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How to Advertise on Social Media

11/9/2022

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How To Advertise on Facebook in 2022. The times may be changing, but knowing how to advertise on Facebook is still an essential skill for most marketers.

Advertising on Facebook isn’t dead. Despite new players on the social media scene — TikTok, we’re looking at you —  knowing how to advertise on Facebook is still an essential skill for most marketers.

Right now, if you advertise on Facebook, your ads can reach 2.17 billion people — in other words, close to 30% of the world’s population. Plus, the platform’s active user base continues to grow.

Sure, these are impressive numbers. But Facebook is all about getting your message in front of the right segment of those people. The users who are most likely to be interested in buying your products or services.

Keep reading to find out everything from how much Facebook ads cost to how to plan your first campaign.

What are Facebook ads?

Facebook ads are paid posts that businesses use to promote their products or services to Facebook users.

Facebook ads are usually targeted to users based on their:
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  • Demographics
  • Location
  • Interests
  • Other profile information

Businesses set an ad budget and bid for each click or thousand impressions the ad receives.

Like Instagram, Facebook ads appear throughout the app, including in users’ feeds, Stories, Messenger, Marketplace, and more. They look similar to normal posts but always include a “sponsored” label to show they’re an ad. Facebook ads include more features than regular posts, like CTA buttons, links, and product catalogs.

To get your brand in front of more users, ads should be a component of any Facebook marketing strategy.

How much does it cost to advertise on Facebook? There’s no hard and fast rule when it comes to Facebook ad budgets. The cost of Facebook ads depends on several variable factors, including:
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  • Audience targeting. It usually costs more to put your ads in front of a narrower audience as opposed to a broader one.
  • Ad placement. Costs can change between ads shown on Facebook and Instagram.
  • Campaign duration. The number of days and hours a campaign lasts impacts the final cost.
  • Competitiveness of your industry. Some industries are more competitive than others for ad space. Ad costs usually increase the higher the product price is or how valuable the lead you’re trying to capture is.
  • Time of year. Ad costs can fluctuate during different seasons, holidays, or other industry-specific events.
  • Time of day. On average, CPC is lowest between midnight and 6 am in any timezone.
  • Location. Average ad costs per country vary widely.

Setting campaign costs according to objectives. Setting the right campaign objective is the most important thing you can do to control Facebook ad costs. Getting this right also increases your chance of success.

Cost-per-click benchmarks vary according to each campaign objective. There are five core campaign objectives to choose from:

  • Conversions
  • Impressions
  • Reach
  • Link clicks
  • Lead generation

Average cost-per-click varies between different Facebook ad campaign objectives. For example, on average, an impressions campaign objective costs $1.85 per click, while a campaign with a conversions objective costs $0.87 per click.
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Choosing the right objective for your campaign is key to reaching goals while lowering costs.

Types of Facebook ads

Marketers can choose between different Facebook ad types and formats to suit their campaign goals, including:

  • Image
  • Video
  • Carousel
  • Instant Experience
  • Collection
  • Lead
  • Slideshow
  • Stories

The wide range of Facebook ad formats means you can choose the best ad type that matches your business goal. Each ad has a different set of CTAs to guide users to the next steps.

Here are each of Facebook’s ad formats explained in more detail:

Image ads. Image ads are Facebook’s most basic ad format. They let businesses use single images to promote their products, services, or brand. Image ads can be used across different ad types, placements, and aspect ratios.
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Image ads are a good fit for campaigns with strong visual content that can be shown in just one image. These images could be made from illustrations, design, or photography.

You can create one with just a few clicks by boosting an existing post with an image from your Facebook Page.

Image ads are simple to make and can successfully display your offering if you use high-quality imagery. They’re suitable for any stage of the sales funnel — whether you want to boost brand awareness or promote a new product launch to increase sales.

Image ads can be limiting — you only have a single image to get your message across. If you need to display multiple products or show how your product works, the single image ad format isn’t the best choice.

Video ads

Just like image ads, video ads on Facebook let businesses use a single video to showcase their products, services, or brand.

They’re especially helpful for product demos, tutorials, and showcasing moving elements.
Video can be up to 240 minutes long, but that doesn’t mean you should use that time! Shorter videos are usually more engaging. Facebook recommends sticking to videos under 15 seconds.

Video ads can add some movement to any user’s feed, like this short and sweet video ad 

The downside of video ads is that they’re time-consuming to make and can become expensive. A carousel or image ad may be a better fit for simple messages or products not requiring demos.

Carousel ads

Carousel ads showcase up to ten images or videos that users can click through. Each has its own headline, description, or link.

Carousels are a great choice for displaying a series of different products. Each image in the carousel can even have its own landing page that’s specifically built for that product or service.

This Facebook ad format is also helpful for guiding users through a process or showcasing a series of related products by separating each part across different sections of your carousel.

Instant Experience ads

Instant Experience ads, previously known as Canvas Ads, are mobile-only interactive ads that let users engage with your promoted content on Facebook.

Using Instant Experience ads, users can tap through a carousel display of images, shift the screen in different directions, as well as zoom in or out of content.

Facebook suggests using five to seven images and videos in each Instant Experience ad for the best chances of engagement. Premade templates also help you save time and repeat your key theme throughout the ad.

Collection ads

Collection ads are kind of like immersive carousels — taking the user experience a step up. Collection ads are mobile window-shopping experiences where users can flick through your product lineup. More customizable than Carousels, they’re also full screen. Users can purchase products directly from the Collection ad.

Businesses can also choose to let Facebook algorithms select which products from your catalog are included for each user.

Collection ads are a great choice for large businesses that sell a variety of products and services. Smaller businesses with a more limited product line may be better suited to other ad types like Carousels.

Lead ads are only available for mobile devices. That’s because they’re specifically designed to make it easy for people to give you their contact information without a lot of typing.

They’re great for collecting newsletter subscriptions, signing someone up for a trial of your product, or allowing people to ask for more information from you. Several automakers have successfully used them to encourage test drives.

Slideshow ads

Slideshow ads are composed of 3-10 images or a single video that plays in a slideshow. These ads are a great alternative to video ads because they use up to five times less data than videos. That makes slideshow ads a top choice for markets where people have slower internet connections.

Slideshow ads are also a great way to get started for people without video-making experience.

Stories ads

Mobile phones are meant to be held vertically. Stories ads are a mobile-only full-screen vertical video format that allows you to maximize screen real estate without expecting viewers to turn their screens.

Right now, 62% of people in the US say they plan to use Stories even more in the future than they do today.

Stories can be made up of Images, videos, and even carousels.

Stories provide more creative freedom than regular image or video ads. Businesses can play around with emojis, stickers, filters, video effects, and even augmented reality.

The drawback of Facebook Stories is that they’re not placed in Facebook feeds, so users may not see them as much as other Facebook ad formats.

Facebook Stories also require different formatting than video or image ads, so you may need to create original content just for Stories.

How to post ads on Facebook. If you already have a Facebook business page (and you should), you can head straight to the Ads Manager or Business Manager to create your Facebook ad campaign. If you don’t yet have a business page, you’ll need to create one first.

Facebook offers 11 marketing objectives based on what you want your ad to accomplish.
Here’s how they align with business goals:
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  • Brand awareness: Introduce your brand to a new audience.
  • Reach: Expose your ad to as many people in your audience as possible.
  • Traffic: Drive traffic to a specific web page, app, or Facebook Messenger conversation.
  • Engagement: Reach a wide audience to increase the number of post engagements or Page follows, increase attendance at your event, or encourage people to claim a special offer.
  • App installs: Get people to install your app.
  • Video views: Get more people to watch your videos.
  • Lead generation: Get new prospects into your sales funnel.
  • Messages: Encourage people to contact your business using Facebook Messenger.
  • Conversions: Get people to take a specific action on your website (like subscribe to your list or buy your product), with your app, or on Facebook Messenger.
  • Catalog sales: Connect your Facebook ads to your product catalog to show people ads for the products they are most likely to want to buy.
  • Store traffic: Drive nearby customers to brick-and-mortar stores.

Get A Proposal

Swift Digital Marketing Agency can help teach you how to advertise on social media. If you’re looking for an in-house team of social media advertising experts who are experienced with all types of social media advertising, we are is here for you.

But most of all, we’re known for the relationships that we forge with our clients. We’re not looking to take over your company’s social media endeavors, we’re looking to become an extension of your marketing team.

We’ll get to know your business and care for its success like it’s our own — because it is.

If you’re interested in learning how to advertise on social media from the experts, Swift is here to help.
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Contact us online for a free quote or give us a call to learn more!

​Join our mission to provide industry-leading digital marketing services to businesses around the globe - all while building your personal knowledge and growing as an individual.
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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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What is Social Media Marketing?

9/7/2022

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Social media marketing is the use of social media platforms to connect with your audience to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic. This involves publishing great content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media advertisements.

The major social media platforms (at the moment) are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat.

There are also a range of social media management tools that help businesses to get the most out of the social media platforms listed above. For example, Swift has a platform of social media management tools, which can help you achieve success with your social media marketing. Whether you want to build a brand or grow your business, we want to help you succeed.

A Quick Overview of Social Media Marketing

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Social media marketing first started with publishing. Businesses were sharing their content on social media to generate traffic to their websites and, hopefully, sales. But social media has matured far beyond being just a place to broadcast content.

Nowadays, businesses use social media in a myriad of different ways. For example, a business that is concerned about what people are saying about its brand would monitor social media conversations and response to relevant mentions (social media listening and engagement). A business that wants to understand how it’s performing on social media would analyze its reach, engagement, and sales on social media with an analytics tool (social media analytics). A business that wants to reach a specific set of audience at scale would run highly-targeted social media ads (social media advertising).

As a whole, these are often also known as social media management.

The Five Core Pillars of Social Media Marketing

1. Strategy


Before you dive right in and publish something on social media, let’s take a step back and look at the bigger picture. The first step is to think about your social media strategy.

What are your goals? How can social media help you achieve your business goals? Some businesses use social media for increasing their brand awareness, others use it for driving website traffic and sales. Social media can also help you generate engagement around your brand, create a community, and serve as a customer support channel for your customers.

Which social media platforms do you want to focus on? The major social media platforms, mentioned above, are Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and Snapchat. There are also smaller and up-and-coming platforms, such as Tumblr, Tik Tok, and Anchor, and social messaging platforms, such as Messenger, WhatsApp, and WeChat. When starting out, it’s better to pick a few platforms that you think your target audience is on than to be on all platforms.

What type of content do you want to share? What type of content will attract your target audience best? Is it images, videos, or links? Is it educational or entertaining content? A good place to start is to create a marketing persona, which will help you answer these questions. And this doesn’t have to be fixed forever; you can always change your strategy according to how your social media posts perform.

To help you create a great social media strategy, here are our long-form, step-by-step guides on creating a social media strategy and social media marketing plan.

2. Planning and Publishing

Publishing to social media is as simple as sharing a blog post, an image, or a video on a social media platform. It’s just like how you would share on your personal Facebook profile. But you will want to plan your content ahead of time instead of creating and publishing content spontaneously. Also, to ensure that you are maximizing your reach on social media, you need to publish great content that your audience likes, at the right timing and frequency.

There are now a variety of social media scheduling tools that can help you publish your content automatically at your preferred time. This saves you time and allows you to reach your audience when they are most likely to engage with your content.

3. Listening and Engagement. As your business and social media following grow, conversations about your brand will also increase. People will comment on your social media posts, tag you in their social media posts, or message you directly.

People might even talk about your brand on social media without letting you know. So you will want to monitor social media conversations about your brand. If it’s a positive comment, you get a chance to surprise and delight them. Otherwise, you can offer support and correct a situation before it gets worse.

You can manually check all your notifications across all the social media platforms but this isn’t efficient and you won’t see posts that didn’t tag your business’s social media profile. You can instead use a social media listening and engagement tool that aggregates all your social media mentions and messages, including posts that didn’t tag your business’s social media profile.

4. Analytics and Reporting.

Along the way, whether you are publishing content or engaging on social media, you will want to know how your social media marketing is performing. Are you reaching more people on social media than last month? How many positive mentions do you get a month? How many people used your brand’s hashtag on their social media posts?

The social media platforms themselves provide a basic level of such information. To get more in-depth analytics information or to easily compare across social media platforms, you can use the wide range of social media analytics tools available.

5. Advertising

When you have more funds to grow your social media marketing, an area that you can consider is social media advertising. Social media ads allow you to reach a wider audience than those who are following you.

Social media advertising platforms are so powerful nowadays that you can specify exactly who to display your ads to. You can create target audiences based on their demographics, interests, behaviors, and more.

When you are running many social media advertising campaigns at once, you can consider using a social media advertising tool to make bulk changes, automate processes, and optimize your ads.

Social Media Marketing Resources

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Social media platforms are always evolving. When Facebook first started, people can only share text updates. Now, there are so many content formats such as images, videos, live videos, and Stories.

Hence, social media marketing is always changing, too. We want to help you stay up-to-date with all the latest changes and strategies to succeed on social media. Here are a few resources to get you started:

  • Social Media Marketing Blog. Swift's social media marketing blog covers the latest social media strategies and tools for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and more.
  • Social Media Marketing Guide. The complete beginner's guide to creating a social media marketing plan, for those brand new to social media and looking for a straightforward way to start.
  • Social Media Listening and Engagement Guide. Here’s why we think social media listening and engagement is so important and how you can overcome the challenges to developing a successful strategy.
  • Social Media Analytics Guide. There’s a wealth of information and insights in your social media data. Here are seven simple, quick, and actionable social media analytics tips.
  • Social Media Advertising Guide. There’s so much to learn with social media advertising. It’s difficult to know where or how exactly to get started. Here’s everything marketers need to know about advertising on social media
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Social Media Marketing for businesses usually starts with having a consistent presence on social media.  By being present on social media platforms, you give your brand an opportunity to be discovered by your future customers.

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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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Digital Marketing Strategies and Ideas for Startups in 2022

8/15/2022

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2022 may have been the year that startup companies finally began to embrace digitization but so far, real changes—the kind that results in growth— have yet to take effect. The problem is simple: the kind of transformation most companies have so far been able to bring about is only the first step. It’s merely paving the way for growth.

The exciting news is now that lots of software and startup companies have made initial efforts to modernize their infrastructures, they’re poised for real growth. If that’s you — if you’ve recently adopted cloud-based CMS and CRM solutions, it’s time to put them to work and start growing your business.

Here are six digital marketing strategies and ideas for startups to help you graduate to that next level of digitization in the year ahead.

1. Content Marketing

To make growth happen in 2022, startup companies need to build on their initial efforts and begin focusing their digital marketing strategies on broader horizons.

And right now, there’s no horizon more promising and full of potential than the customer experience (CX).

Companies who embrace the CX credo — buyers are customers who expect to be delighted — will win in 2020. And what better way to ingratiate your company with purchasing managers than to offer helpful resources that make their job easier. Do this through content marketing.

More than three-quarters of startup companies already have a blog. However, there’s a big difference between simply having a blog and putting it to work as part of a content marketing strategy for your startup company. What you need is a data-driven blog.

Begin by finding out what your buyers need. There are several tools at your disposal for this. First, you can use keyword tools to find what’s trending in your industry. These same tools will let you know which topics actually have search traffic and which are in demand so you’re not wasting time producing and promoting content that nobody wants to read.

Secondly, need is driven by pain, so think deeply about your B2B and B2C customers and what they lack, what causes them to ‘suffer’. Then, supply the kind of content that relieves those pain points. Almost half of the buyers consume online content (3-5 pieces) before reaching out to a sales rep. It should be your content they’re consuming. It should also be well-informed since almost all B2B buyers want the content they consume to include input from industry leaders.

Some examples of buyer pain points that you can help alleviate with helpful content:

  • they lack information about products
  • they struggle to compare products (46 percent of B2B buyers report that it’s difficult to compare products online)
  • they struggle to understand new technologies
  • they find it hard to stay current with industry developments

2. Inbound Marketing/SEO

A solid base of helpful content can also be the cornerstone of a successful inbound digital marketing for startups. You’ve done the research and produced great content for your buyers for your content marketing campaign. Now make it do double duty by earning some SEO credit.

You’ll need to do some deeper research, however
: keyword research that goes deeper and shows you where you could focus your efforts and try to rank. Consider long-tail keywords if your industry is competitive, and write data-driven content that helps your SEO efforts.

The trick is to balance SEO content techniques with user experience. SEO content, which employs strategic placement of keywords throughout the content, can come off as awkward. You want good, relevant, resourceful and helpful content that reads well, so keep that balance in mind with all your content. 

The idea, after all, is to try and get people to create backlinks to your startup website. This can happen in any number of ways, including organically, through guest posting, and via social media promotion. You can check the startup SEO services page to download my SEO growth program that outlines the most common link building and SEO strategies.

3. Social Media Marketing

Because of its rich targeting potential and wide reach, Facebook marketing funnels remains one of the most effective ways to generate leads in B2B and B2C world and should be a part of your startup digital marketing strategy. It’s also the least expensive among the other social networks like Linkedin and Twitter. Over 60 percent of startup marketers plan to increase their Facebook Advertising efforts, according to a 2021 report.

You’ll need to identify your target persona and the companies you are going after and then create that profile on Facebook Ad Manager.  You can also set up a remarketing pixel and target your website visitors and lookalike audiences to make the profile targeted and relevant. That way, you’ll maximize ROI and, depending on your marketing objectives, you can create campaigns that:

  1. generate leads
  2. drive traffic
  3. increase engagement
  4. develop brand awareness
  5. install apps
  6. increase sales
  7. get video views​​

Other options that are available on Ad Manager dashboard include:

  • type of ad (photo ads, video ads, slideshow ads, collection ads, etc)
  • campaign objective
  • type of audience targeting (Facebook connections, Custom Audiences, Lookalike Audiences)
  • budget
  • scheduling

4. Responsive Web Design, HTTPS, AMPFaced with more buyers who expect a better customer experience, B2B players now need to take their cues from B2C and look for ways to delight their buyers wherever they are in the buyer’s journey.

The best place to start is with the company website.

