Objectively speaking, businesses are always looking to do much more than just break even. Most businesses are able to do this by creating value in the markets they operate in and then leveraging the buying power of their clientele.
While this traditional approach has worked well over the years, the dawn of the internet age has forced many enterprises to rethink their strategies.
Sure, value addition remains a central premise for business operation. However, much more is needed if you want to stand out. We’ll be looking to highlight some of the major areas you need to cover ground if you’re looking to register impressive sales numbers going forward.
Traditionally, word of mouth marketing typically spread from one person to the next. The modernised version is somewhat different in that it describes both targeted efforts and naturally occurring happenings where individuals share their satisfaction with a brand.
Data from Nielsen has shown that about 92% of people trust recommendations from friends and family over any other kind of advertising. As it’s already apparent, trust plays an important role in word of mouth marketing. In light of this, you need to foster the right conditions for word of mouth marketing to thrive. With that done, you’ll have broken down trust barriers that may exist and allowed influential customers to openly share their experiences with your company to the masses.
Given the fact that 74% of consumers have reported word of mouth being the key inspiration behind their buying decision, it’s crucial that you tap into this kind of marketing strategy.
If you look closely at the numbers, you’re bound to discover that there’s some long-term value when you invest in word of mouth marketing. This is because referred customers usually stick to a company over extended periods when compared to people who find your company using other means.
A contented customer base is likely going to direct more of their family, friends, and close associates to your direction. Going by this exponential growth curve alone, it’s logical to see just how valuable the first referral is.
As you look to venture into word of mouth marketing, it’s essential for you to understand that it happens in 2 ways, either organically or through marketing and ad campaigns. Since the two have inherent overlaps, it’s necessary for us to distinguish the two.
Video is one of the most powerful mediums out there. Research has shown that adding videos to your landing page can increase your conversion rate by as much as 80%.
When customers watch things like explainer videos, they’re able to visually identify the reasons why they need your product. This means that they’re likely to go further down the sales funnel and complete a sale.
It’s not surprising that this is the case because vision is our most dominant sense. Plenty of the information we are able to transmit to our brains is visual in nature. If the adage, a picture is worth a thousand words is actually true, then, there’s plenty to be said about moving pictures.
You can massively boost your return on investment by using video to tell your story. Luckily, you don’t need to be tech-savvy to come up with great videos. The internet is awash with video production and editing tools that you can quickly acquaint yourself with.
Importantly, you don’t need to come up with perfect videos in order to resonate with audiences. Content is the most important thing you need to be mindful of when producing your videos.
Organic traffic continues to shine when it comes to bringing in new prospects. Since most people discover brands online, it’s essential that you factor this is in your sales and marketing strategy, even if you’re a local business.
More specifically, you need to strive to have your brand get to the very first page of search engine results relevant to your client base.
Two decades before the online world became what it is today, many people weren’t acquainted about the best practices of the web. Today, the game has changed. Our phones are smarter and so are we.
Since most of the precious information is usually situated at the very top of search results, i.e. page one, it’s nigh impossible for visitors to check out websites found on successive pages after page one. We wrote a guide covering some great tips you can implement yourself to increase your local business rankings.
Brands like Facebook and Google use user engagement as a currency in measuring how websites are faring. They analyse even the most mundane of user actions like reactions, number of shares, the comments, and the click-to-conversion ratio. All this is done in a bid to bolster the efficiency of their algorithms.
The more engagements you’re able to register, the more likely it is for your ad to be shown frequently to audiences. As such, you need to aim to stay on page one of search results.
Having shared this, it’s worth documenting that website design also plays a key role in determining the success you have with prospects. The presence of broken links and error messages is not something that many willing buyers will be able to stomach. As alluded earlier, trust is of the essence in the sales game. You need to make sure that clients can trust in your business for them to truly become loyalists.
You’ve done it. After weeks of planning and countless discussions with your design team, you’ve finally got the green light. You’re ready to launch your beautiful brand new website to the world!
But although you might be tempted to push the ‘live’ button right away, it’s really important to test a few vital elements of the site before you start showing off the fruits of your labour to your potential customers.
Carrying out the ten final checks below will give you extra peace of mind that your new platform will perform at its very best after launch (and have a great chance of ranking well in the search engines, too!).
Before launch, go back to basics. Review and proofread all the content on your website to make sure it’s free from typos, poor grammar and duplicate copy.
This is essential for two reasons. Firstly, poorly written content won’t leave the best impression on your users. You only have five seconds or so to capture their attention and encourage them to explore everything your company can offer, so the last thing you want is for them to head straight over to a competitor’s site because they’ve been turned off by sub-standard writing.
