These days, many marketers are perfectly fine carrying out their tasks from home. The recent pandemic showed how people are capable of adapting to a new work environment. 

Sure, it helps to interact with coworkers and clients in person since it reduces potential miscommunication issues. However, that is something one can work on improving with experience, so miscommunication should not be an obstacle.

Since working remotely as a marketer is an option, the idea of pursuing such a career path is quite appealing. 

If you have some experience to back up your job search, you will have an easier time finding the desired position. On the other hand, there are plenty of opportunities to become an intern and slowly build your experience.

The first thing you need is to decide what kind of marketing job you would like to do. As you can guess, there are quite a few available options. And remember that if you struggle with your first attempt, you can take the experience with you to the next gig.

Having said all that, let’s take a look at some marketing jobs you can do from home.

SEO Specialist

Search engine optimization is one of the cornerstones of a successful brand trying to grow its presence online.

According to Higher Visibility, Google alone received over 80 billion queries in February 2023. BrightEdge published a study as well, indicating that roughly 53% of all website traffic comes from organic search.

The task of an SEO specialist is not just about creating a successful initial campaign. No, the reason why some businesses prioritize other marketing methods is because search engine optimization is a long-term task that requires constant investment to step up and develop new strategies.

Keeping up with the trends can be tricky. The strategy you work on for a long time could become obsolete overnight, which calls for a quick change to not fall behind the competition.

Other than spotting the trends and developing strategies, the work of an SEO specialist also involves link-building and working with the content team to ensure that the website has optimized content.

When starting, you might discover that there are blackhat and whitehat SEO tactics. As a rule of thumb, any self-respecting specialist should stay away from the former. After all, you do not want to suffer from a negative reputation, right?

Ultimately, while working as an SEO specialist is one of the most rewarding experiences, it is one of the hardest jobs in the marketing industry.

Content Marketer

Content marketing is another example of work you can do remotely. This position is about creating attractive and useful content targeted at a specific audience.

Take the tech industry, for example. If your website covers laptops, the potential for content ideas is more or less endless. You can focus on solving OS-related specific problems like fixing the blue screen of death or explaining what is kernel_task in activity monitor.

Producing laptop reviews, comparison guides, upcoming news, speculations, etc., is also a possibility. It is about what course the website takes.

As a content marketer and one who creates the pieces, you have to be:

• well-versed in the niche 
• have your sources; 
• know how to do research;

Checkmarking these three is an excellent indicator that you are on the right track to becoming a successful content marketer.

While articles are the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about content on the internet, it does not end there.

Other forms of content exist. Infographics, videos, newsletters, and virtually any other type of media you can find online.

As a single person, covering everything might be impossible, which is why it is common to see content teams with members who work on specific pieces.

You need to identify your strengths and weaknesses to determine what kind of content you can excel at as a creator. 

It will involve trial and error, and you are probably going to doubt yourself due to how many better content creators are out there. That is something you will have to overcome.

Social Media Manager

Social media involves a lot of different marketing strategies. If one person manages a single SM profile, their usual routine of tasks includes:

• Copywriting
• Customer service
• Graphic design
• Interacting with an audience
• Running PPC campaigns
• Keeping up with social media trends

Copywriting is part of social media content creation, as is graphic design. It varies from case to case basis, but many social media managers also involve themselves in content creation. 

If not directly, at the least, they collaborate and let the creative team know what content they should create.

Audience interactions involve responses to direct messages and comments. Social media engagement is an important indicator of the overall campaign success, and one way to build it is not to be active and not ignore your audience.

Social media trends come and go, so it is important to identify them and implement a trend. For instance, one of the most recent notable changes is how platforms are introducing direct commerce on social media, Facebook being the pioneer. 

To become a social media manager, you have two options. The first is to get in touch with various brands and offer your services. The second is to create and grow a social media page yourself.

Out of the two options, going with the second is the most common since you need to build experience if you want to take on already established accounts on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other social media sites.

Managing multiple SM accounts is not the same as working as an influencer. No, think of it as someone who sits behind a brand. There is no need to reveal your face as you are working from the shadows, so to speak.

Outreach Specialist

Working as an outreach specialist has its perks, but the position is not for everyone. It involves direct interaction with people, the majority of which are usually cold leads.

Some companies ask their outreach workers to make cold phone calls, but the practice is not as prominent these days.

When we think about outreach marketing specialists, it usually involves social media and email marketing.

The goal is to reach as many relevant leads as possible, usually with a template that requires a small adjustment, such as a recipient or company name change. There are also massive outreach campaigns that involve an identical message for every single recipient.

Outreach marketing also involves networking. You build connections with people in the same field. Link building is a good example. If you work as a link builder and want to publish links on various websites, reaching out to SEO specialists or content marketers is a solid strategy.

Having experience as an outreach specialist is also beneficial for future endeavors. If you know how to persuade people to have them respond to a call to action, your skill set will be valued, and you should not have problems finding a marketing-related job.

Copywriter

Copywriting, similar to SEO, is a hard craft to learn but one that is quite rewarding. You can expect to make a decent amount of money from as little as a few sentences.

Good copywriters are hard to come by, which is why they get paid so much. If you have a knack for crafting words, then it should be the number one marketing job on your list.

Copywriting usually involves creating shorter content pieces. Writers who write articles are a separate entity from marketing copywriters, but collaborations between the two are not something unheard of.

The craft is about persuasiveness. Your goal is to persuade a reader to take action. Whether it is an email promoting a new deal or a social media PPC ad encouraging people to download a new e-book, the way a copywriter presents their words can be a difference-maker between succeeding and failing.

Some copywriters prefer a pressure-building technique. They mold the piece in a way that tries to trick the reader into believing that they will miss out if they do not take action. 

Unfortunately, the method is quite prominent because it works. If you want to avoid such an approach, then you need to prepare your words in a way that makes a reader believe you can help them.

PR Coordinator

Public relations coordinators might not seem like they are part of the digital marketing world, but the reality is different.

Some of the activities may involve presentations in live events, but as a remote coordinator, you focus on what is available on the internet.

Writing and issuing press releases, overviewing social media accounts, and even arranging public appearances are part of the job. Some treat it as an assistant more than a PR coordinator, but it depends on the exact duties the work entails.

It is also common to collect data about various opinions online by organizing polls or taking what is already available and processing the information. 

Affiliate Marketer

Affiliate marketing has been around for a long time, and it is arguably one of the easiest jobs to break into as a newcomer.

You can find multiple affiliate programs, but new affiliates usually go with Amazon due to how many different products are available to promote.

Start by creating a website and adding content. If you pick drones, for example, you can write articles reviewing various models and adding affiliate links. 

The goal is to persuade site visitors to click on the link, and once they are on a landing page with active cookies, you get a commission for each successful conversion.

Affiliate marketing goes beyond direct sales. Downloads, video views, and other forms of call to action open different opportunities. It is all about presenting the content and persuading your audience to take the initial action and finish the conversion.

Influencer

Influencer marketing is one of the most popular forms of promoting a brand. A regular person who spends their time on social media is not so keen to trust businesses themselves.

The same cannot be said about personalities, though. Half of the Millennials trust influencers for product and service recommendations, and more than 90 percent of marketers believe that influencer marketing is effective.

If the method was ineffective, influencer marketing would not exist in the first place. It is because various personalities on the internet gain traction and build an audience that such marketing exists in the first place.

Someone can call themselves an influencer even if they do not have that many followers. Even as little as 1 000 followers are enough so long as they engage with the content.

From a business perspective, it is much better to work with someone who has 1 000 active followers in the right demographic than someone who has 10 000 followers but sees very little or no engagement. 

Brands have to be smart and do their research so they do not end up working with someone who bought fake followers to create a profile for themselves.

Unlike other mentioned jobs, influencer marketing is not something you can just choose to pursue. 

There are certain elements, such as internet clout, personality, charisma, and originality, that determine your success or failure as an influencer.

In case you decide to give this idea a chance, remember that influencer marketing goes beyond social media. 

Twitch TV and YouTube are the other two platforms that let you make a name for yourself and monetize your audience.

Conclusion

To sum it all up, the availability of online marketing jobs and the convenience of working from your home make the idea of pursuing such a career quite attractive.

Experienced marketers know what jobs to go for because they know their strengths and weaknesses, as well as a resume to back it up.

For newcomers, though, it is a bit different. Identifying and researching a potential idea is part of a potentially long journey.

Use the job list in this article as a reference, and you are bound to find at least one idea that sparks your interest. And from there, it is all about how much effort you put into mastering your craft to become a successful marketer.

The post 8 Marketing Jobs You Can Do From Home appeared first on OmniKick.

Business efficiency should be a top priority for every single company on the planet, whether it’s a public or private organization.

Because it really doesn’t if you’re an ecommerce brand, brick and mortar operation or a tradesperson, if you don’t run your company efficiently then you won’t get the most out of it.

Indeed, it could be more serious than this — you might not just make less money than you could, you may generate less capital than you need to be able to survive.

Tracking tools record data that you can interpret and use to spot areas of your company that are being run inefficiently.

There’s a huge number of tools you can choose from and a wide array of areas of your business you can use them on. We’ve highlighted four examples:

• Time tracking tools
• Website tracking tools
• SEO tracking tools
• Fulfilment tracking tools

While this doesn’t run you through every step of a business, it does take you on a logical journey — from putting the foundations in place to getting your products to your customers.

We explain how you can use each of these tools, providing specific examples and demonstrating the value they offer to your business.

Time tracking tools: for employee efficiency

The foundation of a good business is ensuring that tasks are completed efficiently.

Whether you sell products or services, the price you charge customers is informed by the amount of work it takes your business to give them what they want. If it takes too long then your profit margins will slip.

This means if your workers take too long to complete their tasks then it could be hugely damaging to your company. Time tracking tools are a great way to ensure tasks are completed at a good speed and this is how you can use them.

HourStack is our example tool. While it’s not the only one on the market, it’s routinely held up as one of the best time tracking tools. It allows you to create tasks and assign them to projects. For example, you could have a ‘payroll’ task and assign it to the ‘finance’ project.

Your employees can add tasks to their HourStack profile then record how long each one takes. The image below shows you how this looks in practice:

Credit: YouTube

You can then review how long these tasks are taking and if a project is running over budget. This helps you to promote greater business efficiency in a few important ways:

• You can make sure you assign the most efficient people to specific tasks
• You can see if you’re under or overcharging for the products/service you sell
• You can spot any training gaps or opportunities to make internal promotions

As we explained, HourStack is just one example of a time tracking tool you can use. The point, though, is that if you want your employees to complete their work efficiently then you must review how long it’s taking them to finish their tasks.

Website tracking tools: for customer efficiency

Almost no modern company can operate efficiently without a website.

There are expectations to this but they’re becoming increasingly rare, particularly at a time when many traditional brick and mortar organisations have had their operations suspended because of coronavirus.

But to be an efficient business you need to do more than just get a website online. You need to then manage how your customers interact with it. If you don’t then you may find your company is guilty of two major customer inefficiencies:

• Time, resources and money is wasted on things your customers aren’t engaging with
• Opportunities are missed to provide your customers with things they really want

Credit: PublicDomainPictures

Website tracking tools help to avoid this wastage and spot these opportunities. This is because they show you how your users interact with your website, which they do by providing the following information (all of which is available through Google Analytics):

• Users: the people who are visiting your website.
• Sessions: the number of interactions a customer makes.
• Bounce Rate: the % of people who depart your site without interacting with it.
• Session Duration: the length of time an individual spends on your website.
• Active Users: who is on your website at this exact moment in time.

You can then apply this information to make more efficient use of your time. We’ll now walk you through one such instance where it can be useful.

Let’s say you run an ecommerce fashion brand. You might find that lots of people visit a specific clothing item page. They spend a significant amount of time on the page but sales for the item are low.

From this information, you can interpret that it’s something that interests people but they need a little more convincing to buy it. You can then review similar items and compare the results.

If you find one item is selling at a better rate than the other, you can look at the differences between the pages. You might find that it’s as simple as one having a different CTA button to the other. If this is the case then you can make your sales process more efficient by tweaking your strategy and introducing high converting CTAs.

This is just one example of how using website tracking tools can promote greater business efficiency and it might not be immediately relatable to your company. The takeaway from this, though, is that by interrogating the data behind your website you can find ways of setting it up more effectively.

SEO tracking tools: for ranking efficiency

All digital businesses need to have an appreciation of SEO.

If you have a website and it’s part of your sales channel then you need people to visit it when they’re searching for solutions to their problems. It’s not enough for them to just arrive at it because they already know it exists, as this restricts your visitors to existing customers.

People search for solutions to their problems by entering questions into search engines, such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. These search engines then provide answers to these questions in the form of websites and web pages. If your website isn’t one of the first your prospective customers see, then they’ll visit a competing business instead.

The point we’re making here is that it’s really poor business efficiency if you’re not positioning your website to attract new customers. The way you can avoid this efficiency is by employing SEO tactics and using associated tracking tools to monitor their effectiveness.

SEO tactics are broad, diverse and can be complex. With this in mind, we’ll let one of the industry experts (Matt Diggity) fill you in on them:

We’ll jump back in now and explain how you can use tracking tools to support your tactics.

There are a huge number of tools you can use to track SEO tactics. Ahrefs is renowned as being one of the finest tools because it provides a huge range of data and is really user-friendly. We’ll run you through just one of the ways you can use it to track the SEO tactics you use.

Returning to our earlier example of an ecommerce fashion brand, we’ve highlighted how Verge Girl could use Ahrefs’ tracking features — the suggestions we make are ones you can use for your own website.

We start by dropping the Verge Girl homepage into the Ahrefs Site Explorer. Once it’s loaded, we then head to the top pages for Verge Girl. This is what we found.

Credit: Ahrefs

Our observation is that almost all (97.2%) of its traffic is coming from the homepage and its top keyword is Verge Girl. This is exactly the example we spoke of earlier, with Verge Girl’s customers almost all arriving at the site specifically because they searched for it and not because it featured in a SERP (search engine results page).

So, we took the URL of the page with Verge Girl’s third-highest amount of traffic. The reason we picked this page is that its top KW is in position 11 — a decent rank but far enough off the top spot to vastly reduce the chances of users visiting it, which suggests the content is underperforming.

We then dropped the page into the Ahrefs Site Explorer to analyze its top organic KWs (setting it to Australian, as Verge Girl is an Australian brand). This is what we saw:

Credit: Ahrefs

Our observation from this is that Verge Girl should optimize this page for a wider range of related KWs that it’s currently ranking for, particularly “cami” because this has a monthly search volume of 1,100. It could then track the results through Ahrefs by checking in on the page and seeing how its rankings have changed. Ahrefs does this for you — the ‘position’ column indicates the change in position, with those in green going up and those in red going down.

As we said, this is just one tool and just one way of using it to track SEO rankings. The important thing is that using SEO tactics to rank for the terms your target audience is searching for (not just your brand name) is a really efficient use of your business’ time. Why? Because it can win new customers for your company.

Fulfillment tracking tools: for an efficient conclusion

Fulfillment is the final stage in business but it might just be the most important.

The reason for this is that it’s the moment when your business delivers on its promise to customers, whether that’s a product or a service. It’s when you solve the problems your customers are experiencing.

Suffice to say then, it’s essential you ensure you keep your promises to your customers, and using fulfillment tracking tools is how you can do this. This is because these tools allow you to see where your deliveries are and if they’re getting to your customers in the agreed timescale.

There are two types of tracking tools you can use:

• Courier monitoring: for third-party distributors.
• Telematics tracking: for in-house fulfillment.

It might be that your company uses only one of these two types of delivery and needs just one tracking tool to guarantee your customers receive their orders.

Using couriers is a great way for companies to keep costs under control (you don’t need to buy your own vehicles). However, the downside is if the couriers make any errors with the delivery then it’ll be your company that suffers reputational damage.

Employing in-house deliveries lets you stay in control of your fulfillment process, as it’s your drivers taking goods to your customers. However, the con is that you need to handle the associated costs of ensuring your vehicles and drivers can fulfill your orders.

Credit: Flickr

The benefit of using courier monitoring tools is you get a live record of where your couriers are, what these people are doing, and how effectively they’re working. You can see if your products are arriving on time and if the money you pay these companies to handle fulfillment is being used efficiently by your business.

The good thing about telematics tracking software is that you know where your drivers are at all times. This offers the same benefit as courier monitoring of knowing if they’re on track to get your goods to your customers. There is an additional benefit to telematics software that you don’t get from courier monitoring tools. Telematics also tells you how your staff are using your vehicles because it records the following data points on driving behavior:

• How quickly your employees drive
• How sharply your staff take corners
• How harshly your workers brake

This information you get from telematics tracking software can be really helpful for business efficiency because it allows you to spot bad driving habits. These habits can lead your vehicles to experience wear and tear, meaning you need to pay for repairs and replacements. This could save your company considerable sums of money in the long run.

We’ve not highlighted any examples of companies offering specific courier monitoring or telematics software. However, there are lots available and the one(s) you select isn’t really the point. The point is that each of these tools can help you ensure your orders are fulfilled efficiently, reducing the threat of reputational damage to your business that comes from unhappy customers.

Time, website, SEO, and fulfillment are all areas of your company that benefit from the employment of time tracking tools, with each (in its own way) being a way you can promote greater business efficiency.

While you may choose to use different tools and might employ them slightly differently, we recommend that you take our methodologies on board and introduce them into your business at the earliest opportunity. Doing so could both save and make you money.

The post How To Use Tracking Tools To Promote Greater Business Efficiency appeared first on OmniKick.

Whatever you decide to sell, you need your own website, and there are several ways to build a great one. The first option is to address experts in the field who will develop a website according to your requirements. This method has its advantages in the form of reliability and high-quality results (depending on the chosen service provider, of course), but there’s one huge drawback – high cost. However, there is another option – to create a website independently via a dedicated online service.

There is a huge variety of top website builders. Our list includes only those that may be of interest from a practical or introductory point of view. To compose this rating we have tested more than 20 website builders and selected the best services, which for many years have taken leading positions on the market and remain in steady demand. Any of the presented solutions can be safely used in real conditions, as we have verified by personal experience.

A detailed description of each service will help you choose the right one to develop your own website for your business. But first – the basics.

What’s a Website Builder?

A website builder is a special online service, which you can use to create a professional website. Such builders are designed to make it easy for novices and pros alike. They are equipped with extensive functionality, which allows detailed construction of the site on the development stage.  

Most website builders do not require special design skills or experience. All you have to do is to follow the guidelines and tips of the service.

Website Builder Pros 

• Website builders are popular for a reason – they greatly simplify and speed up the process of website creation. We have described the main advantages of these services below.
• Website builders make the development process simple and fast. This is the main reason to use these services to create your own site for eCommerce.
• Advanced services allow you to create a website of almost any kind. Apart from a professional eCommerce website, you can also build a landing page with basic information about your company, product, or service. You also have the opportunity to create a professional corporate portal for business. 
• Various online stores and blogs that contain a large selection of thematic and classic templates are also very popular. You can quickly find a suitable basis for your future website. In addition, ready-made templates can be modified and complemented with different sections, features, menus, widgets, etc. 
• Most high-quality website builders can work with sites of large volume, which can be built from scratch or upgraded with individual components, e.g. videos, text, graphics, apps, etc.
• Your website data is stored on a third-party hosting service, so you will have constant access to it from any device. In addition, some services allow you to transfer sites from one service to another.

Website Builder Cons

• As a result of development, you will most likely get a website with a rather template look. The design may not look unique. However, this can be avoided if you add your own details to the template at the stage of creation.
• Modifying your website is only available via the service used to build it. Sometimes, website building services do not allow you to transfer your site from one hosting service to another. As a result, you will have to pay regular rent so that your resource will continue to function. Some services provide the opportunity to change hosting but for a certain fee.
• Since website development services restrict access to editing certain parts of the code, you may have problems with promoting your website. This is due to the fact that you will not be able to introduce software modules, plugins, scripts, etc. However, to promote your site, you can still use built-in paid functions.

