize Page Speed

In digital marketing, the correlation between page speed and user satisfaction cannot be overstated. It directly impacts a website’s SEO rankings and user engagement. By design, if you enhance core web vitals of your website and you optimize its image handling, it can lead to shorter load times, thereby fostering a smoother user experience. Excellence and efficiency in web design helps to foster a great user experience.

6. Optimize for Mobile Devices

Google reports now indicate that there is currently a predominance of mobile web traffic. What this means is that most people are now accessing the internet by way of mobile devices. This makes a mobile-friendly web design technique now indispensable. This approach guarantees that users enjoy a consistent and seamless experience across all devices, a factor that significantly contributes to building trust and loyalty. When websites excel in mobile optimization, it underlines the importance of adaptability and user-centricity in today’s digital marketing landscape.

7. Analyzing and Testing Performance

Optimizing sales through web design techniques is always an ongoing and continuous process. It is underscored by continuous performance analysis and iterative design. On this score, marketers usually have many options but most prefer utilizing popular analytical tools like Google Analytics for insights data. Next is A/B testing for design improvements and efficiency. Websites that significantly demonstrate a commitment to evolution and refinement in their design practices through analyzing and testing performance are great marketing tools.

8. Build Trust with Social Proof

Websites that use social proof significantly well are always great for building trust and confidence. The valuable social proof for this purpose is usually in the realm of customer reviews, trust badges, and certifications that are really crucial in customer decision-making process. You can therefore design your website to showcase those important elements that can help boost credibility for your business and encourage visitors to make vital purchase decisions.

Wrapping Up

If you deliberately integrate the foregoing techniques into your web design, it can significantly enhance your sales and recognition. This is because by diligently applying these principles, your business can create visually appealing and functional websites. It is such websites that are really great to attract traffic and sales in this age and time.

10 Ways to Position Your Pinterest Business Account to Make Money

Have you found a viable way yet to monetize your Pinterest business account? If yes, you must remember that there’s a lot more work to do to maximize your earnings on the account. You need to regularly create engaging content and effectively market your pins if you want to maximize your earnings on Pinterest. If you are consistent at doing this, your output can directly impact your ability to reach more users and, subsequently, boost your earnings. This is what most Pinterest marketers usually crave for. This blog post discusses some key points that can help enhance your Pinterest marketing strategy and potentially increase your ability to maximize your earnings on your Pinterest business account.

1. Create Your Own Website: There is a need for you to create your own website if you want to earn money selling your own physical or digital products. You can monetize the website by selling ads spaces or by having an affiliate relationship there. You can then link the website to Pinterest as a free tool to help drive traffic.

2. Focus on Your Niche: If your Pinterest account is focused on a niche, it is more likely to attract a dedicated following. You may choose to focus on very popular niches like Sports, Hospitality, Travels, DIY content, Fashion, or Home decor. A diligent keyword research will reveal to you the most relevant terms to include in your content.

3. Fill in Your Pinterest Profile: By the time you are signing up for a Pinterest business account, make sure to create a name, description, and links. Do not fail to include relevant keywords that can help you draw in relevant followers. Ensure you vividly put forth your qualities/selling points in the description to attract like-minded bloggers.

4. Widely Promote Pins on Other Social Media Sites: Presently, nearly everyone using the Internet is on social media. So, if you already have a lot of followers on other social accounts, you can leverage them on Pinterest as well. All you need do is to simply link them to your account or individual pins or boards regularly. Doing so will help to increase your followers and engagement.

5. Diligently Research Your Target Audience: Significantly, your target audience can impact how you market to users on Pinterest. That depends on the type of content you regularly put out. You can thus for instance choose to tailor your content to professional bloggers, stay-at-home moms, travellers, sports people, or new homeowners. You must however always factor in your own blog niche or the demographics of your current customers to focus your content better.

6. Grow Your Pinterest Followers: The uniqueness of Pinterest as against other social media platforms is that you don’t have to rely on only your followers for traffic. But on Pinterest, the more followers you have, the more people are likely to come across your content. You can thus always aim to increase your followers by interacting with other users and linking people to your profile.

7. Improve Pinterest SEO: Significantly, Pinterest itself can act as a search engine. This is why Pinterest users can search for and find content either through Google or the Pinterest search bar. So, it helps to find your content if you include relevant keywords in your Pinterest profile and each pin description. You can always choose to improve your SEO to make this happen seamlessly.

8. Sign Up for a Reputable Affiliate Program: You can make more money on Pinterest by signing up for a reputable affiliate program. You’ll however need your own unique affiliate referral link/code issued by the affiliate platform which you’ll be promoting to earn commissions from any sales you generate through the link. Reputable sites like Strong Future International, SFI, Amazon or ShareASale are great platforms for profitable affiliate marketing. Marketers on Pinterest can always share their unique referral links/codes on Pinterest pins.

9. Carefully Research Pinterest Analytics: When your own Pinterest account is fully set up, your next challenge should be how to monitor your stats to see what works and what doesn’t. Through these stats, you can determine which type of pin performs consistently better than others. That is the style of content you should focus on if you want to maximize your earnings.

10. Join Group Boards: Pinterest typically offers group boards where multiple Pinterest accounts can upload content. These boards offer excellent marketing advantages. Because many of these accounts have lots of followers largely due to the consistency of content, you can join some in your niche and leverage their large following to increase your own reach. Increased reach usually translates to increased earnings in the long term.

