Posts

3 Steps To Develop Your Marketing Strategy

/in /by

StrategyDriven Marketing and Sales Article |Marketing Strategy|3 Steps To Develop Your Marketing StrategyEvery business owner knows they need to have a marketing strategy to succeed. By having a high-quality one, you’ll:

  • Gain more visibility
  • See more sales
  • Improve your revenue

Figuring out how to develop your marketing strategy can be complicated, however. There are quite a few steps involved, some of which can be easy to overlook. By focusing on a few particular areas, you can make sure your marketing strategy is as comprehensive as possible.

How To Develop Your Marketing Strategy: 3 Vital Steps

1. Do Your Research

Research is a significant part of developing your marketing strategy. Researching your market is the most obvious way of doing this, although that’s far from the only thing you’ll need to focus on. The likes of keyword research for search engine optimization is also vital.

The more information you have at-hand when developing your marketing strategy, the more comprehensive and in-depth it’ll be. It should also make sure you can achieve the results you want while targeting the right audience.
Knowing your audience is an integral part of this. While this could be the most time-intensive part of the process, it’ll make your marketing strategy more successful. You’ll see better results because of it.

2. State Your Goals

You’ll need to have business goals for your company to succeed. You’ll also need to have marketing goals that feed into this. By knowing what your goals are, you can develop a marketing strategy that’s likely to achieve them. It also keeps you and your employees on track and on the same page.

They’re also a way to measure the success of your campaign once it’s finished. You should be realistic when you’re setting these goals. That involves focusing on goals that are achievable and have a direct impact on your company.

Taking a SMART approach with your goal setting is recommended, as it ensures your goals are actionable, results-based, show you how to improve, and can be measured.

3. Use The 7 P’s

Using the seven P’s of marketing can be one of the more effective ways of developing your marketing strategy. The seven P’s of marketing are:

  • Product
  • Price
  • Promotion
    Place
  • People
  • Process
  • Physical Evidence

You should use these as a guide for your marketing strategy and make sure it includes each of the P’s. By doing so, it’ll get your products in front of potential customers in the right way. Having the right combination of these – and highlighting them in the right way – you can make sure your marketing strategy is as comprehensive as possible.

How To Develop Your Marketing Strategy: Wrapping Up

Once you know how to develop your marketing strategy, you shouldn’t have a problem creating a comprehensive guide for your advertising. With that, you shouldn’t have a problem generating visibility and attention among your target market.

In time, that’ll lead to more customers and revenues. While you’ll still need to put the work into adapting your strategy to your specific target demographic, it’ll be easier than you think once you’ve done the above steps.

2 Ways Your Business Can Benefit from Integrating SEO & PPC Processes

/in /by

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |SEO and PPC Processes|2 Ways Your Business Can Benefit from Integrating SEO & PPC ProcessesSEO and PPC are two of the most popular and widely used digital marketing channels. While there is a lot of instruction and discussion out there when it comes to individual optimisation strategies for these respective channels, there is perhaps a lot less said about how these two channels can actually work well together.

In this article, we want to explore two specific ways in which your business can benefit by having your SEO and PPC processes aligned.

This is equally applicable whether you have an in-house team or if you’re working with a specialist SEO agency or a specialist PPC agency.

Keyword Research

One of the first and most obvious ways in which PPC and SEO can be aligned is when it comes to keyword research. Both channels require keyword research which is the process of finding out what exact words prospective customers for a business are using to find what they’re looking for online.

You then look for how much search volume there is against each individual keyword, as well as other metrics when it comes to PPC such as the average cost per click and how much competition there is to appear for a particular keyword.

As you can imagine, there are a lot of areas in which SEO insights can help PPC and vice versa.

PPC is usually much more directed at the lower end of the funnel, which means the PPC team will usually only be spending ad budget on keywords that convert or have a very high likelihood of converting or assisting a conversion.

Therefore PPC is actually a really good way to test whether or not a keyword is relevant and will ultimately help business objectives before investing a lot of resources into it to help it rank at the top of organic search results.

On the other hand, the SEO team may be able to provide some useful insights to the PPC team when it comes to keyword research as well. Usually, the SEO team will also look at what other websites are ranking for a particular keyword and that will give them a hint as to the intent behind the search query because that is what Google takes into consideration when choosing which websites to rank for a particular term.

In that research, the SEO team will usually also look at the landing pages and on-page copy of competing websites that are appearing for a particular search term.

This usually provides a lot of insights into what types of customer fears, motivations, and values appear to be important, which competitors are trying to target with their own page copy.