How to Choose a Website Builder for Your eCommerce Business

When choosing a website builder, you can be guided by a variety of reasons, e.g. your friend recommendations, online reviews, ads, etc. However, you need to have a clear understanding of what your business needs. If you have just a few products, then you need one solution, if you have many goods, it’s quite another. Much depends on your product/service characteristics. Additionally, keep in mind your tech-savvy skills.

Let’s take a closer look at the criteria for evaluating online shopping platforms.

Here’s what questions and points you have to consider:

1. Cost per month. If the cost of hosting the site will eat up the lion’s share of profits, then why would you need such an online store at all? There are free, conditionally free, and costly platforms on the market – plenty to choose from.
2. Is there a free trial period? This question matters because you do not want to buy a pig in a poke. Suppose you pay for a year in advance, and then you find that the functionality is not suitable for your business or find it difficult to manage the site. If there is a trial period, you can check it all from the get-go.
3. Does the site provide any bonuses at registration? It’s clear that each bonus is just a “lure” (who else but you know), however, sometimes, such bonuses are quite attractive, and can save you a penny (e.g., a free domain).
4. Is it easy enough to create a website yourself? Does the developer site take care of installation, software updates, hosting, and SSL security to leave you more time to implement your ideas?
5. Can you use your own domain? Your website address must be attractive. If you are given a third-level domain like “clothes.buy.com” at registration, where “buy.com” is the address of the site itself, it’s not really attractive.
6. What about tech support? The support team must be caring, experienced, accessible, and quick to respond by phone or in live chat. Ideally, you should have a personal manager that you can ask anything. If there is only a chat room with a bot, it’s obviously not good. You’re going to have to either solve problems yourself or wait a long time to get real help (and sometimes, there are situations where procrastination is fatal). Alternatively, if it’s still an AI-helper, then it should be able to help you with design, successful block placement, color palette choices, etc. 
7. How many templates? Are they any good? You want your site to be beautiful and unique, not like your competitor’s online store, right? So you need to look for a platform with a large selection of quality templates. It’s great if there will be about 200 templates or more.
8. Comprehensive visual editor. If you build a personal website manually, the visual editor must be clear and easy to use. Usually, reputable website builders have convenient drag-and-drop editors – you just have to set simple settings. If nothing is clear, or you need some help, then it’s easier to make a stand-alone site.
9. An ability to create custom modules. This is important for those who have an expert developer on standby, or for those who know how to code themselves. If you want to make a truly custom site for yourself, pay attention to this.
10. Can you build a full-fledged online store on the platform, with all the features you need?
11. Is there any external integration with various online services and tools? 
12. Are there product comparisons, analytics tools, forms, counters, event schedules, online chats, customer databases, etc.? 
13. Will your site be easy to find in Google? This will make things much easier for your customers.
14. What payment methods can you add to the site?
15. How easy is it to change prices on the site? Is there a bulk price change? Can you set up promotions? If you can’t provide customers with up-to-date prices, it will affect both sales and your brand status.
16. Further search engine promotion. This includes creating CNCs, convenient filling of meta tags, and adding content to the site.
17. Can you use your own hosting provider? Sooner or later you will want autonomy. However, creating a website from scratch implies new expenses. If you can move your site from the builder to your hosting, it’s just great! You will be able to test the niche via the builder, and once your sales go up, you can move your resource to a separate hosting.
18. Is your future website going to be optimized for all mobile devices automatically? Will it look great on every screen?

Also, the functionality requirements can be specified in the specifications.

Now you know what aspects you need to consider. The question is: what website builder to choose for your eCommerce site?

We have reviewed a few of the best website builders available on the Web to create a professional online store with minimal effort and cost. Read on to find out more!

Top 9 eCommerce Website Builders

The following services are optimal to use when developing standard websites, including online stores. These website builders are distinguished by a wide range of tools and simple functionality. 

Get acquainted with the best website builders on the Web by studying the information below.

PrestaShop 

PrestaShop is among the most popular and well-known online constructors to develop online stores. PrestaShop has incredible features that help create a product of almost any type and scale. It’s especially recommended for novice entrepreneurs with small and medium-sized businesses.

The site supports 70 languages, which is another reason for its popularity. Also, the service is equipped with 120 built-in extensions and offers more than 300 different functions. In 2010 and 2011, it was the number one service provider in the competition for the best e-commerce applications.

PrestaShop is a free eCommerce platform, perfect for those who start running an eCommerce business from scratch. This is due to favorable offers for customers, e.g. basic functions are free of charge, and you will only have to pay for additional extensions (themes, modules, templates, etc.). PrestaShop offers security, for your personal data, flexibility, more than 600 features, and over 5000 templates/themes to choose from.

You can pay for the final product directly after the evaluation of the final design, structure, and modules. If you are not satisfied with your new online store, you can go through the process of creation anew.

There are a few disadvantages, as well. PrestaShop heavily loads the server, so third-party hosting is recommended. Also, the cost of the service can be too high for some. This is due to the fact that most of the users are in the U.S. and Europe.

You can download the basic set of the builder from the official store.

Weebly 

Weebly service is insanely famous in the U.S. With the help of this website builder, you can create any kind of website: online stores, portfolios, landing pages, blogs, etc.

The platform offers a large selection of built-in widgets, which allow you to create a professional website designed to your liking, literally piece by piece. In addition, you don’t need to have any tech skills to use this feature. The simplicity of the interface makes it understandable for any user.

Weebly contains an extensive range of design layouts (paid and free). You can find them by choosing the desired category in the menu. Moreover, the platform offers additional features like online store management, statistics, product import/export, advertising, and marketing tools.

The main drawback of the service is its high prices and transaction fees for sites built on it. Store maintenance costs start from $12 per month. You can find more information about prices on their official website.

Wix  

Wix is one of the most popular online platforms to build and edit online stores, portfolios, blogs, communities, personal business one-page sites, studios, institutions, etc.

The simplicity and functionality of the service make it popular among users around the world. In addition, this service allows you to develop even large professional websites with a lot of elements. All this can be done without any programming skills.

Additionally, if you have enough experience in this area, you can use their visual editor (Velo) to add custom functionality and interactions using Velo APIs and enjoy serverless coding in both the front-end and backend. 

Wix has great AI for web design. In other words, the service can independently build an online store according to the specified requirements with minimal intervention in the process.

This site contains more than 500 design templates for users to choose from. In addition, the platform offers about 200 solutions and services to promote and expand your own brand.

The overloaded interface of the service slightly reduces its demand among users. but the popularity of Wix remains stable for many years.

Also, a significant drawback of Wix is that it does not provide statistics on website visits and has some difficulties with SEO optimization. Many people are confused by the advertising embedded in the sites, which can not be removed even when buying a paid tariff. The basic eCommerce plan will cost you $17/month. This includes secure online payments, price plans, regular payments, user profiles, personal domain (1-year free), ad-free experience (no Wix ads), continued data import, 5-hour video storage, 75$ for commercials 24/7 support, etc.

Webflow 

This online platform with a flexible CMS can be used to build a professional, custom eCommerce store, custom blog, portfolio, and other types of sites. You can experience the power of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in a 100% visual canvas. The exceptional functionality and simplicity of the visual editor allow users to work with it even if they have no programming skills. Also, Webflow allows creating web pages with a number of blocks (columns, forms, lists, different animations, sliders, etc).

You can choose a free plan that includes two full sites (with 50 elements each). However, this does not include the development of an online store.

Webflow contains a large number of free and paid templates of different designs. There’s a huge library of video tutorials, courses, and guides. Advanced users can also take advantage of the code export function.

A disadvantage of Webflow is its costly price plans and 2% transaction fees, which are quite high when compared to other similar services. There are a few compatibility problems with browsers. For example, you are guaranteed to be able to use the created sites only with Google Chrome while stable performance with other browsers such as Firefox and Safari is questionable.

You can create an ordinary one-page site or a website for free by using the appropriate plan. If you choose their Standard plan to create an online store, you’ll need to pay at least $29 per month. The plan features include custom checkout, a customizable shopping cart, product fields, email customization, integrated CMS (for blogs), PayPal support, and automatic tax calculation. There’s also Google, Facebook, Instagram, and MailChimp integration and a custom mode. You can find more information about prices and features on the official website.

Shopify 

Shopify takes the leading position in popularity and prominence among online store builders. This platform is optimal for building sites of different sizes. It offers wonderful responsive and customizable themes, as well as all the eCommerce and point of sale features to run your business.

Shopify is trusted by 1,000,000 businesses worldwide and perfectly adapted for EU and US users to make the most of their websites. You can connect Facebook, Amazon, and Pinterest accounts to your online store to significantly expand your sales area. Shopify offers a single dashboard to manage your orders, shipping, and payments.

Shopify’s functional and well-thought-out visual editor makes the service a reputable platform for building and modifying full-fledged eCommerce websites. At the same time, you don’t need to put a lot of effort to create a marketplace from scratch.

Shopify offers users a list of paid and free modules from the official store. For your convenience, the service has separate categories and built-in tools that help you create and analyze digital marketing campaigns. In addition, when building, you can choose a suitable template from dozens of suggested options, which is Shopify’s significant advantage.

Also, the service offers a lot of efficient tools for SEO and advertising promotion of your developed online store. 

Tilda 

Tilda is on the list of well-known versatile website builders with a wide range of functionality and a wide variety of high-quality designs. This service allows you to build websites in a modular fashion. The total number of pre-designed blocks is 550. 

With Tilda, you can create online stores, company portals, sites of organizations, landing pages, portfolios, blogs, personal pages, and presentations.

Tilda allows you to quickly and easily build online stores of large size – expect a huge variety of templates. You can also build your website from scratch using Zero Block (visual editor), as well as add videos, widgets, etc to your existing site. Tilda allows you to connect your own domain to any of their projects, which are automatically optimized for all screen types. 

In addition, Tilda makes it possible to create catalogs, portfolios, and product pages. Once developed, these projects are easy to edit using a set of tools and can be integrated with Google Analytics, MailChimp, Trello, UniSender, Slack, and others. Additionally, the designer offers great indexation and customizable SEO settings for every web page.

It may be not the best service for building a really complex website, but do you really need one? Even Adidas uses their services! Try Tilda for free or grow your project with premium features (e.g. your own domain connection) from $10 per month. 

Mozello 

This builder belongs to the range of free services for creating websites. Mozello’s main specialization is the development of online stores, business pages, and blogs.

The service contains 48 high-quality design layouts (including paid ones). Each of them is structured by site type and can be customized. You can also edit the created product manually using Javascript, HTML, or CSS.

A significant advantage of Mozello is its dashboard, which is fully adapted for ordinary users. 

With Mozello you can actually create a fully-optimized website with a convenient catalog in 20 minutes! No coding skills required! Your new website will allow you to sell automatically 24/7, accept payments, and take advantage of customizable delivery options. Moreover, you can also expect powerful marketing and SEO features, multiple language support, and a convenient shopping cart. You can also expect reasonable prices.

One of the disadvantages is the impossibility of bulk import of products. This makes Mozello unsuitable for large-sized online stores. Also, the service does not have a built-in drag-and-drop editor function, which can lead to time-consuming site creation.

The service has a rather modest choice of extensions and modules, and the text formatting can be confused. The same goes for uploading images.

Furthermore, Mozello does not support all payment systems, which makes it difficult for users to place orders in online stores.

Bookmark 

Bookmark is a well-known cloud-based web design service for creating online stores and landing pages. The service stands out among others thanks to a powerful AI-based editor, AIDA. This allows you to create and customize an online store or another website without much effort. All you have to do is to specify the main requirements for the final product. After completing the questionnaire, AI selects the best option for the structure of the site, based on the specified data. In addition, at this stage, the service provides a few suitable design templates.

The site builder has a large library of themes and videos (over 1.5m) which you can use to design your own website. Bookmark has a built-in eCommerce engine, making it easy to create a large online store. Multilingual localization is available (over 50 languages available). Powerful marketing and SEO tools of the platform will help you promote your website and increase sales.

Bookmark has a few disadvantages: inconvenient manual one-page site building, sort of unreadable fonts in the Bookmark editor, and fairly high plan prices.

Site123 

Site123 is known for its simplest functionality and useful free features. This service is optimal for developing an online store, landings, blogs, or business-card sites.

This platform is in high demand among users with no coding or design skills. In addition, novice entrepreneurs can build an online store with this service without much effort and money.

There’s a simple visual editor that is easy to work with. When developing a site, you can also choose if it’s going to be a one-page or multi-page project. In addition, users have the ability to add modules to specific pages. And the built-in application store has a large number of different plugins, e.g. analytics and marketing tools, live chat, etc.

The service automatically selects the best design templates for your website subject. Customization tools are also available to change the layout, style, fonts, menu options, etc. Site123 is equipped with a multilingual localization, which has more than 20 languages.

Users highlight several disadvantages starting with the limited functionality and ending with rather monotonous built-in design templates. In addition, there is no opportunity to edit layouts manually. The third disadvantage is a fairly low bandwidth limit (up to 5 GB for a paid plan). But these disadvantages all fade in the background of what this service can actually provide for your business. You can use Site123 for creating small and medium-sized stores.

Summary

Currently, there is a large range of online website builders. Therefore, users try to choose the service that offers good conditions and is characterized by convenient and simple functionality. In addition, the selected CMS must meet the requirements and perform 100% of the tasks.

To create a website, we recommend using free services first, e.g. Site123, Webflow, WordPress, etc. If these sites are not enough, you can take advantage of a free trial period using one of the paid services mentioned above.

It’s advisable to create online stores using professional website builders with CMS and eCommerce modules. 

Your choice should be based on your business goals and the characteristics of your future online store. The best website builders for trading platforms are PrestaShop, Webflow, and WIX.

The post Best eCommerce Website Builders appeared first on OmniKick.

Whatever business niche you are in, there are always experts that lead the way. These experts are known as influencers. They have clout with other people within the niche. 

Depending on the niche, influencers might have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers. And the best part here is that these influencers can persuade their followers to buy any kind of product/service. 

In other words, a single endorsement from an influencer can skyrocket your sales drastically. 

That’s why every business owner wants to build a partnership with niche-related influencers. 

In this guide, you will find out how to benefit from influencer marketing and increase your sales with the help of influencers organically. 

Let’s start!

The Essence of Influencer Marketing 

As you already guessed, influencer marketing is all about building a partnership with niche-related influencers that would help you promote your product or service.

As a rule, influencers have two significant characteristics:

• People follow them immensely

Have you ever thought about why people start following future influencers?

Because influencers create useful high-quality content. And share it across popular web-platforms. People have free access to the content. They consume it and decide whether they like it or not. 

Eventually, if they like content, they start following this content creator across social channels or by subscribing to the newsletter on a website. The more people follow this expert, the more chances this person gets to becoming a niche influencer. 

Especially, the representatives of startups are curious about exploring new strategies. They want to know how to build their business, even if it is a non-profit startup. 

For instance, one of the most notable influencers in the SEO industry is Rand Fishkin. He has over 440K followers on Twitter only.

Keep in mind this nuance and always verify the number of followers a certain influencer has.

• They are true leaders and people tend to listen to them

First of all, don’t confuse “influence” with “popularity.” There is a huge difference between these two notions. If a person has just an army of followers, that would be “popularity.” But if this very person persuades these followers to take any action – that would be “influence.”

Is Influencer Marketing Truly Effective?

You wouldn’t read this post if influencer marketing weren’t effective. Thus, let’s review the benefits of influencer marketing right off the bat. 

• It is all about persuasion – nothing more 

If one person can persuade a group of people to take some action (to buy anything), it would be an example of psychological manipulation. Therefore, there is no need to find some techniques that would allow affecting people’s behavior. Just know the following psychological triggers:

• Influencer authority. It should be mentioned that influencers are those people who know what they do. They are always sure of what they say. As a result, they inspire respect and other people follow them. 
• Social proof. Influencers are popular and have lots of followers/subscribers. It is a sign that people trust them. Thus, you will trust the influencer as well.
• Affinity. You know that people prefer to help those individuals they like. Hence, there are more chances that a niche-related influencer will be more likely to understand your issue than the people outside the niche. 
• Law of reciprocity. It is a well-known fact that people try to pay back what they receive from others. The influencers suggest content that is a kind of a guide to other people who build a business. 
• Commitment. By clicking “like”, “share”, “follow”, and “subscribe” people show their commitment to the influencers. In other words, if you click “like” you agree with what the influencer says. 

To sum up, any influencer is a master of persuasion. 

• It takes lots of time to reach the top – but you don’t need that

It won’t be a surprise if you know who Gary Vaynerchuk is. He is one of the most famous influencers in the niche of entrepreneurship. He has 2.99M subscribers on YouTube. And over 2.4K videos recorded.

Do you imagine what it takes to become as popular as Gary is?

Yes, it might take years to repeat the success. Likely, you don’t need to do this hard work from scratch. You don’t need it because you can build a partnership with the influencer and promote your business using the power of persuasion the exact influencer has. 

• Consumers don’t trust businesses, they trust people

We understand the purpose of the ads companies run here and there. We don’t take companies’ promotions too seriously. We try to ignore all this stuff. 

Instead, we believe what our friends say about various products and services they use. We lean towards a user experience straight from the horse’s mouth. 

Hence, people will listen to the verdict of a live person rather than a brand itself. 

How to Start Doing Influencer Marketing

What does organic influencer marketing mean?

Organic influencer marketing is marked by building friendly relationships with the influencers who become the advocates of your brand/product/service. These relationships give you an opportunity not to pay money for spreading the word about your brand but having it promoted free of charge. 

So, how to find the influencers related to your niche and start doing organic influencer marketing? 

• Start with identifying your target audience 

Despite the fact that the number of followers people have is an influencer indication, you shouldn’t go off the deep end with this.

To get you a better understanding of this aspect, review the next few examples of niche-related influencers.

The first influencer is a rock-star Ozzy Osbourne AKA “Prince of Darkness.” He has 5.3M followers on Twitter.

The second influencer is a well-known SEO expert and marketer Neil Patel with over 383K followers on Twitter.

How do you think who would be the right influencer to build a connection with? (taking into account that you own a marketing agency.)

You are correct. Neil Patel is the right influencer to build your relationships. He will help you promote your agency so far. While Ozzy Osbourne with his 5.3M followers is out of your niche. Even if he promotes your agency, you won’t get as many potential leads as you could working with Neil. 

Why?

Because it is not organic influencer marketing we are talking about. 

To conclude, you must make sure your potential influencer deals with your target audience. And if you know nothing about your target audience, you should create a buyer persona for the business you run. Plus, don’t forget to keep an eye on customer analytics that will help you understand your target audience behavior better. 

By having the data you need, you can start identifying the best influencers to work with. 

• The influencers to choose from 

Since you are aware of who the representatives of your target audience are, it is time to find niche-related influencers. 

It should be mentioned that influencers are split into three main groups. Let’s review them:

1. a) Small fish

This type of influencer represents experts with a small audience that follows them. These influencers have just stepped into the game and have less traction within the niche.

1. b) Big fish

This type of influencer represents experts with a wide audience. If you make a deal with these experts, make sure that their endorsement will impact your business.

1. c) Sharks

True influencers who have hundreds of thousands of followers. They really can create a buzz around your business. They are super-stars, celebrities, and gods of the niche you are working in. It is quite hard to reach them out. But the game is worth the candle. 

When you build a list of influencers to work with, make sure it consists of the representatives of each of these three groups.

• How to find influencers

First and foremost, you should know what channels influencers use to communicate with the audience. These channels are:

• Social media 
• Blogs
• Communities
• Podcasts

Now, let’s see how to find these channels.

1. a) Online conferences

Online summits and conferences are the events that influencers attend regularly. Even now during a COVID-19 pandemic, there are tons of streams that host different experts across various niches. 

If you know at least one influencer from your niche, you can find out where this person participated at the conferences. Everything that you need to do is to take the influencer’s image and click a “Search Google for Image” option. 

Afterwards, add a query “conferences” in the search box.

By having the suggested conferences you can discover more influencers to connect with.

1. b) Curated lists

Influencer marketing is not a brand-new wave of promoting your business. And you are not the only person who is exploring this field. 

Taking the above said into account, there are already compiled lists of influencers that you can find on the web. Go to Google and type the following query:

“top {niche} influencers” 

And voila, rip the benefits.

