Thursday, December 27, 2018
Video Marketing Strategy - 2019
Top 3 Tips to Get Your Video Marketing Strategy Ready for 2019
If you own a smartphone, you have been consuming video content in almost every single task you do on your phone during your waking hours. For example, a quick scroll of your Instagram feed will give you a tour of Insta stories, popular videos from influencers you follow on IGTV, carousel ads from brands in your feed, and instream video ads as well. Video has seeped into all avenues possible!
In fact, in our mobile-first world, research has shown that the internet is set to catch up to television in 2019 in terms of hours of video watched. According to a study, people will be spending 2.6 hours a day online, and 2.7 hours a day watching the tube in 2019. The study also reports that an average person will spend 45 minutes of her time on the internet watching mobile videos in 2019. As a marketer, you wouldn’t want to miss out on that low-hanging fruit.
On-Site SEO | Tips and Strategy
Seven Simple Strategies to Improve Your On-Site SEO
Effectively improving your on-site SEO represents one of the highest-ROI activities you can perform for your business. Driving thousands of visitors to your site each month on autopilot is a great way to build up a passive income stream. All business owners dream of this, but many of them fail to implement the correct strategies to do so. From internal linking to keyword research and visual content, this article will guide you through seven simple but effective SEO strategies that provide great bang for your buck.
Develop an internal linking strategy
SEO very much follows the 80/20 rule in the sense that 80% (or more) of your website traffic will find your site through 20% of your total posts. When you have one of these posts that the search engines seem to love, utilize this to your advantage through internal linking. A high ranking on a competitive search term means that Google sees your content as a high authority within your niche. Including internal links to your lesser performing content is an excellent way to increase your site traffic.
Internal linking is very powerful yet is often overlooked by most in the digital marketing community. Think about it like this. If you don't think highly enough of your own content to link to it, how do you expect Google to find it? Especially with a high performing post, you should now have a consistent stream of visitors each month. By linking to other posts on your site, you can send these engaged visitors to more of your content, decreasing your bounce rate in the process.
Use a keyword research tool
Writing engaging long-form content is a time-consuming process. Before you start, it's important to do some research and find exactly what potential customers in your niche are searching for. If you're on a budget, a solid free way to do this is with the Keyword Planner on Google adwords. This will provide a strong insight as to the monthly searches and competition for certain keywords that you're looking to target.
A good keyword research tool will even uncover related keywords that may be even easier to rank for. Combine this with the excellent free Google Trends tool and you'll gain a historical look at different keywords over time, effectively gauging them to see if they're worth pursuing. An alternative to this outsourcing this keyword research to a specialist SEO services provider with the knowledge and experience to get you even better results.
Thursday, November 22, 2018
Saturday, November 10, 2018
Voice Search Optimization Tips | Marketing Strategy
Six Essential Tips For Voice Search Optimization
Here are six voice search optimization tips to set you up for marketing success in the years to come.
1. Understand the language.
There’s a difference in how people formulate voice searches versus how they construct text-based search queries. When you’re typing something into a search engine, you’re likely stringing keywords together and most sites are optimized for that type of search. Think “Italian food San Diego.”
But when you’re talking to a human-sounding machine, like Alexa or Siri, you’re likely to address it the way you would a human being -- in complete sentences. For example, you might ask your device, “Where can I find the best spaghetti alla puttanesca near me?”
This means Italian restaurants (and every other sort of business out there) need to optimize their content for this new type of search by including more long-tail keywords and complete sentences that answer specific questions.
2. Be conversational.
Piggybacking on the use of complete sentences is the growing importance of conversational language. The user asking their voice device a question is likely using a fairly conversational tone, and your site needs to respond in a similar fashion.
In fact, Google tells its raters to evaluate voice search results by how well the spoken response answers a user’s query, as well as how it sounds. And believe me, you don’t want your content to sound like a machine wrote it! There are other factors involved in the rating, including grammatical correctness and length, but these are the two biggest ones you need to keep in mind when optimizing your website for voice search.
3. Optimize content for answering questions.
What’s your No. 1 reason for using the internet -- aside from looking up memes and cute cat videos? Most of the time, you’re probably searching for information. As stated above, those using voice search are more likely to use some form of long-tail keyword phrase or question.
To capitalize on this growing trend, you’ll need to collect as many questions about your industry as possible, then do your best to answer those questions across all your marketing channels. The more voice-optimized content you have on those channels, the more likely they are to get picked up by search engines and fed through voice search devices.
SEO Tips For 2019
4 SEO Tips to Start the New Year Off Right
One of the most vital things you can do to boost your SEO in 2019 is to plan ahead. When it comes time to deliver content, you don’t want to jump in when everyone else is getting clicks and mining popular keywords for rank.
