Tag: Strategy
How to Maximize Website Conversion Rates Through Mobile Optimization Strategy
If you’re struggling for conversions, it’s tempting to throw money at the problem in search of a quick fix. Resist that temptation, though – because the key to a better conversion rate isn’t always to be found by pumping money into your ad campaigns, or a flashy new marketing drive.
Nope – the solution’s much more simple. Mobile optimization!
Starting with your site’s mobile experience makes sense. After all, 46% of Americans spend between five and six hours on their phones, every day. When they come across your website, it’s likely to be via their phones. Meaning your site needs to be ready.
Below, we’ll walk you through our top 4 mobile optimization tips. Follow them, and you’ll end up with a clean, compelling, and customer-centric site – that’s ready to convert.
What is Mobile Optimization Strategy?
First things first – what is mobile optimization, exactly?
Mobile optimization is the process of tailoring your website to users accessing it on a mobile device, such as a smartphone or tablet (as opposed to on a desktop computer.)
It involves ensuring that your website’s layout, structure, and content are customized to mobile devices. So why is that important?
Well, think about the consequences of a site that isn’t optimized for mobile. Content displays as misshapen or missized. Elements jump around on the page, as if with a life of their own; you find yourself having to zoom madly in and out, simply to read the text on the screen.
It’s not a good user experience (UX). But, more importantly, it’s not good for business. 57% of mobile users won’t recommend a business with poor mobile optimization.
Sloppy mobile optimization – or total lack of it – means a frustrated user. And frustrated users rarely turn into customers!
How To Maximize Your Conversion Rates Through Mobile Optimization Strategy: 4 Top Tips
Ready to start maximizing your conversion rates – and make your website more mobile-friendly in the process? Here are our 4 top mobile optimization tips:
- Provide a simple, clean checkout experience
- Add on-page product recommendations
- Offer more ways to pay
- Strengthen your CTAs – and their visibility
Read on for the full scoop.
1. Provide a Simple, Clean Checkout Experience
The first way of boosting your mobile site’s conversion rates? Optimizing your checkout flow to ensure you’re providing a frictionless experience at the checkout.
How exactly you do this will depend on how you’ve built your website. But a few broad tips include:
- Enabling guest checkout, so users aren’t deterred by having to create an account to make a purchase
- Providing a wide range of shipping options
- Reducing the amount of form fields (i.e. the depth of info you require from your customers)
- Displaying security badges to increase consumer trust
Image source: Average Website Conversion Rates in 5 Key Industries
2. Add On-Page Product Recommendations
Integrating on-page product recommendations is a low-effort – but potentially high-impact – action for optimizing your mobile site.
The on-page product recommendations you recommend could be products the customer has recently viewed, or ones similar to the products they’re currently looking at. These will appear in the frame as they browse your store on their mobile, meaning they can quickly, and easily navigate to the kinds of products they like.
On-page product recommendations are great for UX. But they’re also good for your conversion rates – as you’re removing one more barrier to your customer making a purchase.
3. Offer More Ways to Pay
These days, offering a diverse range of ways to pay isn’t simply a ‘nice to have.’
It’s a must-have. And, along with choosing the right web hosting provider and building your site with the most suitable platform, it’s one of the biggest website decisions you’ll make.
Consumers are more discerning now than ever. Many distrust the process of paying online; others just want the process to be as slick, seamless, and speedy as possible.
Your job? To ensure your customers can pay with multiple different payment methods, including:
- Mobile wallets (such as Apple Pay and Google Pay)
- Credit and debit cards
- PayPal
Millennials, in particular, are fond of the convenience and ease mobile wallet payments offer. In the US, Gen Y leads the share of consumers making digital or mobile wallet payments (46%), according to Statista.
And, to target Gen Z, you can even offer your customers a ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ (BNPL) service. It’s big with that demographic – in the US, 55.1% of Gen Z consumers 14 years old and over will use a BNPL service at least once this year.
4. Strengthen Your CTAs – And Their Visibility
When it comes to maximizing conversions, compelling call-to-actions are a must.
So take the time to audit the content, placement, and design of your website’s current CTAs. Do they:
- Start with command verbs that create excitement and engagement.?
- Cultivate a sense of urgency?