Even a quick spin through the startup galaxy of websites, and you’ll immediately know there’s a lot of room for improvement in the Customer Experience (CX). Here are three ways you can consider adding to your startup digital marketing strategy planning:
  1. Responsive Web Design. More and more, buyers are using mobile devices on the job. If your site wasn’t designed to be usable on multiple devices (PC, tablet, phone) then you’re making a bad impression on potential customers (especially Millennials). Don’t be like 94% of startup companies, who have no mobile strategy in place.
  2. HTTPS. If you’re not sure why you should have an ‘S’ on your ‘HTTP’, then you should know that HTTPS is a search engine ranking signal now.  Not only will it help your website appear higher in search results and drive more organic traffic, it will also add the green secure lock icon to the browser. Major browsers will start showing a “not secure” warning to all website visitors in the near future if you don’t have SSL installed, so make sure you configure it soon to avoid a higher bounce rate and lower rankings.
  3. AMP. Buyers are busy and as a result, necessarily impatient. If your website isn’t loading fast enough, they’re likely to strike your company off their vendor shortlist. AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Presence and if your site doesn’t adhere to AMP best practices, you’re not exactly making the customer journey delightful or easy. Aim for more engagement and a smoother experience with a sound AMP strategy. That means fast-loading pages, quick performing scripts, and form submissions that go through faster than you can say ‘jack rabbit’.

5. Marketing AutomationB2B customers typically use six different channels in their buying journey. Almost two-thirds of them will be frustrated by their experiences.

Since you’re now in the business of ‘delighting’ your customers, you’ll want to upgrade your methods wherever you have a point of contact with your customers and leads. Marketing automation should be a part of your digital making strategy for your startup.

Wherever someone may be along the buyer’s journey, you’ll want to help, coax, encourage, and respond to any actions they’re taking in relation to your business. In fact, a major pain point for 40 percent of surveyed buyers is a slow response time from sales reps. Other frustrations included a sluggish reordering process, which troubled almost a third of survey respondents. Automation can help solve those problems and more by spurring communications, offering helpful links, and tying in customized past ordering data for individual customers.

In essence, what you’re doing is transforming your business into one that’s customer-focused. B2B buyers want the following:

  • easier communications
  • hassle-free reordering process
  • help with product comparison
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The added benefit of automating your marketing processes is that it helps with consistent messaging across all your platforms: email, digital ads, and other channels where you interact with your leads and customers.

6. Email Marketing

Another natural outgrowth of a strong startup digital marketing strategy is email marketing: exciting and useful new content is a great excuse for an email newsletter. Email marketing magnifies the power of your content marketing efforts when you use carefully selected content aimed at segmented buyers at specific points along the buying decision timeline.

Plus, to get more out of your content budget, you can reuse content in lots of different ways. For example, you can redirect leads back to your website through your carefully planned email campaigns that include snippets from blog posts on your website that pertain to the moment.

Conclusion

It’s no secret that startup companies are still playing catch-up to B2B and B2C companies in the process of digital transformation and marketing strategy. Having embraced the notion that digitization can lead to growth, startup players who’ve transformed their back-end processes and IT infrastructures should now work with a startup marketing agency on implementing marketing strategies for startups outlined in this post. That’s how they’ll begin to capture and delight their prospects who expect a stellar customer experience, just like what they get in the B2C world. Good luck in 2022!


DIGITAL MARKETING SEO STARTUP STRATEGY


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What is Digital Marketing?

8/2/2022

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Any marketing that uses electronic devices and can be used by marketing specialists to convey promotional messaging and measure its impact through your customer journey. In practice, digital marketing typically refers to marketing campaigns that appear on a computer, phone, tablet, or other device.

It can take many forms, including online video, display ads, search engine marketing, paid social ads and social media posts. Digital marketing is often compared to “traditional marketing” such as magazine ads, billboards, and direct mail. Oddly, television is usually lumped in with traditional marketing.

Maximize your digital marketing. Use Swift to promote your brand, reach your target audience, and grow your business.

Did you know that more than 3 quarters of Americans go online on a daily basis? Not only that, but 43% go on more than once a day and 26% are online “almost constantly.”

These figures are even higher among mobile internet users. 89% of Americans go online at least daily, and 31% are online almost constantly. As a marketer, it’s important to take advantage of the digital world with an online advertising presence, by building a brand, providing a great customer experience that also brings more potential customers and more, with a digital strategy.

A digital marketing strategy allows you to leverage different digital channels–such as social media, pay-per-click, search engine optimization, and email marketing–to connect with existing customers and individuals interested in your products or services. As a result, you can build a brand, provide a great customer experience, bring in potential customers, and more.

What is digital marketing?

Digital marketing, also called online marketing, is the promotion of brands to connect with potential customers using the internet and other forms of digital communication. This includes not only email, social media, and web-based advertising, but also text and multimedia messages as a marketing channel.

Essentially, if a marketing campaign involves digital communication, it's digital marketing.

Inbound marketing versus digital marketingDigital marketing and inbound marketing are easily confused, and for good reason. Digital marketing uses many of the same tools as inbound marketing—email and online content, to name a few. Both exist to capture the attention of prospects through the buyer’s journey and turn them into customers. But the 2 approaches take different views of the relationship between the tool and the goal.

Digital marketing considers how individual tools or digital channels can convert prospects. A brand's digital marketing strategy may use multiple platforms or focus all of its efforts on 1 platform. For example, a company may primarily create content for social media platforms and email marketing campaigns while ignoring other digital marketing avenues.

On the other hand, inbound marketing is a holistic concept. It considers the goal first, then looks at the available tools to determine which will effectively reach target customers, and then at which stage of the sales funnel that should happen.

As an example, say you want to boost website traffic to generate more prospects and leads. You can focus on search engine optimization when developing your content marketing strategy, resulting in more optimized content, including blogs, landing pages, and more.

The most important thing to remember about digital marketing and inbound marketing is that as a marketing professional, you don’t have to choose between the 2. In fact, they work best together. Inbound marketing provides structure and purpose for effective digital marketing to digital marketing efforts, making sure that each digital marketing channel works toward a goal.

Why is digital marketing important?

Any type of marketing can help your business thrive. However, digital marketing has become increasingly important because of how accessible digital channels are. In fact, there were 5 billion internet users globally in April 2022 alone.
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From social media to text messages, there are many ways to use digital marketing tactics in order to communicate with your target audience. Additionally, digital marketing has minimal upfront costs, making it a cost-effective marketing technique for small businesses.

B2B versus B2C digital marketing

​Digital marketing strategies work for B2B (business to business) as well as B2C (business to consumer) companies, but best practices differ significantly between the 2. Here's a closer look at how digital marketing is used in B2B and B2C marketing strategies.

  • B2B clients tend to have longer decision-making processes, and thus longer sales funnels. Relationship-building strategies work better for these clients, whereas B2C customers tend to respond better to short-term offers and messages.
  • B2B transactions are usually based on logic and evidence, which is what skilled B2B digital marketers present. B2C content is more likely to be emotionally-based, focusing on making the customer feel good about a purchase.
  • B2B decisions tend to need more than 1 person's input. The marketing materials that best drive these decisions tend to be shareable and downloadable. B2C customers, on the other hand, favor one-on-one connections with a brand.

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. A B2C company with a high-ticket product, such as a car or computer, might offer more informative and serious content. As a result, your digital marketing strategy always needs to be geared toward your own customer base, whether you're B2B or B2C.

Take a look at your current audience to create well-informed and targeted online marketing campaigns. Doing so ensures your marketing efforts are effective and you can capture the attention of potential customers.

Types of digital marketingThere are as many specializations within digital marketing as there are ways of interacting using digital media. Here are a few key examples of types of digital marketing tactics.

Search engine optimization

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is technically a marketing tool rather than a form of marketing in itself. The Balance defines it as “the art and science of making web pages attractive to search engines.”

The "art and science" part of SEO is what’s most important. SEO is a science because it requires you to research and weigh different contributing factors to achieve the highest possible ranking on a serch engine results page (SERP).

Today, the most important elements to consider when optimizing a web page for search engines include:

  • Quality of content
  • Level of user engagement
  • Mobile-friendliness
  • Number and quality of inbound links

In addition to the elements above, you need to optimize technical SEO, which is all the back-end components of your site. This includes URL structure, loading times, and broken links. Improving your technical SEO can help search engines better navigate and crawl your site.

The strategic use of these factors makes search engine optimization a science, but the unpredictability involved makes it an art.

Ultimately, the goal is to rank on the first page of a search engine’s result page. This ensures that those searching for a specific query related to your brand can easily find your products or services. While there are many search engines, digital marketers often focus on Google since it's a global leader in the search engine market.

In SEO, there's no quantifiable rubric or consistent rule for ranking highly on search engines. Google and other search engines change their algorithm almost constantly, so it's impossible to make exact predictions. What you can do is closely monitor your page's performance and make adjustments to your strategy accordingly.

Content marketing

As mentioned, the quality of your content is a key component of an optimized page. As a result, SEO is a major factor in content marketing, a strategy based on the distribution of relevant and valuable content to a target audience.
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As in any marketing strategy, the goal of content marketing is to attract leads that ultimately convert into customers. But it does so differently than traditional advertising. Instead of enticing prospects with potential value from a product or service, it offers value for free in the form of written material, such as:

  • Blog posts
  • E-books
  • Newsletters
  • Video or audio transcripts
  • Whitepapers
  • Infographics

Content marketing matters, and there are plenty of stats to prove it:

  • 84% of consumers expect companies to produce entertaining and helpful content experiences
  • 62% of companies that have at least 5,000 employees produce content daily
  • 92% of marketers believe that their company values content as an important asset

As effective as content marketing is, it can be tricky. Content marketing writers need to be able to rank highly in search engine results while also engaging people who will read the material, share it, and interact further with the brand. When the content is relevant, it can establish strong relationships throughout the pipeline.

To create effective content that’s highly relevant and engaging, it’s important to identify your audience. Who are you ultimately trying to reach with your content marketing efforts? Once you have a better grasp of your audience, you can determine the type of content you'll create. You can use many formats of content in your content marketing, including videos, blog posts, printable worksheets, and more.

Regardless of which content you create, it’s a good idea to follow content marketing best practices. This means making content that’s grammatically correct, free of errors, easy to understand, relevant, and interesting. Your content should also funnel readers to the next stage in the pipeline, whether that’s a free consultation with a sales representative or a signup page.

Social media marketing

Social media marketing means driving traffic and brand awareness by engaging people in discussion online. You can use social media marketing to highlight your brand, products, services, culture, and more. With billions of people spending their time engaging on social media platforms, focusing on social media marketing can be worthwhile.

The most popular digital platforms for social media marketing are Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, with LinkedIn and YouTube not far behind. Ultimately, which social media platforms you use for your business depends on your goals and audience.

For example, if you want to find new leads for your FinTech startup, targeting your audience on LinkedIn is a good idea since industry professionals are active on the platform. On the other hand, running social media ads on Instagram may be better for your brand if you run a B2C focused on younger consumers.

Because social media marketing involves active audience participation, it has become a popular way of getting attention. It's the most popular content medium for B2C digital marketers at 96%, and it's gaining ground in the B2B sphere as well. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 61% of B2B content marketers increased their use of social media this year.

Social media marketing offers built-in engagement metrics, which are extremely useful in helping you to understand how well you're reaching your audience. You get to decide which types of interactions mean the most to you, whether that means the number of shares, comments, or total clicks to your website.

Direct purchase may not even be a goal of your social media marketing strategy. Many brands use social media marketing to start dialogues with audiences rather than encourage them to spend money right away.

This is especially common in brands that target older audiences or offer products and services not appropriate for impulse buys. It all depends on your company's social media marketing goals.

To create an effective social media marketing strategy, it’s crucial to follow best practices. Here are a few of the most important social media marketing best practices:

  • Craft high-quality and engaging content
  • Reply to comments and questions in a professional manner
  • Create a social media posting schedule
  • Post at the right time
  • Hire social media managers to support your marketing efforts
  • Know your audience and which social media channels they’re most active on

To learn more about how Swift can help with your social media strategy, check out the comparison of our social media management tools versus others.

Pay-per-click marketing

Pay-per-click, or PPC, is a form of digital marketing in which you pay a fee every time someone clicks on your digital ads. So, instead of paying a set amount to constantly run targeted ads on online channels, you only pay for the ads individuals interact with. How and when people see your ad is a bit more complicated.

One of the most common types of PPC is search engine advertising, and because Google is the most popular search engine, many businesses use Google Ads for this purpose. When a spot is available on a search engine results page, also known as a SERP, the engine fills the spot with what is essentially an instant auction. An algorithm prioritizes each available ad based on a number of factors, including:

  • Ad quality
  • Keyword relevance
  • Landing page quality
  • Bid amount

PPC ads are then placed at the top of search engine result pages based on the factors above whenever a person searches for a specific query.

Each PPC campaign has 1 or more target actions that viewers are meant to complete after clicking an ad. These actions are known as conversions, and they can be transactional or non-transactional. Making a purchase is a conversion, but so is a newsletter signup or a call made to your home office.

Whatever you choose as your target conversions, you can track them via your chosen digital marketing channels to see how your campaign is doing.

Affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing is a digital marketing tactic that lets someone make money by promoting another person's business. You could be either the promoter or the business who works with the promoter, but the process is the same in either case.

It works using a revenue sharing model. If you're the affiliate, you get a commission every time someone purchases the item that you promote. If you're the merchant, you pay the affiliate for every sale they help you make.
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Some affiliate marketers choose to review the products of just 1 company, perhaps on a blog or other third-party site. Others have relationships with multiple merchants.

Whether you want to be an affiliate or find one, the first step is to make a connection with the other party. You can use digital channels designed to connect affiliates with retailers, or you can start or join a single-retailer program.

If you're a retailer and you choose to work directly with affiliates, there are many things you can do to make your program appealing to potential promoters. You'll need to provide those affiliates with the tools that they need to succeed. That includes incentives for great results as well as marketing tools and pre-made materials.

Native advertising

Native advertising is digital marketing in disguise. Its goal is to blend in with its surrounding content so that it’s less blatantly obvious as advertising.

Native advertising was created in reaction to the cynicism of today's consumers toward ads. Knowing that the creator of an ad pays to run it, many consumers will conclude that the ad is biased and consequently ignore it.

A native ad gets around this bias by offering information or entertainment before it gets to anything promotional, downplaying the "ad" aspect.
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It’s important to always label your native ads clearly. Use words like “promoted” or “sponsored.” If those indicators are concealed, readers might end up spending significant time engaging with the content before they realize that it's advertising.

When your consumers know exactly what they're getting, they'll feel better about your content and your brand. Native ads are meant to be less obtrusive than traditional ads, but they’re not meant to be deceptive.

Influencer marketing

Like affiliate marketing, influencer marketing relies on working with an influencer–an individual with a large following, such as a celebrity, industry expert, or content creator–in exchange for exposure. In many cases, these influencers will endorse your products or services to their followers on several social media channels.

Influencer marketing works well for B2B and B2C companies who want to reach new audiences. However, it’s important to partner with reputable influencers since they’re essentially representing your brand. The wrong influencer can tarnish the trust consumers have with your business.

Mobile marketing

Mobile marketing is a digital marketing strategy that allows you to engage with your target audience on their mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets. This can be via SMS and MMS messages, social media notifications, mobile app alerts, and more.

It’s crucial to ensure that all content is optimized for mobile devices. According to the Pew Research Center, 85% of Americans own a smartphone, so your marketing efforts can go a long way when you create content for computer and mobile screens.

The benefits of digital marketing.

Digital marketing has become prominent largely because it reaches such a wide audience of people. However, it also offers a number of other advantages that can boost your marketing efforts. These are a few of the benefits of digital marketing.

A broad geographic reach

When you post an ad online, people can see it no matter where they are (provided you haven’t limited your ad geographically). This makes it easy to grow your business's market reach and connect with a larger audience across different digital channels.

Cost efficiency

Digital marketing not only reaches a broader audience than traditional marketing but also carries a lower cost. Overhead costs for newspaper ads, television spots, and other traditional marketing opportunities can be high. They also give you less control over whether your target audiences will see those messages in the first place.

With digital marketing, you can create just 1 content piece that draws visitors to your blog as long as it's active. You can create an email marketing campaign that delivers messages to targeted customer lists on a schedule, and it's easy to change that schedule or the content if you need to do so.

When you add it all up, digital marketing gives you much more flexibility and customer contact for your ad spend.

Quantifiable results.

To know whether your marketing strategy works, you have to find out how many customers it attracts and how much revenue it ultimately drives. But how do you do that with a non-digital marketing strategy?

There's always the traditional option of asking each customer, “How did you find us?"

Unfortunately, that doesn't work in all industries. Many companies don't get to have one-on-one conversations with their customers, and surveys don't always get complete results.

With digital marketing, results monitoring is simple. Digital marketing software and platforms automatically track the number of desired conversions that you get, whether that means email open rates, visits to your home page, or direct purchases.

Easier personalizationDigital marketing allows you to gather customer data in a way that offline marketing can't. Data collected digitally tends to be much more precise and specific.

Imagine you offer financial services and want to send out special offers to internet users people who have looked at your products. You know you'll get better results if you target the offer to the person's interest, so you decide to prepare 2 campaigns. One is for young families who have looked at your life insurance products, and the other is for millennial entrepreneurs who have considered your retirement plans.

How do you gather all of that data without automated tracking? How many phone records would you have to go through? How many customer profiles? And how do you know who has or hasn't read the brochure you sent out?

With digital marketing, all of this information is already at your fingertips.

More connection with customersDigital marketing lets you communicate with your customers in real-time. More importantly, it lets them communicate with you.


Think about your social media strategy. It's great when your target audience sees your latest post, but it's even better when they comment on it or share it. It means more buzz surrounding your product or service, as well as increased visibility every time someone joins the conversation.

Interactivity benefits your customers as well. Their level of engagement increases as they become active participants in your brand's story. That sense of ownership can create a strong sense of brand loyalty.

Easy and convenient conversionsDigital marketing lets your customers take action immediately after viewing your ad or content. With traditional advertisements, the most immediate result you can hope for is a phone call shortly after someone views your ad. But how often does someone have the time to reach out to a company while they're doing the dishes, driving down the highway, or updating records at work?

With digital marketing, they can click a link or save a blog post and move along the sales funnel right away. They might not make a purchase immediately, but they’ll stay connected with you and give you a chance to interact with them further.

How to create a digital marketing strategyFor many small businesses and beginner digital marketers, getting started with digital marketing can be difficult. However, you can create an effective digital marketing strategy to increase brand awareness, engagement, and sales by using the following steps as your starting point.

Set SMART goals. Setting specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely (SMART) goals is crucial for any marketing strategy. While there are many goals you may want to achieve, try to focus on the ones that will propel your strategy forward instead of causing it to remain stagnant.

