Posts

Marketing Advice for Your Business

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Marketing Advice for Your Business

You may have the best product or service in the world, but if you do not know how you market it, you will not be able to sell it. What this means is that your competitor with an inferior product can potentially make far more sales than you if they have the marketing wherewithal you lack. It may seem easy, post a few adverts on social media, the product will sell itself. You need to understand now that this is not going to work. You need a fully thought out marketing strategy and the ability to maintain it into the future. So here are some ideas to get you started.

Your website

You need to invest in your website. It has to be fully functioning, quick loading, and work in all browsers and devices, as a prerequisite. There is no point in having a beautiful marketing campaign that points to a rundown old website that doesn’t even work properly. There will be a huge disconnect, and people will think they are in the wrong place. Your website needs to be discoverable, so you need to invest time in working out keywords from your target market, and what they are likely to input into a search engine. Once you have done this, you can fully SEO (search engine optimization) every page of your website. Content on the site needs to be updated regularly, so having a blog is essential these days.

Brand awareness

You need a good brand for the business. So think logos and taglines. These must be used on all your content. The idea is to get the brand into people’s minds. In addition, think about your personal brand. You should create your own site where you can authentically promote your business. As a person, you can connect with people more easily, so developing your personal brand is essential. This means that if you have any accolades which make you the perfect person to listen to, such as having gone through a master of occupational therapy program for your clinic, tell your story on a vlog.

Social media

Any business that wants to succeed in the modern world has to have a presence on social media. It is a free way to advertise, and it gives you an unprecedented way to learn about your target audience and connect with them. You need to create a separate method of marketing for each social media platform. However, the onus is on quality posts over quantity. You need to have some glossy images, a good story to tell, think about social responsibility, and what you are doing to help the plant, for example. Have a look at your competitors and members of your target audience to get an idea about what they share. This will give you some ideas about how best to proceed. In terms of frequency of posts, about two to three times a day, every day. You need to be there, but not whitewash people’s feeds as this will have the opposite effect to the one you want, they will switch off.

Content Marketing Success Through Audience Targeting

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, Content Marketing Success Through Audience Targeting

It seems to happen to the best of us. You devote hours and hours of time to writing a great piece of content that you just know is going to drive hordes of people to your website. Of those hordes of people, hopefully, a few will become customers. For some reason, however, it doesn’t work. Very few people read it and those who do aren’t engaging with you or your business. You’re left wondering what happened and what you could have done better.

Often the problem lies in a disconnect between the content creator and their audience. If a piece of content fails to pick up traction, it’s usually because it doesn’t fit what the audience was searching for. Content marketing towards your target audience is an essential piece of the puzzle. Before you can effectively deliver your message, you need to understand who you are marketing it to and why.

Understanding your target audience is complicated and involves more than one step. Here are some ways to achieve content marketing success by targeting the right audience.

Conduct Market Research

The fact of the matter is if you want to know who your target audience is, you’ve got to do the research. Both SEO and content marketing demand research to be successful. It doesn’t matter if you’re looking up keyword strategies or choosing topics for long-form content, you have to begin by researching what topics people want to know about.

Thankfully, you don’t have to just guess. There are several tools available that can help you find out what topics are trending and how to rank long tail keywords. Audience Key, for example, allows you to optimize content, quantify search audience, map your keyword strategy, and much more. You can find data and analytics that will help you know what’s working and get to know your audience.

Sometimes the research may take just as long as it does to produce your content – and that’s ok. It’s better to take the time to produce content for your intended audience and see results instead of spending all that time to effectively have the content flop.

Engage Your Readers Using Emotion

In any case, you’re looking for your readers to have an emotional response to what you’re saying. Of course, you want clicks, shares, and conversions. It’s your business after all. None of that follows if you can’t reach your audience on an emotional level, however.

One of the easiest ways to drive engagement on your site and connect with your audience is to ask them questions. You want your audience to share their own feelings and opinions to connect with you. Ask your readers what they want to hear about. You can also end your content with direct questions to get the conversation going in the comments. Additionally, ask their opinions on your recommended products and services. Encourage conversation, questions, and healthy debates.

