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What is the Power of Advertising?

12/27/2022

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Advertising has the power to establish awareness, the power to set the agenda, the power to suggest as well as influence, the power to convey new information in addition to the power to persuade. Advertising has short-term power (sharing new information, building awareness, enhancing credibility, etc.) and long-term power (sharing brand image, attaching emotional values to the brand, building positive reputation, etc.).

Advertising has been said to be the most powerful, persuasive as well as manipulative tool which firms have in order to control consumers all over the world. It is a type of communication which typically attempts to persuade potential customers to buy or to consume more of a specific brand of product or service.

Its impact on the society through the years has been amazing, particularly in this technology age. Influencing people’s habits, creating false needs, misrepresenting the values and priorities of our society with sexism as well as feminism, advertising has developed into a poison snake ready to hunt his prey. However, conversely, advertising has had a positive effect to help the economy and society.

What is good advertising?

A good advertisement gives us all the information we need something even before we think that we do. It gives us the opportunity to look into the ideal life, the ideal body, the ideal mate, all wrapped in an ideal world.

Effective advertising reaches possible customers and tells them about your products or services. Ideally, advertising needs to capture the prospective customer’s attentions and entice them to make use of your product. Regardless of the method, all your advertising needs to be clear and consistently reflect the unique positioning statement of your business.

Word-of-mouth advertising has been around as long as mankind has communicated and traded goods as well as services. In addition, word-of-mouth advertising is considered the most effective form. It has the desired qualities of strong credibility, high audience attention levels, and friendly audience reception.

It features open-ended conversation with questions as well as answers about the product, psychological motivations to purchase, memorability, efficiency in addition to frequency. Word-of-mouth advertising passes product information to a lot of other potential buyers (and might even include promotional trial demonstrations as well as free sampling), at little or no cost to the business. Whenever possible, a small business should build an advertising programme which results in word-of-mouth advertising. Satisfied customers are your best advertisements.

How profit is generated?

In the business market, the chief and principal key in order to get profit is by the active consumption of a product in the marketplace. Nonetheless, firms have taken advantage of that and have created misleading needs to consumers.
The only real need, it would appear, are for nourishment, clothing as week as housing. In other words, people are able to live without television, internet, iPod, and the like. However, the impact of commercials and advertising have made people feel the requirement of something else than food as well as shelter.

Advertising works through the human emotions and vanity. It appeals toward the psychological domain turning into a temptation for people whose minds are at rest. For example, if a person is at home watching TV, very comfortable and suddenly, a commercial promoting any type of food and drink comes up, that individual will be hungry and thirsty in a couple of minutes. The advertising influenced his mind, provoking an involuntary reaction to do what the commercial caused him to do.
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Does Your Page Speed Measure up?

11/27/2022

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We all know the importance of a high ranking when it comes to internet searches, but the components of those rankings can often be overlooked. Many web creators throw around a lot of SEO buzzwords and talk about boosting rankings, but how often do they get into specifics? Here at Swift Digital Marketing Agency, we dig deep. We know what it takes to achieve and maintain a great ranking, and we use this knowledge to give our clients rock star results!

Importance of Page Speed

Page speed is just one example of a ranking component that we've mastered. Google actually dings pages that load too slowly, causing them to drop in rank, even if they are excellent by every other metric. Additionally, your visitors will find interaction with a sluggish interface frustrating to deal with. This will, in turn, harm your engagement metrics causing your ranking to decrease even more... (see where we're going with this?).

Don't let something as straightforward as page speed cause your rankings to drop. No one wants to see a spike in abandonment rates for any reason, especially something that is so easy to fix! Let us help you measure and increase your loading times, and make your site more attractive to search engines and prospective customers.

You can count on Swift Team as your SEO partner. We use clean code and techniques that greatly increase page speed, giving your rankings and UX a boost. Work with us and see your page speeds, rankings, and engagement metrics outshine the competition month after month!

Submit this Form to get a call from us or call Swift Digital Marketing Agency at (216)339-6041
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Top Benefits of Social Media Marketing

11/2/2022

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Social media is a powerful way for businesses of all sizes to reach prospects and customers. People discover, learn about, follow, and shop from brands on social media, so if you’re not on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, you’re missing out! Great marketing on social media can bring remarkable success to your business, creating devoted brand advocates and even driving leads and sales.

  • What social media marketing is, with benefits, stats, and tips.
  • How to build a social media marketing strategy and a plan to carry it out.
  • The seven best social media marketing platforms and how to use them

What is social media marketing?

Social media marketing is a form of digital marketing that leverages the power of popular social media networks to achieve your marketing and branding goals. But it’s not just about creating business accounts and posting when you feel like it. Social media marketing requires an evolving strategy with measurable goals and includes:

  • Maintaining and optimizing your profiles.
  • Posting pictures, videos, stories, and live videos that represent your brand and attract a relevant audience.
  • Responding to comments, shares, and likes and monitoring your reputation.
  • Following and engaging with followers, customers, and influencers to build a community around your brand.
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Social media marketing also includes paid social media advertising, where you can pay to have your business appear in front of large volumes of highly targeted users.

Benefits of social media marketing.

With such widespread usage and versatility, social media is one of the most effective free channels for marketing your business today. Here are some of the specific benefits of social media marketing:
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  • Humanize your business: Social media enables you to turn your business into an active participant in your market. Your profile, posts, and interactions with users form an approachable persona that your audience can familiarize and connect with, and come to trust.
  • Drive traffic: Between the link in your profile, blog post links in your posts, and your ads, social media is a top channel for increasing traffic to your website where you can convert visitors into customers.
  • Generate leads and customers: You can also generate leads and conversions directly on these platforms, through features like Instagram/Facebook shops, direct messaging, call to action buttons on profiles, and appointment booking capabilities.
  • Increase brand awareness: The visual nature of social media platforms allows you to build your visual identity across vast audiences and improve brand awareness. And better brand awareness means better results with all your other campaigns.
  • Build relationships: These platforms open up both direct and indirect lines of communication with your followers through which you can network, gather feedback, hold discussions, and connect directly with individuals.

The bigger and more engaged your audience is on social media networks, the easier it will be for you to achieve your marketing goals.

Call Swift Digital Marketing Today! (216)339-6041


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What Is Website Design?

10/30/2022

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At first sight, website design to a viewer appears to be the visuals seen on a web page. But the fact is that a whole gamut of techniques and skills are involved in creating a web page design to give it the desired results.

So, web design is about deciding on a lot of elements such as the layout, graphics, colors, fonts, structure, content, text styles, interactive features, imagery, interface, standardized code, etc. It involves a wide range of skills and disciplines. Professional website design is the one that maintains an appropriate balance in the different elements and ensures consistency and integrity of the design.


Website design has become inevitable to do business and highlighting its online presence in the modern competitive markets. It contains all the information like details of a company, its products or services, contacts, blogs, and much more. Professional web design has the ability to create a desired corporate identity of a business and delivers its brand message to the target audience.

A creative web page design is a tool also for better conversion rate, by which a company can achieve steady growth in sales and revenue. Moreover, user-friendly online web designs build trust for products or services, which is essential to creating a stable, loyal customer base.


Who needs a professionally designed website?

Website design is an integral part of doing business in this digital age. But who really needs a professionally designed website? Well, all those enterprises who must ensure a dominating online presence and wish to stay ahead of competitors look for outstanding modern website designs.

So, practically every company be its logo design agency, website designing agency, brochure designing company, or any type of company in a hard-fought competitive market looks for a unique website to stand out.

Such a professional website design has brand colors and fonts, relevant images, icons, content, etc. elements that reflect the company's business values and message. A well-thought-out web page design is a requirement to engages visitors with user-friendly features and convert them into potential customers.

Contact Swift Digital Marketing Agency at (216) 339-6041.
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How to Create an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

8/15/2022

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In this post, you’re going to learn exactly how to create and implement an effective digital marketing strategy, step-by-step.

So, if you want to learn how to use digital marketing to grow your traffic, this strategy guide is for you.

What is a digital marketing strategy?

A digital marketing strategy is a plan of action that describes how to use one or more online marketing channels to reach your target audience. It has a list of steps and specific digital marketing goals.

Having a digital strategy is important because it will help you orchestrate the different online marketing strategies so that they all work towards achieving your business goals.

Together with his team, they will make sure that every marketing activity is part of your digital marketing plan.

How to create a Digital Marketing Strategy

These are the steps to follow to create an effective marketing strategy.
  1. Specify measurable business goals
  2. Identify your target audience
  3. Understand users needs and search intent
  4. Create a content marketing library
  5. Start with SEO as early as possible
  6. Explore paid advertising channels
  7. Use email marketing segmentation and automation
  8. Take advantage of new traffic sources
  9. Use retargeting and personalization
  10. Work on conversion optimization
  11. Evaluate and revise your strategy

1. Specify measurable business goals

The first step in creating a digital marketing strategy is to specify your business goals. In other words, to determine what you want to accomplish with digital marketing.

Any goals you set have to be measurable and well-defined. Everything in a digital marketing campaign is measurable (from start to finish) and you need to take advantage of this and form a digital marketing plan that has specific milestones and targets.

Some typical goals are:

  • Raise brand awareness
  • Increase organic traffic
  • Make more sales
  • Get more email subscribers
  • PPC campaigns
  • Get more Facebook followers
  • Get more YouTube subscribers

While the above is a good starting point, they are still vague. A better version would be:

Raise brand awareness by:

Increase organic traffic by:
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  • Getting higher rankings for keyword X
  • Publishing new content targeting keyword Y
  • Updating existing content that meets criteria A and B
  • Run an email outreach campaign to get X links

A good way to come up with measurable goals is to use the top-down approach. Start by specifying your goals in business terms and then translate that to digital marketing goals.

Here is an example to understand this better.

A typical step could be, “Publish 3 new blog posts per week”, which needs to be broken down further to specify which/topics keywords the blog posts will target and what would be the expected outcome in terms of traffic increase.

Experienced digital marketing specialists know that this is not always easy to calculate because digital marketing is a dynamic industry and changes all the time. But, having a detailed plan will help you adjust your strategies so as to get closer to your goals as possible.

The bottom line is that you need to have a digital marketing plan to follow and not start running campaigns on different channels without knowing what you want to achieve. It goes without saying that your plan has to be realistic, taking into account the competition and complexities of your industry.

Also, to be able to analyze data and make informed decisions, you first need to track it correctly and accurately so, having a good analytics system in place is more than essential.

2. Identify your target audience

The second step is to identify your target audience. In other words to specify in detail who you want to target with your campaigns.

Some marketers, place this as the first step in the process and this is not wrong. What is certain is that this is an exercise you need to perform in the early stages and before finalizing the next steps of your marketing strategy.

What does identifying your audience means? Specifying in detail the characteristics of people that might be potentially interested in your offerings.

In your audience identification, you should include things like:
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  • The countries/areas your potential customers live in
  • Their age group
  • Gender
  • Educational background
  • Marital status
  • Family status
  • Occupation
  • Their interests

Learn as much as you can about your audience

The exact details depend on the industry you’re in and the products/services you are trying to promote.

A good way to start crafting your buyer personas is to analyze the data you already have available.

Digg into your Google Analytics reports, Facebook audience insights, Google Ads reports, and start creating your customer profiles.

3. Understand users needs and search intent

Once you know the profile of your target customer, the next step is to use different techniques and try to understand their needs and how they express this when searching for information using a search engine or a social network.

There are two ways to approach this process. The first method is to take the typical digital sales funnel and identify what your customers might need at each stage.

Digital Sales Funnel

The second method is to take the different customer profiles created above, and come up with a  separate sales funnel for each.

This is my recommended method because it makes it easier to set up and run dedicated digital marketing campaigns for each customer profile.

Let me give you an example to understand this better.

So, by analyzing each buyer persona separately, you can come up with a more accurate plan of how your content, products, or services can help them solve their problems and needs.

Search Intent

In the digital marketing world, the needs of users are expressed through search queries. When a user types a search query in Google, it has a specific intent and if your content/products or services do not satisfy it, your digital marketing strategy will fail.

That’s why it is important to perform keyword research from the very beginning and capture all topics, keywords, and phrases throughout the buyer journey, from awareness to conversion.

Social media networks don’t reveal the ‘searchers’ intent’, what happens then?

It’s true that users browsing Facebook may not have a specific intent in mind but they have a particular profile.

To increase your chances of targeting the right type of audience, you can analyze the profile of your search visitors (using Google Analytics) and using custom audiences to find matching audiences (Lookalike Audiences) on Facebook.

Always use any available data that you have as your starting point for research. The results will be more accurate than using data that is external to your website.

Resources to Learn More About Digital Marketing

  • How to learn digital marketing – a step-by-step guide with learning resources to help you understand how digital marketing works.
  • Best digital marketing courses – the best online digital marketing courses to follow and become an expert in no time.
  • Digital marketing certificates – a list of accredited programs to follow and get certified in digital marketing.


4. Create a content marketing library

The next strategic step you need to make is to create a library of content assets. You know your audience and their needs, now it’s time to create various types of assets to use in your campaigns.

A digital asset can be a blog post, infographic, image, video, podcast, cover image, logo, and anything else you can publish on your website or social networks.

Content Types

In the digital marketing world, this is what content marketing is all about. Content marketing is important because it’s the process used to decide what kind of content to create, when, and where to publish it.

I prefer to execute this step in the beginning and before running any campaigns because it’s more efficient to have a pool of content assets ready in advance rather than having to do this every time you’re about to start a campaign.

When you follow the steps in the order described in this guide (set goals, create customer personas, identify needs, and search intent), then you have all the information you need to work on your content assets.

It’s also easier to assign the content creation part to the different members of your team to work in parallel.

Content Marketing Strategy Plan

5. Start with SEO as early as possible

A strategic decision to make that can positively impact your digital marketing efforts is to start with SEO as early as possible.

SEO is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies but it has a caveat. It takes time to work.

Unlike other digital marketing strategies, when you start an SEO campaign, it may take 4 to 6 months to generate any results. This is a long time to wait so most marketers tend to focus on other digital channels first (like Facebook Ads, Google Ads).

That’s a good approach but the common mistake is that they forget about SEO and only re-visit SEO after they realize that they cannot build a successful digital marketing campaign based solely on paid advertising.

So, a better strategy is to allocate a portion of your marketing budget from the very beginning on SEO related tasks. In parallel, you can start working on your paid campaigns and other channels.

This way, you’ll reach a point sooner where most of your traffic and sales will come from SEO and rely less on paid ads. In business terms, this means an increase in revenue and profit and this is exactly the goal of a successful digital marketing strategy.

How to get started with SEO

SEO is a huge topic. Search engines take hundreds of parameters into account before they decide which webpages to show in the results for a particular query.

To make it easier to handle, SEO can be broken down into three main sub-processes: Technical SEO, On-Page SEO, and Off-Page SEO.

SEO Overview

Each process is responsible to optimize your website for a number of parameters that will eventually lead to higher rankings and traffic.

SEO is important because the majority of search traffic is distributed to websites that appear in the first 5 positions of the search results. So, if you want to get traffic from search engines, you need to appear in the top positions for search terms related to your business.

The best way to get started with SEO is to follow a step-by-step approach:

Step 1: Review your technical SEO and make sure that search engines can access and index your content without any problems. This is important since any issues at this stage will be catastrophic for your efforts.

Step 2: Optimize your content for search engines. In Step 4 above, you will create content that satisfies the needs of the user. Before publishing, you need to make sure that it’s SEO optimized.

This means, giving the right signals to search engines (through your titles, descriptions, headings, etc) to help them understand your content better.

Step 3: Promote your website and content. One of the most important SEO ranking factors is how other websites on the Internet ‘think’ of your website. If other relevant websites trust your website and they express this through a backlink, this is a strong signal to Google that your website deserves to be on the top positions.

If SEO is something that you haven’t done before for your website, the best way to approach this is to add it to your digital strategy and assign this task to SEO experts.

You can also use the resources below to learn more.

6. Explore paid advertising channels

When you start an online business, you know in advance that a large portion of your marketing budget will be allocated on PPC marketing (paid ads).

But, not all PPC platforms are the same. Based on your previous analysis (steps 2 and 3 above), you need to choose which platforms are more suited for your audience.

You can use the table below to get an idea of how the user profile looks for the most popular social networks.

Social Media Platforms Demographics.

For example, if you have an eCommerce website selling directly to consumers (B2C) then Facebook is probably a good choice. If on the other hand, you are targeting Business executives, then LinkedIn is more appropriate.

Run Pilot Campaigns First

The best way to find out which platforms to incorporate in your digital marketing strategy plan is to run pilot campaigns.

A pilot campaign will not waste your budget and at the same time, it will give you enough data to make an informed decision. A common mistake made by digital marketers is to blindly allocate all their budget on one channel because it’s the trend without testing or considering all of the available channels they can use.

Here is a list of the most popular advertising platforms you can use to reach your target audience:

Facebook Ads – ideal for all kinds of businesses. Works better for B2C. The best platform to raise brand awareness.

Instagram Ads – suitable if you want to reach a younger audience.

Twitter Ads – Business oriented. Great for informing your community of updates.
Linked Ads – Strictly for business-related advertising. Use it to reach decision-makers.
Google Ads – The most reliable platform to get targeted traffic to your website through paid search ads.
Google Display Ads – Use it for retargeting purposes and to reach your audience in the various Google products (YouTube, Gmail) and thousands of websites that participate in Google AdSense.
Bing Ads – Not as powerful as Google but a good alternative to get more search traffic to your website.

7. Use email marketing segmentation and automation

The end goal of a digital marketing campaign is to generate more revenue for a business. But in order to get to your ultimate goal, you first need to consider micro-conversions.

Micro-conversions are actions taken by users that are part of the funnel that leads to sales.

For example, while one of my goals is to sell my digital marketing course, an intermediate goal is to get people to subscribe to my email list (micro conversion).

I consider this an important step because I know from my statistics that a large percentage of people that subscribe to my list, will eventually convert.

The same concept can be applied to any business or product. You need to give incentives to users to sign up for your email list and then send them personalized emails that will help them make the final decision, which is to convert by buying your products or services.
An important element to make this work is segmentation and automation.

With email segmentation, you segment your list into groups of people that share the same interests and send them customized content.

For example, people registering to my list to download the SEO Checklist will get different email content than people who register to receive my posts updates.

If email marketing is a new concept for you, then you can realize that it involves a lot of work and that’s where email automation comes into play.

Here is a visual example of how email automation works.

Email Marketing automation example.

With email automation, you can orchestrate the whole process to run without intervention and manual work. Your job is to set up the automation campaigns, monitor their performance, and take corrective actions.

In addition to micro-conversions, email marketing is a great way to raise brand awareness and build a community around your brand. This is something that can positively influence the performance of all your digital marketing campaigns.

Resources to Learn More About Email Marketing

  • What is email marketing – An introduction to email marketing for beginners.
  • How to grow an email list – Simple techniques you can use to increase your email list fast.


8. Take advantage of new traffic sources

A complete digital marketing strategy should not only take into account the traditional online marketing channels but should also cater to new digital marketing strategies that rise to the surface.

To be more precise, at the time of writing this post, there are a number of new channels that you can explore like:
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  • Google Discover Ads
  • Google Shopping Search
  • Google Shopping Ads
  • Tik-Tok
  • Optimizing your content for voice search
  • Optimizing your content for Google rich snippets​

These channels are new and most probably less competitive than established channels. This means you can get better results at a lower cost.

Will these help your strategy? The only way to find out is to test them by running pilot campaigns (as explained above).

9. Use retargeting and personalization

So far, all of the above strategies are related to how you can reach more people but it’s equally important to follow up on users that already know your brand, but are not yet customers.

This is known as ‘retargeting’ or ‘remarketing’. With retargeting, you can show specific ads to users that visited your website (or social network page) but did not convert.

How Remarketing Works

It’s a very powerful technique that has higher conversion rates and less CPA (cost per action) than other marketing techniques.

The ‘marketing rule of 7’ (established in the 1930s by marketers), states that prospects are more likely to convert if they see or hear an ad, at least 7 times.

Unsurprisingly, it is a rule that is applicable today, and remarketing is the way to implement this.

The most popular platforms to run remarketing campaigns are Facebook and Google Display Network.

The concept is simple. You connect your website with Facebook and Google by adding a piece of code provided by the platforms.

You then create custom audience lists that include the people who visited your website but did not convert.

You then create campaigns and ads that are shown to these users as they browse Facebook or visit other websites on the Internet.

To make remarketing more effective, you can also add the element of personalization. Instead of treating all visitors as one group, you can add rules to show different ads to people based on the actions they took on your website.

For example, you can create a retargeting campaign for people that added an item to their shopping cart but did not checkout. To give them an incentive to come back and finish the process, you can offer them a discount via coupon code.

As a matter of fact, retargeting should be a strategy to include in your digital marketing plan from the early stages. This way you’ll maximize the return for any money spend on paid ads or SEO.

10. Work on conversion optimization

Another area that needs to be part of your overall marketing strategy is conversion optimization.

I can tell you from experience, that 90% of digital marketing campaigns focus on how to get traffic and forget about conversion optimization.

What is conversion optimization? In simple terms, conversion optimization is the process to follow to optimize your website so that a higher percentage of your visitors will perform the desired actions.

This starts with your website design, content, landing page optimization, email signup forms, shopping cart, checkout process, and other elements that contribute (directly or indirectly) to conversions.

One of the techniques to use is A/B testing. By applying a/b testing principles you can measure the effect on conversions by carefully changing parts of your website or sales funnel.
I’ll not go into the details on how to perform A/B testing or conversion optimization (you can follow the links in the resources below to learn more), but from a strategic point of view, it’s important to add conversion optimization activities in your digital marketing plan.

Here is an example of how a conversion optimization plan looks like:

Conversion Optimization Plan

You can add it as a step to be executed as part of a single campaign or as part of your general strategy review process.

What I advise my team to do is to review conversion optimization after a campaign is considered to be optimized in terms of traffic.

In other words, it’s better to try and optimize your campaign to get as many visits as possible with the lower cost and then start testing different landing pages, messages to see which one performs better in terms of conversions.

As a rule of thumb, when doing A/B testing, you should focus on specific changes so that you can accurately measure their effect on conversions.

Resources to Learn More About Conversion Optimization

  • How to improve your landing page conversion rate – Simple principles to follow to increase conversions from your existing traffic.
  • A/B testing principles – How to correctly run a/b tests and improve your conversion rate.

11. Evaluate and revise your strategy

Digital marketing is a highly dynamic industry. ‘Rules’ change all the time and it’s extremely important that you evaluate and revise your digital marketing strategy to stay current and relevant.

Digital Marketing

The best way to evaluate your campaign is to do it based on KPIs and other metrics. The most important metrics for any kind of digital marketing campaign are:
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  • Number of website visits
  • Cost per visit
  • Cost per conversion
  • Click-Through Rate
  • Number of Conversions
  • Number of micro-conversions
  • Time on site
  • Bounce rate
  • Number of social shares
  • Number of comments

If you have a good analytics system in place and can track these for every campaign that is part of your strategy, then it will be easier to make informed decisions.

Don’t forget that part of your evaluation should be to look for new channels you can add to your strategy.

It’s always a good idea to take a look at your competitor’s strategies and identify which of their strategies you can include in your marketing mix.

Key Learnings

A digital marketing strategy is a plan that describes in detail how to use various digital marketing channels to grow your business.

To create an effective digital marketing strategy, you start by defining your goals. Then through research, you identify the characteristics and needs of people to target with your campaigns.

Once you have this information, you translate that into content marketing assets, having always in mind the ‘intent’ of the user. Creating the right type of content that can satisfy the user’s needs, it’s a critical success factor.

Then you start with SEO. SEO is the most effective digital marketing channel but it’s not the fastest one. While waiting for your SEO to generate results, you can start testing paid advertising channels by running pilot campaigns.

Once you figure out which channels are more likely to work for the satisfaction of your business goals, you concentrate on those.

Besides generating traffic to your website, you also need to incorporate other strategies for converting traffic to customers such as email marketing, retargeting, and conversion optimization.
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At regular intervals, you should evaluate and revise your strategy to include new traffic sources and trends.

Call Swift Digital Marketing Agency at (216) 339-604. We can create a successful digital marketing strategy for your company.
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Beginner’s Guide: Setting Up Google Ads and Facebook Retargeting

8/15/2022

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The term “retargeting” has been the buzzword of the digital marketing world in recent years. You might have heard all the praises: ROI, incredible conversion rate, and there are even marketers that swore by retargeting as the most effective advertising method nowadays. However, what is retargeting? In this guide, we will discuss the basics of retargeting, and how to easily set up your retargeting campaign in no time at all.

What is Retargeting?

First, we should clarify the common misconception regarding retargeting and remarketing. Although they are related to each other, retargeting is not necessarily remarketing, and vice versa.

The term “remarketing” refers to the marketing efforts targeted to the same prospects again and again. When you see the same restaurant ads repeatedly on those billboards beside the road, that is remarketing.

Retargeting, on the other hand, is a new form of remarketing for the digital world. With retargeting, we are shown repeated online ads on the same traffic for a dedicated time. While retargeting is fairly new, it has grown to be the biggest aspect of remarketing in recent years. Generally, there are three main applications of retargeting:

  1. Retargeting the audience who have visited your site
  2. Retargeting those who have visited your competitors’ sites
  3. Retargeting the audience that has taken certain actions depending on your business’s needs (i.e. retargeting those who have tried a free-trial demo on your site)


Why Retargeting?

Since retargeting is technically a form of remarketing, we should first understand the benefits of remarketing. Let’s take the classic iOS vs Android debate, for example. No, we are not going to discuss which one is better, however, there is a high likelihood that the one you prefer is the one you are more exposed to.