The sooner you write targeted content, the more likely it is to rank when that topic becomes relevant. Have you ever noticed before new games and movies come out you’ll often see a ton of articles about the topic?
Let’s look at the latest blockbuster game – Red Dead Redemption 2. It launched for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on October 26, 2018, and grossed a stunning $750 million in 3 days — making it the second highest 3-day sales on an entertainment product ever, according to Fortune.
It was predicted that Red Dead 2 was going to do this well. Months before it released articles popped up along the lines of “10 Things We Want from Red Dead Redemption 2.” The goal? When this inevitable “boom” happened, these content creators wanted to be ahead of the game. They used the keywords “Red Dead Redemption 2” before anyone else so that they could rank high once the game released.
Plan ahead for all of your content. Write a few holiday articles months in advance, make sure you’re always a couple of months ahead of the trend if you want to rank going into 2019.
Saturday, October 20, 2018
Social Media Tips
7 social media tips from top CEOs
Many of today's top CEOs maintain active accounts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and even Instagram.
Because of the strong influence they have within their given industry, their presence is highly curated. Here are tips organizations and business professionals can take from these leaders to develop their own social media presence.
Tim Cook, CEO of Apple
The only verified presence of Tim Cook on any form of social media is on Twitter. He uses this account to make statements about current events and clarify what Apple is doing to help.
A recent example is his response to the earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia and an announcement that the company would be making a donation to aid in the recovery process. Cook’s other tweets announce and promote new products, expansions and partnerships. He also interacts with Apple’s audience via retweets with hashtags such as #ShotOniPhone.
As a well-known CEO, his lack of presence on other platforms makes followers focus their attention on this one outlet, which makes it seem exclusive.
The lesson: You don’t need to be on every social media platform to have success.
Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors
GM CEO Mary Barra is on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The overarching theme from a quick analysis of her social media channels is consistency. All of her profiles post the same articles with a similar message tailored to that specific platform; in addition, she uses the same profile picture on both her Twitter and Facebook accounts.
One notable variation is that Barra posts messages of condolence for prominent figures and icons who have passed away on her Twitter. This uniformity makes her profiles more recognizable as well as on-brand and true to the message both she and her company want to portray to the world.
The lesson: Be consistent across all social media channels.
SEO | Marketing Tips
15 Common SEO Mistakes To Avoid
Understanding SEO is the ultimate marketing discipline, especially in today's highly digital world. If you want to drive traffic to your site and increase sales, you have to keep up with the ever-changing search engine algorithms.
Here are 15 common mistakes to avoid.
1. Ignoring Your 'Google My Business' Listing
One critical SEO error is not claiming or properly managing Google My Business listings. With Google continuing to place importance on “near me” searches, the single biggest opportunity for small businesses is to claim their location, provide all info and answer questions that come in. - Brian Sullivan, Sullivan Branding
2. Only Focusing On On-Site SEO
Most businesses still believe that SEO is just done on-site. Optimizing your website is a major component to ranking but you cannot overlook off-site strategies. It is essential that all businesses create engaging content for other websites. You need to allocate some time every month to having content placed on other websites that is keyword rich and has links pointing to your website. - Scott Darrohn, fishbat Media, LLC.
3. Overlooking Page Titles And Meta Descriptions
Too many times, I see websites with "Home" as the page title. Fixing your page titles and adding meta descriptions are such an easy thing to correct and so important to SEO. Most website CMS systems have the ability to change this by default but are normally overlooked when a small business owner is building their own website. - Thomas Brodbeck, Site Strategics
4. Not Running Regular Website Audits
An audit reviews your website's performance from the client's point of view and from the view of a search engine. Is site navigation user-friendly? Is relevant information easy to find? How quickly does the mobile version launch? Careful examination reveals ways to improve the site. An audit looks at search engine optimization, loading speed, the checkout process, content quality and so much more. - Jason Hall, FiveChannels Marketing
5. Leaving Old URL Structures In Place When Redesigning A Site
A common mistake that has a huge impact on SEO comes from revamping a website without redirecting traffic from old URLs to new ones. We use a 301 map that maps old URLs to new URLs. Then, we set up redirects in a staging environment, pre-launch. If you change the URL of a highly trafficked page, Google won't know where to send that web searcher and you will lose that SEO traffic. - Ben LeDonni, CreativeMMS
6. Placing Important Text In Images Rather Than On The Page
It is easy to make something look nice in an image instead of actually coding the effects around the text. The problem here is that search algorithms look for text and can't read the text inside images. Content is king, and you need to have words on your page to get indexed. - Omar Jenblat, BusySeed
SEO | Website Marketing | Strategy
5 ways ignoring SEO could affect your bottom line
Anyone who has tried to make the case for investing in Search Engine Optimization to a client, boss, or colleague, will be all too familiar with the common objections: it’s too unpredictable, PPC is better, it takes too long, etc.