All of this can be particularly useful insights for the PPC team, especially if they choose to target a keyword and then produce a landing page specifically for that keyword.

User Behaviour Insights

One of the other ways in which both the SEO and PPC teams can work well together is by looking at the behaviour of users once they arrive on the website, whether that is through paid search or through SEO.

With SEO, you will tend to have a broader spectrum of keywords driving traffic to the website, because with PPC, you will tend to only spend money with a very specific objective of driving a very specific action through your ads.

With SEO, you have a little bit less control over what keywords drive traffic to your website, but of course, you can shape this somewhat.

One of the best ways of understanding how effective and relevant a particular keyword is by analysing the behaviour of users that use that keyword to arrive on your website and seeing what they do next.

You will be looking at which pages they tend to engage the most with and which sections of those pages they tend to engage the most with. Of course, you’re able to do this through tools such as Google Analytics.

You want to see: are there any particular pages that have very high bounce rates? i.e. are people leaving the website right after visiting that particular page? Now, of course, this doesn’t automatically mean that there’s something wrong.

They may have simply received the information that they were looking for and then chosen to leave. However, sometimes high bounce rates can be indicative of a problem with the user experience that you can then go and fix and hopefully improve your conversion rates.

Similarly, the paid search team can provide insights into what types of copy and message are working better because they’re able to produce specific landing pages for particular keywords and campaigns.

They’re able to test a lot more than perhaps the SEO team can, therefore they’ll have a much richer data set of what types of keywords and messages tend to convert better, which can then be utilised on the SEO ranking landing page.

Closing Thoughts

These were just a couple of ways in which having SEO and PPC processes a lot more integrated can benefit your business. There are many other benefits of having SEO and PPC working in tandem, such as capturing more SERP real estate and optimising ad spend, which perhaps we can get into in a future article.

Best Keyword Strategies in 2020 for New Product Launches on Amazon

/in /by

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |Keyword Strategies|Best Keyword Strategies in 2020 for New Product Launches on AmazonOverview

Amazon is the world’s ‘all-you-can eat’ buffet of products and any seller or marketer’s throne for kingdom-hood. With millions of transactions every day, an Amazon listing is ‘your voice’ to the world. A powerful product listing copy that converts is crucial to being an A-List Seller. And to put a halt to your depleting sales numbers.

In the world of online business, particularly Ecommerce and a large online platform like Amazon, your product listing page is highly dependent on a calculated and well implemented Amazon Product Keyword Strategy.

Below we will look at 4 of these crucial strategies.

1. Know Your Competition’s Market

Knowledge is power! Being aware of the “market landscape” and knowing who your competitors are and what they are offering, is a powerful weapon!

Knowing your competitors inside out can in turn help you create your products, services and marketing in a way that is stronger and far more powerful than what’s out there currently.

Constantly keeping an eye on your competition will provide you a wealth of knowledge and an ocean of information that gives you an effective ‘vantage point’ to make your products or services more ‘appealing’ and visible to the same audience that you and your competition are competing for.

You’ll be able to tailor your Keyword Strategy according to what your competitors are doing and not doing.

Now, let’s come to the tactics. What should you know about your competitors? Here are a few areas you can analyze and stay abreast with:

  • The back end, front end or merchant keyword strategies your competition is employing for their product launches and campaigns
  • The products or services they provide and how they market them to customers
  • Their brand and design values
  • Whether they innovate – business methods as well as products

2. Research Relevant Keywords

Keyword research is an important part of your Amazon product launch. Investing the time to properly assess the most important keywords in your niche can maximize your revenue potential. It can also position your product to be the highest asked item for valuable search queries.

But it’s a science and an art!

Have you have seen Amazon product listings with the super-long, keyword-stuffed, one-size-fits-all, uber-optimized product title, you may wonder what human would read such a title and be convinced to purchase the product. This is a valid question. Humans don’t naturally like long sentences.

Sellers who know this use these long titles so that their product shows up in more searched. They’ve done keyword research to identify the exact search terms they want to target. By incorporating variations into their title, description, bullet points, FAQs, and even images, they are improving their chances of being seen by potential customers.

Here are 3 ways you can do solid Keyword Research for your next product launch on Amazon:

Google Keyword Planner

Google’s Keyword Planner is a free tool that shows you estimated search volumes for any word or phrase. It can also help you find other related phrases.

Keyword Scout

While Keyword Planner and Site Explorer are great, simplistic methods for finding keywords, Keyword Scout is also effective.

