When it comes to marketing, you’ve got to move fast to make sure you aren’t left behind the times. This is true in every area of business, which is why it’s so difficult to launch a successful company that stands the test of time.
However, too many businesses have been burned by jumping on a bandwagon and following a trend blindly. Once the losses start rolling in, that’s when you take notice. This begs a very important question – should entrepreneurs wait and see or go all in?
To find out more, please continue reading the following points outlined below.
The Competition
The first thing to look at is the competition. Whether you feel it’s necessary or not, your rival’s approach to marketing can sway your decision. This is because you can’t afford to let them steal a march on you. By failing to invest in the latest trend or piece of technology, you could fall further behind, allowing them to soak up your market share. Sure, you shouldn’t do everything they do, but if enough of your rivals believe a marketing tactic is helpful, and they have a similar business plan, it’s worth considering the consequences of failing to act.
Your Budget
Of course, you must weigh the above against your budget. Lots of SMEs don’t have bottomless pits of money that they can throw at marketing, unlike massive brands and major corporations. Therefore, you need to tread carefully before going all in. If the marketing trend is going to be expensive, it might not be in your remit. Losing out to the competition is something you have to accept. However, anything that’s relatively cheap could be worth a gamble. Look at search engine optimization. It’s unthinkable to create an advertising plan without SEO, particularly as it hardly costs a penny.
The Effectiveness
Some trends are effective from the moment they arrive. SEO is a prime example because it has all the relevant features. Not only was it affordable, but it positively affected almost every part of the industry, making it an essential part of any company’s strategy. Content marketing is along the same lines. As the ultimate guide to content marketing strategy highlights, the effectiveness of your marketing boils down to content. That means to ignore it, or not to pay it the attention it deserves, is an error. The trick is to spot the fads and avoid them like the plague while embracing the tried and tested methods.
Your Data
Jeff Bezos isn’t the richest man in the world because he got lucky. He’s smart and knows when to make decisions based on the data and when to hold back. Famously, Amazon’s founder pulls the trigger when he has 70% of the information as he believes waiting any longer leads to missed opportunities. Concerning waiting or jumping on the bandwagon, you should use the same technique. Wait until you have the majority of the data before shooting your shot. It might go wrong, but at least you took a calculated and informed gamble.
The answer to the title question is – it depends. The circumstances will dictate your approach, and the pointers above will help.
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Marketing is one of the most important elements of a business. Without it, your company will be lost in a sea of other companies and no one will know about your services. For start-ups especially, putting together a high-quality marketing plan is essential. If you’re new to marketing and are keen to put this into action, check out the tips below.
Find Your Niche
Finding your niche is key when it comes to developing a strong marketing strategy. It’s all well and good to market your services, but if it’s not hitting your target audience then it could fall flat on its face. To tailor your campaign to your intended audience, speak to potential customers and find out about their lifestyles, interests, concerns, and needs. Successful campaigns depend on your ability to connect with your audience, so establishing your niche is one of the most important first steps.
Attend Events
Networking is another vital step in your marketing efforts. Expanding your contacts, opportunities, and potential customers will go a long way. While networking events can be daunting, finding ones that are relevant to your industry can be highly rewarding. Where possible, try to meet new people and grow your network of potential clients and customers. You could even co-sponsor an event within your niche to gain more publicity for your business.
Social media is another powerful platform for marketing your business. Creating profiles on the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn is essential if you want your business to be visible. However, to make this more effective, find out which platforms your target audience are using and create content that appeals to their interests.
Do Your SEO Keyword Research
Every business should do their keyword research to target customers. Again, this comes down to understanding your niche and audience. By knowing what these customers do, want, and need, you can then set about finding out what keywords they enter into Google. In other words, you’ll want to tailor your marketing efforts to accommodate the keywords that are used by your target demographic. This will ensure that your services are visible on the search engine results pages (SERPs) and that your potential customers can find you.