How Best to Deploy AI Tools for Affiliate Marketing

AI is still a relatively new technology, but it has the potential to revolutionize the affiliate marketing industry. Significantly, the technology deepens as the internet deepens. As AI continues to develop, smart marketers can always take advantage of it in even more innovative ways for affiliate marketing. Marketers can effectively use AI to create more personalized and targeted affiliate marketing campaigns, develop more effective chatbots that can answer customer questions and provide product recommendations. They can directly help to analyze data from affiliate marketing campaigns in real time with a view to identifying trends and optimizing campaigns for maximum results. This leads to a boost in lead generation and sales conversions which ultimately helps to boost the overall performance and good ROI on your affiliate marketing initiatives/strategies. If your AI tools are right, your affiliate marketing will be right.

To get your affiliate marketing right, you need the right AI tools. Even though there are very many AI tools out there on the internet, some of the most popular AI tools most affiliate marketers like to use are:

• Content Generation Tools: Every affiliate marketer needs good content for effective marketing. This is where content generation AI tools become relevant. These tools can be used to write blog posts, create social media posts, and develop email marketing campaigns. Content generation tools like Shortly AI, Jasper AI and Copy AI are hugely popular among affiliate marketers.
• Chatbots: Chatbots are smart automation tools affiliate marketers find very handy. These tools can be effectively used to automate customer service, answer questions, and provide product recommendations. Some of the popular Chatbot platforms with affiliate marketers include ManyChat, Chatfuel, and Drift.
• Data Analysis Tools: Affiliate marketers need data analysis tools to track conversions, measure ROI, and identify trends. Some of the most popular data analysis tools among marketers are Ahrefs, SEMrush and Google Analytics.

These tools can be of little help if you don’t do things right. In this wise, to get your affiliate marketing on the right track, it is good to:

Set Clear Marketing Goals: Without clear goals, it is difficult to know how well your marketing is doing at any point in time. Therefore, before you start using AI for affiliate marketing, it’s important to set your marketing goals very clearly. You must clearly define what you want to achieve with AI. Do you want to automate tasks, improve targeting, or generate more leads? These are questions your set goals must clearly address.
 
Choose the Right AI Tools: Even though there is a number of AI tools available out there on the internet, what is most important however is to choose the right ones that suit your needs. To do this correctly, you must factor in your marketing budget, your goals, and the features that are important to your needs.

Test, Re-Test and Learn: After setting clear goals and choosing the right AI tools, next is to start testing and learning to see how you can optimize your marketing campaigns for better results. In this quest, you can decide to experiment with different settings and strategies to see what works best for you, and then make the necessary adjustments for better results.

Exercise a Lot of Patience: Even though AI is a very powerful tool, it still takes quite a while to learn how to use it effectively. So, you should not expect to see great results overnight. You must therefore exercise a lot of patience to keep testing and learning as you market along.

Last Line

Presently, there is no gainsaying the fact that the future of AI in affiliate marketing is quite bright. As AI continues to develop, affiliate marketers will have access to more powerful and reliable tools that can help them automate tasks, improve targeting, and generate more leads and sales. Therefore, if you want to succeed very quickly in affiliate marketing, you can do well to adopt AI-powered tools to help you out. 

Top 10 Tested and Effective Marketing Strategies for New Businesses

In the wider world of digital marketing, marketing strategies cover a wide range of techniques. Technically, a marketing strategy is a long-term approach designed to achieve a specific goal or set of goals. But first you must understand your audience before you can effectively reach them with your marketing messages. These messages are usually aimed at increasing brand awareness, driving sales, or engaging a particular target audience. A good marketing strategy involves a detailed plan outlining how you intend to reach your marketing goals, the channels you plan to use, and how you’ll progressively measure your success.

 
Following are some top 10 tested and effective marketing strategies you can really depend on to grow your new business:
 
1. Affiliate Marketing: If you want to make good sales online, think affiliate marketing. It is a marketing strategy requiring affiliates to partner with product merchants to market their products/services in exchange for commissions. Affiliates earn a commission on each sale they help generate.

2. Content Marketing: This is a very popular marketing strategy among digital marketers. It simply involves consistently creating and sharing valuable content to attract and engage your target audience. For easy sharing, the content can be packaged in form of blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, etc.
 
3. Social Media Marketing: Social media marketing strategy leverages the huge popularity of social media platforms to market products/services. You can simply create accounts in the very popular social platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter (now X) and others to widely promote your products/services. Through these platforms, you can easily reach out to a wide audience, build and nurture relationships, and promote your products/services widely.
 
4. Email Marketing: This is one of the easiest and most cost-effective marketing strategies out there on the internet you can depend on to promote products /services. It simply involves sending emails directly to your audience to promote your products/services. With emails, you can widely share marketing newsletters, valuable and impactful content, or to communicate important business/marketing updates with your email recipients.

5. Event Marketing: Event marketing is a marketing strategy that involves hosting or participating in chosen events to promote your business. Such events are designed to engage your audience, showcase your products/services, and build relationships. Events like seminars, webinars, charity walks and local sporting derbies are great events you can use for marketing purposes.

6. Influencer Marketing: Influencers are mostly social media personalities with a large following. Influencer marketing as a strategy entails collaborating with influencers in your niche/industry to promote your products/services to their followers. Depending on the level of partnership, influencers can even endorse or recommend your products/services to their large following. They can help share your impactful content as well by this arrangement.

7. Search Engine Optimization, SEO: Technically, SEO is a digital marketing strategy that helps your website rank higher in the SERPs of search engines. This is made possible by the tactical use of carefully selected keywords on your content that help search engines to find the content. When search engines rank your content high in their SERPs, it translates to good organic traffic back to your website.
 
8. Pay-Per-Click, PPC Advertising: PPC ads are highly targeted and affective ads even though they cost money. They involve running paid ads on platforms like Google AdWords or Facebook Ads to reach a larger audience. With PPC, you are only required to pay for each click delivered to your website. PPC ads can be very effective to drive targeted traffic to your site.

