Tag: digital marketing

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SEO

8 SEO Considerations for a Smooth Transition

Thinking about migrating your domain to a new name? Discover the eight important SEO considerations for a smooth transition. For a smooth transition in SEO, key considerations include maintaining URL structures or implementing proper redirects, preserving and optimizing existing content, and ensuring meta tags are transferred correctly. It’s crucial to conduct thorough keyword research to align with new goals, monitor site performance to catch any SEO issues early, and communicate changes to search engines through updated sitemaps and consistent monitoring of search console data.

If it’s time to give your company a facelift but you don’t feel that re-designing the website itself is enough, rebranding may be the solution. But, with a domain change comes the potential loss of all the SEO you’ve worked hard to build for your current website. If you don’t want to start over from the bottom and risk losing customers and valuable traffic in the process, there are some important things to consider before you begin the rebranding and domain migration process.

Send Signals Before the Switch

If it is possible to do so, use the old website to deliver signals to Google about the transition for a short amount of time before the transition occurs. You can do this through traditional marketing and PR efforts as well as through making changes to your content and metadata. When you’re moving to the new site, maintain elements of the old branding within the new metadata as well.

Use the Same URL Structure

Make every effort to retain the current URL structure. Changes to the URL structure and content placement can wreak havoc on your migration and SEO. Maintaining the URL structure or moving to something similar to the same number of content levels helps mitigate SEO risks and consolidates a variety of signals. It also simplifies the redirect process because it can be done with a single line in the .htaccess file.

All that said, Google will never forget a crawl path. Over time, the old URL will have picked up links that point to non-200 URLs and gone through changes and restructures of its own. Because of this, you still need to compile a complete redirect list and process it to ensure you retain all previous equity and signals.

Keep the Existing Content Wherever Possible

Though it may require some minor edits to align it with the new brand, it’s best to maintain as much of your original content as possible. If you must create new content, aim to replicate your old content as much as you can so that you avoid losing Authority and authorship. This helps prevent your rankings from dropping. Even keeping small elements like your fonts and headers the same can have a big influence on SEO.

Properly Implement 301 Redirects

To maximize your SEO effort and keep visitors happy, redirect every page from your old site to the corresponding pays on your new site.

If you have not been able to maintain the same URL structure for whatever reason, things are a bit more complicated. Because you can’t redirect the old pages to the exact same page on the new site, you have to redirect to the most relevant page on your new site. the easiest way to do this is to create a spreadsheet with the URL for the old site in one column and the URL for the new site and the other. This process could be time-consuming depending on the size of your site so it is crucial to prioritize and start with the pages that generate the most traffic.

Remember People Will Search for the Old Brand

Even if you’ve done a great job with marketing and PR to alert people of the rebrand with a new business name, people are still going to search for your previous brand name for years. To account for this, accommodate for the old brand name through your content in your FAQ Pages, blogs, and support section.

Users, both your existing user base and new ones to come along during and after the rebrand, may have questions about the old platform still. failing to include the old brand in your content to capture those searches leaves traffic to your competitors which could result in a large number of missed opportunities.

Generate New Signals

For the greatest success, you need to take time to generate new signals for the new domain. this can be done with traditional marketing, digital PR, and link building.

When you put together the redirect list, identify high importance links, potentially with branded anchors or commercial anchors that are pointed to the old domain. You can use these as outreach targets to try to have the link updated but these efforts should not substitute adding fresh signals to the mix.

Update Your Social Media Profiles

When your new brand is an effect, it’s crucial to update all of your social media sites. Depending on the platform, it may be a challenge. When rebranding on social media consider:

Twitter has a lot of IDs that aren’t in use so if someone has the one you want but isn’t actively using it, reach out to see if you can take it over. Twitter recommends doing this because they are slow at deactivating these accounts.

Facebook only allows you to change your page name and URL one time. If you need to rebrand a second time, you’ll be stuck creating a new page from scratch and hoping the audience migrates over.

LinkedIn is fairly easy when rebranding as long as someone else isn’t already using your company name. If that’s the case, you may need to change your company name just a little,  such as keeping the name the same and adding a tagline after it. Contact LinkedIn directly to change the URL.

Update Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics

To make sure you are getting accurate data about your traffic and potential crawling issues with Google, update both your Google Webmaster Tools and Analytics accounts to the new domain.

If you follow these recommendations to rebrand and also focus on creating buzz and new signals around the new domain, it should be easy to combine the old brand with a new one and make your transition easier after the migration.

Categories
SEO

Why Google Rewrites Meta Descriptions and How to Avoid It

Google’s John Mueller is a wonderful source of information, but staying up to date with his Webmaster Central Hangouts can be hard for many of us. In a recent episode, someone asked why their meta description was being re-written. His answer helps us see a bit of why Google’s algorithm may re-write your meta descriptions. But it doesn’t stop there – in another Google Webmaster Central Hangout, he responds to a question about what people can do to stop it from happening – so we have the information we need to make our lives easier while keeping the search engine happy.

It’s important to note that Mueller’s advice is general because he cannot provide an exact reason for the re-write without looking at the search results. He says Google re-writes meta descriptions for a variety of reasons. One note he did provide the search engine optimization community revealed it’s best to include the information naturally despite the possibility of Google making changes, as this provides Google with more information about your content.

Keyword Stuffing in Meta Description

If Google sees a bunch of keywords in the meta description, it’s going to assume the description isn’t useful to users and attempt to write something else. Google has to be able to trust the description before it will leave what you’ve provided alone. If you’ve written a meta description that focuses less on keywords and more about what the content of the page is about, it’s more useful to users and less likely to be re-written.

Duplicate Meta Descriptions Across Multiple Pages on the Site

If Google sees the exact same meta description provided for most of the pages on the website, it’s going to re-write them. Unique meta descriptions are essential to providing content that is useful for searchers.

Content and Query Matching Issues

In the publisher’s question about meta re-writes, he mentions that branded queries with a “UK” modifier were the ones rewritten. That may be why Google is re-writing the description. If the webpage itself doesn’t send Google UK related content signals, Google may believe that modifier isn’t relevant to users and change the meta description accordingly.

Adding modifiers to search queries can cause Google to not only rewrite meta descriptions but the title tags, too. It’s most likely to happen when modifiers like “home page” and “UK” are used in the query, but not found in the written content of the page.

The meta description needs to match both what the user is searching for and the other content on the page.

Search Query Influences

Whether Google rewrites a meta description is based on the search query. If you notice a rewritten query, take the branded query and check to make sure the meta description is not spammy and is actually useful to searchers.

Move forward from there, looking for patterns. Is it something that Google always gets wrong? Or is it only wrong some of the time, when the algorithm picks up something else on the page and mistakenly rewrites the meta description?

How to Avoid Google Re-Writing Your Meta Descriptions

There are undoubtedly times when the meta description the site owner provides won’t be enough for Google. There’s no way to ensure that Google will use the meta description you provide 100% of the time. But, there are things you can control that will influence Google to use the ones you provide more often than crafting their own.

Make the Descriptions Unique for Each Page on the Site

While it may be tempting to use a boilerplate meta description for every page on your website, this is problematic, especially if you have a larger site with hundreds or even thousands of pages. Think about the purpose of each page and what the user would be searching for to lead them there – as well as the information they will find to answer their query. Use that, along with relevant keywords to craft a useful meta description for each page on the site.

Pay Attention to Character Length

There is no official meta description length though Google may truncate at 155 to 160 characters. To ensure the entire description is viewable on the search engine results page, do your best to limit the character count to no more than 150 characters or so. To test the length of your descriptions, you can use a character counter tool. Remember, titles are truncated at 50 to 65 characters, so those need to be short and descriptive, too.

Make Them Match What Users are Looking For

Your meta description is basically a short sales pitch. It’s free advertising to reach out to prospects to entice them to click your results instead of another option on the page. And because Google is in the business of providing users the results they are looking for the first time around, you want to make sure you make the user happy to keep Google happy.

That means taking the time to ensure your meta descriptions match what users are looking for, but also match the page content. For example, if you’re targeting the keyword, “dog collars for small dogs”, then make sure that if the page isn’t specific to just small collars, that the page at least includes the option to filter out everything but the small ones. Don’t use a meta description for dog toys, or anything that’s not related to buying collars.

One of the ways you can make this easier is to divide your pages and keywords by search intent, then write the meta descriptions ahead of time, based on the keywords you’re targeting and the search intent of the people who’re using them. This way, you don’t create an informative meta description based on a transactional keyword, which could help boost your SEO results.

Meeting these criteria reduces, but does not eliminate, the chance that Google will rewrite your meta description. If there’s an obscure query that matches a selection of text from your webpage, it’s likely Google will just use that snippet of text in place of your original meta description.

Categories
Content Marketing

How to Use the Right Directional Cues in User Interfaces

User interface directional cues may be either implicit or explicit – obvious like arrows or subtle things like white space that the brain picks up on subconsciously. Knowing when to use them and which ones to use is crucial to building a positive user experience.

Implicit Directional Cues

Implicit cues are the ones that users don’t often notice. Familiar implicit directional cues include:

Color and Contrast

The color itself plays a significant role in how users respond to your content. Color theory indicates that each shade can evoke emotion and has strong psychological associations. Therefore, it’s essential to take time to match your color choices to the message you’re trying to send to site visitors.

  • Red: This primary color is associated with anger, danger, heat, passion, love, and sexuality.
  • Orange: This secondary color mixes equal parts red and yellow, and therefore shares qualities of both colors. It combines the warmth of red when the optimism of yellow to promote socialization and stimulate the appetite.
  • Yellow: As a primary color, it is the most visible color from a distance, so it’s often used as a cautionary color. Yellow is playful, happy, and is often associated with intellect, optimism, and mental clarity.
  • Green: This secondary color is the result of mixing equal parts blue and yellow, thereby sharing characteristics of both colors. Green is associated with both nature and money. With natural associations, it represents growth, rebirth, and renewal. With monetary associations, it represents greed, wealth, and prestige.
  • Blue: This primary color is associated with business, nature, royalty, military, trust, and more. Studies show blue is a favorite color across the globe. It evokes calmness and tranquility.
  • Indigo: Indigo is associated with higher knowledge, intuition, wisdom, devotion, justice, and spirituality.
  • Violet: Violet is associated with a feeling of intelligence and confidence like blue, but it is also associated with individuality and creativity.
  • Pink: As a mixture of red and white, pink is associated with romance, femininity, sensitivity, and sweetness. Certain shades can be energetic.
  • White: White is a color without a hue and is the symbolic opposite of black. In Western culture, white symbolizes purity and innocence, whereas, in Asian culture, it is the color of grief, mourning, and loss.
  • Black: This is the darkest color because it completely absorbs light. It is similar to white because it is also a color without a hue. Black is associated with evil, sadness, darkness, and mourning, but in ancient Egypt, the color had a positive association of protection and fertility. Today, it is becoming a symbol of elegance and simplicity.
  • Grey: As a mixture of black and white, it is both versatile and timeless. As a neutral color, it can be combined with nearly any other color in the spectrum. Though it isn’t the cheeriest color, it can create a contemporary and sophisticated feel. When used with white and black, it creates a serious feel.
  • Brown: Creating brown must occur through a mixture of red black and yellow or red and green depending on which color system you’re using. Surveys indicate that most people dislike brown. The warmth of brown is associated with strength, healing, and reliability. Brown pairs well with nearly every color because of its prominence in nature.

Research has shown that light and color have a specific physiological mechanism that can affect impulsivity, alertness, heart rate, mood, and more.

Need help choosing the right colors for your landing page? With this tool, you can choose one color, then a color combination (complementary, monochromatic, etc.) to generate a palette to work from.

But beyond the colors you choose, the contrast between them matters, too. Stark differences in color drive visitor attention to certain areas of the interface. The contrasting colors also affect readability, which is vital for the overall experience.

White Space

This is the empty area or negative space of your pages. Keeping plenty of white space helps draw attention to specific elements and keeps the page simple and makes it easier for visitors to understand your offer. With fewer components to focus on, visitors have no choice but to look where you want them to.

Encapsulation

Encapsulation refers to how objects are framed. It highlights what’s important on a page by creating a window of focus with boxes, outlines, and contrasting colors. This helps to reduce clutter on the page while also drawing attention to specific elements.

Visual Weighting

Visual weight is the concept that design elements have varied weights. Even in a two-dimensional medium, some objects appear to be heavier than others. This concept allows designers to create visual hierarchy along with harmony, symmetry, and balance in their designs. When strategically used, visual weight can help guide a viewer’s attention to the places we want in a design, making it a rather subtle directional cue.

Sometimes, visual weight is evident because larger objects appear heavier than smaller ones simply because they occupy more space. Color can also influence visual weighting, as can size, shape, proportion, density, and complexity.

Explicit Directional Cues

Explicit directional cues are more obvious to the human eye, making them easier to spot. They include:

Eye Tracking

Also known as eye gaze, eye tracking measures the eye’s motion as a user views a web page or measures where the eye is focused. When website visitors are connected to eye-tracking software, it’s possible to learn:

  • How the size and placement of objects on your existing site or proposed design changes affect attention
  • Where visitors are looking
  • The parts of the user interface that you miss
  • How their focus moves from object to object on a web page
  • How they are navigating the length of the page

Knowing the path of eye gaze helps ensure you guide user attention to the areas where you want the most focus.

This is where using heat maps can be highly beneficial. Also known as a scroll map, this technology is excellent at showing where the most substantial drop off points on a page are located. Heatmaps use a light-to-dark color range to show you the parts of a web page that are getting the most attention. They are based on which sections of the page get more clicks.

The higher activity levels get a dark color, and the lower levels get a light color. You can also use them for scrolling to see how far down your scroll on your website. Confetti and maps are also available to help you learn about the clicks from different segments of viewers, such as where the clicks are coming from or what referral source is bringing them to your website.

Arrows

Arrows are one of the most commonly used directional cues because they are easy to understand and straightforward. Sometimes, you’ll see moving arrows,  but stationary ones are effective as well. Arrows are placed to help users navigate below the fold.

Object Positioning

With object positioning, designers position images and video, so they’re pointed toward a particular Focus area to draw user attention and make that element more noticeable.

Lines

Humans tend to follow a path naturally, so using lines can be helpful on landing pages. Linear directional cues guide visitors through various parts of your page and help prospects stay focused on certain sections of your page.

Gesturing or Pointing

Though this technique isn’t as subtle as using eye gaze, some opt to have a model point or gesture toward a critical element to get visitors to focus on that area. There’s always a chance the gesture may appear unnatural, so it’s crucial to split test your pages with different gestures to determine what provides the best results.

How User Interface Directional Cues Influence User Experience

Directional cues:

  • Make it easier to navigate around a website.
  • Improve visual hierarchy
  • Ensure the screen or page is scannable.
  • Improve conversion rates

Though your copy, form, headline, and call to action (CTA) are indeed crucial for driving conversions, these elements only make up a portion of the user experience. Adding directional cues, both implicit and explicit, helps to ensure your prospects focus their attention on what matters most to your conversion goal.

