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How to Sharpen Your Digital Marketing in 2017

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Everyone is doing digital marketing as a way to promote their products, services, and brands these days. The measurable nature of digital marketing and the fact that even small businesses can achieve great results with a good campaign make digital marketing very appealing to more and more businesses.

Simply doing just an ordinary internet marketing campaign is no longer enough. To reach the right audience and the ensure maximum return on investment, your campaigns must be sharp and highly targeted. Here are some of the things you can do to sharpen your digital marketing efforts in 2017

Leave It to Experts

There are a lot of tasks to tackle when you’re doing digital marketing, from formulating a suitable campaign for the target audience to actually producing the content and executing the campaign itself. Instead of trying to do everything yourself, it is much better to leave certain parts of these efforts to experts.

There are several reasons why hiring experts to help you with your digital marketing campaign is a great idea. For starters, top services are now more affordable than ever. When you need to produce quality content for content marketing, for instance, turning to service providers such as yourcontentshop.com will actually save you a lot of time and money.

On top of that, the time you save working on details of the campaign can then be used to take care of other, more important tasks. Instead of getting caught in micro-managing the digital marketing, you can allocate more time towards ensuring the campaign’s effectiveness and monitoring its results.

Tell a Story

I can’t stress enough how important it is to tell a story when doing digital marketing. Good stories are what the audience actually follow on the internet. The story of your brand or product doesn’t have to be particularly complicated; it just needs to be compelling and relatable enough for the target audience you’re aiming for.

Instead of telling the audience about product advantages, for instance, you can get better user engagement and responses by telling stories about how the product was developed. More importantly, you can share more information about why the product was created in the first place.

The “why” matters. Your reasons for doing things will be what that set you apart from the competition. In a market as crowded as today, having a compelling “why” will make all the difference.

Maintain Consistency

Digital marketing is never a one-time thing. It is a campaign that needs to run continuously in order to capture the audience’s attention over a longer period of time. This means transitioning from one digital marketing strategy to the next smoothly and maintaining consistency at all times.

In fact, maintaining consistency is perhaps the greatest challenge in internet marketing. Not all businesses can remain consistent with their digital marketing campaigns. Do it right, however, and you will be able to enjoy a perpetual series of impacts that will catapult your brand and the products you offer to the top of the market and the audience’s mind.

Brand Marketing Campaigns That Expose You To New Markets

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All businesses want to take territory, either by being first or taking customers away from their competition. The world of business is kind of like a contact sport because you’re aggressively trying to outsell your competition and prove to the world why you’re just plain better than they are. The contact, however, is done with the consumers when you’re trying to convince them that your products and services would make their life more enjoyable and or easy. The battle that is fought in the trenches is the marketing campaign. Exposing your brand to new markets should be treated like a well-orchestrated battle plan. Companies spend a significant amount of time and money on advertising both online and in the real world. Although the world has advanced to a stage that many think only the online presence of a business is important, meeting people face to face, shaking their hand, introducing yourself will never be replaced. Conducting a campaign of brand exposure requires research and assembling of your team.

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Calling the troops

First and foremost you need a call to action. Whether you’re trying to expose your brand to a new market, releasing a new product or service or expanding to another country, you want to give cause to your actions. Every single advertising campaign contact a clear and compelling selling point that moves consumers further down the funnel and closer to the closer. This is called the point of conversion, but it is solely driven by a business that has clearly defined where it is coming from, why the customer should buy their product and how this would improve their life.

It starts off in the boardroom, where all the heads of departments from your business assemble. Here you will stand your troops to attention. Outline clearly your goal for a new product or marketing campaign and spell out your expectations of each member. Each department must have their own section in the call to action brief. In the documents, you must outline how they will work together, what their roles are and the deadlines for everyone to aim for.

Tactile online consumers

It’s crucial you have a compelling message to put across to the audience. This means you need to identify the right fighting grounds, such as online and marketing face to face. In the online world, you should focus and study on how your competition conducts their advertising campaigns. Their motives, target audience, unique selling point, and methodology should be worded in the documents you give to your own marketing team. Take inspiration from a successful brand, but don’t copy and paste their ethos onto yours.

With any digital platform, messaging is critical as it’s the key component when communicating with potential customers. You don’t need a lot of copy space and even a lot of funds to create a campaign that catches the attention of most browsing consumers. You need a compelling, short, sharp message, but at the same time, doesn’t seem rushed or underhanded. Clickbait is dying out, but emotional marketing is rising faster than anything else. Connect your product or service with something meaningful to the majority of consumers.

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Real world imagery

The image of your business will nowhere be most tested than in the real world, because you’ll be out in the open, interacting with all kinds of consumers. You can hire a third party marketing team to go out far and wide for your company, but using your own marketing employees is the best option because they know the business from the inside. Apart from having employees distribute and conduct questionnaires on the streets, you could also use high traffic events to reach and expose your brand to new customers.

