Are You Getting The Best Online Exposure?

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Business is all about sales, and sales are best made through the internet. Anyone who says different doesn’t understand the power that the internet has, and the things that can be done to make sure the best online exposure is achieved. So, we would hope that your business is online, and we would hope that that’s where you’re driving your sales. But you need to ask yourself the question, are you getting enough exposure each month? This can be found through things like conversion rates, sales, clicks etc. If you don’t monitor these, let this article show you why you should.

You’ve Got To Market & Advertise

Some companies just have their marketing strategy so wrong, that’s one of the reasons why online exposure might be so bad. If you hardly put any effort into your marketing campaigns, then you’re definitely never going to get to where you need to be in the business world. One of the best forms of advertising is adwords and pay per click. Adwords is where a company will pay a certain amount to have their website at the top of a search engine, meaning it’s going to get the most exposure. To do this you have to pay a fee, and you have to be constantly outbidding your competitors to stay in one of the top three spots. Adwords management can be hard, so sometimes it might be better to get a company to do it for you. As long as you’ve got the money to spend, this is a really effective technique to use. Pay per click works by showing advertisements for your business, and every time someone clicks the link, then you pay, hence why it is called pay per click. This is effective because using this technique sort of plasters your business all over the web. It’s wherever everyone looks, providing that website allows ads, and it is really effective for gaining that exposure that you need. Depending on how many clicks you get, it’s probably cheaper to do than adwords.

Design Is key

The design of your website is going to be key to making sure you have the best exposure, marketing is only one side of it. Think of it this way, if a person sees your advertisement and thinks, I like the sound of that, but sees your website is under developed and hard to use, they’re obviously going to click right back off. Make sure you have a professional maintain your website to keep it at the highest level of quality possible.

Beating Competitors

Beating competitors isn’t hard, you just have to put in the hard work and dedication to get there. Make sure you’re always running marketing campaigns, and monitor what they’re doing in terms of their own marketing. They’re most likely going to be doing all they can to stay ahead of you, beat them at their own game and your business will just shoot to success. Don’t be afraid to splash the cash because it’ll always work out for you in the end providing you do it right.

4 Benefits of Incorporating Customer Service Into Your Marketing Strategy

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StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales ArticleIt is no secret that customer service can make or break a business. When customers are satisfied with the products or services that your business provides, they are more likely to continue doing business with your company. Additionally, happy customers are far more inclined to recommend your products to friends or family members. Providing quality and consistent customer service can be a challenge for many businesses. To help you overcome this obstacle, here are four benefits of incorporating customer service into your marketing strategy:

1. Improve the Reputation of Your Brand

Ensuring that customer service is an integral part of your marketing strategy can give your brand a competitive edge over similar types of businesses. This means that consumers will continue coming back to your business to spend their money.

2. Expand Brand Awareness

As an increasing number of consumers are doing the majority of their shopping online, online reviews have become more important than ever. Many prospective customers may read these reviews when deciding whether or not to do business with your company. By incorporating customer service into your marketing strategy, you increase the number of opportunities for positive customer interactions. This may result in an increased number of positive customer reviews which can instill trust and confidence in prospective buyers.

3. Increase Brand Loyalty

Positive interactions with your customers are key to developing a loyal fanbase. Companies like SolidCactus offer call center services and other digital marketing solutions that can help ensure that your customers get the quality service they expect from your brand. These positive interactions can drive referrals and help spread the word about your business. Similarly, negative customer experiences can result in negative reviews which can hinder sales and cause long-term damage to your brand.

4. Encourage Cross-Departmental Communication

Incorporating customer service into your marketing strategy can lead to more unified communication across various parts of your business. When properly executed, a customer support team is made aware of any specials or promotions your marketing team is running. In turn, customer support is able to refer customers to the marketing materials.

Customer service is a cornerstone of any successful business. When you incorporate customer service into your marketing strategy, it can yield some serious results. Creating a positive customer experience gives your business a unique selling proposition which can encourage brand loyalty and lead to repeat customers.

Three SEO Considerations When Choosing Your Next Hosting Company

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Let’s start with a couple of statements about hosting. True: hosting companies do not generally affect your organic ranking. False: hosting companies have no bearing on your SEO.