Identify your audience. Before starting any marketing campaign, it’s best to identify your target audience. Your target audience is the group of people you want your campaign to reach based on similar attributes, such as age, gender, demographic, or purchasing behavior. Having a good understanding of your target audience can help you determine which digital marketing channels to use and the information to include in your campaigns.

Create a budget. A budget ensures you’re spending your money effectively towards your goals instead of overspending on digital marketing channels that may not provide the desired results. Consider your SMART goals and the digital channel you’re planning to use to create a budget.

Select your digital marketing channels

​From content marketing to PPC campaigns and more, there are many digital marketing channels you can use to your advantage. Which digital marketing channels you use often depends on your goals, audience, and budget.


Refine your marketing effortsMake sure to analyze your campaign's data to identify what was done well and areas for improvement once the campaign is over. This allows you to create even better campaigns in the future. With the help of digital technologies and software, you can obtain this data in an easy-to-view dashboard. Swift's digital marketing analytics reports will help you keep track of all your marketing campaigns in one centralized location.

Digital marketing creates growth

Digital marketing should be one of the primary focuses of almost any business’s overall marketing strategy. Never before has there been a way to stay in such consistent contact with your customers, and nothing else offers the level of personalization that digital data can provide. The more you embrace the possibilities of digital marketing, the more you'll be able to realize your company's growth potential.

TAKE YOUR BRAND TO THE NEXT LEVEL 

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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.
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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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The Basics Of Search Engine Optimization

4/26/2022

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Ever heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs? It's a theory of psychology that prioritizes the most fundamental human needs (like air, water, and physical safety) over more advanced needs (like esteem and social belonging). The theory is that you can't achieve the needs at the top without ensuring the more fundamental needs. Love doesn't matter if you don't have food.

Our founder, made a similar pyramid to explain the way folks should go about SEO, and we've affectionately dubbed it "Mozlow's hierarchy of SEO needs."

The foundation of good SEO begins with ensuring crawl accessibility, and moves up from there.

Using this beginner's guide, we can follow these seven steps to successful SEO:
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  1. Crawl accessibility so engines can read your website
  2. Compelling content that answers the searcher’s query
  3. Keyword optimized to attract searchers & engines
  4. Great user experience including a fast load speed and compelling UX
  5. Share-worthy content that earns links, citations, and amplification
  6. Title, URL, & description to draw high CTR in the rankings
  7. Snippet/schema markup to stand out in SERPs

Search engines are answer machines. They scour billions of pieces of content and evaluate thousands of factors to determine which content is most likely to answer your query.

Search engines do all of this by discovering and cataloguing all available content on the Internet (web pages, PDFs, images, videos, etc.) via a process known as “crawling and indexing,” and then ordering it by how well it matches the query in a process we refer to as “ranking.” We’ll cover crawling, indexing, and ranking in more detail in the next chapter.

SEO is also one of the only online marketing channels that, when set up correctly, can continue to pay dividends over time. If you provide a solid piece of content that deserves to rank for the right keywords, your traffic can snowball over time, whereas advertising needs continuous funding to send traffic to your site.

Search engines are getting smarter, but they still need our help.

Optimizing your site will help deliver better information to search engines so that your content can be properly indexed and displayed within search results.

Google Webmaster Guidelines

Basic principles:

  • Make pages primarily for users, not search engines.
  • Don't deceive your users.
  • Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you'd feel comfortable explaining what you've done to a website to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, "Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn't exist?"
  • Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging.​

Basic principles:
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  • Be sure you’re eligible for inclusion in the Google My Business index; you must have a physical address, even if it’s your home address, and you must serve customers face-to-face, either at your location (like a retail store) or at theirs (like a plumber)
  • Honestly and accurately represent all aspects of your local business data, including its name, address, phone number, website address, business categories, hours of operation, and other features.
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Local, national, or international SEO?

Local businesses will often want to rank for local-intent keywords such as “[service] + [near me]” or “[service] + [city]” in order to capture potential customers searching for products or services in the specific locale in which they offer them. However, not all businesses operate locally. Many websites do not represent a location-based business, but instead target audiences on a national or even an international level. 


Know your website/client’s goals

Every website is different, so take the time to really understand a specific site’s business goals. This will not only help you determine which areas of SEO you should focus on, where to track conversions, and how to set benchmarks, but it will also help you create talking points for negotiating SEO projects with clients, bosses, etc.

What will your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) be to measure the return on SEO investment? More simply, what is your barometer to measure the success of your organic search efforts? You'll want to have it documented, even if it's this simple:

For the website ____________, my primary SEO KPI is ____________.Here are a few common KPIs to get you started:
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  • Sales
  • Downloads
  • Email signups
  • Contact form submissions
  • Phone calls​

And if your business has a local component, you’ll want to define KPIs for your Google My Business listings, as well. These might include:

  • Clicks-to-call
  • Clicks-to-website
  • Clicks-for-driving-directions​

You may have noticed that things like “ranking” and “traffic” weren’t on the KPIs list, and that’s intentional.

“But wait a minute!” You say. “I came here to learn about SEO because I heard it could help me rank and get traffic, and you’re telling me those aren’t important goals?”

Not at all! You’ve heard correctly. SEO can help your website rank higher in search results and consequently drive more traffic to your website, it’s just that ranking and traffic are a means to an end. There’s little use in ranking if no one is clicking through to your site, and there’s little use in increasing your traffic if that traffic isn’t accomplishing a larger business objective.

For example, if you run a lead generation site, would you rather have:

  • 1,000 monthly visitors and 3 people fill out a contact form? Or...
  • 300 monthly visitors and 40 people fill out a contact form?

If you’re using SEO to drive traffic to your site for the purpose of conversions, we hope you’d pick the latter! Before embarking on SEO, make sure you’ve laid out your business goals, then use SEO to help you accomplish them — not the other way around.

SEO accomplishes so much more than vanity metrics. When done well, it helps real businesses achieve real goals for their success.

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Top Website Design

4/26/2022

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Your website is your brochure to the world. Don’t DIY your first impression with your potential clients. Leave it to the experts at Swift Digital Marketing.

who will build you a blazing fast, secure website and streamline the whole process for you.

​We have build and hosting plans to fit most budgets, and our expert team of designers will make sure your brand screams quality from top to bottom. We look forward to making your next web project a reality.
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The Ultimate Guide to Brand Awareness

10/12/2021

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Have you ever heard people refer to themselves as “Apple people,” “Nike people,” or “Trader Joe’s” people?

This is what brand awareness can do for a brand: embed itself into consumer lifestyles and purchase habits so that they don’t have to think twice before becoming a customer — time and time again.

This guide will help you better understand brand awareness, establish it among your audience, and build campaigns that allow it to continually grow and change with your business. Let’s dive in.

Brand awareness represents how familiar your target audience is with your brand and how well they recognize it. Brands with high brand awareness are generally referred to as ‘trending,’ ‘buzzworthy,’ or simply ‘popular.’ Establishing brand awareness is valuable when marketing and promoting your company and products, especially in the early stages of a business.


Brand awareness might seem like a vague concept, and in truth, it is. For those marketers and business owners out there who like to gauge success with neat and tidy numbers, brand awareness will likely ruffle your feathers.

But just because it isn’t a metric that can be perfectly determined doesn’t mean it doesn’t carry value. Brand awareness is incredibly important for business success and overall marketing goals. Here’s why.

Why is brand awareness important?

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Brand awareness fosters trust.

In a world where consumers rely on extensive research and others’ opinions before making a purchase, brand trust is everything. Once a consumer bonds to your brand, they’re more likely to make repeat purchases with little to no forethought — which then bridges the gap between trust and loyalty.

Brand awareness establishes that brand trust. When you put a proverbial face to your brand name, consumers can trust easier.

Brand awareness efforts give your brand a personality and outlet to be sincere, receive feedback, and tell a story. These are all ways that we, as humans, build trust with one another. The human/brand relationship isn’t any different.


Brand awareness creates association.

When you’ve had a paper cut, I bet you’ve put on a Band-Aid. When you had a pressing question, I’m sure you’ve Googled it.

When you needed to make a few copies, I’m guessing that you Xeroxed them. And when you’ve packed for a nice picnic, I’m willing to bet you grabbed a Coke to drink.


Am I correct? Most likely. But ... notice how the some of the words above are capitalized. These are brands, not nouns or verbs.


That’s what brand awareness does. It associates actions and products with particular brands, subconsciously encouraging us to replace common words with branded terms. And before you know it, simple paper cuts or picnics are doing the marketing for us.

Brand awareness builds brand equity.

Brand equity describes a brand’s value, which is determined by consumer experiences with and overall perception of the brand. Positive experiences and perception equal positive brand equity, and the same goes for negative notions.

Here are a few valuable things that come from positive brand equity:

  • Higher prices due to higher perceived value
  • A higher stock price
  • The ability to expand business through product or service line extensions
  • Greater social impact due to brand name value
​
How does a brand establish (and increase) brand equity? By building brand awareness and consistently promoting positive experiences with the brand. Brand awareness is the foundation of brand equity.

Once a consumer is aware of a brand, they start to recognize it without assistance, seek it out to make a purchase, begin to prefer it over other similar brands, and establish a loyalty that not only spurs on other purchases but also inspires recommendations to family and friends.

That is why brand awareness is so important. It establishes trust with your customers, creates positive associations, and builds invaluable brand equity that allows your brand to become a household name and consumer staple.

How to Build Brand Awareness
​
  1. Be a person, not a company.
  2. Socialize.
  3. Tell a narrative.
  4. Make sharing easy.
​​
Brand awareness among your audience and the general public doesn’t happen overnight. It also doesn’t happen from a simple advertisement or marketing campaign.

Strong brand awareness is a result of multiple simultaneous efforts that extend beyond trying to get paying customers.
If you expect to raise awareness of your brand by running a few product advertisements on Facebook, you won’t get very far. Not only will the consumer be focused on the product (not the brand), but the ad will also lack impact beyond a simple sale.

Here are some ways to establish a solid brand awareness foundation and make a lasting impact with your audience:

1. Be a person, not a company.

When you get to know a new friend, what do you like to discover about them? I like to learn about hobbies, passions, likes and dislikes, and more. I also pay attention to how they speak, what they like to talk about, and what stuff gets them excited.

These are the traits your brand should determine and promote about itself. To leave an impact with your audience, you’ve got to define yourself as more than a company that sells stuff. How else would you define yourself?

What words would you use if you had to introduce your brand to a new friend?


2. Socialize.

Introvert or extrovert, outgoing or quiet, all humans benefit from social contact and spending time with one another. It’s how we stay connected, learn new things, and become known by others.

The same goes for your brand. If you only attempt to connect with others when trying to make a sale or get support, you won’t be known as anything beyond a business with a singular intention (and the same goes for a person).

To raise awareness of your brand, you’ve got to be social. Post on social media about things unrelated to your product or services. Interact with your audience by asking questions, commenting on posts, or retweeting or sharing content you like. Treat your social accounts as if you were a person trying to make friends, not a business trying to make money.
​

Research shows that over 50% of brand reputation comes from online sociability. Being social leads to greater awareness and simply being known.

3. Tell a narrative.

Storytelling is an incredibly powerful marketing tactic, whether you’re marketing products or promoting your brand. Why? Because it gives something real for your audience to latch onto.

Crafting a narrative around your brand humanizes it and gives it depth. And weaving this said narrative into your marketing inherently markets your brand alongside your products or services.

What should your narrative be about? Anything, as long as it’s true. It can be the narrative of your founder, the tale of how your business had its first product idea, or the little-engine-that-could story of how your small business made it in this big world.

People like hearing stories about each other. Authenticity is impactful, and it can lead to a big boost in brand awareness.

4. Make sharing easy.

Whatever your industry, product offering, or marketing strategies, make it easy for your audience to share your content. This could be blog posts, sponsored content, videos, social media posts, or product pages. It doesn’t matter what it is, as long as it’s shareable.

Word-of-mouth marketing is the most effective way to establish trust and familiarity among customers. If someone sees that a friend or family member is recommending a product or service, they’ll take notice of that product … and brand.

Is this a brand worth exploring? Do they have other great products I can rely on? What are their social accounts like, and what do they talk about?


If you make it easy to post about your stuff, consumers will raise brand awareness for you by simply clicking “Share”.
Brand awareness is about impact.

It’s about interacting with your audience in ways that don’t only ask for money, participation, or loyalty.

Imagine if you met a new person who wanted to be your friend. If they asked for any of the above, you’d probably laugh and walk away, right? Not only is that a shallow approach to friendship, but it also leaves no lasting impact on you.

The same goes for establishing and building brand awareness among your audience.

Brand Awareness Strategy

  1. Guest blog on other niche websites.
  2. Try co-marketing.
  3. Advertise everywhere.
  4. Hire a face or create a mascot for the company.
  5. Choose an image or symbol that represents you.
  6. Create a short, catchy slogan.

You already know how to start building your brand awareness from the ground up. Now, it’s time to put together a simple yet powerful brand awareness strategy that will keep the flywheel turning.

1. Guest blog on other niche websites.

Guest blogging is one of the best ways to increase brand awareness with minimal effort. You can take advantage of the traffic that’s already arriving at another website to get more eyes on your brand while offering helpful and relevant content.

In other words, you’re not just pushing out your product on people who aren’t ready to buy, but rather writing in your brand voice and presenting yourself as human first, company second. Another great alternative to guest blogging would be publishing sponsored content on niche websites.

2. Co-marketing.

Co-marketing is an excellent way to build brand awareness — not only because you’d be taking advantage of another brand’s audience but because it can highlight who you are and what you offer in the marketplace.

For instance, if your company sells dog leashes and toys, you could potentially partner with a dog walking app. The campaign itself could appear in any number of ways: You could create a shared offer (“download the app and get one free leash”) or host an Instagram live together. No matter what, partnering up with another brand could help you double and even triple your reach.

3. Advertise everywhere.

​
I know, I know: Advertising many not build brand awareness so much as it builds product awareness, but still — it’s one of the best tools you can use to get people to find out about your brand in a low-touch, unobtrusive way.

Consider Grammarly. It feels like just a few years ago, no one knew about Grammarly. Now it’s one of those brands that you automatically think of when you consider online proofreading software. That’s because they’ve launched robust social, video, and display advertising campaigns that appear nearly everywhere.

You might consider starting with online advertising, which includes paid social media and PPC. If you’re interested in truly appearing everywhere and launching more sophisticated campaigns at a mass scale, you can launch programmatic advertising campaigns.

4. Hire a face or create a mascot for the company.

This may not be doable for smaller companies, but if you do have the budget, consider hiring an actor or spokesperson to represent the company. What do you first think of when you think of Progressive? Flo, who’s even been termed “Progressive girl” for her fun and friendly personality.

This allows you to not only humanize your brand, as mentioned in the previous section, but give a sense of the friendly and knowledgeable service customers can expect to receive.

You don’t have to use a person, either. GEICO is a great example of this. The moment you see that friendly lizard, you know it’s GEICO. Creating an animated mascot may be a cost-efficient but equally effective way to give a face to your brand.

5. Choose an image or symbol that represents you.Nike is not even Nike anymore. It’s a check mark. The moment you see that check mark, you know it’s Nike. Or how about McDonald’s yello “M”? Or Apple’s bitten apple?

I’m not just talking about a logo, either, though it can certainly be part of your logo. But work with your branding team or a freelance graphic designer to create a symbol that you ubiquitously use in your marketing, advertising, and organic campaigns. You might also consider taking a note from Apple, McDonald’s, and Nike, and incorporating the symbol into your product packaging and design.

6. Create a short, catchy slogan.Extending the Nike example, you think of the brand immediately when you hear “Just do it.” Creating a short motto or slogan is a cornerstone of a strong brand awareness strategy and is an easy and simple way to increase brand awareness.

It’s definitely tough — imagine condensing everything you’re about in one short sentence. It must explain how you’re different, what you offer, and why customers should choose you. 

How to Increase Brand Awareness

  1. Offer freemium.
  2. Create free content.
  3. Sponsor events.
  4. Give your brand a personality.
  5. Produce a podcast.
​
Your brand awareness is now effectively off the ground, and people talk about you without needing to see an ad.
What about expanding your established brand awareness and building on that strong foundation? What can you do as a brand to campaign for awareness and constantly increase it?

Here are a few campaign ideas to boost your brand awareness beyond your initial strategy.

1. Offer freemium.

Freemium is a business model that offers a basic product or product line for free, only charging for any products deemed premium or enterprise-level. It’s a popular pricing strategy for software companies.

Offering a freemium option allows customers to get a taste of your brand and product before making a purchase. It’s a try-before-you-buy opportunity that can, technically, last forever (as opposed to a free trial period that some companies choose).

It’s common to offer a freemium option with the condition that the brand’s watermark will be shown on any public-facing parts of the product or service. This makes freemium a win-win situation: The consumer gets the product for free, and the brand gets free advertising when consumers use it.

Typeform is another great example of this. Typeform offers a freemium option of its survey software, but customers must include a thank-you page that features the Typeform logo and message.

Depending on your type of business and product offer, Freemium may be the best way to raise awareness of your brand among your audience.

2. Create free content.

Nowadays, creating content is easier than ever … which is a good thing because today’s consumers turn to the internet for any and all questions, concerns, and DIY projects.

Content is a fun way to raise awareness of your brand because it’s the easiest way to show personality and share opinions and positioning on issues — two major components that personify and humanize your brand.

Content doesn’t have to be in written form, either. You can also create videos, infographics, podcasts (which we’ll cover below), and more. Sure, written content like blogs and downloadable guides are arguably the easiest, but they’re definitely not the only option.

Content doesn’t have to live on just your website, either. Guest posting and sponsored content provide opportunities to get in front of new audiences and diversify the type of content you create.

If your brand isn’t creating content, you might be missing out on some major brand awareness opportunities. Content provides an amazing way to authentically connect with your audience while getting your brand name in front of people.

3. Sponsor events.

How many festivals, concerts, fairs, and exhibitions have you attended? These types of events are typically not possible without the help of brand sponsorships. (Take a look at a t-shirt, koozie, or string backpack you likely grabbed from the event. See any brand names?)

Sponsoring events is a surefire way to get your brand in front of hundreds, thousands, or millions of people that likely fall into your target audience. From banners to flyers to water bottles, your brand name will be everywhere if you sponsor an event.