It is an Amazon keyword tool that uses real Amazon PPC data to discover powerful keyword opportunities.

Hiring an Ecommerce Specialist

This 3rd approach in Keyword Research is the most rewarding, hassle-free, cost-effective, time-freeing and results oriented. Hiring a qualified Ecommerce Specialist frees you from the time, hassle and effort of Keyword Research, while giving you an edge over your competitors with a solid, skilled, experienced and expert Ecommerce Specialist that will do all the work for you.

3. Prioritize the top Keywords

Give strong priority to the keywords with the highest most relevance and potent search potential, based on all your research. Make sure these keywords are placed first in the product listing’s Title, as well sprinkled nicely throughout each of the 5 bullet point descriptions.

This will result in your product ranking higher on Amazon and on Google while being algorithm friendly. More powerful and prioritize keywords automatically mean more brand visibility and higher product sales.

4. Adding Keywords in Title

Just as with Google title tags are very important, but instead of 60 characters you get 195 with Amazon. Also, unlike Google, the longer and more detailed the title, the better. With Amazon it doesn’t have to be compelling or grab a viewer’s attention; it just must give off enough information for someone to make a purchasing decision.

For this reason, using all the 195-character limit is encouraged. If you look around Amazon, you’ll notice that the products with long, keyword-rich titles outrank those that are simple and clean. Below is an example that shows just that:

Now, it can be hard to get used to this after coming from optimization for Google, but it’s an important step. According to an Amazon help page, you should follow a formula to help create your titles.

For example, the style for many products may be: Brand + Model Number + Model Name + Product Type, Color

One example of using this formula for a title would be: KitchenAid KSM150PSER Artisan 5-Quart Mixer, Empire Red

Again, it’s not the prettiest title and it’s very different than something you would use on Google, but this is how it works on Amazon!

You only must have your keyword appear once in your title (that’s right, keywords in your description are less important), so again, that’s why you see some of the companies above using several different keywords all in one title.

Why SEO Is The Driving Force For Your Business

/in /by

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |SEO|Why SEO Is The Driving Force For Your BusinessIf you have to ask if your business should be investing in SEO, then you haven’t been paying attention. SEO is just one of many digital marketing strategies that you should have implemented into everything you do. Not every company will have the know-how or the time to fully integrate an SEO strategy, which is why working with an SEO agency is one of the most important things you can do for your business.

Ideally, you should choose a marketing agency that is well versed in your sector. Like digital marketing only for dental offices or an agency that specializes in the beauty industry. Their insight is unparalleled.
So if you are looking to increase your conversions, reach more customers, and boost your brand awareness, then SEO is the way to go. And, here are just a few reasons why.

Driving Traffic

Good SEO will help you gain high-quality traffic to your website. While traditional marketing can be fairly slow, digital marketing is lightning fast with incredible targeting tools. You can, of course, use things like billboards and newspaper articles to gain attention SEO delivers the content to them in the form of search results.

When people search online, they are looking for something specific already, which means your website is shown to people who already need your services or are ready to buy your product. People are looking for you and what you do. And, as they are already interested, they are more likely to click your call-to-action.

Non-Stop

You work hard, but your SEO works harder. There is no off button, it doesn’t take breaks, SEO will be your 24/7 golden ticket. 60,000+ searches a second is what Google alone processes. The right SEO agency will help you capitalize on your slice of the search traffic pie.

You can reach commuters who are using their mobile, or CEO’s who are kicking back after work – your information is delivered to their device no matter the time.

Lead Gen

A huge benefit of having the right SEO strategy will be having continuous lead generation and increased sales. You’ll notice this improvement in your day-to-day running of the business.

This increase happens due to the strategy implemented by your SEO services provider, they will improve your search ranking, and put you in competition with market leaders. Once you are appearing on the front page of searches, due to the use of high-ticket keywords, you’ll see a higher amount of clicks and visits from the people who want your services or goods.

If you are someone who still underestimates the value of ranking on the first pages, then you might like to know that according to it has been reported that the first position search appearance receives 31% of the search traffic (taking only organic search into the equation).

Local Marketing

According to HubSpot, 34% of ‘near me’ searches will result in in-store visits. Which means that SEO isn’t just about your global reach. It can be incredibly powerful when it comes to your local area. So if you have a brick and mortar store, you can still see a marked increase in both sales and brand awareness by doubling down on your local SEO efforts.

Put plainly, if you leave local SEO out of your strategy, you are taking yourself out of the running for keen shoppers who are ready to buy.

