Top Marketing Strategies Online Marketers Cannot Afford to Ignore

As an online business owner, you cannot succeed without having some working knowledge of marketing. That requires getting to know various digital marketing strategies, the most successful of which trump traditional marketing strategies most times. This is because digital marketing strategies allow you to reach more people at less cost than you would spend on traditional forms of marketing, such as, newspaper ads, billboards, and Radio and TV commercials. Even at that, things don’t come easy too even in digital marketing except you use the right strategies combined with a strong online presence for your business. What this means is that you must have a user-friendly business website as a foremost requirement. Next is to get the business on as many social media platforms as convenient. Your strong online presence starts to build up from these arrangements. If your online presence becomes stronger, you can start to deploy the following marketing strategies to get traffic, leads and customers.

 
Affiliate and Referral Marketing

These are forms of digital marketing strategies which allow third parties to help product merchants promote products/services in exchange for commissions.  Even though Affiliate and Referral Marketing are two terms that are often used interchangeably, they mean basically the same thing. They both involve affiliates promoting products/services for merchants using personalized links/codes for attribution purposes and commissions payment. In a more organized business form, affiliates operate by joining reputable affiliate programs like Strong Future International, SFI to promote products and earn commissions. Since the business model is performance based, the more affiliates promote products/services, the more commissions they earn.

Recruitment Marketing

In this type of marketing, the strategy is not to target consumers but job seekers instead. Just as affiliate marketers market towards consumers to create brand awareness and drive sales, recruitment marketers use recruitment marketing to market towards job seekers with a view to recruiting the most qualified and skilled individuals who apply to work. Recruitment marketing similarly uses digital marketing strategies, such as PPC and social media marketing to recruit job seekers. With the right digital marketing strategies, recruitment marketers can reach the biggest and most skilled job seeking audience.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a digital marketing strategy that uses on-website techniques and the right keywords to get your business website to rank higher on search engines. Even though this form of marketing is limited to search engines, it is one of the most effective forms of digital marketing. SEO relies technically on the use of special keywords on a business website to get it to rank higher in the SERPs of major search engines like Google.
 
Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

This is another digital marketing strategy that derives its effectiveness from the correct use of keywords on a business website. PPC marketing allows marketers to have their ads posted on a publisher’s website for traffic purposes. Anytime such ads are clicked by a visitor, the marketer pays the publisher/website owner. Google Ads are the most common types of PPC. Marketers pay Google to have the top slots on the search engine. In addition to Google ads, marketers can also run PPC ads on very popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. 

Content Marketing

In a content marketing strategy, content is king. Good and high quality content that is! With content marketing, marketers use quality content to create brand awareness and drive traffic to their websites. This Content can be in the form of graphics, photos, videos, blog posts, and any other type of content that you can send through emails and post on social media platforms.

Social Media Marketing

Because of the huge popularity of social media for digital marketing purposes, most of the content by marketers is usually on their social media business pages. This is social media marketing. That process is helped mostly by the fact that most social media platforms allow marketers to create business pages for marketing purposes. The platforms also help marketers with in-house marketing tools and tips to help make their marketing more effective. Because of their popularity and marketing effectiveness, most marketers prefer the following social media platforms.
•    Facebook
•    Twitter
•    LinkedIn
•    Instagram
•    Snapchat
•    Pinterest

Email Marketing

Email marketing allows marketers to communicate with a huge audience by merely pressing a computer button. That audience could be in hundreds of thousands and once the computer message reads “sent”, they all receive it in a matter of seconds. With emails, marketers can easily send marketing messages to their customers, no matter the number and where they are in the world. Marketing content emails usually includes information about upcoming products, promotions, price adjustment, new trends, sales offers, discount coupons, and any other informative news that can help consumers make their decisions or solve their problems.

Wrapping Up

If you run a business online, it will be difficult for you to grow the business and make good sales if you do not at least have a working knowledge of the foregoing marketing strategies. The better you know and are able to use these strategies, the better you can market your business online. If however your knowledge is severely limited in these fields, you can consider hiring the services of a digital marketing agency or some experts in the various fields to help you out. The success of your online marketing is what is most important, not how you choose to bring it about. Good luck!

Key Benefits of Cost-Effective Digital Marketing Strategies

Online, digital marketers use digital marketing strategies to effectively market their products/services. These strategies help marketers to get good traffic, increase their online visibility, get more leads and conversions and subsequently make more sales. On face value, these activities may appear to cost a fortune in marketing expenses but with some cost-effective digital marketing strategies in place, you can increase your online visibility and achieve more beneficial marketing results. Online, digital marketing can be effectively used on social media platforms, websites, search engines, emails, or even by way of mobile applications and it works perfectly fine. Its effective use tends to make a significant difference in the marketability and profitability of any online business.

Discussed below are some key benefits your business gains when you use cost-effective digital marketing strategies to market your products/services online.

Improved Return-On-Investments (ROI)

Every marketer is in business to get returns. If you make investments, the Return on Investment, ROI is a direct measure of how well your business is doing. That effectively makes ROI the primary goal of any marketing campaigns. If you are using cost-effective digital marketing strategies, it is evident you’ll save a lot on spending. Good savings on spending has a positive impact on the returns you get. ROI is the value you get when you divide the investment on spending by the sales you make. When you run your ads campaign for a while, you can collect enough data to evaluate your ROI. If the strategies you are using are cost-effective, your ROI will be going up. But, if not, your ROI will be decreasing over the course of the campaign. ROI is one highly beneficial business indicator to know how well your marketing campaigns are doing at any point in time.

Reduced Customer Acquisition Costs

Among digital marketers, Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is a measure of how much any business spends to acquire new customers. CAC is one very important metric that enables marketers to gauge their performance from time to time. When you deploy cost-effective digital marketing strategies, they help in no small measure to reduce the spending on many costs, CAC inclusive. With digital marketing, you can effectively reach most of your users through very minimal or no cost channels. These are primarily emails, website/blog content and social media platforms and they are hugely effective to boot. When it comes to CAC, the cost to use these channels is quite low and may even be negligible particularly on social media if you use the right platforms and target your ads well.

Using Quality Content Strategically

If your content is qualitative and unique, you can strategically use it to get good marketing results. Among digital marketers, content is king. Good content is what marketers can create with minimal budgetary investment and much less budget spending and your business will still manage to attract a lot more customers when compared to some other marketing techniques. You can quickly build online visibility for your business if in your content, you habitually use catchy creative headlines, ad ideas, quality content, and engaging creations. These together with daily trending info in your content can help to induce better customer engagement, generate leads and conversions.