Reconnect With Your Audience

If you are having trouble engaging your audience, try starting over again. You’ll need to get a good understanding of your audience. This includes:

  • Find out what your audience is passionate about, and write content for them.
  • Connect with your readers on an emotional level to build a community. Encourage conversation and questions.
  • Research the market demographics of your audience thoroughly.
  • Remember to include a call to action when you want your audience to do something. Often, people simply need to be told what you’d like them to do.

It’s easy to see how these guidelines can help increase the amount of engagement your content receives, as well as sales and conversions. When it comes to content marketing, it doesn’t have to be a mystery.

6 SEO Trends You Can’t Ignore This Year (and Beyond!)

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, 6 SEO Trends You Can't Ignore This Year (and Beyond!)

Whether you’re a business owner or a marketing manager, you’ve probably heard about the importance of SEO for your company on more than one occasion. Maybe you’ve even already put in the leg work toward kickstarting your SEO and creating a solid plan to grow your online presence.

But, having an SEO plan in place isn’t enough. It needs to constantly be looked at, tweaked, and changed in order to fit with trends and algorithm changes. Google made headlines in 2019 with its BERT algorithm update, and the search engine shows no signs of slowing down on changing the way it promotes pages and content.

That’s just one example of how quickly things can change and how fast technology moves. If your company isn’t keeping up with it by allowing for an adaptable SEO strategy and by using quality SEO services, it won’t take long for you to fall behind in your marketing efforts.

So, what are some of the trends you need to keep up with in the world of SEO, in order to stay relevant?

1.  User-Focused Content

For years, you’ve likely focused on keyword strategy and link-building. While those things aren’t just going to disappear overnight, it’s important to start shifting the way you create content. For example, with Google’s ever-changing algorithms and people’s desire to form more relationships with businesses, rather than just be target demographics, content is going to have to focus more on user intent.

It’s not going to be enough to piece together words and phrases people might search for. Even keyword research tools may become less useful as time goes on.

So, what can your business do to keep up with the change in where content is going? Listen to your customers, clients, and followers. Focus on their questions, concerns, and comments through every aspect of their journey with your company, whether they use your product/service or not. By really listening to what people are saying about your business, you can hone in on what they’re looking for, and develop your content accordingly.

2. High-Quality Content

It’s no coincidence that the top two spots on this list focus solely on the content of your website. Content is king for a reason, after all.

Not only is it important to shift your content more toward the reader, but it’s equally important to make sure that content is readable.

What does that mean?

Simply put, if the content you’re pushing out on a regular basis isn’t easy to understand, it’s going to start to rank poorly. Google might not be advanced enough to play the role of editor yet, but there’s no doubt that day is coming, soon.

In the past, releasing new content regularly was a good tactic for boosting your rankings. While updating your content regularly is still a must-do, it’s not enough to put together poorly-written pieces just for the sake of a ranking. Instead, your mindset should be to have the best content on the web, consistently. If you don’t feel that someone on your team has the writing skills that will continue to get you noticed, it’s worth it to hire professional writers, even on a freelance basis.

3. Managing Your Reputation

As more businesses and websites compete for high-ranking spots, your reputation will start to play a big part in where you’re found on that list. Google will look at the E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) of a business based on its digital impression.

You should only be publishing content about things you know. With words like “fake news” trending in today’s society, it’s easy for people to be skeptical about things they read online, so you have to prove yourself as a trustworthy source of information. Always double-check what’s being published to make sure it’s accurate and true. One false statistic or exaggerated claim can end up causing a lot of damage.

Your reputation will also be scrutinized when it comes to negative comments and reviews posted about your business online. Negative comments may have deterred potential customers away before. But, now? They could turn Google off from giving your site a high ranking.

If you have other people writing for you or contributing pieces of information to your website, it’s just as important to make sure they have a solid reputation, too. Quoting someone who has been proven to be a fraud or someone with no authority in a particular subject could make your content (and business) seem just as ill-informed.

So, do your research, write what you know, and work hard to preserve positive customer experiences.

4. Focus Your Attention on Mobile

Did you know that 60% of Google searches are done on a mobile device? Or, that over 2 billion people use their smartphone exclusively to access the Internet?

If you’ve been ignoring optimizing your website for mobile, it’s time to make it a priority. Mobile search is only going to become more popular over time thanks to a society on the go, and consumers are growing used to instant gratification. If your website doesn’t load quickly on a phone or is impossible to navigate, they’re going to turn away in a matter of seconds and look elsewhere.

