Digital Marketing Archives

11 LinkedIn Prospecting Mistakes Costing You Valuable Future Customers

Courting a romantic interest and connecting with a potential customer are similar in many ways. You have to anticipate their needs and take the right steps to build a long-lasting connection. Otherwise, the relationship will fizzle out before you know it.

To take your business to the next level, it’s crucial to identify prospects and get them interested in your products and services. However, cold emails and unsolicited calls hardly ever make a positive impression.

In today’s digital world, it’s time to leverage social networking platforms to your advantage. In particular, LinkedIn has emerged as one of the most effective ways to nurture and strengthen customer relationships.

Whether you are new to the platform or your past attempts to win over buyers have failed, here are some blunders costing you valuable prospects. Let’s dive in. Read More

Reputation Management vs. Search Engine Optimization: What’s the Difference?

These days, it seems like you can’t get by without a solid digital marketing strategy. According to data collected by SEO Tribunal, in 1998, Google served only 10,000 queries per day. That number skyrocketed to 3.3 billion daily searches in 2012, and as of 2016, stands at over 5.4 billion daily searches.

These staggering figures serve to prove that consumers are looking overwhelmingly to search engines to find the answers to informational and transactional questions. The intent behind these queries is incredibly valuable, as they provide instantaneous insight into buyer intent, or where searchers fall in the sales funnel—an intangible concept that has traditionally been the bane of a marketer’s existence. The amount of money on the table has led companies from the largest enterprise organizations to challenge e-commerce brands to funnel large portions of their marketing budget into optimizing their site content to rank better in search engine results pages for specific queries (SERPs).

At a minimum, 75% of clicks go to content on the first page of Google results, according to a study on Google organic click-through rates. What’s more, the majority of that percentage goes to the higher-ranked content, and decreasing exponentially the further you scroll (33% of traffic to the first result, 15% to the second, and just 9% to the third result, respectively).

As an e-commerce business, your survival depends on visibility in organic search. You can’t afford to rank poorly for product-specific and branded keywords because the combined search volume behind those queries is what drives sustained organic traffic to your site.

But what if I told you that there was more to organic search than optimizing on-page content or building backlinks? Customers are also searching for your brand name in any combination of ways, and what they find can greatly influence purchase decisions. Buyer perception matters, which is why eCommerce brands need to pay attention to their branded search results.

“Facebook business page optimization… What does that even mean? I just fill out the details and I should be good to go, right?”

A lot of online business owners think about Facebook optimization. Indeed, it can seem that simply creating a page there – just like you do with your personal account – is enough for a decent web presence, but it’s really not. Certainly not in early 2020.

Today, your business needs to optimize their presence on every online platform, be it a social media website or a business directory. Facebook has a special place here because of the wide popularity of the platform (your target customers are certainly using it).

In this article, you’re going to learn how to optimize your Facebook business page for more sales by going beyond just “filling out the details.”

#1. Get Facebook Page Name Right

“So how you can this wrong? Just type your business’s name and you’re done.”

Again, that’s how many business owners think about this. Just “typing the name of your business” is not optimization!

Let me explain.

Let’s suppose that your name is Samantha Brown and you’re a real estate agent working in Los Angeles (fancy!). At your Facebook business page, you just “typed your name,” so its title doesn’t really differ from your personal page.

That might be a good idea if at least everyone in the tri-state area knows you by name so they don’t really need a lot of time to find you (they just look for your name on Google).

But what if you’re not a well-known business?

In this case, limiting your Facebook Business page’s name to your name is a really bad idea because people generally don’t search for names when looking for realtors.

They look for realtors.

This means they use keywords like “a real estate agent in Los Angeles” to find a person that can help them with finding real estate in that city.

Long story short, your Facebook business page name should also contain keywords that describe your business and are used by your target customers to find you online regardless of the search engine.

Here’s an example. Cindy Ambuehl, a real estate agent from Los Angeles, has the keyword “realtor” in the name as well as the hashtag needed to find her on Facebook or Messenger.

Over the last few years, consumer behavior has changed. For local businesses, having a good restaurant, a cafe or a comic book shop isn’t enough to attract more customers. It’s important to spread the word about your business online as a business’s online reputation impacts customer purchase decisions.

One BrightLocal report says that 90% of customers use the internet to find a local business,

82% read online reviews for local businesses, and the average consumer spends around 14 minutes reading reviews before making a decision.

Today, over one billion people are active on Instagram every single month and 90% of them follow at least one business on the platform, so it’s more likely your local customers use Instagram, too. Thus, it’s no wonder that Instagram is testing the local business profile feature to help local businesses attract their customers in-app. And if you want to make the most out of Instagram, let’s find out what is an Instagram business profile and how to use it for local marketing.

Social media platforms are perhaps the most important marketing arena for any business in the modern world. These platforms allow you to micro-target your marketing and send razor-sharp messages that cut through all the other noise. Unfortunately, some so-called black hat social media marketing techniques, such as running fake Pinterest accounts with fake IP addresses, are starting to ruin the internet. Let’s take a look at how these black hat techniques are exploiting social media as well as affecting search engines.