- Demonstrate the benefit to the customer if they choose to take action?
Remember, you’re optimizing your CTAs here for mobile devices. So think about your user, and how they’re interacting with your site. They’re already on their phone, after all – so how can you tap into that to improve your CTAs?
One tip is to use phone call-based CTAs. Instead of inviting someone to fill out a lengthy contact form, or get in touch via email – both trickier to do from a mobile phone, or while on the go – invite them to call to make an inquiry, instead.
Plus, CTAs aren’t just about the wording – what they say – but about how they look. So make sure they stand out from the rest of the page’s content (you want people to know they’re looking at a CTA, after all!). Harness the powerful simplicity of white space. And, if there’s a button, make sure it’s big, bold, and screams “click me!”
Summary
Mobile optimization won’t just improve the look, feel, and usability of your site. It’ll increase your conversion rates – and help you grow your business online, too.
So good luck, and have fun implementing these tips. Mobile optimization can be tricky and time-consuming. But the results will be worth it in the end – trust us!
The post How to Maximize Website Conversion Rates Through Mobile Optimization Strategy first appeared on PPC Hero.
What Is Predictive Analysis and Its Role in a Winning Marketing Strategy
Predictive analysis is often applied to manage supply chains and business operations and to analyze consumer behavior. According to Statista.com, predictive analysis is here to stay with a value of $ 5.29 billion in 2020, and is forecast to grow to $ 41.52 billion by 2028.
But what is it? How can it positively impact your business and marketing strategies? Let’s find out.
What is Predictive Analysis?
Predictive analysis is a form of business analysis that uses statistics or machine learning to predict the outcome of something. That something can be anything from consumer intent and customer lifetime value to sales trends.
Compared to other types of business analysis, while predictive analysis focuses on what is likely to happen, descriptive analysis looks at what has happened. Prescriptive analysis seeks answers based on the other two analytics to determine what should happen – according to what has happened and what is likely to happen.
Predictive analysis can be used to:
- Forecast future customer churn rates.
- Accurately predict future sales forecasts.
- Enable businesses to order the optimal amount of inventory to meet customer demand.
- Calculate a customer’s lifetime value (CLV).
- Predict what products a customer is likely to buy in the future.
- Prevent logistics or warehouse equipment malfunctions.
What Are Methods of Predictive Analysis?
Harnessing current and/or historical data with statistical techniques like predictive modeling, deep learning algorithms, machine learning, and data mining, predictive analysis can forecast future likely events.
Other types of predictive analysis techniques include:
- Data warehousing (such as SQL analytics databricks) forms the foundations of large-scale data mining projects.
- Data clustering uses machine learning to group objects into categories based on similarities, such as audience segmentation based on past engagement.
- Classification is a prediction technique that involves calculating the probability that an item belongs to a particular category.
- Logistic regression finds correlations between inputs and outputs.
- Decision trees are supervised learning algorithms used to determine courses of action and the probabilities associated with each, depending on sets of variables.
- Neural machine translation networks are typically used for data classification purposes through input and output nodes.
- Time series analysis is a technique used for analyzing time-series data, such as changes over periods.
What is a Predictive Analysis Example?
A good use case for predictive analysis is in the eCommerce space – specifically product recommendations. Smart algorithms create accurate projections for consumers based on what they’ve previously bought and other contextual reasons.
One example of these algorithms in practice involves looking at the purchase and reviewing the history of the consumer and recommending products on similar user data. Any products that the user has previously purchased would be disregarded.
Brands seeking to improve customer engagement and conversion rates often garner great results from recommendation engines. Done right, this predictive analysis marketing strategy encourages upsells and cross-sells, establishes brand loyalty, and ensures the customers return for more.
The Role of Predictive Analysis in Marketing
Personalized Experiences
Predictive analysis forms the backbone of winning marketing strategies. This is because using data in the right way enables personalized customer experiences and drives sales. In marketing, needs forecasting is a widely used predictive analytics tool, where businesses anticipate customer needs based on their web browsing habits.
For instance, online home renovation retailers can predict when a customer is in the market for decorating products due to increased searches for home improvements.
