How to Improve your Small Business Online Presence with Listings

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.

How to Use Technology to Shape your Small Business Marketing Strategy

Millions of small businesses are currently relying on digital technology to do business online. That is made easier by the increasing reliance on mobile devices particularly cellphones to do business from anywhere in the world. For this reason, any small business marketing strategy that tends to ignore this reality is not likely to succeed. Since having an online presence is now one of the most preferred business options for millions of small businesses, they do need a marketing strategy that leverages internet technology to get results. Since more and more shoppers as of necessity now begin their searches for products/services online, a marketing strategy that ignores that fact is not likely to be of much use to any small business. Your small business can manage to stay ahead of competition if you create a robust online presence for it by way of deliberate and effective marketing strategy leveraged on internet technology.

 

Here are a few things you can do to enhance that quest.

Leverage New Technologies for Data Storage

At the moment, many small businesses rely on cloud-based business tools to provide inexpensive data storage solutions for their businesses. Among these tools are new point-of-sale technologies which allow small businesses to store customer data online rather than separate data-based servers. Employees’ personal information and data can also be stored online instead of in physical files. This allows the businesses to access and share information remotely. That guarantees safety, privacy and secrecy which are business essentials.

Market with Social Media

With over 4 billion active users of social media worldwide, small business marketing strategies can always take advantage of such huge market. Because most social media users spend a considerable amount of time on social media daily, small businesses can always take advantage of that to post new products and deals on social media 24/7 from anywhere they are in the world. Thus, these businesses can rely on social media to help them bolster website traffic as a viable and easy way to productively engage customers and prospective customers 24/7.

Optimize Your Website for Local Searches

Most small businesses are local. For this reason, prospective customers tend to first search for businesses “near me” on Google before making contact. This is why marketing experts strongly recommend that you optimize your online business for local searches. That optimization includes weaving the city, county and region of your business naturally into your website content to put your business first on the list when prospective customers conduct an online search particularly on Google.

Send Tech-Enhanced Direct Mails

You can send direct tech-enhanced mails to consumers aside from social media and email marketing. However, for best results you must always make sure the direct mail company you choose provides facilities for tracking, 2D barcodes and POS integration. If in addition the company also has some Informed Delivery and mobile apps to enhance your experience and generate a better ROI, so much the better for your business.

Market with Emails

Email marketing may be “old school” and very common, but it remains a very good tool to reach customers and prospective customers. Most small businesses depend on emails to send information about new deals, promos, price slashes/adjustments and any other “hot” marketing information. Emails if effectively used help to generate traffic, leads and even paying customers. 

How Content Strategy Influences Your Internet Marketing Business

Content strategy is your ability to create unique and engaging content and effectively promote it to your audience through various web and social media channels to grow your internet marketing business. In digital marketing terms, content includes written text, images/graphics, video, sound, and even links. Digital marketers deliberately create good content for the sole purpose of reaching out to their audience to deliver something of value to them. That something of value is expected to encourage the audience to take some desired action. If well crafted, good content should be clear, easy to read/watch/use, educational, compelling, informative, and even entertaining. 

If you are a business owner, content marketing is hugely important to the success of your marketing campaigns. You need it to promote your image and grow your brand reputation. To achieve this, you must decide on a specific content at the outset of your marketing campaigns. It is important to develop a detailed plan for it early on. That will enable you to set clear goals and milestones for your content strategy project. Measuring your progress alongside these set goals enables you to determine how much progress your business is making as your marketing campaigns progress.

For your content strategy to deliver good results, it requires creativity and originality. It takes diligence and thoroughly researched information to write unique and engaging content that gets results. Next is to organize and optimize the content for search engine rankings through which it gets organic traffic that benefits your business. As a business owner, if you habitually craft content articles that are relevant to your target audience, they read well, and are well written in a way that compellingly engages readers; you get some of the best results that help to grow your online business.

Granted, content marketing may not be entirely about engaging readers alone. There is much more to it. Smart marketers can use good content to establish and maintain positive relationships and also provide reliable feedback to their audience. For this reason, marketers must always be very sensitive to the concerns of their customers, what they say and what content they are responding to. Because it is very important to stay connected with your audience as a direct benefit to your business, you cannot afford to ignore audience feedback. This feedback gives you the all-important opportunity to regularly fine-tune your marketing strategies with a view to engaging better through web multi-channel including social media platforms. If you do so, your business benefits from more attention, more traffic and more clicks.