9. Video Marketing: Video marketing strategy is gradually increasing in popularity among digital marketers because of its relative effectiveness to drive traffic. Video marketing involves carefully creating and sharing high-quality videos to engage your audience and promote your products/services. Some of the most effective videos suitable for this purpose are ho-to videos, product demos, tutorials, customer testimonials, etc.
 
10. Referral Marketing: This is yet another cost-effective marketing strategy. It thrives on customer loyalty. Referral marketing simply involves encouraging your customers to refer your business to their friends, colleagues, acquaintances or family in exchange for rewards. These rewards can be in form of discounts, free products, token gifts like eBooks or free branded products. 

8 Tips for Maintaining Affiliate Marketing Compliance

Affiliate marketing compliance is a technical term referring to the requirement for marketers to adhere to legal and ethical standards while engaging in affiliate marketing activities. Doing so helps them to ensure transparency, fairness and accountability not only in the business but also in the industry. When marketers gain solid understanding of affiliate marketing compliance, it helps them to establish trust with their audience and protect their business reputation. Affiliate marketing compliance also helps marketers to effectively navigate affiliate marketing landscape with more confidence.

The following tips are handy to help marketers maintain affiliate marketing compliance.

1. Stay Updated: To succeed in affiliate marketing business, you do not just need information; you need information that is current and up to date. For this reason, you must always make deliberate efforts to keep yourself well informed about the latest legal and regulatory developments in the industry as a whole.

2. Provide Clear Disclosures: Full disclosures in marketing are the hallmarks of transparency and honesty. That is what greatly helps trust building. This is why affiliate marketers must always clearly disclose their affiliate relationships to their audience as a viable way to ensure transparency and honesty in their affiliate marketing activities.

3. Use only Compliant Promotional Materials: It can be great for the growth of your affiliate business if you ensure compliance with advertising regulations particularly as they affect promotional materials. Therefore, always make sure that all the promotional materials you and your affiliates deploy meet extant legal and regulatory standards.

4. Personally Monitor and Enforce Compliance: Your affiliate marketing business is your business and its growth must therefore be a primary concern to you. This makes it imperative for you to personally implement monitoring mechanisms to identify and address any compliance violations promptly as they occur.

5. Seek Legal Advice as and when needed: All businesses are subject to the laws of the land. The right people to interpret these laws to ensure compliance are legal professionals. These professionals are always quick to say that it is by far cheaper to comply with extant laws than to embark on litigation. So, in the course of your business, anytime you have questions or concerns about compliance, it is always advisable to consult with a legal professional who specializes in affiliate marketing. Doing so helps to keep your business on the right path of compliance at all times.

6. Regularly Review Affiliate Content: Content is a vital marketing component of affiliate marketing business. Most affiliates rely on it to help promote affiliate links and make sales. It is imperative therefore to regularly review the content and promotional activities of your affiliates and to make quick corrections as needed. This helps to ensure compliance with guidelines and regulations at all times.

7. Train Affiliates Comprehensively: Affiliates are individual and separate business persons in their own rights. They all have varying backgrounds and experiences. Business owners must therefore regularly provide comprehensive training for all their affiliates regarding compliance requirements. This training must as of necessity include proper disclosure practices in marketing.

8. Implement a Compliance Program: It is in the overall interest of a business owner and his business to fully establish a formal compliance program within his business outfit. Doing this helps to ensure ongoing adherence/compliance to legal and ethical standards the business really needs to grow.

Last Line

If you are able to follow these here tips as discussed above, it is possible for you to maintain a compliant affiliate marketing program. You can then effectively mitigate the risks associated with non-compliance, and then grow your business without legal/regulatory impediments.

How Affiliate Marketing Directly Benefits Your Online Business

Technically, affiliate marketing focuses solely on generating leads and sales for businesses. By this arrangement, affiliates work to promote products for product merchants and generate these leads and sales from these efforts. The affiliates in return earn commissions from the products sold or for the referrals. If you run an e-commerce store, affiliate marketing can directly benefit your business in the following ways.

 

Brand Awareness and Recognition

Brand recognition is one huge benefit of affiliate marketing to your business. With various affiliates working in concert to promote your business to various audiences, they help to increase brand awareness and brand recognition for your business. This way, affiliate marketing becomes an effective strategy to build, and improve your brand awareness and recognition. Affiliates are mainly responsible for spreading good news about your brand, both physically and digitally. They are the ones who reach out to a variety of people by using effective marketing messages to convince them to buy products. Through affiliates, the word goes far and wide about the goodness of your business. This directly helps your brand to get recognized and acknowledged. As the word continues to go around, your brand recognition continues to increase in tandem.

Increased Traffic to your Website

Affiliate marketing can directly increase traffic particularly organic traffic to your website. Every experienced digital marketer knows the higher the traffic your website receives, the higher the chances of your making sales. As affiliates continue to bring in consumers using their promo code or affiliate links, your website traffic increases and the sales you make increase as well. Bottom line is, more website traffic simply translates to higher sales and increased ROI. That can be really great for your business.
 
High Return On Investment, ROI

Many smart business owners use affiliate marketing as a very effective means of online advertisement. This directly helps to increase sales. Once sales increase and costs low, it means high Return On Investment, ROI. Many affiliates doing product promotion help to increase sales for your business. That directly impacts the ROI for the business. As a business owner, you can thus use affiliate marketing to increase sales and ROI. With affiliate marketing, as you make more sales, you earn more. More and better earnings lead to high ROI in the business.

Best 25 Techniques to Get Free Advertising for Your Small Online Business

Most small business owners are always operating on a very tight budget particularly for advertising. This is why they always look for cost-effective ways to promote their products and reach new customers. Online, the most cost-effective way to promote products/services is by way of free ads. However, knowing exactly where or how to get free ads is always a huge challenge for most small business owners. I believe this article can hugely benefit such small business owners. If you are in that category, following are 25 of the best techniques that can help you to advertise your products/services for free and to reach many more new customers.

