digital marketing Archives

Creative Ways To Enhance Your Online Exposure

November 13, 2020 · In: Marketing, Remote Work

When it comes to your business or brand, you want to ensure that you do all that you can to enhance and encourage it.

Most things are done online right now, and this year especially has seen many businesses look at online ventures as an alternative to ensure that they can do some business.

However, are you being creative when it comes to enhancing your online exposure? With that in mind, here are some of the things that you could consider to help you increase it.

Self-publishing a book

One of the first things to consider might be a book. Writing a book is for most people they say, but it could be a great way to enhance your online exposure, especially if your business is focused on you as a brand. This could be especially useful for people who work in social media influencing, or perhaps are creative in terms of a freelance writer.

You could look at self-publishing a book on anything and looking online for publishing companies near me could help you find the right fit. It could also be an addition in terms of income to your already existing brand, business, or blog. It is definitely one to consider and could be a great way to enhance your online exposure as more people are looking to read things on the go.

Write a blog

On the subject of writing things on the go, maybe it is time to start thinking about a blog. A blog is a great way to enhance your online exposure. You can use it as an additional page on your current website or even create a separate blog with a new domain.

It can help to enhance your exposure because of the use of the content, keywords, and a focus on search engine optimization. You will likely want your business to be recommended and suggested in terms of search engine results, and a blog can help with links to your existing website and company page or even just as a way of advertising your business in a different way. There are some great articles online that can help you get started with this.

Social media or marketing strategy for content

We all know that more is being done online these days, so it may be time to come up with a social media and marketing strategy to help enhance your online exposure. This can be great for all sorts of businesses and brands as more is being forced online with lockdown and businesses having to temporarily close for face to face contact. Now is the perfect time to try and increase the awareness of your business and brand online and social media is a great way to do it.

You can look at posting more consistently or even thinking about commenting and engaging more online. There is a lot that social media can help with your business and brand, especially with online exposure.

Let’s hope these tips help you to enhance your online exposure.

Image source – pixabay – cco license

How to Become a Better Writer

October 1, 2020 · In: Marketing, Remote Work

For many, writing consistent, quality content can become challenging over time. But despite the challenge, writing is still an essential form of communication used on a daily basis, from texting, sending emails, and even writing the perfect captions for social media. Despite your reason for growth, here are 8 ways to improve your writing skills in any capacity.

Be clear

Clear writing focuses on communicating one message in a way that is simple. Good writing is clear thinking on paper that is logical, specific, and easy to follow. Focus on relaying ideas in a way that is systematic and easy to understand.

Avoid fluff

Quality writing focuses on using words that must earn their place on the page. Instead of trying to write lengthy text, be sure to avoid filler words, such as that, just, really, or very. Unnecessary words take up space and taint the intended message.

Write before you edit

Though you may be tempted to modify your writing during the actual process, your best content comes when you write freely. Instead of attempting to correct mistakes at the moment, first focus on communicating your ideas in fullness to stay on track, and edit later.

Write daily

Getting in the practice of writing every day can significantly strengthen the way you write, and help you build a consistent habit. Set aside time to grow in your craft, even if only journaling for 5 minutes or writing a lengthy note in your phone

Read daily

The more you read, the more familiar you enrich your vocabulary, absorb different sentence structures, and produce quality content. Make reading a daily discipline to learn from the writing styles of others, and implement them in your own work.

Exercise daily

Though exercise isn’t directly correlated to writing – moving your body for 15 minutes a day can reap a multitude of benefits. Exercise is proven to release endorphins that improve your mood, decrease anxiety – and even increase your creativity.

Write down new ideas

No matter what the idea, jot down notes of any new creative thoughts that come your way, and get in the practice of recording them. When those thoughts continue to linger, continue to write them down – you never know where the story may lead!

Write first thing

In a consumerist society, we are bombarded by hundreds of messages on a daily basis from text messages, ads, and threads of emails in both our personal and professional inboxes. Create before you consume, and allow yourself to write in a way that’s unfiltered and without distraction.

Though writing takes skill, developing the discipline to put your writing into practice will drastically improve your ability over time. Instead of taking shortcuts, put in the hard work to grow your writing ability, knowing it will carry you throughout your entire career and life.

How To Best Approach Your PPC Marketing Campaign

July 17, 2020 · In: Marketing

Most businesses know that PPC marketing can drive their success, but not all are sure how to approach a PPC marketing campaign. There are many different elements to consider, so let’s explore a few handy tips.