Getting your content on social media hugely benefits your business. Social media allows unfettered and mutually beneficial interactions between businesses and their audiences/customers/followers. Through that, businesses get to know not only their audiences but also those who are outside of their target demographic. When content marketers connect with followers on social media, they can develop meaningful relationships that translate into increased patronage and sales. You can use social media platforms to gauge how satisfied your customers are with the products/services your business is offering. If you allow your content strategy to effectively serve as your online sales tool, your business benefits from pulling in more sales from social media.

Businesses can also use social media effectively to build or grow their brands through engagements. Social media engagement is one of the most important components of a content strategy. It makes available to marketers veritable platforms to interact and work with friends/followers. This allows marketers to get the most from their content marketing efforts while simultaneously exposing the content to potential customers who also use and regularly visit the social media platforms. That helps to build your brand by way of viral effects.

Your content strategy can only be successful if you know your customers well enough. If you do, you can easily determine what content they want and how best to deliver it to them and through what marketing channels to deliver it to make it appeal to them. If marketers know their customers well enough, they can craft good content that is both compelling and informative and promote it multi-media and multi-channel online. That is what makes it effective. If it is effective enough, it helps online businesses to attract web traffic, build their brands, get leads, make more sales and grow their revenue base.

5 Digital Marketing Tips to Get More Customers

Changes in habits and lifestyles usually force changes in digital marketing techniques. With more and more people taking their businesses online because of the global pandemic restrictions, the scramble for customers and patronage is forcing more changes in digital marketing. Many marketers are aware that over 80% of people looking to purchase a product/service resorts to online searches to get what they want. These are prospective customers whose attention digital marketers scramble 24/7 online to get. If you’re looking to reach out to new customers, nurture existing ones and grow your business, you need an effective digital marketing strategy. 

 

Try these here five tips and see how they’ll help your marketing strategy to get more customers.

1. Responsive Website

Customers are not likely to be attracted to a website that is neither attractive to them nor responsive to their needs. Your website is essentially the face of your business in the digital world. It is where you can effectively promote your products/services, attract customers and grow your brand. To do this efficiently, you need a website that is simple, modern, and comprehensive enough to attract customers. It must be secure, user-friendly, mobile-friendly, loads fast and with great aesthetic appeal to respond well to customers. It is advisable to use the services of professional webmasters who know what they are doing to help you create and host a responsive business website you can use to attract customers. DIY is not advisable unless you are a professional in your own right.

2. Effective Marketing Strategy

You cannot have an effective digital marketing strategy without good content. In fact, your content is the most important element you can use to build an effective digital marketing strategy. What this means is that if you want your business to be effective at getting more customers, your content must be in the forefront to help you attract prospective customers. Therefore, you need to continuously create high quality, informative and educational content if you want to have a powerful and effective digital marketing strategy that helps to get customers. To create an engaging content for your business, you must pay good attention to the images, graphics, videos, and written texts on the content. If such content is easily readable, understandable, informative, educational and engaging enough, it helps to get the attention of more and more readers. Getting leads and customers flows from there.

3. Video Ads

People love to watch videos. So, videos are proving to be very effective digital marketing tools.  With popular social media sites like YouTube, Instagram and TikTok streaming billions of videos by the hour, marketers hugely favor videos to run ads and the results are great. When digital marketers add video content to their posts and their marketing strategy, there is usually a significant increase in interactions, website traffic, and sales. That means marketing with video ads is a great idea to get more customers to do business with you.

4. Email marketing

Email marketing is an effective digital marketing strategy to get more customers. Emails allow marketers to market with precise messages to segmented audiences and the results are usually amazing. Nearly everyone around the world has an email address through which most receive digital information and correspondences regularly. This makes email a very powerful and reliable tool that marketers can depend on to easily connect with prospective customers and customers. If you already have a mailing list, you can easily share a variety of marketing info with your prospective customers and customers on that list. You can share your business updates, special promos/offers, price slashes, hot discounts, giveaways and suchlike info that will attract the attention of your audience to your website. If you optimize your emails to include images along with your text, it makes them visually attractive, easily understandable and more able to market your products/services. When effectively done, email marketing can be a very reliable way to get more customers and make more sales.

5. Strong Social Media Presence

Social media is not only hugely popular it also thrives on its influencing capabilities. The reason it is so attractive to digital marketers. For your social media marketing strategy to be effective, you must first figure out exactly which social media platforms you want to use, why you want to use them, and what they can do for your business. This is because all the social media platforms have their own individual peculiarities which may or may not be suitable for your type of business. Once you get your business on social media, it is guaranteed to be widely seen if your marketing is right. That makes it easy to succeed out there to influence others correctly if you market your business correctly. Building a strong social media presence can be a crucial part of the development of your business and can make most of the difference in the long term in your quest to get more customers. A strong social media presence means a strong influencing capability. Aside from paid ads, social media marketing is essentially free. Even with paid ads, marketing on social media is hugely cost-effective and marketers like to take advantage of that as well to get more customers and make more sales.