Did you know it takes only 1/10th of a second to form a first impression of another individual? Websites are no different. It only takes about 50 milliseconds (.05 seconds) for a user to judge a site and determine whether they like it enough to stay.

That first impression, according to British researchers, is 94% design related. It depends on many factors, including structure, symmetry, colors, spacing, the amounts of texts, fonts, and more. The look and feel of a website is the primary driver of the first impression. Website navigation and visual appeal have the most significant influence on people’s first impressions of a website.

Another study conducted by Stanford University credibility experts, similar results were found. The study indicated that what people say about how they evaluate a website’s trust and how they really do it are different.

The data showed that the average consumer paid far more attention to the superficial aspects of a website, such as visual cues than to its content. Nearly half of the consumers in the study assessed website credibility based in part on the appeal of the overall visual design or user interface.

People are information foragers, and as we look for relevant information, we rely on familiar cute, and icons to direct our path. We process visual stimuli with our past experiences and mental shortcuts known as heuristics to form our visual perception.

As a result, when you perceive a landing page elements such as a CTA or arrow, you process the element via your past experiences. A pointing arrow is generally a cue to direct your attention towards something, and that translates online as well.

The important thing to remember when it comes to directional cues and user interfaces is it visual processing is complicated. It is possible to overdo it on the directional cues, and this is a situation where more is not necessarily better.

If your images or visual cues are irrelevant or distracting from the primary purpose of the page, they can damage conversion. Because of this, it’s important to consider how images reinforce or distract from your value proposition as you’re choosing photos. For instance, if your value proposition is around emotions, using faces could work well. If not, it may be better to use an informational graphic or products.

Directional cues are crucial to effective design. But, as with many things related to the user experience and conversion rate optimization, it is a mixture of both art and science. While there is a lot of creativity that goes into effective page design, it is crucial to test it all for yourself because no two audiences are exactly the same, and they don’t necessarily respond in the same way.

 

Categories
Digital Marketing

How COVID-19 Has Changed Marketing

COVID-19 has changed marketing in a big way, shifting focus towards digital channels as consumer behaviors and preferences evolved. Brands have adapted by increasing online presence, leveraging social media, and creating more empathetic and contextually relevant content. The pandemic emphasized the importance of agility, digital engagement, and personalized marketing strategies, leading to innovative approaches in reaching and communicating with consumers in a rapidly changing environment.

We’re now three months into the Coronavirus pandemic, and while many states are re-opening and trying to bring things to a semblance of normalcy, analyses indicate that ad spending has hit bottom. Though this puts the industry in a great position to rebound in Q3, it’s worth taking a look at how the virus has changed the face of marketing – forever.

As people go back to shopping, we won’t see consumerism the way we saw it before. Consumer priorities have shifted, and to keep up with the change, marketing strategies have to reflect that, too. Out-of-touch marketing campaigns will alienate audiences, and quickly at that.

Take a look at this Coppertone sunscreen commercial. Their “summer is still on” ad seems to speak to the current situation, yet misses the mark. Specifically calling out things like road trips and concerts, saying that they are still on, negates reality for many people.

While some may still elect to take short road trips to destinations close to home, cases of the virus are still climbing, and many are choosing staycations in an effort to avoid getting sick or spreading the virus. And many concerts and music festivals have either canceled their events completely or rescheduled tours for 2021. Several artists have postponed shows, but have yet to work out new dates. Those who don’t wish to attend the rescheduled events have the option to request refunds for the shows, so overall attendance may be down – but we’ll have to wait to see how that pans out.

The “new normal” means that people will focus more effort on saving money, rather than spending it. Research from McKinsey & Company shows Americans will remain financially conservative, reducing discretionary spending for the foreseeable future. Only 36% of those surveyed expect the economy to rebound this summer.

So, what can marketers do to navigate the post-pandemic world?

Focus on Connection

In a world where everyone was always busy and on-the-go, halting everything to stay inside our homes with family for weeks on end has reminded us that we really are all connected. Brands who highlight ways to stay connected but still get things done are ahead of the curve.

When gyms closed, Planet Fitness jumped on Facebook and YouTube to start doing a series of home “work-ins” to encourage people to keep up with their health and fitness routines. People can hop on live and work out with trainers or watch the videos later on their own schedule.

Nike is asking everyone to “play inside, play for the world” to encourage people to stay home, but like Planet Fitness, keep up with healthy activity habits. To support that message, they’ve waived fees on their premium content within the Nike Training Club app.

Shift Marketing Budgets to Test New Strategies

In times of financial crisis, marketing teams are among the first to go, but that’s not the case in this situation. Because people are home now more than before, internet usage has been up. Even though customers may not be buying, it’s still a great time to engage with them.

Direct sales companies like Tupperware and Colorstreet are seeing record high sales because the in-home party has been replaced with social media and video conferencing. People are cooking more meals at home, and using nail polish strips as a way to make up for the fact that they can’t go to the nail salon like they used to. Both companies have had to make adjustments to their website hosting structure to accommodate for the increased virtual sales volume.

Star Director, Michelle Barrett of Heart’s Desire Tupperware notes that her sales team has reached record-breaking sales levels compared to the same time period in 2019.

Colorstreet Stylist Angela Kunschmann joined at the beginning of the pandemic. Colorstreet turns 3 years old this month, and sales are higher than ever before. Since COVID from April – June, companywide sales have exploded and have been growing at 200% in sales and 207% in sponsoring, on top of regular growth.

Companies that can offer virtual replacements for the same things once offered face-to-face will still be able to operate. Restaurants have shifted to providing curbside delivery, while services like GrubHub and Instacart offer no-contact delivery options.

Worry Less About Your Company and More About Your Customers

Yes, your company’s revenue matters. If you can’t stay open, it affects all of your employees. That said, by focusing on your customers – providing help and resources selflessly, you can do a great deal to protect your company and keep it above water.

Your customers may be having financial issues, especially if they’re waiting on unemployment benefits and aren’t considered an essential employee. Offering payment options and flexibility with financing options like Affirm or Klarna makes it easier for customers to pay.

Where you can, offer educational training to help others, as many are seeking new ways to earn money. Create as much content as you can that speaks to your audience’s biggest pain points, worries, and concerns.

As the number of cases continues to grow, we can only expect things to get worse before they get better. Personally, all you can do is practice social distancing and limit trips outside the home to only what is necessary. But, in terms of your business and marketing, it’s possible to make adjustments so that you can keep things running as smoothly as possible until the pandemic runs its course.

Categories
Digital Marketing

First-Party Data and Your Marketing Strategy

First-party data, collected directly from your audience, is vital for an effective marketing strategy. Unlike third-party data, it offers deeper insights into customer preferences and behavior, ensuring more personalized and targeted campaigns. With increasing privacy regulations and cookie deprecation, first-party data becomes even more crucial, enabling businesses to build trust and deliver relevant content while respecting user privacy. Its strategic use can significantly enhance customer engagement and loyalty.

As a marketer, the customer data you have is as good as gold. There are several ways to collect data with internal and external sources.

The most common data sources are from first party and third party. First-party data is essentially you are data because it is the information you collect directly from your website and or your customers. Third-party data, on the other hand, comes from other sources aggregated across a variety of sources.

Because of changes required by the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR, the future of third-party data is uncertain. Combine this with the fact that Safari and Firefox have made cookies from third parties blocked by default and Google has announced that it will no longer support third party cookies by 2022, there are concerns about how marketers will continue to operate.

Under the GDPR, companies are required to inform consumers about the data they’re collecting and how they intend to use it as well as with whom they intend to share it. Because of this change, there are concerns that we may see the end of third-party data as we know it.

What This Means for Marketers

Because of the changes surrounding third-party data, now is the perfect time to rethink your marketing strategy and use first-party data as much as possible. If your website is already using a remarketing pixel for your various media platforms, then you’re off to a good start. Remarketing pixels are considered first-party data because they capture the user’s behavior and activity while they’re on your website.

If you’re using customer relationship management (CRM) software to help manage your customer information, then you likely have information about your customer’s past purchases and other interactions with your business. When you use that information properly, you can leverage your remarketing audiences and CRM data to create highly targeted marketing lists that engage site visitors and packed customers.

Research shows that marketers are increasingly prioritizing first-party data as a result of these changes. 39% of retailers are asking for data directly, while 27% are recording more observed data. If your company isn’t making an effort to collect data directly from your customers and relying completely on third-party data, your marketing strategy could lead to company collapse as more legislation comes in to help consumers protect their privacy and their data.

Making the Most of First-Party Data in Your Marketing Strategy

As the major corporations continue to drive consumer acquisition cost up, profitability decreases for those who can’t compete. That’s why it’s important to build strong data Driven customer relationships. First-party data makes it easier to personalize the experience which is something consumers expect in today’s e-commerce industry. Research shows that 56% of people are more likely to purchase from a brand that recognizes them by name let alone one the personalized has the entire shopping experience.

Use Upsells and Cross-Sells

After a visitor converts, use the CRM data to determine complementary products they could be interested in. For instance, if your customer buys a swimsuit, follow up with ads to sell them a swim cover-up, beach towel, or beach/water shoes.

Use Lookalikes and Similar Audiences

Leverage Google and Facebook for their ability to build new audiences based on your first-party data. This is a great way to extend your reach and find users who are like your current customers.  Facebook launched custom audiences to improve their ad targeting and it has been an essential tool for retargeting and prospecting across a shopper’s purchase journey. Email match rates on Facebook typically fall between 40 and 60%, but if you segment well enough, you can get that number closer to 70 and 80%. And since Google has launched Similar Audiences, advertisers now have the ability to refine their current targeting efforts and expand prospecting campaigns to find new customers.

Best results, focus on your highest value customers and reverse-engineer a customer acquisition and retention strategy by using tools such as smart bidding, similar audiences, and remarketing lists for search ads.

Re-Engage Seasonal Shoppers

If you have a set of customers who only make purchases during a certain time of year such as the summer of the holidays, that’s perfectly fine. Create lists for these customers and ramp up your marketing efforts during that time of year as their most likely to convert. Also, think about whether or not there are other holidays are promotional events that you can use to re-engage the visitors.

Add Video

Video advertising is becoming increasingly popular and it’s a wonderful way to reach your audience. Think about using a sequential messaging strategy to build a story and keep users interested in your brand.

Use Cart Abandonment Reminders

Knowing what your customer is like gives you an idea of what products to show them. Start with what they’ve liked enough to add to their carts. It’s crucial to master your cart abandonment messages because the overwhelming majority of online shopping carts are abandoned. Research shows that 40% of the internet’s abandoned shopping carts are filled with clothes.

Cart abandonment is a behavioral trigger but there are also merchandising triggers. For instance, if a customer that was looking up a jacket that’s since been marked down, you should let them know. The trigger message could help you convert someone to a customer.

Add Direct Mail to Your Strategy

Although some marketers view direct mail as an outdated advertising channel, direct mail does offer an offline advantage that’s good for win back messaging. Mailboxes often have less clutter and distraction than email inboxes. But, for it to be effective you have to do it correctly. Using the spray and pray approach ultimately waste paper and postage. But, if you rely on your digital data to inform your offline campaign, you can use the same personalization that people have come to expect online.

It’s true first-party data may not offer as much opportunity to scale your marketing efforts as a third-party data. However, there’s still plenty of potential to use the first-party data to increase your revenue and improve return on investment. Put your customer data and insights to good used to refine your strategies for Acquisition, retention, and remarketing.

 

 

Categories
Digital Marketing

Google Says No More Cookies

Google says no more cookies in its announcement of the discontinuation of cookies in its Chrome browser. This move marks a significant shift in digital advertising and user privacy. Cookies, which have been essential for personalized ads, will be replaced by a new system. This change aims to enhance privacy while maintaining ad relevance, reflecting growing concerns over personal data security and evolving internet privacy standards.

Recently, Google announced that they are phasing out support for third-party cookies in 2022. Phasing out this support will affect everyone in the digital media industry. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen Google drop 3rd party data or web browsers. But the stakes are a bit higher this time. Publishers are seeing the change as a potential turnaround in what has been a difficult digital transition.

According to Webopedia, a cookie is a message given to a web browser by a web server. The browser stores the message and a text file. The message has been sent back to the server each time the browser requested page from the server. You may also hear cookies referred to as an Internet cookie, browser cookie, web cookie, or HTTP cookie.

Cookies are used to identify users and possibly customize web pages for them. When you enter a website after using cookies, you may be asked to fill out a form to provide information such as your name and interest. The information is packaged into a cookie and sent to your browser which is stored for later use. The next time you visit the website, your browser sends the cookie to the server and they can use this information to present you with custom pages. For instance, rather than seeing a generic welcome page, you may see a page that welcomes you by name or shows the last time you visited the site.

Industry insiders expected the move however, most will be preoccupied with it during the two-year window to overhaul and replace what has been one of the key parts of digital media trading since the industry began.

Marketers who are wary of the industry’s reliance on Google have to figure out how they can adapt their first-party data strategy as some of the marketing tools in recent years have become redundant in a lot of internet browsers. These include third-party data and data management platforms, along with multi-touch attribution providers. Third-party data has been a critically important part of how marketers shape their communication strategies for nearly 25 years. For example, Procter & Gamble, one of the industry’s largest spending advertisers excitedly spoke about its frequency capping efforts at the National Retail Federation annual conference in January.

Because of this change, identifying audiences online will become significantly more challenging after 2022 within Google Chrome. Right now, it holds about a 69% global market share on desktop only.

Advertisers are Disappointed With Google

In a joint statement, the American Association of Advertising Agencies (4A’s) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) said, “It may choke off the economic oxygen from advertising that startups and emerging companies need to survive. We are deeply disappointed that Google would unilaterally declare such a major change without prior careful concentration across the digital and advertising Industries. In the interim, we strongly urge Google to publicly and quickly commit to not imposing this moratorium on third party cookies until effective and meaningful alternatives are available.”

Cookie Support Rolled Back by Others, Too

If you’re upset at Google for making this change, it’s important to know that the other major players in the industry have already started doing the same. The difference is that because Google accounts for such a large part of the market, then making this change will have a much larger impact overall.

In April 2017, Apple started rolling out intelligent tracking prevention in the Safari web browser. Shortly after, Mozilla implemented something similar in Firefox. The Firefox feature is known as enhanced tracking protection which blocks third-party cookies by default. In Germany, Firefox has a much larger browser share than the United States. The browser share is reported to be between 20 to 35% of publisher traffic depending on the source. Given the high degree of market share, the effect of enhanced tracking protection on German publishers has been severe. They have seen a 23% decline in CPM, a 45% decline in revenue, and a 38% decline in bed rate.

When considered with Safari’s intelligent tracking prevention, this clearly demonstrates the third-party cookie base identifiers are rapidly coming to the end of their life. Without a method to identifyAnd reach audiences, media companies are finding it increasingly difficult to sustain their business models and are in figuring degrees of crisis. Ad spend funds media and media plays a vital role in providing an investigative check against large companies and publicly accounted for governments.

What’s the Solution?

Though things appear grim for Germany, there is a clear path forward. Publishers and buyers can opt to leave third-party cookies behind and create real addressability, born from people-based first-party data that is determinist.