There’s a common misconception that the financial benefits of SEO are not as clear as say, social media or PPC. But anyone familiar with SEO knows that it is highly measurable and in most cases even better value for money than both social media and PPC.
And, many businesses seem to have realized this: In 2016, Borrell and Associates predicted that the SEO industry would reach $80 billion a year in revenue by 2020.
A well thought-out SEO strategy will bring more qualified traffic to your website. Quality content tailored to the needs of your customers will bring a higher conversion rate. These things are well known. But ignoring SEO altogether doesn’t just mean losing a few sales here and there: it can be risky or potentially disastrous financially.
Here are five ways that it could affect your bottom line…
Saturday, October 13, 2018
Saturday, September 15, 2018
SEO | Google | Algorithms
How Brands Can Optimize SEO With Google's Evolving Algorithm
In the world of SEO, technological innovations are constantly driving ideas forward. There are a number of things that are evolving in SEO -- first of which is voice search. Since the inception of Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s voice assistant, people are constantly searching for what they need by physically asking their devices for information.
Optimize for voice search.
For instance, people pose inquiries such as "local Chinese restaurants near me” and expect to see Google results of Chinese restaurants in their area. SEO experts, content writers, webmasters and business owners need to make sure they are creating content that will answer these types of questions while still using the appropriate schema markup. Basically, your website needs to include the right words in order to help search engines return more detailed results. Everything from headlines to subheadlines can impact SEO rankings.
Consider mobile first.
Google is further adapting to the evolution of SEO through mobile-first indexing. Google announced that it will first look at a website's mobile version before its desktop version to best decide how the site should be indexed and ranked. Some web designers create a site without first checking how it looks on mobile screens. This includes not only cell phones but tablets, too. However, it’s imperative that webmasters and business owners ensure their websites are mobile-ready and user-friendly on handheld devices.
Furthermore, mobile site speed is going to be an important factor in mobile-first indexing. Web pages that take a while to load on a mobile device may suffer from lower rankings on Google because of the slow speed to get there.
In the past, Google only looked at backlinks and content as the primary factors for deciding search engine rankings. Now, Google is using its artificial intelligence (AI), RankBrain, to decide how websites should rank based on how many visitors come to the site, how many leave the site and how long they stay on the site. They’re also starting to look at how often a company’s brand is mentioned without having a backlink. Because of this, it’s possible that we’ll see brand mentions becoming a more important factor in SEO algorithms.
SEO 2018 | Google Search
SEO 2018 is All About Branded Search Queries
SEO pioneer and Moz co-founder Rand Fishkin was recently asked about the future of SEO and how SEO agencies and marketers should adjust to these changes. Rands says that SEO has changed to the point that the traditional SEO focus on generic related keywords for your products and services is becoming obsolete because of how Google now displays search results.
See below for highlights from Rand's thoughts on the changing SEO landscape:
There is definitely this problem in the SEO space where the amount of opportunity in SEO (is lessened), because of Google entering all these business sectors and taking away of a lot of the clicks and trying to solve the searchers' query before they ever click.
This means that you just don't have as much opportunity to earn search clicks from this search engine anymore.
Tuesday, September 4, 2018
Saturday, September 1, 2018
Social Media | Tips For Businesses
Best Social Media Tips for Businesses
Social media isn’t just for personal use anymore. Businesses small and large have been using platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn for years – to the benefit of their bottom lines. And, if your business is struggling to make an impact, it’s time to make a change.
With 70 percent of the US population claiming at least one social media account, lagging behind on social media is no longer an option if you want to grow as a business. However, constantly changing algorithms and increasingly savvy competitors admittedly make it hard to find your audience, particularly without a little advice.
That’s why getting a few tips from experts can do wonders for your next campaign. Take a look at what we found to be the most helpful social media tips out there today and reach your audience.
Social Media Tips Businesses Should Follow
There’s no one-size-fits-all path to social media success, whether you’re an individual or a business. However, following a few core principles can make all the difference.
To find out the best social media tips for businesses, the experts you should look towards are social media management companies. These firms make social media success their lifeblood. Companies such as Hootsuite, Buffer and Sprout Social exist to help businesses connect with their audiences more intelligently via social media.