Leveraging Social Media Networking

With 4.62 billion active users worldwide, social media platforms are the most user-updated and happening platforms at the moment. Now that’s one huge market out there on social media. On social media, you practically take your business to where your audience is. Marketing info is easily shared on the platforms and it can go viral just like that. If you market with creative content that easily gets the attention of consumers, it can help them to make very crucial buy decisions. For best social media networking results, you can effectively monitor your audience by tracking their interests and targeting them accordingly. Once your content is relevant, engaging and informative, your audience helps to share it widely on social media. That translates to more traffic, more leads and conversions even at very minimal marketing investment.

Diligently Tracking Campaigns with KPIs

Performance indicators tell marketers how well they are doing in their marketing campaigns. So, marketers can use their key performance indicators KFI to track how well their marketing campaigns are doing. Marketers can track how well their digital marketing is doing when they look at their business conversion rates, ROI, customer retention, leads and sales. These are essentially key performance indicators KFI in any digital marketing arrangement. These KFI metrics directly determine the efficiency of any marketing campaigns. If the KFI are not going up, it means your campaign is not doing well. By addressing the reasons for this poor performance, you can take positive steps to minimize them by optimizing your campaign strategy for better results.

Prudent Use of PPC

Yes, pay-per-click (PPC) ads cost money. There is no question about that. But when it comes to saving up on ads budgets, PPC is where to go. When you are marketing with PPC, every ads cent counts a lot. This is why you must use the most relevant keywords and phrases wisely for your ads to hit the desired targets. Because PPC works faster than SEO, it allows marketers to limit their spending on customer conversion. Even at that, PPC still manages to generate higher ROI for marketers.

Tactical use of Re-targeting Ads

Re-targeting ads are ads directly deployed to arrest the attention of online visitors who are looking for a specific product and not just surfing around online. Such visitors are identified to have visited your website earlier and moved on elsewhere. Targeting such a specific audience increases the chances of improved conversion rates. This is because such audience is more likely to move ahead with the final purchase of what the marketer is offering. Re-targeting ads are also for past customers who might be interested in similar products and repeat purchases. For best results, marketers can also re-target ads according to available metrics, collected data, including demographic and behavioral details of online searchers.

4 Signs Your Social Media Pages Are Not Reaching the Right Audience

Since the advent of social media, it has continued to grow in popularity. There are roughly 4.65 billion active social media users around the world presently. Now that’s some huge popularity! Till date, social media users continue to increase in numbers for many and varied reasons but largely on account of the versatility of its uses. These uses include communication, networking, connecting with friends, family and colleagues, for work-related/business reasons, staying in touch, for fun and so much more. The main reasons why so many people are drawn to social media have to do with the relative ease of sharing info on the platforms, easy two-way communication and the relative convenience of using many social media channels to promote and manage a business.

  

As a business owner, even if you do not have your own website, you can easily create business pages on the most popular social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Tiktok, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Tumblr and the likes. That gives your business unlimited and unhindered access to the huge social media market on the Internet. This huge internet space has its own peculiar challenges though. Principal among these challenges is how to make sure your marketing messages reach the right audience. This challenge is usually compounded by the huge competition surrounding any business on the Internet. The only relief is when you have sufficient evidence that your marketing messages are reaching the right audience.

Below are 4 signs you should always watch out for to know if your social media pages are reaching the right audience.

1. Poor Followers/Subscribers Connections

If your social media business pages gain followers and connections consistently, it is a clear sign that your messages are reaching the right audience. If you post high quality content on your social media pages regularly and consistently, people interested in your business niche are bound to notice. If their interest is sustained, they are more like to subscribe to your blog or connect with your page. If however no matter how much you try your social media pages are not gaining any followers or subscribers sufficiently, it is a clear sign that your target market is either unaware or unimpressed with what you are doing, the reason they ignore you.

2. Subdued Responses and Interactions

Responses and interactions with your content on social media are also hugely important. Most social media users naturally interact or respond to what they like and are impressed with. These are messages or content that touch on their emotions. If there are no responses or interactions whatsoever with your marketing content, it is another sign that the content may not be reaching the right audience. The first thing you do is to try to improve on the quality of the content and to make it more appealing to people interested in your business niche. Quality content is a crucial factor in getting interactions to your social media pages because it is a major key to getting users’ attention. If after improving the quality of your content, and you still have less to zero interactions, clearly, you may not be reaching the right audience. Each social media platform has its peculiarities and important demographics. Your messages must factor them in if you want to reach the right audience on each platform. If for example your target audience consists of young people, platforms like Facebook, TikTok and Instagram using plenty of beautiful visuals can get your messages across to young people better. This is because young people are naturally drawn to visuals. So, having solid, attractive and creative visuals on your content can help catch their attention much better. 

3. Increased Expenses on Other Marketing Strategies

Every online marketing strategy comes with various shades of cost elements. Since marketers are always watchful of costs, they tend to prefer strategies with reduced cost elements. This is why when a marketer is spending way too much on marketing strategies and not achieving their objectives in terms of returns, there is always cause for concern. It could mean many things but most prominent of these things is the likelihood that their websites or social media pages are not adequately reaching their target markets. Marketing on social media in the main is a free marketing strategy. So, inspite of this you are spending way too much on other marketing strategies, it simply reveals that your social media pages are not doing enough of what you expect them to do by way of getting the attention of your target market to attract leads and drive sales. Social media marketing, even if a free strategy, can be very effective to reach an intended audience. The results can be great too.

4. Subdued Interest on Your Products/Services

If your social media pages are always freshly updated with quality content and you are still not getting increased inquiries about your products/services, among other things, it could simply mean your target market is not aware that you exist. You are then challenged to explore ways to create this vital awareness even though getting subdued interactions may not necessarily equate to subdued sales. Many social media users may take more positive actions in terms of purchases even without public interactions with the products/services you are marketing. But, if however you are not getting any sales at all, it is a clear indication that you are not reaching the right audience with the right messages through your social media channels.

Final Thoughts

You can always get the best out of your social media marketing strategy if you watch out for the foregoing signs and elevate your social media tactics from time to time. There are always many possibilities to consider if you want to elevate your social media tactics. Top among these possibilities is to primarily market on social media, products/services that appeal to your target audience. When audience reaction is good and products sales are up, it means your social media marketing strategies are doing great. If you feel they are not doing great, what you can do is to make a diligent assessment of your social media pages and the content you post. That is about the best way to figure out the root cause of why you are not reaching your target market as expected. Once identified, you can address it quickly and your sales will begin to pick up without delay.

Most Effective Online Marketing Strategies

For most online marketers, an online marketing strategy is simply a plan that outlines how their businesses can achieve set marketing goals. It is some sort of strategic plan showing how they plan to market, by what means and through which online channels. A good strategic plan vividly outlines what online channels and online marketing tactics will be deployed and even at what cost in terms of investment. If and whenever these strategic plans are effective, your marketing success will be on course.