Determine your goals

When you are planning your PPC marketing campaign, one of the first things that you need to do is to determine your goals. There are several common goals for PPC campaigns, including:

Driving traffic: Driving traffic to your website is usually a top PPC goal. In the modern business world, your website is just about your most important marketing tool. It’s here that you’ll impress visitors with your products and content, but first, you’ve got to get them on your page!
Improve sales and leads: Improving sales and leads is one of the most common PPC goals. Increasing traffic to your site is desirable, but what you really want is as many leads as possible.
Improve brand awareness: Improving brand awareness is a long-term goal that focuses on boosting your reputation and establishing trust and credibility. PPC can support you to extend your reach and get people talking about your business.

Targeting Your Audience

Once you’ve determined what your goals are, you’ll need to decide how you are going to target your audience. Audience targeting usually involves a combination of social media and Adwords. It’s advisable to target your audience based on search intent. Search intent falls under three key categories, including navigational, informational, transactional. It’s important to make sure that the ads you display are appropriate for your sales funnels.

Social media advertising should be a key part of an effective PPC plan. When you show your ads on platforms like LinkedIn and Facebook, you can target your audiences based on detailed personas. Facebook has many different options for audience targeting, one example is ‘custom audiences’.

It’s a targeting feature that allows you to reach individuals who have expressed an interest in your products. There’s also a ‘lookalike audiences’ feature, allowing you to target people who are similar to your existing audiences.

Customer research

Your customer research is a key stage of your PPC marketing campaign. You need to find out what your audience wants and figure out how they search for it. For this stage of the process, you should look at your buyer personas; a detailed buyer persona will help you choose which keywords to use. If you need to improve your buyer personas, try looking closely at your contacts database. See if you can find any trends which show you how certain customers use and find your content. You can also interview prospects and customers to discover what they like most about your product.

Another way to enhance your buyer persona is to collect feedback from your sales team. Ask your team which leads they have frequent interaction with. Ask if they can make any generalizations about the customers who are most suited to your product.

Perfect your keyword research

To improve keyword research, you’re going to need the right tools. Luckily there are plenty of free options out there; these are some of the top picks:

WordStream’s Keyword Tool: With Wordstream’s keyword tool, you can target groups of keywords, gain relevant suggestions, and put words into groups according to common themes.
Soolve: Using Soolve, you can discover the most popular keywords on multiple different search engines. Soolve bases its answers on the initial keyword that you provide. You can also use Soolve to brainstorm new ideas. Simply type in an idea and Soolve will auto-generate a related concept of its own.
Google Keyword Planner: Google Keyword Planner is the most popular tool for conducting keyword research. Here you can also access stats about monthly searches, cost per click, and the competition level. As well as keyword suggestions, you’ll receive synonyms as extra ideas.

Once you’ve decided on your keywords, you’ll need to organize your words into appropriate groups. With relevant and tight keyword groups, it’s far simpler to measure performance and design relevant ads.

Determine your PPC metrics

When it comes to PPC marketing, there are several different metrics you can use to measure your performance. It’s essential to understand which metrics are the most important and to include these as part of your PPC marketing roadmap. Some of the most important PPC metrics are:

Return On Investment

Return on investment is a simple metric that is vital to the success of your campaign. Ultimately, you want to gain a good profit on your marketing efforts over time. To boost your ROI, you should focus on reducing your CPA and increasing your conversion rate. You’ll need to set a strict budget for your PPC campaign and revise this budget regularly. Tweaking your spending every now and then is how you’ll make savings.

Conversion Rate

A conversion rate is one of the most vital PPC metrics. CR refers to the percentage of site visitors who end up converting. When we are talking about conversions, these could either be product sales, subscriptions, or another end goal on your site. Part of your marketing plan should focus on improving your conversion rates. You can enhance CR by:

Using pop-ups: Adding a pop up to your site can help you to boost your conversion rates. Just remember to make an ‘easy to close’ pop up (otherwise people can get a little annoyed)!
Zero distractions: A website with too much going on can increase bounce rates and negatively affect your conversions. Create a site that’s simple, clear, and easy to navigate.
Use testimonials: People can be wary of buying a brand new product, yet lots of glowing reviews and testimonials will quickly change their mind!
Improve your headlines: Improving your headlines is another way to boost your conversion rate. If users aren’t drawn in by a headline, it’s less likely that they will read the rest of your content. You can use A/B testing to try out different options.
Try video: Using video on your site can help to engage your users, entertain them, tell your brand story, and drive leads.
Value proposition: A clearly stated value proposition is another good way to increase conversions. Let your visitors know precisely how your product is unique and why it should be chosen over a similar product.