Solving Problems
Predictive analysis solves customer problems before they are aware that they have problems. Using customer intent and behavior data, businesses can see which customers are more at risk of churn and act accordingly, even if they have a PandaDoc convertible note agreement template in place. Proactively addressing potential issues is a good business position to be in and minimizes the impact on the overall customer experience.
New Customer Acquisition
Use data segmentation as predictive analysis to define customer identification models. This practice works by identifying potential customers based on your existing customers’ needs, wants, purchase behavior, and preferences.
Optimize Marketing Budget
Predictive analysis enables marketers to spend budgets more effectively – whether the goal is to convert potential customers, attract a new audience segment, or retain existing customers. Because predictive analysis can help you understand the actions of users that indicate their conversion intentions, you can craft relevant landing pages, sales funnels, and marketing campaigns that are poised to positively impact your bottom line.
The Predictive Analysis Marketing Process
How could predictive analysis look in your business?
- Define what question you want to answer – e.g. which prospects are likely to sign up for my service within the next 30 days?
- Gather the data – our example needs historical prospects data (specifically how much time it took past prospects to convert), demographic and channel data, plus a current list of prospects.
- Undertake descriptive analysis to determine facts, such as whether the average conversion time varies between channels and whether demographics correlate with these time frames.
- Use statistical techniques to test your theories.
- Create a predictive model after your test discoveries to predict outcomes.
- Deploy the predictive model to glean actionable insights, e.g., the prospects that will likely sign up within the next 30 days.
- Create targeted marketing strategies with these prospects in mind in the hope of maximum conversions.
- Update the predictive model regularly to meet new requirements.
Remember that external influences can skew your data – think about seasonal changes, news events, global crises, etc.
How to Maximize Success in Marketing with Predictive Analysis
Some critical tips to use predictive analysis to its best effect include:
- Gather as much of the right data as possible.
- Decide on the most relevant modeling techniques and algorithms for the specific project.
- Have processes to reduce potential biases.
We Predict That Predictive Analysis is the Future of Marketing
Predictive analysis is fast becoming a vital decision-making tool for forward-thinking businesses. Regardless of industry, predictive analysis can give you the insights you need to drive your marketing. By enabling intelligent data for science collection and harnessing it to accurately predict future outcomes, organizations use predictive analysis to make extremely profitable decisions.
The post What Is Predictive Analysis and Its Role in a Winning Marketing Strategy first appeared on PPC Hero.
SEO doesn’t have to be scary: shift from a reactive to proactive strategy
30-second summary:
- SEO is a reality that all marketers face and many try to steer clear of as they devise an all-encompassing digital marketing strategy that is reactive in nature
- Begin by familiarizing yourself with Google’s Page Quality Rating Guidelines
- Create a sound SEO strategy to use every time you start the content creation process, include – researching audience needs, keyword considerations, and internal linking
- Make sure to clean up and update your existing content so that it doesn’t drag down new, SEO-optimized content
SEO can be vague. It is nuanced. It is always in a state of evolution. But that doesn’t change the fact that it is a very real factor that impacts your marketing, whether you plan for it or not.
Many marketers discover the powerful effects of SEO when it’s too late. Their content is already underperforming. It isn’t ranking for the right keywords. It isn’t retaining readers and has a low dwell time.
Fixing the issue of bad SEO wastes time and resources. It’s also completely unavoidable.
The key to utilizing SEO to your advantage is to approach it in a proactive rather than a reactive manner. If you’re in a pattern of noticing the effects of SEO on your online content and trying to make adjustments after the fact, here are some suggestions to help you seize the reins and regain a sense of control over your organic search traffic.
1. Associate yourself with Google’s Page Quality Rating Guidelines
If you want to dominate with your SEO, you need to start by understanding it as much as possible. This is much easier said than done. SEO often feels more like an art form than a science. Algorithms can be difficult to follow. Results can be conflicting. But there are ways to bring some clarity to the chaos.
Google provides a number of pointers for how its search engine works via its Page Quality Rating Guidelines. This is a massive document that used to be privy to Google employees only. Now that it’s public, it enables marketers and SEO experts to better inform their proactive SEO strategies.
There are several key areas of the document that shed light on how Google evaluates your website. For instance, it’s important to understand key concepts, like YMYL pages. These are ‘Your Money or Your Life‘ pages, which contain important information to help readers make critical decisions. Due to their higher degree of importance, Google grades these pages with a more stringent, high-quality standard. That means you need to keep them impeccably informed and up-to-date (more on that further down).