With a modern screen printing exposure unit, this technology can print off intricate t-shirt designs that are one-of-a-kind. By taking your business to a festival or musical event, you can give these t-shirts away as prizes at your stall. For the testing and feedback of new products and services at these festivals done by customers, these t-shirts can be the reward. People will be wearing your brand logo with perhaps your website or social media accounts on the t-shirt. Essentially, it’s free and long lasting marketing done by consumers themselves. Each staff member should have these t-shirts on while they conduct interviews, introduce themselves, selling products and generally mingle with the crowd.

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Test, understand, test again

When testing your marketing strategy on consumers, it can be a very nerve wracking time. Sometimes arbitrary factors have an adverse impact on your campaign, even though the idea and implementation are sound. Don’t let this discourage you and know that this is the exact reason why you should test and test again. Advertisements may look good on paper, they may even look good when finalized, but it all depends on how they’re taken by the consumer. This is why it’s important to test your marketing strategy before it goes live. It’s critical you pay attention to the fluctuations of negative and positive responses to digital advertisements.

A great way to keep ahead of the curve is to monitor your social media accounts, and see how users are responding to your campaign. You should be using a unique hashtag, so whether you’re on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or any other large community-based news sharing website, you’re accurately tracking the criticisms you receive. A key factor in not wasting resources and time is to make sure that through the correct algorithm, your advertisements aren’t popping up on consumers that are more than likely not to be interested, especially if you’re in a very specific industry. Marketing campaigns that outright, inadvertently target the wrong type of person, purely eat away at your bandwidth and funds.

Brand marketing campaigns should be treated as a battle plan. You’re going to be contacting consumers from around the world, and first impressions count. The world moves fast, and it’s unfortunate to admit, but you only have one chance to get it right. Assemble your team, make sure they’re notified and informed by a well-written and clear, call to action. Monitor and test your campaign strategy and never think that real world marketing is dead. Present yourself and the brand in public, and show your competition you’re taking them head on by communicating with all consumers in high traffic locations.

Creating a Buzz Around Your Brand: Targeting as Many Potential Customers as Possible

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Generating sales and profit is a challenge for any newly established brand. People are unaware of your existence or wary of your products and services. You haven’t had the opportunity to gain their trust and loyalty yet and competitors are reluctant to let them test the waters with your newly posed competition. So, how do you go about encouraging consumers to take a risk and purchase your products? It’s time to make a name for your company. Here’s how to create a buzz around your brand, drawing the attention of as many potential customers as possible.


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Corporate PR

Corporate PR forges the potential for relationships to develop between your brand and your customers. It opens up a conversation, then leaves you to make sales and prove your worth. A good corporate PR agency will ensure that your company appears in all the right places. It will land you reviews in widely read and influential publications and interviews with widely watched television programs. These agencies place you in the spotlight and give you the chance to really showcase what you’re about. Perfect! The more visible your company is and the more consistently it appears in the public eye for positive reasons, the more familiar consumers will feel with your image and the more likely they are to trust you with their purchases.


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SEO

SEO, or search engine optimization, is a business technique that helps to direct as many people to your website as possible. Every single day, millions of internet users employ the help of search engines to find the pages that they’re looking for. If they want to find the answer to a question, they’ll use a search engine to find a site that will provide them with the relevant information. If they want to know what time a certain store opens, they will use search engines to direct them to the company’s site, preferably directly to the page detailing their store details. If they want a certain product, they will use a search engine to find the brands that supply it. It’s not surprising then, that to turn over the maximum profits possible, you want to be featured high in the search engine’s results. The closer you are to the top of the list, the more likely people are going to click on your link and the more traffic directed to your site. Once consumers are on your page, the products will sell themselves. So, how do you go about directing the maximum volume of traffic to your web page? The answer? By educating yourself. Take the SEO class online to gain a full comprehension of SEO. There are so many more factors that will help you to excel in the field than you could imagine: marketing personas, marketing funnel, search fundamentals, searcher intent, search framework, channel selection, branded searches, document relevancy, URL optimization, link neighborhoods. The list goes on and on. So, it’s time to start swotting up!

Customer Reviews

With increasing numbers of people gaining their information online comes another issue that your company needs to prioritize: online customer reviews. Nowadays, individual, non-professional reviews can have a more beneficial or negative effect on your sales than ever before. The internet has given everyday people a platform to express their love or disdain for a product, service or brand that can reach a worldwide audience. So focus on gaining positive feedback. If you offer high-quality produce and impeccable service, you can’t really go wrong. However, if you do receive a complaint or negative feedback, contact the individual who has made it. Discuss the problem with them. Question what they dislike about your service and how things could be improved. Chances are, you can easily rectify the situation by offering a refund, exchange or other means of compensation. This will ensure that you maintain a good relationship with this individual consumer (they will recognize your company as going above and beyond their call of duty) and encourage them to alter their review. Hundreds of thousands of people will have access to this and trust it, so it’s essential that you put wrongs to right. You can also use the situation to ensure that you don’t make the same mistake again. You will be able to constantly improve, ensuring that you don’t receive negative complaints in the future.