People-based identity is built on a foundation of user consent. You can get first-party data in publisher logins, newsletter sign-ups, and free walls, for example, but it comes from anywhere and user authenticate. In exchange for a minute or so of their attention, users give explicit consent to feed an engaging online experience. The open web then shifts to a more trusted environment based on user choice.

Spend the next two years focusing on ways you can improve your brand and trust so that users will voluntarily consent to provide you with their information. This way, if and when things like the California Consumer Privacy Act go nationwide, you won’t have to go through leaps and bounds to become compliant, because you’ve obtained all the information you have on your customers with their consent and don’t plan on sharing it anyway.

Though you may not want to ask users to register their data, effectively meaning that they have to sign in to your website, it is a good way to ensure you have a start on your first-party data strategy. If you are a publisher who is already been feeling the effects of Mozilla and Apple’s targeting restrictions, you may already be doubling down on your first-party data strategy.

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Digital Marketing

Optimizing Your Online Marketing Plan

Optimizing your online marketing plan involves a strategic blend of analytics, creativity, and technology. It’s crucial to analyze data for insights into customer behavior, adjust campaigns for maximum engagement, and utilize the latest digital tools for efficiency. Personalization, SEO, and social media integration are key components. Continual refinement based on performance metrics ensures your marketing efforts remain effective, relevant, and aligned with your business goals.

Need to ensure that present marketing plans are optimized for the future? Do you need a framework to follow so that you don’t have to change things so often? Let’s look at auditing and adjusting your next marketing plan.

In this article, we explore the importance of optimizing your online marketing plan.

Look At Your Social Footprint and Online Consistency

Brand health is important. If you have been using the same methods for the last five years, it’s time to reevaluate. Sachs Marketing Group specializes in all things branding and marketing, so we can give you an extra set of eyes with honest feedback.

Where is your brand headed? How is your message spreading? Look over your brand assets. Consider the logo, packaging, website, marketing materials, and your digital marketing channels. Does it tie together? If not, when determining your marketing budget, plan for the expense of updating it all to make it match.

Look at your photos and product imagery. Do they send the right message to your target audience? Do they adequately reflect the brand image you’re trying to convey? If not, budget for new photography.

If you run a brick-and-mortar store, does it match the look and feel of your website? You want customers to have a positive experience regardless of whether they choose to visit you in-person or online.

Redefine Your Marketing Goals For the Next Year

Look back at your previous marketing goals and budgets. What worked? What didn’t? What can you adjust to help you reach the goals you missed? How can you surpass the ones you achieved? If you don’t change your goals and plan to get there, the business will stagnate.

If you are unsure of what steps to take, review the business plan and mission statement. Those two things can help you keep focused and prepare for the future. Here are a few things to consider:

  • Define your goals – be specific and realistic
  • Identify your target market – know their behavior patterns
  • Analyze the competition – if something works for them, mimic it
  • Understand your product/service – get unbiased and objective opinions from the consumer

These four things can help you find the right goals and provide plenty of information for marketing. Use it to your advantage.

Prioritize and Organize

You’ve defined your goals, so now it’s time to set a date to achieve them within the next year. Break the year down into quarters, each with their own goals and goal dates. Then set out the plan of execution. What can really help is a vision board. It may sound cliche, but it can help keep you focused on your goals. Images and words relating to your goals can be arranged so that when you look at it, you know what you need to do. Others like to make lists for the execution. Or they doodle in a notebook with the execution ideas in the doodle.

Prioritizing is also important. Especially when a goal relies on the success of another. Focus on what has to happen first. Sometimes it may seem like several things have to happen first, don’t let it consume you. Find out what the budget can do and what your time can allow and tackle the first thing quickly. Or maybe you just need to redo the budget before anything else happens and then tackle the goals.

Plan Your Campaigns for the Year

The best thing you can do is to plan out your campaigns for the entire year. The easiest is to put in all of your holiday campaigns first. Those have to be out there at the right time to get the right leverage. Then you can work in others around the perfect shopping times for your specific product or service. Off-season campaigns can be penciled in to boost sales when they are usually low.

Social media campaigns are important for your online presence. They should match if you have any simultaneous campaigns on television, in the local paper, website, and brick and mortar stores. Be wise about your platforms. If most of your target audience is on Facebook, it wouldn’t necessarily help to use Snapchat. You also don’t have to do every social media platform. Look at what has been useful in the past and stick with those.

Collaborative partnerships are a good campaign to add to your schedule. Working closely with a brand that complements yours can save you money on advertising and get you access to new audiences.

Partnerships with influencers can also be included in the plan. Having someone else to talk about your products and special sales is very helpful in broadening your target market and boosting sales. It doesn’t have to be many, just enough to get the word out.

Optimize public relations to remind people that you are a person too. Interviews on podcasts, YouTube channels, and the various relevant print publications to get your name out in the front. The more noticeable you are, the better the outreach.

Use new trends that suit the company’s look. It may be time to expand to a new social media platform. It could be learning slang from the youth to attract them to your product. Look for new promotional opportunities. Or explore podcasts by creating your own.

Something as simple as altering marketing goals can become a major boost to your online footprint and sales goals. It is still a learning process. Some new trends may not work for you. You may find a collaboration didn’t go quite as planned. But the lessons learned can be applied to the following year. The important thing is to keep going, using what works, and learning from what doesn’t.

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Digital Marketing

7 Marketing Ideas to Grow Your Business in 2020

Effective marketing ideas to grow your business include leveraging social media for brand awareness and customer engagement. Creating valuable, SEO-optimized content establishes your expertise and improves online visibility. Email marketing, with personalized messages, nurtures leads. Collaborations with influencers can expand your reach. Offering promotions and loyalty programs encourages repeat business. Utilizing customer feedback for improvement and referral programs can also drive growth and enhance reputation.

Business owners need to know how to promote their businesses in the right way. You may know promoting your business online is necessary in today’s world, but you don’t necessarily understand all of the ways you can do it or the ways that will give you the best results.

No matter which of the methods you choose, the key is putting your customers first in everything you do. Speak to entertain them, inform them, and teach them.

In this article, we share 7 marketing ideas to grow your business.

Revamp Your Website

When it comes to promoting your business online, everything needs to lead back to your website because it is the one piece of the internet you completely control. While social media can help you grow your business, you’ll never have complete control of those spaces and you must have a plan should Facebook decide to put you in Facebook jail or delete your Instagram account.

Investing in your website helps you build long-term equity in your brand. You’ll develop an asset that never stops working for you, and gives your customers a home base.

The key to a successful website is one that is not only aesthetically appealing but is easy for your customers to use and contains content that they find useful. Your website should be treated as a living and breathing organism that must be kept up-to-date and continues to grow.

Invest More in Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of attempting to drive traffic to your website organically through search engines. As Google continues to exert more influence on its own results, SEO is becoming more difficult, but it doesn’t mean you should completely abandon it.

A properly executed organic SEO campaign builds equity in your site which keeps it working for you over the long-term. Organic SEO is better than pay per click ads in many cases. However, because SEO can take months to see results from, it needs to be only a portion of your overall marketing strategy.

Create or Advertise on Podcasts

2019 research indicates that nearly ⅓ of Americans over age 12 listen to a podcast monthly. 41% of Americans say they are listening to podcasts now more than they did last year. And, Americans average 7 podcasts per week during the period of the study.

This tells us that there is a high demand for podcast content which is becoming the new radio. It’s cheaper, easier, and has a much greater reach. If your company has the resources, our regular podcast can be the center of your content marketing strategy. You can build an audience and establish your brand’s authority.

It’s okay if you don’t have the resources to do a good podcast on a regular basis because few do. If you don’t want to start your own podcast, you can find podcasters whose audiences match your target audience. This allows you to leverage the podcast audience and use advertising on those podcasts to promote your business.

You may also consider finding podcasts to be interviewed on, so you can spread the word about your business this way. It may take a bit longer with this approach because you need to build relationships, but guest starring on podcasts is a wonderful way to grow your reach.

Focus on Your Email List

If you don’t already have one, you might not think about emails when you consider promoting your business. When you invest in building your email list you are creating and long-lasting asset for your business.

A HubSpot survey showed that more than half of respondents check their personal email account more than 10 times a day. It is by far their preferred way to receive updates from brands. 59% of those surveyed indicate that marketing emails influence their purchase decisions and more than 59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of return on investment.

If you can get them to trust and value your brand, people will be more than willing to share their email address. Make sure you use smart marketing with compelling and useful content. you need to demonstrate to your audience that you’re worth listening to. Don’t just blast them with annoying emails every day.

Build Your Review Profile

We’ve known for a while now that Google and other search engines use online reviews from customers as a ranking signal. You should be looking for reviews on these platforms for your customers. Reviews serve as a basic kind of social proof to demonstrate quality.

Make sure you’re actively seeking feedback from your customers and using it to improve the products and services you offer. Ask your customers for reviews after your service has been performed or your product has been delivered. Follow up with your customers regularly, if you have long-term customers. and aim to have the best possible customer service at all times.

Why are reviews so important? A 2018 survey revealed 91% of consumers between the ages of 18 and 34 trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. 40% of customers only take into account reviews written within the past two weeks. and 89% of consumers read business’ responses to reviews so it’s crucial that whenever someone leaves the review for you that you respond to it.

Start with making sure you claim your Google My Business profile, as this gives you some control over how your information may display in the search results.

Start a Customer Loyalty Program

A customer loyalty program can be as simple or as complex as you want to make it – but it needs to be easy for people to sign up for, participate in, and redeem rewards for. Whether you use a card that’s scanned every time a purchase is made or another approach, you’ll get data to help you make decisions about your company.

You can use it to see who your most loyal customers are, and send them exclusive deals not available to the rest of your customer base. You can use it to convert more customers into repeat buyers. Your loyalty program can also help you see your most popular products and find other trends you can use to create promotions and other specials to keep your business growing.

Join Professional Associations

Chances are no matter your industry or niche, there is a professional organization available to you. You can use your local Chamber of Commerce or other B2B organization to not only market your business but to build relationships and camaraderie with other members. Membership in professional organizations helps increase your business visibility within your community and provides you with opportunities to network with other businesses in your area.

If you’re ready to kick your marketing up a notch in 2020, let’s talk!

Categories
Digital Marketing

The California Consumer Privacy Act – What You Need to Know

The California Consumer Privacy Act, or CCPA, went into effect on January 1, 2020. The law creates new consumer rights regarding access to, deletion of, and sharing of personal information that businesses collect. The law also requires the Attorney General to solicit broad public participation and adopt regulations to further the CCPA’s purposes. The regulations established procedures to facilitate consumers’ new rights under the law and to provide guidance for businesses on how to comply. It applies only to consumers in California however, it is reasonable to expect other states to follow with similar laws in the near future.

Does it Apply to Your Business?

Your business is only subject to the CCPA if it is for-profit, does business in the state of California, collects consumers’ personal information or determines the purposes and means of processing their personal information. It doesn’t apply to small businesses.

The CCPA only applies to businesses that have annual gross revenue greater than 25 million dollars, businesses that buy or receive customer information for commercial purposes or businesses that share or sell that information for commercial purposes. They must have information for 50,000 or more customers, devices, or households. It also applies to businesses that derive 50% or more of its annual revenue from selling consumers’ personal information.

The law does not apply to medical information collected by a covered entity governed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) or the California Confidentiality of Medical Information Act. It does not apply to personal information collected, processed, sold or disclosed pursuant to the Gramm-leach-Bliley Act or the California Financial Privacy Information Act. It does not apply to the sale of personal information to or from a consumer reporting agency that is to be used in or to generate a consumer report.

Until January 1st, 2021, it does not apply to personal information collected from job applicants, owners, employees, directors, staff, officers, and contractors of a business. Until January 1st, 2021, it does not apply to personal information about an employee, owner, director, contractor, or officer collected pursuant to due diligence or business to business communication or transaction.

What is Required of Businesses?

Under the law, consumers have the right to know all of the data that is collected by a business, twice a year, free of charge. Consumers also have the right to say no to the sale of their information.

Consumers are also given the right to sue companies who collected their data where that data was stolen or disclosed pursuant to an unauthorized data breach if the company was negligent or careless about how it protected the data. Consumers also have the right to delete data they have posted, the right to be not to be discriminated against if they tell a company not to sell their personal information. They also have the right to be informed of what categories of data are collected about them prior to its collection and at a point of collection as well as to be informed of any changes to the collection.

The law also provides mandated often before the sale of any children’s information applying to people under the age of 16. Consumers have the right to know the categories of third parties with whom their data is shared and the right to know the categories of sources of information from whom the data was acquired. They also have the right to know the business or commercial purpose of collecting their information.

This means, as a business that is subject to follow the rules and regulations of this law, you must be able to tell your consumers the information you are collecting and why, and the third parties you may possibly provide the information to and why.

You must also provide a way for consumers to see all of the data you’ve collected on them as well as to give them a way to decline selling their information and deleting any data you have collected.

Compliance Issues Thus Far

We’re not too far into 2020 yet, and we’re seeing that many publishers are making it hard to find their Do Not Sell links. Notices are often highly inconspicuous, which suggests large companies are testing their minimum compliance. Many publishers are attempting to call as little attention as possible to the data opt-out option for their consumers.

Major publishers such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Hulu, and Pandora are listing the required length at the very bottom of their respective home pages in small font. You’ll find that Netflix and Amazon hiding their opt-out language behind plain privacy links on their homepage. The links are also difficult to find on Facebook and Google. The point is that if you’re not actively looking for them, you likely will not find them.

Statute itself requires publishers to “Provide a clear and conspicuous link on the business’s home page titled ‘Do Not Sell My Personal Information’  which links to an internet web page that enables a consumer, or person authorized by the consumer, to opt-out of the sale of the consumer’s personal information. The reality is that what most of these publishers are doing probably doesn’t qualify as “clear and conspicuous”.

The initial efforts to comply with the CCPA may uphold the letter of the law but not the spirit. Hiding the links at the bottom of the page won’t Inspire consumer trust or bring more transparency. While the path forward is complex and murky, smart marketers are embracing privacy rather than fighting it.

I personally believe these bottom of the homepage placements will not be deemed sufficiently conspicuous and publishers will be forced to make them more prominent and potentially simplify the entire process. Rather than hoping users won’t notice, publishers and technology providers should be educating them about the benefits of not opting out, and language that laymen can understand.  making it difficult for consumers to opt-out only furthers customer distrust.

Categories
Digital Marketing

Are Micro Niche Websites a Good Idea?

Micro niche websites – or those that cover a small topic in only a few pages – still remain fairly popular online today. Why? Because when executed correctly, you can turn them into money-making websites pretty quickly. However, as Google seeks to provide its users with high-quality results, it can be harder to get those micro niche sites the traffic they need to produce conversions…..so, are they really still a good idea?

What is a Microniche Website?

A microniche website is a super small website made of just a few pages. Generally speaking, it’s anywhere from one to 10 pages. It’s a niche because it focuses on a specific keyword. There are a lot of profitable ideas out there, and in most cases, a micro niche site is an exact match domain. For instance, if you’re targeting the keyword, “discount watches online” your domain would be discountwatchesonline.com (or .org, .net, etc.). You’d fill the site with content that’s about discount watches, all targeted at that main keyword, and use advertising or affiliate marketing to generate income.

