Blogging for Starters
A blog is a site or a marketing tool that is updated periodically in which texts or articles by an author or several authors are compiled chronologically. In recent years, the proliferation of blogs has been so overwhelming that it has become one of the main forms of marketing.
There are different types of blogs that exist, such as Brand and product, thematic and Customer relation and so on. And having it, like anything else, has its advantages and disadvantages. Let’s briefly discuss the various types of blogs.
Types of blogs
- Product and brand blogs: Here your product or brand are the focus of your blog. It gives you the opportunity to showcase your product and to present your brand to your preference.
- Theme blogs: If you are an expert in a niche, a themed blog is ideal for you, because in it you can liberally educate your audience on specific subject matter in your niche. Theme blogs are very useful for a wide variety of professions. A theme blog supports you in consolidating your expert image, and gives potential customers the opportunity to convince themselves of your expertise in your articles.
- Campaign blogs: You can also plan a blog for a limited time, for example for a PR or advertising campaign. Such a blog would be a campaign blog that can attract attention for a period of time. A campaign blog can also become regular blogs if it is determined that they are going well.
- Customer relationship blogs: The customer relationship is in the foreground of the customer relationship blog. Here, product and brand information are made available to readers keeping them abreast with information. In this type of blog informing and entertaining customers is a top priority.
- Crisis management blogs: In crisis situations, quick action applies to communication and public relations. Crisis management blogs are increasingly used in cases in which difficult situations can be reacted quickly and professionally. A company can provide information on a crisis blog and probably enter into a dialogue with those affected. This enables a relatively simple type of communication, which must still be moderated.
- Knowledge blogs: If you are planning to build up and expand a knowledge network, strive for a knowledge blog. This does not consist solely of individual articles, but rather of the views of the blogger together with the comments of the readers. The information provided by the readers together with the information provided by the blogger results in the knowledge network just mentioned.
A few advantages of starting one
There are several advantages and disadvantages of owning a blog. A few of these are expressed below.
- It helps you position yourself as an expert.
- It gives you a voice and can serve as a portfolio for your business.
- It boosts your SEO and helps your content rank well on search engine result pages.
- You can obtain feedback about the quality, variety and nature of your products through it.
- With it, you can increase your interaction with customers.
- It provides you with opportunities for free advertising through links from other blogs.
- With it, you always keep your website updated.
- You can publish complementary information about product offers, and in a less formal tone.
- It is a great means to support your marketing strategies.
In making the choice to own a blog, you must take into consideration the various types of blog and their characteristics, so that your choice type can be beneficial to you and your business. If you are not yet certain of the type of blog that is best for you, we can collaborate with you in considering all types and picking out the right type for your business.
Online Marketing Strategy: The Basics
Online marketing strategy is a subject that needs to be discussed over and again. In the past, we have often come across clients with assignments such as “I want a Facebook page and 4 posts per week.” When asked how it will affect the business, and therefore how we measure the results of our work, they often could not answer. They just wanted Facebook because someone said it at a conference or they read it in an article.
Today, clients are more educated and aware, but we can still see that they want what they heard at conferences right away – unaware of the time and cost of these approaches.
What online marketing strategy is for?
Strategy can be referred to as the Polaris, which navigates the project. Whenever someone on a project team is not sure if something is the right step, they look at the strategy and it will help them orient themselves. So the strategy navigates to the goal, answering the question “Will this activity help me meet my marketing goals?”
In practice, this means that the strategy helps you whenever you decide whether to embark on an activity that you have heard is “working best now” or “everyone is doing it now.”
Where to start when creating a strategy?
As you probably understand from the lines above, your marketing strategy does not shape your business. If you ask, “We want digital marketing, what can we achieve with it?”, You are not asking the right question. Start from the opposite end. Think about a business goal and ask how it can help you achieve your marketing goals. Not digital, marketing.
Your Online Marketing Strategy: Medium & message
From the first of the questions above, we deduce where we want to reach people. Let’s say we sell slippers, already mentioned. For simplicity, let’s say we have a quantum of slippers designs and almost everyone will find their favorites among them. Thus, the demographics of potential customers are not specific. So we choose a medium where we find a lot of people, make a relatively large (and cheap) reach and see who likes our product. So we will opt for Facebook, where almost everyone is on today – we have a medium.
Demographics have a given marketing strategy as well. We also chose Facebook because we can target people very accurately based on various demographics.