By the way, you can use this search command to find whatever “top” information you need. Just replace “influencers” with what you are looking for – podcasters, bloggers, etc. What’s more important, if you practice affiliate marketing, you can find dozens of affiliate programs in the same way.

1. c) Marketplaces

Influencer marketing is a rapidly growing industry. Therefore, there are various marketplaces available on the Internet that connect business owners with influencers. 

You can find these marketplaces on Google easily. Here are a few examples of them: Influence.co, Followerwonk, etc. 

• Connect with influencers and build strong relationships

Keep in mind that organic influencer marketing takes lots of time before the influencers start working with you.

You need to attract their attention and show your loyalty. And give them something that would bring any value to their brand, business, or personality. 

Don’t dare to ask whatever you need in return. Take your time and you will see the best moment to ask. 

How to give value to the influencers?

1. a) Influencers want engagement – give it to them via content

It is not a secret that influencers are content creators. Doesn’t matter what types of content they create. They want their blog posts to be read, podcasts to be listened to, videos to be watched. 

Help them with this!

Read, listen and watch. Be an active consumer of the content they produce. Comment it, say what you like/dislike, share on your socials. 

Sometimes these experts ask their audience’s opinion or ask for help. Don’t neglect this. It will be your first attempt to attract their attention. 

1. b) Suggest your help (literally)

Influencers work on different projects all the time. You can help them by adding some useful information. Plus, if you own a blog or a podcast, you can invite them to share their story. Everyone likes getting some additional exposure. 

Other than that, you can help with publishing their content by repurposing it into other content types. 

For example, you can create any kind of visual content, like a flowchart with the help of a flowchart maker tool. This would illustrate the same topic in a different visual way. And don’t forget to point out the source this information has been taken from.  

To Sum up 

Influencer marketing is a powerful weapon for promoting your business. The thing is that you must know how to use it correctly. 

This guide has introduced to you the basics of influencer marketing. While there are many other ways of working with influencers. 

If you have never tried influencer marketing in your practice, you should start doing it right now!

The post Everything You Need to Know About Influencer Marketing appeared first on OmniKick.

As a B2B marketer responsible for running a long sales cycle, it’s critical you nurture your audience with relevant and useful messages regularly.

Traditionally, marketers have used email and social media as their main communication channels. In recent years, a new technology has risen to compete with these traditional methods: we are talking about push notifications.

If you want to learn more about how you can leverage the power of push notifications for your B2B business, this article will show you why you need push notifications and how to get started with your first campaign.

Why you need to use push notifications in your B2B marketing strategy

A push notification is a type of message that shows in a user’s browser or mobile device, which they receive after signing up for the company’s notification messages. 

Throughout this guide, you will see that push notifications work similarly to a traditional email marketing campaign. In a sense, the only difference between the two is the medium in which you send your messages; the strategy to approach both channels is similar in almost every way.

Despite its similarities, a Digital Commerce 360 survey found that 72% of businesses find mobile and web-based push notifications to have an equal or greater ROI than email.

Push notifications are a great addition to your B2B content marketing stack, as they complement your other marketing channels, such as paid advertising, email, and social media.

You can use push notifications to communicate with your audience at every stage of the sales cycle. Your push notifications must remain relevant and useful for your target audience consistently to increase your marketing campaign’s effectiveness.

Some experts say push notifications are the future of marketing automation because they allow companies to send more personal and direct communication with their target audiences. In fact, most push notification platforms will enable you to send messages through messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Gmail, and Messenger.

How to create push notifications for a B2B brand

Step #1: Define your goals

Before you can start using push notifications for your B2B company, you need to decide how you want to use them. To do that, you need to define your goals.

As a communication channel, push notifications serve multiple purposes:

• Promoting new content or offers: You can update your subscribers to receive your latest content as soon as you publish it. The same goes for every time you launch a new product or service.
• Offering discounts: If you want a quick boost of sales, push notifications will help you provide discounts to your subscribers.
• Reminding customers about abandoned carts: Abandoned carts are one of the best opportunities to increase sales for an ecommerce business. You can use push notifications to message customers who abandon their carts to recover your lost sales.
• Notifying users about product updates: You can message your users about new updates that improve on your existing software tool along with any other company news.
• Promoting a lead generation campaign: You can retarget your leads with push notifications to continue with their nurturing.

After you have defined a goal, you will have a much easier time defining your target audience, which you will use to determine your push notifications’ targeting options later on.

Step #2: Define your push notification type 

After you decide on your goal, you need to think about the type of push notification you will use. There are two options you have available:

• In-app push notifications: These are notifications users receive on their phones, both when using it or in the lock screen (which means that the user can see them without having to open the app).
• Web-based push notifications: These notifications appear in the user’s web browser.

In-app push notifications show more targeted messages related to the app itself. As the name suggests, you can only use them if you have an app.

Web-based push notifications allow you to bring your subscribers back to your site. Since the messages aren’t context-sensitive as with in-app notifications, you can use this type of notification for any of the five options shown in the previous step.

If you don’t have an app, then your only option is to use web-based push notifications. In the rest of this article, we will assume that’s the case.

Step #3: Build your push list

Just like you need to build an email list for your email marketing efforts, you need to build a push list by offering a free, valuable gift to your visitors. The goal is to entice them to receive your push notifications on their browser voluntarily.

The gift you use will depend on the goal you defined in the first step. For example, to build a push notifications list to promote new content, you can offer your visitors a special ebook. Alternatively, you can offer them to send them the latest content updates, although that option is overused and not as effective as providing a unique offer.

One way to find the best gift to offer your visitors is to reverse engineer your goal. For example, if you want to send new product offers to your list, you can give them a discount for a first purchase, which will drive conversions in the future.

After you define an offer, you need to define the pages you will show your offer on. As a rule of thumb, the closer your offer is to your conversion goal, the better. For example, if your goal is to get readers to check your newest content, show your offer in your blog pages, which is where your readers are.

Finally, define the triggers that will cause the push notification to appear. In the previous example, the trigger would be a blog page visit. You can also use other triggers, such as time on site, number of sessions, and more.

Step #4: Write your push notification

Writing your push notifications requires a great dose of copywriting skills. A push notification is closer to an ad than to a social media message—you need to sell your offer, even if it’s free. 

There are several elements you must use to write your push notification messages, each one requiring special attention. You need to make sure every aspect is aligned with your goal and offer to increase your chances of success.

• Headline: The headline is the most important part of your notification because it’s what defines whether a user will read the rest of it and take action on your offer. As David Ogilvy once said, “On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
• Description: The messages caught the visitor’s attention; the description closes the deal. Use short sentences with action words that persuade your users to take action. Consider using emojis, which have been shown to increase open rates by 85%.
• Hero image: A hero image adds context to the message, increasing its appeal. A great hero image also increases the chances a user will see your notification and read it. Pick an image that fits your headline and offer.
• The landing page’s URL: Show the URL of the landing page you are sending your visitors to. Most likely, that will be your blog, checkout, or product page.
• Call-to-action (CTA): Your CTA defines the action the user must take to receive the promoted offer. It must also align with your goal—e.g., “Finish Checkout” for an abandoned cart notification, “Read More” for a top-of-the-funnel content piece, and so on.
• An icon: The icon should show your brand’s logo, so the user immediately knows who’s messaging them. Alternatively, you can use an attention-grabbing image similar to the hero image you used.

Length is a key factor that affects your click-through rates (CTR). A study by Upland found that the shorter the message, the higher the CTR. While this study doesn’t suggest making your messages unnecessarily short, you shoulcruciald compress your messages in the shortest space possible to increase your CTR.

When writing your push notification messages, leverage all your buyer information in your favor. Doing so will increase their relevance, thus increasing the perceived value the users receive. For example, if you know your buyers are time-strapped executives, use scarcity; if your buyers have small budgets, use discounts; if you target existing customers, promote your loyalty program.

Whenever possible, use the triggers defined previously to personalize your message further, like showing the products to users who abandoned their carts.

Source

Time is another key factor you must weigh in your push messaging strategy. For an abandoned cart, that would be anywhere from an hour after the visitor left the site to a day, at most.

New subscribers often respond better to push notifications as they aren’t used to reading them; after a while, they may develop “banner blindness” and ignore them. Therefore, your push strategy should send the most important messages while the subscriber is still “fresh” and send the least important ones after a week or more has passed.

Step #5: Send your push notifications

After you have written your push notifications, you need to define the timing and segments you will send them to.

You must get the timing right, as you want to send your push messages when your subscribers are active online. When you are getting started, send your push notifications when you send your emails and social media messages. Eventually, you can run tests to find the right timing (more on this later).

You also need to segment your audience properly, which will increase your messages’ CTR and conversion rates. There are several segments you can use, the most common being:

• New subscribers: These are the subscribers who signed up recently. Each push platform has its own time range to determine this factor; 30 days is the most common.
• Engaged subscribers: These are the subscribers who have clicked on a recent message. Make sure you take the content they have engaged with to improve your messages even further.
• Operating system: Each operating system—Android, Windows, iOS—has different demographics and restrictions. You can use this information to target your messages appropriately.
• Browser: Each browser has its own limitations and user bases, which you must consider in your messaging.
• All subscribers: Be careful when you use this segment because not everyone will find your messages equally relevant. You should only use it when promoting a popular offer such as a time-sensitive discount or breakthrough company news.

To identify the best segments for your push notification strategy, analyze your goal and users. You want to target a segment that best fits your campaign objectives.

Step #6: Run an A/B test

Your push notification campaign will always need refining, both in its messaging and its targeting. You can do so by running A/B tests regularly. Testing your campaigns will improve your marketing strategy as you will learn new ways to write your push notifications that improve your KPIs. In fact, after running an A/B test, the Chicago Tribune experienced a 56% increase in their open rates.

To run an A/B test, you first need to define what you want to improve. Check your data and see what’s not working. It could be your impression volume, open rates, your CTR, your conversion rates, etc. Define a benchmark, and think about the potential cause. Then, define a set of tests to fix the cause.

For example, if you see low open rates, you could test new headlines, new hero images, new times, and more. You can test almost everything related to your push notification campaigns, including:

• Segments
• Headline formulas
• Colors
• Hero images
• Offers

Run the A/B tests by implementing the changes, and keep track of the results. As you see your changes improve your results, implement the changes to all your campaigns accordingly.

Wrap up

Push notifications are a new marketing methodology that will improve the way you communicate with your target audience. With the help of an omnichannel platform like OmniKick, you will be able to send better messages, reach new audiences, and build stronger relationships with them. It’s time you try it so you can make the most out of this novel opportunity.

The post How B2B businesses can harness the power of push notifications appeared first on OmniKick.

Most eCommerce brands know that two statistics matter when it comes to business success: user acquisition and conversion rate. Knowing how to convert website visits into successful purchases is essential and warrants a more in-depth approach. 

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is a process marketers use to improve the shopping experience – and drive specific KPIs (key performance indicators), such as sales. Without CRO, growth can stagnate, leaving brands without actionable next steps, even if many visitors are coming to the site. 

Today I’ll share several CRO tips eCommerce websites can use to improve conversion rates.

“CRO is the most important marketing activity because it makes every visitor exponentially more valuable” – Rand Fishkin.

What is a Conversion?

It’s good to start here because it’s not uncommon to have misinformation about what a conversion is or isn’t. A conversion is any key performance indicator (KPI) that the brand finds valuable. That can be a sale or something else entirely, but conversion doesn’t happen unless we optimize for it.

Here are some typical conversions for eCommerce brands.

• A sale is won.
• The prospect adds a product to the wish list.
• The person adds a product to the cart.
• Email subscription.
• The user shares a product or page on social media.

The conversion rate is the percentage of visitors that complete the desired action after visiting a website.

The Average eCommerce Conversion Rate

The average eCommerce conversion rate is between one and two percent. However, it’s possible to increase conversion rates beyond those numbers with CRO.

The objective of CRO is to understand what persuasion tactics and type of content will convince more customers to buy from the brand, furthering the website’s goals.

CRO focuses on the following.

• It aims to increase the motivation of visitors.
• Providing users with a better user experience
• Producing more engaging and relevant content

The Fundamentals to Increasing Your Conversion Rate

The best gains from CRO occur when two things are met: the eCommerce website receives lots of traffic and revenue. The ideal traffic number is at least 100,000 visitors, and one percent of that should be conversions. However, most websites do not receive that kind of traffic. Yet, sites on the low-end can still benefit from CRO by doing things in a certain way.

The obvious thing a website can do is gain more traffic to increase conversions. But gaining more traffic to a website won’t result in measurable improvements unless the site nails all the other important conversion factors. Even if the website has the best copy imaginable, a distasteful design can drive potential customers away quickly.

I’m not suggesting that having great copy and increasing traffic isn’t important because they are top on the list. Rather that when it comes to eCommerce, other on-page factors matter as well.

Additionally, CRO doesn’t apply to eCommerce brands alone, and any website, commercial or otherwise, can benefit from it. CRO makes your existing website traffic and customers a greater asset by making favorable actions more likely to occur.

Advanced Conversion Rate Optimization Tips

Now, for some actionable CRO tips that you can start implementing today. 

While the following tips are useful, don’t assume all will work for a website – take the specifics of the business situation into account before applying anything.

1. Remove Impediments and Add Motivators

Generally, when we can increase the attractiveness of our website and offer, more visitors will convert. However, that’s never the case when there are too many impediments or obstacles. For example, people shouldn’t have to register for an account to checkout. 

Nike removes the obstacle of creating an account to shop by offering guest checkout.

With guest checkout, the customer only provides the necessary information for payment and delivery.

Another example of an impediment is shipping prices. If a customer feels the shipping price is too high, the person may not complete the transaction. While eCommerce brands can’t do much to influence the cost of shipping, there are other ways to diminish this obstacle, such as offering free shipping when the order value reaches a certain amount.

To motivate consumers to shop, we need motivating factors (aka motivators). For example, every time I’m interested in a product on Amazon, I always click-through to read consumer reviews.

Social proof is a proven way of motivating customers to buy or convert. However, many online stores still underutilize it. That’s because many do not have a system for collecting reviews. 

Ecommerce brands that want more customer reviews should create a system that solicits feedback from customers — for instance, sending an email to customers four days after the product delivery. Brands can also incentivize customers to provide reviews in various ways, such as offering a small discount on the next purchase. 

2. Use Video to Showcase Product Features

Video can clear up confusion and better showcase the features, including the benefits of a product – especially for complex products where the potential for confusion is high. Plus, people naturally gravitate toward video content as it’s an easier medium for conveying ideas.

While producing high-quality videos requires time and money, the potential long-term payoff is worth it. Aside from describing how a product works, eCommerce brands can get more creative with product videos.

Here’s a great example from Nine Line. In less than 30 seconds, the brand conveyed the product benefit humorously.

Whether videos are a must-have will depend on what’s being sold. For example, a gym equipment web store can benefit greatly by using video, but a website that sells audiobooks doesn’t necessarily require one.

3. Suggest Additional Products to Customers Before Checkout

Motivating customers to buy additional products is challenging. However, with some careful planning and a well-placed call-to-action, a website can increase its average order value.

Brands can customize or add-on a cross-sell system or acquire an eCommerce solution that already has cross-selling capabilities built-in right out the gate. For example, WooCommerce is an eCommerce platform that comes with cross-selling capabilities. The feature works by suggesting related products based on what the customer already has in the cart.

An example of a brand that cross-sells well is the REI co-op. The company suggests items in a popup that appears after users hit the ‘Add to Cart’ button.

4. Apply Color Psychology

Colors can convey different meanings, emotions and affect moods. However, according to research, it’s not all cut and dry. 

Our personal preference, upbringing, experiences, culture, and other elements determine the effect a particular color has on us. So even though colors can impact marketing outcomes, specific colors can’t evoke universal emotions. For example, we can’t say that blue makes everyone feel a brand is trustworthy.

Instead, think of applying color psychology in broader ways by predicting what is best based on the products and target audience. Here are some studies to help drive the point home.

• A study titled The Interactive Effects of Colors found that choosing appropriate colors for a brand can add immediate value through perceived appropriateness. That means the colors have to match the products being sold.
• Another study, Exciting Red and Competent Blue revealed that colors greatly affect purchasing intent since colors can impact consumer perception. In other words, the ‘personality’ of a brand is influenced by colors.
• Our brains respond better to recognizable brands, making color even more significant when creating a brand identity. 

The color appropriateness as it relates to the product being sold is more crucial than any particular color.

5. Test Multiple Options

An eCommerce brand’s conversion rate is undoubtedly based mainly on how attractive the sales pages are to potential customers. That’s why brands must test several ideas or options concerning sales pages.

Companies can use experimentation software, such as Google Optimize 360 to save time, eliminate guesswork, and help hit those conversion rate optimization goals. With the right experimentation software, almost anyone can conduct thorough multivariable experiments and get the results required to make informed decisions. 

Testing is a critical aspect of growth that we should not overlook. With proper testing, brands can determine which online experiences perform better with users, allowing the business to make data-driven decisions and ensure positive impacts. 

Without testing, it’s impossible to know how effective any implemented changes are – correlation isn’t causation.

When applied consistently, testing can improve user experience, increase conversion rates, and even raise conversion values – happy people tend to buy more stuff.

If one is unsure about the website’s aspects to test out, start with the most critical sections or pages. Test aspects that facilitate sales or lead users to become customers, such as the checkout experience.

6. Use Email to Reduce Cart Abandonment

Most eCommerce brands want to reduce shopping cart abandonment, but few know where to start. A shopping cart abandonment occurs when customers add items to the cart but never complete the transaction. 

Every year trillions of dollars are left on the table because of incomplete transactions. A study of various industries found that over 80 percent of online shopping orders were abandoned.

One way of reducing cart abandonment is to send personalized emails – something Omnikick allows brands to do well. A great abandoned cart email has the following things.

• An attention-getting subject line.
• The email copy is great, short, and sweet.
• It provides a clear call-to-action (CTA).
• The email has good imagery.

Here’s an example from Bearsville Soap Company.

Img credit: ActiveCampaign

Think about what the audience would respond to and act accordingly. For example, creating a sense of urgency may be appropriate depending on the target demographics. The brand can offer a one-time coupon that is only valid for 24 hours.

When done right, email marketing is a powerful tool for eCommerce.

7. Experience Personalization

Customizing every shopper’s experience can improve customer experience, sales, brand image, and loyalty. That’s why the most successful eCommerce brands (e.g., Amazon) religiously use customer experience personalization. 

The moment a user logs into Amazon, the person is greeted with personalized links and offers based on past experiences. Mega eCommerce brands continuously collect data used to personalize experiences, keep customers engaged, and nurture relationships.

With eCommerce personalization, brands can show tailored offers or messages to customers based on historical data, such as behavior, shopping preference, links clicked, etc. For example, an eCommerce website can show specific products related to a customer’s last purchase or particular promotions as they browse web pages.

The possibilities are enormous, and eCommerce personalization is no longer out of reach for many companies. Brands can use AI-driven eCommerce personalization platforms to personalize the customers’ shopping experience – from discovery to the optimization of the user journey to purchase.

When businesses can continuously make customers feel happy and welcome, revenues tend to increase.

8. Get Heatmap or Session Recording Software

One way to see what people are doing on a website is to use session recording or heatmap software. Right now, HotJar is probably the best tool in that regard as it offers heat-mapping and session recordings.

These tools can help understand how users interact with websites on a high-level. 

• Heat-mapping software will show brands where people click the most along with cursor movement and scroll-depth details. 
• Session recording is an invaluable tool used to analyze consumer behavior in real-time. Recordings are typically stored so site owners can watch each one or some whenever convenient.

If any company wants to get down to the root cause of low conversion rates, a session recording or heatmapping snapshot can lead to sound conclusions.

The Relationship Between CRO and SEO

CRO goes hand-in-hand with SEO (search engine optimization) as both complement each other. SEO brings in organic traffic, and CRO ensures the brand makes the most out of it. Further, brands can use CRO research results to base SEO efforts and vice versa. 

Think of CRO as an SEO multiplier. The improvements made via CRO can improve SEO outcomes, and the same goes for when targeted traffic is increased through SEO. Regularly applying CRO and SEO creates a positive feedback loop for the eCommerce brand.

Here’s a quick look at how that happens.