There’s Power in Volume

You won’t be able to quit your day time anytime soon if you only have one or two of these micro niche sites. In other words, the more you build, and the better the keywords you target, the higher your income potential. Marketers who began building these small sites in 2008 or so were easily able to quit their jobs by early 2011 because their AdSense income provided more than their corporate job.

The primary benefit of these kinds of small sites is that you can quickly target keywords and having an exact match domain usually provides a benefit for ringing in Google. By targeting such specific terms, you’re often able to write articles about exactly what the searchers are looking for whereas sometimes the competition only generally discusses the topic.

Times Have Changed

Though many marketers have built hundreds of small niche sites, times have changed. With the Panda and Penguin Google updates, there are now hurdles to how easily sites used to rank. You can still rank micro-niche sites but it really isn’t the best strategy anymore. It’s often easier to switch your focus to fewer sites with more content. Using a strategy of building larger more authoritative sites is better in the long run. Instead of having 30 micro niche websites, focus your attention on two or three authoritative sites in different niches to keep your income stream varied.

You can use small sites to test the market, make some quick money, or in general, test your skills. but, for the amount of time it takes to rank today, it’s better to build something more significant that can bring in even more money. A better long-term strategy is building up your small niche websites with more content, and higher quality to attract natural links.

Defining Your Micro Niche

Most people in business know what a niche is. Health, fitness, business, finance, those are all niches. But a quick search reveals millions of people blogging about those topics. If you want to set yourself apart from your it makes sense to start with a micro-niche. Rather than focusing your brand on general fitness, you can opt to specialize in fitness for those with disabilities, fitness for teen girls, or fitness for seniors. Those are micro-niches.

Some other micro niches are:

  • Tiny houses: Micro-niche in real estate
  • Disney Cruises: Micro-niche in the travel/cruise industry
  • All-natural makeup: Micro-niche in the skincare industry
  • Curly hair care: Micro-niche in the beauty industry
  • Drones
  • Home automation
  • Air purifiers
  • Beard oil
  • Yoga
  • Virtual Private Network (VPN)

When choosing your niche, it needs to be popular in the United States and have a high commercial value or a high CPC, cost per click. Choose a topic that you are comfortable with and related to your business. Look for something that has a good search rate.

Benefits of a Micro Niche

As a small business, when you consider streamlining your services to a more specific area, it’s natural to worry about the loss of potential clients. However, the opposite is quite true. Developing a micro niche for your brand helps to increase your client numbers because you are targeting those who are most likely to be interested in what you have to offer.

Benefits of micro-niches include:

  • Easier Marketability: Standing out from the crowd is the key to getting attention for your brand and increasing sales. Micro niches make this possible and lead to business growth.
  • Increased Profitability: Because of the low competition, you’ll naturally experience greater profits. You have access to more clients who share your desires, passions, and interest.
  • Low Competition: Since the niche is highly specialized, there are fewer businesses to compete against.
  • Easier to Gain Traction:  All small businesses need momentum to get started and continue growing. Using a micro-niche can help you gain the traction you need to make progress.

Gone are the days where you could do a little keyword research, buy an exact match keyword domain, and build a basic website within 10 minutes or less on WordPress. However, using the micro-niche approach to create an authoritative quality website with lots of content targeted at the right audience can be just as beneficial as the old-school microsites used to be.

Categories
SEO

The Death of Google as We Know It

The death of Google is something digital marketers refer to a lot whenever there seems to be a major change within Google, especially in how it manages data and user privacy, impacting its core services like search and advertising. With increased regulatory scrutiny and evolving user expectations, Google may shift towards more privacy-focused models, altering its traditional ad-revenue-driven approach. This could lead to significant changes in SEO, content marketing, and data analytics practices.

Now that Google’s parent company is Alphabet – and the search engine that started it all is just one of many products – small businesses and marketers have had to make some major adjustments to the way things are done.

While SEO is targeted at helping people get clicks from search engines, the sad reality is that more than half of Google searches don’t even result in a click. And as voice searches and smart assistants become even more prevalent, we can expect that number to continue to climb.

But it’s not just the voice searches and the fact that no one has to click to get a result. A lot of it has to do with the simple fact that Google is providing results for a ton of queries right there on the search page.

When you used to Google “calculator”, you’d get a list of results full of websites that have calculators on them. (Yes, sometimes when you’re at the computer it’s faster to just Google “calculator” than it is to open your computer’s native calculator app. Same for the phone. Particularly if you’re a fast typist.)

Now, you get this:

 

Instead of clicking on a result for a scientific calculator, I can just handle whatever equation I need right there on the SERP.

The same thing happens when you search for things like conversions from cups to tablespoons, gallons to liters, Fahrenheit to Celsius, USD to Euro, etc. When you ask for a state capital… and countless other queries.

Even if Google doesn’t provide the tool you need as they do with the calculator and currency converter, they often provide featured snippets that answer your question without you needing to click off the page. Thus the birth of the “no click search” aka “zero-click search.”

When I searched to find the number of Google searches that don’t result in a click? Yep – you guessed it. I didn’t have to click. I could have, but why would I? The answer I was looking for was right there.

 

And even if it wasn’t, I could have clicked on any of the “People Also Ask” questions to find an adequate answer there, too, I’m sure.

Why Google Loves the No-Click Search

Google loves it because they keep you on their property longer. Their customer is the searcher, not the small business that it pulls up in the SERPs… most of the time anyway. (The small businesses are only customers when they’re paying for ads.)

Google wants to make things as quick and easy for the searcher as possible. And usually, that means keeping them on the SERP while still giving them the information they’re looking for. But that’s why Google also tells webmasters to think of site visitors first — they want you to provide a quality user experience, so they in turn can do the same.

Why You Suffer

On the calculator search example, there are only nine results on the first page. The rest of the space is taken up by Google’s calculator, the People Also Ask box, image search results, and related searches. There aren’t any ads, but for the right query, there could be. And when that’s the case, there’s even less room available for organic results.

Take for instance “lawyers near me”. The first three results are ads. Then there’s a huge chunk of real estate for the Google Map pack, followed by a People Also Ask box, before you get the first organic result. Sure, you can click the “website” button on one of the map pack results, but unless you do that, you’ll stay on a Google property.

If you’re one of the lawyers trying to get traffic for that query, users have to scroll. And most people won’t. They’ll just click the ad or the map pack. And when they click the ad, guess who makes money? Google. You might, if they become a client – but you’ll pay Google for that click first.

How You Can Adjust

Now, instead of trying to compete for position 1 — or the first organic search result, you should look for ways you can rank for position zero. This is the featured snippet.

The key here is that not every query results in a people also ask box. And those that do, generally have long-standing results in that box. Those are the oldest, most trafficked sites that have established authority in the industry related to the search.

That means getting more specific with your strategy. Take time to evaluate who is currently in the box, and if you can’t beat them to take over that spot, look for queries that are related. They may be easier to grab the spot from… or they may not have a spot at all (yet.)

In this case, you just have to do the best you can. And that means focusing on providing a high-quality experience for your users. How do you do that?

Focus on Google’s E-A-T guidelines, which come from the Google Search Quality Rater Guidelines:

  • Expertise
  • Authority
  • Trustworthiness

Is E-A-T a ranking factor? Three ranking factors? No. It’s just an indication of quality, which Google uses to determine whether your site is worth displaying to users.

Improve your E-A-T by building more links, keep your content up to date, make sure your content is factually correct, and links to quality sources to support your information. If you’re in a YMYL (your money your life) niche like health or finance, hire experts — because these are niches where life experience won’t be enough to prove expertise.

Make things convenient for users. That means making sure you have a website that is:

  • User-Friendly: Users should be able to find whatever they’re looking for within three clicks. They should be able to browse comfortably whether they are on a computer, smartphone, or tablet.
  • Fast: Aim for a site load time of no more than three seconds.
  • Secure: Install an SSL certificate on your site to help protect user data.

Need help with your website? Reach out to learn more about how SMG can help.

Categories
Digital Marketing

How to Boost Your Email Marketing Results

Email marketing is one of the most effective marketing channels available to business owners. That being said, email marketing success is not guaranteed.

There are a number of key factors that contribute to email marketing results. This includes everything from the content of your email to the way you format it.

In this article, we will explore some email marketing tips that can help you boost your email marketing results.

1. Segment Your List to Personalize Content

Today’s consumers want a personalized experience.

58% of people are willing to provide personal information in exchange for a better shopping experience, under the right circumstances. You’ll need to build trust and a clear value exchange before they will hand it over.

Does it make sense to send the exact same content to people who haven’t made their first purchase and people who are longtime loyal customers? No! Doing so is a major missed opportunity.

Many of today’s email marketing platforms make it easy to segment your list based on a number of parameters, including:

When choosing the email marketing platform you want to use for your company, pay attention to the available integrations. Find something that integrates with programs and platforms you’re already using to not only make your segmentation and personalization efforts easier but to streamline your overall workflow.

You can also use APIs to combine as many of your databases as possible to give you the largest amount of data to work with for personalization purposes.

2. Make Use of Animated GIFs

Animated GIFs have been popular on social media for a while now, and we see lots of brands including them in their email marketing strategy, too. They are a wonderful way to further illustrate your point, add a bit of humor or add some visual flair to the content. After all, visual content increases the desire to read by 80%, and though Google Trends shows animated GIFs piqued in December 2018, the graph below indicates they are still popular.

3. Add Images and Video

Images and video provide a break from standard text, and have been known to help boost engagement rates. If you take the time to make your content shareable on social media, your images and video are much more likely to be shared with others, which can help grow your subscriber base.

4. Adjust Send Frequency

You’re just getting started with email marketing, you may think that you should only send a message when you have news to share, specials or sales, or announcements about your company. This approach isn’t the best one because your e-mail newsletter should be considered a way to build relationships with your followers. Every time you send one, you have the chance for them to go from a satisfied customer to a dedicated fan. If you consider your newsletter some things that may annoy or distract them, then you will be less likely to send quality newsletters more often.

Consider your newsletter as something that adds value to your subscribers’ lives and something that they should look forward to. Send it on a regular basis, even every weekday, perform surprisingly well because subscribers learned to know when they can expect it and add it to their daily reading.

If on the other hand, you are sending your newsletter once or twice a month and suddenly start sending it 5 days a week, it’s easy to get carried away. And it’s also easy to fall into a trap that backfires.

People would like to get regular content, but they don’t want to be inundated when they are trying to spend time with their families or take time to relax. Limit your newsletters to weekdays or late on Sunday nights, and no more than once a day, unless you have a real reason to send more often. This approach prevents the newsletter from being so scarce that people forget about it while also keeping it from being so available that no one feels compelled to open it at all.

Related: How to Create a Digital Content Strategy that Drives Results

5. Keep the Layout Simple and Clean

Following the KISS rule ensures that your readers can focus on the content. If your formatting clutters your newsletter, it may stop the readers from seeing the value it offers. If you feel like your formatting may be causing your engagement to drop, try to limit your newsletters to one or two photos or animated GIFs within simple HTML.

6. Split-Test Until You See What Works Best

Split testing isn’t just for your website. You can use it to test your subject line, layout, content, and even your send dates and times.

Like with your website, you’ll want to run one split test at a time so you can get a better idea of how each tested element influenced your results.

After a series of tests, you can, in theory, develop the perfect recipe for your audience. While you can follow general guidelines based on available research, it’s important to remember that what works for one business or industry may not work for another.

Improving your email marketing results may be as simple as changing the time of day or the day of the week you send your email. It may mean resending the message to the people who didn’t open it first, using a different subject line. A quality subscriber list doesn’t happen overnight, and it can take a while to find the balance between your content, sending times, and all the other elements that influence engagement. Aim for improvement with each issue, and you’ll get to where you need to be.

Conclusion

Email marketing can be a highly effective way to reach out to customers and prospects. However, in order for email marketing to be successful, business owners need to focus on the results and experiment.

The more you experiment with your email marketing strategy, the more success your business will enjoy.

If you need help with your digital marketing strategy, reach out to Sachs Marketing Group for a consultation.

Categories
Digital Marketing

The Evolution of Digital Marketing

The evolution of digital marketing spans far and wide, from basic banner ads to sophisticated, data-driven strategies. The rise of social media platforms introduced new channels for engagement. Search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising became vital for online visibility. The advent of mobile marketing and influencer collaborations further diversified the landscape. Today’s digital marketing is highly personalized, leveraging big data and AI for targeted campaigns.

As we head into a new decade, it’s a great time to look back at 25 years of digital advertising history. Regardless of how good a product or service is, to attract potential customers, you must advertise. Since the early 1990s, digital advertising has changed the concept of marketing for several businesses. We’ve all seen the era of billboards, flyers, and posters used to advertise products. Now, we see digital Billboards that change advertisements had every few seconds in densely populated areas, but we see much less of the “old school” methods like flyers on posts all over town.

Have you ever taken the time to think about why it has changed over the years? One of the main contributing factors to that evolution is the result of analytical technologies. As technology continues to innovate, we’ve seen digital advertising morph alongside it, and we don’t expect it to stop evolving any time soon. From the flashy banner ads of the early 90s to the artificial intelligence-powered bidding optimization we see today, digital advertising has made quite the journey to deliver the right content to the right potential customer at the right time to convert them to a customer when they discover a need.

Adobe recently researched all the milestones in digital advertising over the past 25 years, which I’ve listed here.

1994 – Banner Ads Galore

Hotwired – part of Wired Magazine started using banner ads in 1994. The click-through rates of ads at the time was a whopping 44%. Today, according to Smart Insights, the overall display ad click-through rate is just 0.05%.

1995 – Yahoo Launches

Yahoo launched and became the primary search engine online. That same year, HTTP cookies were introduced as a way to track user behavior and activity online.

1996 – Flash Makes Its Debut

Flash 1.0 debuted to internet users and became a robust way to advertise on the web. Content marketing was introduced through the American Society for Newspaper Editors. Google Chrome is ending its support for Flash at the end of 2020.

1997 – Hello, Pop-up Ads!

These were developed to gain user attention and get potential customers interested in the products and services they offered.

1998 – Google is Born

Though the company had already been formed, this year, they introduced the Google Search Engine. Advertising networks created their own way and connected to various websites with advertising.

1999 – PPC is Introduced

PPC advertising is highly competitive now, but the pay for placement concept wasn’t Google’s brainchild. GoTo.com introduced it.

2000 – Google Launches AdWords

In 2000, Google introduced its AdWords product. It was designed to help they pay per click advertising method become easier. That same year, mobile advertising was also introduced.

2001 – The Dot Com Bubble Bursts

The.com bubble, which expanded from the mid-1990s to 2000, busts. It cost investors 5 trillion dollars.

2002 – The Dawn of Adblockers

The first ad blocker was launched as a browser extension this year. This was designed to stop the pop-up ads that were deemed annoying by users.

2003 – LinkedIn is Born

The social media platform specifically for professionals launched this year.