Content marketing is arguably an empowering medium to target and engages the right audience.

Though content marketing has been impactful, marketers still grapple to find the suitable content to strike the right chord among their prospects and target audience. Simply churning out volumes of the content does not serve the purpose of attracting the right customers. The success of a content marketing strategy lies in identifying the exact needs of the audience and delivering content to them through the right medium.

Due to the high volume of content availability, some pieces may get lost and never see the light of day. So what kind of content can help attract the maximum number of prospects?

Interactive content takes charge of this aspect and ensures to provide marketers with supercharged results.

Undoubtedly, interactive content is a driving force for marketing strategies. So let us delve into its intricacies and know how it can help businesses boost their conversion rates.

In today’s world, smartphones are, perhaps, a necessity and not a luxury anymore. Unsurprisingly, the feasible and handy phones have outnumbered desktops when it comes to online searching. Various statistics show ever-increasing use of mobile devices for searching for different content.

In a recent survey, Global Stats analyzed the worldwide market share of mobiles, desktop, and tablets. The results show that nearly 52% of searches come from mobile, 45% from desktops and only 4% from tablets.

The data translates into the fact that your website has to be optimized for mobile phones. If that’s not the case with your WordPress site, then you are likely to lose half of the online traffic worldwide.

Significance of Mobile SEO

WordPress is one of the best Content Management Systems (CMS) in the market. Certainly, it is an effective CMS for SEO and enhancing your search rankings. Perhaps, you have also built a WordPress site for your business.

Thanks to the worldwide increase in mobile usage, Google made some noteworthy changes and released Pigeon Update in 2015. The aim was to provide mobile-optimized websites for higher search rankings. In case you don’t know, for determining a website’s ranking in the search engine, Google has now shifted to Mobile-first indexing.

If the mobile version of your WordPress site is poorly optimized, your site will have a low ranking in SERPs. So, the better your WordPress site is structured, the higher your search rankings; it is also essential for better usability.

Now that you know the importance of mobile optimization, let’s find out how to audit your WordPress Mobile SEO.

In today’s marketing world, the words on everyone’s lips are ‘sentiment analysis.’ As businesses strive to get ahead of the competition by earwigging on their customers – and potential customers – sentiment analysis is rapidly rising up the ranks to become the most important tool in a marketer’s arsenal. It’s no wonder then that there are so many different tools out there as software companies race to get on board with this hot new trend. Sieving through all of these tools can be time-consuming and frustrating when, having chosen the right one, you discover that it’s outside of your budget. Here are eight best sentiment analysis tools by range to allow you to choose the right tool.

Consumers of today’s age are more empowered than ever before. They have tons of questions and zero tolerance for generic push marketing. In a nutshell, they absolutely hate being sold to.

Enter: Storyteller marketing, an unconventional marketing strategy that weaves gripping narratives to help your audience think –

As Joe Lazauskas, an expert storyteller says, “Good stories surprise us. They make us think and feel. They stick in our minds and help us remember ideas and concepts in a way that a PowerPoint crammed with bar graphs never can.”

Now, while storytelling works, successfully implementing it in your marketing is no easy feat. In fact, successfully storytelling demands creativity, genuine vision, and an a-level consistency to connect with difficult consumers of 2019.

You cannot just improvise a boring story and use it as a sales pitch to attract customers. An impactful story must be emotionally engaging and focused on customers.

So in this article, I’ll answer all the questions you’ve ever had regarding storyteller marketing and further share strategies to implement.

So let’s dive in.

Today, it’s a common practice for a business, no matter how big or small, to be actively present on social media. Some businesses even have several social media accounts to maximize their social media presence and exposure by posting brand content.

A Quick Intro to Brand Content

Brand content is content linked to a brand and represents a brand’s values, core message, and has the following characteristics:

Focus on the brand’s values. Rather than putting a product first, brand content is mainly focused on what a brand represents. This is one of the aspects that make brand content so memorable.
The main goal is to generate conversion. Since brand content seeks to have an impact on the target audience, it aims at increasing conversion rates as a result.
Added value for the audience. Another goal of the brand content is not just to represent the values of a brand but to bring value to the target audience as well.

It is important to remember that brand content is NOT product-oriented and NOT invasive. The purpose of creating brand content is for the target audience to consume it voluntarily and to help a brand stay recognizable and competitive in an increasingly saturated market.

Brand Content: Crunching the Numbers

Besides using brand content to stand out from the competitors, businesses invest in brand content for a number of important reasons:

branded content is 22 times more engaging than display ads
investing in brand content results in 86% brand recall
consumers are 14% more likely to check out a brand that has brand content
brand content is crucial for social media campaigns, with 74% of brands supporting this claim

It all sounds very easy appealing until you start writing your brand content, which is the most challenging part. There are a lot of temptations, including over-advertising your product or putting your ambitions before

So, to make the process of writing brand content more planned and organized, let’s take a look at our step-by-step guide.