If most of your friends are using Android phones (and they recommended it to you, consciously or subconsciously), you are more likely to be an Android user. The idea is, we are more likely to enjoy what we are familiar with.

So how do we build on this with retargeting? Let’s use another example. Let’s say you just browsed on Amazon for a new TV set. Then, for whatever reasons, you decided to stop looking for a TV set that day. A proper retargeting campaign might target you, and when you later on opened your Facebook later that day, a TV ad shows up, effectively reminding you to buy that TV.

If you are familiar with the marketing funnel concept, you might understand that with every step of the buyer’s journey, the possibility of a conversion will be smaller. Retargeting, in essence, is an effort to optimize the chance of conversion in each funnel stage.

Retargeting is also a very effective tactic to build brand awareness, while a study by ComScore suggested that retargeting can increase site visitation by a whopping 726%.


How Retargeting Works

There are two popular ways to run a retargeting campaign: through Google Adwords or Facebook Ads. There are other platforms that offer retargeting services, but considering the size of Google Adwords and Facebook Ads, they should be your first choices.

Retargeting works mainly with the help of a code snippet in the form of a cookie in your customer’s browser. The cookie will then collect their information and based on that gathered data, you can then target those visitors with your promotion.

How about targeting your competitors’ audience?

The best method is using keyword-targeting. Here, you can target a certain keyword related to your industry while excluding your own visitor. This is a pretty reliable method, especially if you are in a competitive industry.

The second, and arguably the easiest method, is to use social media: for example, we can target those who have followed or liked our competitors.


Setting Up Google Ads Retargeting

Google Ads offers a built-in retargeting feature, so you can set up a retargeting campaign easily following these steps:
  1. Click on ‘shared library’ on the left of your Ads dashboard
  2. Click ‘view’ under Audiences, and you can choose ‘Set Up Remarketing’. Leave the box unchecked for now
  3. Google will offer to send you instructions, get it if you want. Check the ‘Use the Google Analytics tag’ box
  4. Set up a new list after clicking on ‘Remarketing List’
  5. Click on ‘Visitors to a page with a specific tag’, then create a new tag
  6. Set the campaign duration
  7. Hit “Save,” and you will get your retargeting cookie on the next page

After you’re done, simply copy and paste the retargeting cookie code into the HTML body tag of your site.

There you have it, you’ve set up a Google Ads retargeting campaign!

Setting Up Facebook Ads Retargeting

Facebook Ads are even easier with less necessary steps and Facebook will walk you through every step. Here are 3 things you will need to know before starting a Facebook Ad Campaign, but you can set up your campaign easily through the following steps:

First, click on ‘Tools’ in your ad manager, and select ‘Pixels’

Enter your domain name, and Facebook will walk you through all the necessary steps. You will then get your retargeting cookie code snippet.

The biggest benefit of the retargeting campaign is higher conversions in each stage of your funnel. It is specifically targeted for those who have shown interest in your brand, product, or your niche, so you know they are shopping.

While the concept of retargeting and code snippets might be confusing at first, it is actually quite easy to learn as Google and Facebook have taken the necessary steps to make this comprehensive system easy to operate. However, it takes years of experience to understand where to invest marketing dollars to get the most return, that’s where B2B marketing consultant can help your business on creating content, generating demand, and enabling sales using budget with maximum efficiency.

FACEBOOK GOOGLE ADS PIXE REMARKETING
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High Quality Web Design Company

7/9/2022

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In need of a web design company to create a sleek and attractive modern website?

We’re experts at designing you a visually striking website across all devices. Our mastery of design principles results in beautiful UIs and well-organized content layouts. From the second your users land on your website, they’ll be in awe of the marvelous design that greets them.

We’re not happy and won’t rest until your website is a lead-generation that converts.

In need of a web design company to create a sleek and attractive modern website?

An Eye for Beauty. 

We understand that websites need more than stellar UX to be successful. Our design know how empowers us to appreciate what colors, balance and shapes work together in harmony to produce a truly aesthetic web experience.

In addition to design savvy, we offer you expertise in vital areas that guarantee website success, like SEO, UX and CRO.

Our team offers you comprehensive web design services that run the gamut from ideation and design to successful launch and revenue acceleration.


Dedication to Lead Generation. The most important goal of any website is to generate leads. At Rise, we understand that better than anyone, which is why we focus on perfect SEO, UX and CRO to turn your website into a lead-generation machine.

Meticulous Planning

Building a user-friendly and lead-generating website is complex because it takes meticulous planning and successful execution. Our expert team’s tried, tested and true site-building process ensures a high-quality build that’s within budget and meets deadlines, every time.

A Full-Service Agency.

When your needs extend beyond your website, we’re still able to help. Our skilled team members also specialize in:
​
  • Branding
  • Copywriting
  • Digital Marketing & SEO
  • E-Commerce
  • Google Ads
  • Mobile Apps
  • Sales Automation
  • Social Media
  • Technical Integrations​​

Your success is always the result of a collaborative, team-based effort.

Call  (216) 339-6041 To Begin Your Design with Swift Digital Marketing Agency

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What Is Brand Identity? And How To Develop a Great One.

7/5/2022

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Just like your personal identity makes you uniquely you, your brand identity is the special sauce of your business that sets you apart from every other Tom, Dick and Harry, Inc. on the block. And your brand identity design? It’s what shapes your company.
​
But what exactly is brand identity? What does it have to do with design? And how do you shape a strong brand identity that takes your business to the next level? Here’s the breakdown:

Table of Contents
  • What is brand identity?
  • How to develop a strong brand identity
  • Design: the foundation of your brand identity
    • Developing your brand design
      • Typography
      • Color Palette
      • Form/Shape
    • Designing your brand identity
      • Logo
      • Website
      • Product Packaging
      • Business cards
      • Email design
    • Create a Brand Style Guide​

What is brand identity?

What does the term brand identity mean?

Brand identity is the collection of all elements that a company creates to portray the right image to its consumer. Brand identity is different from “brand image” and “branding,” even though these terms are sometimes treated as interchangeable.

The term branding refers to the marketing practice of actively shaping a distinctive brand. Brand is the perception of the company in the eyes of the world.

Let’s dig a little deeper.

Let’s say you are a middle school student. As an awkward pre-adolescent, you want to be perceived as cool and get invited to sit at the best table in the cafeteria. But you can’t just force other people to have that image of you. In order to develop this brand, you need to do some work.

So you make sure you watch the right YouTube channels so you always know the latest meme. Maybe you start working on your free throw. And cultivating on an impression of Mr. Archibald, your science teacher. These actions are the work you’re putting towards develop your desired image; they’re your branding.

Finally, you need to make sure you look the part. You save up your money to buy the new Adidas shoes everyone covets. You get a new haircut. You try out for (and join) the basketball team.

Those tangible elements—the shoes, the haircut, the team membership—that’s brand identity.

Your brand identity is what makes you instantly recognizable to your customers. Your audience will associate your brand identity with your product or service, and that identity is what forges the connection between you and your customers, builds customer loyalty, and determines how your customers will perceive your brand.

How to develop a strong brand identity

Know who you are. Before you know what tangible elements you want to make up your brand identity, you need to know who you are as a brand.

A colorful, playful & fun brand identity design by pecas

Who you are as a brand is made up of a few key elements:
  • Your mission (what’s your “why?”)
  • Your values (what beliefs drive your company?)
  • Your brand personality (if your brand was a person, what kind of personality would they have?)
  • Your unique positioning (how do you differentiate yourself from the competition?)
  • Your brand voice (if your brand was a person, how would it communicate?)​

These elements are what define your brand, and before you start building your brand identity, it’s important you have a clear understanding of each.

If you’re having trouble figuring out who exactly you are, don’t sweat it. Sometimes, all you need is a simple brainstorm to help you get clarity on who you are as a brand.

Ask yourself:
  • Why did we start this business?
  • What are beliefs and values that are important to us as a company?
  • What do we do better than anyone else?
  • What makes us special?
  • If we could describe our brand in three words, what would they be?
  • What are the three words we would want our customers to use to describe us?​

You can also check out this awesome branding workbook from consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. While this workbook is geared towards personal branding, the strategies will work for any type of business model.
Once you’ve locked in who you are as a brand, it’s time to build the identity that will bring your brand to life and show who you are to the people who matter most: your customers.

Design: the foundation of your brand identity

Just like your Adidas built the brand identity of your middle-school-star-athlete persona, your design is what will build the brand identity of your company.

Your corporate design assets are the tangible elements that will determine how your brand is perceived. Things like your logo, your packaging, your web design, your social media graphics, your business cards and the uniforms your employees wear.

In other words, nailing your design = nailing your brand identity = building a successful business that’s an accurate representation of who you are as a brand.

So, how exactly do you nail your design and build a brand identity that will take your business to the next level?

Developing your brand designBefore you start creating your design assets, you need to start from the ground up and lock in the basics of your design structure: the building blocks of your brand identity.

The building blocks you’ll want to determine before you create your design assets include:

TypographyTypography refers to—you guessed it—the font (or type) you choose for your branding materials. It’s particularly important to choose logo fonts and brand fonts wisely. There are four major types of typography:
  • Serif fonts (like Times New Roman or Garamond) have what look like an anchor (or to some people, little feet) on the end of each letter. This classic typography is great if you want your brand to appear trustworthy, traditional, and just a little old school.
  • If “serif” is the foot, “sans serif” is without the foot. Sans serif fonts (like Helvetica or Franklin Gothic) are letters that have smooth edges and lack the anchor or “feet” of their serif counterparts. Sans serif fonts give a more sleek, modern feel to brands.
  • Script typography emulates cursive handwriting (so much for all those cursive lessons in elementary school!). These fonts (like Allura or Pacifico) can be a great way to add a luxurious or feminine feel to your brand.
  • Display fonts are kind of in a league of their own. Each display font has a specialized element, whether it’s an unusual shape to the letters, outlines, shadowing, or a more artistic/hand-drawn edge (think Metallica’s lightening bolt font). Want to make a bold statement and create a brand identity people won’t soon forget? A display font is a great way to do it.
​
The typography you choose will say a lot about your brand, so choose your fonts wisely.

Color palette

A brand guide with brand colors by ludibes

Next up is color. People—your potential customers included—have psychological ties to different colors, and using branding colors and logo colors strategically can have a serious impact on how your brand is perceived by your audience.

Here are what the colors of the rainbow (plus a few extras) can do to help your brand identity:
  • Red: Red is the color of passion and excitement. It’s the perfect choice if your brand identity is loud, youthful, and exciting.
  • Orange: Orange is another high-energy color and is great if you want to appear friendly and playful. It’s used less commonly than red, so will also make you stand out.
  • Yellow: Yellow, the color of sunshine, is all about happiness. The cheerful vibe makes it a good choice if you want to feel fun, accessible and affordable.
  • Green: An incredibly versatile color, green can be used for just about any brand. Culturally, though, when people see green, they think two things: money or nature. If your brand is tied to either of those things, green is an especially good choice.
  • Blue: The most universally appealing color in the spectrum, blue can help your branding to appear more stable and trustworthy, so if you’re looking to appeal to a wide demographic—and get them to trust you in the process—go with blue.
  • Purple: Purple is the color of royalty, so if you’re going for a luxurious feel in your branding, this a safe bet.
  • Pink: Right or wrong, pink is culturally tied to femininity, so if your brand is targeted towards women, pink should be a definite contender for your brand color. It’s also a great color for brands with a soft or luxurious identity.
  • Brown: Brown is perhaps the least use color in all of branding, but that could actually work to your advantage! Any time you do something different, it helps you stand out. Brown can also help people to view your brand as rugged or masculine.
  • Black: If you want to be viewed as modern or sophisticated, there’s nothing as classic and effective as black.
​
Form/ShapeWhen it comes to your designs, you also want to think about form and shape. This subtle but effective element that can be used to reinforce the desired reaction from your customers: so, for example, a logo that is all circles and soft edges will inspire a very different reaction from a logo that’s sharp and square.

Here’s how different forms can shape your brand identity (pun intended):
​
  • Round shapes—like circles, ovals, and ellipses—are all about the warm and fuzzies. Brands that incorporate round shapes can create feelings of community, unity and love. The rounded edges can also be viewed as feminine.
  • Straight edged shapes—like squares, rectangles, and triangles—make people think strength and efficiency. The no-nonsense lines create a feeling of stability and trustworthiness, but you need to be careful: if the shapes aren’t balanced out with something fun, like dynamic colors, they can feel impersonal and fail to connect with your customers.
  • Straight lines also have their own implications: vertical lines suggest masculinity and strength while horizontal lines suggest tranquility and mellow vibes.
​
Designing your brand identity

Your brand identity is made of many elements. Once the building blocks of your design are created, it’s time to work with a designer to bring your brand identity to life and translate who you are as a brand into tangible design assets you can use in your marketing.

Your brand identity can be expressed in any number of elements. Depending on the nature of your business, one asset or another may be more or less important.

For example, a restaurant should put a lot of thought into their menu and physical space. A digital marketing agency, however, needs to focus more on their website and social media pages.

Common elements of brand identity include:

Logo design is the cornerstone in your brand identity. When working with your designer, you want to aim for your logo to tick off the following boxes:


  • Clearly communicates who you are and what you value as a brand;
  • Is visually appealing: simple, clean and uncluttered goes a long way;
  • Is classic, not trendy: the last thing you want is for your logo to go out of style in 6 months;
  • Plays along with your industry’s standards—and if you veer off, do so deliberately;
  • Makes a lasting impression on your audience.
​
You also want to make sure that your design partner delivers your logo in multiple formats (like a black and white version or multiple sizes) to ensure you always have the logo you need—and that each is in line with your brand identity.
Learn more on how to design the perfect logo.

Website

​Your website is one of the most representative aspects of your brand identity. Especially if you’re running an online business or a digital product, your customers will definitely check your website out before deciding to do business with you. Your website is where your brand identity should come through in full force.

Learn the building blocks of effective web layouts.

Product packaging

Rose Finch gin bottles designed by sikarame. lIf your product is a physical one, then product packaging is key to attracting the right customers. Whether you’re thinking about the bottle of a cold-brew beverage, or the mail you’ll send to your customers who purchased clothes from your ecommerce business, don’t underestimate the value of good design in improving the experience – and driving both loyalty and repeat purchases. Packaging is an awesome opportunity for your design to shine.

Business cards. If you’re doing any sort of business development (and who isn’t), you’ll want to stock up on business cards. A well-designed card offers the chance to reinforce a positive opinion of yourself in the eyes of potential clients or customers. When it comes to business card design, keep it simple: your company logo on one side of the card and your key personal details on the other side should suffice.

Learn how to design the perfect business card.

Email design

​Email is a great way to engage your customers and drive business. But most people are at inbox overload, so if you want to grow your business via email, you need the right design strategy to set yourself apart from the clutter. Think about the purpose of the email.

Are you trying to make a personal connection? Then keep it short, sweet, and simple. Are you trying to educate? Then format it well so it’s easily readable and scannable and add a few images to make it pop. Are you trying to tell your customers about a new clothing line you launched? Make a few stunning product images the focus.

Create a brand style guide

A brand style guide is a must to preserve your brand identity.Once you’ve got your design assets, you want to make sure they’re used in the right way, which is why you’ll definitely want to create a brand style guide. This document—which outlines your design assets, when and how to use them, as well as any design do’s and dont’s for your brand—will ensure that any future design is in line with your brand identity and generates the right perception with your audience.
Consistency is key to create a strong brand identity. You wouldn’t want your brand to look totally different on social media than it does on your website. That would confuse customers and make your brand feel less trustworthy and professional. So, make sure to always stick to a brand guide that covers all the different elements of your brand identity. That’s what is going to enable you to build brand recognition and brand loyalty in the long term.

Brand identity in a nutshell…

​Your brand identity is what sets you apart from the endless sea of competitors and shows your customers who you are and what they can expect from working with you. And if you want your brand to be perceived in a positive light, it’s crucial that you nail your brand identity and create designs that accurately portray who you are to your customers. And now that you know how to nail that identity, it’s time to start designing.
​

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Top Tips and Ideas For Interactive Web Design

7/5/2022

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Web design is unique because it takes both a designer and a user to make it work. After all, the whole purpose of putting a design on an interactive medium like a computer is so that users can, well, use it. Interaction is also a good measure for how engaged a site visitor is because if they’re interacting, they’re paying attention. Good interactive web design will compel the user to engage with a website, scroll down and consume more content, to navigate to other pages, to share with a friend and, of course, to click that call-to-action button.

One of the challenges interactive web designs face is that there are so many ways a user can interact with a page, and even more ways that the page can respond. Some interactive designs will create a seamless user experience, giving the user feedback and directing them on what to do next. Some will be less obvious, the responses mismatched to the user’s action, or worse, nonexistent.

In order to learn how to tell a good interactive website experience from a bad one, we’re going to take our lessons from the pros. Here, we’ve compiled useful tips for interactive web design by rounding up some of our favorite examples and discussing what makes them work.

1. Take advantage of loading screen time

Loading can be one of the biggest obstacles to the web browsing experience. A business can put so much money and effort into building an outstanding, beautiful website, but if it takes more than two seconds to load, research has shown that the visitor becomes exponentially more likely to leave before seeing any of it. It’s fair to assume that users experience loading as a negative experience.

But loading screens can also be an opportunity. If you have the user’s attention, why not make the most of it? These moments provide an unexpected and, therefore, extra special opportunity to impress users through animations. They’re a novelty chance to show off brand personality and engage and excite users. Often, these animations actually give the user a sense of progress with a loading bar (or something similar) to demonstrate how much time remains before the user accesses the next page.

Ideally, these loading screens offer users something to do, such as a game to play while they wait, which creates a fun, interactive experience.

The point is that loading doesn’t necessarily mean a negative experience for the user. They don’t even have to only be quick and painless—sometimes, they’re the most exciting part of a website.

2. Organize information through animated scrolling

Scrolling is one of the simplest and most intuitive interactions that a user can make. But just because the user might not think about scrolling, doesn’t mean the web designer shouldn’t be! There are plenty of ways that designers have capitalized on scrolling animations to give the user a sense of dynamic movement throughout a website. Let’s go over some common ones.

A popular technique has been to trigger specific animations to activate as the user scrolls through the website. It’s pretty magical in bringing visuals to life and it creates the illusion that the page the user is accessing is actually being built up, in real time, in response to their interaction.

Parallax scrolling (aka asymmetrical scrolling)

A similar technique that has been gaining traction is parallax scrolling. This type of movement involves say two objects on a screen moving at two different speeds, as the user scrolls down the page. The result is a simulation of 3D depth of movement, as foreground objects usually move faster than background objects.

Scrolling page transitions

And finally, designers can use full page transitions, in which the traditional smooth scroll is replaced with either a jump to the next screen or a wholesale page change. This can create a dramatic effect, introducing not only new page elements but sometimes an entirely different color scheme, making the website feel brand new with every scroll.

Overall, these scrolling animations give users important feedback on their interaction—letting them know that they’ve just entered a new section of the website and should expect a change in the type of information being delivered. In short, they provide clear hierarchy and organization in an impressive, interactive package.

3. Breakup vertical movement with sliders and carousels

Carousels are so-called because they condense website content into rotating sections that the user can cycle through, much like the turnstile motion of a real-life carnival counterpart.

They are becoming more common on websites due to the increasing popularity of swiping interactions in mobile apps. Because they are essentially a form of horizontal scrolling, they provide the user a much needed break from the endless monotony of vertical scrolling.

But this is not the only reason why you might want to break up vertical movement. As we mentioned earlier, users tend to associate downward scrolling with progressing to a new part of the website. Carousels and sliders, on the other hand, allow web designers to incorporate more context to each section, since the user isn’t technically leaving them.

This means rather than cluttering the page with all the necessary information at once, carousels collapse site elements into more bitesize segments, allowing the user to cycle through them bit by bit.

This works best when the content is similar in format, so group together either product images, profiles or customer testimonials etc. They’re also useful for showcasing variations, such as products that come in different colors. In terms of animating these carousels, styles range from straightforward left-to-right transitions, to card shuffling, to a rotating wheel animation that’s reminiscent of retro viewmaster slides.

4. Blow up the navigation menu

Like swiping, hamburger menus are another common trend of mobile/app design that has made its way onto desktop websites. Even if the hamburger icon itself is not present, users are generally familiar with the idea that the navigation does not need to be displayed at all times. Users know that it’s there and that they can interact with it when needed. Hiding the menu can give the rest of the web page space to breathe and at the same time, the menu’s reveal is yet another interactive web design opportunity.

Since users are now choosing to pull up the menu, many designers are answering that call with navigation that takes over the entire screen. This allows for big typography, descriptive images and snazzy hover animations.

Going big with menu interaction makes sense: navigation is all about control. The user is effectively steering the ship and emphasizing the menu helps the user visualize the weight of their power over the page. All in all, menu designs are staying hidden until needed, at which point they become larger than life. If you ask me, it’s a nice change from the grey top-of-the-screen, nested lists of yore.

5. Replace forms with user questionnaires

One of the most onerous parts of interacting with a website is entering information. Users are generally wary of giving out their information on a website. The best way to mitigate this is by making the process less like filling out a form at the doctor’s office and more like a get-to-know-you question-and-answer session.

In fact, a prime example of this technique in action has come from tax services like some tax preparation companies who break down tax forms into simple, easy-to-understand questions. This is especially helpful for services that have multiple potential products to sell to a site visitor and need to help narrow down their choices by understanding their needs, tastes, budget, and more.

When it comes to animation in interactive web design, the small movements are what really sell it. And when you consider that the purpose of a website’s animation is often feedback (like letting the user know what they can and can’t interact with or whether they’ve done the right thing), it makes sense that this feedback works best on a subconscious level.

Animations that draw too much attention to themselves can be distracting to the user, overshadowing whatever feedback they were meant to impart in order to show off the animator’s skill. This is where micro-interactions come in.

Micro-interactions are a broad category that describe all of the little ways that a user might interact with a page. Some examples of micro-interactions include hovering over something, closing out of a window, pulling to refresh, and clicking icons such as star ratings, bookmarks, notification bells or add to cart.

In terms of animating micro-interactions, some popular styles include turning a button green, transforming an icon into a checkmark, or an outgoing circle that accompanies a click like an adorable, baby shockwave. The goal is to let the user know that they’ve made a successful change to the page and the design of micro-interactions should be simple and satisfying to this end.

Interactive web design is good web design

At the end of the day, interactive web design is what the internet was made for. Out of the many reasons a visitor might have to check out a website, they are ultimately there to interact, not just to find the information they need but to experience it. This is why a website that fails to capitalize on these interactions can easily get lost in competition. The tips we’ve provided here are a great place to start to make sure this doesn’t happen.

Want to get the perfect website for your business?  Call Swift at (216) 339-6041.

Work with our talented designers to make it happen.

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Web Design For Cosmetic Companies

7/5/2022

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A great website shows the world who you are, makes people remember you, and helps potential customers understand if they found what they were looking for. Websites communicate all of that through color, shape and other design elements. Learn how to make your cosmetics website tell your brand’s story.

​f you own a business, you need a website. But I’m going to guess as you’re reading an article on how to create one, you probably already know that.

by 2ché for sparkingmatt. What you’re realizing is that while using the internet is a pretty straightforward task, designing, building and creating a website is pretty flippin’ complicated. You want it to look nice. You want it to be easy to use. You want people to be able to find it on Google. You want it to actually help you convert visitors into clients… But how do you do all that? And more importantly, how do you do it right?
Our Ultimate Guide to Web Design will walk you through the process of getting a website step-by-step:
​
  • What you need to know to get started
    • Who’s who
    • Domain names and hosting
    • Structure and content
    • Functionality
    • CMSs
  • How to get your website created
    • Templates
    • Custom solutions
    • Hybrid solutions
  • How to design a custom website in 7 steps
    • Determine what you need and hire a designer
    • Start with wireframes
    • Design the look and feel
    • Create templates for all pages
    • Work with a developer to code your design
    • Fill in the content
    • Do user testing

What you need to know to get started

Learn who’s who in the world of web design and development
​
When you design a logo for your brand it’s pretty easy to hire one person to do the job and have it turn out great. That’s not necessarily the case when creating your website. While there are individuals or agencies out there that offer an end-to-end solution, it’s not unlikely that you’ll end up working with more than one person on your adventure to build a website. Here are a few of the char
acters you may encounter on your journey:

Web designers are, well, designers. They take your ideas and turn them into a pretty (or badass) mockup that shows what your future website will look like. This is typically done in Adobe Photoshop or a similar type graphics program.
UX (user experience) or UI (user interface) designers focus on how your layout design impacts your users. For example, they’ll help you decide where to put buttons to get more people to click them, or how to structure your navigation to make your site flow as seamlessly as possible. (There is a difference between UX and UI. 

This article explains it well.) Oftentimes, there is overlap between UX/UI designers and web designers; if you’re looking to save money, it shouldn’t be too difficult to hire a freelancer that has both skill sets.

Web developers—also sometimes called engineers or coders—are magical folks who have learned to speak computer. They take the pretty (or badass) mockup your designer made and translate it into a coding language so it can be displayed on the web. To further complicate things, there are many different coding languages out there, and most developers specialize in one or a few.

Front end developers specialize in the things we see when we look at a website (e.g. rendering images, text, animations, drop down menus, page layout, etc).

Back end developers on the other hand specialize in what’s going on behind the scenes and are necessary if your website needs to communicate with a database. (If you’re going to have a shopping cart, user profiles, or want to be able to upload any content on your own, you’re going to need a database.)

SEO specialists, content strategists, and copy or content writers may also be experts you want to consult as you build your website. They can help you figure out what needs to go on your site to help the right people find it (via search engines) and decide to buy once there.