2004 – Facebook Launches

The largest social media platform till now launched this year. Its first advertisement was known as Facebook Flyers.

2005 – YouTube Launches

In addition to the YouTube video website launching, we saw the launch of broadband connections to provide better performance and faster connectivity.

2006 – Digital Ads

The use of hyper-targeted digital ads started this year. Google buys YouTube.

2007 – iPhone Launches

This was a significant milestone in the mobile industry.

2008 – Digital Agency becomes a Term

Beyond coining the term digital agency, the App Store for iPhone users was also launched

2009 – Instant

Google releases Instant to support real-time search.

2010 – iPad Launches

Apple adds the tablet to its product offering this year.

2011 – Snapchat

Snapchat, the social network that uses videos with augmented reality features launches this year.

2013 – Real-Time Marketing

Instagram launches a new feature with promoted posts that enable users to run ads while promoting previous posts on Instagram.

2014 – The Dawn of In-App Advertising

As a result of the surge in smartphones, the focus of advertising changed from mobile advertising to in-app advertising. This year, Amazon launched its first speech recognition technology as well.

2015 – Mobile Traffic Overtakes Computer Web Traffic

At this point, the internet gets more traffic from mobile devices than desktop devices. For the first time in history, the usage of video content is also increased.

2016 – Pokemon Go

The new app had more than 45 million users globally. It changed the concept of augmented reality.

2017 – Ads.txt

This year the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) introduced Ads.txt. Project intended to increase transparency in the programmatic advertising ecosystem. It stands for authorized digital sellers. It offers a simple, flexible, and secure method that publishers and distributors can use to publicly list the companies they authorized to sell their digital inventory.

The file can only be posted to a domain by a publisher’s webmaster to make it valid and authentic. Because it is a text file, it is easy to update. It supports multiple types of supplier relationships, including domain owners who sell on exchanges through their own accounts, networks and sales houses who programmatically sell on behalf of domain owners, and content syndication partnerships where multiple authorized sellers represent the same inventory.

The amount of revenue digital agencies generated almost doubled since 2009, and Google drops Instant search.

2018 – Voice Technology

Enter the dawn of digital assistants such as Siri, Cortana, Alexa, and Google.

2019 – Personalized Advertising

Because of the use of the internet of things (IoT) and artificial intelligence (AI), companies can now deliver more relevant content and personalized advertising.

Though we already know one thing about 2020, what else do you think we can expect to see in the coming years? Over the next decade? Beyond? Share your predictions with me in the comments below. I’d love to hear what they are!

 

Categories
Digital Marketing

6 Marketing Attribution Models That Help You Understand Conversions

Six marketing attribution models help you understand conversions. Various marketing attribution models assist in understanding conversion drivers. Last-click attribution credits the final touchpoint, while first-click highlights the initial engagement. Linear models distribute credit evenly across all touchpoints, and time-decay gives more credit to recent interactions. Advanced models like data-driven attribution use machine learning to allocate credit based on actual conversion impact, providing a comprehensive view of the customer journey.

Want to make sure you’re fully understanding your customer journey and making the most of your resources? Learn about six of the most common attribution models to use.

Why Attribution is Important to Marketers

A common challenge for many marketers is taking care of in-depth analytics. Chances are, you’re using several channels to market products or services. How do you know which channels are performing well and which ones aren’t?

Is the dramatic increase in traffic to your site from a piece of content you just published or a Facebook ad? Which of your marketing channels caused an increase in conversions that led to additional revenue?

Without proper attribution, you’re only looking at vanity metrics like the number of comments that are linked shares. To gauge the success of your marketing campaign, you have to go deeper and look at things such as how a lead first came in contact with your content, and what pushed them to make a purchase.

Proper marketing attribution allows you to study the entire customer journey of how a person went from a lead to a paying customer, which helps you determine what is working. Maybe your Facebook ads aren’t converting it all, so you’re better off pausing your campaign and reworking your strategy. Or perhaps you’re getting a high return on investment from email marketing, in which case you would want to do more email outreach because you know it works.

Without using marketing attribution to help you see the touchpoints that are contributing to your business growth, you’ll keep wasting time and energy on resources that are not providing a positive ROI.

Let’s take a look at some of the most common attribution models along with the pros and cons of each one so you can determine which model is best for your business and marketing channels.

Related: How to Measure Digital Marketing ROI for your Business

First-Touch Attribution

Using a first touch attribution model, you give credit to the channel that first directed a lead to your product or sent a visitor to your website.

For instance, if a lead was first introduced to your website through a Facebook ad, and then clicked a link on your site that sent them to a webinar. At the end of the webinar, they subscribe to your email newsletter and then later converted to your email outreach. The credit for that conversion would be attributed to the first touchpoint, which is the Facebook ad rather than the email outreach.

The idea behind this attribution model is that many conversions occur at the end of the funnel, but they wouldn’t have been possible without the first touchpoint. This type of model is not usually the best option for B2B because there are generally a lot of touchpoints involved before a lead converts.

Last Touch Attribution

The last touch attribution model is similar to the first touch model, but in this instance, instead of measuring what the lead first came in contact with your business, it attributes the entire sales process to the last touch or the end of the marketing funnel. This is generally the default setting in the majority of attribution models. If you rely on Google Analytics, this is the default attribution model. This approach focuses on what drove the lead to convert and ignores everything before the conversion.

Linear Attribution

With linear attribution, you’ll get a more complete overview of everything that happened between the beginning of the funnel to the end where the lead converts. With this approach, the middle of the final is no more important than the beginning or the end of the funnel because it gives everything equal importance. This model is easy to set up and can be used to compare results from other data models because you don’t have to worry about which touchpoints should receive credit for a conversion. The only real issue with this approach is that, in reality, not all touchpoints are created equally.

Position-Based Attribution

Also known as the u-shaped attribution model, the position-based model gives credit to three main touchpoints. 40% goes to the first and last touch, while the remaining 20% goes to the middle touch. Emphasis is on the first touchpoint because it is the primary impact where the leads come in contact with your business and the last touchpoint because it is the point at which the lead converts.

In marketing, the first and last touchpoints are generally the most important, but this doesn’t mean you should neglect any middle touchpoints. The middle touchpoints may be having an impact that is necessary for conversion.

This model is a good approach because, unlike the first and last touch attribution models that place importance on just one aspect of the data, the u-shaped model provides equal significance for both values. This is not a good approach to use when the first or last touchpoint is not as important. As you do your analysis, you should always check if the first touchpoint is as crucial as the last.

If you have a long sales cycle or a campaign that has to nurture leads, you should avoid using this model. Instead, save it for when the lead engages with your content and decides almost immediately that they want to use the product or service you offer.

Algorithmic Attribution

This method is the most accurate way to measure a customer journey from prospect all the way through to conversion. This model’s success rate is higher than the others because it’s uniquely created for the business. Depending on the tool you use, this process may be done quickly by manually entering the parameters or using machine learning.

In this approach, you can give credit to the touchpoints that matter most of your business instead of providing equal credit to the first, middle, and last touchpoints. It gives you the most accurate data from the customer journey. However, this process is complexed and involves a variety of calculations so you may need the skills of a data analyst along with more powerful and advanced tools. As such, the tools may not be available to smaller businesses since they are often pricey.

If you have a short and straightforward sales cycle, using the algorithmic attribution model is not ideal for you. If, on the other hand, you have a long and complicated sales process that involves both marketing qualified lead and sales qualified lead reporting, the algorithmic model is the perfect option for you because it allows you to conduct in-depth analysis at each stage of the funnel.

Time-Decay Attribution

With the Time-Decay attribution model there is more significance to the touchpoints that are closer to where the conversion occurred then at the top of the funnel. This attribution model is similar to the linear model but is a multi-touch model that gives more credit to the middle and the bottom of the final. It represents them as being worth more because they are the points that drove the conversion.

Which ones do you use and why? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Categories
Digital Marketing

PPC Trends to Watch for in 2020

There are several PPC trends to watch for in 2020. PPC trends focus on automation and machine learning for improved ad performance and efficiency. Voice search optimization becomes crucial as voice-activated device usage rises. Audience targeting is refined, prioritizing user intent over keywords. Video ads gain prominence across platforms. Visual search evolves, offering new advertising opportunities. Advertisers increasingly adopt these trends, adapting to changing technologies and consumer behaviors for effective PPC campaigns.

Over the last year-and-a-half, we’ve seen developments occurring in the paid search industry from both Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising. So far, the changes have involved audiences, average position, smart bidding, and ad copy.

As innovation in digital marketing continues to grow exponentially, smart pay-per-click pros need to be able to keep up with the market.

To stay ahead of the game, here are five trends we are on the look for in 2020.

Voice Search

Comscore predicts that by next year, half of all searches will be voice searches. The search terms that trigger ads that will appear will change as people interact with the search engines more conversationally when they use their voice-enabled devices.

Though we are still quite a long way away from seeing paid search within voice, there’s no reason you shouldn’t start preparing for it now. You can do this by:

  • Beginning to use more conversational and long-tail keyword terms you are targeting
  • Keeping your landing pages more conversational for the user experience and SEO reasons
  • Testing and learning more Long Trail terms in 2020. Focus on the impression and impression share, as well as the CTR and CVR.

Account Management and Automation

We’ve already seen automation start, but we’re going to see it become even more crucial in 2020.

We’ve seen automation in PPC optimization and account management. The ability to identify opportunities within your PPC account and make changes to improve performance and account hygiene is now automated. When it comes to account management, you can automate rules within your account to manage the bidding and daily account management tasks.

Though it’s a good start, there’s not enough automation in the industry. Automating processes such as big management can help harness the power of automation. Even if you are not too keen on the idea of automating bid management, there are many other areas you can apply automation to.

For example, Albert is an AI tool that takes data from across all of your marketing activities to decide where your investment should be focusing. There are moment marketing tools like Mporium that allow marketers to automate changes to their campaigns based on triggers from third-party sources such as social media content, weather, stock market changes, and TV.

In 2020, we’ll see even more attention placed on marketing performance with businesses and clients requiring additional data analysis, reporting, planning, and servicing. As more companies advertise online, it will become increasingly challenging to cut through the clutter.

Because of the higher prominence of automation tools to help with optimization, account management, daily tasks, and reporting, you should start looking into ways you can use automation in your paid search, such as:

  • Using scripts in Bing and Google to automate your account management alerts and changes
  • Testing smart campaigns in Google ads to hit your target KPIs
  • Reduce manual reporting time with automated reporting
  • Rely on bidding rules to manage campaign performance
  • Set up alerts across all of your activities to find out about significant changes
  • Spend more time analyzing your audiences and data so you can deliver the best possible experience for your customers

Audience Segmentation

Audience segmentation is based on taking a group of people who have interacted with you online, either on your website, through a YouTube channel, your CRM, or another social media channel.

You segment the audience based on the URL they visited on your website, how they’ve interacted on your site, and the videos they’ve watched.

You place them into buckets that serve specific ads based on how they’ve interacted with you. This allows you to increase or decrease bids to make sure you are more or less prominent to the audiences based on the value they have to your business. Though it seems very in-depth, this is still among the most basic ways to use audiences.

As we gather more data on our customers and audiences, we can break them up into specific buckets and thereby personalized are messaging and visiting strategies even more based on certain data points, such as:

  • What demographic group they fall under
  • Age and gender
  • The type of user they are
  • Their interests
  • What devices they are on
  • How they came to your website and what keywords they found you through

Including specific data sets as well as inferred emotional data allows you to make your ads extremely personalized toward the people you want to target. You can also identify the type of person you should be spending your resources on to grow your business. You can create audience lists in Google Ads to make use of this opportunity.

Visual Search

Search is not only becoming possible without a screen, but it is also becoming more visual. Now it’s possible to upload an image to a search engine and use it to find relevant results based on other images similar to the one you uploaded. This development started in the social media world with Pinterest and its visual search tool in 2015. Since then, both Snapchat and Instagram have also allowed users to search with images.

Last year, Snapchat announced a visible search partnership with Amazon to allow users to search for products on Amazon straight from their Snapchat camera.

In response, Bing has also released its own visual search engine that allows people to do the same thing with their entire and Ducks of the web rather than just what’s available on a social media platform or retail website.

Preparing for the growth of visual search now will make it easier for you in the future. Do this by:

  • Ensuring you have plenty of images that showcase what you offer on your site
  • Fine-tuning the ALT text of these images have the correct alt text to allow the search engines to pick them up
  • Ensuring you’re using only the best quality images to Showcase your products and services.
  • Where possible, using multiple images, so the bots have a choice of what images to index.

PPC and SEO Integration

As we move forward, it’s essential to address the relationship between PPC and SEO. Both of them have their pros and cons, but you can use them together to get the most of your results.

In 2020, you can make an effort to integrate your PPC and SEO strategies with:

  • Efficient position strategy
  • Keyword unearthing
  • Increased SERP coverage
  • Data and information sharing

What do you think the next few years will bring in terms of PPC? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Categories
SMG News

Sachs Marketing Group Named to the Clutch 1000

Here at Sachs Marketing Group, we pride ourselves on being a trustworthy, 100% in-house SEO company. Since 2010, our marketing experts have provided SEO services for dozens of huge clients, including BMW, Diamond Resorts, and the United States Air Force. We’re proud to learn that our hard work has been rewarded as Clutch has named us one of the top 1,000 B2B companies in the world! The Clutch 1000 only includes the top 1% of firms listed on Clutch, which makes this recognition quite special for us.

Our industry-renowned work has garnered a perfect 5.0 rating on Clutch. A leading B2B market research platform and a member of the Inc. 5000, Clutch uses verified client feedback to rank and evaluate companies across hundreds of directories.

We’ve been consistently named as a top company by Clutch since 2015, and we’re happy to continue to receive such great feedback from customers.

In a recent review, we developed social media advertising campaigns for the California Aeronautical University.

“We’ve worked with similar firms before, but this is the first time we’ve had a really trusting relationship,” said Matthew Johnston, the president of the university. “They’re not trying to take advantage of a budget. They’re true, genuine partners. I don’t feel like we’re a client that simply generates revenue for them. We’re treated more like family.”

Sachs Marketing is also ranked on The Manifest and Visual Objects, Clutch’s sister sites. On those sites, we’re listed as one of the top SEO firms in Los Angeles. Thanks to this industry recognition, prospective buyers can connect with us to bring their SEO to the next level. If you are looking to start a project, feel free to drop us a line today. We offer a free SEO audit and have never had a complaint or credit card dispute.

Categories
Digital Marketing

Holiday E-Commerce Tips: How to Prepare Your Site for Shopping Season

There are several holiday e-commerce tips to consider this year. Successful holiday e-commerce strategies involve optimizing a website for mobile users, creating holiday-themed content, and offering special promotions. Implementing a robust email marketing campaign to highlight deals and gift ideas is crucial. Enhancing customer service with chat support and clear shipping policies can improve the shopping experience. Additionally, utilizing social media for holiday campaigns increases engagement and drives traffic.

Getting your website ready for the holidays takes a lot of preparation. The servers that support your site, the onsite search technology you are using, and the keywords you’re using to target new people during the holidays all have to be in the best shape to make sure you get the most out of the shopping.