Host a Contest
Perhaps one of the lesser-known marketing tips is to host a contest. While contests can seem superficial, some of the most successful companies have achieved growth in this way (YouTube included). Contests are especially great for start-up businesses who are looking to grow quickly. Whether you’re giving away a prize or a service in exchange for sign-ups or purchases from your customers, contests can be a fun and easy growth hack.
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If you don’t feel as though your site is doing as well as it could be, then you are not alone. So many people are in the same situation that you are in right now, but if you are willing to put in the work, then there is no reason at all why you cannot turn things around.
Your SEO is Failing
Google is easily the best source of traffic when it comes to your site. The problem is that getting your content within the top results can be tough. If you want to work around this, then you need to make sure that your content is top-notch. That being said, there are also numerous other factors at play here. This could include setting up an XML sitemap or even installing a plugin. You also need to make sure that you optimise your content for every keyword search term you want to rank for. If you do not do all of this, then you may find that your chances of being able to rank high are in fact very low. If you miss out on just one important factor, then this can give you very low rankings. If you want to help yourself here, then install Yoast SEO if you are using WordPress. If you have no idea about SEO, then you are much better off leaving it to the professionals.
You have a Poor Backlink Profile
A lot of pages that rank in the top 5 slots often have very good backlinks. At the minimum they have a good DA as well. This means that their website has dozens of backlinks that all come from the best sites in the industry. If you haven’t looked into link building before then, there’s a high chance that you don’t have many backlinks at all. If this is the case, then this is probably the reason why you don’t have any backlinks at all. If you want to fix this, then you should know that blog commenting is the way to go. A lot of blogs give no-follow links to the people who comment. This doesn’t carry a lot of link juice, but that being said, you need a good mix if you want to rank well. If you want to build do-follow links, then guest posting is the way to go.
You are Aiming too High for Keywords
The more times someone searches for a keyword on Google, the harder it is to rank for it. If you want to do something about this, then you need to make sure that you are not aiming too high for your keywords. If you are aiming too high, then this will make it even more difficult for you to get ranked, and you may even find that you find it very difficult to come out on top. If you are finding it hard to know which keywords to go for, then it’s a good idea for you to hire an SEO specialist. If you can do this, they can work with you to ensure that your site needs are met.
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All business owners want the same thing, ‘more customers’. Their second answer being more traffic to their website, which will bring in more customers.
So how can you attract more customers to your website? There are many different strategies to consider.
Advertise
This may seem obvious, but advertising is key. Consider your target market and advertise in ways that will reach them. You could consider paid ads, social media, magazine or newspaper adverts, TV, radio or display boards as excellent ways to attract people, building your brand’s awareness, and getting your site out there in front of people.
With any advert, consider the wording and language used and the outcome you want for more people to see your site. For example, if you are looking to convert a visit to a sale, you could include a ‘call to action’ within your advert.
Make Sure Your Content Is Valuable
What is it that you offer, that makes you, your site, brand and product stand out? Think about what your customers (now and future) will gain by visiting your site. You might be able to help them solve a problem, sell a product that will help them overcome a hurdle, teach or educate.
If you’re unsure of where to start, have a look at keyword research tools and google trends to see what is popular.
Social Media
It is never enough to have a great product or service in the hope that everyone will just stumble across your site. You need to proactively promote your brand, product, and service. There are many different channels of social media and the luxury of this and you can utilize them in different ways to get the word out.
For example, Twitter is great for immediate short-term influence, whilst Pinterest can offer a longer-term visual solution for continual advertising and Instagram can allow a more interactive way for customers to engage and ‘tag’ you and your business.
SEO
SEO (search engine optimization) is most likely a strategy you’ll of heard of already. In short, it refers to boosting where a website ranks in search results. The higher you rank, the more your website will be seen.
An SEO company can assist with this and work with you to build a plan of action for your business to list higher when customers search for certain words or phrases.