Acquire a domain name and hostingJust like if you were opening a brick-and-mortar business, the first thing you need to do when you’re building a website is to rent a location.

When you get web hosting you’re renting server space at a data center, much like this large one in Nevada.

Web hosting is the physical space where the assets for your website will live. All those images and text and databases actually require a physical server to host them.

While you can buy your own and put it in your office/house/garage, the vast majority of people and businesses rent hosting space through a company. Hosting (like rent) is typically paid monthly.

For most businesses it will be in the $5-$20/month range, but could be much higher if you have large data needs. Here’s a list of recommended web hosting companies, but you may want to check with your web developer before purchasing (as they may have a preferred vendor).

Your domain name is what people type into their browser to get to your site (e.g. 99designs.com). Typically it is your business name. To get a domain name, you register it with a domain registrar. You will have to pay a small fee (generally less than $10/year) to purchase and retain the name. Most hosting services also serve as domain registrars; that’s generally your best bet as it’ll be the easiest to setup.

Finally, you will need to point your domain name to your servers which basically tells the internet that when someone types your domain into their browser, it should look on this server warehouse to find the right pictures and text to display. While this process isn’t complicated, it can be confusing.

This is a step you can try to DIY (the support team at your web host or domain registrar can help you) but is also something your web developer can easily help you do.

Think about structure and gather the content for your websiteYour web designer or developer is not going to write the about page on your website or take photos of your products for your store. You’re going to have to provide all of the content as well as provide the general structure of the site.

For structure you’ll want to think about what pages you need, common ones include:
​
  • Homepage
  • About page and/or contact page
  • Blog
  • Product directory
  • Individual product pages
  • Terms and conditions
  • Gallery
  • Landing pages/marketing pages for promotions
​
Each of these types of pages will need to be laid out and designed, and each one will need to have content on it.
You don’t necessarily need to have content finalized at this stage in the process, but you do need to have an idea of what content you’ll want on your site and a plan for how you’ll get it. Do you need to set aside time to write copy (or hire someone to do it for you)? Should you hire a photographer to take product photos? You will need to provide all custom imagery (like your logo or photos of your team) for the site, but a web designer can probably help you source stock imagery if you want.

What is stock imagery? (And how to use it right.)

Pro tip: your designer (especially if they have UX/UI experience) may have some great ideas for content and structure you haven’t thought of. It is likely worth having a discussion with them early in the process.

Determine what functionality you need

When someone visits your website, what do you want to happen? Are they just getting information about your product or service, like a phone number or opening hours? Do they need to be able to purchase goods? Is their main goal to read blog articles or learn a skill? Are they filling out a form for a quote? Should they be able to create user profiles and upload their own information?

Your functionality needs are going to determine how you can get your site developed and who you need to work with. They will also have a huge impact on your budget, so you’ll need to have it sorted out in order to get accurate quotes.
Understand what a CMS is and decide if you need one


A CMS (Content Management System) is a database and web application. Essentially, it allows users (like you and your colleagues/employees) to upload content to go on different parts of your site. If you want to be able to regularly edit text or change photos on your website and you don’t know how to code you will need a CMS!

There are a lot of CMS options out there. There are fantastic out-of-the-box options for common use cases (e.g. WordPress for blogging, Shopify for hosting an ecommerce site, Six for building out a profile). But if you need advanced functionality (like you’re hoping to build the next Facebook or Uber or 99designs) you’re going to have to have it custom developed.

How to get your website created

Template sites and builders

Hire freelancers for a custom solution

If you want to have more control over the look and functionality of your site, your best bet is to hire one or more freelancers to help you build it. This is great for getting exactly what you need at a fair cost, but will likely require you to be more hands-on.

We recommend searching through designer profiles to find someone whose style matches what you had in mind. Alternatively, if you want to get lots of design ideas. We’ll help you write a brief. Designers from around the world will read it and send you their ideas for your site. You give feedback to refine the designs, and ultimately choose your favorite(s) as the winner.

Keep in mind you may need to hire both a designer and a developer for your project, though there are some freelancers who do both. Make sure you clarify up front so you can budget (both time and money) accordingly.
Pros:

  • Get exactly the look and functionality you want
  • Reasonable costs (though it obviously depends on the freelancer and your specific needs)

Drawbacks:

  • You may need to hire multiple people (web designer, UX/UI designer, developer)
  • Requires more time and input from you

Hire freelance designers for a hybrid solutionIf you want a custom look, but don’t want to invest in completely custom development, you’re in luck! It’s possible to start with an out-of-the-box template solution, and customize it with your own unique template.


Note, this is also possible with several other template sites (for example, you can create custom templates or modify existing ones for Shopify or Squarespace) so if you would rather use one of those platforms, that’s also an option. Note that in any of these cases, the design still does need to be translated into code, so make sure you ask if your designer can do that, or know that you will have to hire a developer.

Hire an agency for a custom end-to-end solution

Web design and development agencies are experts at what they do. They will not only be able to guide you to help you make the right decisions, but they’ll be able to take you from wireframe to fully developed site. Of course, all of that comes at a premium cost. This is a great option for companies with complex needs, or those for whom cost is less of an issue.

Pros:

  • Fewest headaches; you’re working with experts who will walk you through the entire process​

Drawbacks:
  • You’re likely looking at a high price tag

How to design a custom website in 7 steps

1. Determine what you need and hire a designerHave you got your domain name figured out? Do you know what functionality you need? A list of the pages you want designed? Do you have a plan for gathering all of the custom content you need to fill out your website?

Awesome! Time to hire a designer. To find the right one, you’ll want to look through portfolios. Think about your brand’s personality and determine if the designer is a stylistic match. (For example, do you want something edgy and modern or fun and playful?) It’s generally a good idea to look for designers who have experience in your industry, or with the specific type of site you’re looking for. If you’re a photographer, look for designers who have galleries in their portfolio, if you sell goods, look for one who has experience with other ecommerce companies.

 Time to hire a designer

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SEO: "under the hood"

4/27/2022

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LIf search engine optimization is the process of optimizing a website for search, SEOs need at least a basic understanding of the thing they're optimizing!

Below, we outline the website’s journey from domain name purchase all the way to its fully rendered state in a browser. An important component of the website’s journey is the critical rendering path, which is the process of a browser turning a website’s code into a viewable page.

Knowing this about websites is important for SEOs to understand for a few reasons:

  • The steps in this webpage assembly process can affect page load times, and speed is not only important for keeping users on your site, but it’s also one of Google’s ranking factors.
  • Google renders certain resources, like JavaScript, on a "second pass." Google will look at the page without JavaScript first, then a few days to a few weeks later, it will render JavaScript, meaning SEO-critical elements that are added to the page using JavaScript might not get indexed.

Imagine that the website loading process is your commute to work. You get ready at home, gather your things to bring to the office, and then take the fastest route from your home to your work. It would be silly to put on just one of your shoes, take a longer route to work, drop your things off at the office, then immediately return home to get your other shoe, right?

That’s sort of what inefficient websites do. This chapter will teach you how to diagnose where your website might be inefficient, what you can do to streamline, and the positive ramifications on your rankings and user experience that can result from that streamlining.

Before a website can be accessed, it needs to be set up!

  1. Domain name is purchased. Domain names are purchased from a domain name registrar such as GoDaddy or HostGator. These registrars are just organizations that manage the reservations of domain names.
  2. Domain name is linked to IP address. The Internet uses a series of numbers called an Internet protocol (IP) address (ex: 127.0.0.1), but we want to use names like swift-dm.com because they’re easier for humans to remember. We need to use a DNS to link those human-readable names with machine-readable numbers.
​
How a website gets from server to browser

  1. User requests domain. Now that the name is linked to an IP address via DNS, people can request a website by typing the domain name directly into their browser or by clicking on a link to the website.
  1. Browser makes requests. That request for a web page prompts the browser to make a DNS lookup request to convert the domain name to its IP address. The browser then makes a request to the server for the code your web page is constructed with, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
  2. Server sends resources. Once the server receives the request for the website, it sends the website files to be assembled in the searcher’s browser.
  3. Browser assembles the web page. The browser has now received the resources from the server, but it still needs to put it all together and render the web page so that the user can see it in their browser. As the browser parses and organizes all the web page’s resources, it’s creating a Document Object Model (DOM). The DOM is what you can see when you right click and “inspect element” on a web page in your Chrome browser (learn how to inspect elements in other browsers).
  4. Browser makes final requests. The browser will only show a web page after all the page’s necessary code is downloaded, parsed, and executed, so at this point, if the browser needs any additional code in order to show your website, it will make an additional request from your server.
  5. Website appears in browser. Whew! After all that, your website has now been transformed (rendered) from code to what you see in your browser.

Talk to your developers about async!

Something you can bring up with your developers is shortening the critical rendering path by setting scripts to "async" when they’re not needed to render content above the fold, which can make your web pages load faster.

Async tells the DOM that it can continue to be assembled while the browser is fetching the scripts needed to display your web page. If the DOM has to pause assembly every time the browser fetches a script (called “render-blocking scripts”), it can substantially slow down your page load. It would be like going out to eat with your friends and having to pause the conversation every time one of you went up to the counter to order, only resuming once they got back.

With async, you and your friends can continue to chat even when one of you is ordering. You might also want to bring up other optimizations that devs can implement to shorten the critical rendering path, such as removing unnecessary scripts entirely, like old tracking scripts.

Now that you know how a website appears in a browser, we’re going to focus on what a website is made of — in other words, the code (programming languages) used to construct those web pages.

The three most common are:
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  • HTML – What a website says (titles, body content, etc.)
  • CSS – How a website looks (color, fonts, etc.)
  • JavaScript – How it behaves (interactive, dynamic, etc.)

HTML: What a website says HTML stands for hypertext markup language, and it serves as the backbone of a website. Elements like headings, paragraphs, lists, and content are all defined in the HTML.

HTML is important for SEOs to know because it’s what lives “under the hood” of any page they create or work on. While your CMS likely doesn’t require you to write your pages in HTML (ex: selecting “hyperlink” will allow you to create a link without you having to type in “a href=”), it is what you’re modifying every time you do something to a web page such as adding content, changing the anchor text of internal links, and so on.

Google crawls these HTML elements to determine how relevant your document is to a particular query. In other words, what’s in your HTML plays a huge role in how your web page ranks in Google organic search!

CSS: How a website looks

CSS stands for "cascading style sheets," and this is what causes your web pages to take on certain fonts, colors, and layouts. HTML was created to describe content, rather than to style it, so when CSS entered the scene, it was a game-changer. With CSS, web pages could be “beautified” without requiring manual coding of styles into the HTML of every page — a cumbersome process, especially for large sites.

It wasn’t until 2014 that Google’s indexing system began to render web pages more like an actual browser, as opposed to a text-only browser. A black-hat SEO practice that tried to capitalize on Google’s older indexing system was hiding text and links via CSS for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings. This “hidden text and links” practice is a violation of Google’s quality guidelines.

Components of CSS that SEOs, in particular, should care about:
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  • Since style directives can live in external stylesheet files (CSS files) instead of your page’s HTML, it makes your page less code-heavy, reducing file transfer size and making load times faster.
  • Browsers still have to download resources like your CSS file, so compressing them can make your webpages load faster, and page speed is a ranking factor.
  • Having your pages be more content-heavy than code-heavy can lead to better indexing of your site’s content.
  • Using CSS to hide links and content can get your website manually penalized and removed from Google’s index.

JavaScript: How a website behaves

In the earlier days of the Internet, webpages were built with HTML. When CSS came along, webpage content had the ability to take on some style. When the programming language JavaScript entered the scene, websites could now not only have structure and style, but they could be dynamic.

JavaScript has opened up a lot of opportunities for non-static web page creation. When someone attempts to access a page enhanced with this programming language, that user’s browser will execute the JavaScript against the static HTML that the server returned, resulting in a webpage that comes to life with some sort of interactivity.

You’ve definitely seen JavaScript in action — you just may not have known it! That’s because JavaScript can do almost anything to a page. It could create a pop-up, for example, or it could request third-party resources like ads to display on your page.

Client-side rendering versus server-side rendering JavaScript can pose some problems for SEO, though, since search engines don’t view JavaScript the same way human visitors do. That’s because of client-side versus server-side rendering. Most JavaScript is executed in a client’s browser. With server-side rendering, on the other hand, the files are executed at the server and the server sends them to the browser in their fully rendered state.

SEO-critical page elements such as text, links, and tags that are loaded on the client’s side with JavaScript, rather than represented in your HTML, are invisible from your page’s code until they are rendered. This means that search engine crawlers won’t see what’s in your JavaScript — at least not initially.

Google says that, as long as you’re not blocking Googlebot from crawling your JavaScript files, they’re generally able to render and understand your web pages just like a browser can, which means that Googlebot should see the same things as a user viewing a site in their browser. However, due to this “second wave of indexing” for client-side JavaScript, Google can miss certain elements that are only available once JavaScript is executed.

There are also some other things that could go wrong during Googlebot’s process of rendering your web pages, which can prevent Google from understanding what’s contained in your JavaScript:

  • You’ve blocked Googlebot from JavaScript resources (ex: with robots.txt)
  • Your server can’t handle all the requests to crawl your content
  • The JavaScript is too complex or outdated for Googlebot to understand
  • JavaScript doesn’t "lazy load" content into the page until after the crawler has finished with the page and moved on.

Needless to say, while JavaScript does open a lot of possibilities for web page creation, it can also have some serious ramifications for your SEO if you’re not careful.

Thankfully, there's a way to check whether Google sees the same thing as your visitors. To see a page how Googlebot views your page, use Google Search Console's "URL Inspection" tool. Simply paste your page's URL into the GSC search bar:

From here, click "Test Live URL".

After Googlebot has recrawled your URL, click "View Tested Page" to see how your page is being crawled and rendered.

Clicking the "Screenshot" tab adjacent to "HTML" shows how Googlebot smartphone renders your page.

In return, you’ll see how Googlebot sees your page versus how a visitor (or you) may see the page. In the "More Info" tab, Google will also show you a list of any resources they may not have been able to get for the URL you entered.

Understanding the way websites work lays a great foundation for what we’ll talk about next: technical optimizations to help Google understand the pages on your website better.

How search engines understand websites. Imagine being a search engine crawler scanning down a 10,000-word article about how to bake a cake. How do you identify the author, recipe, ingredients, or steps required to bake a cake? This is where schema markup comes in. It allows you to spoon-feed search engines more specific classifications for what type of information is on your page.

Schema is a way to label or organize your content so that search engines have a better understanding of what certain elements on your web pages are. This code provides structure to your data, which is why schema is often referred to as “structured data.” The process of structuring your data is often referred to as “markup” because you are marking up your content with organizational code.

JSON-LD is Google’s preferred schema markup (announced in May ‘16), which Bing also supports. To view a full list of the thousands of available schema markups, visit Schema.org or view the Google Developers Introduction to Structured Data for additional information on how to implement structured data. After you implement the structured data that best suits your web pages, you can test your markup with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.

In addition to helping bots like Google understand what a particular piece of content is about, schema markup can also enable special features to accompany your pages in the SERPs. These special features are referred to as "rich snippets," and you’ve probably seen them in action. They’re things like:

  • Top Stories carousels
  • Review stars
  • Sitelinks search boxes
  • Recipes

Remember, using structured data can help enable a rich snippet to be present, but does not guarantee it. Other types of rich snippets will likely be added in the future as the use of schema markup increases.

Some last words of advice for schema success:

  • You can use multiple types of schema markup on a page. However, if you mark up one element, like a product for example, and there are other products listed on the page, you must also mark up those products.
  • Don’t mark up content that is not visible to visitors and follow Google’s Quality Guidelines. For example, if you add review structured markup to a page, make sure those reviews are actually visible on that page.
  • If you have duplicate pages, Google asks that you mark up each duplicate page with your structured markup, not just the canonical version.
  • Provide original and updated (if applicable) content on your structured data pages.
  • Structured markup should be an accurate reflection of your page.
  • Try to use the most specific type of schema markup for your content.
  • Marked-up reviews should not be written by the business. They should be genuine unpaid business reviews from actual customers.

Tell search engines about your preferred pages with canonicalization.

​When Google crawls the same content on different web pages, it sometimes doesn’t know which page to index in search results. This is why the rel="canonical" tag was invented: to help search engines better index the preferred version of content and not all its duplicates.

The rel="canonical" tag allows you to tell search engines where the original, master version of a piece of content is located. You’re essentially saying, "Hey search engine! Don’t index this; index this source page instead." So, if you want to republish a piece of content, whether exactly or slightly modified, but don’t want to risk creating duplicate content, the canonical tag is here to save the day.

Proper canonicalization ensures that every unique piece of content on your website has only one URL. To prevent search engines from indexing multiple versions of a single page, Google recommends having a self-referencing canonical tag on every page on your site. Without a canonical tag telling Google which version of your web page is the preferred one, https://www.example.com could get indexed separately from https://example.com, creating duplicates.

"Avoid duplicate content" is an Internet truism, and for good reason! Google wants to reward sites with unique, valuable content — not content that’s taken from other sources and repeated across multiple pages. Because engines want to provide the best searcher experience, they will rarely show multiple versions of the same content, opting instead to show only the canonicalized version, or if a canonical tag does not exist, whichever version they deem most likely to be the original.

Distinguishing between content filtering & content penalties

There is no such thing as a duplicate content penalty. However, you should try to keep duplicate content from causing indexing issues by using the rel="canonical" tag when possible. When duplicates of a page exist, Google will choose a canonical and filter the others out of search results. That doesn’t mean you’ve been penalized. It just means that Google only wants to show one version of your content.

Learn more about canonicalization

​It’s also very common for websites to have multiple duplicate pages due to sort and filter options. For example, on an e-commerce site, you might have what’s called a faceted navigation that allows visitors to narrow down products to find exactly what they’re looking for, such as a “sort by” feature that reorders results on the product category page from lowest to highest price. This could create a URL that looks something like this: example.com/mens-shirts?sort=price_ascending. Add in more sort/filter options like color, size, material, brand, etc. and just think about all the variations of your main product category page this would create!

When we understand what makes their web browsing experience optimal, we can create those experiences for maximum search performance.

Ensuring a positive experience for your mobile visitors.

Being that well over half of all web traffic today comes from mobile, it’s safe to say that your website should be accessible and easy to navigate for mobile visitors. In April 2015, Google rolled out an update to its algorithm that would promote mobile-friendly pages over non-mobile-friendly pages. So how can you ensure that your website is mobile-friendly? Although there are three main ways to configure your website for mobile, Google recommends responsive web design.

Responsive design

Responsive websites are designed to fit the screen of whatever type of device your visitors are using. You can use CSS to make the web page "respond" to the device size. This is ideal because it prevents visitors from having to double-tap or pinch-and-zoom in order to view the content on your pages. Not sure if your web pages are mobile friendly? You can use Google’s mobile-friendly test to check!

AMPAMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages, and it's used to deliver content to mobile visitors at speeds much greater than with non-AMP delivery. AMP is able to deliver content so fast because it delivers content from its cache servers (not the original site) and uses a special AMP version of HTML and JavaScript.

As of 2018, Google started switching websites over to mobile-first indexing. That change sparked some confusion between mobile-friendliness and mobile-first, so it’s helpful to disambiguate. With mobile-first indexing, Google crawls and indexes the mobile version of your web pages. Making your website compatible to mobile screens is good for users and your performance in search, but mobile-first indexing happens independently of mobile-friendliness.

This has raised some concerns for websites that lack parity between mobile and desktop versions, such as showing different content, navigation, links, etc. on their mobile view. A mobile site with different links, for example, will alter the way in which Googlebot (mobile) crawls your site and sends link equity to your other pages.

Improving page speed to mitigate visitor frustration

Google wants to serve content that loads lightning-fast for searchers. We’ve come to expect fast-loading results, and when we don’t get them, we’ll quickly bounce back to the SERP in search of a better, faster page. This is why page speed is a crucial aspect of on-site SEO. We can improve the speed of our web pages by taking advantage of tools like the ones we’ve mentioned below. Click on the links to learn more about each.
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  • Google's PageSpeed Insights tool & best practices documentation
  • How to Think About Speed Tools
  • GTMetrix
  • Google's Mobile Website Speed & Performance Tester
  • Google Lighthouse
  • Chrome DevTools & Tutorial

​Images are one of the number one reasons for slow-loading web pages! In addition to image compression, optimizing image alt text, choosing the right image format, and submitting image sitemaps, there are other technical ways to optimize the speed and way in which images are shown to your users. Some primary ways to improve image delivery are as follows:

There are more than just three image size versions!

It’s a common misconception that you just need a desktop, tablet, and mobile-sized version of your image. There are a huge variety of screen sizes and resolutions.

Learn more about SRCSET

1. SRCSET: How to deliver the best image size for each deviceThe SRCSET attribute allows you to have multiple versions of your image and then specify which version should be used in different situations. This piece of code is added to the <img> tag (where your image is located in the HTML) to provide unique images for specific-sized devices.

This is like the concept of responsive design that we discussed earlier, except for images!

This doesn’t just speed up your image load time, it’s also a unique way to enhance your on-page user experience by providing different and optimal images to different device types.

2. Show visitors image loading is in progress with lazy loadingLazy loading occurs when you go to a webpage and, instead of seeing a blank white space for where an image will be, a blurry lightweight version of the image or a colored box in its place appears while the surrounding text loads. After a few seconds, the image clearly loads in full resolution. The popular blogging platform Medium does this really well.

The low resolution version is initially loaded, and then the full high resolution version. This also helps to optimize your critical rendering path! So while all of your other page resources are being downloaded, you’re showing a low-resolution teaser image that helps tell users that things are happening/being loaded. For more information on how you should lazy load your images, check out Google’s Lazy Loading Guidance.

Improve speed by condensing and bundling your files

Page speed audits will often make recommendations such as “minify resource,” but what does that actually mean? Minification condenses a code file by removing things like line breaks and spaces, as well as abbreviating code variable names wherever possible.

“Bundling” is another common term you’ll hear in reference to improving page speed. The process of bundling combines a bunch of the same coding language files into one single file. For example, a bunch of JavaScript files could be put into one larger file to reduce the amount of JavaScript files for a browser.

By both minifying and bundling the files needed to construct your web page, you’ll speed up your website and reduce the number of your HTTP (file) requests.

Improving the experience for international audiencesWebsites that target audiences from multiple countries should familiarize themselves with international SEO best practices in order to serve up the most relevant experiences. Without these optimizations, international visitors might have difficulty finding the version of your site that caters to them.

There are two main ways a website can be internationalized:

  • Language
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Sites that target speakers of multiple languages are considered multilingual websites. These sites should add something called an hreflang tag to show Google that your page has copy for another language. Learn more about hreflang.

  • Country
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Sites that target audiences in multiple countries are called multi-regional websites and they should choose a URL structure that makes it easy to target their domain or pages to specific countries. This can include the use of a country code top level domain (ccTLD) such as “.ca” for Canada, or a generic top-level domain (gTLD) with a country-specific subfolder such as “example.com/ca” for Canada. Learn more about locale-specific URLs.

Establishing authority so that your pages will rank highly in search results.

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Top Web Design

4/26/2022

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Let's talk about local SEO without physical premises. Not the Google My Business kind — the kind of local SEO that job boards, house listing sites, and national delivery services have to reckon with.

Should they have landing pages, for example, for "flower delivery in London?"

​This turns out to be a surprisingly nuanced issue: In some industries, businesses are ranking for local terms without a location-specific page, and in others local pages are absolutely essential.

​ I've worked with clients across several industries on why these sorts of problems exist, and how to tackle them. How should you figure out whether you need these pages, how can you scale them and incorporate them in your site architecture, and how many should you have for what location types?
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Research shows that you can tell a lot about someone's personality, politics, status,  just from looking at their cloth

9/29/2021

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Your clothes tell a story about you.


​
​Fashion is an Art


​       If you've ever watched the rehearsal process of a play, then you know just how powerful clothes are. Even in the very early stages of a project, professional actors will come to practice in certain clothing pieces that make them feel more like their character.

Perhaps it's an old pair of shoes, a long and heavy skirt, or a bandana that helps them get just the right swagger, grace, or edge. A few weeks later, when they're closer to opening, they'll have an actual dress rehearsal with their real costumes.

​It's pretty amazing to see how the right clothes bring the performances up to a whole new level and transform the actor into the character! As business professionals, we can actually learn a lot from this.
​
Like it or not, your clothes and presentation communicate volumes about you as a person. The question is not whether you care about fashion, it's more about what you're communicating intentionally or unconsciously through your fashion choices.

Just as the actor in the right costume moves and speaks differently, so does the everyday person.

Your clothes tell a story about you. If you want to show that your work is clean, sharp, and to the point, you need to dress in clean lines, sharp creases, and (yes) points on your shoes and tie.

Even the way you wear your glasses speaks volumes about you and your work!
 Clothes You Wear Actually Change the Way You Perform
If you've ever watched the rehearsal process of a play, then you know just how powerful clothes are. Even in the very early stages of a project, professional actors will come to practice in certain clothing pieces that make them feel more like their character.

Perhaps it's an old pair of shoes, a long and heavy skirt, or a bandana that helps them get just the right swagger, grace, or edge.
A few weeks later, when they're closer to opening, they'll have an actual dress rehearsal with their real costumes.

It's pretty amazing to see how the right clothes bring the performances up to a whole new level and transform the actor into the character! As business professionals, we can actually learn a lot from this.
​
Like it or not, your clothes and presentation communicate volumes about you as a person. The question is not whether you care about fashion, it's more about what you're communicating intentionally or unconsciously through your fashion choices.