Here are a few holiday e-commerce tips to help you increase the chances of getting conversions during the holiday season.

Make Sure Your Site is Secure

As the holiday season approaches, there is an increased risk of falling victim to distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. These site outages are always bad, but they are highly damaging when you’re dealing with high volumes of traffic and transactions.

Make sure your site can tell the difference between the influx of new visitors and malicious calls made to your site. Use a service like Cloudflare to help you block the bad calls while still allowing legitimate visitors to come through.

At this point, you should have invested in converting your site to https, but if you haven’t, you should create a plan to do that because of the redirects involved. If you don’t, you’ll lose a lot of organic traffic in the process.

Visitors may receive warnings about your site if you haven’t converted to https, which can cause your conversions to suffer.

Review Your Keywords

Take a look at last year’s organic search terms, and improve their experience on the landing page for the most transaction-oriented terms. This way, the terms people use the most during the holidays will lead them to pages that you’ve carefully designed to convert them into customers.

Related: 11 Essential SEO Tips for Ecommerce Sites

Check Your On-Site Search

When you have new visitors to your site, you’ll have more people who need a bit of help finding what they need. It helps yo have a solid navigation system to make finding things easier. Even still, there will be people who rely on your on-site search to find what they need. As such, you need to make sure your internal search engine serves relevant results to everyone.

Setup on-site search tracking if you haven’t already done so. After your tracking establishes what the top searched terms are, you can use them to improve the on-site search experience.

Check for Errors

If you use Google Analytics, create a report that focuses on 404 error URLs so you can fix them before you start seeing an increase in traffic.

If you’re also using Google Search Console, export a report of errors GSC detects and then look for the sources of the errors so you can fix them.

If you have a number of top URLs people try to reach but don’t exist, you can create redirects to get them to the right place.

Optimize Site Campaigns

Holiday traffic boosts are short-lived, so you need to optimize site campaigns to create a sense of urgency so people act. Consider adding deals that expire, timed offers on holiday bundles, and advertising limited stock.

Using the scarcity principle can do wonders to convert that holiday traffic.

Get Your Promotions Calendar Ready

The content that promotes your product bundles, your Google Ads search terms, and landing pages, the email promotions you send to your list – these are all things that need to be timed and executed perfectly to make the most of your sales opportunities.

As such, you’ll need a project management tool like Trello, or something like Google Sheets and Google Calendar to keep your teams working together. This way, it’s easy for everyone to find out what is launching next, how to escalate when there’s an issue, and whom to contact when something needs to be pushed backed or canceled.

Someone needs to be in charge of your marketing automation efforts, and they need to be in contact with the web team that anticipates the traffic from that effort.

Your PPC specialists need to work with the people managing the website to make sure the messaging is aligned.

You can’t afford for both your website’s pages and shopping cart to be down so the team that deploys any code for enhancement on the site also needs to be in contact with the people who are managing the campaigns. This way, you ensure nothing is affected by upgrades or maintenance projects that may be running on the site.

When the stakes are high it is a good idea to have a master calendar to run everything.

Up Your Shipping Game

For certain shoppers, it won’t matter how much they like your deals if they don’t understand how your shipping works.

A 2018 retail holiday survey found that free shipping is one of the most appealing promotions to customers, second only to discount prices.

If you offer free shipping for certain deals, make sure that it is clear two visitors. Don’t hide it in areas where it will look like an ad.

Be clear about your shipping thresholds because it’s better to have messaging like free shipping on orders above $150 rather than hiding those details and saying free shipping and handling click here for more details.

Free shipping will generally win over fast shipping even for Holiday Shoppers. However, if you can follow through on your promise to ship fast, messaging on how quickly you can deliver the customer’s order needs to be featured prominently to help differentiate you from your competitors.

Improve Your Site Speed

Your site speed is always important. During the holidays, however, it is even more crucial. You’ll have an influx of new visitors who are more likely to spend their money now than at any other point during the year. If you have back burner projects geared toward improving your page load time, now is the time to implement those plans.

Your holiday site preparations can take a toll on your overall page size if you’re not careful. You must use well design and optimize images that look good even on the largest laptop screens. This can impact the total size of all the elements your page needs to load which can slow down the load time.

Pairing this with higher than usual visitor counts can overload your servers which brings your site to a crawl.

Use these tips to help you:

  • Make sure you’re using a Content Delivery Network.
  • Use Scrset to deliver the correct optimize images for different devices so your images are responsive.
  • Minify your JavaScript to avoid any unnecessary site slowdowns.
  • Determine whether your site uses asynchronous scripts so the important elements are loaded first

Have a Retargeting Budget

While you want to ensure that your checkout experience is as Stellar as it can possibly be, no matter how great it is, a portion of your audience will leave items in their cart and not push all the way through to purchase. Cart abandonment is just as much a part of online marketing as conversions.

Save a portion of your holiday ad spending for retargeting rather than just spending it on PPC or other avenues that bring additional visitors in. Plan how you’ll remind visitors to come back to their car when they see your ad and then sure they can go back to where they left off rather than having them start over.

Categories
Digital Marketing

How to Create a Style Guide for Your Brand

Creating a style guide for your brand is essential to ensuring a smooth, deliberate, clear, and intentional message in your marketing and brand representation. Knowing how to create a style guide for your brand is a valuable skill—one you can use as an entrepreneur or in service of a corporation of any size. A successful style guide tells internal employees how to create messaging reflective of your brand and takes into account the recipient of those messages.

What Is a Style Guide?

A style guide is a central document that defines, exemplifies, and executes a brand’s voice. Style guides define language preferences and tones as well as direct an organization’s representatives to use the brand’s style in specific ways, for specific outlets. The style guide may include details about:

It may also include assets such as your logo in a number of formats and a black and white version.

How to Create a Style Guide for Your Brand

When it comes to understanding how to create a style guide for your brand, it’s best to break up a potentially large project into pieces. Divide, delegate, conquer, and publicize (internally) with these steps and stages.

Understand Your Buyer Persona

As your brand, who are you trying to reach? You should consider choosing the language and other stylistic elements partially based upon your prospective and current customers. Your buyer persona can help you understand what type of language you should use to reach your ideal audience.

A buyer persona is basically a profile of your ideal customer, and it’s an essential component of understanding your brand. Here’s an example of a buyer persona for a company that produces high-end coffee machines.

Name: Kathy Sample

Gender: Female

Profession: C-suite executive

Generation: Millennial

Age: 33

Income: $115,000/year

Marital Status: Domestic partnership, no children

Education: Masters degree, Business (MBA)

Religion: Christian

Affinities and biographical information: Kathy is a busy working professional living in an urban environment, likely a loft apartment or condominium, with her partner. She doesn’t own a car, but rents one for long trips. When it comes to brewing coffee, she prefers speed, convenience, and quality, while the cost is not a large concern for her. Kathy enjoys coffee in the morning at home when she wakes up and mid-day at the office. She drinks top-shelf liquor and dines out in the evenings on the weekend. She usually brings pre-planned meals to work or dines out with coworkers at lunch. While Kathy experiences generational tension with her parents, she finds that they can often discuss life over a cup of coffee, and considers it a central bonding experience when spending time with her loved ones.

From this information, we can extrapolate that Kathy might best receive advertising messages during her workday, perhaps when she’s craving a cup of coffee. If she’s thinking about her family, she might want a warmer message, possibly a seasonal one during Christmas.

Adhere to Document Creation Processes

Does your organization already have structures in place for creating documentation? Many businesses adhere to an Agile model, which means you’ll need to plan and allocate time and resources in a structured fashion. This means choosing a deadline, delegating relevant pieces of the style guide creation, ensuring in-house distribution, and in many cases, proving ROI (return on investment) for this piece of content.

If there are already document creation procedures, find out what they are and plan your process.

Seek Input

When it comes to defining your brand, the first step involves evaluating and defining the voice of your brand. To accomplish this, you’ll need measured input from your team. Identify key stakeholders and ensure they contribute to this definition. You can do this through:

  • A series of meetings
  • An electronic survey
  • Compilation of existing documents

In a large organization, consider asking department heads to brainstorm with their individual groups and provide one sheet of feedback per department. Make sure to always provide a deadline.

Once you’ve collected input, identify any trends and consider whether they reflect your brand.

Design Your Brand’s Style Guide

Your brand’s style guide is primarily a document of text defining the limits and expressions of your brand. Naturally, you’ll want to layout your document in an exemplary fashion: your document should exemplify any rules you have for your brand’s style.

You may wish to seek help with the layout of this document, depending on its size, or you may wish to collaborate with a designer to create a complete brand book. Brand books include heavy visual elements and guidelines for using visual imagery along with your brand’s style guide.

You can also use tools such as Frontify or Canva to design it and make it easier to update over time.

Publish In-House in a Shared or Accessible Location

Your style guide is only as good as its ability for others to use it. Once your style guide is complete and published, you’ll need to determine:

  • How you will distribute the style guide
  • Where you will house it (shared internal location is the best bet)
  • How and when you will remind people to use it
  • Remain a point of contact for employees who have questions about using the style guide

Update Existing Materials

Your website, printed marketing collateral, and other messaging may need updates to comply with the style guide. Create a defined schedule for reviewing and updating your marketing materials to ensure they comply with your new style guide.

Update Your Style Guide

Culture changes, both generally and within your organization. Organizations rebrand, relaunch, and go in new directions to survive. As that happens, you’ll need a plan to update your style guide to suit. This means providing a schedule for review (I suggest a quarterly review) as well as a means for others to provide feedback and updates.

Ultimately, knowing how to create a style guide for your brand is all about expressing your brand clearly and encouraging the desired response from your ideal customer or business partner. The presence of a style guide can also create clear direction within your organization and provide a means for you to have agency and advocacy within your brand.

 

 

Categories
Digital Marketing

How Blockchain is Changing Digital Marketing

Blockchain is changing digital marketing by enhancing transparency and security in transactions. It enables more reliable customer verification, preventing fraud in advertising. Blockchain facilitates decentralized data management, giving users more control over their personal information. This shift could lead to more honest and efficient marketing practices, with potential for innovations in customer loyalty programs and targeted advertising.

In the last 10 years, we’ve seen marketing undergo quite a change. Thanks to the blockchain, it’s about to go through yet another revolution. Most of us associate digital marketing with things such as analytics and artificial intelligence. As such, the blockchain may be the most destructive technology to hit marketers in every industry. Let’s take a closer look at how the blockchain is changing digital marketing and who stands to benefit.

The blockchain enables transactions to occur between two parties without the need for any kind of third-party verification. Most of the current uses for the blockchain have been centered around cryptocurrencies and finance, but the underlying technology could also have huge implications for marketing.

Analytics and artificial intelligence have benefited businesses more than consumers, but the blockchain may help level the playing field by giving the power of data back to the consumers themselves.

Consumers Take the Reigns

One of the greatest and perhaps most terrifying for marketers parts of the blockchain is that it gives the value of data back to consumers. Until now, many companies have benefited from being able to gather data from their customers. Everywhere we look, there’s a retailer who wants our email address, phone number, an address to make a circle purchase in-store or online.

While it’s true it helps the consumer in some ways because it allows for more personalized marketing, it is rather invasive. Many companies are selling the personal information they gather, too.

The blockchain is removing a company’s ability to pull data from customers without also offering to reimburse them for its value. The Brave Browser, for instance, is changing how users interact with online advertising. Instead of being bombarded with online ads, Brave users receive basic attention tokens (BATs) for the ads they interact with. It’s a new way of viewing advertising by trading the value of attention online rather than trading the space for ad sales.

Blockstack uses blockchain to protect your digital rights which creates a new type of network for decentralized apps. In the past customers would provide their to use certain applications in the data would remain on the application server out of the consumer’s hands. With Blockstack however, consumer data stays with it. It acts as a key to unlock certain apps but returns to the user as soon as they are finished using it.

Those of us in the marketing business may not like the concept because it’s going back to square one in the sense that you must rely on customers to give you the information you want and need to serve them better. While it’s not necessarily the best news for digital marketing, it is a necessary step in terms of providing better consumer protection.

Authentication and Transparency

In the past, people would shop online and hope that they were buying what was being marketing to them. Where the items really organic? Where they actually made an affair trade environment? Or was it manufactured with child labor in a sweatshop?

With the blockchain, consumers can finally get the answers to these questions and more. Using the power of the blockchain, companies are able to verify exactly where an item was grown or manufactured, what kinds of soil the items were grown in or how much the workers were paid to work there. This is huge in the era of consumers caring not just about the quality of what they’re buying but the integrity of the company supplying it.

Improved Ad-Spend

IBM and Unilever are on their way to clarifying the confusing area of online ad spend. As part of their project, the blockchain creates a trusted and verified chain from the ad dollar all the way to the end-user. In the past, nearly $0.85 / advertising dollar made its way to the publisher. Today, that number is just $0.40 largely as a result of the intermediaries that are used in the process. You know ever has already saved tens of millions of dollars as a result of the project.

While it has helped you Unilever save money, it could put sons of companies that have built themselves up based on verifying add metrics out of business. Blockchain is changing digital marketing in a highly destructive way, potentially wiping out an entire generation of companies built on its very existence.

The real impact of the blockchain in digital marketing is not just in the new use cases being developed. It’s and how those use cases will impact the entire systems that have been created as a way to manage the digital Marketplace. At a time when digital marketing seems to be growing and changing by the moment, blockchain is changing digital marketing in disruptive and maybe even irreversible ways.

Introducing new technology means there are a ton of fear and doubt. With the blockchain, there are plenty of things to be scared of, but once it becomes more mainstream, there is no doubt there will be incredible ways to work with it. When smartphones first became a thing, we didn’t have location-based marketing or mobile apps. We can expect to see a lot of unforeseen Innovation that will happen with the black thing just as it has happened with other new technologies.

Categories
Digital Marketing

AI and Marketing: What You Need to Know

Have you taken the time to think about how artificial intelligence (AI) will impact your marketing? Are you looking for AI tools you can use right now? Are you wondering why you should even bother paying attention to AI?

Why Marketers Must Pay Attention to AI

AI Affects Daily Life

Experts predict AI will have trillions of dollars in annual impact on businesses. There are dozens of consumer applications for everyday from Netflix recommending shows to watch, Google Maps predicting traffic in your area,  Gmail finishing your sentences, and Amazon predicting what you’ll buy next. However, most people don’t have any idea about what it is or how it works because they don’t realize machine learning is handling these tasks.

AI makes your life better by making things more personalized and convenient. We see the same thing happening in marketing and sales. The software marketing and sales professionals use just gets smarter over time. As it does, marketers will have the ability to personalize and do things at scale in a way that’s currently limited by human-powered marketing.

AI Will Change Marketing Careers

Using AI can help your business make better decisions and lead customers to your brand. New technologies will transform the marketing profession just as it has transformed everything else in our lives. New career paths will open up and the jobs will be more enjoyable.