E-A-T is another essential element of Google ranking. The acronym stands for expertise, authority, and trust — a trio of elements that help define how high to rank a web page.
Google’s Page Quality Rating Guidelines may be extensive, comprehensive, and a bit overwhelming. But you don’t need to read it cover to cover every quarter. Instead, familiarize yourself with many of the basic concepts. And, of course, keep it bookmarked for easy reference so that it can continue to inform your SEO strategy in the future.
2. Build each piece of content thoughtfully from the get-go
Everyone and their mother knows about the importance of keywords and linking in SEO. The problem is when you fail to address these critical content components in the planning phase — i.e. before you actually make your content.
Now, this is where things can get tricky. If you focus entirely on things like keywords, it’s easy to over-prioritize SEO at the expense of the reader — and that is always a bad strategy.
Good SEO comes from putting the reader first and the search engines second. That naturally creates content that better satisfies the searcher’s intent. This has the effect of boosting critical SEO criteria, like dwell time …which ends up boosting your SEO in the long run anyway.
Even so, it’s important to factor things like keywords and linking into your initial content creation strategy. A good way to do this while still prioritizing your audience is by using the following steps:
- Search for important keywords and phrases related to your audience: What is your target demographic searching for? What answers or advice do they need? One easy way to see this is by looking up generic keywords from your audience and checking the “Related searches” section at the bottom of the SERPs. Use this to guide what content you create.
- Choose additional keywords: Use a keyword planner to add other keywords to your initial topic. Don’t be excessive. Just use a handful of additional terms to help your content stand out in search results.
- Create complete content: When you go to create the content itself, try to make it as comprehensive as possible. Complete content refers to something that doesn’t just answer an initial inquiry but any follow-up questions, as well.
- Add internal links: Finally, remember to link to other areas of your site throughout each piece. Consistently linking to important pages can tie your site together and help it perform better.
By planning keywords and links ahead of time, you can ensure that you optimize each piece of content right out of the gate.
3. Cultivate existing content
It’s tempting to dive right into creating fresh, new content that is SEO-friendly. But let’s stop for a minute and think things through.
If your current site is already performing poorly, creating better content is only going to solve part of the problem. Many chronic SEO issues are a site-wide affair. In fact, Google has clarified that thin content (that is, content without much value) doesn’t apply to individual posts. It’s a site-wide problem.
That means if you start the proactive SEO process by creating new content, it’s going to have to overcome the flaws of your past low-quality content before it can really start to lift your site out of the SEO gutter.
Instead, as you study Google’s search engine guidelines and gain a better grasp of how to improve your SEO, start the reformation process by assessing the state of your current content. Conduct a review of the existing content on your site by asking these questions:
- Is it up to date?
- Is it long enough?
- Does it utilize keywords without keyword stuffing?
- Are there internal links weaving each page together?
As you go along, try to identify YMYL pages. Remember, those are the pages that contain high value for readers — and which consequently tend to be graded on a higher curve. Make a list of these and check in on them from time to time to keep them at peak value.
Don’t leave SEO to chance
SEO is a powerful tool that can make or break your online content. It’s not the kind of thing that you want to leave to chance. It’s also hard to overcome by reacting to poor SEO after the fact.
Instead, take control of your SEO by using the suggestions above. Start by familiarizing yourself with Google’s guidelines. Then create a sound strategy to guide each new piece of content. Finally, review your existing site (especially any YMYL pages) to make sure you’re offering value with both past and future content.
If you can stay proactive with your SEO, you can turn it into a key element of your marketing strategy.
John Rampton is a top marketing leader and founder of Calendar. Find John on Twitter @johnrampton.
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The post SEO doesn’t have to be scary: shift from a reactive to proactive strategy appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
How to Create an Ecommerce Video Marketing Strategy for Your Products
In today’s world, eCommerce accounts are no longer indulged in using content and images to interact, promote or sell their products; instead, they use video content to pique people’s interests.
Videos are a powerful marketing tool, especially in e-commerce. Videos can explain a product or service differently than text and images. When executed correctly, videos can also be shared and embedded into other forms of media, which have a tremendous impact on your e-commerce business.