How to Grow Your Business with Outbound Sales Strategies

If you run your business online, you need a good outbound sales strategy if you want your business to grow. You may face huge challenges figuring out what works and what doesn’t in your marketing activities. That is expected. But, experienced marketers like to advise “using and testing” to determine what strategy works best. Many do recommend a delicate mix between inbound and outbound sales strategies to get the best results.

These here are some tested outbound sales strategies that could have a positive impact on the growth of your own business.

Create Your Ideal Customer Persona

Before developing any marketing strategy, first you must create an ideal customer persona right from the outset. A good customer persona allows you to understand your existing customers and prospects better. With it, you can better curate your content, services, product development and messaging to meet your target audiences' specific demands, behaviors and issues. To create a reliable customer persona, you may choose to directly interview your existing and prospective customers to uncover what they like most about your brand, services and or products. That is in addition to researching your customers’ database to discover trends related to your leads and the customers' behavior towards your content. The info and insights you glean from these exercises will help you to create and ideal customer persona to market to.

Market on Social Media

By way of definition, social media marketing involves the use of social media platforms to promote your brand's product/service. These days, social media appears to be where nearly everyone is at doing their own things around the world 24/7. It is the versatility of social media that business owners leverage on to communicate and engage with customers and reach new audiences. When properly nurtured, it is this audience that can potentially become paying customers. If effectively used, popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram can help business owners to establish great business relationships by helping them to widely share content of value to potential customers.

Generate Quality Leads

Without a doubt, lead generation is by far one of the most effective ways to succeed in outbound sales marketing. For this reason, business owners always need to consciously generate quality leads for their businesses. Lead generation may be a very technical and hugely challenging activity for most marketers but it is worth the while in the long term. Business owners can however reliably use reputable lead generation tools like ZoomInfo and LinkedIn Sales Navigator to help them out. If you have already created an ideal customer persona, you can leverage these tools to help look for qualified prospects that could be a great match for your product/service. In addition to this, you can generate quality leads by way of deliberate referral programs technique. These are programs that encourage other people to promote your brand in exchange for some token value for every converted lead.

Be Active in Online Communities

Marketers are gradually discovering that participating and being very active in online communities actually delivers a number of advantages to businesses. Online communities such as forums, internet communities and Facebook groups can be great networks for you to get an overview of your product/service and to evaluate how your customers are relating with your brand. The insights from these communities really help brands to improve their offerings, create better products and build better and stronger brands. In addition, you can take advantage of these online communities to create strong partnerships by taking advantage of networking opportunities with fellow business owners in your industry/business niche. That helps to grow and strengthen your brand. As a direct marketing effort, you can directly promote your product/service by providing quality content to the community and reaching out directly to members that may be interested in what you are selling.

Use Cold Email Marketing

Email marketing is still a very effective marketing strategy if spamming is eliminated. Cold email marketing works best if you can create great quality, and attention-grabbing emails, that are optimized and targeted at a segmented audience. If such mails have attention-grabbing headlines, they entice people into opening the emails and possibly acting on them as well. If you send cold emails, make sure to follow up with your prospects and to track the “open-rate” of the mails using online tools. From your analytics/metrics, you can get insights about prospects that opened your emails and actually visited your website. If such persons did not make any purchase, you can then directly promote your brand to them again through re-targeting ads.

How to Market Online with Search Engine Optimization, SEO

Search Engine Optimization, SEO, is the key to helping your target market find you online. It is what helps search engines to rank your website in their SERPs. Irrespective of whatsoever you are marketing online, be it a tangible good/product or even if you are offering a service, you need a good SEO to get noticed online. SEO simply involves a complex set of algorithms created by various search engines to determine the rank of links that address a user’s query. That is what enables search engines to make the highest quality links appear highest in search results. By doing so, these links get noticed by searchers first and they tend to click on them first in order of priority. That simply translates to higher organic traffic through such high ranked links.