If you follow all of these steps, it won’t be long until your brand is part of the public consciousness. People will feel familiar with your company and place their trust in you to provide them with everything that they expect from their transaction. This means you will have more happy and loyal customers and the increasing profit that comes hand in hand with them.

Freelancers, Here’s How To Put Your Website To The Test

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Being a freelancer means relying on your website to bring in customers – it’s your main source of income. For any business, big or small, a website is a vital marketing tool. However, for freelancers it’s more than that – as a freelancer, your website is the heart of your business, which is why it’s so vital to ensure that it’s as effective as possible. The question is, of course, how can you do that – how can you determine how successful your business website is? Use our guide below to determine if your website is as effective and as successful as you think it is…

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Utilize objective feedback

A simple way to determine whether your website is as effective as it could be is to utilize objective feedback. There are many options for getting this feedback, with one of the best ones being AB testing – this is where an objective group of people are shown multiple versions of a website or page and choose the one that they like the best. There are several benefits of AB testing, including being able to get a better idea of what you could consider changing and what you should ensure stays the same. The fact is that when it comes to ensuring that your website is as well-designed as possible, objective feedback is key.

Monitor your site’s traffic

The number of visitors that your website gets is a good indication of how effective your website is as a marketing resource. Think of your website like a shop window for your products and services – for your business to be a success, your website needs to be as appealing as possible and get plenty of traffic. Monitor your overall traffic using Google Analytics or another similar tool and take note of when there are dips and spikes in your page views and cross reference them to days, times, and anything else that may be relevant.

Track new vs. returning users

Using monitoring software like Google Analytics, you can track your new vs. returning visitors. Usually, websites tend to have more new visitors than returning ones, which is perfectly fine. However, if your site has predominantly more new users than returning ones, this could indicate that your site isn’t quite right and needs some changes making to it.

Note down conversion rates

A vital part of working as a freelancer is determining the conversion rate of your website. If you allow for your services to be ordered online, you can track how many users made purchases and how many abandoned their shopping carts mid-purchase. This kind of data demonstrates how user-friendly your site is, and whether you need to focus on improving usability. If your site isn’t easy to use and navigate, the fact is that your customers will go elsewhere – it’s as simple as that.

Determining how successful your website is, is no easy task, as there are lots of factors to take into account. Hopefully, however, the advice above will help to make the process of measuring your website’s effectiveness a little easier for you.

Taking Over The Internet: Building Your Company’s Online Rep

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We live in an age of unprecedented technological expansion. The digital era has revolutionised business, but you don’t need me to tell you that. No matter your industry or the specific nature of your business, technology will affect your operations in some form of another. In particular, the internet has become a tool which offers connectivity, speed and simplicity which has made things easier than ever for businesses who want to excel at an accelerated rate.

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Of course, when every business is using the same technology, the playing field levels out, and the steps required to push past the competition become harder to see. Your business is trying to utilize the online world to its advantage in terms of increasing the goods and services it can sell successfully, but so is every other business in the industry. You might be feeling as if you’ve lost a step, but that’s okay. Here are some pieces of advice for businesses looking to regain their footing and their position in the industry by staying ahead of the game on the internet.

Conduct research.

It’s easy for ego to take the wheel and drive, especially when you’re running a small business and your team is full of innovative, intellectual individuals who want to constantly push the business further and further with great new ideas. Obviously, this is exactly what you want from your team, but sometimes a level business head is needed. You need to be appealing to the market, and not expecting the market to mould itself around the needs of your company. You should be researching the market you’re targeting within your specific industry. These are the people who will keep your business afloat.

Researching might entail looking into reviews you’ve already received from customers of your business, either through social media mentions, review sites or perhaps your business’ own website. You need to listen to what people are saying and work to change the things which aren’t working for your target audience. In addition, if you’re a brand new business with few clients, you need to be monitoring what customers have said about your competitors. If there are flaws with the services of competing businesses, there are gaps in the market for your company to exploit.

Improve your online marketing skills and, in turn, your sales.

You need to be better understanding the internet, so as to ensure you’re selling any online goods or services to the extent at which a business in your industry should be. Of course, if your company is still struggling, you might consider a Magento developer to help you reinvent your eCommerce platform. There are always online solutions to tricky problems your business might be facing, and, when it comes to marketing your business, you need to be properly utilizing the internet’s capabilities.

Your reputation depends on you offering a professional service, because, much like the way you present your business in the physical world, the way you present your business in the virtual world reflects on your company’s standards, experience, expertise and the level of effort they put into what they do.

Show your best goods first.

As a business trying to top your competitors, you really need to be making your mark quickly, efficiently and simply. Consumers have so much choice in the modern era that they can become rather passive about making their decision when it comes to a particular good or service. You should be making that easier by offering them your best products on the front page of your website.