Businesses have been using videos to promote products and services and have seen significant results. But not all companies are using videos to their full potential. Most businesses cannot create an e-commerce video marketing strategy.
In this guide, we will walk you through creating a video marketing strategy that will help you boost your sales and reach your target audience. We will cover everything from defining your goals for e-commerce videos to creating engaging content for all socials.
Guide to Get Started With Video Marketing Strategy
Defining Your Goals: Why do you want to create e-commerce videos?
There could be several reasons to create eCommerce videos. Video marketing is not simply about putting out videos with messages and pulling in a response from the audience. Each goal of the videos will demand different production.
The first step in video marketing is planning.
You want to increase sales or improve customer engagement. Maybe you want to create more brand awareness or improve your search engine ranking. Whatever your goals, creating eCommerce videos can help you achieve them.
1. Selling Point:
Creating videos can be a great way to increase sales. By creating videos that showcase your products, you can give potential customers a better idea of what you offer.
2. Engaging Videos:
You can use videos to improve customer engagement. Creating informative or entertaining videos can keep customers engaged with your brand. Engaging videos should have a compelling message, visuals, and catchy content. An effective way to make engaging and powerful videos is to use a video editor. It helps you to create and edit high-quality videos that capture your audience’s attention.
3. SEO Videos:
Creating videos is a great way to increase your search engine ranking. Videos that are keyword-optimized and relevant to your product or service can improve your e-commerce store’s chances of appearing in search results.
It is common knowledge that videos are one of the best ways to optimize a website for a search. Focus on improving the overall SEO through your videos in the long run. Multiple studies prove that videos are more likely to rank on the first page of Google.
Videos are also a common way for people to interact with companies. We can combine product videos with a landing page that uses a video to show customers how the product works.
4. Brand Awareness:
By sharing your videos with customers and potential customers, you can introduce them to your brand and increase your visibility.
Determine Your Target Audience
Your target audience for an eCommerce video marketing strategy is people interested in buying the products or services that you are selling.
You can do this by targeting specific keywords related to what you are selling or specific demographics. Google trends will help you with demographic information.
Once you have a good understanding of who your target audience is, you can then create videos that are tailored to them.
Platforms To Host And Distribute Your Videos
There are a variety of platforms that you can use as a video creator to host and distribute your videos. Some of the most popular platforms include YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Now it is not an unpopular thing that Pinterest has become famous for uploading videos.
You can share them on social media, post them on your website or blog, or even run ads on them.
You can also submit them to video-sharing websites and directories. The more viewers the videos receive, the more likely they will be watched by others.
Decide Where You Will Use The Videos
By providing your potential customers with a video, you allow them to see your products and services and how they can be used. The ability to see something in action allows them to make a more informed decision, such as with a product video or explainer video.
Your video marketing strategy must include how you will promote your videos on your website. Videos can be great as a part of an email blast and on your website. If you plan to post your videos on other social media sites, ensure that your videos are short enough to be viewed in the time frame allotted for each platform.
The Goal of Each Ecommerce Video
Every video should have a specific goal. This could educate, entertain, or persuade potential customers to buy a product. You should have a general idea of what you wish to accomplish with your video to achieve a video’s goal. Otherwise, your video will be ineffective. The most obvious goal is to sell a product. But this is not always the best way to sell a product. The most effective way to sell a product is to educate your potential customers about the product.
Maintain A Practical Budget
With introducing an e-commerce video marketing strategy, it is essential to maintain a budget to help your business succeed in the long run. Video marketing is a fantastic way to market your business, but you must ensure you put the right amount of money into it.
If you do not have a budget, making a profitable video marketing strategy will be challenging. This will help you decide how often you create new content and how much you need to pay for certain things, such as a video editor.
Experiment With Different Video Types
As an e-commerce store owner, you know that the content is king. How you deliver your content is just as important. You need to create a video marketing strategy if you want to get your products in front of the right people at the right time. But where do you start?
The core step is to figure out how to create a video that will get people excited about your products. You can create many e-commerce video types, but not all of them will be equally beneficial. The goal is to create a video to get people talking about your products, sharing information on social media, and driving traffic to your site. Here is a quick list of the different e-commerce videos you can create.