Create Catchy Headlines
Like your products and services, you need to stand out from your competitors. Your services and products could be the best, but unless you have a compelling heading or caption to draw customers in, they could scroll on by.
Consider your customer, use their language and phrasing to engage them. You may want to write out more than one heading out to consider which is most appealing and eye-catching before pressing the publish button.
Offer Variety Of Content
Not only will variety in social media channels boost your exposure but it is also worth considering once you’ve got your customers to your site, how to maximize their visit. Think about your content and your clients. In today’s world, a lot more customers buy and appoint services through their mobile devices whilst out on the move. With this in mind, it is important to ensure you have a mixture of content to cover all bases. Include short and snappy articles, blog posts, videos, photos as well as longer content articles.
Link Internally
Using internal links on your site. That way you can guide customers to other services or products they may be interested in, which they were unaware of, or link to reviews and feedback confirming how wonderful your product or services is.
Have Evergreen Content
There possibly will be times when you focus on an upcoming holiday or occasion as a driving force to get traffic to your website however it is vital that you can maintain a steady stream of traffic for the rest of the year.
It is recommended to use ‘evergreen’ content available that will always be relevant and will continue to attract that footfall.
Examples of evergreen content would be how-to guides, product reviews and answers to frequently asked questions.
Include List Posts
Articles with numbers in the title such as ‘10 ….’ act as a good way to draw attention. By having a number in amongst words it makes it stand out and eye-catching, which will draw in more click-throughs to your website.
These aren’t always the best types of content to build regular viewers/customers – so this is where those internal links to other articles can help – but they offer a great alternative way to drive the traffic to your cyber front door.
Have A Plan In Place
Like all things business we have to work hard to get the results. Driving traffic to your website is no different. It takes hard work and dedication, along with the ability to multitask planing your content, advertising, social media presence along as with the day to day tasks needed within your business or brand. So, it is always a good idea to generate a plan. Plan out your what you are going to post on social media and site or sites you will be using. Plan any new content you’ll be releasing and how you plan to advertise it.
You can get specialize content calenders to help you with this so you’re releasing all your content in a logical order.
Repurpose Your Content
You might be debating how much more work you’ll be taking it but it will pay out in the end and like anything new you’ll find you get quicker at this the more it is implemented. One way to help keep times down is to revamp and repurpose older content in different formats. You might have some amazing older content in your locker, so dig it out and reuse this content in a YouTube video, for example, a Video Pin on Pinterest.
By doing this you are maximizing the amount of value you are getting out of one piece of content.
Email Marketing
With the majority of the population having email, email marketing is a great way to drive traffic and to keep you and brand in your customers’ minds. All you need to do to benefit from this to get customers to sign up. There are many ways to do this, some sites use pop up boxes for this, others have a ‘subscribe here’ open on their side bar. All you have to do, is come up with a compelling reason that they need to sign up and subscribe now.
Once subscribed you’ll be able to communicate directly with your customers. For new subscribers, you can send a welcome email series out to them. This will allow you to make a good impression and allow your customers a ‘get to know you and what your brand or business is all about’. So remember, this is your opportunity to make a good impression. Keep them notified of all new services, product and valuable content you’ve created.
Within the body of these emails you can also include your social media links and start the process of building yourself ‘super fans’ that follow you across of media channels.
With all of these suggestions, it is worth completing research in advance as there are numerous sites and technologies available to assist and make these steps easier to achieve. If that fails there are also companies out there that strategies and support in different fields that you could outsource too.
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SEO is a lot about experimenting with a bunch of techniques and which ones fit the shoe best. It’s an absolute nightmare for webmasters to see their rankings stay stagnant month after month.
Search engine optimization is an ongoing process. That’s why regularly updating your blog and publishing new content is paramount. It tells users that you’re always in the business.