 

Every search engine may have its own proprietary algorithm but most tend to follow the one developed by Google since Google appears to be the largest search engine at the moment judging from the high percentage of searches attributable to it. Even though the exact components of the Google algorithm and the weighting factors assigned to each component may not be very well known to marketers, SEO experts spend a lot of time and effort conducting experiments to try to determine what these factors are and how they affect the weightings/rankings. What is well known is that links showing up on the first page of the search results on SERPs tend to garner most of the clicks especially those among the top three results. That really counts for something in SEO marketing. Web searchers click on these links first and the beneficiary websites get more organic traffic. Marketers must therefore place more emphasis on SEO with a very keen eye on what SEO experts believe are some of the most impactful factors/activities that determine website ranking. These are:

1. Website security through HTTPS protocols.

2. Gaining backlinks and linking to authoritative online sources, which act as a validation of your content.

3. Mobile-friendliness.

4. Site speed.

5. Providing a positive user experience.

6. Domain age.

7. Social signals, such as clicks from social and other forms of engagement.

8. Producing valuable content on a consistent basis for your website.

Besides these, there are other technical activities which play a role in getting found online. These activities have to do with the choice of and use of specific keywords throughout your website. A key SEO requirement is that the keywords you choose to represent your content must also match closely with user intent as reflected by the words used and the query. These are huge technical matters which may best be handled by SEO experts.

Because of the huge technical challenges in SEO, most business owners/marketers do hire the services of SEO experts to help them out. If however as a business owner you have the education, experience, the right SEO software and the knowhow to do it yourself, all well and good. This option may be less expensive and more effective to meet your business needs. If you do not know how to handle SEO for your website, you are best advised to approach professional agencies or individual SEO experts to help handle it for you. A good SEO on your website is very important and may even be indispensable to the success of your overall online marketing strategy.

10 Digital Marketing Tips to Redefine Your Marketing Strategies

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.

4 Digital Marketing Tips for New Business Start-Ups

No matter the size of your business now, at some point it was a start-up. Business start-up challenges are similar and the biggest challenge however is marketing in the midst of paucity of financial resources to embark on it. Digital marketing comes to the rescue at this stage. Digital marketing helps to get good results even in severely limited financial outlays. Nevertheless, as a start-up, you must embark on aggressive marketing all the same. If you want to engage in a business start-up, the more interest and support, you can muster early on, the more likely your chances of success. These digital marketing tips will help guide you on how to embark on marketing your new start-up for success.

Tip #1. Research, Test and Validate Your Marketing Strategy

Yes, you must begin from the basics. Researching and gathering information to plan your new start-up that is. As a new start-up, you need to design a marketing campaign strategy for your business. The information and data you can gather from your research efforts will give you the opportunity to plan and validate a digital marketing campaign for the future of your business. Detailed information about your products, target customers, the market, your competition, business environment and such like information will help enrich this strategy. These efforts help your business in no small measure to break into the market and be able to get good returns on your digital marketing investment in time, efforts and money.

Tip #2. Create a Business Website

This is a given. A business website serves as your business window on the internet. That is where online surfers first make contact with your business. Your business website is more of a potential marketing tool than just a channel to sell your products on the internet. If well-designed and hosted, it will help expose and promote your brand, attract customers, provide business information to customers and potential customers, attract leads, make sales and so on. To enhance these functionalities, the website must be, fully optimized to make user-experience very pleasant. What this means is that the website should have a good loading speed and be responsive to a wide range of user gadgets particularly computers and smart mobile devices. Ensuring that the website is designed and built for SEO, Search Engine Optimization is a necessity. That is what makes it visible to search engines. This is one issue start-ups must fully address right from the outset. Doing so helps to put the website in the best position possible for future digital marketing campaigns.

 

Tip #3. Engage and Nurture Your Leads

Start-ups naturally start prospecting widely from online audiences. From there, they source leads that they can skillfully nurture to paying customers. Through effective marketing communications, start-ups can do this effectively and efficiently. With good communications, they can maintain follow-up contacts with all the leads/connections they make from their marketing communications. As a start-up, if you embark on good promo before product launch, you can start gathering leads early enough to build potential customer base. One effective way to do this is through expectant offer messaging marketing campaigns.

Tip #4. Think Strategically

Strategic thinking is a must for a successful new business start-up. Since the start-up is new and still young, you always have all the time you need to think of a creative and unique digital marketing strategy for your business niche. Strategic thinking is a way of thinking of a plan designed to achieve a particular long-term aim. Start-ups that cannot effectively think long term are not very likely to succeed. First you must look for the most appropriate and suitable digital marketing techniques to support your digital marketing strategy to survive the long term. With that, you can effectively create your own unique and original marketing strategy to help your business stand out amidst huge competition and gain the attention it needs for success in the long term.