What emerges is a simple seven-step formula for social media success:
Focus Groups | Marketing Strategy
Focus groups are the solution to improving marketing results
One of the main reasons why many new products fail is because marketers fall prey to the concept of “one-size-fits-all.” It simply doesn’t work in marketing. 65 to 75 percent of new products have failed to generate the anticipated revenue or profit due to a one-size-fits-all approach.
If you want to improve your marketing results, customer segmentation is the solution. Segmentation plays a vital role in marketing. Each customer is different, with individual needs and preferences, so you need to treat them differently. This is fact that remains regardless of the industry you are in.
So rather than approaching all of your customers in the same way, it’s always better to put them in separate groups. You can group them based on their behavior, psychographics, demographics, or geographical information.
This will help you create a more personalized messaging for your customers that connects better and drives greater revenue.
SEO | SEO Tips - Online Marketing
How to Quickly Bolster Your SEO Results Organically
With 51% of website traffic coming from organic search, 10% from paid search and 5% from social, it's critical to ensure you're doing all you can to bolster your website’s ranking in Google’s search engine. There are a few powerful techniques communicators can implement to elevate their brand's voice and increase website exposure organically.
1. Improve Page Speed
This might not be the first thing you think of when considering SEO, but it is one of the most important ranking factors. People won't wait for your site to load. A mobile site is almost guaranteed to lose traffic should it take longer than 3 seconds to load.
Sometimes we lose sight of what Google's end goal is as a search engine. It wants to solve users' problems as fast as possible and provide a great user experience since this is what directly influences the search engine's bottom line. If your page is ranking high, but takes 10-15 seconds to load, Google will notice. It will notice the second-ranked page takes 2-3 seconds to load and your stellar rankings will be gone.
To improve your page-load speed reduce the size of image files. In addition eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content, avoid landing page redirects and leverage browser caching.
2. Optimize Title Tags and Meta Descriptions to Improve Click-Through-Rates (CTRs)
The importance of CTR is growing as a top ranking signal. Again, Google wants to provide the best user experience. Therefore, if an article ranked #1 sees a big drop in CTR and the second-ranked article experiences an increase, expect Google to re-order them.
To improve your CTR, ensure you set an optimized meta description and title for each page. The description attribute is a short, helpful summary of your page’s content. It’s a primary piece of information searchers use to decide which result to click on, so having an intuitive, concise and relevant description is key. Search results limit the number of characters they display for meta descriptions. It’s considered best practice to keep them to a maximum of 300 characters.
Page titles also are critical to give searchers quick insight into the content of a search result. It’s a primary piece of information used to decide which result to click on, so it's important to use high-quality, descriptive titles. Keep page titles to 10-70 characters.
Small Business | SEO
How small businesses can see big results with foundational SEO
Whether you are just starting on your search engine optimization (SEO) journey or have been at it for years, there’s a good chance some part of your site can be improved. In fact, from the hundreds of small business websites we look at every year at Bowler Hat (my agency), it is rare we see a site implementing SEO perfectly and completely.
Search engine optimization is not rocket science for any site, small and local businesses included. Yet, it is easy to get lost in trivial details before the essential, basic steps are put in place. This means for most businesses, there are easy wins on the table.
In SEO, as with many business endeavors, the Pareto Principle rings true:
…” for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.”
This is definitely accurate when we look at SEO for smaller businesses. Getting 20 percent of the work done to get 80 percent of the benefits is key to getting an early return from your SEO efforts. Let’s look at the basics and how to use that 20 percent to score easy wins you can put in place today.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO can get, well, technical. Yet, don’t let the term scare you. If you make smart decisions at the outset, then much of the technical work is taken care of by your website hosting and website software.
Selecting a search-engine-friendly content management system (CMS) like WordPress will ensure you have a technically sound base for your SEO efforts. With the right kind of CMS in place, you will then want to ensure you host the site in an optimized environment.
In some recent testing we conducted, we compared a basic WordPress site on a standard web hosting to an optimized environment. The optimized environment did much of the technical optimization required to speed up WordPress. The physical file size was reduced by two thirds and loading time was reduced to one second from three.
All of this was done by making smart decisions rather than doing lots of work and performing manual optimization.
Or, 20 percent effort, 80 percent results.
The primary takeaway here is to make informed choices regarding your website content management system and hosting environment. Get this right, and the complexity melts away.
Saturday, August 18, 2018
Saturday, July 14, 2018
Why Your Business Needs a Website
4 Reasons to Have a Website For Your Business
Marketing Tool
A business website acts as your marketing tool 24x7. Your website is available to the public at all times, at their convenience. As a business owner, whether you are awake or sleeping, available or travelling, you will always have your business website where people can come and learn more about your business.