Just as the actor in the right costume moves and speaks differently, so does the everyday person.

Your clothes tell a story about you. If you want to show that your work is clean, sharp, and to the point, you need to dress in clean lines, sharp creases, and (yes) points on your shoes and tie.

​Even the way you wear your glasses speaks volumes about you and your work!
Fashion design is the art of applying design, aesthetics, clothing construction and natural beauty to clothing and its accessories. It is influenced by culture and different trends, and has varied over time and place.

"A fashion designer creates clothing, including dresses, suits, pants, and skirts, and accessories like shoes and handbags, for consumers. He or she can specialize in clothing, accessory, or jewelry design, or may work in more than one of these areas.

About the fashion designers. They work in a variety of different ways in designing their pieces and accessories such as rings, bracelets and necklaces.

Because of the time required to bring a garment onto the market, designers must at times anticipate changes to consumer desires.

Fashion designers are responsible for creating looks for individual garments, involving shape, color, fabric, trimming, and more. 

Fashion designers play a major role in our world. Their talent and vision play a big role on how people present themselves. They influence society and the way they choose to express themselves. 

Designers conduct research on fashion trends and interpret them for their audience.

Their specific designs are used by manufacturers. This is the essence of a designer's role; however, there is variation within this that is determined by the buying and merchandising approach, and product quality;

for example, budget retailers will use inexpensive fabrics to interpret trends, but high-end retailers will ensure that the best available fabrics are used.

Some clothes are made specifically for an individual, as in the case of haute couture or bespoke tailoring. 


Other high-end fashion designers cater to specialty stores or high-end fashion department stores.

​Large designer brands which have a 'name' as their brand such as Abercrombie & Fitch, Justice, or Juicy are likely to be designed by a team of individual designers under the direction of a design director.


Designing a garment

Some fashion designers sketch their ideas on paper, while others drape fabric on a dress form, another term for mannequine.

When a designer is completely satisfied with the fit of the toile (or muslin), they will consult a professional pattern maker who then makes the finished, working version of the pattern out of card or via a computerized system. 


History: The Chéruit salon on Place Vendôme in Paris, 1910

Fashion design is generally considered to have started in the 19th century with Charles Frederick Worth who was the first designer to have his label sewn into the garments that he created.

Before the former draper set up his maison couture (fashion house) in Paris, clothing design and creation was handled by largely anonymous seamstresses, and high fashion descended from that worn at royal courts.

Worth's success was such that he was able to dictate to his customers what they should wear, instead of following their lead as earlier dressmakers had done.

The term couturier was in fact first created in order to describe him. While all articles of clothing from any time period are studied by academics as costume design, only clothing created after 1858 is considered as fashion design.


It was during this period that many design houses began to hire artists to sketch or paint designs for garments.

The images were shown to clients, which was much cheaper than producing an actual sample garment in the workroom. If the client liked their design, they ordered it and the resulting garment made money for the house.

Thus, the tradition of designers sketching out garment designs instead of presenting completed garments on models to customers began as an economy.


During the Make{able} workshop, Hirscher and Niinimaki found that personal involvement in the garment-making process created a meaningful “narrative” for the user, which established a person-product attachment and increased the sentimental value of the final product.

Otto von Busch also explores half-way garments and fashion co-design in his thesis, "Fashion-able, Hacktivism and engaged Fashion Design".

World fashion industry

Seven countries have established an international reputation in fashion: France, Italy, United Kingdom, United States, Japan, Germany and Belgium.

The "big four" fashion capitals of the fashion industry are Paris, Milan, New York City and London with Paris often being considered as the World's fashion capital.


Most fashion houses in the United States are based in New York City. On the US west coast, there is also a significant number of fashion houses in Los Angeles, where a substantial percentage of high fashion clothing manufactured in the United States is actually made. 

Beverly Hills, particularly on Rodeo Drive, is globally renowned for its fashion design and prestigious shopping. Burgeoning industries in Miami, Chicago, Dallas, and especially San Francisco have developed as well.

A semi-annual event held every February and September, New York Fashion Week, is the oldest of the four major fashion weeks held throughout the world. 

​Parsons The New School for Design, located in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of Lower Manhattan in New York City, is considered one of the top fashion schools in the world.

There are numerous fashion magazines published in the United States and distributed to a global readership.

Examples include Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Cosmopolitan.


American fashion design is highly diverse, reflecting the enormous ethnic diversity of the population, but is largely dominated by a clean-cut, urban, hip aesthetic, and often favors a more casual style, reflecting the athletic, health-conscious lifestyles of the suburban and urban middle classes.

Red carpet fashion: Italian actors Gabriel Garko and Laura Torrisi wearing designer formal wear at Venice Film Festival, 

If you’re working on a fashion-related online store project, or thinking of putting one up on your own, looking through a showcase of websites may help you get some ideas and inspiration.

As a clothing  designer, appearance is importance . Everything you show to current and prospective customers has to demonstrate your sense of style. This is an aesthetically pleasing web design for high fashion  is mportant.

With that in mind, appearance is not the only factor you should take into consideration when designing your site.

To be a successful marketing tool, a clothing retailer’s website has to not only attract the eyes of visitors, but also create an easy process for browsing and buying merchandise.


This page will give you an idea of why and how you can combine attractiveness and functionality to create a successful website for your business, as well as a few other considerations to keep in mind.
​

Keep reading if you want to learn more, or if you're searching for professional web design services.

What makes a fashion website great?

Web design is a lot more than just the fonts and colors you see on a web page—it also impacts the functionality of your website.

A dynamic website provides necessary information, enables communication, and builds trust for your brand. Web design for stores must do the same by ensuring a few key things.

Brand consistency. Visiting your website should feel like walking into a virtual store. It should include the same sense of style, colors, tone of voice, and general personality your store provides.

​Remember, your website is your online introduction, so it should give people a sense of what they would experience in person.

Searchability: Good design makes a website easy to navigate and easy to search.

Web design is a complex process.

Simple navigation is the key. Certain design elements make the site easier to navigate. Consider creating a few main categories with drop-down menus that have more specific results.

This gives your site a less cluttered appearance and reduce the time it takes users to find the pages they are looking for.


Search boxes are also a great tool. If a potential customer already knows that they want a specific style, a search bar will help them find it. 

If you are an established brand, you already have a logo and color scheme that people associate with your company and values. You probably also have a certain aesthetic or style within your designs. 

If you are still working on establishing your brand, your website can be a great place to start. Make your color and logo decisions before launching your site, and then use them as guidelines for the rest of the process.

You want to give your visitors a cohesive idea of what your brand stands for.


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Inspirational designs, illustrations, and graphic elements from the world’s best designers.

9/27/2021

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Professional web design starts with really understanding the client’s business and brand.  After all, a website represents a very significant voice for the brand.  And, that voice should be front and center in a great website. ​

Web Design For Chocolate Companies Picture
The word chocolate can be associated with many words: dark, white, milk, hot, sweet, spicy. As one would expect, chocolate website often use an appetizing brown dominant color.

The quality of product photography on chocolate websites is remarkable. Images are often large and dominant and are given a lot of both horizontal and vertical space. In fact, chocolate, especially gourmet chocolate, is often very visually interesting. The ingredients that go into it can also be very aesthetically pleasing.

​But they all have in common this fascinating sweetness everyone loves.


Submit this Form to get a call back from us or call Swift Digital Marketing Agency at (216)339-6041.

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Help Your Business Soar with our Favorite SEO Strategies

9/27/2021

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SEO allows customers to find your company easily in search engines, which means more website traffic, more conversions, and more revenue for your company.

Unlike traditional advertising campaigns that target large audiences over a set period of time, SEO empowers your business to reach potential customers while they're actively searching for you, year after year.

For example, when you decide to target a keyword with your content, that content is always available for users to read — essentially meaning they can convert at any time around the clock.
​

For this reason, SEO online marketing is also a great strategy if you have clients around the world. Time zone doesn't affect the results of SEO since it's strategies are virtually always in place, and always working to bring your business more customers.

That's the ultimate advantage of SEO — you can reach your customer base any time, any day. The customers and leads can keep coming in, even when you're not actively running an ad campaign. Even on holidays!
​

But that's a pretty big overview. How can you achieve this kind of online growth for yourself?
Technical SEO

Swift Marketing  Agency is here to help! Our team of experts knows what it takes to create successful SEO strategies. You can call 216-339-6041 or contact us online for help getting started today!

If you'd like to learn more about SEO strategies, you can keep reading below! On this page, we'll take a look at the three most impactful SEO strategies you can use to get more traffic, earn more customers, and close more sales than ever before.

No matter your industry, these SEO strategies can work for you.

How do SEO strategies help your business?If you're not sold on the idea of SEO, let's first talk about how the SEO strategies we talk about can help your business succeed.

One huge benefit from SEO is that you'll be able to improve the ranking of your website's pages in search engine results pages like Google. If you don't rank well in results pages, it's highly unlikely that your target customers will find your website, let alone buy your products and services.

SEO can help get you to the top of search results which means more potential customers will see your website pages, visit your website, and purchase your products.

However, these results don't happen overnight, and in order to see results, it's recommended that you implement more than just one of the strategies mentioned below. In fact, some strategies go hand-in-hand, which means it's difficult to have one without the other.

For example, if you implement multimedia on your website, you'll also need to implement alt tags so that Google is able to read your multimedia. Another example would be if you implement an extensive content plan, you should also be sure to implement multimedia so that your content is engaging and interesting.

When you pair more than one SEO strategy together, you're bound to see results for your business!

How many SEO strategies should I use?

There is no hard-and-fast number for how many SEO strategies you should use for success. And in fact, every industry is different and every specific business needs a different campaign.

That being said, if you're already ranking highly for some of your target keywords, but are looking to rank even higher, your campaign might require fewer strategies to succeed.

The number of SEO strategies your business requires depends completely on your business goals, where your campaign currently stands, and your budget.

1. Content production

Content marketing is one of the most popular marketing strategies today. That's because content is essential to SEO success.

Want to learn about our content marketing services? Watch the quick video below!

The term "content" refers to any text, image, video, or interactive that you publish on your website.

Infographics are collections of visualized data that tell a story.

The idea behind an infographic is that statistics can be broken down into visual, manageable chunks.

Then, you can reorganize those chunks into sections that tell a compelling story.

Most infographics follow a simple template that helps them succeed:
​
  • What's the topic?
  • What makes the topic noteworthy?
  • How have others used the topic?
  • What success have they seen?
  • How can the reader use the topic?
​
By answering these five questions, you can create an infographic for any industry.

Infographics are ideal for earning links back to your site from credible sources. This boosts your site's overall SEO power since links are a major ranking factor in search engine results.

This content also works well on social media, where users can easily share it with their friends and followers. And once they do, you stand to earn even more links, and you gain a huge amount of brand awareness.

The only downside to infographics is that many companies are already creating them, which makes it difficult to stand out.

But you can stand out by creating a high-quality graphic that uses data, design, and storytelling to form a cohesive product.

Many of the infographics online don't follow these rules, and that's why they don't get great results.
​

But if you can show your target audience that you're dedicated to quality, you'll earn some form of reward for your work. 
Digital Marketing Budget Allocation Today


But if you can show your target audience that you're dedicated to quality, you'll earn some form of reward for your work. 
Downloadable content is one of the best forms of lead generation you can use to earn more from your website.
​

Like infographics, downloads follow a formula to provide the best value to your target audience.

  • Identify a question your customers frequently ask
  • Address the question from as many angles as possible
  • Explain the reasoning behind your solutions
  • Demonstrate how someone can use those solutions
  • Address the outcome and how someone can improve it
​
This process requires a lot more work than an infographic because you have to write extensively about a topic.

Downloads also require visual aids and links to other sources to validate their legitimacy. This takes people away from your download, but it also provides them with supplemental information that helps them get a good grasp on the subject.

You can create downloadable content by exporting information from programs like Microsoft Word or Publisher into PDFs.

That places everything in one simple package so you can post the PDF to your website and gate it.

"Gating" your PDF means placing it behind a few form fields that users need to fill out before getting your download.
The most common form fields used for gating are: Name and Email Address. 
​
Once you have this information, you can add it to your email marketing platform. Then, you can include these users in your campaigns and send them more information based on the download they got from you.

That keeps them in your sales funnel, which lets you help them move towards eventually becoming a customer.

With blog posts, infographics, and downloads, you have a high-quality content strategy that'll help your business grow year after year.

Still, they can't succeed on their own. Your content needs another ingredient to thrive in the SEO world. ​
2. Keyword optimization

Keyword optimization is essential for ranking well in search engines.

Without it, your content can't rank for search terms related for your business.

Fortunately, a lot of keyword optimization is common sense. When you write with the goal of helping a reader, you'll naturally use the keywords that describe the topic of the page.

Using keywords naturally is crucial, though. If you intentionally use keywords as many times as possible on a page, even where they don't make sense, you'll actually lose SEO power with that page.

At the same time, you don't want to get completely sidetracked by another idea and avoid using your keyword altogether. This can also provide a poor user experience if you go off on a tangent instead of sticking to the matter at hand.

You can prevent both of these scenarios by carefully editing your pages before you post them on your site.

We recommend editing once per piece of content. That's just enough time to find any serious flaws in a piece without overthinking the tiny details.

This way, you can keep the ball rolling, and keep producing more content.
​

Look for grammar mix-ups, spelling errors, complicated sentences, jargon-heavy paragraphs, and keyword usage.
If anything feels off, change the content so that it's up to your business's quality standards.

This helps your pages rank in search results for the terms that matter to your business.

Keywords aren't only meant for body text, though. By using them on key areas of your pages, you can really help your pages climb in search engine results.

Title Tags

Title tags are the names of your site's pages. They're also the first part of your page that Google reads, meaning they're the first bit of context Google can understand.

This means title tags need keywords. Otherwise, Google won't know when or how to rank your page when someone searches for the corresponding keyword.

This is also helpful for drawing clicks to your site.

After all, if you have a title tag saying "Women's Running Shoes for Sale" and someone just searched "buy women's running shoes," then they know they should click to your site.

Title tags provide opportunities for more ideas than just keywords, though.

Numbers, lists, dates, prices, brand names, power words, and other strategies all contribute to getting more clicks from search engines.
​

So instead of "Women's Running Shoes for Sale," you could try "33% Off Women's Running Shoes," "Women's Nike & Adidas from $20," and other ideas to get visitors to your site with as few words as possible.

But the title tag isn't the only opportunity you have to get clicks. Fortunately, you also have meta descriptions.
Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are one- or two-sentence accounts of what someone can find on your page.

They don't play a direct role in SEO, but they can improve your click-through rate (CTR) by encouraging search engine users to click.

As a result, meta descriptions work as quick sales pitches for each page.

They can cover ideas like:

  • What's on the page
  • Why someone would read it
  • The result someone can get from it

This isn't an exhaustive list, but it's a great jumping-off point if you're learning about SEO for the first time.

After you have your meta description up and running, you can tweak it occasionally to test what gives you the best CTR.
Maybe it works best for you to start a meta description with a question.

Maybe it's better to lead with your keyword.

Maybe you can get more clicks by using fewer words.

You can supply definite answers to those ideas by creating, tracking, and changing the meta descriptions on your pages.

With your title tags and meta descriptions in place, you're effectively using keywords to promote your pages.
But there's still another SEO strategy you can use to improve your site.

3. Multimedia

Multimedia is one of the most important parts of SEO.

It makes pages easier to read, engages readers more effectively than text, and keeps people on your site longer.
But there's a catch to multimedia — Google's algorithm can't actually "see" it.

To fix that, you should include alt descriptions for all of your multimedia. These are brief text descriptions of an image, video, or audio clip that Google uses to better understand the page.

Those alt descriptions let you use multimedia effectively for both users and search engines.

With that in mind, most multimedia breaks down into a few different categories.

We'll talk about each of those categories in detail. Images are the most common form of multimedia.

You can use them to break up text to keep people engaged and provide captivating visualizations for readers.

As the header image for this section shows, your images don't always have to pertain 100% to your topic. You can use images for humor just as well as you can use them to make points or add emphasis.

Regardless of how you choose to use images, you're helping your readers with them. 

The biggest advantage of images is that they break up walls of text so your site visitors can scan and read more easily.

In fact, this has become crucial since most Internet users don't read much anymore. Instead, they scan a page to find what they want.

If they can't find what they want, they leave.

This makes images all the more important.

By using them at key points on your pages — like the beginning or at major points in the middle — you make it easier for someone to find what they want at a glance.

At the very least, you can make a page more entertaining so visitors can enjoy themselves on your site.
​

But images are just the beginning. They do a great job keeping your readers engaged — but other formats take engagement a step further. 

VideosToday, every Internet-savvy company wants to jump on video as a marketing medium.

Those are huge improvements over text-only content. They're even advancements past text-and-image content.
So why is video so effective?

The biggest advantage is that you can condense entire pages of text into a few minutes of engaging, visualized explanations. All you need is a decent camera, a willing speaker, and editing software.

A lot of companies who experiment with video marketing start by using the cameras on their phones.

This is a great way to get basic product demonstration videos, office walkthroughs, employee interviews, and other videos to use on your site.

It's always a plus to have at least one person at your company who's comfortable speaking to a camera, too. That adds a face to your business that makes it more relatable, and viewers can come to "know" who's speaking.

If you want to add production value to your final video, you can also use editing software.

Editing software can be pricey, but free options exist.

iMovie is probably the most robust free software, and Adobe Premiere is the gold standard of paid products. It's hard to justify spending on video marketing if you've never used it before. But like other marketing strategies, video is an investment.


The more time and money you invest into it, the better your results will be.

Better results mean lots of advantages for your company's website, including more traffic, more conversions, and better brand association. At the end of the day, you can recoup the investment of video marketing by converting viewers into customers.

You'll likely earn your cost of investment back within a year, although your timeframe may vary depending on your company, industry, and other marketing initiatives. 

With our team, you'll earn the results you need to grow.

Search trafficRanking is a valuable SEO metric, but measuring your site’s organic performance can’t stop there. The goal of showing up in search is to be chosen by searchers as the answer to their query. If you’re ranking but not getting any traffic, you have a problem.
But how do you even determine how much traffic your site is getting from search? One of the most precise ways to do this is with Google Analytics.

Are you ready to launch your company's SEO strategy?

Areas we serve

  • Philadelphia
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  • Baltomore
  • New York City
  • Tampa
  • Boston
  • Altanta
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​
Call Swift Digital Marketing Agency at (216) 339-6041!


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SEO Strategy

9/24/2021

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While Google keeps us on our toes with all the algorithm updates they keep rollin' out, one thing has stayed pretty consistent for inbound marketers looking to optimize their websites for search: keyword research.
Well, the need to do keyword research has stayed the same. How you actually do it hasn't.


What Is Keyword Research?

Keyword research is the process of finding and analyzing search terms that people enter into search engines with the goal of using that data for a specific purpose, often for search engine optimization (SEO) or general marketing. Keyword research can uncover queries to target, the popularity of theses queries, their ranking difficulty, and more.

 Why Is Keyword Research Important? 

Keyword research provides valuable insight into the queries that your target audience is actually searching on Google. The insight that you can get into these actual search terms can help inform content strategy as well as your larger marketing strategy. However, keywords themselves may not be as important to SEO as you may think.

More and more, we hear how much SEO has evolved over just the last 10 years, and how unimportant keywords themselves have become to our ability to rank well for the searches people make every day.

And to some extent, this is true; using keywords that exactly match a person's search is no longer the most important ranking factor in the eyes of an SEO professional. Rather, it's the intent behind that keyword, and whether or not a piece of content solves for that intent (we'll talk more about intent in just a minute).

But that doesn't mean keyword research is an outdated process. Let me explain:

Keyword research tells you what topics people care about and, assuming you use the right SEO tool, how popular those topics actually are among your audience. The operative term here is topics -- by researching keywords that are getting a high volume of searches per month, you can identify and sort your content into topics that you want to create content on. Then, you can use these topics to dictate which keywords you look for and target.

For an inside look into how Ahrefs can aid you in your SEO keyword research, check out our case study and exclusive interview here.

By researching keywords for their popularity, search volume, and general intent, you can tackle the questions that the most people in your audience want answers to.

I'm going to lay out a keyword research process you can follow to help you come up with a list of terms you should be targeting. That way, you'll be able to establish and execute a strong keyword strategy that helps you get found for the search terms you actually care about.

Step 1: Make a list of important, relevant topics based on what you know about your business.To kick off this process, think about the topics you want to rank for in terms of generic buckets. You'll come up with about 5-10 topic buckets you think are important to your business, and then you'll use those topic buckets to help come up with some specific keywords later in the process.

If you're a regular blogger, these are probably the topics you blog about most frequently. Or perhaps they're the topics that come up the most in sales conversations. Put yourself in the shoes of your buyer personas -- what types of topics would your target audience search that you'd want your business to get found for? If you were a company like for example -- selling marketing software  you might have general topic buckets like:


  • "inbound marketing" (21K)
  • "blogging" (19K)
  • "email marketing" (30K)
  • "lead generation" (17K)
  • "SEO" (214K)
  • "social media marketing" (71K)
  • "marketing analytics" (6.2K)
  • "marketing automation" (8.5K)

See those numbers in parentheses to the right of each keyword? That's their monthly search volume. This data allows you to gauge how important these topics are to your audience, and how many different sub-topics you might need to create content on to be successful with that keyword. To learn more about these sub-topics, we move onto step 2 ...

Step 2: Fill in those topic buckets with keywords.Now that you have a few topic buckets you want to focus on, it's time to identify some keywords that fall into those buckets. These are keyword phrases you think are important to rank for in the SERPs (search engine results pages) because your target customer is probably conducting searches for those specific terms.

For instance, if I took that last topic bucket for an inbound marketing software company -- "marketing automation" -- I'd brainstorm some keyword phrases that I think people would type in related to that topic. Those might include:


  • marketing automation tools
  • how to use marketing automation software
  • what is marketing automation?
  • how to tell if I need marketing automation software
  • lead nurturing
  • email marketing automation
  • top automation tools ​

And so on and so on. The point of this step isn't to come up with your final list of keyword phrases. You just want to end up with a brain dump of phrases you think potential customers might use to search for content related to that particular topic bucket. We'll narrow the lists down later in the process so you don't have something too unwieldy. 

Although more and more keywords are getting encrypted by Google every day, another smart way to come up with keyword ideas is to figure out which keywords your website is already getting found for. To do this, you'll need website analytics software like Google Analytics. Drill down into your website's traffic sources, and sift through your organic search traffic bucket to identify the keywords people are using to arrive at your site.

Repeat this exercise for as many topic buckets as you have. And remember, if you're having trouble coming up with relevant search terms, you can always head on over to your customer-facing colleagues -- those who are in Sales or Service -- and ask them what types of terms their prospects and customers use, or common questions they have. Those are often great starting points for keyword research.

Step 3: Understand How Intent Affects Keyword Research and Analyze Accordingly

Like I said in the previous section, user intent is now one of the most pivotal factors in your ability to rank well on search engines like Google. Today, it's more important that your web page addresses the problem a searcher intended to solve than simply carries the keyword the searcher used. So, how does this affect the keyword research you do?

It's easy to take keywords for face value, and unfortunately, keywords can have many different meanings beneath the surface. Because the intent behind a search is so important to your ranking potential, you need to be extra-careful how you interpret the keywords you target.

Let's say, for example, you're researching the keyword "how to start a blog" for an article you want to create. "Blog" can mean a blog post or the blog website itself, and what a searcher's intent is behind that keyword will influence the direction of your article. Does the searcher want to learn how to start an individual blog post? Or do they want to know how to actually launch a website domain for the purposes of blogging? If your content strategy is only targeting people interested in the latter, you'll need to make sure of the keyword's intent before committing to it.

To verify what a user's intent is in a keyword, it's a good idea to simply enter this keyword into a search engine yourself, and see what types of results come up. Make sure the type of content Google is closely related to what you'd intend to create for the keyword.

Step 4: Research related search terms.

This is a creative step you may have already thought of when doing keyword research. If not, it's a great way to fill out those lists.

If you're struggling to think of more keywords people might be searching about a specific topic, take a look at the related search terms that appear when you plug in a keyword into Google. When you type in your phrase and scroll to the bottom of Google's results, you'll notice some suggestions for searches related to your original input. These keywords can spark ideas for other keywords you may want to take into consideration.

Want a bonus? Type in some of those related search terms and look at their related search terms.

Step 5: Use keyword research tools to your advantage. Keyword research and SEO tools such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Ubersuggest can help you come up with more keyword ideas based on exact match keywords and phrase match keywords based on the ideas you've generated up to this point. This exercise might give you alternatives that you might not have considered.

How to Find and Choose Keywords for Your Website

Once you have an idea of the keywords that you want to rank for, now it's time to refine your list based on the best ones for your strategy. Here's how: 

Step 1. Understand the three main factors for choosing good keywords.Before choosing keywords and expecting your content to rank for them, you must curate keywords for three things: 

1. Relevance

Google ranks content for relevance. This is where the concept of search intent comes in. Your content will only rank for a keyword if it meets the searchers' needs. In addition, your content must be the best resource out there for the query. After all, why would Google rank your content higher if it provides less value than other content that exists on the web?

2. Authority

Google will provide more weight to sources it deems authoritative. That means you must do all you can to become an authoritative source by enriching your site with helpful, information content and promoting that content to earn social signals and backlinks. If you're not seen as authoritative in the space, or if a keyword's SERPs are loaded with heavy sources you can't compete with (like Forbes or The Mayo Clinic), you have a lower chance of ranking unless your content is exceptional. 

3. Volume

You may end up ranking on the first page for a specific keyword, but if no one ever searches for it, it will not result in traffic to your site. 