However, online marketers are usually confronted with so many options that at times, it becomes difficult to decide which online marketing strategy to prioritize. What can help the decision about the most effective online marketing strategy to use is to factor in the brand you are promoting, the product and the demographics of your target audience. It is only by doing so you can decide better on an online marketing plan that will be most effective to achieve your marketing goals. Here are the most effective online marketing strategies which most experienced online marketers do not hesitate to recommend.

Content Marketing

As most experienced online marketers like to say, in online marketing, content is king. Marketers effectively use good content to disseminate informative, educational and even entertaining information to gain consumer trust and increase brand awareness. Content marketing is quite popular among digital marketers because it is typically less expensive than most other forms of marketing and it gets better results too particularly in terms of good traffic and more leads. To get these results, your content must be of high quality and valuable to users.

Search Engine Marketing, SEM

Search engine marketing, SEM is a type of online marketing where you increase your search ranking in the SERPs of search engines. Marketers do this by using paid advertising techniques. If you know the techniques and have the experience in Google Ads and display/search ads, you can do it yourself. But, if not, it is best to hire the services of digital marketing experts to do it for you by tinkering with how your business uses text-based search ads, YouTube video ads, display ads and mobile ads. What you expect is for Google to rank your business high in its SERPs. If it does, you’ll receive more and better organic traffic to your online business.
 
Video Marketing

Video marketing is especially very effective in online marketing largely because of the visual captivation of videos as marketing tools. This is more so when used on YouTube which is the most effective online video distribution platform most marketers like to use. YouTube is not only a social media platform; it is a search engine too. Marketing with videos on YouTube is one great way to harness its search influence and vast audience to promote your products. On YouTube therefore, you can effectively use engaging infomercials and instructional how-to videos to market your products and with impressive results. You can in addition host a Google Hangout with your customers/consumers as an entertainment option and with good results also.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a business model that requires the engagement of affiliates to help promote products for a product merchant and the affiliates receive compensation by way of commissions from the sales they generate. You can recruit affiliates directly to help promote your brand, or you link your e-commerce store to a reputable affiliate program like Strong Future International, SFI which has millions of affiliates on roll ready and willing to help promote your products in exchange for commissions on the sales they generate. If however, you choose to recruit affiliates yourself, it is best to use affiliate recruiting software which can help to automate the process somewhat to save your precious time and resources.
 
Email Marketing

Email marketing has been around for quite a while and it is still very popular with digital marketers. This is largely as a result of its continued effectiveness as a reliable marketing strategy with very impressive Return On Investment (ROI) for marketers. The ROI from email marketing is about 4x higher than many other marketing channels like paid search, direct mail and social media marketing which digital marketers also like to use.
    
Search Engine Optimization, SEO

If you have a good SEO on your e-commerce website, you get free organic traffic from search engines. That simply equates to free advertising. There is therefore no better way to get free advertising online than through SEO. A good SEO on your website helps to increase the ranking of the website in the SERPs of major search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo because of the relevant keywords and search terms you have used on the site. The moment you have this digital marketing technique in place on your website, the organic traffic to it will increase significantly. What that means is better online business going forward and you will see a huge increase in the sales your e-commerce store will start to generate. SEO technique simply entails optimizing your website and getting relevant links and citations on it. The more relevant and plentiful these links and citations are, the better its chances of ranking high in search engines. And, a high ranking means more and better organic traffic to the site. That ultimately means more leads and sales on the website.

Pay-Per-Click, PPC

Unlike SEO which requires a lot of technical work on your website before it ranks high, PPC allows you to start ranking on the first page with almost no downtime and less requirements from Google. However, it comes with costs. Your business will have to pay for the clicks generated on your website. PPC technique is quite effective because only the clicks matching your keywords and search terms are directed to your website. PPC directly compliments SEO because SEO may not solve all of your keyword ranking challenges. PPC helps to save up on time as well since SEO even though an effective strategy in its own right is time wasting and highly technical to get in place. With SEO, getting high rankings for each search term takes a lot of time and effort, including strong content writing, keyword research, link building, and a strong website. PPC does not require all that to get you the traffic you pay for.

YouTube Video Marketing

Aside the huge effectiveness of marketing with videos, YouTube is also a very large search engine where people quickly go to look for solutions to their problems. Searchers go to YouTube to find solutions to their problems and the captivating videos on the platform if optimized well enough help to increase views and clicks. That means good traffic, more leads and sales. When you create good how-to/demonstration videos on topics related to your products and recommend the products, if the videos are optimized well enough on YouTube, they help to attract leads/buyers in significant numbers.

Social Media Marketing, SMM

These days nearly everyone is on social media 24/7 around the world. With about 4.65 billion active users worldwide, now that’s one huge market out there. Marketing on social media is therefore a very smart thing to do. Social media marketing is simply the strategy of promoting products/services using social media networks or platforms. But first you must have accounts on the most popular social media websites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest. Depending on the products you are marketing, you can use these platforms to make good promotions most times for free. Some of the platforms like Facebook and Instagram for instance have in-house tools specifically designed to aid marketers to achieve their desired branding and marketing goals. However, that is possible only if you can consistently develop content designed specifically for each social media platform by way of good content in form of articles, photos, videos, or any other type of content that your audience is interested in. If however you have the means, you can pay for ads to run on social media. As your social media marketing grows, you can take advantage of automation by using social media management tools to post and schedule content across multiple social media channels. The results can be very encouraging in terms of leads and sales generated therefrom.

Paid Search Advertising

Paid search advertising is typically pay-per-clicks where a marketer is required to pay for each view or click their ad receives. You can however not get the most out of this hugely effective advertising and marketing technique if you are unable to craft compelling ad texts. This involves the use of powerful headlines and intriguing snippets that are short and concise. You also need to use the right search engines or websites that are relevant to the ad market. Paid search advertising even though it comes at a considerable cost, has the potential to boost your business significantly. If as a marketer you are unable to study and master it perfectly, it is advisable to hire the services of an expert to handle it for you. That comes with a bit of costs too.

Influencer Marketing

People who have a sizeable, responsive and active audience on their websites or on social media and they have the ability to influence their audience to act in a certain way are usually known as influencers. On that premise, Influencer marketing can be rightly described as the marketing practice of working with influencers to promote a brand’s messages, products and or services. Through influencer marketing, marketers can easily get their marketing messages to a wide variety of audiences and at times together with the endorsement or recommendation of the Influencer. This is why it is one great and effective way marketers can take advantage of many digital channels to reach their target audience. It enables businesses to work in close association with Influencers while leveraging the huge popularity of celebrities and experts in their field who share similar values. Businesses can thus easily reach the large followers of Influencers with their branded offers and content. This in addition to Influencer recommendations and endorsements that usually help businesses to get more leads and make more brisk sales.