• CRO increases revenue from the current website traffic.
• SEO increases the current website traffic.
• The brand is now making more revenue than it did before.
• The cycle continues as CRO and SEO continue to lend to the brand’s success. 

Start Now

The best action is to consider all of the conversion rate optimization tips laid out here, make necessary changes, and test assumptions. That way, your organization is more likely to come out victorious, with higher conversion rates. 

However, CRO isn’t a magic bullet. It may take months to gather enough data through research and analytics. Plus, like SEO, CRO is never truly complete because there’s always something that can be improved. Lastly, while smaller sites can benefit from CRO, websites with more traffic will benefit the most.

The post Advanced Conversion Rate Optimization Tips for eCommerce Brands appeared first on OmniKick.

Social media marketing is the trend these days and almost every business is doing it. From small startups to huge organizations, everyone is hopping on the bandwagon of making a strong social media presence. This has increased the competition between brands on social media 

According to Statista, 91.9% of U.S. businesses use social media for marketing and promotions. But it’s a hard pill to swallow that if you aren’t improvising on social media, you are way behind in the game.

Social media demands experimentation and improvisation!

In the world of technology, marketing is a lot of art. It involves taking creative risks and following your gut to build your business’s social media strength. But often marketers end up receiving the bad end of the deal. This can happen when you are a beginner at social media marketing or are too focussed on the right tricks that you avoid common pitfalls.

In this blog, I have talked about the common social media marketing mistakes to avoid when building a marketing strategy for your business. Let’s dig into them one by one and prepare you to create a fault-free social media marketing strategy.

15 Mistakes To Avoid While Creating A Social Media Marketing Strategy For Your Business

1. Discarding a social media marketing plan

It is said that if you want to succeed, creating a plan will induce your progress and define your pathway. This goes for social media marketing as well. If you want to achieve success on your social media platforms, creating a social media plan beforehand will give you a sense of direction regarding where things are moving. 

Firstly, understand your possibilities of scope. Moving forward, come up with a set of objectives you want to achieve, maximum and minimum budget frame, and a plan that induces actions. With this, it’s also important to know who you are talking to and what you want to communicate otherwise you are just driving on a straight road not knowing where it leads.

And as they say the building is only as strong as its foundation, your social media performance also needs a strong foundation that you can create through a social media marketing plan. 

Source

After this video went viral and touched the peaks of their benchmark, Old Spice changed its old social media tactics and embraced their new personality (hippie) that was liked more by the audience.

2. Assuming your audience is everyone

Would you give an alarm clock to a toddler or baby bath products to an old man?

No, right?

Because it would be of no use to them. Similarly, your social media stories and posts should also target the audience that can be or is already interested in your product/service. There are billions of people on social media platforms but not all of them fit into the list of your target audience.

To know who fits into that list, you need to create precise buyer personas. This should include their age, gender, demographics, interests, occupation, buying preferences and other vital information. According to that, fine-tune your brand voice so that your target audience can relate to your brand.

On social media platforms like Facebook, their inbuilt Facebook analytics can help you derive the demographics of your existing audience. This can easily boost your marketing efforts on Facebook and if you need more, this Facebook marketing ebook will guide you further.

For example, if you have an ecommerce store where you sell architecture related products, you need to research what architecture students and professionals are looking for to create more personalized content. You can’t sell architecture products to a non-architect user, no matter how creative you get!

3.  Failing to engage in conversations

Social media users are not looking for a one way experience; that’s the whole point of social media. They are seeking connections, conversations and interactions and as a brand wanting to succeed on social media, you need to give them the same.

Your single conversation can turn a user into a follower, and a follower into a customer. So, make a habit of replying to all the comments and enhance conversations through your content. Infact, having a conversation with your followers can make them trust as well as interact with your brand more.

Moreover, on social media platforms like Instagram, you can make their algorithm like you through a lot of comments on your posts. This is why it is recommended to never leave a comment dead on your social media posts, positive or negative.

The most simplest comments can also be turned into conversations and impact the audience. And that can happen only when you reply to all the comments like Netflix did.

4. Buying followers

This might sound tempting at first but can take a toll on your social media marketing success. First of all, buying followers is against the guidelines of every social media platform. 

Secondly, you are only paying for your social media platform to lose its essence because when you make a post, the more people like and comment on it, the more the algorithm prioritizes it as a good post and shows it to more users. But when you have fake followers that won’t respond to your post, it will be seen as content that isn’t useful, educational or entertaining by the algorithm. This decreases the overall solidity of your social media content.

Ads like this can tempt you instantly but all you have to remember is that you are chasing conversions and not your followers count. Because imagine that you notice a social media profile with 15,000 followers on Instagram, and when you scroll through their posts, you only see 50-100 likes. 

What will you conclude?

Either you will suspect fake followers or you will derive that the content is not good enough. Either of them doesn’t set a positive brand image. So be mindful of every action you take on social media and analyze its impact before taking it.

5. Relying too much on automation

If you are targeting humans, it shouldn’t always be with a machine. Your brand persona thrives on the human touch and when you rely too much on automation tools, you lose it.

Social media automation tools exist to help social media marketers, not to replace them. Imposing all the work on tools can make your brand sound impersonal which can result in reduced impact on the audience.

Because as a marketer you think of ways to delight, inform, entertain, and educate your audience while an automation tool doesn’t do any of that. Also, one should never deploy a social media automation tool to send auto direct messages because when you are having a conversation with your audience, it has to be personal that can develop a real connection.

If you are thinking about or already schedule the same posts on all the social media platforms then it’s time that you are definitely receiving the short end of the stick without even realizing it.

Users receive content differently on each social media platform. For example, infographics work well on Pinterest while on Instagram, it’s advisable to convert the infographic into a carousel post for better visibility and readability.

Infographic on Instagram with lower readability

Infographic converted into a carousel post

6. Using irrelevant hashtags

Hashtags are like a spot where brands and users from a common interest come together and explore. They play a crucial role in finding people of common interests and also to find potential audience for your brand.

Also, including hashtags in your post can help categorize your content but there is a thin line between using hashtags and using irrelevant hashtags. Instead of looking for hashtags with more audience, you should make SEO analysis to find hashtags that are relevant to your industry or content.

A single false step in using hashtags can lead to presenting a negative brand image in front of a large audience. Let me explain this to you with an example.

This particular hashtag #WhyIStayed talks about domestic violence and is a sensitive topic. DiGiorno Pizza used this hashtag as a marketing move and made fun of it which was deeply criticized by the audience and eventually, they had to delete it and apologize to their community.

This is what a wrong hashtag can do to your brand!

7. Treating all social media platforms the same

Every social media platform has its own set of advantages that you can make the most of. But before that, you need to know that the audience on each platform is different and they are expecting different things from each of them.

But wait, do you really need all the social media platforms for your social media marketing?

Ask yourself, ‘Does my business need to be on all social media platforms?’

For example, if you are a B2B company, LinkedIn (business-related and social) will be more beneficial to you than Pinterest (creative and personalized). Now when you have listed the social media platform your business will be at, try to know the audience on each one of them. Dig into what they are expecting from specific platforms. 

Are they expecting more videos on Instagram?

Are they looking for informative content on Facebook?

As soon as you start deriving these answers from experimentation, your social media marketing strategy will start moving in the right direction.

8. Not tracking analytics

To be up to date with your social media marketing strategy, you need to know the areas of improvement. And to know the improvement areas, you need to know the exact numbers behind your existing social media marketing strategy. These numbers include reach, impressions, engagement, conversions, etc.,

Insights into the past and present social media performance can play a huge role in improving the future of your business on social media. And, analytics is the catalyst to run businesses on social media platforms with constant improvement. With social media analytics, you can easily measure the quality of your audience, quality of engagement, post’s popularity, etc.

You can begin with using inbuilt analytics features on the social media platforms and to dig deep into your analytics, there are a bunch of social media analytics tools that you can use.

Preview of Facebook inbuilt analytics

Preview of Instagram inbuilt analytics

9. Avoiding, deleting, counterattacking negative comments

A negative comment is how you look at it. If you look at it as sheer criticism, you won’t be able to change that. If you choose to neglect it, it will only harvest more negative emotions. If you choose to delete it, you are just losing on a chance to improve and provide good customer service.

58% of tweets about negative customer experiences are still going unaddressed by companies on social media and this is never going to help your business. Instead, you can leverage the situation and uplift your customer service quality and build trust within your brand community.

Let me put it straight. Responding to the negative feedback can convert a complaining customer to a loyal customer. If you receive a negative comment, have a conversation with them on the same thread and after a while take it further to their personal inbox or an email.

This will not just make the customer happy but also show your audience that you care about your customers enough to respond and provide them solutions. 

Cuckoo’s Bakery is a fine example of how negative comments or feedback on social media should be dealt with.

10. Creating faceless content

Your target audience are humans, right?

And, humans can trust humans more than businesses. No matter how creative marketing messages you craft, the power of a human face on your marketing effort is undefeated.

Imagine two kinds of businesses. First is a business on social media with a bunch of posters and videos to promote their business without a single human face. And the other one is where their social media content involves testimonials, DIY videos, behind the scenes, etc. with human faces in all of them.

It is certain that the audience will relate more to the second company’s social media content. So now when you are creating a social media post or replying to a social media comment, don’t talk as a corporate machine instead, personalize it to address the user in a better way. 

For example, the following content is informative, and helpful but what more can be added to it is a human face that can make the audience relate to them more. Showing a face/s in your social media marketing can get your audience’s trust sooner than usual.

11. Making your content all about yourself

Social media is called ‘social’ media for a reason. As a business, it’s not a place just to promote your business without keeping the audience in mind. You have to be sociable because with the increasing number of businesses on social media, people are almost tired of promotional content.

There is no secret formula for this. You should divide your strategy according to the 80/20 rule to avoid a social media marketing mistake. According to this rule, 80% of your social media content should cater to the interests of your audience and should be shareable i.e., surprising facts, statistics, user-generated content. While only 20% of the content should be about your brand that inspires the audience to learn about your business and persuade them to follow your call to actions.

I am not denying on sales content because of course that is your social media goal. Only thing that you have to keep in mind is to be subtle with your promotional content like Oreo.

12. Not posting regularly

If you want to be a part of your audience’s life, you need to show up for them as much as possible. You can’t simply post twice a week and complain about not getting engagement or conversions.

Remember, consistency is the key!

There are thousands of brands that are sprawling to increase engagement and to stand out, you shouldn’t miss a single chance of getting noticed by the audience.

The best way to do that is by working on a social media calendar backed by a strong strategy. You can also utilize social media calendar tools and schedule your posts beforehand. This will make sure that you are consistent on social media and you will also have a greater impact on your audience.

Moreover with a social media plan, you will be able to analyze your progress and improvement areas better. But often in the rush of posting constantly, businesses end up posting non-valuable content. Posting regularly is impressive but not until the content is impressive as well.

Content calendar features of SocialPilot tool

13. Not integrating your paid and organic social media strategies 

With the increasing number of businesses and users on social media, organic content’s reach is not reaching many people as expected. Doesn’t matter if you made an interesting post, there are chances that it might not even reach the audience’s feed.

The primary goal of most of the businesses is to service and delight the existing customer through organic content and get new eyes on the business through paid ads. The integration of both can result in increased growth of the business and if you aren’t integrating it yet, it’s time to start it right away. This is how you can attempt to integrate it.

• Boost your best organic content
• Optimize all your posts (A/B testing)
• Match your organic content audience with your paid content audience
• Use retargeting ads
• Don’t pay for all the promotional posts
• Automate your posts
• Use social media analytics tools to know if any campaign needs to be readjusted

14. Not uploading videos on social media platforms

With the skyrocketing number of users and businesses on social media, the engagement rate of images and text-based content is overtook by videos.

Fact Check:

The average engagement rate on Facebook video posts is 6.13%, which is a higher engagement rate than any other type of content on Facebook. 

People looked at videos five times longer than static content.

If you aren’t integrating video in your strategy, you aren’t far away from declined growth due to this social media marketing mistake.

Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram are driving themselves more towards video content. Especially after the release of Facebook Live, Twitter Live, Instagram Live and Instagram Reels, the audience wants to be surrounded by video content. 

Videos on social media don’t just hook the audience’s attention but also drive more conversions if you create an optimized video with a proper call to action.

Look at how IKEA promoted their anti-slip mat in such a subtle manner through a video on Instagram.

Source

15. Sharing only your content

Marketers often feel that sharing curated content doesn’t fulfil their primary goals i.e., sales, revenue, conversions, etc. But what they don’t realize is the power of diversified content. Your existing audience might get bored of your content over time and more importantly, your content will always be in the predicted zone.

What you can do to surprise your audience is share content of other businesses, influencers, etc. This will show that your business cares about providing information and not just about getting customers. To attract customers, businesses can easily embed Instagram Reels on website.

If you get lucky, they will also share content from your social media page which can increase your brand awareness and get you more followers.

It’s a wrap

Though marketing has come a long way from traditional to social media marketing, the primary objective of it remains the same – to get more people to know and buy your product/service. 

As we have entered the era of social media marketing, there is not a single formula to social media marketing success instead, it’s a journey of experimentation. There are already too many things to do around marketing and it’s certain how mistakes can be made unknowingly. 

I hope after going through this blog, you will be able to avoid these social media marketing mistakes when creating your strategy.

After all, your social media presence is only as strong as your strategy!

Happy Social Media Marketing!

The post 15 Mistakes To Avoid While Creating A Social Media Marketing Strategy For Your Business appeared first on OmniKick.

We’ve put together six effective list cleaning strategies below to help you keep your list filled with only the most engaged subscribers.

What is Email List Cleaning?

First, let’s cover the basics. What even is email list cleaning? 

In layman’s terms, email list cleaning is the process of regularly going through your email list contacts to ensure that you’re only sending emails to interested and engaged audience members.

This often includes removing outdated subscribers who no longer exist, users who haven’t opened emails in awhile and irrelevant contacts who simply aren’t going to buy from your business.

Why is Email List Cleaning Important?

A large email list is simply a vanity metric if those subscribers aren’t actually opening, reading and taking action in your emails. It’s better to have a smaller list of fully engaged subscribers than a large list of people who don’t care about your brand.

You also don’t want to send emails to old accounts and cause any bounce issues, or get spam complaints from people who don’t even remember subscribing.

This is why it’s a good idea to regularly update your email list – you’ll improve your open rate and your click-through rate, seeing metrics that actually matter to your bottom line.

Plus, most email marketing platforms require you to pay per subscriber. Why pay to send emails to people who aren’t paying you?

How Often Should You Clean Your Email List?

You might be wondering how often you need to be putting these email list cleaning into play. Luckily, this isn’t something you typically need to take care of each month.

While it does vary depending on your list size, industry and target audience, you’ll likely want to go through and clean up your list every six months or so.

A good rule of thumb is simply to pay attention to your email stats. It might be time to do a good scrub of your email list if you start to see analytics like your open/click rates and email deliverability drop.

Effective Email List Cleaning Strategies

Now let’s dive into the real reason you’re here – learning about these hyper effective email list cleaning strategies that can help improve your email stats and increase subscriber engagement.

1. Do a deep dive through your email list.

The very first thing you need to do is take a good look at your email list and bulk remove subscribers based on certain criteria. You can use filters in your email marketing software or handle this manually if you have a smaller list. 

Plus, you can always use tools to import CSV into Google Sheets and make the whole process easier to manage.

The criteria we recommend checking out includes the following.

Remove duplicate emails.

You don’t want duplicate emails to take up multiple spaces in your email marketing provider, costing you more money, so it’s smart to start by removing any duplicates you find in your system.

Check for obvious email typos.

If gmail is spelled “gamil,” you can probably safely assume what the real email address is and delete or edit it in your system. 

Be on the lookout for similar typos that you can tell lead to incorrect or fake email addresses and remove those from your list to help boost open rates and deliverability. You can also use email verification to check if an email is valid or not.

Delete bounced emails.

Check which emails have regularly had your newsletters bounce and remove all of those from your system. If they’re not receiving your content, they don’t need to be on your list.

Get rid of role accounts.

When we say role accounts, we mean the ones that begin with something like team@, contact@, admin@, info@, etc.

These likely aren’t going to a person’s actual inbox, and if they are, they’re not going to a person who’s interested. Many people input these email addresses as a placeholder to download lead magnets, so it’s a good idea to just remove them.

2. Send a re-engagement campaign.

Maybe your audience is just getting a bit of email fatigue, and they need the right perk to reel them back in again. By sending out a discount, free trial offer, exclusive content or something similar, you might be able to grab their attention and get them re-engaged with your brand.

All you need to do is create a segment of your list based on the last time a subscriber has opened one of your emails and ensure your subject line is as eye-catching as possible.

Using their name, including sad face emoji or sending subject lines like, “We miss you!” are all great tactics to try. You have to see the power of a targeted email campaign like this to really believe it, but it can work wonders for re-engagement.

And if you’re tracking their behavior and still not seeing some of your subscribers take the bait, it’s time to just remove them from your email list and move on.

3. Ask questions.

Another great way to work to re-engage subscribers is by sending engaging, personalized content that would help to engage and entice interested audience members.

Many subscribers might still be interested in your brand and plan to buy eventually, but are overwhelmed by the emails they receive and need more personalized content to grab their eye and get them to open your emails.

There’s a variety of different types of emails you could send to really pull subscribers in, like a poll, a “click this button if” option, asking for feedback, an AMA, giving your audience communication options and more.

Make sure that your email content is always top-notch and extremely relevant to your audience so that subscribers who do want to become or remain customers will regularly open your correspondence.

Understanding how to send emails that make your audience take action is key. If you lose audience attention immediately upon entering their inbox, your strategy isn’t working.

4. Send another opt-in.

If you haven’t touched your list in awhile, or if you’ve segmented out a list of subscribers who haven’t opened your emails in months, it’s a good idea to send out an email requesting another opt-in.

This helps ensure you don’t continue sending content to people who absolutely aren’t interested or who don’t remember subscribing and could potentially mark your emails as spam, giving them the option to immediately opt out of receiving future emails and content from your brand.

Anyone who truly wants to stay subscribed will be happy to click to opt in for your list again, bringing your business back to the front of their mind, and hopefully re-engaging them.

You can also pay attention to your existing opt-ins and landing pages to ensure you remove any with low quality traffic and new leads coming in. This also helps warm up old leads and get them re-engaged.

5. Create multiple newsletters.

Give your audience the option to choose the types of content they want to see, especially if your business covers multiple facets.

You can do this by creating landing pages based on different segments, taking advantage of chatbots or giving users the ability to select the type of newsletter they’d like to receive in your initial welcome email.

Then you can easily create different segments and lists by using an email marketing platform like Right Inbox or Avada.

Some brands that take this approach section out their newsletters based on the different topics they cover, while others will offer a daily digest, weekly newsletter or even monthly update, based on how often they want to hear from your brand.

Many ecommerce email strategies do this to perfectly segment out their email content and it’s a great way to keep your audience happy and engaged.

Plus, offering more landing pages can help to boost your SEO and make link building even easier. So, win-win.

6. Take advantage of email marketing automation.

Want to stay up-to-date on your email list cleaning without having to worry about these more manual strategies? You can easily do so by utilizing your email marketing automation software.

Set rules on your subscribers based on their level of inactivity and create trigger-based emails or rules that will help you regularly clean out your email list and remove inactive subscribers without ever having to lift a finger.

This is a great way to send re-engagement campaigns, opt-in emails to inactive subscribers or even just to remove subscribers who haven’t responded to either campaign.

All you need to do is create an automation campaign based on a specific trigger one time, and then each time you have a subscriber meet the conditions, your software does the rest.

Email automation can sometimes seem overwhelming, but this beginner’s guide should help you feel ready to start setting up some automated campaigns.

Start Cleaning Your Email List

Start utilizing these six strategies for cleaning your email list and ensuring your subscribers stay engaged and interested in your content. Watch your open and click rates improve, as well as your email deliverability.

The post 6 Effective Email List Cleaning Strategies to Improve Subscriber Engagement appeared first on OmniKick.

Here are some of the best ways to make your sales process go more smoothly and convince your prospects to hand over their hard-earned cash.