Many marketers will be amazed by the results in 3 years, but only a certain segment will understand the potential of intelligence software and seek to use these tools today. By taking this initiative, they’re giving themselves a head start on their peers who are still afraid of exploring AI and what it has to offer. Maybe the topic is too overwhelming to try to understand or to abstract. Regardless of the reason, brands that don’t find smarter ways to use AI in their marketing will be left behind the competition that chooses to do so.

Consumers Are Expecting AI Benefits

Over the last 10 years, consumers have been conditioned to give up privacy and data in exchange for personalization and ease-of-use. People have come to expect personalized marketing on some level, even in the B2B space. Anything less than a seamless omnichannel buying experience from companies is frustrating so people clearly want the conveniences that AI can bring.

What is AI?

From a marketing standpoint, it’s important to understand the fundamentals about deep learning and machine learning and how they actually work. The software powering machines is inherently stupid. Of course machines cannot see, understand, speak, or hear. AI is nothing more than an umbrella term for making machines more intelligent to give them human-like capabilities.

Voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa don’t understand anything out of the box. The tools have been trained to hear the human language, then understand what it’s saying and process it before it generates the best response to your question.

Predictions of Future Outcomes

The main subset of AI is known as machine learning. In the simplest terms, it’s about making predictions regarding future outcomes based on historical data.  We’ve been seeing this for decades with data science. The difference between data science and machine learning is that machine learning improves as more and newer data is made available. Then it makes predictions in response to this information.

For instance, Google Maps is not powered by human beings – it’s typing directions to reroute people as they make exits, run into accidents, or do other things on the road. It uses a collection of data points from multiple sources to help predict a better path as you drive.

As you move through your daily tasks of your career, you will find that your making a series of predictions every moment of every day.  Marketers make predictions every day about what to write, where they should publish it and when it should be published, how much to spend on their ads, designs, colors, and much more based on past human behavior. At that point they just hope for the best. Each one of these predictions is an instance where machine learning could be applied.

Exploring AI for Your Needs

Many companies claim they leverage AI when they don’t. This has become a problem and one that experts have been tackling for the last few years. Many companies say they use machine learning, neural nets, or deep learning and it’s up to marketers to ask potential customers to determine whether it’s true.

When trying to find AI tools you can use for your business, you should ask pointed questions about exactly how the technology is used in the process and how it makes your company smarter and more efficient. Don’t be afraid to challenge the sales people who are selling the technology to ensure they really understand it. Tell them how long it takes or how much it cost to run a skill or process and then ask how the machine can make it faster or eliminate it completely.

Once you have answers to those questions, ask them to do walkthroughs or demos. If you have trouble understanding the underlying technology, find someone outside of the company who can explain it to you.

Ways You Can Use AI Right Now

Right now, you can find AI applications being built for nearly anything. If you are working for a large company with access to limitless data and a budget for tools, then you have a wide variety of options. If you’re working for a small business, you may have to dig a Little Deeper to find the tools they need and can afford but the reality is that almost every business could be using AI.

Here are a number of practical applications and benefits for AI when it comes to social media marketing for companies of any size.

Chatbots

Many people misunderstand what a chatbot actually is. They believe that because the word bot is present in the name, it is AI. The truth is the majority of chatbots that are currently available, whether you’re using them for auto responses, sales, or customer service are still heavily reliant on human-powered branching. Along with the series of if-then statements to function.

Setting up a chat bot can be an overwhelming experience because it’s like setting up an email workflow for a hundred thousand people and an automation tool. In some instances, a human being still has to set up all of the rules for the chatbot and then continue to maintain and update the rules moving forward.

On the other hand chatbot technology with AI powered capabilities can eliminate the need for humans to set up and update the rules. To find out if a chatbot technology supports these capabilities, ask questions about how the company is using natural language processing in machine learning to improve efficiency.

Natural language processing room means that the technology process has the meaning behind a statement as it is naturally typed or spoken and then generates a correct recommendation or response. Machine learning is when the technology can determine whether the recommendations are actually helpful and automatically get rid of anything that is not. Then the chat thought adapts all future recommendations based on that information. The chatbot technology is processing learning and adapting entirely without a human needing to track all the interactions and manually adjust rules.

Social Advertising

Automatic ad placement on social media platforms is another place where AI can be helpful. If you’ve managed a Facebook page before you’ve likely seen prompts that ask “Do you want to run this ad?” with an image and text from one of your posts. All you have to do is continue to build the Facebook ad based on Facebook’s recommendations about what it thinks it will do well. This functionality is completely AI powered.

Reviews and Monitoring

Monitoring social media and reviews is another process that using AI technology can simplify and manage. This is especially true for small businesses where reviews play a major role in search. Historically, both tasks have been incredibly time-consuming especially if you take the time to go into sentiment analysis and prioritize which one you should respond to.

Content Strategy

Content strategy comes down to making predictions about what you should write about, how often to publish, the keywords to use and so on. Traditional content strategy is evolving and there’s a lot of money going toward developing tools and platforms that use machine learning to eliminate speculation.

HubSpot was one of the first to implement machine learning in their content strategy tool to do content clustering. If you put in a word, the tool recommends other topics related to it from within the site and then surfaces direct links for you.

You can also use AI to do things like look at multiple datasets on when people search for certain things and then signal when your company should be posting about their products. It can help you determine which keywords to use or maybe even write content for you at some point in the future.

Though this technology has the potential to replace a lot of marketing consultants down the road, it will also create a lot of opportunity for consulting with companies on how to use AI to create a content strategy.

AI Marketing Tools

Persado

Persado is an AI powered marketing tool that creates the text for social ads. It has partnerships with major brands, and is at a price point that excludes most small businesses.

Rasa.io

If you’re currently using an email platform like MailChimp, they could be using AI to provide list segmentation, predict fatigue, learn the best times to send to individual recipients and more. There are ways to rig the features and functions currently offered with MailChimp but the workarounds are not perfect.

Rasa.io, on the other hand is an email platform that creates automated personalized content in newsletters. In theory, each newsletter is sent at a time prioritized for each recipient. It learns which links the user clicks and eventually starts adapting the link that includes and future newsletters based on this information so each newsletter it sends could be different from all the others.

Yext

Yext is an AI-powered tool that is effective at tracking social media monitoring and reviews. The tool can process vast amounts of information and understand what’s being said within it. Then it uses different models to prioritize whom you should respond to.

Yext also enables business data for Amazon Alexa. If you question an Alexa-enabled device about the business hours of a local business, yes is the technology that powers this business listing and provides key pieces of information to voice searchers.

Embracing AI now will set your business up for success in the future.

Categories
SEO

Google Changes GMB Listings

Whenever Google changes GMB listings, you must check your listings to ensure they’re live and accurate. Google made significant changes to Google My Business (GMB) listings, enhancing the platform’s usefulness for businesses and consumers. Updates included more options for business categories, attributes, and posts, enabling businesses to provide detailed information. Enhanced features for booking services, messaging, and Q&A improved interaction with customers. These changes help businesses better manage their online presence and customer engagement.

Google recently announced they will be automatically applying changes to Google My Business listings with distance-based service areas.

The last remaining distance based service areas will be removed. Moving forward, service area businesses currently based on distance are to be automatically converted to the closest named areas. For instance, if your service area includes obscure towns such as Norris, South Carolina, Google will update it to mention Liberty, Central, Clemson, and so on.

Managers of Google My Business listings that are affected by this change will have the chance to review the updates after they log into their account.

If your account is one that has been affected by the changes, you’ll see an update from Google at the top of the page the next time you log in.

At that point you’ll have the option to either accept the changes Google has made or provide a new service area based on zip code, city, or other attributes.

Though it may seem like it is not a sudden change because Google has been in the process of phasing out the distance based service areas since last year. Google is making this change to accommodate businesses that provide services outside of set distance from where they’re physically located. This change is good for businesses that do not serve customers at a physical location.

Google has been encouraging businesses to apply the changes on their own and were given an ample amount of time to do so. Now, Google is forcing the changes on any listings that still has distance based service areas.

If you do not accept the change Google automatically applied, you can provide a new service area. You should receive an email notification about the change.

The change should not have any effect on how your listing appears in the search results. It is a good idea to review Google’s changes to ensure that your listing still shows up in the areas where you serve your customers.

Adding or Editing Your Service Area in Response to the Changes

If your business serves customers within a specific local area, you can list that area on your Google my business listing. Listing the service area how’s your customers know where you’ll go to deliver to them or visit them and helps ensure your listing shows up in the right local searches.

Though you can no longer say your service area as a distance around your business, you’ll be able to specify your service area by ZIP code city, or other areas. This way, you can cover your entire service area or delivery radius using the city names and zip codes in the area.

  1. Sign in to Google My Business.
  2. If you have multiple business locations, open the location you’d like to manage.
  3. If you need to verify your pure services listing, find the verification needed card and click “Verify now.”
  4.  Enter your address and click next.
  5.  Choose the verification off option to finish your verification process.

When you update your business information, it’s important to remember that if you do not serve customers at your business address, you must leave the address field blank and only enter your service area.

If you serve customers at your business address but also have other service areas, enter both your address and your service area.

As a pure service area business, you should not enter your address under the info tab in the Google my business dashboard. Leave the business location field blank.

To edit your service area:

  1. Sign in to Google my business and open the location you’d like to manage.
  2. Click “Info” from the menu.
  3. Click “Edit” in the service area section.
  4. Enter your service area information based on the cities, zip codes, or other areas you serve.
  5. Click “Apply”.

To remove a service area:

You can only remove a service area if you’ve enjoyed your business address.

  1. Sign in to Google my business and open the location you’d like to manage.
  2. Click “Info” from the menu.
  3. Click “Edit” in the service area section.
  4. Click remove next to each service area you want to remove. To remove all service areas at once, click “Clear service areas”
  5. Click “Apply”

Ultimately, this gives you more control over the specific areas you’re advertising your services in. Adding additional locations based on zip code or city will also help your local SEO efforts because you can choose the areas with the least amount of competition.

Categories
SEO

SEO Perfection for Location Pages

Striving for SEO perfection for location pages is every SEO’s priority. However, location pages can vary depending on the industry, type of business, and location. Optimizing SEO for location pages involves using local keywords, providing comprehensive and up-to-date contact information, and integrating Google Maps. User-friendly design, local reviews, and unique content for each location page enhance relevance. Consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) across web listings and integrating local events or news can also boost local SEO performance.

**This post was selected as one of the top digital marketing articles of the week by UpCity, a B2B ratings and review company for digital marketing agencies and other marketing service providers.**

Many clients may believe that stuffing the keyword “near me” is the best way to rank in the map pack. The truth is that SEO rankings in the map pack are based on many factors, but one of the most critical ones is having a top-notch location landing page.

What Makes a Top Notch Location Page?

As SEO professionals, we tell our clients and stakeholders that great SEO implementation must satisfy search intent. why don’t we bring the same logic when it comes to location page optimization?

Use this checklist to address several possible questions your website visitors may have when learning about a local business to cover your bases and increase your chances of ranking in the map pack.

Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP)

The NAP is a critical part of local SEO. Your nap should be an exact match copy throughout all of your citations such as your Google My Business profile, various directory listings, and your location page.

There are many SEO professionals out there they claim exact match isn’t as important as it used to be but there are plenty who still do.  as such, there’s really no point in risking it so you may as well ensure an exact match across all of your local citations.

Photos

Photos are an important part of the location page experience but many businesses are missing important opportunities when it comes to their photos.

Interior Photos

You would think this is a no-brainer, but there are a surprising number of location pages that are missing interior photos.

Interior photos help visitors get a realistic expectation when it comes to your business. Often, especially when it comes to the healthcare industry, high-quality interior photos can be a deciding factor on whether or not to make an appointment.

Exterior Photos

Just like interior photos are important, exterior photos are important for your local page optimization. Examples of exterior photos include:

  • Logos and signage.
  • Nearby businesses if you are located inside a mall or strip mall.
  • Parking lots and other parking areas if applicable.

Including exterior photos will help new visitors locate your business the first time they arrive and they also be a decision factor when it comes to new business.

Optimizing Your Image Metadata

Your images should be high quality, but images taken from digital cameras tend to be large in terms of file size. The larger the file, the longer it takes to load on your website so it’s important to optimize it to improve your page load speed.

Much of the larger file size has to do with the extra metadata that is included within the photos,  the majority of which is unnecessary, such as the type of camera that took the photo.

Using software like ImageOptim can remove that metadata with lossless compression so that the image quality is not compromised, but the file size is greatly reduced. Using software such as ImageExifEditor can be used to add metadata to your images such as a title, description, and GPS coordinates.

When it comes to your website, adding GPS coordinates to the metadata may be a bit much. However, when it comes to adding the data to photos that will be used on your Google My Business profile and other local citations, it may help boost your rankings.

Description of the Business Location

Many businesses fail when it comes to the description of their location. Some locations use the same description on all location Pages only replacing a location name. While it may seem like it’s a good idea at first, ultimately in terms of ranking it is not the ideal approach. For the best possible ranking potential, each location page needs to be unique.

You can do this by including information such as your:

  • Products and Brands: If you are a store, include some of the major brands that someone may be searching for near them.
  • Services Offered: Do you offer services of this location that are unique compared to other locations?
  • Unique Selling Proposition: what makes your business unique compared to the competitors in the area?
  • Menu: For restaurants, including the menu is paramount. However, other businesses such as nail salons can also include a menu that lists the various products and services alongside their pricing to help people know what they can expect to pay once they arrive as a walk-in.
  • Nearby Locations: Do you have any other locations nearby? If so, this can help with your internal linking.

Helpful Call to Action (CTA)

It’s important to include a call to action on any page where you want the visitor to take an action. However, many location pages often overlook this step. The key to a successful CTA is to make sure that it makes sense and adds value to your user experience. Options for CTAs on your location page include:

  • Request appointment.
  • Make a reservation.
  • Call us now (Click/tap to call).
  • Get directions (with a link to Google Maps).
  • Shop Now (if you’re set up for online shopping).

Directions to Business Location

Including directions to your business not only helps users find the business but it can also help you naturally work in Geo specific keywords and targeting in your copy.

As a general rule, you should focus on how to get to your location from at least two directions either east and west or north and south from major highways. It’s a good idea to mention major intersections to also help you identify your business location.

And don’t forget to mention nearby businesses in your direction so your users can find your business if it’s located in a shopping mall or outlet center.

Embedded Map

Take time to embed a map on each location page as this can help users more precisely figure out if your location is the one that is closest to them. If possible, use the Google Maps API to develop a custom map solution that also includes other nearby locations.

Schema

All local businesses should be using the standard local business markup. But, it’s also important to take things one step further and use the specific local business type that is most relevant to you. Take a look at schema.org for a list of more specific business types and try to find the one that matches your business the best.

SEO Title and Meta Description

One of the most important and well-known steps of SEO is to have a well optimized title and meta description. Local SEO amateurs are known for spamming it because they don’t tend to worry about the title and meta description since they are focusing on ranking in the map pack. Local businesses will still get traffic from standard organic search results so you should always cover your bases and ensure that your listing is optimized wherever someone may find it.

To ensure your title is well optimized, it should include your brand name, keyword, and a geo-specific keyword such as your city or local area.