Local Search Marketing

Most online marketers know that every business is first and foremost local. This is why many e-commerce stores usually latch on to Google for their local search marketing through Google-My-Business, GMB. If your e-commerce store is optimized for local searches on GMB, Google usually throws up your business in search results using the searcher’s keywords particularly with a “near me” clause. Optimizing your business on GMB helps to increase the visibility of your business on Google Maps. So, when anyone is searching for a local business nearby, your business benefits from Google local search results. That can be great for local organic traffic, more local leads and more local sales. You can boost your local search results with inbound marketing from your conversations and sharing relevant material on your social media handles. By doing this, instead of panning out wider to find customers, inbound marketing strategies bring them to your website steadily.

How to Use Social Media for Website Marketing Strategies

As many digital marketers have since discovered, social media is one great resource for their marketing activities. It comes in very handy to use in nearly all website marketing strategies. Social media is not only hugely popular, with over 4.65 billion users worldwide, it is easy and cheap to use. It is in addition a great fun and very exciting way for marketers to reach their audience. There are so many benefits marketers derive from website marketing strategies. If they explore ways to use social media for these strategies, they have additional advantage of not having to bother so much about making search engine rankings. Following are strategies that help out this process.

Cyber Marketing Strategies

Marketers derive two major benefits when using social media in cyber marketing strategies. These strategies help build relationships with customers and potential customers by directing them to your website. Secondly, if you use the right social communities, you can easily build backlinks to your website through social media. Because some of the major social community websites on Facebook and Twitter in particular use a “no-follow” tag with the hyperlinks on their sites, they disable the ability for websites to increase their search engine rankings by linking to them from the social sites. By this action, these popular social media sites become especially useful for directing tons of traffic to the marketer’s website. However, there are other social websites, such as Digg and StumbleUpon, that don’t use “no-follow” tags. Marketers can effectively use these sites to get backlinks and to direct traffic to their websites. These benefits do not however compare to the benefits derivable from more popular social sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Internet Marketing Strategies

Using social media for internet marketing strategies is a bit complicated. Marketers really need extra care when using these strategies on social media to avoid spamming label. Yeah, you can promote your business on social media but when updating your status, you must take extra care to avoid making your products promotion too obvious. If you do, you risk getting your audience bored and losing interest in your content updates. Once you recognize that there is a fine line between spamming and regular advertising, it is left to you to strictly observe some updating strategies in your social media posts that will respect this distinction. One of such observances is that you should never make every status update you make to link back to your website. If you do, you are clearly spamming. What is advisable is to make your updates as if you are serving valuable content then occasionally throw in a link back to your website. If you blog on your website, so much the better. You can make a blog post and share on social media. That automatically links back to your website without a semblance of spam.

Social Media Interactions

Ease of interaction and sharing of information are some of the biggest advantages of social media to website marketing. On social media, people know who they are dealing with as human. They are thus very free to ask questions, give answers, make comments, offer solutions and give feedback with ease. Social media puts a personal face on you the business person and that helps to put your audience at ease. Building a reputation for you and your business becomes much easier that way. You can maintain that reputation through every single update you make on social media. You should keep your content mostly focused on your niche and how the info you give can be helpful to your audience. On social media, if you want to maintain your reputation with your audience, avoid any content about race, religion and politics. Making social media updates about these subjects no matter how subtle can hurt your reputation and even your business. It is best to avoid them all together.

5 Inbound Marketing Strategies to Grow Your Blog

Most digital marketers now realize the real benefits of inbound marketing to their marketing activities. If properly annexed, inbound marketing usually brings the right people to your business website. That means traffic, good traffic in the main. The main goal of inbound marketing is to bring people who’re most likely to buy what you’re selling. That means the people who recognized the need for your product/service who tend to need just a little nudge to take the final step to buy. As at today, blogging is, by far, one of the most efficient and result-oriented inbound marketing strategies available to digital marketers, and its benefits are widely recognized by most marketers. If you don’t have a blog on your website, the time to create one is now if you really want to boost the inbound marketing strategy of your business.

If however you already own a blog and you are desirous to grow it, below are tried and tested inbound marketing strategies most bloggers are using to grow their blogs.

1. Boost Your Landing-Page Strategy

A good blog must have an effective landing page strategy to get results. This is because landing pages usually serve the purpose of helping to market your product/service. More specifically and with the right strategy, landing pages actively serve to encourage customers to take some desired action among other numerous benefits such as:

- attracting more traffic and conversions
- giving the first good impression to your website visitors
- making your visitors stay longer on your website
- generating more leads as a result
- helping to build credibility for your business
- offering the right solutions to your audience’s problems
- starting to build a mutually beneficial relationship with your audience

To get these results, you must make your landing page strategy an inevitable part of your overall inbound marketing strategies as a blogger. To do this right, be sure to pick a relevant and interesting topic in your niche your audience will love. Test different landing pages for maximum efficiency before you settle for what works best. Don’t forget to make a CTA button obvious to your audience by placing it correctly in your landing page. You’ll manage to get these results from your landing page if you don’t clutter it up with irrelevant massages.

2. Use More Long-Form Content

High quality and interesting content on a blog helps it to attract traffic. Additionally, the content should be long-form. This is because long-from content is more likely to become viral and gets much more links than regular-length blog posts. If the content is long-form, it has the potential to improve your website’s rankings on the SERPs of search engines. Through that, it will help to create organic traffic to your website, generate quality links for it, and consequently establish good authority for your business in its niche.

3. Use Captivating Headlines

This is rather obvious in content marketing. The more captivating your blog headlines are, the more attention they get and the more traffic they attract. If you are a blogger, the first thing your audience will see on your blog is the headline. It is the quality of this headline that usually determines whether or not people will click on the link and read your blog post. It is therefore advisable to always make sure you spend enough quality time thinking through your headlines and crafting one that will spark the reader’s interest.

4. Give Real Value to Your Readers

Most online surfers are always there to solve one problem or another. Your blog succeeds if it helps provide them with solutions. Therefore, if you want to succeed in your inbound marketing efforts, your blog must always give something of value in addition to quality content to your readership. Some of such things of value include downloadable materials such as research data, e-books, biz quizzes, online courses, and so on. Thus, your blog must be seen to be providing value and not just outright selling. Providing value is important because it helps to increase your brand’s reputation, increases the trust your audience has for your business, and the overall value of your brand.

5. Do Some Niche Guest Posting

Guest posting remains one of the most important inbound marketing strategies available to bloggers. It is good for quality backlinking to your website. However, you must take adequate care to ensure you only do guest posting on quality websites because links quality is very important to search engines. For this reason, having a solid amount of links back to your website is a good idea, but the quality of such links is hugely important. If generally you deliberately do more guest-posting on the quality websites that are in the same niche as yours, you’ll be able to increase your traffic and reach potential customers much more efficiently than doing link building on just any website. For bloggers who want to grow their blogs, guest posts bring a lot of value for their businesses. This value includes providing backlinks, increasing the website’s ranking, promoting brand authority and communicating effectively with the audience that may turn out to be good leads and trusted customers.