How to Effectively Grow Your Email List for Free

The dream of every digital marketer is to build a reliable email list. With time, this list becomes a very valuable asset for email marketing campaigns. The bigger the size of the list, the more valuable it is particularly for segmented email-marketing activities. To build this list, marketers must pay special attention to opt-in and opt-out rates. If the opt-in rate is higher than the opt-out rate, the list grows. This means marketers are getting more email subscribers than they are losing. Generally, many marketers always tend to get more subscribers than they are losing. To sustain this, they usually explore many ways to boost their opt-in rates. Many of these ways are simple, free and quite efficient to grow email lists. Here are some of such ways.

Happening Online Events/Activities

The internet is awake, active and alive 24/7. Meaning, there are important events happening online around the clock. You can take advantage of these online events to share your knowledge and better connect with your audience. Doing so presents excellent opportunities for you to invite subscribers to your email list. You can share valuable knowledge by way of eBooks, webinars, conferences, YouTube shows and podcasts. To get these values, you can invite email subscribers to your list as a direct channel to get the values across to them. Your email list grows freely from these efforts.

Regular Auditing of Email Subscribers Lists

The more credible an email list is, the more valuable it is. Even as you strive to get more subscribers, it is also essential to ensure that your older subscribers remain credible and valid. The reason there is a need for regular auditing of the list. That you have a large email list is not sufficient guarantee of email marketing success. A healthy, credible and reliable list is what guarantees that. Auditing your email list regularly helps to remove misspelled or risky email addresses, removes data decay, removes poor-quality contacts, and enhances the deliverability of your email messages.  Removing old and risky data this way, is the best way to ensure your emails are making it to the inbox of your subscribers. That greatly enhances the credibility and reliability of your email list as well as its value. Expert marketers recommend two main ways to handle email data decay and to enhance the credibility of your email list. It is EITHER:

You use an Email Verification Service, EVS, to validate your list in bulk. This helps to scrub bad emails periodically particularly when the list is growing very fast.

OR

You add an Application Programming Interface, API to your Signup Forms. The API helps to verify all of your new subscribers in real time and rejects addresses you don’t want on your list.

Pay Special Attention to Your Signup Forms

This is hugely important as a first very important step to build email list. Before embarking on promotions to get sign-ups on your email list, be sure the sign-up forms are in a very conspicuous place on your landing page where every visitor to your website can easily find them. Use a very attractive and inviting opt-in phrase on the forms. Sign-up forms perform very poorly when they are located in obscure places on your website or their messages are not enticing enough. You can do well to avoid these two scenarios. Sometimes, one sign-up form may not be enough. In that case, you can consider adding a few more, including at the bottom of every blog post you write. All told, always make sure you stick with your promises and send your very best marketing tips according to your schedule. That helps your email deliverability and fosters healthy marketing engagement.

Be Very Active on Social Media

This requires posting very valuable content consistently on social media. The huge popularity of social media is now like a marketing goldmine for digital marketers. If you post valuable content regularly, your friends/followers list grows rapidly. Generally, as organic reach on social media is declining, it is smart for marketers to create a strategy to get more friends/followers on their lists. One very simple and practical way to get that done is to post about your emails consistently on social media. Promise value and be sure to send it. If you do so, many of your friends/followers on social media will always be willing to send their emails to get this value. That’s how the email list grows. As an added tip, always be sure to place a link to your opt-in form on all of your social media profiles. Some of the most popular social media sites like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn allow you to do this in your account description on their sites. If you use the space wisely, many social media users can easily find their way onto your email list free.

Effective Content SEO Strategy in Brief

Developing a content SEO strategy by marketers is not always a very easy task. Marketers need it for good marketing results though. It is thus inevitable that marketers must have a good content SEO strategy if they want their marketing businesses to survive competition. A good content SEO strategy requires good planning, skillful and deft deployment of carefully selected keywords in your content. Despite the difficulties involved, it is doable and worthwhile. Expert marketers recommend that for a good content SEO strategy, deliberate efforts must be made to properly place and site targeted keywords in your content. Doing so helps to provide the ideal content that appeals to a very broad audience. That is what helps a business website to get valuable organic traffic.

To have an effective content strategy, marketers must first search for and settle for the keywords suitable to their business niche. You can do this by using comprehensive SEO toolset like Ahrefs.com. This tool helps marketers to identify keywords not only based on their search volume, but also with information about how difficult it might be to rank your business within the keywords. Now, that is very valuable insight that smart marketers cannot afford to ignore. With such insights marketers have access to very valuable information to enable them work smarter not harder, by getting the most out of their own individual efforts.