Volume is measured by MSV (monthly search volume), which means the number of times the keyword is searched per month across all audiences. 

Step 2: Check for a mix of head terms and long-tail keywords in each bucket.

​If you don't know the difference between head terms and long-tail keywords, let me explain. Head terms are keywords phrases that are generally shorter and more generic -- they're typically just one to three words in length, depending on who you talk to. Long-tail keywords, on the other hand, are longer keyword phrases usually containing three or more words.

It's important to check that you have a mix of head terms and long-tail terms because it'll give you a keyword strategy that's well balanced with long-term goals and short-term wins. That's because head terms are generally searched more frequently, making them often (not always, but often) much more competitive and harder to rank for than long-tail terms. Think about it: Without even looking up search volume or difficulty, which of the following terms do you think would be harder to rank for?


  1. how to write a great blog post
  2. blogging
​​
If you answered #2, you're absolutely right. But don't get discouraged. While head terms generally boast the most search volume (meaning greater potential to send you traffic), frankly, the traffic you'll get from the term "how to write a great blog post" is usually more desirable.

Why?

Because someone who is looking for something that specific is probably a much more qualified searcher for your product or service (presuming you're in the blogging space) than someone looking for something really generic. And because long-tail keywords tend to be more specific, it's usually easier to tell what people who search for those keywords are really looking for. Someone searching for the head term "blogging," on the other hand, could be searching it for a whole host of reasons unrelated to your business.

So check your keyword lists to make sure you have a healthy mix of head terms and long-tail keywords. You definitely want some quick wins that long-tail keywords will afford you, but you should also try to chip away at more difficult head terms over the long haul.

Step 3: See how competitors are ranking for these keywords.

Just because your competitor is doing something doesn’t mean you need to. The same goes for keywords. Just because a keyword is important to your competitor, doesn’t mean it's important to you. However, understanding what keywords your competitors are trying to rank for is a great way to help you give your list of keywords another evaluation.

If your competitor is ranking for certain keywords that are on your list, too, it definitely makes sense to work on improving your ranking for those. However, don’t ignore the ones your competitors don’t seem to care about. This could be a great opportunity for you to own market share on important terms, too.

Understanding the balance of terms that might be a little more difficult due to competition, versus those terms that are a little more realistic, will help you maintain a similar balance that the mix of long-tail and head terms allows. Remember, the goal is to end up with a list of keywords that provide some quick wins but also helps you make progress toward bigger, more challenging SEO goals.

How do you figure out what keywords your competitors are ranking for, you ask? Aside from manually searching for keywords in an incognito browser and seeing what positions your competitors are in, Ahrefs allows you to run a number of free reports that show you the top keywords for the domain you enter. This is a quick way to get a sense of the types of terms your competitors are ranking for.

Step 4: Use Google's Keyword Planner to cut down your keyword list.

Now that you've got the right mix of keywords, it's time to narrow down your lists with some more quantitative data. You have a lot of tools at your disposal to do this, but let me share my favorite methodology.

I like to use a mix of the Google's Keyword Planner (you'll need to set up an Ads account for this, but you can turn your example ad off before you pay any money), and Google Trends.

In Keyword Planner, you can get search volume and traffic estimates for keywords you're considering. Then, take the information you learn from Keyword Planner and use Google Trends to fill in some blanks.

Use the Keyword Planner to flag any terms on your list that have way too little (or way too much) search volume, and don't help you maintain a healthy mix like we talked about above. But before you delete anything, check out their trend history and projections in Google Trends. You can see whether, say, some low-volume terms might actually be something you should invest in now -- and reap the benefits for later.

Or perhaps you're just looking at a list of terms that is way too unwieldy, and you have to narrow it down somehow ... Google Trends can help you determine which terms are trending upward, and are thus worth more of your focus.

Best Keywords for SEOUnderstand that there's no "best" keywords, just those that are highly searched by your audience. With this in mind, it's up to you to craft a strategy that will help you rank pages and drive traffic. 

The best keywords for your SEO strategy will take into account relevance, authority, and volume. You want to find highly searched keywords that you can reasonably compete for based on: 


  1. The level of competition you're up against. 
  2. Your ability to produce content that exceeds in quality what's currently ranking.
​​
And ... You're done! Congratulations! You've now got a list of keywords that'll help you focus on the right topics for your business, and get you some short-term and long-term gains. 

Be sure to re-evaluate these keywords every few months -- once a quarter is a good benchmark, but some businesses like to do it even more often than that. As you gain even more authority in the SERPs, you'll find that you can add more and more keywords to your lists to tackle as you work on maintaining your current presence, and then growing in new areas on top of that.

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Google vs. Facebook Ads: What to Know Before You Advertise

9/19/2021

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Google and Facebook are two of the most widely used platforms on the Internet. Google garners more than 3.5 billion searches a day, while Facebook boasts 1.4 billion active users each day. Not to mention, each offers advertising services.
Beautiful Video Effects On The Web Design

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What is the difference between Facebook ads and Google Ads, though?

Keep reading to learn all about Google Ads vs. Facebook ads, plus discover which platform is best for your business and various ad campaigns.

Google Ads vs. Facebook ads: What is the difference?

In digital advertising, Google Ads and Facebook ads are the top two ad platforms.

While Google ads appear in Google search results and across websites in Google’s ad network, Facebook ads display across Facebook, Instagram, and other sites in the social media platform’s network. Both platforms offer demographic and behavior targeting, though Google Ads also includes keyword targeting.

What is Google Ads?

Google is the world’s largest and most popular PPC advertising platform. Paid ads, known as pay-per-click (PPC) ads, appear at the top of Google search results. 

Where do Google ads appear?

Ads created with Google Ads can get delivered through several networks, including:

  • Google Search Network
  • Google Display Network
  • Google Play
  • Google Maps
  • YouTube​

When you run a Google advertising campaign, you can target audience or content features like:

  • Audience demographics
  • Audience location
  • Content topics
  • Ad placements
  • And more​

Keyword targeting is one of the most popular strategies for Google Ads, especially when using the Google Search Network. If you want your ad to appear in relevant search results, you must choose the right keywords. Your keywords will determine where your ads appear in search results.

To find relevant keywords, you’ll conduct keyword research. Keyword research will help you find relevant keywords for your campaign. You’ll want to stick to long-tail keywords, which contain three or more words, because they’ll drive the best leads for your campaign.

Advertisers will bid on keywords to get their ad to appear in relevant search results. The bid you set is your maximum bid, which is the amount you’re willing to pay each time someone clicks. It’s also known as your cost-per-click (CPC).

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What kinds of ads can you create with Google Ads?With Google Ads, you can make a range of advertisements, including:

  • Text
  • Responsive
  • Image
  • Video
  • App
  • Call-only
  • Shopping
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The ad format you choose will depend on your audience, goals, and offer.

What are Google Ads good for?

If you’re looking to reach leads that convert, Google ads are the best option. These leads know exactly what they want and just need to find the right business to get what they need.

A Google ad can help them choose your business.

They’ll click on your ad and see what you have to offer. If you’re a good fit for their needs, you can earn more conversions for your business. With remarketing on Google Ads, you can even bring back users that previously had an interest in your product or service, but weren’t quite ready to convert.


What are Facebook ads?

Facebook ads are paid social ads that appear in users’ newsfeeds. They’re tagged with the word “sponsored” to indicate paid content. These ads help companies expose their business to interested leads.

Where do Facebook ads appear?

Facebook ads can appear on several platforms, including:

  • Instagram
  • Facebook
  • Messenger
  • Audience Network

On Facebook, your ads can earn placements in the following locations:

  • News feed
  • Marketplace
  • Suggested video
  • Right column
  • Stories
  • Instant Articles​

How can you target people on Facebook ads?With Facebook ads, you can target people based on:

  • Location
  • Interests
  • Behavior
  • Demographics
  • Connections​

These ads operate based on people’s interests and behaviors. Your ads appear in front of people that are interested in your business, products, or services. You’ll help your business connect with the right leads.

What kinds of ads can you make with Facebook ads?Facebook gives you the option to run numerous ad formats, including:

  • Image
  • Video
  • Slideshow
  • Carousel
  • Collection
  • Instant Experience
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What are Facebook ads good for?Facebook ads are best if you’re looking to gain brand exposure and new leads.
These ads don’t always entice people to convert, but they do get them to follow your page or check out your website. It’s a great way for you to earn more leads for your business because these ads get people comfortable with your business.

A few additional ways (or objectives) you can use Facebook ads include:

  • Generating traffic to your website, Facebook page, or app
  • Raising engagement on a Facebook post
  • Attracting views to a video
  • Earning messages from prospective customers
  • And more​

How much does it cost to advertise with Facebook ads?Generally, Facebook ads are cheaper to run than Google ads. Facebook ads have a CPC that ranges from a few cents to a few dollars. It all depends upon your industry. Some industries are a little more expensive than others.

Facebook ads vs. Google Ads: How each platform benefits your businessIn the Facebook ads vs. Google Ads, you have to look at the advantages of each platform. While each comes with different options (and costs), they both offer benefits that can help you build brand awareness, generate sales, and more.

Take a look at their perks, and learn more about the difference between Facebook ads and Google Ads:

The Advantages of Google Ads

Here are a few benefits you’ll experience from using the Google Ads platform.

  1. Reach more leads for your business: Since Google is a leading advertiser which fields billions of search queries per day, this creates an opportunity for you to reach dozens of leads for your business.
  2. Use different types of advertising: Google offers both search network and display network advertising. This means you can either create ads that appear in the search results or have ads that display on other websites. You have multiple options to try to reach new leads.
  3. Bid on millions of keywords: With Google, you’re able to bid on dozens of keywords to get your ads to rank for them. It allows you to gain more exposure and reach new people. Even better, you can access other targeting options that go beyond words or phrases.
  4. Earn positions based on relevancy: Money won’t buy you a top advertising spot, but relevancy will. This means that, regardless of your budget size, your ad has an opportunity to compete with top brands for relevant queries.​

The advantages of Facebook adsFacebook has billions of active monthly users that engage on their platform.

Here are a few benefits you’ll receive by using Facebook ads.

  1. Access to quality data: People share an abundance of information about themselves on Facebook. They share life events, interests, hobbies, beliefs, and more. When you advertise on Facebook, you can target people based on this information to help your business reach more relevant leads.
  2. Create lookalike audiences: If you already have a database of information about people most likely to be interested in your business, you can upload that information to Facebook. You can target quality Facebook users based on the data once it’s uploaded into your advertising campaign.
  3. Use Facebook’s visual elements: All Facebook ads are visual, which makes your ads more interesting and engaging for your audience. Video, image, and carousel ads can all help you capture the attention of your target shopper and get them excited about your product or service.

Which is better for your business: Facebook ads or Google Ads?

In the Google Ads vs. Facebook ads debate, there isn’t a clear winner.

That’s because both platforms offer value. Whether your business operates in the business-to-business (B2B) or business-to-consumer (B2C) sector, you can use Google and Facebook to grow brand awareness, increase online sales, and even generate phone calls, store visits, and more.

The best platform for your business will depend on what you want for your advertising campaign.


          Brand Awareness

            ✔


          Lead Generation

           ✔

 
          Website Traffic

       
           ✔

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          Online Sales

           ✔
 

          Online Engagement

            ✔​


           App Installs


           ✔


Keep in mind, the above dat is only a guideline.

Your business may find that Facebook ads, for example, work well for generating online sales. Or, that Google Ads performs better when it comes to earning more downloads for your mobile app. Every company and their advertising experience, so you may have to engage in some trial-and-error.

Either way, both these advertising options have their perks.

In fact, no rule says you have to choose either Google Ads or Facebook ads. These two advertising programs work well together. As long as you have the budget to run both campaigns, they can work together very effectively.

Three tips for using Google Ads and Facebook ads 

1. Launch your Facebook ad campaigns with Google Ads’ data

Whether you have past or zero experience with Facebook ads, you want to use this tip for a combined Google and Facebook strategy. That’s because user data can help your business a better and stronger campaign that drives better results.

Via Google Ads, you can access a ton of helpful data points, including:

  • Gender
  • Household income
  • Parental status
  • Locations​

This data can help your team refine the targeting of your existing Facebook ads. Or, you can use the information to launch a brand-new and targeted campaign. Either way, Google Ads can help you make data-driven decisions about your Facebook ad targeting.

2. Leverage your Facebook Lookalike Audiences for Google Ads

While Google Ads offers a feature similar to Lookalike Audiences in Facebook ads, you can still use this Facebook-specific tool in your Google ad campaigns. For reference, Lookalike Audiences help you build an audience similar to an existing one.

That means you can find people most likely to have an interest in your products or services.

Since Google Ads includes a range of targeting options, you can update or tweak them according to your Lookalike Audiences data. Even better, you can apply this data to Facebook ad campaigns. For your business, that means stronger ads across each of these advertising platforms.

3. Target every stage of the buying funnelRemember how Facebook ads work well for brand awareness, while Google Ads excel when it comes to securing leads? You can leverage these differences with a coordinated Google Ads and Facebook ads approach.

While your Facebook ads focus on top-of-the-funnel users, your Google Ads can target middle- and bottom-of-the-funnel users. This kind of approach can prevent blind spots or openings for your competitors to target (and steal) sales from your business.

Plus, it can keep your company top-of-mind as users browse the Internet.

Our full-service digital marketing company that specializes in paid advertising campaigns. Our team of over 200 experts will bring their knowledge and expertise to your campaign. We’ll help you create a customized campaign that is unique to your business.

If you’re looking for a company that drives results, look no further than Swift.  You can count on us to create a campaign that helps your business grow.

Call us today at (216) 339-6041!


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What Is Inbound Marketing?

9/17/2021

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Inbound marketing is a methodology that attracts (versus interrupts like outbound marketing) users with experiences personalized to their wants, challenges, and interests. Strategies like email marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and content marketing all work as inbound marketing strategies. 

Table of Contents

  1. Definition
  2. Examples
  3. Inbound marketing vs. outbound marketing
  4. History
  5. Inbound marketing benefits
  6. How inbound marketing works
  7. Inbound marketing uses
  8. Inbound marketing strategies
  9. Getting started with inbound marketing
  10. Inbound marketing infographic​ ​

What is inbound marketing, though?

How did it start? Why does it work? How can businesses use it?


These are all excellent questions, and this inbound marketing guide answers them all. Keep reading to learn all about inbound marketing and get actionable advice for launching your inbound marketing strategy.

If you need professional help with inbound marketing, contact us online or call us at 216-339-6041. You can also browse our inbound marketing services to see how our team can build a successful plan for your business.


The definition of inbound marketing

Inbound marketing refers to any marketing activities that bring people in, as opposed to marketers having to reach out to them. It can also be summed up as any kind of activity that earns attention, as opposed to an activity that pays for it.

Inbound marketing is usually something that was desired by the person consuming it, as opposed to something that was offered or exposed to someone without their permissions or desire for it. This is why you may also sometimes hear inbound marketing called “permission marketing” (a term coined by author Seth Godin).

Examples of inbound marketing

A few examples of inbound marketing are blog posts, podcasts, emails, social media posts, and videos. In contrast, a few examples of marketing that would not be considered inbound—also known as outbound marketing—are commercials, direct mail, and calls.

Do you see the difference?

Inbound marketing vs. outbound marketing. Inbound marketing methods are sought out and consumed by those who have a desire for them, or who are looking for them in their time of need. On the other hand, outbound marketing methods tend to be intrusive, unwanted, or even spammy.

As time goes on, consumers are learning to tune out outbound marketing methods, or are even finding ways to avoid them. For example, when a television commercial comes on, a consumer may simply change the channel. A spam email may automatically be filtered to the “spam” folder, or deleted without being read. Those who rely solely on these methods are finding that they are not as effective as they once were…nor do they provide the desired return on investment.

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, gives marketers benefits, builds more trust than commercial.

As mentioned, inbound marketing brings people in, as opposed to requiring marketers to reach out. This is the crucial difference between the two.

How did inbound marketing start?

Along with asking “What is inbound marketing?” you may be wondering how this new form of marketing came to be. Truthfully, inbound marketing has been around for many years, and many companies have been using it—but the term “inbound marketing” was not coined until 2005.

Brian Halligan, CEO and co-founder of HubSpot, a marketing software company, came up with the term to describe this type of marketing. In 2009, Halligan and fellow HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah, released a book on the topic titled Inbound Marketing: Get Found Using Google, Social Media, and Blogs.

In addition to creating the term and methodology, HubSpot also developed a flywheel to demonstrate the inbound marketing process. This flywheel grew to encompass not only marketing but also sales and customer service.
The flywheel features three components:
  • Attract: The “attract” element focuses on reaching and bringing your audience to you, like with helpful blog posts, funny social media content, or optimized content for search. Attraction strategies center on generating audience-focused resources that your audience can find easily.
  • Engage: The “engage” component revolves around communication. How you engage with clients and leads, whether on social media, over the phone, or via email, influences their decision when it comes to choosing your business, products, and services.
  • Delight: The “delight” element centers on customer retention. You want to keep your clients happy and satisfied, as well as motivated to recommend your business to others. This stage combines both attract and engage, as you continue to provide resources and communicate.​
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  • Attract
  • Content marketing
  • Search engine optimization
  • Social media marketing and advertising
  • Pay-per-click advertising
  • Video marketing
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  • Engage
  • Social media marketing
  • Email marketing
  • Content marketing
  • Chatbots
  • Delight
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  • Content marketing
  • Social media marketing
  • Chatbots
  • Email marketing
​

Why is inbound marketing important?Inbound marketing matters to businesses for a few reasons, and the Internet is the biggest one.

We Form Long Term Partnerships

Thanks to the World Wide Web, people across the world can research companies, products, and services in an instant. They can compare your business with competitors in minutes. Not to mention, who they find depends on search algorithms, social media, paid ads, and more.

If your company doesn’t use inbound marketing, you won’t have the chance to reach your audience.
Inbound marketing helps you attract users, as well as earn visibility on the Internet.

That makes inbound marketing an immensely powerful marketing approach. Companies can’t afford to ignore inbound marketing, even if they provide the best product or service because people won’t know that they do because consumers can’t find them online.

Use inbound marketing and you can start growing your business.

How Does Inbound Marketing Work?

Inbound marketing does not consist of one single marketing method that draws potential customers to your website. In fact, it consists of multiple marketing methods, all of which are considered inbound.

Each of these methods works a little differently. Some of them may rely on producing content that, like our example above, exists for a consumer’s time of need. Others involve creating a presence on channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. And others focus on the optimization of your website to make your content and business easier to find, increasing it in popularity. 

Let’s explore the methods that make up inbound marketing in a little more detail.

How you can use inbound marketingYour business can use inbound marketing to accomplish a range of goals, including:

  • Building brand awareness for your brand, products, or services
  • Creating an online following across multiple channels, like social media and email
  • Increasing website traffic and website conversions, like with SEO
  • Improving lead quality and lead management
  • Delivering personalized customer service and support
  • Establishing a presence across multiple touchpoints, like search, email, and social
  • Expanding understanding of target audience goals, challenges, and wants
  • And more
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Essentially, you can use inbound marketing to grow your business. In addition to attracting new customers, you can also take advantage of inbound marketing to retain current ones.

Inbound marketing strategies 

You have choices when it comes to inbound marketing strategies. Companies can personalize their tactics to their audience, which makes inbound marketing highly customizable.

Five of the most popular strategies include:

1. Content marketing

If you are creating articles, how-to pages, whitepapers, or other content, this is also a form of inbound marketing. Not only do these content pieces make it more likely that someone will find your company when they are searching for you, they also help those who have already located your site feel an affinity toward it. If you regularly product helpful content, you may be seen as a better, more valuable business than one that does not.

There are many types of content that you can produce, from whitepapers to videos to long-form guides. Not every type of content will work for every business. Experiment with your offerings to see what works best for your leads—you might be surprised!

2. Social media

Social media is also another component of inbound marketing. While it can be used to reach new customers or potential leads, it can also be used to grow relationships with existing ones by offering helpful content or great service at the right times.

3. Blogging

Blogging for your business is a fantastic way to increase awareness, produce great content for your site, and attract links that have the potential to help your site rank better in search engines. Blogging is also a crucial part of many inbound marketing strategies, since it focuses on the creation of content that people will want to consume.

4. Email marketing

Email marketing may not seem like a form of inbound marketing, but because you must get permission before emailing anyone—you do ask for permission, right?—it appears solidly on the inbound list. Like social media, email is typically used to grow existing relationships by offering something desirable at the right time.

You can use email marketing as an inbound marketing method by offering more than sales or deals in your emails. Why not send out how-tos, content, links to your blog posts, or highlights from social media? Or even highlight a fan or customer of the week?

5. Search engine optimization (SEO)

Yes, SEO — or search engine optimization — is a crucial part of inbound marketing. After all, where would these other marketing methods get you if they weren’t properly optimized, or your site wasn’t up to today’s SEO standards?

If you’re not already familiar with SEO, it’s an important part of online marketing by which your website is optimized to appear more often in search results, or rank higher than your competitors. SEO is the difference between ranking #1 and ranking #10, and what determines which websites take the top spots for any specific search query. You can learn more about SEO on this page.

Without SEO, which ensures your content is as search engine-friendly as possible.

These are just a few examples of marketing methods that are considered inbound instead of outbound. 

How to get started with inbound marketing

If you’re looking to get started with an inbound marketing strategy, our advice to you is this: start small. You don’t have to do everything at once, or use every single method we listed on this page. In fact, that would probably be counter-productive.

To get started, choose one marketing method you’re not already doing, and work with your team to set a strategy for it.

Ask the following questions:


  • When will we launch this?
  • How do we expect it to help our leads, clients, or customers?
  • What kinds of goals do we want to meet with this method?
  • How does this fit into our overall marketing plan? ​

Then, launch your method.

Monitor the results carefully for a set period of time. It’s also important to realize that inbound marketing does not often have immediate results: many blogs have to work for months or even years before they see regular readers. However, if you do not meet your goals, you may want to re-evaluate your approach and try again, or even phase that method out entirely.

If you want to add additional inbound marketing methods, be sure that they are added one-by-one, and that you are asking questions like the ones listed above, and measuring your response carefully, each time. By doing this, you’ll be able to have a better idea of what is working for you and what isn’t—and how happy you’re making the people visiting your website!

We hope this page helped answer the question “What is inbound marketing?” for you...and then some! Now that you know more about what inbound marketing is and how it works, we wish you luck in using it on your own website!

Inbound Marketing Explained

Need help developing an inbound marketing strategy?

As a leading inbound marketing agency, Swift Marketing Service can create a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy for your business. While other firms may simply provide a few services and call it a day, Swift Marketing is a full-service agency that works with its clients.

When you’re ready to experience our web design, SEO, and inbound marketing, we’d love to hear from you! Simply email us or give us a call to discuss what you’d like to accomplish with an inbound marketing plan, and we would be excited to talk to you.
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Content Marketing Service

9/17/2021

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Revenue-driving content marketing services

Content marketing is one of the most powerful digital marketing strategies. With the ability to double website conversion rates, as well as drive brand awareness and website traffic, content marketing is essential to increasing your company’s revenue.

With Swift Marketing Servies as your content marketing services partner, you can expect custom content that follows search engine optimization standards. Even better, you can count on transparency — no hidden fees and no secret strategies.

What are content marketing services?

Content marketing services are digital marketing services that include planning a content marketing strategy and creating, distributing, promoting, and tracking content to achieve specific business goals. Content types include articles, blog posts, videos, infographics, podcasts, ebooks, and more.

Content marketing services: Our process

 It’s what all our clients receive with their Swift  content marketing service package.

We even offer custom packages to match your company’s unique needs.

If you’re unsure about which of our packages are right for your business, you can always contact our knowledgeable strategists online. They can offer advice, as well as suggestions, as to whether a basic, aggressive, or market leader plan is right for your company.

Plus, they can answer all your questions about the various content marketing assets, which include:
​
  1. Long-form content
  2. Blog posts
  3. Micrographics
  4. Infographics
  5. Online guides
  6. Videos
  7. Slideshares
  8. And more!​​

No matter which content marketing service package you choose, from our basic to our market leader plan, you can expect our team to deliver a competitive strategy and marketing campaign that reaches your company’s goals.

We Form Longterm Partnerships

Over 90% of Swift clients continue partnering with us into year 2 of their campaign.

Speak with Us Today!

Learn more about some of the features of our content marketing services:
1. Content strategy and keyword research

First, our content marketing team will work with your business to fully understand your company, goals, and industry. Then, we’ll help you develop a custom content marketing strategy, designed to help your site content rank in search engine results and convert customers.

A core part of our content strategy is keyword research. By researching the keywords that matter to your audience, our team can develop original and valuable evergreen content that drives high-quality traffic to your website.

How do we know which keywords to choose, though?

As your content marketing service provider, we look at several factors when conducting keyword research, including:

  • Search volume: It’s important to create content for keywords with a fair number of monthly searches. While a higher search volume is great, it doesn’t necessarily translate to achieving your goals, which is why we also consider keywords with a lower search volume.
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  • Competition: Depending on your website’s SEO status, it can prove challenging to rank in search results for high-competition keywords. That is why our organic SEO services are a perfect addition to our content marketing services.
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  • Cost-per-click (CPC): Another factor to consider during keyword research is the CPC. By referencing this number, our team can determine the potential value of the keyword to your business, as well as to your competitors.
​
  • User intent: One of our most critical considerations during keyword research is the user intent. If you create content that doesn’t answer the user intent behind the keyword, then it won’t perform. That’s why our team investigates a keyword’s user intent in-depth.
​

Once we finish our keyword research, we move onto developing a content plan for you.