Talking back at your potential client

By this, I don’t mean arguing. Before going into SaaS, I used to work in an agency where we would sell business automation software to a variety of clients from different industries. We would have a few meetings to assess their needs and after that, we would send a business proposal to get them hooked on the idea and convince them to sign. How you write these proposals and what you include makes all the difference.

During the meetings, we would make notes about the specific expressions the client was using. Say that a client wanted to spend more time with his daughter rather than fumbling around with accounting software. We would use these specific phrases in our business proposals and any subsequent meetings we had. The client would hear their own words when we talked about the product we were selling and that made them feel like we know what’s at the heart of their problem. This is a super effective and easy trick to use and it won’t cost you a dime.

Find out what the client actually wants

If you run an SEO agency and a potential client comes up asking to rank first on Google for “Sydney plumber”, you may just jump into it and offer them your standard SEO package. However, this is not how the best clients are won. A lot of times, you just need to scratch an itch beyond the surface to find out the client’s real need. In this case, they may have decent success with organic traffic but they could be struggling to convert that traffic into leads.

When you sit down for your client meetings before you send them out a business proposal, make sure to find out what the client actually needs. A lot of times, they could be convinced that they need one thing when the reality is completely different. Not only will you provide a lot more value this way, but you will also be much more likely to get that client to sign.

Back to the example mentioned above – we really had a client who wanted to automate a lot of his work because he couldn’t spend enough time with his daughter. This was in a software company that I worked for and we won that client. We didn’t tell him that we would build him an awesome app that would revolutionize his life, increase revenue or do something groundbreaking. We simply focused on one thing in the introduction to our business proposals – we’ll help you spend more time with your daughter, and here’s how. That’s how clients are won, so don’t talk about what you do or what you think the client needs – focus on listening to them carefully.

Integrate and automate everything you can

We’re in the business of selling proposal software that helps people sell. One thing I realized is that our customers use software to save time on things they don’t want to do manually. Instead of writing proposals for a few hours at a time, they use a proposal template and create one within 20 minutes. Now, that’s just one aspect of sales taken care of.

We did some research and found out that if our users integrate our software with their CRM, they create proposals 83.6% faster. The integration allows them to auto-fill client data directly from the CRM. This not only saves massive time but also reduces the possibility of error when manually typing client information.

If you have a chance to connect your sales software through integrations, use it. Not only will you save significant time for your sales team but you will also be far less likely to make any kind of human error.

Your CRM is just one example of what could be automated. In our case, we made a major breakthrough when we integrated our app with different payment processors such as credit card companies and Paypal. We removed one major obstacle from the payment process by allowing potential clients to sign the proposal and pay immediately after reading it instead of waiting for days for an invoice to come in. 

Price according to value

Pricing is one of the two most important things in every business proposal – this is something we learned a while ago. Sometime it depends on how much they spent on steps in product development. However, many small businesses and freelancers struggle with setting their prices. It’s hard to set a good balance and make the price attractive to the client and still lucrative to you as the person who does the work. After years of trying out different approaches, I found one that works best for selling – pricing according to value.

You can read more about it here in detail, but there are a few ways to price a service: 

• By the hour or day
• A fixed price with a markup
• Retainer package
• Commission-based
• By value

Starting out, many freelancers charge by the hour, which actually doesn’t make all that sense if you want to earn more. What does make sense is charging based on the value you provide. For example, if you’re redesigning an eCommerce website and you know that the redesign will make an extra $10,000 per month for the store, it makes perfect sense to ask $20,000 and more for the redesign. After all, the client will return their investment in as little as two months.

The bottom line is – the more value you provide to the client, the more you can charge. Of course, to get to this point, you need two things to happen.

First, you need to find out exactly what the client wants, what their situation is and how you can help them. Only when you have all the details can you know how much you can increase their bottom line. This is why you need to have detailed discovery sessions and client interviews.

Second and just as important, you really need to be great at what you do and have a proven track record with other clients. Once you have both of these dialed in, you’ll be getting the maximum revenue for each client without working yourself to the bone.

Offer a guarantee

I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel here, but guarantees work great as a way to convince your clients that you stand behind your work. Traditional guarantees have become very commonplace, but in the world of selling services, they’re not used as much. The experience we have from our own customers showed us that guarantees can be incredibly powerful method to move the client one step closer to purchasing.

There are traditional guarantees where you promise to return the money if the customer is not satisfied. These are all fine and dandy, but they won’t excite the client to sign. One of our regular customers builds websites in 24 hours and her guarantee is that if she doesn’t get it done, you don’t pay. Now that’s a crazy guarantee that anyone would be willing to test. You don’t have to do something similar but try to do something unusual to get potential clients even more excited about working with you.

Back up your claims with proof

There is one thing that all of our customers with great conversions have in common. They have a section in their proposals focusing on the proof. There is nothing more powerful to convince your clients to spend money with you than seeing your work in action. Add some testimonials from previous clients and you’re halfway to getting the client to reach for their credit card.

The proof can be anything that shows how you helped a previous client. From short quotes to full-blown testimonials, videos, portfolios – anything goes. Don’t tell the client to go and see examples of your work on your website. That’s lazy and will only backfire. Include relevant proof in your business proposals or even in the discovery meetings.

One part where you have to be careful is to make the proof relevant to the client you’re pitching to. For example, there’s no use showing a website you redesigned for a restaurant if you’re trying to win a redesign job for a law firm. The proof should be super specific if you want it to achieve the intended effect.

Don’t upsell where you don’t have to

Upselling is a key part of the sales game, along with cross-selling. It’s a good tactic to get a client who’s already interested to spend more than they initially intended. The problem is, it does not always work this way. With business proposals, the main aim is to get the client’s signature and wrap up the proposal.

You’re practically giving the client two choices – sign the proposal and hire you or not sign and walk away. You could include a few pricing options and packages with your offer, thinking it would be good to give the client different options. In reality, the more options there are, the more difficult it is to get the client to say yes to your offer. Instead of a simple “yes” or “no”, now they have at least several choices. Needless to say, business proposals that don’t have any upsells have higher conversions and sell for higher values.

Control the situation

Back in the days of normal when the coronavirus pandemic wasn’t ruling every aspect of our life, you would usually have meetings with clients before sending them your business proposals. Some people find these meetings tedious and a waste of time, but for me, it was a great chance to prepare my ground and increase my chances of getting the sale.

If you’re meeting with a client, avoid going to their office. That way, the client is in control, as they show you in, lead you to the person in charge and let you start the meeting. They control when you start and when it ends and in a lot of cases, they get interrupted by people calling or barging into the office.

Instead, choose a neutral ground. I suggest using cafes in the lobbies of fancy hotels because it doesn’t require a lot of effort to make you look great. Speaking of which, dress for the occasion as well. Arrive there 15 minutes early, settle in and grab a drink as you wait for the client. You control the situation and how the meeting will go. If you have your own office, that’s ideal. However, as I was starting out (and as many freelancers do), my company was just me offering design services. This was a simple trick to leave a superb first impression.

Conclusion

Depending on what you sell, there are millions of little tricks that you can use to improve your sales process. These are some of the very best that I picked up in my years of freelancing, working at an agency and running my own business as I help others get more sales. While these tricks are somewhat different, they have one thing in common – tap into your customers’ actual needs and desires instead of what they tell you they need. Do that right and you’ll have an offer that no one can refuse.

The post 8 Little-Known Ways To Make Your Sales Process Successful appeared first on OmniKick.

It’s no wonder why US businesses spent $6.8 billion on it in 2020. Partnering with the right affiliates can help brands reach a broader audience and increase their sales.

Despite its rising popularity, affiliate marketing remains a mystery for many people. It is often confused with referral marketing. There’s also the matter of understanding affiliate marketing terminology (like affiliate network) and the anatomy of an ideal affiliate marketer. 

If you’re serious about making money through affiliates, you need to clarify these basics. With that done, you can explore ways to build a resultful affiliate marketing program.

Want to know the best part?

You don’t have to search Google or read a dozen articles to get all of this information. I have covered all of these topics in this simple, jargon-free post. You’ll learn the fundamentals of affiliate marketing, plus proven optimization tips, real examples, and free tools/resources to help you in the task.

So, let’s get started.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is performance-based marketing where brands pay affiliates for each new customer/lead/website visitor they generate through their own efforts. Affiliate payout can be in cash or kind (discount, deals, free upgrades, etc.). Businesses use tools to track affiliate performance and calculate their commissions.

There is a common misconception that affiliate marketing is the same as referral marketing. 

However, these two marketing forms differ in two major ways:

• Referral marketing relies on word-of-mouth marketing to grow brand awareness and sales. Affiliate marketing, on the other hand, is more complex and technical. Affiliates leverage all types of channels and tactics to bring customers, including promotion on their blogs and social media pages.
• Typically, in referral marketing, existing customers work as marketers, promoting the brands they love to their families and friends. Conversely, affiliates may be existing customers or neutral entities, who are solely in the business of promoting brands to earn commissions. Moreover, their circle of influence is wider than just friends and families.

You might get the impression that referral marketers possess some kind of altruistic instincts. This is not entirely true. Nowadays, brands have proper loyalty programs, in which they reward customers who generate referrals for them. In this regard, referral marketing is somewhat similar to affiliate marketing.

With that out of the way, let’s take a look at a term that will get thrown around a lot in this post – affiliate networks.

What Are Affiliate Networks?

Affiliate networks are platforms where brands/advertisers go to look for affiliates, and where affiliates go to look for suitable brands/offers to promote.

In other words, affiliate networks help:

• Affiliates and merchants connect
• Protect affiliate interests
• Manage affiliate-merchant relationships

While the match-making capabilities of affiliate networks gets due recognition, you certainly can’t overlook their administrative features. They help brands and affiliates with tracking, payment processing, and reporting as well. 

On top of that, they help brands access a wider pool of affiliates and eliminate logistical hassles from affiliate marketing. On the flip side, affiliate networks charge brands (and sometimes affiliates) for services rendered, which can end up cutting into profit margins.

Anatomy of an Affiliate Marketer

So, who exactly are these affiliates? What do they look like?

According to Affstat’s Affiliate Marketing Benchmark Report, here are the locations, interests, and demographics of affiliates:

• Out of all the affiliates surveyed, 57.4% live in the US and 9.7% in Canada.
• In the US, 13.5% of affiliates stay in California, 12.7% in Florida, 11.1% in New York, 10.2% in Texas, and 8.9% in Nevada.
• 54.2% of affiliates are males, 43% females, and 2.8% didn’t specify their gender.
• 31.9% of affiliates fall in the 35-44 years age bracket and 27.6% in the 25-34 years bracket.
• 55.3% of affiliates are married, 62.4% have kids, and 54.3% work from home.
• Most affiliates (81.4%) work in the B2C space.

Boost Your Affiliate Marketing in 6 Simple Ways

When we talk about optimizing affiliate marketing, there are two things that matter – the quality of affiliate-led traffic and conversion rates of your offers/landing pages. Plus, you need to monitor affiliate fraud and costs during your campaigns and beyond. 

Now, let’s take a look at ways to turbo-charge your affiliate marketing.

1. Analyze Your Revenue and Customer Data

Before you get started with affiliate marketing, you need to take a deep look at your business data and answer questions like:

• What is the value of a new customer?
• What is the value of a repeat customer?
• Do you know your customers’ lifetime value?
• What is your profit margin on different types of sales?
• Have you determined your cost of customer acquisition on various channels?

But business data can be complex and scattered. To make sense of it, you can use data cleansing tools. With clean, accurate data, your decision making and analytics are more precise.

Once your data is consolidated and assimilated properly, you will have a bird’s eye view of your business. You can identify resultful channels and high-potential customers. You will also be able to structure your affiliate payouts in a better way.

One more thing…

Affiliate programs for B2B and B2C differ widely. While B2Cs pay affiliates on low individual purchases, B2Bs typically have recurring payment structures and higher pay slabs. While structuring your affiliate programs, ensure that affiliate compensation is commensurate with the lifetime value of the customers they bring in. 

2. Analyze Your Traffic Sources

You can do loads of optimization on the traffic front, and it’s fairly easy to do. 

How, you ask?

First things first. Compare traffic from different sources so that you know which yields the best quality traffic. Then, you can look into what each traffic source allows in terms of affiliate optimization.

For instance, some traffic sources allow you to purchase traffic from specific devices (mobile, desktop, etc.). Others may let you halt or block traffic types so that you can focus on leads that matter and get an accurate picture of your affiliate’s performance. 

You can even pass custom variables that fetch customer data relevant for your affiliate programs. For example, you can construct variables that tell you about the placement type of your traffic. Using such insights, you can fine-tune your marketing efforts and maximize your ROI.

3. Pick the Right Affiliates

Selecting the right affiliates is perhaps the most critical part of your marketing. But it’s easier said than done.

Considering that 42.2% of affiliates don’t promote more than ten brands at a time, good affiliates are a sought after commodity.

Image via AffStat

Recruiting affiliates is not a one-time task. You should always be looking for better affiliates. Onboarding and activating affiliates should be given due attention, with special emphasis on helping them gain traction.

While vetting affiliates, here are some questions that you need to answer:

• Has the affiliate endorsed products in your industry?
• Which other brands are they promoting?
• Do they have experience working with your audience demographic?
• What promotion methods do they leverage?
• Do they have websites, blogs, and other marketing properties?

After you find well-matched affiliates, it’s time to onboard them. 

Familiarize them with your value proposition, products, and brand voice to get them off to a flying start. Share customer research and competition analysis with them. Don’t forget to share your marketing fails with them. That way, they won’t waste time with methods that don’t give returns and they’ll start delivering value from get-go.

Even experienced affiliates need time to score their first sales so don’t expect overnight success with your new affiliates. If possible, assign dedicated affiliate managers to guide your new brand partners. They can be the single point of contact between you and your affiliates. 

4. Stay Connected with Your Affiliates

You need to drill a sense of ownership in your affiliates. If they feel connected to your brand, they will work twice as hard to promote it.

Affiliate managers can bridge the gap between brand and affiliates efficiently. The Benchmark report cited earlier states that often affiliates decide to join, grow, and leave brands based on their relationships with their affiliate managers.

Maintaining open channels of communication with affiliates not only helps them, but brands as well.

How?

• Affiliates are better equipped to promote products from brands they know closely.
• Affiliates are less likely to leave brands with supportive affiliate managers.
• Affiliates can arm you with resources and insights they have gathered and that you can utilize to train your future affiliates and in-house staff. 

Apart from keeping existing affiliates in the loop, it’s also essential to activate latent affiliates. Research proves that only 7%-10% of affiliates are actively driving traffic to brands. This means the remaining 90% of resources have the potential to sell, but are under-utilized. 

Latent influencers can be broken down into three categories:

New affiliates who haven’t sold anything since they joined (~3 months). Try pushing them into action with higher commissions or a bonus on their first milestones.

Old affiliates who have no activity since they registered to your program. Catch up with them informally and ask what they’ve been up to. Keep them informed about upcoming offers and rewards.

Affiliates who were resultful before but are inactive now. Ask them what challenges they are facing. Appoint new affiliate managers for them, if needed.

5. Regulate Affiliate Methods

Affiliates rely on many tactics to drive traffic, including:

• SEO
• Blogging
• Social media marketing
• PPC
• Email marketing

Image via AffStat

You need to regulate and restrict your affiliate methods so that they are not counterproductive to your efforts. 

For instance, if you use SEO to draw organic traffic and your affiliates also use the same technique, you might end up pulling down each other’s rankings. 

That’s why most affiliate networks have method restrictions. They allow you to search for affiliates by their primary promotion method, which can be:

• Deal/coupon
• Email marketing
• Rewards
• Sub-affiliate
• Mobile app
• Price comparison
• Search
• Software
• Social shopping
• Software
• Content
• Services

You also want to watch out for shady practices. If an affiliate just promotes coupon codes and relies on branded searches to be discovered, they aren’t adding much value to your program. Other red flags include using weighted URLs, stuffing unrelated code snippets in URLs, and using plug-ins and adware.

6. Test Your Landing Pages

You can create custom landing pages on your website for your affiliates to promote, or they can create one for themselves. Be sure to A/B test your landing page elements and calculate the page’s conversion rates. That way, you can figure out when an affiliate is performing below par.

Apart from optimizing your landing pages, provide assistance to your affiliates when they are designing their own pages. After all, you’re both working towards the same goal. Currently, less than 25% of affiliates receive creative help from brands they promote, according to the Benchmark report.

Your affiliate managers can extend help in the form of marketing collaterals and creatives. Plus, they should share testing insights from their own pages. Earning the first conversions is always hard for any affiliate, and you should leave no stone unturned to get the ball rolling.

Ready to Accelerate Your Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is more complex than just adding an affiliate page to your website. It involves analyzing your customer data, business data, and traffic sources. Moreover, you need to select the right affiliates and keep communicating with them while regulating their marketing methods. Last but not least, you should follow landing page best practices and test your pages often. 

Do you have any questions about affiliate marketing? Leave them in the comments. I’ll be happy to answer.

The post 6 Effective Tips to Optimize Your Affiliate Marketing Campaigns appeared first on OmniKick.

To help you start fostering those relationships online, we’ve put together 10 strategies for building a community that your clients and customers want to be a part of.

Let’s dive in!

1. Use Social Listening

The first idea is to pay attention to what your audience is saying online about your industry and what their problems are. This is called social listening, and it’s the perfect way to be proactive about what your audience wants from businesses like yours.

Take advantage of social listening tools to help you track certain keywords, topics and users. Tools like Mention are the perfect solution for watching conversations online.

Keep an eye on the online interactions surrounding each of the items you decide to track in order to learn more about what your clients are interested in and what they might want to learn more of from your business.

Then, solve those problems and address those interests any way you can. This doesn’t just have to be through your services. In fact, you can offer a resolution through your giveaways, content marketing, add-ons and more.

2. Create Community Groups

One great way to create genuine and authentic connections with your clients is to launch online community groups.

There are several online spaces that are perfect for hosting a community for clients and other interested parties to join, like Facebook or LinkedIn groups, Slack communities and more online community building platforms.

Brands like Visme host online communities for their users, providing informational content and product insights, as well as giving them a chance to discuss projects with each other.

Create and promote a community for both clients and potential clients to join. Start discussion threads, share valuable information and build an online group/networking area.

Not only is this a great way to build stronger connections with your clients, it’s also a great way to strengthen your personal branding as well as improve brand awareness.

It also enables your brand to create a word-of-mouth funnel for generating new leads. People will refer people to your community and they will want to work with you after seeing the value you already offer.

3. Promote an Open Feedback Channel

Create a way to get honest, anonymous client feedback. Put together a forum, web page, email account or whatever is best for your workflow exclusively for accepting feedback. You can also consider using chatbots to collect instant feedback on your website.

Moreover, make sure to pay attention to the feedback you receive and implement any necessary changes to better serve your clients.

There are many different ways you can create open feedback channels and welcome client concerns.

First, make sure to be open from the get go with your clientele so they feel comfortable leaving feedback and information in these channels.

Second, consider your target audience and the way they prefer to communicate. You want your feedback area to cater to your audience and be easy for them to use.

If they prefer email, send out anonymous surveys or provide a contact email specifically for this type of communication. If they’re tech savvy, you could create an open forum or embed a form on a web page. You could also create polls to share with your clients.

Be sure that you let all of your clients know about this channel for expressing concerns anonymously as well so that the chances they take you up on it are much higher.

4. Showcase Clients in Social Media Content

Talking about client success stories and your biggest clients is a great B2B marketing strategy. There are a number of different ways to do this.

First, consider creating case studies to showcase clients who have seen major results due to your work. These are effective selling tools and allow you to highlight your clients and get them more exposure as well.

You can also share client social media posts onto your own feed or simply promote their products and services, like we see in this example below.

For B2B and tech industry clients, using Twitter marketing tools. For more visually-oriented clients, sharing photos on Instagram can be a great way to lead your audience directly to your clients’ websites and social profiles.

If you hop on this strategy, you can measure engagement and clicks on those posts as one of your social media KPIs, and even let your clients know how each one has performed. They’ll definitely appreciate the added gesture and exposure.

Consider creating social media ads and PPC campaigns as well for even further exposure.