How we will measure campaign success (KPI)
We know what we are going to communicate and where we are going to communicate. We know the medium we intend to use for the campaign, so we know what to expect from it. So let’s say what effect we expect from the campaign. Here we return to the overarching marketing goals.
The objectives should consist of three parts:
- measurable value (hit size – number of people who saw the campaign)
- time data (by which the campaign should reach the given values)
- responsibilities (client / agency / other supplier?)
I simplify again, in fact, the only goal of the e-shop will certainly not be the so-called reach campaign, the aim of which is only to make people know about the e-shop. In reality, the goals of our e-shop could look something like this (ROAS = return of advertising spend):
Implementation plan
At the same time, we plan when we will deploy the campaign, how long it will take us to embark on an ongoing evaluation, and what the next steps will be.
The plan that the client will see in the strategy may look something like this:
- Every month we create a regular report, with which we monitor the fulfillment of KPIs (so that we are not surprised after 3 months)
- After 3 months, we will review the results of the campaign with the client, evaluate whether the goals are realistically set and evaluate the tactical steps in the strategy (eg targeting, budget allocation among the advertised systems, etc.), we do not immediately change the direction of the strategy.
- We will suggest next steps and KPIs
- We will set another status check in 3 months (or another time, depending on goals)
- We continue to create monthly reports and monitor how we approach goals.
Do you have a marketing strategy? What does the plan that you see in the agency look like?
PPC and Other Online Advertising Metrics
What is PPC?
PPC or pay per click is a digital advertising model in which the advertiser pays an amount (fixed or determined by auction) each time a user clicks on one of their ads to visit their website. The idea of a pay per click campaign is to “buy visits” to a specific site, usually with the idea of generating a specific action in users (register or buy a product, for example.
Although PPC is a very common option, it is not the only possible payment model for online campaigns. Therefore, it should be distinguished from others such as:
- PPM (pay per thousand): the advertiser pays a fixed amount for every thousand impressions, that is, each time the ad is shown to users a thousand times. Keep in mind that with this model we do not know how much we are going to pay for each visit, since it is possible that those thousand impressions generate many clicks, few or none.
- PPA (pay per acquisition): the advertiser pays for each time the user performs a certain action, for example, downloading an application. Therefore, the link between cost and objectives is even more evident than in the case of PPC
Some key concepts to understand the PPC
CPC or cost per click
CPC is the price the advertiser pays for each click on their ad. Here a fixed price can be agreed for each click or determined through an auction. In the second case, the advertiser establishes a maximum bid or price that he is willing to pay for each click. The system compares the ad with similar ones based on its quality and the price they are willing to pay, and shows the winning ad first.
CTR
The CTR (“click through rate” or click ratio) is the percentage of users who click on an ad with respect to the total number of users who have seen it. In general, the better an ad is, the higher its CTR will be.
In some PPC systems, the CTR is a determining metric to establish the price of an ad, since the system “rewards” the ads that have higher quality and, therefore, higher CTR.
We call each view an ad receives an “impression,” whether or not the user clicks on it.
Segmentation
With internet advertising, we have a great deal of control over the audience our ads target. We can segment the audience that will see our PPC campaigns based on many factors: age, gender, location, interests, behaviors… Each pay per click platform offers different options that we can combine to achieve a high level of precision. Thus, we make sure that we only pay for clicks from users who have a good chance of becoming our clients.
Landing page
The landing page is the site where the user goes after clicking on our ad. It depends on it whether it ends up becoming a customer or leaves in a few seconds, so it is very important that it is well optimized.
The main characteristics of a good landing page are clarity, simplicity, and relevance to the ad.
Conversion
Conversion is probably the most important metric in a PPC campaign, as it measures the performance of our ad in financial terms. We call each purchase made by a user after clicking on an ad a “conversion”. The conversion rate is the percentage of users who convert compared to the number of users who click.
Conversion Ratio = Number of Conversions / Visits to the web
Frequency
The number of times each ad is shown to a specific user during a given period. To calculate it, we need to divide the number of impressions by the number of unique users.
Frequency = Number of impressions / Number of unique users
Key ways to boost your Google My Business Listing
Today we shall discuss the key ways to boost your Google My Business listing. I never get tired of talking about the importance of a local business being able to enjoy the high visibility on Google and for this, it is important that the company manages and monitors its business profile. The company profile allows a local business to use different tools to promote its products and services as well as benefit from the reviews that customers leave.