2. Content development

Next, our services focus on creating a content project management schedule. In this step, we build a content calendar for your strategy. We also establish a deadline for writing and delivering the content to your team for review.

The amount of content we develop depends on your content marketing services package:

  • If you have the basic plan, we develop three pieces of content each month
  • If you have the aggressive plan, we develop six pieces of content each month
  • If you have the market leader plan, we develop 10 pieces of content each month
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During this stage, your dedicated account manager also provides you with a walkthrough of our preferred platform for project management. Feel free to ask them questions, and they’ll be happy to answer and help you troubleshoot any issues.

3. Content creation

A core part of our content marketing services is content creation.

With the expertise of our talented project managers, as well as specialized writers and graphic designers, we create multiple types of content, including long-form content, blog posts, infographics, online guides, voice optimized content, white papers, and more for your company’s strategy.

Every strategy is different too, based on your unique needs.

While a pharmaceutical company’s digital marketing strategy, for example, may focus on awareness and education, an ecommerce store’s may emphasize immediate action. These focuses can result in different content type, like video for a pharmaceutical brand and blog posts for an ecommerce business.

Our team of editors then review each piece of content to ensure it matches your branding standards. Once your dedicated account manager looks over your deliverables, they’ll forward them to your team for feedback.

If you have any requested changes, our team takes care of them fast.

4. Content optimizationsIn addition to our writers optimizing your content for search, your dedicated account manager will too. For example, if you’re launching a piece of long-form content on your website, they create a compelling title tag and meta description for it.

The result is optimized content for not only users but also search engines. By optimizing your content for both parties, we provide your content the best foundation for success — meaning it will not only resonate with your target audience but also rank well in search results.

You'll see content marketing, as well as SEO results with Swift Marketing Team as your content marketing services provider.

5. Content promotion

Content promotion enables you to boost brand awareness, and it exposes more people to your message. As more people connect with your content online, you’ll reap the benefits of increased site traffic, conversions, and revenue.

We can also use paid strategies, like pay-per-click, to promote your owned media across the web. Social media advertising, for instance, is an excellent content marketing campaign strategy for content promotion.

6. Monthly reporting

We don’t stop after creating and promoting your content!

Our content marketing solutions include custom reporting that allows you to monitor your return on investment (ROI) and drive the best possible results from your marketing efforts.

As a part of our aggressive and market leader content marketing service packages, you receive a monthly content marketing strategy report. Your dedicated account manager compiles this report, which includes tons of helpful information you can share with your company’s decision makers.

By partnering with our full-service marketing agency, you don’t have to worry about creating this content. We develop and launch your content marketing strategy for you. Plus, we feature an experienced team of writers with backgrounds in manufacturing, retail, and a slew of other industries.

Keep reading to learn more about the pricing and deliverables for our services.

Why invest in content marketing services?

For businesses that want to reach their target audience with web marketing, content marketing is a must. Even if your company operates offline, the best content marketing services offer value. With a powerful content marketing strategy, you can connect with audiences a few blocks away or halfway around the world.

That connection leads to several noteworthy benefits, including:

Grow your business

Consumers use the Internet for everything, from posting videos of their cats and dogs to finding products for their new home. In addition, 80 percent of consumers use the Internet for researching services or products — and when it comes to local searches, those have increased.

Online visibility is critical, which is where content marketing comes into use. With a strategic content marketing plan and our leading content marketing agency, you can connect with consumers in varying stages of your buying funnel.

Build your brand awareness

Your brand is one of the most valuable things your company owns. It defines your business, as well as contributes to the retention and loyalty of your clients. It also influences their purchase decisions, which is why building brand awareness is imperative.

With our content marketing management services, you can increase awareness of your brand among your target audience. However, it takes time to build brand awareness. This is why content marketing is an ongoing strategy — just like search engine optimization (SEO).

Like SEO, content marketing delivers long-term revenue and brand awareness for your company. With increased brand awareness, you can expect more shoppers to choose your company when they’re ready to buy.

Why? For weeks, months, or maybe even years, you’ve provided them with high-quality, informative content. This quality content has provided value by answering their questions and offering them guidance.

Research also confirms that content marketing is a powerhouse when it comes to brand awareness. 

Increase your revenue

Another reason why companies invest in content marketing? Its rising conversion rate. 

Better yet, think of your competition. With our competitive content marketing services, you gain a competitive edge in your marketplace. That edge helps your company earn more valuable leads and clients — limiting the growth of your competitors.

The result is a business that’s expanding its market share and revenues.

Reach your target audience

Content marketing also appeals to how modern consumers shop.

When researching a product or service, shoppers read almost 12 pieces of content before purchasing. While some of that content comes from non-competitor websites, such as an industry news site, users arrive on competing sites as they read more.

With content marketing agency's services, you can prevent that.

Our award-winning team will create a personalized strategy that includes not only bottom of the funnel content but also middle and top of the funnel content. That kind of strategy helps you connect with users in the early, middle, and later stages of the buying funnel.

Then, when your target audience makes their buying decision, it’s your company they choose.

Expand your consumer base

Before they buy, consumers want to learn about your business — but in a non-promotional way. In fact, prefer getting to know a company through content, like articles or blog posts.


By considering every step of your buying funnel in your company’s business and content marketing strategy, you have the potential to expand your consumer base. With a bigger following, you can boost the other benefits of content marketing, like increased conversions and brand awareness.

As your partner, you can trust Swift Marketing Team to deliver those perks. 

Maximize your digital marketing ROI

With the ability to create a long-term source of revenue for your business, our digital marketing content services maximize your investment. With a bigger ROI, your company can reinvest in your online marketing strategies, as well as expand your business and its services.

While content marketing’s ROI varies, it does deliver better results than traditional marketing.

The best part is that our content marketing services focus on developing evergreen content for your business. This content attracts new consumers on a routine basis and stays relevant over time.

Become an industry leader

When consumers research their next purchase, they search for information from reputable sources. With our content marketing management services, your business will become an industry-trusted source for your niche market.

That kind of reputation lends itself to several benefits, including:

  • People trust your company: When people trust your business, it’s an immense win. With compelling and informational content, your company can build that trust with users early — which can solidify your business as their top pick.
  • People share your content: With high-quality, high-value content, it’s natural for people to share it. By sharing your company’s content with friends, family, and coworkers, your business attracts the attention of people in your target audience.
  • People choose your company: The best benefit of becoming an industry-trusted source is the conversions. It becomes an easy decision for users to call your business, purchase your product, or visit your store because you are the best in the industry.
​
Like earning the number one position on the first page of search results for a high-value keyword in SEO, it takes time for your company to evolve into a recommended resource for the industry. That is why content marketing is an ongoing, long-term strategy.

What do content marketing services include?

Content marketing services involve:

  • Creating a strategy
  • Planning a content schedule
  • Creating custom content
  • Optimizing content
  • Distributing content
  • Promoting content
  • Tracking and reporting on results​

What types of content are used in content marketing?

Content marketing solutions can involve a wide range of content types. Some examples include:
​
  • Blog posts
  • Articles
  • Infographics
  • Videos
  • Webinars
  • Ebooks
  • Podcasts
​
Why use content marketing services?Content marketing services can help your business:

  • Reach your target audience online
  • Build your brand
  • Establish your brand as an authority in your industry
  • Convert prospects into customers
  • Improve the ROI of your marketing

Why choose Swift Marketing Services for the best content marketing services?

It’s a great question, and there are plenty of reasons to choose our content marketing services. Swift is a top content marketing company.

A Partner Businesses Trust

Their focus on ROI and their innate ability to communicate this information in a way that I understand has been the missing link with other digital marketing firms that I have used in the past.

Get started on your content marketing strategy by requesting a free quote online or calling us at 216-339-6041!


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23 Customer Service Email Templates to Welcome, Support, Renew, Refund, & Retain Customers

9/14/2021

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There's truly nothing worse than an automated, lifeless email from a company. That feeling of sheer disappointment when you read the robotic text is almost heart-wrenching. You expected so much more.


You never want your customers to feel that way about you. After cultivating a relationship with them, the last thing you want is for them to be offended by an impersonal email.

Though it'd be ideal to hand-craft each and every email you send, it can also be time-consuming and inefficient.

Don't fret, we've got you covered. Below, we'll go over a list of best practices for writing customer service emails, a guide for responding to angry messages, and a collection of the best customer service email templates for a variety of scenarios.

Best Practices for Writing Customer Service Emails Though using a customer service email template will make your job much easier, you should still follow a few best practices.

In fact, the following tips apply especially when you use a pre-written email. They can help you personalize your response so that it doesn't seem canned and strengthens your company's customer retention strategy.

1. Use the customer's name.

This is the first step when reaching out or responding to customers. Using their name in the greeting will make your response feel genuine and targeted specifically to them.

2. Have the customer's conversation history handy.

When responding to a customer complaint or email, it's key to know when and why they've reached out to your company. Have they had this same issue in the past? Or have they only been a customer with you for a short time? This information can help you choose the appropriate tone for your email — whether profusely apologetic or cheery and helpful.

Additionally, if you have the customer's conversation history, you can personalize any template you use by including background information and context.

3. Brush up on key facts about their business or buyer persona.

In a similar vein, skim through the information you have on their business and buyer persona to understand why they reached out. Are they users of your product? Or are they top-level stakeholders at their organization? Do you know why they chose to do business with you? We recommend collecting this information using CRM software.

4. Try to understand their problem inside and out.

When reading over the email, try to understand the problem they're encountering before crafting a response. If you still need clarity, your response would be the place to ask questions.

No matter what, ensure that every email you send is filled with empathy and understanding — even when the customer is angry.

Empathy can help you deal with frustrated customers and decrease the chances that they'll leave you for a competitor. We understand that this is hard, so below, we'll take you through a step-by-step guide on how to respond to an angry customer email.

How to Respond to an Angry Customer Email
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  1. Respond as soon as possible.
  2. Apologize for their negative experience.
  3. Explain what may have gone wrong.
  4. Provide context for what happened.
  5. Reassure the customer that this won't happen again.
  6. Offer an incentive, refund, or discount.
  7. Allow them to respond with further questions, comments, or concerns.
  8. Follow up with the customer.
​​
1. Respond as soon as possible.

The longer you wait to respond to a customer complaint, the more likely it is that they will take that complaint to a public platform where other consumers can form opinions about your company. It's best to tackle the problem within an hour as this will likely keep the conversation going over email and will reduce the chance of a follow-up call.
2. Apologize for their negative experience.

The first line in your response should be a genuine apology.

No matter how hurtful or unfair their email may seem, it's important to recognize that they took the time to craft a complaint because they had such a negative experience with your company. As a customer service professional, your goal is for none of your customers to have such a terrible experience, and it's the responsibility of your company to apologize for that.

It's also important to acknowledge your mistakes, taking some responsibility for what your company may have done wrong. It's less about proving a point and more about salvaging the relationship with that customer.

In this step, try to choose a tone that's both empathetic and apologetic, but make it clear that you're also eager to help.

3. Explain what may have gone wrong.

Customers really care about getting clear explanations and complete solutions for their problems — not just for their own well-being but for other customers as well.

They care about not letting the same issue happen to others. Offering the customer an explanation for the situation can help them understand that there were unexpected factors in play.

If you explain to them that the situation was a one-time event or rare occurrence — like their package getting lost in the mail or if they're left on hold for an hour — it will help ease the tension and potentially get them to empathize with your company.

4. Provide context for what happened.

Like we discussed above, it's important to understand where the customer is coming from. By looking at their history with your company, you're starting out on the same page in the conversation.

Show that you understand the context for the situation so the customer knows that you're aware of the issues they've faced before. You could say something like, "I see that you've had this problem before, a few months ago." This can help you provide genuine empathy (and not the fake empathy that some customer service scripts can have).

5. Reassure the customer that this won't happen again.

Even if the problem wasn't your fault — say, your logistics partnered failed to deliver the package on time — it's important to reassure the customer that you're doing everything possible to prevent this from happening again.

Whether you're checking in with your product team, retraining your sales team, or revisiting the relationship with your logistics partner, you should indicate to the customer that their angry email has resulted in company-wide action.

This will reassure them that they won't have this experience again and thus make it less likely that they'll leave you for a competitor.

6. Offer an incentive, refund, or discount.

Offering an incentive is a great option when a customer's complaint is so extreme that you fear worse repercussions — or when they specifically demand a refund or free item.

Alternatively, if a customer complaint is reasonable and polite, offer an incentive as thanks for remaining calm and patient with your team.

If a customer's complaint is the result of an error on your end, do as much as you can to offer them a reasonable discount or refund when appropriate. If the customer is completely unable to use the purchase as a result of the error, it's only fair to offer a full refund.

If an error resulted in an order delay or another type of minor inconvenience that doesn't impact the customer's ability to use the product or service, a small discount can buy goodwill with the customer.

If the complaints are the result of a company-wide outage or error that impacted hundreds of thousands of customers, you may not be able to offer them all a discount or refund. Instead, own your mistake, apologize sincerely, and take steps to prevent the problem from happening again.

7. Allow them to respond with further questions, comments, or concerns.

At the end of the email, before closing, always ask them to let you know if they have any more questions, comments, or concerns. You want to show that you're still open to further feedback and it's on them to end the conversation.

The more opportunities you give them to interact with you, the higher the chance that their temper will subside and they will come to respect your company again.

8. Follow up with the customer.

After leaving the path open for more questions, it's critical to follow up with the customer and give them a final status on the resolution of their issue.

Whether it was a delayed package, a product outage, or a bad experience with the website, you want to reassure the customer that you've finished taking the necessary steps to ensure this doesn't happen again.

For example, if the issue was that the package was delayed in the mail, follow up with them in three days to tell them they should've received the product they ordered. Alternatively, you can check the tracking number and notify them that the package should have been left in their mailbox or on their front step.

If the customer experienced a technical malfunction, touch base with them to let them know that your team has finished working on the issue and that the malfunction is resolved.

Best Sample Email for Responding to an Angry Customer

Using the tips above, we've written a sample email that you can use to respond to an angry email from a customer.
 Hi [Customer],

I'm so sorry that you had a negative experience with [product, service, or company department]. I've looked into the issue, and it seems that [briefly explain the reason for their bad experience, if applicable].

I've forwarded this issue to [head of the appropriate department], our [person's job title].

In the meantime, I'd like to offer a [discount/refund] for the inconvenience and will be checking in with you in a few days to update you on the status of [issue].


Once more, I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience. Please let me know if I can answer any questions, and I'd be happy to help!

Best,
[Your name]

Don't stop here. Below, we've curated a list of the best customer service email templates for every support situation.


50 Customer Service Email TemplatesTell us about yourself to access the templates.

Hi 👋 What's your name?
First Name


Last Name


Hi null, what's your email address?
Email Address


And your phone number?
Phone Number


What is your company's name and website?
Company


Website


How many employees work there?


The Best Customer Service Email TemplatesLet's take a look at some of the best customer service email templates you can lean on when in a variety of situations with customers.

Skip to:
  • Thank You Email Template
  • Questionnaire Email Template
  • Angry Customer Response Email Template
  • Customer Complaint Response Email Template
  • Customer Service Follow-Up Email Template
  • Technical Support Email Template
  • Keep In Touch Email Template
  • Welcome Email Template
  • Account Manager Introduction Email Template
  • Account Manager Transition Email Template
  • Free Trial Email Template
  • Renewal Reminder Email Template
  • Customer Referral Email Template
  • Customer Review Request Email Template
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Customer Refund Letter Templates
  • Refund to Customer Email Template
  • Product Exchange Email Template
  • Product Discount Email Template
  • Customer Apology Email Template
  • Return of Overpayment Email Template
  • Refund Notification Email Template
  • Refund Status Email Template
  • Refund Not Received Email Template
  • Out-of-Policy Refund Email Template
​
1. Thank You Email Template

Once in a while, it's nice to send your customers a little thank you. After all, your company would be nowhere without the loyalty of your customers. This can be sent in several instances: right after they make a purchase, when you notice it's their anniversary with your company, or when they refer another customer.

In a thank you email, you should never try to sell them something. It's simply an opportunity to show your appreciation.

 Hi [Customer],

Thank you so much for referring your friend [Friend's name] to us. I've enjoyed getting to know them and doing business with them. I'm so happy that you've stuck around with us for this long and brought your friend to share the experience with you.

We're lucky to have you. Thanks again for being such a fantastic customer! As a token of our appreciation, here's a [coupon/discount] for you to enjoy.

Cheers,
[Your name]



2. Questionnaire Email Template

There are several kinds of questionnaires you may send your customers. From customer satisfaction surveys to demographics to Customer Effort Score (CES), each questionnaire offers valuable data to your company. Conducting a survey can help you get into the minds of your customers and make effective changes to your service experience.

However, it's easy for customers to see a link to a questionnaire and immediately close the tab. Entice them into taking the questionnaire by mentioning its briefness or perhaps offering an incentive.Pro tip: Consider using one of these "thank you in advance" alternatives for a more polite approach.
​

 Hey [Customer],

Thanks for your recent purchase with us! I hope you're enjoying your [product/service].

I'd love to hear more about your experience working with our team. Please fill out the following survey and give us your honest feedback. I promise it's short, and it'll help improve customers' experiences in the future.

I know your time is valuable, and I appreciate your attention.

Thanks,

[Your name]

<< Attach questionnaire >>



3. Angry Customer Response Email Template

Uh oh. You've got an angry customer, and they want to leave your business. This could have happened for a range of reasons. They might even be angry about external factors and not necessarily your business. Remain calm and think rationally. The worst possible thing you could do is fight fire with fire.

It's okay to take some time to cool down before typing a response. Don't take their email to heart. Sometimes, a customer is so upset that there isn't much damage control you can do. The best move is to wave the white flag and move forward.

This template is best used when the customer has indicated that they're taking their business elsewhere. If the customer is complaining but will remain with your business, you should use template #4.

 [Customer],

I am so sorry to hear that you have had such a poor experience that you no longer want to work with us.

Customer satisfaction is always a number one priority for us. I'm deeply sorry that that wasn't clearly demonstrated to you.

As much as I hate to see you go, I completely understand how upset you must feel. I apologize again for any trouble we may have caused you. Good luck with your business, and I wish you all the best.

Let me know if you have any more questions, comments, or concerns.

Best,

[Your name]



4. Customer Complaint Response Email Template

Similar to an angry customer, a complaining customer is not exactly a ray of sunshine on your workday. They can be almost worse, it seems, than an angry customer.

Anger can often be displaced or without reason, whereas a complaint is typically well-crafted and based on truth. Incidentally, there's often a greater opportunity of turning a complaining customer into a satisfied one.

Just as they have probably put a good amount of time into writing their email, you, too, should do the same. It's important to remain eloquent and polite, even if the complaint frustrates you.

 [Customer],

I am so sorry to hear that [provide a brief summary of their bad experience]. That should never have happened, and I completely understand how frustrating this must be for you. I will relay this message to the appropriate department.

We are prioritizing resolving [the issue they faced with your product, company, or service]. Our team is jumping on that problem right away, and I will let you know as soon as it's fixed.

I appreciate you letting me know about your negative experience. We strive to ensure every customer is satisfied with our business, and I apologize for any way in which we may have inconvenienced you.

Let me know if you have any more questions, comments, or concerns.

Best,

[Your name]

5. Customer Service Follow-up Email Template

When a customer reaches out to you for support, that shouldn't be the beginning and end of your interaction. A customer might not be expecting a follow-up, but that's what will make them appreciate it even more.

Plus, it also indicates that your company is dedicated to not merely sales, but also fostering positive customer relationships.

 Hey [Customer],

I hope you're enjoying your brand new product. I remember that you were torn between two versions, but I firmly believe you went with the perfect choice for you.

If you're interested, I'd love to hear more about how you're liking the product. Let me know some pros and cons and if there's any way I can be of assistance to guide you through this process. I'm here for whatever you need and look forward to hearing from you soon.

Cheers,

[Your name]

6. Technical Support Email Template

While it's more common for customer support engineers to provide technical support over live chat, phone, or another quicker form of communication, they'll sometimes handle support inquiries over email. Since email is not meant to be an immediate channel for communication, customers may use this method when addressing an issue that isn't urgent.
Email also allows you to get a lot more information about the situation because customers can take their time to write out thorough responses to your questions. Take advantage of this and ask several in-depth questions in a single email to find a solution as quickly as possible.

 Hey [Customer],

Thanks for reaching out! I'd be more than happy to help you.

Before we dive in, can you give me a little more context on the situation? When did this issue begin happening? Has it been occurring consistently, or does it happen on and off? Have you tried any solutions on your own?

These questions will help me find a more personalized solution to your problem.

Thanks,

[Your name]


7. Keep in Touch Email Template

It's sad to see a customer go — especially one who has been loyal to your company for a while. Once you've built a real relationship with a customer, the last thing you want to do is break off ties as soon as they decide to take a different path.

You want to show them that, no matter what, you still care about them and want what's best for them. And maybe, just maybe, they'll come back to you in the future.

 Hey [Customer],

I'm sorry to see you go. Doing business with you in the past [amount of years they've been with you] has been great. I've learned so much from you and have made several updates to our products based on your thorough, thoughtful feedback. I appreciate everything you've done to make our company the best it can be.

As you set onto a new path, don't forget about us! I'd love to hear about your successes in the future and the exciting growth your company inevitably will have.

Please keep in touch. Good luck with everything!

Cheers,

[Your name]

8. Welcome Email Template

Congratulations! You've got a new customer or subscriber. There's truly nothing more exhilarating for a business. However, as your company's customer base grows larger, be sure not to overlook newcomers.

That's why it's important to send welcome emails. This will help them get acquainted with your company and also show them that each and every individual customer matters to you. Also, this is a good opportunity to shower them with helpful content.

 Hi [Customer],

Welcome to [Your company]! I'm so excited to have you join us. We're feeling pretty lucky that you chose us, and I just wanna say thank you on behalf of our whole company.

To get you settled, I wanted to share with you some of our best resources so you can make the most out of your experience with us. Subscribe to our blog [add link] for some great tips and knowledge to be successful in your industry. Check out our Instagram [add link], Facebook [add link], and Twitter [add link] for your daily dose of industry news, advice, and behind-the-scenes looks.

If you're interested in learning more about your product, feel free to contact me or anyone else on our support team at any time. We're always here to help you in any way we can.

Cheers,

[Your name]

9. Account Manager Introduction Email Template

It can be tricky to send out that first email as an account manager. Your new client has probably been speaking with one or more other employees at your company and has gotten relatively acquainted with them.

As you will be working directly with them from now on, it's important to develop an even stronger relationship with them that will continue into the foreseeable future.

Make it clear that you will be their direct contact from now on. You can take on a friendly, more comfortable tone. You want them to know that you're someone they can trust.

 Hey [Customer],

I'm [Your name], and I'm very excited to be your new Account Manager at [Your company]! I've heard great things about you from my teammates, and I'm hoping they've said some good things about me, too.

My role will be to guide you through anything you need. If you ever have questions, run into problems, consider an upgrade, or anything at all, I'm the one for the job. We will be working closely together, and I'll be helping you navigate your new product.

I'm looking forward to meeting you. Do you have a few minutes this week to chat?

Cheers,

[Your name]

10. Account Manager Transition Email Template

As much as you might love your company, you may get to the point where it's time to move on. Once you get a job offer that you can't refuse, it can be difficult to relay it to your employer, but even harder to tell your loyal customers.

It's essential that you keep your clients in the loop about this change. Since you have been an integral part of their professional lives, they should be notified of your leave. This will help them prepare for the shift, as this change will affect them, too.

 Dear [Customer],

After eight incredible years at [Your company], I'm excited to inform you that I have just accepted an offer to move on to [New company]. This new role will be an important player in advancing my career, and I couldn't feel more grateful for the opportunity.

However, that means that I will no longer be your Account Manager here. I have enjoyed watching you grow and cheering on your successes. Working with you has taught me so much, and I will carry this knowledge on to this next chapter in my life.

Luckily, I have an incredible replacement for you. [Replacement's name] is an outstanding Account Manager and a dear friend of mine. [She/he/they] has been working here for [amount of years] and has a lot to show for it. I genuinely believe you two will get along well and that [she/he/they] will be a huge support for you.

They will be emailing you in the next couple days with a warm greeting and plans for you to meet. I'm looking forward to hearing all about it.

Thank you again for being a great client for [amount of years]. I wish you all the best!

Thanks,

[Your name]

11. Free Trial Email Template

If you notice a prospect who seems interested in your products but fails to make a purchase, don't sweep them under the rug. This is a perfect opportunity to mention a free trial.

Prospects might be curious to learn more about your products but nervous to show their cards when they haven't gotten a chance to fully interact with your company. By offering a free trial, you're gaining the prospect's trust. Additionally, once a customer gets acquainted with a product during a free trial, it's harder to turn it down.

 Hi [Prospect],

I noticed that you seemed interested in [product name] on our website. If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out. I'd be happy to guide you through the different options.

If you're interested, I want to extend an offer for a free trial, as it can be tough to commit to a product from a mere description. Our free trial lasts 30 days and lets you navigate all premium features. It's a great chance to see which product is right for you and how much it can benefit you and your clients.

If you're interested, email me back or give me a call. I can talk you through all the details and get you set up.

Cheers,

[Your name]


12. Renewal Reminder Email Template

So, your customer purchased an annual subscription to your product? Great.

However, it's hitting 350 days, and they haven't mentioned any interest in renewing their subscription. Yikes.

That's the perfect opportunity to send a renewal reminder email. There's a high possibility they simply forgot. Or, it could be that they're on the fence about it. Either way, a gentle reminder could steer them in the right direction.

 Hey [Customer],

I hope everything is going well with you and that you've had a great year navigating your product.

