Modern Imprint | SEO, Social Media

Saturday, November 11, 2017

Web Design - Marketing, Branding Strategy, Conversions

The Impact of Web Design on Marketing, Branding and Conversions

Most business owners agree that high-quality web design is essential for their business. But when asked exactly why it’s important, only a few could provide an adequate answer. Web design isn’t all about aesthetics. There’s no use to adding all the bells and whistles to your site if it fails to work toward your goal of attracting customers and increasing sales. The main problem is that many decide to compartmentalize the process, hiring an agency for web design and another one for marketing.

Taking a Comprehensive Approach

The traditional approach of hiring different agencies for various aspects of the website is no longer effective. Instead, it’s better to take a more comprehensive approach. Web design must now be deeply incorporated into your inbound marketing and branding strategy. If you employ three agencies for web design, SEO, and branding, it’s nearly impossible to have them work in cohesion and help you inch closer toward your business goals.

Your Design Matters, and so Does Your Content

As a business owner, you’ll do yourself a favor by building a website that resonates with your target audience. Several studies suggest that online users cite web design elements as among the top factors they consider when deciding whether to trust a website or not. Most users share the same red flags to watch out for including busy layouts, pop-up ads, boring web design, slow page load times, and small print.

Next to these design elements, content is the biggest factors considered by visitors. You’ve probably heard countless times that content is king. However, you need to deliver effective content while engaging the attention of your customers. Doing this through traditional text alone proves challenging. Adding certain design elements to your site can give them more reason to stay and consume your content.

Improving Your Branding Strategy

Each year, Google seems to add more weight to branding in the search algorithm. Always keep in mind that your website should serve as an extension of your brand. If you have a physical store, make sure that the characteristic branding elements remain consistent including the logo, colors, and font. Even your style of communicating with customers should be the same across all online marketing platforms you use. This gives your business more credibility, which could have a huge impact on increasing sales.

Augmented Reality | Social Media | Marketing, Advertising

How Augmented Reality Is Creating a New Target Market on Social Media

In discussing the latest and future technologies, virtual reality and augmented reality are often mentioned in the same breath. And oftentimes, they’re used interchangeably, despite all of the differences between them.

VR uses 360-degree video to move you from your current environment and into a new digital (virtual) world. On the other hand, AR transforms your current environment by adding digital information to your line of sight. VR replaces your reality, while AR enhances it.

Of the two techs, AR is expected to record more spending by 2022, and it seems to be catching on at a higher speed.

More brands (25 percent, compared with 21 percent) are showing interest in incorporating the technology, while others are already in the game. The most recent contribution is Apple’s new iOS 11 operating system and iPhone X announcement in September.

The new software brings AR to millions of iPhone and iPad customers around the world, affirming its expected growth in the near future.

What does this mean for social media and brands?

With 37 percent of the world’s population and 60 percent of Americans now active social media users, brands understand the need for social media presence. They rely on it to advertise products and services, as well as use it for daily interaction with consumers.

But as more brands use social media in the traditional form we are all accustomed to, the big giants are slowly incorporating AR to stay ahead.

And in the process, a completely new market is being created. Since people are always looking for fast and convenient processes—which has prompted the creation of custom devices, such as Modbook pen-enabled tablets—brands can use AR ads to bring the actual products to social media users.

This way, potential customers can try out different products before making a purchase—an act that will result in more informed decisions, loyal customers and increased sales.

How can brands leverage AR on social media?

SEO | Search Engine Optimization | SEO Strategy

How SEO Impacts Your Bottom Line

For many marketers, SEO is one of the hardest tactics to grasp. First, there’s a lot of variables that go into developing an effective SEO strategy. Additionally, it can be difficult to provide insights into how your SEO efforts are truly making a positive impact for your business.

If you’re investing time, energy, and resources toward improving your search engine rankings on important key words, here are five metrics you can monitor to measure the effectiveness of your efforts toward your bottom line:

1. Organic Search Traffic

According to a recent study, organic search accounts for 64 percent of all website visits. Whether your current organic search traffic is higher or lower, it’s important to establish a baseline for measuring growth. As you invest in SEO, you should see the percentage of organic search traffic grow over time.

2. Bounce Rate

One of the most important factors in SEO effectiveness is your ability to capture the attention of people who visit your website. A high bounce rate hurts your SEO efforts, because it shows your content isn’t encouraging users to explore and learn more about your business. Tweaking your website (either the content or the user experience) to improve the bounce rate is a great way to improve SEO and impact your bottom line.

Content Marketing | SEO - How They Work Together

How Content Marketing and SEO Work Together

These days, it seems content marketing is often touted as an alternative to SEO. However, it is possible to create content that not only creates value for users, but also build and improve on SEO.