Selling and pitching to the right people at the right time is a difficult task. Having a website also makes it easier to launch products, put out announcements, and other marketing activities. Your business also enables your customer to stay connected with your brand at all times, including non-working hours. Unlike offline stores, your website does not have opening and closing hours.
Make your Business Discoverable
More than 2.4 billion people use the Internet and approximately 90% of people contact companies online before making a purchase. If your business does not have a website, there are high chances that you are losing out on opportunities that can help grow your business.
Having a website makes you more discoverable on the Internet. If your website is well-optimized and search engine friendly, your target audience is bound to discover you. If you have a website, not only will people find you, but will also learn more about your business and make an informed purchase decision. It also means a better ROI for your business thus more profit and growth.
Saturday, June 23, 2018
Marketing Strategies | Big Data
Why Marketing Strategies Need to Use Big Data
Every data scientists and marketer will acknowledge that their industry is increasingly volatile. An influx of new trends, mixed with previously unseen customer behaviour (both actions and reactions), is the reason why every company should focus on forging a better and more efficient plan.
Using big data as a starting point of one’s strategy will allow having a better view of existing options. By compiling data about ones modus operandi, as well as customer reactions, it becomes evident what works and what does not.
Knowing what doesn’t function will make every planning period much easier, as the probability of error decreases.
SEO: AI, Artificial Intelligence, Automation
Supercharging your SEO with AI: Insights, automation and personalization
Recently, I had the pleasure of presenting at SMX London on Supercharging your SEO with AI and thought I would share some of the insights with Search Engine Land readers.
Google made global headlines with the demonstration of its new Duplex at this year’s I/O developers conference. This artificial intelligence (AI) system can “converse” in natural language with people to schedule an appointment at a hair salon or book a table at a restaurant, for example.
To pass the Turing Test, AI must behave in a manner indistinguishable from that of a human. To many, Google Duplex has proven that it can pass this test, but in truth, we are only seeing the beginnings of its future potential.
Content Marketing | SEO Strategy
Why Content Marketing Is a Fool-Proof SEO Strategy Today
The search engine optimization (SEO) market changes all the time. As search engines implement smarter algorithms, it’s not enough to produce low-quality content in the hope that it sways crawlers to your favor.
In fact, SEO now requires human touch, as well as more financial and creative resources than ever before.
Fortunately, SEO experts can take advantage of many different tools that are created precisely with these new requirements in mind. One of them is a content marketing platform called marketin9 that helps marketers publish sponsored articles on websites.
SEO Strategy - SEO Tips | Optimize For Google
Best Ways To Improve Your SEO And Why You Need To Do It
In today’s hyperconnected world and highly competitive business environment, it’s crucial for a business to be able to reach its target audience online with its core message, products and services or latest promotions.
This is where search engine optimization comes (SEO) in. If done right, and in combination with other marketing and technical strategies, SEO can help your business get good rankings and land on the front page of Google search. And with the front page of Google receiving 95% of all web traffic, while other pages receive 5% or even less, you really need your organization to rank as high as possible.
Saturday, June 2, 2018
Digital Marketing Tips For Small Businesses
4 Ways Your Small Business Can Thrive Using Digital Marketing
These four tips will help you lay the groundwork for an effective digital marketing strategy.
According to the latest census figures, there are more than 27.9 million small businesses operating nationwide. which provides nearly half of the private-sector employment. The census data also showed that small firms accounted for 64 percent of net new job creation between 1993 and 2011. It’s clear from these numbers that small businesses are the engine powering the American economy.
Today digital marketing acts as leveling force for small businesses around the world. When executed well, the right campaign can put even the tiniest business in front of the right buyers at exactly the right time. Now small businesses can compete directly with large firms, so long as they offer a quality product at a fair price.
How do small business owners lay the groundwork for an effective digital marketing strategy?
Start with the digital marketing basics
The DIY instinct is at the core of most small business owners, and when it comes to digital marketing, many of the basics can be handled in-house. With that in mind, here are the first four things you should do to get your digital marketing operation off the ground.
READ MORE >>
These four tips will help you lay the groundwork for an effective digital marketing strategy.
According to the latest census figures, there are more than 27.9 million small businesses operating nationwide. which provides nearly half of the private-sector employment. The census data also showed that small firms accounted for 64 percent of net new job creation between 1993 and 2011. It’s clear from these numbers that small businesses are the engine powering the American economy.
Today digital marketing acts as leveling force for small businesses around the world. When executed well, the right campaign can put even the tiniest business in front of the right buyers at exactly the right time. Now small businesses can compete directly with large firms, so long as they offer a quality product at a fair price.
How do small business owners lay the groundwork for an effective digital marketing strategy?