Sponsoring an event also allows you to pin your brand name on an event that matches your personality, interests, and passions, meaning consumers will then associate your brand with that event and its aesthetic and character. It can also gelp your company build brand awareness among highly specialized and qualified audiences. Professionals don’t attend events just for fun. They attend to learn the latest developments in the industry.

It’s more than just being a booth in a sea of booths. By being a consistent event sponsor, you’ll cement yourself in attendees’ minds as a leader in the field. They key is to be consistent in your sponsorship.

Consider Red Bull. Red Bull is an energy drink, and without any brand awareness efforts, we’d simply consider it an energy drink. But, thankfully, Red Bull took their marketing to the extreme — literally — by consistently sponsoring extreme sporting events like cliff diving and motocross. They also sponsor athletes. Now, we inherently associate Red Bull with daring and adventurous … and believe that, if we drink it, we can be the same.

4. Give your brand a personality.

When you market your products and services with personality, you can’t help but boost your brand awareness because your brand will shine right through. Sure, your consumers will take note of the pants or pasta you’re marketing, but they’ll also experience your personality through your advertising.

This is a great strategy when mixing your traditional marketing campaigns with brand awareness campaigns. They don’t always have to be one in the same, but they definitely can be.
​

Advertisements for their hygiene products are overflowing with personality and humor, and they still mention their products throughout. The advertisement not only makes an impact on its viewers, but a mere mention of the “Old Spice man” also sends consumers back to YouTube to watch the commercial … and to the store to buy some deodorant.

5. Produce a podcast.

More than one-third of Americans 12 and older listen to podcasts regularly. There’s no doubt podcasts play an important role in our lives … and marketing efforts.


Podcasts used to be a complicated process, only created by those with a studio and fancy microphone. Now, it’s easier than ever to create and release a podcast, and doing so can do wonders for your brand awareness efforts.

Why? Because podcasts, like written or visual content, provide a way to connect with your audience authentically. Instead of blatantly promoting your product or service (which we’ve agreed isn’t the best way to go about boosting brand awareness), podcasts give you the opportunity to educate, inform, entertain, or advise your audience and build trust by doing so.

See how these brands have chosen podcast topics that relate to their 1) overall brand message and 2) products or services? Doing this helps them relate the podcast back to their brand and continue to raise awareness, too.


Boosting your brand awareness through campaigns gives you a chance to dabble in marketing and advertising opportunities you’d otherwise not invest in — meaning new, powerful ways to connect with your audience.

How to Measure Brand AwarenessHow do you know if your brand awareness efforts are working? How do you know if you need to change direction, top the competition, or fix a crisis? Just like any other marketing metric, you measure it.

Wait … I thought you said brand awareness couldn’t be measured!

Aha! You’ve been listening. I appreciate that.

You’re right — brand awareness can’t be measured in the traditional sense. But, you can still review activities and metrics that’ll help you gauge where your brand stands in terms of popularity and consumer awareness.

Here are a few ways to gauge your brand awareness and learn where you can tweak your efforts:

Quantitative Brand Awareness Measures

These numbers can help you paint the overall picture of your brand awareness. To measure quantitatively, check out these metrics:

  • Direct traffic. Firstly, direct traffic is the result of people intentionally typing in your URL and visiting your website. Your direct traffic number will tell you how much your marketing is prompting people to visit your website. This is an important metric, as many consumers today discover brands through social media, advertisements, or by typing in keywords related to your brand or product. When consumers go directly to your site, it means they were aware of your brand beforehand.
​
  • Site traffic numbers. This number just reflects overall site traffic, which will tell you how much of the general internet population is checking out your content and spending time with your brand. It won’t quite tell you where people came from, but that doesn’t matter, because they’re aware of your brand enough to check it out.
​
  • Social engagement. Engagement can refer to followers, likes, retweets, comments, and more. It’s a reflection of how many people are aware of your brand and socialize with it, as well as how impactful your content is. For instance, sites like Sparktoro can give you a specific score for your Twitter impact.
​
Qualitative Brand Awareness Measures

This step is where your brand awareness “score” gets a little murky. But these tactics can still help you gauge who and how many people are aware of your brand. To measure qualitatively, try:
​
  • Searching Google and setting up Google Alerts. Doing this gets you up to speed with how your brand is being talked about online. It will alert you to any news or mentions by third-party press. As your brand grows, its internet real estate will expand beyond your website, so keep an eye on that.
​
  • Social listening. Social listening is monitoring social media management tools for organic mentions and engagement. Who’s tagging your brand, mentioning it in comments, or using your hashtag in their posts? These tools can help you discover that. And the more your audience is discussing your brand on social media, the more they’re aware of it.
​
  • Running brand awareness surveys. This process involves getting direct feedback from your customers and audience and can be incredibly helpful with not only understanding who knows of your brand but also what they think of it. You can release surveys through SurveyMonkey or Typeform and share them on social media or directly with your customers. This guide will help you create and promote them.
​

These quantitative and qualitative metrics will help you understand your brand awareness among your audience and the general public. It’ll never be a perfect number, but keeping your pulse on this measure will help influence campaigns and stay connected to your audience. Regardless of how you gauge brand awareness for your company, avoid these common mistakes when measuring brand awareness.

This is a brilliant brand awareness move that capitalizes on customers’ love of personalization, and with it, Coca-Cola ensures it remains an unshakable American classic. This example shows how far personalization will get you in your brand awareness campaign, so try to personalize whenever possible. If your product isn’t disposable, consider giving customers the option to add their name.

Over to YouBrand awareness is a powerful (albeit vague) concept that can have a major impact on your marketing efforts, consumer perception, and revenue.

Follow these techniques for establishing and building awareness for your brand, and you’ll find yourself with a loyal audience that recognizes your brand among competitors, chooses your products time and time again, and recommends their friends and family do the same.

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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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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.

Keyword Research Don't forget to share this post!
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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.
​
  • 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.
​
  • 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
​

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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What is a brand mission and how to define it

9/15/2021

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How do you boil down the entirety of your brand’s goals and impact into a few short sentences?

This is where your brand mission comes in. Your brand mission will be a cornerstone in every other aspect of your branding process. And it will help your audience understand the purpose of your brand and what it aims to accomplish.

Let’s learn more about mission statements, why they’re important, and how to draft one.
​
A brand mission statement clearly communicates a brand’s purpose, objectives and how it plans to serve its audience. It is action-oriented and gives readers an idea of what your business does and what impact it wants to make. This statement may shift over time as the company grows and redefines its goals.

Asana’s mission statement is a great example of how a brand mission can be broad yet specific to the company’s goals.
Its mission is “to help humanity thrive by enabling the world’s teams to work together effortlessly.”

The message gets straight to the point and is descriptive enough that defines what Asana stands for. The brand missions incorporates the larger impact the brand wants to make as well as the more practical role it plays in its user’s lives.

Brand mission vs. other elements your brandIt can be easy to confuse the brand mission with other parts of your branding, like brand voice and brand identity. While they are related, each of these elements plays a different role in shaping your brand. Here’s how:

  • Brand mission: The mission statement aims to create an emotional connection with your audience. It describes the brand’s purpose and why it exists.
  • Brand voice: Your brand voice is the style in which your brand talks to your audience. The voice you use to communicate says a lot about your brand. Some brands take on a very authoritative and professional voice, while others tend to be more playful, humorous or sarcastic. Your brand voice should reflect your audience and the way you want your brand to be perceived.
  • Brand identity: Brand identity tends to define the visual elements of your brand. Easily identifiable details such as your brand colors, fonts or general aesthetic will make up your brand identity.

What is a brand mission statement?

Many brands create a style guide or brand guide that illustrates every aspect of their brand. Style guides includes their mission and vision statements, brand voice and brand identity.

Mission statements vs. vision statements

Whereas your mission statement defines your brand’s goals, objectives and approach, the vision statement describes the long-term impact you want to make with your mission.

More simply stated: the mission describes what your brand aims to achieve and how you will achieve it. The vision statement defines where you want those achievements to lead in the future.

Why are mission statements important?

Defining a clear mission for your brand will help you identify your target audience. Once you have a clearly defined mission statement, you can tie everything your brand does to that mission. It can act as a perfect elevator pitch when presenting your brand to a new audience. It can also be an excellent barometer for determining whether new projects align with your overall brand mission.

Your mission statement should be a defining factor for both your audience and your employees. A brand mission statement should also be a framework that your employees can follow when making decisions or speaking on behalf of the organization. Lastly, the mission statement can be an important factor to present to potential partners and investors and easily convey the value that your brand brings.

Creating your brand mission statement

Defining something as integral as a mission statement can seem like a daunting task if you’re just starting.

A great first step is to research some of the mission statements of other brands in your industry. Of course, your mission statement should be authentic and representative of your brand. But you can draw inspiration from how other brands have defined their missions.

Next, make a list of your brand’s goals and the impact you hope to make to your audience, and in the world. Your mission statement should also reflect your long-term goals. Even though you can adjust the statement as your goals shift, you should write your brand mission with longevity in mind. It should reflect the larger purpose of the brand and stay relevant for at least 2-3 years.

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Here are a few questions to ask during the process of crafting a brand mission statement:
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  • In what ways does the brand add value to its audience?
  • What is the larger impact you want to achieve by offering this help?
  • Are these goals actionable and realistic?
  • Can the brand embody this mission in every aspect of the organization?

Keep it conciseYour mission statement doesn’t need to be long. A few concise sentences will suffice. You can have a longer and more robust internal business plan for employees. But the mission statement you share with the public should be succinct.

TED’s mission statement is exactly two words: Spread Ideas.

It’s a perfect representation of their brand that is known for sharing short yet highly valuable content for virtually anyone. Their mission statement gets straight to the point and is perfectly on-brand with what they stand for as a company.

Make it a team effort

When crafting a brand mission, it helps to have people from all areas of your organization involved in the process. Your social media team is likely well-positioned to help refine the brand mission and implement it into social media content. When you have the first draft of a mission statement ready, gather feedback from employees. Their feedback is valuable in understanding whether your mission carries itself internally. Employee feedback may be able to highlight gaps between the mission itself and the internal culture of your brand.

How to embody your brand mission in all aspects of your organizationHistorically, brands have avoided taking controversial stands in politics and other sensitive topics. Today, people are looking more closely at which brands align with their values. Consumers are becoming more critical of which brands they advocate for.

According to our research, 53% of consumers feel more connected to brands whose values align with their own.

Brand authenticity, especially on social media, is more important than ever. If your brand mission is not authentic and aligned with your actions, your audience will notice.

Recently, many brands have made public statements of support and adjusted their missions to include initiatives on racial injustices and representing diversity. On the surface, these statements seemed well-intentioned. But consumers realized that, in some cases, these statements didn’t reflect in the organization’s actions.


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    With the level of resources and information available to the public, performative support on social media is not enough. Consumers want to see how a brand’s actions back up the statements they make.

    When creating a mission statement, brands need to make sure that they’re ready to embody that statement fully. That means observing how they can make changes in all aspects of their organization, both internally and in the public eye.
    Your brand mission needs to be reflected in all aspects of your organization. This includes your hiring process, internal communication practices, marketing and everywhere in between.

    Final thoughtsEven though you want to get your mission statement right, it’s important to remember that you can always adjust it. The statement should be broad enough to reflect the brand’s long term mission, but that doesn’t mean it can’t change. As a brand changes and sets new goals, the mission statement can shift to reflect that growth and change. It’s a good idea to revisit the mission statement every 2-3 years to make sure it still aligns with the brand’s goals and purpose.
    ​
    As the social media landscape changes, consumers will continue to push brands to have more intentional missions. To learn more about how to adapt your brand to be more socially conscious, check out our blog highlighting how brands can create change in the era of the conscious consumer.

    Categories
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    • Branding & Creative
    • Marketing ​
    0 Comments

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

    9/14/2021

    0 Comments

     

    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
    ​
    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
    ​
    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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    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.


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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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    The Ultimate Guide to PPC Marketing

    9/12/2021

    0 Comments

     

    Marketers, can we be honest with each other for a second? On a scale of 1-10, how much do you really understand the world of paid advertising?

    Although 45% of small businesses do some form of online advertising, pay-per-click is still a concept that eludes many of us.

    As a marketer, PPC is a skill that you should have in your tool belt — or at least have a basic understanding of.
    This guide will help you grasp pay-per-click marketing in its entirety. To start, we’ll begin with the benefits of paid advertising and then get into some key definitions that you’ll need to know.

    1. PPC Terms & Definitions
    2. Best PPC Platforms
    3. Benefits of PPC
    4. How to Build a PPC Campaign
    5. PPC Best Practices
    6. PPC Manage-ment

    What is PPC?

    Pay-per-click, or PPC, is a form of advertising that allows you to pay a fee to have your website on the search engine result page (SERP) when someone types in specific keywords or phrases to the search engine. The SERP will display the ads you create to direct visitors to your site, and the fee you pay is based on whether people click your ad.

    When done right, PPC can earn you quality leads. If you can create a seamless user journey (which you’ll learn how to do later in this piece), it could mean a massive ROI for your PPC efforts.

    Pay-per-click advertising is most common in search engine results pages, like Google or Bing, but is also used on social channels (although CPM is more common).

    If you’re wondering where you can find pay-per-click ads, they’re the results you see before and to the right of the organic search results. For instance, check out the ad that came up in my search for "cards.”


    PPC Terms and Definitions

    What’s a marketing channel without a few acronyms and a little jargon? If you’re going to enter the paid advertising space, there are a few terms you should know. Below, we review the main elements of a PPC campaign, ranging from broad to the more specific.

    Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

    The objective of all forms of digital advertising is to rank for a target keyword, which you can do in several ways. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) refers to any digital marketing (paid or unpaid) done on a search engine, like Google, Yahoo, or Bing.

    SEM is an umbrella term that encompasses both paid advertising and search engine optimization, that is, ranking organically for keywords. It’s important to note that not all PPC occurs on search engines — social media has PPC ads, too (think: Facebook Ads).

    CPCCost-per-click (CPC) is the amount that an advertiser pays for each click on your ad. CPC acts as your bid in an auction that determines where your ad will be placed. As you can imagine, a higher bid equates to better ad placement.

    You set your CPC at the maximum price you are willing to pay per click on your ad. What you actually pay is determined by the following formula:

    This value determines the position of an ad on a search engine results page. It’s equal to Maximum Bid  and Quality Score. Quality ScoreThis is the score that search engines give to your ad based on your clickthrough rate (CTR) — measured against the average CTR of ads in that position — the relevance of your keywords, the quality of your landing page, and your past performance on the SERP.

    Maximum Bid. This is the maximum you're willing to pay per click on your ad. You can set your CPC to manual, where you determine the maximum bid for your ads, or enhanced, which allows the search engines to adjust your bid based on your goals. One of these enhanced options involves bid strategies that automatically adjust your bids based on either clicks or conversions.

    CPM (Cost per Mille)CPM, also known as cost per thousand, is the cost per one thousand impressions. It’s most commonly used for paid social and display ads. There are other types of cost-pers… like cost-per-engagement, cost-per-acquisition (CPA), but for the sake of preserving your mental space, we’re going to stick with clicks, a.k.a. CPC.

    CampaignThe first step in setting up your PPC ads is determining your ad campaign. You can think of your campaign as the key message or theme you want to get across with your advertisements.

    Ad GroupOne size doesn’t fit all. That’s why you’ll create a series of ads within your campaign based on a set of highly related keywords. You can set a CPC for each ad group that you create.

    KeywordsEach ad within your ad group will target a set of relevant keywords or key terms. These keywords tell search engines which terms or search queries you want your ad to be displayed alongside in SERPs. Once you determine which keywords perform best, you can set a micro CPC specifically for keywords within your ads.

    Ad TextYour keywords should inform your ad text. Remember, your Quality Score is determined by how relevant your ad is; therefore, the text in your ad (and landing page, for that matter) should match the keyword terms you’re targeting.

    Landing Page

    landing page is a critical piece of your paid advertising strategy. The landing page is where users will end up once they click your PPC ad. Whether it’s a dedicated webpage, your homepage, or somewhere else, make sure to follow landing page best practices to maximize conversions.


    Best PPC PlatformsNow that you understand the PPC basics, I’m guessing your next question is: Where should I advertise? There are dozens of online spaces where you can spend your coveted ad money, and the best way to vet them is by taking a close look at your potential ROI on each platform.

    The most popular advertising platforms are effective because they’re easy to use and, most importantly, highly trafficked. But for a smaller budget, you might consider a lesser-known alternative to these key players.

    When choosing a platform, some other things to consider are the availability of keyword terms, where your target audience spends their time, and your advertising budget.

    Here a non-exhaustive list of some of the top PPC platforms. Google Ads (formerly known as AdWords)

    How many times a day do you hear the phrase “Let me Google that?” Probably more than you can count … hence why Google Ads is the king of paid advertising.

    On average, Google processes over 90,000 search queries every second, giving you plenty of opportunities to target keywords that will get your intended audience to click. The downside is that keywords are highly competitive on this platform, meaning a larger ad spend.

    Bing Ads

    The perks of using Bing Ads over Google Ads is a slightly lower CPC at the expense of a larger audience, of course.
    Facebook AdsFacebook Ads blend in with other posts on the platform.

    Facebook Ads is a popular and effective platform for paid ads (more commonly used as CPM than CPC), mainly due to its specific targeting options. Facebook allows you to target users based on interests, demographics, location, and behaviors.

    Also, Facebook allows for native ads, which means ads are introduced and blend into the social feed. Not to mention, you can use Facebook Ads to advertise on Instagram as well.

    AdRoll is a retargeting platform that advertises to people who have already visited your website. For instance, say someone read your article on cheese making. You can retarget them on other sites they visit with display ads that advertise your online cooking classes.

    While retargeting is possible with Google Ads, the benefit of using AdRoll is that it can display ads on Google and social media sites, which gives you more opportunities to capture clicks or impressions, depending on your goal.

    RevContent focuses specifically on promoting content through PPC. It has the same impact as a guest post, where your content is displayed on an external site, except it’s in the form of an ad. You still bid on keywords, and your advertisement is displayed next to content relevant to those keywords. With this platform, you’ll reap the benefits of a low CPC and highly engaged traffic.


    How does PPC work?

    Pay-per-click, PPC, is a paid advertising model that falls under search engine marketing (SEM). With PPC, the advertiser only pays when people interact with their ad through impressions or clicks. With that explanation out of the way, now let's look at some benefits of PPC ads.