Digital Marketing Strategy Strength

SEO will strengthen your overall digital marketing strategy, which should already include content marketing, social media marketing, and video marketing. All of these components will give you a bigger online presence, which will increase your competitiveness in the online marketplace.

Always consider that a strong digital marketing strategy is the key to a bigger ROI.

And that bigger ROI can then be reinvested into your company, and drive you forward in other areas, or increase your SEO efforts.

Decreasing Costs

This one might seem like an impossible dream, but when you have an SEO expert on board, you are going to see a decreased spend on your advertising costs. Why? Well, because with a well thought out SEO strategy, you are going to be ranking higher for those high-value keywords.

This means you can take a portion of your advertising budget and reinvest it somewhere else. When you have an SEO expert, they will be able to trim the fat on what you are currently spending, and streamline your strategies so that you are ranking where it really matters.

Investing in SEO is more cost-effective than traditional advertising and marketing, so it is no wonder that businesses will (and should) reduce spending in those areas and invest more in the right SEO strategy.

Brand Awareness

Shoppers can’t be aware of what they aren’t seeing. So when looking at how you can increase your brand awareness, SEO makes the most sense. Consumers will move through a buying funnel when they are looking for a specific item. What you should be looking to do is appear in those searches repeatedly, and over time they will begin to recognize your brand. Once that recognition is in full effect, they will switch from random searches to direct – and when this happens, they are more likely to make a purchase.

PPC Boost

It is highly likely you are already investing in PCC, or have at least toyed with the idea of multiple times. SEO is the key to great PPC. PPC is, of course, a paid strategy, and SEO is non-paid (the cost will be in the company you hire to manage this for you), they work together incredibly.

Which both SEO and PPC, you are going to be reinforcing your search appearance, you will be showing up in both paid and organic searches. This provides more opportunities for consumers to visit your website. Again this helps with brand recognition.

And, we all know that data matters. You can apply your SEO data to the PPC campaigns that you are running. Say you have a web page that leads on conversions; when incorporated into your PPC campaign, it will likely rise in value.

The bottom line is that when you work with the right SEO consultant, you are going to see an increase in both traffic and conversions. And the speed in which online shopping and research grow years-on-years means you need a robust strategy in place to capitalize on the potential traffic.

Why SEO Needs to be at the Heart of Your Corporate Strategy

/in /by

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article |SEO|Why SEO Needs to be at the Heart of Your Corporate StrategyBy now, you’ve heard of SEO. Any business that has made a serious effort at launching their own website will either know what SEO is or, hopefully, have hired someone who understands (ask your web designer).

But is SEO just another corporate buzzword, or is it really as important as everyone makes out? The answer is an emphatic yes – SEO is very important to any business.

Web Searches are the Most Common Driver of Internet Traffic

Most internet traffic today is generated by search engines. Without them, we would be completely lost online. Imagine a world where you can only access websites if you know their exact URL. The world of marketing would be very different for one thing; you would have to publicise your web address to consumers.

You can’t afford to be missing out on the traffic that search engines can bring to your site. SEO will bring your website towards the top of those results pages. The vast majority of traffic goes to the first few websites on that list and the top three results will take around 90% of the traffic. SEO is how you climb the ladder.

Build Trust and Credibility

Google’s algorithms have become vastly more sophisticated than they once were and they are now adept at sorting out legitimate content, like this article, from a page that is created purely to artificially boost SEO. There was a time where you could literally just spam a link on otherwise blank web pages and send your SEO through the roof.

Fortunately, search engine providers are all now able to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate content. This means that a website’s SEO score gives us a proxy for measuring trust. Also, when other trustworthy websites link to your website, you will gain a nice SEO boost.

Local SEO Drives Footfall

Working with an seo agency that also handles local SEO can give your brick and mortar business a significant boost in footfall. SEO isn’t just about reaching out into the cold vast expanse of the internet; it can also benefit your business offline as well.

When consumers want to find a particular product or type of business, the vast majority of them will begin by searching for what they need on their smartphone. If your business is one of the names that they see and you are near to them, they are more likely to pay you a visit.

It’s Constantly Changing

You need someone to monitor and regularly update your SEO if you are to be effective. The landscape is constantly changing as Google’s algorithms evolve. See the adpocalypse for an example of how an update by Google can have far-reaching consequences. If you let your SEO practices slip behind then your website and your business will both suffer.

SEO is far too important to be an afterthought when you are devising a corporate strategy. Without SEO, your website will be all but invisible to most internet users. That should be reason enough to convince you it is worth investing in.