Marketers can also use software that utilizes data and online search results to analyze briefs for search volume, SEO difficulties, and the length of content to help content writers compose very valuable drafts. Automation can help these processes even better to save valuable time and resources, by streamlining the content pipeline to add consistency and stability to it. The bottom line is a good SEO strategy and these efforts come in very handy in that quest.
 
It is imperative for marketers to attempt to provide at all times, content that Google can insert into its “People Always Ask” results. For organic traffic purposes, this must also be an important element of your content SEO strategy. Marketers now know that these types of Google-featured results aim to predict what else a user might want to know. That is why Google inserts a trustworthy source amongst its search results and even clips out a section of your article source to embed in the page. When marketers work to build outlines on their content pages that are detailed and thorough enough, Google may surface these pages and offer keyword rankings based on the natural value of the information the content serves.

In matters of using links in content SEO strategy, you can hardly have anything as helpful as building links even though experts recommend that links be used very sparingly and intelligently. If not, they could backfire on the marketer through punitive actions from search engines. About four to five internal links per article is ideal and recommended. If a major search engine like Google for instance detects that your backlinks are, stuffed densely and haphazardly into the body of your content, it will reject them and punish your website for it. Additionally, these links must be to credible and verifiable sources. When backlinks cite properly to credible sources, they help to increase your own credibility through offering accurate information.

It is good for your content SEO strategy if you endeavor to streamline your articles with Google requirements. If you write for Articles Directories for instance, it is a requirement that you include an “Author Box” or “Resource Box” on your articles. This box must include the author’s name, photo/Avatar, a bit of information about the author’s background, qualifications, experience and in some cases a link to his website. This works to help the author meet Google’s standards as a source of credible and authoritative information. Google is very particular about providing its users with the highest quality information. If you have built your own online identity/reputation as a trusted source, Google is glad to share your information with its users. That helps your content SEO strategy a great deal.

How to Create a Data-Driven Email Marketing Strategy

Every effective email marketing strategy derives from and thrives on customer-data. This data provides the information that helps email marketers to drive sales and to know whether or not if they are selling the right products to the right audience. If you are in digital marketing, chances are, you are already sending emails to your customers with products you have on offer. If you have accurate customer data, you can make your emails more specific, targeted, and data-driven. Doing so helps to boost both traffic and sales for your business. Traditionally, marketing emails have always been an excellent medium to communicate with customers. By using customer data to learn more about your customers, you can provide them with the right email content and offers they like. That is one great way to keep them happy and loyal to your brand. One very good move for your marketing business no doubt.

Find below some recommended actions you can take to create an effective data-driven email marketing strategy for your business.

Consider Your Audience First

In digital marketing, the audience is key. It is just not enough to know what you are selling, but also who you are selling it to. That is your audience of customers and potential customers. If you have accurate audience demographics, it can make a huge difference as to how your product is received in the market, and how well it will sell. Marketers need customer data to help them figure out buyers’ demographics and who is buying what. Useful marketing demographics may include a person’s age, education, hobbies, tastes, job, gender, geographical location, language, culture, amongst others. If a marketer puts demographics into consideration, he/she can create more targeted emails for specific demographics. Such emails tend to get a much higher response rate, leads and sales.

Get the Timings Right

In digital marketing, it is not enough to market right, you must also endeavor to time your messages right for best results. Bad timing can kill the best of marketing initiatives and even ads. No matter how good your marketing emails are, once the timing is off, they’ll never get the best results. For this reason, when you are creating your email marketing strategy, you must get your timing right. Exactly at what time of the day do you need to get your emails out to be sure a good percentage of your recipients will open them, read them and possibly act on them? This is hugely important to the results you get.

Use Traditional Marketing Methods

The good part of traditional marketing methods is that they still get good results. They are very flexible and allow you to experiment to determine what works and what doesn’t. By using “traditional” methods of marketing particularly A/B testing, it is possible for a marketer to try one method and, if it doesn’t get the desired response, he/she can try another to determine which gets better results. That way, marketers can always try different methods to find out if a marketing idea is working. With Artificial Intelligence, AI now in use by marketers, if they have to experiment with several options, AI helps to make the process much faster and accurate.

Understand Your Audience

The best way to understand your audience is to, directly ask them their likes and dislikes. This you can do by sending out emails they can respond to. That gives them the chance to tell you what they like. If you understand your audience well enough, you can create effective emails to enable you market to them successfully. Even if a certain audience fits into same kind of demographics, it does not really mean they will all like the same things. Therefore, even within the same demographics, you can go a bit more personal to get a better and deeper understanding of the audience. Emails that appeal to this personal information are more likely to get better attention and more clicks.