    Benefits of PPC

    1. PPC ads are cost-effective.
    2. PPC ads produce fast results.
    3. You can easily control and test PPC ads.
    4. PPC ads allow you to target your ideal customers.
    5. Algorithm changes have little effect on PPC ads.
    6. PPC ads help you rank even with low domain ratings.
    7. Data from PPC ads can improve your SEO strategy.


    1. PPC ads are cost-effective.With PPC ad campaigns, you have complete control over how much you’re willing to spend. Since you only pay when visitors click the link leading to your website or landing page — with a high chance of conversion — you’ll be getting your money’s worth.

    2. PPC ads produce fast results.Although organic ranking is great, it sometimes takes months or even years to get on the first page on SERPs. If you’re a startup or small business, you likely don’t have the time to wait for the effect of organic, social, or direct traffic to kick in.  That’s where PPC ads come in. With optimized PPC ads, you can shoot yourself to the top of the SERP within hours of launching your campaign.

    3. You can easily control and test PPC ads.It’s easy to control the keywords you’re targeting, ad placement, or budget with PPC ads. You can also run A/B split tests with different ads to identify the one that produces the highest return on investment. You can then scale the ads that do well until it no longer produces desirable results.

    4. PPC ads allow you to target your ideal customers.With PPC ads, you can skip right past cold audiences to target a warm audience that’s ready to buy your products and services. You can bid on keywords that solution-aware personas would search for online. Aside from keywords, PPC ads also offer targeting options like past online activity or demographics. 

    Another excellent use of PPC ads is to create retargeting campaigns targeting visitors who didn’t purchase after landing on your site.

    5. Algorithm changes have little effect on PPC ads.Between the numerous Google algorithm changes and the 200 ranking factors, trying to get free traffic from search engines is a bit unstable compared to PPC advertising. 

    With PPC ads, you don’t have to worry about algorithm changes but instead focus on how well your campaigns perform.

    6. PPC ads help you rank even with low domain ratings.Keywords have become increasingly competitive. This makes it more difficult for a business with a low domain authority to get into the top rankings on a search engine or in front of its target audience on a social platform. 

    With PPC advertising, you can quickly rank for keywords your audience is searching, irrespective of your domain ratings. 

    7. Data from PPC ads can improve your SEO strategy.You shouldn’t ditch all your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts altogether — your paid advertising should complement your SEO strategy instead of replacing it.

    When people search for your keywords, you know their search intent and can display the most relevant ad to your audience. This means more clicks and a greater chance of conversion.


    SEO vs. PPC

    SEO refers to the process of optimizing your website to rank high and gain free traffic from search engines. On the other hand, you’ll have to pay for clicks with PPC. Although different, businesses see the best results when they align SEO and PPC in their marketing.

    PPC vs. CPC

    PPC and CPC are not technically the same thing. PPC refers to a style of marketing that includes paying for advertisements. CPC, or cost-per-click, refers to the amount of money you spend on a single click on your ad.


    How to Build a PPC Campaign

    Now that you understand the benefits of PPC and have your key terms, let’s dive into crafting a quality PPC campaign using Google AdWords or some other platform.

    You don’t need to tackle these items step-by-step, but you will need to work through each of them to ensure that you create an effective marketing campaign.

    Set Parameters

    I know I said that you don’t need to do these things in order, but you should do this step first. Without parameters, you risk your ad being untargeted and ineffective. 

    You want to put your ad campaigns into the context of your ultimate business goals. Consider how your paid campaigns will contribute to those goals. Then, think about what you want to accomplish with your ads — whether that be visits, sales, brand awareness, or something else — and how much you’re willing to spend to achieve that goal.
    Your ads should encompass a few things:

    • Who you want to target
    • Theme of your campaign
    • How you will measure success
    • Type of campaign you will run
    ​
    Create Goals and Goal MetricsYour campaign goals will give you something to show for your ad spend as long as you determine how you will measure those goals. Your goal metrics should not be confused with your campaign metrics, which we’ll discuss below.

    Let’s touch on some common PPC goals and how to measure them.

    Brand awareness is how familiar your target audience is with your company. It might be a good idea to look into display ads for this goal so you can supplement your copy with engaging imagery. You can measure brand awareness through social engagement, surveys, and direct traffic.

    Lead generation is the direct result of having a relevant and engaging landing page to follow your paid ad. Since you will create a separate landing page for each ad group, you should be able to easily track lead conversions either in the Google Ads interface via a tracking pixel, or through UTM parameters.

    Offer promotion is great if you’re running a limited-time offer, product or service discount, or contest. You should create a dedicated sign-up page or a unique discount code so you know which users came from your ad.

    Site traffic is a great goal if you have high-quality content throughout your website. If you’re going to spend money getting people to visit your site, you want to have some level of confidence that you can keep them there and eventually convert them into leads.

    Choose Your Campaign Type

    You don’t only need to know where you’ll advertise but also how. There are many different types of paid advertising campaigns, and the one you choose depends on where you can reach your audience. That isn’t to say that you can’t advertise through various means; you can also try a combination of campaign types as long as you’re consistently testing and revising.

    Search Ads are the most common type of PPC and refer to the text ads that show up on search engine results pages.
    Display Ads allow you to place ads (usually image-based) on external websites, including social. There are several ways to buy display ads, including Google Display Network (GDN) and other ad networks.

    Social refers to any ads that you see on social media, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Instagram. You can pay to show up in your target audience’s social feed or somewhere else within their profile, depending on the platform.
    Remarketing can use either cookies or a list of contacts that you upload to target people who have previously engaged with your company through some action. That action could be filling out a form, reading a blog, or simply visiting a page on your website.

    Google Shopping is most effective for ecommerce sites. Your ad — including image, price, and a short product description — will show on a carousel on a search page based on your target keywords.

    Perform Keyword ResearchEach ad group you create needs to be assigned a set of keywords to target — that’s how search engines know when and where to display your ad. The general rule of thumb is to select between one to five keywords per ad group, and those keywords should be extremely relevant — your Quality Score depends on it.

    Select keywords that are closely aligned with the specific theme of your ad group. If you find keywords you want to target that fall outside of one theme, you should create a separate ad group for them.

    It’s important to note that you’re not stuck with the keywords you start with. In fact, you should closely monitor your keyword list throughout your campaign — eliminating those that don’t bring in the types of visitors that you’re looking for and increasing your bids on those that do. Do your best to select the most relevant keywords, but don’t feel pressured to get it 100% right the first time around.

    Set Up Google Analytics and Tracking

    Google Analytics is free to use, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t install it on your website. The tool provides insights into how your website is performing, how users interact with your pages, and what content is attractive to visitors. The information gathered from Google Analytics can be used for PPC and beyond.

    Best Practices for a Quality PPC StrategyYou didn’t think we’d let you spend your hard-earned money on advertisements without providing some best practices to follow, did you? Of course not. We want to make sure you succeed with your next PPC campaign. So, let’s get into some PPC strategies that will help you maximize your efforts and your budget.

    As a note, we’re going to dive specifically into paid search ads (those little guys you see in search engines) here.

    PPC Ad Copy

    Bidding on targeted keywords will get your ad in front of the right people; good ad copy will get those people to click on your ad. Like your keywords, your ad needs to solve for the intent of the searcher — you need to give the searcher exactly what they’re looking for and make sure that is clear through the words you use.

    Search ads are comprised of a headline, a URL, and a short description, and each of these has limited character requirements to follow. To make the most of this space, make sure your ad copy does the following:

    • Speak directly to your target persona.
    • Include the main keyword that you’re bidding on.
    • Provide an actionable CTA so the searcher knows what to do next.
    • Make the offer appealing.
    • Use language that matches your landing page copy.
    • Perform A/B Split tests with your copy.

    Landing Page Best Practices

    Arguably the most important element of PPC (after your ad copy) is the page that you send leads to after they click on your ad. This page needs to be highly targeted, relevant to your ad, deliver what was promised, and present a seamless experience.

    Why? Because the point of your landing page is to convert your new visitor into a lead or customer. Not only that, but a high-converting landing page will improve your Quality Score, leading to better ad placements. There’s nothing that will diminish PPC profits like a poorly crafted landing page.

    What should a PPC landing page include to increase conversions? Glad you asked.

    • Strong headline that mirrors your search ad
    • Clean design and layout
    • Responsive form that is easy to use with a stand-out CTA button
    • Copy that is very specific and relevant to your target keywords
    • Presents the offer that was promised in your ad
    • A/B tested

    A/B Testing Your PPC Ads

    ​As a marketer, you’ll rarely throw something out to your audience that works without testing it. PPC campaigns are no different. A/B testing is as critical to your paid ad campaign as is every other element. The goal of testing your ad is to increase both your clickthrough rate and your conversion rate.

    The good news is that ads comprise just four parts that you’ll need to test: headline, description, landing page, and target keywords. Minor tweaks to just one of these elements can significantly alter your results, so you want to make changes one at a time so you can keep track of where improvements come from.

    Since there are many variations that you could test one at a time, it’s a good idea to list out all the potential tests you can run and prioritize them by most significant impact. Finally, you should allow your ads to run long enough to gather the data you need and test them early enough, so you don’t waste budget on a poor-performing ad.

    Maximizing Your ROI

    At a high level, maximizing ROI on your ad campaigns means considering customer lifetime value and customer acquisition costs, which will help you determine how much is worth spending on a new lead and how much of that spend can come from paid advertising.

    To get more granular, we need to talk inputs and outputs, that is 1) lowering your input (cost per lead [CPL]) and 2) increasing your return (revenue).

    There are a few factors to keep an eye on that will affect both, so let’s break it down.

    Ways to Decrease Inputs

    • Determine an ad budget before you get started.
    • Create more relevant ads. The more relevant, the lower your CPC.
    • Improve your Quality Score. The higher your QS, the less search engines will charge you for clicks.
    ​
    Ways to Increase Revenue
    • Follow landing page best practices to increase conversion rates.
    • Go after quality leads by being specific with your ad. The more quality your leads, the more likely they will convert and eventually become customers.

    Additional PPC Tips and TricksThere are a few other things you can do to maximize the ROI of your paid ads, whether it’s time spent, budget, clicks, or conversions.

    Google allows you to tailor your audience so you save marketing dollars and get in front of the right people. You can upload a customer list so that you don’t waste money on people who have already bought from you.

    Google also has options for prospecting audiences. For instance, In-Market Audiences employs user behavior tracking to put you in front of prospects who are in the market for a product or service like yours.

    You can also increase your bid for more relevant subgroups within your target audience — a practice called layering audiences. 

    Bid Adjustments. Bid adjustments allow you to increase or decrease your bids based on performance. You can even make these adjustments based on different categories, like device, demographics, language, and more.
    For example, if a keyword isn’t performing as well on mobile as on desktop, you can add a negative bid adjustment so that when someone searches your keyword on mobile, you’ll bid X% lower than your normal bid.

    Custom Ad SchedulingYou can set up ad scheduling in Google Ads to display your ad only during specific days and times. This can cut down on ad spend and improve relevance for your target audience.

    Sitelink Extensions. Sitelink extensions allow you to supplement your ad with additional information. For instance, if you’re running an ad for a seasonal promotion at a local store, you can add a sitelink extension to display your store hours and location. These extensions take up more real estate on SERPs and, therefore, stand out. Not only that, but they play a role in improving your Ad Rank.

    Conversion tracking monitors how your landing page is performing via a tracking code that you place on the page where people land after completing your form (usually a “Thank You” page). By enabling this feature, you’ll be better equipped to make adjustments that can improve your conversions.

    Keyword Monitoring. Don’t let too much time pass before you check how your keywords are performing. You can place higher bids on the keywords that are creating the best results for your campaign, and “defund” or eliminate others.

    Match Types. Match Types in Google Ads allows you to choose how closely related you want your ad group to be associated with a search team. There are four match types: broad, modified broad, phrase, and exact match. Google will display your ad in results according to your selection.

    For example, if your keyword phrase is “how to catch geese” and you select “broad match,” then Google will display your ad for queries that include any word in your key phrase in any order, including “geese catch” and “geese catch how.”

    Negative KeywordsA negative keyword list tells search engines what you don’t want to rank for, which is equally as important as what you do. You might know some of these upfront, but likely you’ll determine these keywords by what isn’t performing so well within your campaign.

    Social Media Ads

    Although CPM is more common on social platforms, social media sites do offer PPC that works similarly to search engine ads in that you set a budget and bid on ad placements.

    The difference is social media ads can show up directly in your news feed on most platforms, decreasing the effectiveness of ad blockers. Social platforms, like Facebook, let you set targeted demographics and target people based on interests. While paid search is more keyword-focused, paid social broadens into a demographic focus, leading to more ways to target your persona.

    Social media has two paid ad functions that are critical to ad success — retargeting and Lookalike Audiences. Retargeting is remarketing to people based on site visits or manually uploaded contact lists. Lookalike Audiences reviews the people on your marketing list and creates an audience that parallels your list, expanding your potential target. Paid social also allows for a wider variety of ad types, like images, videos, text, and more.

    PPC Management and TrackingPaid advertising is not “set it and forget it.” You need to manage and constantly monitor your ads to ensure that you’re reaching optimal results. Management, analysis, and tracking are crucial to a PPC campaign because they provide you with valuable insights and help you create a more effective campaign.

    What is PPC management?

    PPC management covers a wide range of techniques, including creating and adjusting goals, split testing, introducing new keywords, optimizing conversion paths, and shifting plans to reach goals.

    Managing your PPC means looking at your strategy and ad spend. On the one hand, it means iterating on your plan to optimize keyword effectiveness. On the other hand, it means thinking about how to allocate resources to specific keywords and how to adjust those resources to maximize ROI.

    A good management strategy also pays attention to providers — like search engines, social platforms, and ad networks — to monitor changes and updates that could affect paid campaigns.

    Overall, PPC management is a hefty undertaking, which is why investing in solid PPC management tools could be a great idea.

    PPC Tools and Software

    With all of the variables that you need to track, PPC management tools should make things easier. You can opt to monitor your ads within the platform, but if you’re looking for additional assistance and organization, a robust, easy-to-read spreadsheet or sophisticated software that gives you insight into your ad performance is vital.

    If you plan to go the software route, there are some features that you want to look for: multi-user support, cross-platform management, A/B testing, scheduling, reporting, and ad grading.

    Here’s a list of some popular, highly-rated PPC software and resources. PPC Metrics to TrackMetrics are everything (but you already knew that). Here are some key metrics to track within your PPC campaign.

    Clicks refer to the total number of clicks you receive on an ad. This metric is affected by your keyword selection and the relevance of your ad copy.

    Cost per click (CPC) measures the price you pay for each click on your ad.

    Clickthrough rate (CTR) is the percentage of ad views that result in clicks. This metric determines how much you pay (CPC). CTR benchmarks vary by industry.

    Impressions are the number of times an ad is viewed. Cost per mille (CPM) is determined for every thousand impressions. Impressions are most relevant for brand awareness campaigns. 
    Ad spend is the amount you are spending on your ads. You can optimize this by improving your Quality Score.
    Return on ad spend (ROAS) is the ROI of your ad campaign. This metric calculates the revenue received for every dollar spent on ads.
    Conversion rate refers to the percentage of people that complete the call-to-action on your landing page and become a lead or customer.
    Cost per conversion refers to the cost to generate a lead. This is calculated as the total cost of an ad divided by the number of conversions.
    Quality Score (QS) determines ad positioning, so it’s an important metric to keep an eye on.
    By paying close attention to each of these metrics, you can increase the ROI of your paid campaign and spend less for better results.

    Go Paid! Whether you just started your business yesterday or have been around for decades, PPC just might be the boost you need to get an edge on your competition — or at least ahead of them in the SERPs. 

    Applying the lessons found in this guide about building a PPC campaign and the best practices for a quality PPC strategy would set you well on your way to improving your website’s traffic and conversions.
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    Online Advertising: Everything You Need to Know in 2021

    9/12/2021

    0 Comments

     
    Have you ever double-tapped an image on Instagram, reacted to a video on Facebook, or clicked a search result in Google, only to realize afterward that it was actually an ad?

    Maybe you never realized it was an ad at all — you just thought it was a cute picture of a dog.
    More than ever, ads can be contextual, relevant, targeted, and helpful in ways they never could before. In short, ads today are content.

    But the online advertising landscape is changing.

    New platforms, ad types, and targeting capabilities are popping up all the time.

    Let's dig into everything you need to know about online advertising across ad platforms for social media, paid search, display, and native advertising.

    If you're only interested in learning about a certain type of online advertising, you can use the table of contents below to navigate to each section.


    1. How to Advertise Online
    2. Social Media Advertising
    3. Paid Search Advertising
    4. Native Advertising
    5. Display Advertising

    How to Advertise Online

    93% of all online interactions start with a search engine, and with those odds, you can catch the attention of the audience you want through online advertising.


    There’s plenty of ways to advertise your business strategically. Think about who you’re trying to reach when you start. Ask yourself “What target demographic am I advertising to?” and “How can I place my product or service offering in front of my target?”.

    The answer is to see where your target demographic spends the most time online. Research their most frequented social media channels and most searched keywords. You can take this information and translate it to organic and paid marketing.

    Not all online advertising has to cost money, people can find your business organically through social media marketing. Making a business page on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or even TikTok can capture people’s interest through engaging posts and content.

    Now if you want to use pay-per-click (PPC) marketing, most social media offers business pages the ability to pay a fee to promote posts/ads within the interface. Or if you are looking to advertise on a search engine for targeted keywords, Google Ads or sixads can guide you through the process of payment and execution.

    There are three key ways that digital advertising can help you improve the performance of your organic marketing efforts.

    With digital ads, organic performance can benefit from:


    1. An increase in brand awareness by displaying your content to individuals within and outside of your networks.
    2. A better understanding of your audiences by leveraging the targeting and analytics of the ads platforms.
    3. The creation of higher-performing content by understanding what ad content helps you achieve your business goals and what doesn't.
    ​​

    The goal of any ads strategy should be to get a positive return on your investment, which comes down to whether you're getting more revenue out of the ad campaign than the cost you're putting in.

    How can you determine what your ad spend should be to get the most return on your investment? To start answering that question, we'll need to understand the bidding system used by the ad networks.

    A bid is the maximum amount of money you're willing to pay for the desired action on your ad. If it sounds like an auction, that's because it is an auction. Ad networks have a limited amount of ad space, and to determine whether or not your ads are shown to your target audience, they run an auction to see how much each advertiser is willing to pay for ad space.