Start with the digital marketing basics
The DIY instinct is at the core of most small business owners, and when it comes to digital marketing, many of the basics can be handled in-house. With that in mind, here are the first four things you should do to get your digital marketing operation off the ground.
READ MORE >>
Online Marketing | Small Business Growth
10 Ways to Accelerate Your Online Marketing and Small Business Growth
Improve Quality, Productivity and Morale with Process Standardization
If your team is left to guess or figure out on their own how to best complete your company’s mission, it can lead to a lot of subpar work and confused employees. But if you utilize process standardization, you can improve several aspects of your business.
Inform Your Content Strategy Using SEO Insights
Content marketing may very well already be a part of your growth strategy. But if you want your content to be as effective as possible, you need informed insights.
Blog Less and Spend More on Technology to Improve SEO
Blogging has been considered a cornerstone of SEO for years. But it doesn’t have to be the only thing you focus on. To accelerate your traffic and online growth, Neil Patel suggests spending more on technology rather than focusing so much on blogging.
Include Influencer Marketing in Your Online Strategy
When you post content online, you’re only reaching your existing audience. But anyone beyond this group can be difficult to target — until now! Consider adding influencer marketing to your strategy as a way to increase your reach.
READ MORE >>
Improve Quality, Productivity and Morale with Process Standardization
If your team is left to guess or figure out on their own how to best complete your company’s mission, it can lead to a lot of subpar work and confused employees. But if you utilize process standardization, you can improve several aspects of your business.
Inform Your Content Strategy Using SEO Insights
Content marketing may very well already be a part of your growth strategy. But if you want your content to be as effective as possible, you need informed insights.
Blog Less and Spend More on Technology to Improve SEO
Blogging has been considered a cornerstone of SEO for years. But it doesn’t have to be the only thing you focus on. To accelerate your traffic and online growth, Neil Patel suggests spending more on technology rather than focusing so much on blogging.
Include Influencer Marketing in Your Online Strategy
READ MORE >>
Social Media Marketing | Tips and Trends
How To Make The Most Of Social Media Marketing
Social media helps grow your business because it's a super efficient way to bring potential customers in at the top of your marketing funnel, and it's also a great way to keep them engaged, and keep your brand top of mind.
You don’t need to maintain a social presence on every platform. Choose the ones that speak to and represent your brand the best. If you make beautiful handcrafted jewelry for example, Instagram is a great place to engage and interact with your followers and customers. If you’re a law firm, your brand will probably play best on Linkedin. Take the time to understand who you'll find on each platform and what kinds of topics play well.
Post early, post often, and keep posting. The algorithms of most social media platforms really favor accounts that are posting regularly, and your content is most likely to be seen in followers' feeds when you do so.
READ MORE >>
Social media helps grow your business because it's a super efficient way to bring potential customers in at the top of your marketing funnel, and it's also a great way to keep them engaged, and keep your brand top of mind.
You don’t need to maintain a social presence on every platform. Choose the ones that speak to and represent your brand the best. If you make beautiful handcrafted jewelry for example, Instagram is a great place to engage and interact with your followers and customers. If you’re a law firm, your brand will probably play best on Linkedin. Take the time to understand who you'll find on each platform and what kinds of topics play well.
Post early, post often, and keep posting. The algorithms of most social media platforms really favor accounts that are posting regularly, and your content is most likely to be seen in followers' feeds when you do so.
READ MORE >>
Marketing: People-Based
Everything You Need to Know about People-Based Marketing
Americans see anywhere from 4,000 - 10,000 ads per day. It sounds like a lot when you add it up, but when you start to think of all the places you see ads, it makes sense. Our lives are saturated with people vying for our attention. While not all ads are created equal, some can be helpful. Whether you're a B2B tech leader, an executive, or a travel blogger, we are all consumers of products in our off time. We may not enjoy being bombarded by ads, but most of us appreciate getting connected with products and services we need.
Similar to a journalist receiving an irrelevant pitch, today's consumer snubs their nose at a poorly placed ad. They have come to expect that if they leave something in their cart, that's ok because that website will be sure to send them an email or place that item in your Facebook feed. Similarly, consumers have begun to embrace alternative forms of communication, like sponsored content, native ads, and creative social media campaigns. All of these point to marketing trends favoring personalization and better targeting.
So what's next in the evolution of marketing? It's personalization on steroids: People-Based Marketing.
What is People-Based Marketing?
While consumer-driven content isn't new, people-based marketing is a new wave in the industry, pushing marketers to use personalized data resulting from recent developments in big data and analytics. According to BounceX, PBM is a strategic approach to marketing in which marketers target individual people, rather than groups, with relevant messaging across different channels and touchpoints. An optimized PBM strategy leverages both consumer identification for accuracy and automation for scale.