How to Create Sponsored Content that Engages Consumers

In digital marketing, content that does not attract engagement is not a valuable content. This is more so with sponsored content which many consumers usually avoid because they tend to see most sponsored content as ads. The main issue with sponsored posts particularly on social media and other digital platforms is really about the manner in which sponsored posts are displayed and not about the messages. That is what most consumers resent and it tends to put many off the messages all together. However, in terms of engagement, sponsored content whether as social post, a blog or a video can be as engaging as a non-sponsored content when done the right away. Both can be effective digital marketing strategies when properly deployed. These here are very effective tips to help boost your sponsored content to get the right engagement.

Avoid Text on Photos

As a digital marketer, it is inevitable that you do have to market with texts and photos. How these texts and photos are used in what determines their effectiveness particularly in matters of user engagement. You must therefore ensure always that your content looks very natural to your consumers. Avoid as much as possible text overlays on photos. In the eyes and perception of consumers, text overlays make your content to look like an ad or a meme. For this reason, you must always keep your text limited to your caption, but even at that, you must avoid going overboard there either. In addition, if you habitually utilize too many hashtags, it makes your sponsored post look spammy and that ultimately results in decreased engagement which you can least afford. When your sponsored content is of poor quality and just feels like an ad, consumers are less likely to engage with it. But, when the content is properly placed, doesn’t include too many tags, utilizes sharp photography, and feels organic and very natural, it turns out to be the right content that can effectively generate very good results for your brand.

Avoid Poor Photographs

Sharp and very high quality photographs are a must in digital marketing. Poor quality photographs are about the most common mistakes most brands and influencers usually make within sponsored content. No matter where the photographs are used, whether on social media or other digital platforms, blurry or poorly cropped photos are always a put off for most consumers. Such poor quality photos therefore usually help to decrease engagement a great deal. Expert marketers advise that as much as practicable, digital marketers should utilize an HD camera to ensure the best visual quality for their marketing photos.

 

Avoid Unnatural Product Displays

If marketing pics appear unnatural on content they reduce engagement. Consumers are people and they relate better with any visual content they see as natural and not outrageous or garish. That helps engagement. What most consumers really want to see influencers doing is to see them use a product in a vividly demonstrable form. Seeing things like that simply tells the story in a very succinct and captivating manner. If for instance you are promoting a sponsored content about a clothing item, the influencer must wear the item to clearly show to consumers how it fits. The idea is to make it feel less like an ad and more like an item that just happened to be captured in the influencer’s photo. That looks more natural and tells the marketing story much better even without appearing to be doing so. Engagement is better as a result instead of prominently featuring the product in such an unnatural manner that may even be disgusting to consumers.

6 Ways Affiliate Marketing Campaigns Benefit your Small Business

Many small business owners always have issues deciding on the best techniques to market their products. But those who take into account effectiveness and affordability never fail to look the way of affiliate marketing. Many settle for a strategic blend of different marketing strategies to promote their products. Some of these strategies like SEO and PPC, email marketing do help small businesses to better utilize their meager resources and to maximize profits. However, quite unlike these other techniques, affiliate marketing can directly help small businesses to increase sales. Affiliate marketing is simply a process where an individual/entity helps to promote products from a product merchant and earns commissions for his efforts. It is quite an effective and convenient marketing solution that can directly help small businesses to increase sales among its many other benefits. 

 
Find below some of the benefits your small business stands to benefit from affiliate marketing campaigns.

1. Social Credibility

Affiliate marketing helps to enhance social credibility for your business. Many online shoppers rely on product reviews and testimonials to make their buy decisions. These people rely almost entirely on customer reviews and feedback to determine the product/brand quality. If you start an affiliate program, your affiliates will directly work with you to promote your products and keep your audience informed and engaged. They help to provide the credible social proof your target audience needs to enhance their buy decisions.

2. Affordability and Cost-Effectiveness

The marketing resources available to many small businesses are always severely limited. The cost-effectiveness of affiliate marketing always comes to the rescue. If you compare affiliate marketing with other forms of marketing available to business owners, it stands out as one of the most affordable options. The reason is simple. Affiliate marketing is a performance-based method and it is hugely effective for results. Affiliates earn commissions only when they make a sale through their direct efforts. That way, business owners are spared the costs of paying for leads, clicks, or impressions.

3. Targets More People

Aside from your own audience as a business owner, you can tap into the audiences of your affiliates. That inevitably allows you to reach many more people with your marketing messages. Directly expanding the reach of your business becomes a direct benefit of targeting many more people. Business owners must therefore endeavor to find and work with affiliates whose audiences resonate with their niche. By doing so, they easily leverage on it to reach a broader audience resulting in increased sales/revenue.

4. Boosts Brand Awareness

The more the numbers of people that recognize your business, you more sales you make. It is imperative to get that recognition by as many people as possible. Affiliate marketers come in very handy to enhance that much-needed recognition. Affiliates usually put in their very best to help drive more and more people to the business website they are affiliated with. That relationship ultimately results in increasing brand recognition and awareness about the business from among the targeted audience. The commissions affiliates earn are directly related to the efforts they put in to grow brand awareness for the business. The reason affiliates as a matter of priority always have favorable opinions and loyal advocates of the brand they are working with. When you have many affiliates vouching for your product/brand, it helps to build trust with your audience and to grow brand awareness for your product/brand.

 

5. Increased Returns On Investment, ROI

Typically, affiliate marketing structure is performance-based. That enables very tight control on costs making it cost-effective to operate. That cost-effectiveness helps its profitability a great deal. Affiliates only earn commissions based on the deals they close. With that kind of arrangement, once you make a sale through the direct efforts of an affiliate, chances are very high that the customer might buy again directly from the seller by way of repeat purchases. That ultimately impacts the ROI for your business positively.

6. Improves Conversion Rate

In affiliate marketing, by using the right tools/metrics you can collect reliable data from various sources. When you analyze such data, it can give you the right insights into the performance of your marketing campaigns. That allows you to take a good look into your business, tweak your business model and make operational improvements as needed. When you engage with affiliates, you can even collect data from them using affiliate marketing tracking software. This info can help you to gain some insights into your customers’ mind-sets and helping you to determine what they need. You can thereafter use such data to make necessary changes to your website, marketing strategies and products. That ultimately helps your business with more conversions and sales. 