    Just like in an auction, the highest bidder wins. Let's say you bid $10 for a click on your ad, and the next highest bidder only pays $5 for a click.

    Each ad network will only make you pay the lowest amount possible to win the bid. In this example, you might be willing to pay $10, but in reality, you'll only have to pay $5.01 to win the bid. Winning this "auction," in addition to the overall quality of your ads, will determine how your ads are displayed on the different ad networks.

    At this point, you might be thinking, "Okay, I get how the auction system works. But how do I figure out how much I should actually spend to see a return on my investment?"

    My advice is to work backward from your revenue to determine what your maximum bid should be.
    Use this equation:

    Lifetime Value (LTV) x Average Lead-to-Customer Rate x Average Conversion Rate

    Your LTV is how much a customer is worth to you throughout their relationship with your business. The average lead-to-customer rate is the rate at which your leads become paying customers. And your conversion rate is the rate at which new contacts convert on your content offers by filling out a form.

    Combined, these metrics show you how much you should spend on your paid ads to break even.

    Let's say that you want to use digital ads to promote your new content offer. You're going to need to know what your maximum ad spend should be to see a positive return on your investment. Assume that you know the following about your business:


    • Lifetime value: $500
    • Average lead-to-customer rate: 10%
    • Average conversion rate: 20%

    Plug these numbers into the equation above to determine what your maximum ad spend should be: $500 x 0.10 x 0.20 = $10. This means that you can spend a maximum of $10 per click on your ad to break even. Your goal should be to spend less than $10 to see a positive return on your investment.

    Types of Online AdvertisingNow that we know more about how to advertise online, let's dive into the various types of online advertising.

    Social Media Advertising

    Every month, there are nearly 2.5 billion active users on Facebook, 1 billion on Instagram, and 330 million on Twitter worldwide.

    Whether it's to chat with friends, stay connected to people across the globe, or for business and networking purposes, consumers are on social media for a multitude of reasons — and marketers know it. Because of the sheer number of active users on these platforms, advertising spend invested in social media channels is at an all-time high. Social media advertising across the world is projected to exceed $8.5 billion this year.

    Advertising on social media comes with many advantages. You can:
    • Reach very specific target audiences with the help of targeting features and different audiences across all of the social media platforms.
    • Leverage a variety of ad formats to advertise in a way that aligns with your business goals.
    • Invest in the specific advertising efforts that drive leads and sales for your business.​

    Let's take a look at eight popular social media networks, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Snapchat, and TikTok. We'll cover the audiences and ad types available on each one.

    1. FacebookFacebook is the most widely used social media network. Almost 2.5 billion people around the world use Facebook. That's more than 30% of the world's population.

    With so many people using Facebook, you're almost guaranteed to be able to reach an audience that's relevant to any type of business. That's where one of the most powerful features of advertising on Facebook comes in: audience targeting. The targeting capabilities on Facebook are unmatched by any other social media network.
    There are three types of audiences that you can target on Facebook:


    1. Core audiences: An audience based on criteria like age, interests, and geography.
    2. Custom audiences: Get back in touch with people who have previously engaged with your business.
    3. Lookalike audiences: Reach new people whose interests are similar to those of your best customers.
    ​​
    Facebook's advanced targeting can be used to target your ads to the most relevant audience — and even tap into new audiences you'd otherwise never reach with organic content alone.
    Advertising on Facebook includes a range of ad types, including:


    • Photo ads
    • Video ads
    • Story ads
    • Lead ads ​

    Photo ads are great for sharing collections of image content. Video ads are great for product explainer videos and branding. Story ads allow you to use a combination of photo and short-form video content. 

    Personally, my favorite way to advertise on Facebook is with lead ads because they give you the best of both worlds: sharing visual content and generating leads all at the same time. Facebook Lead Ads allow you to capture lead information without directing people out of the Facebook platform.


    No matter your business' size or industry, you can use lead ads to find potential customers who are likely interested in your products or services. With lead ads, you provide a helpful piece of content that encourages viewers to sign up for a newsletter, receive a price estimate, or request additional business information. In return, when the viewer fills out the form, the business receives a new lead.

    Another way to advertise on Facebook is through Facebook Messenger.

    Facebook Messenger is a separate messaging app that comes with its own advertising opportunities. Facebook Messenger is the go-to messaging app in countries including the U.S., Canada, and Australia. Other messaging apps like WhatsApp and WeChat are the more popular choice in countries throughout South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.

    Across the world, 20 billion messages are exchanged between people and businesses every month on Facebook Messenger. Ads play a big part in initiating conversations on Facebook Messenger.

    There are a few different ways you can use Facebook Messenger as part of your advertising strategy.
    ​
    • Facebook Messenger call-to-action in ads: Start conversations with ads on Facebook that include a call-to-action to send a message.
    • Facebook Messenger Story Ads: Run story ads on Messenger Stories.
    • Facebook Messenger Ads: Use messenger ads to deliver content directly into users' Facebook Messenger chats.

    All of these ad types come together to encourage your audience to kick off conversations with your business. They can be used to get in contact with a sales team, request more information on a product, or even share other content like blog posts or ebooks.

    My favorite way to advertise on Facebook Messenger is retargeting. Retargeting ads in Facebook Messenger are a great way to start targeted conversations and send personalized offers and content.

    Sponsored messages allow you to advertise to people who have already interacted with your business in Messenger. This is a great way to re-engage your audience in a personalized way.


    2. Instagram

    You can also advertise on Instagram through the Facebook Ads Manager. Instagram has over 1 billion monthly users globally. That's a little less than half of the number of users on Facebook. The majority of users are between the ages of 18 and 34.

    There are three ways that you can advertise on Instagram:


    1. Promote posts and stories directly from your Instagram professional account.
    2. Create ads from your Facebook Page and promote them on both Facebook and Instagram.
    3. Create ad campaigns in the Facebook Ads Manager to access full targeting capabilities. ​

    I recommend taking the third option and creating custom campaigns for your audience on Instagram.
    Instagram has similar ad types to Facebook, including:


    • Photo ads
    • Video ads
    • Story ads
    • Ads in Explore
    • Shopping Post ads ​

    By far, the most interesting ad types right now are ads in the Explore Tab and Shopping Post ads. People using Instagram Explore are exploring their interests and discovering new content creators. Ads in Instagram Explore are a great opportunity to put your brand in front of a new audience.


    Shopping Post ads allow you to include a tag that shows the product's name and price within your image. Clicking on the tag takes your prospects directly to a product page where they can purchase the item — all without leaving the Instagram app.

    3. LinkedInThe LinkedIn platform has over 660 million monthly active members worldwide. Users on the platform are largely made up of working professionals which makes LinkedIn a great place for B2B (business-to-business) advertising. LinkedIn is the go-to platform for working professionals, which provides B2B advertisers a large audience pool to reach.

    Plus, the advantage of advertising on LinkedIn is its unique targeting capabilities. On LinkedIn, you'll have access to unique targeting criteria that isn't available on other platforms.

    You can target users on LinkedIn by unique demographics, including job title, job function, and industry. Maybe you only want to advertise to potential customers at the director level who work in customer service within the recruiting industry. LinkedIn's targeting capabilities make that possible.

    Plus, with the option to include lead gen forms in your LinkedIn ads, LinkedIn can be a lead generation machine. This will allow you to not only reach a very specific audience but drive leads without directing them outside of the LinkedIn platform.

    The most interesting ad type of LinkedIn is Message Ads. Message Ads allow you to send direct messages to your prospects to spark immediate action.

    How to use LinkedIn Message Ads:


    • Deliver a targeted message with a single CTA.
    • Drive stronger engagement and response than traditional emails.
    • Measure the impact of your messages. ​

    But a word of warning: Don't send too many Message Ads to the same people or it will come off like spam. And, make sure the messages sound authentic – if you were writing a LinkedIn message to a friend, what would you write in it?

    If your Message Ads are too stiff, they'll come off as spammy, too. Remember: This channel is a one-to-one conversation. Direct messages are sacred spaces – if you're going to advertise there, you need to be extra careful about taking the time to make your Message Ads feel personal and relevant to your end-users. Make sure you're delivering value to them in a way that feels authentic.

    4. Twitter

    Digital advertising is less common on Twitter because organic reach is still a significant driver of a brand's performance on Twitter. This is very unique to Twitter – but even so, ads can still deliver strong results depending on what your goals are. Twitter has over 330 million monthly users globally. The majority of users are between 35–65 years old.

    Advertisers have discovered a few niches that have high engagement on Twitter: B2B and e-commerce. Many B2B companies are using Twitter as a digital marketing tool, and Twitter users are known to spend a lot of money online. This makes advertising specifically to these audiences a great strategy.

    Twitter breaks down its ads into five goals:


    • Awareness: Promote your tweets and maximize your reach.
    • Tweet engagement: Promote your tweets and get more retweets, likes, and replies.
    • Follows: Promote your account and grow your Twitter following.
    • Website clicks: Promote your website and get more traffic.
    • App downloads: Promote your app and get more downloads.
    ​

    All of these can work together to help you grow your audience on the platform and convert users into customers.

    5. Pinterest

    Pinterest is a unique social media platform with 300 million users who are highly engaged and predominantly female. Some people say that Pinterest is the only platform where users actually want to see ads from brands they love because Pinterest is all about visuals.

    How to advertise on Pinterest in four steps:


    1. Pick a pin: Promote your best pins so they appear in the most relevant places.
    2. Decide who sees it: Set up targeting so the right people see your ads.
    3. Pay for results: Choose to pay for engagement or visits to your site.
    4. Track what's working: Once your campaign starts, see how it's doing and make changes.

    Pinterest is great for businesses relying on photography to sell their products and who have a female target buyer persona.

    6. YouTube

    YouTube is the second largest search engine, second only to Google, with over 2 billion monthly active users. Ads on YouTube appear before and during other YouTube videos or as a stand-alone promoted video that's displayed after performing a search.

    Since you can target demographic information and interests, you can serve your videos to specific relevant audiences already watching videos from similar brands or on related topics.

    7. Snapchat

    Snapchat's 218 million users are predominantly made up of people between the ages of 18–24.

    Snapchat offers a few ad types, including story ads, sponsored tiles in Snapchat Discover, and augmented reality (AR) lenses.

    Snapchat's ad types feel pretty similar to the advertising options on Instagram. What really makes Snapchat unique is the augmented reality lenses. AR lenses are sponsored by a business to create interactive moments that users can use and share with their friends. It might be hard to believe, but in this example from Dominos that pizza isn't really there — that's the AR lens at work.

    8. Tiktok

    One of the newer — and most popular — players in the social media advertising world is TikTok. TikTok is all about creating short, creative, and oftentimes funny videos. TikTok has exploded in the past few years and has reached 500 million monthly users.

    Advertising options are still limited; they are mainly geared towards driving awareness. TikTok doesn't hyperlink posts to websites and only recently started allowing advertising, so businesses advertising on TikTok focus on boosting brand awareness rather than leads or traffic.

    Promoting TikTok videos allow brands to build awareness with a young target audience. Most of the posts you'll see on TikTok are aimed at getting laughs. From a brand perspective, you'll want to create videos that are funny and align with other content on the platform. Think of things like dance challenges and memes. This type of content is the most effective.

    Paid Search AdvertisingPeople searching online are looking for something specific and will click on the first result they believe is going to be the most helpful to them.

    You might be thinking: "I already appear in organic results on search engines. Why should I pay to advertise too?"
    Well, there are three key reasons:


    1. On average, digitally prepared businesses anticipate four times better revenue compared to the less-prepared ones
    2. Advertising on search engines protects you from the competition who may be advertising on your branded terms.
    3. Search ads appear first in the search engine results pages (SERPs) above the organic results.
    ​​

    Paid search advertising allows advertisers to capture the attention of their audience in a more targeted way than with organic search alone.

    Search ads allow you to anticipate the wants, needs, and desires of your potential customers and serve ads to them that are highly contextual. Over time, the analytics of your search ads can help you analyze and improve those ads to reach even more people.

    But how does Google know how to deliver the right ad to the right person? That's where keywords come into play. A keyword is one word or phrase that someone uses to describe what they need in search. Advertising on search platforms takes the targeting capabilities available on social media platforms, like demographics and location, and layers it with the addition of keywords.

    When a Google user types a query into the search field, Google returns a range of results that match the searcher's intent. Keywords align with what a searcher wants and will satisfy their query. You select keywords based on which queries you want to display your ad alongside.

    Keyword research is just as important for paid ads as it is for organic search. That's because Google matches your ad with search queries based on the keywords you selected. Each ad group you create within your campaign will target a small set of keywords and Google will display your ad based on those selections.

    Let's say Mary is moving to a different house and is looking for a home mover. So she goes into Google and types "who are the best movers." By searching "best home movers," she's going to see results for advertisers that targeted keywords like "moving companies" and "top-rated movers."

    Search engines also consider your intent when choosing the types of ads to display.

    In the example above, search ads were the most helpful resource. But what if you're looking for a location-based business, like a coffee shop? In Google maps, you might see “Promoted Pins” like these, shown in purple on the map and in the search results on the left. Promoted Pins are a great way for businesses to attract customers to their business based on location.

    What if you're looking to make a purchase? Well, Google might show you a different kind of post to match your intent, such as Shopping Post Ads.

    In this example below, Google shows you shopping post ads for the keyword "buy snowboard." Since my query includes the word "buy," Google knows that I'm interested in making a purchase, so I am shown ads for products I might be interested in.

    So how do you select your keywords?

    Keywords typically fall under two categories: brand and non-brand.


    Brand and non-brand keywords play a role in your digital advertising strategy. Brand keywords help you protect your brand from your competitor's ads.

    If you don't run ad campaigns for brand keywords, you'll leave your business vulnerable to losing website traffic to the competition who is bidding on your brand keywords. Non-brand keywords still have a role to play, too. Non-brand keywords allow you to reach new audiences unfamiliar with your brand.

    When it comes to when your ad is displayed, you don't just want to pick a certain group of keywords and have the ad shown only when those keywords are entered into the search engine.

    This is where match type comes in. Since there’s an infinite number of ways that people can actually search for one term, Google gives you three match types to choose from: exact match, phrase match, and broad match. You can even use a broad match modifier and exclude negative keywords to optimize where your ads are delivered.

    Let's take a look at each match type:


    • Exact match: A keyword set to exact match will only display your ad if the search term includes that exact keyword or a very close variation. Exact match keywords are surrounded in [brackets].
    • Phrase match: A keyword set to phrase match will display your ad if the search term contains the same order of the words, but it can also contain additional words. Phrase match keywords are surrounded by "quotes".
    • Broad match: A keyword set to broad match displays your ad when the search term contains any or some combination or variations of the words in your keyword, in any order. Broad match keywords don't include any symbols.
    • Broad match modifier: The broad match modifier allows you to select keywords that must be included in the search query for your ad to be displayed. Keywords with a broad match modifier use a +plus sign.
    • Negative keywords: Excludes your ads from being shown on searches with that term. Negative keywords include a -minus sign. ​

    Google vs. Bing vs. Yahoo

    There are a few advertising platforms out there for search, including Google, Bing, and Yahoo. But Google is by far the most used search engine out there. With 3.5 billion search queries a day, over 71% of the total searches made daily around the world are done on Google. Google brings in six times more searches every day than Bing and Yahoo, combined.

    But this doesn't mean you should entirely rule out advertising on these other platforms. In some cases, you can achieve impressive results with a smaller ad spend on Bing and Yahoo than you could on Google since there is less competition from advertisers.

    My recommendation is to dig into your organic traffic to identify if Bing or Yahoo make up a significant amount of traffic for any given keywords or topics. This might indicate that advertising for those keywords on Bing or Yahoo could be profitable.

    Regardless of where you advertise, the good news is that advertising on all of these platforms more or less work and look the same. So knowing how to advertise on one will make advertising on the others easier.

    Native Advertising

    Publishers like BuzzFeed and The Dodo produce content that snowballs in popularity on social media almost every day. And they make money by helping other brands do it, too. Brands will pay these publishers to craft posts and videos that follow the publishers' formula for virality. They also pay publishers to distribute this sponsored content to their massive audience through social media and their website.

    When you pay for a publisher's native advertising services, you'll be able to leverage their editorial expertise and audience reach to help your brand tell captivating stories to a bigger and better viewership. And each publisher is going to support different ad formats and creative types.

    During the creative process, you'll collaborate with publishers to craft sponsored content that covers one of their main topics and looks like a regular piece of content on the publisher's website.

    This way, even though your post is technically promotional, it won't disrupt their audience's browsing experience. They'll enjoy reading your post and won't feel like you or the publisher are advertising to them. This exposes your work to a huge, engaged viewership and attracts new followers to your brand.

    Native advertising creates a symbiotic relationship between publishers and brands. Publishers who do sponsored content right reap the benefits of another revenue stream and gain more audience trust if they promote a native ad from a trustworthy brand.

    For brands, collaborating with prominent publishers can unleash unprecedented amounts of creativity to help them win over the publishers' audience and boost engagement — as the click-through rate on native ads far exceeds traditional. For example, T Brand Studio, the New York Times native ad business, crafted sponsored posts that captured as much engagement as some of nytimes.com's highest-performing articles.

    To find the optimal native advertising opportunities for your brand, try using StackAdapt or Nativo.

    Display Advertising

    Display ads are a controversial topic in the digital marketing community. For almost 25 years, advertisers have abused them by tricking internet users into clicking misleading ads — some malicious display ads have even infected people's computers with viruses. It's easy to see why people have developed banner blindness and can't stop downloading ad blockers: display ads have the reputation of being intrusive, distracting, and irrelevant.

    On the other side of the spectrum, though, display advertising technology has advanced to the point where ad networks can leverage data and machine learning to offer advertisers more effective targeting strategies and consumers more relevant ads.

    Ad networks like Google Display Network and Facebook's Audience Network are the leaders in the banner ad renaissance. They can display your ads to the right target audience at the right place and time. And if you want more control of your advertising, they'll let you decide where to place your ads. Below, we'll cover each ad networks' features and targeting capabilities:

    1. Google Display Network

    When you use Google's Display Network, you can design visually appealing ads and place them on over two million websites and apps, YouTube, and Gmail.

    You can also build new audiences by targeting people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service and remarket website visitors just by importing a list of their contact information.

    If you don't want to build out your ideal audience or deal with bidding, you can let Google Ads do it for you. Its automated targeting and bidding features can identify your highest-converting audience for the best return on investment.