Search engines also see sites that regularly update their content as ‘relevant’ ones. It’s a good practice to audit your site’s according to a fixed schedule (let’s say every 3 months) and make necessary updates wherever you see fit.
Internally Link to Other Pages
Apart from using link building techniques, you must also internally link your pages. While writing on a certain topic, you may find yourself creating references to other pieces of content from within your site. This is called internal linking wherein you add a link to other posts or pages of your site.
Internal links help search crawlers understand your content better. They also keep users engaged for longer by serving as tools of navigation. The words that you link to are called anchor texts. Since search engines pay special attention to these, be sure to use meaningful text for linking.
Pro Tip: It’s good if you read the entire copy after you have written it and proactively look for opportunities where it makes sense to link other pages. Having an internal linking strategy that cross-references and creates groups is good for any website’s SEO health. Although, it can seem a bit challenging and time-consuming; in the end, it’s worth it.
Improve the Load Speed of Your Pages
This is one of the most crucial ranking factors, and for good reasons too! For one thing, Google looks at slow-loading pages and thinks it’s not worth users’ time. In this way, high load times can negatively impact your rankings even if you have great content to offer.
Research tells us that 40 percent of visitors will leave your site if the page takes more than three seconds to load. Of those, eighty percent will likely never return. From an SEO health perspective, this is awful.
A quick loading page keeps people engaged longer and keeps them coming back for more. When Google sees this they will adjust your rankings accordingly by pushing it higher.
Therefore, you must check both your server response time and page speed. Pingdom is one free tool that can help you with that. You can test how your page loads from all across the world. To help with the load speed of your site, you may want to fix the themes and heavy plugins.
Produce High-quality Content
This one is a no-brainer. Content has been the king for a long time and will continue to. Producing high-quality, relevant, and fresh content should be any web marketer’s top priority. Other than that, you must look at something called ‘the dwell time’.
Dwell time refers to the average time a visitor spends on your site. Sites with newsworthy, fresh and, interesting information tend to enjoy higher dwell time.
Here’s something else to look at – Chrome happens to enjoy the majority market share in the world of browsers with 45% of all users using it. In 2017, it was downloaded the maximum number of times.
When a visitor bookmarks an interesting page, there’s a good chance they will come back to it. Having quality content can thus help your SEO rankings as more and more readers bookmark your site pages.
Title Your Page to Help Search Engines and Users
The title of your web page holds a lot of relevance both for users and readers. Search engines, at the time of indexing, will read the meta/title tag to see what the page is all about. Your meta tag is also also the blue color link people see in search results to get a hint about the page’s information.
It’s a healthy SEO practice to include relevant keywords in this tag. Also, the title tag is a little different from the description people see at the top of your page in a browser. If it helps with clarity, you should write one title for the meta tag to show in the SERPs and a different one for the page.
Create purposeful URLs
It’s easy to ignore the URL of the page but it carries SEO significance. It’s a good practice to include relevant keywords within the URL. You can see the page name appear in the URL in most CRMs like WordPress.
Before publishing, check and review the URL. if the page is already published, you can always redirect readers from the old page to the new one.
Target Keywords With High Commercial Intent
While doing keyword research, it’s easy for webmasters to focus mostly on the search volume. It’s also likely that you ignore terms with low search volume. But, that’s not always intelligent.
Once again it’s not always about the quantity but the quality of the terms. In simple words, you must look at the commercial intent of the searches.
For example, keywords like ‘link building services’ don’t necessarily have a lot of search volume. It must be no more than a few hundred. However, the CPC cost of such searches is $25. High commercial intent is an indicator that the traffic for them is made-up of invested and legit buyers.
End Words
SEO is a continuous process. As you progress, you may find some techniques to work better than others. But, the above-mentioned techniques have stood the test of time in yielding high rankings.
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When it comes to marketing, you’ve got to move fast to make sure you aren’t left behind the times. This is true in every area of business, which is why it’s so difficult to launch a successful company that stands the test of time.
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