I noticed that your annual subscription is expiring on [date of expiration]. Are you interested in renewing your subscription? If you're weighing your options, I'd love to chat further with you to help you come to a decision. If you'd like to upgrade to a new product, we can discuss that, as well.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Cheers,

[Your name]


13. Customer Referral Email Template

Now that you've built a solid relationship with a customer, it's about time to ask them (nicely) for a referral. If they've had a very positive experience with your company, it's natural that they'll want the same for their family, friends, and colleagues in similar fields.


 Hi [Customer],

I'm so happy to hear that you're having a great experience with [product/service/company department]. Helping our customers help their customers has always been our goal.

Since I've loved getting to work with you these past few months, I was wondering if there was anyone you know who might benefit in a similar way? It would be a pleasure to help them achieve their goals.

I'm looking forward to it!

Thanks,

[Your name]

14. Customer Review Request Email Template

If you've worked with a customer for a while and helped them achieve results with your product or service, you may want to ask them to review your product, service, business, or you personally.

Reviews help increase ratings on review sites, which are one of the most trustworthy ways prospects research companies or products before making a purchase.

Timing-wise, it might make sense for you to send this email within a chain you've already started with the customer about the good results or a successful project you collaborated with them on. You can either copy this template directly into a chain, or use the exact wording to start a new thread from scratch.

If you sell a physical product that your customer personally uses, you might reach out 10-15 days after the product is delivered to ask them how it's going.

 Hi [Customer],

I hope you're having a great week so far! I saw you've started [details about how they're using your product] — it looks like you've achieved some impressive [details of the results they've achieved]. How are you enjoying working with the tool?

If you have any feedback or questions, don't hesitate to give me a call or shoot me an email, and I'll help you out!
If you'd like to share your experience using [Your company's tool], here are our pages on [review site] and [review site], where you can give us a rating and share your feedback to help other customers like you.

Thanks for your time, and give me a call if you have any questions!

[Your name]


Customer Refund Letter Templates

Here are a few useful customer service email templates that you can use for refunds.

15. Refund to Customer Email Template

Sadly, some customers are going to return your products.

Don't worry, it's not you. But it's also not them. They aren't upset or frustrated like the customers above. They simply don't enjoy the product or find a good use for it.

For instances like this, it's good to respond to a refund with an email expressing that there are no hard feelings and that you hope to do business with them again in the future.

 Hi [Customer],

I've processed your refund, and you should expect to see the amount appear in your bank account in the next couple of business days.

I'm sorry to hear that you didn't love your new product. I completely understand that it isn't for everyone.

If you're still on the search for the right choice for you, let me know. I'd be happy to talk you through some of our other options and see if any of them feel like a good fit. Thank you for your time and for giving us a try.

I hope to connect with you again in the near future.

Best,

[Your name]


16. Product Exchange Email Template

Fortunately, not every unhappy customer will ask for a refund. Some may regularly purchase your product, so they know that one poor experience doesn't represent your brand.

However, that also means they know what to expect from your product and will still be upset that it didn't perform up to their standards. They won't be angry enough to churn, but they will expect you to make things right. This is where this letter comes in handy.

 Hi [Customer],

Thanks for letting us know about this faulty product. We'll do our best to assess the problem and determine exactly what went wrong with your [product name].

In the meantime, please accept this replacement product that I've personally assessed for performance.

We'd like to offer our sincerest apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused. We hope you continue to enjoy using our product and we are happy to answer any questions or concerns you may have.

Please feel welcome to contact our support team at [phone number], or reply to this message and we'd be more than happy to help.

Thanks,

[Your name]


17. Product Discount Email Template

When it comes to refunds, not every company has the same policy. Some may not offer product exchanges or full compensation for specific products or services. Others may require proof of purchase to issue a refund and can only provide store credit without it.

For these cases, your business may offer a small promotion so the customer will have a discount the next time they shop at your store. It's not the refund the customer is looking for, but it's better than leaving them empty-handed.

 Hi [Customer],

Thanks for reaching out.

Unfortunately, we can't offer a refund at this time. According to our policy, [policy description + explanation of why the policy is in place].

I've checked with my manager to confirm this policy, and while we can't offer a full refund, we can provide you with a discount of [discount amount] for the next time you shop in our stores.

We sincerely appreciate your understanding in this matter. Please feel welcome to reach out to me with any questions you may have and I would be more than happy to help.

Thanks again,

[Your name]


18. Customer Apology Email Template

In some cases, your customer service team won't be able to provide any type of refund or discount. This can lead to an awkward or stressful situation with the customer, especially if they feel like your company is in the wrong.

While you should personalize every apology, this message can be a baseline to work from when you need to take responsibility for your company's work.

 Hi [Customer],

Thank you for providing us this feedback.

We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused and we appreciate your understanding in the matter. We know that [problem] has prevented you from achieving [customer's goal], and that we have fallen short of your expectations.

I have relayed this feedback to the rest of my team and can assure you that this mistake won't happen in the future. That said, if there's anything else that I can help you with at the moment, please feel welcome to reach out and I would be more than happy to help.

Thanks again,

[Your name]

19. Return of Overpayment Email Template

Depending on your business model, customers may have to pay for a product or service upfront and are reimbursed later if they paid more than they needed to. This either requires you to send them a check or wire the money via a direct deposit.

Regardless of how it's transferred, customers will want to know where this money is coming from. While they'll be happy to accept the return, they'll be dubious of its origin if you don't notify them ahead of time. You'll also want to take credit for this refund as it shows your intention to provide an honest transaction.

For these cases, you can use this letter to alert your customers of an overpayment.

 Hi [Customer],

Thank you for your recent payment of [payment amount].

Upon review of your transaction, we've determined that the amount you have paid is more than what was required for this product or service. The actual amount that was due was [payment amount], thus leaving you with a credit of [credit amount]. Please find a [check amount or notice of deposit] enclosed in this letter.

We strongly believe in providing an honest experience for our customers and can assure you that we are working constantly to prevent potential fraud. We hope this message resolves any concerns you may have about this transaction and are more than happy to answer any additional questions.

Thanks again,

[Your name]

20. Refund Notification Email Template

There are times where customers are eligible for a refund, but just don't know it. While you shouldn't be eager for them to return products, it'd be dishonest not to notify customers when they qualify to do so.

This type of proactive customer service builds trust with your customer base and creates a delightful support experience.

 Hi [Customer],

We hope this message finds you well.

We are reaching because you qualify for a refund for your purchase of [product name]. This refund is eligible for [period of time] and can be initiated by calling or messaging our customer service team.

Please feel welcome to reply to this email with any questions you may have and I would be more than happy to help.

Thanks,

[Your name]


21. Refund Status Email Template

To avoid any hiccups in the refund process, it'd be helpful to let your customer know the status of their refund once it's en route to their account.

If you'd prefer to refer to your company in the plural form, simply swap the "I" for "We."

 Hi [Customer],

I'm reaching out about the refund you initiated on [date].

Your refund has been deposited into your card ending in [last four digits of card]. You should see the amount credited to your account in about 3 to 5 business days.

If you don't see the refund in your account, respond to this email, and I'll look into it for you. In the meantime, please let me know if I can answer any additional questions — I'd be happy to help!

Thanks,

[Your name]


22. Refund Not Received Email Template

If your customer hasn't received a refund and reached out to you about it, you should act as if you're responding to a customer complaint: with empathy, sincerity, and clear intentions to resolve the problem.

Most of the time, the delay is on the bank's end. In this instance, gently remind the customer that a few more business days may pass before the refund is processed.

 Hi [Customer],

I'm so sorry to hear that a refund hasn't been deposited into your card ending in [last four digits of card].

I've contacted our accounting department to look into this issue for you. A refund has been issued, but it may take a few days for your bank to process the funds.

While we work on the delay on our end, I've created a ticket in our system to keep you updated on your refund status. We'll try to resolve the problem as soon as possible.

I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this may have caused. In the meantime, feel free to reply to this email with any questions or concerns, and I'd be happy to help.

Thanks,
[Your name]


23. Out-of-Policy Refund Email Template

Sometimes, customers reach out for a refund when they're past the date of eligibility.

You have the option of offering store credit or giving them personalized support for getting the most out of their new product.

 Hi [Customer],

Thanks so much for reaching out about order #[number]. I'm so sorry the product hasn't worked out for you.

Because more than [number of days] days have passed since the date of purchase, you're no longer eligible for a refund.

However, I can give you store credit for your purchase. Alternatively, I can set up a meeting with our customer success department so that you can get the most out of your product.

Let me know which option you'd prefer. If you have any questions or concerns, I'd be happy to help.

Thanks,

[Your name]

Create a Strong Customer Experience Using Customer Service Email TemplatesUsing email templates will help you effortlessly master every email conversation and promote strong relationships with your customers. Provide personalized solutions, connect with your customers, and retain their business without needing to write every email from scratch.

The email templates above will help you create a winning customer service strategy — all while saving time and effort for your team.

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How to Create a Sensible Social Media Strategy for Your Business

9/14/2021

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Many businesses find social media overwhelming — there are so many networks available, and they’re always adding new features for you to learn and integrate into your plan.

If you don’t have a full-time team of social media experts at your disposal, your success depends on creating a simple and sensible strategy that fits your resources and goals.

By the end of this guide, you'll know how to develop a social media strategy that'll not only drive traffic but will also quell that overwhelming feeling you get anytime you open Instagram or Twitter.

What is a social media strategy?

Your social media strategy is your master plan for how you create, post, and engage with your social media content.
It encompasses your social content guidelines, posting cadence, social media marketing campaigns, creative plans, and engagement strategy.

Why You Need a Social Media Strategy

The top three challenges that social media marketers face include reaching their audience, measuring ROI, and reaching business goals.

Crafting a social media strategy can help tackle these challenges and more. Social media strategies also equip you to set goals and guardrails, track their performance, and tweak your benchmarks over time. Without a starting point, you can't measure what's working and how to shift your activity to hit your goals.

A social media strategy also helps you set expectations for broader team involvement and get everyone aligned on what they should (and shouldn't) do on your social networks.


How to Create a Social Media Strategy

  1. Define your target audience.
  2. Start blogging.
  3. Create educational content.
  4. Focus on a few key channels.
  5. Develop a recipe card to guide you.
  6. Measure your results.
  7. Adjust your tactics.

Let's unpack how to start building a social media strategy from scratch.

1. Define your target audience. If you haven’t already identified and documented your buyer personas, start by defining the key demographics of the audience you’re trying to reach — age, gender, occupation, income, hobbies and interests, etc.

Consider their challenges and what problems they're solving daily. Focus on no more than four types of people that represent the majority of your buyers. Don’t get hung up on the exceptions or outliers, or you’ll never get started!

2. Start blogging

Fresh content is the linchpin of a successful social strategy, so commit to creating new, quality content on a consistent basis. Compile a list of common questions from prospects and commit to addressing these questions with at least one new blog post per week.

3. Create educational content.

Create downloadable content like ebooks, checklists, videos, and infographics that address your buyer’s pains. If your content is truly helpful, people will likely share it on social media and extend your reach.

4. Focus on a few key social channels.

Most startups and small businesses don’t have the bandwidth to establish and sustain a quality social media presence on every single channel. It's also overwhelming to learn the rules of engagement on a bunch of different networks at one time.

So, start small. Research key networks to learn where your target audience is spending time and focus your effort on building, nurturing, and sustaining a community there before moving on to another channel.

5. Develop a recipe card to guide you.Social media isn’t an exact science (and doesn't work the same for every business or industry). To see results for your business, establish a consistent posting and engagement schedule.

Develop a reasonable recipe card — one you can actually stick to and get your team to follow. Set goals for your posting and engagement frequency and hold yourself accountable to following your recipe.

6. Measure your results.

There are countless things to track on your social media channels. Start by looking at how much traffic your social accounts are driving to your website or blog.

Watch your posts to see what people are responding to, and look for trends related to particular topics or keywords that generate more interest than others. Once you get an idea of your average traffic and post performance, set goals for key metrics and keep a scorecard to measure your progress.

Be sure to choose metrics that are easy to gather - if it's too time-consuming to track, you'll fall off the wagon! Examples of simple metrics (to start with) include net new fans and followers, number of interactions, and visits to your website from social.

7. Adjust your tactics.Social media won't start working overnight. It takes time to build a following, establish your brand, and start seeing results. Experiment a bit to find the right combination of channels, content, and messaging that works for your audience.

Over time, you’ll be able to adjust your recipe card, content, and personas based on the information you’re gathering — which will help you fine tune your strategy and generate more consistent results.

Social Media Marketing Strategy

Social media is a multipurpose business asset. It connects you with your audience, and it also promotes your products, services, and brand. Both functions are equally important.

Building a social media strategy for marketing is a bit different than the process we discussed above. How so? For example, your benchmarks and goals may be more specific to metrics you track for other marketing efforts.

When using social media to market your business, ensure the experience on your social networks is a positive, consistent one. All imagery and content on your social media accounts should be consistent with those on your website, blog, and other digital real estate.

Pay close attention to any questions or comments your audience posts, and be quick to address those (as that engagement could make or break a conversion or purchase).

Lastly, align the content you post and how you post it with marketing campaigns you're running on other channels (e.g., email or ads). This brings us to our next section ...

Social Media Content Strategy

Content is the crux of any social media strategy. Without content, you can't engage with your audience, promote your products, or measure performance.

The somewhat fleeting (and brief) nature of social media may lead you to believe that you don't have to plan its content as much as you do for, say, your emails or blogs. That's untrue. Social media content may not be as static as your landing pages or blog content, but it's still equally important for engaging your audience and representing your brand as a whole.

For that reason, you should also have a social media content strategy. This should include:

  • Posting guidelines and specs for each network on which you're active (e.g., share GIFs on Twitter but avoid on Facebook)
  • Target audience nuances per network (e.g., the younger segment of your audience is more active on Instagram than LinkedIn)
  • Repurposing plans for long-form content from your blog, podcast, e-books, etc.
  • Who on your team is allowed to post and who's responsible for engaging followers
  • The companies, publications, and individuals you'll repost (and those who you won't/can't)​

For more on creating a content strategy for social media, here's a helpful video by HubSpot's Aja Frost.

Social Media Strategy TemplatesSocial media is overwhelming; I get it. Starting your strategy from scratch is even more overwhelming, which is why we developed 10 free social media templates to help.

In the free download, you'll receive:

  • Scheduling templates for every channel, since social media channels aren't one-size-fits-all
  • Complete calendar of hashtag holidays, so you never forget to participate with new, fun content
  • Social auditing template to track your followers, engagement rates, and more
  • A social media content calendar to organize campaigns across every channel
  • A social reporting template to track your monthly social successes
  • A paid social template to help you manage and optimize your paid budget

Time to Get SocialStill feel like social media is overwhelming? That's OK; I'm not sure that feeling every fully fades. You can certainly diminish it, though, by leveraging the tips in this guide and the free templates above. Remember: Tackle one social network at a time, prioritize your audience, and focus the content that works. You'll see results and traffic in no time.

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How to Use TikTok Promote to Reach New Audiences

9/14/2021

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Want to grow your TikTok reach? Wondering how to boost your organic content?

In this article, you’ll discover how to use the TikTok Promote ad feature to amplify your content and reach more people.

What is TikTok Promote?

After months of testing, TikTok has released its new Promote feature, which allows you to promote your organic videos to reach new audiences. This is exciting news for anyone looking to find their target audience without their organic reach getting penalized or shadowbanned. TikTok may even reward those who hop on the new trend quickly.

Similar to Facebook Boost, TikTok Promote is a tool for advertising to people on the platform. It allows creators, businesses, and influencers of any kind to push posts out to a larger pool of consumers. This feature can help you grow your community on TikTok by connecting with more like-minded audiences in a cost-effective and straightforward way.

For this type of campaign, you can only promote public videos with original sound, or a sound specifically created for commercial purposes. (There are more than 100,000 free-to-use sounds available in the TikTok library.) The Promote feature isn’t available for videos containing copyrighted sounds.

Here’s how to set up a new video campaign to promote an organic video and analyze its performance.

1: Choose a Goal for Your TikTok Promote Video CampaignThe first step in creating a Promote video campaign is setting a specific goal based on your overarching business objectives. You have three options: more views, more website visits, or more followers.

More Views

If you’re trying to reach a larger audience on TikTok to get the word out about your business or offering, choose More Views as your goal when setting up your campaign.

This goal will get more people to watch your video, boosting your potential for higher engagement on your post and profile. If consumers like what they see, they’ll be more likely to engage with additional posts, follow you, and maybe even check out your website to learn more.

More Website Visits

Promote offers you an option to guide people straight to your website. If this is your goal, choose More Website Visits for your campaign. When setting up your ad, you’ll enter your website URL and select a call to action (CTA) button. CTA options include Shop Now, Learn More, Contact Us, and Sign Up, among others. This feature works similarly to Instagram’s swipe-up feature.

More Followers

If your main objective is to grow your TikTok following and community, choose More Followers. Increasing the size of your audience can also help you reach other goals like boosting engagement, as long as you target people truly interested in your business. Having a more significant following will also give you a larger community to market (and eventually sell) to.

If you’re a new business, new to TikTok, or haven’t successfully grown an audience on the platform, growing your following could help you create a solid foundation to build from.

Identify Organic TikTok Videos to Promote

Now that you’ve chosen a goal for your campaign, it’s time to identify the best video to help you reach that goal. You can choose any TikTok video you’ve created as long as it’s an original, public video without copyright issues.

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Try to choose a video that has already performed well organically. The video should also authentically show off your brand. Using your most popular content—the video with the most reach and engagement—is a logical way to reach and engage more people. You’ll gain views, traffic, and followers on top of the organic engagement you’ve already earned.

To find your top-performing TikTok videos, start by visiting the analytics section of your account. Simply tap on the hamburger menu in the top-right corner of your TikTok profile. This will take you to your settings.

Next, click on either Business Suite or Creator Tools and then Analytics.

The first screen you’ll see in your TikTok analytics is the Overview tab, where you can view account data ranging from the last 7–28 days.

Note: You can download data if you use the desktop version instead of mobile.

To dig into the analytics for your TikTok videos, click on the Content tab. Here, you can view your posts from the past week and see which ones are trending. Click into a specific video for deeper insights like total play time, total views, average watch time, and audience information.

Identify your most popular TikTok content in terms of views, reach, play time, total watch time, and engagement (likes, shares, and comments). Your top-performing video has the best chance of performing well through promotion.
3: Set Up Your TikTok Promote Video CampaignTo set up your campaign, you can use either the Promote button on a post or go through TikTok Business Suite.

Using the Promote Button. To start setting up your campaign with the Promote button, you have a couple of options.
The first way to access Promote is to go directly to the video you want to use and tap on the three dots near the bottom-right corner of your screen.

Tap the Promote button to begin setting up your campaign, starting on the “What is your goal?” page.

The second way to access Promote is via your settings. Tap on Creator Tools and then Promote. Next, choose the video you wish to promote and select your goal.

If you chose More Website Visits as your goal, you’ll enter the URL of your landing page and a CTA to encourage people to click.

Next, choose the audience you want to target. You can select Automatic for TikTok to choose for you or Custom if you have specific preferences.

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If you customize your targeting audience, you can select a gender, age range, and interests. When making selections, think about who you want to reach. Are they interested in a product like yours or a form of entertainment that relates to what you sell?

Let’s say, for example, that you sell hiking shoes for people in the U.S. Your audience is comprised of avid travelers, digital nomads, and adventure-seekers. They’re active, most of them have a dog, and they love trying a good beer in a new city (or small mountain town). They also love the simple life and are primarily female, working from home, and in their mid-20s to mid-30s.

You could make the following selections for your target audience:

After you’ve customized your audience, tap Next to set a budget and duration for your campaign (how long you’d like to run your promotion).

If you have an Android device, you’ll need to add payment information before submitting your ad for review. If you’re an iPhone user, you can recharge your account with virtual coins. TikTok Coins are the app’s currency that you can purchase using real money. The value of these coins changes over time, but you’ll see how much they cost when you’re ready to buy.

Finally, tap on Start Promotion. Once TikTok approves your campaign, it’ll begin running.

Using TikTok Business Suite

Using Business Suite to set up your promotion is very similar to using the Promote button. If you have a business account, you can navigate to Settings and Privacy > Business Suite > Promote. Then follow the same process described in the previous section to set up your ad.

4: Analyze the Performance of Promoted TikTok Videos

During and after you run your promoted TikTok video campaign, you can check its performance. To view the analytics of your post, tap on the three dots in the bottom right-hand corner of the post. Then tap on Analytics. You’ll see this screen filled with the data from your video ad:

Here’s a rundown of what each metric means and how it pertains to your ad’s performance.
  • Views (play icon): How many times your video plays for someone. A view can consist of anything from a millisecond to minutes of watch time. If your video loops for someone several times, TikTok counts each loop as a distinct view.
  • Likes (heart icon): The number of likes your post has received.
  • Comments (conversation bubble icon): The total number of comments your post has received.
  • Shares (arrow icon): The total number of times someone shared your post.
  • Total play time: The amount of time—cumulatively—that people have spent watching your video. Use this metric to compare your current video play time with that of other videos you’ve posted. You can find which ones get the most play time overall.
  • Average watch time: The average time viewers spend watching your video. The longer your video holds people’s attention, the more engaging it is. Your goal is to get people to watch to the end (if not multiple times).
  • Watched full video: This is the total number of times people have watched your video through to the end.
  • Reached audience: The total number of unique users who’ve seen your video.
  • Video views by section: This metric shows you where your traffic comes from. Sources may include the For You section, people already following you, searches, hashtags, sounds, or personal profiles.
  • Video views by region: This metric breaks down your audience by territory (their location).

Analytics for Website Visits

If your goal is to drive traffic to a landing page on your website, you can measure referral traffic through TikTok. The Promote tool allows you to track the number of people who visit your website by clicking on your link.
To view these analytics, go to Settings and Privacy > Creator Tools > Promote. On the Promotions page, tap on See Details.

Insights for Video Views

If your goal is to increase video views, you should primarily focus on monitoring views and reached audience. You can also calculate your post reach percentage to determine what percentage of your audience saw your post.
Here’s the formula:

Post reach percentage = (Reached audience / Total number of followers) x 100
As you run future campaigns with the same goal, you can begin comparing each post’s performance in terms of views and reach.

Follower Growth Rate

To find the analytics for your follower count, go to Settings and Privacy > Business Suite > Analytics. You’ll find analytics for your entire account in this section, including engagement metrics, follower information, and content data.

If your goal is to grow your following, focus on the graph on the Followers tab. It will show you your total number of new followers, the growth rate, and demographic information.

You’ll also gain insight into what countries your followers are from and their activity (which times and days they’re most active on TikTok). Studying these analytics can help you optimize future campaigns and posting times.

Conclusion

Marketers can experience numerous outstanding benefits by investing in TikTok and its new Promote feature. Jumping on the latest trend just might push you ahead of competitors who haven’t yet taken advantage of the opportunity.

TikTok Promote could be an effective way for you to spread brand awareness, gain new fans for your business, and send leads straight to your website. 

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5 Tips to Improve the Performance of Your PPC Campaigns

9/12/2021

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Let's say you're tracking the performance of your pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns. After all that hard work and PPC strategizing you put toward improving your performance grade, how's the traffic looking? Is it a steep climb, or are you unimpressed with the result?

Some of us come off as natural all-star rock climbers, while others are left frigid, timid, and stuck to the crevices of the wall.

What's the secret? As with most things: proper training.  And if you don't have any, don't worry -- there's still hope.
Below, you'll learn how to run a PPC campaign on a few of the most common platforms, followed by five tips for how to maximize your campaign's performance.

How to Run a PPC Campaign

  1. Choose a platform for your PPC campaign.
  2. Choose a type of ad to invest in.
  3. Determine your budget and bidding strategy.
  4. Customize your target audience, interests, location, and search terms.
  5. Organize your campaign into "ad groups."
  6. Identify and design landing pages that match the intent of each search term.
  7. Track your ads' performance in context of your larger marketing initiatives.​​

1. Choose a platform for your PPC campaign.Your first step in running a new PPC campaign is to decide on which platform to run it. Google Ads are perhaps the most popular PPC campaign among today's marketers, but did you know social networks like Facebook and Twitter also offer pay-per-click advertisements?

Here's how each of these common ad platforms work.

Facebook Ads

Facebook Ads allow you to place "sponsored" posts on the newsfeeds of users who identify with specific audience characteristics set by you, the advertiser. Using this platform, you can choose your ad's objective -- including brand awareness, website traffic, and store visits -- your target audience, budget, and ad format. Facebook will then place your ad on the newsfeeds of users who match your choices, and charge you every time this ad is clicked.

Twitter Ads

Twitter Ads work similarly to Facebook Ads. Using Twitter's PPC ad platform, advertisers can choose between eight different advertising objectives -- including app installs, new followers, tweet engagements, and website traffic -- as well as their target audience for the ads they run. Twitter will then "promote" your post on the newsfeeds of users who match your choices, and charge you every time this ad is clicked.

Google Ads

Google Ads allow you to pay for high-ranking real estate on Google's various web properties -- including search engine results pages (SERPs). Your campaign can take the form of a Display Ad, a Search Ad, an App Ad, or a Video Ad -- the latter of which places your video on YouTube.

These PPC campaigns allow you to set your ad budget, customize your audience, and/or commit to groups of search terms on which you want your search result to appear. Google then charges you each time this search result is clicked.


For the purposes of explaining how to run a PPC campaign, we'll focus on Google Ads in the steps below.