5 Effective Email Marketing Strategies for your Small Business

In this age and time, even though email marketing has been around for quite a while, it still remains one of the best online marketing strategies small business owners can use to grow their businesses. It is not just cost-effective to use, it still gets some of the best results when compared to other means of digital communications online. It characteristically gives very good returns on investment for small businesses. This is why many small business owners never fail to leverage on emails for their marketing campaigns.

Here are five effective email marketing strategies any small business owner who wants to quickly grow their small business needs to adopt.

1. Personalize Your Email Messages

For maximum effectiveness, it is advisable to personalize emails. That however does not mean sending a specific message to everyone on the email list of your subscriber base. Not at all! What it means is to creatively use customer data to create and send a personalized message to your customers. Such messages resonate better with customers and they tend to get the best results. Email personalization simply aims at creating an excellent customer experience by allowing customers to build good relationships and trust with your business.   When emails are personalized with customers’ names, subject lines, customer needs and location, they are usually very effective at conveying marketing messages. Consequently, such emails do help to enhance some increase in the email open rates, conversions and increase in sales.

2. Optimize Your Email Messages for Mobile

Some Google reports now attribute up to 60% of online traffic to mobile devices. Now that’s a very huge chunk of traffic. A very large chunk of marketing emails are now opened via mobile devices particularly smartphones. So, sending emails to subscribers who regularly use their phones to access messages is just not enough. You need to optimize these massages for mobile devices. When your messages are optimized for mobile, it helps to minimize the chances of trashing, unsubscribing or deleting such messages. Sending mobile-friendly messages that are optimized for the mobile devices can lead to increased conversions and sales. One great way to optimize your emails for mobile devices is by using a responsive email template. Such responsive templates are usually created to automatically work on users’ screens for ease of viewing. These templates will allow you the sender to have a preview of your messages exactly how they’ll appear to your recipients. You’ll see in advance how your emails will appear when viewed on a PC, tablet, or smartphone. As more and more people now do business out of mobile devices, optimizing your emails for mobile has become a very good email marketing strategy.

3. Segment Your Subscriber Base

If you segment your subscriber database, it helps to make your email marketing campaigns more targeted to your audience. Better targeting means better effectiveness of your emails. You can therefore use segmentation as a personalization approach to deliver relevant email messages to your subscribers. With segmentation, your messages will get to them according to their interests, buying history, geographic location, gender, age, and so on. With segmentation, a marketer can effectively address the specific needs of the subscribers and facilitate customer satisfaction. For this reason, it is not advisable for all your subscribers to receive the same email content. What works best is that by segmentation, they should receive only messages that are relevant to them and their needs. Doing otherwise helps to increase the chances of many of your emails ending up in trash bins.

For maximum effectiveness, below are some of the best ways to segment your email list:

Content-Specific Segmentation: This is segmentation based on data gathered regarding specific contacts. Such data may relate to the pages customers visited, the content they downloaded, tools used to download content, and so on.

Behavior-Specific Segmentation: This is segmentation relating to audience behavior on your website. Here you craft emails by taking into account how long the audience takes on a web page, the pages viewed, and the frequency of their visits.

B2B Email Segmentation: This is segmentation based on B2B integrated relationship. Most businesses typically are different entities and have their own unique requirements and expectations. For this reason, you must deliberately craft emails for each business category. Such emails should target, Directors, Managers, Supervisors, IT specialists, Administrative Assistants, and so on.

Localized Segmentation: Yes, most small businesses are local. The reason there is an imperative for local segmentation. This type of segmentation is fairly common among many small businesses because it allows them to target and directly market to the local market around their base of operation. If for instance as a small business owner you are organizing a seminar or doing sales promos, sending emails to people within your locality and its environs helps to increase your reach a great deal.

4. Routinely Test Your Emails

Email testing helps to provide the requisite data to guide you in making practical decisions to improve your email marketing campaigns. For practical purposes, it is best to routinely test your email templates, the home page and landing pages to see how they pan out with the right elements of email marketing campaigns. The elements you need to test in your emails are subject lines, call-to-action CTA, messaging, personalization, design, sender name, and the target audience. These are the elements that are instrumental as to whether or not your subscribers will even bother to open your emails or the mails end up in the trash bin. Routinely testing emails can help to better promote your brand image and create an exceptional subscriber experience for your business.
 
You can rely on automated tools to do your email testing. These tools allow you to easily check the appearance of your email for both desktop and mobile users. Automated tools are also handy to check for grammatical and spelling errors that could put off some recipients. Emails also need to be checked for the proper display of images, font sizes and graphics displays that may need adjustments.

5. Leverage User-Generated Content, UGC

Usually, online reviews are like product recommendations from friends and can influence the customers’ buying behaviors. One of the most effective ways of encouraging engagement in email marketing campaigns is asking for customer reviews. Reviews are a great user-generated content, UGC. You get quality UGC when you allow your customers unfettered interaction with your brand. It is one very effective way to influence prospects to buy from you. You can better use UGC to convince customers to buy than other forms of inducement such as the brand/products photos/graphics.

Positive reviews and testimonials are a valuable means of social proof in digital marketing.  Customer reviews can also help to greatly enhance your UGC email marketing campaigns since many customers tend to trust the reviews they access online more. This is why reviews can also be helpful to generate more leads. Some reviews may however not be positive. That’s ok. Even negative reviews and testimonials are also helpful UGC. Experienced marketers can use negative reviews positively by responding to them to demonstrate their commitment to meeting customer needs as needed. 

Wrapping Up

It is proof positive that email marketing can be a very effective way to generate leads and build customer loyalty. With the right strategies in your business as outlined above, you can increase your customer base and do better business. The effectiveness of these strategies is not in doubt even though marketing trends keep changing rapidly. A way around that is to continuously test the relevance of these email marketing strategies with a view to identifying the very best and most suitable for your business. The strategies that work best for your type of business should be used more.

Effective Strategies to Create a Successful Affiliate Marketing Business

If you are thinking of making money online, think affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing is a very popular online business model that is relatively easy to set up and operate. It requires significantly very little or no startup capital and it can generate income relatively quickly. You must however have the right strategies in place to be able to get the full benefits of affiliate marketing. Below are some proven strategies many expert affiliate marketers recommend to create a successful affiliate marketing business.

Choose a Good Business Niche

The business niche you choose is very important because you cannot have a successful affiliate marketing business without having high commissions paying products to promote. The products too must be the types that people readily buy. That is why the business niche is of paramount importance. The niche you choose should be something that you are knowledgeable and passionate about, in addition to the products many people are interested in and are willing to buy. That done you may need a further strategy of narrowing down your niche to an area of interest that is under served online. That is what provides a very fertile ground for your affiliate marketing activities to thrive.