Shifting the focus from cookies to people, marketers of the future realize they have all the data at their fingertips. The good ones just know what to do with it.
READ MORE >>
Americans see anywhere from 4,000 - 10,000 ads per day. It sounds like a lot when you add it up, but when you start to think of all the places you see ads, it makes sense. Our lives are saturated with people vying for our attention. While not all ads are created equal, some can be helpful. Whether you're a B2B tech leader, an executive, or a travel blogger, we are all consumers of products in our off time. We may not enjoy being bombarded by ads, but most of us appreciate getting connected with products and services we need.
Similar to a journalist receiving an irrelevant pitch, today's consumer snubs their nose at a poorly placed ad. They have come to expect that if they leave something in their cart, that's ok because that website will be sure to send them an email or place that item in your Facebook feed. Similarly, consumers have begun to embrace alternative forms of communication, like sponsored content, native ads, and creative social media campaigns. All of these point to marketing trends favoring personalization and better targeting.
So what's next in the evolution of marketing? It's personalization on steroids: People-Based Marketing.
What is People-Based Marketing?
While consumer-driven content isn't new, people-based marketing is a new wave in the industry, pushing marketers to use personalized data resulting from recent developments in big data and analytics. According to BounceX, PBM is a strategic approach to marketing in which marketers target individual people, rather than groups, with relevant messaging across different channels and touchpoints. An optimized PBM strategy leverages both consumer identification for accuracy and automation for scale.
Shifting the focus from cookies to people, marketers of the future realize they have all the data at their fingertips. The good ones just know what to do with it.
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Voice Search | IoT | Marketing
Is Voice Set To Be The Next Big Thing In Marketing?
Voice-first technology is changing how consumers and businesses search for things they need. It's become more common to use the technology with mobile devices. Plus, with the advent of more virtual assistants like Alexa/Echo as well as Google and Apple's voice-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) devices, more marketers are realizing why they need to consider how they might use this technology in their marketing and advertising efforts.
Voice Assisted Searches On the Rise
Let's start with some statistics to illustrate how voice is changing consumer behavior. According to a recent Bright Local survey, 58% of consumers surveyed have used voice search to find local business information during the last 12 months. Consumers also want to be able to use voice search to do certain things. These include making reservations, getting prices on products and services, and confirming if a business has a particular item in stock.
According to statistics collected by Search Engine People, 20% of mobile searches on Google are done using voice. Other statistics find that half of U.S. smartphone users put voice assistants to work on a weekly basis. Also, 60.5 million people in the U.S. are already using digital assistants like Alexa to conduct searches and place orders. And, 87% of B2C marketers surveyed think virtual assistants and chat robots will play an integral role in consumer interaction by 2021.
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Voice-first technology is changing how consumers and businesses search for things they need. It's become more common to use the technology with mobile devices. Plus, with the advent of more virtual assistants like Alexa/Echo as well as Google and Apple's voice-enabled Internet of Things (IoT) devices, more marketers are realizing why they need to consider how they might use this technology in their marketing and advertising efforts.
Voice Assisted Searches On the Rise
Let's start with some statistics to illustrate how voice is changing consumer behavior. According to a recent Bright Local survey, 58% of consumers surveyed have used voice search to find local business information during the last 12 months. Consumers also want to be able to use voice search to do certain things. These include making reservations, getting prices on products and services, and confirming if a business has a particular item in stock.
According to statistics collected by Search Engine People, 20% of mobile searches on Google are done using voice. Other statistics find that half of U.S. smartphone users put voice assistants to work on a weekly basis. Also, 60.5 million people in the U.S. are already using digital assistants like Alexa to conduct searches and place orders. And, 87% of B2C marketers surveyed think virtual assistants and chat robots will play an integral role in consumer interaction by 2021.
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SEO - WordPress Plug-ins
4 WordPress plug-ins for SEO
The whole purpose of a content and social media strategy is to bring attention to your website. You can’t do that if you aren’t applying a solid SEO strategy. Guy Sheetrit, SEO expert and CEO at Over the Top SEO, recommends these Wordpress plugins to make that task easier—and the outcome more successful:
All in One SEO Pack. Makes it super simple to optimize your Wordpress site, even if you are a beginner to SEO. It provides support for Google Analytics, creates advanced canonical URLs to improve SEO value, and automatically generates metatags. It also sends notifications to search engines whenever you change your site.