1. Word-of-Mouth: This is one very effective technique many business owners tend to ignore to their own disadvantage. Smart small business owners can always effectively leverage their social networks to encourage customers to spread the word about their businesses to their friends, associates and family.

2. Affiliate Marketing: For free ads, you can effectively partner with affiliates who can widely promote your products/services to their own various audiences at no ads cost to your business. Even with this free service, affiliates are only entitled to a commission on any sales they generate.

3. Social Media: You can create a social media presence on very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest. This will enable you to reach a much wider audience and get more new customers mostly for free.

4. Content Marketing: If you can consistently create high-value and impactful content and share multichannel, your business can reach many people online. This is more so if the content is packaged in form of blog posts, videos, infographics, and more and shared to your target audience.

5. Email Marketing: If you build a responsive email list over time, you can send regular newsletters or promotional emails to keep customers engaged. That helps to give your business a wide exposure and at minimal costs if any.

6. Community Involvement: Another great way to get free ads for your business is by community involvement. You can participate in local events, sports derbies, charity road walks, sporting and athletics events, community clean ups to get free ads for your business, In addition, you can support any other community initiatives which can help build brand recognition and goodwill for your business.

7. Cross-Promotion: You can partner with complementary businesses and businesses in your niche to promote each other’s products/services to your various audiences. This helps your own brand exposure a great deal.

8. Online Directories: To get free and unlimited exposure for your business, you can submit the business to popular online directories like Google-My-Business, GMB, Yelp, and Yellow Pages.

9. Online Contests and Giveaways: If you occasionally host contests or giveaways on social media or on your website/blog, you can attract more new followers and effectively engage your current audience. That translates to good exposure all for free.

10. Google Maps: If you make sure your business is listed, up-to-date and accurate on Google Maps, it can improve real visibility for the business. That enables the business to attract many more local customers.

11. Business Blogging: Blogging is readily the most popular form of content marketing among small business owners. If you can create a blog on your website to share your small business news, promos, discounts, price adjustments, industry insights and helpful tips with your audience, your business benefits from free ads as a result.

12. Web Directories: You can submit your website/blog to online Directories like Best of the Web to improve your website’s SEO and increase visibility for free for your business.

13. Influencer Marketing: If you partner with influencers in your niche or industry, you can more easily reach their diverse and wide audiences. That way, your business can gain unrestricted exposure through sponsored posts and or collaborations.

14. Networking Events: If you want free exposure for your business, you can choose to attend Networking Events or join Networking Groups to meet potential customers and business collaborators.

15. Referral Programs: If you have being in business for a while, you can get free publicity if you encourage satisfied customers to refer friends, associates and family members in exchange for discounts and or any other incentives.
 
16. Guest Blogging: You can become a guest blogger and get wider exposure on the websites of popular and reputable blogs. If you consistently write impactful guest blog posts for other websites, you can showcase your expertise, get more attention and attract their readers to your business.

17. Business Directories: When you list your business pages in online business directories like Dun & Bradstreet, it can improve visibility and attract new customers to your business.

18. Free Samples or Trials: You can selectively offer free samples or trials of your product/service to attract potential customers and generate word-of-mouth buzz for your business.

19. Video Marketing: If you have the right skills, you can create engaging videos about your business/products and share them multichannel particularly on popular social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or other popular video platforms.

20. Mobile Marketing: From anywhere you find yourself and you have a smartphone, you can use SMS marketing, push notifications, or mobile apps to reach customers on their mobile devices. It greatly enhances exposure for your business at just the minimal cost of an SMS.

21. Press Releases: PRs are very effective tools to get free publicity for your business. You can carefully write highly informative Press Releases and distribute them widely and multichannel to announce new products, services, or your business milestones. If your PRs get to journalists and popular media outlets, they receive unrestricted publicity which enhances visibility for your business.

22. Public Relations: You can carefully package your business story or expertise and pitch it to media outlets like newspapers or even podcasts. If they publish, it earns your business free publicity in the bargain.
 
23. Search Engine Optimization (SEO): You can technically optimize your website/blog for search engines to improve your chances of appearing tops on their SERPs. Your business will benefit from increased visibility and good organic traffic as a result.
 
24. Online Forums: You can actively participate in online forums or groups related to your industry to establish your expertise in your chosen field. That’s one great way to freely promote your business in the forums and to forum members.
 
25. Online Reviews: If you encourage customers to leave positive online reviews on sites like Google, Yelp, and Facebook business page, it can significantly boost your online reputation at no cost to your business. That equates to free publicity for your business.

Lead Generation Strategies to Boost Your Sales Revenue

In digital marketing parlance, a lead is any person/entity expressing interest in the product/service you are marketing. Obtaining such persons/entities by deliberate marketing efforts is lead generation. Marketers acquire leads to grow their customer base by way of leads, conversions and sales. More sales in your business directly translate to a boost in your sales revenue. So, to generate more sales, you must deploy effective strategies to get more leads and eventual conversions. Following are some of the best lead marketing strategies you can deploy to get more leads for your business.

 

Compile a Buyer Persona

A buyer persona is like profiling the individuals you want to target with your marketing messages who may be interested in buying your products/services. If you use the right parameters and segmentation, you can have the right insight into the prospective buyer's needs and wants. You can have an insight into their specific purchasing attitudes and the criteria that can drive them to purchase your products/services. If you have these vital insights of your products/services buyers' persona, it becomes easier for you to create actionable and efficient lead generation strategies. With this persona in mind, you can easily fine-tune all your marketing efforts/strategies to resonate well with the buyer who wants and needs the products/services you are offering. That way, you can get more leads, conversions and sales.
 