When it comes to your meta description, be aware that it does not directly affect rankings but it is a free selling space in the search engine results page. You should include the same three elements from the title while adding some additional flair to help sell users so they are more likely to click your link.

Internal Linking

Whenever possible, you should add relevant internal linking to your local landing pages. Though not all of these may be relevant to your business you can try some of these ideas:

  • Location specific social media profiles
  • Doctor/staff profiles
  • Other nearby locations
  • Informational pages about the specific services you offer
  • Company about page
  • Space for blogs you’ve recently published
  • Menus
  • Any available only shopping options

Loading Speed

Your pages load speed is an important ranking factor especially in terms of local SEO. Having a fast loading location page can make a difference between your site ranking in position 1 or position 2 in the map pack. Use tools such as Google PageSpeed insights or GTMetrix to help you diagnose issues with page load speed and to give you suggestions on how to improve it.

By addressing these 10 key areas on any and all location landing pages on your website, you can increase the chances of beating your competition out of the local map pack for a variety of searches.

Categories
Digital Marketing

How to Use Quora for Marketing

The internet is full of useful, educational, and entertaining places to spend time. Many of these places are important for brands and businesses to connect with their audience. An often-overlooked platform for making those connections is Quora. Learn how to use it for marketing to increase brand awareness and authority.

What is Quora?

Quora is a community based question-and-answer website similar to Yahoo Answers. According to Alexa, this site ranks 82 in global internet traffic and engagement over the past three months. In the United States, it ranks 56. Quantcast data shows the website reaches  more than 327,000 people every month in the us alone and ranks it as Number 3816 in the United States.

Anyone can ask and answer questions. The community votes on the answers that are most helpful. You can Target your question to specific URI users asking them to weigh in with an answer. You can publish content on Quora just like you can with LinkedIn publishing platform. (Repurpose some of your content to start a blog here to really amp it up a notch.) You can search for specific topics or questions related to your business and follow these to get notified whenever someone asks a new question. You can even spend credits to get your question in front of more people.

Even President Obama has jumped in on the Quora fun, answering the question, “What’s it like to  play basketball with President Obama?”

Why Marketers Should Use Quora

Marketers can use Quora for a variety of tasks such as generating content ideas, content creation, and establishing brand Authority. Even if you’re just spending a few minutes a day on the platform, it can do wonders for your overall marketing strategy.

Using Quora for Marketing

Create a Quality Profile

Every time you leave an answer, a portion of your bio is viewable at the top making it a great opportunity to extend some branding. The website shows the first 50 characters of your profile as a tagline above your answer. mention your brand name is close to the beginning as you can to make the most of the space. Your full bio can contain @ mentions of other users and clickable links.

It’s also possible to have topic-specific bio so you can mention your expertise when answering topic specific questions to add to your credibility. Do this by clicking on your profile page. In the right column you’ll see a list of knows about topics. Next to each topic is a link to describe your experience. Click on this link to set up the topic specific.

From here, complete as much as your profile as possible. This includes adding:

  • A detailed About Me section
  • Areas of expertise
  • Interests
  • Social media account connections
  • Your cities
  • Any schools or colleges you’ve attended
  • Previous companies you’ve worked for

All of this information helps you get found on the platform and can make it easier for people to seek you out when they’re looking for users to answer their questions.

If you’re brand-new to Quora, spend some time browsing the answers and upvoting any that catch your eye. Upvotes appear on your public profile right away and can indicate that you are active on the site.

Track the Topics You’re Interested in

You can use cure for market research to learn what people are asking about your industry. You can set up notifications for these topics so you have questions and answers sent to your inbox every day.

Type the topic you’re interested in into Quora search box. It will give you a list of autocompleted suggestions and when you click through to a topic page, you can see an extra list of related topics to follow.

You can also search for users to follow and be notified of their newest answers. You can do the same for blog posts based on the blog name or author name to be notified for every new post.

Go to your settings page and click on email and notifications so you can customize the frequency and specificity of email you received. Each time you log in to Quora your home feed contains the latest questions and answers and posts from topics, people, and blogs you follow.

Find Questions to Answer

You can answer any question you, which is the best way to get involved with the community and share your knowledge. Search for topics to narrow down the questions. Choose a topic that fits your business, that you have meaningful stats for, or have written about recently. Look for threads with lots of upvotes, as this indicates the questions are viewed often. If you have a popular answer in one of those threads, it could potentially lead to thousands of views per day, and a hefty chunk of clicks back to you website. Take time to find neq questions because you have a higher chance of getting to the top of the answers list if you’re one of the first to answer.

Answer with Authority

This helps you be seen as an authority on a topic. Your answer should provide sources, references, and statistics whenever and wherever possible. It should be a good short answer than points to some kind of external resource. Keep it focused and specific. Let your personality and passion for the topic shine through. Don’t be afraid to tell a story with takeaways.

Add links to what you’ve referenced, which is helpful when the information you provide is available in long form on your website.

Build a Quora Page for Your Business

Similar to Wikipedia, anyone could create a page on Quora about anything. This is a great chance to build a company page for your business. Start by searching your business name on Quora. From the results page, if you don’t see the nameless does a topic you can look in the right sidebar below the add question box and click the link to create topic. There you’ll have the option to name the topic and add a brief description.

Once your topic is live, you can ask the community to review the topic. This is particularly helpful for people wondering if they should invest their time and money with your company. And for you, it adds a bit of social proof and testimonials to your brand’s presence on the platform.

Research Topics

What are people asking on Quora? The questions can lead to inspiration for blog posts on your blog – which you can then link to in an answer.

Look for the question and answers from the topic that you cover on your blog. Check the popularity of their threads looking for lots of upvotes and conversation. When you see a lot of activity surrounding certain questions in the topic, it’s an indication that they may make a great blog post.

You can also use Quora to validate your ideas. If you’ve already got a basic idea, search for it on Quora to see what people are asking about it. You may find a new angle or direction to take or the validation you were looking for.

Get New Headline Ideas

Much the same way you can do headline research by typing your keywords into a Google search to learn how people ask things, you can do the same with Quora. All you have to do is type your keyword into a search and filter the results to show only questions.

The result page will show you how people ask their questions about your chosen keyword and therefore how you can frame your content. The most popular questions in terms of the number of answers and upvotes can signal value in regards to how things are worded and it can help you with writing headlines for your next blog post.

Analyze Your Stats

Quora provides free analytics for all users to show you a breakdown of your views, upvotes, and shares. These stats are displayed for the questions you ask, the answers you give, all the content you contribute and the blog posts you write.

With this information you can see how readers are being led to your answers. This way you’ll know if they’re finding your content through your profile through random browsing or through tagged topics. By visiting your  personal views page you can quickly assess who has seen your answers. Quickly glancing at these stats will tell you which avenues give you the most covered so you can adjust your strategy accordingly.

If you focus on creating a great profile and follow topics in your industry while also finding people to connect with, you’ll find Quora is a great place to contribute your knowledge. Though it may not be something you considered as part of your marketing strategy before, it is a unique way to reach your audience.

Are you using Quora to market your business online? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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Digital Marketing

How One Campaign Changed Burger King’s Marketing Outlook

The Whopper Detour marketing campaign changed Burger King’s Marketing outlook forever. A notable Burger King campaign, likely emphasizing creativity and customer engagement, led to a strategic shift in its marketing. By embracing innovative, often unconventional approaches, the campaign could have demonstrated the effectiveness of viral marketing, social media engagement, and customer-centric promotions, influencing the brand’s future marketing direction with a focus on bold and interactive campaigns.

The Hamburger Wars have been going on for decades – ever since Burger King hit the scene in 1954 McDonald’s was first franchised in 1955. Companies like Wendy’s and Burger King have been competing against McDonald’s to keep customers happy. Burger King has been facing off with McDonald’s for a long time – but this time – they’ve done something amazing.

Over the past few years, Burger King has built a reputation for itself. The brand has done an impressive job using creativity to grab attention and build love (and loyalty) for the brand.

Burning Stores, McWhopper, and Google Home of the Whopper are just a few of the campaigns that were talked about widely – giving the brand billions of impressions and helping to revamp the brand. They were successful in driving customers into the stores, but the main focus was to make the brand “cool” again.

Burger King’s real hit campaign, the Whopper Detour, marks a defining moment for the brand and its marketing. Burger King’s global Chief Marketing Officer tells AdWeek, “There’s a clear ‘before’ and an ‘after’ when it comes to the Whopper Detour. This campaign marks a turning point in our marketing and shows what we believe the future of great creativity might be – at least for us.”

A Closer Look at the Whopper Detour Campaign

In December 2018, BK launched the Whopper Detour campaign. From December 4th until December 12th, customers who downloaded the BK app and went to McDonald’s could unlock an offer that allowed people to purchase a Whopper for a penny. It was done as part of the mobile app (available on Android and iOS) relaunch that included features to order and pay in advance.

It was a way for people to order Whopper sandwiches at McDonalds. The brand went so far as to say, the brand turned more than 14,000 McDonald’s into Burger Kings… sort of.

How the Promotion Worked

The promotion works by geofencing McDonald’s locations across the country. If a guest inside one of the restaurants had the BK installed on their phone or tablet,  (or within 600 feet of one of those locations) the app unlocked the Whopper Detour promotion.

Once the customer places the BK order, they were “detoured” from McDonald’s and directed to the nearest BK location to pick up their burger. Each registered BK app user could redeem the promotion once.

The technology used in the campaign isn’t new. Geofencing and mobile order and payment has been around a while. It’s not particularly easy to convince people to download apps from fast-food brands, especially the burger chains. BK, along with many other brands, couldn’t get people to download the app even when giving products away.

The Results

The Whopper Detour increased BK mobile app sales 300% during the nine-day promotion, and by 200% ever since the promotion ended. The campaign sent the BK app from 686 to number one in the app store, across all categories in both Android and iOS. It also drove the highest amount of foot traffic – people visiting the restaurant – in four and a half years.

How Did it Happen?

What started as a crazy idea that bent the rules of direct marketing and eCommerce technology became something with scale and long-time impact.

The campaign took about a year to develop, evolving over time – which is something the brand says they see in all of their best campaigns. It took a large team of people to pull it off, involving a technology team and several tech partners. The entire app, which had been newly updated to include mobile order and payment, had to be recoded to work well with geofencing. That meant geofencing more than 7,000 BK restaurants in the United States and all of the McDonald’s locations in the U.S., of which there are more than 14,000.

Here, you see the power of a big idea, what it takes to make something different happen, and why creative partners such as pay-per-click advertising and digital marketing agencies are so important. Big creative ideas will blow through trends, programmatic advertising, and AI any day – and many people out there seem to forget that.

It’s important to keep a focus on the big idea. Use creativity to grab your audience’s attention and build brand loyalty. This way you’ll build it today and be able to scale it through to tomorrow and beyond. What Burger King  did wasn’t a one-location, one-day stunt. That’s not what got people talking about it. It was the scale at which it launched that got the buzz going.

As marketers, it’s important to learn from the success of others. The mobile phenomenon and geofencing technology allows you to advertise to customers based on their location, no matter your industry. Gyms could start sending deals, such as “Join now and your first month is $1” as soon as they set foot in the competition’s location. Car dealerships could promise to find the vehicle someone is looking for, for a cheaper price the second they see that someone has set foot on another lot.

The technology BK used to troll McDonald’s is available to anyone. It allows you to market any time, and anywhere to highly targeted customers. But, use it well, and you can steal customers from your competition, too.

Categories
Digital Marketing

Facebook Pixel Losing Effectiveness for Marketers

Keyboard Concept

In the coming months, Facebook will release its Clear History tool. Once it is released, the new feature will allow users to see, manage, and disconnect activity that happens off-Facebook from their user profile. As such, the tool will impact marketers ability to reach a targeted audience on the platform.

What is the Clear History Tool?

The Clear History tool was announced at the 2018 F8 Conference. Facebook says the feature will allow users to see the websites and apps that send Facebook information when they are used. It will also give users the power to delete the information from the account and turn off the ability for Facebook to store the information associated with your account moving forward.

Apps and websites that use features such as the Like button or Facebook Analytics send Facebook information to make their content and ads better and more relevant. Facebook uses the information to improve your Facebook experience.

If users clear their history or use the new setting, Facebook will remove identifying information so a history of the websites and apps you’ve used will not be associated with your account. The browsing history isn’t erased or removed, but instead made anonymous. Facebook still plans to provide apps and websites with aggregated analytics so they can build reports to let developers know whether their apps are more popular with certain genders or age groups. Facebook will do this without storing the information in a way that is associated with your account – and they will not provide information about who the people are to advertisers.

According to the Facebook Newsroom post from May 2018, it will take a few months to build Clear History, since they will be working with privacy advocates, policymakers, regulators, and academics to get input on the approach, including how they plan to remove identifying information and rare cases where the information is needed for security purposes.

What Marketers Need to Know

Providing Users with Control and Transparency Makes for Better Business

When people know how their information is used, it makes them feel better about ads and the businesses they interact with online. Ads are how Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp are made free for people to use. The same can be said for many online services. It’s important to understand that protecting people’s information and advertising are not working against each other; it is possible to do both.

Facebook is Helping Users See How Advertisers Use Their Tools

A large part of the clear history tool is helping people understand how the advertisers use Facebook business schools. Facebook is working hard to deliver this type of transparency on Facebook. They are also open to conversations with other businesses about approaches they may take to help people understand more about what data they share and the value that share offers. Businesses are encouraged to start thinking about ways to educate their consumers regarding their marketing practices.

The New Feature May Impact Targeting

When a user decides to disconnect their off-Facebook activity, Facebook will no longer be able to use that data for targeting. This means that targeting options powered by Facebook’s business tools, such as the Facebook Pixel, can’t be used to reach someone with ads. This includes Custom Audiences built from website visitors and app users. Businesses should remember this when they are developing strategies for these kinds of campaigns in the future.

Until now, marketers have been able to install the Facebook Pixel on their website to match people who’ve visited their websites to who they are on Facebook so they can continue to advertise to them. While the Clear History tool will affect targeting because a portion of users will exercise the control and disconnect their off-Facebook activity, there are still some users who will not mind sharing that information. As such, you may still benefit from using the Facebook pixel and Custom Audiences. It’s likely, however, the audience will be smaller. The Clear History feature will also affect businesses that use the SDK or the API.

Measurement Will Remain Intact

That said, Facebook’s measurement and analytics tools have been designed to protect users’ identities. There is no sharing of personal information such as names and phone numbers in the measurement and reporting tools. As of now, Facebook does not anticipate making changes to measurement once the Clear History feature is live. Because of this, Facebook will still be able to provide accurate measurements to understand the impact of their investment in Facebook Ads, while still allowing people to exercise control over their off-Facebook activity.

The marketing industry is seeing the first glimpse of an entirely new Facebook. This iteration of the social platform is more focused on one-on-one messaging and privacy than it is on public social feeds. While this is a good move for users, businesses may need a bit of time to adjust, simply because the ad targeting options are going to become more limited. As we embark on the new era of Facebook, we must begin reconsidering how to connect with our audiences, both on and off the platform.

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