And secondly, the major search engines such as Google will take your syntax into consideration when deciding whether or not to rank your web page in their organic listings. Bad content is less likely to rank well.
Pretend you’re a potential customer. Work your way through your site pathways to see if your new platform offers a simple, seamless experience.
Are your instructions clear? Is your main call to action displayed prominently on each page? Does your contact form return that reassuring ‘thank you’ message once it’s been completed? If you’re finding it difficult to get from A to B, or you’re encountering needless hurdles along the way, you need to address these flow and usability issues before you unleash your site to a wider audience.
It’s a simple check, but it often gets overlooked by webmasters who are keen to launch sooner rather than later. The load time of your pages will have a big impact on the user’s experience (and you’re probably already aware that slow load speeds can have an adverse effect on your SEO, too).
As we mentioned in a previous blog post How Important Is Site Speed For SEO, there are plenty of tools out there that can help you assess and improve your page load speed. Google’s PageSpeed Insights will give you plenty of food for thought, but other alternatives such as WebPageTest, GTmetrix and Pingdom will also return useful feedback.
This is a big one. More of us than ever before are using smartphones and tablets to navigate the web, so any new website must be able to render correctly on mobile browsers.
The best way to make sure your site is mobile responsive is to test it on as many devices as possible. If you spot any glitches, or you find that some or all of your content is displaying incorrectly, let your developers know so they can fix the problem before launch.
Again, there are tonnes of tools out there that can help you test responsive websites. Google Search Console’s Mobile-Friendly Test will show you exactly how your page is being displayed on a typical smartphone screen and will provide you with a site-wide mobile usability report that highlights any major concerns. Elsewhere on the web, you could use Responsinator, mobiReady or MobileTest.me to gauge the responsiveness of your latest creation.
If you want to improve your SEO rankings, you need a winning link building campaign.
Link building is a form of off-page SEO that helps to improve the credibility of your website. Getting links to your site placed on other reputable sites establishes your authenticity and boosts your rankings.
While the premise behind link building sounds simple enough, a successful campaign can be tricky to execute. If you want to get on the first page of Google, take a look at this step by step guide and start building your link building strategy today…
These small but mighty directives are often used by web designers while they’re creating your new website in a test platform. The noindex directive stops the search engines from being able to access the test site’s content while it’s still in development; the nofollow tag prevents Google from following links between pages.
As you can imagine, launching a website with noindex and nofollow tags is far from ideal if you want your pages to be found – so make sure they’re taken off the code when everything’s ready to go.
These handy tags let you control what content shows up when one of our web pages is shared on Facebook. They’re also recognised by Twitter and LinkedIn.
Needless to say, if you don’t have the right Open Graph tags in place, you won’t have any say in what copy is displayed when somebody shares your page or post on social media. Set up and customise these vital pieces of code as soon as you can (or ask your developer to do this for you).
If a user requests a page that doesn’t actually exist, your site will return what’s called a 404 error page. This page can play a key part in keeping the potential customer on the website if they’ve reached a dead end; an empty template will confuse them and, in the worst-case scenario, encourage them to jump ship.
Test your existing 404 pages to see if it follows the same design theme and contains visible links back to the homepage or other resource pages that might be of interest. If it doesn’t, get your developer to improve it ASAP.
Every website should contain two sitemaps: one written in HTML, and one in XML. The HTML sitemap is a more user-friendly version that’s easy for human eyes to follow, whereas the XML addition is designed specifically to help the search engine bots find and index your website’s pages.
Make sure your developer creates an accurate XML sitemap file, then uploads it to your root directory so it can be found at www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml.
We’ve seen it time and time again. An organisation has created a flawless website – its design is impeccable, its UX is incredible, and its content adds that extra je ne sais quoi to the whole platform. But several weeks after launch, there’s not been one single enquiry… or so it seems.
In reality, plenty of people have tried to inquire about the company. But the contact form hasn’t been working properly, so all attempts at communication have been bouncing straight back to their potential customers.
Before you open up your website for business, make sure that your contact portal is set up to send your enquiries straight to the email address of your choice (and isn’t pinging correspondence to your developer, who may have used their own email to test the form during the development phase).
As we all know, the work doesn’t end with the launch of a website. If you really want to make a splash online, you’ll need to invest in an ongoing search engine optimisation campaign that will increase your reach and exposure over time.