5. Create a Loyalty Program

Have you had a handful of clients for a longer period of time? Show them you’re grateful for their loyalty and continued business by creating a loyalty program.

This is a great way to reward return clients each time they sign up for services, when they reach major milestones or when they refer new clients your way.

There are many different types of loyalty programs and rewards you could offer, from discounts to cash bonuses, as well as simply asking long-term clients how they would prefer to be rewarded.

Another option could be to create an affiliate marketing program to give clients who refer to work your way a portion of the profits.

6. Check In With Clients

The best way to build a great rapport with your clients is to be incredibly communicative and upfront. There are a few different ways you can go about this.

For instance, create regular update meetings or emails to let clients know about your progress while you work on a project. Another idea is to be fully transparent about any clauses you may have in your contract.

Also, if any obstacles come up, be clear and communicative with clients from the get go. They’ll be much more appreciative to hear about delays beforehand, rather than after the deadline.

And if you’re waiting on a client for something, don’t be afraid to send a follow up email or two in order to help move the process along smoothly.

7. Put Together a Regular Newsletter

A fun strategy for both strengthening your existing client base and opening up an opportunity to gain new ones organically is by starting a newsletter that you send out to your email list.

Sending newsletters with valuable content can help your clients feel even better about working with you because you obviously know your stuff. Come up with a topic or structure for your newsletter that you can easily update with new information each time you send it out.

You also want to make your newsletter easily shareable so your clients can send it to others who might be interested, generating new leads for your list.

Also, be sure to promote your newsletter across your own online channels, like your website or social media profiles, in order to reach an even wider audience, just like this freelancer did on Twitter.

8. Offer Exclusive Discounts/Sales

One way to make return clients feel valued is by offering exclusive discounts or sales every now and then.

While you never want to sell yourself or your business short, occasionally hosting a flash sale or placing a discount code on a random web page can be a fun Easter egg for your clients.

Choose different outlets each time you decide to do this, like a blog post, a web page, a social media post, a newsletter, or even at the end of a webinar. Disappearing posts, like Instagram and Facebook Stories or Twitter Fleets are also the perfect platforms for announcing a limited-time only sale or a discount code.

9. Create Valuable Content

Content marketing is huge for creating connections – as long as you’re consistently creating valuable content for every step of the customer journey.

Not only that, but content marketing is also a great way to reach an even wider audience, both through social shares of your blog content and the organic traffic that your SEO content can generate.

Valuable content isn’t just limited to your blog, though. Creating video content, podcast episodes, infographics, SlideShares and other types of unique content are great ways to expand your network as well as share your knowledge.

You can further engage your audience through enticing YouTube intros, interactive content and the like.

10. Show Your Brand Personality

Being genuine and authentic in all of your communications, both with clients directly and in your online content, is a great way to build relationships and community foundations.

Social media marketing is all about building connections and being your authentic self, and you want to show your followers who you really are and what you really stand for.

Part of ensuring you show off the brand personality you want to convey is putting together a brand voice. This should embody your company mission, the traits you want your brand to emulate and the reason you do what you do.

Here’s an example from TOPOL.io where they showcase their brand personality through emoji and friendly, relatable messaging.

Look for ways you can convey the same fun, energetic voice in your own copy and online content so you can let your own brand personality shine.

Strengthen Your Own Client Relationships

Building stronger connections is key to long lasting client relationships, so it’s time to start putting a few of these strategies in place. Determine which ones make the most sense for you and your business, whether you’re a freelancer or solopreneur, or you’re representing an entire company.

The post Best Ways to Connect With Your Clients to Build a Strong Community appeared first on OmniKick.

Digital voice (and video) transmission tech dates back to 1995, but since the internet wasn’t as powerful as it is today, VoIP wasn’t a feasible communication channel. The sound quality was dreadful, the connection unstable and the calls cut off all the time.

Eight years later, Skype released the beta version. It was the first globally known, audio-only VoIP service that in the following years expanded to video calling, file sharing and more. 

We could argue that VoIP tech started developing much earlier, with AT&T’s Bell Labs and Picturephone in the sixties, but it wasn’t until the 2010s that VoIP went mainstream.

The internet connection quality rapidly went up, and VoIPs followed. In 2019, the U.S. VoIP industry has reached $14 billion — and with the current global health situation, we expect these stats to skyrocket by the end of 2020. 

Now, why do these stats matter and what does VoIP have to do with marketing strategy anyway?

We plan to reveal that in today’s blog! 

For now, here are some spoilers:

• It saves tons of money
• Traditional phones’ features cannot compare
• VoIP brings local flair to across-the-globe communication
• Office presence is not required
• You’ll have an insight into precious data and the ability to act on it instantly
• Customers are happy and so is the customer support team — feed two birds with one scone (no stones here, birds are cool)

Sounds good? Thought so — let’s dive in, so you can learn how to build the best marketing strategy yet with the business telephone system your enterprise deserves.

While Running Costs Go Down… 

Introducing VoIP into your business enables you to cut the costs in multiple ways, and is one of the main reasons to adopt this model of communication.

Installation costs. First of all, there is no need to install a special office phone line or any new hardware. VoIP uses the existing equipment and infrastructure you own and only requires an initial 15-minute installation. The only thing you need for your VoIP to work is an internet connection. It is much more expensive to set up the traditional telephone system — and it lasts longer.

Call pricing. Remember when you accidentally called an international number as a kid and had a “fun” conversation with your parents when the phone bill came in?

No?

Well, some of us do — and while it wasn’t really a fun conversation, the call surely was expensive.

Anyway, the cost of international calls with traditional phone systems didn’t change much. The costs are based on duration and distance from your base, and there are no freebies. 

VoIP providers offer cost-effective plans at lower prices, and many of them even include this feature for free or provide free minutes.

Service maintenance and overhead costs. Maintenance costs are also higher, while the only running cost of a VoIP comes from the data usage. Additionally, it’s much cheaper and easier to add or remove extra phone numbers than it is with POTS (plain old telephone service). 

Updates. When it comes to scalability, VoIP wins again. The software and bandwidth updates are faster and easier than POTS updates, as VoIP requires no additional hardware installations. 

Features. Finally, the features such as Call Transfer, Call Forwarding or adding remote extensions are included in the basic VoIP packages. With POTS, each additional feature needs to be implemented separately, and it adds up to a hefty bill. Most of them are only available with cloud technology in the first place.

In the end — this saves you plenty of money when it comes to telecommunication costs!

…Conversion Goes Up!

Saving lots of money is already great news, but on top of that — using VoIP increases the conversion rate as well!

By using this type of cloud service, you have an opportunity to expand your marketing strategy through other channels besides online ones. In addition to email, ads, social media and others, VoIP will enable you to reach out to your customers and speak directly to them.

There are multiple scenarios in which issues cannot be solved the other way. Some of these include:

• Explaining something complicated
• Having to answer plenty of questions
• When it’s urgent, important and/ or personal

Although cold calling does have a bad reputation for being intrusive, it’s not what it used to be (and even when it was, back in 2010, it still had a better success rate than email). Reps have many tools at their disposal to “preheat” the call and contact people who are a good fit, and cloud tech that VoIP resides on is one of them.

Now we’re diving into the customer satisfaction area! In the following chapter, we’ll explain how VoIP technology helps you warm up what was once named “cold call” and converts leads to long-term customers.

Maximize Customer Satisfaction — Dynamic And Effective Communication

Handling the impatient customers’ requests fast is a must if you want to stay ahead of the competition. Keep them on hold just a bit longer, and you’ll lose the happy customer; with that, you may miss a bunch of referrals from them, as well as a future purchase.

By using VoIP, you’ll have instant access to all the info you can need! Cloud technology stores and updates the data in real-time, making access fast and intuitive. This makes the conversation effective and most importantly — short. 

The following features will help the reps handle the calls at all times:

• Call History — access the list of calls made earlier to keep track 
• Call Recording — listen to the previous conversations with a certain client and stay up to date with their situation
• Call Comments — leave useful notes for future reference, or access them to learn more when taking over the customer from another rep
• Shared Call Inbox — allows multiple sales reps to participate in call and help if necessary

Still, customers and clients can reach out to you in more ways than one. Email, Chat or Phone Support — everything goes, so even the customers that shy away from speaking over the phone have a way to ask for help or info.

Website Call Widget is another thing that makes it easier for customers to reach out. They can use it to make a call without leaving the website. Customer support reps can assist them at the moment of speaking, and guide them through the problem-solving process. Email exchange could take days — this way, everything can be resolved in a matter of minutes.

In addition to the features described above, VoIP has a way of handling the calls even before the reps pick up the phone. Queue management with IVR menus, auto-attendants — all of these direct the customers to the right department instantly, eliminating the need for transferring the call and without wasting their (and reps’) time.

What’s also amazing about VoIP is that you can do all of this outside the office!

VoIP Increases Your Availability — No More Office-Bound Work

If you opt for VoIP instead of a landline, you can work from anywhere, provided that you have a stable internet connection and your device is not showing technical troubles. Just the same, you can use any smartphone or laptop — from the office, home, coffee shop or any other location you pick.  This can be especially powerful for digital nomad solopreneurs who create educational resources like online courses and want to offer consulting on the side.

It’s possible to assign the same business number to multiple devices, so you’re never caught off guard (or with an empty phone battery without a charger in sight).

This option became crucial in 2020. for the obvious reasons. However, being able to answer the call this way would still matter if the current situation didn’t have the dystopian elements. 

For some businesses, being available outside the typical office hours is a prerequisite. 

Then, there are different time zones you want to cover if you strive for a global presence. In the end, for huge customers in the crucial stages of the sales funnel, not answering the call is not an option! This way, you can speak to them whenever they want, and provide them with an exceptional customer experience. 

Also — did we mention that VoIP opens the doors for the markets far away, but makes it look like you’re right there?

Global Reach With Local Appeal — With Geographical Number Targeting

Need to reach the customers located across the continent? 

VoIP allows you to pick a phone number that matches any geographical location you wish. This also means that you can use multiple phone numbers, a different one for each area.

With this feature, your small business can have the appearance of a bigger enterprise, with HQs established in multiple cities, or even countries. Local numbers also help with customer segmentation — their needs may vary depending on the location, so you can easily group them and present them with offers relevant to their location and cultural preferences.

As it strengthens your company image, it also appeals to local customers. They will see a familiar area code, and won’t think that you’re far away, or that the call will cost them a fortune. And it really won’t — VoIP packages include toll-free numbers as well!

Geographical number targeting is also a great way to track the ad campaigns, and then analyze and compare their success. Find out how to do it below!

Measuring Your Campaign’s Success — See What Works Well And Improve Instantly

Continuing with local numbers and ads success — there’s a “trick” that will show you what ad converts the best. 

When you’re putting the special, local ads together, include the local phone numbers so your customers can use them to contact you. VoIP can provide you with a fair amount of those numbers. Then, you can take a look at the stats, and see what number brings the most calls and sales! This way, you can pinpoint which ad worked the best and make a direct connection between the ads and the sales.

You can also apply this strategy when determining which web pages on your website have the best CTAs. Create and place a special number on each page (or place the Website Call Widget there), and you can estimate the success by noting down which number got the most calls.

However, VoIP has more useful functionalities that help you build marketing campaigns with high conversion rates. Integrate it with your existing CRM and sales tools and you’ll get an interactive dashboard, with all the data right where you need it.

Help Your Customer Service Team — Improving Performance With Little Effort

Including VoIP in your sales and customer service teams’ tech stack will make them work efficiently and alleviate the everyday stress that comes from working in a fast-paced environment. 

The features are devised with teamwork in mind. Assign the Call Owner, and you’ll leave no place for confusion, as everybody knows their tasks and who to turn to in case they need extra info or help. Dedicated Account Manager is in charge of key customers with a long track record of high-priced purchases — eliminating the need for multiple reps to juggle several accounts and mix them up.

The Call Recording feature we mentioned also helps with onboarding new team members: go through the notable calls with them, and you won’t need to schedule special onboarding sessions. Practical, real-life examples are the best learning material!

A Shared dashboard brings the whole team together; no matter where in the world your reps are located, they can access the data in real-time and communicate with coworkers.

Summary

For every well-made marketing strategy, it’s important to go where your customers are. Using VoIP, next to live chat or emails, provides yet another channel for you to do so. 

It’s a cloud service that seamlessly integrates into your existing tools, and ties them together into a powerful kit that makes your teamwork fast and effective. Not only will your team appreciate it, but the customer satisfaction levels will notably grow. Installation and maintenance are cheap and easy, and it pays off on so many levels!

The post How To Build An Effective Marketing Strategy Using VoIP appeared first on OmniKick.

Google’s search algorithm keeps evolving with new updates aimed at weeding out content that does not offer value to searchers. That’s why it is essential for you as a marketer to ensure that your content engages audiences, builds brand authority, and generates returns.

But that’s not all:

You also need a content marketing plan to boost your search visibility. At the same time, you should remember that not all of your content will deliver as expected.

But that’s not the real problem.

The real problem will arise if you don’t do anything about your underperforming content.

How can you improve your existing content so that it offers value to your audience and ranks well in search results?

Find out below.

But before we get into that, let’s learn how to find out which of your content pieces need optimization.

How can you identify content that needs optimization?

Before you can improve your content, it’s essential that you conduct a thorough website content audit.

You can use analytical tools such as Google Analytics and SEMrush to get valuable insights into how well your content is performing.

You can collect data about:

• Sessions
• Time spent on site
• Bounce rate
• Impressions
• Click-through rates
• Conversions
• Number of inbound links
• Referring domains
• Backlinks
• Social shares

Armed with this information, you can easily identify content that has:

• Poor organic traffic
• Poor or no conversions
• High bounce rates
• Little time spent on page
• Outdated information
• Duplicate content
• No backlinks or spammy links

Once you’ve identified underperforming content on your site, it’s time to learn how to optimize it for better performance.

How can you optimize underperforming content?

To improve underperforming content, you need to optimize it and convert it into useful and relevant content. You should also optimize it for the search engines to ensure that it generates high-quality traffic, leads, and conversions.

Here is how to start improving your underperforming content:

1. Upgrade old content

You should start by analyzing the quality of your content and then enhancing it further.

• Find high-traffic keywords: Find relevant keywords that can help you rank for searches related to the topic and incorporate them into your article. However, do not overuse keywords.
• Update your tags: Use relevant keywords in your title, meta description, and heading. Make them intriguing and catchy too.
• Incorporate long-tail keywords: Doing this can increase the chances of your article to rank for voice searches.
• Link to fresh, updated resources: If your article includes statistics that are more than two years old, you should replace them with recent statistics from trustworthy sources.
• Add internal links: Link to other relevant content pieces on your website.
• Fix broken links: Update or remove any broken links.
• Match search intent: Adjust your existing content so that it aligns with the search intent of users. It should provide the information and solutions that your target audience is interested in.
• Add visuals: Add screenshots of recent statistics or relevant videos to increase engagement.
• Increase engagement opportunities: Include compelling calls-to-action (CTAs) in your post, embed tweets, and include social media share buttons to boost user engagement.

While updating your content, you may also find a few articles where you will need to rewrite more than just some sections. In this case, you can also consider rewriting the whole post and publishing it as a new article.

However, you should take the time to write an article that offers real value to your readers. Research the topic thoroughly, provide actionable advice, and include recent statistics and real-life examples.

In short, ensure that it is the most robust resource on the given topic on the web.

Then, inform your audience about its existence by promoting it through various channels and platforms.

2. Improve content quality and relevance

How do you improve the quality of your content?

Start by identifying and updating duplicate content with well-written content. Remove any links that linked to duplicate content.

You should then look for opportunities to combine content pieces that cover the same topic or fall under one broad topic.

You should go through the top articles that rank for your target keywords to find out:

• What information is missing from your article?
• Where does your content quality lack?
• Which related keywords does the article rank for?
• Does the top-performing article include new insights or industry updates on the topic?
• Does the article answer searchers’ questions more efficiently than your content?

Another option is to use content discovery and curation tools to understand what kind of content people currently find interesting about the topic.

You can then conduct in-depth research into the topic and incorporate useful points into your posts to boost engagement.

Once you’ve collected enough information about the topic, you can decide whether to write one in-depth article that covers the topic completely or create content clusters.

3. Resolve technical issues

You may write great content and optimize it with high-traffic keywords. But you may still fail to rank higher in the search engines or find it difficult to keep readers engaged.

Why?

Because your website architecture might be derailing your progress.

To find out if your site is optimized properly for users and the search engines, you should quickly audit your site for technical SEO and fix issues like:

• Crawling problems: Ensure that Google bots can crawl the page. You should also remove duplicate content, fix redirects, and add your blog posts to the sitemap.
• Site speed: Test your site speed and fix any issues to reduce the bounce rate.
• Title and URL: Ensure that you’ve included the target keyword in your title and URL. If not, you should update the old URL and apply a 301 redirect to the updated URL to avoid 404 errors.
• Meta description: Include the keyword phrases you are targeting in the meta description to encourage the search engines to rank you higher and entice searchers to click on your article.
• Content: Make it easy for your readers to skim through your content and find sections they want to read about using a table of contents.

You should also improve readability by writing short sentences and paragraphs. Always divide large chunks of content into meaningful headings, paragraphs, and bullet points.

Ready to optimize your underperforming content?

Ultimately, an effective content marketing strategy is not only about creating new content. It’s also about improving the quality of old, existing content to ensure that it is relevant and up-to-date.

Though finding and optimizing underperforming content may seem challenging, it’s worth it. In fact, enriching your existing content can offer you the most significant gains.

Have you considered optimizing the underperforming content on your site? If not, start today.

If you have other questions, ask them in the comments below. I’ll be happy to help.

The post 3 Tips to Improve Underperforming Content on Your Website appeared first on OmniKick.

These customers often come to the website and then get converted into buyers since that’s the primary source of business information. This makes website traffic the first thing every business desires.

From strategizing SEO to PPC campaigns, increasing website traffic is a goal for every brand irrespective of their domain. They spend loads of time trying to hire the right person or frame the right strategy to drive more visitors.

Another step brands are taking to create awareness and communicate with the audience is to maintain a social media presence – a means to represent the brand as more than just a product or service provider.

But we were talking about website traffic. Why are we suddenly shifting to social media?

It’s because social media can drive up to 200% more traffic to your website, and we will help you do it!

71% of consumers who have had a positive experience with a brand on social media are more likely to recommend the brand to family and friends.

With everyone spending time on their phones all day long, scrolling through social media, and consuming so much content, it’s easy to interrupt and divert their attention to your website. However, to achieve the desired results, you need to follow a systematic approach.

Let’s see how you can do it following this step-by-step guide to increase your scale graph for website traffic using social media.

Content table

Step 1: Link your social media to Google Analytics

Step 2: Identify the right social media channels for your brand

Step 3: Optimize your social media profiles

Step 4: Keep an eye on your competitors

Step 5: Create share-worthy content 

Step 6: Up your content distribution and promotion game

Step 7: Offer free resources and deals

Step 8: Engage with your audience directly

Step 9: Connect with influencers

Step 10: Analyze your efforts

Step 1: Link your social media to Google Analytics

Before you begin optimizing your social media profiles for driving traffic to your website, you need to set an analyzing system in place. This is important because, without this, you won’t be able to distinguish the traffic redirected to your website through social media channels and that from other sources.

Here’s what you can analyze after setting up an analytics system in place:

• Which social media platforms are sending you the most traffic and which ones you need to pay more attention to.
• The time spent on the website by your social media visitors will tell you how engaged they are if you’re targeting the right audience and if they like your content.
• You can compare new visitors and returning visitors to see if your social media visitors are coming back to the website. If not, you can revise your social media strategy to boost its effectiveness.

So, how can you set this up?

1. Log in to your Google Analytics page.
2. Open admin and click on goals.
3. Click on ‘+new goal.’ 
4. Go to ‘goal setup’ and add a template, preferably the ‘custom template.’
5. Under ‘goal description,’ add your social media goal, such as to get email sign-ups.
6. Under ‘goal details,’ select the landing page for which you want to record this data. Here, you need to fill in the URL of your landing page without the domain name.

And voila!