Many business owners aren’t aware that cost and convenience aren’t the only consideration to make when opting for a new hosting company. While these two points are valid and extremely important to growing organisations, what can’t be underestimated is the impact on website SEO that the correct – or incorrect – provider can bring to your site.

Whether your company is trampling the competition, or you’re looking for ways to save money while maintaining a great service, there are many reasons why you may wish to switch your hosting company.

For some businesses, loyalty means ease and convenience – and that works for them, but it’s not always the best option. For one thing, you could end up improving your services dramatically – and at no extra cost. Some brands may even find their hosting costs reduce when they switch, because plenty of operators are looking for new business and offer attractive incentives to the right customers.

So what should you look out for in a service provider? And what could the pitfalls be? Read on to find out the three major considerations you should make before making the commitment to change your hosting company this year.

Speed

Site speed is a huge ranking factor – and it may well be the case that you are considering a hosting move in order to create a more rapid site with better performance. Ranking improvements are definitely seen when a website greatly increases its speed and useability – and that’s simply due to the fact that Google loves to see websites that are slick and ready for customers to use as soon as they click.

Of course, there are ways you can control some of the factors that slow websites down, such as the content, coding and application of imagery and widgets, but a lot of the blame can often be portioned off to your host. So, you can rest easy that you’ve done nothing at all wrong.

The speed of your website can fluctuate normally, so the best and most accurate way to measure your current site speed is to take a look at it, as often as you can, to observe any changes or stalling points that concern you.

Once you’ve double-checked your site’s speed and you still feel it could benefit from being faster, start shopping around to see if your host (or a competitor) can offer you a better service.

The best results for a speedy website will come from migrating a website to a server that’s closer to you and your customer base. This doesn’t necessarily mean in the same town, but swapping a stateside server for one in the UK (if you’re based in England) could make a huge difference. Other host-related factors you can look into are the availability of a Content Delivery Network (CDN), or simply the type of hard drive technology used. It may also be worth asking if the server you’re being linked to is optimised to your content management system – such as WordPress or DNN.

Security

The safety of your site is a huge consideration, and should be taken seriously from initial build to the development of further mini-sites, as and when your business grows. SEO can take a huge hit if your website ranks low on the secure rating, and can end up being hugely damaging if left to deteriorate.

If your website isn’t deterring hackers, they can easily create spam pages and generate fake backlinks that can swoop underneath the radar for months. Google hates this sort of activity as it can be damaging to users’ experience, and so guess what? It penalises without mercy. Poor security can be fixed manually, but often this takes time and the harsh penalties may already have taken effect.

If your website is not hosted on a truly secure server, your site may also be open to malware attacks, infecting your website and putting your visitors at risk. Not only is this a huge inconvenience to your visitors, it also opens you up to having a security warning shown by your results – a huge turn-off for potential customers – or even being blacklisted by search engines completely. And no one wants this for their website; trust us!

To avoid any of these potential headaches and heartbreaks, make sure you talk through the security options available with your web host and request information and costs for any malware removal support, and other hacker defenses they offer to protect your website from attacks.  Entrepreneur.com also suggests requesting information about data encryption, to ensure your information is being held and shared securely and CloudLiving.com recommends five additional steps to secure your website.

Technical Support

There will come a time that you will need the professional support of a web hosting specialist. Don’t get stung with a huge bill when you really need the help; make sure you’re prepared from the start with a package that includes support right from the off.

Web hosting comes with a variety of potential pitfalls and even if this isn’t your first time at the start of a big project like moving servers, there are many ways in which small things can be overlooked. And small issues will no doubt lead to bigger issues further down the line. The best advice – as with most things – is to seek out a professional’s opinion wherever you can. Or even better, seek more than one opinion to make sure the advice you’re getting is sound and relevant to your particular needs.

Should your website go down – heaven forbid – you need to know that the support is there to get you back up and running quickly and with minimum upheaval or stress. Make sure your web hosting company offers 24/7 technical support to get those issues fixed quickly and have your website back on track in as little time as possible.

To give yourself even more peace of mind, delve into the experience and qualifications of the staff you’ll be working with whenever you contact your web host. Will you have a specific team assigned to your website? Do you know their names and their credentials? All of these things will help you to gain a better relationship with the people who can fix any of your issues quickly and will give you a better idea of the expertise you are paying for, too.