1. Brand story videos: Create mini-movies displaying short stories behind your brand inspiration, how it can change people’s lifestyles, perspectives, well-being, and anything that fits aptly with your brand.
Today’s consumers want to be a part of the story. They want to be engaged. They want to be entertained. Suppose you want to build a video marketing strategy to help you sell. In that case, you will need to create different videos, and you can easily create different videos with minimum editing skills using an online video editor.
The importance of using video in eCommerce cannot be overstated. Video allows you to tell your brand’s story, build trust with your customers, and even help them make buying decisions.
2. Ad videos: These videos should fully discuss the product covering most of the features.
3. Product videos: Show people how your product works. It is a great way to show your viewers the ins and outs of your products without the need to read a long article.
4. Social media-specific content: Unlike ad videos, you cannot keep social media videos lengthy, and the ideal video must be around 60 seconds.
5. Explainer videos: These videos should teach your customers how to use the product detailing every step.
6. Testimonials: Honest testimonial videos build trust and give people a reason to invest in your products.
How To Measure The Success of Your E-commerce Video Marketing Strategy?
There are a few key metrics you can measure to gauge the success of your eCommerce video marketing strategy:
1. The number of views: This will give you an idea of how many people are watching your videos.
2. Engagement: likes, comments, and shares can measure engagement. This will give you an idea of how your videos resonate with viewers.
3. Conversions: This is the most important metric, as it will show how many viewers are taking action after watching your videos (e.g., making a purchase).
4. Revenue: This will give you an idea of how much money your video marketing strategy is generating.
By tracking these metrics, you will see how successful your eCommerce video marketing strategy can improve your results.
Conclusion
It is not just about making a video, but about making a video that is good for your business. If you create good videos, the audience themselves will promote your videos through various channels.
The post How to Create an Ecommerce Video Marketing Strategy for Your Products first appeared on PPC Hero.
4 Versatile Conversion Rate Optimization Strategies to Supercharge Your Marketing Strategy
When trying to increase conversions, it’s not enough to just make visually appealing content. There are many marketing strategies you can use to your advantage.
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Top 5 Tips for a Search Audience Strategy in 2021
These tips will help you solve a common mistake seen in search accounts: a low number of audiences applied, and often only applying high-performance audiences.
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What a Post-Pandemic Marketing Strategy Should Look Like
The world as we emerge from Covid-19 will require marketers to think and act differently, use past learnings and follow current trends to devise new strategies.
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Taking a Consumer Approach to Campaign Strategy
A consumer approach means putting yourself in the shoes of your target audience. Understanding your customer’s mindset is key to creating impactful campaigns.
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Where do you take your marketing strategy from here?
30-second summary:
- Most marketers agree that creating content is a core business strategy
- SEO can help you capitalize on the content you’ve created and see lasting results
- Create content around common sales objections to improve the sales process
- Instead of going all-in on the best-case scenario of in-person events being able to happen in 2021, create a plan based on what you know works now and could continue to work into the future as well
With 2020 pulling the rug out from under pretty much everyone, it’s no surprise that marketing has had to shift over the past year. Where the focus for many organizations was once in-person meetings and events like trade shows and conventions, it’s now mostly shifted to tactics that can be deployed remotely.
The biggest winner out of all this change has, without a doubt, been content marketing. In the summer of 2020, I surveyed 49 B2B companies to see how they are approaching marketing, and more than 80 percent of them agreed that content is now considered a core business strategy.
Content marketing is a strategy that doesn’t require any physical contact to connect with people, and content can be shared widely and consistently, regardless of where people are in the world. It can help current clients better understand the value of a company and even act as a way to bring new customers into the fold.
While the strategy owes much of its popularity to the pandemic, content marketing’s recent dominance is unlikely to go away once the pandemic subsides. Before 2020, many marketers had already been pushing for a more content-focused strategy. In many ways, this past year has simply created the opportunity for them to prove the strategy’s true worth.
How to plan a marketing strategy around whatever 2021 may bring
These past few months have been a time of experimentation for marketers, full of successes and failures. For some companies, weaknesses in this strategy, like poor SEO and a lack of budget for content development, have been exposed, even as the potential of content marketing has been proven. Now, the question for marketers is how to bring a content strategy into the next year and successfully meld it with a plan for a world beyond the current health crisis.