Enable Sales Chat Feature on Your Website

Communication is really key to successful marketing efforts in this age and time. If this communication is instant and two-way, so much the better! When visitors take advantage of the chart feature on your website, it is easier for you to deal with them real time, address their concerns instantly and eventually convert them to leads. The presence of a sales chat feature on your website can easily turn ordinary visitors into leads because they can talk to you to know more details about the products/services you are marketing. With chat features like Skype for instance, visitors are easily at ease knowing they are talking to “someone.” With AI like Chatbots, you can have a 24/7 chat feature that helps you to maintain a great customer experience no matter what time of the day or night customers are on your website. These chat features are inevitably handy to help you to nurture your website visitors and convert them into leads and customers. The more leads and conversions you get this way, the more sales you make.

Rev Up Your Content Marketing Efforts

Content remains king in digital marketing particularly for ecommerce business owners. When links to products are embedded in content and promoted widely online, they help to get traffic and clicks back to products on the ecommerce website. The best content is content that is highly informative and impactful. If such content is optimized with the right keywords, it attracts the attention of search engines. Search engines like to go for optimized content, rank it higher in their SERPs and send organic traffic to it. Without good content, your website cannot reach the top search results whenever an Internet user keys in a search. The more good content you create on your website therefore, the more traffic it attracts and the more leads it gets. When your web visitors like your content, they stay with it, read it and may eventually subscribe to your products/services. When the traffic to your website leads to sales, it helps to boost your sales revenue. That is what good content helps to enhance.

Collaborate with Influencers

The advent of social media has really made influencer marketing popular. Influencers are celebrities in the online world particularly social media with huge audience and at times fanatical following. If you partner with and collaborate with influencers, they can help talk about your products, try them out, endorse them and even recommend them to their huge audiences. They can even serve as affiliate marketers to your products and earn commissions on the sales they generate or earn discount codes on your products. That way, influencers can help to promote your products/services, bring in more leads and eventual sales. Most influencers are known for constantly creating a buzz and hype in the online world. This can have a very positive effect on the products/services they are helping to market. This celebrity buzz can help to drive interest to your products/services. That translates to leads and sales for your website.
 
Task Your Current Customers for Referrals

If you want to task your current customers for referrals, there are some marketing strategies you can deploy to help turn them into a good source of leads. This is because there's no one better to ask for referrals than your current customers. Your customers already know your brand, they are delighted with it and are thus in the best position to refer others to the brand. For this reason, you can directly reach out to your customers tasking them on referrals. This you can induce with incentives like discount codes, coupons, or thank you gifts for each referral they send to you. You can also encourage your current customers to send new referrals to your business by giving them a warm follow-up and thank you message after each purchase. Doing this routinely can help you to generate more leads through customer referrals.  

Effective Tips to Market Customized Products

Typically, customized products are usually not common products, the reason they are made on order. Customized products are so unique that they are usually made to fit customers’ orders. There lies the huge challenge in marketing them. It is for same reasons the products are typically more expensive than standard mass-produced products. Since these products are made to order, it takes quite some different and unique marketing strategies to promote the products successfully than some other products. If your business specializes in producing and selling customized products, the following tips can be of help to you to market the products successfully.

 
Know Your Target Customers

Since customized products are typically produced to fit orders, you must study your target customers well enough, know what they want and how they want it before undertaking the orders. You must know who they are and what their preferences are to be able to market them effectively. It takes quite some experience and practice to study consumers meaningfully. You may choose to talk to them directly, or get them to fill out questionnaires or even ask your friends and close associates about them. Social media is also handy where you can display photos of your past works for consumers to make their picks and even make agreed modifications before you fulfill their orders. If you have such vital info about your consumers, it becomes much easier for you to create an effective marketing strategy to attract more customers to your customized products.

Distribute by DropShipping

If you market your customized products out of your e-commerce store, dropshipping is a marketing strategy quite effective to push the products to buyers. This is because dropshipping is a very convenient and low-risk way to distribute such products. It helps you to save up on handling and storing inventory. You can even bypass that by arranging for the products manufacturers to ship them directly to your customers. Once you get information that the manufacturers have made delivery to the customers, you arrange for your balance payment. Smooth and easy!

Write Clear Product Descriptions

Typically, customized products are always unique in their differences. The reason it is usually difficult to make direct comparisons. So, if you are selling your customized products out of an e-commerce store online, buyers like to really look at and understand product descriptions before making purchases. If the product descriptions you provide in your store are not clear and concise enough, you may be losing customers. This is really why you must never fail to include product descriptions under the images of your customized products. Such descriptions should not fail to include details about what the items can do, how they are made and how they can be of good use to consumers. This usually helps to give a very clear picture of the products to consumers to help them make their buy decisions.

Offer Generous Discounts on Bulk Purchases

Discounts are effective marketing incentives to get consumers to buy more products. If you offer wholesale discounts to consumers for bulk purchases, it can help you promote and sell more customized products. The discounts you are giving may even be more helpful to promote the products than what the products can actually do for consumers. They may even be directly responsible for helping you to attract more new customers who may have never heard of the products before. Customers see discounts as great ways they can save money so they choose to buy more and repeat purchases for that reason. Through discount offers, you can manage to incentivize customers to buy more than one product at once. If that saves them money, they’ll be happy to make more and repeat purchases thereafter.

Skillfully Leverage Testimonials

No matter what products you are selling, consumers always want to ensure that what they’re getting is worth their money, more so on customized products. This is why most consumers rely on reviews before making their buy decisions. Most always check for reviews from previous buyers of the products to have an idea of how the products perform. If previous buyers appear satisfied with the products, they are more likely to buy the products themselves. This is exactly how smart marketers can always skillfully leverage testimonials to increase sales.