When a potential customer makes a query on the Internet about a product or service, the first thing Google shows is the websites that are paying for advertising.
Below are a few ways to enhance your listing on Google My Business.
- Encourage reviews to increase trust
Google reviews are powerful and important and can be incentivized.
The best way to work a business listing on Google is by fostering trust through the reviews left by those customers who have already contracted or tried your product or service.
What helps a potential client to decide to call you or send you an email will be the opinions of third parties, when the reviews of your business are positive, the more chances you have that they will choose you.
Contact your returning and regular customers and ask them to please leave you a review on Google. Call them directly, send them a WhatsApp or an email.
Also, try offering incentives or gifts to new customers who have already visited your business, they are key to increasing the number of reviews.
Incentivizing reviews is not bad, what Google hates is that you cheat and ask all your customers to give a positive opinion.
Respond to all the reviews your customers have written about your business, even the negative ones.
Do it in a polite, responsible way and appreciate the time that that person took to write what they think about your products or services.
2. Play fair with the Google token
I just said it before: one thing is that you encourage your clients to leave their opinions on your business profile, another is to reward everyone so that they only speak positively about your company.
Google is able to detect when a local business is not playing fair and its business listing is filled with only positive comments.
Another practice considered spam by Google is to abuse the keywords in the titles of the company listings.
For example:
“Roland Autos” is correct. “Roland Cars, Tricycles, motorbikes, Jeep, truck, power bikes” is considered a bad practice and will make your profile lose visibility.
If you are going to upload photos to your Google My Business profile ensure that they are real photos of your business, photos of your facilities, employees, customers, the products you offer, etc.
Avoid uploading photos from online catalogues, common photos from the Internet, or stealing photos from your competition.
Google knows perfectly well when a company is trying to deceive its search algorithms, and make no mistake that it will take the necessary measures with those companies that publish false reviews and photos.
3. Respond to angry or dissatisfied customers
One thing that excites every business owner is to see how a new positive review arrives on their business listing, then they reply and thank them.
But when what is alerted is a negative review from an angry or dissatisfied customer, they simply walk by and do not answer or seek solutions to the complaint.
It is important that all reviews are responded to, not just positive ones. The first thing you should do is work well in your business to offer a good product and excellent service.
Next, when negative reviews are submitted, discuss the customer’s complaint, speak to your employees, and try to provide a courteous and respectful response.
If something has gone wrong, acknowledge the error, find a solution and personally manage the best solution so that the review goes from being negative to becoming positive.
That will also send a good message to all potential clients who read your business listing reviews.
Other tasks you can carry out on the platform
Google My Business is not a platform that only serves to add information, photos of your business and receive reviews.
It is a complete platform that offers micro and small business owners other tools for their online marketing.
From your Google My Business profile you can do the following:
- Publish a piece of news related to your business
- Announce an important event
- Post an offer for a product or service
- Publish a product
- Promote your business through Google Ads
- Indicate the price of a product or service
- Encourage potential customers to visit your website
- Invite them to call your business or visit in person indicating how to get there from where they are at that time.
Featured Google My Business tools
Statistics report. To check with what terms your business is being found, how many calls you receive, the location of your new clients, and other important information.
Messaging. Receive private messages from Internet users. To do this, you must download the App from Google Play or the App Store.
Virtual store. Create a product catalogue through an online store format.
Web page catalogue. Create a basic and free website to offer all the necessary information about your local business.
Teamwork. You will be able to add more people to help you manage your business file and not miss anything.
Now that you know what actions you should take to boost your business’s Google listing, I invite you to take a little time to improve yours, but if you’d like us to help you with it, we’d be glad to do so.
On-page Optimization Best practices to consider in 2022
On-page optimization is the method of optimizing web pages for specific keywords to improve search visibility and traffic. It uses techniques that are implemented on your webpage to improve your ranking in search engine results pages. It involves aligning your content, keywords, title tags, headings, links and other page-specific elements in such a way that search engine bot can comprehend what the page is about.
This type of optimization is one out of several types and is also known as on-site SEO. Some other types of search engine optimization include; technical SEO, off-page optimization, white hat SEO, black hat SEO, and grey heart SEO. These help to improve the visibility and speed of your website. They also rank your site organically for search engine result pages (SERP).