It’s worth it to higher graphic designers or web designers who specialize in mobile web development to make sure your site is easy to work through, even on a smartphone. It used to be the norm to create a site on a desktop and later optimize it for mobile. Now, the trends are showing us that it may be time to start flip-flopping that old rule of thumb.

5. Building Your Brand

More companies are starting to focus on paid advertising, especially on social media. There was a time where spending very little on social media could get your business heavily-noticed. Now that the practice is becoming more saturated, the ROI is reduced. It’s also likely that the cost will go up, so you’ll have to spend more to get less.

Chances are, you’re going to have to continue to spend something on social advertising, just to stay relevant. But, it shouldn’t be where you focus all of your attention. Instead, shift your goals toward building your brand and promoting brand awareness.

Both Google and Bing have made it known that linkless mentions of your business are used as ranking signals. So, the more people that are talking about your company online, the better.

When you utilize social media listening, you can pay attention to how often your brand is being talked about and what people are saying. It also gives you a great opportunity to interact directly with customers and followers of your business. When you give your business a personality by talking directly with your audience, you’re developing trust. That can help you to stand out among competitors who are simply following the normal trends with canned responses and limited social interaction.

6. Voice Search Optimization (VSEO)

By 2022, voice-based shopping is expected to reach up to $40 billion. That’s just one of the staggering stats associated with this phenomenon that continues to grow in importance. VSEO is huge among teenagers and young adults, so it’s undoubtedly going to take over the next generation of searchers.

What does that mean for your business? Since people are asking more direct questions via voice (and typically doing so using full sentences), you’re going to have to consider exactly how those questions will be asked.

What makes VSEO different from traditional search is that when someone is typing, they’re more likely to use snippets of a phrase, or just one to two words in order to get the information they want. Since searching via voice tends to feel more conversational, they’re going to use longer questions and phrases. Those same questions and phrases need to be brought up in your content in order to be seen. Think about how most questions start, with the same few words:

  • How?
  • Why?
  • What?
  • When?

If your content isn’t including those key terms or the answers to the questions people are asking, you’re going to become less relevant when it comes to your overall ranking.

So Many Changes, So Little Time

With technology changing so quickly and Google coming out with new algorithms all the time, it can feel as though it’s hard to keep up with the latest SEO trends. But, there’s one major theme that you can probably see through all of these trends: The user should be your focus.

When it comes to the content you produce, the trustworthiness of what you say, the ease of which people can view your site via mobile, and how well your brand connects with consumers, it all comes back to user experience (UX).

So, while keeping these trends at the forefront of your marketing/SEO plan will help to keep you from becoming stagnant in your efforts, the most important thing to keep in mind is how those efforts are targeted toward the people searching for you, and those who have already discovered you. That’s a “trend” that will only continue to become more important each year.

Tips and Tricks to Improve Sales With Cloud Apps

Every business strives to close as many deals as it possibly can within a given period. However, not many business owners are willing to invest in upgrading their sales processes to match or even surpass their better-performing competitors.

Are you struggling with managing your customers and looking for tips and tricks to improve your sales? It’s time to embrace automation and move most of your process to the cloud technology. Doing this will help to free up time for your sales team so that it can concentrate on actually making sales.

Below are key areas where you need to focus your automation efforts when looking to optimize your sales process.

Outreach and prospecting

Let’s admit it, outreaching is arguably the most time-consuming activity for any salesperson or team. In most cases, you have to get into a lengthy back and forth exchange with prospects via email, calling, or even visiting in person before you can close a deal. This often leaves you with very little time and energy to do anything else.

However, it doesn’t always have to be this way.

All you need to enhance customer communication is to invest in a proven system that manages everything for you. A reliable customer relationship management (CRM) system like SalesLoft or ActiveCampaign enables you to manage your phone calls and emails directly in the system. In the end, you’re able to gather all the information you need in one place including records of all communications with your customers.

Lead management

Your business is booming and now you boast quite a significant amount of contacts to take care of every day of your work week. Manual management is definitely bound to get hectic at some point which calls for automation of this repetitive process.

Look for a service like Zoho CRM which helps in various lead management tasks including sorting and scoring leads. This ensures you do not miss out on any essential step when qualifying your prospects as well as prioritizing those that are closest to converting.