Yoast SEO. Yoast is similar to All in One SEO pack, making optimization a cinch. It automatically generates title and meta descriptions and provides internal linking suggestions. Plus, you can optimize your webpages with keywords and synonyms. Another huge benefit: The bulk editor allows you to make large-scale edits to your site.
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The whole purpose of a content and social media strategy is to bring attention to your website. You can’t do that if you aren’t applying a solid SEO strategy. Guy Sheetrit, SEO expert and CEO at Over the Top SEO, recommends these Wordpress plugins to make that task easier—and the outcome more successful:
All in One SEO Pack. Makes it super simple to optimize your Wordpress site, even if you are a beginner to SEO. It provides support for Google Analytics, creates advanced canonical URLs to improve SEO value, and automatically generates metatags. It also sends notifications to search engines whenever you change your site.
Yoast SEO. Yoast is similar to All in One SEO pack, making optimization a cinch. It automatically generates title and meta descriptions and provides internal linking suggestions. Plus, you can optimize your webpages with keywords and synonyms. Another huge benefit: The bulk editor allows you to make large-scale edits to your site.
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SEO For Website | Website Marketing | Optimization Tips
How to Build a Strong SEO Foundation for a new Website
Having a search engine optimized site could be the difference between getting the traffic you want or remaining invisible. That means new websites need to build a strong SEO foundation from day one.
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Having a search engine optimized site could be the difference between getting the traffic you want or remaining invisible. That means new websites need to build a strong SEO foundation from day one.
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Tuesday, May 15, 2018
Blockchain | Marketing | Big Data | Business
What Blockchain Could Mean for Marketing
Companies are collecting more data than ever before, and are making significant business decisions based on it. Of the 4 Vs of Big Data (Volume, Velocity, Variety, and Veracity), we have now seen ample evidence of the impact and importance of the first three. A higher “Volume” of data has led to more efficient decision-making in numerous instances, such as in programmatic marketing and in banking. Research has shown how leveraging high “Velocity” data — such as data from mobile devices — has unearthed knowledge that has helped firms better understand their customers. The significant potential of high “Variety” data — data that is unstructured in the form of text, images, videos, and so on — to make better predictions has been documented in numerous academic studies. But what about issues related to the accuracy, reliability, and transparency of the data itself, which basically comprises the fourth V, “Veracity”? In the field of data-driven marketing, an answer to addressing this limitation lies in blockchain technology.
In recent years, a major pain point for brands and advertisers has been the lack of transparency and accountability in being able to ascertain how their ad dollars have been spent. Digital advertising is complex, because ensuring that the media that was purchased was actually delivered as it was intended, is non-trival today. Ad fraud is pervasive, and costs marketers and publishers a significant amount of money. Forrester reports that as much as 56% of all display ad dollars were lost to fraudulent inventory in 2016. And the cost of ad fraud globally is expected to increase to $50 billion over the next decade. A recent study into the state of programmatic advertising revealed that 79% of advertisers surveyed expressed worries about transparency, with over a third regarding the lack of visibility on third parties as one of their key concerns. It’s why we are increasingly hearing that major brands like P&G have cut their ad budgets, because their media agencies failed to give them the transparency they needed.
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Companies are collecting more data than ever before, and are making significant business decisions based on it. Of the 4 Vs of Big Data (Volume, Velocity, Variety, and Veracity), we have now seen ample evidence of the impact and importance of the first three. A higher “Volume” of data has led to more efficient decision-making in numerous instances, such as in programmatic marketing and in banking. Research has shown how leveraging high “Velocity” data — such as data from mobile devices — has unearthed knowledge that has helped firms better understand their customers. The significant potential of high “Variety” data — data that is unstructured in the form of text, images, videos, and so on — to make better predictions has been documented in numerous academic studies. But what about issues related to the accuracy, reliability, and transparency of the data itself, which basically comprises the fourth V, “Veracity”? In the field of data-driven marketing, an answer to addressing this limitation lies in blockchain technology.
In recent years, a major pain point for brands and advertisers has been the lack of transparency and accountability in being able to ascertain how their ad dollars have been spent. Digital advertising is complex, because ensuring that the media that was purchased was actually delivered as it was intended, is non-trival today. Ad fraud is pervasive, and costs marketers and publishers a significant amount of money. Forrester reports that as much as 56% of all display ad dollars were lost to fraudulent inventory in 2016. And the cost of ad fraud globally is expected to increase to $50 billion over the next decade. A recent study into the state of programmatic advertising revealed that 79% of advertisers surveyed expressed worries about transparency, with over a third regarding the lack of visibility on third parties as one of their key concerns. It’s why we are increasingly hearing that major brands like P&G have cut their ad budgets, because their media agencies failed to give them the transparency they needed.
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