Encourage Referrals

If you take deliberate steps to encourage referrals from your existing customers, it can be an excellent way to promote products. You may even choose to have incentives for referrers, like paying commissions or offering discount codes for each referral for instance. You can make contacts directly with customers and make them these offers if they invite friends and family who also make purchases from you. Referring any other persons who may also be interested in similar products should also attract the same incentives. It is not a bad idea either if you can create an affiliate marketing program and offer to pay commissions for every sale the affiliates generate.

Summary

Selling customized products can be quite lucrative if you can get a handle on the tricky marketing techniques. If you take pains to know your consumers well enough, you can create and market these products to their tastes. You can make more money if you offer discounts for bulk purchases, make clear descriptions of the products in your store, distribute products by dropshipping, and encourage testimonials and referrals. By doing these things, you can generate more leads who purchase your customized products, make more sales and increase your revenue base.

Hot Tips to Generate Leads through Content Marketing

When you market online, your business can be easily choked out if you are unable to explore all ways to up your marketing game from time to time. If you follow the latest trends and improve on your content, you’re not likely to easily fall behind your competition in your lead generation strategy. A good content marketing technique involves giving your users vital information that helps to promote your products/services. Yes, this content may be promotional but if it manages to help users find solutions to their problems, it is good content. That’s the kind of content that helps to generate leads too. A well-thought-out content marketing strategy helps this process a great deal. 

This article discusses some content marketing tips that can help you to boost leads generation through content marketing.

Choose the Right Channels to Promote Your Content

To generate leads, you must pick the right channels to promote your content online. If you don’t get your channels right, no matter how good your content is, it will be pretty difficult for it to reach your target audience and with the right impact. First, you will have to research and understand the channel preferences of various audiences. Then you’ll discover that social media platforms like Facebook, TikTok, Instagram are very popular among young adults. Twitter and LinkedIn are preferred platforms by much older persons. Marketing messages that directly target these demographics help to generate leads. Once you pick your channel, you must also think about the format for your content. This is because a mismatch between your product and ad channel can make your ads ineffective. Ineffective ads cannot help your leads generation much.

Diligently Research Keywords

No matter how good your content is, if it can’t reach the right audience, it is not useful for leads generation. You can only effectively reach your audience if you know what they are searching for online. That clue lies in keywords research.
 
Keyword research directly deals with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), a vital digital marketing technique that helps to generate organic traffic and consequently leads. If you tactically use SEO techniques in your advertising content, it helps to attract the attention of search engines to rank your content. Diligent keywords research using keyword tools online will help you to know which keywords are popular enough to generate high amount of online traffic. If you use SEO techniques to optimize these keywords, they help you to generate good organic traffic and consequently good leads.

If however you do not know how to handle SEO because of the technicalities involved, you can hire the services of an SEO expert to help you with keywords research while a PPC specialist can help you to use these keywords in the right places on your content to boost traffic. For best results, it is advisable to hire these professionals to design and deploy the right display ads for you to generate leads.

Carefully Use Personalized Content

If you take adequate care to understand the needs of your target audience, you can engage the audience better by using personalized content to market to them. If you deliberately create personalized and meaningful content for your audience, you can easily generate leads from these efforts. If you can bear the needs of your audience in mind when creating advertising campaigns, you can generate more leads. By way of surveys and asking your audience direct questions related to your ads campaigns, you can better understand what your audience wants to see in your ads. If in addition you know your audience demographics, that info can help you to improve your content or to write a better impacting content. Such content is really great to generate leads.

Explore Ways to Optimize Your Conversion Rate

In online marketing technicality, a conversion takes place when a user takes the desired action upon viewing an ad. The commonest action in this regard is clicking ads and or buying a product. The primary aim of content marketing is to increase conversions for marketers. Every smart marketer therefore always wants to increase conversions through content marketing. You can optimize this content with a CTA (Call-To-Action) for better conversions. CTAs are usually small lines of sentences that encourage users to convert. Real examples of CTAs are “Click to see more”, “Click here to download”, and “Click here to register.” Some marketers also use attractive thumbnails on video ads. Thumbnails are small images on display before a viewer clicks on a video. It is another great way to optimize conversions for your content. Conversion optimization techniques are effective because they help to inspire real curiosity in your audience.

Summary

Your content marketing strategy can be effective if you do things properly and follow the right steps. The foregoing tips are handy to help you achieve high conversions. If you use these tips well enough, you’ll be able to achieve high conversions and generate leads for your online business. High conversions translate to leads, good sales and improved revenues in your business.

6 Ways to Gain Customer Loyalty in your E-Commerce Store

Expert marketers like to advise that it is by far cheaper to retain customers than to get new ones. If you run your own e-commerce store, once shoppers make a purchase, they become customers. Anyone who so makes a purchase therefore becomes a customer gained. It is at this time the business owner can now shift focus to providing direct value and establishing a mutually beneficial relationship with the customer. This is the time to use all customer retention techniques to have this customer coming over and over again to make purchases from your store. This is the stage when customer loyalty comes into the mix. This is the time the business owner must take deliberate steps to know the customer well enough together with his buying habits then deliver his own unique personalized value to communicate with and engage the customer. This is with a view to getting the customer to return for repeat purchases.

Following are effective strategies any smart business owner can use to position his e-commerce store well enough to gain customer loyalty.
 
1. Leverage Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is all about rewards and commissions earning. Affiliates help business owners to promote products and earn commissions on the sales they generate. Smart business owners always explore many viable options to reward their affiliates as well as customers. Some choose to incentivize and motivate their affiliates well enough to help sell more products. The activities of these affiliates directly help to grow brand awareness for the business, get customers for the business and help the business to sell more products all in return for commissions. New customers can even become affiliates by referring their friends, family and associates to the business to make purchases. If you reward them with monetary compensation in form of commissions of about 10% or more of the price of each purchase, that helps immensely to build customer loyalty for your business.