With such a system, you’re able to get a clear picture of your prospects based on their history with your business and all their past communication. Learn about their preferred approach and language and use these details to find the most effective way to connect with them.

Some CRM systems are also able to assign leads automatically to different sales representatives in your company based on factors like their existing workload, language, and geographical distribution. This allows your or your sales manager to focus on other more critical tasks such as coaching the reps and closing deals.

Sales reporting

For a long time, Microsoft Excel and Outlook were the most sophisticated data storage and reporting tools companies knew. Indeed, everyone that handled data in a company including accountants and managers had to prove that they had enough skills working with these tools to get promoted at their workplaces.

Microsoft Excel and related programs are still being used and considered important for certain tasks. However, we now have to accept that there are more effective tools that take much lesser time to capture, organize, and generate data reports than these two.

Are you spending too much time than you should on your data management and therefore failing to put enough effort into making sales? It’s time to re-organize your priorities.

With a tool like Agile CRM or SalesForce, you can optimize your reporting process and improve your productivity and collaboration with other members of your sales team.

Payment

You’ve probably done all the hard work of convincing your prospects that your company is the right one for the job – so, what next? Well, it’s time to sign contracts and request the agreed payments.

To make this process seamless and also prevent common payment issues arising in the future, consider using automated invoicing methods such as Zoho Invoice and Paypal. You might also want to look at other tools like Dotloop or Docusign to capture your customers’ signatures; you’ll possibly need when dealing with checks and some invoices.

Conclusion

At this point, you’re possibly wondering, ‘you’ve already recommended quite a handful of tools and systems – how do I manage them properly so they don’t end up burdening me?’

Our advice is simple – acquire a cloud-based CRM service that integrates and automatically syncs data between all your business apps and systems. Take a look at this PieSync vs. Zapier comparison which features two of the industry’s best data syncing solutions.

Automate your sales process today and watch as your business profitability grows exponentially.

How to Develop a Successful SEO Strategy for Your Business

StrategyDriven Online Marketing and Website Development Article, How to Develop a Successful SEO Strategy for your Business

The importance of SEO has surged in recent years, and if you’re looking to attract more customers to your website, you simply can’t afford to ignore it. When it comes to achieving the coveted first page positions in SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), having a solid SEO strategy in place is essential. These days search engine results are more crowded than ever before, and winning your place in the rankings will require patience, hard work, and an understanding of how to properly optimize your website. With that in mind, below you will discover how to develop your very own successful SEO strategy.

Conduct a Full SEO Audit for your Website

When it comes to getting started with SEO, having solid foundations in place is an important first step to take. Without a strong platform, all other SEO efforts will essentially be wasted, and getting your website to rank highly in search results will be difficult. If you’re looking after a website with thousands of pages, then it might be worth considering an investment in website auditing software such as the industry-standard Screaming Frog or Deepcrawl to speed up this process. If you’re in any way unsure about how to carry out this process, it might be best to get in touch with professionals who are adept at creating and tailoring an SEO strategy to your business.

Start building links as soon as you can

One of the most important elements of any successful SEO strategy is link building, and this needs to be taken into account when trying to get more clicks from Google. Google’s ranking algorithms are complex and multi-faceted, but time and time again links have been proven to play a huge part in determining the position of a page in search results. There are, of course, many other factors to consider, but incorporating link building into your SEO strategy is a must.

Invest wisely in keyword research software

Taking the time to understand your user needs and learning what people are actually searching for is the bedrock of a good SEO strategy. Without in-depth knowledge and data on your customers, how else are you going to create valuable content that they can relate to? The Google search console provides an insight into which keywords are used to drive people to your site, and it’s completely free. Alternatively, sign up to SEMrush or Ahrefs for a more detailed picture of the search landscape.

Top tip: Be on the lookout for question keywords, as this can inform the content strategy of your blog pages.

Keep up to date with industry news and announcements

SEO changes faster than the weather, and in an industry as dynamic as SEO, it’s important to stay as up to date as possible. In 2019 alone, there were thousands of updates to Google’s ranking factors. Subscribe to newsletters, read blogs and be on the lookout for important news from Google about updates so you can ensure your SEO strategy is on-trend.