Keep Your Customers Involved

Digital marketing is all about satisfying customers by meeting their needs. No marketer can guarantee that customers will love everything they offer all of the time. The reason is, there will always be those people who are more enthusiastic about your products than others are. Some will be more loyal to your business than others will. Successful marketing therefore will be to try to win back those customers who are less involved with your business. These are the type of customers you need to market to more by engaging them more. Marketers can now use AI to analyze customer data better and more accurately. The data helps them to keep an eye on dormant and lagging customers. You can get such customers to do better if you send them personalized emails regularly. Chances are, such emails will encourage them to shop more with you, and could prevent them from unsubscribing completely from your business.

Upsell at Every Opportunity

Smart marketers are very adept at upselling. Upselling is selling add-ons to customers to enhance their shopping experience. It is a way of selling items to customers they did not originally set out to buy. For instance, you can upsell seat covers and some other accessories to a customer who buys a car from you. In email marketing, customer data can provide the details needed to upsell products customers are very likely to buy. Marketers always take advantage of that to do some upselling.

Understand Predictive Analytics

Email marketing is mostly about prospecting online. It thrives on permutations and predictions hence the need for predictive analytics. Predictive analytics is all about looking at customer data and making predictions based on it. With it, marketers can successfully create targeted ads and emails by analyzing their buyers’ behavior and interests. These predictions come from analyzing browsing behavior or past purchases of customers, as well as their social media interactions and email engagements. For quicker customer data gathering and analysis, marketers now depend hugely on AI, machine learning, and algorithms that have a particular impact on predictive analysis. With them, marketers can also evaluate customer profiles and buying patterns better. That helps marketers to create more successful marketing strategies and campaigns.

 

Figure Out Customer Response Points

Just as all customers as individuals are separate from one another, so they all have separate individual points that they respond to. By using the right data, marketers can easily see the areas their customers are reacting to. That enables marketers to specially create and tailor emails depending on the customer preferences. Creating a marketing strategy that capitalizes on people’s preferences like this is one a great and very effective way to utilize both demographics and personal information to get good results.

Make Your Responses Personal to Customers

Yeah, most people like to feel and be treated very importantly. Customers are no exceptions to this human craving. Smart marketers make a point about this in responding to the customer’s behavior, with actions that tend to boost their ego and make them happy. By studying, analyzing and following personal customer data, you can respond better and more directly to these behaviors. That is one very effective way to reach out better to them with a view to getting better results out of their responses. For instance, by using AI, you can pinpoint the areas that customers keep looking at on your website. If such customers are yet to make a purchase from you, you can use this info to send emails to them with products relating to this topic and inviting them to buy. This is one great way of predicting your customer’s needs before they even know them. By doing this, you are also providing great customer service as well. This can go a long way to encourage your customers to keep coming back to do business with you.  

Effective Ways to Add Keywords to Your Digital Marketing Content

If you market online, you need an effective digital marketing strategy if you want your business to make any impact. The use of keywords and Search Engine Optimization, SEO are inevitable parts of that strategy. For your digital marketing strategy to be successful, it requires more than simply researching and deciding on some keywords for your content. For best results, these keywords must be strategically and, effectively used in the right places of your content. Keywords help search engines to direct searchers to your website by way of organic traffic. Thus, when your content is well written and rich with your selected keywords, it attracts and makes it compelling for the consumers. If you deploy your keywords in a natural way throughout your content, while carefully avoiding “keywords stuffing,” search engines tend to like your content better. Consequently, they will rank your website higher as internet users search for related terms with your keywords. Google in particular weights formatted content sub-heads/section headers higher than the body of the main article if formatted with the right keywords. Never you forget this as an effective SEO strategy.

Find below the best-recommended parts of your content you can insert keywords to make it SEO effective.

•    The title
•    The meta-description
•    The leading sentence
•    Photo captions
•    Image/graphics file names
•    The URL of the post
•    Sub-heads/Section headers

For best results, be sure to use your chosen keywords in all contents you create for whatever platform. You can even sprinkle them throughout your website copy itself. Include them in any digital marketing content you create even in your social media updates and campaigns. That is what helps your SEO strategy to get the best results.