2. Promote What Makes You Unique

It is products that are great and unique to you that can help grow customer loyalty for your e-commerce store. These products can be unique in terms of quality, method of delivery and even prices. When your products stand out from the crowd, they inevitably attract repeat customers to your business. They help to build up the loyalty of these customers over time. If you take deliberate steps to ensure you promote only products that distinctly set your business apart from others, it can help encourage customers to buy directly from your business over and over again.

3. Offer Your Customers Repeat Purchase Options

If you want to build and elongate a good relationship with your customers, always offer them enticing repeat purchase options. Such enticement can include but not limited to bulk purchase discount, free and automatic shipping and so on. Once they get a unique value from your business that they do not normally get if they shop elsewhere, they’ll keep returning to your business for more purchases.

4. Extend Your Loyalty Program to Customers

If you don’t have a loyalty program for your customers, have one as a matter of priority if you want to cultivate customer loyalty. I guess you’ve heard about buy two and get one free? Come back for a repeat purchase and get 10% discount? These are some form of loyalty programs that help to get customers back to your business. You can also use reward points or a discount after customers spend a set amount of money directly in your store.

5. Deliberately Build Relationships from the Outset

Good business is all about building good relationships. Once a customer makes the first purchase from your store that is when you start to build a one-on-one relationship with the new customer. Encourage each customer who purchases a product for you to give you a feedback about his purchase experience and even the use of the product. Do not forget to first show appreciation though for the purchase that has been made from your store. Always thank customers profusely and demand to know from them how you can serve them better. Let them know the type of incentives they can benefit from when they return to make more purchases. Release discount codes to them for such purposes if you are using discount codes of your loyalty programs. If they are entitled to commissions when they introduce other parties to make purchases from your store, let them know. All these help immensely to build customer loyalty.

6. Always Encourage Your Customers to Help Share Your Brand Story

There is no business without a story behind it. If the story is unique to the business, that is much better. When your customers help to tell your unique story, it is not only credible, it spreads faster. Make your bragging rights known to your customers, how far your business has come, what it went through and how many obstacles it had to overcome to still be in business. These are the kind of stories people want to hear to relate them to their own stories. Your customers can directly share these stories with their family, friends, associates and even their social media audiences. If convenient, you can offer a token but valuable gift with a purchase or a discount off their next purchase directly from your store for widely sharing your story. Such offers can help bring customers back to your store to claim the gifts. That’s customer loyalty.

7. Highlight Values That Are Intrinsic To Your Business

Well, I have heard it said that everyone brags with something of unique value that is attributable to them. It holds true too even in business. So, if you have an in-house policy of using a given percentage of your sales to support noble causes around the world, let your customers know. You can specifically mention the causes you support with charitable and not-for-profit organizations like the Red Cross, Rotary International, World Wildlife Foundation, Amnesty International and so on to make our world a better place to live in. Consumers who care about these same causes may be influenced to buy from your store and to keep buying from the store in support of these causes.

Effective Techniques to Capture Sales Leads Using WhatsApp

Most digital marketers are increasingly becoming highly innovative. Presently, if they need to pass information quickly, many easily turn to WhatsApp which is now one of the most popular messenger Apps in the world. The App is deliberately designed for business and it makes an excellent and efficient sales leads generation tool. It is one App that is very easy to use for marketing purposes and you can post marketing messages including excellent pictures to individuals and in groups making your messages available to hundreds of thousands of WhatsApp users in a matter of seconds. Now, that’s a great marketing tool no doubt! You can set up a WhatsApp account in minutes and take advantage of instant two-way communication that is great for leads generation. If you create a WhatsApp business account, it comes packaged with a wide range of in-house marketing tools and products that provide excellent support for your businesses. On WhatsApp, marketers can easily share marketing messages and even photos and videos of their latest products demonstrating how the products work.

 
Because of the design and peculiarity of WhatsApp, it can be great for these here lead generation techniques.
 
Easily and Widely Sharing Stories
 
Every business that wants to generate leads must as a matter of course share stories and very widely too. That is where the stories feature or WhatsApp status becomes quite handy and relevant for sharing stories on WhatsApp. This feature allows marketers to connect directly with their followers by sharing the relevant content they may be interested in. Such relevant content can be in form of new products, product launches, product promos and salient customer testimonials. Smart marketers also share user-generated content to entice and hook their followers using some powerful social proof to pique their followers’ interest. Such content helps to entice quick response to enable the marketer take their queries and direct them to the answers.
 
Leveraging Data-Driven Marketing Campaigns

WhatsApp messaging allows you to prioritize data-driven decisions. This allows marketers to speed up their marketing processes and get better and faster results. Marketers can therefore leverage on it to improve predictability, speed, and adaptability to change in their marketing campaigns. Through it, you can quickly determine what works and what isn’t working as you expect in your marketing campaigns particularly as it affects your lead generation and sales strategy. You can extract the right data at any stage in your marketing. This allows you to come up with rapid iterations that can help you to increase your conversions.
 
Providing Better and more Effective Customer Service
 
Serving customers is always a business priority. In fact, customers always expect to be served and served well without which you cannot expect to have them as customers for much too long. WhatsApp comes in handy here because it is always on 24/7. With it, marketers can directly interact with customers and even prospects round the clock. Prospects and customers can ask questions at any time and get instant and direct responses. That can be great for customer support, leads generation and conversions. For this reason, WhatsApp is not only a great app for building trust and relationships; it can also be effectively used to nudge prospects further down the sales funnel and towards a conversion.