SEO used to be as easy as throwing keywords in the meta tags, and you could rank for anything, regardless of whether the content on your website matched the keywords in the meta tags. But as the web has evolved and search engines have discovered it’s important to treat their users as customers, the way you build rank has changed significantly. And the competition for that ranking has greatly increased. The problem was, most of the content out there wasn’t designed to help people looking for information – it was garbage written to game the search engines into higher ranking.

Content marketing became a way to provide the search engines with the quality content they wanted to serve to their users. It also became a way to educate your prospects about the products and services you offer, without directly being a sales pitch.

Content marketing and SEO became linked the moment we started turning to search engines to solve our problems, and the search engines started weeding out the poor content in favor of well written, informative content.

The Differences Between SEO and Content Marketing

While the two disciplines are interdependent and overlap, there are some clear differences between them.

SEO is a narrower discipline that is more technical in nature.
Content marketing is much more broad and holistic.

You must use Search Engine Optimization techniques when you implement your content marketing campaigns, or you’re setting the campaigns up for failure.

Still, there are some “experts” out there claiming that content marketing has replaced SEO – and the two are completely different. Yes, there are areas where they are different, but the idea that you don’t need SEO for content marketing is crazy – because SEO is necessary to ensure the content ranks in the first place.

You can get eyes on your content without it ranking highly in Google, thanks to social media and paid advertising, but the far better long-term pay off comes from organic traffic.

Artificial Intelligence | SEO, Search Engines, Google

Has AI changed the SEO industry for better or worse?

With Google turning to artificial intelligence to power its flagship search engine business, has the SEO industry been left in the dust? The old ways of testing and measuring are becoming antiquated, and industry insiders are scrambling to understand something new — something which is more advanced than their backgrounds typically permit.

The fact is, even Google engineers are having a hard time explaining how Google works anymore. With this in mind, is artificial intelligence changing the SEO industry for better or worse? And has Google’s once-understood algorithm become a “runaway algorithm?”

Monday, September 4, 2017

Image Search | Marketing Strategy

How To Use Image Search To Enhance Marketing Strategy

Online search is a routine practice among consumers and marketers alike. Need some information on a product? Just "Google it": A phrase that people say as easily as they use the word “Kleenex” as a generic term for a product.

Yet advances in search algorithms are creating nuanced search options, tailored to varyious digital media. Among those nuances is image search, with contextual tactics becoming as valuable to digital marketers as real estate to a New York City realtor.

The latest image search innovations from Pinterest, Google, and Amazon, are aimed at helping users find relevant information through contextual association. By picking information related to images interest to the users, a visual search becomes a discovery engine for products and services, encouraging conversions as a result.

The image search landscape

Pinterest, for exampled, introduced Lens, an app feature that allows users to aim a camera at an object, and find pins and pinboards related to it. This is a significant catalyst for consumer sales, since many Pinterest users swap images of products.

Another app, from Amazon, added a similar feature for Prime customers, called Spark. Users view a feed of product posts and photos shared by other Prime customers.

Customers can respond by clicking on the shopping bag icon, or interacting with people by commenting or "smiling" on their posts. The feed allows customers to learn more about products through the images that customers comment on and share, much like a social media platform.

Meanwhile, Google introduced its own features to its Image Search engine. Query results now provide navigational highlights such as text that clarifies the action you can take, and badges that indicate what sites or links are associated with the image. These highlights can direct potential customers to associated materials and aid research behind a product or service image.

Marketing Strategy - Content Marketing, Social Media

7 Ways to Correct a Failing Marketing Strategy

No entrepreneur has a perfect first marketing campaign. Even if you’re experienced as a marketer or entrepreneur, you can’t really dial things in until you have data to inform your campaign.

So let’s say you have a marketing strategy that’s, for the most part, “failing.” You aren’t seeing the results you predicted, and from what you can tell, your return on investment (ROI) is either negligible or negative. I’m going to assume that this isn’t just a gut feeling or an early reaction, either -- you’ve looked up the hard numbers, and can objectively demonstrate that your marketing strategy isn’t working the way you’d hoped.

You don’t want to abandon your strategy altogether, so what can you do to correct it?

1. Give it more time.

First, I want to acknowledge that some strategies—like SEO—take a long time to start paying off. If you’re investing in your brand image, or if you’re relying on inbound channels of traffic to bring you more customers, don’t get discouraged after only a few weeks of effort.

On the other hand, some strategies -- like PPC advertising -- should start working immediately and improve over time as you make adjustments based on the data. If you’re working on a long-term strategy, consider giving your campaign more time to develop. Otherwise, try one of the approaches below.

2. Differentiate it.

The marketing world is a competitive one, especially in popular realms like content marketing and social media. There are thousands of brands competing for your target audience’s attention, so what makes your strategy unique? If you’re saying the same things that your competitors are saying, or if your design blends in as background noise, your campaign is going to falter. Correct this by saying something unique that only your brand could say. Sometimes, it’s the only way to cut through the noise.