    Display ads can be most effective when retargeting an audience that's already familiar with your brand.

    2. Facebook's Audience Network

    With Facebook's Audience Network, brands can expand their Facebook ad campaigns and use the same targeting data they use on the platform to advertise on a huge collection of websites and apps.

    Brands can place native ads, banner ads, full-screen ads, in-stream video ads, and rewarded video ads (for example, "Watch this video ad to get more tokens!") on the network's websites and apps that their Facebook audience frequently visits.

    This type of advertising can be particularly effective for mobile games, like in the example below from 5agame who was able to attribute 80% of their revenue through their rewarded video.


    Now that you know about all of the digital ad types that are available, the next step is to learn how to leverage the right ads for your business to achieve your goals.

    Digital Marketing. Don't forget to Share This Post!
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    How to Create Effective Marketing Strategies for Your Business

    9/10/2021

    0 Comments

     
    An effective marketing strategy underlines business growth, and often its very existence. From meeting the target audience's needs and helping you build brand loyalty to determining the right prices for your products and services, the right strategy maximizes your chances of making it in the business world. 

    Marketing Strategy DefinitionA marketing strategy is a company's long-term plan of action that aims to promote its products and services and gain a competitive advantage. 

    Don’t confuse marketing strategy with a marketing plan, though. The main goal of a marketing plan is to attract new customers and turn them into loyal buyers. As your marketing plan should be firmly rooted in your company's value proposition, it helps you to market your products or services to consumers in a more compelling way.

    Marketing Strategies vs. Marketing Plans: What's the Difference?

    While marketing strategies and marketing plans both play a crucial part in your business's success, there are several important distinctions between them to keep in mind.

    The main difference between the two concepts is that a marketing strategy is a long-term idea, while a marketing plan typically deals with short-term issues. 

    Marketing strategies tend to encompass a company's mission as a whole, including what they stand for and what they hope to achieve in the future. Meanwhile, marketing plans normally cover the various logistics of marketing campaigns, such as specific types of data and market research.

    Your company's overall strategy will help inform your marketing plan, which means it's crucial to make your strategy as comprehensive as possible.

    Understanding Marketing Goals and PlanningNow that you understand the basics of a marketing approach, you need to start mapping out your business's marketing goals.

    First, take the time to define the following core aspects of your company:

    • Your company's main purpose/mission 


    Think of Google. The brand has always been pretty transparent in communicating the key company mission — “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” This is precisely what they do, and this global idea underpins every innovation and addition across the company’s products and services.

    • The way your company operates

    This aspect can be tied to your company mission. For instance, Volvo Cars has always been known as a car brand that cares about the environment and safety. Hence, their overall business operations (think of their recent move into direct-to-consumer carsharing) are underlined by the principle of building a circular economy. 

    • Why customers should choose your products or services

    If you’ve set your mission and company operation right, you’ll be able to better define why people should choose your product over others. They may want to buy Apple products because they like to be viewed as “thinking differently”, or they might choose a Cos dress because they are environmentally conscious. 

    Customers today have no shortage of options when they decide to make a purchase, so businesses need to make an effort to set themselves apart from the rest of the crowd.

    Once you've defined all of the above aspects of your business, you'll know what makes your company unique. Your goal now is to communicate that uniqueness to your customers so that they think of your business first.

    How to Create an Effective Marketing Strategy

    Once you are able to define what is understood by a marketing strategy, it's time to begin forming a powerful strategy for your business. 

    The beginning of the strategy-building process can be daunting for many business owners. To help take some of the guesswork out of the process, we've divided the standard marketing strategy into three different components., which should help you build an efficient strategy one step at a time.

    1. Competitive Strategies

    The main purpose of a marketing approach is to gain an advantage over your competitors. 
    As you form your company marketing strategy, be sure to think about how your business can create a competitive advantage in order to succeed. 

    4Ps AnalysisTo get some idea of your rivals, run a simple 4Ps analysis for competing products. The 4Ps framework is typically used for internal marketing strategy purposes, but you can use it to outline the key features of your competitors: product, price, place, and promotion.
    Initially, you have to define:

    • The features of the competing product;
    • Its pricing and, thus, customer segment; 
    • Placement (locations — online and offline — where the product is marketed)
    • Promotional tactics (marketing and advertising).
      SWOT AnalysisThen, see how you stack up against the competition with a quick SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis.


    If you want to evaluate your product’s market stance against the competition, the SWOT framework should do, as you will analyze both the internal factors (strengths and weaknesses) and external ones (opportunities and threats). 

    • In Strengths, you have to name business features that give you a competitive edge.
    • Weaknesses define which product/business aspects weaken your market position.
    • Opportunities outline data-driven insights that show how you can boost sales, maximize profitability, and grow your market share.
    • Threats show which elements can potentially hinder your business performance - from the presence of innovative game-changers to slowing economic conditions.

    The Market Explorer Tool

    You can also turn to the Market Explorer tool. Its Growth Quadrant will instantly reflect how your market positions stack up against the competition, showing all the key market players’ growth dynamics and current market share:

    If you top up your SWOT analysis with insights from the Market Explorer tool, you will have a clear understanding of your current market positions and future outlook.

    Get insights →2. Growth Strategies

    A successful marketing plan will enable you to expand your business in various ways. To directly support this growth, you need to determine how you want your company to grow in the long run. This is where growth strategies come in.
    Growth strategies, also known as product-market strategies, aim to increase your market share and persuade more customers to invest in your products or services. 

    Ansoff Matrix

    A common example is the Ansoff Matrix, a tool used by many companies to plan and develop their marketing strategies for growth. 

    The matrix itself looks like a grid where you place each market strategy and start your assessment:
    • Market Penetration is the least risky move, and involves expanding your sales of existing products across existing markets. In this case, think of lowering prices to appeal to a larger audience base, boost your promotion and distribution tactics, or acquire one of your competitors that are operating within the same niche.
    • Product Development comes with the introduction of a new product to an existing market. For taking this approach, you might need to increase your R&D investment or purchase a new technology/brand that can trigger new product development.
    • Market Development triggers you to enter new markets with an existing product base. This approach involves either regional or international expansion, or entrance to a new customer segment.
    • Diversification, the riskiest approach, focuses on introducing a new product to a brand-new market. Diversification can be related (think of Apple producing laptops and then starting smartphone production) or unrelated (think of global conglomerates like P&G that have both food and personal hygiene products).

    ​​​​​STP Marketing Model Another helpful tool you can use to reinforce your growth strategies is Segmenting, Targeting and Positioning (STP). 

    This audience-focused model helps you prioritize propositions and deliver marketing messages that are relevant to your target audience.

    The basics of the STP model:

    • Segmentation: identify the key audience characteristics that will split your audience into separate segments. This post will uncover how to go about market segmentation.
    • Targeting: based on demand analysis, define which customer segments would potentially bring in higher profits, have a longer life cycle, and be more compelled by your product.
    • Positioning: identify how to position your product in front of different customer segments. This value/brand proposition will inform your marketing mix, messaging, and brand development. Navigate to this post to learn how to define and implement value-based brand positioning.


    Think of car brands.

    Each company has a unique selling point, yet they all have different offers for different audiences. Volvo is generally associated with safety, hence, they appeal to safety-conscious audiences that may want a family car (SUVs) or a luxury sedan (S90). Meanwhile, Audi, while still being a safe car brand, typically appeals to speed-conscious drivers who like to get a sports car feel while driving a city car. So, this is how essentially one product can be positioned and perceived as completely different based on the STP Marketing Model.

    BCG MatrixTo further accelerate your business's growth, consider using the BCG Matrix also. By helping you determine when to invest in products and when to discontinue them, the BCG Matrix lets you optimize your products so that you can retain existing customers and attract new ones. This post reveals all the ins and outs of the BCG Matrix, as well as revealing where you can unearth all the necessary data. 

    3. Attitude StrategiesIt isn't enough to simply plan for your company's growth. The most successful businesses also identify the method of growth, which is determined by attitude strategies.

    When determining your company's method of growth, you have two main options: Growth Method Acquisition and Organic Growth. 

    Growth Method Acquisition involves the acquisition of one business by another business. Think of the time when Facebook acquired MSQRD. This app that had advanced visual tech for video was supposed to supercharge Facebook’s other acquisition, Snapchat. This is what Growth Method Acquisition looks like in practice.

    Organic Growth, on the other hand, does not include any acquisitions. Instead, this growth method refers to an increase in sales that occurs through the company's own resources. You can trigger this kind of growth by: 

    • expanding your market and audience share by efficient marketing techniques; 
    • entering new markets (geo expansion, for instance); or
    • adding new products either through horizontal line extension (diversification or expansion to other markets and/or product categories) or vertical line extension (introducing new products within the same category but with other price or quality points).

    Keep in mind that there are advantages and disadvantages to both methods. No matter which type of growth you choose, it's crucial to ensure that it matches up with your company's unique goals. 

    Grow Your Business With a Powerful Marketing Strategy

    There are numerous ways to help your business grow, but one of the most powerful tools that you can use is an effective marketing strategy. These steps can help you get started on forming a strategy that brings out the best in your company. By taking the process one step at a time, you can expand your customer base, boost your revenue and steer your business towards lasting success.

    Don't forget to share this post!
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    Top Trending Google Searches

    9/6/2021

    0 Comments

     
    For your reference, we compiled a list of the ​100 top trending​ Google searches and most Googled questions from our database of 20 billion keywords.

    This list of top trending searches is being regularly updated every quarter for the most up-to-date information. 

    If you want to try your own Google searches, our Keyword Magic Tool or Google's Keyword Planner will help you to find keywords for your strategy and campaigns.

    Top 100 Google Most Searched Terms Globally Keyword

    Average Apr – Jun 2021

    1. youtube 1.3B
    2. facebook 1.1B
    3. whatsapp web 618.0M
    4. google 506.0M
    5. gmail 414.0M
    6. translate 14.0M
    7. weather 388.7M
    8. amazon 338.0M
    9. google translate 338.0M
    10. instagram 338.0M
    11. traductor 338.0M
    12. hotmail 226.0M
    13. cricbuzz 176.7M
    14. fb 173.7M
    15. tiempo 162.3M
    16. clima 142.0M
    17. google maps142.0M
    18. twitter 133.0M
    19. nba 130.7M
    20. yahoo mail 124.0M
    21. yahoo 124.0M
    22. satta king 124.0M
    23. netflix 124.0M
    24. tradutor 124.0M
    25. weather tomorrow 116.3M
    26. xổ số miền bắc 116.3M
    27. погода 101.0M
    28. maps 101.0M
    29. livescore 91.7M
    30. roblox 89.1M
    31. ipl 88.5M
    32. walmart 86.7M
    33. переводчик 84.0M
    34. speed test 83.1M
    35. tiempo mañana 83.1M
    36. outlook 83.1M
    37. whatsapp 83.1M
    38. ebay 78.1M
    39. çeviri 78.1M
    40. home depot 74.9M
    41. yandex 73.9M
    42. mcdonalds 72.3M
    43. restaurants 68.7M
    44. pinterest 68.0M
    45. google traduction 68.0M
    46. omegle 68.0M
    47. meteo 68.0M
    48. facebook login 68.0M
    49. traduction 68.0M
    50. traductor de ingles a español 68.0M
    51. sarkari result 65.5M
    52. hotels 65.5M
    53. e devlet 64.8M
    54. yt 63.9M
    55. google classroom 63.9M
    56. flipkart 63.9M
    57. tik tok 63.9M
    58. twitch 59.7M
    59. вк 59.7M
    60. ipl 202 159.0M
    61. kea 56.4M
    62. classroom 56.4M
    63. wetter 56.4M
    64. bbc news 55.6M
    65. google tradutor 55.6M
    66. ترجمة55.6M
    67. amazon prime 55.6M
    68. shein 55.6M
    69. mp3 juice 55.6M
    70. le bon coin 52.2M
    71. юту б52.2M
    72. traductor ingles español 52.2M
    73. news 52.2M
    74. google dịch 52.2M
    75. cowin. gov. in 49.9M
    76. satta 48.9M
    77. bet365 48.9M
    78. hava durumu 48.9M
    79. satta matka 48.9M
    80. ipl live score 48.3M
    81. instagram login 45.5M
    82. olx 45.5M
    83. linkedin 45.5M
    84. discord 45.5M
    85. youtube to mp 345.5M
    86. target 45.2M
    87. starbucks 44.6M
    88. serie a 44.2M
    89. zoom 42.7M
    90. traduttore 42.7M
    91. calculator 42.7M
    92. gmail login 42.7M
    93. coronavirus 41.8M
    94. facebook log in 41.2M
    95. cowin 40.1M
    96. bild 40.0M
    97. canva 40.0M
    98. mercado libre 40.0M
    99. яндекс 40.0M
    100. premier league 39.0M

    Search volume is the average number of times a specific search query is entered on a search engine per month. In this study by search volume we mean an average number of monthly searches for the last 12 months.

    Top 100 Google Most Searched Terms in the US Keyword

    Average Apr – May 2021

    Average Apr – Jun 2021

    1. facebook 151.0M  151.0M
    2. youtube 151.0M  151.0M
    3. amazon 124.0M  124.0M
    4. weather 101.0M  101.0M
    5. nba 33.0M  68.0M
    6. home depot 64.3M  55.6M
    7. gmail 61.8M  55.6M
    8. walmart 43.0M.  ​ 55.6M
    9. google translate 45.5M  37.2M
    10. yahoo mail 45.5M  37.2M
    11. yahoo 37.2M  37.2M
    12. target 40.3M  30.4M
    13. restaurants 33.0M. 30.4M
    14. ebay 30.4M   30.4M
    15. fox news 30.4M  30.4M
    16. food near me 30.4M   30.4M
    17. restaurants near me 27.7M   30.4M
    18. google maps 24.9M   30.4M
    19. hotels 23.5M. 30.4M
    20. nba scores 19.3M  30.4M
    21. amc stock 9.3M    30.4M
    22. instagram 30.4M  24.9M
    23. translate 30.4M  24.9M
    24. amazon prime 24.9M   24.9M
    25. weather tomorrow 24.9  M24.9M
    26. starbucks 34.6M   20.4M
    27. mcdonalds 29.6M   20.4M
    28. costco 26.9M  20.4M
    29. best buy 25.4M   20.4M
    30. lowes 24.9M  20.4M
    31. usps tracking 22.7M   20.4M
    32. craigslist 20.4M   20.4M
    33. espn 20.4M  20.4M
    34. zillow 20.4M  20.4M
    35. you tube18.5M   20.4M
    36. spanish to english 20.4M  16.6M
    37. cnn 18.5M   16.6M
    38. news 16.6M  16.6M
    39. traductor 16.6M  16.6M
    40. food 20.8M  13.6M
    41. walgreens 20.8M  13.6M
    42. calculator 20.4M  13.6M
    43. bank of america 17.0M  13.6M
    44. twitter 15.1M  13.6M
    45. wells fargo 15.1M  13.6M
    46. dominos 13.6M  13.6M
    47. facebook log in 13.6M  13.6M
    48. macys 13.6M  13.6M
    49. netflix 13.6M  13.6M
    50. maps 13.6M  13.6M
    51. indeed 12.4M  13.6M
    52. trump 11.4M  13.6M
    53. covid vaccine near me 18.0M  11.1M
    54. cvs 13.9M  11.1M
    55. etsy 13.6M  11.1M
    56. hotmail 13.6M  11.1M
    57. autozone 12.9M  11.1M
    58. fedex tracking 12.4M  11.1M
    59. kohls 12.4M  11.1M
    60. msn 12.4M  11.1M
    61. aol mail 11.1M  11.1M
    62. shein 11.1M  11.1M
    63. speed test 11.1M  11.1M
    64. ups tracking 11.1M  11.1M
    65. dogecoin 10.1M  11.1M
    66. gas 9.3M  11.1M
    67. google flights 9.1M  11.1M
    68. southwest airlines 9.1M  11.1M
    69. dr. wu lien-teh 5.6  M11.1M
    70. walmart near me 5.0M  11.1M
    71. gas station 22.7M  9.1M
    72. google docs 17.0M  9.1M
    73. taco bell 12.0M  9.1M
    74. dollar tree 11.4M  9.1M
    75. pizza hut 11.1M  9.1M
    76. roblox 11.1M  9.1M
    77. sam's club 10.5M  9.1M
    78. old navy 10.1M  9.1M
    79. usps 10.1M  9.1M
    80. grocery store 9.9M  9.1M
    81. airbnb 9.1M  9.1M
    82. capital one 9.1M  9.1M
    83. linkedin 9.1M  9.1M
    84. omegle 9.1M  9.1M
    85. paypal 9.1M  9.1M
    86. american airlines 8.3M  9.1M
    87. donald trump 7.6M  9.1M
    88. lakers 12.9M  7.5M
    89. irs 11.4M  7.5M
    90. burger king 9.3M  7.5M
    91. fedex 9.3M  7.5M
    92. ikea 9.3M  7.5M
    93. hentai 9.1M  7.5M
    94. pinterest 9.1M  7.5M
    95. credit karma 8.3M  7.5M
    96. chipotle 8.3M  7.5M
    97. discord 8.3M  7.5M
    98. dow jones 7.5M  7.5M
    99. facebook marketplace 7.5M  7.5M
    100. mlb 7.5M  7.5M