Leveraging Consultative Selling
 
Marketers understand consultative selling to be when they prioritize the customer-business relationship. It simply means putting the customer’s interest first in your marketing calculations at all times. With WhatsApp, you can easily explore all ways to understand your customers’ problems before attempting to sell them anything. It is like needs assessment really. It is only when you know what your customers really want that you can effectively sell them anything. So, instead of focusing on the product you are selling, you can focus more on the customer and his needs through direct WhatsApp messaging. This is possible because you can easily use WhatsApp to extract relevant information from your customers. Through this App, you can spend quality time building and nourishing a great business relationship with customers. This enables you to get to know them much better. If you do, you’ll then be able to deliver an awesome brand experience to them. In most cases, doing so usually results in improved sales. 

Easily Eliminating Junk Leads

Most online businesses usually find it difficult to know which leads are good and which are simply junk. WhatsApp is a perfect tool that comes really handy for marketers to attract quality leads and easily eliminating junk leads. This is because of its easy two-way interaction feature. This feature allows marketers to rely on WhatsApp to classify leads faster and drastically cut down on the time needed to do so. The App can come in handy for customers at any stage they are in the sales funnel. No matter the stage customers are in the sales funnel, marketers through WhatsApp can still target prospects with the right marketing messages/strategy. This is because marketers can easily match these messages to wherever the buyers are in their buying journey.

Wrapping Up

If you are an ambitious marketer and you want to get and retain customers, WhatsApp is the right social media App your business needs. This is why the App has quickly grown to become one of the most-used social media platforms in the world. It is not enough to simply set up a WhatsApp account. If you cannot use it to implement the foregoing strategies, your business cannot benefit from it. Many marketers now effectively use this App to connect with businesses as well as being social. You too can tap into the huge potentials of this fantastic marketing App to acquire more leads and expand sales in your business.

How to Track your Brand’s Ad Results on Google

Advertising on Google tends to get quicker marketing results for marketers. The reason smart marketers really take advantage of Google ads to reach new customers and grow their brands. You can never know how well your Google ads are doing if you cannot effectively track the ads. Without good tracking, you could be wasting a lot of resources, time and money on ads and end up with very poor results.  If you decide to run a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign for instance, it is essential to diligently track your ads performance data. If you do, it is easy for you to see how well your ads are doing. You must therefore understand how PPC performance works before you can effectively track the success of your Google ads campaigns. That is about the best way to know how well you are doing and if you are getting the most out of your advertising budget.

Following are recommended steps you can take to effectively track your Google ads results.

Use Google Analytics to Track Ads

Google Analytics is a free Google online tool. With this tool, you can effectively track how much traffic your website gets from all sources, inclusive of PPC ads. The tool will help you to understand how visitors interact with your website and the ads displayed on it. The information you gather with it can help you to make the right adjustments on your advertising. Well-adjusted ads can help to improve your conversion rate and ultimately good ROI.

Keep an Eye on Your Conversion Rate

Conversion rate is a direct way to gauge the performance of Google ads. You must keep a keen eye on it during your ads campaigns. Technically, conversion rate is the percentage of people who click on your ads and take desired action. Such actions include but not limited to making a purchase. You can find this information in the “Conversions” tab of your Google AdWords account. Here is how to interpret the data. High conversion rate means high performing ads while low conversion rate indicates poorly performing ads. If your ads are performance well it means they are reaching the right audience but if low, it means they are not reaching the right audience. This could mean your ad copy is ineffective or you are targeting the wrong audience. This is why if you track your conversion rate well enough, you can identify issues that may require adjustments to enable your ads perform optimally.
 
Use Google AdWords to Check your Ads Positioning

Ad positioning is a crucial metric that tells a marketer the average position of where his ad appears on Google SERPs. What this means is that the higher the ad is ranked on the SERPs, the higher the chances that more users are likely to see and click on it. To make this possible, your ad must be optimized with the right keywords that users are targeting. Next is to review the positions for your brand’s keywords and compare them to the positions of your competitors. If you notice that your brand is appearing in a lower position than your competitors it is an indication for you to quickly make some performance adjustments on your ads campaign. You can find keywords information in your Google AdWords account’s “Keywords” tab.
 
Test Your Ads with A/B Testing
 
Regularly testing your ad copy is a way of determining how well the ad is doing. Most marketers rely on A/B testing to track their ad performance and optimize results. When they create two or more ad versions, they can use A/B testing to track and compare which one performs better. Before launching your Google ad campaign, you can run an A/B test on the versions of ad copy you are planning to use. This is about the best way to ensure that your Google ad campaign is performing as optimally as you want. You can check out the right information you need to do this in the “Experiments” tab of your Google AdWords account. If you want to get the best results from PPC ads, you can A/B test different ad copy, landing pages, and other website elements. By doing this, you’ll get to know which ad combination leads to the most conversions and consequently, a higher ROI. 

Review the Impressions and Clicks on your Google Ads

Impressions are another great way to measure the performance of Google ads. They represent the number of times an ad has been shown. This is as against clicks which represent the number of times people have clicked on the ad. A diligent review of these two metrics gives the marketer a clear idea how effective his Google ads are at reaching the target audience. You can access this data in the “Ads” tab of your Google AdWords account. Here is how to interpret the data. When your Google ads have a high number of impressions but the click-through rates are low, it means your ad copy needs some adjustments. When the ads have high click-through rates, it means they are actually reaching the right audience and driving them to take desired action. To actually determine if your ads are doing great therefore, you must diligently review these PPC metrics regularly.
 
Wrapping Up

Tracking your Google ad performance is a desirable step to know if your marketing campaign is doing great. The metrics data you collect from your tracking efforts is helpful for you to better understand what’s working well and what’s not working well in your marketing campaign. These metrics provide the data you can rely on to make needed adjustments to help you get the most out of your PPC and Ad campaigns budget. If you want to get such vital marketing benefits, start now to track your Google ads campaign results.