Click-Through Rate

Click-through-rate is a metric that monitors how many overall impressions you get vs how many clicks. There are a few different ways that you can plan to improve your CTR:

Try timers: Using countdown timers can help to improve your CTR. It’s suggested that this is because timers create urgency, leading users to take action ‘before it’s too late!’
Try ad extensions: Ad extensions are a fab way to improve your click-through rate. You could try using location extensions, (showing the distance from the user to your store). Review extensions are another popular choice to boost CTR.
Use the main keyword in the URL: When you use the main keyword in the URL of your ad, this indicates to the readers that your ad is the most relevant result.

There are plenty of other PPC metrics to take into consideration from impressions to session duration and cost per acquisition.

What compliments a PPC Marketing Campaign?

Competitor Research

Analyzing the moves of your competitors is useful when creating your PPC marketing plan. It’s your competitors who you need to stay one step ahead of, so their own PPC strategies should inform yours. Of course, you’re looking to be better than your competitors, simply copying their strategy just isn’t going to cut it!

It doesn’t matter how much time you spend on your keyword research; it’s still possible to miss things. If you take a look at your competitor’s keywords, you could well find a move or two that you’ve missed.

SEO Marketing

SEO and PPC use different ideas; however, they do support each other. For example, it’s valuable to use data from your SEO marketing to help you with your PPC. Your SEO marketing will include keywords that are high performers. There’s nothing stopping you from using this data to drive the success of your PPC campaigns.

A PPC Company

To improve the success of your PCC marketing, it’s advisable to work with an expert PPC company. When it comes to PCC marketing, there are so many considerations to make, strategies to adopt, and metrics to track. With the help of a professional PPC company, you can supercharge your efforts and see an improved ROI.

A talented PPC service can support you to perfect your digital marketing strategy and boost your conversions. Most PPC services will be able to support you with your overall digital marketing strategy including SEO and web design too.

You might know a little about digital marketing, but best practices are developing all of the time. With plenty of competition out there, it’s wise to call in the professionals to help you to promote your business.

Image credit: Pexels

Why Search Engine Optimization Should Lead Your Marketing Strategy

April 10, 2020 · In: Marketing, Remote Work, Technology

Whether you create a personal brand on purpose or start a successful company by accident, you’re going to need to leverage marketing to grow and expand. Unless you’ve been house-bound before the current COVID-19 lockdown rules came into place, you’ll know that search engines are the key to success.

With their help, you can utilize SEO trends to rank highly on SERPs and boost sales and conversions. Plus, leads are likely to go through the roof, too. It all stems from Google and Co’s influence on the industry.

But, why are they at the top of the tree, and will their position ever be challenged?

Bias Is Low

The haters will point out that the success of search engines, Google especially, is down to biased algorithms. They run and control the internet, so they get to control what people see, including their branding and marketing efforts. Although it was once a popular theory, and there’s no doubt that it doesn’t hurt to incorporate them into your strategy, there is evidence. Google search bias is very low, according to Gotch SEO. The only potential sticking point in their report was that Google employed humans and that humans are inherently biased. Still, it’s not much of an argument for search engines rigging the market.

Image credit: Pexels – CC0 Licence

And Reputation Is High

A direct knock-on effect of the above is this – customers turn to them for answers. Search engines’ reputations are high, to the point shoppers check with them before making a purchase. There are several ways that this piece of knowledge should impact your advertising campaigns, but the two main ones are SERPs and reviews. Ranking on the first page of Google will instantly make you reputable, increasing the chances of conversions. Plus, quality reviews will reinforce the image that you want to convey, i.e., a business that is honest and reliable. To put it into perspective, there are 74,000 searches for reviews from car buyers every month.

The Competition Is Flailing

For the crown to slip from the heads of search engines, there has to be stiff competition. Social media platforms are the closest competitors, yet they have distinct disadvantages. One is that Google and Co. are using their history to consolidate success via billion-dollar budgets. More problematic for search engines’ rivals is the continued PR disasters. Facebook and Twitter have to deal with calls for web regulation regarding user content. Search engines, however, slip under the radar unscathed.

Image credit: Pexels – CC0 Licence

Content Will Always Be #1

What makes engine leaders and what will continue to do so for a long time is the fact that content is essential to marketing. While social media companies benefit from this, search engines exploit it more than any business because they give people the power to react in real-time. Yes, you may see an ad that you like on Instagram, yet you’ll use Bing or Google for the bulk of your research. Content only encourages browsers to use search engines more often, strengthening their position at the top.