To make sure you’re able to monitor your online performance, set up a Google Analytics account and link it to your website’s header to start tracking your site data from day one. The data generated by the software will give you valuable insight into where your traffic is coming from, how users are interacting with your pages, and how people are converting into genuine leads.
On-page SEO is of the essence because it plays a major role in how search engines like Google comprehend the content on your webpage.
In light of this, it’s is your job to ensure that all the content on your webpage is optimised from a subset of chosen keywords. Once this is enforced, you will find it easy to rank higher in SERP.
When you don’t have good onpage SEO, it becomes harder for you to stand out in your industry. This is especially true when you consider that there’s every possibility that your competitors have already optimised their pages to rank higher in search results.
While you may have a compelling backlink profile and awesome content, you may find yourself overshadowed by others simply because your webpage falls short in onpage SEO.
The most vital part of onpage SEO are the actual keywords you decide to target. If the keywords you select are too competitive, you’ll be inhibiting your chances to rank, irrespective of how well you optimise your page. To get a better understanding of what keywords are good to target for your London based business, we recommend to hire an SEO consultant as they will have extensive knowledge and know exactly what keywords are too competitive.
If you don’t then it’s important to conduct proper keyword research. When you do this, you’ll be able to find the best phrases with the highest search volume that you can target.
Having identified which keywords you’ll go with, your onpage SEO strategy needs to be focused on optimising your webpage for those particular keywords and their semantic options.
It’s also worth documenting that you need to sort out your title tag, the header tag, image alts and optimisation in the content itself. ClickSlice can help with that if need.
Here’s a breakdown of the top Onpage SEO tools in the market.
As divulged earlier, keywords are critically important in SEO campaigns. Not only do they provide you with a target to aim for, but they also guide your optimisation efforts.
While all this sounds quite easy on paper, keyword research can be quite tasking, especially if all you have is the Google AdWords tool.
With Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer, you can ease the workload by a significant fraction. This SEO tool is quite handy in that it allows you to discover new keywords to target whilst showing you all the backlink data. The fact that it enables you to conduct comparison tests on different keywords makes this tool a gem.
A number of businesses use SEOCrawler as their key onpage SEO tool. The Site Auditor feature is probably their most impressive asset. With it, you can analyse a page in a swift manner and get updates on page speed, duplicate content, broken links, and keyword optimisation. Impressively, all this is provided in an instant.
With such automation features at your disposal, you can save plenty of time and divert your attention towards more lucrative ventures out there.
The Site Auditor feature also provides users with suggestions on how they can enhance their webpage for more effectiveness. With the changes made, you can monitor just how impactful the changes were on the Rank Tracker.
This neat tool is particularly useful if you’re outsourcing the services of a copywriter for your brand. Since Google favours original content, it’s imperative that the content that’s delivered to you is in no way duplicated from other platforms.
To get started with the tool, all you need to do is paste content into their editor and it will scan its records before letting you know just how unique the copy is.
Cognizant of the fact that an increasing number of people conduct internet searches on their phones, Google has upped the ante by introducing page speed as part of their ranking factors.
In today’s world, websites have to ensure that their pages load fast. When they do, they’re likely to win over a significant section of the mobile community. If you’re looking to rank favourably with mobile users, it’s up to you to ensure that your pages load swiftly after launch.
You can make use of the Google PageSpeed Insight tool to analyse just how fast your page is. The tool does a great job of suggesting a couple of improvement areas that can take your page to the next level and rank higher in SERP’s.
This tool does a great job of analysing your webpage and notifying you just how it compares to their specially curated checklist of SEO factors. After analysis, the tool gives you a result that indicates the overall grade of your website with suggestions on how to make enhancements.
The real beauty of Moz On-Page Grader is that it has an intuitive design which makes it the perfect tool for novices. If you’re looking for a tool that will guide you through the ropes of onpage SEO, this is the best way to get acquainted.
Social media marketing is the canon that will fire your enterprise to success. That is right. Your current clients, the target audience, influencers and everyone else is on social media. 75% of male internet users and 83% of female internet users are on Facebook. 81% of the millennials check their Twitter accounts daily while 6 in 10 online adults are on Instagram.
What these figures mean is that all that your business needs to grow is leverage or appropriate social media marketing strategy. Reach the target audience, understand what clients want, and professionally answer their issues.
Well, you might say that your business is already on social media because you run an account there. But this is not all. You need to understand the social media dynamics, use all the available tools, and learn about the competitors in order to outdo them in their game. Digital marketers agree that social media is only opening up. Therefore, be part of this great train that is helping enterprises to grow rapidly. When social media marketing is implemented appropriately, here are the main benefits to anticipate.