1. Focus on SEO
All the high-quality content in the world can’t help you if no one can find it. Make better SEO a key goal if you want to capitalize on everything you’ve done this past year. Perform a technical website audit to ensure your website is set up to be found by search engines and a keyword audit to ensure your content aligns with your target audience’s queries. Not only should your keyword research guide your content for the future, but it should also steer your updates of older content to maintain its relevance. Updating old content is often the most efficient strategy you can employ.
Don’t just stop at keywords, though. Perform a deep dive into your audience’s behavior to figure out exactly what they’re looking for to increase your chances of turning visits into conversions. After all, what you think you know about user behavior and what is actually true can turn out to be wildly different. For example, according to HubSpot, popups are the most-used form for sign-ups, but they only succeed in converting three percent of visitors. Landing pages, meanwhile, have the highest conversion rate, despite being the least popular version of sign-up form.
2. Develop more sales enablement content
Effective content can be useful for more than just marketing. Sales reps can also use it to better communicate with potential customers.
Listen to sales calls to figure out which questions are the most common and which are the most difficult for your sales team to answer. From there, you can create sales enablement content, such as blog posts and infographics, that the team can refer to and pass on to prospects. You can also use the biggest client successes as case studies that can help potential clients better understand your value. This will not only help sell customers, but it can also help with securing internal buy-in for a content-focused strategy.
3. Don’t bet on in-person events in 2021
Over 90 percent of event marketers plan to invest in virtual events next year. Even if everything goes perfectly over the next few months and things can begin moving toward some level of normalcy by summer or fall, don’t count on big in-person conventions and trade shows to come roaring back and take over your marketing strategy. That’s why a majority of marketers are creating strategies that can work for both virtual events and in-person events over the next year.
Content will still be just as effective when the pandemic is over, but what in-person events will look like is still up in the air. Don’t bet on an imaginary best-case scenario, create a plan based on what you know works right now and could continue to work into the future.
While 2020 might have thrown everyone for a loop, the lessons learned this year can be applied in 2021, even if we’re unsure of what the coming year will truly bring. By focusing more on a content-first strategy, you can ensure your marketing plans don’t go to waste both in best-case and worst-case scenarios.
Cherish Grimm is VP at Influence & Co., a content marketing agency that helps its clients achieve measurable business results through content marketing.
The post Where do you take your marketing strategy from here? appeared first on Search Engine Watch.
When Facebook Ads is NOT a Viable Strategy for Clients
It’s only human nature to try things that other people are doing because it feels like a good idea and/or the right thing to do. In many instances, the outcome is either neutral or positive. However, in today’s online marketing world, just because someone is doing it, doesn’t make the outcome “good”. In contrast, it could actually backfire (both financially and reputation-wise). Let me explain.
When Facebook rolled out their advertising platform, everyone wanted to get in on the action. After a few years of “trial and error” trying to figure out the algorithm, it became clear that this was a potential money-making machine for advertisers. However, it didn’t take long for these same advertisers to see that their Ad dollars increasing while their Cost/Conversion skyrocket. It was this outcome, that started everyone to second-guess the benefit of this new PPC alternative to Google Adwords (now Google Ads)
Personally, many of my clients over the years wanted to try Facebook ads and frankly who wouldn’t? It was an amazing feeling where an advertiser could target pretty much anything they wanted. (Men 55+, Divorced, like Fine Scotch, NY Yankees and watches CNN). However, that honeymoon didn’t last very long. It was not based on strategy or setting inaccurate expectations, it was simply not cost effective and actually started to hurt their reputation. Clients would take a hit based simply on comments given by competitors and/or disgruntled people. It was this experience that quickly changed the minds of not only myself, but also the client. It was this combination of poor performance along with reputation issues that made them feel even more skeptical this new platform. However, over the years there’s been (1) one silver-lining and that is identifying which clients could benefit the most from this hyper-targeting platform.
In conclusion, as an Agency or Freelancer it is entirely OK to say to a client NO to Facebook Ads or at the very least say we should do a “test” to evaluate it’s potential. In candor, it all depends on the advertiser’s audience along with sensible strategies and agreed upon success metrics.