    ​Find keywords for your business

    1. what to watch  9.1M
    2. when is mothers day   3.8M
    3. when is fathers day  ​ 3.4M
    4. what is my ip  ​ 3.4M
    5. what dinosaur has 500 teeth  ​ 3.2M
    6. how to delete instagram account  ​ 3.1M
    7. where does vanilla flavoring come from  ​ 2.3M
    8. what time is it  ​ 1.8M
    9. how to screenshot on mac  ​ 1.7M
    10. when is father's day 202  ​ 11.7M
    11. where am i  ​ 1.5M
    12. how many ounces in a cup1  ​ .3M
    13. when is mother's day 202  ​ 11.3M
    14. how many weeks in a year  ​ 1.2M
    15. what song is this  ​ 1.2M
    16. what the font  ​ 1.0M
    17. how many ounces in a gallon  ​ 1.0M
    18. how to lose weight fast  ​ 882.0K
    19. how are you  ​ 823.0K
    20. when does senate vote on stimulus  ​ 757.4K
    21. when is memorial day 2021  ​ 740.8K
    22. what time is it in california  ​ 673.0K
    23. how many liters in a gallon  ​ 673.0K
    24. how many ounces in a pound  ​ 673.0K
    25. what is love  ​ 673.0K
    26. how to delete facebook account  ​ 673.0K
    27. when is mothers day 2021  ​ 647.5K
    28. what is the factorial of hundred  ​ 637.8K
    29. where does vanilla flavouring come from  ​ 637.4K
    30. what lies below  ​ 634.0K
    31. what is the meaning of  ​ 632.0K
    32. is ariana grande married  ​ 611.4K
    33. what is critical race theory  ​ 601.7K
    34. when is the next full moon  ​ 591.0K
    35. is today a holiday  ​ 591.0K
    36. how to tie a tie  ​ 591.0K
    37. how many grams in an ounce  ​ 591.0K
    38. how to download youtube videos  ​ 591.0K
    39. what is 100 factorial  ​ 578.8K
    40. when are taxes due 2021  ​ 566.7K
    41. how long to boil eggs  ​ 557.7K
    42. how old is queen elizabeth  ​ 555.7K
    43. how many countries in the world  ​ 550.0K
    44. what is the weather today  ​ 550.0K
    45. how to solve a rubik's cube  ​ 550.0K
    46. how to draw  ​ 550.0K
    47. how old is bernie sanders  ​ 528.0K
    48. who called me  ​ 516.7K
    49. when calls the heart  ​ 489.7K
    50. how old is donald trump  ​ 486.3K
    51. how to pronounce  ​ 483.3K
    52. what day is it today  ​ 483.3K
    53. what is today  ​ 483.3K
    54. how to earn money online  ​ 483.3K
    55. who won yesterday ipl match  ​ 481.1K
    56. what is mean in math  ​ 456.0K
    57. how many people are in the world  ​ 450.0K
    58. what is the  ​ 450.0K
    59. how many  ​ 450.0K
    60. how to deactivate facebook  ​ 450.0K
    61. what does  ​ 450.0K
    62. what is cryptocurrency  ​ 447.3K
    63. who is kits mom bachelor  ​ 441.8K
    64. is reddit down  ​ 441.3K
    65. when is eid 2021  ​ 435.5K
    66. when will senate vote on stimulus4  ​ 28.1K
    67. what is the meaning  ​ 422.7K
    68. how to screenshot on windows  ​ 422.7K
    69. how many cups in a quart  ​ 422.7K
    70. how to delete snapchat account  ​ 422.7K
    71. why are flags at half mast today  ​ 411.3K
    72. when is ramadan 2021  ​ 407.7K
    73. when is mother's day in 2021  ​ 403.3K
    74. where i can find happiness  ​ 400.3K
    75. how many quarts in a gallon  ​ 395.3K
    76. who is the richest person in the world  ​ 395.3K
    77. what is a verb  ​ 395.3K
    78. what is the time  ​ 395.3K
    79. how many oz in a gallon  ​ 395.3K
    80. what time is it in the uk  ​ 395.3K
    81. how many seconds in a day  ​ 388.0K
    82. when does summer start  ​ 382.0K
    83. when is easter  ​ 380.0K
    84. what if  ​ 373.0K
    85. what time is it in hawaii  ​ 373.0K
    86. what is computer  ​ 373.0K
    87. how many days in a year  ​ 368.0K
    88. what we do in the shadows  ​ 368.0K
    89. what is an adjective  ​ 368.0K
    90. how to make money online  ​ 368.0K
    91. how to lose belly fat  ​ 368.0K
    92. what is a noun  ​ 368.0K
    93. how many centimeters in an inch  ​ 368.0K
    94. how much  ​ 368.0K
    95. how to lose weight  ​ 368.0K
    96. when is eid  ​ 366.0K
    97. how old is the queen  ​ 366.0K
    98. how to register for covid vaccine  ​ 364.0K
    99. what to mine  ​ 354.7K
    100. how to take a screenshot on a mac   345.7K

    The Top 100 Most Googled Questions in the US Keyword

    ​
    Average Apr – May 2021Average Apr – Jun 2021

    1. what time is it  ​ 5.0M   3.7M
    2. what to watch  ​ 4.5M   4.4M
    3. when is mothers day  ​ 3.7M   2.5M
    4. when is mother's day 202   ​11.3M  ​ 891.7K
    5. what dinosaur has  500 teeth 1.1 M  ​ 1.3M
    6. how many ounces in a gallon  1.0M   1.0M
    7. when is memorial day 2021  ​ 946.5K   647.5K
    8. how to screenshot on mac  ​ 911.5K   882.0K
    9. where am i  ​ 911.5K   882.0K
    10. when is memorial day  ​ 900.5K   620.5K
    11. when is fathers day  ​ 873.0K   2.2M
    12. when are taxes due 2021  ​ 836.5K   566.7K
    13. how many weeks in a year  ​ 823.0K   823.0K
    14. how many ounces in a cup  ​ 823.0K   823.0K
    15. where does vanilla flavoring come from  ​ 817.5K   565.2K
    16. when does senate vote on stimulus  ​ 757.4K   509.9K
    17. when is father's day 2021  ​ 710.5K   1.2M
    18. how to delete instagram account  ​ 673.0K   673.0K
    19. what is my ip  ​ 673.0K   673.0K
    20. why are flags at half mast today  ​ 562.0K   404.8K
    21. how many ounces in a pound  ​ 550.0K   550.0K
    22. what time is it in california  ​ 550.0K   550.0K
    23. what song is this  ​ 550.0K   591.0K
    24. when is mothers day 2021  ​ 550.0K   372.7K
    25. what lies below  ​ 545.3K   383.7K
    26. how old is bernie sanders  ​ 500.0K   483.3K
    27. what time is it in australia  ​ 500.0K   415.3K
    28. what time is it in arizona  ​ 500.0K   415.3K
    29. how old is queen elizabeth  ​ 479.0K 374.3K
    30. how to lose weight fast  ​ 450.0K   450.0K
    31. how many grams in an ounce  ​ 450.0K   450.0K
    32. is today a holiday  ​ 450.0K   450.0K
    33. when is the next full moon  ​ 450.0K   450.0K
    34. who is kits mom bachelor  ​ 441.8K   441.8K
    35. when will senate vote on stimulus  ​ 428.1K   296.4K
    36. is ariana grande married  ​ 416.5K   332.6K
    37. how long to boil eggs  ​ 409.0K   395.3K
    38. how many cups in a quart  ​ 409.0K   395.3K
    39. how old is donald trump  ​ 409.0K   422.7K
    40. how many quarts in a gallon  ​ 409.0K   395.3K
    41. how to tie a tie  ​ 409.0K   395.3K
    42. how many oz in a gallon  ​ 368.0K   368.0K
    43. how many liters in a gallon  ​ 368.0K   395.3K
    44. what is the weather today  ​ 368.0K   368.0K
    45. when is easter  ​ 366.8K   255.5K
    46. how did dmx die  ​ 356.8K   246.9K
    47. when does the senate vote on stimulus  ​ 343.9K   234.2K
    48. what day is mother's day  ​ 334.5K   227.0K
    49. what is mean in math  ​ 334.5K   259.7K
    50. what time is it in hawaii  ​ 334.5K   345.7K
    51. how many seconds in a day  ​ 307.0K   249.7K
    52. how many cups in a gallon  ​ 301.0K   301.0K
    53. how many tablespoons in a cup  ​ 301.0K   301.0K
    54. how many teaspoons in a tablespoon  ​ 301.0K   282.7K
    55. how many feet in a mile  ​ 301.0K   301.0K
    56. when calls the heart  ​ 301.0K   225.3K
    57. when are taxes due  ​ 301.0K   203.4K
    58. why are flags at half mast  ​ 292.5K   208.5K
    59. what is memorial day  ​ 288.6K   203.4K
    60. is jennifer love hewitt on 911 really pregnant  ​ 281.1K   281.1K
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    How To Craft a Social Media Content Strategy (from Start to Finish)

    9/6/2021

    0 Comments

     
    Think of your social media content strategy as your blueprint for your business's success across social platforms. If you don't take the time to put together a solid strategy, you will find that your social efforts lack direction and don't deliver the results you expect to see. 

    You need to dedicate the time and resources to plan your approach, map out exactly what you want to achieve, how you will get there, and how you will measure the impact that your efforts have on your goals. 

    But it isn't always easy to know where to start, especially if you have never put one together before.
    In this guide, we will walk you through a proven 7-step process to developing a social content strategy from scratch, specifically looking at:

    • Why You Need a Social Media Content Strategy?
    • How to Develop a Social Content Strategy in 7 Simple Steps
      • 1. Setting Goals for Your Content
      • 2. Know The Profile of Your Audience and When You Should Post
      • 3. Choose the Right Social Platform(s)
      • 4. Plan Social Content and Choose Formats
      • 5. Create a Content Calendar
      • 6. Publishing Your Content
      • 7. Analyze and Measure Your Content's Performance


    Continue reading, and you will learn a simple but effective process that you can use to plan your social content and take your growth from your chosen platforms to the next level.

    Why You Need a Social Media Content Strategy? Strategy is underrated.

    Sure, you might get away with posting something every day on your social channels without ever giving much thought to what you are posting, or more importantly, why.

    But this isn't going to drive growth or real, impactful results. 

    You will not acquire new fans and followers or convince these individuals to visit your website or convert into a customer or client by blindly posting whatever you feel like pushing out that day. That is just not how it works.

    You need to know what you want to achieve to figure out how you will get there. And this is what a strategy is.

    When you can craft a strategy that maps out the route you need to take to meet your goals, your chance of achieving these massively increases. It also helps everyone involved to focus their efforts, something that, in itself, can help to improve performance and returns.

    Social media should be a channel that drives sales and inquiries; it is not just a vanity channel. But for this to happen, you need to have a strategy that everyone on your marketing team works towards.

    How to Develop a Social Content Strategy in 7 Simple Steps

    The reality is that developing a social content strategy is easier than you probably think.

    And following a proven process can help you define your goals, create and publish content to a schedule that is right for your audience, and measure your efforts' impact.

    Keep reading to learn how you can do this in just 7 simple steps, including a look at the tools you should be using to make the whole process that little bit easier.

    1. Setting Goals for Your ContentHave you ever heard of S.M.A.R.T. goals?

    It is important that you start creating every strategy by knowing what you want to achieve, as this will help shape the path you take to make this happen. Otherwise, you are working blindly. And that is not very strategic at all.

    Without goals and KPIs, you will also not be able to measure the effectiveness of your efforts. 

    Setting goals is all about having an indicator of success that allows you to determine your social strategy's ROI. 
    If you are not familiar with S.M.A.R.T goals, these are goals that are:

    • Specific (Goals should be clear and specific to allow a solid focus on what needs to be achieved)
    • Measurable (You must be able to measure the progress of goals to know when you've achieved them)
    • Attainable (Goals should be realistic, yet should be challenging enough to motivate you)
    • Relevant (Goals should be relevant to your wider business objectives and make sense when achieved)
    • Time-bound (You should always set a timeframe for goals to be measured against to maintain focus)
    ​

    Your social content strategy should start with goal-setting, as this is something that will help to shape the following steps in the process.

    Having clearly defined goals means that you can align every piece of content, and every post that you publish, with these.

    2. Know The Profile of Your Audience and When You Should Post

    Knowing your audience's profile means that you can tailor your content to talk directly to these people.

    After all, taking a targeted approach is almost always more effective than trying to engage too wide of an audience with a single strategy.

    Knowing the times when your audience is the most active on each channel can also help you to generate an increased level of engagement by sharing your content at the right time. And the great news is that you can gain these insights from your main social channels.

    Facebook

    Facebook Insights provides an absolutely phenomenal amount of data on your audience, and if you are not already using this to inform your social efforts, then you need to dive deep into the tool.

    Head to your Facebook Business Page, and you will see an 'Insights' tab on the left-hand menu:


    From here, you can gain a wealth of data around the performance of your page. But, for the purpose of putting together a solid strategy, you need to head to the 'people' tab where you can see information around who your key audience is:


    Next, head then to the 'posts' tab to gain an understanding of the times and days when your audience is most likely to be online:


    Twitter

    Unfortunately, Twitter deprecated its powerful audience insights dashboard earlier this year. However, you can still use the Analytics tool to gain some insights into your own Tweets' performance. 
    Head to Twitter Analytics and hit the 'Tweets' button at the top of the page:


    On this page, you can see the days when your recent Tweets have performed the best:


    While this isn't as useful as Facebook Insights, it can help you to spot patterns of the days when your Tweets are the most likely to perform to the best of their potential. We will have some upcoming tips on how to get more insights on each of the social platforms. 

    LinkedIn

    If you are a B2B marketer, LinkedIn can give you a phenomenal amount of insights about your audience and those who follow your company page.

    Head to the 'analytics' tab on your company page dashboard and navigate to 'Followers.'


    From here, you can access insights on:
    • Follower metrics
    • All followers
    • Follower demographics
    • Companies to track (how you compare to similar companies)​

    However, when it comes to understanding your audience, the 'follower demographics' section is insanely valuable, helping you to understand the exact profile of those who follow your page.


    You can also gain insights into your audience on Instagram, TikTok, and  YouTube. However, the most powerful insights are those that we have walked through above. 

    3. Choose the Right Social Platform(s)You don't have to use every available social platform.

    Let's repeat that — you don't have to use every available social platform.

    In most instances, it makes sense to focus your efforts on the platforms where your audience is active and likely to engage with your business, rather than spreading your time and content too thinly across every available platform.
    You will no doubt already have a good idea, by this stage, as to the platforms where your audience is the most active, but we recommend choosing a couple of these and executing a really solid strategy.

    Trust us when we say that you will see far better results doing this than trying to be present everywhere. 
    As a general rule of thumb:

    Facebook is effective for both B2B and B2C businesses, with support for a whole load of different content formats, ad targeting options, and users. There are very few businesses that should not include Facebook as one of their core channels.

    Twitter isn't for every business, due to the platform's fast-moving nature and the fact that it is still very much based around a simple Tweet format. However, it is the perfect customer service platform for businesses that deal with high volumes of support and service queries.

    LinkedIn is perfect for B2B service businesses and is the perfect place to position individuals and companies as experts through a content strategy based on thought leadership and a strong focus on editorial content.

    Pinterest is a favorite amongst eCommerce retailers and owners of businesses that are easily promoted visually. 

    YouTube is the world's second-largest search engine, and pretty much all sectors can benefit from the platform. However, you need to be prepared to consistently publish engaging video content, something that not all businesses are set up to do. 


    Instagram is often the first or second-choice platform for B2C businesses that have access to (or can take) engaging photos and images and engage their audience. It is usually of lesser-importance to B2B businesses.

    TikTok is the newcomer to the social scene, and there are plenty of examples of brands winning big on the platform, but the format and nature of the content isn't for everyone. It is perfect for lifestyle-focused B2C brands. 

    4. Plan Social Content and Choose Formats

    Once you have chosen the main social platforms that you are going to focus your efforts upon, you need to plan out your content and the formats that you are going to create.

    And our guide on  15 Social Media Content Types (with examples for ideas and inspiration) is a great starting point to inspire you to create awesome content that resonates with your audience.

    A great starting point is to map out the key messages that you want to share with your audience (ideally mixing sales-focused product or service posts with educational, information, or inspirational content), alongside the formats that you can create content around.

    You need to balance different formats to ensure you are getting your key message across effectively, and some of the more popular ones that we recommend include:
    • User-generated content
    • Live streams
    • Contests & competitions
    • Case studies
    • Influencer marketing collaborations​

    Don't rely on a single content format if you truly want to drive engagement from your audience, but be sure to balance the time needed to produce each different piece with the importance of maintaining a consistent publishing schedule. 

    5. Create a Content Calendar

    Once you have started planning out your content, you need to set up a content calendar that your team can use for organizational purposes.

    And this is important for a simple reason; it keeps you accountable.


    Once you have set a publishing schedule and mapped it out on a content calendar, you have made a commitment. And this is often what is needed to keep your efforts focused and on track. It also helps you work with other teams to complete goals.

    For example, if you know in 2 weeks, you are launching a new campaign and need graphics, your content team and graphics teams can both view the calendar and ensure tasks are done on time. 
    ​

    And creating a content calendar couldn't be easier to assign your social content with your wider digital marketing campaign:

    Just make sure to keep your calendar updated so your whole team can use it as a reference point. 

    Get into the habit of adding in your planned social content and sticking to it; this is often the motivation that most marketers need to keep on track.

    And let's not forget that committing to regular social publishing is one of the main drivers of success. It is hard to stick to, and very few do. But this means that those who keep on track are typically the ones who gain a competitive advantage. 

    In terms of how frequently you should be posting on each platform, we recommend a baseline schedule that looks like this (depending on the platforms you are using):

    • Facebook: 5 to 7 posts per week
    • Twitter: 3 to 5 Tweets per day
    • LinkedIn: 1 post per day
    • Instagram: 1 post or story per day
    • Pinterest: Focus on creating interesting boards and sharing relevant images rather than a set posting schedule
    • TikTok: At least once per day
    ​

    6. Publishing Your Content

    Publishing your content on social media can be a time-consuming task.

    And that's why many marketers choose to schedule their content in advance, making it easier to block out time each week to create your content and have it automatically post across your platforms at the time that you deem to be the most impactful.

    Start by connecting your chosen social networks:

    Once you have connected your channels, you will be able to schedule posts across each of these to have shares go out at your chosen time.

    We recommend setting aside a regular time in your calendar each week to schedule your social content for the coming days. Again, this keeps you focused and on track to consistent publishing.

    7. Analyze and Measure Your Content's PerformanceRemember the goals you set when mapping out your strategy?
    You need to track your content's performance against those goals; otherwise, you won't know how successful your efforts are. But how you track this very much depends upon the goals that you set.

    We talked about ensuring that each goal is measurable, and this is where you should have identified what you will measure success as and how you will do it.

    If you have set a benchmark for your performance, you can easily identify which posts are exceeding this.
    We recommend analyzing the performance of your social efforts on a weekly basis and measuring these against the goals and KPIs that you set.

    If you are on your way to achieving your goals, great. If not, a weekly check-in on progress means you are able to make adjustments and improvements to your strategy to get things back on track. 

    Don't underestimate the power of putting together a solid social content strategy.

    It is your roadmap to success, and having a clear plan of action that can be communicated across your team and key stakeholders and time invested in putting this together is time well spent.

    Just be sure to follow a clear process, know your goals and checkpoints, and maintain a consistent approach to publishing great content! 

    Don't forget to share this post!
    ​
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