The crown isn’t going anywhere yet. Will it one day? What do you think?

Featured image credit: Pexels – CC0 Licence

Easy Ways to Market Your Business

January 14, 2020 · In: Marketing

If you want to market your business to the best of your ability, then you need to try and think outside the box. Hone in on your target market. If you try and target everyone then you might not end up getting the solid customer base you’re looking for.

Here are a few easy ways to market your business even if you don’t have a huge budget.

Use Social Media

Utilize social media channels like Instagram, Pinterest, Linkedin, Twitter, and Facebook. Each of these is all unique in their own right and they require a certain approach as well.

Choose a few that really appeal to you and try not to master everything at once. Focus on consistent and quality content on where your audience is, and then branch out to other platforms as you get more comfortable.

Create Content that is Valuable

Your customers love great content, and so does Google. At the end of the day, there are so many ways that you can share information. Some of them range from creating videos to hosting podcasts and even designing infographics. When you do things like this, you can then gain authority as an expert and you can also capitalize on traffic more too. Consistent blogging is also incredibly helpful to boost your brand authority and boost your SEO.

Contests and Giveaways

Everyone loves a good contest or a giveaway. A lot of businesses try and avoid things like this because they don’t understand the return on their investment. This is not the case at all, and there are plenty of ways that you can really benefit. One way would be for you to offer a voucher or discount code for your service. When creating a contest, it helps to engage your customers as much as possible. Crosswords or even word searches are fantastic here, as they generate interest and engagement. WordMint is a great source if you’d like to pursue this further.

Send out a Newsletter

Sending an email newsletter is also an inexpensive way to engage customers. When you do, you will be able to remind your customers of who you are, and you can also encourage them to buy from you. The best thing about newsletters is that you can create them yourself and use your database to gather your customer data. If you are planning on sending out email newsletters, then make sure to track your results! If you don’t then you may end up putting effort into something that just isn’t working for you.

Image credit: Pexels (CC0 License)

A Beginner’s Guide to Meta Tags

April 5, 2019 · In: Technology

Simply stated, a meta tag is a snippet of text injected on your website to boost your SEO.

Essentially, meta tags are your opportunity as a content curator to describe what your content is about for the search engines, so you can allow your content to be more widely seen.

So, how do you create meta tags that ultimately enable us to achieve a higher ranking, and allow our content to be more widely seen? Here’s a quick guide on where to start.

Write Google-worthy meta tags

Though other search engines like Bing are significant, Google is still king. Focus on writing descriptions that are worthy of the platform. What do you want to communicate about your page in 150-160 characters or less? What keywords need to be present?

Note that in some cases, Google won’t display your meta description at all, and in many other cases, Google will only display a small portion of your description. Choose your words wisely so that no matter what is published as your description, it accurately depicts your work, and boosts your ranking.

Meta tags need to be unique

For starters, duplicating your meta descriptions is an absolute no-no. Right along with keyword stuffing, this sends the message to the search engine that the page is a duplicate, or that maybe you do have too many keywords and are just trying to use them to rank.

Try using schema markup, or creating rich snippets of relevant text, in your descriptions. Include ideas like customer ratings, reviews or product descriptions on a given page to start.

Think about your keywords

Keywords matter. Even if every other description or piece of content was taken away, your audience should be able to understand the basis of your website based on keywords alone. Because of keyword stuffing, keywords won’t affect your ranking as much as in previous years, but based on clarity for your audience and attracting your target market, they are still extremely relevant.

Title tags are relevant

In short, a title tag names your site. The meta tag, or meta description, does just that: it describes your website. Your title tag perhaps has the most important impact on your SEO ranking, and so for chloeanagnos.com most people will search for “Chloe Anagnos,” considering it is a personal brand. Therefore, a title tag is formed.

Data matters

Most people will stop after the above steps are completed, but the most success you’ll have with your SEO ranking is by paying attention to your data over time.

Remember, ranking doesn’t happen overnight, and just like your workout routine, you’ll see performance if you are consistent over time. Every month or so you should be revisiting your data to see if your ranking has improved, and if your pages are being clicked directly from the search engine. Use a tool like Google Search Console, Google analytics, or your website’s built in analytics to monitor your performance and make adjustments as needed.

What compliments a PPC Marketing Campaign?

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