Sometimes you get what you pay for. Often with web hosting, you’ll be better off paying more for a better service if it means keeping your SEO ranking high, your customers safe and your website up and running efficiently and quickly.

Ensure the Launch of Your App Is a Success with These Marketing Tips

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A lot of people spend around six months building an app, yet they don’t even spend five per cent of this time planning the app’s launch. If you don’t spend a lot of time and effort planning the launch and your marketing efforts, your app is going to fall flat, and all of your hard work will have been pretty much wasted. So, with that being said, read on to discover some tips you can use to launch your app successfully…

Before the app goes live, use promo codes – One technique that is not used as regularly as it should be is the sharing of promo codes for an application that is not yet live, but has been improved. This enables you to invite your target audience to look at the final, app store version of your application before it has become available to anyone else. This strategy is successful because it enables press contracts especially to review the application should they want to do a piece on it before the formal launch.

Have a support system ready to go – A lot of app creators do not think about the customer support aspect of marketing. This is a massive error. While you should not just help your users because you deem it a marketing activity, you will give yourself a big marketing boost if you provide outstanding customer service, and so it does go hand in hand.

Make the most of app short links – There will be a number of vital links that you will need to share on social media and send contacts. All links are going to be very long, aside from the one for your website itself. This is why you should use a service like Bit.ly or Branch.io, the latter of which is more app-centric, to shorten and clean up your links.

Put together an app press kit – An app press kit is recommended because it makes it a lot easier for anyone to write about your application. At a minimum, this kit should include app store links, the app store description, app icon, and app store screenshots.

Use a professional service – Last but not least, if you are worried about launching your app and you do not have any experience in marketing, why not use the services of a digital marketing agency? This is a great way to benefit from the peace of mind that your app is going to be launched successfully and that effective marketing methods will be used. Not only this, but analytics will help you to understand improvements that can be made going forward.

So there you have it: some useful tips on how to make sure the launch of your app is a success. You can build the most exciting app to have ever hit the Google Play Store or the iStore, but if you do not market it properly, what’s the point?

Driving Traffic To Your Ecommerce Site

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When you have a physical store gaining footfall is a huge influence on your advertising and how you design your store. And all of that is still valid with an ecommerce site. The only differences lie in the fact that you aren’t aiming to grab the attention of someone walking by, but to target your audience when they are browsing the internet – whether or not they are searching for you. An ecommerce site has so many advantages, as does a physical store, but it gives you the ability to reach so many more people than a fixed location does. You just have to know how to go about getting that attention in the right way. The saying ‘any press is good press’ is 100% wrong; you need to strive to have a good reputation while using the right tools and software to attract and retain your customers.

Design

The first thing to consider is the base of your operations; your website. An ecommerce site doesn’t need to be overly complicated. In fact, you can easily start one with a DIY web building platform. But making sure that it can be easily navigated by anyone is key. Keep things simple and uncluttered, with drop menus and different categories clearly found and all key contact information on both a contact page and at the bottom of each page. And make sure that you stay true to your style – if you are selling custom skateboards you need to stick to the cultural designs surrounding that to attract your main audience base.

Research

Do the research before and after you have launched your ecommerce site. You need to know who is searching for what you’re selling, what demographics are visiting your page and who is sticking around long enough to buy something. Look at Google Analytics to get you started, and look into applying applications and advice from Veon Consulting to increase your ecommerce statistics. The right software and tools are key here, and never think that doing the job once means completing the task.

SEO

Search Engine Optimisation are key words and phrases that increase your standing on a search engine results page. Use them well by wisely – Google do block pages that appear to dump a lot of phrases together in the hope of being first on that list. Keep it relevant- use Google AdWords to figure out the right phrases for you and check in regularly. As trends change as will the most commonly searched phrases. Integrating SEO phrases comes naturally to a content writer, so maybe you should look into hiring one for your web content, or you can give it a go yourself.

Deals

Just like a giant SALE banner in a window catches the eye, does a good deal encourage clicking. Use social media to advertise any deals or promotions you have going on. You can use cookies to target the right audience, but it can also help to interest people who otherwise wouldn’t think about visiting your ecommerce store.