Notably, social media is one of the most cost-effective online marketing tactics. When a good social media strategy is implemented, your brand gets greater recognition because it will get engaged in a broad range of audience of clients.
To get started on social media and start interacting with clients, you need to set up brand profiles. Then, ask the employees, sponsors, clients, and business partners to visit, like the page and start sharing it. By getting more people to interact with the business content, you will raise brand awareness and embark on a journey to grow its reputation.
To get more from social media marketing, you should consider investing ample time to study and know what the target clients want. Here, you also need to create content that can help visitors relate to the business more. Let us take an example of a business in the fitness industry. You need to create content that helps answer questions such as the best strategies to lose weight, great fitness strategies for the elderly, special recipes, and related content. The bottom-line is to understand the target audience and bridging the information gap.
If your enterprise is not using social media marketing, the inbound traffic will only come from usual clients. Those who are already cognizant of your brand are already searching for related keywords that your enterprise is ranked for. This means that it will ultimately become more difficult to reach new clients outside the common customer base.
Social media profiles add to the brand marketing mix that acts as the gateway to the website, blog and email marketing. Therefore, social media will act as a melting point to net different clients to your brand. By forming groups, following competitors, and guiding discussion about your industry or brand, social media offers the opportunity to showcase what the brand has and funnel traffic to the main site. To draw more traffic, use social media to shout about the latest offers, new info, coupons, and membership specials.
One of the main reasons for posting content to social media profile is driving traffic. It is also a unique way to raise ranking on social media. Though social media does not have a direct influence on search engine ranking, more than 58% of digital marketers indicate that posting great content on social media is directly correlated to better ranking on search engines. But how does it happen?
Today, everyone uses Google to search for information. In many cases, people searching on Google only open what is on the first page. If a business is featured on subsequent pages, people will rarely open it. But Google search algorithm has advanced so much and is interested in getting what delivers better UX to the front page of search pages. The algorithm follows carefully even what takes place on social media.
To get better ranking, make sure to craft high-quality content and integrate the keywords with specific targeted keywords. Content like case studies, blogs, articles, reviews, business info, employee reports, business location, and others will grow the brand community. In addition, it will often get featured by influencers. The search engine algorithm will not take long to figure out that the important content belongs to you and place it on top of SERPs.
Now that the social media marketing strategy has won the brand’s extra visibility, the business has more opportunities for conversion. For every post, video, image, or comment, all followers will become part of the traffic that could ultimately convert to sales.
As a marketer, the content and interaction should only be a first step in the long journey to driving sales. The next thing should be developing partnership and demonstrating why they should buy from you. Most social media marketers indicate that developing a relationship with clients on social media have a positive impact on direct sales.
Social media is the ideal tool and a force that your enterprise requires to grow traffic, enhance engagement, and drive conversions. It will further help to increase customer satisfaction, improved brand loyalty, enhance enterprise loyalty, and lower cost of marketing.
Are you using digital marketing in your enterprise? If the answer is no or unsure, know that you are lagging behind. The marketing niche is adrift. Traditional brick-and-mortar models no longer bring results. They are expensive, lengthy and unreliable.
Starting from 2017, marketing professionals are referring to the session as post-digital marketing period. In their study, Smart Insights found that most businesses already have some form of digital marketing.
About 34% have already integrated digital marketing into their marketing strategies while 17% do not have a digital strategy though they use several channels for online marketing.
Brands no longer broadcast their ads on television and sit back waiting for clients to come. Rather, they use digital marketing campaigns that help build communities around their enterprises to strengthen their image, sustain high sales and grow over time. In this post, we take a comprehensive look at digital marketing to demonstrate why now is the best time to start investing in digital marketing.
Digital marketing is an umbrella term used to refer to online marketing efforts through channels such as emails, social media, search engines, and websites to reach and connect with the target audience. Good digital marketing strategies involve understanding
where your target clients are and reaching them using the best strategies. Some great digital marketing strategies include;
Other digital marketing strategies include social media marketing, Google Ads, Search Engine Optimisation, email marketing, and marketing automation.
Even as digital marketing takes root and its benefits become evident, many businesses still opt to go the traditional way. However, it comes as a rude shock when the target clients find alternatives that are more reliable, direct and satisfying. Here are some great reasons why you need to put more investment to digital marketing.
To succeed in the current highly competitive marketing environment, investing in digital marketing is not an option. It is the best way to fire an enterprise and keep the fire for faster growth burning. When implemented appropriately, digital marketing guarantees the highest return on investment.
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