Now, whichever way you use your social media strategy to direct traffic to your website, it will start analyzing it for the landing page you selected and the goal you chose.

Now, let’s begin with our social media game!

Step 2: Identify the right social media channels for your brand

Now that you have an analyzing system in place tracking every parameter, you need to work your social media game. However, before doing that, you need to ensure you’re leveraging the right channels.

There are many social media platforms, but what’s best for you is determined by your brand objectives and goals.

If you’re a consumer- or product-based company, a B2C, business-to-consumer channel like Instagram and Facebook might be right for you. On the other hand, if you serve businesses and address a professional audience, then, a B2B, business-to-business channel like LinkedIn would be more suitable.

Now, if your brand needs to maintain a visual presence, then platforms like YouTube and Pinterest may be a good fit for you.

In this infographic, Remic points out the main features and demographics of some popular social media channels. These are generic findings and can be looked at to take an idea about the platforms most suitable for your brand.

But why do you need to choose your social media channels?

Because focusing on all the channels together or on the wrong one for your brand may cause more harm than good because you won’t be serving your target audience.

You need to target someone and not everyone. And to do this, you need to identify the right platform, so your efforts are backed by results,  in this case, increased traffic to your website.

Here are some things to consider while choosing your social media platforms:

1. Who is your target audience?

Research says that if you have a preconceived and general understanding of the demographic and marketing you’re catering to, it provides extra leverage in establishing a relationship with them.

To sufficiently understand your audience, do a detailed analysis. See what they do, where they live, the demographics, their buying capacity, how much time they spend on their phones, and more. You can even use a tool to understand your website visitors. The best way to understand your audience is by looking at the ones visiting your website.

After doing this research, create a buyer persona.

A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer derived from your target audience research. With this, you will understand your audience much better and take the necessary steps accordingly.

You can use Hubspot buyer persona templates to draft one for your brand and let that guide your strategy.

2. Which platforms do they use the most?

Your target audience is most likely to use one or two platforms more than the others. Those one or two platforms they use and visit every day are your go-to platforms. Why?

Because that’s where your target audience hangs out, and this is where you can attract them with your content and social media campaigns to make them want to visit the website and eventually convert into paying customers.

3. What kind of content are you trying to produce?

Content is the center of all social media activities. To meet your goal of increasing website traffic, you need to create stellar content that adds value to the target audience.

But before you can create content, you need to decide what kind of content you’re planning and if it is suitable for the platform you’re choosing.

For example, visual content works better on Instagram, but text content works well on Facebook.

Your content goals also need to align with your social media goals.

4. What is your brand’s story?

How do you wish to tell your brand’s story? Through videos, or written content or images? These aspects also need to be considered while choosing a social media platform for yourself.

Your brand story matters a lot because it humanizes your brand and aims to start a conversation with your target audience to engage with them. So, framing your brand’s story and deciding how you will communicate also plays a significant role.

5. How will social media support and grow your website?

Even though you have a social media plan in mind, you need to have an idea about what you expect from social media and how it can contribute to growing your website.

Is it through giveaways, content creation, gated content, collaborations, or interviews?

This will help you decide which platform matches best with your overall goals.

These questions can be answered by conducting market research of your target audience and understanding their behavior. This is because, ultimately, your audience will visit the website.

The social media platform you decide as a part of this objective should align with your brand’s personality and reflect what you uphold.

Once you have your social media channels in place, you can start taking steps towards the ultimate objective of increasing website traffic.

Step 3: Optimize your social media profiles

Optimizing your social media profiles is as important as optimizing your website’s SEO.

Social media is a great brand building and recognition tool, but it will only reap good results if you genuinely invest time, making it the absolute best.

On social media, many other brands/individuals are doing the same thing as you, so how do you stand out? By turning your business into a brand and focusing on branding.

Here’s a checklist for you to keep in mind while optimizing your social media profiles:

1. Profile and cover picture

You don’t have a cover picture on Instagram, but on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, you do. And to keep the branding consistent, you must have the same profile and cover picture across your social media profiles.

Here, Mad Over Marketing (M.O.M), an advertising and marketing agency, has the same profile and cover picture on both LinkedIn and Twitter.

Why? Because this helps your customers and audience recognize your brand and its posts the minute they come across it.

Ensure both of these reflect the brand’s personality because they create a first impression on the user, which cannot be missed!

2. Complete your profile bio and contact details

Your social media bio needs to define what you do and why you do it. It’s best if it conveys the message in a tagline, followed by a call-to-action.

Since we aim to drive traffic to the website, the CTA should be the website URL along with a text which says,

‘Need help with XYZ? Visit our website,’ or anything which goes along your brand guidelines.

Make sure the website URL is visible on all your social media profiles.

Since you can’t write a hefty article on yourself in the bio, keep it short and crisp with only the necessary information. Don’t forget to add your main keywords in the bio, which helps in better SEO ranking.

The contact details can include your location and email address.

On Twitter, Buy me a Coffee has a crisp bio that tells the users what they do and the next step they should take, ‘create a page,’ they further go on to say, it only takes 2 minutes to enroll a bit of humor too.

3. Choose themes and a color palette for your feed

One thing contributing to your presence on social media is having a branded feed made along with your brand’s personality.

This includes choosing a color palette as per your brand’s logo and using that to guide your posts’ design on the platform.

Remember, great content hooks the audience, but great design compels them to keep visiting your profile and reading your posts. This is especially true now more than ever when visual content rules!

The idea of a branded feed is to condition your audience to your colors, such that whenever they see a post, story, video, or ad which has a palette and design unique to you, they will be able to recognize you without seeing the brand name. A consistent feed aesthetic helps to define your brand voice and reputation better. That’s how vital branding is.

On Instagram, SquareAcademy maintains a joyful theme of pink and contrasting colors keeping everything consistent from the design layout to the font in every post that perfectly defines their brand.

Once you have successfully optimized and completed your social media profiles, it’s time to research.

Step 4: Keep an eye on your competitors

A great marketing strategy also consists of keeping an eye on your competitors and monitoring their success. You can use several social media tools for analyzing your competitor’s social traffic and top posts.

You don’t have to hire a detective to keep an eye on them, but a simple analysis and notes here and there might save you time researching your target audience and contemplating how you can keep them engaged enough to visit your website.

The idea is not to replicate their strategy but to take inspiration from it and create your strategy. If you have the same target audience as your competitor, you’ll get an idea about:

• The type of content they create
• How they engage with their audience
• How the audience responds to their content
• How they divert traffic to their website

This competitor analysis template by Popsters is an excellent example of how you can analyze your social media competition. Or consider making a template along the same lines by tweaking elements as per your requirement.

This can help you in many ways, including not making the mistakes they make and identifying the gaps and filling them with your strategy.

Everyone wants to be the best option for the solution they provide, but there is always a gap, a new and innovative idea that your competitor is not doing but can make a world of difference for your brand.

You need to observe, analyze, and understand their strategy to draft your own by filling in their gaps.

Step 5: Create and post share-worthy content

If you want to drive traffic to your website through social media, you need users to visit your profile, because that’s where the website link is right?

But would they visit your website if you’re just promoting your website content to gain more visitors? No, they won’t.

Let’s be real; every person is on social media to hang out. They want to be up to date with trends and participate in it by sharing their pictures and content. This means that the key to getting people to your profile is to create share-worthy content that adds value to your audience.

Here are some things you should consider while creating and posting content:

1. Type of content

Ideally, visual content is 40 times more likely to be shared than any other piece of content but with the continually evolving social media features, let’s explore our options:

• Carousels

Carousels perform well on social media if they provide valuable information on a particular topic given the headline is strong and enticing. An idea here could be to repurpose your blogs into carousels and redirect the audience to the blog for more information by sharing the link.

However, this can be done for selective blogs and not for each one, since you don’t want to promote your website blatantly.

Rest, base your carousels on your target audience’s pain points for the best response.

• Videos

Long-form videos for Youtube and short-form videos for Instagram work because they are easier to consume and significantly divert attention.

Here again, your blogs can be converted into videos or vlogs to garner more reach.

Tips and tricks, tutorials, how-to videos, and personal experiences are examples of putting video content in front of the audience to establish a one-to-one connection.

Influencer Gary Vaynerchuk creates IGTV videos to educate the audience about relevant topics and snippets from his speaking gigs, which are widely loved and appreciated.

• Infographic

Infographics present valuable information supported by visuals to keep the user engaged.

They can be used as an outline for a blog post embedded in the blog and shared on social media. This can further be linked to the blog post, thus providing even more value to the audience.

Humour is a great way to keep your audience engaged, and if you’re making memes about topics surrounding your brand, the users may want to re-share it thus garnering more people on your profile, and eventually the website.

You can also use stories on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to offer sneak peeks into your upcoming blogs or link to an interview hosted on your website.

The more valuable content you share, the more likely are people to be curious about what you do, and when they do, they will visit your website. So, focus on creating share-worthy and valuable content that clicks with the audience while redirecting them to your website in a not so obvious manner.

Netflix made a meme about one of their shows relating it to the current situation of 2020. Since the audience could relate to it, the post was widely shared.

2.Posting time

Once you’ve created excellent content, you need to post it. But posting it randomly at any time in the week is not going to cut it, you need to see when your audience is most active- time and days both!

The posting time differs for every platform, for example, according to Hootsuite, the best time to post on Facebook is 12 pm-3 pm on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday while 12 pm-1 pm on Saturday and Sunday.

Even though these are generic calculations, you can always experiment and see which posts garner more engagement at what time to work out a posting schedule.

Instagram’s in-built analytics tell you when your audience is most active, so you can even follow those.

It’s important to post when your audience is active because they’re free, scrolling through social media, and are ready to be interrupted by your content. So, you can steal their attention, make them curious, and entice them to visit your website- all through quality content and active posting time.

3. Social media content calendar

Now that you have a content creation process in place, and the posting time, it’s time to create a content calendar.

Why is this important?

You can’t just randomly post whenever you want because, with social media, consistency is vital. If you’re posting 3 times a week, it’s much efficient if you have a schedule and system that keeps the content prepared well in advance while maintaining the agility to tweak a few changes.

You can make a Trello board or a Google sheet with the following categories:

• Content topic
• Content format
• Writer
• Designer
• Platform to be published on
• Day and time of publishing
• Status (to do, pending, in review, published)

This will give your team a heads up of the schedule and make the process swift.

You can make a similar board for free using Monday to make your calendar. Ensure that you make the calendar in a place where it’s easy to collaborate with your team members so all of them can work on it together.

4. Hashtag strategy

Hashtags are an essential part of social media because they segment the content as per their keywords. People often search for content using relevant hashtags, so it’s essential to use hashtags pertinent to your content to increase its reach.

Many tools like Later and Hashtagify tell you the relevant hashtags as per your content or industry, so you use only those that cater to your target audience and avoid spammy/blocked hashtags.

5. Call-to-action buttons

Social media is a communication and engagement platform more than a content creation platform, and so, it’s important to tell your audience what to do next.

These CTAs should be placed in your stories, videos, carousels, bio, comments, or posts.

Here are a few examples of CTAs which will expand your social media reach and website traffic:

• Read more, link in bio
• Tag a friend who might find this useful
• What are your views on this? Comment below
• Do you have more to add? Best comment gets pinned
• Share this, tag us in your stories for a prize
• Visit our blog to read similar content
• Follow our hashtag to stay updated

Monk Entertainment asks its audience to check out their brand work, a great CTA, to redirect the audience to another brand page.

These calls to actions are essential because, without them, you’ll lose your audience.

Step 6: Up your content distribution and promotion game

Creating great content alone is not enough to generate traffic to the website and get visitors to engage with you. It requires multiple touchpoints before the user finally takes action. For this, a good content distribution and promotion strategy work best.

Research says that the 1st one hour of posting any content on your social media is crucial because it determines if your content will break through the noise of excessive content online or saturate like the others.

Let’s see how you can do this:

1. Share your posts more than once

You should share your content multiple times because some of your followers may be in different time zones, and if you re-share, say, after a week of first posting it, you may have garnered more followers.

Re-sharing expands the scope of reach and introduces it to new followers, thus increasing the traffic.

2. Cross-promote

If you’re using 2 platforms, say Facebook and Instagram, consider linking your posts across platforms to divert the audience, make them curious, and increase your follower base.

If you have a post on Instagram, share it on Facebook, with the link of the original post on Instagram. This way, whenever they visit your social media profile, they will be able to access and visit the link in bio, your website.

You can even target your website visitors to present them offers on social media.

3. Share your posts in community groups

There are many community groups about your industry on every social media platform. You need to find the right one with active users who lie in your target audience.

Posting here introduces your content to more people, and since such groups have constant member additions, you can wrap more and more people in your funnel.

4. Ask your friends, family and employees/colleagues to share the posts

If your post has to garner good engagement in the 1st one hour of posting, it needs to be shared, more so by your 1st connection.

Ask them to share it on their social media profiles and among groups. Research suggests social media content shared by employees gets 8x more engagement than from brand accounts. This may be the push your posts need to get more followers and, thus, more website visitors.

5. Repurpose your content

Repurposing means changing the format of your content to increase its reach. You can convert your blog posts into carousels, videos, live sessions, infographics, cheatsheets, email newsletters, etc.

You can link the repurposed content back to the original one so that it gets promoted indirectly, and the users are visiting your website.

This blog post repurposing workflow by Social Champ broadly explains how you can break a single piece of content into different formats for maximum reach.

Step 7: Offer free resources and deals

Our heart skips a beat the minute we hear the word ‘FREE’ or ‘DISCOUNT.’ So, why can’t we use this to convert our audience and increase our website traffic?

When you give your audience something more than just products and services, they feel compelled to check it out, especially if it means that either they won’t have to spend money or will be able to save on it.

Let’s see how you can do this:

1. Special promotions and deals

Deals on festivals, or after reaching a particular milestone, give people a push. Whenever we set out to buy something, the first thing we do is ask if it’s on sale or search for a promotional code to get a discount.

What if you post your discount code and offer on social media to redirect them to your website?

This will not only give them something to check out your product but also build curiosity about your brand and products. The end action here will be to visit the website to avail the code or check out the deal.

2. Free resources

Offering your audience free and valuable resources like eBooks, buying guides, cheatsheets, checklists, and templates can contribute extensively to becoming a thought leader in the industry. These can be made in a downloadable format, available on your website, and promoted on your social media profiles.

These resources work the charm because it helps the audience solve their problems or increase their efficiency; thus, taking a step towards building faith in you as a brand.

To download the resource or avail the deal/discount code, they visit the website, and it’s a win-win situation.

Hubspot promoting its playbook on Twitter is an excellent example of a free resource.

Step 8: Engage with your audience directly

Brands and individuals often tend to overlook the social aspect of social media. Yes, social media platforms are great for content creation, but they’re also great for other important aspect-brand communication.

Research says that only 11% of customers get replies from online brands, and if you want to be in the top 1% in your industry, then engaging with your audience is the key.

Social media, a 2-way communication channel, allows you to engage with your audience directly. This increases brand recall value and their chances of visiting a brand’s website, which directly relates to them. Be a brand your customer loves because that’s one thing they will never forget. Focus on that, and provide value to your audience.

Imagine if you tweet about a brand, and they retweet it along with a comment, wouldn’t you feel special and maybe check out their page, website or even buy from them?

Let’s see how you can do this:

1. Reply to tweets, comments, and DMs

While you may not be active or available all the time to reply to your audience, hiring a social media manager can help the case. If a person messages or tweets about your brand, rather than no reply or worse, a bot reply will harm.

Here, a social media manager representing the brand and communicating with the audience will make them feel special and remind them that they responded to them.

You can even create conversational chatbots on platforms like Facebook to directly answer your customer’s questions and engage with them.

It would be best if you humanize your brand for people to start relating to you. You can occasionally respond to the best comments, maybe pin them on your post, retweet, or reply to their messages.

This will not only make them feel special, but your brand will earn a special place in their hearts. And, if they visit your profile, a clickable link to the website will call out to them, thus doing the trick.

Netflix is doing a great job of replying to comments on their Instagram posts!

2. Host giveaways, quizzes, and polls

Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter have come up with a new feature for polls. You can directly question your audience for something fun or related to your brand and record their responses.

You can do this to know about their pain points, struggles in your niche, or if they like the content, you’re creating.

Giveaways are a great way to attract more people to your profile. You could ask them to comment on your post, tag a friend or share it on their story, and in return, they could get a shoutout on your page, a product sample, or maybe some other deal.

These bring in many people, thus increasing your profile’s reach and engagement, and eventually, the number of people visiting your website.

This giveaway by Buy me a Coffee is a Monday ritual, and the audience loves it!

3. Participate in conversations and trends

Memes and moment marketing are gaining momentum and for all the right reasons. Here, brands participate in an ongoing trend popular among the general audience with a post related to the trend and their brand.

This is humorous, witty, and a great way to engage the audience. You’re creating relatable content that will start a conversation, thus, contributing to your brand recall value.

4. Participate in public forums

Public forums like Reddit and Quora are great ways of engaging with your audience and answering questions where they lie. You can simply search for your niche keywords and answer relevant questions.

On Quora, you can include your website link once in every 3-4 answers and to your profile bio, so that people can visit it. This way, giving valuable answers to questions may garner more website visitors.

BuzzSumo co-founder answers questions relevant to his brand on Quora to engage with the audience.

You can also participate in conversations on Reddit and comment on your website link on subreddits that allow.

However, focus on value and not just linking your website because doing so may block your profile. The way to your consumer’s heart is through value.

Engagement and communication is an integral part of social media. If you want to increase your followers and profile visits, engaging with your audience and providing value are vital factors.

Step 9: Connect with Influencers

People who already have a significant follower base similar to your target audience can contribute to spreading the word, be it about your product, giveaway, deal, services, or simply, for brand awareness.

Since these people already have your target audience as followers and are popular among them, it’s easy to divert them. However, the difficult task is choosing the right influencer with the right set of audiences to endorse your brand and, in the process, build a relationship.

Here are some things you should keep in mind while selecting the right influencer:

1. Genre of content

Every influencer has a separate genre of content they create on their social media profiles and so, finding the one that fits with your brand’s personality and work is essential.

2. Location and audience

Social media is a diverse space, and your target audience and the influencer’s followers must be close in location, age, and language to ensure your efforts yield results.

3. Authentic reach

The influencers need to have a good follower base, yes, but it’s equally crucial that those followers are authentic. Today, it’s effortless to buy followers, and so, if you tie up with an influencer who doesn’t have an authentic reach, then your collaboration won’t be able to drive the desired results.

The larger the follower base, the more extensive reach your brand will get.

4. Engagement analytics

If your influencer has a good follower base but not-so-good engagement, it won’t work. You can assess this by seeing if their posts are getting likes, comments and if people are genuinely engaging with their posts.

If their content is engaging and gets a good response, your brand may also get returns.

5. Quality and value

Just choosing the right influencer is not enough, you’ll also have to see what type of posts they put out for collaborations and how innovative they are.

To do this, you can look at their partnership posts and get an idea. This will determine how much value the influencer can bring to the table and how you can benefit from it.

These stats by Omniconvert clearly suggest how vital influencer marketing is on social media platforms.

It is a great way to get the word out, but it all comes down to choosing the right one and drafting the right strategy, including the type of content they’ll put out, how, on which platform, and how frequently.

All this done with the right mindset and strategy will result in increased profile views and website traffic.

Step 10: Analyze your efforts

Now that you have taken significant measures towards achieving your goal of driving traffic to your website, it’s time to measure the results and assess the strategy.

There are 2 ways to do this:

1. Google Analytics

In the first step, we linked Google Analytics and your social media channels. Go back to it and assess the performance to see the difference in traffic from social media now and before you started.

You should also see the platform from which most traffic comes because you need to pay attention to this channel.

The idea here is to identify the gaps, analyze them, and tweak your strategy using these free courses to get an even better result.

2. Platform analytics

Analyzing how your profile performs on different platforms is vital to assess your efforts and the audience’s reaction to it.

However, not all social media platforms have in-built analytics except Instagram, which gives you an insight into your audience, top-performing posts, and reach.

Alternatively, you can use social media tools like Buffer and Hootsuite to check your performance.

Wrapping it up

Social media is a buzzing place to be, but you can leverage it to do more than just content creation and communication through the right set of actions. 