Create Innovative Ways to Reach Your Target Audiences

You cannot create a successful affiliate marketing business without creative marketing innovations. That is because the business is hugely competitive. You need some innovative creativity to match and stay ahead your competition if you want your affiliate business to succeed quickly. You need to constantly explore very creative ways to better engage your target audience. That includes serving them the right type of content through the most popular platforms they mostly like to use. TIP: In affiliate marketing, marketers do practically the same things but those marketers who do these same things in a special way tend to get the best results. It is creative innovation that helps to make that difference.

Work with a Mentor

In life and living, everyone needs a mentor. So it is in affiliate marketing. An experienced affiliate marketer can help you avoid costly pitfalls and guide you to success based on his own experience in the business. If you have the right mentoring and use the right strategies therefrom, you can succeed in affiliate marketing fairly quickly. Your personal determination combined with the bits and pieces of know-how you can garner from your mentor can help you create a successful affiliate marketing business with the potentials to generate passive income for you over a prolonged period of time.

Market Products with High Commission Rates

Affiliate marketing is all about promoting products and earning commissions. Depending on your business niche and the products you are marketing, you can hook up with programs that require that you sell huge quantities of products with minimal commissions or you sell fewer products with high commissions volume. The bottom-line is to make money and what fits your own business model better is what can help you build a successful affiliate marketing business. However, unless you have the advantage of significant traffic, you can hardly make huge quantities of sales. So, if you find creative ways to promote products with high commissions volume, you can be making more money with less traffic and less work.

Create and Sell Your Own Products

This is the ultimate benefit of affiliate marketing by selling your own specially created products. From your activities as an active affiliate marketer, you have the advantage of a unique insight into what people want in a certain niche/genre. If you manage to create a unique product that fills a gap in the market, you can add value for your customers. Ultimately, by doing so, you create an additional stream of income. You can additionally leverage the sales of your product to increase your affiliate sales. That is smart marketing no doubt.

Connect with Like-Minded Communities

As most digital marketers very well know, finding a community of like-minded people can be invaluable for any digital marketing business. You can benefit from the advice of other affiliates in terms of the right businesses to work with as well as the right campaigns to latch on to. Additionally, other affiliates can help switch you on to useful tools and resources that you can effectively leverage to boost your sales. Affiliate communities also help to keep each other informed about ever-changing algorithms affecting their marketing campaigns. This information can have a profound effect on your traffic and in turn, your sales. You can locate affiliate forums online particularly on social media platforms where you can easily interact with like-minded communities to glean info, tips and tricks to help build your own business.

Create Valuable Content

If you want your affiliate marketing business to succeed, don’t be content with creating only content that helps to drive sales. Such content is simply not enough except you want people to easily see through your sales pitch to be exactly that, sales pitch. You risk losing prospects if all they see is sales pitch in your content. You must create content that gives your readers something they can take away with them such as an answer to a question they may have, useful information about a product or service, or tips that they can use to make their lives easier. That no doubt is great value devoid of direct sales pitch.

Use Clear CTAs

Even if it is a no no to inundate your audience with sales pitches, you must still explore other techniques to give them the option to purchase the products you’re promoting. To make it easy for them to do so, clear Call-To-Action, CTA techniques come in very handy. Be sure these CTA buttons are easy to spot on your website and the short invitations they carry are captivating enough. You can use clear CTAs like “get a discount”, “buy now” buttons, tables that prominently display products, highlighted links, and images that showcase the products and encourage people to click. If you have a preference for creating and marketing with video reviews, be sure to let your audience know how they can purchase the products you are discussing. This you can do by including your affiliate link or promotional code on the videos.

18 Tips to Generate More Traffic with Your Content

If you market online, it is inevitable for you to develop innovative content marketing strategies and tactics. Such strategies/tactics can help your business stand out of the crowd and grow traffic. This is why every online business owner who wants to have more traffic and by implication more customers must find a way to market content. Despite the fact that the Internet today is a severely crowded market space, many marketers are still creating content and getting it out on the Internet by way of thousands of new blog posts published every hour 24/7. These marketers know that a well-thought-out content marketing strategy is a very effective way to brand your business, increase engagement, and generate more website traffic. No matter the nature of your online business, content is one great marketing tool to engage with and effectively speak to your customers and potential customers. Growing your website traffic flows directly from such efforts.

If you’re running an online business, here are some of the most effective strategies/tactics online marketing experts recommend to start effective content marketing for your business.

1. Publish only easy-to-read content: If your content is easy to read, it is easy to understand and therefore more effective. If you want to write content that easily guides readers, it must have good headings and short paragraphs that are easy for the human eyes and mind to comprehend.

2. Promote your content on social media: The wider you promote your content, the more it is read. For this reason, you can use social media channels to promote your content widely. That helps to increase web traffic to your site.

3. Don’t ignore SEO: You must pay special attention to Search Engine Optimization, SEO to benefit from organic traffic search engines send to websites.

4. Use keywords wisely: Research, select and use keywords wisely. If you use Google keyword planner, it is possible for you to target and use the right keywords searchers mostly use when searching for your type of business.

5. Monitor your Competitors: You can do this by analyzing your competitors’ content/blogs. That will allow you to understand what they are doing and why they’re doing what they are doing. Such insights will enable you to compete favorably with them.

6. Create a blog for your business: Blogging in one great way to market content. A good blog will enable you create educational and informative content to engage your readers. Take your business niche and commence writing on relevant topics in the business to engage your readers.

7. Create evergreen content: Evergreen content is content that remains relevant and continue to engage readers over a prolonged period of time. If you create such content, it will continue to send traffic to your website, year in year out.

8. Leave your blog posts undated: You can remove publish-dates from your blog posts to prevent them from looking out of date. Not many readers like to click through blog posts if the publish-date is old and stale.

9. Invite Guest bloggers: Bloggers like to cooperate for mutual benefits. You can therefore invite other people as guest bloggers in your business niche to blog on your own website. Doing so helps to bring new readers to the site. Make sure you select only guest bloggers of repute who will help enrich your website with high quality content.

10. Embrace storytelling: People generally love to hear stories. These stories help readers make connections between what they may already be aware of and new things your own stories will reveal to them. Write human angle content that many people can relate with particularly real life stories, challenges, triumphs and trials and with real-life examples. Such stories help to draw readers in for more engagement.

11. Use bullet points, images, and videos: Doing this helps your content to be shared more easily and frequently and search engines love them as well.

12. Make your posts easily shareable: If you use eye-catching social sharing buttons on your content, it makes it more shareable across multiple social media channels.
 
13. Respond to comments from your blog readers: This helps to build more engagement and nurturing of customers. Responding to comments promptly and intelligently helps to show your readers that you value their feedback. It can help sustain customers’ interest to come again and again to your website. 

14. Work with Influencers: You can follow influencers on social media and invite others who are respected individuals in your business niche. They can help share your content to their followers, a consequence of which you may get hundreds of extra views on your content.
 