Significance of On-page Optimization
On-page optimization is so important to websites at large for these reasons.
- It brings organization to your website and your page content.
- It makes it easy for customers to find you through search engines.
- It helps you clarify that a search query you rank for is relevant to your website
- It organically ranks your web content higher in search engines, giving it more visibility.
- It boosts your page traffic and conversion.
- It increases the credibility of your business and website in search engines.
Optimization practices to consider
- Optimize your URLs: You can optimize your page’s URL by ensuring that your primary keyword is included in it, to help search engine bots better understand the content of your page. Also, shorten the length of your URL, and use real words in it, rather than random letters and numbers.
- Improve your title tags and meta descriptions: Title tags and meta descriptions are two very important factors of on-page SEO. They help to increase the click-through rate (CTR) of your website thereby bringing you more traffic organically and ranking better in search engines.
- Enhance header titles: Making use of multiple types of header tags in the right way can boost your page’s SEO and make your content look organized and readable. It also grants your visitors the opportunity to skim through your content, when they choose to and easily find what they need off of your content. It also helps Google understand the content of each section of your page through the keywords that are added to a few of your subheadings.
- Execute copywriting best practices: This would help you keep your users and visitors engaged in your page, and enhance your content marketing efforts. To begin, make the introduction of your content concise, stating the problems your content tackles and the solution it provides. Use short sentences, paragraphs, and subheadings. Include keywords, images and emotions to keep and heighten readers interest.
More optimization practices
- Use targeted keyboard: It is advisable to use your primary keywords early in your content. Adding keywords to your links, your headers and in the first few sentences of your content is so important because this, in a way, informs google that, that is the primary topic of your page. And it indirectly reduces your website bounce rate because your site visitors can easily identify that your content tackles the subject matter that they intend to read about.
- Maintain an appropriate keyword density: As much as it is important to include your primary keywords in certain areas of your page, it is equally important to maintain an appropriate and acceptable keyword density. Resist the temptation of flooding your content with keywords, rather do it in such a way that it looks natural and goes with the content flow.
- Create valuable readable content: We all can agree that the most important feature of a website is its content. Both search engines and users visit a website because of this and the value it is expected to bring. In creating your page content, consider its length, the expected value and information it should give, the simplicity of your content, and its readability.
- Include links: The use of links in your page content shows the relevance and depth of your writing and research on the given topic. It helps display the relationship between the subject matter and another blog post and improves your sites bounce rate and conversion rate. There are two types of links you can use for your page contents – internal and external links, which are displayed using anchor text such as a keyword or a key phrase.
- Improve your images: You can begin optimizing by descriptively naming the image. Name your image alt tags with the appropriate keywords or description to help search engines understand the image. Also, optimize the image size in such a way that it does not negatively affect the load time of the page.
Remarketing: an important marketing technique
Remarketing is an online marketing strategy in which businesses connect and market again to the people who have visited and engaged with them through their website or mobile application. This marketing strategy allows you to interact with people who have shown interest in your brand.
The term remarketing is oftentimes used in the stead of retargeting, however, both terms do not have the same meaning. Retargeting displays ads using third-party networks like Facebook ads while remarketing entails personally displaying ads to people through an email.
Its types
There are various types of remarketing. Here are just a few:
- Standard Remarketing: In this type, ads are displayed to visitors who may have visited your website but didn’t take any action. It goes beyond the aforementioned to targeting visitors who use search engines to search for keywords that your product and services may rank for.
- Dynamic Remarketing: This form of remarketing displays ads to people based on their interactive behavior on your website. It is specifically created for the person it is displayed to, and it increases the possibility of a revisit to your website. For an online product store, dynamic ads would connect again with the store visitors showing them the products with, and left without having taken any action.
- Video Remarketing: This is an engaging and important form marketing. It entails the display of ads to visitors who previously have seen your content or engaged with your website. It is majorly used on platforms with video content and displayed either at the beginning or during the course of watching the video.
- Email Remarketing: In this type of marketing, ads are displayed to people who have opened and clicked the links you may have sent to them from your website but did not make a purchase or transaction. The purpose of this marketing is to follow up on these people and convince them to click on a button in the email which redirects them to your website to make the purchase.
Remarketing services to consider
- Google AdWords: For startups, Google marketing is a good starting point for remarketing. Its standard services and setup including PPC and ads campaign are entirely free. Google AdWords also encompasses the four types of marketing listed above, making it a preferred starting point for new businesses.