2. Choose a type of ad to invest in.Each platform described above will give you options for the type of ad you want to pay for clicks on. On Facebook, for example, you can choose between a single image, a single video, or a slideshow to be your ad's main asset. On Google, your ad options are:

Display Ads

Banner ads can appear anywhere in the Google ecosystem, such as Gmail, YouTube, and similar domains within Google's "Display Network."

This ad type is what you most likely associate with PPC. A method of search engine marketing, Google's Search Ads show your chosen landing page in the form of a hyperlinked search result when users enter specific search terms. You can choose these search terms when setting up your Google Ads campaign.

Ads help to promote an app you've developed for sale on Google Play, the company's app marketplace. Using this ad type, Google automatically synthesizes each ad's artwork using the contents of your app's download page. Google then runs these ads in your chosen languages and locations. App Ads can appear across the Google ecosystem, including Google Search, Google Play, and YouTube.

Video Ads

Google's Video Ads appear across YouTube and certain Google partner platforms. Advertisers can run their video ads before, during, or at the end of various videos that share a similar audience with the advertiser.

3. Determine your ad budget and bidding strategy.

Your PPC campaign budget will dictate how much you're willing to pay for the clicks you get on your ad placements. On Google Ads, you'll set a daily budget, whereas platforms like Twitter and Facebook will have you select the increments you want your payments to be in.

So, for example, if your marketing team is allotted $1,000 for PPC, you'll first want to find out how many campaigns you're running. Let's say that number is eight, which would theoretically make each campaign worth $125. Having determined how much of that budget is available to each campaign, you'll then divide this number by the number of days you want this campaign to run. If you want it to run for 14 days, your daily budget would be roughly $8.93/day.

However, there is another element of budget-setting in the world of PPC: Not all topics and audiences are equal in value. This means certain interests, audience segments, and especially search terms will cost different amounts per click.

Most PPC platforms have "auction" systems that help you decide how much your audience criteria will cost you. In turn, you have several bidding strategies available to you to help you make the most cost-effective purchases for your campaign. On Google Ads, these bidding strategies include:

  • Cost-per-click (CPC) bidding: You pay Google each time someone clicks on your ad.
  • Cost-per-thousand viewable impressions (vCPM) bidding: You pay Google for every 1,000 times your ad appears to users.
  • Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bidding: You pay Google each time someone clicks on your ad, but the amount you pay is automatically optimized against how much it costs you to "acquire" a customer -- or similar conversion behavior -- from your website.
  • Cost-per-view (CPV) bidding: You pay Google each time your video ad is viewed, clicked on, or otherwise engaged with on YouTube.

4. Customize your target audience, interests, location, and search terms.In any PPC platform you choose, you have ability to choose who you want your ads to reach. The "who," in the context of Google Ads, includes your audience's location, interests, apps they use, and of course the searches they perform. You can also create custom audiences each with their own "custom affinities" and "custom intents" to help you further tailor your PPC campaign to the right people.

Once you've established your target audience, you'll top it all off with specific search terms, whose SERPs you want your ads to appear on (this is assuming you're creating Google Search Ads). Be careful how many keywords you choose for each ad. Contrary to what Google Ads might suggest, the more keywords you choose to place an ad on, the higher the chance you'll wind up in front of the wrong audience.


Start with just one or two keywords that are high in search volume and match the intent of your target visitor (we'll talk more about intent in step 6, below).

5. Organize your campaign into "ad groups."Assuming you're creating Google Search Ads, you'll take the keywords you selected in step 4, above, and put them into "ad groups." If you're creating PPC ads on Twitter, you'll use a similar campaign framework.

In each ad group, you can further customize the search terms associated with that ad to be sure your ads are appearing in front of the people who are most interested in your content. For example, instead of simply selecting two keywords that both sound alike and have high monthly search volume, you can parse the specific words within your search terms and set your ad to appear in any search engine query that contains those words. Here's an example of both scenarios:

A Bad Ad Group

If your PPC ad is promoting the sale of ice skates, you might start with the search term "ice skates." Then you discover the search term, "ice skating," and decide to add it to your PPC ad. The second search term, "ice skating," weakens the ad group. Why?

While "ice skates" appeals to those who are looking for ice skates to buy, "ice skating" stretches your audience to include those who might be looking for ice skates, ice rinks in their area, or even instructions on how to start ice skating -- searches that don't apply to your target audience and therefore limit the chances you'll find interested customers among the people who click on your ad.

A Good Ad Group

If your PPC ad is promoting the sale of ice skates, you might start with this search term and decide to branch out into other search terms that include this term, but carry different or additional wording.

For example, using Google Ads features like Modified Broad Match, you can also pick up searches like "skates for ice rinks." Using Phrase Match, you can pick up searches like "ice skates for hockey." This way, you can diversify your ad with more search terms without sacrificing the interests of your audience.

6. Identify and design landing pages that match the intent of each search term.It's not a good idea to make the destination of your PPC ad your website's homepage. This only serves to confuse your visitors and, ultimately, scare them off. Whether you choose from an existing webpage on your domain, or design a new one, make sure you're sending your visitors to a destination that helps them find what they're looking for. This is known as "intent match," and search engines like Google take it very seriously.

Let's go back to our "ice skates" example from step 5, above. If someone searches for "ice skates," clicks on your ad, and they're taken to a page on your website offering ice skating lessons, you haven't matched the intent of their search -- even if this page is set up to convert visitors using a signup form for paid skating lessons. These people are looking to purchase ice skates, not lessons. Therefore, a better destination page for this ad would be a product browsing page with all of your available ice skates listed and optimized for purchasing.

7. Track your PPC campaign's performance in context of your larger marketing initiatives.The platform on which you're running your PPC campaign will have an analytics dashboard where you can track how your ads are performing. Take full advantage of it -- here, you get to see the fruits of your labor. This includes the traffic you're receiving to your ad's landing page, how much you're spending, and even how well this traffic is converting into leads or revenue.

With this data, you can find out if you're getting the bang for your buck. But don't be afraid to consider a more holistic view of your PPC ads' performance, as well. By integrating your Google, Twitter, Facebook, or even LinkedIn ad campaigns into your company's marketing software, you can associate these PPC campaigns with the rest of your marketing initiatives -- helping you determine how the business is performing as a result of your paid efforts.

PPC Tips
  1. Include "negative keywords" in your PPC campaign.
  2. Use the "Iceberg Effect" to gain more control over your PPC campaign.
  3. Keep tabs on conversions vs. sales.
  4. Gauge your visitors' intent on the CTA temperature scale.
  5. Use micro PPC conversions to break down the larger conversion into smaller pieces.​​

1. Include "negative keywords" in your PPC campaign.Just as there are keywords and search terms that dictate where each PPC ad you run will appear, there are keywords that you can specifically omit from your campaign. These are called "negative keywords," and they prompt your ad platform to avoid placing ads on results pages that are produced when a user enters these search terms.

In the example group of search terms, above, an advertiser on Google Ads has elected to place their ad on the SERPs of the search terms, "blue tennis shoes" and "running gear" -- but not "blue running shoes," "shoes running," and "running shoes." This allows the advertiser to avoid audiences who are searching for these products, since they're looking for something similar but that the advertiser doesn't actually sell.

Learn more about how to select negative keywords here.

2. Use the "Iceberg Effect" to gain more control over your PPC campaign.The search terms that you end up paying for and the keywords that you're actually targeting don't always line up the way you want.

Too often we see the "Iceberg Effect" in action, where miscellaneous search terms below the surface are tacked onto keywords that we think are working properly in our ad campaigns. It gives us an unhealthy search-to-keyword ratio that might look something like this:


Not being in control of all those search terms? Not ideal. With a search term to keyword discrepancy ratio of 132:1, it can be challenging to continually improve your clickthrough rates and lower your cost-per-click averages.

How do you gain control of this icy situation? We use something called Single Keyword Ad Groups (SKAGs) to shoot for a 1:1 ratio of search terms to keywords, allowing for more control over the entire ad group.

Here's what a non-SKAGs search term report might look like:

It's not that any of these search terms are bad, it's that each search term has a different conversion and sales rate. And by keeping them as search terms and not turning them into keywords, you will never be able to control them to take your PPC campaigns to the next level.

So what does a search term report look like if we use this granular PPC tactic and use SKAGs?

Everything in the search term column matches the keyword column. With the SKAGs tactic, you can get super granular and isolate one variable at a time, which means you have more control over your entire PPC account.
​

And with the ability to lower your search term to keyword ratio to 1:1, you can take it one step further and do the same from keyword to ad. When this happens, you're able to increase your clickthrough rate, which in turn:

  • Increases your quality score
  • Decreases your cost-per-click
  • Increases your impression share
  • Improves your average position
​
3. Keep tabs on conversions vs. sales.

​
With your PPC tactics now upgraded, your PPC campaigns should be driving up conversion volumes and making you more money. But do you know which keywords, audiences, or placements are actually making you money?

If you don't track the components of your campaign and attribute them to your sales, you might be missing out on where to focus your efforts. By implementing Google's ValueTrack parameters you can automatically track data within URLs when your visitors convert.

When you tie your hidden field sales tracking back to your CRM, you can find out specific details about which leads are making you the revenue (doesn't apply to ecommerce). Hidden form fields can reveal to you things that happen during a conversion, like which landing page URL your conversion came from, where the visitor is located, or what keyword they typed in.

You can also do this with manual UTM parameters. Here's an example of how on the surface, you would think Keyword #1 is converting better:

Keyword #1 has a lower cost-per-conversion.
Here's an example of what hidden field sales tracking can reveal to you on a deeper level:


Now Keyword #2 looks better, right?
Although Keyword #1 has a lower cost-per-conversion, Keyword #2 has a much higher sales rate, which is making you more money. See the benefits of tracking the sale vs. the conversion?

Knowing these types of details can help you understand where you should be crediting your sales success, so you can be more aggressive in bidding on those keywords, audiences, or placements. With this PPC tactic, you can ease up your budget on the areas that aren't contributing to sales, and allocate to the areas that are.

4. Gauge your visitors' intent on the CTA temperature scale.Not all PPC visitors come through to your landing pages with the same conversion intent.

Typically, those that come through from display tend to be colder, while visitors that come in from search tend to be warmer. Here's a visual we've learned works well across the multitude of client verticals we service:

There's a temperature scale that varies depending on visitor origin. Knowing where your visitors come from can help you immensely when it comes to matching your call-to-action with their temperature in the conversion funnel. We recommend testing out various CTAs to match the intent temperature of your visitors -- after all, a small CTA tweak could've made all the difference.

Here are some ideas to make your offer more relevant to your visitors:

In short: the warmer your visitor's intent the warmer the CTA can be. Traffic that comes in from the display network will likely respond to colder CTAs, since those visitors are in the awareness stage.

5. Use micro PPC conversions to break down the larger conversion into smaller pieces.As you know, the more granular and detail-oriented you can get with you PPC campaigns, the more control you can have over the success of them.
When it comes to conversions, you can break down your larger macro conversion into micro conversions to figure out where your issues are.

An effective way to figure out which part of your PPC campaign is causing the conversion bottleneck is to analyze the micro conversions. Let's say that you're running some new Facebook campaigns but for some reason, no one is converting. If you knew, however, that visitors spend an average of four seconds on your site/landing page, then you know that your Facebook ad targeting may be off. Instead of thinking it's the ad or landing page that needs some tweaking, it could be your targeting instead.

Here are some common types of micro conversions we use to analyze the path towards a conversion:

What can each of these common micro conversions tell you about your landing page? Let's break it down:
​
  • Time On Site. How long are your visitors spending on your site? If the time is brief, the conversion issue doesn't have to do with your landing page design. The issue is happening in an earlier stage, like in your ad campaign or your targeting options.
  • Scroll Depth. How far are your visitors scrolling down your landing page? If they aren't scrolling down very far, maybe you need to have a shorter landing page where your CTA is above the fold. If they're scrolling pretty deep, it might be a good opportunity to include additional (super legible) offer details toward the bottom of the page.
  • Form Field Completion. Are visitors abandoning your forms? If so, try testing out different formats and include a multi-step landing page with more form fields.
  • Button Click. Testing out different CTA button colors and copy may be the key to your larger conversion success.​

By isolating micro conversions you can zero in on where exactly the conversion friction is located, which can help you alleviate the issues quickly and reach your larger conversion goal.

Whether it's addressing the Iceberg Effect, tracking your sales vs. conversions, testing CTA temperatures, or analyzing your micro PPC conversions, each of these PPC tactics can have a significantly positive impact on the performance of your campaigns.

And the best part, there's a good chance your competitors don't even know about them.

Now it's your turn to up your PPC performance game. With these useful PPC tactics, you'll be climbing your performance incline to the top with utmost ease.


PPC Don't forget to share this post!
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Social Media Management: Monitoring Your Social Pages & Interactions

9/12/2021

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Social media management is a core part of digital marketing. Leveraging social media allows brands to engage with audiences, create and publish relevant content, and access a whole world of potential new customers.
​
With the right tools and knowledge, you can unlock the audiences—and huge marketing potential—of each social media platform.

What is social media management?

Social media management is the process of creating, publishing, and analyzing organic (unpaid) and paid content on social media profiles to support business objectives. 

Business objectives can include earning sales, growing an audience, or increasing customer engagement. 

Managing social media includes engaging with audiences and influencers on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. It can also include tracking your social media performance against competitors.

While some companies were initially slow to include social media in their marketing strategies, the ability to reach enormous audiences on networks like Facebook (which has over 2.32 billion active monthly users) makes it impossible to ignore the platforms’ commercial potential. 

Businesses now use social media to manage and nurture relationships with customers by responding to reviews, and informing and entertaining their audience with tailor-made content. 

Why is social media management important? In the United States alone, as many as 295 million people use social media; that’s around three-quarters of the total population. 

Companies that effectively leverage social networks in their marketing plans can be rewarded with a growing audience and strong customer engagement. One of the most effective ways to manage social media is to run a mixture of paid and organic marketing campaigns. 

Paid social media (think ads) is a great way to get your brand message in front of new audiences. The algorithms deployed by social networks can make it difficult to reach new profiles with unpaid content. Paid ads can also be used to amplify your organic content such as videos or blog posts, or promote an offer that is converting well for you on other marketing channels.

Organic social media campaigns may not be as potent as paid social for reaching new customers, but it’s an excellent method for maintaining strong customer relationships and nurturing your audience. Organic social can be especially effective when content is published regularly. 

Studies suggest that, in many cases, posting once or twice per day is optimal for an organic social posting cadence, depending on the platform. 

If your content is high quality and published regularly, your audience is likely to stay engaged and rely on your content as a source of updates, information, and entertainment. 

Content can also help build trust and position your brand as an authority.

A busy social media schedule with multiple profiles on multiple platforms invites complexity. It’s important to work efficiently across a variety of social tasks, and accurately measure the ROI of your social media campaigns to ensure your budget is not going to waste. 

As managing social media for business can be a time-intensive process, many companies choose to automate their tasks with social media tools.

Social media tools can be an affordable and effective way to manage your profiles. Tools facilitate more efficient workflows by automating or reducing time-consuming tasks, like scheduling your content. They can also provide valuable insights that help you execute better campaigns, analyze ROI, track audience engagement, or check on your competitors’ social media performance.

What social media management tools are available?

There are a wealth of social media management tools available for social media scheduling, tracking, and more. However, you’ll benefit by working with a toolkit that tackles each part of your workflow. 

There are many social media tools that can help you manage your social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, Pinterest, Google My Business, and LinkedIn.

You can plan, deploy, and measure the performance of your entire social media strategy, all in one place. The toolkit is designed to manage multiple profiles for multiple businesses with an easy-to-read dashboard.

Tool 1: Social Media Ads

If you’re looking to market to new audiences and break through the barriers presented by social media algorithms, then a great way to start is with some ads. The Social Media Ads tool helps you build and launch ad campaigns for Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Facebook Audience Network. 

The intuitive interface makes creating a new campaign easy. Select your objective (reach, traffic, or conversions), set your budget, schedule, bidding strategy, then choose your placements, and you’re ready to launch your campaign. 
The Quick UTM option makes accurately tracking your campaigns a breeze. Simply generate UTM codes with the name, source, medium, content, and term parameters of your ads with the click of a button.

With Performance Report, you can check 46 different metrics for your published ad campaigns. Review each of your ad’s strengths and weaknesses to quickly discover optimization opportunities. Scale your good ads or fix those that need a bit of extra tweaking. 

Create & Manage Ad Campaigns with the Social Media Ad Manager

 Tool 2: Social Media Poster

Social Media Poster benefits content creators and others managing a busy content schedule. Draft and schedule content or post directly to Facebook (business pages), LinkedIn, Instagram, Google My Business, Pinterest, and Twitter from the tool:

The friendly calendar interface provides a clear view of your content schedule and easily creates an automated queue. 
You can find out the most effective times to post, or set up RSS feeds to get a stream of inspiration and ideas for your own content.

Scheduling large batches of content is also easy. You can bulk upload your existing content calendar from a CSV. To save time, edit images, or add UTM codes to any hyperlinks in your posts directly in the editor without having to switch in and out of the interface. 

Tool 3: Social Media Tracker

The Social Media Tracker lets you dive into your competitors’ performance metrics so you can quickly see where you’re winning, and where opportunities for improvement lie in your social strategy. 

Compare your engagement and growth rates to those of your competitors on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram Business, YouTube, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, then quickly generate PDF reports to share with clients or managers. 

Social Media Tracker also lets you see which hashtags your competitors are using in their campaigns. Use the Twitter Mentioners report to monitor customer interactions and see how often your brand is being mentioned versus your competitors. 

With this report, not only can you see which brands and topics are hot, but you can also be ready to react quickly when you need to manage potentially difficult situations, such as concerns or complaints.


Track Your Competitors’ Social Media with the Social Media Tracker

Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring is the process of listening to what your existing and potential customers are saying about your brand and your competitors online. 

When you understand your audience, it allows you to create and publish content that’s strongly aligned to their needs and desires—and this content is likely to perform well. 

With our social media toolkit, taking a comprehensive approach to social media becomes easier. 

Manage profiles across multiple platforms, keep your audience engaged with a regular schedule of relevant content, and compare your competitors’ performance to ensure that you’re not falling behind—or missing an opportunity to outdo them.

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How to Accept Payments Online

9/12/2021

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If your Ecommerce Business isn't offering your customers multiple ways to make payments online, you're leaving money on the table.

While there's no way to escape some transaction fees and currency fees, there are ways to reduce payment processing costs and receive payments online for free.

In this post, we'll talk about the software options available today for accepting free online payments as well as details about how to actually go about accepting those payments.

But first, let's review some additional reasons you'd want to use a payment processing software.

Why should you use payment processing software? Here's a look at some of the advantages payment processing software will bring to your business.

1. Convenience

Convenience is one of the main factors that influence conversion rate. The more steps a customer has to take to make a payment, the more likely they are to abandon their purchase and go elsewhere.

2. Speed

Payment processors can transfer most payments between shoppers and sellers instantly. On the other hand, transfers to and from bank accounts can sometimes take 24 hours or more.

3. Trust

Many payment processors are brands that are globally recognized. If a customer already uses payment software, they're more likely to trust your payment system.

4. Security

Payment processing companies add an extra layer of protection to online transactions. You can set limits, flags for activity on your account, and sometimes even a time frame to recall payments.

5. Record-Keeping

With payment processors, you'll have access to your account online and can manage your contacts, recurring payments, and other account activity via desktop or mobile.

Top Online Payment Processing Providers

Once you've developed a strategy for accepting payments online, you'll need to decide which payment processing provider to use. Here are seven of the most popular options:

1. PayPal

Price: 3.49% plus $0.49 per transaction (as of August, 2021).

PayPal is one of the most trusted and widely recognized payment processing companies. It's free to join and they provide all the tools you'll need to integrate PayPal payments into your website and set up a secure payment gateway for visitors. Additionally, comprehensive coverage makes the platform a good choice for international companies.

2. Stripe

Price: 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction.

Stripe offers a wide range of options for online businesses such as customizable checkouts as well as subscription management and recurring payment features. Stripe supports all major credit cards, mobile paying apps, wallets, and more.

3. Square

Price: 2.9% plus $0.30 per transaction.

Square entered the payment processing space by introducing a dongle that sellers could insert into a mobile phone to accept credit card transactions.

They've since expanded their software to cover all the major payment processing options and have included some useful tools for online businesses as well as high-street stores.

You can even create a basic website for free and integrate all of their point-of-sale (POS) solutions at the same time. They also have paid options for a custom website.

4. Google Pay

Price: Google Pay doesn't charge any fees — merchants only pay transaction fees as usual with credit/ debit sales.

Google Pay has a payment tool for businesses, websites, and apps. Google Pay's APIs work to create a delightful checkout and payment experience for your customers.

If you use Google Pay on your website, you'll gain secure and easy access to hundreds of millions of cards saved to Google Accounts worldwide so customers can pay for your products safely and at the touch of a button.

5. Apple Pay

Price: Apple Pay doesn't charge any fees — merchants only pay transaction fees as usual with credit/ debit sales.

Apple Pay can be used on websites, in stores, by app, and via Business Chat or iMessage. It allows Apple users to quickly and safely input contact, payment, and shipping information during checkout.

Rather than having your ecommerce customers look around for their credit cards, Apple Pay allows them to checkout at the click of a button within apps and websites. On a website, an Apple users will simply click "Apple Pay" as their payment option, confirm the payment with one tap (via their iPhone, Apple Watch, etc.), and they're good to go.

6. Venmo For Business

Price: 1.9% plus $0.10 of the payment.

Venmo For Business is a mobile payment software and app owned by PayPal. You can choose to allow users to pay via your mobile app or your website.

You can set up a business profile on Venmo so users can quickly find your profile on the app. And if you add Venmo to your website, it'll appear as a payment option right next to where it'll give customers the option to pay with PayPal.

Once a customer selects the Venmo option at checkout, they'll be directed to their Venmo app to complete the transaction. The Venmo payment option can be added to any of the pages of your ecommerce site that would also show the option to pay with PayPal, including your product pages, shopping cart page, and checkout page.

7. Helcim

Price: 2.38% plus $0.25.

Helcim is an online payment solution for ecommerce businesses — you can choose to start an online store from scratch or add a payment solution to your current website.

The easy-to-use and secure online payment system integrates on your website, shopping cart, billing system, and/or app, thanks to Helcim's API. In addition to in-app and via website, Helcim works over the phone, in person, and by invoice, and it integrates with your accounting tools to save you time when it comes to bookkeeping.

Next, let's cover the steps involved in receiving payments online for free.

How to Accept Payments Online for Free
​
  1. Create a secure online payment gateway.
  2. Facilitate credit and debit card payments.
  3. Set up recurring billing.
  4. Accept mobile payments.
  5. Accept cryptocurrency payments.
  6. Use email invoicing.
  7. Accept electronic checks (eChecks).

1. Create a secure online payment gateway.

There are a couple of ways you can approach creating a secure online payment gateway. You can hire an outside developer or use your website development team to create a bespoke gateway. Or, you can use third-party software.

Setting up a secure gateway is essential. You're also putting automated processes in place, which will save time on manual processing, especially as you scale your business and handle more transactions.

The more payment methods you make available within your payment portal, the wider the audience, and the easier it'll be for your customers to send you money.

2. Facilitate credit and debit card payments.

Although it may change as mobile payments become more prevalent, using debit/ credit cards is still the most popular way people pay for products and services online. You can easily facilitate accepting card payments through established payment providers such as PayPal or Stripe. These will accept the most-used credit cards worldwide -- Visa, MasterCard, and American Express.

3. Set up recurring billing.

If you offer subscription plans or ongoing monthly services, the most efficient and reliable way to invoice and receive payments is via recurring billing. Most of the major payment processing software also includes recurring billing features. For example, Growth Marketing Pro built an SEO tool that charges subscribers on a monthly basis and they used Stripe to set this up.

Sites like Paysimple also offer a suite of tools to set up custom, automated recurring billing if you already have a payment processing system in place.

Using automation is essential. It removes most human error and the stress of keeping track of invoicing and payments.
Your customers can commit to recurring payments with just a few clicks, and you won't have to worry about manually managing your customer base.

4. Accept mobile payments.

These days, people are often more likely to have their phones on hand than debit cards — plus, mobile payment apps are more convenient than ever.

For instance, Apple Pay has quickly become one of the most popular mobile payment systems in the United States. With an estimated 43.9 million users, you'd miss out if you didn't accept Apple Pay.

Google Pay, Venmo, and PayPal also have mobile apps with a decent market share.

5. Accept cryptocurrency payments.

If you're okay with handling cryptocurrencies, it's a way you can extend your reach to a broader online audience. Sites like Bitpay provide all the tools you need to accept crypto payments online, send invoices, request payments, and receive money on the go-through apps.

Because they're a decentralized exchange, cryptocurrencies offer some unique benefits for businesses. You can accept payments from anywhere in the world without incurring currency exchange fees or bank handling fees. There's also a reduced risk of fraud.

6. Use email invoicing.

Email invoicing is a proactive way to request payments. You can share a payment form through email or add a link redirecting the recipient to a payment portal. However, there are a couple of issues with this method: Email isn't the most reliable form of communication, and customers can have trust issues making payments via email.

Expect a failure rate, but it's a vital part of payment processing for a lot of businesses.

7. Accept electronic checks (eChecks).

To accept eChecks for payment, you need a form where the user can input their information, which you can see using payment processing software. It's basically a way to pay by check online. It's a quicker and more reliable way than sending a paper check through the post, so offering this to your customers will make the process run smoother.

Start Accepting Payments Online For Free

No matter which payment processing software you choose, the most important part is making it easy for the customer to pay. And the more ways they can pay, the more likely your customers will follow through on a purchase.
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