Driving traffic to your website through social media can work on many levels if you work out a strategy with a step-by-step approach. At every step of the way, analyze how you can do it better, and work on it.

‘’A brand is no longer what we tell the customer it is- it is what customers tell each other’’- Scott Cook

Be a brand. Do it at your own pace, start small, but start right because the initial foundations are fundamental, and you can create a first impression only once. And on social media, first impressions by brands matter a lot.

But if you think that you’ll have to invest a lot of time on social media and maybe you don’t have that time, then think again because this is where your audience is, and investing time once to drive results and keep the process going by keeping a team in place can yield great results.

You can even use team collaboration tools to keep the process efficient and consistent.

Social media is a gold mine to drive visitors to your website, organically. Leverage and maximize its potential to skyrocket your website traffic.

Good luck!

The post The Complete Guide To Achieving Up To 200% More Traffic to Your Website With Social Media (Organically) appeared first on OmniKick.

“The Art of War” is a book written around 500 BCE in ancient China.

The author, Sun Tzu was a military general, strategist, and philosopher.

His book has influenced many military operations and conquests over the years.

Why would a CEO of a social media startup give a book about war to each of his employees?

Gaining the attention of anyone online is like a battle.

You’re competing against many other businesses and individuals. They all demand the attention of the same person you want.

Search engines are one of the most reliable channels to drive web users to your website.

To rank high in search engines, you need to understand SEO (search engine optimization).

Your competitors want to rank number one for the same keywords you want.

They are applying the same SEO tactics you know.

How do you ensure that you continue to win the SEO battle and get more targeted visitors from search engines?

There are eight brilliant ways to stay ahead of the competition in the battle to claim the top spots in search engines.

1. Monitor trends

Keywords are the most important elements of search.

When a web user enters a phrase into the search box on Google, it returns relevant and useful results to the searcher.

You want your website to show up first for a phrase that is related to your business.

Every few years, they tend to be a rise in new keywords or phrases across most niches or industries.

Old keywords lose some interest among web users. New keywords emerge.

Google Trends is one of the potent tools digital marketers overlook.

The tool will tell you if a topic or phrase is losing or gaining interest online.

Create a lot of high-quality blog posts that target new, emerging keywords, and you’ll quickly establish your authority for those phrases in Google before your competitors do.

By the time your competitors are fully aware of these new keywords, they’ll be playing catch-up.

Search users will have recognized your website as an authority in that niche.

2. Fight link decay

The term “link decay” is not new in the SEO world.

As you probably know, links are a big part of search engine algorithms.

Therefore, link decay has been part of the search algorithms for a long time now. Perhaps, since their inception.

Link decay means your backlinks are losing value as time passes by.

For example, a backlink your site got from a high authority site ten years ago is not as valuable now as it was back then.

If you gained 300 backlinks three years ago and stopped building links, and a competitor got 100 links from established sites in the past year, they have a higher chance of surpassing you in search engine results.

Because they have new backlinks.

Search engines will think that if your competitors are getting a lot of backlinks than you right now, it means people love what they are doing.

Another type of link decay is when the pages you got backlinks from changed content and your links were removed.

Maybe the domain name expired.

Your backlinks are de-indexed. You’ve lost those links.

I don’t believe in the magical power of old links or links from old pages.

I don’t believe that links created five years ago are more valuable than links created a month ago.

If the page the link is coming from isn’t being updated on a regular basis, it loses its relevance in search engines.

Okay, let me give you an example.

Steve Pavlina, one of the most popular personal development bloggers, got a backlink from Lifehacker.com in 2006.

A link earned over a decade ago can’t be as powerful if your competitors are getting links from authority sites regularly.

So, fight link decay.

How do you do that?

Publish evergreen content that will continue to earn backlinks for many years to come. You should also keep updating your pages.

It makes your content the perfect choice for website owners or bloggers who link out.

An article published by Cyrus Shepard on Moz titled “How to Rank: 25 Step Master SEO Blueprint,” is a perfect example of a blog post that will continue to earn links for years to come.

The article was published in May 2013, and it’s still relevant and useful today.

3. Strive for link diversity

SEO was simple some years ago. The more links you have, the higher you rank.

Today, search engines look deeper into your backlinks. They analyze where they come from, and whether they matter to web users.

Your site should have different kinds of backlinks coming from various sites.

Here are some of the common ways to get links

• Guest blogging
• Press releases
• Blog commenting
• Infographics publishing
• Footer backlinks
• Business directories
• Bookmarking sites
• Social media profiles

And many others.

When you gain most of your backlinks through one particular link building method, it puts your search engine rankings at risk.

No link building tactic should make up 40% of your overall links.

To be on the safe side, I recommend 10%.

Spread your backlinks across various link building tactics.

By doing that, you’re diversifying your link profile.

Your link profile will appear natural and good in the eyes of search engines’ bots.

For example, by heavily relying on guest blogging to get most of your backlinks, you’re at risk of getting hit by a search engine penalty when they decide to stop valuing links from guest posts.

Because most of your backlinks come from guest posts, it’ll take you some time to recover from the penalty.

Instead of waiting for your site to get hit by a search penalty, you should start diversifying your backlinks now.

Doing that will help you have a better link profile and enjoy a strong presence in search engines.

4. Foresee more competition

If you’re in a competitive niche, it’s probably because many people are making good money there.

And if you’re in a low competition niche, you should expect competitors to increase because more people will think it’s easier to build a business there than crowded niches.

If competition is high in a particular niche, you’ll find it harder to rank for top keywords in that niche.

For example, as an SEO consultant, ranking for the keyword “SEO consultant” is tough because a lot of people do what I do.

They want to rank for that keyword too.

You’ll have to work harder and smarter than competitors if you want to gain a lot of traffic from search engines.

It doesn’t matter whether competition is high or not.

So, instead of doing better than your current competitors, you should expect new upstarts who are ready to do more to overtake you in search engines.

You should out-think, out-work, and out-brand your competitors.

By out-thinking the competition, you create new exciting content ideas that’ll interest search engine users.

By out-working the competition, you create more content than anyone in your niche.

For example, when Pete Cashmore started Mashable, he was writing seven blog posts per day. That is more than what most of his competitors were publishing in a week.

By out-branding the competition, you invest a lot of time into brand-building and educational content. Your goal is to get people talking about your brand everywhere on the web.

For a high competition keyword like “compare credit cards,” you’ll expect banks, financial institutions, and financial press to rank #1 for the keyword.

Instead, it’s a niche site, comparethemarket.com that is ranking in the number one position for this keyword that receives a huge number of searches per month.

Create a lot of blog posts that target long-tail keywords.

Long tail keywords are phrases that contain 4 or more words that are related to your business.

Don’t wait for new competitors to knock you out.

Out-think, out-work, and out-brand them before they appear.

5. Get quick wins by ranking for easy terms

Every niche has some easy keywords anyone with a low authority domain can rank for.

I use Keyword Explorer by Ahrefs to determine the ranking difficulty level of a keyword.

Ahrefs uses a scale of 1 – 100 to determine how difficult a keyword is.

Any keyword below 30 is an easy keyword.

For example, the keyword “small business marketing consultant” has a difficulty of 26.

If you take a closer look at the sentence below the difficulty score, you’ll see Ahrefs suggesting that I only need backlinks from 30 sites to rank in the top 10 for this keyword.

It’s easy to rank for keywords like this because your competitors aren’t focusing on them.

Perhaps, they haven’t built many backlinks to pages that target those easy keywords.

Ranking for keywords that are easy help you establish some level of authority and credibility in search users.

For example, MedCognition, a medical and technology startup may avoid trying to rank for tough health and medical keywords, and instead focus on queries that receive low searches on Google.

When search users see you as an authority and credible expert, they’ll spread the word about your site. That may drive more backlinks to your site, which you need to rank even higher in search engines.

6. Upgrade your SEO strategy

When you’ve used the same SEO tactic for a long period of time, and gain the same type and quality of links, your organic search traffic may stop growing.

An SEO strategy could become less effective over time.

Perhaps, because your competitors are using the same approach.

Or, the strategy has become too common and no longer works.

You’ll have to upgrade your SEO strategy to start receiving better and more traffic from search engines.

For example, when long-form content became an SEO strategy, marketers who first used it saw big boosts in their organic search traffic.

In a Forbes‘s, R.L. Adams writes that he “ranks number one for so many of the most competitive searches, and almost all of those articles are over 2,000 words.”

Today, writing long-form content as an SEO tactic isn’t as effective as before.

So many people are now creating long-form content to receive more visitors from search engines.

Neil Patel wrote that Kissmetrics generated 2,512,596 visitors and 41,000 backlinks within two years, using infographics.

Kissmetrics traffic from search engines increased as a result.

Today, there are too many infographics on the web, and the tactic is less useful for link building.

Upgrading your SEO strategy means finding and using new tactics that boost search traffic.

7. Don’t sacrifice quality and quantity

Quality and quantity are both vital to winning the SEO battle.

Search engines rarely reward inactive sites.

Each blog post you publish is an opportunity for people to see your site in search engines.

The more blog posts you publish, the more visits you’ll receive from Google and Bing.

A study by HubSpot found that companies that published 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5X more traffic than companies that published between 0 – 4 monthly posts.

The quality of your posts is also important.

Publishing low-quality articles won’t help you win in search engines.

Higher quality content will help your site rank for many keywords.

Quality content is not easy to create.

If it’s easy, everyone will be doing it.

For example, I spent 10 hours creating this article.

When you publish a lot of high-quality articles, search engines will have no choice but to rank your website high for competitive keywords.

8. Branch out into related niches

If you publish a lot of high-quality articles, you’ll soon exhaust topics and keywords in your niche.

Instead of writing about the same topics, branch out into related niches in your industry.

For example, if you’ve exhausted the bodybuilding niche, you can start creating content about nutrition.

Bodybuilding and nutrition are connected.

After exhausting topics and keywords in the nutrition niche, you could branch into men’s or women’s health.

Even if you’re a local business, you should create content that targets topics related to your profession.

As you continue to venture into related niches, search engines will see you as an authority.

The post 8 Ways to Dominate The Competition in Organic Search Results appeared first on OmniKick.

And you read too much about it as I do.

You’ve probably come across the below lines more than once:

“Steve Jobs was a college dropout.”

“He, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne started Apple in his parents’ garage.”

“Steve Jobs was fired from Apple in 1985.”

“Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997.”

“Apple released the iPhone in 2007.”

The stories behind the Apple brand alone make you desire their products.

The number one reason Apple has been so successful can be traced to Steve Jobs.

Jobs was a master storyteller.

He talked about everything he’s done, his life and mindset.

Jobs discussed taking calligraphy classes.

“I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.

It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.” – Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs was the first to give us a real choice in fonts, even though he didn’t invent typefaces.

Storytelling is a powerful key to building a memorable brand.

Neil Patel is one of the most respected digital marketers and has a popular personal brand.

In one of his blog posts, he shared a story about how he got started in digital marketing:

“The first website I ever started was a job board called Advice Monkey. I was trying to get the website ranked for terms like ‘job search’ and ‘tech jobs.’

I hired a few SEO agencies to help me out, but none provided any results. After tens of thousands of dollars down the drain, I had no more money and no choice but to learn how to optimize Advice Monkey for search engines… all on my own.” – Neil Patel

Alex Turnbull, the CEO, and founder of Groove wrote about how he built a company that generates $5 million annually within three years of doing content marketing.

When you tell exciting stories, it makes your company worth remembering for prospects and customers.

Share your personal opinions

Some years ago, Mark Schaefer published an article titled “Content Shock: Why content marketing is not a sustainable strategy.”

Schaefer elaborated on what he calls “Content Shock” using personal opinions.

“If I was ‘paying’ my readers $500 a week in 2009, I am probably paying them $1,500 per week now because of the pressure to create more and better content that will keep their attention.

Next year, it might be $3,000 per week — just to MAINTAIN my readership in the face of the Content Shock.

At some point, the amount I am ‘paying out’ will exceed the amount I am bringing in and at that point, creating content will not be a smart business decision for me and many other businesses.” – Mark Schaefer

The article sparked a discussion in the digital marketing niche.

It is now one of the most popular pages on Schaefer’s blog, according to Open Site Explorer.

Mentioning a bunch of facts and statistics won’t make someone follow your brand and buy your product.

People want to know where you and your company stand on issues.

They want to know your opinions.

Saying what others have said isn’t going to separate you from the competition.

When Matt Cutts, the former head of the webspam team at Google, wrote a blog post on why you shouldn’t use guest blogging to build links, Neil Patel came out with his own opinion on the subject.

Here’s a snippet from the blog post published by Matt Cutt:

“Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop.

Why?

Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.

Back in the day, guest blogging used to be a respectable thing, much like getting a coveted, respected author to write the introduction of your book. It’s not that way any more.”

And below is a snippet from Neil Patel’s post. Pay attention to how he wrote his thoughts on the topic.

“The reason guest posting won’t work the same way it used to is because companies are trying to guest post on irrelevant blogs.

The content they are publishing isn’t high in quality either. In other words, they are trying to do the bare minimum to get a link.

So, what I think Google will end up doing is this:

1. Discount guest-post links from irrelevant blogs.
2. Discount rich anchor text links from guest posts.
3. Start looking more at author rank to figure out if you are writing high or low-quality content.
4. Place more emphasis on social signals as the more social votes a post has, the higher its quality usually is.

In the end, if you are using guest posting to rank for specific head terms, I don’t think it will be a good long-term strategy. But if you use it to help build up your brand, referral traffic, and overall sales, it will continue to be a great strategy.” – Neil Patel

Think of the people you like. They share their opinions with you, and you agreed with them.

Think of the people you don’t like. They probably shared their opinions with you, and you disagreed with them.

Andrew Chen is one of the most respected people in the startup community.

Why?

He shares his personal opinions about various startup topics on his blog.

Recently, he published a blog post, talking about why marketplaces are underestimated.

With so much new content getting published every day on the web, you need to stand out.

The best way to do that is to share your personal opinions.

Do your research on a topic before writing about it.

Focus on delivering an extraordinary value

“The more value you create, the more valuable you become.”

An extraordinary value delights customers because it blows everything out of the water.

Asim Qureshi is providing so many values on Quora.

I see his answers almost every time I visit Quora.

According to him, his two startups have traffic from Quora as their main marketing channel, and the conversion rates are high.

Quorans are familiar with Asim because he’s providing a lot of good answers on the platform.

Lead, teach, inspire, and listen to your customers in ways that make them like and recognize you.

Go the extra mile for them. Never settle for less.

Create something better than the competition. Continue to do this for a long time.

Never settle for the average or normal.

By creating amazing content on a regular basis, people will start to notice and remember your brand.

Engage with people

Here are the things you must do to make people develop a sense of connection with your brand:

• Make them feel heard
• Answer their questions
• Help them fix their problems

One of the best places to achieve all these is on social media.

For example, Nike makes its customers feel heard on Twitter, even if it means replying with a GIF.

Social media lets you engage with people who are interested in your business.

When you engage with people on social media, they interact and share their experiences with you.

People want great content. They want an interactive, real-time conversation with you.

Don’t ask how you can sell to them. Ask how you can help them.

When you do this, people have so much love for you.

If you only tell people about what you sell, they have the option of disliking and forgetting your brand.

But when you talk to people about their needs, interests, and problems, it makes them like you.

Deal with negative criticism and focus on the positive

Everyone isn’t going to love what you’re doing, and that is fine.

Some people will criticize you and your brand.

How you deal with criticism is what’s important.

If you handle a negative review of your brand well, it’ll help you win those angry customers. Loyal customers will be proud of you more for that.

But when you mishandle a criticism, angry customers may dislike your brand more, and even some loyal customers may not be happy about that.

So, how do you deal with negative reviews when they appear?

First, you should respond to negative reviews.

For example, if someone complains they don’t like the service you’re providing.

Explain why your service is great, and what you’re going to do to fix it.

If they are wrong, you should appreciate the feedback and promise to improve the experience for the next time.

Explain to them why you think you have decent service, product, or offering right now.

Some people will still disagree. You just can’t please everyone.

The important point here is to respond to these people in a friendly and positive way.

Don’t tell a customer that they are wrong and don’t know what they are saying.

Responding negatively or rudely could upset your happy customers and fans.

Your response should be positive.

Secondly, you should use negative feedback to improve your business.

Even if you’re not receiving negative reviews, you should strive to make your business better.

The more you try to please unhappy customers, the less negative reviews you get.

If many people can rate you 4.5 or 4.7 out of 5 stars, it means you’ve built a brand worth remembering.

Newtons respond positively to a request to bring back a discontinued product.

A response like this win hearts.

The brand could’ve said that they will never bring back the discontinued product, hurting the customer in the process.

They promised to pass the comment to their team. Comments like this make an unhappy customer feel heard.

When you ignore a negative comment, it could turn into a social media wildfire.

So, respond to all negative comments and focus on being positive when you do.

Become a media company

Brands use the media to reach and communicate with prospects.

The media has been evolving a lot over the last ten years. A lot of businesses have not been evolving with constantly changing media.

Today, every brand can become a media company to succeed and stay ahead of the competition.

We are now living in a world where you don’t have to invest in the printing press, or satellite, or a sales team to distribute your story.

Everybody can use the internet to distribute their stories via amazing tools like YouTube, Medium, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.

You don’t need the help of a newspaper, blog, or influencer to reach prospects.

All you need to do is become a media company first.

Even though your company sells products and services, you also have to create interesting and entertaining content people want to read online.

The faster you realize that you need to become a media company, the more you’ll succeed in a few years from now.

For example, HubSpot was a media company before it began to develop and sell software for marketers.

HubSpot has too much content that its website now receives over 4.5 million unique visitors each month.

Smart Insights is a marketing consulting firm. They publish a lot of content on their blog, which receives over 1 million monthly visits, according to SimilarWeb.

It’s not surprising that Smart Insights has been able to attract renowned brands like 3M, Canon, HSBC, and HP as clients.

Even a California insurance agency like Nielsen Professional Insurance Services, Inc. is putting content there on the web.

There’s no way you’ll create so much valuable content and prospects won’t continue to remember you.

Despite the intense competition online, medical startups like MedCognition should focus on being a media company.

Don’t abuse marketing tactics

Web users receive lots of spammy emails from digital marketers.

I’ve subscribed to a few email newsletters, only to realize that I’ve been bombarded with tons of emails some hours later.

Digital marketers are good at taking a marketing strategy that is working and abusing it until it no longer works.

Above, I talked about companies like HubSpot and Smart Insights publishing lots of blog posts every day.

Some digital marketers will create lots of auto-generated content and publish hundreds of blog posts per day. These are fake blog posts.

Because answering questions on Quora works, some marketers will answer a question with one sentence.

They’ll try to answer a lot of questions as possible with one sentence.

Some might even copy and paste other people’s answers and claim the credit for them.

Don’t!

Instead, deliver great value each time with your ads, emails, blog posts, Quora answers, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter updates.

Build a community around your brand

In their first three years in business, social media management tool, HootSuite grew from zero to 3 million users.

They achieved this feat without spending a dime on ads, marketing, and PR.

Their secret?

Community building.

By the end of 2012, they had hosted over 100 Hootups, as they call it.

Here’s the video they made celebrating 100 Hootups, in 10 languages, 46 cities, and 13 countries.

When you build a community around your brand, customers become advocates of your products and services.

For example, Apple has built a community around their products.

You don’t need to see Apple’s ads before you buy their products.

Just meet two Apple fans and watch how enthusiastic they are about the brand.

Immediately, you’ll start to develop a love for it.  You’ll want to buy it so you can become part of the Apple community.

Check out this article to further help you build your brand online.

You can start a Facebook group or page for your business and publish updates that get people to talk about your brand.  It doesn’t matter if you’re a business. A dentist and orthodontist in Phoenix can build a community on Facebook.

Advocates will talk about your business in bars, meetings, and recommend it to their friends.

Building a community around your brand takes time.

It means showing up every day and delivering exciting content people want to share with their network.

It also means creating a remarkable product or delivering a service the competition can’t beat.

The post How to Build a Great Brand Customers Don’t Forget appeared first on OmniKick.