- Adroll: Adroll remarketing service is another great tool to consider. It covers about 95% of the web and has a great search engine and social media partners like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Twitter.
- Facebook Retargeting: Facebook is a great platform for advertising and remarketing. The platform provides you with the opportunity to retarget your ads to a specific custom audience. Most businesses consider Facebook to be a great tool for their marketing purposes.
Considering this technique in your digital marketing strategy is great, but including it is a step in the right direction. Like Larry Kim said, “a user may become somewhat less likely to click on a remarketing ad overtime, those who do click are more than twice as likely to convert.
Using demographics data to boost lead generation
Demographics
Demographics are statistical data that researchers use to study groups of humans. It refers to distinct characteristics of a population, that is used to analyze whole societies or just groups of people.
In marketing, demographics is market segmentation according to age, race, religion, gender, family size, ethnicity, income, qualification, marital status, nature of employment, to help an organization target its consumers more accurately. These segmentations explain how researchers divide a market into smaller groups accordingly to ease the creation of strategies for marketing.
For instance, the products or services that interest a teenage boy, might not interest a 40-year-old Asian woman. According to demographic diversity, dividing the target audience will help a marketer design an accurate marketing plan that will yield productive results.
Importance of Demography in Marketing
- Demographics are a key part of a business’ marketing strategy. It helps identify the individual members of a target audience by key characteristics, wants and needs.
- This data is used to refine the marketing budget and make more targeted investment decisions about how to engage an audience. Here are a few take-home points to explain this:
- It can be used to achieve knowledge about the size, composition, organization and distribution of the population.
- Aids the description of past evolution, present distribution and future changes in the population of an area.
- Helps to enquire about the trends of population and its relationships with the different aspects of social organization in an area.
- Demographics explain who makes up an audience and help to segment customers by individual characteristics and needs.
- Using demographics to make marketing efforts more effective is a key element of running a successful marketing campaign.
How Demographics Can Improve Marketing Reach and Impressions
Whether marketing to domestic or international markets, demographic information can provide important insights about a target market and how to address consumer needs.
Researchers examining demographics typically have two objectives in mind. The first, to segment the market by determining which subgroups exist in the overall population, and the second, to create a clear and complete picture of the characteristics displayed by typical members of each segment.
Once these profiles are constructed, marketers can use them to develop the targeting strategy and accompanying marketing strategy and marketing plan.
With demographic profiles about target segments in hand, marketers evaluate the marketing mix. They make recommendations about what to change, and whether to decrease or increase the goods or services offered, .
Based on demographic data, marketers may adjust product features, distribution strategy, SEO, web and social media marketing strategies or other factors to reach a market segment that has the most potential.
A demographic profile can be very useful in determining the promotional mix and how to achieve maximum results with this data.
Utilizing Social Media for Lead Generation
In recent years, social media marketing has revolutionized marketing communication by assisting in customer engagement and establishing business relationships. Over 4 billion individuals are proven to utilize social platforms for business promotional activities, with the average person spending a minimum total of 2 hours on their social media pages.
To effectively utilize social media for your lead generation purposes, you must first determine your target audience, and afterwards, plan out the right digital marketing techniques for it. You can utilize both paid and organic marketing strategies for this purpose.
Social platforms can foster interests
Social media is a medium that has proven to be perfect for generating quality leads. It is known to be quite useful in fostering interest in ideas, items and/or solutions that the target audience is not so familiar with. A few key pointers you can take advantage of when targeting leads for B2B or B2C purposes are;
- Name of the business
- Job Seniority
- Job Title
- The number of people who visited similar industry-related websites online.
Social platforms can build trust
Another thing social media does for you is that it helps provide perspective and new customers with the validation that they need to trust your brand. Through your written, audio, or visual content you can help your audience build trust in your brand by purposefully putting out valuable content regularly and sharing a testimonial, commendations and feedbacks from past clients. Also through your content, you can give your brand a personality, which in return can boost trust because people tend to trust more when they know the person behind the brand.
Social platform can boost traffic
Utilizing social media for your brand can increase your brand’s organic traffic generation, your brand exposure and content distribution and reach. To effectively generate leads using this method, you may need to utilize certain key aspects of pages such as hashtags for posts, proper profile description structuring, and consistently giving out value. This can organically boost your traffic and the numbers of your following.