15. Find good content marketing examples: You can look for successful marketing campaigns to work with so that you can introduce them in your own content marketing strategy.

16. Create irresistible headings: Every content marketer knows that without a great headline, even the best blog post can go unread.

17. Link internally: Internal linking of your content helps with SEO. A good SEO on your content can result in a better experience for your readers. A direct consequence of that is increased traffic to your site.

18. Publish industry interviews: Yeah, everyone always wants to know what is new and trending in any industry. Timely interviews help to fill that yearning. For this reason, you can publish industry leaders’ interviews on your site. Aside from making interesting reading/listening for readers, the famous names recognition that comes with such interviews help boost credibility for your business.

Tips to Boost the ROI of Your Email Marketing Campaigns

Email marketing campaigns are readily one of the most affordable and cost-effective online marketing strategies for most marketers. Marketers resort to email marketing to save costs, widely each out to customers and potential customers, drive sales/revenues, nurture leads, and gain more customers. Marketers rely hugely on emails to maintain a strong relationship with customers and to build their brands. You can easily measure the effectiveness of your emails. That makes emails ready marketing tools to drive Returns-On-Investment, ROI for your business. Emails allow you to optimize and fine-tune your marketing campaigns to drive ROI that outperforms many other marketing channels. For this reason, smart marketers are always in search of better ways to use emails in their marketing campaigns to make the campaigns more effective and profitable. One of such ways is to use emails effectively well to boost ROI. These here tips can be of help to you in your own email marketing campaigns.

 
 
Include Call-To-Action, CTA in Your Emails

If you’ve ever opened a marketing email and you find it difficult to understand what the marketer is really up to, you’ll realize the importance of CTAs in emails. A huge percentage of emails without CTAs usually end up in trash bins. I doubt if you can afford such huge waste in your own marketing efforts. Emails without CTAs don’t convert. If your marketing efforts are not converting, you are simply wasting your precious time and resources. For your emails to convert at a higher rate, you must include a conspicuous CTA to tell your recipients what action you want them to take. That action if taken helps your conversions. Simple CTAs marketers like to use are: “Click here for more info”, “Click here for Discount Coupon”, “Pre-Order Now” and suchlike messages.

Diligently Track Your Email Deliverability

Diligently tracking emails helps to measure their effectiveness and there are useful online tools to get it done in a fairly accurate manner. Metrics like emails opening rates, click-through rates, deliverability rates and revenue generated are all important metrics marketers need to measure to help drive ROI. When your emails are not reaching their targets, they are not even opened and they don’t help generate revenue for your marketing efforts, they’re as good as useless. Therefore, you must always make sure your emails are optimized and well-crafted with simple marketing language and with a dash of good aesthetics to make them attractive to recipients. That is the best way to get them to escape sperm filters and to reach their targets. These days, with more advanced sperm filters now in use, they can easily detect and filter out what they consider “junk” based on some spam-trigger words included in the subject line and body of email messages. It gets that technical so adequate care must be taken to always draft emails that are deliverable and can be tracked for effectiveness. Only such emails manage to help ROI better.

Segment Your Email List

If you want your email campaigns to help boost ROI for your business, you must divide and break down your email list into as many different segments as possible. Doing so makes marketing segmentation easy and effective. Find out what works best for your marketing campaigns and do your segmentation based on it. It is a marketing reality that not all your email recipients want the same things or are influenced by the same messages. Segmentation allows you to send different types of emails to different groups depending on what each group needs. The most effective emails are the mails specially created to cater to these needs. These are the emails that greatly help to boost ROI.

Humor Your Email Recipients to Action

For email effectiveness, you can tactically deploy humor and shock value in your subject lines. What you want is for your subject email line to easily command attention and trigger the recipient to click on it. You can achieve that if your emails manage to stand out from the dozens of other emails competing for attention in your recipients’ inboxes. Humor and shock value can at times help pull the tricks to earn your emails desirable attention even amidst strong competition from several other emails dropping in your recipients’ inboxes. For your offer to be noticed, your emails must first be opened. If not opened, you are simply marketing in vain. If humor helps to get your mails opened and not quickly trashed, so much the better for your email marketing campaigns. Trashed emails stand no chance at all of generating any kind of returns and therefore cannot be of any help to ROI.

Optimize Your Emails for Mobile

With increasing use of mobile devices worldwide, it is safe to assume that a high percentage of your marketing emails will be read on mobile devices. That has very significant marketing implications. Mobile emailing is growing so rapidly that it has become imperative for marketers to optimize their emails for mobile devices. You can do this by having a custom responsive email template design or by using a branded template which is essentially a very low-cost way to make your emails stand out in attractiveness and in aesthetics. What this means is that for your emails to be effective, your subject lines must easily grab the attention of recipients, your messages must be direct and to the point, and your design must be eye-catching and must flow seamlessly on small screens typical of most mobile devices. Optimizing your emails for mobile devices takes care of all suchlike marketing essentials that somehow help to boost ROI.

How to Increase Online Presence with your Small Business website

Your online presence derives from your small business website. This website is your main contact window on the internet. That is where consumers first make contact with your business. No matter how someone finds out about your business, either through social media, an ad, a listing, direct mail, or through a friend, their first instinct is naturally to check out your website. A considerable percentage of consumers won’t consider doing business online without a credible website. This is because consumers consider it more convenient and appealing to browse for information on a website at their own time and location. Engaging with the business, getting more information and actually making a purchase, is also very convenient through a website. This is more so in times of severe restrictions the world is experiencing at the moment because of Covid-19 pandemic. If your website is well-designed, well-hosted, easy-loading, user-friendly, mobile-friendly and optimized well enough, it helps to increase its online presence.

To enhance that, you must opt for a very modern and attractive website for your business. Because consumer expectations are increasingly getting higher these days, having a good website helps to make your online presence stronger. That is if consumers can easily search for it, interact with it and do business with it. A tidy majority of consumers admit to judging the credibility of a business through its website design. This is further reinforced if they can seamlessly interact with the website and not experience distracting glitches. All these help to increase the online presence of a website, making it the type of website that helps a small business to generate leads, customers and sales.

Search engines are the strongest online agents that help to enhance the online presence of a business website. This is why marketers always strive to make their websites search engine-friendly. This they do by way of Search Engine Optimization, SEO. It is recommended to always perform SEO on your website with the latest updates in mind. That is what helps it with good search engine rankings and a strong online presence eventually. SEO is a free way to get on the first page of major search engines SERPs particularly Google’s. Doing so is the hallmark of a strong online presence. To get SEO right on your website, you must embark on deliberately targeted SEO efforts like link building, content creation, keyword research, selection and deployment on the content of your website. This may take time, considerable efforts and patience but when done right, it becomes a lasting asset that can help to increase online presence for your business over a considerable period of time.