7 Ways to Get the Best from Your Digital Marketing Strategy

Digital marketers always worry about how effective their digital marketing strategies are. They worry about how these strategies help their businesses to grow. If at any point in time they discover that the strategies they are using are not working for them as expected, they take steps to rejig them for better results. In your own business, whenever you observe that your marketing campaign is not working well to your satisfaction, it is a very clear sign that your business is in a vulnerable position. That is when something just has to be done and done fast too. A good look at your digital marketing strategy is the first logical step in that wise. Smart digital marketing demands it as a basic step, since most businesses rely heavily on effective marketing for their survival and steady growths. To get the best from your digital marketing strategy, don’t ignore the following. 

 
1. Have a Formal Digital Marketing Strategy

You must first be sure to have a marketing strategy and it works for your business. Not having one is always a very grave marketing error that stunts business growth. If you have a digital marketing plan in your overall marketing strategy, your business benefits immensely. By putting all the elements together in an effective way, doing all you should do at the right and proper time, your strategy becomes effective as a result. Of course, you can only know how well you are doing, if you have the right tools in place to track your results and monitor your progress.

2. Use Your Marketing Budget Prudently

Smart marketers always have a very keen eye on marketing costs. This is with a view to better organizing their marketing budgets and in delivering higher Returns on Investments, ROIs. For this reason, budget analysis/management in digital marketing becomes hugely important. By relying more on the most cost-effective techniques in your digital marketing strategy, you can better manage your marketing budget more prudently.

3. Target the Right Audience

You dissipate energy and resources unnecessarily if you habitually “shoot at everything that flies” in your marketing activities. Effective targeting is what gets the best results. If you fully identify and understand the ideal audience for your products, you can market to them directly for good results. For this reason, if you know your audience well enough, you can effectively tailor your digital marketing activities to fit them. These activities entail the right content, the right type of marketing medium/channel and the right message you are conveying. It is always very important therefore, to have a plan for targeting customers and potential customers who share a lot in common in a specific and effective way. Targeting the right audience in your marketing efforts, is not only a cost-effective thing to do, it gets the best results.

4. Pay Attention to Search Engine Optimization, SEO

A good search engine optimization, SEO technique on your website helps to get it noticed by search engines. It requires a careful and tactical use of keywords and alt tags in your content and headlines. When correctly used, they have a large amount of influence on your SEO. They help search engines particularly Google to rank your website well in its SERPs. That is what easily becomes available to searchers first when in need of information. Your website directly benefits by way of good organic traffic from such search results. Because search engines tend to change their algorithms from time to time, be sure to keep an eye on these changes and to update your SEO techniques in tandem to avoid penalties from search engines. Such penalties may have adverse effects your business online.

5. Connect with Influencers

It remains a good marketing strategy to develop good relations with influencers and to depend on their large following to grow your business. Because of their effectiveness, making some investments in connecting with influencers is a good marketing strategy. Making this investment is usually worth the while because it tends to engender higher ROI for the marketer. This is why marketing with influencers is always worth it and a large percentage of marketers think so as well. Many see it as a very effective marketing strategy because of the good results it gives. For best results, it is advisable to make some deliberate efforts to source the right influencer to work with and who suits and promotes your brand better. That kind of influencer can easily help to create a huge awareness for your brand and help to boost sales/revenue for your business.

6. Use Paid Social Media Ads

Social media platforms have become very popular with digital marketers because of their immense popularity and ease of sharing information. They now serve as very important platforms for marketers to build and grow their audiences very quickly. With their customized in-house analytics, marketers benefit by building greater insights into their marketing efforts free of cost. These benefits can be boosted with additional paid ads that are cost-effective too. Promoting your brand on social media without any paid advertising is usually time consuming and may not even guarantee any appreciable increase in your audience. If your marketing budget can accommodate it, it is good to invest in paid ads on social media. Doing so will not only help you to better target your audience, but also, it will help transform your page into a very popular page and a top leads generator as a result.

7. Market with all the Platforms

Expert marketers like to advise marketers not to ignore any marketing channel/platform in their digital marketing strategy. All channels have their own advantages and peculiarities and the results they deliver vary as well. Content marketing, blogging, email marketing, social media marketing, inforgraphics, video marketing etc. must be part of your marketing strategy for better effectiveness. What matters is to be very active when using most of these channels. If you regularly post fresh and informative content related to your brand/product on daily basis, it will help your page to get more traffic and to build a larger audience. For better and direct audience targeting particularly on social media, it is very important to understand how their algorithms work. You can rely on hashtags to post information according to your audience’s online stats to get insights and a brief of your audience. Doing so will enable you to have a better use of hashtags and keywords to target your audience based on such hugely important marketing demographics like age, education, employment, profession, gender, marital/parental status, and interests. You get better results as well.